Accession to the European Union

Summary: Poland joined the European Union, completing its return to the West after the fall of communism and accelerating its economic and political integration into Europe.


Taíno settle Borikén

Summary: Arawak-speaking peoples develop the Taíno culture on the island they call Borikén, living in cacique-led villages and farming cassava and other tropical crops.


Columbus claims the island

Summary: On his second voyage, Christopher Columbus reaches the island and claims it for Spain, naming it San Juan Bautista.


Ponce de León founds Caparra

Summary: Juan Ponce de León establishes the island's first Spanish settlement and becomes its first governor; the colony is soon moved to the islet of San Juan.


El Morro and the fortification of San Juan

Summary: Spain begins the great harbour castle of El Morro; with La Fortaleza and a city wall completed by 1678, San Juan becomes a key Caribbean stronghold.


El Morro repels Francis Drake

Summary: The new fortifications withstand an attack by the English privateer Sir Francis Drake, proving San Juan's defences.


Grito de Lares

Summary: Rebels seize Lares and proclaim a Republic of Puerto Rico; though crushed, the uprising becomes the foundational moment of the island's independence movement.


Abolition of slavery

Summary: Spain abolishes slavery in Puerto Rico, a reform widely linked to the pressure generated by the Lares revolt.


Charter of Autonomy

Summary: Spain grants Puerto Rico an Autonomous Charter conceding limited self-government, only months before the Spanish-American War.


Treaty of Paris cedes Puerto Rico

Summary: After the Spanish-American War, Spain cedes Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States, ending Spanish rule on the island.


U.S. takes control of Puerto Rico

Summary: American military rule begins; the island passes from Spain to the United States as a new colonial relationship is established.


Jones-Shafroth Act grants citizenship

Summary: Congress collectively confers U.S. citizenship on Puerto Ricans and restructures the island's government, but without the federal vote.


Albizu Campos leads the Nationalists

Summary: Pedro Albizu Campos becomes president of the Nationalist Party, intensifying the campaign for outright independence.


First elected governor

Summary: Luis Muñoz Marín is elected the island's first governor; his administration launches Operation Bootstrap to industrialise the economy.


Commonwealth established

Summary: Muñoz Marín proclaims the Constitution of the Commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado), giving Puerto Rico self-government within U.S. sovereignty.


Status plebiscites

Summary: Non-binding votes in 1967, 1993, and 1998 ask Puerto Ricans to choose among commonwealth, statehood, and independence, producing no binding resolution.


U.S. Navy leaves Vieques

Summary: After years of civil disobedience following a 1999 death, the Navy ends weapons testing and withdraws from Vieques.


Debt crisis and PROMESA

Summary: With debt declared unpayable in 2015, Congress passes PROMESA in 2016, installing a federal oversight board over the island's finances.


Hurricane Maria

Summary: A devastating hurricane wrecks Puerto Rico's power grid and infrastructure, with an official death toll later estimated near 2,975.


Statehood plebiscites

Summary: Votes in 2012, 2017, and 2020 favour statehood, but the 2017 ballot was boycotted and drew only about 23% turnout, and Congress has not acted.


Legendary founding of Gojoseon

Summary: According to the Samguk yusa, the mythical Dangun establishes Gojoseon, traditionally regarded as the first Korean kingdom and a shared origin point for both Koreas.


Silla unifies the peninsula

Summary: Allied with Tang China, Silla conquers Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668, then expels the Tang, achieving the first unification of Korea under native rule.


Goryeo dynasty founded

Summary: Wang Geon establishes the Goryeo dynasty, which reunifies the peninsula and gives rise to the Western name Korea.


Joseon dynasty founded

Summary: Yi Seong-gye founds the long-lived Joseon dynasty, which adopts Neo-Confucianism and under King Sejong creates the hangul alphabet.


Japanese annexation of Korea

Summary: Japan formally annexes Korea, ending the Joseon dynasty and beginning thirty-five years of colonial rule over the entire peninsula.


Liberation and division at the 38th parallel

Summary: Japan's surrender frees Korea but the peninsula is split along the 38th parallel into Soviet and American occupation zones, setting the stage for two rival states.


Founding of the DPRK

Summary: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is proclaimed under Kim Il Sung, weeks after the Republic of Korea is established in the south, institutionalizing the division.


North Korea invades the South

Summary: North Korean forces cross the 38th parallel, opening the Korean War; the North nearly overruns the peninsula before a US-led UN coalition intervenes.


China enters the war

Summary: After UN forces push deep into the north, the People's Republic of China intervenes and drives the front back toward the 38th parallel, producing a stalemate.


Korean War armistice

Summary: An armistice halts the fighting and creates the Demilitarized Zone; no peace treaty is signed, freezing the division of the peninsula to the present day.


Socialist Constitution adopted

Summary: A new constitution creates the presidency for Kim Il Sung, enshrines Juche as the Workers' Party's guiding idea, and confirms Pyongyang as the capital.


Kim Jong Il designated successor

Summary: Kim Il Sung formally designates his son Kim Jong Il as his successor, beginning an unprecedented hereditary transfer of power in a communist state.


North and South Korea join the UN

Summary: Both Korean states are admitted to the United Nations with separate seats, an acknowledgment of the durability of the two-state division.


Death of Kim Il Sung

Summary: Kim Il Sung dies after ruling for nearly five decades; he is declared Eternal President and power passes to his son Kim Jong Il.


The Arduous March famine

Summary: A famine driven by the loss of Soviet support, reduced Chinese aid and flooding kills an estimated several hundred thousand or more North Koreans, a defining national trauma.


First inter-Korean summit

Summary: Kim Jong Il hosts South Korean president Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang in the first summit between the two Koreas, briefly easing tensions.


First nuclear test

Summary: North Korea conducts its first underground nuclear test, having withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and cycled through failed negotiations.


Death of Kim Jong Il

Summary: Kim Jong Il dies and is succeeded by his youngest son Kim Jong Un, completing a third generation of hereditary rule.


Largest nuclear test and ICBM launches

Summary: North Korea conducts its most powerful nuclear test and tests intercontinental ballistic missiles, prompting expanded UN Security Council sanctions.


Singapore summit with the United States

Summary: Kim Jong Un becomes the first North Korean leader to meet a sitting U.S. president, signing a joint statement with Donald Trump on working toward denuclearization.


Hanoi summit collapses

Summary: A second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi ends without agreement over sanctions and denuclearization, after which diplomacy stalls and weapons testing resumes.


South Korea declared principal enemy

Summary: Kim Jong Un renounces the goal of peaceful reunification, declaring South Korea a hostile separate state and the North's principal enemy and calling for constitutional revision.


Battle of Ourique

Summary: By tradition, Afonso Henriques took the title of king of Portugal after defeating a Muslim army at Ourique, asserting the county's break from the kingdom of Leon.


Recognition of autonomy at Zamora

Summary: Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile accepted the autonomy of Afonso Henriques, an early step toward the recognised independence of Portugal.


Capture of Lisbon

Summary: Afonso Henriques took Santarem and then Lisbon from the Muslims, the latter with the help of crusaders sailing to the Holy Land, advancing the Reconquista to the Tagus.


Papal recognition in Manifestis Probatum

Summary: Pope Alexander III confirmed Afonso Henriques as king and recognised Portugal as an independent kingdom under the protection of the Holy See, the founding act of Portuguese sovereignty.


Treaty of Alcanices

Summary: King Dinis and Ferdinand IV of Castile confirmed Portuguese possession of the Algarve and fixed the frontier, creating one of the oldest stable borders in Europe.


Capture of Ceuta

Summary: Portuguese forces took the North African port of Ceuta, the starting point of overseas expansion and of Prince Henry's interest in exploring the African coast.


Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope

Summary: Bartolomeu Dias led the first European expedition to round the southern tip of Africa, showing that the Atlantic and Indian oceans were connected and opening the route to Asia.


Treaty of Tordesillas

Summary: Portugal and Castile divided the unexplored world along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, an agreement that underpinned Portugal's claim to Brazil.


Vasco da Gama reaches India

Summary: Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut, completing the sea route from western Europe to India and inaugurating direct trade with Asia.


Cabral reaches Brazil

Summary: A fleet under Pedro Alvares Cabral, en route to India, made landfall on the coast of Brazil and claimed it for the Portuguese crown.


Disaster at Alcacer Quibir

Summary: King Sebastian was killed leading a crusade into Morocco, triggering the succession crisis that opened the way to Spanish rule.


Iberian Union under Philip II

Summary: Philip II of Spain occupied Portugal and was accepted as king by the Cortes at Tomar in 1581, uniting the two crowns for sixty years.


Restoration and the House of Braganza

Summary: A nationalist revolution proclaimed the duke of Braganza as King John IV, restoring Portuguese independence and founding the Braganza dynasty.


Spain recognises independence

Summary: By the Treaty of Lisbon, Spain at last acknowledged Portuguese sovereignty, ending the war of Restoration begun in 1640.


The great Lisbon earthquake

Summary: An earthquake, tsunami and fire destroyed much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands, prompting the reconstruction and reforms directed by the Marquis of Pombal.


Court flees to Brazil

Summary: As a French army invaded, the prince regent and royal court sailed for Brazil under British escort, moving the seat of the Portuguese monarchy to Rio de Janeiro.


The Peninsular War

Summary: British, Portuguese and Spanish forces fought the French in the Iberian Peninsula, eventually expelling Napoleon's armies from Portugal and Spain.


Independence of Brazil

Summary: Pedro, regent and son of John VI, declared Brazil independent and became its emperor, ending Portugal's rule over its largest and wealthiest colony.


Salazar and the Estado Novo

Summary: Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, prime minister from 1932, built an authoritarian corporative dictatorship, the Estado Novo, that ruled Portugal for over four decades.


The Olivenca dispute

Summary: Spain occupied Olivenca in 1801 and acquired it by the Treaty of Badajoz; the Congress of Vienna recommended its return to Portugal in 1815, but the sovereignty remains contested.


The Carnation Revolution

Summary: Officers of the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the Estado Novo in a nearly bloodless coup, ending the dictatorship and beginning Portugal's transition to democracy.


Decolonisation of the African empire

Summary: Following the revolution, Portugal's African colonies, including Angola and Mozambique, became independent in 1975, ending an empire begun in 1415.


Accession to the European Communities

Summary: Portugal joined the European Communities on 1 January 1986, together with Spain, anchoring its democracy in European integration.


The Savage Islands maritime dispute

Summary: Spain disputed the exclusive economic zone Portugal claims around the Savage Islands, contending that the islets are rocks under the law of the sea, an issue examined in US State Department maritime studies.


Peopling of the river basins

Summary: Indigenous peoples occupy the basins of the Parana and Paraguay rivers over many millennia, with Guarani-speaking farming and forest peoples coming to predominate in the historic era.


Founding of Asuncion

Summary: Spaniards complete a stockade on the Paraguay River on the feast of the Assumption, founding Asuncion, the 'mother of cities' from which much of the south was settled.


Asuncion becomes the Spanish base

Summary: After the first Buenos Aires is abandoned, its survivors flee to Asuncion, which becomes the headquarters of Spanish colonial activity in eastern South America.


The Jesuit reducciones

Summary: The Jesuits gather up to 150,000 Guarani into some thirty mission towns in the Parana and Uruguay basins, blending Indigenous labour with Christian instruction and Baroque art.


Treaty of Madrid and the Guarani War

Summary: A planned transfer of seven mission towns to Portugal provokes Guarani resistance and a Spanish-Portuguese campaign, hardening official hostility to the Jesuits.


Expulsion of the Jesuits

Summary: Charles III expels the Jesuits from Spanish America; the Guarani missions are abandoned and fall into ruin, their populations scattered.


Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata

Summary: The new viceroyalty centred on Buenos Aires makes Asuncion and Paraguay dependent on the river port, feeding Paraguayan resentment of its decline.


Independence from Spain

Summary: Paraguayan officers depose the Spanish governor at Asuncion without bloodshed, ending colonial rule; a republic is proclaimed in 1813.


The dictatorship of Dr Francia

Summary: Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia rules as Supreme Dictator, sealing Paraguay off from the world in near-total isolation until his death.


Carlos Antonio Lopez modernises Paraguay

Summary: Ending Francia's isolation, Carlos Antonio Lopez opens the country, signs commercial treaties, and builds railways, foundries and schools while enlarging the army.


Francisco Solano Lopez takes power

Summary: On his father's death, Francisco Solano Lopez becomes leader, inheriting a large army and ambitions that would soon plunge Paraguay into war.


Paraguay invades Mato Grosso

Summary: Francisco Solano Lopez opens hostilities by invading the Brazilian province of Mato Grosso, the first move in a war that would soon include Argentina and Uruguay.


Treaty of the Triple Alliance

Summary: Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay sign a secret alliance against Paraguay, committing to wage war until the fall of Lopez.


Battle of Tuyuti

Summary: The allies inflict a heavy defeat on Paraguay at Tuyuti, one of the largest battles of the war, beginning the slow destruction of Lopez's army.


Death of Lopez at Cerro Cora

Summary: Brazilian troops kill Francisco Solano Lopez at Cerro Cora, ending the war; Paraguay has lost territory and a vast, disputed share of its population (figures are estimates).


Rebuilding and the party system

Summary: Paraguay slowly rebuilds after the war as foreign capital returns and land is sold off; the Colorado and Liberal parties emerge to dominate national politics.


The Chaco War

Summary: Paraguay and Bolivia fight a costly war over the Gran Chaco; about 100,000 men die before a 1935 truce, with most of the region awarded to Paraguay by the 1938 treaty.


Paraguayan Civil War

Summary: A brief, bloody civil war ends in victory for the Colorado Party, entrenching one-party dominance and clearing the path to authoritarian rule.


Stroessner seizes power

Summary: General Alfredo Stroessner overthrows President Federico Chaves and assumes the presidency, beginning a thirty-five-year dictatorship under the Colorado Party.


Itaipu dam begins generating

Summary: The binational Itaipu hydroelectric dam on the Parana, built with Brazil under a 1973 treaty, starts producing power, transforming Paraguay's economy.


Overthrow of Stroessner

Summary: General Andres Rodriguez ousts Stroessner in a coup and wins elections later that year, opening Paraguay's transition to democracy.


New democratic constitution

Summary: A Constituent Assembly enacts a constitution establishing a presidential republic and making Guarani co-official with Spanish.


First opposition victory

Summary: Former bishop Fernando Lugo wins the presidency, ending more than sixty years of Colorado Party rule in Paraguay's first electoral transfer of power between parties.


Canaanite city-states of the Bronze Age

Summary: Walled Canaanite towns flourished across the southern Levant, trading with Egypt and Mesopotamia and forming the region's earliest urban civilisation.


Arrival of the Philistines

Summary: The Philistines settled the southern coastal plain, founding cities such as Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ashdod; their name would later give the land the name 'Palestine'.


Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem

Summary: Neo-Babylonian forces under Nebuchadnezzar II captured Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple, deporting much of the population to Babylon.


Persian rule under the Achaemenids

Summary: Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and incorporated the region into the Persian Empire, permitting exiled communities to return.


Hellenistic conquest

Summary: Alexander the Great's conquest brought the region into the Hellenistic world of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms.


Roman conquest

Summary: The Roman general Pompey took Jerusalem, bringing the region under Roman authority as the province of Judaea.


Province renamed Syria Palaestina

Summary: After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, the emperor Hadrian renamed the province Syria Palaestina, formalising the name 'Palestine' in Roman administration.


A Christian holy land

Summary: Following Constantine's conversion, Palestine became a centre of Christian pilgrimage; churches were built over sites venerated as those of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection.


Arab Muslim conquest of Jerusalem

Summary: Jerusalem surrendered to the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, beginning nearly a millennium of predominantly Islamic rule and the region's gradual Arabisation.


Building of the Dome of the Rock

Summary: The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, an early masterpiece of Islamic architecture on the Haram al-Sharif.


Crusaders capture Jerusalem

Summary: The First Crusade seized Jerusalem and founded the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, holding the city until 1187.


Saladin retakes Jerusalem

Summary: Saladin, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, defeated the Crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem, largely ending Crusader rule over the city.


Mamluk rule established

Summary: The Mamluk sultanate of Egypt expelled the last Crusaders from the Levant and governed Palestine until the Ottoman conquest.


Ottoman conquest

Summary: Sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks and incorporated Palestine into the Ottoman Empire, beginning four centuries of Ottoman rule.


First waves of Zionist immigration

Summary: From the 1880s organised Jewish immigration (the aliyot) began establishing agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine, driven by persecution in Europe and an emerging national idea.


First Zionist Congress

Summary: Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, founding the World Zionist Organization and adopting the aim of a Jewish national home in Palestine.


Balfour Declaration

Summary: Britain declared its support for a Jewish national home in Palestine while affirming the rights of the existing, overwhelmingly Arab, non-Jewish communities.


British Mandate for Palestine

Summary: The League of Nations entrusted Britain with governing Palestine; the Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration's commitment to a Jewish national home.


Arab Revolt in Palestine

Summary: A sustained Palestinian Arab uprising against British rule and Zionist immigration was suppressed with great severity, leaving Palestinian society weakened.


UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181)

Summary: The UN General Assembly recommended partition into Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem internationalised; accepted by Zionist leaders and rejected by Palestinian and Arab leaders.


The Nakba

Summary: During the war surrounding Israel's establishment, around 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled and, per UN figures, more than 500 villages were depopulated and destroyed.


Founding of the PLO

Summary: The Palestine Liberation Organization was established as the umbrella body of the Palestinian national movement, later led by Yasser Arafat.


Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza

Summary: In the Six-Day War Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, placing most Palestinians under a military occupation that endures.


First Intifada

Summary: A sustained popular uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza brought the Palestinian cause to renewed international attention.


Declaration of the State of Palestine

Summary: The Palestinian National Council in Algiers, chaired by Yasser Arafat, proclaimed the independent State of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.


Oslo Accords

Summary: Israel and the PLO exchanged mutual recognition and agreed a framework for Palestinian interim self-government, creating the Palestinian Authority.


Second Intifada

Summary: A second Palestinian uprising brought years of violence and Israeli military operations, ending the optimism of the Oslo era.


Blockade of the Gaza Strip

Summary: After Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade restricting the movement of people and goods, with severe humanitarian consequences.


UN recognition as non-member observer state

Summary: The UN General Assembly, by resolution 67/19, recognised the State of Palestine as a non-member observer state by 138 votes to 9 with 41 abstentions.


The Gaza war

Summary: After a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people, Israel launched a massive campaign in Gaza; by Gaza Health Ministry figures cited by the UN, tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed.


ICJ provisional-measures order in South Africa v. Israel

Summary: The International Court of Justice found at least some rights under the Genocide Convention plausible and a real and imminent risk to them, ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts; the case remains under adjudication.


UN Special Rapporteur's 'Anatomy of a Genocide'

Summary: UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese reported reasonable grounds to believe genocide was being committed against Palestinians in Gaza (A/HRC/55/73).


Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch findings

Summary: Amnesty International (5 December) concluded Israel was committing genocide; Human Rights Watch (19 December) found acts of genocide and the crime against humanity of extermination.


UN Commission of Inquiry finds genocide

Summary: The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that Israel had committed genocide in the Gaza Strip; Israel rejected the findings.


Pearling and fishing villages on the Gulf coast

Summary: The peninsula's people lived from pearl diving, fishing and seasonal Bedouin herding, with pearls the great export carried across the Indian Ocean and Arabia from the early Islamic period and earlier.


Founding of Al Zubarah

Summary: Families migrating from Kuwait, including the Al Khalifa, settled the northwest coast and built Al Zubarah, which grew into a flourishing walled pearling and trading town.


Destruction of Al Zubarah

Summary: After attacks by rival Gulf powers, the thriving town of Al Zubarah was burned to the ground; it fell into decline and was abandoned by the early 20th century.


Bahraini attack and the Qatari-Bahraini conflict

Summary: Forces from Bahrain and its allies attacked Al Wakrah and Al Bidda, an assault the British viewed as a breach of Gulf agreements and that sharpened Qatar's sense of separate identity.


British agreement with Sheikh Mohammed bin Thani

Summary: Colonel Lewis Pelly concluded a separate agreement with Mohammed bin Thani, widely taken to mark Qatar's emergence as a distinct entity and the rise of Al Thani rule.


Ottoman garrison established

Summary: The Ottoman Empire extended its presence into eastern Arabia and placed a garrison on the Qatari peninsula, beginning several decades of nominal Ottoman authority.


Sheikh Jassim succeeds as ruler

Summary: Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani formally succeeded his father, an event commemorated as Qatar's National Day and marking the consolidation of the tribes under Al Thani leadership.


Battle of Al Wajba

Summary: Sheikh Jassim's tribal forces defeated an Ottoman expedition at Al Wajba, forcing the release of Qatari captives in a victory remembered as a key assertion of Qatari autonomy.


Anglo-Qatari Treaty: British protectorate

Summary: Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim signed a treaty (ratified 1918) placing Qatar under British protection in exchange for foregoing relations and concessions with other powers without British consent.


First oil concession signed

Summary: Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim granted an oil concession, opening Qatar to the exploration that would lead to the discovery of oil within a few years.


Oil discovered at Dukhan

Summary: Following the 1935 concession, oil was discovered at the Dukhan field, though development stalled during the Second World War.


First oil exports begin

Summary: Commercial export of Dukhan crude began in 1949, starting the transformation of an economy battered by the collapse of the pearl trade in the 1930s.


Independence from Britain

Summary: Qatar declared independence from Great Britain, ending the protectorate established in 1916; the United States recognised the new State of Qatar on 5 September 1971.


Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa takes power

Summary: Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani became emir in 1995, launching reforms and the development of Qatar's natural gas wealth that would make it one of the richest states in the world.


Al Jazeera launched

Summary: Qatar founded Al Jazeera, the first independent Arabic-language satellite news channel, broadcasting from Doha and giving the small state global reach and influence.


North Field LNG development

Summary: Qatar invested heavily in liquefied natural gas from its offshore North Field, becoming the world's leading LNG exporter and reaching among the highest per-capita incomes globally.


Hamad abdicates in favour of Tamim

Summary: In a transfer of power unusual for the Gulf, Sheikh Hamad abdicated in favour of his son Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, then 33, to make way for a new generation.


Sheikh Tamim becomes emir

Summary: Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani succeeded his father as emir of Qatar, having earlier overseen the country's successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup.


Blockade by neighbouring states

Summary: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt cut ties and imposed a land, sea and air blockade, accusing Qatar of supporting terrorism; Qatar rejected their thirteen demands as a breach of its sovereignty.


Al Ula declaration ends the blockade

Summary: At the GCC summit in Al Ula, the parties signed a solidarity and stability agreement restoring relations and reopening routes, ending the nearly four-year dispute.


Qatar hosts the FIFA World Cup

Summary: Qatar staged the FIFA World Cup, the first in an Arab and Muslim country, after a decade of major infrastructure investment, drawing both global celebration and scrutiny.


The Dacian kingdom

Summary: The Dacians built a powerful kingdom in the Carpathian arc, fortified by stone strongholds in the Orastie Mountains with their capital at Sarmizegetusa Regia, the nucleus of Dacian power.


Trajan's first Dacian war

Summary: The emperor Trajan invaded Dacia and forced King Decebalus to terms, installing a Roman garrison in the Dacian capital at Sarmizegetusa.


Conquest of Dacia and the Roman province

Summary: In a second war Trajan subdued the whole country; Decebalus killed himself, and Dacia became a Roman province whose colonists made Latin its language, the root of Romanian.


Trajan's Column commemorates the conquest

Summary: The Dacian wars were commemorated in Rome on Trajan's Column, a 38-metre marble monument whose spiral frieze of more than 2,600 figures narrates the two campaigns against the Dacians.


Aurelian abandons Dacia

Summary: Under mounting frontier pressure the emperor Aurelian withdrew the Roman army and administration from Dacia, yet a Latin-speaking population persisted, carrying forward the Daco-Roman heritage.


Basarab I founds Wallachia

Summary: The voivode Basarab I defeated King Charles I of Hungary at Posada, winning recognition of Wallachia's autonomy and establishing the first Romanian principality.


Bogdan I founds Moldavia

Summary: The Vlach voivode Bogdan I crossed the Carpathians from Maramures and wrenched Moldavia from Hungarian vassalage, founding the second Romanian principality.


Stephen the Great's victory at Vaslui

Summary: Stephen the Great of Moldavia crushed a much larger Ottoman army at Vaslui, one of his celebrated victories in a long resistance to the Turks that won him renown across Christian Europe.


Vlad III the Impaler resists the Ottomans

Summary: Vlad III of Wallachia, remembered for impaling his enemies, fought a savage campaign against Ottoman power; his reputation later inspired the literary figure of Dracula.


The Phanariot regime

Summary: Under Ottoman suzerainty the Porte appointed the princes of Wallachia and Moldavia from among the Greek Phanariot families of Constantinople, a period of heavy tribute and misrule that lasted until 1821.


Horezu Monastery and Brancovan art

Summary: Prince Constantin Brancoveanu founded the monastery of Horezu in Wallachia, a masterpiece of the 'Brancovan' style whose school of mural and icon painting influenced religious art across the Balkans.


Union of the Principalities

Summary: Moldavia (5 January) and Wallachia (24 January) elected Alexandru Ioan Cuza as their common prince, uniting the two principalities and founding the modern Romanian state.


Cuza's reforms

Summary: Prince Cuza carried through agrarian reform giving land to some 400,000 peasant families, reformed law and taxation, introduced the metric system and a French-modelled civil code.


Independence recognised at the Congress of Berlin

Summary: After fighting in the Russo-Turkish War, Romania's full independence was recognised by the great powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, though it ceded southern Bessarabia to Russia.


Kingdom of Romania proclaimed

Summary: Romania was proclaimed a kingdom and Carol I, prince since 1866, became its first king, completing the country's emergence as a sovereign European state.


Romania enters the First World War

Summary: Romania joined the Allies in 1916 seeking the Romanian lands of Austria-Hungary, especially Transylvania; despite early defeats, the collapse of the empires opened the way to union.


Union of Transylvania with Romania

Summary: A great national assembly of Romanians at Alba Iulia proclaimed the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania, the central act in the creation of Greater Romania.


Greater Romania

Summary: With Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania joined to the kingdom, Romania nearly doubled in size, gaining large Hungarian and German minorities within its enlarged borders.


Treaty of Trianon

Summary: The Treaty of Trianon formally transferred Transylvania and part of the Banat from Hungary to Romania, stripping Hungary of about two-thirds of its territory and leaving a lasting dispute.


Soviet seizure of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina

Summary: The Soviet Union demanded and took Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania, the first of the 1940 territorial losses; Bessarabia, largely Romanian-speaking, became the core of the later Republic of Moldova.


Second Vienna Award and Southern Dobruja

Summary: Under German and Italian arbitration Romania ceded northern Transylvania to Hungary; in September southern Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria, costing Romania about 30% of its territory and people.


Romania joins the Axis

Summary: After the loss of King Carol II's throne, General Ion Antonescu took power and brought Romania into the Axis, later joining the war against the Soviet Union and presiding over the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma.


Communist takeover and the People's Republic

Summary: After the war Romania was drawn into the Soviet bloc; the Paris treaty restored northern Transylvania, but Bessarabia stayed Soviet, the monarchy was abolished and a communist People's Republic proclaimed.


The Ceausescu dictatorship

Summary: Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania from 1965, pursuing a foreign policy independent of Moscow while imposing a personality cult, pervasive secret-police control and harsh 1980s austerity.


The Romanian Revolution

Summary: Protests beginning in Timisoara spread to Bucharest; the army turned against the regime, the Ceausescus fled on 22 December and were executed on 25 December 1989, ending communist rule.


Romania joins NATO

Summary: Romania formally joined NATO on 29 March 2004, depositing its instrument of accession in Washington alongside six other new members in the alliance's largest round of enlargement.


Accession to the European Union

Summary: On 1 January 2007 Romania, with Bulgaria, joined the European Union, raising it to twenty-seven member states and completing Romania's integration into the West.


Moldova's independence and the Romanian bond

Summary: As the Soviet Union dissolved, the former Bessarabia declared independence as the Republic of Moldova, immediately recognised by Romania, with which it shares the Romanian language and a common history.


ICJ Black Sea boundary with Ukraine

Summary: The International Court of Justice fixed the Romania–Ukraine maritime boundary in the Black Sea, ruling that Ukraine's Serpents' Island would have no effect beyond its 12-mile territorial sea.


Oleg seizes Kiev and founds Kievan Rus'

Summary: The Varangian prince Oleg, successor to Rurik of Novgorod, captures Kiev and makes it his capital, uniting the river towns of the Dnieper-Volkhov route into the first East Slavic state.


Vladimir the Great adopts Orthodox Christianity

Summary: Vladimir of Kiev is baptized and orders the mass baptism of his people in the Dnieper, adopting Byzantine Orthodox Christianity as the state religion and binding the Rus' to Constantinople's faith and culture.


Yaroslav the Wise and the Russkaya Pravda

Summary: Under Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus' reaches a cultural peak; he issues the Russkaya Pravda, the earliest East Slavic written law code, and patronizes churches and learning in Kiev.


Mongol invasion and the fall of Kiev

Summary: Batu Khan's Mongol army sacks the Rus' principalities, destroying Ryazan and Vladimir and storming Kiev in December 1240; the Russian lands become tributaries of the Golden Horde.


The Great Stand on the Ugra ends the Mongol yoke

Summary: Ivan III, having stopped paying tribute, faces down the Great Horde at the Ugra River; the bloodless standoff is traditionally regarded as the end of Mongol overlordship and the rise of a sovereign Muscovite state.


Ivan IV crowned first Tsar of All Russia

Summary: Ivan IV is crowned 'Tsar of All Russia' in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin, becoming the first Russian ruler to hold the imperial title and converting the Grand Principality of Moscow into the Tsardom of Russia.


Conquest of the Khanate of Kazan

Summary: Ivan IV captures Kazan, and in 1556 Astrakhan, destroying the successor states of the Golden Horde on the Volga and opening the river and the route to Siberia to Russian colonization.


The Time of Troubles

Summary: After the Rurikid line dies out, Russia descends into the Time of Troubles, a period of famine, civil war, pretenders, and Polish occupation of Moscow that nearly destroys the Russian state.


Michael Romanov elected tsar

Summary: A national assembly (Zemsky Sobor) elects sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov as tsar, ending the Time of Troubles and founding the Romanov dynasty that will rule Russia for three centuries.


Russian explorers reach the Pacific

Summary: Cossacks and fur traders crossing Siberia reach the Pacific coast, extending the Russian state across northern Asia and giving it a vast Eurasian dominion within a single century of expansion.


Peter the Great proclaims the Russian Empire

Summary: After victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War and the Treaty of Nystad, the Senate proclaims Peter I 'Emperor of All Russia,' transforming the Tsardom into the Russian Empire and confirming Russia as a European great power.


The reign of Catherine the Great

Summary: Catherine II expands the empire to the Black Sea and through the three Partitions of Poland, patronizes the arts and Enlightenment ideas, and founds the Hermitage collection, while serfdom reaches its most oppressive extent.


Napoleon's invasion and retreat from Moscow

Summary: Napoleon's Grande Armee invades Russia and reaches a burning Moscow, but is destroyed by attrition, scorched earth, and the Russian winter; the catastrophe makes Russia a leading power of post-Napoleonic Europe.


Emancipation of the serfs

Summary: Tsar Alexander II issues the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing more than twenty million serfs of the Russian Empire; the landmark reform grants legal freedom but leaves peasants burdened by redemption payments and land hunger.


The Revolution of 1905

Summary: Defeat by Japan and the 'Bloody Sunday' shooting of demonstrators spark strikes, mutinies, and unrest across the empire, forcing Nicholas II to grant a parliament (Duma) and limited civil liberties in the October Manifesto.


February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II

Summary: Bread riots, strikes, and a garrison mutiny in Petrograd force Nicholas II to abdicate, ending the Romanov dynasty and over three centuries of tsarist rule; a Provisional Government takes power alongside the Petrograd Soviet.


The October Revolution

Summary: Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrow the Provisional Government in a near-bloodless coup in Petrograd, proclaim a government of soviets, and establish the world's first communist state, withdrawing Russia from the First World War.


Execution of the Romanov family

Summary: Bolshevik guards shoot and bayonet the deposed Nicholas II, his wife, their five children, and their servants in a cellar in Yekaterinburg, eliminating any rallying point for the monarchist cause.


The Russian Civil War

Summary: Trotsky's Red Army battles the anti-communist Whites, foreign interventionists, and nationalist forces in a devastating civil war marked by the Red Terror and mass famine, leaving millions dead before the Bolsheviks prevail.


Founding of the Soviet Union

Summary: The Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Transcaucasian Soviet republics formally unite to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a federal one-party communist state with its capital at Moscow.


The Holodomor and the Soviet famine

Summary: Forced collectivization and ruthless grain requisitioning produce a man-made famine across the USSR; in Ukraine the Holodomor kills an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people and is recognized by many countries as a genocide.


The Great Terror

Summary: Stalin's secret police carry out mass arrests, deportations, and executions; at least 750,000 people are shot in two years and millions more sent to the gulag, as old revolutionaries, officers, and ordinary citizens perish in the purges.


The Great Patriotic War

Summary: Nazi Germany's invasion of 22 June 1941 begins the war's deadliest theater; after the siege of Leningrad and the decisive victory at Stalingrad, Soviet forces reach Berlin in 1945 at a cost of roughly 27 million Soviet dead.


Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space

Summary: Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth aboard Vostok 1, a triumph of the Soviet space program that followed the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and symbolized Soviet scientific power in the Cold War.


Dissolution of the Soviet Union

Summary: Weakened by economic stagnation, nationalist movements, and a failed August coup, the USSR is dissolved; Mikhail Gorbachev resigns on 25 December 1991 and the Soviet flag is lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.


Birth of the Russian Federation

Summary: As the USSR dissolves, the Russian Federation becomes its principal successor state, inheriting the Soviet UN Security Council seat and nuclear arsenal, with Boris Yeltsin as its first president.


Constitutional crisis and new constitution

Summary: A standoff between President Yeltsin and parliament ends with the army shelling the legislature; a referendum in December 1993 adopts a new constitution that concentrates power in a strong presidency.


Vladimir Putin becomes president

Summary: After Yeltsin's resignation, Vladimir Putin wins the presidency and, aided by rising oil and gas revenues, stabilizes the economy while progressively centralizing political power and curbing independent media.


Annexation of Crimea

Summary: Following the fall of Ukraine's pro-Russian president, Russian forces seize Crimea and Moscow annexes the peninsula, an action recognized by almost no other state, while Russia backs separatists in eastern Ukraine.


Full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Summary: Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since 1945, prompting sweeping Western sanctions, international isolation, and an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for President Putin.


Clans coalesce into kingdoms

Summary: Across the highlands, clans containing Hutu, Tutsi and Twa form into small kingdoms; the Nyiginya dynasty of the Tutsi begins to extend its authority, founding the kingdom of Rwanda.


A centralised Tutsi-led state

Summary: A single kingdom under a Tutsi mwami controls much of present-day Rwanda, governing through clan chiefs and cattle-clientship arrangements such as ubuhake.


Reign of Kigeri IV Rwabugiri

Summary: Mwami Kigeri IV Rwabugiri expands the kingdom through military conquest and administrative reform toward Lake Kivu, marking the high point of precolonial Rwandan power.


Death of Rwabugiri

Summary: Rwabugiri dies during a campaign, just as European powers reach the central African interior; a disputed succession leaves the kingdom weakened on the eve of colonial rule.


First European contact

Summary: The German explorer Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen reaches the Rwandan court; Rwanda is incorporated into German East Africa and ruled indirectly through the mwami.


Belgium occupies Rwanda

Summary: Belgian forces take Rwanda from Germany during the First World War; from 1922 it is governed with Burundi as Ruanda-Urundi under a League of Nations mandate.


Belgians depose Mwami Musinga

Summary: The Belgian administration removes the uncooperative King Yuhi V Musinga and installs his son Mutara III Rudahigwa, tightening colonial control over the monarchy.


Ethnic identity cards introduced

Summary: Belgium issues identity cards classifying every Rwandan as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, fixing a once-fluid social distinction into a rigid, inherited racial category.


The Hutu Manifesto

Summary: Hutu leaders publish the 'Hutu Manifesto' demanding an end to Tutsi domination; Belgian authorities and the Church begin to favour the Hutu majority over the Tutsi elite.


The Hutu 'Social Revolution'

Summary: A Hutu uprising, tolerated by the Belgian authorities, kills hundreds of Tutsi and drives many into exile, breaking the power of the Tutsi monarchy.


Monarchy abolished by referendum

Summary: A UN-supervised referendum abolishes the monarchy and rejects King Kigeri V; Grégoire Kayibanda's Parmehutu wins the concurrent elections.


Independence from Belgium

Summary: Rwanda becomes a sovereign republic with Grégoire Kayibanda as first president, ending Belgian rule of Ruanda-Urundi; Burundi gains independence the same day.


Reprisals against the Tutsi

Summary: An incursion by Tutsi exiles is met with mass killings of Tutsi civilians and a further exodus, setting a pattern of cyclical anti-Tutsi violence.


Habyarimana seizes power

Summary: Defence minister Juvénal Habyarimana overthrows President Kayibanda in a coup and establishes a one-party state under the MRND.


RPF invasion begins the civil war

Summary: The Rwandan Patriotic Front, composed largely of Tutsi exiles from Uganda, invades northern Rwanda, igniting a civil war and intensifying official anti-Tutsi propaganda.


Arusha Accords signed

Summary: Government and RPF sign the Arusha peace agreement promising power-sharing and refugee return; a UN force (UNAMIR) deploys, but extremists reject the deal and plan genocide.


Habyarimana's plane shot down

Summary: A surface-to-air missile downs the plane carrying President Habyarimana and Burundi's president over Kigali, killing all aboard; extremists seize on it to unleash the genocide.


The killing begins

Summary: Within hours of the plane crash, the Presidential Guard and Interahamwe militias begin murdering Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Kigali, using roadblocks and prepared lists; the violence spreads nationwide.


Genocide against the Tutsi

Summary: Over roughly 100 days an estimated 800,000 to one million people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, are systematically murdered, and an estimated 150,000–250,000 women are raped.

RWA:un-prevent-genocide RWA:un-historical-background RWA:ushmm-massacre RWA:ictr-genocide


RPF victory ends the genocide

Summary: Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front captures Kigali and most of the country by mid-July, defeating the genocidal regime and halting the mass killing.


Refugee crisis and the Congo wars

Summary: Over a million Hutu flee to camps in Zaire and beyond; the presence of armed génocidaires there draws Rwanda into the Congo wars from 1996, which kill millions across the region.


International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Summary: The UN Security Council establishes the ICTR in Arusha, which indicts 93 people and delivers landmark genocide convictions before closing in 2015.


The gacaca community courts

Summary: Rwanda revives the traditional gacaca courts to try genocide cases locally; by their closure in June 2012 they have heard more than 1.9 million cases.


Kagame becomes president

Summary: Paul Kagame formally assumes the presidency and consolidates power, presiding over reconstruction and growth alongside tight control of political life.


The Dilmun trading culture flourishes

Summary: Around the eastern shores of the Arabian Peninsula, the Dilmun culture became a hub linking Mesopotamia with the Indus valley, remembered in Sumerian literature as a land of prosperity and long life.


The kingdom of Lihyan rises at Dadan

Summary: The Lihyanite kingdom, centered on Dadan in the AlUla region, grew wealthy from the incense trade and tribute, developing its own language, script, and irrigated agriculture.


The Nabataeans make Hegra their southern capital

Summary: The Nabataean kingdom extended south and developed Hegra (al-Hijr) as a major caravan city, carving monumental rock-cut tombs that survive as the second-largest Nabataean site after Petra.


Rome annexes the Nabataean kingdom

Summary: The Roman Empire absorbed the Nabataean realm, after which Hegra and the northern caravan cities gradually declined as trade routes shifted.


Birth of Muhammad in Mecca

Summary: Muhammad was born in Mecca into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh, the tribe that controlled the pilgrimage sanctuary of the Kaaba.


The first revelations

Summary: According to Islamic tradition Muhammad, at about forty, began receiving revelations through the angel Gabriel, proclaiming a strict monotheism that would form the Quran.


The Hijra to Medina

Summary: Facing persecution, Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina), founding the first Muslim community; the event marks year one of the Islamic calendar.


The submission of Mecca

Summary: Muhammad returned to Mecca largely without bloodshed, cleansed the Kaaba of idols, and established Islam across much of the Hejaz.


Death of Muhammad

Summary: By the Prophet's death much of the Arabian Peninsula had embraced Islam, leaving Mecca and Medina as the enduring holy cities of the faith.


Medina as capital of the early caliphate

Summary: Under the first (Rashidun) caliphs, Medina served as the capital of an expanding Muslim empire before power shifted away from Arabia.


Umayyad and Abbasid rule over the Hejaz

Summary: The Umayyads shifted the empire's capital to Damascus and the Abbasids later ruled from Baghdad, leaving Arabia politically peripheral while Mecca and Medina remained its religious centre.


The Sharifate of Mecca takes shape

Summary: A line of sharifs descended from the Prophet came to administer Mecca and the Hejaz, holding local authority for nearly a thousand years under shifting overlords.


Ottoman suzerainty over the Hejaz

Summary: After defeating the Mamluks, the Ottomans gained sovereignty over the holy cities; the Sharif of Mecca recognized the Ottoman sultan as caliph while retaining local power.


The Diriyah pact founds the First Saudi State

Summary: Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of Diriyah, and the reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab formed an alliance joining political power and religious revival, the foundation of the first Saudi state.


The Ottoman-Egyptian campaign against the Saudis

Summary: On behalf of the Ottoman sultan, the Egyptian forces of Muhammad Ali Pasha waged war on the expanding First Saudi State, driving it from the holy cities and into the Najdi heartland.


The fall and destruction of Diriyah

Summary: After a months-long siege Ibrahim Pasha took Diriyah in September 1818 and razed it, ending the First Saudi State; the last imam was executed in Constantinople.


Turki ibn Abdullah founds the Second Saudi State

Summary: Turki ibn Abdullah Al Saud expelled the occupying garrisons, re-established Saudi rule, and made Riyadh the capital of a revived but smaller state.


The Al Rashid end the Second Saudi State

Summary: Weakened by internal feuds, the second state fell to the rival Al Rashid of Hail, who drove the Al Saud into exile in Kuwait.


Abdulaziz captures Riyadh

Summary: Returning from exile, Abdulaziz ibn Saud and a small force seized the Masmak fortress in Riyadh from the Al Rashid, launching the campaign to rebuild the Saudi state.


Conquest of the Hejaz and the holy cities

Summary: Abdulaziz's forces took Mecca and Medina, ending Hashemite rule in the Hejaz and bringing the holy cities under Saudi control.


The Treaty of Jeddah

Summary: Britain formally recognized the independence and sovereignty of Ibn Saud's Kingdom of the Hejaz and Nejd, securing its international standing.


Proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Summary: By royal decree the regions of Najd and the Hejaz were unified and renamed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with Abdulaziz ibn Saud as its first king.


The oil concession is granted

Summary: Abdulaziz granted an oil exploration concession to the Standard Oil Company of California, the agreement that would become the basis of Aramco.


Oil struck at Dammam Well No. 7

Summary: Commercial quantities of oil were discovered at Dammam Well No. 7 in March 1938, the find that transformed Saudi Arabia's economy and the world energy market.


The Arab oil embargo

Summary: Under King Faisal, Saudi Arabia led Arab OPEC states in an embargo against supporters of Israel, sharply raising oil prices and demonstrating the kingdom's economic power.


Hegra becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Summary: The Nabataean site of Hegra (al-Hijr) was inscribed as Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing the kingdom's deep pre-Islamic past.


Vision 2030 is launched

Summary: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled Vision 2030, a program to diversify the economy beyond oil, grow the private sector and tourism, and reshape Saudi society.


The Kerma culture

Summary: The city-state of Kerma dominates the middle Nile, one of the earliest urban civilisations in sub-Saharan Africa and a rival of pharaonic Egypt.


Kush independent at Napata

Summary: As Egypt's New Kingdom collapses, Kush re-emerges as an independent kingdom centred on Napata, near Gebel Barkal.


Piye conquers Egypt — the 25th Dynasty

Summary: The Kushite king Piye (Piankhi) brings Egypt under Nubian rule, founding the 25th Dynasty of "Black Pharaohs"; Taharqa later reigns at its height.


Assyrians expel the Kushites from Egypt

Summary: Esarhaddon and then Ashurbanipal invade Egypt, driving the Kushite pharaohs back to Nubia by the 660s BCE.


Capital moves to Meroe

Summary: After Psamtik II of Egypt sacks Napata, the Kushite court shifts south to Meroe, beginning the Meroitic age of iron, script and pyramids.


Nubia converts to Christianity

Summary: Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia adopt Christianity, partly through missions linked to the Byzantine court; the Nubian Nile becomes a Christian realm.


The Baqt treaty

Summary: After repelling an Arab invasion, Makuria and Muslim Egypt agree to the Baqt, a durable pact of non-aggression and regulated trade.


Decline of Makuria

Summary: Under Mamluk pressure and Arab settlement, the Christian kingdom of Makuria fragments and its capital at Dongola is lost.


Fall of Alodia

Summary: The last Christian Nubian kingdom, Alodia, collapses as new Muslim powers rise on the central Nile, ending Nubian Christianity's long ascendancy.


Funj Sultanate founded at Sennar

Summary: Amara Dunqas establishes the Funj Sultanate, a Muslim confederation centred on Sennar on the Blue Nile.


Sultanate of Darfur founded

Summary: Sulayman Solong founds the Keira dynasty in the west; under Ahmad Bukr Islam becomes the state religion.


Sennar at its height

Summary: The Funj capital flourishes as one of the major trading cities of the African interior, dealing in gold, ivory and enslaved people.


Darfur's capital fixed at al-Fashir

Summary: The Keira sultans establish al-Fashir as their capital; Darfur controls caravan routes across the Sahara.


Turco-Egyptian conquest; Khartoum founded

Summary: Muhammad Ali's armies conquer the Sudan; Khartoum is founded c. 1821 at the junction of the Blue and White Niles as the seat of Egyptian rule.


Muhammad Ahmad proclaims himself the Mahdi

Summary: A religious teacher declares himself the awaited redeemer and launches a holy war against Turco-Egyptian rule.


Fall of Khartoum; death of Gordon

Summary: Mahdist forces storm Khartoum after a long siege and kill General Charles Gordon; the Mahdi dies months later.


Battle of Omdurman

Summary: Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army destroys the Khalifa's forces with overwhelming firepower, ending the Mahdist state.


Anglo-Egyptian Condominium established

Summary: Sudan is placed under joint British and Egyptian rule by the Condominium agreements of January and July 1899.


Independence of the Sudan

Summary: Sudan becomes a sovereign republic, ending Anglo-Egyptian rule; its parliament chooses independence over union with Egypt.


First civil war

Summary: Rebellion in the south, begun in 1955, grows into a 17-year war ended by the Addis Ababa Agreement of 27 February 1972, which grants southern autonomy.


Second civil war begins

Summary: Nimeiri scraps southern autonomy and imposes sharia; the SPLM/A under John Garang launches a war that kills an estimated two million people.


Bashir seizes power

Summary: Omar al-Bashir takes power in an Islamist-backed military coup, beginning a three-decade rule.


Comprehensive Peace Agreement

Summary: The 2005 accord ends the second civil war, grants the south autonomy, and promises a referendum on independence.


War in Darfur begins

Summary: Rebel attacks meet a government-backed Janjaweed campaign; UN estimates put the toll at about 300,000 dead and some three million displaced.


ICC indicts Bashir

Summary: The International Criminal Court issues warrants for President al-Bashir for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide — the first against a sitting head of state.


South Sudan secedes

Summary: After a referendum, South Sudan becomes independent, taking most of the former Sudan's oil with it.


Revolution ousts Bashir

Summary: Months of mass protests prompt the military to remove Omar al-Bashir after three decades in power.


War between SAF and RSF

Summary: Fighting erupts between the army under al-Burhan and the RSF under "Hemedti", spreading nationwide and causing mass death, displacement and famine.


Cattle-herding cultures in the Sudd

Summary: Archaeological evidence indicates transhumant cattle-raising societies established in the Sudd marshlands of the upper White Nile.


Nilotic expansion across the upper Nile

Summary: Western Nilotic peoples including the Dinka and Nuer spread out from the Sudd, a dispersal linked to the decline of the Christian Nubian kingdoms of Makuria and Alodia.


Founding of the Shilluk Kingdom

Summary: The Shilluk establish a centralised kingdom on the White Nile under the sacred kingship of the Reth, traditionally traced to the founder-figure Nyikang.


Fashoda made the Shilluk royal seat

Summary: King Tugo founds Fashoda as the permanent residence of the Shilluk kings, formalising the kingdom's investiture rituals and divine kingship.


Turco-Egyptian conquest reaches Sudan

Summary: Muhammad Ali's forces conquer the Funj lands and extend Egyptian rule up the Nile, seeking gold, ivory and slaves and making Khartoum the seat of administration.


Zariba slave and ivory raids

Summary: Armed traders such as al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur establish fortified zaribas across the south; contemporary estimates put captives taken at tens of thousands a year by the mid-1870s.


Equatoria province established

Summary: Samuel Baker is appointed governor of Equatoria, an Egyptian southern province later led by Charles Gordon, partly to suppress the slave trade.


Mahdist revolt and the fall of Khartoum

Summary: The Mahdist uprising overruns Sudan and captures Khartoum, ending Turco-Egyptian rule and bringing further upheaval to the southern Nile peoples.


Mahdist state crushed at Omdurman

Summary: An Anglo-Egyptian army defeats the Mahdist forces at Omdurman, clearing the way for the reconquest of Sudan, including the south.


Anglo-Egyptian Condominium established

Summary: Britain and Egypt establish joint rule over Sudan, with the largely Christian and traditionalist south administered separately from the Arab-Muslim north.


Closed District ordinances

Summary: Colonial 'closed district' rules restrict travel and trade between north and south, isolating the southern provinces and curbing northern and Arabic influence.


The Southern Policy formalised

Summary: A government memorandum directs administrators to develop the south as a distinct bloc, favouring local languages and English over Arabic and limiting northern contact.


Britain reverses course

Summary: Colonial authorities abandon the Southern Policy and move to unite the south with the north, without meaningful consultation of southerners.


Juba Conference

Summary: Northern and southern representatives meet at Juba to discuss the south's place in a future Sudan, but southern delegates have little leverage over the outcome.


Torit mutiny begins the First Civil War

Summary: Southern soldiers of the Equatorial Corps mutiny at Torit over fears of northern domination, an event marking the start of the First Sudanese Civil War.


Sudan's independence; the south sidelined

Summary: Sudan becomes independent under a northern-dominated government, with southern demands for federalism largely unmet.


Addis Ababa Agreement

Summary: The Addis Ababa Agreement ends the seventeen-year first war, granting the south a single autonomous region and integrating Anyanya fighters into Sudan's forces.


Second Civil War and the rise of the SPLM/SPLA

Summary: Khartoum abolishes southern autonomy and moves to impose sharia; the SPLM/SPLA forms under John Garang, beginning the Second Sudanese Civil War.


An estimated two million dead

Summary: Over more than two decades the war kills around two million people through combat, famine and disease and uproots millions, among the deadliest conflicts of its time.


Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed

Summary: Khartoum and the SPLM/SPLA sign the CPA, ending the second war and providing for southern autonomy and a self-determination referendum within six years.


Death of John Garang

Summary: Weeks after becoming Sudan's first vice-president, John Garang dies in a helicopter crash; Salva Kiir Mayardit succeeds him as SPLM leader and southern president.


Self-determination referendum

Summary: In a week-long vote, 98.83% of southern Sudanese choose independence on a turnout of about 99%.


Independence of South Sudan

Summary: At midnight on 9 July 2011 South Sudan becomes an independent state, the world's newest widely recognised nation, recognised the same day by the United States and others.


Admission to the United Nations

Summary: South Sudan is admitted as the 193rd member state of the United Nations, and soon after joins the African Union.


Civil war erupts in Juba

Summary: A power struggle between President Salva Kiir and former vice-president Riek Machar ignites fighting in Juba that spreads nationwide and takes on an ethnic character.


Famine declared in Unity state

Summary: The UN declares famine in parts of Unity state, with millions needing emergency aid; experts warn that famine used as a weapon of war may be an international crime.


An estimated 383,000 dead

Summary: A London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine study estimates about 383,000 conflict-related deaths by April 2018, roughly half from direct violence.


Revitalised peace agreement (R-ARCSS)

Summary: After repeated failed ceasefires, the government and opposition sign the R-ARCSS, providing for a unified army, a new constitution and elections.


Unity government formed

Summary: A Revitalised Transitional Government of National Unity is sworn in, with Riek Machar again first vice-president under President Salva Kiir, though the peace remains fragile.


Islam reaches the Senegal River

Summary: North African Muslim traders introduce Islam to the peoples of the Senegal valley well before any ruler adopts it officially.


War Jabi adopts Islamic law in Takrur

Summary: King War Jabi of Takrur is recorded as making Sharia official, by tradition the first Sahelian ruler to do so, anchoring Islam in the region.


Takruri forces and the Almoravids

Summary: Takrur aligns with the Almoravid movement; black cavalry, possibly Takruri, are recorded among Almoravid forces in Iberia, reflecting Takrur's wider reach.


Takrur drawn into Mali's orbit

Summary: Political fragmentation and the rise of the Mali Empire bring Takrur under outside dynasties, ending its independent prominence.


Rise of the Jolof Empire

Summary: A Wolof confederation unites provinces between the Senegal and Gambia rivers, drawing tribute and trade across the western savanna.


Guelowar dynasty in Sine and Saloum

Summary: The Gelwaar lineage establishes matrilineal monarchy over the Serer kingdoms of Sine and Saloum, ruling under the title Maad.


Portuguese reach the Senegambian coast

Summary: Portuguese ships arrive off Senegal and the Gambia, opening Atlantic maritime trade — and the first European slave raids — along the coast.


Cayor breaks from Jolof

Summary: The coastal province of Cayor rebels and wins independence, and Baol and Waalo follow, fracturing the empire into rival kingdoms.


France founds Saint-Louis

Summary: French traders establish Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, the first permanent French settlement and future colonial capital.


France takes Gorée

Summary: France captures Gorée island from the Dutch during the Franco-Dutch War, holding the slaving and trading post for nearly three centuries.


House of Slaves built on Gorée

Summary: The Maison des Esclaves is constructed on Gorée; it later becomes a museum and a contested memorial to the Atlantic slave trade.


Citizenship granted to coastal towns

Summary: The French Second Republic extends citizenship to inhabitants of the coastal communes, a status later restricted before being reaffirmed in 1916.


Faidherbe begins the conquest

Summary: Governor Louis Faidherbe pushes up the Senegal River, conquering Waalo and building forts that subdue the interior kingdoms over decades.


Amadou Bamba founds the Mourides

Summary: Cheikh Amadou Bamba establishes the Mouride Sufi brotherhood, later founding the holy city of Touba in 1887 and preaching nonviolence and work.


Bamba exiled; French West Africa formed

Summary: France exiles Amadou Bamba to Gabon for his independent influence; the same year Senegal is incorporated into French West Africa.


Blaise Diagne elected to the French parliament

Summary: Diagne becomes the first African deputy in the French National Assembly, representing the Four Communes.


The Diagne Law confirms citizenship

Summary: Diagne secures a law affirming the originaires of the Four Communes as full French citizens who may retain Muslim personal status.


Mali Federation formed

Summary: Senegal and the Sudanese Republic unite in the Mali Federation, seeking a federal path out of French rule.


Independence within the Mali Federation

Summary: France grants the Mali Federation independence, transferring power on 4 April 1960; full independence follows on 20 June.


Senegal proclaims separate independence

Summary: After the federation collapses, Senegal secedes and proclaims its own independence; Senghor is elected first president.


Senghor resigns peacefully

Summary: Senghor voluntarily hands power to Prime Minister Abdou Diouf, Senegal's first orderly transfer of power.


Casamance insurgency begins

Summary: Clashes in Ziguinchor over a Casamance flag mark the start of the MFDC separatist conflict, one of Africa's longest-running.


Wade defeats Diouf

Summary: Abdoulaye Wade wins the presidency from Abdou Diouf — Senegal's first transfer of power across party lines.


Macky Sall elected

Summary: Sall defeats Wade at the polls, continuing Senegal's pattern of competitive elections and peaceful handovers.


Casamance peace agreement

Summary: A peace deal between the government and MFDC factions proves more durable than earlier ceasefires; violence drops sharply.


Faye wins after democratic crisis

Summary: After Macky Sall's attempt to delay the election is overturned, Bassirou Diomaye Faye wins; power passes peacefully again.


Papuan settlers reach the islands

Summary: Papuan-speaking peoples occupy the main Solomon chain, part of Near Oceania, in some of the earliest recorded sea crossings by humans.


Arrival of the Lapita

Summary: Austronesian-speaking Lapita voyagers, ancestors of much of the later Pacific, settle the islands and mix with existing populations.


Mendaña reaches and names the islands

Summary: Álvaro de Mendaña becomes the first European to reach the archipelago; rumoured gold leads to the name 'Solomon Islands' after the biblical king.


Mendaña's failed colony

Summary: A second Spanish expedition attempts a settlement in the Santa Cruz islands but collapses amid disease and conflict; Mendaña dies there.


The blackbirding labour trade

Summary: Recruiters carry tens of thousands of Solomon Islanders, many coerced, to plantations in Queensland and Fiji, bringing disease and depopulation.


Killing of Bishop Patteson

Summary: John Coleridge Patteson, first Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, is killed at Nukapu, reportedly in reprisal for blackbirders' raids on islanders.


British protectorate proclaimed

Summary: Britain declares a protectorate over the southern Solomons to curb labour-trade abuses and forestall French and German expansion.


Germany cedes the northern islands

Summary: Germany transfers most of the northern Solomons to Britain in exchange for recognition of its claims elsewhere, enlarging the protectorate.


US landings on Guadalcanal

Summary: US Marines land on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the first major American amphibious offensive of the war, seizing the future Henderson Field.


Japanese evacuate Guadalcanal

Summary: After a six-month seesaw campaign, Japan withdraws its forces; Guadalcanal becomes a turning point of the Pacific War.


The Maasina Rule movement

Summary: A post-war Malaitan movement for self-government and custom, born of the wartime labour corps, is credited as an early step toward independence.


Internal self-government

Summary: Solomon Islands attains internal self-government, the final constitutional step before independence, with Peter Kenilorea as chief minister.


Independence from the United Kingdom

Summary: The protectorate becomes the independent state of Solomon Islands within the Commonwealth, with Sir Peter Kenilorea as first prime minister.


The United States recognises the new state

Summary: Senator John Glenn delivers President Carter's letter of recognition to Prime Minister Kenilorea on independence day itself; diplomatic relations follow on 9 October.


The Melanesian Spearhead Group

Summary: Solomon Islands joins Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in a bloc formed to preserve Melanesian cultural traditions — small Pacific states organising around what they share.


The Tensions

Summary: Ethnic conflict between Guadalcanal and Malaitan groups around Honiara displaces thousands and, in 2000, topples Prime Minister Ulufa'alu.


East Rennell inscribed, and later imperilled

Summary: The southern third of Rennell Island — the largest raised coral atoll in the world — joins the World Heritage List; it is moved to the List in Danger in 2013.


The Malaita Eagle Force coup

Summary: Militants take Prime Minister Ulufa'alu hostage and force his resignation; an Australian-brokered treaty that October begins a weapons handover that does not hold.


Cyclone Zoe strikes Tikopia

Summary: A cyclone devastates the remote islands of Tikopia and Anuta; a relief vessel sails expecting mass casualties and finds nobody killed.


RAMSI intervention

Summary: At the government's request, Australia leads a multinational mission that restores order, disarms militias and rebuilds institutions until 2017.


Harold Keke surrenders

Summary: The Isatabu Freedom Movement leader gives himself up to Australian forces and is charged with the murder of the priest and MP Augustine Geve.


Switch from Taiwan to China

Summary: Manasseh Sogavare's government ends recognition of Taiwan and establishes diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.


Honiara riots

Summary: Protests over the China switch and provincial grievances turn into deadly riots in Honiara; Australia and Pacific partners send security forces.


The security agreement with China

Summary: A security pact signed with Beijing sharpens Western concern about the Pacific, three years after the switch in recognition.


Jeremiah Manele becomes prime minister

Summary: After general elections, parliament selects Jeremiah Manele as prime minister, signalling continuity in relations with China and Australia.


Portuguese chart the 'Lion Mountains'

Summary: Portuguese mariners, an expedition associated with Pedro de Sintra reaching the area about 1462, charted the great harbour and named the surrounding hills Serra Lyoa, the 'Lion Mountains' — the origin of the country's name.


The Rice Coast chiefdoms

Summary: The Sherbro, Bullom, Temne, and other peoples farmed rice, fished, and traded along the coast and rivers, organised in chiefdoms and ritual societies rather than a single state.


The Mane incursions

Summary: Mande-speaking Mane raiders pushed to the coast and by the 1550s had subdued the Temne and other peoples, imposing a new ruling elite in a contested episode that reshaped the region's politics.


Emergence of the Mende

Summary: Out of the mingling of Mane aristocrats with indigenous Bullom and other populations the Mende identity and language took shape, spreading as a lingua franca and becoming one of Sierra Leone's largest ethnic groups.


The coast enters the Atlantic trade

Summary: European ships drew the rivers of the Sierra Leone coast into the transatlantic slave trade, exchanging goods and firearms for captives seized in raids and wars across the region.


Bunce Island slave fort established

Summary: The Royal African Company built a fortified post on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River, beginning the island's long and notorious role in the British slave trade.


Bunce Island at its height

Summary: Under the London firm of Grant, Sargent and Oswald, Bunce Island became one of the largest British slave castles on the Rice Coast, with many captives — valued as skilled rice-growers — sold to planters in South Carolina and Georgia.


Britain abolishes the slave trade

Summary: The British Parliament outlawed the transatlantic slave trade, ending Bunce Island's slave-trading operations and clearing the way for Freetown to become a base for naval suppression of the traffic.


The 'Province of Freedom' founded

Summary: Abolitionists associated with Granville Sharp settled about 400 of London's 'Black Poor' on the Sierra Leone peninsula, founding the 'Province of Freedom' and the settlement of Granville Town.


The Sierra Leone Company chartered

Summary: After Granville Town's destruction, the abolitionist-backed Sierra Leone Company was chartered to revive and govern the colony as a base for legitimate commerce and Christian settlement.


Nova Scotian settlers found Freetown

Summary: Some 1,100–1,200 Black settlers from Nova Scotia — African Americans who had sought freedom with the British in the American Revolution — landed and founded Freetown beneath the Lion Mountains.


Jamaican Maroons arrive

Summary: About 550 Jamaican Maroons, exiled after the Second Maroon War, arrived in Freetown and helped put down a revolt by the Nova Scotian settlers against the Sierra Leone Company.


Sierra Leone becomes a Crown Colony

Summary: The British Crown took over from the Sierra Leone Company, making Freetown a Crown Colony and the principal base for the Royal Navy's suppression of the Atlantic slave trade.


The West Africa Squadron frees the recaptives

Summary: Courts at Freetown emancipated more than 80,000 'Liberated Africans' rescued from slave ships by the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, who were resettled in and around the colony.


Fourah Bay College founded

Summary: The Church Missionary Society founded Fourah Bay College in Freetown, the first Western-style university in sub-Saharan Africa, helping earn the city the name 'the Athens of West Africa'.


The Krio community takes shape

Summary: The Liberated Africans and earlier settlers fused into the Krio (Creole) people, with their English-based Krio language, Christianity, and Western education spreading influence across West Africa.


The Protectorate proclaimed

Summary: Britain declared a Protectorate over the interior of Sierra Leone, extending colonial rule over the Temne, Mende, and other peoples beyond the coastal Crown Colony.


The Hut Tax War

Summary: The imposition of a tax on dwellings sparked armed resistance led by the Temne chief Bai Bureh in the north and spreading to the Mende in the south; Britain suppressed the revolt and exiled Bai Bureh.


Rise of the Sierra Leone People's Party

Summary: Constitutional reform and the founding of the Sierra Leone People's Party under Milton Margai broadened African political participation and set the colony on the road to self-government.


Independence from the United Kingdom

Summary: Sierra Leone became an independent state within the Commonwealth under Prime Minister Sir Milton Margai, ending British colonial rule begun in 1808.


Sierra Leone becomes a republic

Summary: Sierra Leone adopted a republican constitution; two days later Prime Minister Siaka Stevens became the nation's first president, beginning a long consolidation of personal power.


One-party state under the APC

Summary: Siaka Stevens's new constitution made Sierra Leone a one-party state under the All People's Congress, entrenching personal rule, patronage, and economic decline.


Civil war begins

Summary: The Revolutionary United Front under Foday Sankoh, backed by Liberia's Charles Taylor, invaded from Liberia, beginning an eleven-year civil war marked by atrocities and funded by 'blood diamonds'.


British intervention and UNAMSIL

Summary: As the RUF again advanced on Freetown, Britain's Operation Palliser and a strengthened UN Mission (UNAMSIL) turned the war; Foday Sankoh was captured, breaking the rebellion's momentum.


The civil war ends

Summary: With disarmament completed, the eleven-year civil war was declared over; estimates put the death toll above 120,000, with millions displaced and thousands maimed.


Charles Taylor convicted

Summary: The UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone convicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor of aiding and abetting war crimes and sentenced him to 50 years — the first head of state convicted by an international tribunal since Nuremberg.


The Ebola epidemic

Summary: An Ebola outbreak reached Sierra Leone in May 2014, killing nearly 4,000 people and overwhelming health services before the WHO declared the outbreak over in November 2015, with recovery following.


Joya de Ceren buried by ash

Summary: An eruption of the Laguna Caldera volcano seals the Maya farming village of Joya de Ceren under volcanic ash, preserving the daily life of ordinary agriculturalists in extraordinary detail.


Rise of Pipil Cuzcatlan

Summary: Nahua-speaking Pipil migrants establish the realm of Cuzcatlan, the Land of the Jewel, dominating the region west of the Lempa River with a society resembling that of the Aztecs.


Joya de Ceren named World Heritage

Summary: UNESCO inscribes Joya de Ceren on the World Heritage List as a unique record of pre-Hispanic Maya farming life, the Pompeii of the Americas.


Alvarado's conquest begins

Summary: An expedition from Guatemala under Pedro de Alvarado enters the region, meeting fierce Pipil resistance west of the Lempa River as the Spanish conquest of the territory begins.


San Salvador permanently founded

Summary: After being abandoned and resettled several times in the face of Pipil resistance, the Spanish town of San Salvador is permanently established near the old Pipil capital.


First cry of independence

Summary: An early uprising in San Salvador, associated with the priest Jose Matias Delgado, is suppressed but remembered as a first stirring of the independence movement.


Independence from Spain declared

Summary: The Act of Independence of Central America, signed in Guatemala City, frees the region including the province of San Salvador from Spanish rule.


Federal Republic of Central America

Summary: The provinces adopt the constitution of the Federal Republic of Central America, a union of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in which the Salvadoran Francisco Morazan becomes a leading figure.


El Salvador becomes sovereign

Summary: As the federation dissolves amid civil war, El Salvador assumes fully sovereign powers as a separate republic and adopts its modern name.


Communal lands abolished

Summary: Laws abolishing communal and Indigenous landholding open the highlands to coffee estates, dispossessing peasant communities and entrenching a landed oligarchy.


Uprising and la matanza

Summary: A peasant and Indigenous revolt in the coffee districts, linked to Farabundo Marti, is crushed by the army; in the ensuing repression, the matanza, estimates of those killed range from at least 10,000 to as many as 30,000.


Execution of Farabundo Marti

Summary: Agustin Farabundo Marti, the communist organiser of the uprising, is captured and executed by firing squad; his name is later taken by the FMLN guerrilla front.


Hernandez Martinez seizes power

Summary: General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez takes power in a coup, beginning his dictatorship and inaugurating nearly half a century of military rule allied with the oligarchy.


Assassination of Archbishop Romero

Summary: Archbishop Oscar Romero is shot dead while celebrating Mass; the UN Truth Commission later concludes he was killed by a right-wing death squad, an act that helped ignite the war.


El Mozote massacre

Summary: An army counterinsurgency operation kills hundreds of villagers at El Mozote and nearby hamlets; in 2012 President Funes apologised for the deaths of 936 people.


Chapultepec Peace Accords

Summary: The government and the FMLN sign the UN-brokered Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City, ending the civil war, reforming the armed forces and turning the FMLN into a political party.


Truth Commission report

Summary: The UN Commission on the Truth for El Salvador issues its report, From Madness to Hope, documenting wartime atrocities in a conflict in which more than 75,000 people are estimated to have died.


Dollarisation

Summary: El Salvador retires its national currency, the colon, and adopts the US dollar as legal tender, deepening ties to the United States economy and to migrant remittances.


Bukele wins the presidency

Summary: Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of San Salvador, wins the presidency outside the FMLN and ARENA, ending decades of two-party dominance.


Bitcoin made legal tender

Summary: El Salvador becomes the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender alongside the US dollar.


State of exception and gang crackdown

Summary: After a surge of gang killings, the government imposes a state of exception suspending constitutional protections and launches mass arrests; homicides fall sharply amid human-rights concerns over tens of thousands detained.


Bukele re-elected

Summary: Despite a constitutional ban on consecutive terms, cleared by a loyal court, Bukele is re-elected by a landslide of about 85 percent of the vote.


Foundation by Saint Marinus

Summary: By tradition the stonemason Marinus, fleeing Diocletian's persecution of Christians, founded a free community on Mount Titano on 3 September 301, the act from which San Marino dates its existence.

SMR:sms-origins SMR:vsm-history SMR:worldatlas-oldest SMR:britannica-sanmarino-history


'I leave you free from both men'

Summary: Marinus is said to have left his followers the words 'Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine', freedom from both emperor and pope, enshrined as the founding ideal of Sammarinese liberty.


The Placito Feretrano

Summary: The earliest surviving document to name the community of San Marino records a legal dispute over its liberties, the first firm attestation that a self-governing community existed on Mount Titano.


Refuge on a fortified mountain

Summary: Set atop the steep limestone massif of Mount Titano and of little strategic value to its powerful neighbours, the community could govern itself in isolation, a continuity of free republican life that UNESCO would later recognise as stretching from the Middle Ages to today.


First Captains Regent

Summary: The republic adopted its signature institution, two Captains Regent serving jointly for six-month terms; since the late-thirteenth-century statute their office has alternated every six months without interruption.


The earliest Statutes

Summary: San Marino set down its first written statutes, with a fuller body of state law following by 1295, formalising the self-government of the mountain commune.


Self-government affirmed within papal Romagna

Summary: As the Papal States consolidated their hold over the surrounding Romagna, San Marino preserved its autonomy by diplomacy and the recognition of its rights, the strategy of survival that kept the commune free among far greater powers.


Promulgation of the Leges Statutae

Summary: The republic enacted the Leges Statutae Republicae Sancti Marini, a six-book written constitution governing the Council, the Regents and the courts; it remains in force as the foundation of San Marino's law.


An island within the Papal States

Summary: By the seventeenth century the lands of the Church surrounded San Marino on every side; the republic guarded its autonomy and secured papal acknowledgements of its rights, but its independence rested on the goodwill of a far greater neighbour.


The Alberoni occupation

Summary: Cardinal Giulio Alberoni, papal legate of Ravenna, occupied San Marino with troops, suspended its constitution and sought to annex it to the Papal States, abolishing the Captains Regent.


Civil resistance

Summary: Rather than fight, the Sammarinese practised civil disobedience and sent clandestine appeals to Rome documenting the legate's abuses, refusing to accept the imposed government.


Independence restored by Clement XII

Summary: Pope Clement XII condemned the occupation and on 5 February 1740 recognised San Marino's rights and restored its independence, an event still celebrated each year on the feast of Saint Agatha.


Napoleon's offer declined

Summary: Napoleon offered San Marino friendship, artillery and an extension of territory to the sea; the republic accepted the gifts but declined the land, satisfied with its existing borders, and was recognised by the Treaty of Tolentino.


Recognition at the Congress of Vienna

Summary: The post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna confirmed San Marino's independence, leaving the ancient republic untouched as Europe's monarchies were restored around it.


Garibaldi given refuge

Summary: Fleeing the collapse of the Roman Republic and pursued by four armies, Giuseppe Garibaldi crossed into San Marino with his followers and was granted asylum by the Captain Regent before escaping by night toward the Adriatic.


Lincoln made an honorary citizen

Summary: Abraham Lincoln accepted honorary citizenship of San Marino, writing that 'although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history' - the beginning of US recognition of the republic.


First treaty of friendship with Italy

Summary: After Italian unification, San Marino and the new Kingdom of Italy concluded a treaty of friendship in 1862 confirming the republic's independence, the first of the agreements that secure its sovereignty as an enclave.


The Arengo and the end of oligarchy

Summary: Summoned for the first time in three centuries, the Arengo of household heads voted on 25 March 1906 to abolish lifelong co-option of councillors, opening the way to democracy.


First modern democratic elections

Summary: Following the Arengo vote, San Marino held its first modern democratic elections on 10 June 1906, ending centuries of oligarchic rule by co-opted councillors.


Fascist seizure of power

Summary: Amid postwar economic distress the Sammarinese Fascist Party took control in 1923 and dissolved the Grand and General Council, ruling the republic for two decades in step with Mussolini's Italy.


The bombing of San Marino

Summary: Despite the republic's neutrality, a British air raid on 26 June 1944, based on faulty intelligence later admitted, killed about sixty people in the small state.


Refuge for 100,000 and liberation

Summary: Neutral San Marino, with a population under 15,000, sheltered more than 100,000 wartime refugees, including Jews; after fighting crossed its soil in September 1944 it was liberated and its neutrality restored.


Admission to the United Nations

Summary: On the recommendation of Security Council Resolution 744 (25 February 1992), San Marino was admitted to the United Nations on 2 March 1992 as a full member state.


Treaties of friendship with Italy

Summary: San Marino's sovereignty as an enclave is secured by treaties of friendship and good-neighbourliness with Italy first concluded in 1862 and renewed in 1939 and later, regulating relations while guaranteeing independence.


Member of the Council of Europe

Summary: San Marino joined the Council of Europe, one of the steps by which the ancient republic took its place among the institutions of postwar Europe while keeping its full sovereignty.


Euro monetary agreement

Summary: Under a monetary agreement with the European Union, in force since 2012 in place of an earlier 2000 accord, San Marino uses the euro as official currency and mints its own euro coins with national designs.


Islam takes root on the Gulf of Aden coast

Summary: Merchants and seafarers crossing the narrow Gulf of Aden carried Islam to the northern Somali shore very early, making it one of the oldest centres of Muslim life in Africa, with Zeila among its earliest mosque towns.


Zeila flourishes as a trading emporium

Summary: The port of Zeila became a major centre of medieval Islamic commerce, exporting goods of the interior and importing wares from across the Red Sea, and an early seat of Muslim political power on the coast.


Rise of the Adal Sultanate

Summary: The Adal Sultanate emerged as a major Muslim power of the Horn of Africa, its trade reaching the sea through Zeila and other coastal towns — a heritage shared across the region.


Britain establishes the Somaliland Protectorate

Summary: Through protection treaties signed with northern Somali clans from the 1880s, Britain established a protectorate over the coast to safeguard the sea route to India, administered separately from Italian Somaliland to the south.


The Dervish resistance of Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan

Summary: A two-decade religious-led resistance to colonial rule, headed by Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, tied down British forces until it was broken around 1920 in a campaign that included aerial bombing.


Italian occupation and British reconquest

Summary: Italy overran the protectorate in 1940; British forces retook it in 1941 and went on to capture Italian Somaliland, placing the region under British administration for a period.


Independence of the State of Somaliland

Summary: The British Somaliland Protectorate became the independent State of Somaliland on 26 June 1960, briefly receiving diplomatic recognition from a number of governments before its planned union with the south.


Union with the south forms the Somali Republic

Summary: Five days after its own independence, the State of Somaliland united on 1 July 1960 with the newly independent former Italian Somaliland to create the Somali Republic, fulfilling the pan-Somali ideal of a single state.


Early northern discontent with the union

Summary: Power, the capital and government institutions concentrated in Mogadishu, and a 1961 constitutional referendum drew weak support in the north, planting early grievances about an unequal union.


Siad Barre seizes power in Somalia

Summary: A military coup brought Mohamed Siad Barre to power, ushering in an increasingly centralised and authoritarian regime under which northern Isaaq communities came to feel marginalised.


Founding of the Somali National Movement

Summary: Isaaq émigrés established the Somali National Movement (SNM), an armed opposition movement that waged a guerrilla campaign against Siad Barre's government through the 1980s.


Bombardment of Hargeisa and Burao

Summary: After an SNM offensive took much of Burao and Hargeisa, government forces subjected both cities to indiscriminate artillery and aerial bombardment, destroying the bulk of each and displacing hundreds of thousands.


Mass killing of Isaaq civilians (Isaaq genocide)

Summary: Human-rights investigators documented the systematic killing of Isaaq civilians; a 2001 UN inquiry found the crime of genocide had been perpetrated by the government between 1987 and 1989. Death-toll estimates vary widely and are cited with caution.


Declaration restoring Somaliland's independence

Summary: Meeting at Burao as Somalia collapsed, clan elders and the SNM declared the north's withdrawal from the 1960 union and the restoration of its independence — a declaration that won no international recognition.


Borama conference and the Guurti

Summary: A months-long clan reconciliation conference at Borama produced a national charter, institutionalised the House of Elders (Guurti), and elected Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal president, anchoring the new polity in indigenous institutions.


Constitution approved by referendum

Summary: A national referendum approved Somaliland's constitution by an overwhelming margin, a vote widely interpreted as also confirming popular support for independence.


Peaceful transfer of power by election

Summary: In the 2010 presidential election an opposition candidate won and power passed peacefully between rivals, a rare democratic transition in the Horn of Africa that bolstered Somaliland's standing as a functioning self-governing polity.


Dispute over Sool and Sanaag

Summary: Somaliland's claim to its eastern regions, contested with Puntland on clan grounds, produced fighting over Las Anod in 2007 and again in 2023, when local forces expelled Somaliland's troops and the area's control fell into question.


Memorandum of understanding with Ethiopia

Summary: Somaliland and Ethiopia announced an MoU giving landlocked Ethiopia coastal access, reportedly in exchange for moves toward recognition; Somalia condemned it as a violation of its sovereignty, heightening tensions in the Horn of Africa.


Israel recognises Somaliland

Summary: Israel announced formal recognition of Somaliland — the first UN member state to do so. Somalia condemned the step as unlawful, and a broad range of states at the UN reaffirmed that they regard Somaliland as part of Somalia.


Status still disputed and unresolved

Summary: Somaliland continues to govern itself de facto and claims sovereignty, yet it is recognised by only one UN member state; the African Union and the great majority of governments still regard it as part of Somalia, leaving its status unsettled.


Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt

Summary: Reliefs at Queen Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahri record a major Egyptian trading voyage to the Land of Punt, returning with myrrh trees, incense, gold and ivory—the most celebrated ancient evidence of the trade.


Egyptian trade with Punt begins

Summary: Egyptian records attest trading contact with Punt from the Old Kingdom onward, drawing the Horn of Africa into pharaonic commerce in aromatic resins and luxury goods.


Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

Summary: A Greek mariner's handbook describes ports along the Horn coast trading frankincense, myrrh, ivory and tortoiseshell with Egypt, Arabia and India, documenting the region's role in Indian Ocean commerce.


Cushitic pastoralists spread across the Horn

Summary: Cushitic-speaking herding peoples, ancestral to the Somalis, expand across the arid interior of the Horn of Africa, establishing the pastoral, clan-based society that would endure into modern times.


Islam established on the Somali coast

Summary: Trade and migration across the Gulf of Aden carry Islam to the Horn, and Muslim merchant communities take root in the coastal towns that become Somalia's medieval city-states.


Zeila, Berbera and Mogadishu flourish

Summary: The ports of Zeila, Berbera and Mogadishu grow wealthy on Indian Ocean trade with Arabia, Persia and India; Mogadishu mints its own coinage and becomes a leading commercial centre.


Ibn Battuta visits Mogadishu

Summary: The traveller Ibn Battuta describes Mogadishu as a large, prosperous Muslim trading city, attesting to the wealth of the Benadir coast in the medieval Indian Ocean world.


Wars of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi

Summary: From the Adal Sultanate, Imam Ahmad 'Gurey' launches the Futuh al-Habasha campaigns against Christian Ethiopia, conquering much of the highlands before his defeat and death in 1543 with Portuguese intervention.


Death of Ahmad and decline of Adal

Summary: Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi is killed in battle against an Ethiopian–Portuguese force, halting the Muslim conquest of the highlands and beginning the decline of the Adal Sultanate.


The Ajuran Sultanate

Summary: The Ajuran empire dominates southern Somalia and the Horn, controlling the Shabelle and Jubba river systems, building wells and fortifications and resisting Oromo and Portuguese incursions before fragmenting in the late 17th century.


Rise of the Geledi Sultanate

Summary: The Sultanate of the Geledi emerges from the breakup of the Ajuran state, with its capital at Afgooye, and under the Gobroon dynasty comes to dominate the trade of southern Somalia.


Majeerteen and Hobyo sultanates

Summary: In north-eastern Somalia the Majeerteen Sultanate (Migiurtinia) and the Sultanate of Hobyo control the coast and its maritime trade, maintaining centralised authority and treaty relations with outside powers.


Geledi at the height of its power

Summary: Under Sultan Yusuf Mahamud Ibrahim the Geledi Sultanate reaches its peak, commanding tribute across southern Somalia, before the sultan's death in battle in 1848 begins a gradual decline.


British Somaliland protectorate

Summary: Britain signs treaties with northern Somali clans and establishes a protectorate over the northern coast to safeguard supplies for Aden, creating British Somaliland.


Italy's protectorates and Italian Somaliland

Summary: Italy signs protectorate treaties with the Hobyo and Majeerteen sultanates and occupies the Benadir coast, building up Italian Somaliland in the south; the Benadir colony is formally established in 1905.


The Dervish resistance

Summary: Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan leads the Dervish movement in a twenty-year armed struggle against British, Italian and Ethiopian forces, defeating several colonial expeditions from fortified bases in the interior.


RAF bombing ends the Dervish state

Summary: Britain uses the Royal Air Force to bomb the Dervish forts, including Taleh; the movement collapses and Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan dies of illness later that year.


Italian Somaliland joins Italian East Africa

Summary: After Fascist Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland is merged into the new colony of Italian East Africa; Britain takes control of the region during the Second World War, holding both Somalilands by 1941.


Birth of the Somali Republic

Summary: British Somaliland (independent 26 June) and the former Italian Somaliland unite on 1 July 1960 to form the independent Somali Republic, with Aden Abdullah Osman Daar as first president.


Siad Barre seizes power

Summary: Following the assassination of President Shermarke, the army stages a coup and General Mohamed Siad Barre takes control, suspending the constitution and establishing a one-party socialist dictatorship.


Somali written in Latin script

Summary: Barre's government adopts a Latin-based orthography for the Somali language and launches mass literacy campaigns, a lasting cultural achievement of the early socialist period.


The Ogaden War

Summary: Somalia invades Ethiopia to annex the Somali-inhabited Ogaden; initial gains are reversed in 1978 when the Soviet Union and Cuba back Ethiopia, inflicting a costly defeat on Somalia.