Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, knows of 20,202 battles. I put 13,712 of them on a map, from a legendary clash in 3001 BCE to the fighting of 2026, and asked where war happened, century by century, which places have been fought over again and again, and how much the map is a record of war and how much a record of who wrote things down.
Every so often someone posts a map of "every battle in history", and it always looks the same: Europe ablaze, the Mediterranean outlined in fire, the eastern United States glowing with the Civil War, and much of Africa, Asia and the Americas oddly calm. That map is real, in the sense that it shows real data. But it is not a map of war. It is a map of which wars have been written up, in which languages, by which volunteers. I wanted to make the map properly, with the dates, and then look hard at what it can and cannot tell us.
The data are every item in Wikidata that is an instance of "battle" or one of its subclasses: 20,202 items. 14,768 have coordinates (9,626 their own, the rest borrowed from the place they are said to have happened), and 15,874 have a date. 13,712 have both, and those are the battles on this page.
Each dot is one battle, coloured by era. The hexagons count battles on an equal-area grid, so a big hexagon in Siberia covers the same ground as one in Belgium. The time slider is stretched, because the record is: a few dozen battles survive from the second millennium BCE, thousands from the 19th century. Press play to step through time, from 500 years at a step in the ancient world to a decade at a step since 1800. Pick a war, a kind of event or a continent, or search for a battle, a war or a place.
Dots: 13,712 Wikidata battle items with coordinates and a date (9,626 items have their own coordinates; for the rest the point is the place given as the battle's location, so it can be a town, a region or a sea). Years before 1 CE are BCE. Hexagons: equal-area grid in the Equal Earth projection, 60, 120 or 240 km across the corners depending on zoom (set it under Map layers); colours count the battles shown. Under Map layers: the most fought-over hexagons and regions, the centre of war century by century, and the deadliest battles in Wikipedia's list. Outlines: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
Wikidata's battles are not spread evenly through time. 672 are dated before 1 CE. Only 3 are older than 2000 BCE, and the oldest, the Battle of Banquan of Chinese legend, is placed in 3001 BCE. From about 1000 CE the numbers climb, and after 1500 they take off: 77% of all dated battles happened after 1500, and 52% after 1800. The 19th century is the best recorded century, with 3,714 battles, just ahead of the 20th with 3,630. The single year with the most is 1944 (319 battles), then 1863 (256), and the busiest decade is the 1940s (1,216).
Battles per century, 13th century BCE to the 21st century
Every dated battle. Coloured: the continent of mapped battles; grey: dated but not mapped. The 21st century so far covers 2001 to 2026. Hover a bar.
Counted per year rather than per century, the recent record is just as dense: 37.1 battles a year in the 19th century, 36.3 in the 20th and 35.4 so far in the 21st, from Iraq, Syria and the Sahel to Ukraine. That is not evidence that the world has become as warlike as it was in the age of Napoleon and the American Civil War. It is evidence that recent wars get written up on Wikipedia as they happen, battle by battle.
Where is the middle of the world's recorded fighting? For each century with at least 20 mapped battles I found the point on the globe with the smallest total distance to all of them, a kind of median on a sphere. In 27 centuries it has wandered remarkably little. It sits in Greece in the age of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars and moves to Italy with Rome. Then, from the 5th century to the 19th, in every century but one, it lies within 800 km of the middle of the Alps, drifting between northern Italy, Austria, Switzerland, southern Germany and France as the wars of medieval and early modern Europe dominate the record.
The centre of war, century by century
The spherical median of each century's mapped battles (centuries with 20 or more), from the 6th century BCE (pale) to the 21st century (dark red). Hover a point for the century, the number of battles and how spread out they were.
The departures are just as telling. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE the centre jumps east towards the Caucasus and the Caspian, because the record holds more battles from Han and Three Kingdoms China (67% of the 3rd century's mapped battles are in Asia) than from Rome, and the median of two clusters far apart lands between them; in the 3rd century half of all battles were more than 3,090 km from the centre. In the 7th century it moves to Syria with the Arab conquests. In the 20th it moves east to Romania, pulled by the Eastern Front, the Balkans and the Middle East. And in the 21st century it has left Europe for Syria, 1,883 km from where it stood in the 20th century: 49% of this century's mapped battles are in Asia and 37% in Africa.
To find the most fought-over ground I counted battles in equal-area hexagons of 9,353 km², about the size of Cyprus, and in regions of seven neighbouring hexagons (65,472 km², about twice the size of Belgium). The winner is not a surprise. Flanders, Artois and Brabant, from Dunkirk and Ypres to Arras, Brussels and Antwerp, holds 369 battles across 17 centuries: Caesar's war with the Belgae, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the Eighty Years' War, Marlborough, Waterloo and two world wars. Its busiest single hexagon, Arras, Artois and southern Flanders, has 113. Of all countries larger than 20,000 km², Belgium is the most fought-over for its size: 195 battles, 63.4 for every 10,000 km².
The most fought-over places on Earth
Left: regions of seven equal-area hexagons (65,472 km²), by battles. Right: single hexagons (9,353 km²), by the number of different centuries with a battle. The coloured bar under each place shows its battles by era. Click a place to see it on the map.
Counting how long a place has been fought over, rather than how often, gives a different answer. Jerusalem, Gaza and the coastal plain has battles in 16 different centuries, from 1025 BCE to 2025, and in all eight of my eras; only 2 hexagons on Earth manage that, the other being Baghdad. Northern Italy is close behind: Milan, Pavia and the Adda has 16 centuries of battles, from the Gauls and Hannibal to Pavia, Marignano and Napoleon, and Rome 15. The Levant, the Po valley, Greece and the land between Rome and Naples have been fought over for as long as there have been records.
Some of the busiest places are a warning about the data. The second busiest region is Western France, from the Vendée to Normandy, with 260 battles, 68% of them from the War in the Vendée and the Chouannerie of the 1790s, which together have 191 battle items, more than the Thirty Years' War. They were bloody wars, but they are on the map in such detail because French Wikipedia editors have written up every skirmish. Dense local coverage also helps put the Welsh Marches, Catalonia and central Scotland near the top, and Japan's Kyoto and Osaka plain, the busiest place east of Iran.
66% of the battles say which war they were part of. Wikidata often records a theatre or campaign rather than the war (the Second World War's battles are spread over 60 different "part of" values, from the Pacific War to Operation Overlord), so I grouped the theatres of the two world wars into the wars themselves. The Second World War has the most battles, 864, then the First with 532 and the American Civil War with 524. The ten best-recorded wars hold 22% of all the battles that name a war.
The wars with the most battles in Wikidata
Battle items per war (world war theatres grouped), coloured by the continent with most of its mapped battles. The number after each bar is the median number of Wikipedia language editions per battle. Click a war to show it on the map.
The list says as much about the record as about war. The American Revolutionary War has more battle items than the Napoleonic Wars proper, the Greek War of Independence more than the Hundred Years' War, and the Polish-Soviet War more than the Korean War. Apart from the Korean, Vietnam, Syrian and Afghan wars, all of the top 25 were fought in Europe or North America. No war in China, India or Africa makes the list.
Europe has 51% of the mapped battles, Asia 24%, Africa 9%. Through time the balance shifts: Asia leads in the ancient record, Europe dominates from the classical age to the world wars, the Americas appear with the colonial wars and dominate the 19th century (43% of its mapped battles, with the wars of Latin American independence and the American Civil War), and since 1946 Asia and Africa have most of them. In the 21st century Europe has only 14%.
Where the battles were, by century
Share of each century's mapped battles by continent (centuries with 20 or more). Naval battles count for the continent of the nearest land; Russia west of the Urals is Europe. Hover a bar.
Very. Europe has 7% of the world's land outside Antarctica and 51% of the mapped battles, 6.9 times its share. Some of that is real: Europe was crowded, divided and constantly at war. But much of it is the record. Wikidata grows out of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's battle articles are written mostly in European languages, from European and American histories. A battle between two West African kingdoms in the 17th century, or two Indian states in the 12th, is far less likely to have an article, an item, coordinates and a date.
Famous old battles, many obscure new ones
Every dated battle: its year (stretched scale, as on the map) against the number of Wikipedia language editions that cover it (log scale; 0 shown at the bottom). Lines: median and 90th percentile by century. Hover a point.
The sitelinks, the number of Wikipedia language editions that have an article on a battle, show the other side of the bias. The median battle has 3; 32% have one or none. Ancient battles that survive in the record tend to be famous (median 6 editions before 500 CE), because only famous ones were written about at all, while the modern record is full of small, obscure actions known in one language (median 3 since 1800). The most widely covered battle is Battle of Stalingrad (108 editions), then Battle of Waterloo (95) and Attack on Pearl Harbor (88).
Wikidata's "battle" class is broad and inconsistent. Only 79% of the items are called a battle in their English label. The rest are sieges, skirmishes, raids, attacks, assaults, landings, massacres, operations and offensives (below), and 7% have no English label at all. And many famous fights are missing, because they are typed as a siege, an offensive or a military operation rather than a battle: of the 709 rows in Wikipedia's list of battles by casualties I could match only 551 (78%) to a Wikidata battle, and the unmatched ones include Operation Barbarossa, the Siege of Leningrad and the Battle of the Bulge.
What the battle items are called
All 20,202 items, by the first matching word in the English label.
The deadliest battles tell the same story from the other side. Of the 540 entries of Wikipedia's casualty list I could map, 63% are in Europe and 26% in Asia, though the list includes the An Lushan rebellion and the Taiping war, and Asia has had most of the world's people for all of recorded history. Turn on "Deadliest battles" under Map layers to see them; the casualty figures are Wikipedia's own high estimates, often disputed.
The map of every battle is a map of war, but it is also a map of whose wars got written down, and in which language.
Battles. Every Wikidata item that is an instance of battle (Q178561) or of any subclass of it, with its English label, number of Wikipedia sitelinks, coordinates (P625), location (P276) and its coordinates, point in time (P585), start time (P580) and "part of" (P361), fetched through the QLever endpoint in 2026. The query returns 23,069 rows, one per combination of location and war, which I reduced to 20,202 items. Coordinates are the item's own where it has them, otherwise those of its location (the location nearest the middle of its locations, when there are several). The year is the earliest point in time, otherwise the earliest start time; years before 1 CE use Wikidata's astronomical numbering (year 0 is 1 BCE) and are shown as BCE. Centuries are ordinal (the 19th century is 1801 to 1900), which also places dates that Wikidata stores only to the century, such as "1300" for the 13th century, in the right one. The export does not give the precision of a date, so some ancient years are only approximate.
Places. Country and continent come from Natural Earth outlines: the country the point is in, or the nearest country within 400 km for battles at sea (1,369 mapped battles; 43 far out in the ocean have no continent). Russia west of the Urals and Turkey west of the Bosporus count as Europe. Hexagons are on an equal-area grid in the Equal Earth projection, so they can be compared anywhere. The centre of war is the spherical geometric median of each century's battles. Wars are the "part of" value with the most battles, with theatres and campaigns of the two world wars grouped into the wars (inside 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945). Kinds come from the first matching word in the English label. Casualties: the five tables of Wikipedia's "List of battles by casualties", matched to Wikidata by label and year (within three years).
What this is not. It is not a count of all the battles ever fought, nor of how violent each age or place was. It is a count of Wikidata items, which reflect Wikipedia's coverage: heavily European and modern, generous to some wars (the Vendée, the American Civil War) and silent on others. Points can be approximate, borrowed from a town or a region; some items are legendary; and Wikidata's classes are inconsistent, so the same kind of event can be in or out depending on how an editor typed it.