Map of the Mediterranean World
Every marker is a place where history happened: the ruins of Carthage, the boundary stream of the Rubicon, the headland at Actium, the walls of Constantinople. Tap a marker for the story, tap the legend to filter by era.
☜ Tap a marker and its story appears here.
The Republic
Civil Wars & the Republic’s Dusk
The Empire
Late Antiquity & the Eastern Empire
The map’s extent matches the "European History" universe (longitude -11° to 63°, latitude 30° to 71°, Natural Earth 50m), which already covers the main sites of the Roman world; place coordinates use the approximate modern locations of the ancient cities.
Places on this map
Rome
The city the she-wolf’s twins raised on the Palatine Hill. From monarchy to Republic to Empire, Senate, forum, and Colosseum piled on top of one another — the Rome that all roads lead to.
Connected figures: Romulus · Brutus the Elder · Julius Caesar · Augustus · Cicero · Nero
Carthage
The Mediterranean trading empire founded by the Phoenicians — Rome’s strongest rival. Hannibal set out to cross the Alps from its holdings in Spain; after the Third Punic War it was razed to the ground.
Connected figures: Hannibal · Scipio Africanus · Cato the Elder · Marius
The Alps
In 218 BC Hannibal led fifty thousand foot and horse and thirty-seven war elephants over these mountains into Italy — a route the Romans thought impossible, one of the most famous marches in the history of war.
Connected figures: Hannibal
Cannae
In 216 BC Hannibal, outnumbered, encircled and annihilated nearly seventy thousand Roman troops in a single day — the eternal textbook case of a battle of encirclement, still required study in military academies two thousand years later.
Connected figures: Hannibal
The Rubicon
The legal boundary river between Italy proper and the provinces. For Caesar to cross it with an army in 49 BC was treason — "the die is cast," and civil war and one-man rule became irreversible.
Connected figures: Julius Caesar · Pompey
Actium
The decisive naval battle of 31 BC. Cleopatra’s fleet withdrew mid-battle, Antony followed her, and Octavian won without a fight — the last battle on the road to the Principate.
Connected figures: Augustus · Mark Antony · Cleopatra
Alexandria
The Egyptian capital of the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra’s throne and her deathbed. Caesar was drawn into Egypt’s civil strife here, Antony died in her arms, and Egypt passed into Rome along with her.
Connected figures: Cleopatra · Mark Antony · Julius Caesar
Hadrian’s Wall
The stone wall Hadrian built across northern Britain, declaring that the empire went "this far and no further" — a symbol of the turn from Trajan’s expansion to consolidation.
Connected figures: Hadrian
The Danube Frontier
The empire’s longest northern border. Trajan crossed the river to conquer Dacia; Marcus Aurelius spent much of his life here fighting Germanic tribes and writing his Meditations.
Connected figures: Trajan · Marcus Aurelius
Split (Diocletian’s Palace)
The seaside palace Diocletian built for his retirement. Here he grew cabbages and refused to return to power — the only Roman emperor to hand over power of his own accord.
Connected figures: Diocletian
Constantinople
The "New Rome" Constantine founded on the old site of Byzantium, commanding the Bosporus between Europe and Asia. On this city the Eastern Empire survived for a thousand years, until Constantine XI fell in the sack of 1453.
Connected figures: Constantine · Constantine XI