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One slider. Two thousand years.
Drag it and the borders move with your hand. Hit play and watch Rome recede, the caliphates sweep west, the Mongols ride out of the steppe and Europe shatter into confetti and reassemble.
2,026 years · 1,420 territories · one slider
What did the world look
like the year you were born?
Now drag the slider back. Watch empires swell and burst, kingdoms split between brothers, whole countries appear out of nothing and quietly vanish again. Two thousand years of the map redrawing itself — and you can stop anywhere and ask what you're looking at.
AD1914
The last summer of the old order.
Or start somewhere interesting
- Years
- 2,026 AD 1 to today, every one of them
- Territories
- 1,420 Click any of them, in any year
- Glossary entries
- 1,280 Researched across 12 regions
- References
- 1,508 Named, linked and checkable
What it does
Less reading. More falling
down the rabbit hole.
1,280
Wait — who were they?
The map is full of names you've never heard of: the Qarlugs, the Sarbadars, the Nogai Horde. Click one to find out who ruled it, how long it lasted and what swallowed it. 1,280 territories have a full article.
Sizes you can actually trust.
Most world maps inflate Russia and Canada into monsters. This one defaults to the Equal Earth projection, so when an empire looks enormous, it really was. Mercator is one click away.
Found something? Share it.
Spotted an empire you want a friend to see? Copy the address and send it — they'll land on the same year, looking at the same place.
See the world in 1492 →Right in your browser.
No account, no install, no paywall. It works on a laptop, a tablet or a phone — open it and start exploring.
Same frame, four moments
Watch the world fill in.
Look how empty it starts. That's not missing data — for most of history, most of the world simply had no borders on it at all.
The honest part
It tells you when
it doesn't know.
Historical borders are disputed, approximate, and often anachronistic as an idea. Plenty of maps hide that. This one says so — quietly, next to the thing it's unsure about.
Blank means blank
Empty land is an answer, not a gap. AD 1 has 45 states on the whole planet. Today there are 190.
Borders weren't always lines
Before 1648 territory was a tangle of overlapping rights, not an outline. The map admits where it's simplifying.
Sources you can check
Every shape comes from a published academic dataset. Nothing is drawn by hand to make a gap look tidier.
Known flaws, left visible
Where the underlying data is wrong or coarse, it's flagged rather than smoothed over. Full detail inside, under About the data.
The part nobody else writes
Every shape has a story.
We've written 1,280 of them.
Clicking a territory tells you what it was, when it was and who ran it — in seconds. The glossary is the long version: where a state came from, how big it really got and how it ended, researched against named sources and linked back to the exact year it stood on the map.
Popular starting points
Where it comes from
Standing on real scholarship.
The borders come from open academic datasets, all credited and checkable. The glossary cites 1,508 books, papers and archives — every one listed on the sources page, linked to the entries that use it.
CC-BY-4.0
Cliopatria v0.12
Seshat Global History Databank
The world layer — every year from AD 1 to 2026
GPL-3.0
Historical Basemaps
André Ourednik
The optional German states overlay, 1715–1814
Public domain
Natural Earth
1:110m land · 1:50m shaded relief
The coastlines, and the terrain under the Mercator view
1,508 references
Every glossary source
Grouped by publisher, linked to each entry
See the full list →
Two thousand years, one slider
Go on. Pick a year.
The one you were born. The one your town was founded. The one you had to learn at school and never quite pictured.
Or open it at 1492, the year most people try first.