Curated playlist
Former empires
- Akkadian EmpireNaram-Sin, king of Agade, declared himself a living god while still breathing, the first ruler in Sumerian culture to claim that for himself. His grandfather Sargon had been the son of a gardener, or so the Sumerian King List records.…
- Carolingian EmpireThe Carolingian Empire began with a scene that had not occurred for centuries: on Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III placed a crown on the head of King Charlemagne, naming him Roman Emperor. The ceremony in Rome was not merely…
- Sasanian EmpireThe Sasanian Empire declared itself, in its own words, the "Empire of the Iranians." That title first appeared in the trilingual Great Inscription of Shapur I, where the king announced: "I am the lord of the Empire of the Iranians." It was…
- HittitesThe Hittites built one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia, yet for centuries the only place anyone could read their name was the Hebrew Bible. The English classicist Francis William Newman spoke for many in the…
- Achaemenid EmpireThe Achaemenid Empire, at its peak, covered roughly 5.5 million square kilometers, making it the largest empire of its time. It reached from the Balkans and Cyrenaica in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. Inside that span sat…
- Austrian EmpireThe Austrian Empire began with a stroke of the pen in 1804, when Holy Roman Emperor Francis II declared himself Emperor of Austria, creating an entirely new state out of thin air. He did it because he was afraid: Napoleon had just…
- Dzungar KhanateThe Dzungar Khanate was the last nomadic empire of Oirat Mongol origin, and at its height it stretched from southern Siberia in the north to Tibet in the south, from the western edge of Mongolia to present-day Kazakhstan. For more than a…
- HunsThe Huns arrived at the Volga River by 370 CE and within decades had shaken the foundations of the Roman world. They were a nomadic people from Central Asia, first recorded living east of the Volga in a region that was then considered part…
- Crown of AragonThe Crown of Aragon began with a monk who never wanted to be a king. Ramiro II, raised in the Monastery of Saint Pons de Thomières as a Benedictine, was the youngest of three brothers in the Aragonese royal line. When his brother Alfonso I…
- Maurya EmpireThe Maurya Empire rose from the plains of Magadha around 320 BCE, and within a generation it had become the largest political entity the Indian subcontinent had ever seen. At its height under Ashoka, its roads stretched from the mountains…
- Kingdom of FranceThe Kingdom of France began not with a crown placed on a French king's head, but with a treaty signed in 843 that divided a dying empire. When the Carolingian realm was carved into three at Verdun, Charles the Bald walked away with West…
- Tang dynastyOn the 18th of June in the year 618, word reached Li Yuan that Emperor Yang of Sui had been murdered by a general named Yuwen Huaji. Li Yuan had already occupied Chang'an months earlier, reducing the Sui emperor to a retired figurehead and…
- Ancient CarthageAncient Carthage was once the richest city in the western Mediterranean, a Phoenician-descended power that controlled the coasts of North Africa, Iberia, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, and the Balearic Islands. By 300…
- Qin dynastyThe Qin dynasty ruled China for only 14 years, from 221 to 206 BC, yet the political system it built outlasted it by more than two thousand years. A man named Ying Zheng, who had come to the Qin throne at age nine, spent the following…
- Spanish EmpireThe Spanish Empire existed for nearly five centuries, from 1492 to 1976, stretching across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. It became so vast that contemporaries called it "the empire on which the sun never sets." At its greatest…
- Mongol EmpireThe Mongol Empire became the largest contiguous empire in history. At its height it stretched from the Sea of Japan to Eastern Europe, reaching north into Siberia and south into the Indian subcontinent. It pushed west as far as the Levant…
- Austria-HungaryAustria-Hungary was, for roughly half a century, the second-largest country in Europe by area, surpassed only by Russia. From 1867 to 1918, it held together a patchwork of a dozen or more distinct peoples under a single emperor who wore…
- German EmpireOn the 18th of January 1871, while German armies still besieged Paris, William I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The German Empire was born inside the palace of the enemy it had just…
- First Bulgarian EmpireThe First Bulgarian Empire was born from a humiliation so complete that the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor could barely write it down. After a disastrous defeat in 680, the Emperor Constantine IV was compelled to sign a…
- Empire of NicaeaThe Empire of Nicaea was born from catastrophe. In 1204, Western European and Venetian forces seized Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine world, in what history calls the Sack of Constantinople. The aristocracy of the Byzantine…
- Habsburg monarchyThe Habsburg monarchy began with a single castle in present-day Switzerland, built by a man named Radbot of Klettgau in the late 10th century. From that modest origin, a family would go on to rule an empire spanning Italy, Spain, the…
- First French EmpireThe First French Empire was proclaimed on the 18th of May 1804, when the French Senate granted Napoleon Bonaparte the title Emperor of the French. Six months later, on the 2nd of December 1804, he was crowned at Notre-Dame de Paris by Pope…
- Latin EmpireThe Latin Empire began with a coronation inside the Hagia Sophia on the 16th of May 1204. Baldwin IX of Flanders, a Crusader from western Europe, sat where Eastern Roman emperors had sat for centuries, wearing the regalia of a civilization…
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi. Their Islamic contemporaries named their realm the land of the Romans, Bilad al-Rum. The word…
- Nazi GermanyNazi Germany lasted just twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, yet in that span it launched the deadliest war in human history and carried out the systematic murder of millions of people. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on the…
- Gallic EmpireIn 260, a Roman general named Postumus besieged his own emperor's son inside the city of Colonia Agrippina, had the boy and his guardian put to death, and declared himself the ruler of a new order. Not a rebel trying to take Rome. Not a…
- Soviet empireThe Soviet empire was never called an empire by the people who ran it. Soviet leaders declared their system anti-imperialist, a people's democracy, a beacon for the oppressed world. Yet Sovietologists watching from outside observed…
- ManchukuoManchukuo lasted just thirteen years, from 1932 until its dissolution in 1945, yet it carried the grand title of empire and the trappings of a brand new civilization. A press release from the Japanese Information Service on the 1st of…
- Holy Roman EmpireThe Holy Roman Empire was, in the words of the philosopher Voltaire, "in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." That sardonic line has clung to it for centuries. Yet this sprawling polity held together much of Central and Western Europe…
- Ancient RomeAncient Rome began as a cluster of graves and a timber wall. The first burials in the necropolis on the Esquiline Hill appear around 800 BC. A clay and timber wall on the lower Palatine Hill dates to the middle of the 8th century BC. From…
- British EmpireThe British Empire was once described as "the empire on which the sun never sets", because the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories. By 1913, it held sway over 412 million people. By 1920, it covered 35.5 million…
- Italian EmpireThe Italian Empire, known in Italian as the Impero coloniale italiano, spanned nearly eight decades, from 1882 to 1960. At its height, between 1936 and 1941, it stretched across the territories of present-day Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, and…
- Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was one of the most expansive and enduring political structures the ancient world produced, stretching from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria. At its height…
- Ottoman EmpireThe Ottoman Empire began as a single beylik, a small principality founded around 1299 in northwestern Anatolia by a Turkoman tribal leader named Osman I. From that obscure frontier holding, his successors built a state that stretched…
- German colonial empireThe German colonial empire entered history not with a plan, but with a reversal. Otto von Bismarck, the man who built unified Germany, spent decades telling anyone who would listen that he wanted nothing to do with overseas colonies. "I am…