Civilizations

    The United States is young by Civilization standards, being barely more than 200 years old. The United States did not expand to reach its current borders until the middle of the 19th century, and did not become a true world power until the middle of the 20th century. America was the first European colony to separate successfully from its motherland, and it was among the first nations to be established on the premise that sovereignty rests with its citizens and not with the government.

    Prior to the 1770s, the American colonists were loyal subjects of the British Empire, but a combination of taxes and ministerial mismanagement of the situation led to the outbreak of revolution in 1776. George Washington, the leader of the colonial forces during the Revolutionary War and later First President of the United States, along with the other Founding Fathers, managed to win the fight for independence against all odds and lay the constitutional foundation for America's future growth. In its first century and a half, the country was mainly preoccupied with its own territorial exploration, internal development, and economic growth. American politics evolved from quasi-aristocratic beginnings to become increasingly democratic during the 1820s and '30s. But despite the nation's rapid acquisition of territory and dramatic population growth, the spectre of slavery continued to divide the country between North and South. The struggle between anti- and pro-slavery advocates eventually erupted in a bloody Civil War that lasted four years and consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. In the end, the Union was preserved and the power of the central federal government greatly strengthened compared to before the conflict.

    Following the Civil War, the nation entered a period of unprecedented prosperity after the long conflict and reconstruction. In the ensuing two decades industrial production, the number of industrial workers, and the number of factories all more than doubled. European immigration, westward expansion, urban growth, technological advances, and a host of American inventions - including the telephone, typewriter, linotype, phonograph, electric light, cash register, air brake, refrigerator car, and the automobile - contributed to the American explosion, while widespread use of corporate organization offered new opportunities for large-scale financing of business enterprise and attracted new capital. But despite America's growth as one of the world's leading industrial powers, the nation still remained isolationist in outlook, paying little to no attention to the world outside its borders.

    The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked the emergence of the United States onto the world's stage as a major power, but it was not until World War I that the country truly became invovled in world politics. Following the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, the nation again turned its back on the rest of the world and enjoyed the prosperous decade known as the "Roaring Twenties". Unfortunately, this economic boom was not to last. Wall Street's stock market crashed in 1929 and kicked off the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the midst of constant bank failures and rampant unemployment, Franklin Roosevelt was elected president and set about to fix the country through his recovery plan called the "New Deal". The program was a mixed success economically, but helped restore hope and confidence to a people that were in serious need of both. Roosevelt then went on to lead the United States through the crucible of World War II, dying a few months before victory was won.

    The Allied victory at the end of World War II left the United States as one of the world's two "superpowers" along with the Soviet Union. In only a few short years the two former allies had become opponents in the Cold War, a tense diplomatic standoff that would last for forty years. Domestically, the nation enjoyed considerable prosperity in the 1950s, experienced a turbulent period of cultural and social change in the 1960s, and suffered through economic stagnation in the 1970s, with recovery taking place in the following decades. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989-91, the United States has been left alone as the world's sole remaining superpower. Rather than facing conventional armies on the field of battle, America is now threatened by terrorist groups who make no distinction between military and civilian targets. Highly trained special operations units like the Navy SEALs are often used to combat these enemies using advanced weaponry. But for all of its overwhelming economic and military strength, the United States will have to work together with other nations in order to meet the threats of the modern world.

    Before the spread of Islam and the Arabic language, the term "Arab" referred to any of the nomadic residents of the Arabian Peninsula. When used in a modern context, "Arab" refers to any of the Arabic-speaking peoples who reside on the Atlantic Coast of Africa, Southwestern Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi-Arabia, Syria, and Iraq. The earliest nomadic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula herded their sheep, goats, and camels through an unforgiving desert environment; while those Arabs who settled in the oases provided date and cereal agriculture as trade staples for Arab caravans that transported spices, ivory, and gold from southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa to the civilizations farther north.

    During the 7th century AD, Muhammad emerged as the prophet for the religion of Islam, which was widely adopted by the Arab community. Islam unified the Bedouins and the town-dwellers of the oases, and within a century, spread throughout most of the present day Arab-speaking world. The newfound social organization that followed Islam offered new possibilities for the Arabs as agricultural production and intercity trading, particularly in luxury goods, saw significant increases. Gradually, the triad of temple, court, and market formed, as well as a standardized style of writing for laws and other texts. New institutions also emerged, including coinage, territorial deities, royal priesthoods, and standing armies, which further enhanced Arab power.

    By proclaiming his message publicly, Muhammad gained many followers. After his death, the succeeding caliphs continued to spread the faith of Islam far beyond the religion's birthplace in Mecca. Aside from initial conquests in Iraq and Syria, the Arab conquests penetrated regions including Anatolia, Northern Africa, and Iran. Using their Camel Archers to cross difficult desert terrain, the Arabs were able to create an empire stretching from Spain to the borders of India in barely more than a hundred years. The Arab empire of the medieval period was far more advanced than contemporary Europeans; Harun al-Rashid's Baghdad may have held a million people at the same time that Charlemagne's Aachen was a "capital" of ten thousand. Centers of learning attracted scholars from across the Muslim world to great cities such as Baghdad, Damascus, and Cordoba. The Arabs of this period made many advances in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and other areas, as well as translating many of the classics of the Ancient Greeks into Arabic, thereby saving them from destruction.

    During the period of the Crusades, the Arabic world came under assault from Christian Europe. The greatest of Muslim generals from this period was Salah al-Din, better known as Saladin, who successfully defeated the Third Crusade and recaptured Jerusalem for the Arabs. In addition to his military skills, Saladin was known to be a pious man and was well-respected by his enemies as well as his allies - which was very unusual indeed for the Crusades.

    For most of the past five centuries, much of the Arab world has been ruled by foreigners; first by the Ottoman Turks, then by the Western colonial powers. Since the onset of de-colonization in the 1950s, traditional Arab values have been modified through the combined pressures of urbanization, industrialization, and Western influence. While urban Arabs still tend to identify themselves more by nationality than by tribe, village farmers revere the pastoral nomad's romantic way of life and claim a kinship with the great desert tribes of the past. As heirs to the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Hebrews, even to the Greeks and Indians, the societies created by Muslims bridge time and space. The original Arab tribes, in less than 20 years after Muhammad's death, defeated the Byzantine and Persian empires, occupied a vast territory from Libya to Persia, and then developed into the Arab, or Islamic, Empire known today.

    Argentina is a sovereign state, organized as a representative and federal republic, located in the southeastern corner of America. Its territory is divided into 23 provinces and one autonomous city, Buenos Aires, which is the nation's capital and seat of the federal government. Its mainland, covers much of South America, it borders with Bolivia and Paraguay on the north, with Brazil on the north-east, with Chile in the west and south, with Uruguay on the east and with the Atlantic Ocean on the west. The last Spanish viceroy, who ruled from Buenos Aires, was deposed the 25 of May of 1810 and the First Board government was organized. The 9th of July of 1816 Argentina formally proclaimed its independence in Tucumán as a free and sovereign country.

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    The origin of the Aztec people is uncertain, but elements of their own tradition suggest that they were a tribe of hunter-gatherers on the northern Mexican plateau before their appearance in Meso-America in the 12th century. The Aztec were so called for Aztlan ("White Land"), an allusion to their origins in northern Mexico. It is possible that their migration southward was part of a general movement of peoples that followed, or perhaps helped trigger, the collapse of the Toltec civilization. The Aztecs settled on islands in Lake Texcoco and in 1325 founded Tenochtitlan, which remained their chief city. The basis of the Aztecs' success in creating a great state and ultimately an empire was their remarkable system of agriculture, which featured intensive cultivation of all available land, as well as elaborate systems of irrigation and reclamation of swampland. The high productivity gained by these methods made for a rich and populous state. The empire the Aztecs established was equaled in the New World only by that of the Incas of Peru, and the brilliance of their civilization is comparable to that of other great ancient cultures of the New and the Old World.

    Under a succession of ambitious kings they established a dominion that eventually stretched over most of present-day Mexico. By commerce and conquest, Tenochtitlan came to rule an empire of 400 to 500 small states, comprising by 1519 some five to six million people spread over 80,000 square miles. Valor in war, notably in the feared Jaguar Warrior formations, was the surest path to advancement in Aztec society, which was caste- and class-divided but nonetheless vertically fluid. The priestly and bureaucratic classes were involved in the administration of the empire, while at the bottom of society were classes of serfs, indentured servants, and outright slaves. The incredible story of a wandering tribe that was able to build an empire in one century (from the beginning of the 14th century to the beginning of the 15th) can be largely explained by three main factors: the Aztec religion, the thriving trade routes centered on Tenochtilan, and Aztec military organization. In 1502 the ninth emperor Montezuma II (1502-1520) succeeded his uncle Ahuitzotl as the leader of an empire that had reached its greatest extent, stretching from what is now northern Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua. The Aztec empire was still expanding, and its society still evolving, when its progress was halted in 1519 by the appearance of Spanish adventurers.

    For all its apparent strength, the Aztec Empire had vulnerabilities that the Spanish were able to exploit. Aztec rule was based upon a system of tribute and fear over the surrounding peoples; every year, they were forced to pay the Aztecs money, goods, and a supply of captives to be sacrificed on the altar. Taking advantage of this resentment of their Aztec overlords, the tiny Spanish force was able to attract a massive army of some 30,000 Mesoamericans of many different tribes. After mistaking the Spanish for gods and inviting them into Tenochtitlan, Montezuma was taken prisoner by Hernando Cortes and died in custody. Montezuma's successors, Cuitlahuac and Cuauhtemoc, were unable to stave off the force raised by the conquistadors and, with the Spanish sack of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Aztec empire came to an end.

    The Babylonian Empire was, rather than a new idea, a reinvigoration of the old Sumerian Empire, which had also occupied what is today Southern Iraq. Babylonia was formed from a collection of roughly a dozen city states and was named for its capital city of Babylon. Originally a disorganized region, Babylon and Babylonia began to grow as a center for culture, trade, and religion under the rule of Hammurabi in 1728BC. Location of one of the seven ancient wonders - the Hanging Gardens - Babylonia became the jewel of the ancient world.

    Hammurabi was the first known ruler of united Babylonia as well as its greatest lawgiver. Hammurabi's Code of Laws regulated Babylonian life in such a way as to make the consequences of most criminal acts publicly known. Citizens could then structure their behavior based on these laws leading to a more organized society. So comprehensive was the Babylonian Code that little about its laws or governmental system changed in the entirety of its 1,200 years of existence. Babylon was so revered for this system that cities and states as far as the Mediterranean would emulate it for centuries.

    After the death of Hammurabi (1750 BC), the empire slowly declined in power and influence until it was eventually conquered by the Kassites (around 1600 BC) from what are now the mountains of Iran. The Kassites ruled over Babylonia for 576 years, reinvigorating the empire under their reign. Although Hammurabi ruled over Babylonia as a series of interconnected city states, the Kassites were the first rulers of Babylonia to transform the country into an organized territory. The Kassites created trade routes to countries as far away as Greece, Armenia and Turkey. Trade with these nations brought further wealth and status to Babylonia.

    Towards the end of the Kassite era of rule, Babylonia once again began to fall into decline, in part due to external political and military pressure. In 627 BC, the last Kassite ruler died, and Babylonia revolted under the command of a new leader, Nabopolassar. Nabopolassar's son, Nebuchadnezzar II, ruled Babylonia and brought about another golden era. During his rule, Babylonia became a military power, invading and taking territory in Egypt and Assyria. Not long afterwards, in 539 BC, Cyrus of Persia invaded Babylonia, conquering it, and forever ending Babylonia's existence as an independent territory.

    Despite numerous regime changes, education reached exceptional heights among the Babylonians. Technical achievements such as the creation of a base 60, "sexigesimal," system of mathematics, are still used to this day. Sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour: modern time, is in fact, Babylonian time.

    Much like the Sumerian Empire from which they were descended, Babylonia was a nation of fanatical record-keepers. Starting with Hammurabi and continuing down until the empire's dissolution at the hands of Cyrus and the great Persian emperors, every financial transaction, every court verdict, every contract, and just about anything that could be written down, was - on clay tablets. With laws pertaining to almost every aspect of daily living, a significant amount of data was recorded, and much of this has been uncovered and excavated during the modern era. Researchers have even found several optical devices, similar to magnifying glasses, which were used to allow record keepers to write in smaller cuneiform, in order to fit more information on each clay tablet.

    Babylonia played an important role in the development of law throughout the world. The creation of Hammurabi's Code of Laws, and the zeal with which his successors, both blood-related and not, upheld those laws, demonstrated for all of history how successful and wealthy a nation could become by following an organized system of government.

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    In March 1808 AD, the Portuguese royal family and ministers arrived in Rio de Janeiro to take refuge in Brazil as Napoleon's forces overran their homeland. The prince regent Joao, ruling in the stead of his mother Maria I, who was incapacitated due to mental illness, re-established his capital in Rio and ruled the empire from there. While in residence, he put in place all the ministries of a sovereign capital, as well as founding a royal library, a military academy, a royal mint, a printing office, and medical and law schools. In 1815, Joao declared Brazil a kingdom, co-equal with Portugal in the empire. Following the defeat of France, he preferred to remain in Brazil until called back to Portugal to deal with radical revolts. In April 1821, Joao appointed his son Pedro to the regency. Pedro's ministers, many Brazilian born, urged independence; the young regent issued a declaration of independence for Brazil in September 1822 and was crowned as Emperor Pedro I within three months. In 1825 the Portuguese government officially recognized Brazil's sovereignty, and within the year most of the European nations followed suit.

    General Ernesto Geisel assumed the presidency in 1974, and immediately launched into a "slow, gradual and safe" policy of returning rule to a democratic government. Over several years he ended the torture of political prisoners, censorship of the press, and finally the junta itself when he repealed the Fifth Institutional Act. His successor continued the process, and in 1985 the first free elections made Jose Sarney president. With a stable government and thriving economy, Brazil has since taken a leading role in regional affairs, being a founding member of organizations such as the Latin Union, Organization of American States, Mercosul, and Union of South American Nations. At the beginning of a new millennium, Brazil is poised to assume an equally influential role on the world stage.

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    The Byzantine Empire, centered around the city of Constantinople, was the successor to the Roman Empire. At its height, the Byzantine Empire reached from Persia to Spain, controlling nearly all the territory that felt the lap of the Mediterranean's warm waters.

    When the Byzantine Empire began and the Roman Empire ceased is a point of much contention. Some historians place the beginning of the Byzantine Empire in 300 AD, when Constantine I moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to a city called Byzantium (later know as Constantinople). Others place the birth of the Byzantine Empire at the end of the reign of Theodosius I, who at his death split the Roman Empire into the Western Empire, ruled from Rome, and the Eastern Empire, ruled from Constantinople.

    Regardless of historic debate, after the sacking of Rome in 476 AD, the Byzantine Empire was to become the foremost European nation in art, trade and stability - although not necessarily all at once. Taking the throne in 527 AD, Justinian I extended the grip of the Byzantine Empire from Constantinople to the furthest coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. However the Empire would not be able to enjoy the benefits of such territorial expansions for long, as Justinian's successor, Justin II, would begin a trend of placating the various enemies of the Empire - the Sassanid Persians, the Bulgars, and the Arabs, newly organized under Mohammed - with territory in exchange for peace.

    Territorial losses would continue to weaken the Byzantines until a new lineage of emperors, known as the Macedonian Emperors, arose to invigorate the Empire once again. Basil I founded the Macedonian line in 869. Under the Macedonians, the Byzantine Empire once again began to reach outwards, solidifying its hold on much of the territory neighboring Constantinople. Art flourished in their roughly two centuries of rule, as did the Greek Orthodox Church.

    The new millennium would be a painful one for Byzantium. Relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church had been deteriorating for many years, and the conflict came to a head with the Great Schism (1054), which finally split the two religions. Militarily, increased assaults by the Seljuk Turks culminated in a resounding defeat for the Empire at the Battle of Manzikert, the Empire losing much of its freshly-gained holdings.

    But once again, the rise of a powerful new dynasty reversed the Empire's decline. This new dynasty, the Comnenius, sent the call to Western Europe for aid in fighting the Seljuk Turks. Pope Urban II, seeing a chance to reconquer the Holy Lands of Antioch and Jerusalem, as well as halt the squabbling of the European Kings, spread the word for the First Crusade.

    Through the Crusaders' efforts, the Byzantine Empire regained a portion of its lost territory. But the holy warriors of Western Europe became difficult to control, often threatening to assault the very Empire that had requested their aid. John II and Manuel I, the two most prestigious of the Comnenius emperors, held off the Crusaders and safeguarded the empire from a host of external foes, while ushering in a new era of Byzantine artistic and economic prowess.

    Manuel I Comnenius was the last great emperor of the Byzantines and the last Comneni. The Angeloi dynasty, successors to the Comneni, proved unable to halt the Empire's slow collapse. In 1204, the knights of the Fourth Crusade, summoned by a disposed Angeloi prince, sacked Constantinople and split the Byzantine Empire into three smaller kingdoms. Nicaea, one of these ex-Byzantine states, recaptured Constantinople years later, but all hopes of reviving the Byzantine Empire would be ended with the capture of the city by the Ottoman leader Mehmed II in 1461.

    Canada is a country in North America consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean. At 9.98 million square kilometres in total, Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area. Its common border with the United States is the world's longest land border shared by the same two countries. The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonies were established on the region's Atlantic coast. As a consequence of various conflicts, the United Kingdom gained and lost North American territories until left, in the late 18th century, with what mostly comprises Canada today. Pursuant to the British North America Act, on July 1, 1867 three colonies joined to form the autonomous federal dominion of Canada. This began an accretion of provinces and territories to the new self-governing dominion. In 1931, Britain granted Canada full independence in most matters with the Statute of Westminster 1931. The Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament. Canada is a federal parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. Canada is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. The country is officially bilingual at the federal level. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries, with a population of approximately 35 million as of December 2012. Its advanced economy is one of the largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed trade networks. Canada's long and complex relationship with the United States has had a significant impact on its economy and culture. Canada is a developed country and one of the wealthiest in the world, with the eighth highest per capita income globally, and the eighth highest ranking in the Human Development Index. It ranks among the highest in international measurements of education, government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, and economic freedom. Canada's participation in economic international and intergovernmental institutions or groupings includes the G8 (Group of Eight); the Group of Ten (economic); the Group of Twenty (G-20 major economies); the North American Free Trade Agreement; and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. Canada's alliances include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

    The Celts were a group of Indo-Europeans who inhabited much of Central and Western Europe in the period between 1000 and 500 BC. While Celtic culture today is associated with Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the ancient Celts were spread out over a much larger distance. In addition to those locations, different groups of Celts were also present in Spain, France (Gaul), Hungary, and Bulgaria (Thrace). Although the Greeks and Romans considered the Celts to be barbarians, they possessed a sophisticated and unique culture.

    The ancient Celts of Gaul and Britain (who we know the most about) were divided into many tribes loosely based on kinship ties. Social structure was determined by a mixture of class standing within the tribe and one's place within the Celtic religion. Kings were elected to lead the tribes, and society was divided into the three groups: warriors, an intellectual class of druids and bards, and everyone else. Society was based around warfare, but to the Celts it was more of a sport than a battle to the death: raids were the norm, and pitched battles were rare.

    The Celts do not appear to have had any large cities, although there were many small towns and fortresses across the regions they controlled. Trade was rather primitive and mostly consisted of a barter economy, although in some coastal regions it was more developed. The Celts shared a common religion emphasizing sacred groves, the role of druids as priests and scholars, and the use of periodic sacrifices (which were occasionally human sacrifices). Celtic gods were named after natural phenomenon and they were quite numerous. Other Celtic practices included the removal of body hair (done to ensure cleanliness) and the taking of enemy heads as trophies in battle.

    The most notable event in the early history of the Celts was the sacking of the city of Rome in 390 BC under the great King Brennus. Although the victory was a military triumph and provided a large immediate gain to the Celts, the Romans would prove to have a very long memory, and over the years they would make their enemies pay dearly for it by methodically conquering all Celtic territory their mighty legions could reach.

    By 192 BC, the Romans had subjugated the last of the Celtic tribes in Italy, and they then began a program of colonization of southern Gaul on the Mediterranean coast. Under the great general Julius Caesar, the Romans conquered the entirety of Gaul and defeated a large revolt headed by Vercingetorix between 58 - 51 BC, removing the Celtic threat to the Imperial City once and for all. Under the Emperor Claudius, the Romans went on to invade and occupy Celtic Britain as well.

    The Celts remained under Roman rule for the next four centuries until the Germanic invasions of the fifth century AD destroyed the Roman Empire in the west. Although Celtic culture disappeared in many parts of Europe during those years of foreign occupation, it was preserved in Ireland and the western fringe of Britain. Over time the pagan Celtic culture would combine with Christianity to give rise to beautiful new forms of artwork and literature. Despite many attempts over the centuries to destroy it, the Celtic culture survives. In fact, today it enjoys a great deal of popularity and is even experiencing something of a revival.

    Despite political and social upheavals that frequently ravaged the country, China is unique for its longevity and resilience as a politico-cultural entity. Most of China's cultural progress has been accomplished with relatively little outside influence; even when the country was ruled by such "barbarian" peoples as the Chin or Mongols, these were soon absorbed into the fabric of Chinese culture. The casting of bronze and the development of an alphabet date from the period of the Shang dynasty - China's first, believed to have dominated north China from the mid-16th to mid-11th century BC. The overthrow of the Shang dynasty by the Chou (1111-255 BC) spanned three generations; although the vibrant Chou culture produced some of history's greatest philosophers and artists, among them Confucius and Lao-zi, the final two centuries of the dynasty saw China engulfed by a series of civil wars known as the "Warring States" period (403-221 BC).

    The fighting came to an end when Qin Shi Huang managed to conquer all of his rivals and establish the Ch'in Dynasty (221-206 BC). He became the first Chinese Emperor, and was the first man to unite all of China under a single ruler, but the Ch'in Dynasty was unable to outlive his death. The subsequent Han dynasty was founded by Liu Pang, who also assumed the title of emperor in 202 BC. The four centuries of the Han were ones of considerable changes in imperial, political, cultural, and social development. The Han undertook massive engineering projects (including the Great Wall), and established a Chinese identity that would survive until the advent of Communism. The Cho-ko-nu, a type of repeating crossbow, was developed during the Han period and remained in use by the Chinese for almost two thousand years.

    By the end of the 2nd century AD the Han Empire had virtually ceased to exist, and was followed by a lengthy period of rival kingdoms that did not end until 618 AD, when the T'ang dynasty came to power. The T'ang were followed by the Sung Dynasty (960-1279 AD), which collapsed in the face of the Mongol invasions. By securing the allegiance of the Hsi Hsia in Tibet (1209), Genghis Khan disposed of a potential enemy and prepared the ground for an invasion of China. For several years Mongol armies pillaged the country; finally, in 1214 Genghis overwhelmed the capital of the northern Chin (modern Beijing). During the next decades there was an uneasy truce between the Mongols in the north and the Sung state in the south. The Mongols resumed their advance in 1250 under Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis.

    From 1267 onward, the Mongols, this time assisted by the armored horsemen and auxiliary troops of north China, attacked on several fronts. When organized resistance ceased soon afterward, foreign invaders controlled the whole of China for the only time in history. The Mongols occupied China for a century, but ineptitude on the throne, factionalism at court, and rivalries among generals weakened their rule. Out of this turmoil emerged a new native dynasty, the Ming (1368-1644), known for patronage of the arts. Before turning inward and reverting to an isolationist policy in 1424, the Ming period saw extensive trade with India and Arabia, and Ming navigators may have reached the Americas before Columbus. The Ming were followed by the Manchus (1644-1911), the last imperial dynasty of China, marked by continuous warfare, Western imperialism, rampant corruption, and bureaucratic ineptitude.

    In the wake of the disastrous Boxer Rebellion, the imperial court could no longer maintain support among the peasantry and army; revolution (1911-1912) followed. The first half of the 20th century saw the disintegration of the old order in China and the foundations of a new society, begun by the short-lived democratic Republic (1912-1920), which quickly degenerated into the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek. A new revolution, led by the Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), erupted. Although they had been united against the Japanese invasion, by the end of World War II civil war raged in China. Nationalists and Communists raced to take over Japanese-held territories, built up their forces, and fought limited engagements while still conducting negotiations; during 1947-1948, after initial Nationalist victories, the strategic balance shifted in favor of the Communists. Four years after Japan's surrender, a profound and popularly based revolution had swept China, and, in October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. In 1966, the Communists at the instigation of Mao launched the disastrous "Cultural Revolution," a ten-year assault on "traditional values" and "bourgeois thinking" which ultimately left the country in disarray. After Mao's death in 1976, his rival Deng Xiaopeng assumed power and began social and economic reforms that would see China return to world prominence. China today is one of the world's rising powers, but exactly what course its leaders will chart next remains uncertain.

    The territory of what is now Colombia was originally inhabited by indigenous peoples including the Muisca, Quimbaya, and Tairona. The Spanish arrived in 1499 and initiated a period of conquest and colonization ultimately creating the Viceroyalty of New Granada, with its capital at Bogotá. Independence from Spain was won in 1819, but by 1830 "Gran Colombia" had collapsed with the secession of Venezuela and Ecuador. What is now Colombia and Panama emerged as the Republic of New Granada. The new nation experimented with federalism as the Granadine Confederation (1858), and then the United States of Colombia (1863), before the Republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886. Panama seceded in 1903.

    Since the 1960s, the country has suffered from an asymmetric low-intensity armed conflict. The conflict escalated in the 1990s, but since 2000 the conflict has decreased considerably.

    Colombia is ethnically diverse, and the interaction between descendants of the original native inhabitants, Spanish colonists, Africans originally brought to the country as slaves, and 20th-century immigrants from Europe and the Middle East, has produced a rich cultural heritage. This has also been influenced by Colombia's varied geography, and the imposing landscape of the country has resulted in the development of very strong regional identities, in many cases stronger than the national. The majority of the urban centers are located in the highlands of the Andes mountains, but Colombian territory also encompasses Amazon rainforest, tropical grassland and both Caribbean and Pacific coastlines.

    The Kingdom of Kongo was a former state in western Central Africa, founded in the 14th century. In the 15th century the kingdom stretched from the Congo River in the north to the Loje River in the south and from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to beyond the Kwango River in the east. Several smaller autonomous states to the south and east paid tribute to it. Kongo was ruled by the manikongo, or king, and was divided into six provinces, each administered by a governor appointed by the manikongo.

    In 1482, Diogo Cao, a Portuguese explorer, visited the kingdom, and the reigning manikongo, Nzinga Nkuwu, was favorably impressed with Portuguese culture. In 1491, Portuguese missionaries, soldiers, and artisans were welcomed at Mbanza-Kongo, the capital of the kingdom. The missionaries soon gained converts, including Nzinga Nkuwu (who took the name Joao I), and the soldiers helped the manikongo defeat an internal rebellion.

    The next manikongo, Afonso I (reigned 1505-43), was raised as a Christian and attempted to convert the kingdom to Christianity and European ways. However, the Portuguese residents in Kongo were primarily interested in increasing their private fortunes (especially through capturing Africans and selling them into slavery), and, despite the attempts of King Manuel I of Portugal to channel the efforts of his subjects into constructive projects, the continued rapaciousness of the Portuguese played a major part in weakening the kingdom and reducing the hold of the capital over the provinces.

    After the death of Afonso, Kongo declined rapidly and suffered major civil wars. The Portuguese shifted their interest southward to the kingdom of Ndongo and helped Ndongo defeat Kongo in 1556. However, in 1569 the Portuguese aided Kongo by helping to repel an invasion from the east by a Lunda ethnic group. The slave trade, which undermined the social structure of Kongo, continued to weaken the authority of the manikongo.

    In 1641, Manikongo Garcia II allied himself with the Dutch in an attempt to control Portuguese slave traders, but in 1665 a Portuguese force decisively defeated the army of Kongo and from that time onward the manikongo was little more than a vassal of Portugal. The kingdom disintegrated into a number of small states, all controlled to varying degrees by the Portuguese. The area of Kongo was incorporated mostly into Portuguese Angola and partly into the Kongo Free State (under control of Belgium). Today the territory is made up by Northern Angola, the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Kinshasa, former Zaire) and southern Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville).

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    Originally several separate territories under the control of the Holy Roman Empire, and then united into one state under Habsburg rule (16th century), the Netherlands did not acquire national independence until the conclusion of the Eighty Years' War (1568-1648 AD) when the Spanish formally renounced all claims to Dutch sovereignty in the Treaty of Münster.

    The Eighty Years' War was sparked by Spanish religious oppression and an occupation by Spanish forces led by the Duke of Alba, during which over one thousand people were sentenced to death, including two prominent and popular Dutch nobles; these actions caused dissention among the Dutch people. In 1568 Willem, Prince of Orange, returned from a self-imposed exile (in order to avoid prosecution by the Duke of Alba) and led the uprising against the Spanish occupation.

    The Dutch fight for independence can be seen as a war against religious oppression, with the Pacification of Ghent treaty being a written representation of this sentiment. Signed on November 8th, 1576 the document specified an alliance between the Dutch provinces, in which religious differences would be put aside for the purposes of expelling the Spanish and restoring local provincial control to the Netherlands.

    During the seventeenth century the Dutch began using their large military and merchant navies to both create their own trading posts along the African coast and rob those of the Portuguese in an effort to reach valuable markets in India and Indonesia. The inrush of treasure, trade and knowledge from these trading and military expeditions was extremely beneficial, and during this first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch experienced a Golden Age of cultural and economic growth. This Golden Age would soon come to a crushing end.

    In 1795, France, under Napoleon I, conquered the Dutch mainland. The Netherlands quickly declined in influence and power, locally and internationally, with the British taking most of their colonial possessions. After Napoleon was defeated a few colonial territories were restored to the Dutch and remained under their control until the decolonization of the twentieth century.

    Many historians regard the Dutch empire as the first truly capitalist country. In addition to developing the first stock exchange, many modern services such as corporate insurance and retirement funds were attributed to Dutch inventiveness.

    The Netherlands is also the birthplace of one of the world's early democratic institutions - the Dutch Water Boards. Due to the unique topography of the Netherlands - about half of the mainland is a foot or more under sea level - the country's waterways must be constantly monitored and controlled in order to prevent flooding that would result in tremendous loss of life and property. Each Water Board is in charge of one of the nation's 27 water districts and all matters pertaining to local water management. The creation of these water boards predates the Netherlands itself.

    The modern Netherlands, with a diverse population and liberal laws towards drugs, prostitution, abortion, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia, has been a constant haven for refugees from other countries. Cultural minorities are encouraged to protect their own cultural identity while at the same time integrate into Dutch culture at large, further reinforcing the open-minded ideals for which Dutch ancestors fought and died.

    Few civilizations have left such an indelible mark on history as that of ancient Egypt. Though the first settlers of the Nile valley are thought to have arrived as early as 7000 BC, it wasn't until the legendary king Menes unified Upper and Lower Egypt that the region began to develop a cohesive sense of culture and identity. This First Dynasty (2925-2775 BC), with its capital at Memphis, was followed by 26 more over the next 2700 years. Writing was the major instrument in the centralization and self-preservation of Egypt. The two basic forms of writing, hieroglyphs and the cursive form known as hieratic (used on papyrus), were invented at much the same time in late pre-dynastic Egypt (about 3000 BC). Writing was used chiefly for administration and until about 2650 BC no continuous texts were recorded; the only literary texts written down before the early Middle Kingdom (1950 BC) seem to have been lists of religious practices and medical treatises. Another strength was the Egyptian religion, which was one of the most enduring of the ancient world, through which Egypt became a highly stratified, highly efficient society. Egypt's economic strength allowed for the support of a priestly class, who were tasked with the spiritual well being of the people yet able to devote their time to the study of religion, astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics. The priesthood also served the functions of a state bureaucracy, carrying out the edicts of the Pharaoh and managing his financial and diplomatic affairs. The great organizational and economic power of Egypt allowed the rulers to accomplish unmatched works of construction. The Great Pyramids of Giza, completed in the Fourth Dynasty (2575-2465 BC), still stand as one of mankind's most impressive feats of engineering and logistics.

    Prior to 1700 BC, no outsiders had ever held dominion over Egypt. That changed when the Hyksos, a Semitic people, overran Lower Egypt. Thereafter, Egypt's borders were defended by capable Libyan warriors and the elite often rode into battle in War Chariots, which were able to use speed to outflank opponents and break up organized formations of troops. It was under the rule of Hatshepsut, a woman who managed to exercise power despite the prohibition that the pharaoh must be male, that the Hyksos were driven out of the country through the use of such chariots. Egypt's greatest military strength, however, lay in the employment of mercenaries from Macedonia, Greece, Nubia and many other neighboring peoples - Egyptian gold was always their most valuable military asset. However, this was not enough to guarantee the isolation of the richest land in the Mediterranean world. Egypt fell to the Assyrians, and then to the Persians yet even during the plunder of Xerxes' governors, Egyptian culture and religion survived. Alexander the Great liberated the Egyptians from Persian rule in 332 BC and established the city of Alexandria, which was to become the new capital of Hellenic Egypt under the rule of the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty (332-30 BC), the last Egyptian kingdom. The kingdom was one of several that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander's death and the struggles of his successors. It was the wealthiest, and for much of the next 300 years, the most powerful politically and militarily.

    The able Ptolemies ruled in an unbroken line until the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC. Her suicide marked the end of Pharaonic rule and the beginning of Egypt's centuries as a Roman and Byzantine province. Although swept by the Islamic tide in 642 AD, Egypt was to remain under foreign occupation - Arabic, Ottoman, French, and British - until after World War I, when she finally gained her independence from a British administration weary of overseas conflict. From 1922 through 1952, Egypt appeared to be one of the world's most successful constitutional monarchies. But it was ripe for revolution; the military coup of July 1952 led by Gamal Nasser, ironically, finally made Egypt an island of stability in a turbulent Middle East.

    In the classical age Britain lay on the periphery of the civilized world; Julius Caesar's visitations to the island in 55/54 BC were viewed as a daring voyage into the unknown. But in 43 AD the island was invaded by Roman soldiers under the Emperor Claudius, and it was to spend the next four centuries as a Roman province. The Romans built cities, roads, and great bathhouses, the ruins of which can still be seen today. With the collapse of Roman power under Germanic onslaught, tribal migrations into Britain began about the middle of the 5th century. The first arrivals were invited by a British chieftain to defend his kingdom against the Picts and Scots. These first mercenaries were from three tribes - the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes - which were located on the coastlands of northwestern Germany. Eventually, these peoples would themselves topple the existing order, and Britain would spend many centuries divided between various warring kingdoms such as Mercia, East Anglia, and others. The first political entity that could rightly be called "England" formed out of the efforts of the kingdom of Wessex to unite the island against the invasion of Danes and Vikings in the 9th century. But the English domination was fleeting; the subsequent Norman Conquest (1066) resulted in the subordination of England to a Frankish aristocracy, and the introduction of feudalism to the Isles.

    The Norman invasion reoriented England from the Scandinavian world to the Mediterranean one, and reintroduced many elements of Latin culture that had been lost in the Germanic invasions. The English Normans would eventually give rise to a purely British line of kings, the Plantagenets. Three centuries later, the Wars of the Roses was the final struggle between the Yorkist and Lancastrian descendants of the Plantagenets for control of the throne. When Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, seized the crown in 1485, leaving the Yorkist Richard III dead upon the field of battle, few Englishmen would have predicted that 118 years of Tudor rule had begun. Elizabeth I (1558-1603) proved to be the most able Tudor monarch. No observer in 1558, any more than in 1485, would have predicted that despite the social discord, political floundering, and international humiliation of the past decades, the kingdom again stood on the threshold of an extraordinary age. Her reign ushered in two centuries of British exploration, colonization, and artistic and intellectual advances. When Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen," died childless, Parliament offered the crown to the closest blood kin, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England (1603-1625) and founded the Stuart dynasty. The Stuarts kings did not possess the best luck; Charles I was defeated by the forces of Parliament in the English Civil War and executed, and a scant four decades later his descendent James II was also overthrown in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. But despite all this turbulence, by 1700 England had merged with Scotland to become "Britain" and established an identity that would be both Protestant and Parliamentry.

    The British Empire was to be one based on trade and control of the seas. Using the soldiers commonly denoted "Redcoats", every major war Britain engaged in during the 18th and 19th centuries increased its colonial power. The Seven Years' War was particularly notable in this respect, and so were the Napoleonic Wars. By 1820 the total population of the British Empire was 200 million, 26% of the world's total population. However acquired, all these acquisitions added to the crown's and the country's power and reputation. For the privileged and the rich, the Victorian era was pre-eminently one of confidence and arrogance, under the able guidance of Britain's two longtime Prime Ministers, Gladstone and Disraeli. Stretching from Australia and New Zealand through India, much of Africa, and Canada, the British Empire under Victoria was truly one on which the "sun never set."

    But the "long summer of peace" came to an end in the bloodbath of Flanders. Although Britain suffered far less physical damage than France and underwent no political revolution, World War I may have affected it more fundamentally than any other European power. The war was a catalyst for social and economic change. The mainstays of the early Industrial Revolution, such as coal mining, textile production, and shipbuilding, upon which British prosperity had been built, were now impoverished or redundant. Britain was slow to develop many of the newer manufacturing industries, such as those involving chemicals, electronics, and automobiles. British foreign policy for much of the postwar period aimed at rehabilitating Germany, while domestic policy focused on institutionalizing socialism to counter public concerns. In general, these movements were opposed by France and resulted in a rupture between Britain and its wartime ally, forcing France into a position of isolation that would have prodigious consequences for Europe with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. World War II was a British victory, but left the nation bankrupt and unable to prevent the onset of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. Although Britons maintained a high standard of living, the British economy continued to perform poorly throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As a reaction, Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) set out to end socialism in Britain. Her most dramatic acts consisted of a continuing series of statutes to denationalize nearly every industry that Labour had brought into public ownership during the previous 40 years. Promising that "we shall govern as New Labour," the Blair government installed in general elections in 1997 accepted some of Thatcher's foreign policies but also carried out the economic reforms it promised in its manifesto. Faced now with terrorist attacks that threaten the lives of ordinary civilians, Britain has pledged to work together with the United States and other nations to defend this attack on civilization.

    Ethiopia is believed by many historians to be the birthplace of the human race. Lucy, a 3.2 million year old human skeleton, was discovered in Ethiopia's Afar Depression. However, beyond Lucy, there is little evidence to suggest (one way or another) that Ethiopia was settled until roughly the eighth century BC, when it is theorized that Jewish settlers fleeing Egypt, Sudan, and southern Arabia settled there.

    The first recorded government in Ethiopia was the Kingdom of Axum in the first century AD. Information on this kingdom is scarce; its founder remains unknown. But under Axum rule, Ethiopia became the first Christian nation in Africa. In roughly 330 AD, Frumentius, a Greek from Tyre, was consecrated the first bishop of Ethiopia by Saint Athanasius. Frumentius spread Christianity in Ethiopia through the construction of churches on land given to him by the Axum emperor. Although Christianity did not become a widespread religion in the region until much later, Frumentius can be considered the originator of Christianity in Ethiopia.

    Although Ethiopia had traditionally been the target for Muslim raids in the region, it was not until 1528 that a full scale invasion was successful. Under the leadership of Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi, Muslim forces swept through Ethiopia, routing the emperor's forces and sending him into hiding. Unable to re-secure his homeland with Ethiopian forces alone, Emperor Lebna Dengel Dawit II petitioned the Portuguese to assist defeating the invaders. In 1541 the Portuguese deployed an army of 400 musketeers to assist the emperor, and while these forces were defeated at the Battle of Wofla, the Muslims were ultimately forced to retreat when their leader was killed the following year at the Battle of Wayna Daga.

    Ethiopia had been wracked by a series of internal conflicts throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century. While not splintering the nation, these conflicts eroded the empire's central power until the feuding families were ultimately defeated by Tewodros II, who ruled Ethiopia between 1855 and 1868. Despite a prestigious military career, Tewodros II committed an egregious political faux pas when, in 1867, he imprisoned several British nationals after Queen Victoria of the England failed to answer a letter he had sent to her. The British swiftly sent an army to rescue the British citizens, and upon the Ethiopian army's defeat, Tewdros II committed suicide.

    Soon after, in 1870, the Italians, who had bought the Ethiopian costal city of Eritrea from a local Sultan, claimed that the Treaty of Wuchale (1889), an agreement between Italy and Ethiopia on the official boundaries between Ethiopia and Eritera, granted them sovereignty over all of Ethiopia, though in reality it only specified a very small portion of Northern Ethiopia near Eritrea. The Italians sent an army to conquer Ethiopia, but were repelled by Emperor Menelek II at the Battle of Adowa. After their defeat, the Italians signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa (1896) which recognized Ethiopia as an independent state. As it turned out, the Italians would be back.

    In 1936 the Italians once again invaded and occupied Ethiopia, this time under the fascist dictatorship of Mussolini, forcing the emperor to flee to England. The Italians were eventually defeated in 1941 by combined British and Ethiopian forces.

    Perhaps the most influential Ethiopian Emperor of the modern era was Haile Selassie I. Ruling from 1930 until his death in 1974 (with the exception of the brief Italian occupation), Selassie made great strides in modernizing his nation. New tax programs were implemented and the constitution was revised under his rule.

    In 1972, an enormous drought hit Ethiopia resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 citizens. Local rulers conspired to keep this information from Emperor Selassie, and when the information was finally revealed, the government's credibility with the common citizenry was seriously undermined. Combined with a major economic recession, the chaos within the government due to the drought provided the opportunity for officers within the Ethiopian military to stage a coup and take over the government. Haile Selassie I died on August 27th, 1975 when it is believed that he was suffocated in his sleep while imprisoned by the military government.

    In 2005 Ethiopia underwent its second multiparty election. Despite claims of corrupted vote counting, much of the international community saw this election as a positive step for Ethiopia's future.

    Modern France has its roots in ancient Gaul. In the 2nd century BC Rome intervened on the side of Massilia (Marseilles), a Greek colony founded in 600 BC, in its struggle against the barbarian tribes of the hinterland. The result was the formation, in 121 BC, of the Roman Provincia in what is now southern France; between 58 to 50 BC Julius Caesar seized the remainder. For more than four centuries Gaul enjoyed the benefits of Roman rule, and many ruins of aqueducts and bathhouses still dot the French landscape. After 395 AD the internal problems of the Empire encouraged barbarian penetration of Gaul. By 418, the Franks and Burgundians were established west of the Rhine, and the Visigoths had settled in Aquitaine. The period of the Merovingian and Carolingian Frankish dynasties (476-887) frames the Early Middle Ages.

    Following his ascension, the first Merovingian king, Clovis (481-511), consolidated the position of the Franks in northern Gaul. Clovis came to believe that his victories were due to the Christian God. Clovis' subsequent conversion assured the Frankish rulers of the support not only of the Catholic Church but of the majority of their own subjects. The Frankish kingdom reached its largest extent under Charlemagne (768-814), who united modern-day France, Italy, and Germany under his rule. After Charlemagne's death, his grandsons divided the kingdom into the three parts that have largely survived to the present. France was a divided kingdom for much of the medieval period, but power gradually began to accumulate in the hands of the rulers of the Ile de France region centered around Paris. By the rise of the house of Valois in 1328, France was the most powerful kingdom in Europe. Its ruler could muster larger armies than rivals; he could tap enormous fiscal resources; and the king's courts maintained royal supremacy. The history of France in the Late Middle Ages is dominated by efforts of its kings to maintain their suzerainty, efforts that, despite French advantages, were long frustrated.

    The Hundred Years War was an intermittent struggle between England and France in the 14th-15th centuries over a series of dynastic disputes, including the legitimate succession to the French crown. The war's turning point was reached in 1429, when an English army was forced to raise its siege of Orleans by a relief force organized by Joan of Arc. By 1453, England retained only Calais, which it finally relinquished in 1558. The French kings of the 16th century spent much of their time fighting the Hapsburg monarchs for control of Italy, while religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants led to a series of civil wars between 1562 and 1598.

    The ascension of the Bourbon line of kings beginning in 1589 brought renewed stability to France, and the country soared to some of its greatest heights during the long rule of Louis XIV (1643-1715). Under Louis, France became the artistic and intellectual capital of Europe. From his magnificent palace of Versailles, Louis was truly the "Sun King", the absolute master of all he surveyed. The French military was the most powerful in Europe at this time, known for the elite Musketeer units that served as the king's personal guard. France was so strong at this time that the other European nations kept banding together to stop France from conquering them - a pattern that would be repeated in the French Revolution.

    These intellectual developments, although significant by themselves, gave rise to a still more momentous change: the French Enlightenment. This movement was a cultural transformation based on rationalism, empiricism, and an amorphous concept of freedom found in the influential writings of figures like Voltaire (1694-1778) and Rousseau (1712-78). Compounding the situation was the bankruptcy of the French crown, which forced the king to call upon representatives of the people for additional taxes. Hence, what began in 1787 as a conflict between royal authority and aristocrats became a triangular struggle, with "the masses" opposing both absolutism and privilege. By any standard, the fall of the Bastille to the Parisian crowd in 1789 was a monumental event, a seemingly miraculous triumph of the people. But the French Revolution soon degenerated into a reign of terror and chaos. After a decade of violence and uncertainty, Napoleon terminated the bloodshed by overthrowing the French government in 1800, at the price of suppressing freedom altogether. In utter contrast to the Revolution, militarism became the defining quality of the Napoleonic regime. The French armies under Napoleon won victory after victory against all of the other great European powers, but decades of war led to the exhaustion of the nation and eventual defeat in 1815.

    However, the revolutionary fervor of the French citizenry was undiminished by the Napoleonic experience, and led to further revolutions in 1830 and 1848. The latter revolution lead to the short-lived Second Republic (1848-1852), which was overthrown by Napoleon's nephew "Napoleon III" who instituted the Second Empire (1852-1870). Following defeat in the Franco-Prussia War, the Third Republic (1870-1940) was formed, which survived the First World War but collapsed in the face of the German invasion in 1940. After the war, the period of the short-lived Fourth Republic (1947-59) was succeeded by the Fifth Republic (the current one), adopted in September 1958 by popular referendum. Although shorn of its past colonial holdings and aura of military invulnerability, France today remains a major economic power and influential member of the European Union.

    The Holy Roman Empire was created in 800 AD by Charlemagne. Covering much of central Europe from the Netherlands to Hungary, the Empire was both a political powerhouse and a hotbed of political intrigue and military conflict. In some ways "Emperors" in name only, the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were rarely able to exert real control over any territory that was beyond the reach of their personal armies.

    Although the Holy Roman Empire was not referred to as such until late in the reign of Otto I (962-973), it came into being as a political entity in 800 AD when Pope Leo III, in an effort to break ties with the weakening Byzantine Empire, crowned Charlemagne the "Emperor of the Romans." A keen military strategist and devout Catholic, Charlemagne managed to keep the empire united until his death in 814, upon which the empire steadily dissolved into separate warring states until reunited under the rule of Otto I. While Otto I managed to reunite the empire, his downfall, and that of many successor emperors, was his fixation on Italy. Although Italy was not formally part of the empire, Otto I repeatedly invaded that country in order to secure holdings for the Germanic empire. However, the majority of his military ventures into Italy were unsuccessful, and Otto I only succeeded in eroding his power base in Germany.

    Throughout its history, the Holy Roman Empire was the stage for conflicts between its Emperors and the Church. Initially it was only the Pope who could designate the Roman Emperor, however over time - especially during the reign of Otto I - it became instead the Emperor who named the next Pope, providing the throne with enormous religious power. During the reign of the Salian Emperors (1024-1125) this practice again changed. A council of churchmen, known as Cardinals, was formed and given the power to nominate and elect popes. This practice has continued with only minor changes to the present day.

    Charles VI ruled with perhaps the most pragmatic view of his empire. Voted by the Cardinal Council as Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, Charles immediately gave up all imperial ambitions in Italy and instead focused on consolidating power in the Germanic lands and the eastern half of his empire. Accepting that the German cities and territories were the political and military domains of their local rulers, Charles worked with these local leaders to establish a combined dominance instead of attempting to wrest away their power. Unfortunately, upon Charles' death his son Sigismund fell back into the historical fallacy of attempting to control Italy, and the Empire once again continued its decline into irrelevancy.

    Despite the internal power struggles wracking the Holy Roman Empire, local rulers banded together in order to face the Napoleonic threat from France. From 1792 to 1802, Austria, Prussia and the other German states combined forces with the hope of defeating the invading French, but to no avail. With little territory left under his control, Emperor Francis II resigned the title of Holy Roman Emperor. The Empire was formally dissolved on the sixth of August, 1806.

    Over its history, the Holy Roman Empire existed more as an idea than an actual administrative organization. The empire's leaders rarely had actual control over their lands, and constant squabbling between fiefdom holders, as well as the church and state, kept the empire from solidifying any real control over its domain. Its recreation has, however, served as a goal which many would-be conquerors in history have strived to achieve, including Otto von Bismark, King William I, and Adolf Hitler.

    The period following the catastrophic collapse of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece (about 1200 BC) was marked by a series of migrations by barbarian peoples from the north, leading to the formation of a number of city-states - prominent among these, Sparta and Athens - and a phase of Greek colonization along the shores of the Mediterranean. For several centuries, Greek history was a provincial tale of neighbors squabbling over scarce resources. But it was also the dawn of philosophy and science, the era when the bard Homer composed his great epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. There seems to be no good reason why the Hellenes, clustered in isolated city-states in a relatively poor and backward land, should have struck out into intellectual regions that were only dimly perceived, if at all, by the splendid civilizations of the Yangtze, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Nile valleys - but they did.

    The Persian Wars (492-449 BC) were sparked by a revolt of Greek colonies in Asia Minor and brought the Greeks onto the stage of world history. Athens and Eretria sent a small fleet in support of the revolt, which the Persian emperors took as a pretext for launching two invasions of the Greek mainland. In 490 BC a Persian army under Darius I (522-486 BC) landed unopposed on the plain of Marathon; following an appeal to the Spartans, the Athenian-led Greeks won a decisive victory. A larger second invasion ten years later, blunted by the valiant stand by the Spartans and Thespians at Thermopylae (481 BC), ended with the crushing defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis. Sporadic fighting between Greek alliances and Persia continued for another 30 years, before the Peace of Callas (449 BC) finally ended the hostilities. The surprising Greek triumph ensured the survival of Greek culture and political structures.

    Growing tensions among the victors led to the Peloponnesian Wars (431-404 BC), fought between Athens and Sparta. The Athenian League was, in fact, an empire that included most of the island and coastal states around the shores of the Aegean Sea, while Sparta was leader of an alliance of independent cities that included most of the major land powers of the peninsula. The end finally came in 404 BC when, starved by an impenetrable blockade, Athens capitulated. Athens' devastation and decline was perhaps the worst casualty in a war that crippled Greek unity.

    By this time, a new power was growing in the north of Greece. In 353 BC, Philip I was in undisputed control of a much-enlarged Macedonia. Phalanx tactics were known from ancient Sumer and Egypt, but Philip perfected the tactical use of these spear-wielding forces in dense, massive blocks of eight or even sixteen ranks, sacrificing flexibility and mobility in order to achieve maximum protection and power. Unless Alexander (336-323 BC) was himself responsible for his father's assassination in 336 BC, he could not have foreseen the moment of his succession - but he was certainly well prepared. Educated by Aristotle and left in charge of Macedonia during Philip's attack on Byzantium, Alexander had defeated the barbarians people called the Maedi in 340 BC; two years later he had commanded the left wing at the battle of Chaeronea, in which Philip defeated the allied Greek states and became master of all Greece. Using his father's soliders to good effect, Alexander invaded the Persian Empire and began one of the greatest campaigns in history. Ten years and thousands of miles later, Alexander had destroyed the Persian Empire and carved out a kingdom stretching from Macedonia to the borders of India. By the time of his death at the age of 33, Alexander had initiated a new age by spreading Hellenism in a vast colonizing wave throughout the Middle East and created, at least economically and culturally (if not politically), a single civilization stretching from Gibraltar to the Punjab, open to trade and intellectual intercourse.

    However, the Greek empire could hardly survive Alexander's death. During a 40-year (323-280 BC) interregnum, the provinces became independent kingdoms, with various of Alexander's generals rising to rule through bloodshed and assassination, yet they were unable to ally against the coming of a new military power. By 350 BC, Rome was encroaching on the westernmost Greek settlements, beginning a 200-year conquest of the Hellenic world that Alexander had created. With the defeat of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony, Octavian's forces occupied Egypt and the last kingdom of Alexander's successors fell to Rome. For two millennia, Greece was part of the Roman, then Byzantine, and finally the Ottoman empires. Following an uprising supported by Britain, Russia, and France, Greece's existence as an independent nation gained formal recognition in 1832. Greece fought on the Allied side in both world wars, and was occupied by the Germans during World War II. A civil war followed the conflict, in which pro-Western forces defeated their pro-communist opponents. Greece today is a modern democracy and part of the European Union, and tens of thousands of tourists visit the country every year to see its rugged beauty and great monuments from the past.

    The earliest traces of civilization in the Indian subcontinent can be found along the Indus River. The first excavations of this Indus Valley Civilization, or Harappan Civilization, were conducted in 1921 in the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Both of these sites show examples of a highly sophisticated civilization that first developed some 4,500 - 5,000 years ago. The Indus Valley people were most likely Dravidians, who may have been pushed down into southern India when the Aryans, with their more advanced military technology, commenced their migrations to India around 2,000 BC. Though the Indus Valley script has yet to be deciphered, the numerous seals, statuary, potter, and cities of the Indus Valley have enabled scholars to construct a realistic account of the Indus Valley Civilization.

     A centralized state and extensive town planning is suggested by the layout of the great cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. The same kind of burnt brick appears to have been used in many cities that were hundreds of miles apart. The weights and measures show a substantial regularity. The Indus Valley people domesticated animals and harvested various crops, such as cotton, sesame, peas, and barley. They may also have been seafaring people, as Indus Valley seals have been found in places such as Sumer. However, the Indus Valley Civilization appears to have been extensively urban, challenging the former idea of India as an agricultural civilization. The Indus Valley people had a merchant class that, as data suggests, engaged in widespread trading.

    Neither Harappa nor Mohenjo-Daro show any evidence of fire altars, and as a result one can reasonably surmise that the various rituals around the fire which are important in Hinduism were brought in by the Aryans. The Indus Valley people do not appear to have been in ownership of horses, as Harappan seals and terracotta do not show any evidence of horses. Other than the excavated ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, these seals provide the most detailed hints on the personality and culture of the Indus Valley people. Bulls and elephants do appear on the seals, yet the horned bulls still cannot be associated with Shiva's bull in Hinduism. The revered cow of Hinduism also does not appear on the Harappan seals. The women portrayed on the seals wear elaborate clothing in heavy jewelry. This suggests that the Indus Valley people were sophisticated people with cultured tastes in an advanced artistic feeling.

    The Indus Valley civilization raises many unresolved questions. Why did this civilization, considering its sophistication, not spread beyond the Indus Valley? The area where the Indus Valley Civilization developed is arid, and one can surmise that urban development took place along a river that flowed through a virtual desert. There are also question about the disappearance of the Indus Valley cities. In the Rig Veda there is mention of a Vedic war god, Indra, destroying some forts and citadels, which could have included Harappa and other Indus Valley cities. However, most of the evidence concerning the cities' disappearance is based on the arrival of the Aryans in India.

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    Hundreds of years ago, a group of people calling themselves the Inca settled the Cuzco Valley high in the Andes Mountains of South America. Where they had come from was a mystery that still remains unsolved. Although their purpose for settling such a rugged and inhospitable landscape was unclear, the end result of their arrival is without doubt. In time, the Inca built an empire that spanned the Pacific coast as far south as Argentina and as far north as Ecuador, some 2000 miles of hills, mountains, valleys, and coastline. In just a short time (roughly 100 years), the Incan Empire dominated South America and is, to this day, considered one of the finest empires the world has ever known. Starting with the ninth ruler, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the Inca began their expansion. Pachacuti won his first military campaign against the Chanca people, consolidated control over his cultural base of Cuzco, then turned his army south and conquered the Colla and Lupaca tribes. Though not the first Incan ruler, Pachacuti was by many accounts one of the finest Pre-Columbian persons that ever lived. It was under the rule of Huayna Capac, however, that the Incan Empire reached its greatest height. When his father died in 1483 and he became emperor in his own right, Capac continued the campaigns of the previous emperor, eventually extending the empire's borders into what is modern Colombia. A dedicated ruler, Huayna did much to improve the lives of his people. In addition to building temples and other works, Huayna greatly expanded the road network, along which he built storehouses for food so that aid could be quickly rushed to any who were in danger of starvation.

    Like many other groups that preceded the Inca (the Chimu, the Nazca, the Moche), Incan society was heavily dipped in the worship of powerful gods. Their pantheon contained such lofty omnipotents as Viracocha (the god of creation), Inti (the sun and father of the Inca Dynasty), Illapa (god of rain, thunder, and lightening), Pacha Mama (mother of the earth), and Mama Cocha (mother of the lakes). Grand ceremonies were held frequently to honor these gods, for the Inca believed that if one did not give thanks and obedience to the gods, bad things would happen. The world of the Andes Mountains is full of ecological wonders - and ecological disasters such as earthquakes, severe storms, and volcanic activity. The gods held sway with these events and thus the proper respect had to be paid at all times.

    The Inca called their empire Tahuantinsuyu (Land of the Four Quarters?), which was divided into four provinces. Each province was controlled by a local governor called the apu; below him were the local rulers - the curacas - and even lower still the district headsmen - the camayoc. Through this governmental structure, the Sapa-Inca could rule the empire with impunity. Additional structures were also put in place, such as the Imperial road system, which was built along the steep inclines of mountains, interspersing bridges and stone walkways, stone steps, and flat brick highways. In addition, way-stations known as tambos were constructed at strategic points along the roads, giving travelers and important dignitaries a place to rest and prepare for the next leg of their journey.

    The Incan army was also well organized. When called upon to fight, each province would muster squadrons of men armed with maces, bows and arrows, slings, darts, and spears. These fierce Incan warriors, known as the Quechua, conquered much of the Andes and coastal regions of what is now Peru and Ecuador in the period between 1440 and 1530 . During a battle, slingers would let fly a shower of rocks to soften the enemy lines. Then, archers would release their shafts, darts would fly, and then the shock troops would hit, in a torrent of screams and shouts meant to confuse and terrify the wavering opposition. Incan warfare was very successful. But nothing could prepare the empire for what was coming.

    After the glorious reign of Huayna Capac, the empire began to erode under a series of internal and external disasters. A bitter civil war between half brothers Huascar and Atahuallpa, the sons of Capac, stretched the empire to the breaking point. Atahuallpa won the war, quickly killed his half-brother, and declared himself king. But, in 1532 AD, Spanish Conquistadors, under the command of Francisco Pizarro, entered the Cajamarca Valley and brutally attacked Atahuallpa and his subjects, killing many and taking the Sapa-Inca hostage. Eventually, Pizarro killed Atahuallpa, pillaged the empire of its riches, and brought an end to the mighty Incan civilization.

    The Indian subcontinent is the home of one of the world's oldest and most influential civilizations. From about 5000 BC, increasing numbers of settlements of subsistence agriculturalists began to appear throughout the Indus Valley; by 2600 BC some of these villages grew into urban centers, forming the basis for the early Harappan civilization, the peer of contemporary Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. It was around this period that Hinduism, the world's oldest religion, began to take form. Unlike the Egyptians and Babylonians, however, a central state failed to form in India until a much later period. It was not until the Mauryan Period (325-185 BC) that the first Indian empire ruling most of the subcontinent took shape.

    Chandragupta Maurya was the warrior who carved out much of the territory that would form the Mauryan Empire. Using War Elephants to good effect, he defeated Alexander's successor Seleucus, the ruler of the eastern Greek holdings in Iran and India. It was under Chandragupta's grandson Asoka (272-232 BC), however, that the Mauryan Empire reached its height, covering the entire subcontinent except for the southern tip. Asoka's India possessed an elaborate administrative and tax-collecting system, and trade flourished due to his construction of roads. Asoka converted to Buddhism during his rule and gave up violent conquest in order to live a moral life. His ethical teachings can still be found inscribed on pillars and rockfaces across India today.

    A century later, the disintegration of the Mauryan empire gave rise to a number of feuding kingdoms, the Guptas and Pajputs in the north and Chola, Hoysalas and Pandyas in the south. These divided kingdoms were unable to stand against the coming Islamic tide. The first Arabic raids in the subcontinent were made along the western coast and in Sind during the 7th and 8th centuries, and there had been Muslim trading communities in India for decades beforehand. The permanent military movement of Muslims into northern India, however, dates from the late 12th century and was carried out by the Turkish dynasty that arose on the ruins of the Abbasid caliphate. Sultan Mahmud, who conducted more than 20 campaigns in India from 1001 to 1027 AD and established a large but short-lived empire, laid the road to conquest. By 1186 AD, the Mahmud realm had been destroyed by the Ghurids, who proceeded to conquer the Rajput kingdoms and establish a Muslim sultanate in Delhi, from which a series of able Turkish overlords ruled the north until 1526 AD.

    The Muslim states were themselves supplanted by the Islamic Mughul Empire (1526-1761 AD), founded by Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur (1526-1530 AD). Babur was a Mongol, a fifth-generation descendant of Timur and a 14th-generation descendant of Genghis Khan. In a lightning series of campaigns commencing in 1511 AD, he overran the Punjab and Hindustan. Akbar the Great (1556-1605 AD), his grandson, continued the conquest of the subcontinent, overrunning Gujarat, Bengal and Rajasthan. At its zenith, the Mughal realm commanded resources unprecedented in Indian history and covered almost the entire subcontinent.

    The 16th and 17th centuries also saw the establishment and expansion of European trading organizations in the subcontinent, principally for the procurement of rare resources. By 1740, the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French had all founded colonial trading posts, but after their defeat in the Seven Years War the French holdings were surrendered to the British East India Company. The collapsing Mughal Empire left a power vaccuum that the East India Company would step in and fill. Despite initially possessing no more than a handful of trading posts, the British soon won control of the rich province of Bengal, and continued their territorial expansion from there. Military adventurers using small numbers of British forces mixed with large numbers of Indian auxiliaries won a series of stunning victories against the dying Mughals and the independent princes of states such as Mysore, Rajputana, and the Maratha Confederacy. By 1850, the entire subcontinent was controlled by the British either directly or through alliances. The quarter-century following the bitter Indian revolt of 1857-59, which transferred the East India Company's rule to the British crown, ended with the birth of nationalist agitation.

    The Indian National Congress held its first meeting in December 1885 in Bombay even as Indian troops were fighting in upper Burma under the British flag. Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), later known as Mahatma ("Great-Souled"), was recognized throughout India as the spiritual leader of a nationwide movement for independence. The Jallianwala Bagh (1919) massacre turned millions of moderate Indians from patient and loyal supporters of the British Raj into fervent nationalists. The last years of British rule were racked by increasingly violent Hindu-Muslim conflict and intensified opposition to foreign rule. In July 1947, Britain's Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, ordering the demarcation of the dominions of India and Pakistan by midnight of August 14, 1947, and dividing within a single month the assets of history's largest and richest colony. India today is the world's largest democracy, with a population estimated at over a billion, and despite widespread poverty is viewed as one of the world's rising powers.

    The history of Iran has been intertwined with the history of a larger historical region, comprising the area from the Danube River in the west to the Indus River and Jaxartes in the east and from the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, and Aral Sea in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and Egypt in the south. The southwestern part of the Iranian plateau participated in the wider Ancient Near East with Elam, from the Early Bronze Age. The Persian Empire proper begins in the Iron Age, following the influx of Iranian peoples which gave rise to the Median, Achaemenid, the Parthians, the Sassanid dynasties during classical antiquity.

    The southwestern part of the Iranian plateau participated in the wider Ancient Near East with Elam, from the Early Bronze Age. The Persian Empire proper begins in the Iron Age, following the influx of Iranian peoples which gave rise to the Median, Achaemenid, the Parthians, the Sassanid dynasties during classical antiquity.

    Once a major empire of superpower proportions, Persia as it had long been called, has been overrun frequently and has had its territory altered throughout the centuries. Invaded and occupied by Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and others—and often caught up in the affairs of larger powers—Persia has always reasserted its national identity and has developed as a distinct political and cultural entity.

    Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to 4000 BC. The Medes unified Iran as a nation and empire in 625 BC. The Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BC) was the first of the Iranian empires to rule from the Balkans to North Africa and also Central Asia. They were succeeded by the Seleucid Empire, Parthians and Sassanids which governed Iran for almost 1,000 years.

    The Islamic conquest of Persia (633-656) and the end of the Sassanid Empire was a turning point in Iranian history. Islamicization in Iran took place during 8th to 10th century and led to the eventual decline of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia. However, the achievements of the previous Persian civilizations were not lost, but were to a great extent absorbed by the new Islamic policy and civilization.

    After centuries of foreign occupation and short-lived native dynasties, Iran was once again reunified as an independent state in 1501 by the Safavid dynasty who established Shi'a Islam as the official religion of their empire, marking one of the most important turning points in the history of Islam. The Safavids ruled from 1501 to 1722 (experiencing a brief restoration from 1729 to 1736) and at their height, they controlled all of modern Islamic Republic of Iran, Republic of Azerbaijan and Republic of Armenia, most of Iraq, Georgia, Afghanistan, and the Caucasus, as well as parts of Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Turkey. Safavid Iran was one of the Islamic "gunpowder empires", along with its neighbours, the Ottoman and Mughal empires. The Safavid dynasty had its origin in the Safaviyya Sufi order, which was established in the city of Ardabil in the Azerbaijan region. It was of mixed ancestry (Kurdish and Azerbaijani, which included intermarriages with Georgian and Pontic Greek dignitaries). From their base in Ardabil, the Safavids established control over all of Greater Iran and reasserted the Iranian identity of the region, thus becoming the first native dynasty since the Sassanid Empire to establish a unified Iranian state. Despite their demise in 1736, the legacy that they left behind was the revival of Persia as an economic stronghold between East and West, the establishment of an efficient state and bureaucracy based upon “checks and balances”, their architectural innovations and their patronage for fine arts. The Safavids have also left their mark down to the present era by spreading Shi'a Islam in Iran, as well as major parts of the Caucasus, South Asia, Central Asia, and Anatolia.

    After several intermediate dynasties, Iran was united again under the Qajar dynasty. Like virtually every dynasty that ruled Persia since the 11th century, the Qajars came to power with the backing of Turkic tribal forces, while using educated Persians in their bureaucracy. In 1779, after brutally murdering Lotf Ali Khan, of the Zand dynasty, ruler of southern Persia, Agha Mohammad Khan, the leader of the Qajar tribe, set out to reunify Iran. In his quest for power, he razed cities, massacred entire populations, and blinded some 20,000 men in the city of Kerman because the local populace had chosen to defend the city against his siege.

     Increased European interest in Iran and the ravages of time destroyed the Qajar dynasty as well. By the 17th century, European countries, including Great Britain, Imperial Russia, and France, had already started establishing colonial footholds in the region. Iran as a result lost sovereignty over many of its provinces to these countries via the Treaty of Turkmenchay, the Treaty of Gulistan, and others. The Great Persian Famine of 1870-1871 is believed to have caused the death of 2 million persons. A new era in the History of Persia dawned with the Constitutional Revolution of Iran against the Shah in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Shah managed to remain in power, granting a limited constitution in 1906 (making the country a constitutional monarchy). The first Majlis (parliament) was convened on October 7, 1906. The discovery of oil in 1908 by the British in Khuzestan spawned intense renewed interest in Persia by the British Empire. Control of Persia remained contested between the United Kingdom and Russia, in what became known as The Great Game, and codified in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which divided Persia into spheres of influence, regardless of her national sovereignty. During World War I, the country was occupied by British and Russian forces but was essentially neutral. In 1919, after the Russian revolution and their withdrawal, Britain attempted to establish a protectorate in Iran, which was unsuccessful. Finally, the Constitutionalist movement of Gilan and the central power vacuum caused by the instability of the Qajar government resulted in the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi and the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925. In 1921 military coup established Reza Khan, a Persian officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade, as the dominant figure in the next 20 years. Seyyed Zia'eddin Tabatabai was also a leader and important figure in the perpetration of the coup. The 1921 overthrow was not actually directed at the Qajar monarchy; it was targeted at officials who were in power and actually had a role in controlling the government; the cabinet and others who had a role in governing Persia. In 1925, after being prime minister for a couple of years, Reza Shah became the king of Iran and established the Pahlavi dynasty.

     The end of the Pahlavi dynasty came with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The revolution was populist, nationalist and later Shi'a Islamic. It was in part a conservative backlash against the Westernizing and secularizing efforts of the Western-backed Shah, and a liberal backlash to social injustice and other shortcomings of the ancien regime. The result of the war was the creation of the modern Islamic Republic of Iran, a Shi'a theocracy. The country remains as such till the present day.

    In steady decline since the 2nd century AD, the Roman empire broke into two parts in 285 AD: the Western Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire in the East. The western part under the pressure of Goths finally dissolved, leaving the Italian peninsula divided into small independent kingdoms and feuding city states for the next 14 centuries, and leaving the eastern part sole heir to the Roman legacy. The italian civilization was born from the ashes of the roman civilization.

    Following a short recapture of the Italian peninsula by Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD from the Ostrogoths, a new wave of Germanic tribes, the Lombards, soon arrived in Italy from the north. For several centuries the armies of the Byzantines were strong enough to prevent Arabs, the Holy Roman Empire, or the Papacy from establishing a unified Italian Kingdom, but were at the same time too weak to fully unify the former Roman lands themselves. Nevertheless, during early Middle Ages Imperial dynasties such as the Carolingians, the Ottonians and the Hohenstaufens managed to impose their overlordship in Italy.

    Italy's regions were eventually subsumed by their neighbouring empires with their conflicting interests and would remain divided up to the 19th century. It was during this vacuum of authority that the region saw the rise of the Signoria and the Comune. In the anarchic conditions that often prevailed in medieval Italian city-states, people looked to strong men to restore order and disarm the feuding elites. In times of anarchy or crisis, cities sometimes offered the Signoria to individuals perceived as strong enough to save the state, most notably the Della Scala family in Verona, the Visconti in Milan and the Medici in Florence.

    Italy during this period became notable for its merchant Republics. These city-states, oligarchical in reality, had a dominant merchant class which under relative freedom nurtured academic and artistic advancement. The four classic Maritime Republics in Italy were Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi.

    During the late Middle Ages, the present-day region of Italy was a collection of smaller independent city states and kingdoms and their dependencies.

    Venice and Genoa were Europe's gateways to trade with the East, with the former producer of the renowned venetian glass. Florence was the capital of silk, wool, banks and jewelry. The Maritime Republics were heavily involved in the Crusades, taking advantage of the new political and trading opportunities, most evidently in the conquest of Zara and Constantinople funded by Venice.

    During the late Middle Ages Italy was divided into smaller city-states and territories: the kingdom of Naples controlled the south, the Republic of Florence and the Papal States the center, the Genoese and the Milanese the north and west, and the Venetians the east. Fifteenth-century Italy was one of the most urbanised areas in Europe and the birthplace of Renaissance. Florence in particular, with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (c. 1313–1375), as well as the painting of Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337), is considered the center of this cultural movement. Scholars like Niccolò de' Niccoli and Poggio Bracciolini scoured the libraries in search of works of classical authors, such as Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Cicero and Vitruvius.

    The Black Death pandemic in 1348 left its mark on Italy by killing one third of the population. The recovery from the disaster led to a resurgence of cities, trade and economy which greatly stimulated the successive phases of Humanism and the Renaissance. In 1494 the French king Charles VIII opened the first of a series of invasions, lasting up to sixteenth century, in a competition between France and Spain for the possession of the country. Ultimately Spain prevailed through the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis which recognised Spanish dominance over the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples. The holy alliance between Habsburg Spain and the Holy See resulted in the systematic persecution of any Protestant movement. Austria succeeded Spain as hegemon in Italy under the Peace of Utrecht. Through Austrian domination, the northern part of Italy gained economic dynamism and intellectual fervor. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815) introduced the ideas of equality, democracy, law and nation. Italy's population between 1700 and 1800 rose by about one-third, to 18 million.

    The creation of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful war was declared on Austria. Giuseppe Garibaldi, popular amongst southern Italians, led the Italian republican drive for unification in southern Italy, while the northern Italian monarchy of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia whose government was led by Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour, had the ambition of establishing a united Italian state under its rule. The kingdom successfully challenged the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence with the help of Napoleon III, liberating the Lombardy-Venetia. In 1866, Victor Emmanuel II aligned the kingdom with Prussia during the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annex Venice. In 1870, as France during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War abandoned its positions in Rome, Italy rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal State from French sovereignty. Italian unification finally was achieved, and shortly afterwards Italy's capital was moved to Rome.

    As Northern Italy became industrialized and modernized, Southern Italy and agricultural regions of the north remained under-developed and stagnant, forcing millions of people to migrate to the emerging Industrial Triangle or abroad. The Sardinian Statuto Albertino of 1848, extended to the whole Kingdom of Italy in 1861, provided for basic freedoms, but the electoral laws excluded the non-propertied and uneducated classes from voting. In 1913, male universal suffrage was adopted. The Socialist Party became the main political party, outclassing the traditional liberal and conservative organisations. The high point of Italian emigration was 1913, when 872,598 persons left Italy. Starting from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Italy developed into a colonial power by forcing Somalia, Eritrea and later Libya and the Dodecanese under its rule. During World War I, Italy at first stayed neutral but in 1915 signed the Treaty of London, entering Entente on the promise of receiving Trento, Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia and parts of Ottoman Empire. During the war, 600,000 Italians died, and the economy collapsed. Under the Peace Treaty of Saint-Germain, Italy obtained just Bolzano-Bozen, Trento, Trieste and Istria in a victory described as "mutilated" by the public.

    The turbulence that followed the devastation of World War I, inspired by the Russian Revolution, led to turmoil and anarchy. The liberal establishment, fearing a socialist revolution, started to endorse the small National Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini. In October 1922 the fascists attempted a coup (the Marcia su Roma, "March on Rome"), but the king ordered the army not to intervene, instead forming an alliance with Mussolini. Over the next few years, Mussolini banned all political parties and curtailed personal liberties, thus forming a dictatorship. In 1935, Mussolini subjugated Ethiopia after a surprisingly lengthy campaign. This resulted in international alienation and the exodus of the country from the League of Nations. A first pact with Nazi Germany was concluded in 1936, and a second in 1938. Italy strongly supported Franco in the Spanish civil war. The country was opposed to Adolf Hitler's annexations of Austria, but did not interfere with it. Italy supported Germany's annexation of Sudetenland, however.

    On 7 April 1939 Italy occupied Albania, a de facto protectorate for decades, and entered World War II in 1940, taking part in the late stages of the Battle of France. Mussolini, wanting a quick victory like Hitler's blitzkriegs in Poland and France, invaded Greece in October 1940 via Albania but was forced to accept a humiliating defeat after a few months. At the same time, Italy, after initially conquering British Somalia, saw an allied counter-attack lead to the loss of all possessions in the Horn of Africa. Italy was also defeated by British forces in North Africa and was only saved by the urgently dispatched German Africa Corps led by Erwin Rommel. Italy was invaded by the Allies in June 1943, leading to the collapse of the fascist regime and the arrest of Mussolini. In September 1943, Italy surrendered. The country remained a battlefield for the rest of the war, as the allies were moving up from the south and the north was the base for loyalist Italian fascist and German Nazi forces. The whole picture became more complex by the activity of the Italian partisans; see Italian resistance movement. The Nazis left the country on 25 April 1945. This led to the eventual disbanding of Italian fascist forces.

    In 1946, Vittorio Emanuele III's son, Umberto II, was forced to abdicate. Italy became a republic after a referendum held on 2 June 1946, a day celebrated since as Republic Day. This was the first election in Italy allowing women to vote. The Republican Constitution was approved and came into force on 1 January 1948. Under the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947, the eastern border area was lost to Yugoslavia, and, later, the free territory of Trieste was divided between the two states. Fears in the Italian electorate of a possible Communist takeover proved crucial for the first universal suffrage electoral outcome on the 18th of April 1948 when the Democrazia Cristiana, under the undisputed leadership of Alcide De Gasperi, won a resounding victory with 48 percent of the vote. In the 50s Italy became a member of the NATO alliance and an ally of the United States, which helped to revive the Italian economy through the Marshall Plan: until the 60s the country saw a period of prolonged economic growth termed the "Economic Miracle". In 1957, Italy was a signatory to the Treaties of Rome founding the European Economic Community (EEC), which became the European Union (EU) in 1993.

    From the late 1960s till late 1980s the country experienced a hard economic crisis and the Years of Lead, a period characterised by widespread social conflicts and terrorist acts carried out by extra-parliamentary movements. The Years of Lead culminated in the assassination of the Christian Democracy (DC) leader Aldo Moro in 1978, bringing to an end the "Historic Compromise" between the DC and the Communist Party. In the 1980s, for the first time since 1945, two governments were led by non-Christian-Democrat premiers: a republican (Giovanni Spadolini) and a socialist (Bettino Craxi); the DC remained, however, the main force supporting the government. The Socialist Party (PSI), led by Bettino Craxi, became more and more critical of the Communists and of the Soviet Union; Craxi himself pushed in favour of US president Ronald Reagan's positioning of Pershing missiles in Italy, a move the Communists hotly contested.

    From 1992 to 2009, Italy faced significant challenges, as voters, disenchanted with past political paralysis, massive government debt, extensive corruption, and organized crime's considerable influence (collectively called Tangentopoli after being uncovered by Mani pulite - "Clean hands") demanded political, economic, and ethical reforms. The scandals involved all major parties, but especially those in the government coalition: between 1992 and 1994 the DC underwent a severe crisis and was dissolved, splitting up into several pieces, while the PSI and the other governing minor parties completely dissolved. The 1994 elections put media magnate Silvio Berlusconi into the Prime Minister's seat. However, he was forced to step down in December when the Lega Nord Party withdrew its support. In April 1996, national elections led to the victory of a center-left coalition under the leadership of Romano Prodi. Prodi's first government became the third-longest to stay in power before he narrowly lost a vote of confidence, by three votes, in October 1998. A new government was formed by Massimo D'Alema, but in April 2000 he resigned. In 2001, national elections led to the victory of a center-right coalition under the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi, the center-right formed a government, and Silvio Berlusconi was able to remain in power for a complete five-year mandate, but with two different governments. The first one (2001–2005) became the longest-lived government in post-war Italy. Italy participated in the US-led military coalition in Iraq. The elections in 2006 were won by the center-left, allowing Prodi to form his second government, but in early 2008 he resigned because of the collapse of his coalition. In the ensuing new early elections in April 2008, Silvio Berlusconi won to form a government for a fourth time.

    It is not known when humans first settled on the Japanese archipelago, but the Jomon people might be called proto-Japanese, and they were spread throughout the archipelago by 250 BC. The Yayoi culture that arose in Kyushu, while the Jomon culture was still evolving, spread gradually eastward, overwhelming the Jomon. Culturally, the Yayoi represented a notable advance and flourished for some five or six centuries, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD. The unification of Japan under the Yamato court, with the tenno ("Emperor of Heaven") at its center, occurred around the mid-4th century. The 6th century reign of Kentai (507-531 AD) represented a decline of Yamato influence both at home and abroad; the period can be characterized by the growing accumulation of power by regional leaders and a weakening of royal influence.

    It was during this Yamato period that Japan first began to experience significant contact with the mainland. Buddhism was introduced to Japan by Korean monks around 530 and was shortly adopted by the emperor's court. Rather than displacing Japan's native Shinto religion, Buddhism would eventually merge with it to form the synthesis that characterizes modern Shintoism. Chinese influences were also particularly strong in Japan at this time; Prince Shotoku is said to have written the Constitution of Seventeen Articles promoting moral and political principles of the Chinese court. In the year 710, the first permanent Japanese capital was established in Nara, a city modeled after the Chinese capital. Buddhist monasteries near Nara became so influential that the court was moved to Kyoto in 794, which would remain the capital for the next thousand years.

    This Heian Period (794-1185) was characterized by a slow decline of Chinese influence in favor of the development of native Japanese customs. In the late Heian period, the more powerful of the Samurai gathered in or near the capital, where they served both the military needs of the emperor and also as bodyguards for the great noble houses. Emerging from provincial warrior bands, the aristocratic Samurai caste of the Kamakura period (1192-1333), with their military skills and deep pride in their stoicism, developed a disciplined culture distinct from the earlier, quiet refinement of the imperial court.

    Under the growing influence of Zen Buddhism during the Muromachi period (1338-1573), the samurai culture produced many uniquely Japanese arts that continue today. Although Japan was nominally united under the emperor and the shogun in Kyoto, the reality was that by the end of the Muromachi period the power of the government in Kyoto had declined to practically nothing. Japan disintegrated into a hodgepodge of warring feudal states, each presided over by a daimyo, or feudal lord. Many of the most famous stories of the samurai date from this "Sengoku" Period. Eventually, Japan was reunited through the efforts of three men: Oda Nobunaga, his general Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Hideyoshi's successor Tokugawa Ieyasu. Tokugawa founded the Edo shogunate (1603-1867), which ended the incessant conflicts and brought reform and peace to the islands. The following two and half centuries of peace brought prosperity to Japan, but the isolationist policy of the shoguns left the nation backwards technologically.

    Although small numbers of Spanish and Portuguese traders had been in Japan since the mid-1500s, it was the arrival of a squadron of U.S. warships commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry in Uraga Bay in July 1853 that finally opened the nation to Western influence. The opening up of Japan brought pressure for political reforms and a national identity that the oudated shogunate was unable to meet, leading to a revolution in the 1860s. The Meiji government that followed the overthrow of the shogunate set about the task of westernization and the creation of a modern state, and moved Japan onto the world stage. Japan's stunning victories over China (1894-95) and Russia (1904-05) announced its presence as a world power, but the same nationalistic forces that led to Japan's resurgence also caused xenophobia and violent excesses against non-Japanese peoples. Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s resulted in invasions of China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and eventually the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After initial successes in World War II, the summer of 1945 brought disaster for the Japanese: the Americans took Okinawa in a bloody invasion, in August the Soviet Union declared war and swept over Manchuria, and atomic bombs largely destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, respectively. The Pacific War came to an end on August 14, with the formal surrender signed on September 2 in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship USS Missouri. With postwar American aid, from 1952 to 1973 Japan experienced accelerated economic growth and social change. By the 1990s, Japan was again a first-class power, the senior partner in the emerging Asian economic bloc.

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    The Khmer Empire was a kingdom located in Southeast Asia from 790 until 1431 AD. At its height, the Khmer Empire covered fully one half of Southeast Asia, encompassing what is today Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and parts of Myanmar.

    The Khmer Empire was founded on the remnants of the kingdom of Chenla, which had spread itself across much of Cambodia and Laos, but had become fractured and weakened by the eighth century AD. A former Chenla prince, Jayvaraman II, returned to the area after his education in Java and created the base of power for the Khmer Empire in the region that is today central Cambodia.

    The fractured state of Southeast Asia after the collapse of Chenla made the unified strength of the Khmer a welcome presence in the region. The new nation quickly annexed many of its smaller neighbors, sometimes peacefully, sometimes less so.

    As their prominence grew, the Khmer kings initiated many grand public works projects. King Yasovarman I, ruling from 889 to 915, built Yasodharapura, the first major capital of the Khmer, on a site that would remain important throughout Khmer history. Yasovarman also constructed the East Baray, a massive raised reservoir that was capable of holding over 60 million cubic meters of water.

    Not long after Yasovarman's reign, internal struggles began to sweep the Khmer Empire. And while a number of impressive works of construction were completed during this period, it was not until the reign of Jayavarman V, from 968 to 1001 that the Khmer Empire could again find itself in relative peace. And it would still be another century until Suryavarman II would again make the Khmer a force to be reckoned with.

    Ascending to the throne in 1113, Suryavarman II established himself as a firm ruler over the squabbling princes that wreaked havoc on the reign of his father, Suryavarman I. Wisely guiding the forces within his nation, Suryavarman the younger would turn the Khmer Empire into the most powerful kingdom in southeast Asia. Extending his domain over much of neighboring Thailand and Myanmar and constructing Angkor Wat, a monumental temple complex erected not far from the site of the original Khmer capital of Yasodharapura, Suryavarman would guide his Empire to its greatest heights.

    Shortly after the death of Suryavarman in 1150, relations would sour between the Khmer and the Champa Empire, former allies of the Khmer, and would lead to the sacking of Angkor Wat in 1177, nearly drawing to an end the reign of the Khmer kingdom. The kingdom would be given one last flourish under the reign of Jayavarman VII, whose keen military insight brought the Champa under Khmer control. A devout Buddhist, Jayavarman also littered the Cambodian countryside with new temples.

    Jayavarman's reign would mark the end of the powerful rulers of the Khmer. A Thai uprising established the kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1350, which would eventually absorb all that once was the Khmer Empire within its borders by 1431.

    Archaeological evidence indicates that humans have been living on the Korean peninsula for the last 700,000 years. The earliest discovered settlements date back to at least 3000 BC. According to legend, Korean history began in 2333 BC when King Dangun founded the kingdom of Gojoseon. Dangun was said to have been born of the son of Heaven and a woman from a bear-totem tribe; ancient Korea was characterized by clan communities which combined to form small city-states. The Bronze Age began around 1000 BC in Korea, and many weapons from this period have been found, as well as archaeological evidence of walled settlements. This suggests that the Korean city-states did not always enjoy peaceful relations with one another, despite their nominal unity under the Kingdom of Gojoseon. The kingdom of Gojoseon came to an end in 109 BC when the Chinese launched a massive invasion near the Liao River. The Chinese established four provinces in northern Korea and Manchuria, but were unable to hold these for any length of time.

    After the fall of the Gojoseon kingdom, three new states emerged in Korea (these are collectively known as the "Three Kingdoms"). Baekje was founded in 18 BC on the southwest of the Korean Peninsula; it was based around the city of Seoul and played an important role in transporting Chinese culture (such as Buddhism, iron making, the Chinese alphabet, etc.) across the sea to Japan. Goguryeo was founded in 37 BC; it usually was the largest of the three kingdoms. In addition to its Korean citizens, it also included Chinese and Tugusic tribesman from Manchuria. Finally, the third kingdom of Silla (founded 57 BC) was culturally distinct from the other two because of the cultural influence of northern nomads from the steppes - Baekje and Goguryeo were mostly dominated by Chinese culture. The three kingdoms coexisted on the peninsula for over six centuries, until King Munmu of Silla ordered an attack on Baekje in 660 AD. With the help of forces from Tang China, the Sillans conquered first Baekje and then Goguryeo (in 668 AD). The Sillans then drove out the Chinese and ruled over a united Korean state.

    Unified Silla remained peaceful and prosperous for the next two centuries, until it was overthrown in 935 AD by a new dynasty, the kingdom of Goryeo, which would last for over four hundred years. During this period laws were codified, a civil service system was introduced, and Buddhism spread throughout the Korean peninsula. In 1231 the Mongols invaded Korea, and the king of Goryeo was forced to surrender a short time later. Under the treaty of capitulation the Korean kings continued to rule as a figurehead, while the Mongols held all of the real power. As time passed the Mongol power began to decline, and in the 1340s King Kongmin was able to throw them out. Upon regaining power the Goryeo dynasty enacted important reforms to the government. It remained in power some fifty years, until overthrown by the turncoat Korean general Yi Seonggye in 1392.

    Yi Seonggye had been sent to China to fight against the Ming Chinese, but once there he switched sides and returned to Korea backed by Chinese power. He then overthrew the Goryeo Dynasty and founded his own. This new Joseon Dynasty moved the capital to Seoul and adopted Confucianism as the state religion, causing great loss of power and wealth by Korea's Buddhists. The Joseon state successfully fought off a series of invasions from Japan between 1592 and 1598, but succumbed to an attack by the Qing Dynasty of China in 1636. For the next two centuries Korea remained nominally independent, but in actuality was a province of the Chinese Qing Empire.

    At the end of the nineteenth century Korea was invaded and occupied by Japan after its victories over China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). The Japanese ruthlessly exploited the Korean population and attempted to destroy the Korean culture in order to replace it with their own. After Japan's defeat in World War II (1945), Korea was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel into north and south regions, a division which the Korean War of 1950-53 made permanent. South Korea has since become a prosperous economic powerhouse, while North Korea remains stifled by an oppressive communist regime.

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    Once one of the great centers of Islamic culture and wealth, Mali (which is among the continent's most ancient states outside of North Africa) owes much of its reputation to its situation as a major trading center and to the tax that is levied on its trans-Saharan route. The Mali Empire was located on the Mandinka plateau in West Africa, located in the southern part of the modern Republic of Mali. It was founded by Sundiata Keita, a Mandinka who led a revolt against the Soso Kingdom which had dominated the area. Sundiata's life is commemorated in the Epic of Sundiata, a poem of the Mandinka people. It is said that after his victory over the Soso, Sundiata Keita converted to Islam as a gesture of goodwill to the Islamic traders who brought his country wealth. After defeating the Soso, Sundiata pursued an expansionist policy, and soon the Empire covered not only modern Mali, but also extended west to the ocean across what is now Senegal. During war, the Mali often fought as "skirmishers" - soldiers who fanned out in loose formation to protect the main force's flanks or front. The Mali skirmishers were lightly-armed archers in that force, famed for their courage and their marksmanship.

    The Mali Empire reached its zenith under the rule of Mansa Musa (1312-1337) in the early 14th century. Previously, it had been part of the empire of Ghana, which flourished between the seventh and 11th centuries based on the trade of gold from the interior for salt from the coastal regions. Mansa Musa made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 laden with gold and slaves to proclaim Mali's prosperity and power. It is said that he lavished so much wealth along his route that the price of gold was depressed for years afterwards. During Mansa Musa's rule Muslim scholarship reached new heights in Mali, and such cities as Timbuktu and Djenné (Jenne) became important centers of trade, learning, and culture.

    After the decline of the Mali Empire, the territory became part of the Songhai Empire, which occupied an area covering parts of modern-day Guinea, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Nigeria. Songhai was brought to an end and its territory usurped by the Moroccan invasion of 1591. With the decline of the trans-Saharan trading routes in favor of naval commerce, the area enjoyed little strategic importance and was divided into small kingdoms for the next two centuries until the arrival of French colonists. Mali was absorbed into French West Africa in 1895. In 1960, together with what is now Senegal, it achieved independence as the Federation of Mali, although Senegal seceded after a few weeks.

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    The Mayan Empire blossomed within the thick jungles and volcanic hills of Belize, Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Creators of the most advanced civilization in the Americas from 700 BC until 900 AD, the Mayan population in its age was second only to the Chinese T'ang dynasty in sheer numbers.

    Often referred to as the "Greeks of the New World," the Mayans were similarly organized into a series of feuding city states, although these cities served more religious and administrative purposes than as populations centers. Uniting the Maya culture was a common language, religion and artistic style, but each city state remained fiercely independent, often uniting only at the point of a Holkan spear.

    Every city-state was governed by its own royal family, whom often claimed full or semi-divinity. During the Mayan Classical Period from roughly 250 to 900 AD, these cities became vast complexes of pyramids, causeways and plazas. Nakbe, the first city-state to grow on a grand scale, began its expansion around 700 BC. By 300 BC, Nakbe had been transformed into an impressive city, with four grand step pyramids and a seven mile stone causeway linking it to the nearby city of El Mirador.

    Nakbe was only the first of many vast cities. Chichen Itza, Tikal and Palenque all became massive population centers. With myriad pyramids and religious structures, Tikal grew to become a city of the grandest scale and the largest of the Mayan population centers, dwarfing Palenque and Copan.

    Palenque, a significantly smaller settlement to the West, reached its zenith in the seventh century AD under the reign of Pakal I, whose subjugation of neighboring cities ensured the hegemony of his own. Much is known about Pakal and his city thanks to the intricately-carved history left to us within Pakal's tomb, "The Temple of Inscriptions," entire walls of which were filled with the Mayans' distinctive pictographic language, the only written language developed in the Americas.

    Language was not the only realm in which Mayan minds excelled. Their calendars were nearly on par with those of the modern era, but were created without the use of the telescope or other tools. Independent development of the number zero, an accomplishment that eluded both the Greeks and Romans, was yet another of the impressive feats of the Mayans.

    Most of these discoveries grew out of the Mayan religion. And while certainly interested in knowledge, the Mayan religion was ensconced in the belief of the power of blood. Many wars among the Maya were fought simply to provide prisoners to be sacrificed in intricate religious ceremonies, thought necessary to ensure the safety and advancement of the people.

    The Mayan civilization came to a surprisingly abrupt end, and the cause of this fall is still a hotly debated topic. One of the most widely-accepted theories is that the delicate ecology of the Yucatan rainforests simply could no longer support the growing population of the Mayan people. A peasant revolt is also a likely cause of the fall of Mayan priestly caste, as belief in brutal Mayan rituals fell to the wayside.

    But the popular notion that the Mayans simply disappeared is false. While the grand temple building, intricate carvings and sacrifices ceased, the Mayan language and people continued to survive in their former homeland, even after the conquest of their country by Spanish conquistadors. The Mayan languages, Yucatec being the most common, are still spoken to this day and armed resistance by the Maya continued into the twentieth century. The Maya remain a living people.

    Highly developed cultures, including those of the Olmecs, Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs, existed long before the Spanish conquest. Hernando Cortes conquered Mexico during the period 1519-21 and founded a Spanish colony that lasted nearly 300 years.

    Independence from Spain was proclaimed by Father Miguel Hidalgo on September 16, 1810. Father Hidalgo's declaration of national independence, known in Mexico as the "Grito de Dolores", launched a decade long struggle for independence from Spain. Prominent figures in Mexico's war for independence were Father Jose Maria Morelos; Gen. Augustin de Iturbide, who defeated the Spaniards and ruled as Mexican emperor from 1822-23; and Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, who went on to dominate Mexican politics from 1833 to 1855. An 1821 treaty recognized Mexican independence from Spain and called for a constitutional monarchy. The planned monarchy failed; a republic was proclaimed in December 1822 and established in 1824.

    Throughout the rest of the 19th century, Mexico's government and economy were shaped by contentious debates among liberals and conservatives, republicans and monarchists, federalists and those who favored centralized government. During the two presidential terms of Benito Juarez (1858-71), Mexico experimented with modern democratic and economic reforms. President Juarez' terms of office, and Mexico's early experience with democracy, were interrupted by the Habsburg monarchy's rule of Mexico (1864-67), and was followed by the authoritarian government of Gen. Porfirio Diaz, who was president during most of the period between 1877 and 1911.

    Mexico's severe social and economic problems erupted in a revolution that lasted from 1910-20 and gave rise to the 1917 constitution. Prominent leaders in this period (some of whom were rivals for power) were Francisco Madero, Venustiano Carranza, Pancho Villa, Alvaro Obregon, Victoriano Huerta, and Emiliano Zapata. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), formed in 1929 under a different name, emerged from the chaos of revolution as a vehicle for keeping political competition among a coalition of interests in peaceful channels. For 71 years, Mexico's national government was controlled by the PRI, which won every presidential race and most gubernatorial races until the July 2000 presidential election of Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (PAN).

    The Mongol tribes entered into history with the birth of Temujin, born in c.1167 AD in the wild steppe-land of Mongolia, which is bordered by modern China and Russia. When Temujin was nine years old, tribal rivals poisoned and murdered his father Yesugei, creating a power vacuum in the tribe that resulted in the exile of young Temujin and his family as fugitives. In time Temujin would return to claim his inheritance, forge political alliances, and vanquish old rivals. In 1204 AD he summoned a kuriltai war council and proceeded to unite all local nomad tribes by force, becoming the first man ever to unite the Mongols. It was at this time he received the title 'Genghis Khan', meaning 'Great Ruler'.

    China, at the time, was divided into three parts: the Ch'in, who were the most powerful, reigned in the north at Beijing; the Sung occupied the South; and the Hsi-Hsia, the weakest of the 3, inhabited the western flank of the Great Wall. The Mongol conquest against China began in 1211 when the consolidated tribes of the Great Khan struck at the Hsi-Hsia, with tremendous success. Not impressed with the defeat of his weaker neighbor, the new Emperor of Ch'in insisted on a public display of servitude from Temujin. Temujin reacted by ordering a general advance against the Ch'in Empire. The resulting war lasted for approximately 23 years, and ended in the complete destruction of the Ch'in. Although the Mongols began the war as nomadic horsemen, by the time they defeated the Ch'in they had learned how to use advanced siege weaponry to capture cities. During this campaign Temujin ensured that the epic war upon the Ch'in did not occupy all of his resources and time; there were older enemies to address.

    Amid the war against the Ch'in the Mongols also rallied against the Kara-Khitay, one of the original Kuchlug tribes that had fled from defeat during Temujin's war of unification. Victory over the Kara-Khitay provided the Mongols a common frontier with the Shah of Khwarizm, who ruled a large Muslim state that stretched from modern day Iran to southern Russia as far as the Caspian and Aral Seas. Temujin initially attempted to establish friendly relations with the Shah Ala-al-Din, but he was contemptuously rebuffed, and the Mongol emissary killed. That was a mistake. In 1219 a Mongol horde estimated at 100,000 horsemen invaded Khwarizm and the other cities that lay along the rich Silk Way. Due to their stubborn resistance, the cities of Khwarizm were destroyed, their populations slaughtered or enslaved, and the area almost completely depopulated. Ala-al-Din fled in exile and died shortly thereafter. In many respects, this area today still has not recovered from the Mongol invasion.

    After destroying Khwarizm, the Mongols had access to Russia. Not content with remaining a peaceful neighbor, Temujin's successor Ogodai permitted his generals to lead an extraordinary campaign into southern Russia, which would be staged largely in the winter months. In a series of campaigns between 1237-40, the Mongols completely subjected the various principalities of Russia, destroying anyone who opposed them. From Russia, the Mongols continued their western advance by invading Poland, Silesia, and Hungary. They easily defeated the armies of Poland, Germany, and Hungary, and appeared poised to erupt into Western Europe. But the death of Ogodai, the great khan, caused the armies to retreat in order to seek new orders, thus sparing most of Europe from destruction. Less fortunate was the Muslim world, as Baghdad was sacked in 1258 by yet another Mongol army and the Caliph executed by being trampeled to death beneath Mongol horses. The destruction of Baghdad and slaughtering of its population was a blow that the Arab Empire of the Caliphs never fully recovered from. The Mongols were finally turned back for the first time by the Mameluks of Egypt in 1260.

    Mongol children were taught to ride on horseback from the age of three, and were given bow and arrows to use for hunting at the age of five. Horseback riding became a natural way for the Mongols to conduct war. When speed was essential, a Mongol rider could even sleep while in the saddle; and by using a system that consisted of approximately four remounts, Temujin's army was capable of traversing 130 miles in two days, with no breaks for food. Another defining characteristic of a Mongolian army was the speed and voracity with which it was able to accept and prepare for battle. The Mongols' harsh, nomadic lifestyle had prepared them well for the rigors of war; and they often thrived in conditions that would be considered intolerable by any other military of its time. When the need arose they could last up to ten days at a time without cooking food, during which they would sustain themselves by drinking the blood of their horses. Their primary weapon consisted of horse archers called Keshiks, who could fire with great speed and incredible accuracy from the back of a saddle. The mobility of the Mongol forces gave them a great tactical advantage within battles that Mongol generals would exploit over and over again.

    Every victory wrought by the Mongols was followed by slaughters of incredible scale. No citizens, with the exception of those who were useful to the Mongol war effort, were spared in these attacks. In 1221, the Islamic city of Merv was captured; 700,000 were murdered (this number is almost certainly exaggerated but still amazing), and a rearguard was assembled to dispatch any citizens who were fortunate enough to have escaped the original slaughter - this was routine work for the Mongol army. It is said that Temujin planned to depopulate northern China for use as a pasture for his livestock, until being told that subjects would pay more in taxes than cattle.

    By the end of the 13th century Mongol armies had been involved in action in countries including: Poland, Japan, Korea, Hungary, Russia, Palestine, Egypt, Persia, India, China, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, and Indonesia. After Temujin's death in 1227 five more Khans would follow, including Kublai Khan, whose triumph was the union of all of China under his rule. However, the death of Kublai Khan in 1294 AD marked the end of an era for Mongol conquests, and the march of Mongol armies began to decline. While many of the khanates founded by the Mongols lasted for several more centuries, the age of the great nomadic forces was over. Although their era was brief in duration, the Mongols conquered the largest empire the world has ever seen and terrorized virtually the entire Eurasian continent.

    The term Moors has referred to several historic and modern populations of Berber, Black African and Arab descent from Northern Africa, who came to conquer, occupy and rule the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 800 years. At that time they were Muslim, although earlier the people had followed other religions. They called the territory Al Andalus, comprising most of what is now Spain and Portugal.

    Moors are not a distinct or self-defined people. Medieval and early modern Europeans applied the name primarily to Berbers, but also at various times to Arabs, Muslim Iberians and West Africans from Mali and Niger who had been absorbed into the Almoravid dynasty. Mainstream scholars observed in 1911 that "The term 'Moors' has no real ethnological value."

    The Andalusian Moors of the late Medieval era inhabited the Iberian Peninsula after the Moorish conquests of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, and the final Umayyad conquest of Hispania. The Moors' rule stretched at times as far as modern-day Mauritania, West African countries, and the Senegal River. Earlier, the Classical Romans interacted with (and later conquered) parts of Mauretania, a state that covered northern portions of modern Morocco and much of north western and central Algeria during the classical period. The people of the region were noted in Classical literature as the Mauri.

    The term Mauri, or variations, was later used by European traders and explorers of the 16th to 18th centuries to designate ethnic Berber and Arab groups speaking the Hassaniya Arabic dialect. Today such groups inhabit Mauritania and parts of Algeria, western Sahara, Morocco, Niger and Mali. Speakers of European languages have historically designated a number of associated ethnic groups as "Moors". In modern Iberia, the term is applied to people of Moroccan ethnicity living in Europe. "Moor" is sometimes colloquially applied to any person from North Africa. Some people to whom it is applied consider the term pejorative and racist.

    The Mughal Empire was an Indian-Islamic imperial power that ruled a large portion of the Indian subcontinent which began in 1526, invaded and ruled most of South Asia by the late 17th and early 18th centuries by forming alliance with Indian Maharaja, and ended in the mid-19th century. The Mughal Emperors were descendants of the Timurids, and at the height of their power around 1700, they controlled most of the Indian Subcontinent extending from Bengal in the east to Balochistan in the west, Kashmir in the north to the Kaveri basin in the south. Its population at that time has been estimated as between 110 and 130 million, over a territory of over 4 million sq.km (1.5 million square miles).

    The "classic period" of the Empire started in 1556 with the accession of Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar, better known as Akbar the Great. It ended with the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, although the Empire continued for another 150 years. During this period, the Empire was marked by a highly centralized administration connecting the different regions. All the significant monuments of the Mughals, their most visible legacy, date to this period which was characterised by the expansion of Persian cultural influence in the Indian subcontinent, with brilliant literary, artistic and architectural results.

    Following 1725 the empire declined rapidly, weakened by wars of succession, agrarian crises fueling local revolts, the growth of religious intolerance, the rise of the Maratha, Durrani, and Sikh empires and finally British colonialism. The last king, Bahadur Zafar Shah II, whose rule was restricted to the city of Delhi, was imprisoned and exiled by the British after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

    The name Mughal is derived from the original homelands of the Timurids, the Central Asian steppes once conquered by Genghis Khan and hence known as Moghulistan, "Land of Mongols". Although early Mughals spoke the Chagatai language and maintained Turko-Mongol practices, they were essentially Persianized. They transferred the Persian literature and culture to India, thus forming the base for the Indo-Persian culture.

    Also known as Scandinavians or Vikings, the Norse were a group of people from northern Europe who became famous for carrying out a series of raids across the continent between roughly 800 - 1050 AD. The period is sometimes known as the "Viking Age," and it was an era of chaos and disruption for large parts of Europe. The Vikings can be classified into three main groups: the Danes largely attacked England; the Norwegians visited Scotland, Ireland, and points further west; while the Swedes invaded the river systems of what is now Russia. Although the Vikings usually employed hit and run tactics, many of them settled in new communities in the areas they had subjugated, eventually mixing with the local population. And while the Vikings are thought today to be bloodthirsty brigands, they probably acted more often as commercial traders than as warriors.

    Historians debate the reason why the Vikings suddenly emerged from Scandinavia at the end of the eighth century AD and began preying upon other parts of Europe. Theories include: the Vikings were suffering overpopulation caused by better agricultural tools; that the unification of Norway led to an excess of idle warriors; the Vikings were reacting to attempts by the Franks to muscle them out of trade with the east; or that the men went off to raid and pillage out of simple boredom. One particularly interesting theory is that the climate of Europe was warmer during the early Middle Ages, leading to an excess population in Scandinavia and the subsequent Viking colonization of places such as Iceland and Greenland.

    Whatever the actual reason for their expansion, the Viking drive outward began with the sacking of the important island monastery of Lindisfarne, located off the coast of Britain, in 793 AD. England was regularly raided by the Danes in the following decade, and in 865 a major invasion landed in East Anglia. This force was led by several landless Viking kings; in the battles that followed most of the English kingdoms were defeated, but the state of Wessex under Alfred the Great managed to hold the invaders off. The Vikings settled in Northumbria, and their territory became known as the "Danela" (most of these Vikings were Danes).

    Another wave of Vikings landed in England in 947 under the command of Erik Bloodaxe, who managed to capture the city of York. Vikings would largely remain in control of England until the Norman invasion of 1066 - and the Normans were themselves the French descendents of Vikings. Scotland and Ireland also experienced a heavy Norwegian Viking presence at this time; a number of important cities were founded by them - including Dublin. Eventually the Vikings settled down and intermarried with the native Irish.

    The main target for Viking aggression, however, was France. All throughout the ninth century the Vikings sailed up and down the Seine River with impunity, sacking French towns and monasteries at their leisure. Finally the French king Charles the Simple made an agreement with the Viking leader Hrolf Ganger in 911, in which Hrolf was granted control over territory in northern France. In exchange, Hrolf and his men agreed to convert to Christianity and become vassals of the French king. Hrolf's name was changed to Rollo and he became duke of the province of Normandy (named for the Norsemen who settled in it). The Normans retained their martial edge even after conversion to Christianity, and would go on to make a number of important conquests in England, the Mediterranean, and during the Crusades.

    The exploits of the Viking sailors were the stuff of legend. Viking mariners found their way to Iceland, Greenland, and even Newfoundland in North America, setting up colonies in all of these locations. Viking longboats were both fast and seaworthy, and their shallow drafts allowed them to sail far up the river systems of Europe. The Vikings could strike from the sea and be gone again before the military forces of a kingdom could be marshaled to meet them. In the east, the Swedes traveled down the rivers of modern Russia and founded the state of Kievan Rus', which grew rich off the river trade between the Baltic and the Byzantine Empire. These Vikings also found employment as mercenaries within the Byzantine domains, and their most elite warriors found employment in the Byzantine Varangian Guard. The Viking Age finally came to a close around 1050AD, as the Vikings were incorporated into Christian Europe and settled down to the less exciting but more stable pursuits of agriculture and fishing; their reputation as fierce invaders from the sea has endured to this day.

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    The Ottoman Empire was a Turkish state situated upon the eastern Mediterranean that lasted for some 630 years, from 1299 - 1922 AD. At the height of its power, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman domains stretched across vast regions in Anatolia, the Balkans, the Near East and northern Africa. For several centuries it was one of the foremost military powers in the world (until it began to stagnate technologically and fell far behind its competitors).

    The Ottoman state began as a vassal of the earlier Seljuk Turks, who had formed a large empire in the Near East in the eleventh century. When the Seljuk state of Rum in Anatolia collapsed, the Ottomans took advantage of the ensuing power vacuum and rose in power. According to tradition, Osman I became the bey, or chief, of the state of Sö?üt in 1281. When Osman captured the Byzantine city of Bilecik in 1299, he declared his state's independence from the Seljuks. This is the traditional date given as the foundation of the Ottoman Empire - which was named after its first leader, Osman.

    The Ottomans expanded rapidly in Anatolia throughout the fourteenth century. A series of capable military leaders made many gains against the tottering Byzantine state. The important cities of Nicaea and Nicomedia fell in 1331 and 1337, and by the 1360s the Ottomans had crossed over into Europe and began capturing territory in Thrace. As a sign of this growing power, Murad I declared himself a sultan (or king) in 1383. Around the year 1400, Timur invaded Anatolia. This caused a great deal of disruption, but the Ottomans bounced back and continued to make territorial gains. Under the rule of Mehmed II, the Ottomans attacked and captured Constantinople, whose mighty walls finally fell to the cannon of the Ottomans. This destroyed the Byzantine Empire, and the Ottomans made Constantinople their capital. Mehmed II became known as "Mehmed the Conqueror." Suleiman I, also known as Suleiman the Magnificent, continued to expand and consolidate the Empire; the Ottomans were at the height of their power and influence during his reign

    After the capture of Constantinople the Ottoman state virtually adopted the Byzantine civil service to run the empire, and its administration was generally sound (until the nineteenth century, when it began to fossilize and became outdated). The Ottoman Empire was very much a pre-modern dynastic state, made up of many different nationalities - in fact, Greeks largely ran its bureaucracy and were vital to its continued success. Militarily, the Ottomans were very strong largely because of their early adoption of gunpowder and their powerful cavalry forces. The military also employed elite slave soldiers known as "janissaries" who won victory after victory for the expanding Ottoman state. The military remained powerful until the late eighteenth century, when they fell fatally behind Western Europe in military technology.

    The Ottomans were known for their religious tolerance. The Empire was an Islamic state, and Islamic law dominated its legal system, but non-Muslims were generally well treated and enjoyed the freedom to worship their own religion. The Ottoman Empire was long seen as a refuge for Jews across Europe. Economically, the Ottoman Empire was somewhat of a failure. Most of the region's commerce was carried on by Greek or Italian merchants, which slowed the development of Turkish industry. Once the European voyages of exploration found new routes to India and China which did not involve passing through the Near East, the Ottoman Empire began a slow commercial decline.

    By the start of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire still held enormous amounts of land, but the empire was stagnant and corrupt, and was widely viewed as the "sick man of Europe." The western powers, their commercial and military strength exploding under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, began to snap up vulnerable Ottoman territories. Britain and France forced humiliating commercial treaties on the Ottomans, and the Ottoman state was forced to take out massive loans to cover its debts - the start of a vicious cycle which only incurred more debt for the empire.

    While some positive reforms were carried out in terms of modernizing the Ottoman state, custom and tradition prevented the reformers from moving fast enough. Furthermore, the rising tide of nationalism began to tear the empire apart, as Serbians, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Greeks all declared their independence and set up their own nations. By the outbreak of World War I, the Ottomans had lost virtually all of their holdings in Europe. Desperate to preserve what was left, the Ottomans threw in their lot with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria), only to be defeated by a British-led Arab revolt in the Near East. When the war ended the victors partitioned and dissolved the Ottoman Empire at the Paris peace conference. However, the Turkish Revolution prevented the planned division of Anatolia from taking place. With the creation of the nation of Turkey in 1922, and the deposition of the final sultan Mehmed VI, the Ottoman Empire came to a close.

    

    The term Persia has been used for centuries, chiefly in the West, to designate a region of southern Iran formerly known as Persis or Parsa; the name of the Indo-European nomadic people who migrated into the region about 1000 BC, eventually supplanting the Assyrians and Chaldeans. The first mention of the Parsa occurs in the annals of Shalmanesar III, an Assyrian king, in 844 BC. Cyrus II (559-529 BC), also known as Cyrus the Great, was heir to a long line of ruling chiefs in Mesopotamia and was the founder of the Persian Empire; he was called the father of his people by the ancient Persians. In 550 BC, Cyrus, the Prince of Persia, revolted against the Median king Astyages and welded the Persians and Medes together into one powerful force. Cyrus consolidated his rule on the Iranian Plateau and then extended it westward across Asia Minor. In October 539 BC, Babylon, the greatest city of the ancient world, fell to his Persian forces. Cyrus also oversaw the construction of a series of great roads to link together the territories that he had conquered. Although Cyrus was a great military conqueror, he was also a fair ruler; he allowed the Jews to return from Babylon to their homeland in Palestine. His dynasty, known as the Achaemenids, ruled Persia for two centuries.

    Following the death of Cyrus' heir, Darius I (522-486 BC), a leading general and one of the princes of the Achaemenid family, proclaimed himself king following the suppression of a number of provincial rebellions and challenges from other pretenders to the throne. Darius was in the mold of Cyrus the Great - a powerful personality and a dynamic ruler. To consolidate his accession, Darius I founded his new capital of Parsa, known to the Greeks as Persepolis ("Persian City") and expanded the ranks of his personal bodyguard, the Immortals. The elite force drew its name from the fact that no matter how many men were lost, the Persian Emperor would always pay the cost to restore the Immortals back to their original strength. Although Darius consolidated and added to the conquests of his predecessors, it was as an administrator that he made his greatest contribution to Persian history. During his reign, political and legal reforms revitalized the provinces and ambitious projects were undertaken to promote imperial trade and commerce; coinage, weights and measures were standardized, and new land and sea routes explored and established.

    Such activities, however, did not prevent Darius from following an active expansionist policy. Campaigns in the east confirmed gains made by Cyrus the Great and added large sections of the northern Indian subcontinent to the list of Persian-controlled provinces. Expansion to the west began about 516 BC when Darius moved against the Greek colonies along the coast of Asia Minor. Xerxes (486-465 BC), son and successor of Darius I, was determined to continue the Persian conquest of the west and is best known for his massive invasion of Greece from across the Hellespont in 480 BC, a campaign marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Although successful in the pacification of Egypt and suppression of a Babylon revolt, his defeat by the allied Greek city-states spelled the beginning of the decline of the Persian Empire. In Xerxes' last years, he squandered the once-enormous treasury he had gathered through trade and taxation by launching vast construction programs, most never finished.

    The death of Xerxes was the final turning point in Persian influence. Occasional flashes of vigor and ability by some of Xerxes' successors were too infrequent to prevent eventual collapse. The final act was played out during the reign of Darius III (336-330 BC), who was defeated at the Battle of Granicus (334 BC) by Alexander the Great. Persepolis fell to the young Macedonian conqueror in April 330 BC, and Darius, the last Achaemenid, was murdered in the summer of the same year while fleeing the Greek forces. In the struggle for power after Alexander's death, Seleucus I brought under his control the Persian provinces of Alexander's empire. But this unity was short-lived, as the Indian holdings successfully revolted and the Seleucid kingdom broke into the competing nations of Parthia and Bactria. Parts of the Seleucid kingdom lasted for two centuries, but it was eventually swept aside by the Parthians, who founded an empire that stretched almost as far as Persia under the Achaemenids. The Romans and Parthians struggled against one another for centuries over control of Mesopotamia, with the Parthians usually holding onto most of the Fertile Crescent. But in 224 AD the Parthians were themselves overthrown by a new Sassanid dynasty that revived many of the customs of the Achaemenids, such as the Zoroastrian religion. The Sassanids fought a series of debilitating wars with the Byzantine Empire in the 6th and 7th centuries, which fatally weakened the Persian Empire when the Arabs exploded onto the scene. In a series of decisive battles between 633 and 642, the Arabs conquered and destroyed the Persian Empire; since this time, Persia (modern Iran) has largely belonged to the Arab world. The customs and religion of ancient Persia were destroyed and the population absorbed into the surrounding Islamic culture; only a few remnants survive today.

    Carthage was an ancient city-state in North Africa located somewhere near the site of modern Tunis. It was settled by Phoenician colonists from the city of Tyre sometime around 814 BC. According to tradition, the first ruler was a queen named Dido, who is mentioned in a number of surviving Greek and Roman legends. Carthage had an excellent harbor, and the city was well situated to form a maritime empire based on Mediterranean trade. As time passed and Carthage expanded, it gained control over the other Phoenician colonies on the northern coast of Africa. Carthaginian merchants dominated trade in the western Mediterranean, and navigators may have sailed as far as Britain and Nigeria. The rise of Carthage in power and influence would bring it into conflict with first the Greek city-states of Sicily, and later the Roman Republic.

    Carthage's government was an oligarchy not unlike that in republican Rome. One or two "Sofetim" (which best translates as "judges") were elected annually from among the wealthy and influential families of Carthage to hold positions of executive and judicial power. These aristocratic families were also represented in a deliberative body that appears to have been similar to the Roman Senate. Although Carthage was primarily controlled by these oligarchs, there were also a few limited elections for minor positions of authority within the government.

    Carthage's economic prosperity was based largely upon its lucrative trade with the silver and tin mines of Spain, and those trade routes were jealously guarded by Carthaginian merchants. Culturally, the Carthaginians practiced the polytheistic religion of the Phoenicians, based upon worship of the divine couple Tanit and Ba'al. The Carthaginians also appear to have participated in the unsavory practice of child sacrifice as part of their religion, although some historians have disputed this.

    Carthage first came into military conflict with the Greeks over control of the island of Sicily, whose strategic location would allow the Carthaginians to control access to the western Mediterranean. Carthage fought three separate wars against the Greek colonies on Sicily, all of which largely ended in inconclusive stalemates.

    Eventually Rome occupied the Greek colonies in the south of mainland Italy, allowing Carthage an opportunity to conquer most of Sicily. Tension between the two states soon boiled over into the First Punic War (264 - 241 BC) during which the Romans recovered from initial setbacks and built a navy for the first time, with which they defeated the Carthaginians at the Battle of the Aegates Islands. This victory won Sicily for Rome, and the two sides entered into an uneasy peace.

    After losing Sicily to the Romans, the Carthaginians expanded their holdings in Spain to compensate. They also began to prepare for a second conflict with Rome. The war faction was led by the members of the Barca family, and in particular the soon-to-be-famous Hannibal. When a border dispute in Spain provoked an incident between the two states, the Carthaginian senate declared war, initiating the Second Punic War (218 - 202 BC).

    During this conflict Hannibal was authorized to lead a campaign into Italy. He led his large force - which included war elephants - across the Alps, taking the Romans completely by surprise (and creating one of the most enduring war stories of all time). Hannibal met and soundly defeated the main Roman army at Lake Trasimene (217). Despite this disaster the Romans mustered up an even larger army the following year. The two forces met at Cannae, and employing a series of brilliant tactical maneuvers, Hannibal once again utterly destroyed the Romans.

    Following this grisly slaughter, the Romans adopted a Fabian strategy of retreat, refusing to give battle against Hannibal. Hannibal continued to devastate the Italian countryside for the next decade, but he was unable to knock Rome out of the war. Meanwhile, the Roman general Scipio attacked Carthage's holdings in Spain, gaining complete control of the region by 206. Scipio then led an expedition to Africa itself, and Hannibal was recalled from Italy to defend the city of Carthage. The two sides met at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC and Hannibal was defeated, Scipio taking the name "Africanus" to celebrate his victory. Carthage was forced to sue for peace, and Rome imposed very harsh terms on the city.

    Despite the destruction of the Second Punic War and the harsh peace terms, Carthage soon recovered her strength and began once more to exert control over trade in the Western Mediterranean. This caused great fear among the Romans, who had never forgotten the damage that Hannibal had done to Italy in the earlier war. In 149 BC Rome declared war on Carthage again on spurious pretexts, initiating the Third Punic War. The Carthaginians attempted to negotiate a settlement, but the Romans would be satisfied with nothing less than the cities total destruction. After a long siege, the city fell and its people were killed or sold into slavery. Carthage itself was pulled apart brick by brick and completely destroyed. The city would be rebuilt by the Romans, but the former Phoenician state would never rise again.

    There can be little doubt that, had they been able to overcome their internal divisions, the Poles would have been a dominant power in the Middle Ages. The first institution that can be called a Polish kingdom or nation arose in around 980 AD, when a tribal leader named Mieszko united three major tribes in eastern Europe and converted to Catholicism. The concept of a dynasty had not yet caught on in that part of Europe, though, so successions were often extremely violent and chaotic. After Mieszko's rule, the fortunes of the Polish nation-state depended entirely on the ruthlessness and strength of will of its leader. Some of Mieszko's successors were strong and able to impose their wills on the fractious principalities and tribes of Poland and Pomerania, and thereby defend effectively against foreign, usually German or Bohemian, invasion. Others were not.

    In 1226 AD, just over two hundred years after Boleslaw II successfully reunited the Polish kingdom, Poland was deeply divided once again. Baltic tribes menaced the north and the German state of Brandenburg sought greater land and influence in the west. The Polish king, Conrad of Mazovia, decided to import an army to fight off both of these threats in exchange for an indefinite homeland in Poland. The army was the Teutonic Knights. They accepted Conrad's offer and, after arriving in northern Poland, waged several bloody campaigns of conquest against the German and Baltic occupiers. To Conrad's surprise, though, the Knights then decided that they would rather have their own country rather than a dependent homeland inside someone else's kingdom. Conrad had saved the Polish kingdom from outside invasion, only to be invaded from within.

    Future Polish kings then had to deal not just with Germans, Bohemians and Lithuanians, but the restless and aggressive Teutonic Knights. As if that were not enough, in 1241 a major Mongol invasion force arrived in Silesia (southeastern Poland). The Poles were able to defeat the Mongols, but at huge cost. Vast lands were laid waste and thousands of soldiers perished. In 1330 tensions between the Teutonic Knights and Poland erupted into open war, and after many political and military stalemates, the Polish king Casimir III was able to expand and recover from the Mongol attack and the endless conflicts with Poland's neighbors. But despite holding firm, Casimir had to settle for survival rather than prosperity.

    The golden age of Poland came at the end of the Middle Ages, when alliance with Lithuania led to a combined assault on the Teutonic Knights that culminated in the fated battle of Grunwald in 1410. The Knights were able to fight off one contingent of the allied force, but were crushed by the other. The Knights were not totally defeated, but they would never again exert their will upon Poland as forcefully as they had in the preceding two centuries. Casimir IV, perhaps the greatest Polish king, was able to capitalize on this success to unite the Polish succession lines with those of Hungary and Bohemia, creating, albeit briefly, an eastern European super-state that dominated the region culturally and militarily for two generations.

    Polynesia is a subregion of Oceania, made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are termed Polynesians and they share many similar traits including language, culture and beliefs. Historically, they were experienced sailors and used stars to navigate during the night.

    The area which encompasses modern Portugal was originally settled by Celtic tribes around 1000 BC and was then subsequently conquered by the Visigoths and finally the Moors. The Christian Kings of Asturia eventually drove the Moors out of the area; the new nation of Portugal was formed after its separation from Spanish rule.

    Portugal was one of the first great internationally-based sea empires in the European world. Between 1415 and 1665, Portugal created a series of resting and refueling ports along the eastern and western coasts of Africa in a bid to eventually reach the profitable shores of India. In 1498 they achieved their goals when Vasco da Gama reached Kozhikode (known then as Calicut). Several important battles took place between the Arabs (who had previously monopolized spice trade in the Indian Ocean) and the Portuguese during this era, the most important of them being the victory over the Egyptian-Gujarati fleet off of Diu in 1509. This victory assured the Portuguese maritime superiority in the Indian Ocean and enabled them to capitalize on the rich spice trade routes between India and Europe. However, in 1578 King Sebastian of Portugal was killed at the battle of "Field of the Three Kings" in Morocco (which Portugal had long hoped to conquer), along with the majority of his force, destroying a central part of Portugal's land armies.

     In 1580 the throne of Portugal was given over to the Habsburg kings of Spain, partially a result of the Portuguese weakness after the demise of its own king. At the same time, Portuguese power in both the east and west was declining due to a lack of skilled sailors available in Portugal. The English and the Dutch had also been amassing large navies, and began expanding their spheres of influence along routes traditionally held solely by the Portuguese. Although the Portuguese wrested national control back from the Spanish in a 1640 revolt, they lost their control in Malacca, Ceylon, Cochin, Hormuz, among many others to the Dutch or other seafaring nations. With their eastern territories diminishing, Brazil, discovered by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500, became increasingly important.

    Gold was discovered in Brazil in 1690, which had previously been exploited mostly for its dyewood, sugar, diamonds, tobacco and slaves. The ensuing gold rush boosted the population of Brazil from 200,000 in 1650 to 1.5 million in 1770. Brazil today remains the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world.

    In 1808, French troops under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Portugal, forcing the prince regent, Dom João, to flee to Brazil and set up a new government. In 1821, the royal family moved back to Portugal after reclaiming the country. Dom João stayed behind, and then his son, Dom Pedro I, ruled Brazil until the country broke away from its mother country, declaring independence in 1822.

    After losing Brazil, Portugal focused on building its African acquisitions in order to compete with their British and French counterparts. However, after World War II, the majority of European nations began abandoning their outlying colonies. India forcibly retook the Portuguese colonies still in their territory. In 1974, a democratic government was established in Portugal. This new government negotiated the release of its African holdings, which were promptly devastated by civil war and vicious in-fighting generated by the Cold War.

    Today Portugal is ruled from its capital in Lisbon as a democratic republic under the constitution of 1976. It remains an important participant in the European Union as well as one of the major environmental reformers of Europe.

    Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars brought the Germanic tribes into the spotlight of history. Although Roman efforts to establish hegemony across the Rhine continued for decades, the frontier eventually stabilized along the Rhine and Danube rivers. At that time, Germanic culture extended from Scandinavia as far south as the Carpathians. Although it was heavily fortified, the frontier was never a barrier to trade or culture. Germanic fear of the Huns eventually drove many of the tribes inside the borders of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, where the weakened Romans were unable to contain them. The Eastern Roman Empire survived the crisis and lasted for another thousand years, but the Germanic peoples carved out their own independent kingdoms in the West.

    Of the various Germanics tribes that had invaded the Roman Empire, the Franks proved to be the most successful. The Merovingian kings and their Carolingian successors eventually brought much of what would later constitute Germany under Frankish control, but the ceaseless blows from Danes, Saracens (Muslims), and Magyars in the later 9th and 10th centuries weakened the kingdom's cohesion. Because the Carolingians themselves were unable to provide effective defense for the empire, there arose in nearly all the German lands powerful lines of margraves, counts, and hereditary rulers; their intrigues and wars against each other were interrupted only briefly by the rise of strong emperors such as Frederick Barbarossa (1155-1190). The subsequent history of Germany is, despite the role of the central rule of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the rise and fall of feuding principalities. It would be a thousand years before Germany was again unified under a single ruler.

    Out of the hundreds of states that made up Germany, it was the kingdom of Prussia that would eventually succeed in bringing them together. Beginning as a small duchy on the shores of the Baltic Sea, the rulers of Prussia gradually accumulated more and more territory through a combination of warfare and marriage agreements. King Frederick William I (1713-40) trained the Prussian army to be one of the finest in Europe, and his son Frederick II (1740-86) - also known as Frederick the Great - used it to win a series of military victories against the larger kingdoms of Austria and Russia. Frederick was also known as a patron of the arts, his court attracting intellectuals such as Voltaire from across Europe. Ruling as an enlightened despot, Frederick was equally skilled at defeating Russian invasions and playing the flute.

    Following its humiliation and defeat in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, Prussia managed to bounce back and reorganize itself along more modern lines. Troubled by the popular uprisings that had occurred across Germany during the 1848 revolutions, William I of Prussia (1861-1888) considered abdicating in favor of his son, who was believed to have political views close to those of the liberal opposition. He was persuaded, however, to consider forming a new government led by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian ambassador to Paris. In September 1862, Europe was startled by the news that a statesman with a reputation for conservatism, nationalism, and [realpolitik] had become the prime minister of Prussia. Bismarck proved to be a master strategist, and the new German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871, in the aftermath of three short and decisive wars against Denmark, Austria, and France. In the span of a decade, Bismarck had unified Germany - or, as some would say, Prussia had conquered it.

    The same nationalism that had brought unity would also bring disaster. Ignoring the careful diplomacy that had isolated Prussia's opponent in each of Bismarck's wars, Germany rushed into World War I against a coalition of Britain, France, and Russia. Despite initial successes, the war eventually turned into a stalemate that Germany could not win, especially once the United Stated entered the war on the Entente side in 1917. Already staggering under a vengeful peace imposed by the Western Allies following World War I, the worldwide economic collapse that began in 1929 proved the catalyst for political extremism. Although bitterly opposed to each other, the Nazis and Communists during the next decade succeeded in mobilizing the political and economic resentments generated by defeat and depression. When Hitler finally became chancellor in January 1933, it was not on the crest of a wave of popular support but as the result of ruthless political intrigue.

    World War II is appropriately called "Hitler's War." Spearheaded by Panzer formations using revolutionary new tactics, Hitler came close to realizing his aim of establishing German hegemony in Europe. But the turning point of the war came with his decision to send his Panzers into Soviet Russia. Though at the end of 1942 an ultimate German victory still seemed possible, by spring 1945 the Third Reich was prostrate. As a legacy of surrender and the ensuing Cold War, a truncated Germany was divided into two zones of military occupation. While under Soviet rule East Germany suffered and stagnated, West Germany's recovery from total economic and political prostration at the end of World War II was of such dramatic proportions as to become a modern legend. The swift and unexpected downfall of the Soviet order in Europe led to a unification treaty, ratified by the West German Bundestag and the East German People's Chamber in September 1990. After 45 years of division, Germany was once again a united nation. Today Germany is one of the world's economic powerhouses, and a leading force in the European Union.

    The founding of Rome on the fertile Tibur River is obscured by myth and legend, but it is generally accepted that Rome was first settled in 753 BC and that the Republic was founded in 509 BC, following the overthrow of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last of Rome's seven kings. Rome was built on a site highly prized by the Etruscans, who dominated the Italian peninsula in the 6th century BC. The Etruscan king Porsenna defeated the Romans and expelled Tarquinius Superbus. Yet before Porsenna could establish himself as monarch over the unruly Romans, he was forced to withdraw. Rather than restoring their inept king, the citizens replaced the monarchy with two elected consuls, generals whose primary task it was to lead Rome's armies, and a Senate to serve as an advisory body. Where the Etruscans had failed, the people of Rome succeeded in the task of unifying the various Italian peoples into a political whole.

    Toward the end of the 5th century BC, the Romans, propelled by the pressures of unchecked population growth, began to expand at the expense of nearby city-states. Rome's first two wars were fought with Fidenae, an independent city near Rome, and against Veii, an important Etruscan city. In the process, the expanding Roman Republic found the Greek phalanx formation too unwieldy for fragmented fighting in the hills and valleys of central Italy; accordingly, Rome evolved a new tactical system based on flexible ranks of cohorts, organized into self-contained Legions, the means by which Imperial Rome conquered and ruled the ancient world. As Rome became increasingly powerful, the remaining city-states took up arms; the ensuing Latin War (340-338 BC) was quickly decided in Rome's favor. By 264 BC all Italy south of the Alps was united under the leadership of Rome, its members either incorporated in or allied with the Republic. Rome's growing influence led it into conflict with Carthage, an established commercial power in northern Africa. The defeat and destruction of Carthage in the three Punic Wars (264-146 BC) sustained Rome's acquisitive momentum, and the Republic set its sights on dominating the entire Mediterranean area. In short order, the Romans overran Syria, Macedonia, Greece, and Egypt, all of which had until then been part of the decaying Hellenistic empire created by Alexander the Great.

    But such expansion was not without costs; tensions grew and civil war erupted. The ensuing period of unrest and revolution marked the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire. The Late Republic witnessed the struggle between Marius and Sulla, the famous slave uprising under Spartacus, and saw the rise of figures such as the general Pompey, the orator Cicero, and the consul Julius Caesar. Although he was dismissed as vain and effeminate young man early in his career, Caesar proved to be a master politician and military strategist. Caesar conquered Gaul between 58-50 BC, then proceeded to crush all of his opponents in a civil war that left him the undisputed master of Rome. After Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, it was not long before civil war again erupted; but following his victory at Actium (31 BC), Octavian, Caesar's nephew, was crowned Rome's first emperor, taking the name Augustus (27 BC-14 AD).

    Although there were notable exceptions such as Caligula (37-41) and Nero (54-68), the Roman Empire was generally blessed with a series of able and brilliant leaders during its first two centuries who expanded the frontiers until Rome's empire reached from Britain to Egypt and from Spain to Persia. Imperial Rome was distinguished not only for its military - the foundation upon which the empire rested - but also for its accomplishments in engineering and statecraft. The Romans were gifted in the applied arts of law, record-keeping and city planning, yet they also acknowledged and adopted the contributions of earlier peoples - most notably, those of the Greeks, much of whose culture was thereby preserved. Roman law was a complex body of precedents and opinions, which were finally codified in the 6th century as the Justinian Code. The empire's road network was without match in the ancient world, designed for rapid movement of commerce, agriculture, and mail delivery as well as the needs of the army. Roman city planners achieved unprecedented standards of hygiene with their plumbing, sewage disposal, dams, and aqueducts. Roman art and architecture, though often imitative of Greek styles, was boldly planned and lavishly executed. Roman science and culture, in short, became the foundations of the European world.

    After the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD, the empire was plagued by a series of poor rulers. The Praetorian Guard, formerly a highly respected elite unit sworn to serve the emperor, turned into a body that would sell itself to the highest bidder. During the middle of the 3rd century, Rome suffered through more than 30 emperors in a span of 70 years, and the empire nearly collapsed under the pressure of internal revolts and barbarian invaders. The Emperor Diocletian (284-305) managed to restore order, at the cost of imposing a strict authoritarian rule that left little room for individual freedom. Further chaos broke out after Diocletian's retirement, until Constantine (306-337) managed to emerge victorius from another series of civil wars. Constantine accomplished two extremely noteworthy things; first, he founded the city of Constantinople to serve as the new capital of the empire, from which the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire would endure for another thousand years. Secondly, Constantine legalized Christianity as a religion, allowing it to spread much more rapidly throughout the Roman world.

    After Constantine's death, the empire was split into an eastern and western half, the division becoming permanent in 395. When the empire again came under barbarian onslaught in the late 4th and 5th centuries, the weakened West collapsed but the East - where most of the empire's population and wealth was concentrated - managed to survive. The final emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476, although the Western Empire had become a fiction in all but name decades earlier. Although destroyed as a political entity, the Latin culture of the Roman Empire largely survived and can still be observed today throughout the Mediterranean.

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    Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, and other races have occupied what is now the territory of Russia since 2000 BC, but little is known about their institutions and activities. Modern Russia dates from about 770 AD, when Viking explorers began an intensive penetration of the Volga region. From bases in estuaries along the eastern Baltic, Scandinavian bands, probably in search of new trade routes to the east, began to penetrate territory populated by Finnish and Slavic tribes, where they found unlimited natural resources.

    Within a few decades the Rus, as the Viking settlers were known, together with other Scandinavians operating farther west, extended their raiding activities down the main river routes toward Baghdad and Constantinople, reaching the Black Sea in 860. In the period from 930 to 1000, the region came under complete control by the Rus from their capital at Kiev. The lifeblood of this sprawling Kievan empire was the commerce organized by these Viking princes. Sometime around 1000 the Kievan princes were converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries, and the medieval Russian states would maintain close cultural ties with the Byzantines. The united Kievan state broke apart after 1054 under the pressure of attacks by nomads from the steppes, fragmenting Russia into a number of independent principalities. The devastating attack by the Mongols in 1237-40 resulted in widepread destruction of cities, loss of life, and wiped out a developing commercial middle class centered around the fur trade. This helped bring about the long rule of autocracy in Russia.

    Of the various Russian principalities, it was Muscovy that proved to be the most successful. Beginning as the state that collected taxes for Russia's Mongol overlords, the princes of Muscovy eventually gained a position of leadership by throwing off the yoke of their oppressors. Ivan III (1462-1505) consolidated the gains his father, Vasily II, had won in the saddle, and his warrior descendent Ivan IV (1533-84), known as Ivan the Terrible, gained enough power to take the title of "Tsar", or Emperor, in 1547. This "gathering of the Russian lands" became a conscious and irresistible five-century drive by Moscow to annex all Slavic lands, both the Russian territories and the Belorussian and Ukrainian regions. The ascension of Peter I (1694-1725), known as Peter the Great, ushered in and established the social, political, and intellectual trends that were to dominate Russia for the next two centuries. The location of his new capital, St. Petersburg, on the shores of the Gulf of Finland symbolized this shift toward a European involvement. But while the Russian aristocracy may have adopted the courtly behavior and modern military tactics of the West, the vast majority of the Russian people remained mired in a slave-like state of feudal servitude.

    Catherine the Great (1762-1796), though a German princess who was unrelated to Peter in any way, would prove to be his true intellectual and political heir. Catherine's reign was notable for imperial expansion. Most important were the securing of the northern shore of the Black Sea, the annexation of the Crimea, and the expansion into the steppes beyond the Urals. This permitted the protection of Russian agricultural settlements in the south and the establishment of trade routes through the Black Sea. In the process, the military democracies of the Cossack hosts along the Dnieper, Don, and Volga rivers lost their autonomy and special privileges; the wealthier officers became Russian nobles, receiving the right to own and settle serfs on their own lands, while the fierce horsemen sank to the level of peasants with special military obligations. Catherine's partitioning of Poland also helped bring Russia closer to the rest of Europe, at least geographically.

    Despite the heritage of Peter and Catherine, by the time of Nicholas II (1894-1917) Russia was in disarray, plagued by internal misery and oppression. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War followed by the 1905 Revolution indicated that Russia was in need of drastic reforms, but the autocratic structure of the Tsarist state was poorly suited to adapt to changing conditions. World War I imposed stresses on the Tsardom that it could not meet, and the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, riding on a wave of popular discontent. The Kerensky Provisional Government, a moderate attempt to resolve the problems, collapsed in the face of the Bolshevik (Communist) revolution. Given the Bolshevik desire to dominate the whole of Russia and the rest of the former Tsarist empire, civil war was inevitable, and a bitter struggle between Red (Communist) and White (Tsarist) forces lasted until the Bolsheviks were victorious in 1922. Stalin would complete the consolidation of Communist power begun by Lenin, most notably through the forced industrialization of the Five-Year Plans and the mass starvations engendered by the collectivization of agriculture. Despite an almost inhuman level of suffering imposed on the Russian people, Stalin would lead the Soviet Union through the greatest threat to its existence during the Nazi invasion of 1941-45, and help it emerge as one of the world's superpowers following the Second World War.

    But in the ensuing Cold War, Russia's economy tottered towards collapse. The Communist economic system worked well at producing millions of tons of iron for use in tanks, but was unable to produce simple household goods to improve the daily lives of its people. Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to revive the stagnant Soviet economy through the relaxation of economic and political controls, but the forces of free speech and a free market quickly took hold in a way Gorbachev never would have imagined. Within a few years, the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe were declaring their independence and new politicians like Boris Yeltsin were demanding democratic elections. An ill-conceived, ill-planned, and poorly executed coup attempt to unseat Yeltsin occurred in August 1991, bringing an end to the Communist Party and accelerating the movement to disband the Soviet Union. Yeltsin dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1991, banned the Communist Party in Russia, and seized all of its property, becoming the first president of Russia. Today, as it often has throughout its history, Russia finds itself struggling between whether to follow the example of the West or pursue its own unique path of development.

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    The Kingdom of Spain is located in the extreme southwest of the European continent, and occupies approximately 85 percent of the Iberian Peninsula. Spain is bordered on the west by Portugal, in the northeast by France, and by the great wall of the Pyrenees Mountains. The Iberian Peninsula that the Spanish inhabited was occupied by various other civilizations, including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, and Muslims, and Spain is now associated with having a very rich, eclectic culture as a result.

    The development of Christian society and culture in the first 300 years following Islamic conquest in Spain was slow, but major changes occurred for the Spanish in the 12th and 13th centuries. The population grew, communication with northern Europe intensified, commerce and urban life gained in importance, and the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal emerged as the governing bodies of the Iberian Peninsula. These kingdoms reached the frontiers that they would keep, with minimum amount of alteration, until the end of the Middle Ages, when Isabella I became Queen of Castile.

    Isabella began participating in the royal court at the age of 13; and when Portugal, Aragon, and France offered their marriage candidates, she favored Ferdinand of Aragon. Isabella ascended to the throne as Queen of Castile to rule sensibly and with a prudent political program. Her unification of the states of the Iberian Peninsula into a single entity, the maintenance and control over the Straits of Gibraltar, policy of expansion into Muslim North Africa, reform of Spanish Catholicism, and support for the exploration and expansion of the unknown were evidence of her wisdom and capabilities as Queen. In 1492 Columbus, with the blessing and financial backing of Isabella, sought a route to the legendary rich markets of China and Japan. He instead discovered what would become known as "The New World", the present day Americas. This voyage gave way to a new golden age of expeditions and conquest, as the Americas contained gold, a valuable resource that Spain happened to be desperately bereft of at the time.

    The Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes came to the New World with the sole purpose of seeking out new frontiers and riches in the unknown. Men like Cortes became known as Conquistadores, adventurers who undertook their expeditions in the vast landmasses of the Americas at their own expense, risking their lives without aid from the Spanish royalty. Their conquests included campaigns in Guatemala, Peru, Cuzco, Columbia, Chile, the Bay of Honduras, and as far as the Pacific coastal regions. The Conquistadors, however, were given to fighting and searching for gold, and were swiftly replaced by administrators and settlers from Spain who governed in their place.

    The twin forces of disease and conquest combined to devastate the indigenous peoples of the Americas, allowing the Spaniards to carve out an enormous empire comprising most of North and South America. Many of the Spanish colonies proved to yield fabulous wealth in the form of gold and sugar, but working conditions were so harsh that large numbers of Africans were brought across the Atlantic as slaves to replace the Indians who had died working on the plantations. These lucrative operations inevitably became high-profile targets of pirates and other raiders who were endorsed by European powers such as England. The Monarchy of Spain endeavored to retaliate by building an armada of warships that was dubbed "The Invincible Armada". The armada was a collection of over 130 naval warships and transport-ships, which contained approximately 8,000 seamen and 19,000 soldiers. King Philip II (1556-98) directed this armada to invade England when the various and frequent raids on Spanish commerce in the Caribbean became intolerable. England's success in repelling the Spanish fleet saved England and the Netherlands from potential consolidation into the Spanish Empire, but despite the Armada's defeat, Spain remained temporarily the strongest land power in Europe.

    Thereafter, Spain declined in power quickly; the enormous influx of gold and silver from the Americas debased the Spanish currency, and most of the nation's military might was wasted in the quagmire of religious conflict known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48). By the beginning of the 18th century, Spain had become somewhat marginal in international politics, even though it continued to hold vast territories in the Americas. Spain's period of imperial power and exploration left a legacy that consisted of 18 nations in Latin American, the Spanish presence in the Phillipines, and the ever-growing Spanish-speaking population in the United States today. It is also due to the work of Jesuit missionaries from Spain that hundreds of millions of people in Latin America practice Roman Catholicism to this day. In 1975 Spain transitioned into a constitutional monarchy by way of a democratic constitution and is now recognized for its eclectic culture as well as for the glory and mystique that it once possessed in its youth.

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    Thai city-states gradually became independent from the weakened Khmer Empire. It is said that Sukhothai was established as a sovereign, strong kingdom by Pho Khun Si Indrathit in 1238 AD. A political feature which "classic" Thai historians call "father governs children" existed at this time. Everybody could bring their problems to the king directly, as there was a bell in front of the palace for this purpose. The city briefly dominated the area under King Ramkhamhaeng, who established the Thai alphabet, but after his death in 1365, Sukothai fell into decline and became subject to another emerging Thai state: the Ayutthaya Kingdom in the lower Chao Phraya area.

    Another Thai state that coexisted with Sukhothai was the northern state of Lanna, centered in Chiang Mai. King Phya Mangrai was its founder. This city-state emerged in the same period as Sukhothai. Evidently Lanna became closely allied with Sukhothai. After the Ayutthaya kingdom had emerged and expanded its influence from the Chao Phraya valley, Sukhothai was finally subdued. Fierce battles between Lanna and Ayutthaya also constantly took place and Chiang Mai was eventually subjugated, becoming Ayutthaya's 'vassal'.

    Lanna's independent history ended in 1558, when it finally fell to the Burmese; thereafter it was dominated by Burma until the late 18th century. Local leaders then rose up against the Burmese with the help of the rising Thai kingdom of Thonburi of king Taksin. The 'Northern City-States' then became vassals of the lower Thai kingdoms of Thonburi and Bangkok. In the early 20th century they were annexed and became part of modern Siam, the country now called Thailand.

    Over the centuries the Yarlung Zangbo valley was the focus of ancient trade routes from India, China, and central Asia. Tibet emerged from an obscure history to flourish in the 7th cent. AD as an independent kingdom with its capital at Lhasa. Toward the end of the 12th century many Indian Buddhists, fleeing before the Muslim invasion, went to Tibet. In the 13th century Tibet fell under Mongol influence, which was to last until the 18th century. In 1270, Kublai Khan, emperor of China, was converted to Buddhism by the abbot of the Sakya lamasery. The abbot returned to Tibet to found the Sakya dynasty (1270-1340) and to become the first priest-king of Tibet. In 1720, the Ch'ing dynasty replaced Mongol rule in Tibet. China thereafter claimed suzerainty, often merely nominal.

    During the 18th century, British authorities in India attempted to establish relations with Lhasa, but Tibet maintained its traditional seclusion. Meanwhile, Ladakh, long part of Tibet, was lost to the rulers of Kashmir, and Sikkim was seized by Britain. In 1906, Britain recognized China's suzerainty over Tibet. However, the Tibetans were able to expel the Chinese from Tibet and reassert their independence (1912). After the death (1933) of the 13th Dalai Lama, Tibet gradually drifted back into the Chinese orbit. By a Tibetan-Chinese agreement (May, 1951), Tibet became a national autonomous region of China under the traditional rule of the Dalai Lama, but under the actual control of a Chinese Communist Commission.

    The Communist government introduced far-reaching land reforms and sharply curtailed the power of the monastic orders. Full-scale revolt broke out in March, 1959. The Chinese suppressed the rebellion, but the Dalai Lama managed to escape to India.

    The Chinese adopted brutal repressive measures, provoking charges from the Dalai Lama of genocide. Landholdings were seized, the lamaseries were virtually emptied, and thousands of monks were forced to find other work. In 1965 the Tibetan Autonomous Region was formally established. The Cultural Revolution, with its antireligious orientation, was disastrous for highly religious Tibet. Religious practices were banned and over 4,000 monasteries were destroyed. Though the ban was lifted in 1976 and some Buddhist temples have again been in operation since the early 1980s, Tibetans continue to complain of widespread discrimination by the Chinese. Several protests in Tibet in the late 1980s and early 1990s were violently suppressed by the Communist government and martial law was imposed in 1989. Demonstrations against Chinese rule have nevertheless continued. Moreover, in recent years other countries have increasingly raised the issue of human-rights violations in Tibet, and have pressured the Chinese government to moderate their stance in that region.

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    The Turkic peoples are a collection of ethnic groups that live in central, eastern, northern, and western Asia as well as parts of eastern Europe. They speak languages belonging to the Turkic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds. Traditional national and cultural symbols of the Turkic peoples include wolves in Turkic mythology and tradition; as well as the color blue, iron, and fire. Turquoise blue (the word turquoise comes from the French word meaning "Turkish") is the color of the stone turquoise still used in jewelry and as a protection against evil eye.

    The term Turkic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of peoples including existing societies such as Altai, Azerbaijanis, Balkars, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Crimean Karaites, Gagauz, Karachays, Karakalpaks, Kazakhs, Khakas, Krymchaks, Kyrgyz people, Nogais, Qashqai, Tatars, Turkmens, Turkish people, Tuvans, Uyghurs, Uzbeks, and Yakuts and as well as ancient and medieval states such as Dingling, Bulgars, Alat, Basmyl, Onogurs, Shatuo, Chuban, Göktürks, Oghuz Turks, Kankalis, Khazars, Khiljis, Kipchaks, Kumans, Karluks, Bahri Mamluks, Ottoman Turks, Seljuk Turks, Tiele, Timurids, Turgeshes, Yenisei Kirghiz, and possibly Huns, Tuoba, Xiongnu. It is generally agreed that the first Turkic people lived in a region extending from Central Asia to Siberia, with the majority of them living in China historically, establishing themselves after the 6th century BC.

    The earliest separate Turkic peoples appeared on the peripheries of the late Xiongnu Confederation about 200 BC (contemporaneous with the Chinese Han Dynasty) and probably lived as nomads for many years before establishing the Turkic Khaganate or Göktürk Empire in the 6th century. The first mention of Turks was in a Chinese text that mentioned trade between Turk tribes and the Sogdians along the Silk Road. The first recorded use of "Turk" as a political name appears as a 6th-century reference to the word pronounced in Modern Chinese as Tujue. The Ashina clan migrated from Li-jien (modern Zhelai Zhai) to the Rouran seeking inclusion in their confederacy and protection from the prevalent dynasty. The tribe were famed metalsmiths and were granted land near a mountain quarry that looked like a helmet, from which they were said to have gotten their name tujue. A century later, their power had increased such that they conquered the Rouran Khaganate and established the Gök Empire. The Khanate retained elements of its original shamanistic religion, Tengriism, although it received missionaries of Buddhist monks and practiced a syncretic religion. The Göktürks were the first Turkic people to write Old Turkic in a runic script, the Orkhon script. The Khanate was also the first state known as "Turk". It eventually collapsed due to a series of dynastic conflicts, but many states and peoples later used the name "Turk".

    The main migration of Turkic peoples and related groups occurred in medieval times in many waves, when they spread across most of Asia and into Europe and the Middle East. In the Volga region one group of Bulgars settled and mixed with local Volga Finns to become the Volga Bulgars in what is today Tatarstan. Other Bulgars settled in Southeastern Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries, and mixed with the Slavic population, adopting what eventually became the Slavic Bulgarian language. As these peoples founded states in the area between Mongolia and Transoxiana, they met Muslims, and most of them gradually adopted Islam. Small groups of Turkic people practice other religions, including Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians. The Khazars, for example, converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century. Everywhere, Turkic groups mixed with the local populations to varying degrees.

    In the Muslim world, Turkic dynasties emerged as rulers of great and powerful empires. In the 11th century, Oghuz and other tribes captured and dominated various countries under the leadership of the Seljuk dynasty and eventually captured the territories of the Abbasid dynasty and the Byzantine Empire, forming the Great Seljuk Empire; The Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), that came to dominate not only the Middle East, but also even southeastern Europe, parts of southwestern Russia, and northern Africa; The Timurid Empire were a Turkic Uzbek-based empire founded in the late 14th century by Timurlane, a descendant of Genghis Khan; The Mughal Empire, a Turkic-founded Indian empire that, at its greatest territorial extent, ruled most of the South Asia from the early 16th to the early 18th centuries; And the Iranian Safavid and Afsharid dynasties, who formed what has come to be the modern Iran state.

    The dominance of the nomads ended in the 16th century, as firearms allowed settled peoples to gain control of the region. Russia, China, and other powers expanded into the region and captured the bulk of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century.

    vFrom the mid-19th century until almost the end of the 20th century, most of Central Asia was part of the Russian Empire (and later the Soviet Union). After the collapse of the Russian Empire living either in the Soviet Union or (after a short-lived First East Turkestan Republic) in the Chinese Republic.

    In 1991, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, five Turkic states gained their independence. These were Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Other Turkic regions such as Tatarstan, Tuva, and Yakutia remained in the Russian Federation. Chinese Turkestan remained part of the People's Republic of China.

    Immediately after the independence of the Turkic states, Turkey began seeking diplomatic relations with them. Over time, political meetings between the Turkic countries increased and led to the establishment of TÜRKSOY in 1993 and later the Turkic Council in 2009.

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