Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The present volume must be considered as an introduction or preface to the series of Epochs of Modern History, rather than as an integral member of the series. The other volumes are narratives, and enter into detail. This one is a mere general sketch, necessarily one of the barest outline, faint and vague where they are full. My aim has been little more than to disengage the leading lines in the history of five most important and most confused centuries, and to mark the influences which most asserted themselves, and which seem to have most governed the results as we see them in subsequent history. In this summary view I have confined my attention mainly to the West, saying little of the great nations of later times in the North and East – Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, Russia.