(5) SPANISH EMPIRE (1492 – 1976)

The first global empire and the original “empire on which the sun never sets”.

The Pope literally divided the world up between them and the Portuguese in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, although only after Portugal nudged the line further west to party it up in Brazil. Other European nations disagreed with the papal division of the world.

The Spanish Empire owed its global extent to its ‘discovery’ and conquest of the Americas from 1492 – a perfect storm of history as the Spanish royal sponsorship of Columbus coincided with the template for conquest from the Reconquista retaking the last Islamic stronghold in Spain.

Alexander the Great was reputed to have lamented that there were no new worlds to conquer (likely apocryphal) – the Spanish discovered one and conquered it. And whatever else one may think of the conquistadors, they exceeded Alexander and anyone else for a feat unparalleled in military history – remarkable in just how few Spanish forces conquered such large areas and populous empires numbering in the millions, crowned by their conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires.

From there, they were the first to circumnavigate the world with Magellan’s expedition in 1522, although Magellan himself died en route from a nasty overdose of native spears and swords in the Philippines. So of course the Spanish claimed and conquered the Philippines as well, along with other Pacific Ocean islands.

However, they did claim more than they actually controlled in some places such as North America. Much of the modern United States was originally part of the Spanish Empire as attested by place names, but their claims extended well beyond that along the north-west Pacific coastline to Canada and Alaska, where they were ultimately contested by the British and Russians. Even so, the Spanish Empire still ranks as the fifth largest empire by area in history.

The Spanish Empire seemed to rise from one glittering height to another – with a lot of all that glitter indeed as gold and silver from the Americas, propelling it to the first world maritime superpower, and after the naval defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto, arguably the greatest power of the world.

Of course, it was all downhill from there. Part of that was a result of pursuing dynastic Habsburg claims in Europe – it’s odd to think of the Netherlands and parts of Italy as former Spanish territory. Pro tip – you can have a maritime empire, or you can try to dominate Europe, but you can’t do both.

Still, Spain retained its empire, despite being eclipsed by other European powers, until the nineteenth century when it began to decline in spectacular fashion as a casualty of one war after another.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

And how!

You could argue that Spain parallels the Romans in their tenacious decline and fall. Despite what might be called its crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and despite its waning power, at sea against England or Britain, and on land against France – it retained its empire until the nineteenth century.

However, the bell then tolled for the Spanish Empire, with the American Revolution (which it supported) and the French Revolution (particularly in the person of Napoleon). The Spanish Empire faced its own American revolution, losing the crown jewel of its empire with most of Spanish America winning independence.

Still, Spain was left a modest mid-tier empire as a nice beachside retirement nest egg, particularly in Cuba and the Philippines – arguably its parallel to the Byzantine continuation of the Roman Empire but skipping past a couple of centuries to that smaller rump Byzantine empire. It even briefly regained the Dominican Republic, as its parallel to the reconquests of Justinian or Basil.

And then it fell foul of the American Revolution again, this time in the form of the United States all grown up as the rising world power at the dawn of the twentieth century. The United States was looking around at empires and decided to take Spain’s for a test drive in the Spanish-American War.

Spain lost the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, as well as Cuba to quasi-independence (effectively as an American colony). Reading the writing on the wall with respect to retaining any Pacific territory, Spain sold its other Pacific island territories to that other rising power of the twentieth century, Germany.

That left Spain with just the bottom-tier empire of its African territories – small outposts in Africa like Fernando Poo in Equatorial Guinea, although it did also expand into the territory known as Spanish Sahara. Pro tip – if your empire consists of places like Fernando Poo and anywhere with the Sahara in it, it’s time to get out of the empire game.

And so Spain did, albeit like Portugal only in the 1970s

THE SPANISH EMPIRE NEVER FELL

On the other hand, Spain technically retains some overseas possessions – the Canary Islands as well as some tiny islands and weird enclave cities in Morocco

But more so, the endurance of Spanish language and place names in the Americas demonstrates that, at least in some cultural sense, the Spanish Empire never fell

THE SUN NEVER SETS

The Spanish Empire was the original empire to make this claim – and mean it literally, although the claim was more memorably (and definitively) made by the British Empire. In influence, it was also a true world empire, reshaping Latin America in its own image.

EVIL EMPIRE

And how!

The Spanish Empire would be one of the leading contenders people would advance for an entry if one were to compile a Top 10 Evil Empires, primarily due to its apocalyptic destruction of the Americas – although in fairness that was mostly down to one horseman of the apocalypse, pestilence. The death toll is usually tallied in the tens of millions – with many native tribes and their cultures wiped out.

Even setting aside death from disease, the Spanish conquest of the Americas involved atrocity, brutality and cruelty by any standard, including contemporary opinion at the time.

However, many point to what is often called the Spanish Black Legend – a tendency to demonize or vilify the Spanish Empire, as well as Spain (and Catholicism) more generally in history – with at least some fairness to it. After all, it was Spanish advocates such as Friar Bartolomé de las Casas who documented so many of the evils of its empire for history – and Spain was the first in recorded history to pass laws for the protection of indigenous peoples, although the Crown often found it difficult to enforce those laws on its distant and unruly colonists.

And one can’t help but observe the far more substantial mix of indigenous population and culture in the Americas south of the Rio Grande as opposed to north of it – although again in fairness North America had more sparse populations and had higher European immigration

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(6) PERSIA – ACHAEMENID EMPIRE (550 – 330 BC)

“The empire that kicked off all the other empires” – the largest empire in history up until that point and first of the world empires, in impact rather than literal global extent. Best known in Western history as the liberators of the Jewish exiles in Babylon and recurring antagonists of the Greeks, not surprisingly reflecting the two predominant sources of Western culture.

The Persians originally started off as nomadic vassals of the preceding Median Empire, the extent and nature of which is disputed but apparently laid much of the groundwork for the latter Persian Empire in forming a powerful Iranian state. Cyrus the Great then founded the first Persian or Achaemenid Empire, by rebelling against and supplanting the Medes before then conquering the Neo-Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia and kingdom of Lydia in Anatolia.

Ultimately the borders of the Persian Empire extended from central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east, to the Nile, Black Sea and Balkans in the west – although famously the Greek city states successfully resisted it in the Greek-Persian Wars. It was so big it had four capitals – Babylon, Ecbatana, Susa and Persepolis.

The Persian model of governance – “a successful model of centralized, bureaucratic administration via the use of satraps; its multicultural policy; building infrastructure, such as road systems and a postal system; the use of an official language across its territories; and the development of civil services, including its possession of a large, professional army” – essentially set the template for subsequent empires, particularly in the Middle East – influencing not only the Greeks and Romans, but also the Arabs and the Abbasid Caliphate. For the latter, it “left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.

Its ultimate nemesis was Alexander the Great – apparently an admirer of Cyrus the Great, but who just took the empire from Cyrus’ more pathetic descendant Darius III. Oh well – he wasn’t using it anyway. And the legacy of Cyrus suited Alexander better, including that title of the Great.

However, the first Persian or Achaemenid Empire might have been swept from history, but Persia itself continued to be a seat of empires – it revived under the Parthian and Sassanid empires, both recurring antagonists of the Romans until the Sassanids were conquered by the Arabs. Even then, Persia managed to revive itself under Islamic or Turkic dynasties.

 

DECLINE & FALL

For tenacity in decline…yes and no. The Achaemenid Empire itself collapsed with indecent haste, conquered by Alexander as he pursued Darius III from one corner of the empire to the next like a Macedonian Terminator. However, the Persians proved quite adept at the long game of reviving themselves while under the nominal satrapy of their conquerors, whom they ultimately overthrew to revive their empire in even more enduring and tenacious form.

THE ACHAEMENID EMPIRE NEVER FELL

Well yes, the Achaemenid Empire fell rather dramatically to Alexander the Great, but Persia kept bouncing back, the zombie franchise of empires – as the Parthians, Sassanids, Safavids and the ironic ideological empire of the latter day Islamic Republic.

THE SUN NEVER SETS

Persia was the first of a long line of what can be termed world empires, as opposed to global ones – that is, in terms of their enduring influence and impact rather than a literal geographic global extent.

Although interestingly the Persians may well have been the origin of the claim for their empire as the empire on which the sun never sets. According to Herodotus’ Histories, Xerxes made the claim before invading Greece – “We shall extend the Persian territory as far as God’s heaven reaches. The sun will then shine on no land beyond our borders.”

EVIL EMPIRE

Well, with their mutant armies and war rhinoceri…wait – that was the film 300. Outside of that film’s depictions of the Persian Empire as the Mordor of its time, which reflects Greek accounts of them as antagonists to some degree, the Persians do reasonably well in avoiding the evil empire tag – although obviously they didn’t build and maintain an empire of that size by being nice.

And they do pretty well in their Biblical portrayals, due to Cyrus’ liberation of the Jews from Babylonian exile – while Babylon is immortalized by the Bible as the symbol of evil, Cyrus is praised by it and even hailed as messiah, a term that used to be more generic for one anointed by God.

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(7) ARAB – UMAYYAD CALIPHATE (661-750 / 756-1031)

The Arab conquests were a nigh-unstoppable historical explosion, once previously divided tribes in a historical backwater had been united under Mohammed – conquering one of history’s largest pre-modern empires (indeed the seventh or eighth largest in all history) in about a century or so, a blitzkrieg by horse, sail…and camel!

Mohammed had essentially conquered the Arabian peninsula, but his death left his successors – the three great Arab caliphates – only at the start of extending his empire to even wider conquests.

Now it might be said that I am somewhat inconsistent between empires in my entries, as I classify some, such as the Arab caliphates, as separate empires by different dynasties, while others I essentially classify as single empires despite their dynastic succession or fragmentation.

And the answer is, as usual, that I make my own rules and break them anyway – some empires have historical unity to them, if only in culture or theme, that appeals to me, while the different Arab caliphates appeal to me as distinct polities.

The Rashadun Caliphate, immediate successors to Mohammed, did most of the heavy lifting of empire as they broke out of the Arabian peninsula. Two formidable empires blocked their path, the Persian Empire and the eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, but the Arabs conquered the former and routed the latter back to Anatolia.

However, it was under their successors, the Umayyad Caliphate, that Arab empire reached its greatest extent, westwards from the north African shore to Europe itself – conquering Spain (well, not quite all, in a manner similar to the famous caveat to the Roman conquest of Gaul in Asterix comics) and famously invading France before being turned back at Tours by Charles Martel. Eastwards, they also extended beyond Persia through central Asia to the fringes of India and China – the latter of which presented even the Tang Empire some difficulty resisting their advance.

The Umayyads were mostly overthrown by the third Arab caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, who then presided over what is often regarded as the Golden Age of Islam from their capital in Baghdad – but for all that became increasingly vestigial in the empire they had inherited from the Umayyads as it fragmented into separate dynasties. The Abbasids did revive their political authority somewhat in Mesopotamia and Persia – only to be crushed along with Baghdad by the Mongols, although they continued to limp along in even more vestigial form in Egypt until the Ottomans replaced them as caliphate. Ha! That’s what you get for messing with my boys, the Umayyads!

Nor were the Umayyads done with history just yet – the Umayyads managed to pull a Taiwan, with an Umayyad prince in the role of Chiang Kai-Shek, fleeing into exile across the Mediterranean to Spain and continuing the Caliphate as the Emirate of Cordoba independent from the Abbasids, even with their own rival golden age of Islam in the fabled Al Andalus of Spain.

The Umayyads endured for almost three centuries before finally falling again in 1031 – but true to karmic form, once again cursed their successors with fragmentation, as Islamic Spain broke up into minor states and principalities, weakening it to Christian reconquest.

 

 

DECLINE AND FALL

You have to rank the Ummayads high for tenacity in their decline and fall – even in defeat by the Abbasid Revolution, they pulled a Taiwan to rule in Spain, partying it up in Ibiza like an English tourist .

THE UMMAYAD CALIPHATE NEVER FELL

Well it obviously did, although perhaps not in its enduring influence in Spain, and even more so in the dreams of caliphate by Islamic political extremists in the twenty-first century.

THE SUN NEVER SETS

One of the top 10 largest empires in history – although the sun literally set on them, they can be ranked among the world empires of history.

EVIL EMPIRE

To be honest, I don’t know much about the brutality of Arab conquests or repression, although there seem to be a number of revolts against them, not least the Abbasid revolution itself.

But they do have to rank highly in evil empire stakes for one thing – the Arab slave trade, which was of a scale at least equal to, if not exceeding, the more notorious Atlantic slave trade by European empires – not as intense perhaps, but of a longer duration. As in only abolished (when it was formally abolished) in the twentieth century.

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(8) OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1299 – 1922)

The empire that conquered Constantinople and besieged Vienna – twice.

As the latter, the last non-European empire to invade and conquer significant parts of Europe (unless you count the Americans or Soviets), although Vienna was their high water mark – and as the former, the power that finally conquered (and saw itself as inheriting) the last of the Roman Empire.

Ironically, the Ottomans often resembled the Roman Empire, firstly in its rise from one of numerous non-descript warring tribes on a peninsula, albeit the Anatolian rather than Italian peninsula (although as further irony, the Romans traced themselves from that peninsula as well, with their mythic origin from Troy). And secondly, in its tenacity in decline.

It is also intriguing how much of the origins of modern history might be traced to the looming presence of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the Mediterranean – such as the discovery of the New World from seeking to find alternate trade routes to Asia and so on.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire rivals the conquests by the Arab caliphates it ultimately replaced in predominance in the Middle East – and indeed replayed much of the same history. The Ottoman Empire may have lacked the range and speed of the Arab conquests, although it made up for that in the extent to which it invaded and conquered within Europe.

With its conquest of the Byzantine Empire (as well as Constantinople as its newly conquered capital) and control of the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was a transcontinental empire at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa for six centuries.

Egypt was of course the jewel in the crown of their African empire – but it extended westwards from Libya to Morocco (and briefly into the Atlantic with the Canary Islands), becoming the basis of the fabled Barbary corsairs or pirates which even fought the United States, although these were only nominally under Ottoman control. The Ottomans also extended southwards to the Horn of Africa – and into naval wars in the Indian Ocean.

In Asia, they inherited the caliphate and its predominance in the Middle East, extending south through the Arabian peninsula, although held at bay by a resurgent Persia under their own Turkic Safavid dynasty.

And in Europe, they conquered the Balkans, extending to Crimea with the Crimean Khanate or Tatars, successors to the Mongol Golden Horde, as their vassal state, and also reached to the heart of Europe to besiege Vienna. Although apart from its defeats when besieging Vienna, it encountered significant holdouts or resistance elsewhere – Croatia, Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, Venice and the naval Battle of Lepanto.

It faced its waning tide of decline in the aftermath of its second defeat at Vienna, steadily losing its conquests in the Balkans even as it was propped up by Britain against Russia, resulting in it being styled as the “sick man of Europe” in the nineteenth century – somewhat overconfidently, as the Allies were to find out in WW1, although ultimately it collapsed in that war.

 

DECLINE & FALL

Ironically, the Ottomans might be compared favorably to the Romans they supplanted in their tenacity in decline. They did not endure for so many centuries as did the Romans – but then modern history moves a lot faster.

Of course, they were helped by European powers propping it up against each other, particularly Britain propping it up against Russia.

And against the apparent odds, they and their predominance in the Middle East endured until the First World War – and they might well have endured beyond that if they had remained aloof from that war and not chosen the losing side. Even in that war, they proved a resilient adversary, and even in defeat, they cast a long shadow – historian J.M. Roberts refers to most wars in the Middle East thereafter as the wars of Ottoman succession, up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE NEVER FELL

On the other hand, their imperial core Turkey, to which they were shorn after the First World War, has also had a remarkable resurgence, rebounding almost immediately after its defeat from that war against further incursions, and newly emerging as a regional power in the Middle East, extending its influence and military presence through much of its former imperial territory

THE SUN NEVER SETS

Well, the sun did literally set on the Ottoman Empire in pure geographic terms – for example, it did not extend as far eastwards into Asia as its Arab caliphate predecessors. However, it can properly be ranked as a world empire in its influence, extending across three continents and reaching even further beyond that.

EVIL EMPIRE

As I said, the Ottomans get a lot of historical hate from certain circles – but sadly, I do have to rank them highly in the evil empire stakes. To be honest, I don’t know quite how brutal they were in maintaining their conquests, but they were notorious for their patronage of piracy and slavery, particularly through the Barbary corsairs.

What earns them their high ranking in evil empire stakes is their actions against ethnic minorities in the empire’s dying days – notably the Armenians – that gave the definition to genocide in the twentieth century

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

Given my interest in military history, it’s not surprising that I’ve also always found empires a fascinating subject of history, again from the fortunate perspective of being well removed from the sharp end of them. Empires are typically creatures of military conquest or power, and rise and fall by war.

Indeed, the two books that define my historical (and political) worldview are Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yes – I know I’ve shortened the title for the latter) – so it’s not surprising that their subject matter, war and empires, also define my primary interests in history.

Not all empires are equal, however. Not even the same empire, as like the proverbial river of Heraclitus, you cannot step into the same empire twice.

Of course, that is perhaps implicit in their rise and fall, particularly when the fall of one empire is at the hands of the rise of another – such as when you have a tale of two empires, in a strikingly memorable phrase (for the 1945 Soviet offensive against Japan in Manchuria), one “at the absolute top of its game” and the other “dying and insane”.

So these are my Top 10 Empires of History. These are not ranked by how large, populous, rich, powerful or influential they are, but by my historical interest in them – although this tends to overlap with the former criteria. For example, of the ten largest historical empires by area at their greatest extent, all but two of them pop up in my Top 10 (with the other two in my special mentions).

Just some further notes, as with my Top 10 Wars, I have some ratings within each entry:

 

DECLINE & FALL

I have to admit that my particular interest in empires is not so much in their robust rise, but in their decline and fall. But again, not all empires are equal in their decline and fall. Some empires seem to collapse almost overnight, but others hold the line over incredible areas or incredible periods of time (or both), even rebounding or bouncing back. My interest is in the latter, so just how impressive or tenacious was each empire’s decline and fall?

 

THE EMPIRE NEVER FELL

On the other hand, rating the empires by their temporal span, particularly for that arguably never fell, or still haunt the world as ghosts or shadows.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

Rating the wars by their geographic scale as world empire. It was famously said of one empire as descriptive of its extent that the sun never set on it. Actually it was said of at least one other empire before that, with precursors even before that, but never mind that now.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

Yes, yes – they’re all evil. But just how evil?

But seriously, no empire rises to or maintains its power by being nice. They do it by crushing their opponents or rebellious subjects – “they make a desolation and call it peace”. Hence rating how brutally or ruthlessly they did so – just how evil was each empire?

But also seriously, history usually does not repay moral judgements, particularly contemporary moral judgements. Almost every empire proclaims itself to be spreading civilisation or bringing some benefit to its subjects – and all but the most destructive have at least some merit in those claims. Empires were often the only means for any political unity above the tribal level, or indeed peace from inter-tribal warfare, although of course both were typically achieved by an imperial “tribe” or nation subjugating others, usually with great death or destruction, even if it subsequently absorbed or adopted the latter as citizens or soldiers of empire.

Also, prior to modern concepts of ethnic national self-determination, I tend to regard all polities as imperial in nature, at least in so far as they comprised any more than one ethnic group, and generally even in the case of more homogenous or tribal polities over their own members, in the absence of any concept of participatory representation.

 

So these are my top ten empires in history. And yes – this is another of my deep dive top tens, counting down from tenth to first place and looking at individual entries in some depth or detail of themselves.

But wait – there’s more! The subject is prolific enough for my usual twenty special mentions per top ten and for honorable mentions beyond that.