Maps on the Web

Timelapse of Every Battle in History

by Cottereau

This video shows every battle referenced on Wikipedia (10,624). Every battle is represented by a dot. Dots stay on the map for a while and then disappear.

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 :

- Missing data. 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.