All about the continent of Europe

Pictured: A map of the continent of Europe.

The continent of Europe includes 44 countries, including the United Kingdom. Located in the northern and eastern hemispheres, Europe spans from the Strait of Gibraltar in the south-western corner of the continent, the islands of Great Britain, Ireland and Iceland in its north-western corner, the Ural River and Ural Mountains in the north-east and the Bosporus Straight and Caucasus Mountains in the south-east.

Modern Europeans mainly descend from migrants from Asia and Africa who settled in the continent 9,000 to 5,000 years ago. Western civilisation is believed to have began in Ancient Greece, in the south-east of Europe, some 3,000 years ago, which is also seen by many as the birthplace of Western democracy.

The world's first democratic government that we know of was established in Athens in 508 BC, around 2,500 years ago. In that same century, other Greek city states defeated invading forces from what is now Iran, which is seen as a major moment in world history, leading to the Golden Age of Athens which laid the foundations of Western civilisation, with the Ancient Greeks pioneering Western philosophy, democracy and humanism.

By 100 BC, Ancient Greece had been conquered by Ancient Rome, which replaced it as the main power of Ancient Europe. Over the following centuries, it conquered much of Europe, including what is now Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, England, Wales, Turkey, the Middle East and the coast of North Africa, ruling the entirety of Western and Southern Europe.

Ancient Rome pioneered Western law, engineering, politics, governance, language and architecture, as well as other major aspects of Western civilisation. Outside of Rome, the rest of Europe was spit between different tribes, including Germanic, Scottish and Slavic tribes among others. It later collapsed in the 5th century, with a successor state known as the Byzantine Empire continuing to rule over Greece and Turkey while the rest of the continent fell to different tribes and kingdoms waging war with one another, in a period known as the Middle Ages marked by conflict and cultural and economic decline.

Christianity emerged in Europe during the Roman period, and was later followed by Islam in the 7th century; these religions became the two most dominant religions in Europe and later the rest of the world, becoming the official religions of Rome, Byzantium and other empires in North Africa, Southern Europe and the Middle East.

From the 700s to the 1400s, a series of religious wars were waged by Christian and Islamic forces over what is now Portugal and Spain, leading to the expulsion of Islamic forces from the area in 1492. From the 11th and 15th centuries, several religious crusades were waged by Christian forces to retake land lost to emerging Islamic states in the Middle East. These declined after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453, which went on to rule what is now Turkey, Greece and parts of Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Middle East and North Africa.