title: Morbius (film)

text: The negative reception toward the film generated an ironic meme culture surrounding it with "praise", which led Sony to re-release it into 1,000 theaters on June 3, 2022. This re-release also performed poorly, making just $280,000 over the weekend.


title: Morbius (film)

text: Sony signed deals with Netflix and Disney in April 2021 for the U.S. streaming and TV rights to their 2022 to 2026 film slate, following the films' theatrical and home media windows. Netflix signed for exclusive "first pay window" streaming rights, which is typically an 18 month window and included future Marvel films in Sony's Spider-Man Universe. "Morbius" began streaming on Netflix starting September 7, 2022. Disney signed for "pay 2 window" rights for the films, which would be streamed on Disney+ and Hulu as well as broadcast on Disney's linear television networks. "Morbius" was released on digital download on May 17, 2022, and was released on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD on June 14 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.


title: Morbius (film)

text: "Morbius" grossed $73.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $93.6 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $167.5 million.


title: Morbius (film)

text: In the U.S. and Canada, "Morbius" was projected to gross around $33 million from 4,268 theaters in its opening weekend, with some industry tracking going as high as $40–50 million. The film earned $17.3 million on its first day, including $5.7 million from Thursday preview screenings. It went on to debut to $39 million, finishing first at the box office. In its second weekend of release in the US and Canada, the film grossed $10.2 million and finished second behind "Sonic the Hedgehog 2", while experiencing a drop of 74%, the second-worst of all time for a superhero movie, behind only "Steel" (1997), and the worst of any tentpole superhero movie. It fell to sixth place at the box office in its third weekend, grossing $4.7 million (a drop of 54%), and dropped to ninth place in its fourth weekend with $2.3 million (a drop of 51%). The film earned $1.5 million in its fifth weekend, finishing tenth. "Morbius" dropped out of the box office top ten in its sixth weekend. The film's "re-release" in theaters during its tenth weekend made $310,665 from 1,037 screens during its first three days.


title: Morbius (film)

text: Outside the US and Canada, the film earned $44.9 million from 62 international markets in its opening weekend, including $2.5 million from IMAX screens. It added $15 million in its second weekend for a drop of 62%. It added $6.7 million in the third weekend, $3.3 million in its fourth, and $1.6 million in its fifth.


title: Morbius (film)

text: On June 3, 2022, Sony announced the film would return to 1,000 theaters weeks after its initial theatrical and digital release. This was largely attributed to the film's influx in attention from internet memes in the weeks prior. This decision was also met with criticism from various outlets, which speculated that the release was because Sony was unaware that the internet trend was not due to legitimate popular admiration towards the film. Upon its re-release the film performed very poorly, making only $85,000 on the day it was released, with many outlets claiming the film bombed for a second time. After a dismal $300,000 weekend performance in its re-release—a $289 per-theater average—Sony pulled the film entirely from theaters.


title: Morbius (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 15% based on 273 reviews, with an average rating of 3.8/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Cursed with uninspired effects, rote performances, and a borderline nonsensical story, this dreary mess is a vein attempt to make "Morbius" happen." It ranks as the 16th worst-reviewed superhero movie on the site. Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 35 out of 100 based on 55 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Indo-Asian News Service described the film as having been "utterly ravaged" by critics, and "Variety" reported reception as being "comically bad". Jonathon Crump of "Manchester Evening News" reported that early reviews to the film are mixed at best, although he noted that some critics "praised the acting in the film, including Leto's performance". "Variety"s Ellise Shafer also said while the reviews were negative overall, Smith "did receive some praise for his performance". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave it a 62% positive score (with an average 2.5 out of 5 stars), with 47% saying they would definitely recommend it. The C+ score is the second-worst of any Marvel adaptation, ahead of only "Fantastic Four" (2015).


title: Morbius (film)

text: Reviewing the film for "Collider", Emma Kiely felt that the "central problem of "Morbius" is a lazy and uninspiring script" and added that "no weight or depth is given to any character." She also noted that there is "little humor" in the film and "when it tries to make a tongue-in-cheek joke, it fails miserably." Barry Hertz of "The Globe and Mail" panned the film, saying it "is charmless, incoherent, ugly and so aggressively stupid that it defies any attempt to shove it into the desperate 'guilty pleasure' box." Wendy Ide of "The Observer" gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, calling it an "incoherent, vampire-themed Marvel offcut." Hannah Strong of "Little White Lies" also gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, describing it as "soulless, tedious filmmaking". Richard Roeper of the "Chicago Sun-Times" awarded the film 2 out of 4 stars, saying: "It looks like "Morbius" might soon cross paths with Spider-Man in one universe or another, but that would be a big step up for him, because his introductory vehicle feels more like a just-average 1990s vampire movie." Mick LaSalle of the "San Francisco Chronicle" awarded the film a 3 out of 4 and called the film "briskly riveting" and a "perfect antidote to bloated "The Batman"". Chris Bumbray of "JoBlo.com" gave the film a 6 out of 10 and called it "a decent enough start for the latest addition to the Sony Spider-Man Universe" while also praising the cinematography and "horror aspects" of the plot.


title: Morbius (film)

text: Leah Greenblatt of "Entertainment Weekly" gave the film a B grade, saying that Leto "hits the right notes of fear and longing in a surprisingly restrained performance". Stephanie Zacharek of "Time" commended Leto's performance writing that it has a "quietly vibrating vulnerability". "The Hollywood Reporter"s David Rooney said the film "only intermittently matches the intensity" of Leto's performance and wrote: "It's just a shame this opening salvo takes itself too seriously to have much fun with the mayhem, despite the potential in Smith's devilish turn for amusing interplay between the antagonists." Matt Donato of "IGN", who awarded the film a 5 out of 10, praised Smith's performance for providing a "colorfulness the film desperately needs", saying that his "flamboyance and spirit is the antithesis to Leto's drearily dour genius, which is a purposeful but inefficient comparison", and unfavorably compared Leto's solemn performance to Tom Hardy's "campy" performance in the "Venom" films."


title: Morbius (film)

text: The post-credits scenes also came under heavy scrutiny and became a joke in the eyes of the general public due to the failed fan service, confusing and incoherent explanation, and dialogue. Kate Erbland of "IndieWire" stated, "This is confusing stuff, and the appearance of Keaton in a pair of [mid-credits] scenes does little to help the sense that "Morbius" is mostly incoherent, or at least very at odds with whatever it's trying to say." Paul Tassi of "Forbes" said that Adrian Toomes' motivation made little sense and opined that "[a]ll of this seems... pretty poorly mapped out at the moment... It's more like [Sony] stole Toomes from the MCU rather than added Morbius to the MCU, which was more the original implication." Julia Glassman of "The Mary Sue" found the overall reveal weak, stating, "I'm beginning to wonder if Sony just... doesn't quite "get" the point of [mid-credits] scenes." "Time Out"'s Cathy Brennan felt that the film's "attempts" to "court an audience by dangling a potential connection" to the MCU's Spider-Man is "the worst kind of unearned fan service in a film this lacklustre."


title: Morbius (film)

text: Due to its lackluster box office performance and dour critical reception, "Morbius" inspired various internet memes. "Polygon" wrote that the film became "a kind of collective internet hate watch", with fans sharing meme shitposts which ironically praised it. Following its release, the hashtag #MorbiusSweep, which jokingly claimed "Morbius" was the most financially and critically successful film of all time, began trending. Claims included the film becoming the first to sell over a trillion tickets, the first to make over a "morbillion" dollars, receiving an impossible 203% or higher approval rating (and similarly-impossible 142% or higher audience rating) from Rotten Tomatoes, and an edited screenshot of the Wikipedia page covering the highest-grossing films claiming "Morbius" had earned $352.9 trillion. One such post made the claim that Martin Scorsese, who had previously declared that superhero films were not cinema, had changed his mind after seeing the film; this fake quote was shared on Instagram by "Morbius" actor Tyrese Gibson under the belief it was genuine, later being deleted.


title: Morbius (film)

text: The film received a resurgence in internet memes following its release to video on demand, with many involving the fake catchphrase "it's Morbin' time", a play on the "Power Rangers" catchphrase "it's Morphin' time". Users on the film's official Discord server call themselves "Morbheads", and users engaged in "Morbin on various Discord servers by distributing pirated copies. A large number of channels on the live-streaming service Twitch began illegally hosting the entire film on repeat; one channel, Morbius247, was banned after acquiring thousands of followers. "Morbius" piracy spread to other platforms, including Twitter, where the entire film was posted in a series of 52 two-minute long videos, compressed into a 30-second long video, and the entire script copy-and-pasted into individual tweets. On Tumblr, the entire film was compressed into a very tiny GIF file and widely spread. Additionally, viral fake news posts claiming that a "Morbius" sequel had been greenlit as a result of the internet memes spread on Twitter, leading ""Morbius 2"" to trend on the website, in addition to the phrase "it's Morbin' time" trending on Twitter for a week.


title: Morbius (film)

text: Leto, in response to the memes, tweeted "What time is it?" and a 19-second video where he was "caught" reading a script titled "Morbius 2: It's Morbin' Time" "written" by himself under the pseudonym Bartholomew Cubbins. Following the financial failure of the rerelease, a petition was started on Change.org to put the film back in theaters for a third time with the claim that "we were busy that weekend".


title: Morbius (film)

text: In January 2021, Leto said there was potential for Morbius to appear alongside the character Blade in a future project, with Mahershala Ali cast in that role for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). That December, in discussing the introduction of the multiverse in "" (2021), Leto said there was potential for further crossovers with his character in future films. Tom Holland expressed interest in seeing his version of Spider-Man from the MCU fighting Morbius in the future, while producers Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal confirmed interest in a potential film starring both Leto and Ali. In March 2022, Leto also expressed interest in a future film featuring Morbius appearing alongside Venom, portrayed by Tom Hardy. During CinemaCon 2022, Sony announced numerous Marvel projects. Some outlets noted that while "Venom 3" and "" (2024) were announced, there was no announcement for a "Morbius" sequel, leaving the character's future in question.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Olivia Jane Cockburn ( ; born March 10, 1984), known professionally as Olivia Wilde, is an American actress and filmmaker. She played Remy "Thirteen" Hadley on the medical-drama television series "House" (2007–2012), and has appeared in the films "" (2010), "Cowboys & Aliens" (2011), "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" (2013), and "The Lazarus Effect" (2015). Wilde made her Broadway debut in 2017, playing Julia in "1984". In 2019, she directed her first film, the teen comedy "Booksmart", for which she won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. Wilde's second feature as director, "Don't Worry Darling", was released in 2022.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde was born Olivia Jane Cockburn in New York City on March 10, 1984. She grew up in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. while spending summers at Ardmore in Ireland. She attended Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C. and Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, graduating in 2002. Wilde derived her surname from Irish author Oscar Wilde, and started using it while in high school to honor the writers in her family, many of whom used pen names. She was accepted to Bard College, but deferred her enrollment three times in order to pursue acting. She then studied at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin. For a short time, Wilde's family also had a house in Guilford, Vermont.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde's father, Andrew Cockburn, is a British journalist; he was born in the London suburb of Willesden and raised in Ireland. Her mother, Leslie Cockburn ("née" Redlich), is an American producer on "60 Minutes" and journalist. She has a sister five years older and a brother nine years younger. Her grandfather, British novelist Claud Cockburn, and his sons Alexander and Patrick Cockburn also worked as journalists and her aunt, Sarah Caudwell, was a writer. Writer Christopher Hitchens was the Cockburn family's tenant in Washington, D.C. and served as Wilde's babysitter.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Some of Wilde's paternal Scottish ancestors were upper-class and lived in many locations at the height of the British Empire, including Peking (where her paternal grandfather was born), Calcutta, Bombay, Cairo, and Tasmania. The Cockburns descend from the lawyer, judge, and literary figure Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn. One of Wilde's great-great-grandfathers, Henry Arthur Blake, was governor of Hong Kong. Through her father's family Wilde is related to George Cockburn, who was responsible for burning down Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812. Aside from Scottish, Wilde's ancestry includes English, German, Irish, and Manx; she is also of 1/64th Sephardic Jewish descent through her great-great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Bernal (1783–1854), a British Whig politician and actor.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde appeared as "Jewel Goldman" on the short-lived television series "Skin" (2003–2004). She gained attention for her recurring role as bisexual bar owner, Alex Kelly, who dates both characters played by Adam Brody and Mischa Barton on the teen drama television series, "The O.C." (2004–2005).


title: Olivia Wilde

text: She appeared in films "The Girl Next Door" (2004), "Conversations with Other Women" (2005), "Bickford Shmeckler's Cool Ideas" (2006), "Turistas" (2006) and "Alpha Dog" (2006).


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In 2007, she starred off-Broadway in "Beauty on the Vine", a political thriller, playing three different characters. She was also in "The Death and Life of Bobby Z" (2007) and the short-lived drama television series "The Black Donnellys" (2007). In September 2007, Wilde joined the cast of the medical drama television series "House". She played the character of Remy "Thirteen" Hadley, a bisexual internist with Huntington's disease, who was handpicked by House out of a number of applicants to join his medical team. Her first appearance was in the episode "The Right Stuff".


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde appeared in the comedy film "Year One" (2009) as Princess Inanna. She starred in Disney's "" (2010) as Quorra. Inspired by her award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker parents, Wilde has served as executive producer on several documentary short films, such as "Sun City Picture House" (2010), which is about a community in Haiti that rallies to build a movie theater after the disastrous 2010 earthquake.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In August 2011, it was announced Wilde would be leaving "House" to further pursue her film career; she left a few months later, in the episode "Charity Case". Wilde starred in "Cowboys & Aliens" (2011) as Ella Swensen, who works with other characters to save the Earth from evil aliens, and also starred in the comedy "The Change-Up" (2011). She was also in the films "In Time" (2011), "On the Inside" (2011) and "Butter" (2011). In 2011, Wilde became a global brand ambassador for the cosmetic company Revlon, which featured her in their commercials. Wilde made her directing and screenwriting debut with the film "Free Hugs" (2011) for "Glamour Magazine"'s short film series, which was screened at various festivals.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In May 2012, Wilde's character, Remy "Thirteen" Hadley, returned for the series finale of "House" for two episodes, "Holding On" and "Everybody Dies." She starred in the film "People Like Us" (2012), "Third Person" (2012), "The Words" (2012) and as Liza in "Deadfall" (2012), a thriller about two siblings who decide to fend for themselves in the wake of a botched casino heist, and their unlikely reunion during another family's Thanksgiving celebration. In 2012, Wilde was featured in PBS docu-series "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide", which was inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book of the same name. The docu-series follows Wilde as she learns of the struggles women face in Nairobi, Kenya. She also produced the short film, "Baseball in the Time of Cholera" (2012), which explored the cholera epidemic in Haiti.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In 2013, Wilde wrote an article called the, "Do's and Don'ts of Turning 30," which was published in "Glamour Magazine". She starred in and executive produced "Drinking Buddies" (2013). She had a supporting role as Jane, a magician's assistant, in "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" (2013). She also played Suzy Miller in the biographical drama "Rush" (2013), about James Hunt and Niki Lauda, and had a starring role in the film "Her" (2013), which was lauded by critics, and received accolades from the Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards. She has served as executive producer for other documentary short films: "The Rider and the Storm" (2013), about Timmy Brennan, a New York ironworker from Breezy Point, Queens who lost everything he owned when Hurricane Sandy hit and "Body Team 12" (2015), which follows the team tasked with collecting the dead at the height of the Ebola outbreak. The film went on to win Best Documentary Short at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) at the 88th Academy Awards.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde starred as Elizabeth Roberts, a trophy-wife customer who enters a strait-laced pharmacist's life and takes him on a joyride involving sex, drugs and possibly murder in "Better Living Through Chemistry" (2014). She starred as Beatrice Fairbanks in "The Longest Week" (2014), as the middle of a love triangle between an affluent drifter and his best friend. In 2015, she was the brand ambassador of H&M's Conscious Exclusive campaign. She starred in the thriller "The Lazarus Effect" (2015) as Zoe, a medical researcher who is accidentally killed, then revived with a miraculous serum with unfortunate side-effects. Wilde also starred in and produced the drama "Meadowland" (2015), that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York on April 17, 2015. She played Eleanor in "Love the Coopers" (2015).


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In 2016, Wilde directed a music video for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, teaming up with director of photography Reed Morano. She then worked with American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, directing the music video for their song "Dark Necessities". Wilde starred as Devon Finestra in HBO's rock 'n' roll drama television series "Vinyl" (2016). Also in 2016, Wilde also directed an acclaimed live table reading of "Hannah and Her Sisters" at "The New York Times"s Center Theatre. The cast included Wilde as Hannah. Wilde stated that "Hannah and Her Sisters" is "just a perfect script, and I knew an audience would enjoy having the chance to focus on the genius of the writing, which is what the Live Reads allow for". Her brand ambassador partnership with Revlon ended in 2016.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In 2017, Wilde made her Broadway debut portraying the role of Julia in "1984". It opened at the Hudson Theatre in New York City on June 22 (previews beginning May 18) for a limited run until October 8, 2017. In May 2017, Wilde became chief brand activist of True Botanicals, a cosmetics and skin care company. Her documentary short "Fear Us Women" (2017) follows Canadian civilian Hanna Bohman, who has spent the last three years in Syria as a volunteer soldier battling ISIS. As a member of the YPJ, an all-female Kurdish army, Hanna gives an inside look at the women fighting for liberation in Syria.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In 2018, Wilde appeared in "A Vigilante". Its world premiere was at South by Southwest on March 10, 2018. It was released March 29, 2019. The same year, Wilde starred in the drama "Life Itself". The film was released on September 21, 2018, received negative reviews from critics, and performed poorly at the box office.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde made her directing debut with the teen comedy "Booksmart", which was released on May 24, 2019. it was rated 97% "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, from 271 critics' reviews. "The Washington Post" stated, "[as the film progresses,] Wilde's filmmaking skills become more and more evident, bursting forth in a third act that builds into something beautiful and even transcendent." The "Los Angeles Times" wrote that it "leaves you feeling unaccountably hopeful for the state of humanity – and the state of American screen comedy too", and "The Wall Street Journal" noted, "Nothing funnier, smarter, quicker or more joyous has graced the big screen in a long time." The film won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature at the 35th Independent Spirit Awards on February 8, 2020.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde next appeared in "Richard Jewell" in 2019, playing "Atlanta Journal-Constitution" reporter Kathy Scruggs who died in 2001. The film was criticised for depicting Scruggs as offering to trade sex with an FBI agent in return for confidential information. The editor-in-chief of "The Atlanta-Journal Constitution" wrote in an open letter that this depicted incident was "entirely false and malicious". Employees of the newspaper demanded the film have a prominent disclaimer that "some events were imagined for dramatic purposes and artistic license." The film was accused of perpetuating a sexist trope of women journalists exchanging sex for information. Wilde defended her role and stated that there was a sexist double standard, in that Jon Hamm's FBI agent character was not held to the same scrutiny. Commentators noted that Wilde's character was based on a real person, whereas the FBI agent was an amalgamation of multiple characters from the original script. They also stated that the purpose of the film was to expose and condemn the character assassination of Jewell; however, in the process, the film commits the same character assassination of Scruggs.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In 2020, she directed "Wake Up", a short film starring Margaret Qualley. In 2022, Wilde directed her second feature, also playing a supporting role in, "Don't Worry Darling", an erotic psychological thriller about a 1950s housewife, starring Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Gemma Chan and Chris Pine, for New Line Cinema from a screenplay by Katie Silberman. The film gained substantive media attention for its multiple on and off set controversies. It premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival to mixed reviews. The critics praised Pugh's performance, the cinematography, and production design but criticized the screenplay and direction. Also that year, she voiced Lois Lane in the animated film "DC League of Super-Pets".


title: Olivia Wilde

text: She is attached to direct "Perfect", a biopic about gymnast Kerri Strug for Searchlight Pictures, an untitled holiday-comedy film for Universal Pictures, and a female-centered superhero film as part of the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters franchise.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In 2008, Wilde campaigned with actors Justin Long and her then-current "House" castmate Kal Penn in support for the Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. Wilde was a supporter of the youth voter organization 18 in '08. She serves on their advisory council and appeared in a public service announcement that debuted June 30, 2008 which encouraged youth to vote at the 2008 election.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: She appeared in the MoveOn.org mock-PSA "supporting" the rights of the healthcare insurance industry. Wilde was praised by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farmworkers' union, for supporting the Fair Foods campaign.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde is one of the board of directors at Artists for Peace and Justice, which provides education and health services in Haiti, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. Wilde is a celebrity influencer/activist for RYOT, a Los Angeles-based media company.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: On June 30, 2015, she introduced Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at a campaign event in New York City.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde starred in a PSA released on March 21, 2016, for World Down Syndrome Day, alongside 19-year-old AnnaRose from New Jersey who has Down Syndrome.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde is widely known as a feminist. In 2013, she appeared in a video clip for Gucci's "Chime for Change" campaign that aims to raise awareness and funds of women's issues in terms of education, health, and justice. She participated in the 2017 Women's March in Washington, D.C. and the 2018 Women's March in Los Angeles.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: On June 7, 2003, when she was 19 years old, Wilde married Italian filmmaker and musician Tao Ruspoli, a member of the Ruspoli family. They were married in Washington, Virginia, on a school bus with only a pair of witnesses. She later said the wedding occurred in an abandoned school bus because it was the only place where they could be completely alone, as the marriage was a secret at the time. On February 8, 2011, she and Ruspoli announced that they were separating. Wilde filed for divorce in Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 3, 2011, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on September 29, 2011. Wilde did not seek spousal support, and the pair reached a private agreement on property division.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde began dating American actor and comedian Jason Sudeikis in November 2011. They became engaged in January 2013. The couple have two children: a son, born in 2014, and a daughter, born in 2016. Sudeikis and Wilde's relationship ended in November 2020. Wilde was publicly served with court documents regarding child custody while she was presenting "Don't Worry Darling" at CinemaCon 2022.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: In January 2021, Wilde began dating Harry Styles after meeting during the filming of "Don't Worry Darling". Their relationship ended in November 2022.


title: Olivia Wilde

text: Wilde considered herself a pescetarian in 2013, although she has been both vegan and vegetarian at different times. She was voted PETA's Sexiest Vegetarian Celebrity of 2010.


title: Europe

text: Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. Comprising the westernmost peninsulas of Eurasia, it shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with both Africa and Asia. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and Asia to the east. Europe is commonly considered to be separated from Asia by the watershed of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Black Sea and the waterways of the Turkish Straits.


title: Europe

text: Europe covers about , or 2% of Earth's surface (6.8% of land area), making it the second-smallest continent (using the seven-continent model). Politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states, of which Russia is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a total population of about /1e6 round 0 million (about 10% of the world population) in . The European climate is largely affected by warm Atlantic currents that temper winters and summers on much of the continent, even at latitudes along which the climate in Asia and North America is severe. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable than close to the coast.


title: Europe

text: European culture is the root of Western civilisation, which traces its lineage back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and the subsequent Migration Period marked the end of Europe's ancient history, and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Renaissance humanism, exploration, art, and science led to the modern era. Since the Age of Discovery, started by Portugal and Spain, Europe played a predominant role in global affairs. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers colonised at various times the Americas, almost all of Africa and Oceania, and the majority of Asia.


title: Europe

text: The Age of Enlightenment, the subsequent French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars shaped the continent culturally, politically and economically from the end of the 17th century until the first half of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to radical economic, cultural and social change in Western Europe and eventually the wider world. Both world wars took place for the most part in Europe, contributing to a decline in Western European dominance in world affairs by the mid-20th century as the Soviet Union and the United States took prominence. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East, until the Revolutions of 1989, Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Dissolution of the Soviet Union.


title: Europe

text: In 1949, the Council of Europe was founded with the idea of unifying Europe to achieve common goals and prevent future wars. Further European integration by some states led to the formation of the European Union (EU), a separate political entity that lies between a confederation and a federation. The EU originated in Western Europe but has been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The currency of most countries of the European Union, the euro, is the most commonly used among Europeans; and the EU's Schengen Area abolishes border and immigration controls between most of its member states, and some non-member states. There exists a political movement favouring the evolution of the European Union into a single federation encompassing much of the continent.


title: Europe

text: In classical Greek mythology, Europa (, ) was a Phoenician princess. One view is that her name derives from the Ancient Greek elements () 'wide, broad', and (, , ) 'eye, face, countenance', hence their composite would mean 'wide-gazing' or 'broad of aspect'. "Broad" has been an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and the poetry devoted to it. An alternative view is that of Robert Beekes, who has argued in favour of a Pre-Indo-European origin for the name, explaining that a derivation from would yield a different toponym than Europa. Beekes has located toponyms related to that of Europa in the territory of ancient Greece, and localities such as that of Europos in ancient Macedonia.


title: Europe

text: There have been attempts to connect to a Semitic term for "west", this being either Akkadian meaning 'to go down, set' (said of the sun) or Phoenician 'evening, west', which is at the origin of Arabic and Hebrew . Martin Litchfield West stated that "phonologically, the match between Europa's name and any form of the Semitic word is very poor", while Beekes considers a connection to Semitic languages improbable.


title: Europe

text: Most major world languages use words derived from or "Europa" to refer to the continent. Chinese, for example, uses the word , which is an abbreviation of the transliterated name ( means "continent"); a similar Chinese-derived term is also sometimes used in Japanese such as in the Japanese name of the European Union, , despite the katakana being more commonly used. In some Turkic languages, the originally Persian name ('land of the Franks') is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as or .


title: Europe

text: The prevalent definition of Europe as a geographical term has been in use since the mid-19th century.


title: Europe

text: Europe is taken to be bounded by large bodies of water to the north, west and south; Europe's limits to the east and north-east are usually taken to be the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, and the Caspian Sea; to the south-east, the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea, and the waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.


title: Europe

text: Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions based on sociopolitical and cultural differences. Cyprus is closest to Anatolia (or Asia Minor), but is considered part of Europe politically and it is a member state of the EU. Malta was considered an island of North-western Africa for centuries, but now it is considered to be part of Europe as well.


title: Europe

text: The term "continent" usually implies the physical geography of a large land mass completely or almost completely surrounded by water at its borders. Prior to the adoption of the current convention that includes mountain divides, the border between Europe and Asia had been redefined several times since its first conception in classical antiquity, but always as a series of rivers, seas and straits that were believed to extend an unknown distance east and north from the Mediterranean Sea without the inclusion of any mountain ranges. Cartographer Herman Moll suggested in 1715 Europe was bounded by a series of partly-joined waterways directed towards the Turkish straits, and the Irtysh River draining into the upper part of the Ob River and the Arctic Ocean. In contrast, the present eastern boundary of Europe partially adheres to the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, which is somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent compared to any clear-cut definition of the term "continent".


title: Europe

text: The current division of Eurasia into two continents now reflects East-West cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences which vary on a spectrum rather than with a sharp dividing line. The geographic border between Europe and Asia does not follow any state boundaries and now only follows a few bodies of water. Turkey is generally considered a transcontinental country divided entirely by water, while Russia and Kazakhstan are only partly divided by waterways. France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom are also transcontinental (or more properly, intercontinental, when oceans or large seas are involved) in that their main land areas are in Europe while pockets of their territories are located on other continents separated from Europe by large bodies of water. Spain, for example, has territories south of the Mediterranean Sea—namely, Ceuta and Melilla—which are parts of Africa and share a border with Morocco. According to the current convention, Georgia and Azerbaijan are transcontinental countries where waterways have been completely replaced by mountains as the divide between continents.


title: Europe

text: The first recorded usage of "Eurṓpē" as a geographic term is in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, in reference to the western shore of the Aegean Sea. As a name for a part of the known world, it is first used in the 6th century BCE by Anaximander and Hecataeus. Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni River on the territory of Georgia) in the Caucasus, a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. Herodotus mentioned that the world had been divided by unknown persons into three parts, Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa), with the Nile and the Phasis forming their boundaries—though he also states that some considered the River Don, rather than the Phasis, as the boundary between Europe and Asia. Europe's eastern frontier was defined in the 1st century by geographer Strabo at the River Don. The "Book of Jubilees" described the continents as the lands given by Noah to his three sons; Europe was defined as stretching from the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar, separating it from Northwest Africa, to the Don, separating it from Asia.


title: Europe

text: The convention received by the Middle Ages and surviving into modern usage is that of the Roman era used by Roman-era authors such as Posidonius, Strabo and Ptolemy, who took the Tanais (the modern Don River) as the boundary.


title: Europe

text: The Roman Empire did not attach a strong identity to the concept of continental divisions. However, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the culture that developed in its place, linked to Latin and the Catholic church, began to associate itself with the concept of "Europe". The term "Europe" is first used for a cultural sphere in the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century. From that time, the term designated the sphere of influence of the Western Church, as opposed to both the Eastern Orthodox churches and to the Islamic world.


title: Europe

text: A cultural definition of Europe as the lands of Latin Christendom coalesced in the 8th century, signifying the new cultural condominium created through the confluence of Germanic traditions and Christian-Latin culture, defined partly in contrast with Byzantium and Islam, and limited to northern Iberia, the British Isles, France, Christianised western Germany, the Alpine regions and northern and central Italy. The concept is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian Renaissance: "Europa" often figures in the letters of Charlemagne's court scholar, Alcuin. The transition of Europe to being a cultural term as well as a geographic one led to the borders of Europe being affected by cultural considerations in the East, especially relating to areas under Byzantine, Ottoman, and Russian influence. Such questions were affected by the positive connotations associated with the term Europe by its users. Such cultural considerations were not applied to the Americas, despite their conquest and settlement by European states. Instead, the concept of "Western civilization" emerged as a way of grouping together Europe and these colonies.


title: Europe

text: The question of defining a precise eastern boundary of Europe arises in the Early Modern period, as the eastern extension of Muscovy began to include North Asia. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 18th century, the traditional division of the landmass of Eurasia into two continents, Europe and Asia, followed Ptolemy, with the boundary following the Turkish Straits, the Black Sea, the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and the Don (ancient Tanais). But maps produced during the 16th to 18th centuries tended to differ in how to continue the boundary beyond the Don bend at Kalach-na-Donu (where it is closest to the Volga, now joined with it by the Volga–Don Canal), into territory not described in any detail by the ancient geographers.


title: Europe

text: Around 1715, Herman Moll produced a map showing the northern part of the Ob River and the Irtysh River, a major tributary of the Ob, as components of a series of partly-joined waterways taking the boundary between Europe and Asia from the Turkish Straits, and the Don River all the way to the Arctic Ocean. In 1721, he produced a more up to date map that was easier to read. However, his proposal to adhere to major rivers as the line of demarcation was never taken up by other geographers who were beginning to move away from the idea of water boundaries as the only legitimate divides between Europe and Asia.


title: Europe

text: Four years later, in 1725, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg was the first to depart from the classical Don boundary. He drew a new line along the Volga, following the Volga north until the Samara Bend, along Obshchy Syrt (the drainage divide between the Volga and Ural Rivers), then north and east along the latter waterway to its source in the Ural Mountains. At this point he proposed that mountain ranges could be included as boundaries between continents as alternatives to nearby waterways. Accordingly, he drew the new boundary north along Ural Mountains rather than the nearby and parallel running Ob and Irtysh rivers. This was endorsed by the Russian Empire and introduced the convention that would eventually become commonly accepted. However, this did not come without criticism. Voltaire, writing in 1760 about Peter the Great's efforts to make Russia more European, ignored the whole boundary question with his claim that neither Russia, Scandinavia, northern Germany, nor Poland were fully part of Europe. Since then, many modern analytical geographers like Halford Mackinder have declared that they see little validity in the Ural Mountains as a boundary between continents.


title: Europe

text: The mapmakers continued to differ on the boundary between the lower Don and Samara well into the 19th century. The published by the Russian Academy of Sciences has the boundary follow the Don beyond Kalach as far as Serafimovich before cutting north towards Arkhangelsk, while other 18th- to 19th-century mapmakers such as John Cary followed Strahlenberg's prescription. To the south, the Kuma–Manych Depression was identified circa 1773 by a German naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, as a valley that once connected the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and subsequently was proposed as a natural boundary between continents.


title: Europe

text: By the mid-19th century, there were three main conventions, one following the Don, the Volga–Don Canal and the Volga, the other following the Kuma–Manych Depression to the Caspian and then the Ural River, and the third abandoning the Don altogether, following the Greater Caucasus watershed to the Caspian. The question was still treated as a "controversy" in geographical literature of the 1860s, with Douglas Freshfield advocating the Caucasus crest boundary as the "best possible", citing support from various "modern geographers".


title: Europe

text: In Russia and the Soviet Union, the boundary along the Kuma–Manych Depression was the most commonly used as early as 1906. In 1958, the Soviet Geographical Society formally recommended that the boundary between the Europe and Asia be drawn in textbooks from Baydaratskaya Bay, on the Kara Sea, along the eastern foot of Ural Mountains, then following the Ural River until the Mugodzhar Hills, and then the Emba River; and Kuma–Manych Depression, thus placing the Caucasus entirely in Asia and the Urals entirely in Europe. However, most geographers in the Soviet Union favoured the boundary along the Caucasus crest, and this became the common convention in the later 20th century, although the Kuma–Manych boundary remained in use in some 20th-century maps.


title: Europe

text: Some view separation of Eurasia into Asia and Europe as a residue of Eurocentrism: "In physical, cultural and historical diversity, China and India are comparable to the entire European landmass, not to a single European country. [...]."


title: Europe

text: During the 2.5 million years of the Pleistocene, numerous cold phases called glacials (Quaternary ice age), or significant advances of continental ice sheets, in Europe and North America, occurred at intervals of approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years. The long glacial periods were separated by more temperate and shorter interglacials which lasted about 10,000–15,000 years. The last cold episode of the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. Earth is currently in an interglacial period of the Quaternary, called the Holocene.


title: Europe

text: "Homo erectus georgicus", which lived roughly 1.8 million years ago in Georgia, is the earliest hominin to have been discovered in Europe. Other hominin remains, dating back roughly 1 million years, have been discovered in Atapuerca, Spain. Neanderthal man (named after the Neandertal valley in Germany) appeared in Europe 150,000 years ago (115,000 years ago it is found already in the territory of present-day Poland) and disappeared from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago, with their final refuge being the Iberian Peninsula. The Neanderthals were supplanted by modern humans (Cro-Magnons), who appeared in Europe around 43,000 to 40,000 years ago. Homo sapiens arrived in Europe around 54,000 years ago, some 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. The earliest sites in Europe dated 48,000 years ago are Riparo Mochi (Italy), Geissenklösterle (Germany) and Isturitz (France).


title: Europe

text: The European Neolithic period—marked by the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock, increased numbers of settlements and the widespread use of pottery—began around 7000 BCE in Greece and the Balkans, probably influenced by earlier farming practices in Anatolia and the Near East. It spread from the Balkans along the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine (Linear Pottery culture), and along the Mediterranean coast (Cardial culture). Between 4500 and 3000 BCE, these central European neolithic cultures developed further to the west and the north, transmitting newly acquired skills in producing copper artifacts. In Western Europe the Neolithic period was characterised not by large agricultural settlements but by field monuments, such as causewayed enclosures, burial mounds and megalithic tombs. The Corded Ware cultural horizon flourished at the transition from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic. During this period giant megalithic monuments, such as the Megalithic Temples of Malta and Stonehenge, were constructed throughout Western and Southern Europe.


title: Europe

text: The modern native populations of Europe largely descend from three distinct lineages: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, a derivative of the Cro-Magnon population of Europe, Neolithic farmers who migrated from Anatolia during the Neolithic Revolution, and Yamnaya pastoralists who expanded into Europe in the context of the Indo-European migrations. The European Bronze Age began c. 3200 BCE in Greece with the Minoan civilisation on Crete, the first advanced civilisation in Europe. The Minoans were followed by the Myceneans, who collapsed suddenly around 1200 BCE, ushering the European Iron Age. Iron Age colonisation by the Greeks and Phoenicians gave rise to early Mediterranean cities. Early Iron Age Italy and Greece from around the 8th century BCE gradually gave rise to historical Classical antiquity, whose beginning is sometimes dated to 776 BCE, the year of the first Olympic Games.


title: Europe

text: Ancient Greece was the founding culture of Western civilisation. Western democratic and rationalist culture are often attributed to Ancient Greece. The Greek city-state, the polis, was the fundamental political unit of classical Greece. In 508 BCE, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens. The Greek political ideals were rediscovered in the late 18th century by European philosophers and idealists. Greece also generated many cultural contributions: in philosophy, humanism and rationalism under Aristotle, Socrates and Plato; in history with Herodotus and Thucydides; in dramatic and narrative verse, starting with the epic poems of Homer; in drama with Sophocles and Euripides, in medicine with Hippocrates and Galen; and in science with Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes. In the course of the 5th century BCE, several of the Greek city states would ultimately check the Achaemenid Persian advance in Europe through the Greco-Persian Wars, considered a pivotal moment in world history, as the 50 years of peace that followed are known as Golden Age of Athens, the seminal period of ancient Greece that laid many of the foundations of Western civilisation.


title: Europe

text: Greece was followed by Rome, which left its mark on law, politics, language, engineering, architecture, government and many more key aspects in western civilisation. By 200 BCE, Rome had conquered Italy and over the following two centuries it conquered Greece and Hispania (Spain and Portugal), the North African coast, much of the Middle East, Gaul (France and Belgium) and Britannia (England and Wales).


title: Europe

text: Expanding from their base in central Italy beginning in the third century BCE, the Romans gradually expanded to eventually rule the entire Mediterranean Basin and Western Europe by the turn of the millennium. The Roman Republic ended in 27 BCE, when Augustus proclaimed the Roman Empire. The two centuries that followed are known as the "pax romana", a period of unprecedented peace, prosperity and political stability in most of Europe. The empire continued to expand under emperors such as Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, who spent time on the Empire's northern border fighting Germanic, Pictish and Scottish tribes. Christianity was legalised by Constantine I in 313 CE after three centuries of imperial persecution. Constantine also permanently moved the capital of the empire from Rome to the city of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul) which was renamed Constantinople in his honour in 330 CE. Christianity became the sole official religion of the empire in 380 CE and in 391–392 CE, the emperor Theodosius outlawed pagan religions. This is sometimes considered to mark the end of antiquity; alternatively antiquity is considered to end with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE; the closure of the pagan Platonic Academy of Athens in 529 CE; or the rise of Islam in the early 7th century CE. During most of its existence, the Byzantine Empire was one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military forces in Europe.


title: Europe

text: During the decline of the Roman Empire, Europe entered a long period of change arising from what historians call the "Age of Migrations". There were numerous invasions and migrations amongst the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Goths, Vandals, Huns, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Slavs, Avars, Bulgars and, later on, the Vikings, Pechenegs, Cumans and Magyars. Renaissance thinkers such as Petrarch would later refer to this as the "Dark Ages".


title: Europe

text: Isolated monastic communities were the only places to safeguard and compile written knowledge accumulated previously; apart from this very few written records survive and much literature, philosophy, mathematics and other thinking from the classical period disappeared from Western Europe, though they were preserved in the east, in the Byzantine Empire.


title: Europe

text: While the Roman empire in the west continued to decline, Roman traditions and the Roman state remained strong in the predominantly Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. During most of its existence, the Byzantine Empire was the most powerful economic, cultural and military force in Europe. Emperor Justinian I presided over Constantinople's first golden age: he established a legal code that forms the basis of many modern legal systems, funded the construction of the Hagia Sophia and brought the Christian church under state control.


title: Europe

text: From the 7th century onwards, as the Byzantines and neighbouring Sasanid Persians were severely weakened due to the protracted, centuries-lasting and frequent Byzantine–Sasanian wars, the Muslim Arabs began to make inroads into historically Roman territory, taking the Levant and North Africa and making inroads into Asia Minor. In the mid-7th century, following the Muslim conquest of Persia, Islam penetrated into the Caucasus region. Over the next centuries Muslim forces took Cyprus, Malta, Crete, Sicily and parts of southern Italy. Between 711 and 720, most of the lands of the Visigothic Kingdom of Iberia was brought under Muslim rule—save for small areas in the north-west (Asturias) and largely Basque regions in the Pyrenees. This territory, under the Arabic name Al-Andalus, became part of the expanding Umayyad Caliphate. The unsuccessful second siege of Constantinople (717) weakened the Umayyad dynasty and reduced their prestige. The Umayyads were then defeated by the Frankish leader Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, which ended their northward advance. In the remote regions of north-western Iberia and the middle Pyrenees the power of the Muslims in the south was scarcely felt. It was here that the foundations of the Christian kingdoms of Asturias, Leon and Galicia were laid and from where the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula would start. However, no coordinated attempt would be made to drive the Moors out. The Christian kingdoms were mainly focussed on their own internal power struggles. As a result, the Reconquista took the greater part of eight hundred years, in which period a long list of Alfonsos, Sanchos, Ordoños, Ramiros, Fernandos and Bermudos would be fighting their Christian rivals as much as the Muslim invaders.


title: Europe

text: During the Dark Ages, the Western Roman Empire fell under the control of various tribes. The Germanic and Slav tribes established their domains over Western and Eastern Europe, respectively. Eventually the Frankish tribes were united under Clovis I. Charlemagne, a Frankish king of the Carolingian dynasty who had conquered most of Western Europe, was anointed "Holy Roman Emperor" by the Pope in 800. This led in 962 to the founding of the Holy Roman Empire, which eventually became centred in the German principalities of central Europe.


title: Europe

text: East Central Europe saw the creation of the first Slavic states and the adoption of Christianity (. The powerful West Slavic state of Great Moravia spread its territory all the way south to the Balkans, reaching its largest territorial extent under Svatopluk I and causing a series of armed conflicts with East Francia. Further south, the first South Slavic states emerged in the late 7th and 8th century and adopted Christianity: the First Bulgarian Empire, the Serbian Principality (later Kingdom and Empire) and the Duchy of Croatia (later Kingdom of Croatia). To the East, Kievan Rus' expanded from its capital in Kiev to become the largest state in Europe by the 10th century. In 988, Vladimir the Great adopted Orthodox Christianity as the religion of state. Further East, Volga Bulgaria became an Islamic state in the 10th century, but was eventually absorbed into Russia several centuries later.


title: Europe

text: The period between the year 1000 and 1250 is known as the High Middle Ages, followed by the Late Middle Ages until c. 1500.


title: Europe

text: During the High Middle Ages the population of Europe experienced significant growth, culminating in the Renaissance of the 12th century. Economic growth, together with the lack of safety on the mainland trading routes, made possible the development of major commercial routes along the coast of the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. The growing wealth and independence acquired by some coastal cities gave the Maritime Republics a leading role in the European scene.


title: Europe

text: The Middle Ages on the mainland were dominated by the two upper echelons of the social structure: the nobility and the clergy. Feudalism developed in France in the Early Middle Ages, and soon spread throughout Europe. A struggle for influence between the nobility and the monarchy in England led to the writing of the "Magna Carta" and the establishment of a parliament. The primary source of culture in this period came from the Roman Catholic Church. Through monasteries and cathedral schools, the Church was responsible for education in much of Europe.


title: Europe

text: The Papacy reached the height of its power during the High Middle Ages. An East-West Schism in 1054 split the former Roman Empire religiously, with the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic Church in the former Western Roman Empire. In 1095 Pope Urban II called for a crusade against Muslims occupying Jerusalem and the Holy Land. In Europe itself, the Church organised the Inquisition against heretics. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista concluded with the fall of Granada in 1492, ending over seven centuries of Islamic rule in the south-western peninsula.


title: Europe

text: In the east, a resurgent Byzantine Empire recaptured Crete and Cyprus from the Muslims, and reconquered the Balkans. Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the 9th to the 12th centuries, with a population of approximately 400,000. The Empire was weakened following the defeat at Manzikert, and was weakened considerably by the sack of Constantinople in 1204, during the Fourth Crusade. Although it would recover Constantinople in 1261, Byzantium fell in 1453 when Constantinople was taken by the Ottoman Empire.


title: Europe

text: In the 11th and 12th centuries, constant incursions by nomadic Turkic tribes, such as the Pechenegs and the Cuman-Kipchaks, caused a massive migration of Slavic populations to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north, and temporarily halted the expansion of the Rus' state to the south and east. Like many other parts of Eurasia, these territories were overrun by the Mongols. The invaders, who became known as Tatars, were mostly Turkic-speaking peoples under Mongol suzerainty. They established the state of the Golden Horde with headquarters in Crimea, which later adopted Islam as a religion, and ruled over modern-day southern and central Russia for more than three centuries. After the collapse of Mongol dominions, the first Romanian states (principalities) emerged in the 14th century: Moldavia and Walachia. Previously, these territories were under the successive control of Pechenegs and Cumans. From the 12th to the 15th centuries, the Grand Duchy of Moscow grew from a small principality under Mongol rule to the largest state in Europe, overthrowing the Mongols in 1480, and eventually becoming the Tsardom of Russia. The state was consolidated under Ivan III the Great and Ivan the Terrible, steadily expanding to the east and south over the next centuries.


title: Europe

text: The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was the first crisis that would strike Europe in the late Middle Ages. The period between 1348 and 1420 witnessed the heaviest loss. The population of France was reduced by half. Medieval Britain was afflicted by 95 famines, and France suffered the effects of 75 or more in the same period. Europe was devastated in the mid-14th century by the Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history which killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe alone—a third of the European population at the time.


title: Europe

text: The plague had a devastating effect on Europe's social structure; it induced people to live for the moment as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in "The Decameron" (1353). It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and led to increased persecution of Jews, beggars and lepers. The plague is thought to have returned every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 18th century. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe.


title: Europe

text: The Renaissance was a period of cultural change originating in Florence, and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The rise of a new humanism was accompanied by the recovery of forgotten classical Greek and Arabic knowledge from monastic libraries, often translated from Arabic into Latin. The Renaissance spread across Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries: it saw the flowering of art, philosophy, music and the sciences, under the joint patronage of royalty, the nobility, the Roman Catholic Church and an emerging merchant class. Patrons in Italy, including the Medici family of Florentine bankers and the Popes in Rome, funded prolific quattrocento and cinquecento artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.


title: Europe

text: Political intrigue within the Church in the mid-14th century caused the Western Schism. During this forty-year period, two popes—one in Avignon and one in Rome—claimed rulership over the Church. Although the schism was eventually healed in 1417, the papacy's spiritual authority had suffered greatly. In the 15th century, Europe started to extend itself beyond its geographic frontiers. Spain and Portugal, the greatest naval powers of the time, took the lead in exploring the world. Exploration reached the Southern Hemisphere in the Atlantic and the Southern tip of Africa. Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, and Vasco da Gama opened the ocean route to the East linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in 1498. The Portuguese-born explorer Ferdinand Magellan reached Asia westward across the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans in a Spanish expedition, resulting in the first circumnavigation of the globe, completed by the Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano (1519–1522). Soon after, the Spanish and Portuguese began establishing large global empires in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. France, the Netherlands and England soon followed in building large colonial empires with vast holdings in Africa, the Americas and Asia. In 1588, a Spanish armada failed to invade England. A year later England tried unsuccessfully to invade Spain, allowing Philip II of Spain to maintain his dominant war capacity in Europe. This English disaster also allowed the Spanish fleet to retain its capability to wage war for the next decades. However, two more Spanish armadas failed to invade England (2nd Spanish Armada and 3rd Spanish Armada).


title: Europe

text: The Church's power was further weakened by the Protestant Reformation in 1517 when German theologian Martin Luther nailed his "Ninety-five Theses" criticising the selling of indulgences to the church door. He was subsequently excommunicated in the papal bull "Exsurge Domine" in 1520 and his followers were condemned in the 1521 Diet of Worms, which divided German princes between Protestant and Roman Catholic faiths. Religious fighting and warfare spread with Protestantism. The plunder of the empires of the Americas allowed Spain to finance religious persecution in Europe for over a century. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) crippled the Holy Roman Empire and devastated much of Germany, killing between 25 and 40 percent of its population. In the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia, France rose to predominance within Europe. The defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 marked the historic end of Ottoman expansion into Europe.


title: Europe

text: The 17th century in central and parts of eastern Europe was a period of general decline; the region experienced more than 150 famines in a 200-year period between 1501 and 1700. From the Union of Krewo (1385) east-central Europe was dominated by the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The hegemony of the vast Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had ended with the devastation brought by the Second Northern War (Deluge) and subsequent conflicts; the state itself was partitioned and ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century.


title: Europe

text: From the 15th to 18th centuries, when the disintegrating khanates of the Golden Horde were conquered by Russia, Tatars from the Crimean Khanate frequently raided Eastern Slavic lands to capture slaves. Further east, the Nogai Horde and Kazakh Khanate frequently raided the Slavic-speaking areas of contemporary Russia and Ukraine for hundreds of years, until the Russian expansion and conquest of most of northern Eurasia (i.e. Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia).


title: Europe

text: The Renaissance and the New Monarchs marked the start of an Age of Discovery, a period of exploration, invention and scientific development. Among the great figures of the Western scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries were Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Isaac Newton. According to Peter Barrett, "It is widely accepted that 'modern science' arose in the Europe of the 17th century (towards the end of the Renaissance), introducing a new understanding of the natural world."


title: Europe

text: The Seven Years' War brought to an end the "Old System" of alliances in Europe. Consequently, when the American Revolutionary War turned into a global war between 1778 and 1783, Britain found itself opposed by a strong coalition of European powers, and lacking any substantial ally.


title: Europe

text: The Age of Enlightenment was a powerful intellectual movement during the 18th century promoting scientific and reason-based thoughts. Discontent with the aristocracy and clergy's monopoly on political power in France resulted in the French Revolution, and the establishment of the First Republic as a result of which the monarchy and many of the nobility perished during the initial reign of terror. Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and established the First French Empire that, during the Napoleonic Wars, grew to encompass large parts of Europe before collapsing in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleonic rule resulted in the further dissemination of the ideals of the French Revolution, including that of the nation state, as well as the widespread adoption of the French models of administration, law and education. The Congress of Vienna, convened after Napoleon's downfall, established a new balance of power in Europe centred on the five "Great Powers": the UK, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia. This balance would remain in place until the Revolutions of 1848, during which liberal uprisings affected all of Europe except for Russia and the UK. These revolutions were eventually put down by conservative elements and few reforms resulted. The year 1859 saw the unification of Romania, as a nation state, from smaller principalities. In 1867, the Austro-Hungarian empire was formed; 1871 saw the unifications of both Italy and Germany as nation-states from smaller principalities.


title: Europe

text: In parallel, the Eastern Question grew more complex ever since the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). As the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire seemed imminent, the Great Powers struggled to safeguard their strategic and commercial interests in the Ottoman domains. The Russian Empire stood to benefit from the decline, whereas the Habsburg Empire and Britain perceived the preservation of the Ottoman Empire to be in their best interests. Meanwhile, the Serbian revolution (1804) and Greek War of Independence (1821) marked the beginning of the end of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, which ended with the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913. Formal recognition of the "de facto" independent principalities of Montenegro, Serbia and Romania ensued at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.


title: Europe

text: The Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain in the last part of the 18th century and spread throughout Europe. The invention and implementation of new technologies resulted in rapid urban growth, mass employment and the rise of a new working class. Reforms in social and economic spheres followed, including the first laws on child labour, the legalisation of trade unions, and the abolition of slavery. In Britain, the Public Health Act of 1875 was passed, which significantly improved living conditions in many British cities. Europe's population increased from about 100 million in 1700 to 400 million by 1900. The last major famine recorded in Western Europe, the Great Famine of Ireland, caused death and mass emigration of millions of Irish people. In the 19th century, 70 million people left Europe in migrations to various European colonies abroad and to the United States. Demographic growth meant that, by 1900, Europe's share of the world's population was 25%.


title: Europe

text: Two world wars and an economic depression dominated the first half of the 20th century. The First World War was fought between 1914 and 1918. It started when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip. Most European nations were drawn into the war, which was fought between the Entente Powers (France, Belgium, Serbia, Portugal, Russia, the United Kingdom, and later Italy, Greece, Romania, and the United States) and the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire). The war left more than 16 million civilians and military dead. Over 60 million European soldiers were mobilised from 1914 to 1918.


title: Europe

text: Russia was plunged into the Russian Revolution, which threw down the Tsarist monarchy and replaced it with the communist Soviet Union, leading also to the independence of many former Russian governorates, such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as new European countries. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed and broke up into separate nations, and many other nations had their borders redrawn. The Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended the First World War in 1919, was harsh towards Germany, upon whom it placed full responsibility for the war and imposed heavy sanctions. Excess deaths in Russia over the course of the First World War and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million. In 1932–1933, under Stalin's leadership, confiscations of grain by the Soviet authorities contributed to the second Soviet famine which caused millions of deaths; surviving kulaks were persecuted and many sent to Gulags to do forced labour. Stalin was also responsible for the Great Purge of 1937–38 in which the NKVD executed 681,692 people; millions of people were deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.


title: Europe

text: The social revolutions sweeping through Russia also affected other European nations following The Great War: in 1919, with the Weimar Republic in Germany and the First Austrian Republic; in 1922, with Mussolini's one-party fascist government in the Kingdom of Italy and in Atatürk's Turkish Republic, adopting the Western alphabet and state secularism.


title: Europe

text: Economic instability, caused in part by debts incurred in the First World War and 'loans' to Germany played havoc in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s. This, and the Wall Street Crash of 1929, brought about the worldwide Great Depression. Helped by the economic crisis, social instability and the threat of communism, fascist movements developed throughout Europe placing Adolf Hitler in power of what became Nazi Germany.


title: Europe

text: In 1933, Hitler became the leader of Germany and began to work towards his goal of building Greater Germany. Germany re-expanded and took back the Saarland and Rhineland in 1935 and 1936. In 1938, Austria became a part of Germany following the Anschluss. Later that year, following the Munich Agreement signed by Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, Germany annexed the Sudetenland, which was a part of Czechoslovakia inhabited by ethnic Germans, and in early 1939, the remainder of Czechoslovakia was split into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, controlled by Germany and the Slovak Republic. At the time, the United Kingdom and France preferred a policy of appeasement.


title: Europe

text: With tensions mounting between Germany and Poland over the future of Danzig, the Germans turned to the Soviets and signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which allowed the Soviets to invade the Baltic states and parts of Poland and Romania. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, prompting France and the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany on 3 September, opening the European Theatre of the Second World War. The Soviet invasion of Poland started on 17 September and Poland fell soon thereafter. On 24 September, the Soviet Union attacked the Baltic countries and, on 30 November, Finland, the latter of which was followed by the devastating Winter War for the Red Army. The British hoped to land at Narvik and send troops to aid Finland, but their primary objective in the landing was to encircle Germany and cut the Germans off from Scandinavian resources. Around the same time, Germany moved troops into Denmark. The Phoney War continued.


title: Europe

text: In May 1940, Germany attacked France through the Low Countries. France capitulated in June 1940. By August, Germany had begun a bombing offensive against the United Kingdom but failed to convince the Britons to give up. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. On 7 December 1941 Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into the conflict as allies of the British Empire, and other allied forces.


title: Europe

text: After the staggering Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the German offensive in the Soviet Union turned into a continual fallback. The Battle of Kursk, which involved the largest tank battle in history, was the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front. In June 1944, British and American forces invaded France in the D-Day landings, opening a new front against Germany. Berlin finally fell in 1945, ending the Second World War in Europe. The war was the largest and most destructive in human history, with 60 million dead across the world. More than 40 million people in Europe had died as a result of the Second World War, including between 11 and 17 million people who perished during the Holocaust. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people (mostly civilians) during the war, about half of all Second World War casualties. By the end of the Second World War, Europe had more than 40 million refugees. Several post-war expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe displaced a total of about 20 million people.


title: Europe

text: The First World War, and especially the Second World War, diminished the eminence of Western Europe in world affairs. After the Second World War the map of Europe was redrawn at the Yalta Conference and divided into two blocs, the Western countries and the communist Eastern bloc, separated by what was later called by Winston Churchill an "Iron Curtain". The United States and Western Europe established the NATO alliance and, later, the Soviet Union and Central Europe established the Warsaw Pact. Particular hot spots after the Second World War were Berlin and Trieste, whereby the Free Territory of Trieste, founded in 1947 with the UN, was dissolved in 1954 and 1975, respectively. The Berlin blockade in 1948 and 1949 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 were one of the great international crises of the Cold War.


title: Europe

text: The two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, became locked in a fifty-year-long Cold War, centred on nuclear proliferation. At the same time decolonisation, which had already started after the First World War, gradually resulted in the independence of most of the European colonies in Asia and Africa.


title: Europe

text: In the 1980s the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Solidarity movement in Poland weakened the previously rigid communist system. The opening of the Iron Curtain at the Pan-European Picnic then set in motion a peaceful chain reaction, at the end of which the Eastern bloc, the Warsaw Pact and other communist states collapsed, and the Cold War ended. Germany was reunited, after the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the maps of Central and Eastern Europe were redrawn once more. This made old previously interrupted cultural and economic relationships possible, and previously isolated cities such as Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Trieste were now again in the centre of Europe.


title: Europe

text: European integration also grew after the Second World War. In 1949 the Council of Europe was founded, following a speech by Sir Winston Churchill, with the idea of unifying Europe to achieve common goals. It includes all European states except for Belarus, Russia, and Vatican City. The Treaty of Rome in 1957 established the European Economic Community between six Western European states with the goal of a unified economic policy and common market. In 1967 the EEC, European Coal and Steel Community, and Euratom formed the European Community, which in 1993 became the European Union. The EU established a parliament, court and central bank, and introduced the euro as a unified currency. Between 2004 and 2013, more Central European countries began joining, expanding the EU to 28 European countries and once more making Europe a major economical and political centre of power. However, the United Kingdom withdrew from the EU on 31 January 2020, as a result of a June 2016 referendum on EU membership. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict, which has been ongoing since 2014, steeply escalated when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, marking the largest humanitarian and refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War and the Yugoslav Wars.


title: Europe

text: Europe makes up the western fifth of the Eurasian landmass. It has a higher ratio of coast to landmass than any other continent or subcontinent. Its maritime borders consist of the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian Seas to the south.


title: Europe

text: Land relief in Europe shows great variation within relatively small areas. The southern regions are more mountainous, while moving north the terrain descends from the high Alps, Pyrenees and Carpathians, through hilly uplands, into broad, low northern plains, which are vast in the east. This extended lowland is known as the Great European Plain and at its heart lies the North German Plain. An arc of uplands also exists along the north-western seaboard, which begins in the western parts of the islands of Britain and Ireland, and then continues along the mountainous, fjord-cut spine of Norway.


title: Europe

text: This description is simplified. Subregions such as the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula contain their own complex features, as does mainland Central Europe itself, where the relief contains many plateaus, river valleys and basins that complicate the general trend. Sub-regions like Iceland, Britain and Ireland are special cases. The former is a land unto itself in the northern ocean that is counted as part of Europe, while the latter are upland areas that were once joined to the mainland until rising sea levels cut them off.


title: Europe

text: Europe lies mainly in the temperate climate zones, being subjected to prevailing westerlies. The climate is milder in comparison to other areas of the same latitude around the globe due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is nicknamed "Europe's central heating", because it makes Europe's climate warmer and wetter than it would otherwise be. The Gulf Stream not only carries warm water to Europe's coast but also warms up the prevailing westerly winds that blow across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean.


title: Europe

text: Therefore, the average temperature throughout the year of Aveiro is , while it is only in New York City which is almost on the same latitude, bordering the same ocean. Berlin, Germany; Calgary, Canada; and Irkutsk, in far south-eastern Russia, lie on around the same latitude; January temperatures in Berlin average around higher than those in Calgary and they are almost higher than average temperatures in Irkutsk.


title: Europe

text: The large water masses of the Mediterranean Sea, which equalise the temperatures on an annual and daily average, are also of particular importance. The water of the Mediterranean extends from the Sahara desert to the Alpine arc in its northernmost part of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste.


title: Europe

text: In general, Europe is not just colder towards the north compared to the south, but it also gets colder from the west towards the east. The climate is more oceanic in the west and less so in the east. This can be illustrated by the following table of average temperatures at locations roughly following the 64th, 60th, 55th, 50th, 45th and 40th latitudes. None of them is located at high altitude; most of them are close to the sea. (location, approximate latitude and longitude, coldest month average, hottest month average and annual average temperatures in degrees C)


title: Europe

text: It is notable how the average temperatures for the coldest month, as well as the annual average temperatures, drop from the west to the east. For instance, Edinburgh is warmer than Belgrade during the coldest month of the year, although Belgrade is around 10° of latitude farther south.


title: Europe

text: The geological history of Europe traces back to the formation of the Baltic Shield (Fennoscandia) and the Sarmatian craton, both around 2.25 billion years ago, followed by the Volgo–Uralia shield, the three together leading to the East European craton (≈ Baltica) which became a part of the supercontinent Columbia. Around 1.1 billion years ago, Baltica and Arctica (as part of the Laurentia block) became joined to Rodinia, later resplitting around 550 million years ago to reform as Baltica. Around 440 million years ago Euramerica was formed from Baltica and Laurentia; a further joining with Gondwana then leading to the formation of Pangea. Around 190 million years ago, Gondwana and Laurasia split apart due to the widening of the Atlantic Ocean. Finally and very soon afterwards, Laurasia itself split up again, into Laurentia (North America) and the Eurasian continent. The land connection between the two persisted for a considerable time, via Greenland, leading to interchange of animal species. From around 50 million years ago, rising and falling sea levels have determined the actual shape of Europe and its connections with continents such as Asia. Europe's present shape dates to the late Tertiary period about five million years ago.


title: Europe

text: The geology of Europe is hugely varied and complex and gives rise to the wide variety of landscapes found across the continent, from the Scottish Highlands to the rolling plains of Hungary. Europe's most significant feature is the dichotomy between highland and mountainous Southern Europe and a vast, partially underwater, northern plain ranging from Ireland in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. These two halves are separated by the mountain chains of the Pyrenees and Alps/Carpathians. The northern plains are delimited in the west by the Scandinavian Mountains and the mountainous parts of the British Isles. Major shallow water bodies submerging parts of the northern plains are the Celtic Sea, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea complex and Barents Sea.


title: Europe

text: The northern plain contains the old geological continent of Baltica and so may be regarded geologically as the "main continent", while peripheral highlands and mountainous regions in the south and west constitute fragments from various other geological continents. Most of the older geology of western Europe existed as part of the ancient microcontinent Avalonia.


title: Europe

text: Having lived side by side with agricultural peoples for millennia, Europe's animals and plants have been profoundly affected by the presence and activities of man. With the exception of Fennoscandia and northern Russia, few areas of untouched wilderness are currently found in Europe, except for various national parks.


title: Europe

text: The main natural vegetation cover in Europe is mixed forest. The conditions for growth are very favourable. In the north, the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift warm the continent. Southern Europe could be described as having a warm, but mild climate. There are frequent summer droughts in this region. Mountain ridges also affect the conditions. Some of these (Alps, Pyrenees) are oriented east–west and allow the wind to carry large masses of water from the ocean in the interior. Others are oriented south–north (Scandinavian Mountains, Dinarides, Carpathians, Apennines) and because the rain falls primarily on the side of mountains that is oriented towards the sea, forests grow well on this side, while on the other side, the conditions are much less favourable. Few corners of mainland Europe have not been grazed by livestock at some point in time, and the cutting down of the preagricultural forest habitat caused disruption to the original plant and animal ecosystems.


title: Europe

text: Possibly 80 to 90 percent of Europe was once covered by forest. It stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arctic Ocean. Although over half of Europe's original forests disappeared through the centuries of deforestation, Europe still has over one quarter of its land area as forest, such as the broadleaf and mixed forests, taiga of Scandinavia and Russia, mixed rainforests of the Caucasus and the Cork oak forests in the western Mediterranean. During recent times, deforestation has been slowed and many trees have been planted. However, in many cases monoculture plantations of conifers have replaced the original mixed natural forest, because these grow quicker. The plantations now cover vast areas of land, but offer poorer habitats for many European forest dwelling species which require a mixture of tree species and diverse forest structure. The amount of natural forest in Western Europe is just 2–3% or less, while in its Western Russia its 5–10%. The European country with the smallest percentage of forested area is Iceland (1%), while the most forested country is Finland (77%).


title: Europe

text: In temperate Europe, mixed forest with both broadleaf and coniferous trees dominate. The most important species in central and western Europe are beech and oak. In the north, the taiga is a mixed spruce–pine–birch forest; further north within Russia and extreme northern Scandinavia, the taiga gives way to tundra as the Arctic is approached. In the Mediterranean, many olive trees have been planted, which are very well adapted to its arid climate; Mediterranean Cypress is also widely planted in southern Europe. The semi-arid Mediterranean region hosts much scrub forest. A narrow east–west tongue of Eurasian grassland (the steppe) extends westwards from Ukraine and southern Russia and ends in Hungary and traverses into taiga to the north.


title: Europe

text: Glaciation during the most recent ice age and the presence of man affected the distribution of European fauna. As for the animals, in many parts of Europe most large animals and top predator species have been hunted to extinction. The woolly mammoth was extinct before the end of the Neolithic period. Today wolves (carnivores) and bears (omnivores) are endangered. Once they were found in most parts of Europe. However, deforestation and hunting caused these animals to withdraw further and further. By the Middle Ages the bears' habitats were limited to more or less inaccessible mountains with sufficient forest cover. Today, the brown bear lives primarily in the Balkan peninsula, Scandinavia and Russia; a small number also persist in other countries across Europe (Austria, Pyrenees etc.), but in these areas brown bear populations are fragmented and marginalised because of the destruction of their habitat. In addition, polar bears may be found on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago far north of Scandinavia. The wolf, the second largest predator in Europe after the brown bear, can be found primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Balkans, with a handful of packs in pockets of Western Europe (Scandinavia, Spain, etc.).


title: Europe

text: European wild cat, foxes (especially the red fox), jackal and different species of martens, hedgehogs, different species of reptiles (like snakes such as vipers and grass snakes) and amphibians, different birds (owls, hawks and other birds of prey).


title: Europe

text: Important European herbivores are snails, larvae, fish, different birds and mammals, like rodents, deer and roe deer, boars and living in the mountains, marmots, steinbocks, chamois among others. A number of insects, such as the small tortoiseshell butterfly, add to the biodiversity.


title: Europe

text: The extinction of the dwarf hippos and dwarf elephants has been linked to the earliest arrival of humans on the islands of the Mediterranean.


title: Europe

text: Sea creatures are also an important part of European flora and fauna. The sea flora is mainly phytoplankton. Important animals that live in European seas are zooplankton, molluscs, echinoderms, different crustaceans, squids and octopuses, fish, dolphins and whales.


title: Europe

text: Biodiversity is protected in Europe through the Council of Europe's Bern Convention, which has also been signed by the European Community as well as non-European states.


title: Europe

text: The political map of Europe is substantially derived from the re-organisation of Europe following the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The prevalent form of government in Europe is parliamentary democracy, in most cases in the form of Republic; in 1815, the prevalent form of government was still the Monarchy. Europe's remaining eleven monarchies are constitutional.


title: Europe

text: European integration is the process of political, legal, economic (and in some cases social and cultural) integration of European states as it has been pursued by the powers sponsoring the Council of Europe since the end of the Second World War The European Union has been the focus of economic integration on the continent since its foundation in 1993. More recently, the Eurasian Economic Union has been established as a counterpart comprising former Soviet states.


title: Europe

text: 27 European states are members of the politico-economic European Union, 26 of the border-free Schengen Area and 19 of the monetary union Eurozone. Among the smaller European organisations are the Nordic Council, the Benelux, the Baltic Assembly and the Visegrád Group.


title: Europe

text: The list below includes all internationally recognized sovereign countries falling even partially under any common geographical or political definitions of Europe.


title: Europe

text: Within the above-mentioned states are several de facto independent countries with limited to no international recognition. None of them are members of the UN:


title: Europe

text: Several dependencies and similar territories with broad autonomy are also found within or close to Europe. This includes Åland (an autonomous county of Finland), two autonomous territories of the Kingdom of Denmark (other than Denmark proper), three Crown Dependencies and two British Overseas Territories. Svalbard is also included due to its unique status within Norway, although it is not autonomous. Not included are the three countries of the United Kingdom with devolved powers and the two Autonomous Regions of Portugal, which despite having a unique degree of autonomy, are not largely self-governing in matters other than international affairs. Areas with little more than a unique tax status, such as the Canary Islands and Heligoland, are also not included for this reason.


title: Europe

text: As a continent, the economy of Europe is currently the largest on Earth and it is the richest region as measured by assets under management with over $32.7 trillion compared to North America's $27.1 trillion in 2008. In 2009 Europe remained the wealthiest region. Its $37.1 trillion in assets under management represented one-third of the world's wealth. It was one of several regions where wealth surpassed its precrisis year-end peak. As with other continents, Europe has a large variation of wealth among its countries. The richer states tend to be in the West, followed by Central Europeans, while some of the Eastern Europe economies are still emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia.


title: Europe

text: The model of the Blue Banana was designed as an economic geographic representation of the respective economic power of the regions, which was further developed into the Golden Banana or Blue Star. The trade between East and West, as well as towards Asia, which had been disrupted for a long time by the two world wars, new borders and the Cold War, increased sharply after 1989. In addition, there is new impetus from the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative across the Suez Canal towards Africa and Asia.


title: Europe

text: The European Union, a political entity composed of 27 European states, comprises the largest single economic area in the world. Nineteen EU countries share the euro as a common currency.


title: Europe

text: Five European countries rank in the top ten of the world's largest national economies in GDP (PPP). This includes (ranks according to the CIA): Germany (6), Russia (7), the United Kingdom (10), France (11) and Italy (13).


title: Europe

text: There is huge disparity between many European countries in terms of their income. The richest in terms of nominal GDP is Monaco with its US$185,829 per capita (2018) and the poorest is Ukraine with its US$3,659 per capita (2019). Monaco is the richest country in terms of GDP per capita in the world according to the World Bank report.


title: Europe

text: As a whole, Europe's GDP per capita is US$21,767 according to a 2016 International Monetary Fund assessment.


title: Europe

text: Capitalism has been dominant in the Western world since the end of feudalism. From Britain, it gradually spread throughout Europe. The Industrial Revolution started in Europe, specifically the United Kingdom in the late 18th century, and the 19th century saw Western Europe industrialise. Economies were disrupted by the First World War, but by the beginning of the Second World War, they had recovered and were having to compete with the growing economic strength of the United States. The Second World War, again, damaged much of Europe's industries.


title: Europe

text: After the Second World War the economy of the UK was in a state of ruin, and continued to suffer relative economic decline in the following decades. Italy was also in a poor economic condition but regained a high level of growth by the 1950s. West Germany recovered quickly and had doubled production from pre-war levels by the 1950s. France also staged a remarkable comeback enjoying rapid growth and modernisation; later on Spain, under the leadership of Franco, also recovered and the nation recorded huge unprecedented economic growth beginning in the 1960s in what is called the Spanish miracle. The majority of Central and Eastern European states came under the control of the Soviet Union and thus were members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON).


title: Europe

text: With the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1991, the post-socialist states began free market reforms.


title: Europe

text: After East and West Germany were reunited in 1990, the economy of West Germany struggled as it had to support and largely rebuild the infrastructure of East Germany.


title: Europe

text: By the millennium change, the EU dominated the economy of Europe, comprising the five largest European economies of the time: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain. In 1999, 12 of the 15 members of the EU joined the Eurozone replacing their former national currencies by the common euro. The three who chose to remain outside the Eurozone were the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden. The European Union is now the largest economy in the world.


title: Europe

text: Figures released by Eurostat in 2009 confirmed that the Eurozone had gone into recession in 2008. It impacted much of the region. In 2010, fears of a sovereign debt crisis developed concerning some countries in Europe, especially Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. As a result, measures were taken, especially for Greece, by the leading countries of the Eurozone. The EU-27 unemployment rate was 10.3% in 2012. For those aged 15–24 it was 22.4%.


title: Europe

text: In 2017, the population of Europe was estimated to be 742 million according to , which is slightly more than one-ninth of the world's population.


title: Europe

text: A century ago, Europe had nearly a quarter of the world's population. The population of Europe has grown in the past century, but in other areas of the world (in particular Africa and Asia) the population has grown far more quickly. Among the continents, Europe has a relatively high population density, second only to Asia. Most of Europe is in a mode of sub-replacement fertility, which means that each new(-born) generation is being less populous than the older.


title: Europe

text: Pan and Pfeil (2004) count 87 distinct "peoples of Europe", of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities.


title: Europe

text: According to UN population projection, Europe's population may fall to about 7% of world population by 2050, or 653 million people (medium variant, 556 to 777 million in low and high variants, respectively). Within this context, significant disparities exist between regions in relation to fertility rates. The average number of children per female of child-bearing age is 1.52. According to some sources, this rate is higher among Muslims in Europe. The UN predicts a steady population decline in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of emigration and low birth rates.