Wars by Era
2 major conflicts, 21 battles, and an estimated 1,100,000 dead.
The final, apocalyptic round of a 700-year struggle between Rome and Persia. The Sasanian king Khosrow II overran the Roman East — taking Antioch, Jerusalem, and Egypt and seizing the True Cross — and twice reached the walls of Constantinople. Then the emperor Heraclius struck deep into Persia in one of history's great comebacks, shattering the Sasanians at Nineveh. Both empires were left so exhausted that, within a decade, the armies of Islam swept them away.
9 battles · 500,000 dead
The fastest major expansion in human history. In a little over a century, armies fighting under the banner of a new faith erupted from Arabia and conquered an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Indus — destroying the Sasanian Persian Empire outright, tearing Syria, Egypt, and North Africa from Byzantium, and overrunning Visigothic Spain. Only at the walls of Constantinople and the field of Tours was the tide finally checked.
12 battles · 600,000 dead