Curated playlist
Former monarchies of Europe
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Kingdom of EnglandThe Kingdom of England was born on the 12th of July 927, when the monarchs of Britain gathered at Eamont Bridge, in what is now Cumbria, to recognise a single man as king of the English. His name was Æthelstan, and the realm he founded…
- MerciaMercia was an early medieval English kingdom whose name meant, literally, "boundary folk" - people defined by the edges they occupied. For roughly three centuries, from around 600 to 900, Mercia dominated England south of the Humber…
- NorthumbriaNorthumbria was a medieval English kingdom that survived from 654 to 1066 AD, straddling what is now Northern England and Southern Scotland. Its name meant, quite literally, the people north of the Humber. Between its first king and its…
- Kingdom of Italy (Napoleonic)The Kingdom of Italy was born on the 17th of March 1805, not from centuries of unified rule, but from a single decision by one man who was already emperor of France. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had served as president of the Italian Republic,…
- Kingdom of PrussiaThe Kingdom of Prussia was proclaimed on the 18th of January 1701, when Frederick III of Brandenburg crowned himself "King in Prussia" in an act that sidestepped the rules of the Holy Roman Empire. Legally, kingdoms could exist inside the…
- Kingdom of RomaniaThe Kingdom of Romania was born on the 15th of March 1881, when the Romanian parliament raised the country to the status of a kingdom and crowned a German prince as its first king. That prince, Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig von…
- Crown of CastileThe Crown of Castile carried two names side by side. Sometimes it was called simply Castile. Sometimes, more fully, it was called the Crowns of Castile and León. That double name survived because, for a long stretch of its history, one…
- Kingdom of SerbiaThe Kingdom of Serbia lasted only thirty-six years, from 1882 to 1918, yet in that brief span it fought four wars, doubled its population, and dissolved itself into a larger state that would shape the twentieth century. When Milan I had…
- 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…
- 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…
- Roman KingdomThe Roman Kingdom was built on a river crossing. Around 753 BC, a small cluster of settlements appeared on the Palatine Hill above a ford across the Tiber in central Italy. The hills surrounding that spot were naturally defensible; the…
- Kingdom of Great BritainThe Kingdom of Great Britain came into being on the 1st of May 1707, not with a battle or a conquest, but with a signature. Two ancient kingdoms, England and Scotland, folded themselves into a single state through a Treaty of Union agreed…
- Grand Duchy of LithuaniaThe Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at its height, stretched from the shores of the Baltic Sea all the way to the Black Sea. By 1440 it had grown into the largest state in all of Europe. That fact alone is startling: a realm born from pagan…
- 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…
- 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…
- Kingdom of GreeceThe Kingdom of Greece was born from a secret society formed in 1814 by three men who met in Odesa. Nikolaos Skoufas, Emmanuil Xanthos, and Athanasios Tsakalov had one purpose: to unite all Greeks in an armed uprising against Ottoman rule,…
- Duchy of OldenburgThe Duchy of Oldenburg sat in the north-west of what is now Germany, a small territory whose rulers punched far above their weight. From a single county seat, the House of Oldenburg spread across the thrones of Europe, eventually claiming…
- 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…
- Empire of ThessalonicaThe Empire of Thessalonica is the name modern historians give to a Greek state that held the city of Thessalonica between 1224 and 1246. Its rulers came from the Komnenodoukas dynasty, the same family that ruled the Despotate of Epirus.…
- Kingdom of ItalyOn the 17th of March 1861, Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was proclaimed King of Italy in Turin. This event marked the birth of a new state from decades of struggle known as the Risorgimento. The movement to unite the Italian peninsula…
- 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…
- Maritime republicsIn the year 849, a coalition of Italian coastal cities sailed out to the port of Ostia and shattered a Saracen invasion fleet. The cities were Amalfi, Gaeta, Naples, and Sorrento. Some historians call that battle the first real military…
- Archduchy of AustriaCharles V ruled over an inheritance described as one 'on which the sun never sets,' and the Archduchy of Austria was its heart. That inheritance was assembled over centuries through battlefield victories, a disputed forgery, and marriages…
- Lordship of IrelandThe Lordship of Ireland began with a crown that was never placed on anyone's head. In 1185, Henry II of England ordered a crown made of gold and peacock feathers for his youngest son John, intending to crown him King of Ireland. The pope…
- 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…
- Hospitaller MaltaHospitaller Malta began with one of the strangest rental agreements in history. In 1530, Emperor Charles V handed the islands of Malta and Gozo to a displaced military order in exchange for a single Maltese falcon delivered each year on…
- Kingdom of WestphaliaThe Kingdom of Westphalia lasted only six years, from 1807 to 1813, yet it introduced the first modern written constitution in Germany and abolished serfdom in a single stroke. It was ruled by Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of…
- Kingdom of PortugalThe Kingdom of Portugal was a monarchy that endured from the mid-12th century all the way to the early 20th century, outlasting empires and dynasties across the Western world. Its story begins not with a grand declaration but with a battle…
- Kingdom of SardiniaThe Kingdom of Sardinia traces its origins to a single political transaction in 1297, when Pope Boniface VIII created a fictional realm on paper and offered it to King James II of Aragon as an inducement to abandon his brother's hold on…
- DaciaDacia, the ancient land whose core lay in what is now Transylvania, once stretched from the river Tisza in the west to the Black Sea in the east. Its people, the Dacians, built a kingdom that Julius Caesar himself found threatening enough…
- 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…
- Western Roman EmpireThe Western Roman Empire did not fall in a single dramatic moment. On the 4th of September 476, a Germanic military leader named Odoacer deposed a teenage emperor named Romulus Augustulus in the city of Ravenna. Barely anyone noticed. No…
- ColchisColchis, the ancient Georgian polity that Greek poets called a land of gold, sits at the eastern edge of the Black Sea in what is now western Georgia. Between 70 and 300 languages were spoken in the single city of Dioscourias alone,…
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and IrelandThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was born on the 1st of January 1801, stitched together by the Acts of Union after a failed rebellion and a war with Revolutionary France had made the prospect of an independent Ireland seem,…
- BadenBaden sits in the southwest corner of Germany, pressed between the Rhine on one side and the Black Forest on the other. At its narrowest point, near the town of Gaggenau, this strip of land is only 18 kilometers wide. The locals call that…
- Duchy of MilanThe Duchy of Milan came into being on the 11th of May 1395, when a single document signed in Prague changed the shape of Northern Italy forever. Wenceslaus of Bohemia put his name to a diploma that handed Gian Galeazzo Visconti the title…
- Kingdom of NaplesThe Kingdom of Naples bore an official name that almost nobody used: the Kingdom of Sicily on this side of the lighthouse. That lighthouse was the Punta del Faro, the headland marking the Strait of Messina, and it split a centuries-long…
- Empire of TrebizondCervantes described the hero of Don Quixote as imagining himself "already crowned at least Emperor of Trebizond." Rabelais gave the same ambition to his character Picrochole, the ruler of Piedmont, who declared he wanted to be Emperor of…
- Grand Principality of MoscowMoscow is first mentioned in chronicles under the year 1147, as part of the principality of Rostov-Suzdal. At that point it was a minor settlement on the edge of medieval Russia, not yet the capital of anything. Within roughly four…
- Vladimir-SuzdalIn 1169, the city of Kiev was sacked, and the order to do it came from the north. Andrey Bogolyubsky, a prince ruling from the forested lands beyond the river, sent his armies against the mother city of the Rus and broke its hold on power.…
- 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…
- Russian EmpireThe Russian Empire announced itself to the world on the day the Treaty of Nystad was signed in 1721, when the Governing Senate and Synod bestowed upon Peter I the titles of Peter the Great, Pater Patriae, and Imperator of all Russia. In…