ABSTRACT
Without using an explicitly millennial framework, and certainly with no apocalyptic references or obscure numerical correlates, various historians have identified two trends that run through the preceding thousand years reasonably consistently, despite a host of twists and turns. One is strictly Western European, the other more global. Western culture unquestionably harbors traditions that can anticipate catastrophic change or utopian bliss. Most historical trends—the patterns that really shape a particular historical period, including the present—have a shorter life span, particularly as change has accelerated over the past several centuries. For Western Europe, then, the past millennium has meant a surprisingly consistent, if very general, political trend. But it is genuinely true in Western history that a focus on the origins and emergence of the modern state over a thousand-year period has some validity. Western Europe, although hostile to the Muslim faith, gained access to Muslim and Jewish philosophies, along with west Asian holdings of classical Greek learning.
