Empires
Events · 116
- 330 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Founding of Constantinople
In 330 CE the Roman emperor Constantine the Great dedicated a magnificent new capital on the site of the old Greek city of Byzantium, at the strategic crossing between Europe and Asia. He called it 'New Rome,' but it became known as Constantinople — the city of Constantine. Christian from its foundation, it was built to be the greatest city in the world.
Reputable source - 476 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Survival of the Roman East
When the Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the last Western emperor in 476 CE and the Western Roman Empire dissolved into barbarian kingdoms, the wealthier, more urbanized eastern half survived intact. Ruled from Constantinople, it carried on as the Roman Empire — Greek-speaking and Christian, but proudly Roman. Historians call it the Byzantine Empire; its people simply called themselves Romans.
Reputable source - 527–565 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Justinian I and the Dream of Rome Restored
The emperor Justinian I came to the throne in 527 determined to restore the Roman Empire to its ancient glory. In a reign of nearly forty years he launched wars to reconquer the lost West, rebuilt Constantinople in splendour, and reformed the empire's law and administration — the last great flourishing of the ancient Roman world.
Reputable source - 527–548 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Theodora and the Nika Riots
Justinian's wife Theodora, a former actress of humble birth, became one of the most powerful empresses in history. In 532, when the Nika Riots — sparked by the chariot-racing factions of the Hippodrome — engulfed Constantinople and nearly toppled Justinian, he prepared to flee. Theodora is said to have shamed him into staying with the words that royal purple made a fine burial shroud. The revolt was crushed, with tens of thousands killed, and Justinian's throne was secured.
Reputable source - 533–554 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Belisarius and the Reconquest
Justinian's brilliant general Belisarius carried out the emperor's dream of reconquest. In 533–534 he destroyed the Vandal kingdom of North Africa, and from 535 he led the long, grinding Gothic War to retake Italy, capturing Rome and Ravenna. Byzantine armies also won a foothold in southern Spain.
Reputable source - 529–534 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Code of Justinian
Justinian ordered a team of jurists led by Tribonian to gather a thousand years of tangled Roman law into a single, coherent body of work — the Corpus Juris Civilis. It comprised the Codex of imperial laws, the Digest distilling the writings of the great Roman jurists, the Institutes as a textbook for students, and later new laws called the Novellae. Rediscovered in medieval Italy, it was studied at Bologna and spread across Europe.
Reputable source - 537 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Hagia Sophia
After the old cathedral was burned in the Nika Riots, Justinian rebuilt it on a scale never seen before. Completed in 537, the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) was crowned by an enormous dome that seemed to float on light. On entering it, the emperor is said to have exclaimed, 'Solomon, I have outdone you.' For nearly a thousand years it was the largest enclosed space in the world.
Reputable source - 541–549 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Plague of Justinian
At the height of Justinian's reign, the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague erupted in the empire. Spreading along trade routes from Egypt, it reached Constantinople in 542, killing enormous numbers — the emperor himself caught it but survived. The pandemic recurred for two centuries and may have killed tens of millions around the Mediterranean.
Reputable source - c. 550 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Procopius and the Secret History
Procopius of Caesarea, who served on Belisarius's staff, became the great historian of Justinian's age. His official Wars and Buildings chronicled the emperor's campaigns and monuments — but in a scandalous private work, the Secret History, he savaged Justinian and Theodora as corrupt and even demonic. It was not published until long after his death.
Reputable source - 610–641 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Heraclius and the Last Great War of Antiquity
Heraclius seized the throne in 610 to find the empire on the brink of collapse, its eastern provinces overrun by the Sasanian Persians, who had even carried off the True Cross from Jerusalem. Against the odds he reorganized the state and, in a daring counteroffensive, crushed Persia at the Battle of Nineveh in 627. He recovered the lost provinces and the True Cross — but the two exhausted empires were left defenceless.
Reputable source - 634–642 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Arab Conquests and the Loss of the East
In the 630s the armies of the new Islamic caliphate exploded out of Arabia. At the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 they annihilated a Byzantine army, and the empire abandoned Syria; Jerusalem fell in 637 and Egypt by 642. The empire's richest and most populous provinces — the granary of Egypt and the wealth of the Levant — were gone forever.
Reputable source - 674–718 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Arab Sieges and Greek Fire
Twice the Arab armies laid siege to Constantinople itself — in 674–678 and again in 717–718 — and twice the city held. Its salvation lay in two great defences: the massive triple Theodosian Walls, the strongest fortifications of the medieval world, and 'Greek fire,' a secret incendiary weapon sprayed from siphons that burned even on water and terrified enemy fleets. Its exact recipe was so closely guarded that it is lost to this day.
Reputable source - 726–843 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Iconoclasm Controversy
For over a century the empire was torn by a bitter dispute over religious images, or icons. Beginning with Emperor Leo III around 726, iconoclast emperors who believed icons were idolatrous ordered them destroyed, while their opponents venerated them. The conflict convulsed church and state until the veneration of icons was finally and permanently restored in 843, an event still celebrated as the 'Triumph of Orthodoxy.'
Reputable source - 4th–11th centuriesThe Byzantine Empire
The Gold Solidus: Byzantium's Coin
Introduced by Constantine in the early 4th century, the Byzantine gold coin — the solidus or nomisma — held its weight and purity almost unchanged for some 700 years. Trusted from western Europe to India, it functioned as the medieval world's dollar: the standard against which other currencies were measured. Only in the 11th century was it debased, before Alexios I Komnenos replaced it in 1092.
Reputable source - 988 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Conversion of the Rus
In 988 Vladimir, grand prince of Kievan Rus, adopted Christianity from Constantinople and had his people baptized in the Dnieper. The conversion was sealed by a marriage alliance with the emperor Basil II. Byzantine priests, art, and the Church Slavonic liturgy followed, and Kyiv became a great centre of Orthodox Christianity.
Reputable source - 10th–14th centuriesThe Byzantine Empire
The Varangian Guard
Around 988 the emperor Basil II received 6,000 warriors sent by Vladimir of the Rus and forged them into an elite personal bodyguard — the Varangian Guard. Recruited from Norse, Rus, and later Anglo-Saxon fighting men, these axe-wielding foreigners, loyal to the emperor alone, guarded the person of the ruler for centuries.
Reputable source - 4th–15th centuriesThe Byzantine Empire
Byzantine Art and the Icon
Across its long life Byzantium produced some of the most influential art of the Middle Ages: shimmering gold-ground mosaics, luxurious ivories and enamels, illuminated manuscripts, and above all the icon — a sacred image of Christ, the Virgin, or the saints, believed to open a window onto the divine. This tradition spread with Orthodoxy across the Slavic and Mediterranean worlds.
Reputable source - 976–1025 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Basil II, the Bulgar-Slayer
Under Basil II the medieval empire reached its height. A tireless soldier-emperor, he crushed internal rebellions and waged a decades-long war against the Bulgarian Empire. After his decisive victory at Kleidion in 1014, he is said to have blinded thousands of Bulgar captives — earning the name 'Bulgar-Slayer.' By his death in 1025 he had roughly doubled the empire's territory.
Reputable source - 1054 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Great Schism
Centuries of growing division between the Greek-speaking Eastern church, led by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Latin Western church, led by the Pope in Rome, came to a head in 1054. Legates of the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated one another, formalizing a split over papal authority, doctrine, and ritual.
Reputable source - 1071 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Battle of Manzikert
At Manzikert in eastern Anatolia in 1071, the Byzantine army was crushed by the Seljuk Turks and the emperor Romanos IV himself was captured. In the chaos and civil war that followed, the Turks overran Anatolia — the empire's heartland and its main source of soldiers and revenue.
Reputable source - 1081–1118 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Alexios I Komnenos and the First Crusade
Alexios I Komnenos seized the throne in 1081 and hauled the empire back from the brink, rebuilding its finances, army, and coinage. Facing the Seljuk Turks, he appealed to the West for mercenaries — and in 1095 Pope Urban II answered by launching the First Crusade. The passing crusader armies helped Byzantium recover territory, but also sowed dangerous distrust between East and West.
Reputable source - c. 1148 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Anna Komnene and the Alexiad
Anna Komnene, the learned daughter of Alexios I, wrote the Alexiad — a sweeping history of her father's reign and the coming of the First Crusade, composed in archaizing Greek. Barred from power after a failed bid for the throne, she retired to a convent and turned to scholarship, producing one of the masterpieces of medieval literature.
Reputable source - 1143–1180 CEThe Byzantine Empire
Manuel I Komnenos and the Last Revival
Manuel I Komnenos, the last great emperor of his dynasty, presided over a final flowering of Byzantine power, wealth, and culture. An energetic and ambitious ruler, he campaigned from Italy to the Holy Land and dominated the empire's neighbours. But his overreaching wars strained the state, and his defeat by the Seljuks at Myriokephalon in 1176 dashed hopes of retaking the Anatolian interior.
Reputable source - c. 1162The Mongol Empire
The Birth of Temüjin
The future Genghis Khan was born Temüjin, son of the Mongol chieftain Yesügei, around 1162 on the harsh grasslands of Mongolia. By tradition he came into the world clutching a clot of blood in his fist — an omen, the sagas said, of the conqueror he would become.
Reputable source - c. 1171The Mongol Empire
A Fatherless Boy on the Steppe
When Temüjin was still a boy, his father Yesügei was poisoned by rival Tatars. His clan then abandoned the widow and her children on the open steppe, left to survive on roots and small game. In these desperate years the young Temüjin killed his own half-brother in a dispute and was for a time held captive in a wooden cangue.
Reputable source - c. 1190s–1204The Mongol Empire
Temüjin Unites the Steppe Tribes
Rising through alliance and war, Temüjin bound himself to the powerful Kereyid khan Toghrul (Ong Khan) and to his blood-brother Jamukha — then broke with both as he outgrew them. In a series of campaigns he crushed the great tribal confederations one by one: the Tatars, the Kereyids, the Naimans, and the Merkids, absorbing their warriors into his own growing following.
Reputable source - 1204 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople
In 1204 the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, diverted from the Holy Land, turned on Constantinople itself. They stormed and brutally sacked the great Christian city, carrying off or destroying its treasures and installing a short-lived Latin empire in its place. The Byzantine state fractured into rival successor kingdoms.
Reputable source Genghis Khan Proclaimed at the Kurultai
In 1206 a great assembly (kurultai) of the Mongol nobility proclaimed Temüjin their supreme leader, giving him the title Genghis Khan — usually rendered 'universal ruler.' He now stood at the head of a unified Mongol nation, and set about organizing it for war and government, including a new written script for the Mongol language.
Reputable source- from 1206The Mongol Empire
The Yasa and the Machinery of Empire
Genghis Khan built a state as well as an army. He issued a body of law, the Yasa, that bound Mongol and conquered peoples alike; promoted men by merit and loyalty rather than birth; and organized society and the military into a strict decimal system of tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten-thousands. Across the empire he established the Yam, a network of relay stations where couriers could change horses and carry messages and travelers vast distances at speed.
Reputable source - early 13th centuryThe Mongol Empire
The Mongol War Machine
The Mongols conquered so much so fast because of an army unlike any other. Every man was a mounted archer, able to shoot the powerful composite bow accurately at a gallop and to ride for days on a string of hardy ponies. Organized in a strict decimal system, they used feigned retreats, encirclement, and coordinated columns, adopted siege engineers and gunpowder weapons from conquered China, and were linked across the empire by the yam relay network.
Reputable source The Conquest of Western Xia
Genghis Khan's first great campaign against a settled state struck the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia in northwestern China. Mongol armies raided and besieged its cities and forced its king to submit and pay tribute, giving the nomads their first taste of siege warfare against walled towns.
Reputable sourceThe Fall of Jin China's Capital, Zhongdu
From 1211 Genghis Khan invaded the Jin dynasty, the Jurchen state that ruled northern China. After years of war the Jin moved their court south, and in 1215 the Mongols captured and burned their northern capital, Zhongdu — on the site of modern Beijing — in a sack remembered for its slaughter and destruction.
Reputable source- 1219–1221The Mongol Empire
The Destruction of the Khwarazmian Empire
When the Khwarazmian shah, ruler of a vast realm across Central Asia and Persia, executed a Mongol trade caravan and envoys, Genghis Khan unleashed a war of annihilation. Between 1219 and 1221 the Mongols stormed the great cities of the Silk Road — Bukhara and Samarkand among them — massacring populations and razing whole towns in a campaign of extraordinary devastation.
Reputable source · 2 sources - August 1227The Mongol Empire
The Death of Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan died in August 1227, aged around 65, while campaigning to crush the Western Xia's final revolt. The cause is unknown — perhaps illness or a fall from his horse. By his wish he was buried in secret; the location of his tomb has never been found. He left the empire to his family, with his third son Ögedei designated as heir.
Reputable source Ögedei Khan and Karakorum
When Genghis Khan died in 1227, the empire passed not to a single heir but to his family, with his son Ögedei elected Great Khan in 1229. Ögedei pressed the conquests forward on every front and built a fixed capital at Karakorum in the Mongolian heartland — a cosmopolitan city drawing merchants, craftsmen, and envoys from across Eurasia, with churches, mosques, and temples side by side.
Reputable source · 2 sources- 1237–1240The Mongol Empire
The Conquest of the Rus' and the Sack of Kiev
A great western campaign under Genghis Khan's grandson Batu and the veteran general Subutai fell on the Rus' principalities. Riding out of the frozen steppe, the Mongols stormed and burned Ryazan and Vladimir, and in December 1240 took Kiev after a short siege, putting its people to the sword and reducing the once-great city to ruins.
Reputable source - April 1241The Mongol Empire
The Invasion of Europe: Legnica and Hungary
In the spring of 1241 the Mongols drove deep into Central Europe on two fronts. At Legnica (Liegnitz) in Poland they destroyed an army of Polish and German knights under Duke Henry the Pious, who was killed and his head paraded on a spike. Days later another Mongol army shattered the Hungarians and ravaged the kingdom, sacking Buda, Pest, and Esztergom.
Reputable source Ögedei's Death Spares Europe
With Europe seemingly at their mercy, the Mongols suddenly turned back. News had arrived of the death of the Great Khan Ögedei in December 1241, and the princes of the blood withdrew east toward Mongolia to take part in choosing his successor. By 1242 the armies had pulled back north of the Black Sea.
Reputable source · 2 sources- from the 1240sThe Mongol Empire
The Golden Horde and the Yoke over Russia
The western Mongol lands became the khanate of the Golden Horde, founded by Batu Khan on the lower Volga. For more than two centuries it dominated the Russian principalities, exacting tribute and confirming or deposing their princes. Russian rulers had to travel to the Horde's court to secure the right to rule.
Reputable source - 1241–1246The Mongol Empire
Töregene Khatun's Regency
After Ögedei's death, his widow Töregene Khatun seized control as regent and ruled the empire for some five years, maneuvering to have her son Güyük elected Great Khan at a kurultai in 1246. She dismissed her husband's ministers and installed her own, wielding real power over the largest empire on earth.
Reputable source - c. 1240s–1252The Mongol Empire
Sorghaghtani Beki, Mother of Khans
Sorghaghtani Beki, the widow of Genghis Khan's youngest son Tolui, was among the most capable politicians of the age. A Nestorian Christian who patronized many faiths and prized education, she groomed her four sons for power and, through skillful alliance-building, engineered the transfer of supreme rule to her line.
Reputable source Möngke Khan and the Reunified Empire
In 1251, with his mother Sorghaghtani's backing, Möngke — Tolui's eldest son — was elected Great Khan, wresting supreme power from the line of Ögedei in a bloody purge of rivals. An energetic and able ruler, he reformed the administration and launched two great new campaigns: his brother Hülegü westward into the Islamic world, and his brother Kublai southward against Song China.
Reputable sourceHülegü and the Sack of Baghdad
In 1258 Genghis Khan's grandson Hülegü led a Mongol army against Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate and a great center of Islamic learning. After a short siege the city fell and was sacked, its libraries destroyed and the caliph and much of the population killed. Hülegü founded the Ilkhanate to rule Persia and the Middle East.
Reputable sourceThe Death of Möngke Khan
In 1259, while campaigning against Song China, the Great Khan Möngke died suddenly — of illness, or perhaps dysentery or a battle wound. With no clear successor and the ruling brothers scattered across three continents, the vast empire was thrown into a succession crisis.
Reputable source- September 1260The Mongol Empire
The Battle of Ain Jalut
As Hülegü pulled the bulk of his army back after Möngke's death, the Egyptian Mamluks marched to meet the remaining Mongol force in Palestine. At Ain Jalut ('the Spring of Goliath') in September 1260, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz and his general Baybars lured the Mongols under Kitbuqa into a trap and destroyed them.
Reputable source - 1204–1261 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Empire in Exile and the Recovery of Constantinople
After 1204 Byzantine exiles founded a successor state at Nicaea in Anatolia, which kept the imperial tradition alive and slowly gathered strength. In 1261 the Nicaean emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos recaptured Constantinople almost by chance, when his general slipped into the poorly defended city. The empire was restored — but as a much-diminished power.
Reputable source - 1260–1264The Mongol Empire
The Toluid Civil War: Kublai vs Ariq Böke
Möngke's death set his brothers against each other. Kublai, in China, and Ariq Böke, in Mongolia, each had himself proclaimed Great Khan by rival assemblies in 1260, and for four years they fought a civil war for supremacy. Kublai, drawing on the wealth of China, finally forced Ariq Böke to surrender in 1264.
Reputable source - 1260s onwardThe Mongol Empire
The Empire Splits into Four Khanates
After the civil war, the Mongol Empire settled into four increasingly independent realms: the Yuan dynasty of Kublai in the east; the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia; the Golden Horde on the Russian steppe; and the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Middle East. The Great Khan in China held only nominal authority over the others.
Reputable source Kublai Khan Founds the Yuan Dynasty
In 1271 Kublai Khan proclaimed a new Chinese dynasty, the Yuan, ruling as both Great Khan of the Mongols and Emperor of China. He built a magnificent capital at Dadu, on the site of modern Beijing, and adopted Chinese forms of government while keeping the Mongols a privileged ruling caste.
Reputable source- c. 1271–1295The Mongol Empire
Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan
Around 1275 the young Venetian merchant Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan, entered his service, and — by his own account — spent some seventeen years traveling and working within the empire. The book of his travels, dictated after his return, later amazed Europe with its tales of the fabulous wealth and marvels of the East.
Reputable source The Conquest of Song China Completed
After decades of hard fighting against the wealthy, populous Southern Song — including the years-long siege of the Yangtze fortress of Xiangyang — Kublai's forces finally overwhelmed the last Song resistance. In 1279 the dynasty ended in a naval catastrophe at Yamen, where a loyal official is said to have leapt into the sea clutching the boy emperor rather than surrender.
Reputable source- 1274 & 1281The Mongol Empire
The Failed Invasions of Japan
Twice, in 1274 and 1281, Kublai Khan sent enormous fleets to conquer Japan. Both times the samurai defended fiercely, but it was violent typhoons — remembered by the Japanese as the kamikaze, or 'divine winds' — that wrecked the Mongol fleets and saved Japan from invasion.
Reputable source - late 13th–14th centuryThe Mongol Empire
The Pax Mongolica
With a single power holding the Silk Road from China to the Black Sea, the 'Mongol peace' made overland trade and travel safer than ever before. Merchants, missionaries, and envoys crossed Eurasia; goods, technologies, and ideas — paper money, gunpowder, printing, art, and knowledge — flowed between East and West. The Mongols, though brutal in war, were famously tolerant in religion, protecting many faiths across their domains.
Reputable source The Death of Kublai Khan
Kublai Khan died in 1294, aged nearly 80, after a reign that saw the empire at its height and himself grown heavy and grief-stricken in his final years. He was the last Great Khan whom the other khanates even nominally recognized, and the last to command real prestige across the Mongol world.
Reputable sourceGhazan and the Ilkhanate's Conversion to Islam
In 1295 the Ilkhan Ghazan, ruler of Mongol Persia, converted to Islam — the faith of most of his subjects — and made it the state religion, the first Ilkhan to do so. He also carried out sweeping reforms of taxation, coinage, and administration and sponsored a great flowering of Persian art, science, and history.
Reputable source- c. 1299 CEThe Ottoman Empire
Osman I Founds the Ottoman State
Around 1299, a Turkish frontier chieftain named Osman I carved out a small principality (beylik) in northwest Anatolia, on the fraying edge of the Byzantine Empire. His followers took his name — Osmanli, or Ottomans.
Reputable source The Collapse of the Ilkhanate
The Ilkhanate reached a cultured peak in the early 1300s, but when the last effective Ilkhan, Abu Sa'id, died without an heir in 1335, the state rapidly disintegrated. Rival warlords and puppet khans fought over the fragments, and within a generation the Mongol dynasty in Persia had vanished.
Reputable source- 1346–1353The Mongol Empire
The Black Death Rides the Trade Routes
The same Mongol peace that carried silk and silver across Eurasia also carried plague. Erupting in Central Asia, the Black Death spread west along the trade routes; according to one account it was hurled into the Genoese port of Caffa on the Black Sea when a besieging Mongol army catapulted infected corpses over the walls. From there it reached Europe by 1347 and killed perhaps a third of its people within a few years.
Reputable source - 1326–1354 CEThe Ottoman Empire
Orhan, Bursa, and the Crossing into Europe
Osman's son Orhan captured Bursa in 1326 and made it the Ottoman capital, then seized Byzantine cities across Anatolia. By 1354 the Ottomans had crossed the Dardanelles at Gallipoli, gaining their first foothold in Europe.
Reputable source - from 1354The Byzantine Empire
The Ottoman Advance into Europe
As Byzantium tore itself apart in civil wars, a new power rose on its eastern frontier: the Ottoman Turks. In 1354 the Ottomans seized Gallipoli and gained their first foothold in Europe, then swept across the Balkans — taking Adrianople around 1362 and encircling Constantinople. The emperors were reduced to vassals and tribute-payers of the sultan.
Reputable source The Fall of the Yuan Dynasty
Weakened by factional strife, corruption, floods, famine, and the arrival of the Black Death, Mongol rule in China faltered in the 14th century. In 1368 a peasant-led rebellion drove the Yuan out of Beijing and founded the native Ming dynasty. The Mongol court retreated back to the steppe.
Reputable source- from the 14th centuryThe Ottoman Empire
The Janissaries and the Devshirme
The Ottomans built an elite standing army, the Janissaries, through the devshirme — a levy of Christian boys from the Balkans who were converted to Islam and trained as fiercely loyal soldiers of the sultan.
Reputable source - 14th–15th centuryThe Mongol Empire
The Long Decline of the Golden Horde
The Golden Horde outlasted the other khanates but slowly weakened through the 14th century, torn by succession struggles and battered by the Black Death. In 1380 a Russian army under Dmitry Donskoy of Moscow won a famous victory at Kulikovo — a crack in Mongol invincibility — and over the following century the Horde fractured into smaller khanates before fading away.
Reputable source - 1389 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Battle of Kosovo
At the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Sultan Murad I broke a Serbian-led coalition and secured Ottoman dominance over the Balkans — though Murad himself was killed at the moment of victory.
Reputable source - 1370–1405The Mongol Empire
Timur: The Last Great Steppe Conqueror
From the ruins of the Chagatai Khanate, a Turco-Mongol warlord named Timur (Tamerlane) built a new empire from his capital at Samarkand. Between 1370 and his death in 1405 he waged devastating campaigns across Persia, India, and the Middle East, crushing the Golden Horde and the rising Ottomans, and leaving towers of skulls in his wake — all while claiming the mantle of Genghis Khan.
Reputable source - September 1396 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Battle of Nicopolis
In 1396 Sultan Bayezid I 'the Thunderbolt' annihilated a grand crusader army of French, Hungarian and other European knights at Nicopolis, in what is now Bulgaria.
Reputable source - 1402 CEThe Ottoman Empire
Timur and the Ottoman Interregnum
In 1402 the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) crushed the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara and captured Sultan Bayezid I. The empire fractured into a decade of civil war known as the Interregnum before Mehmed I reunited it.
Reputable source - 1453 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Fall of Constantinople
By 1453 the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople, defended by fewer than 5,000 men. The young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II besieged it with the largest cannon yet built, and after a 53-day siege his troops breached the ancient walls on 29 May 1453. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died fighting, and the city fell.
Reputable source - May 29, 1453 CEThe Ottoman Empire
Mehmed II Conquers Constantinople
In 1453, 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II besieged Constantinople with giant bronze cannons and took the thousand-year-old capital of the Byzantine Empire. He made the city — Istanbul — his new capital.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1461 CEThe Byzantine Empire
The Last Byzantines: The Fall of Trebizond
A few Byzantine splinter-states outlived Constantinople itself. The Despotate of the Morea in Greece fell to the Ottomans in 1460, and in 1461 the Empire of Trebizond, a Black Sea remnant that had endured since 1204, surrendered to Mehmed II after a siege. With it, the last independent fragment of the Roman world was extinguished.
Reputable source John Cabot Reaches North America
In May 1497 the Italian navigator John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), sailing from Bristol under a commission from King Henry VII of England, crossed the Atlantic in the small ship Matthew with a crew of about eighteen. On 24 June he reached the coast of North America — most likely Newfoundland — and went ashore to claim the land for the English crown.
Reputable source- 1516–1517 CEThe Ottoman Empire
Selim I, the Mamluks, and the Caliphate
Sultan Selim I doubled the empire's size, crushing the Mamluk Sultanate to seize Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz in 1516–17. With the holy cities of Mecca and Medina now under Ottoman rule, the sultans claimed the title of caliph — leader of the Muslim world.
Reputable source - reigned 1520–1566 CEThe Ottoman Empire
Suleiman the Magnificent
Under Suleiman the Magnificent, the empire reached its zenith, stretching from Hungary to the Persian Gulf and from Crimea to North Africa. His armies took Belgrade and Rhodes and dominated the Mediterranean.
Reputable source - 1529 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Siege of Vienna
In 1529 Suleiman marched on Vienna, the gateway to central Europe. Overextended supply lines, heavy rains and a determined defense forced the Ottomans to withdraw from the city's walls.
Reputable source - 16th centuryThe Ottoman Empire
Suleiman the Lawgiver and the Golden Age
To Europeans he was 'the Magnificent,' but to his own people Suleiman was Kanuni — 'the Lawgiver.' He systematized Ottoman law, and his reign saw a flowering of poetry, calligraphy and monumental architecture in Istanbul.
Reputable source - 1571 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Battle of Lepanto
In 1571 a Christian 'Holy League' fleet destroyed the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto — the last great clash of oar-powered galleys. The Ottomans rebuilt their fleet within a year, but the spell of invincibility was broken.
Reputable source The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
In 1588 King Philip II of Spain sent a great Armada of some 130 ships to invade Protestant England. Harried up the Channel by English guns and scattered by fireships off Calais, the Spanish fleet was mauled at the Battle of Gravelines and then wrecked by storms as it fled around Scotland and Ireland. Barely half returned home.
Reputable sourceThe East India Company
Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to a company of London merchants for trade with the East Indies. The English (later British) East India Company grew into a commercial colossus with its own army and administration, gradually conquering and governing vast territories in India on behalf of shareholders.
Reputable sourceJamestown and the First English Colonies
English settlers founded Jamestown in Virginia, the first permanent English colony in the Americas. Precarious at first — beset by starvation and conflict — it survived on tobacco and began the wave of English settlement that would spread down the Atlantic seaboard.
Reputable sourceThe Mayflower and Plymouth Colony
In 1620 a group of English religious separatists — the Pilgrims — crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower, seeking to worship freely. Blown off course, they landed near Cape Cod and founded Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts, first drawing up the Mayflower Compact to govern themselves. Over half died in the first winter; the survivors endured with the help of the local Wampanoag people.
Reputable source- the 1640sThe British Empire
Barbados and the Sugar Revolution
English settlers reached Barbados in 1627 and at first grew tobacco and cotton. In the 1640s, learning sugar-making from the Dutch, planters turned the island into a vast sugar factory worked by enslaved Africans. Barbados became the richest colony in English America — the sugar capital of the Caribbean — and the model for a plantation system that spread across the West Indies.
Reputable source The Hudson's Bay Company
On 2 May 1670 King Charles II granted a royal charter to 'the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay.' The company received a trading monopoly over the entire Hudson Bay watershed — a territory called Rupert's Land covering more than a third of modern Canada — together with the power to govern it. It ran the fur trade there for two centuries.
Reputable source- 1683 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Second Siege of Vienna and the Great Retreat
In 1683 the Ottomans besieged Vienna a second time, only to be routed when a Polish-led relief army charged down from the hills. It was the beginning of a long retreat from central Europe.
Reputable source - 1699 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Treaty of Karlowitz
The Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 forced the Ottomans to surrender Hungary and other lands to their European enemies — the first time the empire signed away large territories in defeat.
Reputable source - 17th–18th centuriesThe British Empire
The Atlantic Slave Trade
Britain became the largest slave-trading power on earth. In a 'triangular trade,' British ships carried manufactured goods to West Africa, then transported millions of enslaved Africans across the ocean in the horrific Middle Passage to labour and die on the plantations of the Caribbean and North America, returning to Britain laden with sugar, tobacco, and rum.
Reputable source The Acts of Union: Great Britain
On 1 May 1707 the Acts of Union joined the Kingdom of England (with Wales) and the Kingdom of Scotland into a single state, the Kingdom of Great Britain, governed by one Parliament at Westminster. Trade was made free and equal throughout Great Britain and its colonies.
Reputable sourceThe Battle of Plassey
On 23 June 1757 an East India Company army under Robert Clive, only about 3,000 strong, defeated the far larger army of the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey — a victory secured largely by bribing the Nawab's commander, Mir Jafar, to betray him. The Company installed a puppet ruler and seized control of Bengal's revenues.
Reputable source- 1756–1763The British Empire
Global Supremacy: The Seven Years' War
In a war fought across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and India — often called the first true world war — Britain defeated France and its allies. At the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Britain took Canada and Florida and confirmed its dominance in India, emerging as the world's foremost colonial and naval power.
Reputable source - 1768–1771The British Empire
Cook's Pacific Voyages
Between 1768 and 1771 the Royal Navy's James Cook, aboard HMS Endeavour, led a scientific expedition to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus and search for a great southern continent. He charted New Zealand and became the first European to map the eastern coast of Australia, claiming it for Britain. Later voyages ranged from the Antarctic to Hawaii.
Reputable source - 1775–1783The British Empire
The Loss of America
Britain's thirteen American colonies, resentful of taxation without representation, rose in revolt. After eight years of war — and French intervention on the American side — Britain recognized the independence of the United States at the Treaty of Paris in 1783, losing the most populous part of its empire.
Reputable source Botany Bay and the Founding of Australia
In 1788, less than two decades after James Cook charted its east coast, Britain established its first penal colony in Australia. A fleet of eleven ships landed at Botany Bay and settled at Sydney Cove, beginning European settlement of the continent. Over the following 80 years more than 150,000 convicts were transported there from Britain and Ireland.
Primary source- 18th–19th centuriesThe Ottoman Empire
The Empire in Retreat
Through the 18th and 19th centuries the Ottomans lost ground to Russia and Austria and to rising nationalism: Greece won independence, Egypt gained autonomy, and Balkan peoples broke away one by one.
Reputable source - 1807–1833The British Empire
The Abolition of Slavery
After decades of campaigning by abolitionists and enslaved people themselves, Parliament banned the British slave trade in 1807 and then abolished slavery across most of the empire in 1833. The Royal Navy began patrolling the Atlantic to suppress the trade — though slaveholders, not the enslaved, received compensation.
Reputable source - 1839–1876 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Tanzimat Reforms and the 'Sick Man of Europe'
To survive, the Ottomans launched the Tanzimat ('reorganization') reforms from 1839, modernizing the army, law, education and administration and granting new rights to non-Muslim subjects. Even so, a Russian tsar dubbed the empire 'the sick man of Europe.'
Reputable source The Treaty of Waitangi and New Zealand
On 6 February 1840 representatives of the British Crown and more than 500 Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, bringing New Zealand into the empire. Crucially, the English and Māori texts differed: the English version ceded full sovereignty to the Crown, while the Māori version granted it only a lesser 'governorship,' a discrepancy that has been disputed ever since.
Reputable source- 1839–1842The British Empire
The Opium Wars and the Opening of China
To reverse a trade deficit with China, British merchants sold vast quantities of Indian opium into the country. When the Chinese government tried to stop the ruinous drug trade, Britain went to war. Its modern navy overwhelmed Qing forces, and the First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanjing, which forced China to open five treaty ports to Western trade and to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1857–1858The British Empire
The Indian Rebellion and the British Raj
In 1857 a massive rebellion erupted against the East India Company's rule in India, beginning with a mutiny of Indian soldiers at Meerut and spreading across northern and central India. After brutal fighting on both sides, Britain crushed the uprising and, in 1858, abolished Company rule — the British Crown took direct control of India, inaugurating the British Raj.
Reputable source - 1869–1875The British Empire
The Suez Canal and the Road to India
The Suez Canal opened in 1869, cutting the sea route between Britain and India by weeks. Though built by a French-led company, the canal quickly became a British lifeline: by the mid-1870s most of its traffic was British. In 1875, when the debt-ridden ruler of Egypt sold his shares, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli seized them for Britain for £4 million.
Reputable source - 1837–1901The British Empire
Victoria, Empress of India, and the Height of Empire
Queen Victoria reigned for over 63 years, and the empire reached its zenith during her long rule. In 1876 Parliament granted her the new title Empress of India, symbolizing Britain's dominion over the subcontinent. By the century's end the empire spanned roughly a quarter of the globe and its people — a domain so vast it was famously said that 'the sun never set' upon it, bound together by the Royal Navy and global trade.
Reputable source - 1884–1914The British Empire
The Scramble for Africa
In the late 19th century the European powers raced to carve up Africa, formalizing their claims at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Britain seized a vast swathe — from Egypt and Sudan through East Africa to South Africa — pursuing a dream of a continuous empire 'from Cairo to the Cape.'
Reputable source - 1899–1902The British Empire
The Boer War
Britain fought a bitter war against the Boer republics of southern Africa, descendants of Dutch settlers, largely over the region's gold and diamonds. To break Boer guerrilla resistance, the British herded civilians into concentration camps where tens of thousands died of disease and starvation.
Reputable source - 1908 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Young Turk Revolution
In 1908 the Young Turks — reform-minded officers and intellectuals — forced the autocratic Sultan Abdul Hamid II to restore the constitution and parliament, seizing effective control of the crumbling state.
Reputable source - 1914–1918 CEThe Ottoman Empire
World War I and the Armenian Genocide
The Ottomans entered World War I on Germany's side in 1914. Amid the war, the government carried out the systematic deportation and mass murder of its Armenian population — the Armenian Genocide — in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died.
Reputable source · 2 sources - 1914–1918The British Empire
The Empire at War: 1914–1918
When Britain entered the First World War in 1914, the whole empire was drawn in. More than three million soldiers and labourers from across the empire and Commonwealth served alongside the British Army — Indians, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Africans, and more. Campaigns such as Gallipoli in 1915 cost tens of thousands of dominion lives.
Reputable source - April 13, 1919The British Empire
The Amritsar Massacre
On 13 April 1919, in the enclosed Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to open fire without warning on a large crowd of unarmed Indians who had gathered in defiance of a ban. The soldiers kept firing until their ammunition ran low, killing hundreds and wounding over a thousand.
Reputable source - December 6, 1921The British Empire
The Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Partition of Ireland
After the Irish War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921 created the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion within the British Empire covering twenty-six counties. Six counties in the north opted out to remain part of the United Kingdom, partitioning the island. The treaty's terms split the independence movement and led to a civil war.
Primary source - 1922–1923 CEThe Ottoman Empire
The Fall of the Empire and the Republic of Turkey
Defeated and occupied after WWI, the empire was saved from partition by a nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). The sultanate was abolished in 1922, and in 1923 the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed — a secular nation-state on the empire's Anatolian heartland.
Reputable source - March–April 1930The British Empire
Gandhi and the Salt March
In the spring of 1930 Mahatma Gandhi led a 240-mile march to the sea at Dandi to make salt from seawater, deliberately breaking Britain's salt monopoly and its tax on this daily necessity. Growing crowds joined him, and when he scooped up salt on 6 April it triggered mass civil disobedience by millions of Indians.
Reputable source The Statute of Westminster
Passed on 11 December 1931, the Statute of Westminster recognized the self-governing dominions — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State, and Newfoundland — as equal in status to Britain and free to control their own domestic and foreign affairs. They were now bound to the mother country by a shared crown rather than by subordination.
Reputable source- February 15, 1942The British Empire
The Fall of Singapore
On 15 February 1942, during the Second World War, a British-led force of some 85,000 men surrendered the 'impregnable' fortress of Singapore to a smaller Japanese army. Churchill called it the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history. About 80,000 troops were taken prisoner, many to die in captivity.
Reputable source Indian Independence and Partition
Exhausted by two world wars and faced with a powerful independence movement led by figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Britain withdrew from India in 1947. The subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan — a hurried division that triggered vast migrations and communal violence in which hundreds of thousands died.
Primary sourceThe End of the Palestine Mandate
Unable to reconcile Arab and Jewish claims and facing mounting violence, Britain announced it would give up its League of Nations mandate over Palestine. At midnight on 14–15 May 1948 the mandate ended, British forces withdrew, and the State of Israel was proclaimed — followed immediately by war between the new state and its Arab neighbours.
Reputable source- 1952–1960The British Empire
The Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya
From 1952 an armed rebellion against British rule and white settlement broke out among the Kikuyu of Kenya. Britain declared a state of emergency and responded with great force, detaining tens of thousands of Kenyans in a network of camps where torture and abuse were widespread. Decades later the British government apologized and paid compensation to surviving victims.
Reputable source The Suez Crisis
In 1956, after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain and France conspired with Israel to invade and seize it back. The operation collapsed under fierce pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union, forcing a humiliating withdrawal.
Reputable source- 1957–1960The British Empire
The Wind of Change: Africa Decolonizes
Ghana led the way, becoming the first of Britain's African colonies to win independence in 1957. In February 1960, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told South Africa's parliament that 'the wind of change is blowing through this continent' and that Britain must accept the rise of African nationalism. Over the following years dozens of colonies across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean became independent nations.
Reputable source · 2 sources - July 1, 1997The British Empire
The Handover of Hong Kong
At midnight on 1 July 1997, after 156 years of colonial rule, Britain handed Hong Kong back to China. The transfer followed the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, under which China agreed that Hong Kong would keep its own economic and social system for 50 years under a 'one country, two systems' arrangement.
Reputable source