History of Europe and its lands. The European religious wars between German and Spanish rulers. The Reconquista ended Muslim rule in Iberia. By the 1490s a series of oceanic explorations marked the Age of Discovery, establishing direct links with Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Religious wars continued to be fought in Europe, until the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The Spanish crown maintained its hegemony in Europe and was the leading power on the continent until the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended a conflict between Spain and France that had begun during the Thirty Years' War. An unprecedented series of
Treaty of Athens Treaty of Athens The Treaty of Athens between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Greece, signed on 14 November 1913, formally ended hostilities between them after the two Balkan Wars and ceded Macedonia—including the major city of Thessaloniki—, most of Epirus, and many Aegean islands to Greece. In the First Balkan War, the coalition of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro defeated the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans lost nearly all their European possessions, which were reduced to a small amount of territory around the Sea of Marmara by the Treaty of London. The Ottomans however were able to recover Eastern