An awful lot of conquering has gone on during the course of human history. Here are the empires that conquered the most land.
1. THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Britain built settlements in many different parts of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries, to use as bases for trading goods. But most of the huge British Empire was gained during the reign of Queen Victoria. It was at its biggest around 1920, when Queen Victoria’s grandson, George V, was in charge. The empire was spread out in different parts of the world – India, big chunks of Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and more besides. The empire ruled more than 450 million people, which was about a quarter of the population of the entire world at the time, and covered almost a quarter of the planet’s land.
2. THE MONGOL EMPIRE
Britain’s Empire might have been the biggest, but the Mongol Empire, begun by Genghis Khan, was more impressive because it was one continuous chunk of land, not dotted around the world like the British Empire. Amazingly, it stretched all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. And it was gained by terrifying Mongolian hordes rampaging about on horseback. The Mongol Empire was at its biggest when Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, was emperor.
3. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The Russian Empire was vast – almost as big as the Mongol Empire. In the 1600s the Russians conquered Siberia, and by the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic Sea, up into the Arctic and across Siberia to the Pacific. At one time, Alaska was also part of the Russian Empire, but it was sold to America in 1867 for $7.2 million dollars, which worked out at just under five dollars per square kilometre. The Russian Revolution put a stop to the expansion of the empire in 1917.
OTHER EMPIRES
The Roman Empire might have ruled most of the known world, but it comes quite a long way down the list of biggest empires ever: it was only a fifth of the size of the British Empire. The empire conquered by ancient Greek Alexander the Great was smaller still (although it was still pretty huge), about a fifth of the size of the Mongol Empire.
See here to find out about Alexander the Great and his empire, here to find out about Charlemagne and the Frankish Empire, and here to find out about Aurangzeb and the Mughal Empire.
