Curated category
Former transcontinental empires
- Fatimid CaliphateThe Fatimid Caliphate ruled over a stretch of land so vast it reached from the western Mediterranean all the way to the Red Sea.
- Abbasid CaliphateThe Abbasid Caliphate began not with a coronation but with a revolt carried out under the sign of the Black Standard, launched from the distant eastern…
- Afsharid IranAfsharid Iran began with a man born as Nadr Qoli into a humble semi-nomadic family of the Afshar tribe in Khorasan. Within a few decades, he would command an…
- Achaemenid EmpireThe Achaemenid Empire, at its peak, covered roughly 5.5 million square kilometers, making it the largest empire of its time.
- Safavid IranSafavid Iran was born from a Sufi dervish order in the city of Ardabil, and within a single generation it became one of the largest empires the Islamic world…
- Timurid EmpireThe Timurid Empire was born from a single man's refusal to accept the limits of his origins. Timur, a warlord from the Barlas tribe, a Mongol group that had…
- 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…
- 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.
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi.
- Golden HordeThe Golden Horde lived in tents whose color may have given the state its name. According to one account, the appellation Golden came from the golden hue of…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- Soviet UnionOn the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule.
- 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…
- 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…