Curated playlist
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. At its height, this empire held Egypt, Sicily, the Levant, the Hejaz, Yemen, and territories as distant as…
- 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 region of Khurasan on the 9th of June 747. Within three years, the rebels had shattered…
- 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 army of 375,000 men, seize the Peacock Throne from a Mughal emperor, and suspend…
- 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…
- 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 had ever seen. Shah Ismail I captured Tabriz in July 1501, crowned himself King…
- 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 become Turkicized on the Central Asian steppe, seized power in 1370 and built a…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 the tents the Mongols used in wartime. Another points to an actual golden tent used…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Soviet UnionOn the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule. The country he led had spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until that day. It was the…
- 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…
- 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…