Map of European History
Every marker is a real coronation site, ancient battlefield, or historical turning point, from Hastings to Auschwitz. Tap a marker for the story, tap the legend to filter by era.
☜ Tap a marker and its story appears here.
The Middle Ages & the Crusades
The Renaissance & the Age of Exploration
Absolutist Power & the Enlightenment
Revolution & Napoleon
Nation-States & the World Wars
The map covers all of Europe and the neighboring holy land and Asia Minor; coastline data from Natural Earth. Historical coordinates use standard scholarly identifications; some place names involve modern sovereignty disputes (such as Jerusalem), noted here only as historical geography, taking no political stance.
Places on this map
Aachen
The core stronghold of the Carolingian empire that Charlemagne chose; Aachen Cathedral is his burial place, and for centuries after one of the important sites of the coronation of Holy Roman Emperors.
Connected figures: Charlemagne
Hastings
In 1066 the Norman army led by William defeated the English king Harold II here, and the "Norman Conquest" thereby began, profoundly rewriting the language and ruling order of England.
Connected figures: William the Conqueror
Jerusalem
The holy city fought over again and again in the Crusades; in 1187 Saladin retook it, and Richard I, leading the Third Crusade, clashed with him time after time, the contest ending at last in an honorable truce.
Connected figures: Saladin · Richard the Lionheart
Orléans
A key French town long besieged by the English in the Hundred Years’ War; in 1429 Joan of Arc lifted the siege and turned the whole course of the war.
Connected figures: Joan of Arc
Rouen
After her capture Joan of Arc was handed to the English and here tried and convicted by a pro-English church court, burned at the stake in 1431; twenty-five years later the papacy retried the case and cleared her name.
Connected figures: Joan of Arc
Florence
One of the birthplaces of the Renaissance; both Leonardo and Michelangelo trained in art and created early masterworks here, and the Medici family’s patronage made the city the art center of all Europe.
Connected figures: Leonardo da Vinci · Michelangelo
The Vatican / Sistine Chapel
The Sistine Chapel ceiling that Michelangelo took four years to paint, together with Milan, where Leonardo’s fresco The Last Supper stands, make up the most concentrated display of Renaissance artistic achievement.
Connected figures: Michelangelo · Leonardo da Vinci
Mainz
Gutenberg’s hometown, where he improved metal movable-type printing; the Gutenberg Bible printed in the 1450s was the first book produced on a large scale in Europe.
Connected figures: Gutenberg
Frombork
Where Copernicus served as a canon in his later years and completed On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres; his heliocentric model quietly took shape here, published only in the last year of his life.
Connected figures: Copernicus
Granada
The capital of the last Islamic state on the Iberian peninsula, which fell in 1492 before the combined army of Isabella I and Ferdinand II, ending the "Reconquista."
Connected figures: Isabella I · Ferdinand II
Palos
In August 1492 Columbus set sail west from this small port with three ships, landing in the Caribbean two months later and opening the close contact between Europe and the Americas that would run for centuries after.
Connected figures: Columbus
Lisbon
The core port of Portugal’s Age of Exploration; the fleets of both da Gama and Magellan set sail from here to round the Cape of Good Hope for the route to India and to cross the Atlantic seeking a new path to Asia.
Connected figures: Vasco da Gama · Magellan
Istanbul
The capital of the Ottoman Empire; under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent great building works were undertaken here, and the Süleymaniye Mosque is still one of the city’s most iconic buildings.
Connected figures: Suleiman the Magnificent
Vienna
The Habsburg capital before whose walls Suleiman the Magnificent came in 1529 but could not take; later the seat of Maria Theresa’s rule and the site of the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Connected figures: Suleiman the Magnificent · Charles V · Maria Theresa · Metternich
Versailles
Louis XIV expanded what had been a hunting lodge into the grand Palace of Versailles, compelling the nobles of the realm to reside there in rotation and wearing down their independent power with court ritual — the model of absolute monarchy thereby set.
Connected figures: Louis XIV · Cardinal Richelieu
St. Petersburg
The new capital Peter the Great ordered built on the marshes at the mouth of the Neva, deliberately imitating the style of Amsterdam and other Western European cities, a symbol of Russia’s "window on Europe."
Connected figures: Peter the Great
Potsdam
Where Frederick the Great built his summer palace "Sanssouci"; here he once hosted Voltaire, their relationship at first close and then soured — a miniature of the complex bond between an "enlightened absolutist" monarch and an Enlightenment thinker.
Connected figures: Frederick the Great · Voltaire
Geneva
Rousseau’s birthplace; his late thought deeply shaped the ideological foundation of the French Revolution, and the opening line of The Social Contract, "man is born free," is still widely quoted today.
Connected figures: Rousseau
Königsberg
The hometown Kant never left in all his life, where he built his far-reaching system of critical philosophy; legend says the locals set their clocks by his fixed hour of walking each day.
Connected figures: Kant
Vienna (Capital of Classical Music)
Both Mozart and Beethoven long lived and worked here, giving the Viennese Classical school its name; the premiere of the Ninth Symphony also took place in this city.
Leipzig
The city where Bach served as cantor of St. Thomas Church for 27 years in his later life, composing a great body of important sacred music.
Connected figures: Bach
Stratford
The birthplace and burial place of Shakespeare; "Stratford-upon-Avon" is still a place of pilgrimage for lovers of Shakespeare the world over.
Connected figures: Shakespeare
The Globe Theatre, London
The theater built by Shakespeare’s company on the south bank of the Thames, where many of his classic plays premiered; burned down in 1613 after a stage effect accidentally set it alight, then rebuilt to the original design.
Connected figures: Shakespeare · Elizabeth I
Paris
The central stage of the French Revolution; Marie Antoinette and Robespierre were each in turn sent to the guillotine here, and Napoleon rose to make himself emperor amid the city’s political turmoil.
Connected figures: Marie Antoinette · Robespierre · Napoleon
Cape Trafalgar
In 1805 Nelson led the British fleet to a crushing defeat of the combined Franco-Spanish fleet here, utterly shattering Napoleon’s plan to invade Britain by sea; Nelson himself was shot and killed in the battle.
Moscow
The target Napoleon drove straight for in his 1812 invasion of Russia; the Russians burned the city in a scorched-earth retreat, and the rout through the depths of winter was the turning point from the height of Napoleon’s empire to its decline.
Connected figures: Napoleon
Waterloo
In 1815 Wellington, joined by the Prussian army, utterly defeated the returned Napoleon here, ending the Napoleonic Wars; Napoleon was then exiled to St. Helena.
Connected figures: Napoleon · The Duke of Wellington
The Congress of Vienna Venue
Where Metternich led the convening of the Congress of Vienna, redrawing the political map of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars and seeking, through the concert of the great powers, to maintain a lasting peace.
Connected figures: Metternich
Marsala
In 1860 the Red Shirts of Garibaldi’s "Expedition of the Thousand" landed here in Sicily and, against all expectation, routed the army of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, speeding the process of Italian unification.
Connected figures: Garibaldi
Turin
The political stage of Cavour, prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and briefly the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy after unification — the wellspring of the "diplomatic path" to Italian unity.
Connected figures: Cavour
Berlin
The capital of the German Empire after Bismarck brought about German unification, and also the seat of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the endpoint of the European theater of World War II — the Soviet capture of the city in 1945 marked Nazi Germany’s surrender.
Connected figures: Bismarck · Adolf Hitler
Sarajevo
On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated here, and the assassination, through the chain reaction of the great powers’ complex alliances, at last ignited the First World War.
Connected figures: Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Stalingrad (Volgograd)
In 1942–1943 the Soviet and German armies fought here one of the fiercest urban battles of World War II; the Soviets at last encircled and destroyed the main German force — a key turning point of the Eastern Front.
Connected figures: Stalin · Adolf Hitler
Auschwitz
The site of Nazi Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp, where some 1.1 million people, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, were systematically murdered during World War II — one of the most firmly documented sites of the Holocaust.
Connected figures: Adolf Hitler
London
The British capital, under sustained bombing by the German air force during World War II; here Churchill delivered many morale-lifting wartime speeches, firmly leading Britain to resist to final victory.
Connected figures: Churchill
Yekaterinburg
In 1918 the family of the last Tsar Nicholas II, held under house arrest here, was secretly executed by night by the Bolshevik regime, ending the Romanov dynasty’s more than three hundred years of rule.
Connected figures: Nicholas II