>>17956460
The term "Western" is, first of all, an American concept. So keep in mind it's not often used in non-English language and it was mostly used to shill a particular American narrative that's no longer relevant to anyone, but the term stuck.
The term that medieval Europeans used to refer to themselves was simply "Christendom". Less commonly scholars refered to our civilization as the Occident (Latin for "West"). This latter term does not refer to "Western parts of Europe", it refers connected Christian states resulting from the Western schism of the Church. The East therefore refered to Orthodox and former ERE, not Eastern Europe (which was mostly still pagan back then). The idea was that post schism the Byzantine scholars drastically decreased their communication with us (except when begging crusaders for help etc.). Meanwhile the Western part of Christendom continued to heavily correspond, share technology, ideas etc. So in short everyone that was in contact with the Roman Pope during medieval times was part of "Western civilization". Obviously that includes Poland.
The second part of this equation as that during the extremely rapid advancements of the Enlightenment the primary scholarship was again between more or less the same states that used to he connected by the clergy. This is of course because universities were still mostly focussed on theology and philosophy at that point. Western civilization was then taking on the meaning of these nations who were advancing far more rapidly than the rest of the planet, but at this same time ideas, cultures and technology started being shared to Orthodox Christians, especially after the fall of Byzantine. Peter the Great was a part of this network and took many ideas, therefore English speakers also refer to the Russian Empire he created as part of Western civilization and they started doing Western things like exploration, science academies, intensive scholarly correspondence with the rest of Europe etc.
