Massage in Europe begins back in the mists of time.  From the very beginning of those writing about it, it is entwined with physical training and exercise and hygeine.  Hippocrates, Celsus and Galen, of ancient Greece and Rome, all wrote about it.   But the fall of the Roman Empire brought with it the deterioration of its great bathhouses and the fall of hygeine as a centerpiece of health care. 

As happened to much of the classical knowledge, the Dark Ages marked a period where bodywork went out of documented history and the church-dominated scientific preferences of the time.  Some religious orders maintained the old spas as healing facilities for the sick and dying, and scholars in the Muslim world preserved and developed the knowledge until its "rediscovery" in the Renaissance.  Meanwhile there was a centuries old tradition throughout Europe of herbal healers, midwives and bonesetters (rebouteax in France, knochen-einrichter in Germany, algebrista in Spain, and kloge folk in Denmark) who make little mark in written history except perhaps when they were burned at the stake as witches during the Inquisition.

By the sixteenth century, written works from a variety of European countries, including France, Germany, England, and Italy, were recommending "mechanical treatment".  For example, the Italian physician Hieronymus Mercurialis (1530–1606) who published De arte Gymnastica Apud Ancientes (The Art of Gymnastics Among the Ancients), the French physician Ambroise Pare (1510-1590), considered the Father of Surgery, who used frictions in post-surgical recovery, and English physician Timothy Bright (1550-1615) whose writings mentioned baths, exercise and massage, and who was the first to introduce to England the term 'spa'. 

By the 18th century, systems of gymnastics were under development in Germany and France.  Joseph-Clément Tissot's Gymnastique Medicinale et Chirurgicale (1780) gives indications for the use of friction (massage).   The 1793 book Gymnastik für die Jugend (Gymnastics for Youth) by Johann Friedrich GutsMuths (1759-1839) is the first textbook of "modern" gymnastics, and is followed by Die Deutsche Turnkunst (German Gymnastics) by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852) in 1816. 

Per Henrik Ling of Sweden (1776-1839) studied at the gymnasium of one of GutsMuths' disciples (Franz Nachtegall) in Copenhagen for five years and brought the ideas he learned back to his native country, but changed the focus from developing muscular strength to the harmonious development of the body.  In addition to active movements, his system included passive movements: spanning, stemming, holding, balancing, rocking, Russian swinging, perpherical, pendulum, swinging, pressing, squeezing, ligature, shaking, knocking, tapping, clapping, chopping, sawing, kneading, stroking, frictions, standing, and walking.  Ling had a degree in divinity and was a fencing master, not a physician.  There's an apocryphal story sometimes encountered on acupuncture websites and Ling's wikipedia entry that Ling befriended a Chinese martial artist and tuina practitioner while he was abroad.  If this is true "Swedish Massage" may be one of the first truly "global fusion" styles of massage.  (But I have not found any support to this tale in any reference books... yet.)

Mechanotherapy (exercises, manipulations and massage) makes its first appearance in print in the Netherlands around 1840, called variously medical gymnastics, Swedish gymnastics, Nordic gymnastics, kinesitherapy, or orthopaedic gymnastics.  The Dutch physician Johan Georg Mezger (1838-1909)  worked with one of the Dutch orthopedists who had traveled abroad to study medical gymnastics and was a "domestic physical education teacher" before he went to medical school.  His contribution to Swedish massage history was to reduce the numerous passive movements of Ling's system into 4 basic strokes and give them the (French) names still used today: effleurage, petrissage, friction and tapotement.  (The fifth classic stroke, vibration, was added by later practitioners.)  He treated many people in the 1870s and 1880s in his flourishing practice in the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam, and has received credit from many authors for bringing massage back to the attention of the medical profession in the 19th century.

From the late nineteenth century through about World War I, a great number of physicians wrote books and articles about the Swedish Movement Cure / Mechanotherapy / Massage / Medical Gymnastics.  Massage was used extensively in sanitariums and taught to nurses.  The first professional organizations (which would evolve into today's professional organizations for physical therapists) were founded.  But shortly after World War II, massage had largely been dropped from physical medicine and its status went back to how it survived the Dark Ages - as an alternative health practice.  Instead the field of physical therapy continued on with the exercises from gymnastics and new electrical methods that are less labor intensive than massage. 

Much of the information in this essay comes from Robert Noah Calvert's History of Massage. 

Additional Reading:

Sweat by Mikkel Aaland - for coverage of Greco-Roman bathing, the Islamic Hammam, and the Nordic Sauna

Climbing and Gymnastics: A Historical Association by John Gill - for pictorial coverage of the 18th century German gymnastics figures.

History of Gymnastics - http://www.gymnastics247.com/history.html

Who founded Swedish massage? - article at worldmassageforum.com

"Swedish massage did not originate in Sweden, nor was it created by a Swede"  - article by Robert Noah Calvert

Roots of Physical Medicine, Physical Therapy, and Mechanotherapy in the Netherlands in the 19th Century: A Disputed Area within the Healthcare Domain by Thomas J.A. Terlouw - http://jmmtonline.com/documents/v15n2/TerlouwV15N2E.pdf