Introduction to volume II

As pointed out in the Introductory observations in volume I, the ancient Greeks were not Europeans; they did not have a corresponding word, and the world to which they felt to belong was (as we describe the divisions of the world) Near Eastern and North African; the Hellenistic world was even more so. The Roman Empire, on its part, ranged widely, but its centre was the lands around the Mediterranean, and its intellectual centre was the Greek and Hellenistic world. Nor was the Islamic world European – before the Ottoman conquests the only part of it located within present-day Europe was al-Andalus.