Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Every battle in history, mapped

Title card reading 'Every battle in history' in black and red on pale paper, beside a map of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East covered in small dots coloured by era, densest in western Europe and the Levant. Text: 13,712 battles with a place and a date, 3001 BCE to 2026; most fought-over: Flanders, 369 battles; Europe has 51% of battles and 7% of the land.

Wikidata knows of 20,202 battles. I mapped the 13,712 that have both a place and a date, from a legendary clash in 3001 BCE to the fighting of 2026, to see where war happened century by century, which places have been fought over again and again, and how much the famous “every battle in history” map is really a map of who wrote things down.

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You have probably seen the map. Someone downloads every battle from Wikidata, plots them as glowing dots, and posts it: Europe ablaze, the Mediterranean outlined in fire, the eastern United States lit up by the Civil War, and great stretches of Africa and Asia oddly quiet. It is a beautiful image, and it is almost never dated, explained or questioned. So I made it again, properly, and then asked what it can and cannot tell us.

The raw material is every Wikidata item that is an instance of “battle” or one of its many subclasses: 20,202 items. 14,768 have coordinates, 15,874 have a date, and 13,712 have both. Those are the dots.

World map with thousands of small coloured dots, one per battle, coloured by era. Europe is almost solid with dots of every era; the Mediterranean coasts, the Middle East, the eastern United States, India, China, Japan and Korea are dense; much of Africa, Central Asia, Siberia, South America and Australia have scattered dots, mostly from the last two centuries.
Every battle in Wikidata with a place and a date, coloured by era. Data: Wikidata (CC0).

Five thousand years, mostly the last five hundred

The record goes back a long way. The oldest item, the Battle of Banquan, a battle of Chinese legend, is placed in 3001 BCE, and 672 battles are dated before 1 CE. But almost all of the record is recent: 77% of dated battles happened after 1500 and 52% after 1800. The 19th century has the most, 3,714, just ahead of the 20th with 3,630. The single busiest year is 1944, with 319 battles.

Stacked bar chart of battles per century from the 13th century BCE to the 21st century. Bars are tiny before about 1000 CE, rise through the medieval centuries and climb steeply after 1500 to peaks of 3,714 in the 19th century and about 3,600 in the 20th. Colours show Europe dominant in most centuries, North America large in the 19th, and Asia and Africa large in the 21st.
Battles per century, coloured by continent. Grey: dated but not mapped.

Counted per year, the 21st century is as busy as the 19th: 35.4 battles a year since 2001, against 37.1 in the 19th century. That does not mean the world is as warlike as it was in the age of Napoleon. It means that today’s wars, in Syria, Iraq, the Sahel and Ukraine, are written up on Wikipedia battle by battle, as they happen.

Eight small world maps, one per era, with battles counted in hexagons from pale yellow to dark red. Before 500 BCE a few hexagons in the Near East, Greece and China; in the classical era a dense band from Italy to Anatolia; in the medieval eras Europe dominates; from 1500 the Americas, India and East Asia fill in; 1800 to 1913 is dense in the eastern United States and South America; the world wars cover Europe; since 1946 the darkest hexagons are in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Battles by era, counted on an equal-area hexagon grid.

The centre of war

Where is the middle of the world’s recorded fighting? For each century I found the point on the globe closest, on average, to all of its battles. It sits in Greece in the age of Marathon and the Peloponnesian War and moves to Italy with Rome. Then, from the 5th century to the 19th, in every century but one it stays within 800 km of the middle of the Alps. The exceptions are revealing: in the 2nd and 3rd centuries it jumps east towards the Caucasus, because the record holds more battles from Han and Three Kingdoms China than from Rome, and in the 7th it moves to Syria with the Arab conquests. In the 21st century it has left Europe altogether, for Syria.

Map of Europe and the Middle East with a line joining the centre of war for each century, coloured from gold for the 6th century BCE to dark red for the 21st century. The early points cluster in Greece and Italy; most medieval and early modern points sit around the Alps; the line jumps east to the Caucasus for the 2nd and 3rd centuries and to Syria for the 7th; the 19th century is in northern France, the 20th in Romania and the 21st in Syria.
The centre of war, century by century: the spherical median of each century’s battles.

The most fought-over places on Earth

To compare places fairly I counted battles on a grid of equal-area hexagons, each about the size of Cyprus, and in regions of seven hexagons, about twice the size of Belgium. The winner will not surprise anyone who knows European history: Flanders, Artois and Brabant, with 369 battles across 17 centuries, from Caesar’s war against the Belgae and the Battle of the Golden Spurs to Waterloo and the battles of Ypres. Belgium has more battles for its size than any country larger than 20,000 km²: 63.4 for every 10,000 km².

Map of Europe and the Mediterranean with battles counted in small hexagons, and fifteen numbered outlines of the most fought-over regions, beside a ranked list with bars coloured by era. Flanders, Artois and Brabant is first with 369 battles, followed by western France with 260, the southern Levant with 244 and Lombardy and the Po valley with 205.
The most fought-over regions, each seven equal-area hexagons, with their battles by era.

Counted by how long rather than how often, the Levant and Italy win. The hexagon around Jerusalem, Gaza and the coastal plain has battles in 16 different centuries, from 1025 BCE to 2025. Milan and Pavia have 16, and Rome 15. These are corridors between powers, and places worth holding, and they have been fought over for as long as there have been records.

The map of every battle is a map of war, but it is also a map of whose wars got written down, and in which language.

A map of who wrote things down

The second most fought-over region on the map is western France, from the Vendée to Normandy, with 260 battles. 68% of them come from the War in the Vendée and the Chouannerie of the 1790s, which between them have 191 battle items in Wikidata, more than the Thirty Years’ War. They were savage wars, but they are on the map in such detail because French Wikipedia editors have written up every skirmish. The best-recorded wars tell the same story: the Second World War has 864 battle items and the American Civil War 524, while no war in China, India or Africa makes the top 25.

Horizontal bar chart of the twenty wars with the most battle items in Wikidata. World War II leads with 864, then World War I with 532 and the American Civil War with 524, then the American Revolutionary War with 221 and the Peninsular War with 155. Most bars are blue for Europe and green for North America; the Korean, Vietnam and Syrian wars are red for Asia.
The wars with the most battles in Wikidata, coloured by continent.

Overall, Europe has 51% of the mapped battles on 7% of the world’s land. Some of that is real: Europe was crowded, divided and constantly at war. But much of it is the record. And the thing called “battle” is slippery: only 79% of the items are actually called a battle in English, the rest being sieges, skirmishes, raids, massacres and operations, while famous fights such as Operation Barbarossa and the Siege of Leningrad are missing because they are typed as something else. Of the 709 entries in Wikipedia’s list of battles by casualties, I could match only 551 to a Wikidata battle.

Left: a scatter of every dated battle by year against the number of Wikipedia language editions covering it, with a median line between 6 and 10 for classical battles falling to 3 or 4 after about 1000 CE, and a 90th percentile line falling from about 25 in the classical centuries to between 11 and 16 since 1000 CE. Right: paired bars of continents' shares of battles and of land: Europe 51 percent of battles against 7 percent of land; Asia 24 against 33; Africa 9 against 22; North America 11 against 18; South America 4 against 13; Oceania 1 against 6.
Left: old battles in the record are famous, recent ones obscure. Right: shares of battles and of land by continent.

How I did this

I took every Wikidata item that is an instance of battle or any of its subclasses, through the QLever endpoint, and reduced the query’s 23,069 rows to 20,202 items. Each item’s point is its own coordinates, or failing that its location’s; its year is its point in time, or failing that its start time, with BCE years converted from Wikidata’s astronomical numbering. Countries and continents come from Natural Earth. Hexagons are on an equal-area grid in the Equal Earth projection, and the centre of war is the spherical geometric median of each century’s battles. I grouped the theatres and campaigns of the two world wars into the wars, and matched Wikipedia’s list of battles by casualties to Wikidata by name and year. These are records, not a census of war: the map is heavily European and modern, generous to some wars and silent on others.

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Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Wikidata contributors: items that are instances of battle (Q178561) and its subclasses, via the QLever SPARQL endpoint. CC0.
  • Wikipedia contributors, List of battles by casualties, English Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0; the matched table is shared under the same licence.
  • Natural Earth outlines and places (public domain). Base map tiles on the interactive page © Esri.
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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