Eight Years When History Happened Twice

In the spring of 331 BC, on a strip of Egyptian coastline near a fishing village called Rhakotis, Alexander the Great paced out the boundaries of a new city he had decided to name after himself. According to the historian Arrian, when his architect ran out of chalk, Alexander had the lines marked in barley flour. He never returned. He died eight years later in Babylon. The city he sketched in that morning would outlast his empire by more than two thousand years and is, with much of its ancient layout buried, still there.

Six months later, in October, the same Alexander stood with his outnumbered army on the plains of Gaugamela in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. The Persian king Darius III had assembled an army of perhaps 100,000, with chariots, war elephants, and his entire imperial cavalry. Alexander's response was tactical brilliance: he drew the Persian line apart, charged the gap with his Companion cavalry, and threatened Darius personally. Darius fled in his chariot. The Achaemenid Empire, the largest the world had yet seen, founded by Cyrus the Great two centuries earlier, effectively ended in a single afternoon.

On opposite ends of Eurasia, in the same calendar year, two men inherited the militaries that would define their centuries. In China, the king of Qin completed the conquest of the last of the Warring States, declared himself Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, and began standardizing the script, the currency, and the width of cart axles across an empire roughly the size of Western Europe. He commissioned the unified Great Wall, the network of imperial roads, and his own astonishing tomb with its terracotta army. Centralized China, as a political idea, dates from this year.

Eight thousand kilometers to the west, in the Carthaginian-held south of Spain, the general Hasdrubal the Fair was assassinated by a slave seeking revenge for his master. Command of Carthage's Spanish army passed by acclamation to Hasdrubal's twenty-six-year-old brother-in-law: Hannibal Barca. He had spent his teens campaigning in Iberia under his father Hamilcar's command, and had reportedly sworn, as a child, eternal hatred of Rome. Eight years after his appointment, he would cross the Alps with elephants and come within a single decision of destroying the Roman Republic.

In a single year, Rome erased two of the Mediterranean's oldest civilizations. In the spring, Scipio Aemilianus broke through the walls of Carthage after a three-year siege. The city was sacked for six days, the surviving population enslaved, and Roman senators ordered the foundations themselves dismantled stone by stone. The famous story of Carthaginian soil being salted is a 19th-century invention, but the destruction was real and total: a city that had been Rome's existential rival for more than a century simply ceased to exist.

By autumn, on the other side of the Greek world, the Roman consul Lucius Mummius marched into Corinth at the head of a punitive expedition against the Achaean League. He sacked the city just as systematically and shipped its art back to Rome by the boatload, complaining (according to Velleius) that he could not understand why the Greeks made such a fuss about paintings. The Achaean League ceased to exist as a political body. The Greek historian Polybius, who was Greek by birth and Roman by adoption, watched the destruction of his homeland with a notebook in hand. The histories he wrote of both sieges are why we know what happened.

On September 25, the Saxon king Harold Godwinson destroyed an invading Norse army at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, killing the legendary king Harald Hardrada and his own exiled brother Tostig. It was a devastating victory, and historians often mark it as the symbolic end of the Viking Age: no Scandinavian army of that scale would ever invade England again.

Three days later, while Harold's exhausted army was still in the north, William of Normandy landed his fleet at Pevensey on the south coast. Harold force-marched his men 270 miles south and met William on October 14 on a ridge near Hastings. After a day of combat in which the Norman cavalry repeatedly feigned retreat to draw the Saxon shield wall apart, an arrow struck Harold (in the eye, by the most famous account) and the line collapsed. Within three weeks, two invasions had landed, two kings had died, and the Saxon dynasty that had ruled England for six hundred years had ended.

On May 29, the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II broke through the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople after a fifty-three-day siege, ending more than a thousand years of Roman rule in the east. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting in the breach in the uniform of an ordinary soldier; his body was never reliably identified. Mehmed entered the city on horseback, prayed in Hagia Sophia, and made it the new Ottoman capital. The Greek world that had survived the western Roman collapse by almost a thousand years was over.

Four months later, on October 19, French and English forces clashed at Castillon in Gascony. The English commander John Talbot was killed by a French cannon, the English line broke, and within weeks the Crown of England had lost every continental possession it had held since the days of Henry II, except Calais. Historians later named the conflict the Hundred Years War. It had actually run a hundred and sixteen, and it ended in the same calendar year that the Roman Empire did.

On January 2, the keys of Granada were handed to Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, ending nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula. The Reconquista, which had begun in 722 with a small Christian victory at Covadonga, was complete in a single ceremony at the Alhambra. The last Nasrid sultan, Boabdil, surrendered the city without a fight under negotiated terms. According to the legend, his mother chided him for weeping like a woman over what he had not defended like a man.

Eight months later, with Spain unified for the first time and its monarchs flush with conquest, the same court financed an Italian-Genoese sailor named Cristoforo Colombo to sail west across the Atlantic in search of a faster route to Asia. He landed in the Bahamas on October 12 in the same calendar year. The two events were not unrelated: the political consolidation that had finished Granada freed the resources, the attention, and the ambition to fund Columbus, and his three ships sailed under banners that had just been victorious at the Alhambra.

On October 31, an obscure German monk and theology professor named Martin Luther sent his ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences to the Archbishop of Mainz; whether he also nailed them to the door of the Wittenberg church is disputed by historians, though the door was the customary university bulletin board. Within months, thanks to the printing press only sixty years old, his arguments were circulating across the German-speaking world. Within five years, the religious unity of western Christendom was permanently shattered.

The same year, on the other side of the Mediterranean, the Ottoman sultan Selim I completed the conquest of Mamluk Egypt, captured Cairo in January, executed the last Mamluk sultan, and added the title of Caliph to his Sultanate. The Ottoman Empire now stretched from the Balkans to Yemen and controlled Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The institutional framework of Sunni Islam had a single political head, who was also the most powerful sovereign on earth. Two religious orders were permanently reshaped in the same year, in opposite directions: Christianity fragmented; Islam consolidated.

On April 30, on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, George Washington swore the first oath of office under the new United States Constitution. For the first time in modern history, an executive head of state derived all his authority from a written contract with the governed, and could be removed by them under specified procedures. There was no royal blood involved, no sacred ceremony of anointing, no claim of divine right. The orderliness of the inauguration, and the precedent it set, would shape every constitutional democracy that followed.

Six weeks later, on June 17 at Versailles, the Third Estate of the French Estates-General declared itself the National Assembly and refused to disband. On July 14, a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille. By August 26, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was published. The American experiment in self-government had begun in an orderly inauguration; the French version began in revolution and crowd violence. Both upended a thousand years of monarchical assumption about the source of legitimate political power, in the same calendar year, on opposite sides of the Atlantic.