Changing traditions: Europe 9th-17th centuries

By the ninth century, great empires had grown across Asia, some nomadic, some built on cities and trade. In western Europe, between the ninth and seventeenth centuries, many things we link with modern times grew slowly: science based on experiment rather than belief, serious thinking about government (civil services, parliaments, codes of law), and better technology in farming and industry. These changes would later be felt far beyond Europe.

After the western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the tribes that set up kingdoms there slowly adapted Roman institutions to their own needs. Towns in western Europe were smaller than in the east, but centres like Aix, London, Rome and Siena still mattered. The finest example of the Church and kings blending Roman institutions with tribal customs was the empire of Charlemagne in the early ninth century. It soon collapsed, under attack from Hungarians, Vikings and others, but towns and trade routes survived.

Feudalism grew in the countryside:

• Farming was organised around castles and manor houses. Lords owned the land, and serfs cultivated it, owing the lord loyalty, goods and services.
• Lords in turn were loyal to greater lords, who were vassals of kings.
• The Catholic Church, headed by the Pope, supported this order and owned land itself. At a time of disease and short lives, it taught people how to live so that life after death would be bearable, and it ran monasteries for those who wanted to devote their lives to God.

Trade revives. From the twelfth century, merchants of the Italian cities of Venice and Genoa traded across the Mediterranean with Muslim states and the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire. The crusades, in which European kings fought to take 'holy places' linked with Christ from Muslim rulers, strengthened links across the sea. Inside Europe, trade grew around fairs and the port cities of the Baltic and North Seas.

A new outlook. Islamic art and literature, with their respect for living things, and Greek ideas arriving through Byzantine trade, encouraged Europeans to look at the world afresh. From the fourteenth century, in what is called the Renaissance, wealthy people in north Italian towns became less concerned with life after death and more with the wonder of life itself; artists and writers turned to humanity and the discovery of the world.

Voyages of discovery followed at the end of the fifteenth century:

• Portuguese and Spanish sailors pushed down the west coast of Africa, and then round the Cape of Good Hope to India. Vasco da Gama reached Calicut (Kozhikode) in 1498, and the Portuguese tried to control the Indian Ocean trade by force.
• Columbus, looking for a western route to India, reached in 1492 the islands Europeans called the West Indies.
• Europeans learnt from some of the people they met, and sometimes worked with them. But often they were aggressive and treated others as inferior. In the Americas, the diseases Europeans brought killed over 90 per cent of the people in some areas by the end of the sixteenth century.
• For the Islamic lands, India and China, Europeans remained a curiosity, hardy traders and sailors, until the end of the seventeenth century. Japan quickly adopted some European technology, producing muskets on a large scale by the late sixteenth century.