Peaceful change of government

Summary: Bainimarama's party loses its majority; a coalition led by Sitiveni Rabuka takes power through the ballot box, ending 16 years of his rule.


First recorded sighting

Summary: The English navigator John Davis is credited with the first recorded European sighting of the uninhabited islands; the territory marks Falklands Day on 14 August in commemoration.


French Port Louis founded

Summary: Louis-Antoine de Bougainville established the first settlement, Port Louis, on East Falkland, and named the islands the Malouines — origin of the Spanish Malvinas.


British Port Egmont established

Summary: A British expedition under Commodore John Byron claimed West Falkland in 1765, and Britain founded Port Egmont on Saunders Island the following year.


Spain buys out the French and administers from Buenos Aires

Summary: Spain purchased the French settlement around 1767 and governed the islands from Buenos Aires; in 1770 it expelled the British from Port Egmont, restored after a 1771 settlement.


Buenos Aires proclaims sovereignty

Summary: Having declared independence from Spain in 1816, the Buenos Aires government proclaimed its sovereignty over the islands, the basis of Argentina's later claim.


USS Lexington raid on Port Louis

Summary: The U.S. warship Lexington destroyed the Argentine settlement on East Falkland in reprisal for the seizure of American sealing ships, ending Vernet's colony.


Britain re-establishes control (founding of continuous administration)

Summary: A British force required the small Argentine garrison to leave Port Louis and re-asserted British control — the start of continuous British administration, which Argentina contests as illegitimate occupation.


First British lieutenant governor

Summary: Britain appointed a civilian lieutenant governor for the Falklands, formalising the colonial administration begun in 1833.


Stanley becomes the capital

Summary: The seat of government moved to Stanley on East Falkland, which became the islands' capital, port and main settlement.


Falkland Islands Company chartered

Summary: The Falkland Islands Company received a royal charter in 1851 and grew into the colony's largest landowner and sheep rancher, central to its wool economy.


A self-supporting wool colony

Summary: By 1885 a British community of some 1,800 people on the islands was self-supporting, sustained mainly by sheep farming and wool exports.


Battle of the Falkland Islands

Summary: A British naval squadron destroyed a German cruiser force off the islands in an early First World War engagement, underscoring their strategic position near Cape Horn.


Listed as a Non-Self-Governing Territory

Summary: The Falkland Islands (Malvinas) were placed on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories after the UK transmitted information under Article 73(e) of the Charter.


Decolonisation Committee takes up the question

Summary: From 1964 the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation began considering the question of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) and the dispute between the two governments.


General Assembly Resolution 2065 (XX)

Summary: The UN General Assembly recognised a sovereignty dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom and invited both to negotiate a peaceful settlement, taking account of the islanders' interests.


Argentine invasion

Summary: Argentine forces landed and seized the islands, overwhelming the small British garrison; Argentina described it as recovering the Malvinas, Britain as an invasion of its territory.


Belgrano and Sheffield sunk

Summary: A British submarine sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano on 2 May; on 4 May an Argentine Exocet missile sank the destroyer HMS Sheffield.


British landings at San Carlos

Summary: British forces landed at San Carlos on East Falkland and advanced overland, capturing Darwin and Goose Green before closing on Stanley.


Argentine surrender at Stanley

Summary: Argentine forces surrendered at Stanley after a 74-day campaign; about 255 British and 649 Argentine personnel and three islanders died in the war.


Security Council Resolution 502

Summary: The Council determines that a breach of the peace exists, calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities, demands the prompt withdrawal of all Argentine forces, and urges both governments to seek a diplomatic settlement under the Charter. Adopted 10 in favour, 1 against, 4 abstentions.


The Commons sits on a Saturday

Summary: Parliament meets on a Saturday for the first time in a generation. Margaret Thatcher opens by telling the House that, for the first time in many years, British sovereign territory has been invaded by a foreign power.


Fisheries licensing zone established

Summary: The Falkland Islands government created a fisheries conservation and licensing zone; squid licensing revenue became the mainstay of the post-war economy.


Sovereignty referendum

Summary: About 99.8% of islanders voting (turnout c. 92%) chose to remain a British Overseas Territory; the UK upheld the result while Argentina rejected its validity.


UN reiterates call for negotiations

Summary: The UN Special Committee on Decolonisation again adopted a resolution asking Argentina and the United Kingdom to resume talks toward resolving the sovereignty dispute.


Contested status and an oil prospect

Summary: The islands remain a British Overseas Territory claimed by Argentina, with an economy led by fisheries and the prospect of Sea Lion offshore oil development.


Foundation of Massalia (Marseille)

Summary: Greek colonists from Phocaea establish a trading port — the oldest city in France.


Siege of Alesia

Summary: Caesar defeats Vercingetorix, completing the Roman conquest of Gaul.


Gaul becomes Roman

Summary: Gaul is incorporated into the Roman world; Latin, Roman law and cities reshape the land.


Baptism of Clovis I

Summary: The first Frankish king to adopt Catholic Christianity, aligning crown and Church.


Charlemagne crowned Emperor

Summary: Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne in Rome, reviving the Western imperial title.


Treaty of Verdun

Summary: Charlemagne's empire is split; West Francia becomes the seed of France.


Hugh Capet elected king

Summary: Beginning of the Capetian dynasty and the long consolidation of the French crown.


Hundred Years' War begins

Summary: A dynastic struggle with England that would last until 1453 and forge French identity.


Joan of Arc at Orléans

Summary: Joan lifts the siege of Orléans, reversing English fortunes; she is executed in 1431.


Edict of Nantes

Summary: Henry IV grants toleration to Protestants, ending the Wars of Religion.


Reign of Louis XIV

Summary: Absolutism and the court of Versailles make France the dominant power in Europe.


Storming of the Bastille

Summary: The opening act of the French Revolution; later France's national day.


Declaration of the Rights of Man

Summary: Proclaims liberty, equality and popular sovereignty — a founding text of modern democracy.


Napoleon crowned Emperor

Summary: Bonaparte founds the First Empire and exports the Napoleonic Code across Europe.


Battle of Waterloo

Summary: Napoleon's final defeat ends the Empire and the Napoleonic Wars.


Separation of Church and State

Summary: The 1905 law establishes laïcité — France's distinctive secularism.


Liberation of Paris

Summary: Allied and Free French forces liberate Paris after four years of occupation.


Fifth Republic founded

Summary: De Gaulle's new constitution creates the strong presidency that governs France today.


Founding member of the EEC

Summary: France signs the Treaty of Rome, beginning European integration.


Forest hunter-gatherers of the Ogooué

Summary: Rainforest hunter-gatherers, ancestors of peoples such as the Babongo and Baka, inhabited the equatorial forest of present-day Gabon, living by hunting, fishing and gathering and trading with later farming communities.


Bantu farmers and ironworkers arrive

Summary: Bantu-speaking peoples moved into the region from the north, bringing farming, pottery and iron-working; the Ogooué valley served as a corridor of the wider Bantu expansion across Central Africa.


Settlement and iron-working at Lopé-Okanda

Summary: The Lopé-Okanda landscape along the Ogooué preserves dense habitation sites, iron-working remains and about 1,800 rock engravings, recording the successive passage of peoples through the river corridor.


Portuguese reach the estuary and name it Gabão

Summary: Portuguese navigators arrived at the estuary of the Komo River in 1472 and named it Gabão, the Portuguese word for a hooded cloak, after the estuary's shape; the country's name derives from it.


Myènè peoples settle the coast

Summary: Myènè-speaking peoples including the Mpongwe at the estuary, the Orungu at Cape Lopez and the Nkomi at Fernan Vaz settled the Gabon coast, organised in clans well placed to trade with the interior and the sea.


Peak of the Atlantic slave trade

Summary: The Atlantic slave trade on the Gabon coast reached its height, driven by Brazilian and Cuban demand; the Orungu kingdom and the Loango coast served as middlemen channelling captives from the interior to European slavers.


Captives embarked at Gabon and Cape Lopez

Summary: Records describe roughly 500 captives a year being embarked at points called Gabon and Cape Lopez in the late eighteenth century, an index of the trade run through the coastal Myènè kingdoms.


France treats with King Denis

Summary: The French officer Bouët-Willaumez signed a treaty in 1839 with the Mpongwe ruler Antchouwe Kowe Rapontchombo ("King Denis"), securing French trading and basing rights on the Gabon Estuary.


Libreville founded for freed slaves

Summary: Freed captives taken from a slave ship seized by the French navy were settled on the estuary in 1849; the settlement was named Libreville, "free town," and became the colonial and modern capital.


Brazza explores the Ogooué

Summary: Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza led expeditions up the Ogooué and on to the Congo River, founding Franceville in 1880 and signing treaties that opened the interior to French rule.


Gabon joins French Equatorial Africa

Summary: France reorganised its Central African colonies into French Equatorial Africa in 1910 — Gabon, the Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari and Chad, governed from Brazzaville — with Gabon a separate colony.


Schweitzer founds the Lambaréné hospital

Summary: Albert Schweitzer and his wife Hélène arrived at Lambaréné on the Ogooué in 1913 and founded a hospital near a mission; it treated thousands and made Lambaréné internationally known. Schweitzer received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.


Overseas territory of the French Union

Summary: After the Second World War Gabon became an overseas territory within the French Union, gaining elected representation and laying the groundwork for African political movements led by figures such as Léon M'ba and Jean-Hilaire Aubame.


Oil discovered near Port-Gentil

Summary: Oil was discovered offshore at the Ozouri field near Port-Gentil in 1956; petroleum would become the foundation of independent Gabon's economy and a key source of state revenue.


Internal autonomy as the Gabonese Republic

Summary: Under the 1958 French Community Gabon became an autonomous republic with Léon M'ba as head of government, a step short of full sovereignty within the French constitutional framework.


Independence under Léon M'ba

Summary: Gabon became an independent republic on 17 August 1960, with Léon M'ba as its first leader; he was formally elected president in February 1961, maintaining close ties to France.


Coup attempt reversed by France

Summary: Military officers briefly ousted M'ba in February 1964, but French troops intervened within a day to restore him, illustrating the depth of post-independence Franco-Gabonese ties.


Omar Bongo takes power

Summary: On M'ba's death in November 1967 his vice-president Albert-Bernard (later Omar) Bongo became president; in 1968 he made the Gabonese Democratic Party the sole legal party, beginning a four-decade rule.


Death of Omar Bongo; Ali Bongo succeeds

Summary: Omar Bongo died in June 2009 after ruling for over forty years; his son Ali Bongo Ondimba won the ensuing presidential election, continuing the family's hold on power.


Military coup ends Bongo rule

Summary: After a disputed 26 August 2023 election, officers led by General Brice Oligui Nguema seized power on 30 August 2023, annulling the result and detaining Ali Bongo — ending the Bongo family's 56-year hold on the presidency.


Roman conquest of Britain begins

Summary: The emperor Claudius launched the Roman invasion of Britain, beginning nearly four centuries of Roman rule over the province of Britannia, with its towns, roads, and the frontier of Hadrian's Wall.


End of Roman Britain

Summary: Roman authority was effectively withdrawn from Britain around 410, after which the former province fragmented and Germanic-speaking peoples gradually settled across what became England.


Alfred defeats the Vikings at Edington

Summary: Alfred the Great of Wessex won a decisive victory over the Viking 'Great Heathen Army' at Edington, securing the survival of Anglo-Saxon rule in southern England and beginning the path to unification.


England unified under Athelstan

Summary: By capturing Viking-held York and securing the submission of other rulers, Athelstan became the first king to rule over all of England, forging a single English kingdom.


Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest

Summary: William of Normandy defeated and killed King Harold II at Hastings and was crowned king on Christmas Day, beginning Norman rule and transforming England's language, law, and aristocracy.


Domesday Book compiled

Summary: William the Conqueror ordered a comprehensive survey of landholding in England, producing Domesday Book, an unparalleled record of the kingdom's wealth and the new Norman order.


Magna Carta sealed at Runnymede

Summary: Rebel barons compelled King John to seal Magna Carta, asserting that the monarch was bound by law; though soon annulled, it became a lasting symbol of limits on royal power.


The Black Death reaches England

Summary: The plague pandemic killed a large proportion of England's population within a few years, devastating communities and accelerating long-term changes in labour and society.


Battle of Bosworth ends the Wars of the Roses

Summary: Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field, ending the Plantagenet dynasty and the Wars of the Roses and founding the Tudor line as Henry VII.


Act of Supremacy and the break with Rome

Summary: Parliament declared Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church of England, ending papal authority in England and launching the English Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries.


The Elizabethan Religious Settlement

Summary: Elizabeth I's settlement re-established royal headship of the Church and a Protestant order, ending decades of religious upheaval and shaping the Church of England for centuries.


Defeat of the Spanish Armada

Summary: England repelled the Spanish Armada sent by Philip II, a decisive check to Spanish ambitions that bolstered English naval confidence and national identity.


Founding of the East India Company

Summary: A royal charter created the East India Company for trade with Asia; over the following centuries it grew into an instrument of conquest that brought much of India under British control.


Union of the Crowns

Summary: James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England, uniting the English and Scottish crowns under one monarch while the two kingdoms remained separate states.


Execution of Charles I

Summary: After defeat in the English Civil War, Charles I was tried and beheaded, and a republican Commonwealth was established — a singular assertion of Parliament's power over the crown.


The Glorious Revolution

Summary: James II was deposed and William and Mary took the throne on Parliament's terms; the Bill of Rights of 1689 entrenched parliamentary authority and constitutional monarchy.


Acts of Union create Great Britain

Summary: The Acts of Union merged the kingdoms and parliaments of England and Scotland into a single Kingdom of Great Britain, governed by one Parliament at Westminster.


Loss of the American colonies

Summary: The Treaty of Paris recognised the independence of the United States, ending the American Revolutionary War and stripping Britain of its thirteen mainland colonies.


Union with Ireland forms the United Kingdom

Summary: The Acts of Union 1800 merged the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and abolishing the separate Irish parliament.


Abolition of the British slave trade

Summary: The Slave Trade Act prohibited the Atlantic slave trade across the British Empire, though it did not free those already enslaved in British colonies.


Slavery Abolition Act

Summary: Parliament abolished slavery across most of the British Empire, effective 1834, freeing more than 800,000 people while compensating former slave-owners rather than the enslaved.


The Great Irish Famine

Summary: Potato blight and an inadequate, laissez-faire government response caused mass starvation in Ireland, killing roughly a million people and forcing about a million more to emigrate.


The Victorian era and the height of empire

Summary: During Queen Victoria's long reign Britain became the world's foremost industrial and imperial power, its empire eventually spanning about a quarter of the globe.


The First World War

Summary: Britain and its empire fought in the First World War at enormous human cost; the war accelerated social and political change, including votes for women, and led to the partition of Ireland and the Irish Free State in 1922.


The Second World War

Summary: Britain fought Nazi Germany and the Axis, endured the Blitz, and emerged victorious but economically drained; the wartime Bengal famine of 1943 killed millions in British India.


Founding of the National Health Service

Summary: The post-war Labour government launched the NHS, providing healthcare free at the point of use and forming the centrepiece of Britain's new welfare state.


Independence of India and the start of decolonisation

Summary: India and Pakistan became independent, beginning the rapid dismantling of the British Empire as dozens of colonies gained independence over the following decades.


The United Kingdom leaves the European Union

Summary: Following the 2016 referendum, the UK formally withdrew from the European Union, ending nearly half a century of membership in the European project.


Kingdom of Colchis flourishes

Summary: On the Black Sea coast of western Georgia, the wealthy kingdom of Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece in Greek myth, traded with the Greek world and developed a society famed for its metalwork.


Kingdom of Iberia founded

Summary: The eastern Georgian kingdom of Iberia emerged in the lands of Kartli, centred on Mtskheta, forming a distinct monarchy that would become the core of the Georgian state.


Pompey campaigns in the Caucasus

Summary: The Roman general Pompey campaigned in Colchis and Iberia, drawing the Georgian lands into the long contest between Rome and the Iranian empires over the Caucasus.


Iberia adopts Christianity

Summary: Through the preaching of St Nino, King Mirian III of Iberia adopted Christianity as the state religion, making Georgia one of the world's oldest Christian states.


Arab conquest and the Emirate of Tbilisi

Summary: Arab armies brought Islam to the Caucasus and established an emirate at Tbilisi, beginning centuries in which Georgian princely houses contested Muslim and Byzantine power.


Bagrat III unites Georgia

Summary: Bagrat III of the Bagrationi dynasty united the eastern and western Georgian lands into a single kingdom, laying the foundation for the medieval golden age.


Battle of Didgori

Summary: David IV the Builder defeated a much larger Seljuk Turkish coalition at Didgori west of Tbilisi, a decisive victory that broke Seljuk power in the Caucasus.


Tbilisi recovered and made capital

Summary: David IV recaptured Tbilisi from Muslim rule, ending centuries of the emirate and establishing the city as the royal capital of a reunited Georgia.


Reign of Queen Tamar

Summary: Tamar, titled mepe ('king'), brought Georgia to the height of its power and prestige, ruling a pan-Caucasian realm and presiding over a cultural golden age.


Rustaveli's national epic

Summary: Shota Rustaveli composed 'The Knight in the Panther's Skin', the Georgian national epic, the supreme literary achievement of the golden age and a classic of world literature.


Invasions of Timur

Summary: The armies of Timur (Tamerlane) repeatedly devastated Georgia, accelerating the breakup of the kingdom into rival principalities amid Mongol and Turkic pressure.


Treaty of Georgievsk

Summary: King Erekle II of Kartli-Kakheti placed his kingdom under Russian protection, ceding control of foreign affairs in exchange for guarantees of its integrity and dynasty against Persia and the Ottomans.


Russia annexes Kartli-Kakheti

Summary: The Russian Empire unilaterally annexed eastern Georgia and abolished the Bagrationi monarchy, beginning the absorption of the Georgian lands that was completed over the following decades.


Democratic Republic of Georgia proclaimed

Summary: Amid the collapse of the Russian Empire, Georgia proclaimed an independent democratic republic governed by Mensheviks, with a democratic constitution and land reform.


Red Army conquest

Summary: The Soviet Red Army invaded, took Tbilisi after heavy fighting and proclaimed the Georgian SSR on 25 February 1921, incorporating Georgia into the Soviet Union.


The April 9 tragedy in Tbilisi

Summary: Soviet troops violently broke up a peaceful pro-independence demonstration in Tbilisi, killing about twenty people and galvanising the Georgian national movement.


Independence restored

Summary: Following a referendum on 31 March, the Supreme Council adopted the Act restoring Georgia's independence on 9 April 1991, two years after the April 9 tragedy.


War in Abkhazia

Summary: Fighting between Georgian forces and Abkhaz separatists, with outside support, ended in Georgian defeat and the displacement of much of the ethnic Georgian population; casualty figures are disputed estimates.


The Rose Revolution

Summary: Peaceful mass protests over disputed elections, in which demonstrators carried roses, forced the resignation of President Shevardnadze and brought the reformer Mikheil Saakashvili to power.


Russia–Georgia war over South Ossetia

Summary: A five-day war around South Ossetia drew in the Russian military; estimates put the combined dead at about 850 with over 100,000 displaced. Russia then recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a step most states rejected.


EU Association Agreement

Summary: Georgia signed an Association Agreement with the European Union, deepening a Western orientation that later led to its 2022 EU membership application and 2023 candidate status.


The medieval Ghana Empire flourishes far to the northwest

Summary: The Soninke empire of Ghana, centred on Koumbi Saleh in modern Mauritania and Mali, dominated the trans-Saharan gold-and-salt trade before its decline; the modern state would later adopt its name despite sharing no territory.


Rise of Bono and the early Akan states

Summary: The Bono, regarded by tradition as the first Akan state-builders, established centres such as Bono Manso, with the nearby town of Begho growing into a major forest trading hub for gold, kola, and ivory.


Gold links the forest to the Sahel

Summary: Akan gold dust, traded north through Begho to Djenné and Timbuktu by Wangara merchants, made the forest states wealthy and laid the economic foundations for later kingdoms.


Portuguese reach the Gold Coast

Summary: Portuguese mariners arrived on the coast of present-day Ghana, where the abundance of gold gave the region the name by which Europeans would know it for centuries — the Gold Coast.


Portugal builds Elmina Castle

Summary: The Portuguese raised Castelo de São Jorge da Mina (Elmina Castle) to protect the gold trade — the first European fortress in sub-Saharan Africa and the oldest surviving European building south of the Sahara.


The Dutch seize Elmina

Summary: Dutch forces captured Elmina from Portugal and, by 1642, took over the Portuguese Gold Coast, joining a competition among European powers that lined the coast with slave-trading forts.


The Atlantic slave trade

Summary: European demand for plantation labour turned the coastal castles into holding pens of the transatlantic slave trade; vast numbers of enslaved Africans were shipped through forts such as Elmina to the Americas in conditions of extreme violence.


Britain abolishes its slave trade

Summary: Britain outlawed its own transatlantic slave trade and began using naval patrols to suppress the traffic along the West African coast, though illegal slaving persisted for years afterward.


Founding of the Asante Empire

Summary: Osei Tutu's alliance of Akan states defeated the dominant Denkyira at the Battle of Feyiase, founding the Asante Empire with its capital at Kumasi and the Golden Stool as its unifying symbol.


Okomfo Anokye and the Golden Stool

Summary: By Asante tradition the priest Okomfo Anokye called the Golden Stool from the sky onto Osei Tutu's lap, declaring it the dwelling of the nation's soul — the sacred emblem of Asante unity and kingship.


Asante victory at Nsamankow

Summary: At the Battle of Nsamankow the Asante defeated a British-led force and killed the Gold Coast governor Sir Charles MacCarthy, an early reversal in the long Anglo-Asante wars.


British expedition burns Kumasi

Summary: In the third Anglo-Asante war a British force advanced inland and burned the Asante capital at Kumasi, marking a decisive shift of power toward Britain on the Gold Coast.


The War of the Golden Stool

Summary: After the British governor demanded to sit on the sacred Golden Stool, Yaa Asantewaa led an uprising — the last major Asante resistance — which Britain suppressed before exiling her to the Seychelles.


Denmark sells its Gold Coast forts to Britain

Summary: Denmark sold its coastal forts to Britain, an early step in the consolidation of British control over the Gold Coast that would culminate in the formal colony.


The Gold Coast becomes a crown colony

Summary: Britain formally proclaimed the coastal territories the Gold Coast crown colony, having bought out Dutch interests including Elmina in 1872 and defeated the Asante in war.


Asante annexed and Northern Territories added

Summary: Following the War of the Golden Stool, Britain annexed the Asante kingdom and established a protectorate over the Northern Territories, completing the colonial framework of the Gold Coast.


Nkrumah returns to lead the nationalists

Summary: The United Gold Coast Convention invited the foreign-educated organiser Kwame Nkrumah home as its secretary, energising the movement for self-government and independence.


Nkrumah founds the Convention People's Party

Summary: Breaking from the UGCC, Kwame Nkrumah founded the CPP and launched a mass campaign for immediate self-government, transforming Gold Coast nationalism into a popular movement.


Ghana wins independence

Summary: The Gold Coast, united with British Togoland, became independent Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah — the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence and a beacon for the continent's decolonisation.


Ghana becomes a republic

Summary: Ghana adopted a republican constitution with Kwame Nkrumah as its first president, severing the last formal ties of British sovereignty.


Founding of the Organisation of African Unity

Summary: A leading Pan-Africanist, Nkrumah helped found the Organisation of African Unity, advancing his vision of a politically united and liberated Africa.


Nkrumah overthrown

Summary: While Nkrumah was abroad, the army and police seized power in a coup, ending the first republic and beginning decades of military and civilian upheaval.


An era of coups

Summary: Ghana endured repeated military takeovers and short-lived governments, with coups in 1966, 1972, 1978, and twice involving Jerry Rawlings in 1979 and 1981, amid economic decline.


Rawlings's first coup and a brief civilian return

Summary: Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings led an uprising in June 1979, then handed power to the elected civilian president Hilla Limann in September.


Rawlings seizes power again

Summary: Rawlings overthrew Limann and established the Provisional National Defence Council, ruling Ghana for the following two decades.


The Fourth Republic begins

Summary: A new constitution, approved by referendum in 1992, took effect on 7 January 1993, ending military rule; Rawlings, now an elected president, inaugurated Ghana's enduring Fourth Republic.


First democratic alternation of power

Summary: John Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party defeated the ruling NDC, the first peaceful transfer of power between parties in the Fourth Republic and a milestone in Ghana's democratic consolidation.


Mahama returns in a peaceful handover

Summary: John Dramani Mahama won the December 2024 election with about 56.5 percent of the vote; his opponent Mahamudu Bawumia conceded swiftly, marking another orderly transfer of power.


Foundation of the Mali Empire on the upper Niger

Summary: Sundiata Keita unites the Malinké chiefdoms of the Manding heartland and founds the Mali Empire, with its capital at Niani on the upper Niger.


Mansa Musa's pilgrimage makes Mali's gold legendary

Summary: Under Mansa Musa, the Mali Empire — embracing the Mande lands of the upper Niger — reaches its height and becomes renowned abroad for the wealth of its rulers.


Songhai ascendancy in the western Sudan

Summary: Askia Muhammad seizes power and expands the Songhai Empire, which dominates much of the Niger valley and the western Sudan into the sixteenth century.


Fall of Songhai to a Moroccan army

Summary: A Moroccan expeditionary force defeats the Songhai at Tondibi, ending the era of the great Sahelian empires that had embraced the Guinea region.


Fulani jihad founds the Imamate of Futa Jallon

Summary: Fulani pastoralists and Muslim traders rise against the non-Muslim chiefdoms of the Futa Jallon highlands, founding an Islamic theocratic state governed by sharia.


Ibrahima Sori succeeds Karamokho Alfa

Summary: On the death of the first leader Karamokho Alfa, the military commander Ibrahima Sori takes power and consolidates the imamate as a regional force.


French annexation of Futa Jallon

Summary: After decades of nominal autonomy, the imamate is brought under French colonial control as European expansion absorbs the Guinea interior.


Samori proclaims the Wassoulou Empire

Summary: Samori Touré declares himself faama of the Wassoulou Empire, the state he has built in the savannas of present-day Upper Guinea and beyond.


Capture of Kankan

Summary: Samori takes control of the major Dyula trading centre of Kankan on the upper Milo, a hub of the kola-nut trade.


Islam proclaimed state religion; Samori takes the title almami

Summary: Samori formally adopts Islam as the religion of his empire and assumes the title of almami, fusing political and religious authority.


Treaties with France

Summary: Samori signs agreements with France, including the Treaty of Bissandougou in 1887, as he manoeuvres between negotiation and war against colonial expansion.


Capture of Samori Touré

Summary: After nearly two decades of resistance and a long fighting retreat eastward, Samori is captured by French forces at Guélémou and later exiled to Gabon, where he dies in 1900.


Founding of Conakry

Summary: The French establish Conakry on the Atlantic coast; it becomes the capital of the colony of French Guinea.


Colony of French Guinea established

Summary: The coastal territory of Rivières du Sud is reorganised into the colony of French Guinea, its borders extended over the conquered interior.


Incorporation into French West Africa

Summary: French Guinea becomes a constituent colony of the federation of French West Africa, administered from Dakar.


Rise of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée

Summary: Postwar political mobilisation gives rise to the PDG, which under Ahmed Sékou Touré becomes the leading nationalist party in the colony.


Guinea votes 'Non'

Summary: In the constitutional referendum, Guinea overwhelmingly rejects de Gaulle's French Community — the only French African colony to do so.


Independence proclaimed

Summary: Days after France abruptly withdraws its aid and personnel, Guinea proclaims itself a sovereign republic with Ahmed Sékou Touré as president.


Camp Boiro and the one-party state

Summary: Under a one-party socialist regime, the Camp Boiro detention centre becomes the centre of a repression in which thousands of detainees are executed or die from torture and starvation.


Death of Sékou Touré

Summary: President Sékou Touré dies while receiving medical treatment abroad, ending more than a quarter-century of one-party rule.


Lansana Conté seizes power

Summary: A bloodless military coup led by Colonel Lansana Conté takes control after Sékou Touré's death; political prisoners at Camp Boiro are released.


Camara's coup after Conté's death

Summary: On the death of long-ruling President Lansana Conté, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara leads a military junta to power.


Conakry stadium massacre

Summary: Security forces fire on a peaceful opposition rally in a Conakry stadium, killing at least 157 people and committing widespread sexual violence.


Alpha Condé elected; return to civilian rule

Summary: Veteran opposition leader Alpha Condé wins Guinea's first competitive presidential election, beginning a civilian government; he is re-elected in 2015 and 2020.


Doumbouya's coup ousts Condé

Summary: Special-forces commander Mamady Doumbouya overthrows President Alpha Condé, dissolves the constitution and installs himself as transitional leader.


Megalith-building begins along the river

Summary: Communities in the Senegambian region began raising circles of cut laterite pillars and burial mounds along the Gambia River; excavated burials yield dates spanning roughly the third century BCE to the sixteenth century CE.


A sacred landscape of more than a thousand monuments

Summary: Over fifteen centuries a prosperous, organised society created more than 1,000 stone circles and tumuli across a band some 100 km wide along 350 km of the river; burials near Wassu date to roughly AD 900–1300.


Settlement of the Mandinka, Wolof, Fula and Serer

Summary: The ancestors of the region's principal peoples — Mandinka, Wolof, Fula and Serer — settled the river valley and savanna through migration and the spread of farming, herding and trade, predating the river kingdoms.


Mali's reach extends to the Gambia

Summary: The Mali Empire expanded into the Gambia River valley in the thirteenth century, bringing the region within the Mande world and spreading Islam, trade and administration as Mandinka traders moved west.


Mandinka kingdoms of the river

Summary: Mandinka warriors and traders founded small states along both banks of the Gambia, including Niumi (Barra), Niani and Wuli, which controlled river trade and important inland routes.


Niumi commands the river mouth

Summary: The Mandinka kingdom of Niumi, controlled in rotation by clans such as the Jamme, Maane and Sonko, grew prosperous by taxing merchant traffic at the mouth of the Gambia River and would later levy tolls on European vessels.


Portuguese ships enter the Gambia

Summary: Expeditions under Cadamosto and Usodimare, sailing for Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, reached the Gambia River and opened European trade, establishing the first contacts and small settlements along its banks.


England takes James Island

Summary: English forces seized the midstream island, renaming it James Island and building Fort James; chartered companies ran the post, and its trade shifted from gold and ivory toward enslaved Africans.


The Atlantic slave trade on the river

Summary: James Island, with the villages of Juffure and Albreda, became a major slaving station; captives from the interior were held there before being shipped across the Atlantic, while England and France fought repeatedly for control of the river.


Britain abolishes its slave trade

Summary: Britain outlawed its transatlantic slave trade and later built defences such as Fort Bullen at the river mouth to help suppress slaving — among the few regional structures built against the trade rather than for it.


Kunta Kinteh Island recognised

Summary: James Island and Related Sites were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003 as a memorial to the slave trade; the island was renamed Kunta Kinteh Island in 2011, recalling the figure in Alex Haley's Roots associated with nearby Juffure.


Bathurst founded on St Mary's Island

Summary: Captain Alexander Grant established the settlement of Bathurst (now Banjul) near the mouth of the Gambia, creating Britain's base for suppressing the slave trade and trading in groundnuts.


Anglo-French agreements draw the enclave

Summary: Boundary agreements between Britain and France fixed The Gambia's frontiers as a narrow band following the river, leaving the territory almost entirely surrounded by French Senegal.


Colony and Protectorate established

Summary: Britain organised its possession into the Colony of the Gambia, centred on Bathurst, and a larger inland Protectorate governed indirectly through local chiefs, completing the colonial framework.


Jawara leads toward self-rule

Summary: After a new 1960 constitution created a House of Representatives, Dawda Jawara of the People's Progressive Party became premier in 1962, leading the colony through internal self-government toward independence.


Independence from the United Kingdom

Summary: The Gambia became independent within the Commonwealth as a constitutional monarchy, with Dawda Jawara as prime minister; the United States acknowledged independence the same day at ceremonies in Bathurst.


The Gambia becomes a republic

Summary: After a second referendum, The Gambia adopted a republican constitution and Dawda Jawara became its first president, severing the last formal ties of British sovereignty.


Coup attempt and Senegalese intervention

Summary: A violent attempt to seize power led by Kukoi Samba Sanyang briefly took Bathurst while Jawara was abroad; Senegalese troops intervened under a defence pact to crush the revolt and restore him.


The Senegambia Confederation formed

Summary: The Gambia and Senegal established the Senegambia Confederation to integrate their militaries, security and economies while retaining sovereignty, with Senegal's Abdou Diouf as president and Jawara as vice-president.


The confederation dissolves

Summary: Lacking popular support and strained by disputes over economic and customs integration, the Senegambia Confederation was formally dissolved after Senegal withdrew its troops, and the two states resumed separate paths.


Jammeh's coup ends the Jawara era

Summary: Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh and fellow officers overthrew President Dawda Jawara in a bloodless coup, installing a military council and ending the only government independent Gambia had known.


Jammeh elected president

Summary: After a transition to civilian rule under a new constitution, Jammeh was declared winner of the 1996 presidential election and sworn in, beginning a tenure he would extend through further votes in 2001, 2006 and 2011.


Repression and abuses under Jammeh

Summary: Jammeh's rule was marked by suppression of the press, detentions, torture, enforced disappearances and a 2009 witch-hunting campaign; a later Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission documented widespread abuses.


Barrow defeats Jammeh

Summary: Adama Barrow, backed by an opposition coalition, won the presidential election; Jammeh initially conceded but a week later rejected the result, precipitating a constitutional crisis.


ECOWAS intervention and transfer of power

Summary: Barrow was sworn in at the Gambian embassy in Dakar on 19 January 2017; with ECOWAS troops deployed under UN authorisation, Jammeh agreed to leave and went into exile in Equatorial Guinea on 21 January, completing a peaceful handover.


Mali's reach and the rise of Kaabu

Summary: The Mali Empire expanded west into the region, traditionally under Sundiata Keita's general Tiramakhan Traoré; the conquered lands became Kaabu (Gabu), a Mandinka province that would outlast Mali itself.


Kaabu becomes an independent federation

Summary: As Mali declined, Kaabu emerged as an independent federation of Mandinka kingdoms led by the Nyancho warrior nobility, centred on Kansala and dominant across the Senegambian interior.


The coastal and island peoples

Summary: The coast and rivers held the Balanta, Jola, Fula, Papel, Manjaco and Biafada, while the offshore Bijagós formed matrilineal warrior societies of seafarers and raiders — a fragmented mosaic of peoples and small states.


The Battle of Kansala ends Kaabu

Summary: A Fula army linked to Alfa Molo besieged and destroyed the Kaabu capital of Kansala; tradition holds the mansaba Dianke Walli blew up the gunpowder store rather than surrender, ending Kaabu and giving rise to the Fula kingdom of Fuladu.


Portuguese ships reach the Rivers of Guinea

Summary: Expeditions under Alvise Cadamosto, sailing for Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, explored the coast and estuaries of Guinea, opening European trade in the labyrinth of rivers that gave the region its name.


Cacheu fortified as a slaving station

Summary: The Portuguese established a fortified post at Cacheu, which became the principal slave-trading centre on the rivers; captives were funnelled through it to Cape Verde and across the Atlantic.


The Atlantic slave trade via Cape Verde

Summary: Administered through Cape Verde, the Rivers of Guinea became a major source of enslaved people; tens of thousands were carried to the islands' plantations and onward to the Americas, especially during the Iberian Union (1580–1640).


Bissau founded as a fortified post

Summary: The Portuguese founded Bissau in 1765 as a military and slave-trading station; it grew into the region's main commercial centre and, in 1942, replaced Bolama as the colonial capital.


Slavery abolished, contract labour follows

Summary: Portugal abolished slavery in its territories, but replaced it with coercive "contract labour" arrangements; the transatlantic trade through Guinea's rivers had already declined across the nineteenth century.


Guinea separated from Cape Verde

Summary: Portuguese Guinea was detached from Cape Verde and constituted as a separate colony; after the Berlin Conference its frontiers with French possessions were fixed by agreement with France.


A separate military district

Summary: Lisbon made Guinea a distinct military district to promote "effective occupation", but Portuguese authority still reached little beyond the coastal forts and trading towns.


Teixeira Pinto's pacification of the mainland

Summary: The officer João Teixeira Pinto, with the auxiliary Abdul Injai, led brutal campaigns that crushed mainland resistance and brought the interior under Portuguese control for the first time.


The Bijagós islands subdued

Summary: After repeated campaigns against the seafaring Bijagós, the Estado Novo finally imposed control over the archipelago in 1935–1936, completing the conquest more than four centuries after first Portuguese contact.


Renamed an "overseas province"

Summary: Responding to international criticism, Portugal reclassified Guinea and its other colonies as "overseas provinces", recasting empire as an integral part of Portugal while colonial conditions persisted.


Amílcar Cabral founds the PAIGC

Summary: The agronomist Amílcar Cabral and a small group founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), the movement that would lead the struggle against Portuguese rule.


The Pidjiguiti massacre

Summary: Portuguese police opened fire on striking dockworkers at the Pidjiguiti quay in Bissau, killing scores; the killings turned the PAIGC away from peaceful protest and toward armed struggle.


The war of independence begins

Summary: The PAIGC launched its armed campaign with attacks on Portuguese garrisons in the south, opening a guerrilla war that would steadily expand the "liberated zones" across the interior.


Cabral assassinated in Conakry

Summary: Amílcar Cabral was shot dead at a roadblock in Conakry by a disgruntled PAIGC member, Inocêncio Kani, and others, in a plot widely linked to Portuguese agents — eight months before independence was proclaimed.


Independence declared at Boé

Summary: The PAIGC's People's National Assembly unilaterally proclaimed the Republic of Guinea-Bissau in the liberated southeast; the new state was rapidly recognised abroad and endorsed by a 93–7 UN General Assembly vote in November.


Portugal recognises independence

Summary: Following the Carnation Revolution and an accord at Algiers, Portugal formally recognised Guinea-Bissau's independence on 10 September 1974; the United States acknowledged it the same day, with Luís Cabral as first president.


Nino Vieira seizes power

Summary: A coup led by João Bernardo "Nino" Vieira overthrew President Luís Cabral, fracturing the planned union with Cape Verde and beginning Vieira's dominance of national politics.


First multi-party elections

Summary: After the introduction of multi-party politics in 1991, Guinea-Bissau held its first competitive elections in 1994, which confirmed Vieira as president — though military factionalism persisted.


The civil war

Summary: A military mutiny led by Ansumane Mané escalated into a civil war that drew in Senegalese and Guinean troops, devastated Bissau and displaced hundreds of thousands before Vieira was ousted in May 1999.


Vieira assassinated

Summary: Having returned to the presidency in 2005, João Bernardo Vieira was assassinated by soldiers in March 2009, hours after the killing of the army chief of staff — a vivid sign of the army's grip on politics.


Coup amid the cocaine trade

Summary: A military coup interrupted a presidential election in April 2012, deepening a pattern of intervention by a politicised army increasingly entangled with cocaine trafficking.


A cocaine transit "narco-state"

Summary: Weak institutions, porous borders and an archipelago of uninhabited islands made Guinea-Bissau a major transit point for Latin American cocaine bound for Europe; the UN described it as the first African "narco-state", with the drug trade rivalling the legal economy.


Bubi settle Bioko

Summary: Bantu-speaking peoples, ancestors of the Bubi, are held to have crossed from the mainland to the island later called Fernando Pó (Bioko) in successive waves, settling an island that earlier held Neolithic populations and developing a distinct island society.


Fang and Ndowe of Río Muni

Summary: The Fang, a large Bantu people, settled the forests of the mainland enclave of Río Muni, while Ndowe and related coastal peoples — later grouped as Playeros — occupied the shoreline and mediated trade with the interior.


Annobón peopled from Angola

Summary: The remote island of Annobón, uninhabited before Atlantic navigation, was settled by Africans brought by the Portuguese largely from Angola via São Tomé; the Annobonese came to speak a Portuguese-based creole.


Fernão do Pó sights the island

Summary: The Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó sighted the volcanic island in the Gulf of Guinea in 1472, reportedly naming it Formosa; it soon took his own name as Fernando Pó, the island later renamed Bioko.


Treaty of El Pardo cedes the islands to Spain

Summary: By the Treaty of El Pardo, Portugal ceded Fernando Pó, Annobón and commercial rights on the adjacent African coast to Spain, in exchange for recognition of Portuguese claims in South America; Spain sought a base for the slave trade.

GNQ:el-pardo-wiki GNQ:britannica-history-eg GNQ:history-eg-wiki GNQ:nwe-eg


The Argelejo expedition fails

Summary: A Spanish expedition under the Conde de Argelejo arrived to take possession but was broken by disease and disorder; Spain effectively abandoned the islands for decades, administering them on paper from its American viceroyalties.


Britain founds an anti-slavery base at Port Clarence

Summary: With Spanish acquiescence, the Royal Navy under William Fitzwilliam Owen established a base on Fernando Pó in 1827, founding Port Clarence (later Santa Isabel/Malabo) to support the squadron suppressing the Atlantic slave trade.


Britain withdraws to Sierra Leone

Summary: The British base on Fernando Pó was withdrawn to Sierra Leone in 1843, Spain having declined to sell its rights; freed Africans, Sierra Leoneans and other settlers remained as the English-speaking Fernandino community.


Spain installs effective rule under Carlos Chacón

Summary: Spain sent the naval officer Carlos Chacón as governor in 1858 to organise a colonial administration on Fernando Pó; Baptist missionaries established under the British were pressed to withdraw in favour of Spanish Catholic missions.


Treaty of Paris fixes Río Muni

Summary: The 1900 Treaty of Paris with France delimited Spain's mainland enclave of Río Muni at roughly 26,000 km², far smaller than Spain had claimed, setting the borders with French Cameroon and Gabon.


Liberian labour treaty for the cocoa plantations

Summary: A 1914 treaty brought contract labourers from Liberia to Fernando Pó's cocoa plantations; an ILO inquiry in 1930 found the recruitment had occurred under "criminal compulsion" akin to slave raiding, and the Liberian supply was cut off.


Bioko and Río Muni united as Spanish Guinea

Summary: From 1926 Spain governed Fernando Pó and the mainland enclave of Río Muni together as the colony of Spanish Guinea, its economy resting on the cocoa plantations of the island.


Made an overseas "province" of Spain

Summary: In 1959 Spain reclassified the colony as the "Equatorial Region," divided into the provinces of Fernando Poo and Río Muni, with elected local representatives sent to the Spanish Cortes — a first step toward decolonisation.


Autonomy and the name Equatorial Guinea

Summary: A 1963 referendum approved a regime of autonomy granting limited internal self-government; the territory took the name Equatorial Guinea ahead of full independence.


Independence from Spain

Summary: After a 1968 constitutional referendum and September elections won by Francisco Macías Nguema, the Republic of Equatorial Guinea became independent from Spain on 12 October 1968, uniting Bioko, Río Muni and Annobón.

GNQ:britannica-history-eg GNQ:history-eg-wiki GNQ:spanish-guinea-wiki GNQ:nwe-eg


Macías Nguema becomes first president

Summary: Francisco Macías Nguema, victor of the September 1968 elections, became Equatorial Guinea's first president at independence, soon concentrating power and beginning a slide into dictatorship.


President for life

Summary: After establishing a single-party state in 1970 and gutting the constitution, Macías had himself declared president for life in 1972, ruling through a violent personality cult that dismantled churches, schools and much of the state.


Mass killing and exile

Summary: Under Macías tens of thousands were killed — figures of roughly 35,000–50,000 deaths are commonly cited — and by 1979 around a quarter of the population had fled into exile; the Bubi and Nigerian workers were among those targeted. Figures remain estimates.


Cocoa economy collapses as labourers flee

Summary: Amid the terror, tens of thousands of Nigerian contract labourers were withdrawn from Fernando Pó's plantations in the mid-1970s, and cocoa production — the colony's economic mainstay — collapsed.


Obiang's coup overthrows Macías

Summary: On 3 August 1979 Macías's nephew, army officer Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, led a coup that overthrew the dictator after fighting that cost hundreds of lives.


Macías executed

Summary: Captured and tried, Francisco Macías Nguema was executed by firing squad on 29 September 1979 along with several associates, ending eleven years of dictatorship; Obiang assumed the presidency.


Obiang takes power

Summary: Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo assumed the presidency after the 1979 coup and execution of Macías, and renamed the main islands Bioko and Annobón; he has remained in power ever since.


Zafiro oil field discovered

Summary: Mobil and partners discovered the major Zafiro oil field offshore Bioko Island in March 1995, the find that opened Equatorial Guinea's petroleum era.


Oil production begins

Summary: The Zafiro field came on-stream in August 1996, less than eighteen months after discovery, launching Equatorial Guinea as an oil producer; output later peaked in the hundreds of thousands of barrels a day.


The "Wonga Coup" foiled

Summary: An attempted coup by a group of foreign mercenaries — the so-called Wonga Coup, linked to Simon Mann — was foiled in 2004, underscoring the instability around oil-rich Equatorial Guinea.


Wealth amid deep inequality

Summary: Oil gave Equatorial Guinea one of Africa's highest GDP-per-capita figures, yet much of the population remained poor; the government faced sustained criticism over corruption, human rights and the concentration of wealth in the ruling family.


Joined, then delisted, by the transparency initiative

Summary: Equatorial Guinea joins the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in February 2008 and is delisted in April 2010; a fresh application in October 2019 is refused by the EITI Board in February 2020.


A capital in the rainforest

Summary: The government moves its headquarters from Malabo on Bioko to Ciudad de la Paz — Djibloho — an unfinished purpose-built city deep in the mainland forest.


Rise of the Minoan palaces on Crete

Summary: The Minoan civilization built great palace complexes at Knossos and elsewhere on Crete, Europe's first advanced civilization, sustained by trade and a sophisticated artistic and administrative culture.


Flourishing of Mycenaean civilization

Summary: Fortified palace-citadels such as Mycenae and Pylos rose on the mainland, ruled by warrior elites who were the first attested Greek-speakers and traded across the eastern Mediterranean.


Linear B and Mycenaean control of Crete

Summary: Mycenaeans adapted Minoan script into Linear B to write an early form of Greek and extended their authority to Knossos, as Minoan power on Crete waned.


Bronze Age collapse and the Greek Dark Ages

Summary: The Mycenaean palaces were destroyed and writing was lost in the wider Bronze Age collapse, ushering in centuries of decline known as the Greek Dark Ages.


Traditional first Olympic Games

Summary: Greek tradition dated the first Olympic Games to 776 BCE at Olympia, a panhellenic religious festival that became a shared marker of Greek identity and a basis for dating.


Cleisthenes founds Athenian democracy

Summary: The Athenian statesman Cleisthenes reorganized the citizens into ten tribes and established popular institutions of self-rule, the system later called democracy and regarded as the first in the world.


Battle of Marathon

Summary: Athenian hoplites defeated the first Persian invasion on the plain of Marathon, a landmark victory that became central to Athenian self-confidence and identity.


Battle of Salamis

Summary: A Greek coalition fleet destroyed the navy of the Persian king Xerxes in the straits of Salamis, the decisive naval victory of the second Persian invasion; victory at Plataea in 479 BCE ended the threat.


The Peloponnesian War

Summary: A protracted war between Athens and Sparta and their allies ended in Athens' defeat, exhausting the leading city-states and chronicled by the historian Thucydides.


Battle of Chaeronea

Summary: Philip II of Macedon defeated an alliance of Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes, ending the era of fully independent poleis and establishing Macedonian dominance over Greece.


Alexander invades the Persian Empire

Summary: Alexander the Great crossed into Asia and began the campaign that, over a decade, toppled the Persian Empire and carried Greek arms and culture as far as India.


Foundation of Alexandria

Summary: Alexander founded Alexandria in Egypt, which became the greatest city of the Hellenistic world and a centre of Greek learning, home to its famous Library and Museum.


Death of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms

Summary: Alexander died at Babylon, and his generals divided his empire into the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid kingdoms, beginning the Hellenistic age of Greek-ruled states across the East.


Rome sacks Corinth and conquers Greece

Summary: The Roman general Lucius Mummius destroyed Corinth and crushed the Achaean League, bringing Greece under Roman domination; it was later organized as the province of Achaea.


Foundation of Constantinople

Summary: Constantine refounded Byzantium as Constantinople, the new capital that shifted the Roman Empire's centre eastward and became the heart of the Greek-speaking Byzantine world.


Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople

Summary: Crusaders captured and plundered Constantinople, fragmenting Byzantine territory, including parts of Greece, among Latin and Greek rulers and gravely weakening the empire.


Fall of Constantinople

Summary: Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire and clearing the way for Ottoman rule over the Greek lands.


Ottoman conquest of the Morea

Summary: The Ottomans completed their conquest of the Greek mainland with the fall of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, including Mystras, bringing the Greek lands under Ottoman rule.


Outbreak of the Greek War of Independence

Summary: Revolution against Ottoman rule erupted across the Peloponnese and beyond, beginning the war that would create an independent Greek state and inspiring philhellenes across Europe.


Battle of Navarino

Summary: A combined British, French and Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian navy at Navarino, a decisive intervention by the Great Powers that turned the war in Greece's favour.


London Protocol recognizes Greek independence

Summary: Britain, France and Russia signed the London Protocol declaring Greece an independent state, the first international act recognizing Greek sovereignty.


Treaty of Constantinople and the Kingdom of Greece

Summary: The Ottoman sultan recognized Greek independence and the new state's frontiers in the Treaty of Constantinople; the Bavarian prince Otto was chosen as the first king of Greece.


Asia Minor Catastrophe

Summary: The Greco-Turkish War ended in the rout of Greek forces and the destruction of Smyrna in 1922; the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne mandated a population exchange that brought over a million refugees into Greece.


Axis occupation of Greece

Summary: After resisting Italy in 1940, Greece was occupied by Germany, Italy and Bulgaria from 1941 to 1944, enduring a devastating famine and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.


Greek Civil War

Summary: Following liberation, a civil war between communist and government forces tore the country apart until 1949, an early conflict of the Cold War that left lasting political divisions.


Fall of the junta and the Third Hellenic Republic

Summary: After the collapse of the 1967–1974 military dictatorship, a referendum abolished the monarchy and established the current Greek parliamentary republic.


Greece joins the European Communities

Summary: Greece became a member of the European Communities (later the European Union), anchoring its post-war democracy in European integration; it adopted the euro in 2001.


The Saqqaq settle Greenland

Summary: The Saqqaq, the earliest known people in Greenland, migrated from Arctic North America and spread along the coasts as caribou and seal hunters, beginning more than four millennia of continuous Arctic settlement.


The Dorset (Tuniit) culture

Summary: The Dorset Paleo-Inuit, expert sea-mammal hunters known for their carved art, followed the Saqqaq and occupied Greenland's coasts through the long pre-Thule centuries.


Arrival of the Thule

Summary: The Thule people migrated eastward from Alaska with dog sleds, kayaks and whale-hunting technology, settling Greenland's coasts and becoming the direct ancestors of the modern Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit).


Erik the Red founds the Norse colony

Summary: Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland, led settlers to south-west Greenland and established the Eastern and Western Settlements, the first European colony on the island.


Leif Erikson sails to Vinland

Summary: Erik's son Leif Erikson voyaged west from Greenland to North America, reaching the land the sagas called Vinland and becoming the first European known to have set foot on the American continent.


Submission to the Norwegian crown

Summary: The Greenlanders accepted the sovereignty of the king of Norway, tying the colony to the Scandinavian crowns and, through later unions, ultimately to Denmark.


The Norse settlements vanish

Summary: A wedding at Hvalsey Church in 1408 is the last dated record of Norse Greenland; the Eastern Settlement was abandoned within decades, the colony's disappearance still debated and linked to the Little Ice Age.


Hans Egede reaches Greenland

Summary: The Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede landed in Greenland seeking the lost Norse colonists, found only Inuit, and founded a mission and trading post at Godthåb (Nuuk), beginning the Danish recolonisation.


The royal trade monopoly

Summary: Denmark established the Royal Greenland Trading Department, granting the crown a strict monopoly over all trade with Greenland and sealing the colony off from foreign contact for nearly two centuries.


Danish sovereignty confirmed

Summary: The Permanent Court of International Justice ruled in the Eastern Greenland case that Denmark held sovereignty over the whole island, rejecting Norway's occupation of the eastern coast.


Greenland under U.S. protection

Summary: With Denmark occupied, the Danish minister Henrik Kauffmann signed the Agreement Relating to the Defense of Greenland with the United States, placing the island under American protection and opening it to U.S. bases.


Thule Air Base built

Summary: Under a 1951 NATO-era defence agreement, the United States constructed Thule Air Base in north-west Greenland, a major Cold War installation for bombers and early-warning radar, now the Pituffik Space Base.


From colony to Danish county

Summary: The revised Danish constitution abolished Greenland's colonial status and made it an integral county of the Kingdom of Denmark, a change the United Nations accepted as decolonisation.


Home Rule established

Summary: After a January 1979 referendum, the Home Rule Act came into force, giving Greenland its own parliament and government with Jonathan Motzfeldt as first premier and responsibility for many domestic affairs.


Greenland leaves the European Community

Summary: Following a 1982 referendum, Greenland withdrew from the European Community in 1985, mainly to control its fishing waters, becoming the only territory ever to leave the bloc.


Self-Government referendum

Summary: In a referendum some 75 per cent of Greenlandic voters approved the Self-Government arrangement, paving the way for greater autonomy and recognition of the right to self-determination.


Act on Greenland Self-Government in force

Summary: The Self-Government Act came into force on Greenland's National Day, recognising the people of Greenland as a people under international law with the right to self-determination and a legal path to independence.


Múte B. Egede becomes premier

Summary: After elections in 2021, Múte Bourup Egede of Inuit Ataqatigiit became premier, the youngest in Greenland's history, advocating independence as a long-term aim grounded in economic self-reliance.


The 2025 election under world attention

Summary: Amid intense U.S. interest in the island, Greenlanders voted on 11 March 2025; the centre-right, gradualist Demokraatit party won the largest share, and most Greenlanders rejected becoming part of the United States.


Jens-Frederik Nielsen becomes premier

Summary: Jens-Frederik Nielsen of Demokraatit took office as premier on 7 April 2025, supporting independence pursued pragmatically and insisting Greenland's future is for Greenlanders to decide.


Tikal settled in the Peten

Summary: A village forms at Tikal in the Middle Formative period and grows into a ceremonial centre of the lowland Maya.


Tikal at its height

Summary: Tikal reaches its architectural and artistic peak as one of the dominant city-states of the Classic Maya world.


Classic Maya collapse

Summary: Tikal and the southern lowland centres are depopulated and abandoned as the Classic Maya order disintegrates.


Conquest under Pedro de Alvarado

Summary: Alvarado invades from Mexico, defeats the K'iche', and burns their capital Q'umarkaj, beginning Spanish rule in Guatemala.


Santiago de los Caballeros re-founded

Summary: After a flood destroys the earlier capital, the colonial seat of the Captaincy General is established at present-day Antigua Guatemala.


The Popol Vuh set down

Summary: The K'iche' creation epic, the Popol Vuh, is written in alphabetic K'iche', preserving Maya mythology and dynastic history.


Santa Marta earthquakes ruin Antigua

Summary: Powerful earthquakes devastate the colonial capital, leading to the transfer of government to present-day Guatemala City.


Independence from Spain

Summary: Guatemala City signs the Act of Independence of Central America, ending nearly three centuries of Spanish rule.


Federal Republic of Central America

Summary: The former captaincy general forms a federation of five states, with Guatemala City as its capital.


Republic of Guatemala proclaimed

Summary: With the federation dissolved, Guatemala declares itself a sovereign republic under Conservative rule.


Liberal revolution

Summary: Justo Rufino Barrios and the Liberals seize power, launching coffee-based modernisation and the expropriation of communal and Maya lands.


The coffee economy

Summary: Coffee becomes Guatemala's dominant export, financing railways and ports while binding the Maya to plantation labour.


Rise of the United Fruit Company

Summary: United Fruit acquires extensive lands, railways, and the main port, becoming Guatemala's largest landowner and a dominant economic force.


Dictatorship of Jorge Ubico

Summary: General Ubico rules for thirteen years, repressing labour and opposition while sustaining the coffee oligarchy and ties to United Fruit.


October Revolution

Summary: A popular uprising ends the Ubico dictatorship and ushers in democratic reform under Juan Jose Arevalo.


Agrarian reform under Arbenz

Summary: President Arbenz's Decree 900 expropriates idle lands, including United Fruit estates, for the landless, alarming Washington.


CIA-backed coup overthrows Arbenz

Summary: The covert operation PBSUCCESS pressures Arbenz to resign on 27 June 1954, ending the reform era and installing military rule.


Civil war and the Maya genocide

Summary: A thirty-six-year conflict leaves some 200,000 dead or disappeared, mostly Maya, with the state held by the CEH to have committed genocide.


Firm and Lasting Peace accords

Summary: The government and the URNG sign the final peace agreement in Guatemala City, ending the civil war.


Memory of Silence report

Summary: The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification publishes its findings, attributing the bulk of wartime atrocities to the state and finding acts of genocide against the Maya.


Rios Montt convicted of genocide

Summary: A Guatemalan court convicts the former dictator of genocide against the Ixil Maya, the first such verdict by a national court, though it is soon annulled.


Election of Bernardo Arevalo

Summary: Anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arevalo wins the presidency and, despite attempts to block him, is inaugurated in January 2024.


Amerindian settlement of the Guianas

Summary: Arawak, Carib and Warrau peoples settle the rivers, coast and highlands of present-day Guyana, developing cassava farming, fishing and riverine trade.


The Wild Coast and El Dorado

Summary: Spanish and other navigators probe the rivers of the 'Wild Coast' in search of the golden kingdom of El Dorado, but find no empire to conquer.


Founding of Essequibo

Summary: The Dutch establish the colony of Essequibo, the oldest of the three, followed by Berbice (1627) and Demerara (split from Essequibo in 1745).


The engineered sugar coast

Summary: Dutch planters drain the coastal plain with polders, dams, canals and koker sluice-gates, building a below-sea-level sugar landscape worked by enslaved Africans.


The Berbice slave rebellion

Summary: Enslaved Africans led by Cuffy rise in Berbice, holding much of the colony for almost a year in one of the largest slave revolts in the Americas before being suppressed.


Founding of Stabroek (Georgetown)

Summary: A British occupying force lays out the town of Stabroek at the mouth of the Demerara River; renamed Georgetown in 1812, it becomes the colony's capital.


The Demerara rising

Summary: Thousands of enslaved people in Demerara rebel, believing emancipation has been withheld; the revolt is brutally suppressed, and the death of missionary John Smith galvanises British abolitionists.


Creation of British Guiana

Summary: Britain unites the colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice into a single Crown colony, British Guiana, with Georgetown as its capital.


Emancipation and Indian indenture

Summary: Full emancipation takes effect on 1 August 1838; the first indentured labourers from India arrive on 5 May 1838, beginning decades of immigration that reshape the colony's population.


End of Indian indenture

Summary: Indentured immigration from India is brought to a close after some 250,000 people have come to British Guiana, leaving Indo-Guyanese the colony's largest ethnic group.


PPP victory and suspended constitution

Summary: The People's Progressive Party wins the first elections under universal suffrage and Jagan becomes chief minister, but Britain suspends the constitution and sends troops after 133 days.


The PPP splits along ethnic lines

Summary: Forbes Burnham breaks with Jagan and forms the People's National Congress; the two parties harden into Afro- and Indo-Guyanese blocs that dominate national politics.


Independence of Guyana

Summary: British Guiana becomes the independent nation of Guyana within the Commonwealth, with Forbes Burnham as first prime minister and Cheddi Jagan as opposition leader.


The Cooperative Republic

Summary: Guyana is proclaimed a cooperative republic, marking the date of Cuffy's 1763 rebellion as Republic Day while remaining within the Commonwealth.


Nationalisation of the economy

Summary: Burnham's government nationalises the foreign-owned bauxite and sugar industries, bringing most of the economy under state control in a 'cooperative socialist' programme.


The Jonestown tragedy

Summary: At the Peoples Temple settlement of Jonestown, more than 900 followers of the American preacher Jim Jones die in a mass murder-suicide after the killing of a visiting U.S. congressman.


Death of Burnham; Hoyte succeeds

Summary: Forbes Burnham dies in office and is succeeded by Desmond Hoyte, who begins to liberalise the economy and ease political controls.


Return of Jagan and free elections

Summary: Internationally observed elections return Cheddi Jagan and the PPP to power after 28 years, restoring multiparty democracy; his widow Janet Jagan later becomes Guyana's first woman president.


First offshore oil discovery

Summary: ExxonMobil and partners make the first major oil discovery in the offshore Stabroek block, beginning Guyana's transformation into a significant petroleum producer.


Guyana takes Essequibo case to the ICJ

Summary: Guyana files proceedings at the International Court of Justice seeking to confirm the 1899 arbitral award fixing its boundary with Venezuela.


First oil production

Summary: Production begins in the Stabroek block; within a few years Guyana exceeds 600,000 barrels a day and becomes one of the world's fastest-growing economies.


ICJ hearings on the merits

Summary: Public hearings on the merits of Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899 (Guyana v. Venezuela) are held at the International Court of Justice, a decisive stage in the long-running Essequibo controversy.


Copán settled

Summary: A small farming village on the Copán River grows over centuries into a major Maya centre in what is now western Honduras.


Dynasty of sixteen kings

Summary: A line of at least sixteen rulers governs Copán, raising temples, stelae, and the Hieroglyphic Stairway during the city's Classic-period height.


Hieroglyphic Stairway completed

Summary: The fifteenth ruler finishes the great stairway, whose roughly 1,200 carved glyphs form the longest known Maya inscription.


Copán abandoned

Summary: After centuries of decline the Maya completely abandon Copán, leaving its monuments to the forest.


Columbus reaches Honduras

Summary: On his fourth voyage Christopher Columbus makes landfall on the Caribbean coast of Honduras.


Lempira's resistance

Summary: The Lenca chief Lempira unites more than two hundred communities against the Spanish before his revolt is crushed.


Silver strike and rise of Tegucigalpa

Summary: A highland silver discovery draws prospectors and gives rise to Tegucigalpa, long a rival to Comayagua.


Independence from Spain

Summary: The provinces of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, Honduras among them, declare their independence from Spain.


Federal Republic of Central America

Summary: After a brief Mexican annexation, Honduras joins the United Provinces of Central America under a federal constitution adopted in 1824.


Morazán leads the federation

Summary: The Honduran Liberal Francisco Morazán serves as president of the United Provinces, fighting to preserve the union against Conservative revolts.


Honduras becomes sovereign

Summary: Amid the federation's collapse, Honduras separates to become a fully independent state.


Rise of the fruit companies

Summary: U.S. firms, foremost United Fruit and Standard Fruit, develop the north coast, making bananas Honduras's dominant export.


Cuyamel and the Zemurray coup

Summary: Samuel Zemurray's Cuyamel Fruit Company buys plantation land and, in 1911, backs an armed coup to secure a favourable government.


United Fruit absorbs Cuyamel

Summary: Zemurray sells Cuyamel to the United Fruit Company, concentrating the Honduran banana industry as the Depression begins.


Carías dictatorship

Summary: Tiburcio Carías Andino governs as authoritarian president, opening an era of military influence over Honduran politics.


War with El Salvador

Summary: A brief border war with El Salvador, rooted in migration disputes, erupts amid a football tournament and hardens the military's role.


Contra war staging ground

Summary: Honduras hosts an expanded U.S. military presence at Soto Cano and serves as a base for the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinistas.


Hurricane Mitch

Summary: One of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes devastates Honduras, killing some 7,000 people and ruining infrastructure and crops.


Removal of President Zelaya

Summary: The military removes President Manuel Zelaya and Congress installs Roberto Micheletti; a later OAS commission deems the removal an illegal coup while finding Zelaya had defied the courts.


Xiomara Castro inaugurated

Summary: Xiomara Castro takes office as Honduras's first woman president, ending years of National Party rule.


Extradition of Juan Orlando Hernández

Summary: Former president Juan Orlando Hernández is extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges, later resulting in conviction.


Asfura succeeds Castro

Summary: After a narrow, contested 2025 election, Nasry Asfura of the National Party is inaugurated president, succeeding Xiomara Castro.


Dalmatia and Pannonia become Roman provinces

Summary: After the crushing of the great Illyrian (Pannonian) revolt, Rome organised the eastern Adriatic and its hinterland into the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, beginning centuries of Roman rule and urban life along the coast.


Diocletian's Palace at Split

Summary: The Dalmatian-born emperor Diocletian built an immense fortified palace near Salona around the turn of the fourth century; the historic core of Split later grew within its walls, today the most complete surviving Roman palace.


Slavic settlement and the coming of the Croats

Summary: Avar and Slavic invasions destroyed the Roman provincial order, including the capital Salona; the Croats settled the former provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia and gradually organised duchies of their own.


Papal recognition of Duke Branimir

Summary: Pope John VIII acknowledged the rule of Duke Branimir over the Croatian realm, aligning the Croats with the Latin Church of Rome and marking the emergence of Croatia as a recognised state.


Tomislav recognised as king of the Croats

Summary: Having united the Croats of Dalmatia and Pannonia and held off the Magyars and Bulgars, Tomislav was addressed as king in letters of Pope John X and is regarded by tradition as the first king of a unified Croatia.


Coronation of Demetrius Zvonimir

Summary: Zvonimir was crowned king of Croatia with the sanction of the papacy, the last of the great native rulers and a symbol of the medieval kingdom at its height.


Personal union with Hungary

Summary: King Coloman of Hungary was crowned king of Croatia and Dalmatia, joining the crowns in a personal union; Croatian tradition records the terms in the Pacta conventa, under which Croatia kept its Sabor and its ban.


Venice secures Dalmatia

Summary: After long rivalry Venice took control of most of the Dalmatian coast, which it would govern for nearly four centuries until 1797, shaping the art, architecture and administration of the coastal cities.


The Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik)

Summary: Dubrovnik governed itself as an aristocratic merchant republic, paying tribute to the Ottoman sultan after 1458 while rivalling Venice in trade; its walled old city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.


The Dalmatian towns under Venice

Summary: Coastal cities such as Trogir flourished under Venetian rule, acquiring fine Romanesque, Renaissance and Baroque buildings; the historic island town of Trogir is preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Venetian period.


Habsburgs elected to the Croatian throne

Summary: Facing Ottoman conquest after the disaster at Mohacs in 1526, the Croatian nobility elected the Habsburg Ferdinand I as king, binding Croatia's defence to the Austrian monarchy.


The Military Frontier

Summary: To hold the line against the Ottomans the Habsburgs created the Military Frontier, a militarised border zone settled by free soldier-peasants, including many Serb and Vlach refugees, who served in exchange for land and privileges.


The Great Dubrovnik earthquake

Summary: A devastating earthquake struck Dubrovnik in 1667, destroying much of the city, killing thousands and ending the long prosperity of the Ragusan republic.


Napoleon's Illyrian Provinces

Summary: Napoleon gathered much of the coast and hinterland into the short-lived Illyrian Provinces, an episode that helped stir a sense of shared South Slav identity among the Croats.


The Illyrian movement and national revival

Summary: Led by Ljudevit Gaj, intellectuals and clergy promoted a standard Croatian literary language and South Slav cultural unity, laying the foundations of the modern Croatian nation.


Croatian made the official language

Summary: The Croatian Sabor adopted Croatian in place of Latin as the official language, a milestone of the national revival and a response to the imposition of Hungarian.


The Croatian-Hungarian Settlement (Nagodba)

Summary: Within the Dual Monarchy created in 1867, the Nagodba granted Croatia-Slavonia limited autonomy under its own ban and Sabor, though real authority remained with Budapest.


Entry into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes

Summary: After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the Croatian lands joined Serbia and Montenegro in the new South Slav kingdom proclaimed on 1 December 1918, later renamed Yugoslavia.


The Independent State of Croatia (NDH)

Summary: Following the Axis invasion, Germany and Italy set up the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state run by the fascist Ustase under Ante Pavelic, embracing Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.


The Jasenovac camp

Summary: The Ustase regime operated its largest camp complex at Jasenovac, where it murdered an estimated 77,000 to 99,000 people, among them tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma, between 1941 and 1945.


Croatia in socialist Yugoslavia

Summary: The Partisan victory under Tito made Croatia one of the six republics of a federal socialist Yugoslavia, ending the Ustase state and beginning four decades of communist rule.


The Croatian Spring

Summary: Reformers and students in the 'Croatian Spring' demanded greater economic and constitutional autonomy; Tito crushed the movement and purged its leaders, though the 1974 constitution later widened republican rights.


Declaration of independence

Summary: The Croatian Sabor declared independence from Yugoslavia on 25 June 1991; rebel Serbs backed by the Yugoslav army seized nearly a third of the country and proclaimed the Republic of Serbian Krajina, igniting war.


The fall of Vukovar

Summary: After a siege of some three months, Vukovar fell to the Yugoslav army and Serb forces on 18 November 1991; two days later 194 people taken from the hospital were killed at the Ovcara farm, a crime later prosecuted at the ICTY.


International recognition

Summary: Croatia won international recognition as a sovereign state in 1992; the United States recognised it on 7 April 1992, and the country was admitted to the United Nations.


Operation Storm

Summary: In August 1995 the Croatian army launched Operation Storm, which within days overran the Republic of Serbian Krajina and ended its existence, accompanied by the flight of tens of thousands of Serbs; generals later tried at the ICTY were acquitted on appeal in 2012.


Piran Bay arbitration award

Summary: The Permanent Court of Arbitration issued its Final Award on the Croatia-Slovenia border in the Gulf of Piran; Croatia, which had withdrawn from the process in 2015, declared it did not consider itself bound by the ruling.


Plitvice Lakes inscribed by UNESCO

Summary: Plitvice Lakes, Croatia's oldest national park, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979 for the ongoing formation of tufa barriers that dam its waters into a chain of lakes and waterfalls, the country's first World Heritage site.


Accession to the European Union

Summary: Croatia joined the European Union on 1 July 2013 as its 28th member, after a 2012 referendum, having joined NATO in 2009; it adopted the euro and entered the Schengen area on 1 January 2023.


Columbus lands on Hispaniola

Summary: Christopher Columbus reaches the Taino island of Quisqueya and names it La Isla Espanola, beginning Spanish colonisation of the Americas.


Collapse of the Taino

Summary: Forced labour, violence, and Old World disease devastate the Indigenous population within a generation of contact.


France gains Saint-Domingue

Summary: The Treaty of Rijswijk transfers the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France, creating the colony of Saint-Domingue.


World's richest colony

Summary: Saint-Domingue, with roughly half a million enslaved Africans, has become the leading producer of sugar and coffee and France's most valuable colony.


The slave uprising begins

Summary: A massive revolt of the enslaved erupts on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue, opening the Haitian Revolution.


Napoleon's expedition; Toussaint deported

Summary: Napoleon sends an army to restore slavery; Toussaint Louverture is seized and deported to France, where he dies in 1803.


Independence proclaimed

Summary: Jean-Jacques Dessalines declares independence at Gonaives, founding Haiti as the world's first Black republic.


Christophe crowned King Henry I

Summary: Henry Christophe proclaims a kingdom in northern Haiti and builds the Citadelle Laferriere; the south remains a republic under Petion.


The French indemnity

Summary: France recognises Haitian independence only in exchange for an indemnity of 150 million francs, burdening Haiti with crippling debt.


Boyer unifies Hispaniola

Summary: After Santo Domingo declares independence, Haitian forces move east and govern the whole island — a republic of former slaves administering the oldest European colony in the Americas.


Dominican Republic secedes

Summary: The eastern, Spanish-speaking part of Hispaniola breaks from Haitian rule to form the independent Dominican Republic.


The Second Empire of Faustin Soulouque

Summary: General Soulouque makes himself emperor and spends his reign in repeated attempts to reconquer the east.


The United States recognises Haiti

Summary: Fifty-eight years after independence — and only in the middle of its own civil war — Washington recognises the republic a slave revolt had founded.


United States occupation

Summary: U.S. Marines occupy Haiti for nineteen years, controlling its finances and building infrastructure amid widespread resentment and resistance.


Papa Doc Duvalier takes power

Summary: Francois Duvalier becomes president and establishes a personal dictatorship enforced by the Tontons Macoutes, declaring himself president for life.


President for Life

Summary: Duvalier proclaims himself president for life and crushes an uprising at Jeremie with hundreds killed; his anti-communism keeps American support flowing.


Fall of Baby Doc

Summary: A popular uprising drives Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier into exile, ending a 29-year family dictatorship in which an estimated 40,000-60,000 Haitians were killed.


Aristide elected

Summary: Jean-Bertrand Aristide wins Haiti's first free presidential election; he is overthrown in 1991 and restored in 1994.


Twenty thousand US troops restore Aristide

Summary: An American-led intervention reverses the 1991 coup and returns the elected president to office.


Aristide leaves again; the UN deploys

Summary: An armed rebellion drives Aristide from the country a second time; US Marines land and a UN stabilisation force takes over, staying until 2019.


Catastrophic earthquake

Summary: A magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastates Port-au-Prince; death-toll estimates vary widely and remain disputed, with around three million people affected.


Hurricane Matthew

Summary: The strongest storm to strike the region in a decade kills hundreds and destroys thousands of homes.


Assassination of President Moise

Summary: President Jovenel Moise is assassinated at his home, accelerating Haiti's slide into gang rule and state collapse.


A second great earthquake

Summary: Five weeks after the assassination, a magnitude 7.2 quake in the south-west kills some 2,200 people.


Transitional council and security mission

Summary: A transitional presidential council and a Kenyan-led security mission seek to restore order as gangs control most of the capital and a strengthened UN-authorised force is approved.


The Magyar conquest (Honfoglalás)

Summary: Seven Magyar tribes under the chieftain Árpád crossed the Carpathians and seized the Carpathian Basin, founding the Árpád dynasty and the settlement that gave rise to the Hungarian state.


Pannonhalma Abbey founded

Summary: Benedictine monks settled at Pannonhalma, founding Hungary's first Christian monastery; it would help convert the Magyars, found the country's first school and, in 1055, produce the first document written in Hungarian.


Coronation of Stephen I

Summary: Stephen, of the Árpád line, was crowned the first king of Hungary, traditionally with a crown from Pope Sylvester II, founding a Christian kingdom organised on Western models. He was later canonised as Saint Stephen.


Mongol invasion and the Battle of Mohi

Summary: The Mongols under Batu Khan destroyed King Béla IV's army at the Sajó River and ravaged Hungary for a year, leaving much of the kingdom in ruins before withdrawing in 1242.


Siege of Belgrade

Summary: Hungarian forces under John Hunyadi broke an Ottoman siege of Belgrade, checking the Turkish advance into central Europe for decades and becoming a celebrated victory of the medieval kingdom.


Battle of Mohács

Summary: Süleyman the Magnificent destroyed the Hungarian army and killed King Louis II, ending the medieval kingdom and opening Hungary to Ottoman and Habsburg domination.


Ottoman capture of Buda and the three-part division

Summary: The Ottomans seized Buda and Hungary fractured into Royal Hungary under the Habsburgs, Ottoman Hungary ruled from Buda, and the autonomous Principality of Transylvania.


Reconquest of Buda

Summary: A Habsburg-led Christian coalition retook Buda from the Ottomans, part of the campaign that drove the Turks from Hungary after more than a century.


Treaty of Karlowitz

Summary: The Ottomans ceded almost all of Hungary to the Habsburgs, reuniting the country but binding it firmly within the Habsburg monarchy.


The Revolution of 1848

Summary: A bloodless rising in Pest, with Sándor Petőfi among its voices, won the March Laws abolishing censorship and serfdom and establishing a responsible Hungarian government against Habsburg absolutism.


Defeat of the war of independence

Summary: After Hungary proclaimed independence under Kossuth, the revolution was crushed by a combined Austrian and Russian army; the surrender brought executions and Kossuth's exile.


Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich)

Summary: The Ausgleich transformed the empire into the Dual Monarchy, granting Hungary full internal autonomy with its own parliament while keeping defence and foreign affairs common to Austria-Hungary.


The founding of Budapest

Summary: Buda, Óbuda and Pest were unified into a single capital that grew into one of Europe's great cities; its historic core along the Danube is today a UNESCO World Heritage site.


Collapse of Austria-Hungary

Summary: Defeat in the First World War destroyed the Dual Monarchy; amid revolution Hungary passed through a democratic republic and a brief communist regime before the conservative order of Regent Horthy.


The Treaty of Trianon

Summary: Hungary lost about two-thirds of its territory and population, leaving roughly three million ethnic Hungarians outside the new borders in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and elsewhere; the trauma shaped Hungarian politics for a century.


First Vienna Award

Summary: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy awarded Hungary parts of southern Slovakia from Czechoslovakia, the first of the revisionist gains that drew Hungary toward the Axis.


Second Vienna Award

Summary: Germany and Italy awarded Hungary northern Transylvania from Romania, deepening Hungary's dependence on the Axis powers in its quest to reverse Trianon.


Hungary enters the war as an Axis ally

Summary: Seeking to keep and extend the lands restored by the Vienna Awards, Hungary joined Germany's war and took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union.


German occupation of Hungary

Summary: German forces occupied Hungary to keep it in the war and to deport its Jews, then the largest surviving Jewish community in Europe, numbering some 760,000 to 780,000 people.


Deportation of the Hungarian Jews

Summary: Between 15 May and 9 July 1944 about 437,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where some three-quarters were murdered on arrival; Horthy halted the trains on 7 July.


The Arrow Cross seizure of power

Summary: After Horthy's attempt to leave the war, Germany installed the fascist Arrow Cross, which murdered thousands more Jews in Budapest before the Soviet conquest of the city.


The siege of Budapest

Summary: The months-long battle for the capital between German-Hungarian and Soviet forces destroyed much of historic Budapest, including the castle and the Danube bridges, as the Red Army completed its conquest of Hungary.


The Hungarian People's Republic

Summary: Backed by the Soviet Union, the communists seized total power and proclaimed a one-party People's Republic, imposing Stalinist terror, show trials and forced collectivisation under Mátyás Rákosi.


The Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Summary: A nationwide rising under premier Imre Nagy declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact; the Soviet army crushed it on 4 November, killing some 2,500 Hungarians and driving about 200,000 into exile.


'Goulash communism' and the New Economic Mechanism

Summary: János Kádár's reforms admitted limited market forces and private enterprise, giving Hungarians a relative prosperity and freedom unusual in the Soviet bloc.


The Pan-European Picnic and the opening of the border

Summary: A border gate opened near Sopron let some 700 East Germans flee west; Hungary's subsequent full opening of its frontier breached the Iron Curtain and helped bring down the Berlin Wall.


Proclamation of the republic

Summary: On the anniversary of the 1956 rising Hungary proclaimed itself a free republic, ending four decades of communist rule and beginning its transition to democracy.


Accession to NATO and the European Union

Summary: Having joined NATO on 12 March 1999, Hungary acceded to the European Union on 1 May 2004 in the bloc's largest single enlargement, completing its return to the West.


Rise of the Srivijaya thalassocracy

Summary: From its base at Palembang in Sumatra, the Buddhist kingdom of Srivijaya comes to dominate maritime trade through the Straits of Malacca and Sunda and becomes a renowned centre of Buddhist scholarship.


Construction of Borobudur

Summary: Under the Sailendra dynasty in central Java the great Buddhist monument of Borobudur is built; the world's largest Buddhist temple, it is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.


Founding of the Majapahit empire

Summary: Raden Wijaya establishes Majapahit in eastern Java, which grows into the most powerful Hindu-Buddhist empire of the archipelago.


Majapahit's golden age under Hayam Wuruk

Summary: Under King Hayam Wuruk and his prime minister Gajah Mada, Majapahit reaches its height, projecting power and trade across much of the archipelago.


Islam takes root in northern Sumatra

Summary: The early Muslim sultanate of Samudera Pasai in northern Sumatra marks the establishment of Islam in the archipelago, spread by traders along the maritime routes.


Rise of the Demak Sultanate on Java

Summary: Demak emerges as the first major Islamic state on Java and a base from which Islam spreads across the island as Majapahit's power collapses.


Spice sultanates of Ternate, Tidore and Aceh flourish

Summary: Muslim sultanates controlling the clove, nutmeg and pepper trade grow rich and powerful, making the archipelago the hub of a global spice economy.


Portuguese capture of Malacca

Summary: Afonso de Albuquerque seizes the trading city of Malacca, beginning sustained European involvement in the archipelago's spice trade.


Founding of the Dutch East India Company (VOC)

Summary: The Dutch Republic charters the VOC with sweeping powers to trade, wage war and govern, launching nearly two centuries of company rule in the Indies.


Founding of Batavia

Summary: Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen storms Jayakarta and builds Batavia (modern Jakarta) as the VOC's Asian headquarters.


The Banda massacre

Summary: To enforce the nutmeg monopoly, Coen's forces kill, starve, enslave or deport almost the entire population of the Banda Islands, an atrocity that destroys Bandanese society.


Dissolution of the VOC

Summary: Bankrupt after decades of war, debt and corruption, the VOC is dissolved and its possessions pass to the Dutch state, ushering in direct colonial rule.


The Cultivation System

Summary: The Dutch impose the Cultuurstelsel, forcing Javanese peasants to grow export crops for the colonial state; it enriches the Netherlands while causing widespread hardship and local famines.


Founding of Budi Utomo

Summary: The cultural society Budi Utomo is founded, widely regarded as the start of organised Indonesian nationalism and the National Awakening.


Sukarno founds the Indonesian National Party

Summary: Sukarno establishes the PNI, demanding full independence and giving the nationalist movement a charismatic mass leader.


The Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda)

Summary: Young nationalists vow to recognise one Indonesian motherland, nation and language, a foundational moment in forging a unified national identity.


Japanese occupation of the Indies

Summary: Japan conquers the Dutch East Indies, ending Dutch rule; its occupation brings forced labour and hardship but also mobilises and arms Indonesian nationalists.


Proclamation of Independence

Summary: Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaim Indonesia an independent republic in Jakarta, days after Japan's surrender; they become president and vice-president the next day.


The Indonesian National Revolution

Summary: Indonesians wage a four-year armed and diplomatic struggle against Dutch attempts to reimpose colonial rule, enduring two major Dutch offensives and heavy losses.


Recognition of sovereignty

Summary: Following the Round Table Conference in The Hague, the Netherlands formally transfers sovereignty and recognises the independence of Indonesia.


The anti-communist mass killings

Summary: Following the 30 September coup attempt blamed on the PKI, an army-led purge kills an estimated 500,000 to over a million suspected communists and others, a vast atrocity that paves Suharto's path to power.


Suharto's New Order

Summary: Suharto formally becomes president and rules for over three decades, delivering growth and stability through authoritarian control, military dominance and pervasive corruption.


Fall of Suharto and Reformasi

Summary: Amid economic collapse and mass protests, Suharto resigns after 32 years in power, launching the Reformasi era of democratic reform and decentralisation.


First direct presidential election

Summary: Indonesians directly elect their president for the first time, consolidating one of the world's largest democracies after the authoritarian New Order.


Mature urban phase of the Indus cities

Summary: Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and hundreds of other settlements reach their peak, with grid-planned streets, advanced drainage and standardised weights across a vast trading network.


Mohenjo-daro flourishes

Summary: Mohenjo-daro, on the Indus in modern Pakistan, becomes one of the civilisation's largest cities and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site renowned for its Great Bath and citadel.


Decline of the Harappan cities

Summary: The major cities are gradually abandoned as weakening monsoons and shifting rivers undermine the agricultural base, marking the end of the civilisation's urban phase.