European history timeline
This chart puts 26 major European states and cultures on one timeline in order, from Yamnaya culture (before 3200 to 2600 BCE) to United Kingdom (1801 CE to the present).
See it on the interactive chart
- Yamnaya culturebefore 3200 to 2600 BCE
- Minoan civilizationc. 3100 to 1450 BCE
- Greek city-statesc. 800 to 338 BCE
- Roman Republic509 to 27 BCE
- Athens508 to 322 BCE
- Empire of Alexander the Great336 to 323 BCE
- Roman Empire27 BCE to 395 CE
- Hunnic Empirec. 370 to 469 CE
- Byzantine Empire395 to 1453 CE
- Republic of Venicec. 697 to 1797 CE
- Carolingian Empire751 to 843 CE
- Viking Age Norsec. 793 to 1066 CE
- Kievan Rus882 to 1240 CE
- Holy Roman Empire962 to 1806 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 to 1922 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 to 1999 CE
- Spanish Empire (Habsburg Spain)1516 to 1700 CE
- Habsburg Monarchy1526 to 1804 CE
- Dutch Republic1581 to 1795 CE
- Kingdom of France (Bourbon)1589 to 1792 CE
- Russian Empire1721 to 1917 CE
- United Kingdom1801 CE to the present
- First French Empire1804 to 1815 CE
- German Empire1871 to 1918 CE
- Soviet Union1922 to 1991 CE
- Nazi Germany1933 to 1945 CE
- Greek
- Latin and Romance
- Germanic
- Slavic
- Turkic
- People or culture without a state
In order
Yamnaya culture
Herders of the Pontic-Caspian steppe who used wagons and probably rode horses, and buried their dead in pit graves under kurgans. The widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis holds that they spoke a stage of Proto-Indo-European.
Minoan civilization
A Bronze Age civilization on Crete, often regarded as Europe's first, known for frescoes and palace complexes at Knossos, Phaistos and Malia. Its Linear A script is undeciphered and its language unknown. Mycenaean Greeks dominated Crete after about 1450 BCE.
Greek city-states
About 1,500 known city-states, which founded colonies around the Mediterranean and Black Sea and defeated the Persian invasions at Marathon and Salamis. Philip II of Macedon beat Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 BCE.
Roman Republic
Governed by two annual consuls and the Senate, Rome conquered Italy, destroyed Carthage and took Greece and Gaul. Its civil wars ended with Octavian as sole ruler.
Athens
Cleisthenes made Athens a democracy in 508 BCE. It led the Delian League, built the Parthenon and was home to Socrates and Plato. It lost the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE and its democracy to Macedon in 322.
Empire of Alexander the Great
Alexander III conquered the Persian Empire, from Egypt to the Indus, in ten years of campaigns. After his death in Babylon in 323 BCE civil wars among his generals, the Diadochi, broke it apart.
Roman Empire
In 27 BCE the Senate gave Octavian the title Augustus, marking him as the first emperor. The empire reached its greatest extent under Trajan and encircled the Mediterranean. Theodosius I, the last emperor to rule both East and West, died in 395.
Hunnic Empire
Steppe nomads who reached the Volga by 370, set off the westward movement of the Goths and under Attila took gold tribute from the Eastern Roman Empire and invaded Gaul and Italy. Their empire broke up after Attila died in 453.
Byzantine Empire
The eastern Roman Empire, centred on Constantinople, where Greek gradually replaced Latin for official use. Justinian briefly retook much of Italy, and the city withstood Arab sieges until the Ottomans took it in 1453.
Republic of Venice
Ruled by an elected doge from, by tradition, 697, Venice built a trading empire in the Adriatic and Aegean and steered the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople. Napoleon ended it in 1797.
Carolingian Empire
Pepin the Short's dynasty. His son Charlemagne conquered Saxony, Lombardy and Bavaria and was crowned emperor in Rome in 800. His grandsons divided the empire at Verdun in 843.
Viking Age Norse
Norse raiders, traders and settlers who struck Lindisfarne in 793, settled Iceland, Normandy and the Danelaw, and traded down the Russian rivers to Constantinople and Baghdad.
Kievan Rus
According to the Primary Chronicle, the Varangian prince Oleg took Kiev in 882 and imposed tribute on the East Slav tribes. Vladimir I adopted Orthodox Christianity in 988. The state split into rival principalities and fell to the Mongols in 1240.
Holy Roman Empire
Dated from Otto I's imperial coronation in 962 (some date it from 800), a decentralised empire of German, Italian and Burgundian lands under an elected emperor. The Thirty Years' War devastated it, and Francis II dissolved it in 1806.
Ottoman Empire
From Anatolia the Ottomans crossed into Europe at Gallipoli in 1354 and ruled the Balkans for five centuries, besieging Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Defeat in 1918 led to the sultanate's abolition in 1922.
Portuguese Empire
Starting with the capture of Ceuta in 1415, Portugal built the first and longest-lasting European colonial empire, from Brazil to Goa, Malacca and Macau. It ended with the handover of Macau to China in 1999.
Spanish Empire (Habsburg Spain)
Charles V and Philip II ruled Castile, Aragon, the Netherlands, much of Italy and the Americas, and fought long wars with France, the Dutch and England. The line ended with the death of Charles II in 1700.
Habsburg Monarchy
Ferdinand I was elected king of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526. Vienna withstood Ottoman attacks in 1529 and 1683, and Maria Theresa fought to keep her inheritance in the 1740s, losing most of Silesia to Prussia.
Dutch Republic
The northern provinces renounced Philip II in 1581 and grew rich in the Dutch Golden Age through the Dutch East India Company and the world's oldest stock exchange. French invasion and the Batavian Revolution ended it in 1795.
Kingdom of France (Bourbon)
Henry IV ended the Wars of Religion. Louis XIV made France the dominant power in Europe from Versailles, and under the debt-burdened Louis XVI the Revolution broke out in 1789.
Russian Empire
Peter the Great proclaimed the empire after defeating Sweden. It spanned Europe and northern Asia, beat Napoleon in 1812 and freed the serfs in 1861, then collapsed in revolution in 1917.
United Kingdom
The union with Ireland in 1801 created the UK, whose empire was the largest in history at its height in the 1920s. Most of Ireland left in 1922, most colonies became independent after the Second World War, and the UK left the EU in 2020.
First French Empire
Napoleon was proclaimed emperor in 1804 and dominated the continent from Spain to Poland after Austerlitz. The Russian disaster of 1812 and Waterloo in 1815 ended it.
German Empire
Proclaimed at Versailles in 1871 under the Prussian king, it became the largest economy in continental Europe and gained colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Defeat in 1918 ended the monarchy.
Soviet Union
A one-party communist federation built by Lenin and Stalin through forced industrialisation and terror. It bore the heaviest losses in defeating Nazi Germany, led one side of the Cold War and dissolved in December 1991.
Nazi Germany
Hitler's dictatorship rearmed Germany, started the Second World War in 1939 and murdered about six million Jews in the Holocaust. Its armed forces surrendered unconditionally in May 1945.
Major events
- Thera eruption. The volcano on Santorini buries the Minoan town of Akrotiri under metres of ash in one of the largest volcanic events in human history.
- First Olympic Games. By tradition the first Olympic festival is held at Olympia in honour of Zeus. Greeks later counted years in four-year Olympiads from this date.
- Athenian democracy. Cleisthenes reorganises the citizens of Athens into ten new tribes based on where they live, breaking the power of the nobility. His reforms underpin Athenian democracy, the best known of several Greek democracies.
- Battle of Marathon. Athenians aided by Plataea defeat a larger Persian force sent by Darius I, a turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus records 6,400 Persian bodies counted on the field and 192 Athenian dead.
- Battle of Salamis. The Greek fleet, led by the Athenian Themistocles, defeats Xerxes' navy in the straits off Salamis, a turning point in the Persian invasion of Greece.
- Peloponnesian War begins. Spartan king Archidamus II invades Attica, opening the war between Athens's Delian League and Sparta's Peloponnesian League. Persian support for Sparta from 413 BCE helps bring Athens to defeat in 404.
- Death of Socrates. An Athenian jury convicts the philosopher of impiety and corrupting the youth and sentences him to die by drinking hemlock. His students Plato and Xenophon wrote accounts of the trial.
- Alexander invades Persia. Alexander crosses the Hellespont with about 48,100 soldiers and 6,100 cavalry and begins the conquest of the Persian Empire.
- Hannibal crosses the Alps. The Carthaginian general leads his army and elephants from Spain over the Alps into Italy and wins at Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae.
- Battle of Cannae. Hannibal's Carthaginians and allies surround and practically annihilate a larger Roman and Italian army in Apulia. Ancient writers put the Roman dead at 50,000 (Appian, Plutarch) to 70,000 (Polybius), figures some modern writers doubt.
- Spartacus's slave revolt. About 70 gladiators escape a school at Capua and start a rebellion that grows to some 120,000 men, women and children within two years. Crassus crushes it in 71 BCE, and about 6,000 survivors are crucified along the Appian Way.
- Caesar crosses the Rubicon. Defying the Senate's order to disband his army, Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon into Italy with the 13th Legion in January 49 BCE. The crossing starts a civil war that eventually makes him dictator for life.
- Assassination of Julius Caesar. Senators led by Brutus and Cassius stab Caesar, dictator for life, on the Ides of March, setting off the civil wars that end the Republic.
- Battle of Actium. Octavian's fleet under Agrippa defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra in the Ionian Sea off Actium in Greece on 2 September. The victory consolidates Octavian's power and marks Rome's transition from republic to empire.
- Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Arminius of the Cherusci destroys three Roman legions under Varus, and Rome gives up the conquest of Germany beyond the Rhine.
- Vesuvius buries Pompeii. Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under pyroclastic surges and ash. The total number of deaths is unknown.
- Edict of Milan. Constantine and Licinius grant Christians freedom of worship across the Roman Empire.
- Constantinople dedicated. Constantine dedicates his new capital on the site of Byzantium. It stays the seat of the eastern Roman Empire for over 1,100 years.
- Battle of Adrianople. Gothic rebels under Fritigern overwhelm an Eastern Roman army near Adrianople (modern Edirne) and kill Emperor Valens. The battle is often considered the start of the events that led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
- Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. A coalition under the Roman general Aetius and the Visigothic king Theodoric I fights Attila's Huns and their vassals in Gaul. It is one of the Western Roman Empire's last major operations, and its strategic significance is disputed.
- Justinian's Code. Emperor Justinian I promulgates the first edition of his Code, a compilation of imperial enactments, in April 529. It becomes part of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the body of Roman law enacted between 529 and 534.
- Plague of Justinian. Plague reaches Roman Egypt in 541 and Constantinople in 542, where estimates of the dead range from a fifth to 40 percent of the city. Outbreaks recur until the middle of the 8th century.
- Viking raid on Lindisfarne. Norse raiders sack the monastery of Lindisfarne off Northumbria, the conventional start of the Viking Age.
- Charlemagne crowned emperor. Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor of the Romans in Saint Peter's on Christmas Day, reviving the imperial title in the west.
- Treaty of Verdun. Agreed on 10 August 843, the treaty ends the Carolingian civil war and divides the empire among Lothair I, Louis II and Charles II. It is the first in a series of partitions contributing to the dissolution of Charlemagne's empire.
- Baptism of the Rus. Vladimir I of Kiev adopts Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and has the people of Kiev baptised in the Dnieper.
- East-West Schism. Papal legates and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicate each other, splitting the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
- First Crusade proclaimed. At Clermont, Pope Urban II calls on western knights to aid Byzantium and take Jerusalem, which the crusaders capture in 1099.
- Crusaders sack Constantinople. Knights of the Fourth Crusade and the Venetian fleet storm and loot Constantinople and divide the Byzantine Empire among themselves.
- Mongols sack Kiev. Batu Khan's Mongol army takes Kiev after a short siege in late 1240. Galicia and Volhynia then submit to Mongol rule, and the Mongols advance west into Hungary and Poland.
Questions
What is the order of major European states and cultures?
By start date: Yamnaya culture, Minoan civilization, Greek city-states, Roman Republic, Athens, Empire of Alexander the Great, Roman Empire, Hunnic Empire, Byzantine Empire, Republic of Venice, Carolingian Empire, Viking Age Norse, Kievan Rus, Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, Portuguese Empire, Spanish Empire (Habsburg Spain), Habsburg Monarchy, Dutch Republic, Kingdom of France (Bourbon), Russian Empire, United Kingdom, First French Empire, German Empire, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
How many major European states and cultures were there?
This timeline shows 26. Other lists count differently, depending on how they treat rival states and periods of division.
Which came first?
Yamnaya culture, before 3200 to 2600 BCE, is the earliest on this timeline.
Where do these dates come from?
Each row's dates were checked against the sources listed on that row's own page, mostly English Wikipedia articles, which cite the underlying scholarship. Dates that are uncertain are marked c.