Military & conflict

King Eannatum of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash defeated neighbouring Umma in a long-running dispute over fertile border farmland and commemorated his victory on a carved limestone monument known as the Stele of the Vultures.

Under the Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh Senusret III (c. 1872–1853 BCE), Egypt completed a chain of massive mudbrick fortresses along the Nile around the Second Cataract, fixing its southern frontier at Semna.

According to tradition, the Shang leader Cheng Tang defeated the last Xia king, the tyrant Jie, at the Battle of Mingtiao, sending Jie into exile and establishing the Shang dynasty (c.

The Hittite king Mursili I led a long-range raid down the Euphrates, defeated Aleppo, and sacked Babylon, overthrowing Samsu-ditana, the last king of Hammurabi's First Dynasty, and carrying off the statue of the city-god Marduk.

Early in the Egyptian New Kingdom, the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Thutmose I (reigned c.

Thutmose III defeated a coalition of Canaanite and Syrian city-states, led by the king of Kadesh, at Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley.

Ramesses II led an Egyptian army of around 20,000 men, organised into four divisions (Amun, Ra, Ptah, Seth), against the Hittite king Muwatalli II near Kadesh on the Orontes River in Syria.

Across roughly 1200–1150 BCE the interconnected civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed in a few decades: Mycenaean palaces in Greece were destroyed and abandoned, the Hittite Empire fell, the great Syrian port of Ugarit was…

At Muye, near the Shang capital, the western state of Zhou under King Wu decisively defeated the army of the last Shang king Di Xin (Zhou Xin), ending more than five centuries of Shang rule and inaugurating the Zhou dynasty, the…

On seizing the Assyrian throne in 745 BCE, Tiglath-Pileser III reorganised the state and army in ways that turned Assyria into the ancient Near East's first true territorial empire.

After a multi-year siege begun by Shalmaneser V, the Assyrian capture of Samaria around 722 BCE ended the northern Kingdom of Israel; Sargon II later claimed completion of the conquest and consolidation in 720 BCE.

During his 701 BCE campaign against the rebellious kingdom of Judah, the Assyrian king Sennacherib besieged and captured Lachish, Judah's second city, building a massive stone-and-earth siege ramp against its walls and storming it with…

In 612 BCE a coalition of Babylonians under Nabopolassar and Medes under Cyaxares, with Scythian support, besieged and stormed Nineveh, the great capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

After a siege of roughly 18–30 months, the army of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon breached Jerusalem and, in 587 or 586 BCE, sacked the city and burned Solomon's Temple.

Cyrus II (the Great), founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, died around 530 BCE while campaigning against the Massagetae, a nomadic Scythian confederation inhabiting the steppes of Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea, near the…

Around 513 BCE the Achaemenid king Darius I led a large army from Persia across the Bosphorus on a pontoon bridge of boats, marched through Thrace, and crossed the Danube over a second bridge built by his Ionian Greek vassals to invade the…

In September 490 BCE an Athenian army, supported by a small Plataean contingent, defeated the first Persian invasion of mainland Greece on the plain of Marathon in north-eastern Attica.

In 480 BCE Xerxes I launched a vast second Persian invasion of Greece by land and sea.

From 431 to 404 BCE the Greek world was convulsed by the Peloponnesian War, a struggle for hegemony between the Athenian-led Delian League and the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League.

At Chaeronea in Boeotia, Philip II of Macedon defeated a coalition of Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes.

In spring 334 BCE Alexander III of Macedon crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor with an army of roughly 40,000–50,000 men, launching the campaign that would dismantle the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

On 1 October 331 BCE, Alexander the Great decisively defeated Darius III on the plain of Gaugamela, near modern Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The First Punic War, fought between Rome and Carthage largely over control of Sicily, was the longest continuous conflict and greatest naval war of antiquity, lasting twenty-three years.

Around 261 BCE the Mauryan emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga (coastal Odisha), a war his own thirteenth Major Rock Edict records as causing some 100,000 deaths, many more from disease and famine, and 150,000 deportations.

During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who had invaded Italy by crossing the Alps, inflicted on Rome one of the worst defeats in its history near the village of Cannae in Apulia.

Around 215 BCE the First Emperor dispatched General Meng Tian with a large army northward against the Xiongnu, driving the nomads from the Ordos region.

After the Qin collapse, the warlords Liu Bang and Xiang Yu fought the four-year Chu–Han Contention for mastery of China.

At Zama in North Africa the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio (later 'Africanus') decisively defeated Hannibal, ending the Second Punic War and Carthage's status as a great power.

Around 176 BCE the nomadic Yuezhi confederation, then dominant in the Gansu (Hexi) Corridor of northwestern China, was crushed by the rising Xiongnu under Modu Chanyu, whose forces overran their pastures and broke their power.

In a single year Rome obliterated two of the Mediterranean's most storied cities, announcing its supremacy over both the western and eastern halves of the sea.

Between 58 and 50 BCE the proconsul Gaius Julius Caesar conquered Gaul (roughly modern France and Belgium), bringing a vast new territory and its peoples under Roman control and dramatically extending Roman power to the Atlantic and the…

In 53 BCE the Roman triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus invaded Parthian Mesopotamia with seven legions, seeking wealth and military glory to rival Pompey and Caesar.

On 2 September 31 BCE, the fleet of Octavian, commanded by Agrippa, defeated the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII of Egypt in a naval battle off Actium on the western coast of Greece.

Over several days in September 9 CE, a coalition of Germanic peoples led by Arminius — a chieftain who had served as a Roman auxiliary officer and held Roman citizenship — ambushed and annihilated three legions (XVII, XVIII and XIX) under…

At the death of the emperor Trajan in 117 CE, the Roman Empire reached its maximum territorial extent, spanning roughly 5 million square kilometres from the Atlantic and Britain to the Persian Gulf, and from the Rhine and Danube to the…

The Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE) was the last and most devastating of the three great Jewish uprisings against Rome.

In 184 CE the religious leader Zhang Jue launched a massive uprising against the Eastern Han, drawing on a Daoist healing movement (the Way of Great Peace) and hundreds of thousands of followers across several provinces.

Near Edessa in northern Mesopotamia, the Sasanian king Shapur I decisively defeated a Roman army under the emperor Valerian and captured the emperor himself, along with much of his staff.

On 9 August 378 CE, near Adrianople in Thrace (modern Edirne, Turkey), the eastern emperor Valens led the Roman field army against Gothic forces under Fritigern, a coalition of Therving and Greuthung Goths together with Alans and others…

Maya inscriptions record that on a day corresponding to 16 January 378 CE, a figure named Siyaj K'ak' ('Fire is Born') arrived at Tikal, apparently as the emissary or general of a powerful lord called Spearthrower Owl, widely identified…

On 24 August 410 CE the Visigoths under their king Alaric entered Rome and plundered the city for three days, the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy in nearly 800 years.

On 20 June 451 CE, a coalition of the Western Roman Empire and the Visigoths, jointly led by the Roman general Flavius Aetius and the Visigothic king Theodoric I, confronted the Huns and their subject peoples under Attila on the…

In 533 the emperor Justinian I dispatched his general Belisarius with about 16,000 men to recover Roman Africa from the Vandals, who had held Carthage since 439.

Launched in 535, Justinian's Gothic War aimed to recover Italy from the Ostrogothic kingdom established by Theodoric.

In April 562 CE the Maya city of Tikal suffered a catastrophic defeat in a conflict recorded with the celestial glyph epigraphers call a 'star war', a designation reserved for the era's most decisive military confrontations.

In 568, only fourteen years after Justinian's costly reconquest, the Lombards under King Alboin crossed the Alps into a depopulated and war-weary Italy, accompanied by Saxon and other allies.

During the great Byzantine–Sasanian war of 602–628, Persian forces under Khosrow II overran the empire's eastern provinces, and in 614 they besieged and stormed Jerusalem.

Over six days in August 636, the army of the Rashidun Caliphate, with Khalid ibn al-Walid playing a leading role, decisively defeated a much larger Byzantine force near the Yarmuk River on the borders of present-day Syria, Jordan and…

Between 639 and 642 CE the Arab general Amr ibn al-As led a swift campaign that wrested Egypt from the Byzantine Empire.

In 711 CE a mainly Berber army under the commander Tariq ibn Ziyad, dispatched from North Africa by the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr, crossed the strait that now bears Tariq's name (Gibraltar, from Jabal Tariq) and invaded the…

From the summer of 717 the Umayyad Caliphate mounted its greatest assault on Constantinople, sending a large army under Maslama across Anatolia and an enormous fleet into the Sea of Marmara to take the Byzantine capital and open the road…

In October 732 CE, somewhere between Tours and Poitiers in central Gaul, the Frankish leader Charles Martel and his infantry defeated a raiding army of the Umayyad governor of al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who was killed in the…

In July 751, near the Talas River on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, an Abbasid army under Ziyad ibn Salih defeated the Tang Chinese forces of Gao Xianzhi in the only direct military clash between the Caliphate and…

In December 755 the powerful frontier general An Lushan rose in revolt against the Tang dynasty, seizing the eastern capital Luoyang and then the main capital Chang'an, forcing Emperor Xuanzong to flee and proclaiming a rival Yan dynasty.

On 8 June 793 Scandinavian raiders attacked the wealthy monastery of Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumbria that was a preeminent centre of Christianity in early medieval England.

In 878, after years of Viking conquest that had overrun most of Anglo-Saxon England, Alfred the Great of Wessex emerged from hiding in the Somerset marshes, rallied the West Saxon levies, and decisively defeated the Great Heathen Army…

In December 938, the Vietnamese commander Ngo Quyen decisively defeated an invading fleet of the Chinese state of Southern Han at the mouth of the Bach Dang River, near present-day Ha Long Bay in northern Vietnam.

Over three days in August 955, King Otto I of East Francia (Germany) annihilated a large invading Magyar (Hungarian) army near Augsburg on the Lech river.

In 969 CE the Ismaili Shia Fatimid Caliphate, based in Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia), conquered Egypt under the general Jawhar al-Siqilli, acting on behalf of Caliph al-Muizz li-Din Allah.

In 1025 the Chola emperor Rajendra I launched a long-distance naval expedition across the Bay of Bengal against the Srivijayan thalassocracy of maritime Southeast Asia, an almost unique example of large-scale overseas force projection from…

The death of the childless King Edward the Confessor in January 1066 triggered a contested succession to the English throne.

On 26 August 1071, near Manzikert (modern Malazgirt in eastern Anatolia), the Byzantine army under Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was decisively defeated by the Seljuk forces of Sultan Alp Arslan.

In 1076 the Almoravids, a militant Berber Muslim movement from the western Sahara, are traditionally said to have sacked Koumbi Saleh, the great trading capital of the Ghana Empire.

Following the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031, al-Andalus fractured into rival taifa kingdoms.

At the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II called on the warriors of Western Christendom to march east, aid the Byzantine Empire against the Seljuk Turks, and recover Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from…

On 4 July 1187 the Ayyubid sultan Saladin (Salah al-Din) decisively defeated the main army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee.

Called by Pope Innocent III to recover Jerusalem by way of Egypt, the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) was diverted by debts owed to Venice and entanglement in a Byzantine dynastic dispute.

After the Khwarazmshah Muhammad II executed Mongol envoys and merchants at Otrar, Genghis Khan launched a devastating invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire, the dominant power of Central Asia and Persia.

Around 1235 the Mandinka prince Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso king Sumanguru Kante at the Battle of Kirina, on the upper Niger in what is now Mali.

During the western campaign led by Batu Khan and the general Subutai, the Mongols stormed Kiev after a short siege, with the city falling on 6 December 1240.

Between 29 January and 10 February 1258, a vast Ilkhanate Mongol army led by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, besieged and stormed Baghdad.

On 3 September 1260, at Ain Jalut ('Spring of Goliath') in the Jezreel Valley of Palestine, the Mamluk army of Egypt under Sultan Qutuz and the general Baybars decisively defeated a Mongol force commanded by Hülegü's lieutenant Kitbuqa.

Kublai Khan twice attempted to subjugate Japan, drawing on the resources of his Yuan empire and the subdued Korean kingdom of Goryeo.

Between 1277 and 1287, the Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan launched a series of campaigns against the Pagan Empire after its king, Narathihapate, refused demands for tribute and submission.

On 9 April 1288, the forces of Dai Viet, commanded by the Tran-dynasty grand commander Tran Hung Dao, annihilated the invading Yuan-Mongol fleet on the estuary of the Bach Dang River in present-day Quang Ninh Province, northern Vietnam.

In 1398 the Central Asian conqueror Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, led a massive army from his capital Samarkand across the Indus into northern India, claiming to punish the Delhi Sultanate's tolerance of its Hindu subjects.

The siege of Orleans, begun by English forces in October 1428, marked the high tide of English power in the Hundred Years' War.

In 1431, after a siege that Thai chronicle traditions describe as lasting roughly seven months from 1430, Ayutthayan (Siamese Tai) forces under King Borommarachathirat II captured and looted Angkor, the great capital of the Khmer Empire…

On 29 May 1453, after a siege of some seven weeks begun on 6 April, the army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, extinguishing the Byzantine Empire that had endured for over a thousand years as the eastern continuation…

Around 1470 the Inca, under the general and future emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui, conquered Chimor, the powerful Chimu kingdom of Peru's north coast, and absorbed its capital Chan Chan.

In August 1511 the Portuguese governor of India, Afonso de Albuquerque, stormed and captured the Sultanate of Malacca, the principal entrepôt commanding the strait through which trade between China, the Indian Ocean and the Spice Islands…

On 23 August 1514 the Ottoman Sultan Selim I crushed the Safavid army of Shah Ismail I at Chaldiran in northwestern Iran.

On 13 August 1521 the Mexica (Aztec) capital Tenochtitlan fell to a coalition of Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés and tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, above all the Tlaxcalans.

On 29 August 1526 Suleiman the Magnificent destroyed the army of King Louis II of Hungary at Mohács.

On 21 April 1526 Babur, a Timurid prince from Central Asia, defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi at Panipat in northern India.

From late September to mid-October 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent besieged Vienna, the Habsburg capital, with an army of over 100,000. The roughly 21,000 defenders under Niklas Graf Salm held the city behind hastily strengthened walls.

On 16 November 1532 a band of fewer than two hundred Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro ambushed and captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca, slaughtering thousands of his unarmed retinue.

On 23 January 1565 a coalition of the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Golconda decisively defeated the army of the Vijayanagara Empire at Talikota (Rakshasi-Tangadi) in northern Karnataka.

By 1565 King Bayinnaung of the Toungoo dynasty had assembled the largest empire ever seen in mainland Southeast Asia, the culmination of a decade and a half of relentless military expansion from his base at Pegu (Bago).

On 7 October 1571 a fleet of the Holy League, a Catholic coalition assembled by Pope Pius V and led by Spain and Venice under Don Juan of Austria, defeated the Ottoman navy in the Gulf of Patras off western Greece.

In 1588 King Philip II of Spain dispatched a great fleet, the Armada, to escort an invasion army from Flanders and overthrow the Protestant Elizabeth I of England, whose support for the Dutch rebels and Protestant cause had inflamed…

On 13 March 1591 a Moroccan expeditionary force under Judar Pasha, dispatched across the Sahara by the Saadi sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, crushed the army of Askia Ishaq II at Tondibi near Gao.

In May 1592 Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched roughly 158,000 troops against Joseon Korea, intending to march through the peninsula to conquer Ming China.

On 23 May 1618 Bohemian Protestant nobles threw two Catholic imperial regents and their secretary from a window of Prague Castle, an act of defiance against the Habsburg crown that triggered the Bohemian Revolt and ignited the Thirty…

On 8 November 1620, outside Prague, a Catholic imperial and Catholic League army under Count Tilly and Bucquoy routed the Protestant forces of Frederick V of the Palatinate in barely an hour at the Battle of White Mountain.

In 1628 and 1629 Sultan Agung of Mataram, ruler of the dominant Javanese kingdom, launched two great expeditions to expel the Dutch East India Company from its fortified port of Batavia (modern Jakarta).

In 1644 the Ming dynasty collapsed amid famine, fiscal breakdown and rebellion. The peasant rebel Li Zicheng, who had proclaimed his own Shun dynasty, marched across north China and entered Beijing on 24 April; the next day the last Ming…

In 1661-62 the Ming loyalist commander Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, besieged and expelled the Dutch East India Company from its fortress of Zeelandia on Taiwan, ending nearly four decades of Dutch colonial presence on the…

In July 1683 the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to Vienna with a great army, hoping to seize the Habsburg capital and open Central Europe to Ottoman power. The city held out for two months under desperate conditions.

After a siege lasting from March 1696 to December 1698, the army of the Yarubid sultan of Oman, Saif ibn Sultan, stormed Fort Jesus at Mombasa on 13 December 1698, ending nearly two centuries of Portuguese dominance over the East African…

Between 1724 and 1727 King Agaja of Dahomey conquered the coastal kingdoms of Allada and, on 26 February 1727, the great slaving port of Whydah, more than doubling his kingdom's territory and securing direct access to the Atlantic.

On 24 February 1739 the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah, founder of the Afsharid dynasty, routed the Mughal army at the Battle of Karnal, and on 20 March he entered Delhi.

Between 1755 and 1759 the armies of the Qianlong Emperor destroyed the Dzungar Khanate, the last great steppe nomadic power of Inner Asia, and brought the vast region north and south of the Tianshan mountains under Qing rule as a single…

On 23 June 1757 a British East India Company force of about 3,000 under Robert Clive defeated the roughly 50,000-strong army of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, on the field of Plassey near Murshidabad.

On 14 January 1761 the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani, allied with the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh, crushed the Maratha army under Sadashivrao Bhau at Panipat north of Delhi.

Signed in Paris on 3 September 1783, the Treaty of Paris formally ended the American Revolutionary War and secured Great Britain's recognition of the United States as a sovereign, independent nation.

On 4 May 1799 a British East India Company army and its allies stormed the island fortress of Seringapatam (Srirangapatna), capital of the Kingdom of Mysore, ending the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War.

On 1 January 1804, at Gonaïves, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, restoring the indigenous Taíno name Haiti.

On 2 December 1805, near Austerlitz in Moravia, Napoleon won what is often regarded as his greatest tactical victory.

On 21 October 1805, off Cape Trafalgar on the southwest coast of Spain, a British fleet of 27 ships of the line under Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson decisively defeated a combined Franco-Spanish fleet of 33 ships commanded by Admiral…

The Peninsular War erupted in 1808 after French armies, having transited Spain to occupy Portugal in 1807, turned on their Spanish ally and Napoleon installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne.

In June 1812 Napoleon led a multinational Grande Armée of around 600,000 men across the Niemen River to compel Tsar Alexander I to return to the Continental System.

Fought from 16 to 19 October 1813 around Leipzig in Saxony, the Battle of the Nations was the largest engagement of the Napoleonic Wars and one of the largest in European history before the twentieth century, involving more than half a…

On 18 June 1815, near the village of Waterloo in present-day Belgium, Napoleon's bid to reclaim power during the Hundred Days came to a decisive end.

The Mfecane (Nguni for "the crushing" or "scattering"; difaqane in Sesotho) was a period of widespread warfare, upheaval, and forced migration that transformed the political and demographic landscape of southern Africa during the first…

On 7 August 1819 Simón Bolívar's patriot army, having crossed the flooded plains of the Orinoco and the freezing Andean pass of the Páramo de Pisba, routed a Spanish royalist force at the Boyacá bridge in present-day Colombia.

The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832) was the first successful nationalist revolt to break a European people away from the Ottoman Empire, making the Greeks the first Ottoman subject nation to win recognition as an independent…

On 9 December 1824, on the high plateau near Ayacucho in Peru, a patriot army of about 6,000 commanded by Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's most capable lieutenant, decisively defeated a larger Spanish royalist force under Viceroy José de…

The Java War of 1825–1830 was the largest and costliest armed challenge to Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies during the nineteenth century.

The First Opium War (1839–1842) pitted the Qing dynasty against the British Empire after China's suppression of the illegal opium trade at Canton.

Fought between 1846 and 1848, the Mexican–American War grew out of the United States' 1845 annexation of Texas and a disputed border on the Rio Grande, set against the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was a vast civil war against the Qing dynasty led by Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka schoolteacher who, after failing the imperial examinations and experiencing religious visions, proclaimed himself the younger…

The Crimean War (October 1853 – February 1856) pitted Russia against an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and, from 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.

The Second Opium War (1856–1860), also called the Arrow War, saw Britain and France wage a joint campaign against the Qing dynasty to expand the privileges won in 1842.

The Second Italian War of Independence (April–July 1859) was the decisive military step that made Italian unification possible.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was fought between the United States and eleven Southern states that seceded to form the Confederacy, primarily over slavery and its expansion.

In July 1863 Governor George Grey launched the invasion of the Waikato, the largest campaign of the New Zealand Wars and a decisive moment in the colonial conquest of New Zealand.

The Austro-Prussian or 'Seven Weeks' War of 1866 resolved the long-standing contest over whether a unified Germany would be led by Habsburg Austria or Hohenzollern Prussia.

The Franco-Prussian War (July 1870 – May 1871) completed the unification of Germany and reshaped the European order.

The Anglo-Zulu War was fought in 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom of southern Africa, triggered by an ultimatum from British colonial authorities seeking to break Zulu independence and advance confederation in the…

The Mahdist War pitted Sudanese followers of Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, against Egyptian and British forces.

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) was fought between Qing China and the Empire of Japan, primarily for influence over Korea, long a Chinese tributary.

On 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia, an Ethiopian army under Emperor Menelik II decisively defeated an invading Italian colonial force led by General Oreste Baratieri.

The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) was an anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising in northern China led by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, whose members—nicknamed 'Boxers' for their martial-arts practices—believed ritual training…

The Second Boer War, fought from October 1899 to May 1902, pitted the British Empire against the two Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, whose independence and rich Witwatersrand gold deposits clashed with…

The Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905) was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea.

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie were shot dead in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb member of the Young Bosnia movement.

In 1916 the Western Front produced two of the deadliest battles in history, epitomising the industrialised attrition warfare of World War I.

The Armistice between the Allies and Germany was signed at around 5:45 a.m. on 11 November 1918 in a railway carriage in the Compiègne Forest in France and took effect at 11:00 a.m.

On 18 September 1931, officers of Japan's Kwantung Army detonated explosives on a Japanese-owned railway near Mukden (Shenyang) and blamed Chinese forces, staging the false-flag Mukden Incident as a pretext for invasion.

Encircled by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces in their Jiangxi Soviet base, the Chinese Communists broke out beginning around 16 October 1934 and embarked on a fighting retreat that became known as the Long March.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was a war of colonial aggression that exposed the impotence of the League of Nations and hardened the road to global war.

The Long March was the epic 6,000-mile retreat that transformed Mao Zedong into the paramount leader of the Chinese Communist Party and seeded the movement that would rule China.

On 17 July 1936 a coalition of conservative, monarchist, and far-right army officers launched a coup against Spain's elected Second Republic, beginning in Spanish Morocco and spreading to mainland garrisons the next day.

Full-scale war between China and Japan erupted after the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugou Bridge) Incident near Beijing on 7 July 1937, when a clash between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a Japanese invasion of the Chinese heartland.

On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, north and south, employing fast-moving armoured and air forces in a campaign that became associated with the term Blitzkrieg.

Between July and October 1940 the German Luftwaffe attempted to gain air superiority over the United Kingdom as a precondition for a planned cross-Channel invasion (Operation Sea Lion).

Beginning on 10 May 1940, German forces invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, bypassing the Maginot Line by driving armoured columns through the Ardennes.

On the morning of 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft launched a surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking or damaging numerous battleships and other vessels and killing about 2,400…

On 22 June 1941 Germany and its Axis allies launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union along a front of roughly 2,900 km with more than three million troops.

From 4 to 7 June 1942 the United States Pacific Fleet defeated a Japanese naval force near Midway Atoll in the central Pacific.

The Battle of Stalingrad was fought from 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943 between German and Soviet forces for control of the city on the Volga.

On 6 June 1944, Allied forces under Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower launched Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of German-occupied France across five beaches in Normandy.

The United States detonated nuclear weapons over Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945) — the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict.

The First Indochina War pitted the communist-led Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh against French colonial forces seeking to restore control over Indochina after World War II. Full-scale fighting broke out in December 1946.

Operation Crossroads was a pair of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the summer of 1946, the first nuclear detonations since the Trinity test and the wartime bombings of 1945 and…

Full-scale civil war between China's Nationalists and Communists resumed in 1946, when the fragile post-war truce brokered with American mediation collapsed amid mutual distrust and the scramble for territory left by the Soviet withdrawal…

The first India–Pakistan war erupted in October 1947 over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, weeks after both nations gained independence.

On 24 June 1948 the Soviet Union blockaded all rail, road and water routes into the Western-controlled sectors of Berlin, which lay deep inside the Soviet occupation zone of Germany.

On 14 May 1948, as the British Mandate over Palestine expired, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv.

The Malayan Emergency began on 16 June 1948, when the British colonial administration declared a state of emergency after communist insurgents of the Malayan National Liberation Army killed three European plantation managers.

On 4 April 1949 twelve nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, D.C., establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Korean War began on 25 June 1950 when North Korean forces invaded South Korea across the 38th parallel.

From 1952 to 1960 the British colony of Kenya was convulsed by the Mau Mau rebellion, an armed insurgency by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, drawn mainly from the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru peoples, against colonial rule and the dispossession…

The Algerian War began on 1 November 1954, when fighters of the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched coordinated attacks across French Algeria in the 'Toussaint Rouge', and ended with Algerian independence on 5 July 1962.

The fall of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954, after a nearly two-month siege by Viet Minh forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap, shattered French military power in Indochina and led directly to the end of French colonial…

On 14 May 1955 the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European communist states signed the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance in Warsaw, creating the Warsaw Pact.

The Hungarian Revolution began on 23 October 1956 when student-led demonstrations in Budapest, demanding political reform and an end to Soviet domination, escalated into a nationwide revolt.

On 26 July 1956 Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company, asserting Egyptian sovereignty over the strategic waterway and intending to fund the Aswan High Dam after Western financing was…

For thirteen days in October 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union came closer to nuclear war than at any other point in the Cold War. After U.S.

In early August 1964 the United States reported clashes between US Navy destroyers and North Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin; a claimed second attack on 4 August was later shown not to have occurred. President Lyndon B.

Between 5 and 10 June 1967 Israel fought and decisively defeated the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War.

The Nigerian Civil War (6 July 1967 to 15 January 1970) pitted the federal government against the secessionist Republic of Biafra and produced one of the twentieth century's deadliest famines.

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalisation in Czechoslovakia that began on 5 January 1968 when the reformist Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party.

On 30–31 January 1968, during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year (Tet) holiday, North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong launched a coordinated surprise assault on more than 100 cities, towns, and military installations across South Vietnam…

The Bangladesh Liberation War arose from Bengali demands for self-determination in East Pakistan after the Pakistani military, under Yahya Khan, refused to honour the 1970 election won by the Awami League and launched Operation Searchlight…

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean armed forces, led by army commander General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition.

On 6 October 1973, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria under Anwar Sadat and Hafez al-Assad launched a coordinated surprise attack on Israeli forces in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, seeking to recover territory lost in…

India joined the ranks of nuclear-armed states on 18 May 1974, detonating its first nuclear device—code-named Smiling Buddha—in an underground test at the Pokhran range in the Rajasthan desert.

Cyprus was violently partitioned in the summer of 1974 when Turkey invaded the Mediterranean island, an unresolved division that persists today.

On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, ending the Vietnam War.

The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, launching one of the twentieth century's deadliest social experiments.

Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war ignited on 13 April 1975, when Phalangist gunmen ambushed a bus in Beirut's Ain el-Remmaneh district, killing 27 Palestinian passengers in what became known as "Black Sunday." The massacre triggered…

Soviet forces entered Afghanistan in late December 1979 (the 40th Army's main incursion began on 24–25 December) to prop up the embattled communist government in Kabul.

In early 1979 two linked conflicts reshaped mainland Southeast Asia. After years of border raids by Pol Pot's forces, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in late December 1978 and captured Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979, driving the genocidal Khmer…

The Iran–Iraq War, one of the longest and deadliest conventional wars of the twentieth century, began in 1980 when Iraq invaded revolutionary Iran.

The Falklands War of 1982 was a brief but consequential conflict between Argentina and Britain over a remote South Atlantic archipelago.

Sri Lanka's civil war began in 1983 with an outburst of anti-Tamil violence that set the island nation on a course of nearly three decades of conflict.

French intelligence agents sank the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour on 10 July 1985, killing a photographer and committing an act of state terrorism on the soil of a friendly nation.

The last Soviet troops crossed the Friendship Bridge out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989, ending a nine-year military occupation that had become the Soviet Union's costly and demoralising equivalent of a quagmire.

The Gulf War was a US-led coalition campaign that expelled Iraq from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein's tanks overran the oil-rich emirate on 2 August 1990.

Following the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, war erupted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, widely dated from 6 April 1992 when the newly independent republic gained international recognition.

The Battle of Mogadishu on 3–4 October 1993 was a bloody urban firefight in which US Army Rangers and Delta Force operators, sent to capture lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, found themselves trapped overnight after two Black…

Over roughly 100 days from 7 April 1994, members of Rwanda's Hutu-led government, army and allied militias such as the Interahamwe carried out a systematic genocide against the Tutsi minority, also killing moderate Hutu and Twa.

In July 1995, during the final stages of the Bosnian War, units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska under General Ratko Mladic overran the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, which the United Nations had declared a 'safe area'…

Beginning on 2 August 1998 and formally ending on 18 July 2003, the Second Congo War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo drew in around nine African states and dozens of armed groups, earning the name 'Africa's World War'.

Al-Qaeda announced itself to the world on 7 August 1998 with near-simultaneous truck bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding thousands.

On 11 September 2001 the militant group al-Qaeda carried out coordinated suicide attacks against the United States, hijacking four passenger airliners.

On 7 October 2001 a US-led coalition launched air strikes on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, opening Operation Enduring Freedom less than a month after the September 11 attacks.

On 12 October 2002 militants linked to the Southeast Asian jihadist network Jemaah Islamiyah detonated bombs in the tourist district of Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali.

On 13 December 2003 US forces captured the deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during Operation Red Dawn near his hometown of Tikrit.

On 20 March 2003 a US-led coalition including Britain, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq, opening with a 'shock and awe' bombing campaign aimed at the government of Saddam Hussein.

From February 2003, rebel groups in Sudan's western Darfur region — chiefly the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement — took up arms against the Khartoum government, citing political and economic…

Protests in Libya in February 2011 escalated rapidly into armed rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled since 1969.

In March 2011 protests demanding political reform spread across Syria, galvanised by the arrest and torture of teenagers who had scrawled anti-regime graffiti in the southern city of Daraa.

On 2 May 2011 (1 May in the US), US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda and architect of the September 11 attacks, during a covert night raid on his fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In June 2014 the jihadist group ISIL launched a lightning offensive across northern Iraq, capturing the major city of Mosul on 10 June as the Iraqi army collapsed, along with Tikrit and large swathes of territory.

On 30 September 2015 Russia launched a military intervention in Syria at the request of President Bashar al-Assad, whose government then controlled only a fraction of the country and was losing ground to rebel and jihadist forces.

On 26 March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen, intervening on behalf of the internationally recognised government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War, escalating a war that had begun with Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbas.

On 7 October 2023 the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a large-scale surprise assault from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, breaching the border barrier and attacking military bases and civilian communities.

A lightning offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and allied factions captured Damascus, toppling President Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia.

After militants killed 26 tourists, mostly Hindu civilians, in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir on 22 April 2025, India blamed Pakistan-based groups and launched missile and air strikes inside Pakistan on 7 May under the codename…

On 13 June 2025, Israel launched a surprise air campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities, missile sites, and senior military and scientific personnel, opening a direct twelve-day war between the two adversaries.

On 26 October 2025, Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) captured El Fasher, the Sudanese army's last stronghold in the Darfur region, after a brutal siege lasting some 18 months.