Western Europe began as Rome’s Latin half versus the East
Western Europe’s borders change with every context, but the idea of “the West” first opposed “the East” inside the ancient Mediterranean—the Latin West of Rome and later Western Christendom. Renaissance and Age of Discovery usage then stretched the label across Atlantic-facing societies.
Before Rome’s conquests, much of the region shared the Iron Age La Tène culture. As the empire expanded, a cultural and linguistic divide opened between the urbanised, Greek-speaking provinces of the Hellenistic east and the Latin-speaking west. Late antiquity and the Middle Ages deepened the split: the Western Roman Empire collapsed, opening the Early Middle Ages, while the Eastern Empire, usually called Byzantine, survived and prospered for another thousand years.
The rise of the Carolingian Empire and, above all, the schism of 1054 between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy sharpened the contrast, leaving the west mostly Catholic and much of the east Orthodox. After the Ottomans took Constantinople in the fifteenth century and the Holy Roman Empire fragmented, the divide between Catholics and Protestants, a product of the sixteenth-century Reformation concentrated in the west, came to matter more than the old line with Orthodoxy. Christianity still dominates: a 2018 Pew study found 71 percent of Western Europeans identified as Christian.
Seen from East Asia, the region was the far west, taixi in Chinese and taisei in Japanese, a usage that became standard in Ming China. The Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci was among the first to use it as a mirror of the European phrase Far East, signing himself Matteo of the Far West, and the term survived into the early twentieth century.
For four decades the Cold War simplified matters, since the Eastern Bloc defined everything east of it. Many historians and social scientists now regard that division as outdated, which is why the boundaries of Western Europe continue to shift with context.
Source: Western Europe
