Empires and Dynasties
Events · 302
- Traditionally 21 April 753 BCEAncient Rome
Romulus founds Rome, or so the story goes
Roman tradition held that twin brothers Romulus and Remus, abandoned as infants and suckled by a she-wolf, grew up to found a city on the site where they had washed ashore. Romulus began digging trenches and raising walls around his chosen hill, the Palatine; when Remus mocked him by leaping over the unfinished wall, Romulus killed his own brother for it and named the city for himself. The historian Livy dated Remus's death and the city's founding to 21 April 753 BCE, a date generations of later Romans treated as fact.
Reputable source - 612 BCEAncient Persia
The Medes Unite and Help Bring Down Assyria
The Medes were Indo-Iranian-speaking clans from the Zagros mountains of western Iran, originally a loose collection of tribes rather than a unified kingdom. Constant Assyrian raids and, later, invasions from Urartu and the Scythians pushed the Median clans toward unification through the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. That unified Median military became a superpower in 612 BCE when it joined the Babylonians in sacking Nineveh and destroying the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the dominant power of the ancient Near East for three centuries. By the time King Astyages ruled from Ecbatana (r. 585 to c. 550 BCE), Media controlled a swath of territory stretching toward Anatolia, with the Persians to the south as vassals under Median overlordship.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 550 BCEAncient Persia
Cyrus Defeats Astyages and Founds the Persian Empire
Cyrus II, king of the Persian vassal state of Anshan in the Zagros, rebelled against his Median overlord Astyages around 550 BCE. Astyages sent an army against him commanded by a general named Harpagus, who defected to the Persian side once battle was joined. Astyages was captured and his forces scattered, and Cyrus became king of a combined realm of Persians and Medes practically overnight. Taking over the loosely organized Median empire also handed Cyrus its subject territories: Armenia, Cappadocia, Parthia, and other regions that had been governed by Median vassal kings.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 547-546 BCEAncient Persia
Cyrus Defeats Croesus and Annexes Lydia
Croesus, king of Lydia in western Anatolia and famous even in his own time for his wealth, saw Cyrus's growing power as both a threat and an opportunity. He asked the Oracle at Delphi whether he should attack Persia and was told that if he did, he would destroy a great empire, advice he took as encouragement without asking whose empire the oracle meant. Cyrus met Croesus's army on the plains north of the Lydian capital Sardis, and, according to Livius.org's account of the ancient sources, neutralized the feared Lydian cavalry by putting camels in the Persian front line, since horses that had never smelled the animals panicked and bolted. Cyrus then besieged the citadel of Sardis itself and took the city after a brief blockade. Ancient sources disagree on the precise year, with 547 or 546 BCE both defended by different scholars using the same Babylonian chronicle evidence.
Reputable source · 2 sources - October 539 BCEAncient Persia
Cyrus Takes Babylon and Issues the Cyrus Cylinder
In October 539 BCE, Cyrus's forces took Babylon, capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and captured its king Nabonidus. According to the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay document written on Cyrus's orders and now in the British Museum, Nabonidus had angered Babylon's priesthood by neglecting the city's chief god Marduk in favor of the moon god Sin, and the Babylonian population accepted Cyrus's kingship without resistance. The cylinder has Cyrus speak in the first person, declaring himself "king of the world, great king" and describing how he restored the cults Nabonidus had disrupted, ended forced labor imposed on the population, and let people who had been forcibly resettled by earlier kings return to their home cities. The biblical Book of Ezra later credits Cyrus with a decree freeing the Judean exiles held in Babylon since Nebuchadnezzar II's conquests and permitting the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. The cylinder itself never names Jerusalem or the Judeans specifically, and scholars debate how directly its general amnesty language connects to the biblical account, but its policy of returning deported peoples and cult objects is a documented and significant break from earlier Assyrian and Babylonian practice.
Primary source · 2 sources - summer 530 BCEAncient Persia
Cyrus Dies and Is Buried at Pasargadae
Cyrus the Great died in the summer of 530 BCE, reportedly during a campaign against nomadic peoples on the empire's northeastern frontier, and was buried at Pasargadae, the residence he had founded in Fars as one of the oldest Achaemenid royal sites. His tomb, a gabled stone chamber roughly 13.75 by 12.25 meters set on a stepped platform about five meters high, originally held a gold sarcophagus along with his weapons, jewelry, and a ceremonial cloak used in Persian royal inauguration rites. More than two centuries later, Alexander the Great is said to have found the tomb robbed and ordered it restored, though archaeologists have found no physical evidence that repairs were actually carried out. The structure survives today, later converted into a mosque known locally as the tomb of the mother of Solomon.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 525 BCEAncient Persia
Cambyses Conquers Egypt at Pelusium
Cambyses II, Cyrus's son and successor, invaded Egypt in 525 BCE after Egypt's aging pharaoh Amasis died and was succeeded by his son Psammetichus III. The Egyptian admiral Wedjahor-Resne, according to livius.org's account of the ancient sources, had already been courted by Cambyses and would later serve as his right-hand man after the conquest. The two armies met at Pelusium in the eastern Nile Delta; the Egyptians were defeated and fell back to Memphis, which the Persians took after a long siege. Psammetichus III was captured alive and treated with a degree of honor. Cambyses then traveled to the Egyptian city of Sais to be crowned pharaoh in the traditional Egyptian style, following the same pattern his father had used at Babylon of adopting local ceremonial legitimacy rather than simply imposing foreign rule. The Greek historian Herodotus later portrayed Cambyses as sacrilegious and half-mad in Egypt, including a story that he killed the sacred Apis bull, but this account appears to draw heavily on hostile Egyptian oral tradition and is not backed by contemporary Egyptian sources.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 522-520 BCEAncient Persia
Darius Seizes the Throne and Carves the Behistun Inscription
Cambyses died in 522 BCE under disputed circumstances, and a man named Gaumata seized the throne claiming to be Cambyses' brother Bardiya. Darius, a distant relative of the royal line, killed Gaumata and took the throne himself, then spent roughly two years suppressing a wave of revolts across the empire before his rule was secure. Darius had his version of these events carved into a limestone cliff at Behistun in western Iran, a relief and trilingual inscription set about 100 meters up the rock face, showing Darius with his foot on the chest of the defeated Gaumata while nine bound rebel leaders stand before him under the winged symbol of the god Ahura Mazda. The text, written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian cuneiform, opens "I am Darius, the great king, king of kings, king of Persia, king of countries," and lists twenty-three subject lands. The trilingual text later proved essential to modern scholarship: British officer Henry Rawlinson used it in the 1830s and 1840s to crack Old Persian and then Babylonian cuneiform, the same role the Rosetta Stone played for Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Primary source · 2 sources - practiced by the Achaemenid periodAncient Persia
Zoroastrianism Becomes the Achaemenid State's Religious Framework
Zoroastrianism traces its origin to the Persian prophet Zoroaster, also called Zarathustra, whom scholars date anywhere from roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE, well before the Achaemenid dynasty existed. The religion teaches that a single supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, meaning "Lord of Wisdom," created and sustains the world, and that Ahura Mazda is opposed by a hostile spirit in an ongoing cosmic struggle between truth and falsehood. Adherents are urged to practice "good thoughts, good words, good deeds." Darius invokes Ahura Mazda repeatedly in the Behistun Inscription as the god who granted him the throne and helped him defeat the rebels, showing that by his reign the religion, or at least its supreme deity, had become bound up with royal legitimacy at the highest level of the Achaemenid state, even though the empire did not impose it as an exclusive faith on conquered peoples.
Reputable source · 2 sources - begun c. 518 BCEAncient Persia
Persepolis Rises as the Ceremonial Capital
Darius founded Persepolis around 518 BCE as a new ceremonial capital in Fars province, choosing a remote site that, according to the World History Encyclopedia, kept it largely hidden from the outside world and made it the safest place in the empire to store art, archives, and the royal treasury. Construction began with a massive stone terrace, about 125,000 square meters and 20 meters tall, built up from soil and rock fastened together with metal clamps. On this platform Darius raised the Apadana, a hypostyle audience hall roughly 60 meters on a side with 72 columns each 19 meters high supporting a cedar roof, where bas-reliefs along the stairways show representatives of the empire's subject nations arriving with tribute. Darius began the Council Hall and Treasury as well, and his son Xerxes I completed the Apadana and added his own palace and a harem complex. The Ten Thousand Immortals, the king's elite bodyguard, garrisoned the terrace alongside a permanent standing army.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 518-500 BCEAncient Persia
Darius Builds an Imperial System: Satrapies, the Royal Road, and Coinage
Once his throne was secure, Darius reorganized the empire into roughly twenty provincial units called satrapies, each headed by a governor and assessed for regular taxes, with neighboring smaller peoples grouped into single administrative units for convenience. He upgraded the existing Royal Road network connecting Sardis, Gordium, and the Persian capitals of Susa, Persepolis, and Pasargadae, adding a system of way stations called caravanserais where travelers could change horses and find lodging. Royal messengers and inspectors known as the King's Eyes carried passports entitling them to food rations along the route, evidence of a genuine professional government bureaucracy operating for the first time at this scale. Darius also introduced imperial coinage, including gold coins called darics, and made Aramaic, already a widely used script and language across the Near East, the empire's common administrative language for correspondence between satrapies that otherwise spoke dozens of different tongues.
Reputable source · 2 sources - About 510 BCEAncient Rome
Rome throws out its kings
Rome's monarchy did not end in a single dramatic night. The historian Mary Beard describes the shift from kings to Republic as a change 'borne over a period of decades, if not centuries,' even though Roman tradition fixed one clean date, 510 BCE, for the expulsion of the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, Tarquin the Proud. In place of a single ruler, Rome installed two consuls, elected annually by the Comitia Centuriata, each holding equal power to command armies, preside over the Senate, and propose law, and each able to veto the other outright.
Reputable source - 499-493 BCEAncient Persia
The Ionian Revolt and the Burning of Sardis
The Ionian Revolt began in 499 BCE when Aristagoras, the Persian-installed tyrant of Miletus, launched a failed joint expedition with the Persian satrap Artaphernes against Naxos. Facing removal from power over the debacle, Aristagoras chose instead to incite the Greek cities of Ionia into open revolt against Darius. In 498 BCE, Ionian rebels supported by troops from Athens and Eretria marched inland and burned the lower town of Sardis, the regional Persian capital, though Artaphernes held out in the city's citadel. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the burning of Sardis destroyed a temple of the goddess Cybele, an act later used to justify harsh Persian reprisals, and it was the rebellion's only real military success. Persian forces caught the retreating Ionians and Athenians and defeated them decisively at Ephesus, after which the rebels were mostly on the defensive until the revolt was fully suppressed by 493 BCE.
Reputable source · 2 sources - September 490 BCEAncient Persia
The Battle of Marathon
In 490 BCE Darius sent his generals Datis and Artaphernes on a seaborne expedition with roughly 25,000 Persian troops to punish Athens and Eretria for their role in the Ionian Revolt. The Persian force landed at Marathon, on the coast northeast of Athens, chosen partly because it offered good open ground for Persian cavalry. The Athenians, joined by a small contingent from Plataea, fielded around 10,000 hoplites under the general Miltiades, who according to livius.org's account of the sources had a personal grudge against Persia after being forced out of his own territory near the Hellespont. When the Persian cavalry appears to have been re-embarking on transport ships, possibly to strike undefended Athens directly, the Greek hoplites advanced and broke through the weaker Persian center before enveloping both flanks. Herodotus records Greek losses of 192 dead against roughly 6,400 Persian dead, a ratio ancient historians later treated with some skepticism but that no source seriously disputed as an overwhelming Greek victory. Datis and Artaphernes abandoned the campaign and sailed home.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 480 BCEAncient Persia
Xerxes Invades Greece: Thermopylae and Salamis
Xerxes I, who succeeded Darius in 486 BCE, spent years assembling a massive invasion force, building a canal at Chalkidike and pontoon bridges across the Hellespont to move his army into Greece. At Thermopylae, a narrow coastal pass, a small allied Greek force under the Spartan king Leonidas, roughly 300 Spartans with helots plus contingents from Thespiae, Thebes, and other cities, held the pass for three days before Xerxes's elite Immortals found a mountain path around the position, betrayed by a local named Ephialtes. Leonidas and his remaining troops died fighting a rearguard action while most of the Greek force withdrew. With the pass open, Xerxes advanced and burned Athens, whose population had already evacuated. But at Salamis on 29 September 480 BCE, the Athenian commander Themistocles lured the larger Persian fleet into the narrow strait between the island and the mainland, where the Greek triremes' maneuverability overcame Persian numbers. Xerxes reportedly watched the destruction of his navy from a hillside throne and, with his fleet broken and his supply lines exposed, withdrew most of his army back toward Asia, leaving his general Mardonius in Greece with a reduced force to continue the campaign.
Reputable source · 2 sources - summer 479 BCEAncient Persia
The Battle of Plataea Ends the Persian Invasion
After Xerxes withdrew most of his forces following Salamis, his general Mardonius remained in northern Greece over the winter with a reduced army, hoping to bribe or fight the Greek coalition into submission. The following summer, in 479 BCE, Mardonius faced a combined Greek force at Plataea commanded by the Spartan regent Pausanias. Running low on supplies and worried by the growing Greek numbers, Mardonius tried to draw the Greeks into open ground where Persian cavalry could be effective; when the Greeks briefly retreated under archer fire, the Persians crossed a river believing they had won, only to be broken by the superior close-order fighting of the Spartan phalanx. Mardonius was killed in the fighting and the Athenians captured the Persian camp. On the same day, according to tradition, a Greek fleet destroyed the remaining Persian navy at Mycale on the Anatolian coast.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 451-450 BCEAncient Rome
Rome's Plebeians Force the Patricians to Write the Law Down
For decades after the Republic's founding, Rome's plebeians (commoners) had no written law to appeal to. Patrician judges, who alone knew and interpreted the unwritten customs, could and did rule arbitrarily, especially against debtors. Plebeians had already walked out of the city once before, in 494 BCE, camping on the Aventine Hill and refusing to return until the patricians granted concessions, including the office of tribune of the plebs. Decades later they demanded the patricians make the laws public, and in 451 BCE the Senate suspended normal offices and appointed ten men, the decemviri, with full consular power specifically to collect, draft, and publish a law code. The commission produced ten tables of law, and after a second commission added two more, the completed Twelve Tables were engraved on brass and fixed up in public view in the Forum, so that the law itself, not just a patrician's memory of it, was what governed a case.
Primary source · 3 sources - 401 BCEAncient Persia
Cyrus the Younger's Revolt and the March of the Ten Thousand
By the late 5th century BCE the Achaemenid throne had passed through Xerxes's successors to Artaxerxes II, whose younger brother Cyrus the Younger, satrap of western Anatolia, decided to seize the kingship by force in 401 BCE. Cyrus assembled an army whose core was 14,000 Greek mercenaries under the Spartan commander Clearchus, including the Athenian Xenophon, who held a minor position in the expedition and would later write its history. The two brothers' armies met at Cunaxa near Babylon. The Greek mercenaries on Cyrus's right defeated the opposing Persian cavalry and archers under the satrap Tissaphernes, but Cyrus personally led his own left wing directly at Artaxerxes, opening a gap in his line that Tissaphernes's forces exploited to attack Cyrus's camp; Cyrus himself was killed in the melee. With their employer dead, the roughly ten thousand Greek soldiers found themselves stranded deep in hostile Persian territory and had to fight their way north over harsh terrain to the Black Sea coast, a retreat Xenophon later recorded in his Anabasis, the most important surviving account of the whole campaign.
Reputable source · 2 sources - circa 390 BCE (some modern historians favor circa 387 BCE)Ancient Rome
Brennus and the Gauls Burn Rome, Leave Only the Capitoline Standing
A force of Senones Gauls under a chieftain named Brennus invaded from northern Italy and met a Roman army at the Allia river, roughly 11 miles north of Rome. The Romans, heavily outnumbered, were routed so completely that soldiers were reportedly cut down from behind as they fled rather than killed in the fighting itself. Brennus then marched on Rome and occupied the city with little resistance. Only a small band of defenders who had fortified themselves on the Capitoline Hill held out, forcing a siege rather than a clean conquest. As the siege dragged on, famine struck both sides, and disease killed off the Gauls encamped in the low-lying ground so badly that the burial site was afterward remembered as the Busta Gallica, the Gallic pyre.
Primary source · 2 sources - January-May 330 BCEAncient Persia
Alexander Conquers Persia and Burns Persepolis
Alexander the Great's Macedonian army reached Persepolis in January 330 BCE, having already defeated the Achaemenid king Darius III at Gaugamela the previous year. According to Arrian, whose account derives from the eyewitness general Ptolemy, Alexander burned the palace complex deliberately, after discussion with his officers, as retribution for the Persian destruction of Athens during Xerxes's invasion a century and a half earlier. A separate tradition, recorded by Plutarch, Diodorus, and Curtius Rufus, claims the Athenian courtesan Thais, Alexander's companion, convinced him during a drunken celebration to set the palace alight on impulse. Livius.org's assessment of the ancient sources notes Alexander was not yet the sole ruler of the former Persian empire and had strong practical reasons not to leave the enormous Persepolis treasury behind for a rival to seize. Whichever motive is accurate, Alexander selected the Apadana, the Treasury, and the Palace of Xerxes for destruction in the spring of 330 BCE.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 311 BCEAncient Persia
Seleucus Founds the Seleucid Empire from Babylon
After Alexander's death in 323 BCE, his empire fractured among his generals, the Diadochi. Seleucus was made satrap of Babylon at the Partition of Triparadisus in 321 BCE, but the more powerful general Antigonus forced him to flee. With support from Ptolemy, Seleucus returned and captured Babylon in May 311 BCE during what is called the Babylonian War, then claimed to rule as viceroy for Alexander's infant son Alexander IV. From 312 BCE onward Seleucus expanded ruthlessly, eventually controlling the former Persian and Median territories along with Mesopotamia and much of the Levant, and founded twin capitals around 300 BCE at Antioch in Syria and Seleucia on the Tigris in Mesopotamia, deliberately shifting the empire's center of gravity toward the Mediterranean and away from the old Achaemenid heartland in Fars.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 280-275 BCEAncient Rome
Pyrrhus Wins Twice, Loses His Army, and Names a Kind of Victory
King Pyrrhus of Epirus, a Greek kingdom, crossed into southern Italy in 280 BCE at the invitation of the Greek city of Tarentum, which wanted help against Rome's expansion. At the Battle of Heraclea that year, Pyrrhus fielded roughly 26,000 heavy infantry alongside cavalry and 20 war elephants against a larger Roman army. The Romans had never fought elephants before, and when Pyrrhus brought them into the fighting late in the day, the animals terrified the Roman horses and scattered them. Pyrrhus won, but ancient accounts describe roughly equal, extremely heavy losses on both sides, with the dead on Pyrrhus's side counted among his best troops. The following year, at Asculum, the Romans had adapted, building anti-elephant wagons fitted with hooks and burning torches, and though Pyrrhus won again, he lost thousands more of his own men than the Romans did. It was after this second costly win that Pyrrhus is said to have remarked that one more victory like it would finish him.
Reputable source - 247 BCEAncient Persia
Arsaces and the Parni Found the Parthian Kingdom
The satrapy of Parthia in northeastern Iran had been governed by Seleucid appointees since Alexander's conquest, but in 245 BCE, while the Seleucids were distracted by the Laodicean War in the west, the local satrap Andragoras revolted from the young king Seleucus II. In the resulting confusion, a nomadic tribe from the Central Asian steppe called the Parni, led by a chieftain named Arsaces, overran Parthia itself. By 238 BCE they had added the neighboring district of Astauene, and three years after that a Parnian leader named Tiridates pushed further south and took the rest of Parthia. The Parni, who came to be called Parthians after the territory they occupied, recognized Arsaces as their king, founding the Arsacid dynasty that would eventually rule the Parthian Empire from 247 BCE until 224 CE.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2 August 216 BCEAncient Rome
At Cannae, Hannibal Let His Center Collapse on Purpose, Then Closed the Trap From Both Sides
Following his crossing of the Alps and early victories in Italy, Hannibal met a much larger Roman army in Apulia. Hannibal placed weaker Gallic and Spanish infantry at his center, arranged in a forward-bulging crescent, with his more seasoned African infantry held back on the flanks and his cavalry on the wings. As the Roman legions pushed into the center, that weaker infantry fell back and the crescent inverted, drawing the Roman mass deeper in while the flanks held firm. Hannibal's cavalry then routed the outnumbered Roman cavalry on the wings and swept around behind the Roman formation, closing a ring around them from the rear while the African infantry pressed in from the sides. Packed too tightly to fight or retreat, the encircled Roman army was cut down over the following hours.
Reputable source · 2 sources - October 202 BCEAncient Rome
Scipio Beat Hannibal at His Own Game at Zama, Using Hannibal's Tactics Against Him
More than a decade after Hannibal crossed the Alps and remained unbeaten on Italian soil, Rome shifted strategy under a young commander, Publius Cornelius Scipio, who had already cleared Carthaginian forces out of Spain. Scipio carried the war to North Africa itself, forcing Carthage to recall Hannibal from Italy to defend his home city. At Zama, Scipio arranged his infantry in columns with gaps between them, masked by screens of light infantry, deliberately echoing the kind of formation Hannibal himself had used at Cannae. When Hannibal opened the battle with a war elephant charge, Scipio's men sounded trumpets and opened lanes in their formation, letting most of the elephants run harmlessly through or turn back onto Hannibal's own lines. The battle's deciding factor was cavalry: Roman horsemen together with Numidian cavalry led by the North African king Masinissa defeated Hannibal's cavalry on the wings, then wheeled around and struck the Carthaginian infantry from behind, mirroring the same double-envelopment pattern Hannibal had once used against Rome.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 146 BCEAncient Rome
Cato Ended Every Senate Speech the Same Way Until Rome Finally Erased Carthage
By the mid-2nd century BCE, Carthage had rebuilt itself into a prosperous trading city but posed no serious military threat to Rome. The senator Cato the Elder, who had visited Carthage and seen its recovered wealth firsthand, is recorded by Plutarch as ending his remarks in the Senate on any subject whatsoever with the same line, that in his opinion Carthage must be destroyed. When Carthage went to war against neighboring Numidia in 150 BCE without Roman permission, technically violating its Zama peace treaty, Rome used it as grounds to declare war a third time. Roman forces besieged the city for roughly three years, until Scipio Aemilianus took command in 147 BCE, sealed off Carthage's harbor, and forced his way into the city through prolonged, brutal street fighting into the spring of 146 BCE.
Primary source · 3 sources - 264 to 146 BCEAncient Rome
Hannibal crosses the Alps, and Rome nearly loses everything
Rome and Carthage fought three wars over more than a century for control of the western Mediterranean. In the second of them, the Carthaginian general Hannibal gambled everything on marching his army, elephants included, over the Alps into northern Italy, then won battle after battle against Rome. At Cannae in 216 BCE he lured the Roman center forward, let it collapse inward as planned, and closed his flanks around the trapped legions from behind: 44,000 Roman soldiers died against roughly 6,000 of Hannibal's own. Carthage never sent him the reinforcements to finish the job, and Rome, astonishingly, absorbed the loss and kept fighting. Decades later, in 146 BCE, Roman general Scipio Aemilianus besieged Carthage for three years, and when it finally fell, sacked and burned the city to the ground; it lay in ruins for over a century.
Reputable source - 141 BCEAncient Persia
Mithridates I Conquers Media and Babylonia for Parthia
Mithridates I, who had already taken Media from the Seleucids in 148-147 BCE and added Elam and likely Persis soon after, occupied Babylonia itself between 13 April and 10 June 141 BCE. In July he captured the Seleucid capital Seleucia on the Tigris, and by October he had reached Uruk in southern Babylonia. When the Seleucid king Demetrius II Nicator tried to reclaim the lost territory, he was defeated and captured, a humiliation that confirmed the shift in power on the ground. Mithridates took the title of Great King following this conquest and adopted the surname Philhellene, or friend of the Greeks, despite his ongoing wars against the Greek-ruled Seleucid state.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 133-121 BCEAncient Rome
Tiberius Gracchus Is Clubbed to Death Over a Re-Election Bid
As tribune in 133 BCE, Tiberius Gracchus bypassed the Senate and took a land redistribution bill straight to the Plebeian Assembly, reviving an old cap on how much public land one citizen could hold and reassigning the excess, land wealthy Romans had occupied for generations, to poorer citizens. When a fellow tribune vetoed it, Tiberius had him stripped of office, then broke tradition further by seeking a second consecutive term, since he knew the law would be repealed without him in office. During the vote, a mob of senators led by his own cousin, Scipio Nasica, armed themselves with broken benches and clubs and beat Tiberius to death on the Capitoline Hill. His body, along with roughly 300 supporters killed alongside him, was thrown into the Tiber that night. A decade later his younger brother Gaius, as tribune, pursued a wider set of reforms including subsidized grain and new colonies. When the Senate passed Rome's first ever emergency decree against him in 121 BCE, Gaius had his own slave kill him at his request rather than be captured, and some 3,000 of his followers were rounded up and executed without trial.
Primary source · 2 sources - 88-82 BCEAncient Rome
Sulla Marches His Legions Across Rome's Sacred Boundary
In 88 BCE the tribune Sulpicius Rufus stripped Consul Sulla of his command against Mithridates of Pontus and handed it to the aging general Gaius Marius, whose earlier reforms had opened army recruitment to landless citizens for the first time. Marius sent two military tribunes to remove Sulla; Sulla's soldiers stoned them to death, and Sulla marched six legions into Rome itself, crossing the pomerium, the sacred boundary within which no citizen could legally bear arms. It was the first time a Roman general had led an army against the city, and many of his own officers deserted rather than take part. Sulla purged his enemies, then left to fight Mithridates while Marius returned and killed his opponents in turn. Sulla came back in 83 BCE, crushed the opposing forces at the Colline Gate in 82 BCE, executed thousands of captured prisoners, and posted proscription lists in the Forum naming enemies of the state whose killers could legally claim their property and a cash reward, even if the killer was the victim's own slave or son. The Senate made Sulla dictator, he pushed through constitutional reforms, then voluntarily retired in 79 BCE and died the following year.
Primary source · 3 sources - 73-71 BCEAncient Rome
Spartacus Breaks Out of a Gladiator School With Kitchen Knives
In 73 BCE the Thracian gladiator Spartacus and 78 fellow trainees broke out of a gladiatorial school at Capua, arming themselves initially with kitchen knives and spits before seizing proper weapons and fortifying on Mount Vesuvius. Escaped slaves, shepherds, and herdsmen joined them until the group grew to a reported 70,000 or more. Over roughly two years the rebels defeated the armies of two Roman praetors and the governor of Cisalpine Gaul. In 72 BCE Spartacus tried to lead his followers north over the Alps to disperse home, but they refused and turned back into Italy instead, prompting the Senate to treat the revolt as a genuine emergency. Marcus Licinius Crassus was given command, trapped a large rebel contingent in the south, where several thousand died, and finally cornered and killed Spartacus in 71 BCE. His body was never recovered. Pompey, returning from campaigning in Spain, intercepted and destroyed a separate group of roughly 5,000 fleeing survivors and used the timing to claim he had ended the war, over Crassus's objection that he had won the actual pitched battle.
Reputable source - 60 BCEAncient Rome
Three Men Quietly Agree to Override the Senate
In 60 BCE, Julius Caesar brokered an informal, unofficial alliance with Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, later called the First Triumvirate, though it held no legal or constitutional status and was arranged privately rather than voted on by any assembly. According to the biographer Suetonius, the three swore a pact to oppose any legislation any one of them disapproved of. Each man had a goal the Senate had been blocking: Pompey needed land grants for his veteran soldiers and ratification of his eastern settlements, blocked for years by the conservative senator Cato the Younger. Crassus, already Rome's wealthiest man, wanted relief for tax-collecting contractors who had overbid on Asian tax contracts and a military command to match Pompey's glory. Caesar, deeply in debt, wanted the consulship of 59 BCE and a substantial military command afterward. As consul, Caesar pushed an agrarian law through the popular assembly rather than the Senate, securing Pompey's veteran land and delivering what Crassus and Caesar himself needed in the same stroke. Caesar then took a five-year command in Gaul, which he used to conquer the region between 58 and 51 BCE.
Reputable source - 53 BCEAncient Persia
The Battle of Carrhae and the Parthian Shot
Marcus Licinius Crassus, a member of Rome's First Triumvirate alongside Pompey and Caesar and one of the wealthiest men in Rome, launched an unprovoked invasion of Parthian territory in 54-53 BCE, seeking military glory to match his rivals. At Carrhae, on the plain east of Harran, the Parthian general Surena, commanding forces loyal to King Orodes II, met Crassus's roughly 40,000-strong army with a force built around horse archers and heavily armored cataphract cavalry. The Parthian archers used a tactic that came to be called the Parthian shot, firing accurately backward at full gallop while feigning retreat, surrounding and exhausting the Roman infantry's supply of shields and formation cohesion while the cataphracts delivered repeated charges. Crassus was killed, reportedly lured into a parley under false pretenses, and only around 5,000 of his original 40,000 men escaped the disaster.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 49 to 44 BCEAncient Rome
Caesar crosses a small river, and the Republic never recovers
On 10 January 49 BCE, Julius Caesar led a single legion across the Rubicon, the shallow river marking the legal boundary beyond which a general could not bring troops into Italy itself. The historian Suetonius records Caesar weighing the decision aloud: 'Even yet we may draw back; but once cross yon little bridge, and the whole issue is with the sword,' before crossing anyway and reportedly declaring alea iacta est, the die is cast. Caesar won the civil war that followed, was appointed dictator for a fixed term in 46 BCE, and then dictator for life in early 44 BCE. On the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BCE, a group of senators led by Marcus Junius Brutus stabbed him to death in the Senate itself.
Reputable source - 31 to 27 BCEAncient Rome
Octavian wins at Actium and becomes Augustus
On 2 September 31 BCE, off the Greek coast at Actium, Octavian's admiral Agrippa used smaller, faster warships called Liburnians against the larger, slower fleet Mark Antony and Cleopatra had massed, sinking fifteen of Antony's ships with a grappling weapon called the harpax before the rest fled or surrendered. Both Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives within the year rather than be paraded through Rome as Octavian's captives. In January 27 BCE, mindful of how dangerous it had looked when his great-uncle Julius Caesar accumulated open personal power, Octavian formally resigned his emergency authority to the Senate, which promptly voted to restore it along with a new title: Augustus.
Reputable source - 27 BCE, with the settlement evolving through Augustus's death in 14 CEAncient Rome
Augustus Builds a Monarchy and Calls It a Restored Republic
In January 27 BCE, Octavian publicly resigned his extraordinary powers to the Senate, which promptly voted them back to him along with the honorific title Augustus. He never called himself king or dictator. Instead he used the title princeps, first citizen, and built his real authority from a specific stack of powers: imperium proconsulare maius, military command superior to any other provincial governor, and, from 23 BCE, tribunicia potestas, the powers of a tribune held for life, which let him propose laws, veto other officials, and claim to protect the common people. The Senate, assemblies, and magistrates all kept meeting and voting, but the Senate lost control of foreign policy, finance, and war, and its membership was cut from roughly 1,000 to 800. In 27 BCE Augustus also founded the Praetorian Guard, a permanent bodyguard of nine cohorts totaling at least 4,500 men. Historians call the whole arrangement the Principate, a monarchy that kept every republican label while hollowing out what the labels meant.
Reputable source · 3 sources - 43 CEAncient Rome
Claudius Conquers Britain to Prove He Belongs on the Throne
Claudius had been treated as a family embarrassment for most of his life, walking with a limp, speaking with a stutter, and twitching constantly, disabilities severe enough that his own mother called him a monster only half finished by nature. When the Praetorian Guard found him hiding behind a curtain after Caligula's assassination in January 41 CE, they proclaimed him emperor almost by accident, over a man with no political base of his own. Two years later, Claudius sent a force of four legions and roughly equal numbers of auxiliary troops, under the general Aulus Plautius, across the Channel to conquer Britain, a land Julius Caesar had raided but never held. Roman forces fought their way to the Thames against the Catuvellauni tribal kingdom, killing its co-ruler Togodumnus in the fighting, while his brother Caratacus continued resisting. Claudius then crossed to Britain himself and was present for the fall of the Catuvellaunian capital, Camulodunum, modern Colchester, staying only 16 days before returning to Rome.
Reputable source · 3 sources - 64 CEAncient Rome
Rome Burns for Six Days, and Nero Blames the Christians
The Great Fire of Rome broke out in July 64 CE and burned, with a brief lull and a second flare-up, for about six days total. According to the senator and historian Tacitus, who was alive at the time, the fire was finally contained after five days near the Esquiline hill, only for flames to break out again with fresh fury. When it was over, only 4 of Rome's 14 districts had escaped damage entirely, 3 were leveled completely, and the other 7 were left with only scattered, half-burnt ruins. Tacitus places Nero away from the city when the fire started, and says he did not return until the flames reached his own palace, after which he opened public buildings to the homeless and brought in emergency grain supplies. The popular legend that Nero fiddled while Rome burned is not ancient, the fiddle did not exist until roughly the 16th century. What ancient writers actually describe is contested among themselves: Tacitus reports only a rumor that Nero appeared on a private stage during the fire and sang about the fall of Troy, while Suetonius and Cassius Dio, writing decades later, place him watching or performing from elsewhere in the city.
Primary source · 2 sources - 79 CE (a 2018 inscription suggests October, not August)Ancient Rome
Vesuvius buries Pompeii in a single afternoon
Mount Vesuvius erupted with a force later calculated at roughly 100,000 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, sending a column of pumice and ash 27 miles into the sky above the Bay of Naples. Pliny the Younger watched from across the bay and wrote to the historian Tacitus describing the cloud's shape, comparing it to an umbrella pine tree, the eyewitness account that still anchors the modern understanding of what is now called a Plinian eruption. Through the afternoon and evening ash and pumice buried Pompeii under a slowly accumulating weight; then, near 11 p.m., the collapsing eruption column unleashed the first of six pyroclastic surges of superheated ash and gas that swept over the town and asphyxiated whoever remained.
Reputable source - c. 1st-2nd century CEThe Khmer Empire
Funan Rises as a Trading Kingdom on the Mekong Delta
The earliest known Khmer-speaking state, Funan, grew up around the Mekong Delta and the port city of Oc Eo, in what is now southern Vietnam. UNESCO's nomination file for the Oc Eo-Ba The archaeological site describes it as the main transshipment point between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific through the Kra Strait, part of the first world trading system connecting China, Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean. Archaeologists working the site since French excavations began in the 1940s have recovered Roman gold coins and medals, Han dynasty bronze mirrors, Persian lamps, and glass and precious metals imported from India, alongside local jewelry and glass workshops. The finds show a town that manufactured goods for export across South Thailand, Malaysia, Java, and southern China as much as it traded.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 117 CE, the end of Trajan's reign begun in 98 CEAncient Rome
Trajan Pushes Rome's Borders to Their Farthest Point, From Scotland to the Caspian Sea
Trajan fought two wars against the Dacian kingdom, in roughly modern Romania, before the Dacian capital of Sarmizegetusa fell and its king Decebalus took his own life rather than be captured. The Romans seized the Dacian royal treasury entirely and shipped it back to Rome, and that captured wealth, along with Dacia's ongoing gold production, paid for a new building program in the city, including the Forum of Trajan and Trajan's Column, a 100-foot monument wrapped in a spiral relief that narrates the Dacian campaigns in carved detail and still stands in Rome today. From 114 CE, Trajan turned east against the Parthian Empire after a dispute over the throne of Armenia, a Roman client state. His legions annexed Armenia and Mesopotamia and marched down the Tigris to capture the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon, briefly bringing the empire to its largest size ever, stretching, as one modern account summarizes it, from Scotland to the Caspian Sea.
Reputable source · 3 sources - 165 to 180 CEAncient Rome
The Antonine Plague kills a quarter of the empire
A disease, most likely smallpox, emerged somewhere near China and spread west along the Silk Road, reaching Roman troops besieging Seleucia on the Tigris around 165 or 166 CE. Soldiers carried it home to Gaul and the Rhine frontier, and from there it spread through the entire empire. The physician Galen, who witnessed the outbreak directly, recorded fever, vomiting, a blackish diarrhea suggesting internal bleeding, and a body-wide rash of red and black skin eruptions; those who survived about two weeks of illness gained lasting immunity. The historian Dio Cassius recorded 2,000 deaths a day in Rome at the outbreak's height, and modern estimates put the empire-wide toll at a quarter to a third of the entire population, on the order of 60 to 70 million people, before a second, even deadlier wave arrived decades later.
Reputable source - 28 April 224 CEAncient Persia
Ardashir I Defeats Artabanus IV and Founds the Sassanid Empire
Persis, the historic Achaemenid heartland, had remained a vassal territory under the Parthian Arsacid dynasty for centuries. Ardashir, son of a local ruler named Papak, inherited the vassal throne of Persis and rebelled against his Parthian overlord, the Arsacid king Artabanus IV. According to livius.org's account of the reliefs Ardashir later commissioned, the decisive battle between Ardashir's rebel forces and the Parthian king was fought at the plain of Hormozdgan in Media on 28 April 224 CE. Artabanus IV was defeated and killed, and Ardashir, well-trained militarily at Darabgerd and already experienced from earlier victories, became the new King of Kings. He completed the conquest of remaining Parthian resistance by 226 CE and took Ctesiphon, the former Parthian capital on the Tigris, as his own. Ardashir commemorated his victory in rock reliefs carved at Firuzabad, Naqsh-e Rustam, and Naqsh-e Rajab, showing the moment of Artabanus's defeat.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 235-284 CEAncient Rome
The Third Century Crisis: Rome Nearly Comes Apart in 50 Years of Chaos
After the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus in 235 CE, Rome entered roughly 50 years without stable leadership. World History Encyclopedia counts over 20 emperors rising and falling between 235 and 284, compared with 26 emperors across the previous 250-plus years combined. Most seized power through the army and were killed by their own troops or rivals within months or a few years. At the same time, Germanic peoples pressed across the Rhine and Danube, the Sasanian Persian Empire attacked in the east, plague spread through the population, and repeated currency debasement drove severe inflation. The empire briefly split into three competing states: a Gallic Empire in the west founded by Postumus around 260 CE covering Gaul, Britain, and Spain, the core Roman territory in the middle, and a Palmyrene Empire in the east under Queen Zenobia from around 270 CE, stretching from Syria through Egypt.
Reputable source - 260 CEAncient Rome
A Roman Emperor Is Taken Prisoner: Valerian and Shapur I
During the Crisis of the Third Century, Emperor Valerian marched a Roman army into Mesopotamia to fight the Sasanian Persian king Shapur I, but his forces were already weakened by plague when they arrived. After a defeat near Edessa in 260 CE, Valerian tried to negotiate peace terms directly with Shapur. The meeting was a trap: Shapur seized him and took him prisoner. Valerian spent the rest of his life in Persian captivity, and according to the accounts that survive, he was used as a human footstool, forced to kneel so Shapur could step on his back while mounting a horse, and after his death his skin was reportedly removed, dyed, and displayed in a Persian temple as a warning to visitors.
Reputable source - 260 CEAncient Persia
Shapur I Captures the Roman Emperor Valerian
In 260 CE the Roman emperor Valerian led an army against the Sassanid king Shapur I, Ardashir's son and successor, near Edessa in upper Mesopotamia. Valerian's forces were already weakened by a plague outbreak when the two armies met, and the Romans were decisively defeated. When Valerian led a delegation to Shapur's camp to negotiate terms, he was seized along with his staff, his praetorian guard, and several senators, and taken to Persia as a prisoner, marking the first time in Roman history a reigning emperor was captured alive by a foreign power. Shapur commemorated the victory, along with his earlier defeats of the emperors Gordian III and Philip the Arab, in monumental rock reliefs at Naqsh-e Rustam and Bishapur showing Valerian kneeling or gripped by the hand of the Persian king.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 274-277 CEAncient Persia
Kartir's Rise and the Execution of Mani Establish Zoroastrian Orthodoxy
Mani, born around 216 CE in southern Mesopotamia and raised in a Judaeo-Christian Baptist community, founded a new religion he saw as completing the earlier revelations of Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus. Under Shapur I, Mani enjoyed royal tolerance and spread his teaching freely, partly because the Zoroastrian priest Kartir had not yet gained enough influence to block him. Kartir served under Shapur I and rose to real power under Shapur's successors Hormizd I, Bahram I, and Bahram II, leaving several inscriptions, including at the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht, that describe his own religious career in the first person. Once Bahram I took the throne and aligned himself with Kartir, policy reversed. Mani was arrested and imprisoned on the king's orders, and according to the Encyclopaedia Iranica's review of the earliest sources, he was executed and his body hung up at a gate of the city, an event usually dated to around 274 CE, though some traditions place his death as late as 277 CE. Kartir's own inscription goes further, claiming he struck down and suppressed Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Nazarenes, Baptists, and Manichaeans across the empire, and describing his campaign against the Jewish community as reaching a particular peak of severity. Modern scholars reading the same text disagree on how literally to take Kartir's boasts: some read certain measures against Jewish practice as the Magi asserting religious authority within Jewish communities rather than outright violence, but the specific case of Mani is not in dispute since multiple independent traditions, Manichaean, Christian, and Zoroastrian, confirm the execution.
Reputable source · 3 sources - 284-305 CEAncient Rome
Diocletian Splits the Throne Four Ways, Then Walks Away From It
Diocletian took power in November 284 CE after defeating his rival Carinus in battle. Concluding that no single emperor could defend and administer the whole empire against simultaneous threats on multiple frontiers, he split imperial authority between four rulers in a system now called the Tetrarchy: two senior emperors called Augusti, himself in the east and Maximian in the west, and, from 293 CE, two junior emperors called Caesars serving under them, each responsible for a quarter of the empire's defense and government. Diocletian also overhauled the tax base with a new empire-wide census of population and land, issued an Edict on Maximum Prices attempting to curb inflation, and doubled the number of provinces from around fifty to about one hundred. In 305 CE, after a serious illness, he did something almost no Roman emperor had done before: he voluntarily retired, forcing his co-Augustus Maximian to retire alongside him, and withdrew to a purpose-built palace at Split on the Dalmatian coast.
Reputable source - 293 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Diocletian Splits the Roman Empire Into a Tetrarchy
Emperor Diocletian, who ruled Rome from 284 to 305 CE, judged the empire too large and too threatened at its borders for one man to govern. In 293 CE he formalized a system historians call the Tetrarchy, or rule of four: two senior emperors called augusti, each paired with a junior emperor called a caesar. Diocletian ruled the east as augustus with Galerius as his caesar, while Maximian governed the west with Constantius Chlorus as his junior partner. Each tetrarch commanded his own army and administration from a capital near the frontier he had to defend, none of them Rome itself. The arrangement was meant to guarantee an orderly succession: when an augustus retired, his caesar would rise to take his place and appoint a new caesar in turn.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 3rd-6th century CEThe Khmer Empire
Indian Merchants and Brahmans Bring Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sanskrit
Contact with Indian traders, diplomats, and Brahman priests over several centuries reshaped Funan and the kingdoms that followed it, a process historians call Indianization. World History Encyclopedia describes art and culture across the region as heavily influenced by India through long-established sea trade routes, with Hinduism the dominant religion alongside Buddhism, mixed with animist and traditional local cults rather than replacing them outright. Temple inscriptions from the following Chenla period, carved in both Sanskrit and Old Khmer at sites like Sambor Prei Kuk, name Hindu deities and record the adoption of a god-king concept in the centralized state, according to UNESCO's documentation of the site. Pre-Angkor kings across this period began presenting themselves in this devaraja mold well before Jayavarman II's more famous 802 ceremony.
Reputable source · 2 sources - February 313 CEAncient Rome
Constantine legalizes the religion Rome had been killing people for
After a vision he reported experiencing before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE, the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, a faith the Roman state had periodically persecuted for nearly three centuries. In February 313 CE he summoned his co-emperor Licinius to Milan, and together they issued what is known as the Edict of Milan, granting Christians throughout the empire the legal right to organize churches and worship openly, and ordering the return of property confiscated from them during earlier persecutions. The edict did not make Christianity Rome's official religion, only legal; that step would not come until the Edict of Thessalonica, decades later in 380 CE.
Reputable source - May 11, 330 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Constantine Founds Constantinople as a New Rome
After defeating his last rival Licinius at the Battle of Chrysopolis in 324 CE, Constantine reunited the Roman Empire under a single ruler and decided the empire needed a new capital. He rejected old Rome, whose economy and infrastructure he saw as declining, and settled on the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, founded in the 7th century BCE on the European shore of the Bosphorus strait. The site offered a defensible position nearly surrounded by water, an excellent harbor at the Golden Horn, and easy access to both the Danube and Euphrates frontiers. Constantine funded a massive rebuilding project using Licinius's treasury and a special tax, quadrupling the old city's size, laying it out on seven hills like Rome, and dividing it into fourteen districts lined with statues of past emperors and himself. He dedicated the finished city as Nova Roma, New Rome, and the dedication festivities in 330 CE lasted forty days.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 9 August 378 CEAncient Rome
Valens Doesn't Wait for Reinforcements, and Loses an Army and His Life
In 376 CE, large numbers of Goths, driven from their homes by the advancing Huns, asked to cross the Danube and settle inside the Roman Empire as refugees. Rome let them in, but corrupt local officials confiscated their weapons and left them to face starvation during a famine, and the Goths rebelled. In 378 CE, Emperor Valens marched out to confront the Gothic forces near Adrianople rather than wait for reinforcements coming from his co-emperor and nephew Gratian, reportedly eager not to share credit for the victory. Roman scouts badly underestimated the Gothic force, and when Gothic cavalry that had been away foraging suddenly returned and struck the Roman flank, the Roman battle line collapsed. About two-thirds of the Roman force was killed. Valens himself died on the field as darkness fell, and his body was never identified or recovered afterward.
Reputable source - 380-395 CEAncient Rome
Theodosius Makes Christianity Mandatory, Then Rome Splits in Two for Good
On 27 February 380 CE, Theodosius I, ruling jointly with western emperors Gratian and Valentinian II, issued the decree known as Cunctos populos, usually called the Edict of Thessalonica. It ordered that Rome's subjects follow the Nicene form of Christianity, that only its followers could call themselves Catholic Christians, and that other Christian groups were heretics subject to punishment, going well beyond Constantine's earlier legalization of Christianity decades before, which had simply made the religion permitted. Theodosius reunited the eastern and western halves of the empire under his own rule, the last time this happened. When he died in 395 CE, the empire was divided between his two young sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west, and it was never reunified again.
Primary source · 2 sources - January 17, 395 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Theodosius I Dies and Divides the Empire for the Last Time
Theodosius I had reunited the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire after defeating the usurper Eugenius and his general Arbogast in 394 CE, making him the last emperor to govern the whole Roman world. When he died in Milan on January 17, 395 CE, his will split the empire between his two sons: eighteen-year-old Arcadius received the eastern provinces, with Constantinople as his capital, while eleven-year-old Honorius received Italy, Gaul, Hispania, Africa, and Britain in the west. Because both sons were too young to rule alone, guardianship of Honorius fell to the general Stilicho and guardianship of Arcadius to the praetorian prefect Rufinus, setting up rival power centers that competed rather than cooperated.
Reputable source · 2 sources - August 410 CEAncient Rome
Alaric's Goths do what no enemy had done in 800 years
In August 410 CE the Gothic king Alaric marched his army through Rome's Salarian Gate and sacked the city, the first time in nearly eight centuries that Rome itself had fallen to a foreign enemy. His troops spared the churches of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, but burned the old Senate House, destroyed pagan temples, and carried off Emperor Honorius's own sister, Galla Placidia, as a captive. Alaric died of illness shortly after leaving the city; his burial site has never been found.
Reputable source - 413 to 439 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Theodosius II Builds the Walls That Protect Constantinople for a Millennium
After the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE, Emperor Theodosius II resolved that Constantinople would never suffer the same fate, and set his praetorian prefect Anthemius to oversee a massive new line of fortifications. Built from 413 CE and completed in 439 CE, the Theodosian Walls stretched about 6.5 kilometers across the peninsula from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn, expanding the city by roughly five square kilometers. The design used a triple line of defense: a wide moat that could be flooded, an outer wall with a patrol track, and a massive inner wall nearly five meters thick and twelve meters high, studded with 96 towers roughly twenty meters tall. Attackers had to cross the moat under fire from two walls before even reaching the main fortification.
Primary source · 2 sources - 4 September 476 CEAncient Rome
A teenager is deposed, and the Western Empire quietly ends
The Roman general Orestes had deposed the reigning emperor in 475 CE and installed his own teenage son on the throne instead, under the grand name Romulus Augustulus, the same Romulus this timeline opened with, reduced now to a diminutive nickname on a boy-emperor with no real power. When Orestes refused his own mercenary soldiers' demand for a third of Italy's land as payment, they turned on him, proclaiming the general Odoacer their leader instead. Odoacer defeated and executed Orestes, then deposed young Romulus Augustulus on 4 September 476 CE. Rather than execute him or name a new puppet emperor, Odoacer simply sent the boy into comfortable house arrest in Campania with a fixed yearly allowance. Romulus Augustulus disappears from the historical record after that, his ultimate fate unknown.
Reputable source - September 4, 476 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Odoacer Deposes the Last Western Roman Emperor
In 476 CE the Germanic general Odoacer, serving in the western Roman army, led a revolt after the general Orestes refused his soldiers' demands for land in Italy. Odoacer's forces defeated and killed Orestes, and on September 4, 476 CE Odoacer deposed Orestes's teenage son, the emperor Romulus Augustulus, who had ruled for less than a year. Rather than naming a new western emperor, Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople and had the Roman Senate recognize the eastern emperor Zeno as sole ruler, while Odoacer himself governed Italy as king. The Roman Senate had approved Odoacer's leadership and granted him the honorary rank of patrician.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 528 to 534 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Justinian Codifies Roman Law in the Corpus Juris Civilis
In February 528 CE, Justinian I assembled ten legal experts and 39 scribes under the quaestor Tribonian to overhaul centuries of accumulated and often contradictory Roman law. Their task meant sorting through older law collections such as the Codex Gregorianus, the Codex Hermogenianus, and the Codex Theodosianus, deciding what still applied and what needed revision. The resulting Corpus Juris Civilis, or Body of Civil Law, took final shape between 529 and 534 CE in four parts: the Codex itself, a collection of imperial edicts; the Digest, a summary of expert legal opinions; the Institutes, a training textbook for lawyers; and the Novellae, new laws issued afterward. The first version of the Codex was completed on April 7, 529 CE, and a revised edition replaced it in 534 CE.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 531-579 CEAncient Persia
Khosrow I Anushirvan and the Golden Age of Gundeshapur
Khosrow I, known by the epithet Anushirvan, or "Immortal Soul," ruled the Sassanid Empire from 531 to 579 CE and is widely regarded by historians as its most accomplished king. He reformed the tax system by introducing land surveys and a rational, predictable assessment in place of arbitrary older methods, restructured the military, and worked to curb the independent power of the great noble families. He expanded the intellectual center at Gundeshapur, originally established by Shapur I in the 250s CE, into a cosmopolitan hub combining Greek, Syriac, and Indian scholarship, and according to World History Encyclopedia's account, welcomed Nestorian Christian scholars and Greek philosophers displaced when the Byzantine emperor Justinian closed the Academy of Athens in 529 CE. He sent the physician Burzoe to India specifically to bring back Sanskrit medical texts for translation, and Gundeshapur's associated hospital tradition, described in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, would go on to influence medical practice under the later Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad.
Reputable source · 2 sources - January 11 to 19, 532 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Nika Riots Nearly Topple Justinian
In January 532 CE, rival chariot-racing factions in Constantinople's Hippodrome, the Blues and the Greens, united in anger after Emperor Justinian I refused to pardon members of both factions arrested for earlier violence. Chanting Nika, meaning Conquer, a word usually shouted for favorite charioteers, the mob abandoned the races and rampaged through the city, burning the Church of Hagia Sophia, the Church of Saint Irene, the baths of Zeuxippus, and part of the Senate House. The rioters crowned a rival claimant, Hypatios, as emperor in the Hippodrome. According to the historian Procopius, Empress Theodora refused to let Justinian flee, telling him royalty makes the best shroud. Justinian's generals Belisarius and Mundus then trapped the crowd inside the Hippodrome and killed an estimated 30,000 people to end the revolt.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 533 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Belisarius Crushes the Vandals and Begins Justinian's Reconquest
In 533 CE, Justinian I sent his rising general Belisarius across the Mediterranean to reclaim North Africa from the Vandal Kingdom, which had ruled the former Roman province since the 5th century. The Vandal king Gelimer, who had recently usurped the throne from Hilderic, met Belisarius's forces near Carthage at the Battle of Ad Decimum in September 533 CE. Belisarius won decisively, and within about three months of landing he had crushed Vandal resistance, captured Gelimer, and restored Africa to imperial rule as a Byzantine praetorian prefecture. Belisarius returned to Constantinople to celebrate a formal triumph with the Vandal royal treasure and the captive king.
Reputable source · 2 sources - December 27, 537 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Justinian Rebuilds Hagia Sophia After the Nika Riots
The Nika riots of 532 CE burned down the existing Church of Hagia Sophia along with much of central Constantinople. Justinian I used the destruction as an opportunity to commission an entirely new building on a scale no one had attempted before, appointing the mathematician Anthemius of Tralles and the physicist Isidore of Miletus as architects. Construction ran from 532 to 537 CE, and the new Hagia Sophia was inaugurated on December 27, 537 CE. Its vast central dome, an unprecedented feat of engineering for the period, sits atop a building that dominated the Constantinople skyline and became the model for later domed Byzantine churches across the empire.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 541 to 542 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Plague of Justinian Devastates the Empire
Beginning around 541 CE, a pandemic of bubonic plague, the first fully documented outbreak of the disease in history, spread from Egypt across the Mediterranean into Constantinople. Justinian's court historian Procopius, who lived through the outbreak, recorded it in Book II of his History of the Wars and reported that the disease killed roughly a fifth of the population in the capital at its peak. Justinian himself contracted the plague and survived, but the epidemic recurred in waves across the empire for years afterward, straining tax revenue, military recruitment, and the labor force needed to sustain his reconquest campaigns.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - 602-628 CEAncient Persia
The Byzantine-Sassanid War and the Loss of the True Cross
Khosrow II launched an invasion of Byzantine territory in 602 or 604 CE, framed officially as revenge for the murder of the Byzantine emperor Maurice, his own benefactor, by the usurper Phocas. Persian forces under the general Shahrbaraz took Antioch in 612 CE and Damascus in 613, then advanced on Jerusalem the following year. According to livius.org's summary of the ancient sources, the Persians captured Jerusalem in 614 CE and carried off the True Cross, the relic Christians believed was the actual cross of the crucifixion, an event that caused panic and outrage across the Byzantine world. Persian forces went on to occupy Egypt as well, at their furthest extent controlling more territory than any Sassanid king before them. But the new Byzantine emperor Heraclius, who had overthrown Phocas in 610 CE, launched a sustained counteroffensive from 622 to 626 CE and eventually defeated a major Persian army near the ruins of ancient Nineveh. Khosrow II was overthrown by his own army in a palace coup in March 628 CE and replaced by his son Kavad II, who immediately sued for peace, returning all Byzantine territory, prisoners, and the True Cross itself.
Reputable source · 2 sources - late 6th - early 7th century CEThe Khmer Empire
Chenla Absorbs Funan and Builds Its Capital at Ishanapura
By the early 7th century a kingdom the Chinese called Chenla, once a vassal of Funan, had absorbed its former overlord and shifted the region's political center inland from the coast to the Mekong's tributaries. Its capital, Ishanapura, rose at what is now Sambor Prei Kuk in Kampong Thom province under King Isanavarman I, who reigned roughly 616 to 637 CE. UNESCO's listing for the site describes an ensemble of 186 fired-brick temples with sandstone detailing spread across an 840-hectare temple zone, linked to the Stung Sen river by three earthen causeways up to 700 meters long, alongside 102 separate hydraulic features. Eleven of the temples are built as octagons, a form with no known Indian architectural precedent, following principles from ancient Indian manuals of architecture but adapted independently.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 622 to 628 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Heraclius Defeats Persia in the Last Great War of Antiquity
Heraclius became emperor in October 610 CE after leading a fleet from Carthage to overthrow the tyrant Phokas, inheriting an empire already reduced to half its former size and effectively bankrupt. The Sasanian Persian king Khosrow II, who had declared war ostensibly to avenge Phokas's victim Maurice, spent the years from 602 to 622 CE conquering the Levant, parts of Anatolia, and Egypt for the first time in the war. Heraclius spent years rebuilding Byzantine finances and forces before launching counter-offensives from 622 to 626 CE that pushed into Persian territory itself. His campaigns, combined with the defection of the Persian general Shahrbaraz after Heraclius revealed Khosrow's secret order for his death, forced the Persians onto the defensive and ended the war by 628 CE with the return of the True Cross, captured by the Persians, to Jerusalem.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 636 to 642 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Byzantium Loses Syria and Egypt to the Arab Conquests
Just years after exhausting itself in the war against Persia, the Byzantine Empire faced a new opponent in the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate. From August 15 to 20, 636 CE, the Muslim army under Khalid ibn al-Walid fought the Byzantine legions under the field commander Vahan of Armenia at the Battle of Yarmouk in the Jordan valley, and the heavily outnumbered Rashidun forces won decisively. With the main Byzantine army destroyed, cities across Syria including Damascus, Homs, and Jerusalem negotiated surrender, and the provincial capital Caesarea held out until it fell in 641 CE. Arab forces then advanced into Egypt in 639 CE, and Alexandria, the province's capital, came under Muslim control in 642 CE.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 636-637 CEAncient Persia
The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah
In the mid-630s CE, an invading Arab Muslim army confronted a larger Sassanid force near al-Qadisiyyah, close to al-Hirah in present-day Iraq, in a multi-day engagement traditionally dated to 636 or 637 CE, though the Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that some modern scholars, citing numismatic evidence pointing to a serious blow to Sassanid administration as early as 634 or 635 CE, argue for an earlier chronology. The Sassanid commander Rostam was killed in the fighting, along with the loss of the Sassanid royal standard known as the Derafsh-e Kaviani, a banner of deep symbolic importance to Persian kingship. The Arab victory broke organized Sassanid resistance in Mesopotamia and opened the road toward the Sassanid capital at Ctesiphon, which fell soon after.
General source · 2 sources - 642 CEAncient Persia
The Battle of Nahavand and the Fall of the Sassanid Empire
In 642 CE, Arab forces under the commander al-Numan ibn Muqarrin met a Sassanid army under the last Sassanid king, Yazdegerd III, at Nahavand in western Iran. Livius.org's summary of the king's reign records simply that Yazdegerd was defeated at Nehavand and retreated toward the northeast; the Persian army, drawn substantially from farmers and townspeople rather than professional soldiers after decades of exhausting warfare with Byzantium, was destroyed. The defeat opened Isfahan and the surrounding region to Arab conquest and ended any organized Sassanid resistance as a state. Yazdegerd fled deeper into the Iranian plateau and spent the following nine years attempting, without success, to raise fresh support from local rulers and Central Asian allies, until he was killed near Merv in 651 CE, reportedly murdered by a local miller, bringing the four-century-old Sassanid dynasty and the last independent Zoroastrian Persian state to an end.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 678 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Greek Fire Saves Constantinople From the First Arab Siege
As the Umayyad Caliphate pressed its expansion against Byzantium, Arab fleets blockaded Constantinople for years in the 670s CE, wintering on the nearby peninsula of Cyzicus and renewing attacks on the city's fortifications each spring. In 678 CE the Byzantines deployed a new weapon for the first time in battle: Greek Fire, a highly flammable liquid invented by a Christian refugee named Kallinikos who had fled Muslim-held Syria for Constantinople in 668 CE. Sprayed under pressure or launched in catapulted bombs, the substance set enemy ships and fortifications ablaze and could not be extinguished with water. Its use against the Arab fleet destroyed large portions of it and forced the caliphate to lift the siege.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 717 to 718 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Leo III Breaks the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople
Leo III, born in Syria to a family relocated to Thrace, rose through the army to become governor of the Anatolikon military province before seizing the throne in 717 CE. He inherited a Constantinople already under threat and, almost immediately, faced a massive Arab siege by land and sea. His predecessors had prepared the ground: Anastasios II had strengthened the city's walls, and Theodosios III had secured an alliance with the Bulgar Khan Tervel to guard against attacks on the land walls. Combining these preparations with his own skill in warfare and diplomacy, Leo broke the siege of 717 to 718 CE so thoroughly that it proved a disaster for the Arab caliphate rather than the conquest it had planned.
Primary source · 2 sources - 726 to 730 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Leo III Launches Byzantine Iconoclasm
Beginning around 726 CE, Emperor Leo III, having already saved Constantinople from Arab siege, turned against the veneration of religious images, ordering the removal of an icon of Christ that hung over the Chalke Gate, the ceremonial entrance to the Great Palace. Leo publicly opposed icon veneration in 726 CE and formally decreed in 730 CE that icons must be destroyed, a policy his successor Constantine V pursued even more aggressively, persecuting iconophiles with mutilation and execution and burning the Pelekete monastery. Pope Gregory III responded by declaring that anyone who destroyed icons would be excommunicated, deepening a rift between the eastern and western churches. Iconoclast theologians argued that any painted image of Christ improperly merged or separated his human and divine natures, a position that iconophile scholars like John of Damascus rejected by distinguishing veneration from worship.
Primary source · 2 sources - 802 CEThe Khmer Empire
Jayavarman II Proclaims Himself Universal Ruler on Mount Kulen
In 802, a Khmer leader named Jayavarman II, who inscriptions say had returned from exile in a place called Java, held a consecration ceremony on Phnom Kulen, a sandstone plateau known in Sanskrit inscriptions as Mahendraparvata, the mountain of the great Indra. There he was proclaimed chakravartin, universal ruler, and took the title devaraja, god-king, according to the Sdok Kak Thom inscription cited in UNESCO's tentative-list documentation for the site. World History Encyclopedia notes this 802 date is the one historians use to mark the empire's beginning, after Jayavarman II had spent years subjugating the patchwork of smaller Khmer kingdoms through military campaigns and alliances. Archaeological survey of the plateau has found around 40 brick temples, ancient reservoirs, dykes, channels, and platforms, evidence of a real settlement rather than a purely symbolic mountaintop.
Reputable source · 2 sources - March 11, 843 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Empress Theodora Restores the Icons at the Triumph of Orthodoxy
A second wave of Iconoclasm under Emperor Theophilos, who ruled from 829 to 842 CE, targeted the monks who produced icons directly, branding noted icon-painters like Theophanes Graptos on their foreheads as a warning. After Theophilos died in 842 CE, his widow Theodora ruled as regent for their young son Michael III and moved decisively to end the controversy. In March 843 CE, Theodora deposed the iconoclast patriarch John the Grammarian, installed the iconophile Methodios as patriarch, and had a local council in Constantinople formally proclaim the veneration of icons Orthodox. A triumphant procession carrying the restored holy images through the city on March 11, 843 CE gave the event its lasting name, the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
Primary source · 2 sources - 863 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Cyril and Methodius Bring Christianity and a New Alphabet to the Slavs
Constantine, later known by his monastic name Cyril, was born in Thessaloniki and educated in Constantinople, where he studied under the Patriarch Photios and taught philosophy at the Magnaura university, earning the title Constantine the Philosopher. In 863 CE, Prince Rastislav of Moravia requested Byzantine missionaries, and Emperor Michael III sent Cyril along with his older brother Methodius to preach Christianity to the Slavs. Because no writing system existed that could accurately represent Slavic sounds, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet, borrowing elements from Hebrew and Greek cursive script, to translate scripture and liturgy into the Slavic vernacular. Their students at the Preslav Literary School later simplified Glagolitic into what became the Cyrillic alphabet, named for Cyril, drawing more heavily on Greek letterforms.
Primary source · 2 sources - 867 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Basil I Murders His Way to the Throne and Founds the Macedonian Dynasty
Basil was born a peasant in Thrace or Macedonia around 830 to 836 CE and moved to Constantinople, where he worked as a groom before catching the attention of Emperor Michael III and entering the imperial household. In 866 CE Basil murdered Bardas, the power behind Michael's throne, and was raised to co-emperor; the following year he murdered Michael himself and became sole ruler. The 11th-century historian Michael Psellos later wrote that he doubted any family had been so favored by God, a surprising thing given that its fortune had been, in his words, planted with murder and bloodshed. Despite this violent start, Basil's dynasty ruled Byzantium for 194 years and presided over what historians call the Macedonian Renaissance, a revival of classical learning, art, and literature after decades dominated by military survival.
Primary source · 2 sources - c. 877-889 CEThe Khmer Empire
Indravarman I Builds the Empire's First Great Reservoir at Hariharalaya
Ruling from the capital of Hariharalaya, in what is now the Roluos area near Siem Reap, King Indravarman I launched an extensive building campaign that included temples, palaces, and one of the first large-scale hydrological systems in Khmer history, according to the National Library of Australia's account of the period. He built the Indratataka reservoir, a man-made lake roughly 3.8 kilometers long and 800 meters wide that could hold about 7.5 million cubic meters of water, comparable to three Olympic swimming pools. During the monsoon the reservoir collected excess rainfall; in the dry season, canals and sluices released the stored water to irrigate rice paddies around the capital.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 889-900 CEThe Khmer Empire
Yasovarman I Moves the Capital and Founds Angkor
Between 889 and 900, Indravarman I's son Yasovarman I moved the Khmer capital northwest from Hariharalaya to the plains near the hill of Phnom Bakheng, founding a new city he called Yasodharapura, City that Maintains Glory, later known simply as Angkor, meaning Capital City. A raised causeway connected the new capital back to the old one. Yasovarman crowned his new city with a state temple on top of Phnom Bakheng itself, using the natural hill as the base for a temple-mountain representing Mount Meru, and completed the Eastern Baray, a reservoir measuring roughly 7.1 by 1.7 kilometers that dwarfed his father's Indratataka.
Reputable source · 2 sources - July 29, 1014 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Basil II Blinds the Bulgarian Army at Kleidion
Basil II, great-great-grandson of Basil I, took the throne in 976 CE at age five alongside his brother Constantine, though guardians and generals actually ruled until he came fully into power. Basil fought a decades-long war against the Bulgarian Empire under Tsar Samuel, a struggle that included Basil's own earlier defeat at Trajan's Gate. The decisive encounter came at the Battle of Kleidion on July 29, 1014 CE, when Byzantine general Nikephoros Xiphias infiltrated the Bulgarian rear and helped shatter Samuel's army. Basil then divided thousands of Bulgarian prisoners into groups of one hundred, blinded 99 men in each group, and left one man with a single eye in each group to lead the others home; Samuel reportedly died of shock two months later upon seeing his returning soldiers.
Primary source · 2 sources - 11th century CEThe Khmer Empire
The Western Baray, the Largest Reservoir of the Angkor Period
Khmer kings kept scaling up their reservoirs through the 10th and 11th centuries, culminating in the Western Baray, the largest built during the entire Angkor period. According to the National Library of Australia's account of Khmer engineering, it measures about 8 by 2 kilometers, 16 square kilometers in total, and once held an estimated 53 million cubic meters of water, roughly 21 Olympic swimming pools. Earthen dykes built from clay and soil dug out of the reservoir basin held the water; in some cases whole rivers were diverted to fill the barays. At its center stands the West Mebon, a temple built in the 11th century by King Udayadityavarman II that became an island when the reservoir was full. In 1936 archaeologists recovered fragments of a colossal bronze reclining statue of Vishnu from the site, suggesting the temple once depicted the god reclining on the cosmic ocean.
Reputable source · 2 sources - July 16, 1054 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Cardinal Humbert Excommunicates the Patriarch and Splits the Church
Long-simmering theological and political tensions between the Latin west and Greek east, over questions like the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed and the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, came to a head after Norman conquests in southern Italy suppressed Greek church practices there. Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople retaliated by pressuring Latin churches in his city to adopt Greek customs. Pope Leo IX sent a delegation led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, who received a cold reception and, after Cerularius refused to deal with him further, walked into Hagia Sophia during a service on July 16, 1054 CE and placed a bull of excommunication against the patriarch on the altar. Cerularius responded in kind, excommunicating Humbert and his fellow legates.
Primary source · 2 sources - August 26, 1071 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Manzikert Shatters Byzantine Anatolia
Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes, who took the throne in 1068 CE determined to reform the Byzantine military against the rising Seljuk threat, marched into Armenia in 1071 CE hoping to catch the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan off guard despite a peace treaty the two had signed in 1069 CE. The armies met near Manzikert on August 26, 1071 CE, and the Seljuks won decisively, capturing Romanos himself. With the empire thrown into disarray as rival generals fought over the succession rather than defending the frontier, Seljuk forces and Turkish settlers swept across Anatolia largely unopposed in the years that followed.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1095 to 1097 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Alexios I Asks the West for Help and Gets the First Crusade
Alexios I Komnenos took the Byzantine throne in 1081 CE and spent his reign fighting the Normans, the Pechenegs, and the Seljuk Turks who had overrun Anatolia after Manzikert. Worried about continuing Seljuk advances, Alexios sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza in March 1095 CE asking Pope Urban II for military aid, expecting western mercenary reinforcements of the kind Byzantium had used before. Instead, after Urban preached a much larger call to arms at the Council of Clermont later that year, waves of western crusaders set out for the east, including an unarmed peasant movement called the People's Crusade. The main crusader armies departed Europe in August 1096 CE and gathered outside Constantinople's walls between November 1096 and April 1097 CE, arriving in far greater numbers and with far more independent ambitions than Alexios had sought.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1111 CEThe Aztec Empire
The Mexica Leave Their Legendary Homeland of Aztlan
According to Aztec accounts recorded after the Spanish conquest, the Mexica people set out from Aztlan, a homeland whose location is unknown and may be entirely legendary, guided by their patron god Huitzilopochtli. The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute's account of the migration traces the Mexica first to Chicomoztoc, the Place of Seven Caves, and describes a journey that took them through the Valley of Mexico by 1168 and lasted nearly a century before it ended. Along the way the Mexica were driven off repeatedly by established city-states that saw them as poor, unwelcome newcomers with no land of their own. Huitzilopochtli promised his followers an island in a lake marked by an eagle on a cactus, a sign they would carry as their founding myth for the rest of their history.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1113 CEThe Khmer Empire
Suryavarman II Seizes the Throne by Killing His Great-Uncle
Suryavarman II took the Khmer throne in 1113 by assassinating his great-uncle, the reigning king Dharanindravarman I. World History Encyclopedia notes he is said to have compared the coup to destroying a serpent, though what exactly that reference meant, and what motivated the killing, is not recorded and remains unclear. Rather than rely on descent alone to justify his rule, Suryavarman II built legitimacy through accomplishment: he opened formal relations with Song dynasty China, which boosted trade and strengthened the Khmer economy, even though his military campaigns against Dai Viet and the Cham kingdoms mostly failed. He is remembered as one of the strongest kings of the empire despite, or partly because of, how he came to power.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1122 CEThe Khmer Empire
Construction Begins on Angkor Wat
Around 1122, Suryavarman II began construction of Angkor Wat, a temple complex covering 162.6 hectares dedicated to his personal protector-god Vishnu. World History Encyclopedia's timeline dates the start of building to 1122; the temple used an estimated 1.5 million cubic meters of sand and silt in its foundations, with sandstone blocks quarried from the Kulen Hills 18 miles away and floated to the site along a purpose-built canal network. Its central tower rises 65 meters, and a moat 200 meters wide and roughly 5 kilometers around encircles the whole complex. Unusually among Angkorian temples, which typically face east, Angkor Wat faces west, the direction traditionally associated with the dead, and its bas-relief carvings are arranged to be read counterclockwise, the reverse of normal Khmer funerary practice, which has fueled a long scholarly debate over whether it was designed from the start as Suryavarman II's tomb.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1160sThe Mongol Empire
The Steppe Tribes Live in Constant Blood Feud
In the mid-12th century the grasslands of central Asia were home to nomadic tribes such as the Mongols, Tatars, Kereits, Naimans, and Merkids, each composed of related but rival clans with no central authority over them. The World History Encyclopedia describes the conflicts among these groups as bitter, noting one tribal leader was infamously remembered for boiling his captives alive in 70 large cauldrons. Herding, raiding, and kidnapping rival clans' women and livestock were routine, and alliances shifted constantly as families sought revenge for old killings. Temujin's own father, Yesugei, a minor chief of the Borjigin clan, was among those caught in this cycle: he had earlier abducted his wife Hoelun from a Merkid bridegroom, a debt the Merkids would later collect.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1162The Mongol Empire
Temujin Is Born and Left for Dead on the Steppe
Temujin, the future Genghis Khan, was born to Yesugei and Hoelun on the steppe. His exact birth year is disputed among scholars, with some favoring 1162 and others 1167. When Temujin was around nine to twelve years old, his father was poisoned by a rival tribe, the Tatars. Too young to hold his father's followers together, Temujin could not maintain his father's authority, and he and his mother were abandoned by their own clan and left on the steppe to die. The family survived by foraging and living off the land. According to the World History Encyclopedia, Temujin may later have killed one of his own older half-brothers, Bekter, in a dispute likely rooted in rivalry over their father's legacy, after which he fled with his remaining followers and allied himself with Toghril, chief of the Kerait tribe, a group his father had once helped.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1177 CEThe Khmer Empire
Cham Forces Sail Up the Tonle Sap and Sack Angkor
In 1177, the kingdom of Champa, a rival Indianized state on the coast of what is now central Vietnam, launched a surprise attack on Angkor. Cham forces under King Jaya Indravarman IV sailed a fleet up the Mekong River, across the Tonle Sap lake, and up the Siem Reap River to reach the Khmer capital directly by water, bypassing the empire's land defenses entirely. World History Encyclopedia describes it as Cham's humiliating revenge, looting Yasodharapura and pushing the empire to the edge of destruction; the reigning Khmer king, Tribhuvanadityavarman, was killed in the attack.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1181 CEThe Khmer Empire
Jayavarman VII Expels the Chams and Is Crowned King
Jayavarman VII, then in his mid-fifties, led the Khmer campaign that drove the Cham occupiers out of Angkor and was crowned king in 1181. World History Encyclopedia calls him the empire's greatest king, ruling from 1181 to 1215 CE, and credits him with restoring the realm from anarchy after the 1177 sack before turning to offense: he later invaded Champa itself, making it a Khmer dependency for roughly three decades. Unlike his Hindu predecessors, Jayavarman VII was a devout Mahayana Buddhist, and his reign marks the point where the Khmer state religion shifts decisively toward Buddhism at the highest level, even as most subjects continued a blend of Hindu and Buddhist practice.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1186 CEThe Khmer Empire
Jayavarman VII Dedicates Ta Prohm to His Mother
In 1186, Jayavarman VII dedicated a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and center of learning called Rajavihara, monastery of the king, known today as Ta Prohm, to his mother, honored in the temple's central image as Prajnaparamita, the bodhisattva embodying transcendent wisdom. The temple's own foundation stele, K.273, one of the largest surviving inscriptions from Angkor at 127 verses across four carved faces, records the scale of its endowment directly: 3,140 villages granted the temple by the king, self-donors, and devotees, and 12,644 personnel assigned to it, including 615 dancers, according to the scholarly translation hosted by Study Ancients. Ta Prohm is one of the few Angkorian temples that conservators deliberately left partly overgrown by jungle when restoration work began in the early 20th century, preserved as what French archaeologists called a concession to the picturesque.
Primary source · 3 sources - c. 1190s-1200s CEThe Khmer Empire
Jayavarman VII Builds Angkor Thom and the Bayon at Its Center
Jayavarman VII rebuilt the Khmer capital as Angkor Thom, meaning Great City, a walled and moated urban complex enclosing roughly 9 square kilometers, which World History Encyclopedia calls a city within a city in Angkor. At its geographic center he built the Bayon as his state temple, breaking with two centuries of Hindu state temples to make it the only Angkorian state temple built primarily to honor Buddhist deities. The Bayon is best known for the dozens of towers carved on all sides with large, serene stone faces; their exact identity is still debated among scholars, with some interpretations naming the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, and others reading them as portraits of Jayavarman VII himself merging royal and divine identity.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1195 to 1205The Mongol Empire
Temujin Defeats His Rivals One Tribe at a Time
Over roughly ten years, from about 1195 to 1205, Temujin built his power through a mixture of diplomacy, generosity, and calculated force. He defeated in turn the Tatars, the Kereits of his former ally Toghril, the Naimans, and the Merkids, absorbing their warriors into his own following rather than simply destroying them, a practice that let his army grow with every victory. His break with his childhood friend and rival Jamukha, who commanded his own coalition of tribes, was one of the decisive struggles of this period. By 1205 the major rival confederations that had once made the steppe ungovernable had all been broken or absorbed.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. early 13th century (legendary)The Inca Empire
Manco Capac Leads the Legendary Founding of Cuzco
According to Inca tradition, the creator god Viracocha brought the first people into being at Lake Titicaca, and the Inca specifically were born at Tiwanaku from the sun god Inti. In one version of the story the first Inca, Manco Capac, and his sister-wife Mama Ocllo emerged from a sacred cave called Tampu T'oqo, 'the House of Windows,' near a place called Pacariqtambo south of Cuzco, carrying a golden staff Inti had told them to plant wherever it sank into the earth. EBSCO's Research Starters entry describes Manco Capac as a curaca, a local lord, who led a migration from Pacaritambo into the Cuzco valley in the early 13th century, organizing his own family and neighboring clans into ten kin groups called ayllus. Along the way the migrants defeated the valley's existing occupants, the Chanca, with help the Incas said came from stone warriors called pururaucas, and Manco Capac then drove out the people of Acamama and founded Cuzco as his capital.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. late 12th-early 13th century CEThe Khmer Empire
Jayavarman VII Builds a Hundred Hospitals Across the Empire
As part of his construction program, Jayavarman VII built what World History Encyclopedia describes as a hundred hospitals across the empire, along with an extensive network of highways and rest-houses connecting Angkor to distant provinces. A separate foundation stele found at Ta Prohm, inscription K.273, devotes its final section specifically to this hospital network, recording an empire-wide system of 102 arogyasala, hospital-temples, spread across two administrative districts, backed by 838 villages assigned to support their operations and 80,640 personnel, doctors, pharmacists, attendants, cooks, and maintenance staff, according to the scholarly translation hosted by Study Ancients. The same inscription describes a detailed pharmaceutical inventory supplied to the hospitals, including named medicines, barks, roots, and pastes. The hospital buildings themselves were built mostly of perishable wood and bamboo that have since disappeared, but the stone hospital chapels built alongside each one survive and let archaeologists trace the network's extent today.
Primary source · 2 sources - c. 1200-1400The Inca Empire
Cuzco Grows from a Village into a Regional Capital
Archaeology at Cuzco shows people living in the valley long before any Inca state existed. World History Encyclopedia notes that settled populations occupied the site from at least 500 BCE, with the pre-Inca settlement of Chanapata leaving behind decorated pottery but no large buildings or metalwork. Cuzco itself only began to take real shape as a town around 1200 CE and did not become a capital of any significance until the reign of Inca Roca in the 14th century, when successive rulers began building their own walled palace compounds. For most of this period the Inca were one small kingdom among several rival highland groups in the Cuzco valley and the surrounding basin, with no special claim to regional dominance.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1204 to 1261 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Empire of Nicaea Preserves Byzantium in Exile
After the Fourth Crusade shattered the Byzantine Empire in 1204 CE, three Greek successor states rose at its edges: the Empire of Trebizond on the Black Sea's southeastern coast, the Despotate of Epiros in modern Albania and northwestern Greece, and the Empire of Nicaea, centered on the ancient city of Nicaea in northwestern Anatolia and founded by Theodore I Laskaris. Because Trebizond was too remote to seriously contend for Constantinople, the real struggle for the Byzantine legacy played out between the Latins who held the city, the Epirotes, the Nicaeans, and neighboring Bulgaria, with alliances shifting constantly and battles fought frequently over the following decades. The Laskarid rulers of Nicaea maintained Byzantine imperial traditions and administration throughout, positioning their state as the empire's true continuation in exile.
Primary source · 2 sources - April 1204 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Fourth Crusade Sacks Constantinople
The Fourth Crusade, called by Pope Innocent III in 1198 CE to retake Jerusalem, was diverted early when the crusaders, unable to pay Venice for their transport ships, seized the Christian city of Zara on Venice's behalf. An exiled Byzantine prince, Alexios, then offered the crusaders a large payment to install him on the Byzantine throne, and they sailed to Constantinople and installed him as emperor in July 1203 CE. When Alexios was murdered in February 1204 CE and replaced by a new emperor who ordered the crusaders to leave, they instead laid siege to the city. On April 12, 1204 CE, the crusaders breached the sea walls, and for three days their leaders carried out a planned, systematic sack, agreed in advance, that stripped Constantinople's churches, monasteries, and libraries while killing and robbing its inhabitants.
Reputable source · 2 sources - after 1206The Mongol Empire
The Yassa and the Decimal Army Reorganize Mongol Society
After the 1206 kurultai, Genghis Khan drew up the Yasa (also spelled Yassa), a law code laying out punishments for specific crimes and rules meant to bind Mongols of different tribal backgrounds under one legal order. He paired this with a reorganized army built on a strict decimal structure: units of ten men (an arban), grouped into hundreds (a jagun), grouped into thousands (a minghan), and grouped into tens of thousands (a tumen). The World History Encyclopedia's article on Mongol warfare notes that 98 minghan units of 1,000 men each were created, drawing on tribal levies but deliberately mixing men from different clans so loyalty attached to the khan and his commanders rather than to the old tribal chiefs. Genghis Khan also kept a personal bodyguard of 10,000 men, the keshig, which doubled as a training ground for future commanders of the other divisions.
Reputable source · 2 sources A Kurultai Declares Temujin 'Genghis Khan'
In 1206 a great assembly, or kurultai, of Mongol and allied tribal leaders met at the Kerulen River and formally declared Temujin their supreme leader. He took the title Genghis Khan, which the World History Encyclopedia translates as meaning roughly 'universal' leader. The event marked the first time the steppe's many rival clans had accepted a single ruler rather than fighting under separate chiefs. It set a precedent that later Mongol succession, in theory, would also run through a kurultai rather than pure hereditary right, though in practice the position stayed within Genghis Khan's own line for the rest of the empire's history.
Reputable source · 2 sources- c. 1210 CEThe Khmer Empire
The Khmer Empire Reaches Its Greatest Territorial Extent
By the later years of Jayavarman VII's reign, the Khmer Empire had reached its maximum territorial extent, covering much of what is today Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and southern Vietnam, according to World History Encyclopedia. The empire had expanded steadily northward into the Khorat plateau and west into the Chao Phraya river basin over the preceding centuries, and Jayavarman VII's conquest of Champa temporarily extended Khmer influence into central Vietnam as well. The article notes the population of Angkor itself is difficult to estimate precisely but a figure of approximately one million is considered acceptable by historians working from the site's mapped extent.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1209 to 1215The Mongol Empire
Genghis Khan Conquers the Jin and Western Xia States
Genghis Khan began raiding the Tangut state of Western Xia in 1205 and 1207, forcing its ruler to surrender by 1210 and become a Mongol vassal. He then turned on the larger Jurchen Jin dynasty, which ruled northern China, attacking in 1205, 1209, and 1211, the latter invasion using two Mongol armies of 50,000 men each. The Jin capital, then called Yanjing (modern Beijing), fell after a lengthy siege in 1215, forcing the Jin emperor to abandon the northern half of his territory. Western Xia later tried to ally with the Jin and Song against the Mongols, a betrayal Genghis Khan would punish with the state's near-total destruction in 1225 to 1227.
Reputable source · 2 sources The Otrar Massacre Ignites War With the Khwarazmian Empire
In 1218 the governor of Otrar, a Khwarazmian trading city on the Syr Darya river, arrested a caravan of 450 Muslim merchants sent by Genghis Khan to open commercial relations with the Khwarazmian Empire, confiscated their goods, and slaughtered them. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that the governor, Inalchuq (also called Qayer Khan), acted as a kinsman of the Khwarazmshah and apparently with his agreement. When Genghis Khan sent an embassy demanding reparations, the Khwarazmshah Ala al-Din Muhammad rejected it, an act that made a Mongol invasion of his territories inevitable.
Reputable source · 2 sources- early-to-mid 13th century CEThe Khmer Empire
Building Activity and New Inscriptions Slow After Jayavarman VII's Death
Following Jayavarman VII's death around 1218, the pace of new temple construction and royal inscriptions across the empire dropped noticeably. The National Library of Australia's account of the decline notes that by the time Zhou Daguan visited in 1296, the empire was already in decline, and that records and artworks had become rarer, a sign that the cultural and economic strength that powered a century of monumental building was ebbing even before any single military defeat. World History Encyclopedia adds that the Khmer court was repeatedly occupied with putting down rebellions by ambitious nobles or fighting conspiracies against the king throughout the empire's history, and that this instability was especially common each time a king died, since successions were usually contested.
Reputable source · 2 sources - February to March 1220The Mongol Empire
Bukhara and Samarkand Fall to the Mongol Advance
Genghis Khan led a force of roughly 100,000 men through Persia in response to the Otrar massacre. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that Bukhara was conquered by Genghis Khan on 10 February 1220, with its citadel falling twelve days later; the inhabitants were driven out, their property plundered, and the city burned, while the citadel's defenders were killed. Genghis Khan then advanced on Samarkand, one of Transoxiana's greatest cultural and commercial centers, which also fell and was sacked. The Khwarazmshah, Ala al-Din Muhammad, fled the Mongol advance and died weeks later on an island in the Caspian Sea. The World History Encyclopedia notes that the Mongols also wrecked the region's irrigation system as they went, destroying the agricultural base that had supported the cities for centuries.
Reputable source · 2 sources Tolui's Army Destroys Nishapur
In 1221 Genghis Khan's youngest son Tolui led a Mongol force into Khorasan, ending Khwarazmian rule there. At Nishapur, the defenders fought for three days before being overwhelmed, and Encyclopaedia Iranica states plainly that the population was massacred. Later Persian chroniclers gave staggering casualty figures for the whole Khorasan campaign: the historian Herawi claimed 1,747,000 killed at Nishapur alone and 1,600,000 at Herat, while Juzjani put the Herat toll at 2,400,000. Encyclopaedia Iranica's modern assessment is blunt about these numbers, noting it is doubtful anyone was actually counting and that the cities involved could not have held populations anywhere near those totals.
General source · 2 sourcesJebe and Subutai Rout the Rus at the Kalka River
While Genghis Khan campaigned in Khorasan, his generals Jebe and Subutai led a separate force on a reconnaissance sweep around the Caspian Sea, defeating a combined army of Rus principalities and Cuman (Kipchak) allies at the Kalka River in 1223. The World History Encyclopedia's Mongol Invasion of Europe article notes that despite this defeat, the western powers drew no lasting lesson from it: a Novgorodian chronicler later wrote of the Mongols, 'They turned back from the river Dnieper, and we know not whence they came and whither they went.' The Mongol force then withdrew fully back to Mongolia, having gathered intelligence rather than sought to hold territory.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 18 August 1227The Mongol Empire
Genghis Khan Dies Besieging the Western Xia Capital
Genghis Khan died on 18 August 1227 of an unknown illness, possibly worsened by a fall from his horse while hunting a few months earlier. At the time he was in northwest China besieging Zhongxing, the capital of Western Xia, a state he was punishing for its earlier attempt to ally with the Jin against him. His commanders kept news of his death from the Mongol army until the city surrendered, after which its population was slaughtered. His body was then carried back to Mongolia for burial at a location that remains unknown to this day.
Reputable source · 2 sources Ogedei Khan Becomes Great Khan and Builds Karakorum
Ogedei, Genghis Khan's third son, was chosen as the new Great Khan in 1229 and was the first Mongol ruler to formally use the title khagan, or 'great khan,' where his father had used only 'khan.' In 1235 Ogedei ordered the construction of a walled capital at Karakorum in the Orkhon Valley, roughly 400 kilometers southwest of modern Ulaanbaatar, a site chosen partly for its traditional use as a gathering ground and its reliable water and pasture. The World History Encyclopedia notes Ogedei himself rarely lived there, preferring to move between traditional yurt camps, but the city became a genuinely cosmopolitan hub even though its resident population never exceeded about 10,000 people.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 6 December 1240The Mongol Empire
Batu Khan Sacks Kyiv
Under Batu Khan and his general Subutai, a third wave of Mongol forces moved into Ukraine in 1239, defeated the Cuman Polovtsians, and captured Kyiv after a brief siege on 6 December 1240. The World History Encyclopedia records that the inhabitants of Kyiv were put to the sword just as in other conquered cities. Giovanni de Piano Carpini, a papal envoy who passed through the region six years later, described what he found: countless human skulls and bones lying on the ground, and a city that had once been large and thickly populated reduced to almost nothing.
Reputable source · 2 sources - April 1241The Mongol Empire
Legnica and Mohi, Then a Sudden Withdrawal
From Kyiv the Mongol army split, one wing driving into Poland and Bohemia, the other into Hungary. At Legnica (called Liegnitz, near Wahlstatt) on 9 April 1241, a Mongol force met an army of Poles, Germans, and Teutonic Knights under Henry the Pious, Duke of Silesia. The Mongols used their standard false-retreat tactic, then attacked again under cover of smoke from burning reeds; Henry was killed and his head paraded on a spike. Two days later, on 10 to 11 April, a separate Mongol army under Subutai crushed the main Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohi on the Sajo river, crossing a pontoon bridge and a swamp to outflank the Hungarians while catapults bombarded them from the opposite bank. Despite these victories, the invasion stopped in its tracks that same spring: word finally reached the army that Ogedei Khan had died on 11 December 1241, and the senior commanders, including Batu, needed to return to take part in choosing his successor.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1250sThe Mongol Empire
The Pax Mongolica Reopens the Silk Road
With most of Eurasia's overland trade routes now under Mongol control, merchants could travel between China, Central Asia, Persia, and Europe under a single set of rules and protections, a period historians call the Pax Mongolica. At Karakorum, the Mongol capital, merchants were drawn by the khan's practice of paying generous, often double-market prices for goods, and the city developed large regular markets trading everything from livestock to luxury goods. The empire also maintained an extensive postal and relay system, with stations set roughly every 25 to 30 miles along major roads, each offering lodging and fresh horses for envoys and travelers, a system later described in detail by Marco Polo.
Reputable source · 2 sources Mongke Khan Purges Rivals and Centralizes Power
Mongke, a grandson of Genghis Khan, was elected Great Khan at a kurultai in 1251, becoming the third to hold the title. He moved immediately and ruthlessly against rival branches of the family, purging the House of Ogedei; Oghul Qaimish, widow of the former khan Guyuk and regent from 1248 to 1251, was tried for treason in December 1252 and executed by being thrown into a river wrapped in felt, a method traditionally reserved for those accused of witchcraft. The House of Chagatai was similarly purged of potential rivals. With his position secured, Mongke turned the empire's resources toward two major new campaigns: one under his brother Hulagu against the Abbasid Caliphate and the Assassins of Persia, and one against the Song dynasty in southern China, in which his brother Kublai took part.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 4 January 1254The Mongol Empire
William of Rubruck Reaches Karakorum
William of Rubruck, a Flemish Franciscan friar, set out in 1253 on a mission for King Louis IX of France, traveling through the western part of the Mongol Empire and eventually reaching Karakorum, where he was received at court and given an audience with Mongke Khan on 4 January 1254. His account, the Itinerarium, records the Great Khan telling him: 'Just as the sun spreads its rays in all directions, so my power and the power of Batu is spread everywhere,' a statement of the divided authority between the Great Khan in Mongolia and Batu's Golden Horde in the west. Rubruck also described Karakorum's walls, markets, and separate quarters for Muslim and Chinese craftsmen, and noted, less flatteringly, that Mongke was frequently drunk when receiving visitors.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1257 to 1292The Mongol Empire
Vietnam and Java Resist Mongol Conquest
Beyond China and Japan, Kublai Khan's forces launched repeated campaigns into Southeast Asia that achieved only limited success. The World History Encyclopedia records Mongol invasions of Vietnam in 1257, 1281, and 1286, Burma in 1277 and 1287, and a naval assault on Java in 1292, all facing conditions the Mongol military had never had to solve on the steppe: humid jungle terrain, tropical disease, and opponents who used war elephants. None of these campaigns produced lasting Mongol control of the region, in sharp contrast to the outright conquests of China, Persia, and Russia.
Reputable source · 2 sources - January to February 1258The Mongol Empire
Hulagu Khan Sacks Baghdad and Ends the Abbasid Caliphate
Hulagu Khan, brother of Mongke, defeated the Abbasid Caliphate in January 1258, and Mongol forces captured Baghdad the following month after a brief siege. The World History Encyclopedia's account of the Abbasid dynasty describes the city, including the great library and research institute known as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), as leveled and its population massacred; the last Abbasid caliph, al-Mustasim, was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by horses so that no royal blood would touch the ground, and most of the royal family was killed. Medieval tradition put the death toll as high as 800,000, a figure modern historians treat as unverifiable but indicative of a massacre on a scale that shocked the wider Islamic world.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1260 to 1264The Mongol Empire
The Toluid Civil War Splits the Empire
When Mongke Khan died in 1259 during the campaign against the Song dynasty, a succession crisis broke out between two of his brothers, Kublai and Ariq Boke, both of whom declared themselves the new Great Khan. Ariq Boke held the advantage of controlling Karakorum, the traditional capital, and drew support from more conservative Mongols wary of Kublai's increasingly Chinese-influenced rule. The World History Encyclopedia notes the situation of two rival khans was not resolved until 1264, when Kublai finally prevailed, having already captured Karakorum itself in 1262. The war permanently fractured any pretense of a single unified Mongol Empire, which settled into four increasingly separate khanates: the Yuan dynasty in the east under Kublai, the Golden Horde in Russia, the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Middle East, and the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 3 September 1260The Mongol Empire
The Mamluks Stop the Mongols at Ain Jalut
After Hulagu returned east with the bulk of his army to attend the kurultai following Mongke Khan's death, he left roughly 10,000 to 20,000 troops in Syria under his general Ket Buqa. Hulagu had sent envoys to the Mamluk sultan in Cairo, Qutuz, demanding submission; Qutuz had the envoys killed and their heads displayed on Cairo's gates. The two armies met at Ain Jalut, a spring in the Jezreel Valley, on 3 September 1260. According to the near-contemporary Persian chronicle translated and hosted by De Re Militari, the Mamluks under Qutuz used a feigned retreat to draw the Mongols into an ambush, then encircled them in a battle that lasted from dawn to midday; Ket Buqa was captured and executed after refusing to flee, reportedly telling his captors that Hulagu's wrath would follow regardless of his own death.
Primary source · 2 sources - July 1261 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Michael VIII Palaiologos Retakes Constantinople
Michael Palaiologos rose to power after the early death of Theodore II Laskaris in 1258 CE, becoming co-emperor with Theodore's young son John IV in 1259 CE before blinding and deposing the boy in 1261 CE. Michael had planned the recovery of Constantinople from the start of his reign, but the opportunity came unexpectedly: his general Alexios Strategopoulos, positioned near the city, discovered its Latin garrison was away and seized Constantinople in a swift operation in July 1261 CE, ending 57 years of Latin rule. Michael then moved the Byzantine capital back to the city and spent heavily to rebuild it, constructing new churches and monasteries and reinforcing its walls after decades of neglect under the Latin emperors.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1271 to 1279The Mongol Empire
Kublai Khan Conquers the Song and Founds the Yuan Dynasty
In 1271 Kublai Khan formally established the Yuan dynasty, ruling China from 1271 to 1368 and becoming the first non-Chinese ruler of the whole country. The conquest of the Southern Song took eleven hard years, since the Song had adopted static, fortified warfare with river fortresses instead of relying on the cavalry tactics Mongol armies were used to countering; the Song could field an army of over a million men and both sides used gunpowder weapons, catapults, and, in a first for warfare, the largest naval battles yet seen. Mongol forces finally crossed the Yangtze in March 1275, and after the slaughter of Changzhou and the surrender of the Song empress dowager and child emperor at the capital Lin'an on 28 March 1276, the last resistance was crushed at the naval battle of Yaishan on 19 March 1279. Kublai founded his capital at Xanadu (Shangdu) and established Daidu, on the site of modern Beijing, as its permanent successor.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1275The Mongol Empire
Marco Polo Reaches Kublai Khan's Court
Marco Polo, born into a Venetian merchant family in 1254, set out at age 17 in 1271 with his father and uncle on their second journey to East Asia, reaching the court of Kublai Khan around 1275. The World History Encyclopedia notes Kublai appointed Marco a permanent, roving envoy, in keeping with the khan's policy of avoiding reliance on Chinese officials where possible. The Polos stayed 17 years, finally leaving China in 1292 by escorting a Mongol princess to Persia, and reached Venice in 1295, a year after Kublai's death. Marco's account, later dictated in prison and known as The Travels of Marco Polo, described Xanadu, paper currency, and the empire's postal relay system in detail unmatched by any other European writer of the period.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 14 August 1281The Mongol Empire
The Kamikaze Destroys Kublai Khan's Invasion Fleet
Kublai Khan sent a fleet of some 800 to 900 ships and 16,600 to 40,000 Mongol, Chinese, and Korean troops against Japan in November 1274, but after initial victories the invaders withdrew to their ships rather than push inland, possibly due to supply problems, and the fleet later withdrew entirely. After Japanese forces beheaded a follow-up embassy demanding tribute, Kublai launched a far larger invasion in June 1281: 4,400 ships and roughly 100,000 troops, reinforced later by another 40,000. Japanese fortifications built in the interim held at Hakata, and the combined Mongol fleets moved toward Takashima. On 14 August a typhoon destroyed most of the Mongol fleet, wrecking ships that had been chained together for defense against Japanese raiding boats; the World History Encyclopedia estimates half to two-thirds of the Mongol force was killed. The storm winds became known in Japan as kamikaze, or 'divine winds,' credited to the war god Hachiman answering Japanese prayers.
Reputable source · 2 sources - August 1296 - July 1297The Khmer Empire
Zhou Daguan Arrives as a Chinese Envoy and Records Daily Life at Angkor
In August 1296, a Chinese diplomat named Zhou Daguan arrived at Angkor as part of a mission sent by Temur Khan, the Yuan dynasty emperor, and remained at the Khmer court for about eleven months before returning to China. His account, compiled sometime before 1312 and known in English as The Customs of Cambodia, is according to the National Library of Australia the only surviving eyewitness record of daily life in the Khmer Empire, since almost no internal administrative records from the Angkor period survive on their own. Zhou described the walled city of Angkor Thom in specific detail, its five gateways each with two gates, its wide moat crossed by bridges carved with stone snakes and pulled by fifty-four sculpted deities, and noted the Eastern Baray, describing a bronze reclining Buddha at its center with water flowing from its navel. He also documented the strict social distinctions in Khmer housing: officials' homes could be tiled, but commoners were forbidden to put up even a single roof tile.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1299The Ottoman Empire
Osman I founds the Ottoman beylik
Osman I, known as Osman Gazi, led a small Turkic principality centered on Sogut in the Anatolian region of Bithynia, on the frontier between the fragmenting Seljuk world and the declining Byzantine Empire. Around 1280 he had succeeded his father Ertugrul as ruler of this territory, one of many small beyliks that emerged after Mongol pressure broke Seljuk authority in Anatolia. In 1299, with no functioning central Seljuk authority left to answer to, Osman's forces laid siege to the Byzantine city of Nicaea, an act later Ottoman historians treated as the founding moment of an independent Ottoman state. The siege itself failed, ending in defeat two years later, but by 1300 Osman's forces had captured the city of Yenisehir and made it their first capital.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 13th-14th century CEThe Khmer Empire
The Empire Shifts from Hindu-Mahayana Kingship to Theravada Buddhism
Over the 13th and 14th centuries, Khmer religious practice shifted decisively away from the blend of Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism that had underpinned centuries of devaraja kingship, toward Theravada Buddhism, a tradition emphasizing personal reflection, simplicity, and social equality. The National Library of Australia's account of the decline states this presented a direct challenge to the traditional class structure and divine authority of the kings, since Theravada teaching offered little support for the idea that a monarch was a living god. Tensions grew between Theravada's spiritual ideals and the rigid hierarchies of royal power that the devaraja cult and monumental temple-building had depended on. Columbia Magazine's reporting on Angkor scholarship notes that some researchers, including historian Victor Lieberman, argue Angkor's political structure disintegrated as Buddhism swept through the region in the 13th century, precisely because Angkor's rulers had built their authority on being earthly representations of Hindu gods.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1300s-1400s CEThe Khmer Empire
Tree-Ring Evidence Shows Decades of Drought Strained Angkor's Water System
Climate scientists Brendan Buckley, Roland Fletcher, and Edward Cook published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that Angkor experienced two long, severe droughts in the century before its final collapse, reconstructed from a seven-and-a-half-century tree-ring record from tropical southern Vietnam. The first drought, in the mid-1300s, lasted roughly 30 years and was the most sustained dry period the region had seen in eight centuries; the second, shorter drought around the turn of the 15th century included the single driest year in the entire tree-ring record, 1403. Between and after these droughts came unusually intense monsoon seasons capable of causing severe flooding. The National Library of Australia's synthesis of this research notes that when rains did return after prolonged drought, sediment no longer held in place by cleared forest washed into the barays and canals, clogging them with silt.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - c. 1325 CEThe Aztec Empire
An Eagle on a Cactus Marks the Site of Tenochtitlan
The Mexica's migration story reaches its climax with the killing of a rebel named Copil, son of Huitzilopochtli's sister Malinalxochitl, who had led an uprising against the wandering clan. World History Encyclopedia recounts that Huitzilopochtli ordered Copil's heart thrown as far as possible into Lake Texcoco, and that wherever it landed would mark where the Mexica should build their home. An eagle sitting on a prickly-pear cactus and devouring a snake appeared at that spot on a small, unpromising island in the lake, exactly as the god had promised generations earlier. The traditional date most often cited for the founding is 1325, though World History Encyclopedia's own reference material and other chroniclers give 1345, a discrepancy that reflects genuine disagreement among the surviving pictorial annals rather than a settled fact. Luis Barjau, former head of ethnohistory at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, has argued for March 13, 1325 specifically, a date first popularized for the city's 600th anniversary celebration in 1925.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1325-1400s CEThe Aztec Empire
Chinampas and Causeways Turn a Swamp Into a Capital
The island the Mexica settled had almost no farmland, so they built it themselves using chinampas, artificial islands constructed by driving wooden posts into the shallow lakebed, weaving reed and branch fences called chinamitl between them, and filling the enclosures with mud dredged from the lake bottom and layered with vegetation. World History Encyclopedia describes chinampas ranging from 8 to 100 meters long and 2 to 25 meters wide, with willow trees planted at the corners so their roots would anchor the structure. The nutrient-rich lake water and canal mud made these plots extraordinarily productive, allowing multiple harvests a year of maize, beans, squash, and flowers. As the city grew, three causeways running north, east, and west connected the island to the mainland, built with removable wooden bridges over gaps so canoes could pass and so the causeways could be broken during an attack.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1346 to 1347The Mongol Empire
The Black Death Travels the Mongol Trade Routes to Europe
The bacterium now known to cause the Black Death originated in Central Asia and, according to the World History Encyclopedia, was carried to the Crimea by Mongol warriors and traders using routes the Pax Mongolica had opened up. Genoese trading ships fleeing the besieged Black Sea port of Caffa, where Mongol forces are recorded to have catapulted infected corpses into the city, reached Sicily in 1347, and from there the disease spread rapidly through Italy, France, Spain, and the rest of Europe. Genetic studies published in 2011 have specifically pointed to China as a likely point of origin, arriving in Europe by the same overland and maritime trade network the Mongol conquests had connected into a single system.
Reputable source · 2 sources - mid-14th century CEThe Khmer Empire
The Rising Kingdom of Ayutthaya Begins Raiding Khmer Territory
Thai-speaking peoples had migrated south from the Yunnan region for generations, first appearing in Khmer records as hired mercenaries before settling as farmers in the empire's marginal borderlands, according to World History Encyclopedia. Migration accelerated once Mongol campaigns disrupted southern China and intensified further after the Mongols conquered Yunnan in 1253. These Thai populations eventually built independent kingdoms of their own, most significantly Ayutthaya, and as those kingdoms grew stronger through the 14th century they began attacking and annexing Khmer territory rather than serving it. The National Library of Australia notes these incursions disrupted trade and undermined the safety of the empire's borders, and Angkor was briefly conquered by Thai forces as early as 1353, though the Khmer regained control afterward.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1352-1354The Ottoman Empire
Ottoman forces cross into Europe and take Gallipoli
Under Osman's son and successor Orhan, Ottoman forces first crossed the Dardanelles into Thrace in 1352, seizing the fortress of Tzympe as part of an arrangement with the Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, who wanted Ottoman help in a civil war. In 1354 an earthquake wrecked the walls of nearby Gallipoli, and Ottoman troops occupied the town outright, giving them their first permanent base on European soil rather than a temporary raiding post. The cooperation with Kantakouzenos soon collapsed and the Ottomans and Byzantines returned to open conflict, but the foothold at Gallipoli stayed in Ottoman hands. Over the following decades Ottoman forces pushed into Thrace and took Adrianople, known today as Edirne, around 1362.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1354 to 1402 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Ottomans Rise as Byzantium Shrinks to Constantinople's Walls
What began as a small Turkish principality in Anatolia under Osman expanded rapidly under his successors, crossing into Europe when Orhan Ghazi's troops raised Ottoman standards at Gallipoli in 1354 CE as part of an arrangement with a Byzantine emperor fighting his own civil war. The alliance soon collapsed, and Ottoman forces advanced steadily, taking Adrianople around 1362 CE, then Thrace, southern Bulgaria, Sofia, Nish, and Salonica through the 1380s CE. Sultan Bayezid I, called Yilderim or thunderbolt, defeated a major European coalition at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 CE, leaving Byzantium almost entirely surrounded. Bayezid's ambitions were checked only when the Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur crushed his army at the Battle of Ankara in 1402 CE, capturing Bayezid and plunging the Ottoman state into a decade-long civil war.
Primary source · 2 sources The Yuan Dynasty Falls to the Red Turban Rebellion
By the mid-14th century the Yuan dynasty was weakened by infighting among Mongol leaders, corrupt and overextended government, heavy taxation during a period of inflation, and catastrophic flooding of the Yellow River after irrigation projects were abandoned. A peasant and former Buddhist monk named Zhu Yuanzhang joined the Red Turban Movement, an offshoot of the Buddhist White Lotus movement, in 1352, and replaced its original aim of restoring the Song dynasty with his own ambition to rule. Zhu captured Nanjing in 1356 and defeated his main rival rebel leaders, Chen Youliang at the Battle of Poyang Lake in 1363 and Zhang Shicheng in 1367, becoming the most powerful figure in China. After his forces took Beijing, the last Yuan emperor of a unified China, Toghon Temur, fled north to Mongolia and the largely abandoned former capital of Karakorum, where the Mongols continued to rule as the Northern Yuan dynasty. Zhu Yuanzhang declared himself emperor in January 1368, founding the Ming dynasty under the reign name Hongwu.
Reputable source · 2 sources- Late 14th centuryThe Ottoman Empire
The janissaries and the devshirme system take shape
As Ottoman territory in the Balkans grew under Murad I, the sultans built a new kind of fighting force through the devshirme, a periodic levy of Christian boys, mostly from the Balkans, taken from their families to serve the Ottoman state. A 1558 Ottoman miniature analyzed by World History Commons shows the first stage of the process: boys' families held behind a wall by an Ottoman official as the children are registered. Selected boys were forcibly converted to Islam, then placed with Turkish families or in palace schools depending on ability, with the most capable trained for administration and the rest funneled into the janissary infantry corps. The janissaries became salaried, uniformed, barracks-based soldiers who marched to music and were among the first infantry in the world equipped mainly with firearms.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1375-1426 CEThe Aztec Empire
The Mexica Become Tribute-Paying Vassals of the Tepanec
For roughly its first century, Tenochtitlan was not an independent power but a subject city paying tribute to Azcapotzalco, capital of the Tepanec people, under their ruler Tezozomoc. In 1375 the Mexica installed their first tlatoani, Acamapichtli, and the city grew in size and organization, but it did so as a client state supplying warriors for Tepanec campaigns. Indigenous Mexico's research on the period describes the Mexica assisting Azcapotzalco's conquest of rival Texcoco in 1418, helping capture the city and kill its king, Ixtlilxochitl I, whose young son Nezahualcoyotl escaped into hiding. In exchange for their loyalty, the Mexica were rewarded with tribute rights over conquered territory, including a claim on Texcoco itself, and learned Tepanec methods of warfare and administration that they would later turn against their patrons.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 15 June 1389The Ottoman Empire
The Battle of Kosovo kills two rulers and breaks Serbian resistance
On 15 June 1389, an Ottoman army under Sultan Murad I met a Christian coalition led by Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic, joined by troops from Bosnia under Vlatko Vukovic, on the plain of Kosovo Polje. Murad split his forces into three, commanding the center himself while his sons Bayezid and Yakub led the wings. Both Murad and Lazar died in the fighting; later tradition holds that a Serbian knight, Miloš Obilic, killed Murad by feigning surrender and then stabbing him, though historians treat this story as legend rather than established fact. Murad's son Bayezid secured the succession on the battlefield itself, reportedly by having his brother Yakub strangled to remove a rival claimant, and returned to Edirne as the new sultan.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1297-1585 CE (dating disputed)The Khmer Empire
Angkor Wat Is Fortified as the Empire's Defenses Fail
At some point late in Angkor's history, defenders modified Angkor Wat itself with wooden fortifications, the only known example of an Angkorian temple being systematically converted for defensive use, according to the University of Sydney's Greater Angkor Project. Professor Roland Fletcher described the discovery as evidence of Angkor Wat's last attempt at defence. The team could only bracket the date broadly, placing it either between 1297 and 1585 alongside other defensive works built around Angkor, or possibly between 1585 and the 1630s, and noted either date would make the fortifications one of the last major construction efforts at the site.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 20 July 1402The Ottoman Empire
Timur crushes Bayezid I at Ankara, and the empire collapses into civil war
Sultan Bayezid I, nicknamed Yildirim, the Thunderbolt, had spent his reign since 1389 expanding into the Balkans and crushing a European crusader army at Nicopolis in 1396. His refusal to submit to the Central Asian conqueror Timur, who had already taken the Ottoman city of Sivas and territory from the Mamluks, brought Timur's forces into Anatolia. At the Battle of Ankara on 20 July 1402, Timur's larger army defeated Bayezid's forces and captured the sultan himself. Bayezid died in captivity within a year. With no clear successor recognized by all factions, the empire fell into the Ottoman Interregnum, an eleven-year civil war among Bayezid's surviving sons that ended only when Mehmed I emerged as sole ruler in 1413.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1428-1430 CEThe Aztec Empire
Itzcoatl and Tlacaelel Form the Triple Alliance
Following their defeat of Azcapotzalco, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan formalized their wartime coalition into a permanent pact known as the Triple Alliance, with Itzcoatl ruling Tenochtitlan and his nephew Tlacaelel serving as cihuacoatl, the chief adviser and effectively co-architect of the new state. World History Encyclopedia describes the arrangement: conquered territory and its tribute were divided among the three cities, with two shares going to Tenochtitlan and Texcoco and one to the smaller Tlacopan. Tenochtitlan's ruler took the title huey tlatoani, or high king, and the city increasingly dominated the alliance in practice even though the pact treated all three as partners. Tlacaelel, who would go on to advise four successive Mexica rulers without ever becoming tlatoani himself, is credited by later chroniclers with designing much of the alliance's religious and administrative machinery.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1428 CEThe Aztec Empire
The Tepanec War Ends Mexica Subjugation
When Tezozomoc died, his son Maxtla seized the Tepanec throne and moved against the very allies who had helped Azcapotzalco dominate the valley, blockading Tenochtitlan and raising its tribute demands under the new Mexica ruler Itzcoatl, while forcing Texcoco's king Nezahualcoyotl into exile. Rather than accept renewed subjugation, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and the smaller city of Tlacopan, joined for a time by Huexotzinco, went to war against Azcapotzalco in 1427. The coalition defeated the Tepanec the following year and destroyed Azcapotzalco as an independent power. History Crunch's summary of the alliance describes Huexotzinco withdrawing from the coalition after the victory, leaving Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan to formalize their partnership.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1430 CEThe Aztec Empire
Itzcoatl Orders the Old Codices Burned
Soon after the Triple Alliance's founding, Itzcoatl ordered the burning of the existing pictographic codices that recorded the Mexica's earlier history, according to the Florentine Codex compiled decades later under the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagun. History of Information's summary of the episode describes this as a deliberate act to develop a state-sanctioned history that venerated Huitzilopochtli as the Mexica's central god, and later chroniclers attribute much of the intellectual work behind this rewriting to Tlacaelel, who is said to have argued the old records contained falsehoods unworthy of the new empire. The reasoning attributed to Itzcoatl in the Florentine Codex is that it was not fitting for common people to know the old paintings, since the true history could be dangerous knowledge in the wrong hands.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1431 CEThe Khmer Empire
Ayutthaya Lays Siege to Angkor and Captures the City
In 1431, forces from the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya laid siege to and captured Angkor for the final time, an event World History Encyclopedia and the National Library of Australia both mark as the conventional end date of the Khmer Empire. The siege followed decades of repeated Ayutthayan attacks and destruction, weakened further by raids from the Lan Xang kingdom to the north; trade routes into the capital had already been disrupted before the final assault. With the capital in ruins and food and trade networks broken, much of the population abandoned the city in the aftermath.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1431 CEThe Aztec Empire
Nezahualcoyotl Becomes Tlatoani of Texcoco
Nezahualcoyotl, whose father Ixtlilxochitl I had been killed when Azcapotzalco conquered Texcoco in 1418, spent years in hiding and exile among Mexica relatives before officially becoming tlatoani of Texcoco in 1431, according to World History Encyclopedia's chronology of the city. As ruler of a city that reached a population of around 45,000, Nezahualcoyotl built a reputation as a poet, legislator, and patron of learning, issuing a law code and establishing what World History Encyclopedia describes as one of four councils of government specifically dedicated to promoting science and the arts. His palace, covering more than a square mile, included dedicated quarters for historians and poets and a library, and Texcoco under his rule became known as a center of culture within the Triple Alliance even as Tenochtitlan grew into the dominant military and economic power.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1431-1434 CEThe Khmer Empire
The Khmer Court Abandons Angkor and Moves South Toward Phnom Penh
In the years immediately after the 1431 siege, what remained of the Khmer royal court relocated south, away from Angkor and toward the area of present-day Phnom Penh, according to the National Library of Australia's account of the empire's final collapse. The move marked the end of Angkor's five-and-a-half-century run as the Khmer capital, stretching back to Yasovarman I's founding of Yasodharapura around 889. Angkor itself was not entirely emptied. Angkor Wat in particular continued to function as an active Buddhist religious site, visited and maintained by monks and pilgrims, even as the surrounding city's administrative and political role ended.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1438The Inca Empire
Pachacuti Defeats the Chanka and Seizes the Throne
In the early 15th century the Chanka, a rival highland people, attacked Cuzco. According to World History Encyclopedia's account of the semi-legendary tradition, the reigning Inca ruler Viracocha Inca and his heir Inca Urco judged the city indefensible and fled. A younger son, then known as Cusi Yupanki, stayed with a small band of loyal warriors and, inspired by a vision he attributed to the sun god Inti, organized a defense that drove the Chanka out of Cuzco. Cusi Yupanki took the throne as the ninth Inca ruler and adopted the name Pachacuti, meaning 'Reverser of the World' or 'Earth-shaker,' a term the Inca also used for the periodic cosmic upheavals they believed reshaped history. The World History Encyclopedia dates the Chanka defeat to 1438, calling it an event with a real historical basis beneath its legendary telling.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1438-1471The Inca Empire
Pachacuti Rebuilds Cuzco and Founds the Imperial State
After securing Cuzco, Pachacuti set about remaking it as an imperial capital. He drained the swampy northern part of the city, built a new ceremonial center there, raised himself a palace called Kunturkancha, rebuilt the Temple of Inti at the Coricancha in fine stonework, and began the fortress complex of Sacsayhuaman on the high ground protecting the city's northern approach. He also built fortified way-stations at strategic points such as Pisac and Ollantaytambo. Beyond construction, Pachacuti introduced the systems of tribute and forced labor that would fund the empire, built a network of storehouses called qollqa to guard against famine, created a rule that the next ruler would be chosen from the sons of a nominated principal wife to reduce succession disputes, and had scribes record important episodes of Inca history on painted tablets kept in a restricted building in the capital.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 15th-16th century CEThe Aztec Empire
Human Sacrifice at the Templo Mayor: Belief and Disputed Scale
Aztec religion held that the gods had sacrificed themselves to create the world and the sun, and that humans owed a debt of blood and hearts to keep the sun rising and the world from collapsing back into chaos. World History Encyclopedia describes the practice as neither unique to the Aztecs, since the Olmec and Maya practiced human sacrifice earlier, nor a simple invention of Spanish propaganda, since the Aztecs clearly took it to a larger scale than their predecessors. The specific death tolls come almost entirely from Spanish chroniclers writing after the conquest: figures cited by these sources range from Zumarraga's 20,000 a year to Gomara's 50,000 to Las Casas's claim of 50,000 to 100,000, numbers modern historians treat with real skepticism since exaggerating Aztec bloodshed served to justify Spanish conquest and colonial rule to audiences back in Europe. World History Encyclopedia's own assessment lands on hundreds to perhaps thousands of victims sacrificed annually at major religious sites, a figure still large by any standard but far below the highest Spanish claims.
Reputable source · 2 sources - mid-15th centuryThe Inca Empire
The Coricancha Becomes the Empire's Golden Temple to the Sun
The Coricancha, also called the Golden Enclosure, was Cuzco's central religious complex and the Inca empire's most sacred site, dedicated to Inti the sun god along with the creator god Viracocha and the moon goddess Quilla. Its construction is generally credited to Pachacuti, who rebuilt an older, pre-imperial shrine on the site into a stone complex whose interior and exterior walls were covered with gold sheets, reportedly 700 plates half a meter square and 2 kilograms each, on the Temple of the Sun alone. Inside stood a gold statue of Inti called Punchao, shown as a small seated boy with a hollow torso used to store the cremated organs of dead Inca rulers; it was carried outside each morning and returned to its shrine at night. From the complex radiated 41 sacred alignments called ceques linking 328 shrines across the region, and conquered peoples' captured religious relics were stored here, functioning as a kind of hostage collection that enforced compliance with Inca rule.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1450s onwardThe Inca Empire
Sacsayhuaman's Massive Walls Take Shape Above Cuzco
Construction of the Sacsayhuaman complex on the high ground above Cuzco began under Pachacuti or, by some accounts, his son Topa Inca Yupanqui, and continued under later rulers. World History Encyclopedia's entry on the site states 20,000 laborers were conscripted under the Inca's tribute-labor system to build it, working in rotation, with 6,000 assigned to quarrying and 4,000 digging trenches and laying foundations. The finished walls used polygonal blocks, some over four meters tall and weighing more than 100 tons, cut and fitted so precisely that no mortar was needed. Workers shaped the stone with harder stone and bronze tools, moved blocks using ropes, log rollers, levers, and earthen ramps, and built the walls in a zigzag pattern stretching more than 540 meters that let defenders catch attackers in crossfire.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1450The Inca Empire
Machu Picchu Is Built as Pachacuti's Royal Estate
High in the Urubamba Valley north of Cuzco, Pachacuti founded the settlement now known as Machu Picchu, 'old hill,' around 1450 as his personal imperial estate. World History Encyclopedia describes competing theories about its purpose, fortress, retreat, symbol of Inca power, ceremonial site, but notes the architecture is dominated by religious structures, including the Intihuatana carved stone used for solar observations and a chamber carved from bedrock as a shrine to Inti. The site held perhaps 1,000 residents at its peak and was linked to nearby valley settlements by a dedicated road. On Pachacuti's death ownership passed to his descendants. The Inca abandoned the site before the Spanish conquest, and Pizarro's forces never found it. UNESCO's World Heritage listing calls it probably the most amazing urban creation of the empire at its height, its walls and terraces built to look like extensions of the mountain's own rock.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1440-1469 CEThe Aztec Empire
Moctezuma I Expands the Empire and Invents the Flower War
Under Moctezuma I, who ruled Tenochtitlan from 1440 to 1469, the Triple Alliance pushed its conquests outward, establishing garrisons as far as Mitla in the Oaxaca Valley by around 1450, according to World History Encyclopedia's chronology of the period. Against Tlaxcala, Huexotzinco, and Cholula, city-states that refused outright submission but could not be easily crushed either, Moctezuma I is credited with formalizing the xochiyaoyotl, or Flower War, a form of scheduled ritual combat that took captives for sacrifice while serving political ends short of full conquest. These wars let neighboring rivals remain nominally independent while feeding Tenochtitlan's need for sacrificial captives and giving Aztec warriors a controlled setting to build reputations through captures rather than kills.
Reputable source · 2 sources Hagia Sophia becomes an imperial mosque
Within days of taking Constantinople, Mehmed II ordered Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine cathedral built under Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, converted into an imperial mosque. Ottoman builders added a mihrab indicating the direction of Mecca, a minbar for the imams' sermons, and eventually four minarets, completing the structure's transformation while leaving its Byzantine dome and much of its interior intact. The building's massive dome and pendentive-supported design, radical for its time in the 6th century, went on to directly shape later Ottoman mosque architecture, most visibly in the work of the imperial architect Sinan a century later.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 29 May 1453The Ottoman Empire
Mehmed II conquers Constantinople and ends the Byzantine Empire
Sultan Mehmed II opened the siege of Constantinople on 6 February 1453 after Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI refused an ultimatum to surrender. The city's Theodosian Walls were defended by only about 5,000-7,000 soldiers under the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani, spread thin across a long perimeter, while Mehmed had new colossal cannons built specifically for the siege. When Byzantine ships blocked the Golden Horn with a giant chain, Mehmed had his fleet dragged overland on rollers to bypass it, a maneuver that let Ottoman ships attack the city's weaker sea walls. After a final assault launched in three waves on 29 May, regular infantry supported by artillery breached the outer wall and the city fell; Constantine XI died in the fighting. Mehmed's troops sacked the city for three days before the sultan made his triumphal entry through the Gate of Charisius.
Reputable source · 2 sources - May 29, 1453 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Mehmed II's Cannon Breach the Theodosian Walls and Constantinople Falls
By 1451 CE, when Sultan Mehmed II took the Ottoman throne, Byzantium had shrunk to little beyond Constantinople itself, still protected by the Theodosian Walls that had held for over a thousand years. Mehmed besieged the city for 53 days beginning April 6, 1453 CE, deploying cannon built by the Hungarian gunsmith Urban, who had originally offered his services to the Byzantines before Constantine XI could not meet his price. The largest gun, called the Basilic, stretched 7.3 meters and weighed more than 18,000 kilograms, requiring 90 oxen and 400 men to move and capable of firing a 550-kilogram ball over a mile. Constantinople's ancient walls, built to withstand siege engines and battering rams, could not withstand sustained gunpowder artillery, and the city fell on Tuesday, May 29, 1453 CE, with Constantine XI, the last Roman emperor, dying among his soldiers in the final assault.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1454-1487 CE (final major phase)The Aztec Empire
The Twin Shrines of the Templo Mayor Honor War and Rain
At the heart of Tenochtitlan's sacred precinct stood the Templo Mayor, called Hueteocalli by the Aztecs, a pyramid platform roughly 60 meters high topped by two side-by-side shrines reached by separate staircases. World History Encyclopedia describes the north shrine as dedicated to Tlaloc, god of rain, marked by steps painted blue and white for water, while the south shrine honored Huitzilopochtli, god of war and the sun, with steps painted red for blood and war. The Tlaloc temple aligned with the summer solstice, symbolic of the rainy season, while Huitzilopochtli's aligned with the winter solstice, marking the traditional start of the campaign season. Archaeologists working the site since Mexico City's Proyecto Templo Mayor began in 1978 have identified at least seven successive construction phases, each king rebuilding and enlarging the temple over the one before, meaning the structure the Spanish saw in 1519 encased generations of earlier temples inside it.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 15th century CEThe Aztec Empire
Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc, and the Aztec Pantheon
Aztec religion recognized a large pantheon inherited and adapted from earlier Mesoamerican cultures, with Huitzilopochtli as the Mexica's own war and sun god sitting alongside older, widely shared deities. World History Encyclopedia describes Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, as god of wind, of the priesthood, and of learning, science, and the arts, a deity whose worship long predated the Aztecs and stretched back to earlier Mesoamerican civilizations including the Toltecs. Tlaloc, the rain god associated with mountains, caves, and springs, was considered old enough that his cult predated even Teotihuacan, centuries before the Aztecs arrived in the valley. The Templo Mayor's sacred precinct at Tenochtitlan also housed dedicated temples to Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl alongside the main shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, reflecting how thoroughly the Mexica absorbed older regional gods into their own state religion rather than replacing them.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 19 October 1469The Spanish Empire
Ferdinand of Aragon Marries Isabella of Castile
Isabella, heir to the throne of Castile, wanted Ferdinand of Aragon as her husband because uniting two neighboring kingdoms with similar customs and laws made political sense for Castile. Her half-brother King Henry IV had approved other suitors and required his consent to any marriage, so Isabella wrote asking permission. Henry never answered. She married Ferdinand anyway on 19 October 1469 in Valladolid, where the two had met for the first time only days earlier. Because Ferdinand and Isabella were second cousins, both descended from John I of Castile, they needed a papal dispensation from Sixtus IV to marry under canon law. The 1469 Marriage Concession that accompanied the wedding stated that Castile belonged to Isabella alone: Ferdinand agreed he would never separate their children from her and that the couple's main residence would be Castile.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 15th century CEThe Aztec Empire
Pochteca Merchants and the Great Market of Tlatelolco
The pochteca were a hereditary class of professional merchants who traded over long distances for the Aztec state, specializing in precious goods unavailable in the Valley of Mexico: tropical bird feathers, gold, turquoise, shells, greenstone, cacao beans, and exotic animal skins, according to World History Encyclopedia's account of Aztec society. They were supervised by the most experienced traders among them, the pochtecatlatoque, who administered trade and settled disputes among merchants in their own dedicated courts, and a related group called the tlaltlani traded specifically in slaves destined for sacrifice, a role that brought them particular wealth and privilege. Because pochteca traveled constantly beyond the empire's formal borders to reach distant markets, they were also positioned to bring back political and military information about the peoples they traded with, a secondary function noted across multiple accounts of the class. Their commercial hub inside the capital was the market at Tlatelolco, Tenochtitlan's twin city built on the same island, which World History Encyclopedia's description of Tenochtitlan notes sold goods brought in from all corners of Mesoamerica.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1471-1493The Inca Empire
Topa Inca Yupanqui Doubles the Size of the Empire
Pachacuti's son Topa Inca Yupanqui, also written Thupa Inca Yupanqui, took the throne around 1471 and is credited by World History Encyclopedia with expanding Inca territory by roughly 4,000 kilometers, extending its reach from Ecuador in the north down toward Chile and Argentina in the south. He had already been active as a commander under his father, leading campaigns into the Chimu civilization's territory on the northern coast, before assuming full rule himself. By the end of his reign the empire had grown from Pachacuti's regional Cuzco-based kingdom into a territory spanning most of the length of the Andes, encompassing dozens of conquered peoples with their own languages and customs.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1486-1502 CEThe Aztec Empire
Ahuitzotl Doubles the Empire's Territory
Ahuitzotl took the throne of Tenochtitlan in 1486 after his half-brother Tizoc was removed, reportedly poisoned, following a weak reign marked by failed campaigns against the Tarascans. World History Encyclopedia describes Ahuitzotl as youthful, strong, and audacious, and he proved to be one of the most effective military commanders in Aztec history, pushing the empire's borders into Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Veracruz and, according to some accounts, as far south as parts of modern Guatemala. His campaigns more than doubled the territory under Triple Alliance control and brought in captives and tribute at a scale not previously reached, funding building projects across the empire's core cities. Ahuitzotl also used mass public sacrifice of captured enemies as a deliberate tool of intimidation, designed to terrify visiting rulers of newly conquered territories into passive acceptance of Aztec authority rather than continued resistance.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1487 CEThe Aztec Empire
The Templo Mayor Is Completed and Dedicated With Mass Sacrifice
In 1487 the Templo Mayor reached what World History Encyclopedia's own site chronology records as its completed form, inaugurated with a mass sacrifice of captives that later Spanish colonial sources put at 20,000 people over four days, using eight teams of priests working in relay according to the account preserved by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. This figure, like most large Aztec sacrifice tolls, comes from post-conquest chronicles and cannot be independently verified against a contemporary record, and modern historians generally treat it as inflated even while accepting that a genuinely large mass sacrifice took place to mark the occasion. The event fell only five years before Columbus's first voyage reached the Caribbean, meaning the temple's completion and the Spanish arrival in the Americas were separated by less than a single generation.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2 January 1492The Spanish Empire
Granada Falls and the Reconquista Ends
The Emirate of Granada was the last Muslim territory left in Iberia after a Christian reconquest that had captured Cordoba in 1236, Valencia in 1238, and Seville in 1248. Granada survived for over two centuries by paying tribute to Castile, but the Granada War (1482-1492) between the Catholic Monarchs and the Nasrid dynasty ended that arrangement. Internal civil war crippled Granada while Ferdinand and Isabella's forces stayed unified. On 2 January 1492, Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil, surrendered the Emirate of Granada, the city of Granada, and the Alhambra palace to Castilian forces, ending 770 years of Muslim rule in Iberia that had begun with the 8th-century Moorish conquest of Visigothic Spain.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 31 March 1492The Spanish Empire
The Alhambra Decree Expels the Jews of Spain
On 31 March 1492, in the city of Granada only months after its conquest, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, also called the Edict of Expulsion, ordering unconverted Jews out of every territory under their joint crowns by 31 July of that year. The decree aimed to stop unconverted Jews from influencing conversos, Jews who had already converted to Christianity, into secretly reverting to Judaism. Modern estimates place the number expelled between 40,000 and 200,000 out of a Jewish population of roughly 300,000, with many others choosing conversion over exile; the figures remain debated because contemporary records are incomplete. Those who left scattered mainly to Italy, Greece, Turkey, and North Africa, carrying Spanish Jewish culture into what became the Sephardic diaspora.
Primary source · 2 sources - 12 October 1492The Spanish Empire
Columbus Reaches the Caribbean Under the Spanish Crown
Christopher Columbus spent years failing to find a sponsor for a westward voyage to Asia before Ferdinand and Isabella, fresh from completing the Reconquista, agreed to back him. The royal provision authorizing his voyage was read publicly at the Church of Saint George in Palos de la Frontera on 23 May 1492, and Columbus departed in August with three ships. Land was sighted on 12 October 1492; Columbus named the island San Salvador, though the Indigenous Lucayan people who lived there called it Guanahani. Convinced he had reached islands off Asia, he went on to name Hispaniola and returned to Spain in January 1493 to report his findings, having secured in advance a lavish agreement: if he succeeded, he would be knighted, appointed Admiral of the Ocean Sea, made viceroy of any lands found, and awarded ten percent of any new wealth.
Primary source · 2 sources - c. 1493, mature imperial useThe Inca Empire
The Quipu Records an Empire That Had No Writing
Lacking an alphabetic writing system, the Inca recorded numerical information using the quipu, an assembly of knotted, colored cords, sometimes as many as 1,500 strings, hung from a primary cord or bar. World History Encyclopedia describes the system as a decimal positional code identical in structure to the base-10 system in use today, capable of representing numbers up to 10,000: a knot's turns indicated digits one through nine, a figure-eight knot marked a fixed value, a simple overhand 'granny' knot equaled ten, and a missing knot on a string signified zero. Specialists called khipu kamayuq, whose role was hereditary, memorized the oral explanation that accompanied each quipu, since the knots alone recorded quantities, not full narrative content, though some scholars now argue quipu were moving toward encoding narrative information as well when the empire collapsed. Quipu recorded census data, tribute owed, storehouse inventories, livestock counts, army rosters, and astronomical and calendar information, and chasqui runners carried them alongside their spoken messages.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1493, at its territorial heightThe Inca Empire
Tawantinsuyu: The Four Regions Governed from Cuzco
The Inca called their empire Tawantinsuyu, 'the four regions' or 'the four parts together.' Cuzco sat at the notional center of the world, with highways and sacred sightlines radiating out to four quarters: Chinchaysuyu to the north, Antisuyu to the east, Collasuyu to the south, and Cuntisuyu to the west. World History Encyclopedia describes the resulting territory as stretching 5,500 kilometers from what is now Ecuador and southern Colombia down through Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile, and upland Argentina, governed by roughly 40,000 ethnic Inca administrators ruling some 10 million subjects who spoke more than 30 different languages. Government ran through nested layers: local ayllu kin groups reporting to regional nobles called kurakas, who reported to over 80 regional administrators, who reported to four quarter-governors, who answered to the Sapa Inca in Cuzco. Quechua speakers held privileged legal status across the empire regardless of their own ethnic origin.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1493, at maximum extentThe Inca Empire
The Qhapaq Nan Links the Empire with 40,000 Kilometers of Road
The Inca road network, called the Qhapaq Nan or royal highway, eventually covered more than 40,000 kilometers by World History Encyclopedia's account, or 30,000 kilometers of designated heritage route by UNESCO's more conservative count of surviving, mapped sections, running along two main north-south corridors, one down the coast and one through the highlands, tied together by roughly 20 secondary routes and many smaller trails. Some of it reused older roads built by earlier Andean cultures such as the Wari and Tiwanaku, but Inca engineers also cut fresh routes across deserts, ravines, and mountain passes above 5,000 meters, using no more than wood, stone, and bronze tools, with milestones marking each seven-kilometer unit of distance called a topo. Rope suspension bridges, some over 40 meters long, crossed the deepest gorges; the road had no use for wheeled vehicles since the Inca had none, so all traffic moved on foot or by llama caravan.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1493, mature imperial systemThe Inca Empire
Tambo Waystations and Chasqui Runners Keep the Empire in Contact
Along the road network the Inca built two tiers of rest stops: small stations called chaskiwasi spaced roughly every 20 kilometers where ordinary travelers could shelter, and larger, more elaborate complexes called tambos serving as administrative and supply centers. Messages moved through a relay system of runners called chasquis, who World History Encyclopedia describes as operating in short bursts, handing information to a fresh runner stationed every six to nine kilometers so the message never slowed for one person's endurance. Using this method, information, and even perishable goods like fresh fish or seafood destined for Inca nobles' tables, could travel up to 240 kilometers in a single day. Because messages passed through many hands and oral retellings, runners likely carried quipu cords alongside their spoken message as a memory aid to help preserve its exact content.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1493, mature imperial systemThe Inca Empire
The Mit'a Labor Tax Fills Thousands of State Storehouses
The Inca economy ran without money. Instead, conquered communities paid tax in kind, foodstuffs, precious metals, textiles, feathers, dyes, and spondylus shell, and in labor, known as mit'a service, which could send workers anywhere in the empire they were needed: building roads, working state farms, or constructing monuments like Sacsayhuaman. Agricultural land and herds were divided into three parts, one for the state religion, one for the Inca ruler, and one for the farming community itself, and families performing mit'a duty kept their own plots largely untouched while they worked the state's land. The resulting surplus filled qollqa, single-room stone storehouses built by the tens of thousands across the empire, arranged in neat rows near population centers and roadside stations, with ventilation and drainage designed to keep contents dry: ordinary goods could be kept for up to two years and freeze-dried foods for up to four.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1493-1527The Inca Empire
Huayna Capac Rules an Empire at Its Territorial Peak
Huayna Capac, also written Wayna Qhapaq, became the eleventh Sapa Inca around 1493, succeeding Topa Inca Yupanqui. Under his rule the empire reached its greatest territorial extent, with campaigns extending Inca control north through modern Ecuador and into southern Colombia, an expansion significant enough that Huayna Capac established a second Inca capital at Quito to administer the northern territories more directly. He spent much of his reign campaigning in the north rather than in Cuzco, reflecting how much of the empire's remaining growth after Topa Inca Yupanqui's conquests was concentrated in that direction.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 15th-16th centuryThe Inca Empire
Capacocha: Children Sacrificed on the Empire's Highest Peaks
The Inca practiced capacocha, a ritual in which selected children, often from elite or provincial families, were taken from their communities, brought through a period of ceremony, and then sacrificed, frequently at high-altitude shrines on mountain summits considered sacred. In 1999, archaeologists Johan Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti discovered three child mummies near the 22,110-foot summit of the Llullaillaco volcano on the Argentina-Chile border, since named the Llullaillaco Maiden, the Llullaillaco Boy, and the Lightning Girl. National Geographic reported that hair analysis of the Maiden showed she had consistently used coca at a high level during the last year of her life, with alcohol consumption surging sharply only in her final weeks, a pattern researchers read as evidence of a year of preparatory ceremonies that ended with the children being deliberately sedated, allowed to fall asleep, and left in a stone tomb roughly 1.5 meters underground to die of exposure.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1493, mature imperial ideologyThe Inca Empire
The Sapa Inca Rules as a Living God
The Sapa Inca, the empire's absolute ruler, was regarded as Inti the sun god's living representative on earth, a status that justified Inca claims to rule over conquered peoples in the first place. World History Encyclopedia describes a ruler who drank from gold and silver cups, wore silver shoes, and lived in a palace furnished with the finest textiles available in the empire. Royal treatment did not end at death: Inca rulers were mummified, and their preserved bodies, called mallquis, were kept in the Coricancha temple and periodically brought out in ceremonies, dressed in fine regalia, offered food and drink, and consulted on state affairs as though still living. Atahualpa, the last ruler before the conquest, is separately described drinking from gold cups, wearing silver-soled sandals, traveling on a gold-and-silver litter trimmed with parrot feathers, and having anything he touched ritually burned each year to guard against witchcraft.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1493, mature agricultural systemThe Inca Empire
Terracing and Freeze-Dried Chuno Turn the Andes into Farmland
To farm the steep, high-altitude Andes, the Inca built extensive stone terracing on hillsides, paired with canals and irrigation networks that let them drain wetlands and redirect water across long distances. Fields were worked with simple tools, including the chakitaqlla, a wooden or bronze foot plough, and teams of about seven or eight farmers worked together, men breaking ground and women following to sow seed. Potatoes, one of the staple crops alongside maize and quinoa, could be preserved through a freeze-drying process producing chuno. World History Encyclopedia describes potatoes being dried or freeze-dried this way, extending their usable life to roughly four years in storage, far longer than fresh potatoes would last. A parallel technique produced ch'arki, freeze-dried meat, a popular food for travelers. Crop rotation and fertilizer from dried llama dung, guano, or fish heads helped manage soil fertility across this terraced terrain.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 7 June 1494The Spanish Empire
Spain and Portugal Divide the World at Tordesillas
Following Columbus's return, Spain and Portugal negotiated a treaty to settle competing claims over newly found Atlantic lands. Signed at the village of Tordesillas on 7 June 1494 and ratified by Spain on 2 July and by Portugal on 5 September of that year, the treaty drew a north-south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Lands to the east of the line would belong to Portugal, and lands to the west would belong to Spain. The treaty's own text, negotiated in the presence of named representatives of both crowns, records Ferdinand and Isabella's full royal titles across Castile, Leon, Aragon, Sicily, Granada, and their other territories, underscoring how much authority stood behind the agreement.
Primary source · 2 sources - 15th-19th century CEThe Khmer Empire
Angkor Wat Survives as a Living Buddhist Site Through the Empire's Long Twilight
Long after Angkor ceased to be the Khmer political capital, Angkor Wat itself continued to function as an active Buddhist religious site rather than falling into complete abandonment. World History Encyclopedia notes it had been largely abandoned as an urban center by the 16th century and taken by the surrounding jungle, but the temple was never fully lost to the outside world in the way popular accounts sometimes suggest: Khmer Buddhist monks maintained a presence there across the following centuries, and the site retained religious meaning even as the wider Angkorian city around it emptied out and was reclaimed by forest.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1502 CEThe Aztec Empire
Moctezuma II Inherits an Empire at Its Territorial Peak
Moctezuma II succeeded his uncle Ahuitzotl as huey tlatoani in 1502, inheriting an empire at what World History Encyclopedia's chronology records as its greatest territorial extent, extracting tribute from 371 city-states across 38 provinces covering roughly 200,000 square kilometers. Unlike Ahuitzotl's aggressive expansion, Moctezuma II's reign focused on consolidating and administering the territory his predecessors had conquered rather than adding significantly to it, while also working to centralize religious and political authority more tightly around Tenochtitlan and his own person. He continued to fight Flower Wars against Tlaxcala and neighboring holdouts, keeping long-standing tensions with those unconquered city-states alive right up to the point when Hernan Cortes would arrive looking for allies willing to fight against Tenochtitlan.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1503The Spanish Empire
The Encomienda System Puts Millions of Indigenous People Into Forced Labor
Under the encomienda system, the Spanish crown granted settlers and conquistadors the legal right to extract forced labor from Indigenous chiefs and their communities across the Americas. In exchange, encomenderos were supposed to provide military protection and fund a parish priest so laborers could be converted to Christianity. In practice the system functioned as a form of slavery: laborers worked mines, fields, and construction projects under threat of violence, with death rates from overwork, malnutrition, and disease running extremely high. The Dominican friar and former conquistador Bartolome de las Casas, who had personally taken part in the conquest of Cuba in 1511, turned against the system and in 1522 wrote a graphic account of its abuses titled A Very Brief Recital of the Destruction of the Indies.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1504 to 1525The Mughal Empire
Babur, a Descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan, Turns Toward India
Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur was born in 1483 in the Fergana Valley, in what is now Uzbekistan, a Timurid prince descended from Timur (Tamerlane) on his father's side and from Genghis Khan on his mother's side through the Chagatai line. As a young ruler he tried repeatedly to hold and then reclaim Samarkand, Timur's old capital, and lost both that city and his home territory of Fergana to stronger Uzbek rivals. Driven out of Central Asia, he occupied Kabul in 1504 and ruled there for two decades before turning his ambitions toward Hindustan, the plains of northern India. He wrote his own account of these years in Turki, the Baburnama, one of the first true autobiographies in Islamic literature. In November 1525 he set out from Kabul on the expedition that would end the Delhi Sultanate.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 22 January 1517The Ottoman Empire
Selim I conquers the Mamluk Sultanate and claims religious primacy
Sultan Selim I, having already defeated the Safavid Shah Ismail I at Chaldiran in 1514, turned south against the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz. Ottoman forces defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq in August 1516 and again at Ridaniya near Cairo on 22 January 1517, bringing Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina under Ottoman control. Selim took custody of the last Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil III, who had lived in Cairo as a Mamluk figurehead, and brought him to Constantinople. A later tradition, first recorded in the 1790s by the Swedish orientalist Ignatius Mouradgea d'Ohsson, claimed al-Mutawakkil formally transferred the title of caliph to Selim in a ceremony, but historian Hakan Karateke's review of Selim's own contemporary correspondence finds no mention of any such transfer; Selim's letters describe himself only as acting with the caliph's authorization, not as caliph himself.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - 28 June 1519The Spanish Empire
Charles V Inherits a Habsburg Empire on Four Fronts
Charles, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella through his mother Joanna and grandson of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I through his father Philip, inherited Spain and its American territories in 1516 and was elected Holy Roman Emperor on 28 June 1519, adding Austria, the Netherlands, and a claim to authority across the German-speaking lands. This combination made Charles ruler of the largest European power bloc since Charlemagne, stretching from Spanish America to Central Europe. He convened the 1521 Diet of Worms hoping to unify his subjects religiously, where the German reformer Martin Luther refused to recant his challenge to Catholic doctrine. When Charles's later attempt to impose religious unity at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg failed, he tried to force the issue militarily in the 1546-1547 Schmalkaldic War against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. Charles won that war but could not suppress the Protestant movement it had been fought to destroy.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1519-1521 CEThe Aztec Empire
La Malinche Becomes Cortes's Voice and a Contested Symbol
Born near modern Veracruz to a noble father and a lower-ranking mother, Malintzin was sold into slavery as a child, passed through Xicallanco and then Potonchan, where she lived among the Chontal Maya before being given to the Spanish in 1519. World History Encyclopedia's biographical account, drawing on historian Camilla Townsend's research, describes how she was rechristened Marina by her Spanish captors, who did not ask what she had been called before. Because she spoke both Nahuatl and Chontal Maya, and quickly learned Spanish, she became the essential link in a communication chain that let Cortes negotiate, threaten, and gather intelligence from Nahuatl-speaking polities throughout central Mexico, including eventually direct exchanges with Moctezuma II. She has since become one of the most contested figures in Mexican historical memory, at once cast as a traitor for aiding the conquest and reclaimed by other scholars and writers as a symbol of resilience and survival within an impossible position as an enslaved woman with no real choice in the matter.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1519 CEThe Aztec Empire
Hernan Cortes Lands in Mexico and Gains an Interpreter
In 1518 the governor of Cuba, Diego Velazquez de Cuellar, dispatched Hernan Cortes with 11 ships and around 500 men to explore the Mexican coast, and the expedition landed in March 1519. Among the early captures was a Nahuatl and Chontal Maya-speaking woman the Spanish called Marina, later known as La Malinche or Malintzin, who had been enslaved and traded among Maya communities before being given to the Spanish along with 19 other women following a battle. World History Encyclopedia's account of the campaign notes that with Malintzin working alongside another Spaniard fluent in Mayan, Cortes could finally communicate reliably with the peoples of central Mexico, a capability that proved decisive as he marched inland in August 1519, first fighting and then allying with the Tlaxcalans, longtime enemies of the Triple Alliance, before continuing on toward Tenochtitlan.
Reputable source · 2 sources - November 8, 1519The Aztec Empire
Cortes and Moctezuma II Meet in Tenochtitlan
Cortes and his men were permitted to enter Tenochtitlan peacefully on November 8, 1519, and World History Encyclopedia describes them marveling at the temples, canals, and markets of a city larger than anything they had seen in Europe. Moctezuma II and Cortes met and exchanged gifts, with the Aztec ruler apparently wary of the newcomers, having heard reports of their earlier military victories against other peoples, but undecided about how to handle them. That uncertainty ended six days later: on November 14, Cortes took Moctezuma hostage inside his own capital, forcing him to swear loyalty to the Spanish king Charles V and enduring the added humiliation of a Christian crucifix being erected atop the Templo Mayor itself.
Reputable source · 2 sources - September-December 1520The Aztec Empire
Smallpox Sweeps Through Tenochtitlan
Smallpox broke out in Tenochtitlan in the months after the Noche Triste, most likely carried by a member of the rival Spanish force Cortes had defeated at Veracruz. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library's exhibit on the epidemic quotes the Florentine Codex's account from a survivor: sores erupted across the body, victims became too weak to move or even lie face down without unbearable pain, and many who did not die directly from the disease starved to death because everyone around them was too sick to provide care. In a population that had never previously encountered the virus, mortality among the infected could run as high as 100 percent depending on the strain, and Dumbarton Oaks cites estimates of five to eight million deaths across Mesoamerica during this single outbreak. The Aztec ruler Cuitlahuac, who had taken power after Moctezuma's death only weeks earlier, was among those who died of the disease, reigning for a reported 80 days before smallpox killed him too.
Reputable source · 2 sources - May-June 1520The Aztec Empire
The Toxcatl Massacre and the Death of Moctezuma II
While Cortes left Tenochtitlan in May 1520 to confront a rival Spanish force sent by the governor of Cuba to arrest him, he left the city under the command of Pedro de Alvarado, whose men attacked Aztec nobles during a religious ceremony, provoking an uprising World History Encyclopedia describes the Aztecs rising up and killing a number of the Spanish left behind. Cortes returned on June 24 after defeating the rival Spanish force and persuading its survivors to join him, but found the city in open revolt, with the remaining Spanish trapped inside the palace of Axayacatl under bombardment from the Templo Mayor above them. When the Spanish tried to use the captive Moctezuma to calm the population, he was struck by a stone thrown from the crowd and died on June 30, 1520, having already lost most of the authority that made him useful as a hostage.
Reputable source · 2 sources - June 30, 1520The Aztec Empire
The Noche Triste: Cortes Flees Tenochtitlan
With Moctezuma dead and the population in open revolt, Cortes decided to abandon Tenochtitlan rather than face annihilation inside it, attempting to slip his forces out along the western causeway under cover of darkness on the night of June 30, 1520. World History Encyclopedia's account describes the Spaniards using temporary wooden bridges to cross the city's many canal gaps during their retreat, but the Aztecs discovered the escape and attacked, and the fighting that followed became known as the Noche Triste, the Sad Night. Many Spanish soldiers, weighed down by looted gold, drowned in Lake Texcoco when overloaded boats and makeshift crossings failed under them. Cortes emerged from the retreat having lost roughly half his men, most of his horses, and the eight tons of treasure his expedition had accumulated since landing in Mexico.
Reputable source · 2 sources - August 13, 1521The Aztec Empire
Cuauhtemoc Surrenders and Tenochtitlan Falls
By August 1521, Tenochtitlan's defenders under Cuauhtemoc, who had become ruler after Cuitlahuac's death from smallpox, had been pushed back to the city's central core after months of fighting, their food and water supplies exhausted and the surrounding causeways blocked by Spanish brigantines. On August 13, after 93 days of siege, Cuauhtemoc attempted to escape across the lake by canoe with loyal nobles and advisors but was discovered and captured. World History Encyclopedia records this date as the moment the Aztec capital fell into Spanish hands, ending the independent existence of the empire the Triple Alliance had built over the preceding century. The Spanish and their Tlaxcalan allies then began construction of a new colonial capital, Mexico City, directly on top of Tenochtitlan's ruins, reusing stone from the demolished Templo Mayor in the foundations of the new city's cathedral and other buildings.
Reputable source · 2 sources - April-August 1521The Aztec Empire
Cortes Besieges Tenochtitlan
Cortes began his siege of Tenochtitlan in April 1521 with a force World History Encyclopedia records as 700 infantry, 118 crossbowmen and gunners, 86 horses, and 18 field guns, but the decisive numerical advantage came from at least 100,000 Tlaxcalan allies fighting alongside the Spanish against their old Aztec enemies. On April 28, Cortes launched 13 specially built brigantines onto Lake Texcoco, prefabricated ships that could contest the Aztecs' vast fleet of war canoes in a way nothing before had. On May 26, Pedro de Alvarado's forces destroyed the Chapultepec aqueduct, cutting off Tenochtitlan's supply of fresh water and forcing the city to rely on brackish lake water. Through May and June, three Spanish columns pushed into the city from the west, south, and east while the brigantines blocked the causeways, and Cortes's own force was nearly captured during a failed assault on June 30, saved only by the Aztec preference for taking live captives rather than killing enemies outright in the field.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 13 August 1521The Spanish Empire
Cortes Brings Down the Aztec Empire
In 1519, drawn by rumors of gold and sophisticated inland cities, Hernan Cortes led an expedition of eleven ships and about 500 men to Mexico. He marched inland toward Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital built on an island in a lake, gathering thousands of native allies from peoples who resented Aztec rule and forming a partnership with an enslaved Nahua woman, La Malinche, who served as his translator and adviser. A smallpox epidemic, likely carried by a member of a Spanish resupply expedition, swept through the Valley of Mexico while Tenochtitlan was already under siege, killing the emperor Cuitlahuac and an estimated third to half of the population in the worst-hit areas. Tenochtitlan fell to Spanish and allied forces on 13 August 1521. Pre-contact population estimates for the Valley of Mexico range from 15 to 20 million; within a century the same region held perhaps two to three million people, though historians treat the exact figures as approximate given gaps in surviving Spanish records.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1521-1523The Ottoman Empire
Suleiman takes Belgrade and Rhodes, opening the road into Europe
Suleiman I, who succeeded his father Selim I in 1520, moved immediately against two fortresses that had resisted earlier Ottoman sieges. In 1521 his forces took Belgrade from the Hungarians, removing the main defensive barrier protecting the Kingdom of Hungary. The following year Ottoman forces besieged Rhodes, held by the Knights Hospitaller who had used the island to raid Ottoman and Muslim pilgrim shipping in the eastern Mediterranean; after a defense World History Encyclopedia calls courageous and daring against overwhelming numbers, the Knights surrendered and the island came under Ottoman control by early 1523.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1524-1528The Inca Empire
Smallpox Arrives Ahead of the Spanish and Kills Huayna Capac
An epidemic of Old World disease, generally identified in the sources as smallpox, spread down through the Americas ahead of the Spanish themselves, likely carried by indigenous trade and travel networks from the Caribbean and Central America, where the Spanish had already been present for years. World History Encyclopedia states the disease killed Huayna Capac in 1528 along with his intended heir, Ninan Cuyuchi, who had also been being groomed for the throne, and that in some regions the epidemic killed 65 to 90 percent of the population. Because Huayna Capac died without a settled second heir, since his first choice had also died of the same disease, the succession passed into open dispute between two surviving sons, Huascar and Atahualpa.
Reputable source · 2 sources - April 21, 1526The Mughal Empire
Babur Wins the First Battle of Panipat With Cannon and Cart
At Panipat, about 50 miles north of Delhi, Babur's roughly 12,000 men met the army of Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, whose forces are usually put between 30,000 and 100,000 with as many as 1,000 war elephants. Babur had no such numbers, but he had gunpowder: 15 to 20 field cannon under Ottoman-trained gunners, lashed behind a barricade of roughly 700 carts tied together with rawhide, an arrangement he had learned of from Ottoman use at the Battle of Chaldiran. Matchlock men fired from cover between the carts while cavalry under the tulughma tactic swept around both flanks. The cannon fire panicked Ibrahim's elephants, which trampled back through his own ranks, and Ibrahim Lodi was killed in the fighting along with thousands of his men.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 29 August 1526The Ottoman Empire
The Battle of Mohacs destroys the Kingdom of Hungary's army
Suleiman the Magnificent led a large Ottoman army against Hungary in 1526, meeting the Hungarian field army under King Louis II near the town of Mohacs on 29 August. The Hungarian force, badly outnumbered by Ottoman janissaries, cavalry, and artillery, was encircled and destroyed within about two hours. Louis II was killed fleeing the battlefield, thrown from his horse. Suleiman annexed large parts of the fallen king's realm afterward, though full Ottoman control of central Hungary took additional campaigns over the following years.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 6 May 1527The Spanish Empire
Charles V's Own Unpaid Troops Sack Rome
Pope Clement VII allied with France against Charles V despite having already been defeated once by Spanish forces at Pavia in 1525, and to save money he had dismissed most of Rome's troops. In 1527, Charles V lacked funds to pay his Spanish troops and German mercenaries in Italy; defying their commanders, the unpaid army marched south intending to sack Florence and Rome, robbing and killing as it advanced. On 6 May 1527, under cover of fog, the army broke through Rome's defenses. Two thousand Swiss guards died protecting Clement, who escaped to the Castel Sant'Angelo while Charles's mercenaries looted, tortured, and killed for months, burning roughly two-thirds of the city and holding cardinals and nobles for ransom. They were barely dissuaded from torching the Vatican Library or destroying the Sistine Chapel. The invaders only left when disease began killing them.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1527-1532The Inca Empire
Huascar and Atahualpa Fight a Six-Year Civil War
With Huayna Capac dead and no settled heir, his sons Huascar, based in Cuzco, and Atahualpa, based in the northern capital Quito, fought for control of the empire. World History Encyclopedia describes six years of increasingly damaging warfare between the two half-brothers' factions, fought by Inca nobility on both sides, until Atahualpa finally prevailed shortly before the Spanish arrived. Atahualpa captured Huascar, imprisoned him, and had his immediate kin-group killed along with many of his supporters. Atahualpa also had historians executed and Inca quipu records destroyed, an act the chroniclers describe him framing as a pachakuti, a deliberate world-renewing purge, the same term the dynasty's founder Pachacuti had taken as his own title generations earlier.
Reputable source · 2 sources - September-October 1529The Ottoman Empire
The first siege of Vienna fails
Three years after Mohacs, Suleiman marched on Vienna itself, the Habsburg capital, putting the city under siege in the autumn of 1529. The Ottoman army had overwhelming numbers, but an early onset of winter weather and the strain of supplying a large army so far from Ottoman territory undermined the siege before the city's defenses could be broken. Suleiman was forced to withdraw without taking the city, and a follow-up campaign in 1532 also produced no decisive result, leaving a costly standoff on the empire's western frontier.
Reputable source · 2 sources - November 1532 - mid 1533The Inca Empire
Atahualpa Offers a Room Filled Twice Over with Gold and Silver
Held captive after Cajamarca, Atahualpa offered his freedom's price: a room measuring roughly 6.2 by 4.8 meters filled with treasure up to a height of 2.5 meters, first with gold objects, from jewelry to religious idols, and then filled twice more with silver. World History Encyclopedia states the full collection took eight months to assemble and deliver, and that the accumulated treasure would have been worth well over 300 million dollars in modern terms. While the ransom was being gathered Atahualpa continued to direct Inca affairs from captivity, and Pizarro sent expeditions to scout Cuzco and Pachacamac while awaiting reinforcements from Panama, using shipments of gold to signal the wealth still on offer to attract them.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 16 November 1532The Inca Empire
Pizarro Meets Atahualpa at Cajamarca
Francisco Pizarro, an aging Spanish adventurer on his third expedition down the Pacific coast, arrived at the highland town of Cajamarca with a force of 168 men, including 62 cavalry, after a slow advance up from the coast in which his troops had already noted the well-built roads and storehouses of a clearly wealthy civilization. On Friday 15 November 1532 Pizarro sent word requesting a meeting with Atahualpa, who was resting at nearby hot springs after his recent victory over Huascar; confident in his 80,000-strong army, Atahualpa made the Spanish wait until the next day. On 16 November the two sides met formally in the town square with brief speeches and a shared drink while Atahualpa's retinue watched Spanish horsemanship. Both sides left intending to strike first. The next morning Pizarro used the maze-like layout of Cajamarca's buildings to position his men in ambush; when Atahualpa's procession entered the square, Spanish cannon fired, followed by a mounted charge. In the resulting battle, matching firearms, cannon, and steel armor against spears, slings, and clubs, about 7,000 Inca were killed against no recorded Spanish losses, and Atahualpa was struck on the head and taken alive.
Primary source · 2 sources - 26 July 1533The Inca Empire
Pizarro Executes Atahualpa After Collecting the Ransom
Once the ransom had been fully collected, Pizarro tried and executed Atahualpa anyway on 26 July 1533. World History Encyclopedia states he was originally sentenced to death by burning at the stake, a sentence commuted to death by strangulation after Atahualpa agreed to be baptized as a Christian. Some of Pizarro's own men considered the execution dishonorable given the ransom had been paid in good faith, and the Spanish crown itself later criticized Pizarro for the treatment of a foreign sovereign, but Pizarro had concluded that only the Sapa Inca's death could break Inca resistance, since Atahualpa's captivity had already shown him how completely Inca subjects still deferred to their king even as a prisoner. Atahualpa's severed head gave rise to the Inkarri legend, the belief that the head would eventually regrow a body and the Inca ruler would return to restore the old order.
Reputable source · 2 sources Pizarro Captures Atahualpa and Ends the Inca Empire
Francisco Pizarro arrived in present-day northern Peru late in 1531 with a small force of about 180 men and 30 horses. He took advantage of an ongoing Inca civil war, then requested a meeting with the Inca ruler Atahualpa, who agreed to meet at Cajamarca in November 1531. Spanish forces tried to convert Atahualpa to Christianity; he refused, and in the confrontation that followed the Spanish captured him. Atahualpa offered to fill a room with gold and silver as ransom, and the Inca delivered the treasure, but Pizarro had him executed anyway in 1533. Spain went on to suppress several Inca rebellions over the following decades, achieving full control of the former empire by 1572.
Primary source · 2 sources- 15 November 1533The Inca Empire
Cuzco Falls to the Spanish
Following Atahualpa's execution, Pizarro's forces moved on the Inca capital, encountering resistance from troops still loyal to Atahualpa near Hatun Xauxa and a retreating Inca army at Vilcaswaman, along with at least one surprise attack that inflicted a real Spanish defeat en route. The Spanish were aided throughout by local populations willing to help against Inca rule and by the ability to resupply from captured Inca storehouses. Cuzco itself, according to World History Encyclopedia, fell into Pizarro's hands on 15 November 1533 after only brief resistance, and the golden treasures of the city and of the Coricancha temple were stripped from the walls and melted down. Pizarro's first attempt to install a puppet ruler, Tupac Huallpa, a younger brother of Huascar, failed when the man died of illness soon after; Pizarro then installed another son of Huayna Capac, Manco Inca, as a second puppet Sapa Inca.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1536-1537The Inca Empire
Manco Inca Turns on the Spanish and Besieges Cuzco
Installed by Pizarro as a puppet Sapa Inca to keep the state functioning, Manco Inca instead organized his own rebellion, raising large armies that besieged both Cuzco and the new Spanish capital at Lima. World History Encyclopedia describes the sieges as prolonged, with the Spanish holding out until the besieging Inca forces, composed largely of farmers who could not afford to abandon their own harvests indefinitely, were forced to withdraw; a second siege the following year again failed once the Spanish killed the Inca army's commanders in a targeted attack, after which organized resistance around Cuzco collapsed.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1537The Inca Empire
Manco Inca Retreats to Vilcabamba and Founds a Rump State
Forced from Cuzco after his failed sieges, Manco Inca withdrew south into the remote, forested Vilcabamba region beyond the Spanish-controlled highlands, where he established an independent Inca state that World History Encyclopedia describes as resisting Spanish control for another four decades through Manco Inca and his successors. Machu Picchu, once mistakenly believed to be this last refuge after its 1911 rediscovery, was in fact a separate, older site: the true final capital was located further downstream in the Urubamba Valley at Vilcabamba itself, distinct from Pachacuti's earlier royal estate.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1520s-1550sThe Ottoman Empire
Suleiman codifies Ottoman law and earns the title Kanuni
Alongside his military campaigns, Suleiman oversaw a sustained effort to systematize Ottoman law, work that earned him the Turkish title Kanuni, the Lawgiver, distinct from the European nickname Magnificent. His administration extended and organized kanun, the sultan's own dynastic law covering taxation, land tenure, and criminal punishment, and worked to bring it into closer alignment with sharia, the body of Islamic religious law administered by the ulema. The result was a more uniform legal and bureaucratic framework applied across an empire that stretched from Hungary to the Hejaz, reinforced by an expanding administrative apparatus that extended the sultan's direct control over the empire's resources.
Reputable source · 2 sources Potosi's Silver Mountain Fills Spain's Treasury
Spanish conquistadors gained a lasting reputation as gold-seekers, but silver proved far more valuable: over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the Americas between 1492 and 1560, while by 1600 some 25,000 tons of silver had been shipped to Spain. Diego de Huallpa discovered the Potosi mines at Cerro Rico in Bolivia in 1545, and they became the single most spectacular source of wealth in the entire Spanish Empire. At their peak around 1600, the Potosi mines numbered over 600 and collectively yielded roughly 9 million silver pesos a year, more than every other silver mine then operating in the world combined. Extraction relied on forced Indigenous labor, and the Spanish crown took a fixed one-fifth cut, the quinto real, of every bar produced, stamped by a royal representative before shipment back to Spain.
Reputable source · 2 sources- August 1550The Spanish Empire
The Valladolid Debate Argues Whether Indigenous Americans Are Fully Human
Bartolome de las Casas had already presented Philip II with a petition calling for the return of Inca treasures and tributes seized since 1532, but the standard view of the period held that pagan peoples were being justly punished for their own conduct. Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a fellow Dominican, took a public stand against Las Casas, and their opposing views became known as the Valladolid debate after a public discussion at the monastery of San Gregorio in Valladolid in August 1550. Sepulveda argued that peoples of the Americas were natural slaves, so arrangements like the encomienda posed no moral problem and served as a necessary part of civilizing them. Las Casas argued the opposite: that the sophistication of Inca beliefs and culture in particular meant Indigenous Americans should be treated as potential converts deserving respect, not as beasts of burden, though he did view enslaved Africans differently and even encouraged increasing their numbers in the Americas.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1540 to 1555The Mughal Empire
Humayun Loses Delhi, Then Recovers It With Persian Help
Babur died in 1530, four years after Panipat, having built new gardens and a few buildings in the Persian style but leaving his conquest militarily fragile. His son Humayun succeeded him but, in the V&A's description, lacked his father's determination and military brilliance. Within ten years the Afghan noble Sher Shah Suri defeated Humayun's forces and drove him out of Hindustan entirely, taking Delhi and ruling from there himself; Sher Shah's own rule was short, but the V&A notes he instituted an extremely effective administrative system that outlasted him. Humayun fled with a small band of followers to the Safavid court of Shah Tahmasp in Iran. With Safavid backing he retook Kabul from his own brother Kamran, then launched a campaign back into Hindustan, and after nearly 17 years away from his former capital he defeated the remaining Sur forces and regained Delhi and Agra in 1555.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 16 January 1556The Spanish Empire
Charles V Abdicates and Splits His Empire in Two
Charles V spent his reign trying to hold together an empire assembled through inheritance rather than conquest, one stretched across Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Naples, and Spanish America, while fighting France, the Ottoman Empire, and Protestant princes simultaneously. His victory in the 1546-1547 Schmalkaldic War failed to end the Protestant Reformation his own Diet of Worms had tried to suppress in 1521. Worn down by decades of war and unable to achieve the religious and political unity he had spent his life pursuing, Charles abdicated his throne in stages beginning in 1555 and 1556, formally giving the Spanish crown and its American empire to his son Philip II and the Holy Roman Empire to his brother Ferdinand I, splitting the Habsburg inheritance permanently between an Austrian and a Spanish branch.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1556 to 1605The Mughal Empire
Akbar Expands Mughal Rule Across Northern India
Akbar became emperor in 1556 at 13 under the guardianship of Bayram Khan, an aristocratic Iranian noble who had served his father. Over the following 49 years Akbar extended Mughal rule over most of the north of the Indian subcontinent, from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east, and from Kabul and Kashmir in the north to the edge of the independent Deccan sultanates in the south. Some kingdoms were conquered outright; others signed treaties and entered imperial service rather than fight. A key step came in 1575 at the Battle of Tukaroi, where Mughal forces under Mun'im Khan decisively defeated the Sultanate of Bengal and Bihar under Daud Khan Karrani, leading directly to Bengal's annexation.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1550-1557The Ottoman Empire
Mimar Sinan builds the Suleymaniye and reshapes Ottoman architecture
Sinan, the Ottoman Empire's most celebrated architect, served under Suleiman the Magnificent and his two successors. Born to Christian parents and conscripted into the janissary corps as a young man, Sinan rose to become chief royal architect and designed hundreds of buildings across the empire. His largest work, the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, was commissioned by Suleiman, with construction beginning in 1550 and the mosque inaugurated in 1557. Sinan drew directly on the dome-and-pendentive design of Hagia Sophia, which he also worked to repair during the reign of Suleiman's son Selim II, adapting its structural principles into new imperial mosques across the capital.
Reputable source · 2 sources - from c. 1562The Mughal Empire
Akbar Builds Rajput Alliances Through Marriage and Rank
Rather than rule the Hindu-majority population purely by conquest, Akbar built political ties to the Rajput ruling houses of Rajasthan through marriage. He married daughters of Hindu Rajput rulers, and Hindus reached the highest levels of his administrative hierarchy, a policy the Victoria and Albert Museum's institutional history describes as central to how Akbar governed a population that was predominantly Hindu with a significant Muslim minority. Rajput nobles who accepted Mughal overlordship, rather than resisting it, could rise to high military rank inside the empire's mansabdar service cadre; Richard Eaton's scholarly account of Mughal-era temple patronage notes that the Rajput general Raja Man Singh, a mansabdar in Akbar's service, was permitted to build his own monumental Govind Deva Temple at Brindavan in 1590.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - c. 1562 to 1577The Mughal Empire
The Golden Age of Mughal Painting Takes Shape Under Akbar
In the royal House of Books, or Ketabkhana, Akbar had Hindustani artists directed by two Iranian masters formerly in his father's service to produce a new style of book painting, combining the traditions of Hindu and Muslim craftsmen from across the subcontinent with those of Iranian masters. Their first major project was the Hamzanama, or Book of Hamza, illustrating traditional oral tales of the hero Hamza; contemporary sources put the work at 12 to 14 bound volumes of roughly 100 paintings each, produced over about 15 years, most likely between 1562 and 1577. Fewer than 200 of the original paintings survive, separated from their long-vanished bindings; the largest surviving groups are held today by the MAK museum in Vienna and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the latter having acquired 28 folios and two fragments in 1880-81 during a buying trip to Kashmir.
Reputable source · 2 sources Philip II Builds the Escorial as Monastery, Palace, and Royal Tomb
Philip II founded the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in 1563 as a votive monument and pantheon for Spanish monarchs going back to his father, Charles V. Built at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama north of Madrid on a plan shaped like a grill, the instrument of Saint Lawrence's martyrdom, its design came from Juan Bautista de Toledo, a Spanish pupil of Michelangelo, and was completed by Juan de Herrera after Toledo's death. The complex combined a monastery, a basilica, a royal pantheon, a palace, a library, a college, and a hospital in one austere structure whose architectural style, a sharp break from earlier Spanish styles, influenced Spanish architecture for more than half a century. Philip, described as a mystic king, used the Escorial as a personal retreat, but by the last years of his reign it had become the center of the greatest political power in the world at that time.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1564 (jizya abolished); debates broadened from 1575The Mughal Empire
Akbar Abolishes the Jizya and Opens the Ibadat Khana to All Faiths
In 1564 Akbar abolished the jizya, the poll tax that Islamic law levied on non-Muslim subjects, a step the Encyclopaedia Iranica describes as taken primarily for reasons of state. The previous year he had already ended a pilgrimage tax on Hindus. From 1575 he built a meeting house at his new capital, Fatehpur Sikri, called the Ibadat Khana, or House of Worship, where he convened religious scholars for structured debate. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Akbar grew frustrated with the narrow, often bitter arguments of the Muslim clerics who first dominated these sessions, and progressively widened participation to include Shi'ite scholars, Sufi dervishes, and eventually Hindus, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. The experience pushed him toward his personal formula of sulh-i-kul, or peace with all.
General source · 2 sources The Manila Galleons Link Asia and the Americas
From 1565, Spain used galleon ships to carry silver accumulated at Manila, in the Spanish-controlled Philippines, to Acapulco on Mexico's Pacific coast, then overland or onward to Spain itself. Rather than route around Africa like the Portuguese, Spain sent its Pacific galleons eastward across open ocean, almost all of them built in the Philippines under a law enforced from 1679. Cargoes included silk, porcelain, spices, Persian carpets, jewelry, medicines, Indian cotton, gemstones, and often enslaved people, stored below decks in ships that could weigh up to 2,000 tons. Merchants routinely made 150 to 200 percent profit on their investment; a roll of silk was worth ten times more in the Americas than in Manila. Chinese manufacturers adapted their output to the trade's demand, and Ming porcelain workshops began producing designs specifically aimed at European and American buyers. The trade continued for 250 years, from 1565 to 1815.
Reputable source · 2 sources- c. 1568The Spanish Empire
Philip II's Religious Persecution Sparks the Dutch Revolt
Charles V had introduced the Inquisition into the Netherlands, and his son Philip II continued and broadened his father's anti-Protestant policies after taking control of the region in 1555 and becoming king in 1556. Philip's early decrees included a continuance of Charles's 1550 Edict of Blood, reissued in 1556, which banned printing, writing, copying, keeping, or even discussing the works of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other named reformers. Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle enforced these policies until 1564, when Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba, took over and pursued Calvinists with such severity that the sitting governor, Margaret of Parma, resigned in protest. Persecutions, high taxes to fund foreign wars, and general discontent over Spanish rule combined to produce sustained armed resistance that became known as the Eighty Years' War.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1571 to 1573, occupied until 1585The Mughal Empire
Akbar Builds Fatehpur Sikri, His City of Victory
Between 1571 and 1573 Akbar built Fatehpur Sikri, a new planned capital about 23 miles from Agra, on a ridge where the Sufi saint Shaikh Salim Chishti lived and where the saint had foretold that Akbar would finally have a male heir. The city was the first planned city of the Mughals, enclosed by a 6-kilometer wall pierced with nine gates, and built almost entirely of red sandstone with little marble. Its centerpiece is the Jama Masjid, completed 1571-72, which holds Salim Chishti's tomb, and the 40-meter Buland Darwaza gate, completed in 1575 to mark the conquest of Gujarat. Akbar abandoned the city as his working capital in 1585, when he moved to Lahore.
Primary source · 2 sources - 7 October 1571The Ottoman Empire
The Holy League destroys the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto
After Ottoman forces under Selim II completed the conquest of Venetian Cyprus in 1570, a coalition of Catholic states called the Holy League, assembled under Pope Pius V and led by Spain and Venice, moved to confront the Ottoman fleet. The two navies met on 7 October 1571 in the Gulf of Patras near Lepanto, in the largest galley battle in Mediterranean history. The Holy League destroyed the Ottoman fleet, ending what had been unchallenged Ottoman naval dominance in the eastern Mediterranean for decades.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 7 October 1571The Spanish Empire
The Holy League Destroys the Ottoman Fleet at Lepanto
The Ottoman conquest of Venetian Cyprus in 1570 and 1571 provoked the formation of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic states organized under Pope Pius V and led by Spain and Venice, commanded by Don Juan of Austria, the illegitimate half-brother of Philip II. A fleet of more than 200 galleys, mainly Venetian and Spanish with squadrons from the Papal States and Genoa, met the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Patras near Lepanto on 7 October 1571. The battle was decided by boarding and hand-to-hand fighting rather than gunnery. Though the Christian coalition was outnumbered on the flanks, it triumphed in the center and destroyed the Ottoman fleet, at a cost of about 25,000 Turkish and 8,000 Christian dead.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1572The Inca Empire
Tupac Amaru's Execution Ends Inca Resistance
Manco Inca's successors held Vilcabamba for decades after his death, but in 1572 a Spanish force under Viceroy Francisco de Toledo captured the last independent Sapa Inca, Tupac Amaru, described by World History Encyclopedia as Thupa Amaru. Toledo's forces took him back to Cuzco, where he was executed, ending the line of independent Inca rulers and any remaining organized state resistance to Spanish rule in Peru. World History Encyclopedia's broader account of the conquest notes that by roughly 1570 around half of the pre-Columbian Andean population had already died from the combined effects of war and disease since the Spanish arrival four decades earlier.
Reputable source · 2 sources Philip II Annexes Portugal Into an Iberian Union
King Sebastian I of Portugal died in Morocco in 1578 without an heir, and when his elderly great-uncle King Henry died in 1580 the Portuguese throne fell into a succession crisis. Philip II of Spain, who had a hereditary claim, pressed it and in 1580 became Philip I of Portugal, joining the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in what historians call the Iberian Union. By that point Portugal had built a commercial and strategic empire stretching from Goa and Hormuz in the Indian Ocean to Malacca, Macau, Mozambique, and Brazil, all of which now fell under the same monarch who already ruled Spain, Spanish America, the Philippines, and territories in Europe.
Reputable source · 2 sources- c. 1582The Mughal Empire
Akbar Proclaims the Din-i-Ilahi
Around 1582, after years of interfaith debate at the Ibadat Khana, Akbar formulated what the Encyclopaedia Iranica calls tawhid-i ilahi, an eclectic personal belief in a divine monotheism drawn largely from Sufi sources, including the teachings of Shaikh Mubarak, father of his chief minister Abu'l Fazl. Later writers gave this framework the name Din-i-Ilahi, the Religion of God. It borrowed selectively from Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and other traditions Akbar had encountered through the Ibadat Khana debates, and it was never a mass religion: it functioned more as a personal spiritual order for a small circle at court than a faith Akbar tried to impose on his subjects.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 5 August 1583The British Empire
Humphrey Gilbert Claims Newfoundland
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a Devon-born soldier and half-brother of Walter Raleigh, sailed from England in June 1583 with five ships to find a site for an English colony in North America. His fleet reached St. John's harbour in Newfoundland, already crowded with European fishing vessels. On 5 August 1583 Gilbert formally took possession of Newfoundland and the land 200 leagues to its north and south in the name of Queen Elizabeth I. Merchants and fishermen assembled before his tent while a rod and turf were cut and delivered to him as a token of the soil's transfer, and he proclaimed the land the Queen's in perpetuity, promulgating laws against public religious dissent. Gilbert never established a settlement there. He drowned that September when his small ship, the Squirrel, sank in a storm on the voyage home.
General source · 2 sources - 1585-1590The British Empire
Raleigh's Roanoke Colonies and the Lost Colony
Sir Walter Raleigh sent two colonizing expeditions to Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The first, in 1585, was a military garrison of about 108 men under Ralph Lane, delivered by a fleet under Sir Richard Grenville that had been delayed and damaged crossing the Atlantic. Short on supplies and in worsening conflict with the local Roanoke and Secotan peoples, the garrison abandoned the site in 1586. A second expedition of 112 to 121 men, women, and children arrived in 1587 under governor John White, who returned to England for supplies but was delayed three years by war with Spain. When a relief ship finally reached Roanoke in 1590, the colonists had vanished, leaving behind the single word CROATOAN carved into a post and no sign of a struggle. Their fate has never been conclusively established.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 8 August 1588The Spanish Empire
England Defeats the Spanish Armada
Philip II's grievances against Protestant England had been building for years: Elizabeth I's support for the Dutch rebels, English privateers like Francis Drake plundering Spanish treasure ships, and England's rejection of Catholicism. When Drake raided Cadiz in 1587 and destroyed supplies meant for Spain's planned invasion, what Philip called his Enterprise of England was delayed but not abandoned. He assembled an armada of 132 ships carrying 17,000 soldiers and 7,000 mariners, which sailed from Lisbon on 30 May 1588 intending to establish control of the English Channel and link up with a second army in the Netherlands. The Royal Navy met the Armada in the Channel, and thanks to superior maneuverability, better firepower, and English fireships launched on the night of 7 August, the Spanish fleet was forced to break formation. Defeated, the Armada had to sail the long way home around Scotland and Ireland, and storms wrecked more ships along that route; only about half the fleet made it back to Spain.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 31 December 1600The British Empire
The East India Company Is Chartered
On 31 December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to a group of London merchants trading as the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. The charter, initially limited to fifteen years, gave the company exclusive English trading rights across the entire ocean east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Strait of Magellan, aimed at breaking into the spice trade then dominated by the Dutch. The company set up its first Indian trading post at Surat in 1607 and was rechartered as a permanent body in 1609. Its charter permitted it to wage war in pursuit of its trading interests, a power that would prove decisive two centuries later.
Reputable source · 2 sources Cervantes Publishes Don Quixote at the Height of Spain's Golden Age
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra published El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha in Madrid in 1605, a novel written as a satire of the chivalric romances so common in Spanish literature at the time. Two competing 1605 editions appeared almost immediately, one pirated in Lisbon and one authorized in Spain, a sign of the book's instant popularity. Don Quixote arrived during the same decades that produced painters Diego Velazquez and El Greco and writers including Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Luis de Gongora, and Lope de Vega, the period historians call the Spanish Golden Age or Siglo de Oro. Velazquez, born in Seville in 1599, rose to become Philip IV's court painter after a 1623 portrait so pleased the king that he decreed no one else would paint him; El Greco, born on Venetian Crete and trained in Venice and Rome, settled in Toledo by 1577 and painted works including a commission from Philip II for the Escorial.
Primary source · 2 sources- 14 May 1607The British Empire
Jamestown Founded in Virginia
Three ships financed by the Virginia Company of London, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, carried 104 English men and boys across the Atlantic, departing in December 1606. On 13 to 14 May 1607 they landed on a peninsula in the James River, sixty miles from the Chesapeake Bay, and named the settlement Jamestown after King James I. The site offered a deep-water harbour but poor soil and swampy, disease-ridden ground. Starvation, disease, and conflict with the Powhatan people killed most of the original settlers within the first years, and the colony survived only after John Rolfe introduced tobacco as a cash crop from 1612. It remained Virginia's capital until 1699.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 9 April 1609The Spanish Empire
Spain Expels the Moriscos
On 9 April 1609, King Philip III secretly signed a decree to expel all Spaniards of Muslim descent, the Moriscos, whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity after Islam was outlawed in Spain in 1502. The decision came after centuries of restrictive measures against religious minorities, Jews first and then Moors, and after a January 1608 Royal Council meeting where mass slaughter of the Moriscos was proposed before expulsion was chosen as the preferred solution instead. The Royal Council, led by the Duke of Lerma, formally decreed the expulsion on 4 April 1609, and it was publicly announced in Valencia that September; a sermon soon after claimed the Moriscos had conspired with the Ottoman Turks to invade Spain. Estimates of the total expelled between 1609 and 1614 range from 300,000 to half a million people, out of a Spanish population of roughly 8 million; contemporary accounts describe tens of thousands dying during the expulsion itself or in the passage abroad, and many who reached North Africa were abused or killed by the Muslim communities they landed among.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1605 (accession); 1611 (marriage)The Mughal Empire
Jahangir Inherits a Wealthy Empire and Marries Nur Jahan
Akbar's son Salim succeeded him in 1605 and took the title Jahangir, World Seizer, inheriting what the Victoria and Albert Museum calls a stable and immensely wealthy empire with twelve separate treasuries feeding cash from every province into the royal household. In 1611 Jahangir, who already had several wives, married Mehr un-Nissa, from an aristocratic Iranian family whose father and brother had already reached the highest ranks of the Mughal hierarchy. He gave her the title Nur Jahan, Light of the World, and became devoted to her; she was the only Mughal queen ever to have coins issued in her own name, and she effectively ruled alongside him for the rest of his reign.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1612 to 1619The Mughal Empire
Sir Thomas Roe Secures East India Company Trading Rights
Between 1612 and 1619 the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe secured permission from the Mughal court for the East India Company to establish its first factory, a fortified trading post, at Surat on India's western coast. Roe spent time at Jahangir's court in Ajmer and traveled with the imperial retinue, and the encounter went both directions culturally: Roe showed Jahangir a miniature portrait by the English painter Isaac Oliver, which so impressed the emperor that he had a court artist copy it, then tested Roe's ability to tell the copies from the original.
Reputable source · 2 sources Jahangir's Court Painters Perfect Natural History and Portraiture
Like his great-grandfather Babur, Jahangir wrote his own memoirs, the Jahangirnama, and like Babur he had a deep interest in the natural world, but unlike Babur he commissioned artists to paint the animals, birds, and people he described. In 1621 a delegation presented Jahangir with an African zebra, an animal he had never seen and that struck him as a horse painted with stripes; he wrote that the painter of fate had left it on the page of the world with a strange brush. He assigned the commission to Mansur, one of his two leading artists, who signed the resulting painting, now in the V&A's collection, and Jahangir himself added notes in his own hand about how and when the animal arrived. Portraiture under Jahangir also reached a new level of naturalism, a shift historians usually connect to his artists' exposure to European portraits carried to his court by visitors like the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1632 to 1653The Mughal Empire
Shah Jahan Builds the Taj Mahal for Mumtaz Mahal
Shah Jahan's wife Arjumand Banu Begum, known by the title Mumtaz Mahal, died in 1631 in Burhanpur while giving birth to their fourteenth child. Shah Jahan had her body moved to Agra and ordered a tomb built for her; construction of the Taj Mahal began in 1632 and the main mausoleum was completed by 1648, with the mosque, guest house, main gateway, and outer courtyard finished in 1653. UNESCO's documentation credits Ustad Ahmad Lahori as the main architect, and describes masons, stone-cutters, inlayers, carvers, calligraphers, and dome builders drawn from across the empire and from Central Asia and Iran. The tomb sits deliberately off-center within its walled garden, an innovation UNESCO calls one of the site's most distinctive design choices, adding depth to the view from a distance; Shah Jahan's own cenotaph was added beside his wife's more than thirty years later, after his death in 1666.
Primary source · 2 sources - c. 1635The Mughal Empire
Shah Jahan Commissions the Peacock Throne
Shah Jahan commissioned the Peacock Throne in the early seventeenth century for the Diwan-i-Khas, the Hall of Private Audiences, in what would become his Red Fort at Delhi. Contemporary accounts describe a throne extravagant even by the standards of the wealthiest Mughal court, reportedly costing roughly twice what the Taj Mahal itself had cost to build, set with an enormous quantity of gems. Jahangir had already left Shah Jahan an empire whose twelve separate treasuries, one dedicated purely to precious stones, gave his son the resources for a commission on this scale. The throne became the physical symbol of Mughal sovereignty and remained in the Red Fort until it was carried off as war plunder more than a century later.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1639 to 1648The Mughal Empire
Shah Jahan Moves the Capital to Delhi and Builds the Red Fort
Shah Jahan commissioned the Red Fort in 1639 as the palace fort of Shahjahanabad, the new Mughal capital he built at Delhi, completing it in 1648. Named for its massive red sandstone walls, the fort's private apartments consist of a row of pavilions connected by a continuous water channel known as the Nahr-i-Behisht, the Stream of Paradise. UNESCO's documentation describes the fort's design as a fusion of Persian, Timurid, and Hindu architectural traditions built on an Islamic layout, and identifies it as representing what UNESCO calls the zenith of Mughal creativity under Shah Jahan. White marble from the Makrana mines in Rajasthan, carved or inlaid with semi-precious stones in imitation of imported Florentine pietre dure panels, became the defining decorative style of his reign, seen across textiles, metalwork, and book painting as well as architecture.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1640sThe British Empire
The Barbados Sugar Revolution
English settlers had grown tobacco and cotton on Barbados since the 1620s with limited success. In the mid-1640s, after Dutch traders fleeing Portuguese Brazil introduced sugar-making techniques and financing, planters converted the island's land almost entirely to sugarcane. The shift, which historians call the Sugar Revolution, consolidated small farms into large plantations and replaced free and indentured labour with enslaved Africans on a mass scale. By the 1670s the Royal African Company's Bridgetown operation supplied enslaved workers who outnumbered white colonists on the island by nearly ten to one.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 24 October 1648The Spanish Empire
The Thirty Years' War Bankrupts Spain and Costs It Portugal
The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) began as a religious revolt in Bohemia but grew into the last major European conflict fought along Catholic-Protestant lines, killing an estimated 8 million people across four phases of fighting. Catholic Spain backed its Habsburg relatives in the Holy Roman Empire from the start, and by the 1630s Spanish forces were fighting directly against France, even threatening Paris in 1636. The strain of financing this war on top of the ongoing Eighty Years' War against the Dutch proved too much: in 1640, Portugal revolted against its Spanish rulers, permanently ending the 1580 Iberian Union, and Spanish military efforts weakened everywhere else as a result. The war finally ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a set of treaties that also formally ended the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch Republic, recognizing Dutch independence outright.
Reputable source · 2 sources - May 1655The British Empire
England Seizes Jamaica
Oliver Cromwell's Western Design aimed to seize Spain's American possessions and cripple its silver-based empire. An English fleet under Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables sailed for Hispaniola in 1654 to 1655, but its assault on Santo Domingo in April 1655 was a costly failure, with roughly a thousand men lost to disease and Spanish resistance. Rather than return home empty-handed, the expedition sailed on to Jamaica, which was sparsely defended, and took the island with little resistance in May 1655. Spain formally ceded Jamaica to England in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. The colony's main harbour, Port Royal, became a notorious base for English-sponsored privateers and buccaneers who continued raiding Spanish shipping.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1657 to 1658The Mughal Empire
A War of Succession Ends With Aurangzeb Imprisoning His Father
In 1657 Shah Jahan fell seriously ill and was feared to be dying. He named his eldest son Dara Shikoh as his successor, but when the emperor unexpectedly recovered, a war of succession had already broken out between his sons. Aurangzeb emerged the victor, deposed his own father, and proclaimed himself emperor in 1658 under the title Alamgir. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum's account, he had all but one of his brothers put to death to eliminate future rivals, then imprisoned Shah Jahan in the fort at Agra, where the deposed emperor could see the tomb of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, the Taj Mahal, in which he himself would be buried when he died in 1666.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 27 September 1672The British Empire
The Royal African Company Is Chartered
King Charles II granted a royal charter to the Royal African Company on 27 September 1672, giving it a monopoly over English trade along roughly 5,000 miles of the West African coast, from Cape Sallee to the Cape of Good Hope. The company, a reorganization of an earlier Company of Royal Adventurers founded in 1660, traded chiefly in enslaved people, gold, and ivory in exchange for manufactured goods. Between 1672 and 1731 the Royal African Company shipped an estimated 186,748 enslaved Africans to the Americas across 652 voyages, more than any other single institution in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, before losing its legal monopoly in 1698 and finally abandoning the slave trade for ivory and gold in 1731.
Primary source · 2 sources Shivaji Builds Maratha Power and Is Crowned Chhatrapati
Shivaji Bhonsle was born in 1627 into a family of Maratha bureaucrats and, according to UCLA's academic account, built a reputation as a guerrilla warrior plundering the countryside around Pune before turning his ambitions on the Sultanate of Bijapur. His most famous act came in 1659, when the Bijapur general Afzal Khan, sent with 10,000 troops to subdue him, met Shivaji in person under a supposed truce; Shivaji killed him with a dagger and steel tiger claws concealed in his sleeves, and the encounter is often credited as the birth of organized Maratha power. In 1664 Shivaji plundered the wealthy port of Surat, drawing a Mughal response under General Jai Singh that forced Shivaji into a period as an acknowledged Mughal vassal, though he escaped Aurangzeb's court in 1666 and by 1670 had retaken many of his surrendered fortresses. In 1674 he had himself crowned Chhatrapati, or sovereign, in a ceremony attended by tens of thousands, marking his formal break from Mughal overlordship.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1669 to 1680The Mughal Empire
Aurangzeb Reimposes the Jizya and Orders Temples Destroyed
In 1679 Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya, the tax on non-Muslim subjects that Akbar had abolished 115 years earlier, a step widely read at the time and since as a marker of a harder religious line than his predecessors. Around the same period Aurangzeb also ordered the destruction of specific, named temples: the Vishvanath temple at Banaras in 1669, associated with a Mughal officer suspected of aiding the escape of his enemy Shivaji, and the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura in 1670, tied to the leader of a Jat rebellion. Historian Richard M. Eaton's peer-reviewed analysis of the pattern across Indo-Muslim states finds these were not indiscriminate: Aurangzeb also formally ordered, in 1659, that Brahmin temple-keepers at Banaras be protected from harassment, writing that ancient temples should not be torn down under Islamic law even as he added that no new ones should be built there. Nine years after the jizya's return, in 1679 and 1680, Aurangzeb ordered several prominent Rajasthan temples destroyed, each one tied to a Rajput chieftain who had specifically withdrawn loyalty to the Mughal state.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources - 12 September 1683The Ottoman Empire
The second siege of Vienna fails, and the long retreat begins
In 1683 an Ottoman army under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha besieged Vienna for two months, forcing Emperor Leopold I to flee the city. A relief force led by Polish King John III Sobieski, combined with Habsburg and other Holy Roman troops, arrived in September. On 12 September, Sobieski's forces, including the famous winged hussar cavalry, seized high ground overlooking the Ottoman camp and launched a charge that broke the Ottoman lines before the janissaries in the siege trenches could be organized to respond. Kara Mustafa's army collapsed into a rout and retreated from Vienna in defeat.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1658 to 1707The Mughal Empire
Aurangzeb Pushes the Empire to Its Greatest Size
Aurangzeb ruled from 1658 to 1707 and, in the words of the Victoria and Albert Museum's institutional history, extended the Mughal Empire to its greatest size, a project that required long campaigns to subdue the independent sultanates of the Deccan, in India's south-central plateau. These campaigns were eventually successful, bringing more territory under direct Mughal control than any previous emperor had held. But the cost was severe: years of almost constant warfare drained the empire's wealth, and Aurangzeb's personal absence from the northern capitals for nearly three decades while campaigning in the Deccan left those cities in economic decline.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 26 January 1699The Ottoman Empire
The Treaty of Karlowitz ends three centuries of Ottoman expansion
After sixteen years of continued warfare following the failed second siege of Vienna, the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Karlowitz with Austria, Poland, and Venice on 26 January 1699, ending the Great Turkish War. The Ottomans ceded Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia to Austria, Podolia to Poland, and the Peloponnese and parts of Dalmatia to Venice. The Ottoman negotiating team, led by Rami Mehmed Pasha and the Greek dragoman Alexandros Mavrokordatos, represented the first time in the empire's history that its diplomats negotiated a peace settlement from the position of the defeated side rather than the victor.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources The War of the Spanish Succession Ends the Habsburg Line in Spain
King Charles II of Spain, the last Habsburg ruler of Spain, was childless and in poor health for most of his reign. When he died in November 1700, his will left the entire Spanish Empire to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France and a member of the Bourbon dynasty, rather than to the rival Habsburg claimant, Archduke Charles of Austria. Louis XIV supported his grandson's claim, and Philip was crowned King Philip V of Spain on 16 November 1700. England, the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, and other powers formed a Grand Alliance in 1701, unwilling to let a Bourbon on the Spanish throne create a union of French and Spanish power under one family. Thirteen years of war followed across Europe, from the Spanish Netherlands to Italy, with major battles like Blenheim, Turin, and Malplaquet, before peace negotiations confirmed Philip as King of Spain in 1714 while stripping Spain of its European territories outside Iberia.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1 May 1707The British Empire
The Acts of Union Create Great Britain
Following the Treaty of Union agreed in July 1706, the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England each passed an Act of Union, and on 1 May 1707 the two countries were, in the Act's own words, 'United into One Kingdom' called Great Britain, with a single Parliament sitting at Westminster. Scotland retained its own legal system and Presbyterian church establishment under separate guarantees, and gained 16 seats in the House of Lords and 45 in the House of Commons. The merged Parliament first met that October. Responsibility for governing Scotland now sat with ministers in London, an arrangement worked out haltingly over the following decades.
Primary source · 2 sources Aurangzeb Dies and the Empire Begins to Break Apart
Aurangzeb died in 1707 after 49 years on the throne, the longest reign of any Mughal emperor and the one that had brought the empire to its largest territorial extent. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum's account, the empire began slowly but irreversibly to break up almost immediately after his death, as regional governors became virtually independent and new rulers seized land that nominally still belonged to Delhi. Power drained away from the Mughal emperors toward regional courts, many of which continued to follow the artistic and architectural conventions Shah Jahan had established, though on a much reduced scale, since none could match the wealth of the Mughal court at its peak.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1718-1730The Ottoman Empire
The Tulip Period brings peace, gardens, and the first Ottoman printing press
After the Treaty of Passarowitz ended a costly war with Austria in 1718, Sultan Ahmed III and his grand vizier, Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha, turned toward peace and cultural patronage in a period later historians named the Tulip Period, for the flower's popularity among the Ottoman elite. Ibrahim Pasha built the Sadabad summer palace complex outside Istanbul and supported new artistic and architectural styles influenced by European Baroque forms. In 1727, after consulting religious authorities for approval, Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian-born convert to Islam, received permission to establish the empire's first Turkish-language printing press with movable Arabic type; in 1729 he printed his first work, a two-volume Arabic dictionary. The period ended in 1730 when the Patrona Halil rebellion, driven by resentment of elite extravagance and heavy wartime taxation, forced Ahmed III's abdication; Ibrahim Pasha was captured and executed by the crowd.
Primary source · 2 sources Nader Shah Sacks Delhi and Carries Off the Peacock Throne
The Iranian ruler Nader Shah, founder of the Afsharid dynasty, invaded northern India and sacked Delhi in 1739, in what the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art describes as a period of political and artistic decline following Aurangzeb's reign that left the Mughal Empire subject to outside invasion. Nader Shah's occupation turned violent after an initial period of calm, and estimates put the death toll at roughly 20,000 to 30,000 people killed in the city over the course of a single day. When his forces withdrew, they carried home a vast haul of treasure, including the Hamzanama manuscript, the Peacock Throne itself, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
Reputable source · 2 sources- June 23, 1757The Mughal Empire
Clive Wins the Battle of Plassey and the Company Gains Bengal
On 23 June 1757, at the village of Plassey on the Bhagirathi-Hooghly River, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Clive's East India Company force of about 3,000 men, including 2,100 Indian sepoys, met the roughly 50,000-strong army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, backed by French artillery officers. A downpour ahead of the main engagement disabled the Nawab's uncovered gunpowder while Clive's men kept theirs dry under tarpaulins; when Siraj's infantry advanced believing the Company's guns were equally silenced, they were met, in the National Army Museum's account, by a storm of fire and withdrew in disarray. At the decisive moment Mir Jafar, commanding the Nawab's cavalry, had secretly agreed with Clive and the Jagat Seth banking family to betray Siraj in exchange for being installed as the new Nawab, and he refused to engage. Clive routed the remaining forces, losing only 22 killed to over 500 Bengali and French casualties, and Mir Jafar had Siraj killed and took his place, now effectively a Company puppet. In 1765 Clive secured the diwani, the right to collect Bengal's tax revenue, directly from the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 23 June 1757The British Empire
The Battle of Plassey
On 23 June 1757, at Plassey in north-east India, an East India Company force of roughly 3,000 men under Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Clive, including about 2,100 Indian sepoys and 800 Europeans, faced the army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, which numbered around 50,000 troops including 16,000 cavalry and French-manned artillery. The battle turned on treachery rather than force of arms: Mir Jafar, who commanded the Nawab's cavalry, had secretly agreed with Clive beforehand to hold his troops back from the fighting in exchange for being installed as the new Nawab if Siraj was defeated. With Mir Jafar's forces standing idle, Siraj's army collapsed. The Company placed Mir Jafar on the throne and took direct control of Bengal's tax revenues.
Reputable source · 2 sources - c. 1765-1790sThe Spanish Empire
The Bourbon Reforms Modernize Spain's Colonial Administration
Beginning with Charles III's reign, Spain's Bourbon monarchs introduced sweeping changes to colonial administration designed to increase crown revenue and reassert control that had loosened over two centuries. Spain introduced a system of intendancies, administrative units run by appointed governors, intendentes, who answered directly to the crown rather than to local viceroys, replacing older, more corruptible arrangements. Research on the reform's economic effects finds it substantially increased crown revenue and reduced the exploitation of Indigenous communities that flourished under the older system, but it also generated serious tension with local colonial elites, the criollos, who found themselves shut out of the powerful new intendant posts, which went almost exclusively to men born in Spain.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1769-1770The British Empire
The Great Bengal Famine of 1770
Failed rice harvests in 1768 and 1769, worsened by a smallpox epidemic and peasant migration, produced a catastrophic famine across Bengal and Bihar in 1769 and 1770, remembered in Bengali as Chhiattor-er Monnontor, the Famine of '76. Contemporary and later estimates of the dead range as high as ten million, roughly a third of the affected population, though modern historians treat the highest figures as uncertain given the poor demographic records of the time. The East India Company, which had held the right to collect Bengal's revenue since 1765, continued to press for tax payments through the crisis: British Library India Office records show land tax collection in the famine year of 1770-71 exceeded that of the pre-famine year of 1769-70, and administrators including Reza Khan faced later accusations of profiting from grain monopolies during the famine.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 3 September 1783The British Empire
Britain Loses the American Colonies
Resentment over taxation without parliamentary representation drove Britain's thirteen American colonies into open revolt from 1775. French intervention on the American side from 1778 turned a colonial rebellion into a wider war Britain fought without a European ally. After the decisive American and French victory at Yorktown in 1781, peace negotiations dragged through 1782, and the Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783. Britain formally recognized the independence and sovereignty of the United States, ceded territory east of the Mississippi River, resolved Newfoundland fishing rights and prewar debts, and agreed to evacuate its remaining forces from the thirteen states.
Primary source · 2 sources - 26 January 1788The British Empire
The First Fleet Founds Colonial Australia
The First Fleet, eleven Royal Navy and convict transport ships under Captain Arthur Phillip, left Portsmouth in May 1787 carrying more than 1,400 convicts, marines, and officials. After an eight-month voyage the fleet reached Botany Bay on 18 to 20 January 1788, but Phillip judged the site too exposed and short of fresh water. On 26 January 1788 he moved the fleet to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson and began establishing a convict settlement there. Between 1788 and 1868 Britain transported more than 162,000 convicts to Australia's penal colonies, with about 7,000 arriving in 1833 alone.
Primary source · 3 sources - by 1803The Mughal Empire
The Mughal Emperor Becomes a Company Pensioner in a Shrinking Delhi
In the decades after Plassey and the 1765 diwani grant, Mughal authority contracted steadily as the East India Company, the Marathas, and regional rulers absorbed what had once been imperial territory. By 1803, according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, Mughal territory had shrunk to the area immediately around Delhi itself. The emperor remained, in the Smithsonian's phrase, the symbolic center of authority in India even as actual power passed to the Company and to regional successor states, a titular sovereignty with no army, no independent revenue, and no real territory to speak of beyond his own palace walls.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 25 March 1807The British Empire
Parliament Abolishes the Slave Trade
Campaigners including Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and William Wilberforce had pressed Parliament since founding the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. After repeated failed bills, the Slave Trade Act passed the Commons by 283 votes to 16, far beyond expectations, and received royal assent on 25 March 1807, taking effect that May. The Act prohibited British subjects from buying, selling, or transporting enslaved people across the Atlantic, and the Royal Navy began patrolling West African waters to intercept trafficking ships. It did not free a single person already enslaved in Britain's colonies.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1821-1832The Ottoman Empire
The Greek War of Independence breaks Ottoman rule in the Peloponnese
The Filiki Eteria, a secret society founded in Odessa in 1814 to organize Greek independence, launched a revolt in the Danubian Principalities in early 1821, which Ottoman forces suppressed; the rebellion that mattered began weeks later in the Peloponnese. Sultan Mahmud II's forces, aided by the Egyptian governor Mehmed Ali Pasha's army and navy, gradually reasserted control through the mid-1820s, defeating Greek forces at Missolonghi and elsewhere and besieging the rebel-held city of Navarino by 1825. Britain, France, and Russia then intervened, and their combined fleet destroyed the Egyptian-Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Navarino in October 1827 without a formal declaration of war. Russia followed with its own war against the Ottomans in 1828, advancing into the Balkans and Caucasus.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 24 June 1821The Spanish Empire
Bolivar and San Martin Lead the Wars That End Spanish Rule on the Mainland
Napoleon's occupation of Spain in 1808 shattered the assumption of Bourbon authority across the Spanish Americas, triggering uprisings that would take over two decades to run their course. Simon Bolivar led patriot forces that, after early defeats, won at the Battle of Boyaca on 7 August 1819 and entered Bogota to celebration; by the end of that year he had established Gran Colombia, encompassing much of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. Victory at the Battle of Carabobo on 24 June 1821 secured Venezuelan independence permanently, and Bolivar's armies went on to liberate Ecuador and Peru as well. Jose de San Martin led parallel campaigns from the south, and between the two commanders, by 1826 all of mainland Latin America except the coastal fortifications at Veracruz, Callao, and Chiloe had slipped from Spanish control; the United States recognized Chile, the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, Peru, Gran Colombia, and Mexico as independent in 1822, and Britain followed in 1825.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 15-16 June 1826The Ottoman Empire
Mahmud II destroys the janissary corps in the Auspicious Incident
By the 1820s the janissary corps, founded through the devshirme system four centuries earlier, had become a politically obstructive force that had killed reforming sultans in the past, most recently helping depose and later kill Selim III over his attempts to modernize the army. Mahmud II spent years quietly building support among the ulema and appointing loyalists to hollow out janissary influence from within before creating a new auxiliary force, the Eskinci, drawn from the janissaries themselves as a pretext. On 15 June 1826 the janissaries rose in the rebellion Mahmud had been provoking; he was ready, and ordered artillery to bombard their barracks, killing thousands and forcing the survivors into exile or execution. Traditional janissary dress, including turbans, was banned immediately afterward and replaced with the fez and Western-style uniforms, a change extended to civil servants by 1829.
Reputable source · 2 sources - August 1833The British Empire
The Slavery Abolition Act Ends Slavery in the Empire
In August 1833 Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act, ending slavery across most of the British Empire, though not in territories controlled by the East India Company. The Act converted enslaved people into unpaid apprentice labourers bound to their former masters, a status that continued for years after nominal abolition, with only children under six freed immediately. West Indian slaveholders were compensated collectively with £20 million, about 40 percent of British government spending that year, distributed through more than 40,000 separate claims. Around 800,000 enslaved people were recorded in the compensation process; none of them received any payment.
Primary source · 2 sources - 3 November 1839The Ottoman Empire
The Edict of Gulhane launches the Tanzimat reforms
On 3 November 1839, Sultan Abdulmejid I, who had succeeded his reforming father Mahmud II just months earlier, issued the Edict of Gulhane, opening a period of legal and administrative reform known as the Tanzimat that continued until 1876. The edict, pushed by reformist grand vizier Mustafa Resid Pasha, promised security of life, property, and honor for all Ottoman subjects regardless of religion, fair taxation, formal conscription rules, public trials, and an end to tax farming. Later Tanzimat measures created a new secular school system, reorganized the army along Prussian lines, established provincial representative assemblies, and introduced commercial and criminal law codes modeled on French law.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 29 August 1842The British Empire
The First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing
British merchants had built a lucrative trade smuggling opium grown in India into China, reversing Britain's trade deficit and creating mass addiction that Chinese authorities tried to suppress by destroying opium stockpiles at Canton in 1839. Britain responded with a war fought largely at sea, where its modern steam-powered navy overwhelmed Qing forces. Negotiations were held aboard the British warship HMS Cornwallis, anchored in the Yangtze, and the Treaty of Nanjing was signed on 29 August 1842. China ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain, opened five treaty ports including Shanghai and Canton to Western trade, and agreed to pay a substantial indemnity for the destroyed opium.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1845-1852The British Empire
The Great Famine in Ireland
A strain of the water mould Phytophthora infestans, causing potato blight, reached Ireland in 1845 and destroyed much of the crop that a third of Ireland's population relied on as its primary food source. The blight recurred across the whole country over the following years, at its worst in 1847, remembered as Black '47. Although Irish MPs and landowners in Parliament were aware of the unfolding crisis, large quantities of food continued to be exported from Ireland to Great Britain throughout the blight years. Roughly one million people died of starvation and related disease, and at least another million emigrated, reducing Ireland's population from about 8.5 million before the famine to 4.4 million by 1901.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1853-1856The Ottoman Empire
The Crimean War props up the 'sick man of Europe'
Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who had described the Ottoman Empire as the sick man of Europe in conversations with British and Austrian diplomats, demanded protective rights over the Ottoman Empire's Orthodox Christian subjects and occupied the Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1853. The Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia in October 1853, and Britain and France entered the war the following year to prevent Russian expansion at Ottoman expense, landing forces in the Crimea and besieging the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856, which barred Russian warships from the Black Sea and granted the Ottomans' Christian subjects a degree of official equality.
Reputable source · 2 sources - May to September 1857The Mughal Empire
Delhi Becomes the Center of the 1857 Rebellion
The rebellion against East India Company rule broke out at Meerut in May 1857 and spread rapidly across northern and central India, with its main centers at Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Jhansi, and Gwalior. Delhi, in the National Army Museum's account, became the center of the uprising because it was the seat of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the old and largely powerless Mughal emperor; the mutineers from Meerut went there immediately to seek his backing, which he gave reluctantly. British forces spent from June to September 1857 trying to retake the city, holding a ridge overlooking Delhi against more than 30,000 rebels through the summer heat and cholera outbreaks before reinforcements under Brigadier-General John Nicholson arrived in August with a siege train of 32 guns. The final assault came on 14 September, breaching the walls at the Kashmir Gate, and after a week of street fighting the city fell on 21 September; it was then ransacked in what the museum's account calls an orgy of looting and killing.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1858 (trial), died 1862 in exileThe Mughal Empire
The British Exile Bahadur Shah Zafar and End the Mughal Dynasty
After Delhi's fall, Bahadur Shah Zafar was captured and held in Delhi awaiting trial for his role in the rebellion; a photograph in the National Army Museum's collection, taken by Robert Christopher Tytler, shows him in captivity reclining on a bamboo charpoy and smoking a hookah, a scene one visitor, William Hodson's wife, described firsthand. Although there were calls for his execution, the museum's account notes a promise had been made on his surrender that his life would be spared, and he was instead sentenced to exile in Burma; his sons suffered a harsher fate, most of them killed by the British after they had surrendered. Bahadur Shah Zafar died in exile in Rangoon in 1862, ending the Mughal dynasty founded by Babur at Panipat 336 years earlier.
Primary source · 2 sources - 2 August 1858The British Empire
The Indian Rebellion and the Transfer to Crown Rule
The rebellion began at Meerut on 10 May 1857, when 85 sepoys of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry, jailed for refusing to use rifle cartridges rumoured to be greased with animal fat, were freed by their comrades, who then killed Europeans in the area and marched on Delhi. The uprising spread across northern and central India before Company and British forces crushed it in brutal fighting on both sides through 1858. In its aftermath, Parliament passed the Government of India Act on 2 August 1858, liquidating the East India Company and transferring its territories, armies, and administrative functions directly to the British Crown. The Governor-General gained the additional title of Viceroy, and a new India Office in London, headed by a Secretary of State, took over policy for the subcontinent.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 19th century CEThe Khmer Empire
Western Explorers Popularize Angkor and Restoration Work Begins
In the 19th century, Western explorers reached the overgrown site of Angkor and, through published accounts and illustrations, introduced the temple complex to a much wider international audience than had known of it before, according to World History Encyclopedia. Their reports prompted decades of clearing and restoration work at the site, work that continued into the 20th century under organizations like France's École française d'Extrême-Orient. Today Angkor is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1992, and Angkor Wat is among the most visited archaeological sites in the world.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1 January 1877The British Empire
Victoria Becomes Empress of India
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pushed the Royal Titles Bill through Parliament despite objections, recorded in Hansard, from opponents including William Gladstone, who argued the title 'Empress' carried unwelcome absolutist connotations. The bill received royal assent on 1 May 1876, formally granting Queen Victoria the title Empress of India, and the new title was proclaimed at the Delhi Durbar on 1 January 1877, a vast ceremonial gathering of Indian princes and British officials. Victoria never visited India herself. By the end of her 63-year reign in 1901 the empire she nominally headed as Empress spanned roughly a quarter of the world's land and population, held together by the Royal Navy and by global trade.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1876-1908The Ottoman Empire
Abdul Hamid II suspends the constitution and rules by autocracy
Abdul Hamid II became sultan in 1876 during the empire's First Constitutional Era, a brief experiment with an elected parliament and constitutional monarchy. Within two years he suspended the constitution and the parliament, reasserting absolute monarchical rule that lasted until 1908. During his three-decade reign he pursued technological modernization, including an extensive railway-building program, while suppressing political dissent and overseeing the Hamidian massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire's eastern provinces between 1894 and 1896, killings widely regarded by historians as a direct forerunner to the Armenian Genocide of the following decade.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 26 February 1885The British Empire
The Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened representatives of 14 states in Berlin, beginning discussions on 15 November 1884 and concluding with a General Act on 26 February 1885, to set rules for the accelerating European seizure of African territory. No African kingdom, state, or people had any representative present. The General Act established principles including free navigation of the Congo and Niger rivers and a requirement that new claims to African coastal territory be backed by effective occupation to be internationally recognized. Britain used the framework to expand its claims across East and Southern Africa, pursuing a strategic vision of continuous British territory from Cairo to the Cape, while other powers, chiefly France, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal, staked out their own zones.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 10 December 1898The Spanish Empire
The Spanish-American War Ends Spain's Empire in the Americas and the Pacific
By early 1898, tensions between the United States and Spain had been mounting for months over Spain's brutal suppression of the Cuban independence movement. After the U.S. battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor under mysterious circumstances on 15 February 1898, U.S. military intervention became likely. President William McKinley asked Congress on 11 April 1898 for authorization to intervene, and Congress passed a joint resolution shortly after. The war lasted only months: Spain's Pacific and Caribbean fleets were destroyed, and at Spain's request the French ambassador arranged a cease-fire signed on 12 August 1898. The war officially ended when the United States and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris on 10 December 1898. The treaty guaranteed Cuban independence, forced Spain to cede Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States, and required Spain to sell the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars; the U.S. Senate ratified it on 6 February 1899 by a single vote.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1899-1902The British Empire
The Boer War and Britain's Concentration Camps
Britain fought the Second Boer War against the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, descendants of Dutch settlers in southern Africa, largely to secure control of the region's gold and diamond wealth. When Boer fighters turned to guerrilla tactics after their conventional armies were defeated, the British army responded by burning farms and moving civilians, along with Black African labourers and residents on Boer land, into camps intended to deny the guerrillas supplies and support. Poor planning left the camps overcrowded with inadequate rations and almost no medical or sanitary facilities. Roughly 28,000 Boers, most of them women and children, died in these camps from malnutrition and disease, and around half that number of Black Africans died in separate camps. The Fawcett Commission, sent by the British government to investigate, found that most of the deaths had been preventable.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 24 July 1908The Ottoman Empire
The Young Turk Revolution restores the constitution
The Committee of Union and Progress, a reform movement popularly known as the Young Turks and based largely among army officers in the empire's Balkan territories, forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to restore the constitution he had suspended in 1878. Facing the threat of an armed march on the capital, Abdul Hamid reinstated the parliament on 24 July 1908, opening the Second Constitutional Era. The sultan attempted a countercoup the following April, but it failed, and he was deposed in 1909 and replaced by his brother Mehmed V, who ruled as a figurehead while the Committee of Union and Progress held real power.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1912-1913The Ottoman Empire
The Balkan Wars strip the empire of nearly all its European territory
In October 1912 the Balkan League, an alliance of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro formed specifically to exploit Ottoman weakness after the Young Turk period's instability, declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Bulgarian forces besieged the Ottoman fortress at Adrianople and won major battles at Kirk Kilisse and Lule Burgas, while Greek forces took Salonika and Serbian and Montenegrin forces advanced into Macedonia and Albania. By the time a peace treaty was signed in London in May 1913, the Ottomans had lost roughly 83 percent of their remaining European territory and 69 percent of their European population, retaining only eastern Thrace and Constantinople. A Second Balkan War broke out weeks later when Bulgaria turned on its former allies over the division of the spoils, this time with the Ottoman Empire joining the coalition against Bulgaria and recovering Adrianople.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 24 April 1915The Ottoman Empire
The Armenian Genocide begins with the arrest of Constantinople's Armenian leaders
On the night of 24 April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested roughly 250 to 270 Armenian political leaders, writers, and clergy in Constantinople and deported them, a roundup now commemorated annually as the start of the Armenian Genocide. Over the following months the Committee of Union and Progress government, then fighting Russia in the Caucasus and citing fears of Armenian collaboration with Russian forces, ordered the mass deportation and killing of the empire's Armenian population, then estimated at about 1.5 million people concentrated in eastern Anatolia. American diplomats stationed in the empire, including Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., cabled the State Department in real time that the persecution amounted to a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations through arbitrary arrests, torture, and mass deportation accompanied by killing. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum documents that at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were killed between spring 1915 and autumn 1916, through massacre, forced marches, exposure, and starvation.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1914-1918The British Empire
The Empire Goes to War, 1914-1918
When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, its declaration bound the entire empire, not just the British Isles. Over the following four years more than 3 million soldiers and labourers from across the empire and Commonwealth served alongside the British Army, from a starting force that had been small and designed chiefly to police colonial territories. Roughly 140,000 Indian troops reached the Western Front by the war's end, alongside soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and around 15,000 recruits from the West Indies, including 10,000 from Jamaica, who served largely as labourers in ammunition dumps and gun emplacements under frequent enemy fire. Campaigns such as Gallipoli in 1915 inflicted especially heavy losses on Australian and New Zealand troops.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 30 October 1918The Ottoman Empire
The Armistice of Mudros ends Ottoman participation in the war
As the Central Powers collapsed on multiple fronts in autumn 1918, the Ottoman government sued for peace. On 30 October 1918, Ottoman Minister of Marine Affairs Rauf Bey signed the Armistice of Mudros with British Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe aboard HMS Agamemnon, anchored off the Aegean island of Lemnos. The armistice ended Ottoman military participation in the war and opened the empire's remaining territory, including Constantinople itself, to Allied occupation. Rauf Bey had been chosen partly because he had not been involved in the deportation and mass killing of the empire's Armenian population and maintained relations with figures across the political spectrum, making him an acceptable Ottoman signatory to the Allies.
General source · 2 sources - 13 April 1919The British Empire
The Amritsar Massacre
On 13 April 1919, during the Sikh festival of Baisakhi, a large crowd gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in Amritsar with few exits, some to celebrate the festival and others to protest the recent imprisonment of nationalist leaders under the Rowlatt Act. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, who had been sent to restore order after unrest that killed several Europeans, arrived with troops. His armoured car could not fit through the narrow passage into the square, so his men entered on foot and, without any warning to disperse, Dyer ordered them to open fire directly into the crowd. Troops kept firing until their ammunition ran low. At least 379 people were killed and more than 1,500 wounded, though Indian estimates put the toll higher. An official inquiry led to Dyer's dismissal from the army, but he remained unrepentant and was celebrated by some in Britain as having preserved order.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1919-1922The Ottoman Empire
Mustafa Kemal leads the Turkish War of Independence
Mustafa Kemal, a former Ottoman army officer who had distinguished himself commanding the defense at Gallipoli in 1915, landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast on 19 May 1919, a date now treated as the start of modern Turkish nationalist history. He organized resistance to Allied occupation and the Treaty of Sevres partition from Ankara, where the Turkish Grand National Assembly declared itself the legitimate government of the Turkish people on 23 April 1920, rivaling the occupied Ottoman government in Constantinople. Turkish nationalist forces fought Armenian, French, and especially Greek forces occupying western Anatolia; Kemal's decisive attack at the Battle of Dumlupinar in August 1922 broke the Greek lines, and Turkish forces retook Smyrna on 9 September 1922, effectively ending large-scale fighting.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 10 August 1920The Ottoman Empire
The Treaty of Sevres tries to partition what remains of the empire
On 10 August 1920, representatives of the Allied powers and the Ottoman government signed the Treaty of Sevres, drafted at the Paris Peace Conference to formally dismantle what remained of the Ottoman Empire after the war. Under its terms, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria would gain independence or pass to European mandates, Italy would receive the Dodecanese islands and Rhodes, Greece would receive Thrace and the Turkish Aegean islands along with a zone around Smyrna, and provisions called for an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan. The treaty was never ratified by the Ottoman parliament, and Turkish nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal, organizing from Ankara rather than occupied Constantinople, rejected its terms outright and continued fighting.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1 November 1922The Ottoman Empire
The Grand National Assembly abolishes the Ottoman sultanate
With the Turkish War of Independence militarily won and Allied occupying forces withdrawing from Anatolia, the Grand National Assembly in Ankara formally abolished the Ottoman sultanate on 1 November 1922, separating the offices of sultan and caliph and ending 623 years of rule by the House of Osman as a governing monarchy. The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, left Constantinople aboard the British warship HMS Malaya on 17 November 1922, going into exile. The Assembly retained the caliphate as a separate religious office under a different member of the dynasty, but the following year, once the Treaty of Lausanne on 24 July 1923 secured international recognition of Turkish sovereignty, the Republic of Turkey was formally proclaimed on 29 October 1923 with Ankara as its capital and Mustafa Kemal as its first president.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 29 October 1923The Ottoman Empire
The Republic of Turkey is proclaimed
On 29 October 1923, the Grand National Assembly formally proclaimed the Republic of Turkey, with Ankara, rather than Ottoman Constantinople, as its capital. Mustafa Kemal became the republic's first president and immediately began a program of political, economic, and cultural reform intended to transform the former Ottoman territory into a modern, secular nation-state, later formalized under the ideology of Kemalism, built on republicanism, secularism, and nationalism. In March 1924, the Assembly abolished the Ottoman caliphate as well, the last remaining office connected to the House of Osman, and closed the religious courts and schools that had operated under it.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 12 March - 6 April 1930The British Empire
Gandhi's Salt March
On 12 March 1930 Mahatma Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad with 78 followers on a march of roughly 240 miles to the coastal village of Dandi, to break Britain's legal monopoly on salt production by making salt from seawater himself. Crowds grew along the route as Gandhi spoke and led prayers at stops throughout the 24-day march. On reaching Dandi, he found that police had crushed the salt deposits on the beach into the mud, but on 6 April 1930 he bent down and picked up a lump of natural salt anyway, a deliberate act of lawbreaking. The gesture triggered mass civil disobedience against the salt laws across India, and more than 60,000 people were jailed in the campaign that followed, though the British government made no immediate major concessions.
Primary source · 2 sources The Bengal Famine of 1943
A famine struck Bengal and Orissa in 1943, during the Second World War, killing an estimated three million people from starvation and diseases worsened by malnutrition and population displacement. Unlike most famines, this one was not primarily caused by a shortfall in food production: rice supplies were only marginally below the five-year average and were actually higher than in 1941, a year with no famine. Wartime inflation drove food grain prices up by more than 300 percent between 1939 and 1943 while agricultural wages rose only 30 percent, pricing labourers out of the market for rice they had previously been able to afford. British authorities in London, anticipating a Japanese invasion after the fall of Burma, restricted the movement of boats and grain within Bengal under a scorched-earth policy and limited shipping allocated for relief, citing wartime shortages, even as food continued to be exported to other parts of the war effort.
Peer-reviewed · 2 sources- 15 August 1947The British Empire
Indian Independence and Partition
Weakened by two world wars and facing an independence movement that neither repression nor reform had contained, Britain moved its planned withdrawal from India forward by a year. On 3 June 1947 Viceroy Lord Mountbatten announced with Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru and Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah that Britain would transfer power to two new dominions, India and Pakistan. Independence was declared on 14 and 15 August 1947, but the actual border, splitting the provinces of Punjab and Bengal along a roughly even division of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh populations, was not announced until two days later, on 17 August. In the following months more than 15 million people migrated across the new borders in one of the largest forced migrations in history, accompanied by communal violence in which at least a million people died.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1952-1960The British Empire
The Mau Mau Uprising and the Kenya Emergency
From 1952 the Mau Mau, drawn largely from the Kikuyu people of Kenya, waged an armed rebellion against British colonial rule and the seizure of land by white settlers. Britain declared a state of emergency and, through operations such as Operation Anvil, systematically screened and detained tens of thousands of Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru people, eventually passing at least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 150,000 people through a network of dozens of detention camps. Detainees were funnelled through the camps, sometimes called 'the pipeline,' where torture, forced labour, and isolation were routine. Those judged 'irreconcilable' were sent to remote camps such as Hola, where eleven detainees were beaten to death in March 1959, a killing that helped bring the emergency to an end. Decades later the British government formally apologized and paid compensation to elderly survivors of the camps.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 29 October 1956The British Empire
The Suez Crisis
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, determined to reverse the move, secretly agreed with France and Israel in October that Israel would attack across the Sinai Peninsula, giving Britain and France pretext to intervene as supposedly neutral peacekeepers protecting the canal. Israeli forces attacked on 29 October 1956, advancing to within ten miles of the canal, and British and French troops landed on 5 to 6 November. The Eisenhower administration, wary of appearing to endorse European colonialism while it was condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary that same week, applied severe financial and diplomatic pressure, forcing Britain and France to halt the operation and withdraw by December. Eden's health collapsed under the strain and he resigned soon after returning from a recuperative trip to Jamaica.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 3 February 1960The British Empire
The Wind of Change and African Decolonization
Ghana became Britain's first African colony to achieve independence in 1957. On 3 February 1960, addressing the Parliament of South Africa in Cape Town, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared: 'The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.' The speech, delivered in a country then governed under apartheid, signalled that Macmillan's Conservative government would no longer try to hold back independence movements across Britain's remaining African territories. Independence followed rapidly: Nigeria in 1960, Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962, and Kenya in 1963 among more than twenty former colonies across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean that became sovereign states over the following decade.
Primary source · 2 sources - 1 July 1997The British Empire
The Handover of Hong Kong
Britain and China signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on 19 December 1984, under which Britain agreed to transfer sovereignty over Hong Kong, including Hong Kong Island ceded in 1842, Kowloon ceded in 1860, and the New Territories held on a 99-year lease since 1898, to the People's Republic of China. The declaration established the 'one country, two systems' principle, under which Hong Kong's capitalist economic system and civil freedoms would remain unchanged for fifty years after the handover, distinct from mainland China's socialist system. At midnight on 1 July 1997 Britain formally transferred sovereignty, ending 156 years of colonial administration, and Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China under the leadership of its first Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2007-2013 (mapping a city occupied c. 9th-15th centuries)The Khmer Empire
Lidar Surveys Confirm Angkor Was the Largest Pre-industrial City on Earth
Beginning with a 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and continuing through lidar missions flown in 2012, the University of Sydney's Greater Angkor Project, led by Professor Roland Fletcher and Dr. Damian Evans, mapped the full extent of the settlement surrounding Angkor's temples. Their surveys found a sprawling, low-density urban complex covering roughly 1,000 square kilometers, encompassing a grid of roads, house mounds, ponds, and local shrines that stretched far beyond the monumental temple core most visitors see today. Estimates drawn from this survey work put the population of Greater Angkor at somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 people at its height in the 13th century, making it by area the largest urban settlement anywhere in the pre-industrial world.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2012 (discoveries describing a city founded c. 802 CE)The Khmer Empire
Lidar Reveals Mahendraparvata as a Planned Grid City
In 2012, a team led by archaeologists Jean-Baptiste Chevance and Damian Evans used airborne lidar to scan the Phnom Kulen plateau and rediscovered the full extent of Jayavarman II's capital, a city that had been noted from inscriptions for over a century but never mapped. Smithsonian Magazine's on-site reporting describes a sprawling network of temples, palaces, ordinary dwellings, and waterworks infrastructure invisible to earlier ground surveys. UNESCO's tentative-list documentation for the site, citing Chevance's 2019 published findings, calls Mahendraparvata the first large-scale gridded city known in the Khmer world, a design that would not reappear at this scale until the 12th century.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2015The Khmer Empire
2015 Surveys Show Angkor Wat's Precinct Was Larger and Not Only for the Elite
A 2015 survey by University of Sydney archaeologists Roland Fletcher and Damian Evans, using lidar, ground-penetrating radar, and excavation, found that Angkor Wat's surrounding precinct was far larger and more populated than previously understood. The team discovered a grid of roads, ponds, and house mounds indicating ordinary residential occupation around the temple, not just a sacred zone reserved for royalty and priests, and identified an ensemble of buried towers built and later demolished during the temple's construction period. To the south they found a massive structure over 1,500 by 600 meters whose purpose remains unknown and which has no known equivalent anywhere else at Angkor.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 2015-2017 CE (excavation of a 15th-16th century structure)The Aztec Empire
Archaeologists Uncover the Huey Tzompantli Skull Tower
In 2015, researchers from the Urban Archaeology Program of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, digging beneath the Templo Mayor site in Mexico City, uncovered a section of the Huey Tzompantli, the temple's main trophy structure for displaying the skulls of sacrificial victims, initially finding 484 skulls. Smithsonian Magazine reported that continued excavation eventually brought the total count to roughly 650 skulls, built up in at least three distinct construction phases dated to between about 1486 and 1502, the reign of Ahuitzotl. Analysis of the remains found that around a quarter belonged to women and children, contradicting earlier assumptions that the tower held only defeated male warriors. The skulls, bonded together with lime, had first been displayed on smaller racks elsewhere in the city before being incorporated into the larger tower structure, and Spanish forces and their indigenous allies partially destroyed the tower when they occupied Tenochtitlan in the 1520s.
Reputable source · 2 sources