HISTORY, Modern. General Charac When History is divided merely into Ancient and Modern, the term Modern applies to history subsequent tb the 8th century A.D. The AMERICANA, however, keeps to the more usual triple division into Ancient. Mediaeval and Modern; and with this classification Modern History begins about the year' 1500.
At that date, as for several centuries pre ceding it, the scene of human progress was con fined to western Europe, and the actors were the Latin and Teutonic peoples. Except for Poland with its Latin church and borrowed German culture, eastern Europe was outside the pale of civilization. The barbarous northern Slays seemed doomed to Tartar domination, and the somewhat less barbarous southern Slays with the neighboring Magyars were enslaved by the Turk. From the devouring victorious march of the Turk even central Europe was in im minent peril.
Even in western Europe, nations, in the proper sense, were not made; and the political map bore faint resemblance to that of to-day. There was one Latin Christendom, binding in feeble union the several geographic units. But most of the units themselves were broken into fragments under local rulers; and these frag ments, sometimes of widely separated lands, were recombined, with kaleidoscopic confusion, in loose, shifting aggregates which possessed not even permanent names. Out of this feudal chaos, strong monarchies were just emerging, to organize states, in France, England, Spain, Austria and Bohemia, Sweden and Denmark. Like governments had appeared, too, in Hun gary and Poland; and Switzerland and the Netherlands were loosely related to the Aus trian monarchy. There was hardly a prophecy of a Germany or an Italy.
The rise of monarchic states is the change that marks the close, politically, of the Middle Ages. At the moment it seemed a disaster to many good men, like Dante, who clung to the old ideal of a united Christendom. But since the days of the old Roman Empire, Europe had never known a true union. *Latin Christen dom,* in its best period of union, had been made up of various layers of society—nobles, burgesses, artisans, priests, peasants; and the horizontal cleavages between these classes had been mole fatal to unity of spirit and to progress than the new cleavage into nations was to be. One class had been more foreign to another in the same land than France to England. French noble and German noble were always ready to make common cause against French peasants or German townsfolk. The new monarchies were to change all this. The real mission of each of them, whether the monarchs saw it or was to weld all the classes within its land into one people. While this was being done, some old class liberties were lost. But the way was being paved for a new popular freedom, broader and safer than the world had ever known.
Until 1250, for centuries Italy and Germany had been the two centres of interest in Europe. Each had claimed universal empire; and its overreaching claim had left each broken in frag ments. Not for centuries was either to attain to this new political form of a united monarchy. Leadership therefore had passed from these two lands to France, Spain and England,— the three countries in which the new movement was most advanced. Germany and Italy were to be, for
long, little more than a battleground for these neighbors.
The social and economic conditions of the year 1500 made a dismal picture. Society was hopelessly aristocratic and predominantly tant, and it was crystallized in strata. The skilled industry of the towns was managed upon the guild system; and agricultural labor, except in England. and some other small districts, was carried on by serfs.
But Europe had been astir with dim im pulses to change for 400 years,—ever since the Crusades broke the torpor of the Dark Ages and prepared the way for the rise of towns and the Renaissance. Near the close of the 15th century the tendency to progress became more pronounced, and the lines of activity more varied. Louis XI in France, the Tudors in England, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, pre pared the way for new consolidated political societies, and for new principles of government; the invention of printing made possible the preservation and utilization of the recently re discovered Greek learning and the rapid dis semination of new ideas; the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama set free un dreamed-of energies among the lands of the Atlantic seaboard, and summoned commercial Europe to a right-about from east to west; the adoption of gunpowder in the wars between Francis I and Charles V marked the passing of the military superiority of the knight in armor, and undermined. the citadel of aristocracy in politics; the opening of the Protestant Reforma tion (1520) shattered the old unity of Christen dom, and, together with the Catholic Counter Reformation, called out new energies in the fields of morals and intellect. Within two gen erations, the one just before and the one just after the year 1500, there stood revealed not merely a new physical hemisphere and new con tinents in the old one, but also a new universe of thought and feeling. Europe had passed Into a new age.
The four centuries of Modern History have been a period of constant, marvelous, increas ingly rapid transformation,—intellectual, politi cal, industrial. The stage itself has widened from a corner of the smallest continent into welinigh the whole surface of the globe. The actors have multiplied, until they promise in the near future to include all branches of the human race. The drama has become infinitely complex, with the interaction of countless streams of influence. As compared with Ancient or Mediae val History, Modern History deals with a brief time, but with vast spaces, complex relations and accelerated progress. The separate move ments that make up the bewildering maze are discussed severally in some detail, under appro priate headings, in the A MF.RICANA. This article attempts only to marshal them in such order as to bring out the essential relations between them.
It is convenient to divide the four centuries of Modern History into the age of monarchic states and the age of The Ameri can and French Revolutions make the transition from one to the other, and the most satisfactory dividing date is 1789.