The Persian king had sent his son with an army so vast that Greek historians swore it drank whole rivers dry. Three hundred Spartans and seven hundred Thespians held the pass at Thermopylae until they were all dead, buying the city time to evacuate. Xerxes burned Athens to the ground. But then, in the narrow strait at Salamis, the Athenian navy trapped the Persian fleet in shallow water and destroyed it while Xerxes watched from a golden throne on a hilltop.
The next year, a combined Greek army finished off his land forces at Plataea. Xerxes went home and never came back. In 449 BC, Persia gave up every claim to Greek soil forever. Athens entered a golden age, and Pericles rebuilt the burned city in marble.
The problem was that Athens had grown too powerful after beating the Persians. It ran an empire of naval tribute states, taxing them to build ever more marble temples. Sparta, the great land power of southern Greece, decided to break it. In 413 BC, Athens sent 40,000 men and 200 ships to conquer Sicily.
Every man died or was enslaved in the quarries of Syracuse. A devastating plague had already ripped through the city, and tens of thousands more were dead across the Greek world. The end came in 405 BC at Aegospotami, when the Spartan admiral caught the Athenian fleet on shore while the sailors were searching for food and burned it where it lay. Athens, cut off from the grain ships that fed the city, starved through the winter.
The following spring, Sparta demolished Athens’ long walls to the sound of flute music. Sparta itself lasted barely a generation as the dominant power. Into that power gap walked a kingdom to the north, and its king was Philip II. His son was Alexander the Great.
Rome and Carthage began as trading partners on opposite sides of the western Mediterranean. They ended with a Roman general watching the greatest city of North Africa burn for seventeen days. Senator Cato the Elder had visited Carthage and returned terrified by how fast it was recovering. From that day forward, he ended every speech in the Roman Senate with the same line: Carthage must be destroyed.
In the middle war, Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps with war elephants in winter and ambushed Roman legions at Cannae, killing roughly 50,000 men in a single afternoon. It took Rome fifteen years to produce a general good enough to beat him. His name was Scipio, and he cornered Hannibal at Zama in 202 BC. The third war was pure vengeance.
Rome besieged Carthage for three years, breached the walls, and razed the city block by block. Fifty thousand survivors were sold into slavery. In 614 AD, the Persian army stole the True Cross from Jerusalem. The Byzantine emperor spent the next fourteen years getting it back.
For twenty-six years, the Christian Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire and the Zoroastrian Sasanid Persian Empire tore each other apart across the Middle East. Persian armies reached the walls of Constantinople itself. Emperor Heraclius answered by leading a cavalry raid deep into Persian territory, burning the great fire temple at Ganzak, the Zoroastrian equivalent of the Vatican. In 628, they signed peace.
Hundreds of thousands were dead, and both empires were bankrupt. Four years later, the armies of Islam erupted from the Arabian desert. The Sasanid Empire vanished within twenty years. Byzantium survived, barely, but lost Syria, Egypt, and North Africa forever.
On May 23, 1618, a group of Protestant nobles stormed into Prague’s Royal Castle and threw two Catholic officials out of a third-story window. They fell seventy feet and lived, saved by a pile of manure. Catholics said the Virgin Mary had caught them. Protestants said they had landed in what they deserved.
That war lasted thirty years. Between four and eight million people died, mostly from the famine, plague, and mercenary bands that followed the armies. A French cardinal named Richelieu, a Catholic, funded Protestant armies because he hated Spain more than he loved the Pope. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended it and quietly invented the modern world.
States, not popes or emperors, became the highest authority on Earth. The sovereign nation-state, the foundation of every border you cross today, was born in the exhaustion of Westphalia. Charles XII of Sweden inherited the throne at fifteen, and by twenty-two, he had beaten every enemy on the Baltic. Then he decided to invade Russia.
Peter the Great, humiliated in an earlier Swedish victory, had spent years rebuilding his army from scratch. In 1709, at Poltava, deep in Ukraine, Peter destroyed Charles’ army in a single day. Charles fled south into the Ottoman Empire, expecting the Sultan to give him fresh troops. Instead, the Sultan kept him as a guest for five years.
Charles finally rode home in disguise, covering 1,400 miles across Europe in fourteen days on borrowed horses. Four years later, he was shot through the head at the siege of a Norwegian fortress. Nobody is sure whether the bullet came from a Norwegian or from one of his own men. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 handed Russia the entire eastern shore of the Baltic Sea.
Sweden, which had dominated northern Europe for a century, was finished as a great power. The Seven Years’ War began in the forests of Ohio in a skirmish between a young colonial officer named George Washington and a French patrol. It spread to Bengal, the Caribbean sugar islands, and the ports of the Philippines. Roughly a million people died.
France lost its entire North American empire to Britain, all of Canada, everything east of the Mississippi. In India, a small trading company called the British East India Company crushed its French rival at Plassey and began the conquest that would give Britain the subcontinent for two centuries. The winner was Britain. The loser in the end was also Britain.
Winning had cost so much money that Parliament raised new taxes on its American colonies to help pay for it. Twelve years later, those colonies revolted. The first global war had accidentally triggered the first modern revolution, and George Washington, whose skirmish had started the whole thing, led the revolt against the empire he had once fought for. Napoleon Bonaparte had crowned himself in Notre Dame with the Pope watching.
Then, in 1812, he lost half a million men in the Russian winter, was driven back to France, and exiled to a tiny island off Italy. He escaped after ten months. He landed on the French coast with a thousand men and gathered the entire French army along the road to Paris. Regiments sent to arrest him joined him.
King Louis XVIII fled out the back door of the palace. Napoleon reassembled his empire in a hundred days. He failed by a few hours. On June 18, 1815, at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington held the ridge at Mont Saint Jean all day.
Late in the afternoon, Prussian Marshal Blücher, seventy-two and trampled by his own horse two days earlier, arrived on Napoleon’s right flank with a fresh army. The Imperial Guard, veterans who had never been broken in fifteen years of war, were routed for the first and last time. Napoleon was shipped to Saint Helena. His wars had cost the lives of around three to six million people.
The Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe with a single goal: never again let one man dominate the continent. The system it built held for ninety-nine years until August 1914. Aurangzeb was the last of the great Mughal emperors, determined to conquer the Deccan Plateau. It was defended by a Hindu people called the Marathas, who didn’t fight the way emperors expected.
They refused pitched battles. They ambushed his supply lines. They let him take their forts and took them back the next season. Aurangzeb spent the last decades of his life dragging his army from one empty village to the next, bankrupting a treasury that had been the richest in the world.
He died in his tent in 1707, still on campaign. Roughly five million had died in wars for nothing. His sons began killing each other over what was left of the empire. Into the wreckage walked a trading company from London.
Within a century, the British East India Company ruled all of India. Francisco Solano López was the dictator of Paraguay. In 1864, he decided to make it the greatest power on the continent by declaring war on Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay simultaneously. It went the way that it usually goes.
Six years of grinding warfare followed. Paraguay’s regular army was destroyed, then its reserves, then the boys and old men called up to replace them. By the end, eight-year-olds were being sent into battle with false beards glued on to make them look older. Paraguay lost roughly sixty percent of its population and ninety percent of its adult men.
It ceded forty percent of its territory to Brazil and Argentina. López himself was hunted for weeks through the rainforest and speared through the stomach by a Brazilian cavalryman. As he bled out in the mud, he reportedly gasped, “I die with my country. ” He was almost right about the country.
A century and a half later, it remains one of the poorest countries in South America. On April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse, two men sat in a Virginia farmhouse. One wore a clean gray uniform with his sword. The other was covered in mud after spending the night on horseback.
The man in gray was surrendering. After four years of fighting, 620,000 Americans had lost their lives. Eleven Southern states had left the Union following Lincoln’s election because they feared slavery would be abolished. The war brought devastating battles like Antietam, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor.
By the end, around one in four white Southern military-aged men had died. General Robert Lee expected to be arrested when he arrived at Appomattox. Instead, General Ulysses Grant offered surprisingly generous terms. Confederate soldiers were allowed to return home, and those with horses could keep them for spring planting.
The peace lasted only five days. On the night of April 14th, John Wilkes Booth entered Abraham Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, the man who had held the nation together, never lived to see the peace he had fought for. A failed civil service candidate in Southern China took a fever dream in his sickbed literally, and twenty million people died because of it.
Hong Xiuquan had failed the Imperial exams four times, and the last failure gave him a nervous breakdown. Bedridden with fever, he had visions of an old man with a golden beard who told him he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to purge China of demons. Hong took the demons to mean the ruling Qing Dynasty. Within a few years, he had an army of peasants who worshipped him as a god.
In 1853, he captured Nanjing as his capital. The war that followed killed between twenty and thirty million people, more than the entire population of Britain at the time. Foreign powers, terrified their trading rights would collapse with the dynasty, helped save it using Western mercenaries. Nanjing fell in July 1864.
Hong had poisoned himself weeks earlier. The dynasty won, but it had been hollowed out. This paved the way for further foreign exploitation and the eventual fall of Imperial China in 1912. In 1912, the First Balkan War pitted Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro against a crumbling Ottoman Empire.
In seven weeks, the Ottomans lost eighty-three percent of their European territory. The victors immediately turned on each other. Bulgaria felt cheated of its share of newly liberated Macedonia and attacked its former allies the following year. Bulgaria lost badly, and Serbia doubled in size overnight.
Austria-Hungary, watching a Slavic nationalist power balloon on its southern border with Russian backing, panicked. The consequences arrived on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. A nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist stepped out of a deli shop and found Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in an open car three feet in front of him. He shot him in the neck.
Within six weeks, every great power in Europe was at war. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns went quiet. In a railway carriage parked in a forest clearing at Compiègne, France, German officers signed an armistice with the Allies. Four years of industrial slaughter had killed twenty million people and wounded twenty million more.
An entire generation of European men were in the ground. The German civilian population, blockaded by the Royal Navy for four years, was starving. Then came the peace, and the peace was worse than the war. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the same Hall of Mirrors where Germany had humiliated France half a century earlier.
It stripped Germany of its colonies, its army, and its Rhineland. On top came enormous reparations to be paid in gold. In a Munich beer hall, an unemployed Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler read the terms and began his political career on the promise of cheering them up. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, looking at the signed treaty, said something that would haunt the room: “This is not peace.
This is an armistice for twenty years. ”
In a basement in the Ural Mountains, on the night of July 17, 1918, a Bolshevik firing squad murdered the Tsar of Russia, his wife, his four daughters, and his son. The girls did not die at first. Bullets ricocheted off diamonds and rubies they had sewn into their corsets, believing the jewels would protect them.
The killers finished them with bayonets. The old Russia died in that room. The new Russia still had five years of civil war to fight. The Bolsheviks built a new army from scratch under a former newspaper editor named Leon Trotsky, who ran the war from a private train.
Famine and typhus killed more people than the fighting did. By 1921, the Red Army had won. Roughly ten million people were dead, mainly civilians. The Soviet Union was proclaimed the following year, the world’s first communist state.
Its first leader, Lenin, died in 1924. A minor party functionary named Joseph Stalin, whom Lenin had privately warned against on his deathbed, outmaneuvered every rival and took over. World War II ended twice. On May 7, 1945, in a schoolhouse in Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich.
Officially, Adolf Hitler had shot himself in a Berlin bunker eight days earlier. Europe was silent for the first time in six years, but the Japanese weren’t done yet. On August 6th, an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and killed roughly 80,000 people in a flash of light. Three days later, a second one erased Nagasaki.
Between them, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and poured into Manchuria with three million men. On August 15th, Emperor Hirohito went on the radio and told his people to surrender. It was the first time any of them had ever heard his voice. Millions bowed toward their radios and wept.
On September 2nd, Japanese officials signed the final surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Around seventy million people had died worldwide, making it the deadliest war in history. Europe’s colonial empires were finished, and two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, stood over the wreckage. Before the ink on the surrender was dry, the Cold War began.
The Chinese Civil War ran for twenty-two years and killed between four and nine million people. Two men fought it. Chiang Kai-shek was a Western-educated general with American backing and the entire Chinese army. Mao Zedong was a former village librarian.
Their armies had been killing each other since 1927. Japan’s invasion in 1937 forced an uneasy truce. Both sides mostly fought Japan while quietly stockpiling for the next round. The moment Japan surrendered, the truce died.
Mao’s peasant army swept through northern China. Chiang’s nationalists collapsed city by city, bled dry by inflation so bad that soldiers wallpapered their barracks with worthless banknotes. On October 1, 1949, Mao stood atop Tiananmen Gate in Beijing and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with two million loyalists and the entire Chinese gold reserve.
He never gave up his claim to be the true government of China. The Chinese Communist Party never gave up its claim to Taiwan. Both positions remain official today. The Korean War was the war that never ended.
At dawn on June 25, 1950, North Korean tanks crossed the 38th parallel. Within weeks, they had driven the defenders into a shrinking pocket around the southern port of Pusan. Then General MacArthur staged one of the most audacious amphibious landings in history at Inchon, deep behind enemy lines. He cut the North Korean army in half and drove toward the Chinese border.
That was when 300,000 Chinese volunteers poured across the Yalu River in the freezing dark. At the Chosin Reservoir in minus thirty-degree weather, 30,000 American Marines were surrounded by ten times their number. They fought their way out over eighty miles of mountain road, carrying their frozen dead. MacArthur publicly demanded the United States drop atomic bombs on China.
President Truman fired him. Two more years of grinding trench warfare followed. Over three million people died, most of them Korean civilians. On July 27, 1953, generals from both sides signed an armistice in a wooden hut.
It wasn’t a peace treaty. It was a temporary ceasefire. Technically, legally, the war is still going. A North Vietnamese tank smashed the iron gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon on the morning of April 30, 1975.
A few miles away, an American helicopter was lifting the last Americans off the embassy roof. The photograph of desperate Vietnamese climbing a ladder toward that helicopter became the image of American defeat. The war had run for twenty years and killed roughly three million people, most of them Vietnamese civilians. The Paris Peace Accords, signed in 1973, gave President Nixon a face-saving exit.
American combat troops came home. Once American air power had left, the North waited two years and finished the job. The South collapsed in fifty-five days. Roughly a million South Vietnamese fled by boat, and tens of thousands drowned.
The worst came next door. In Cambodia, American bombing had pushed peasants into the arms of the fanatical communist Khmer Rouge movement. Seventeen days before Saigon fell, they seized the capital. They emptied the cities at gunpoint and killed roughly a quarter of their own countrymen by starvation, disease, and execution.
In America, the war ended more than lives. It ended the certainty of an entire generation. The government that had promised the war was being won had been lying. The country has never fully trusted its leaders again.
On February 15, 1989, Soviet General Boris Gromov walked alone across a steel bridge over the Amu Darya River into Uzbekistan. When he reached the far side, he turned to look back at Afghanistan. He was the last Soviet soldier to leave. Behind him lay a decade of catastrophic failure.
Roughly a million Afghans and 15,000 Soviet troops were dead. A country the size of Texas had been bombed into rubble. The USSR had invaded in December 1979 to prop up a friendly communist government in Kabul. What they got was a nine-year guerrilla war against Islamist Mujahideen fighters who lived in caves and were armed by a secret alliance of the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
American Stinger missiles started knocking Soviet helicopter gunships out of the sky. The war didn’t just embarrass the Soviet Union. It broke it. The invasion had cost billions the Soviet economy couldn’t spare, and body bags coming home in secret had corroded faith in the regime.
The fight had also drawn foreign volunteers from across the Muslim world. One was a young Saudi engineer and heir to a construction fortune named Osama bin Laden. Two years after Gromov crossed that bridge, the Soviet Union no longer existed. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, expecting a quick land grab from a country in the chaos of its Islamic Revolution.
Instead, Iranian teenagers walked into his machine gun fire in human waves, plastic keys to paradise pinned to their chests. Saddam responded with mustard gas. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini finally accepted a UN ceasefire in July 1988, calling it more deadly than drinking poison. Eight years, a million people dead, and the border was drawn exactly where it had been before Saddam invaded.
Two years later, broke and desperate for oil revenue, he invaded Kuwait and dragged America into the Middle East for the next three decades. Yugoslavia had been a mosaic of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Slovenes, Albanians, and Macedonians held together by the iron will of one communist strongman, Josip Broz Tito. Tito died in 1980, and the country followed him into the grave within a decade. Slovenia broke away in 1991, followed by Croatia and Bosnia.
In Bosnia, the war turned genocidal. Concentration camps returned to Europe for the first time since the 1940s. In July 1995, Serb forces separated 8,000 Muslim men and boys from their families at a town called Srebrenica and shot them all in a nearby field. It happened in front of Dutch UN peacekeepers who had no authority to stop it.
NATO air power finally forced the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table. The Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War that November. Seven new countries emerged from the wreckage of Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian president who had orchestrated most of the killing, died in a UN prison cell in 2006 while on trial for genocide.
The Second Congo War was the deadliest war since World War II. Nine African countries and roughly twenty-five armed groups tore each other apart across the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1998 and 2003. Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, and Zimbabwe came for the mineral wealth: diamonds, gold, cobalt, and a rare metallic ore called coltan that ends up in every cell phone on Earth. Militias hacked apart villages that sat on the wrong deposit.
Between three and five million Congolese died, mostly not from bullets, but from the collapse of everything a society needs to keep people alive: food supplies, hospitals, clean water. Most of the dead were women and children. A peace agreement was signed in 2003. It changed almost nothing.
Militias in the Eastern Congo still fight over the same mines today.
