ABSTRACT
Medieval and modern European history can be conceived as a sequence of developments with a number of caesurae which were important for the whole of Europe and a minor caesurae with specific meanings for the history of individual European countries. Mass death and widespread violence caused many people to search for new strategies of survival in the wide spectrum of new approaches taken in the fourteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries. If one takes an even closer look at the fourteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries, a number of themes emerge which may be useful for a comparative analysis and therefore deserve further consideration. Perhaps some will become persuaded by the notion that the abuse of power, the rule of violence, and the experience of mass death were such elementary forces in thefourteenth, the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries that a combined interpretation of these three centuries may lead to new ways of understanding European history as a whole.
