Timelapse of Every Battle in History
14,926,931
Published 2019-01-01
List of every battle on Wikipedia : docs.google.com/document/d/1WOVVkcd-AySAAoBC3VYp5z…
Rules
• Battles are included only if they have a Wikipedia article
• Each country can only have 1 predecessor state at the same time (eg. the UK's predecessor is England, but not Scotland)
Methodology:
I used Wikipedia as a directory of battles:
1. I created a query with Wikidata Query to get the list of all articles tagged as "battle" by Wikipedia. This gives me about 12,000 battles
2. I downloaded the data that is included in the top right hand table of every of those Wikipedia article. I did it for the following versions of Wikipedia: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Danish, Norwegian, Slovakian, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Hindi, Hebrew, Basque, Bulgarian, Romanian, Catalan, Finnish, Swedish, Vietnamese, Persian, Indonesian, Korean
3. I cleaned up the data on Excel to remove double entries and obtained 10,624 unique battles
4. I created an index of countries with their predecessor states:
• France (476 - 2018): Frankish Kingdom, Frankish Empire, West Francia, Kingdom of France, French Empire, French Republic
• UK-England (927 - 2018): Kingdom of England, Commonwealth of England, Great Britain, United Kingdom
• USA (1776 - 2018): American patriots, USA
• Russia (882 - 2018) : Kievan Rus', Muscovy, Russian Empire, Bolsheviks, USSR, Russian Federation
• Germany (843 - 2018) : East Francia, Kingdom of Germany, Holy Roman Empire, Confederation of the Rhine, German Confederation, North German Confederation, German Empire, Germany
• Spain (718 - 2018) : Asturies, León, Castile, Kingdom of Spain
• Poland (960 - 2018) : Kingdom of Poland, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Duchy of Warsaw, Polish insurgents, Poland
• Rome (753 BC - 476) : Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic, Roman Empire, Western Roman Empire
• China (2500 BC – 2018) : Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, 3 Kingdoms, Jin, Sui, Tang, 10 Kingdoms, Song, Yuan, Ming, China
• Turkey (1037 - 2018): Seljuk empire, Anatolian Turks, Ottoman Empire, Turkey
Limitations :
You probably noticed that Europe concentrates the majority of battles. Possible explanations include the fact that Wikipedia is used more in Europe, the ban of Wikipedia in China or Turkey, or the lack of documentation of military records in some countries.
Some similar research also found that Europe had more battles than the rest of the world. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/12180516/Geogra…
Credits :
Music : Hans Zimmer - Imagine the Fire
Special thanks to the GOAT
All Comments (20)
-
Europe: Peace was never an option
-
-
Remember, these are RECORDED battles. The map is likely a lot worse.
-
Fun fact: At about 1250 BCE a little dot appears in the northeastern corner of Germany. That was the battle of the Tollense-valley. There aren’t any written records about it, but archeologists dug up a battlesite with incredibly high casualties for the time and place. This is the first large battle in Europe that we know of
-
Fun fact: almost every battle won by china was fought against another china
-
NAPOLEONIC BOOST France 1779: 368 France 1815: 776
-
Fun fact: the peace treaty between Rome and Carthage was signed in 1985. That treaty posed end to a war that "unofficially" was still going on from 2131 years.
-
Rome existing in the list till the end of the video is insane
-
Rome winning one more battle in the 1800s was like when a character returns to a sitcom as a guest
-
4:48 America had the right idea to get more battle wins by going to war with itself.
-
Damn no wonder France and England have be fighting eachother for a 1000 years, apparently they’re so evenly matched they just kept farming eachother
-
The fact that both world wars are passing super fast with no weight is very terrifying
-
The Fact that Rome stayed on this list a millenium after their collapse is insane.
-
Notice how they didn’t show Antarctica, those penguins have been fighting each other in battles since the beginning
-
Funny how the Crusaders, a military expedition, managed to make it at the list at 3:25 which illustrates how brutal the crusades was.
-
The USA was only a country since 1776 and in that short amount of time it went up to 3rd place. Pretty impressive.
-
WW1: "That's a lot of damage" WW2: "How about a little more"
-
Fun fact: That one single dot in western Australia was the E m u w a r
-
The Chinese record is missing a lot. During the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period, the 5th Sixteen Kingdoms Period, the 5th Ten Kingdoms Period, and the Mongols Period, there were no joke of fighting. But it's hardly checked
