Avevide glossary

Deep-dive history has its own vocabulary, from satraps and consuls to sans-culottes, soviets and the July Crisis. This glossary explains the terms that recur across our long reads on ancient worlds, revolutions, and the rise and collapse of empires up to 1923, drawing on museum, archive and university sources and on ancient writers in public-domain translations. Where historians still argue about what a term means or how much weight an event deserves, we say so.

Achaemenid Empire: The Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great around 550 BCE and ended by Alexander the Great's conquest in 330 BCE; at its height it stretched from Anatolia and Egypt to northern India and Central Asia, the largest the ancient world had yet seen. Darius I organized it with roads and provincial governors and built Persepolis. Much of the surviving narrative comes from Greek writers focused on Persia's relations with the Greek states, so its tales of court intrigue and decadence reflect an outsider's view.; Related:Satrap Royal Road Behistun inscription
Articles of Confederation: The first constitution of the United States, adopted by the Continental Congress on November 15, 1777, and in force from March 1, 1781, when Maryland's ratification completed the process, until 1789. It created a "league of friendship" in which the states kept every power not expressly delegated; the central government could not levy taxes and had little power to regulate commerce, and the present Constitution replaced it in 1789.; Related:Declaration of Independence
Behistun inscription: A monumental relief and inscription carved high on a limestone cliff at Behistun (Bisotun) in western Iran, beside the ancient road from Babylon to Ecbatana; UNESCO puts it about 60 meters above the plain, while other accounts give about 100 meters. In it Darius I tells how he dethroned a usurper he names Gaumata in 522 BCE and put down revolts, in parallel versions in Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite, making it a key source for his reign.; Related:Achaemenid Empire Cuneiform
Bill of Rights (1689): The English act that set out the Declaration of Right presented to William and Mary and settled the crown on them. It received royal assent on December 16, 1689, but the official UK legislation site catalogues it as Bill of Rights [1688]: the Convention Parliament first met in February 1689, which was still 1688 in the old-style calendar (the year then began on March 25), and Acts were dated to the year their session began. It declared illegal the suspending or dispensing of laws without Parliament's consent and a standing army in peacetime without that consent, and it declared that elections to Parliament ought to be free and that subjects have the right to petition the king.; Related:Glorious Revolution Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Blank cheque: Germany's assurance to Austria-Hungary in July 1914 that it would support its ally unconditionally against Serbia, even if that led to a wider European war. Historians debate why Germany's leaders gave it; some, such as Dominic Lieven, see it as the decisive step toward war.; Related:July Crisis Triple Alliance and Triple Entente
Bolsheviks: The radical socialist party led by Vladimir Lenin, rivals of the other socialist parties such as the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). As other socialist parties joined coalitions with the Provisional Government in 1917, the Bolsheviks remained its only consistent critics, which helped them win support in the major cities and army units before they took power in October.; Related:October Revolution Soviet Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Bronze Age collapse: The breakdown of the interconnected palace kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East around 1200 BCE, when Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites and other powers declined or vanished along with their writing systems and long-distance trade. Proposed causes range from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought and the cutting of trade routes; historian Eric Cline argues that multiple interconnected failures, not any single cause, brought the system down, and scholars continue to weigh the factors differently.; Related:Sea Peoples Mycenaean civilization Linear B
Byzantine Empire: The modern name for the eastern Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, the city Constantine the Great made his capital in 330 CE; its own Greek-speaking citizens called themselves Rhomaioi, Romans. It lasted more than 1,100 years, outlived the Fourth Crusade's capture of Constantinople in 1204 by retaking the city in 1261, and ended when the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 and the remaining Byzantine centers at Mistra and Trebizond within a few years.; Related:Fall of Constantinople Fall of the Western Roman Empire Ottoman Empire
Consul: The highest regular magistracy of the Roman Republic, held by two men at a time for a one-year term. According to Polybius, the consuls directed public business in Rome, brought urgent matters and foreign embassies before the senate, and commanded the legions in war.; Related:Mixed constitution Legion Roman Republic
Cuneiform: The wedge-shaped writing made by pressing a reed or wooden stylus into wet clay, which grew out of pictographic accounting signs in southern Mesopotamia, at cities such as Uruk, in the late fourth millennium BCE. Nineteenth-century scholars named it from the Latin cuneus, wedge; cuneiform was later used to write other languages too, including Babylonian, Elamite and Old Persian, the three languages of the Behistun inscription.; Related:Behistun inscription Linear B
Declaration of Independence: The statement of the thirteen American colonies' case for independence from Britain, drafted mainly by Thomas Jefferson for a Committee of Five. Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, and adopted the revised Declaration on July 4, 1776.; Related:Articles of Confederation Social contract
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: The statement of principles adopted by France's National Assembly on August 26, 1789, in seventeen articles setting out, in the English translation published by France's Constitutional Council, "the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man." Its first article declares, "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."; Related:National Assembly Social contract Bill of Rights (1689)
Diadochi: Greek for "successors": the generals and rulers who fought over Alexander the Great's empire after his death in 323 BCE. After a series of wars, three large kingdoms emerged by around 280 BCE: Antigonid Macedonia, Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid kingdom in Asia.; Related:Achaemenid Empire Polis
Directory: The French government from November 1795 to December 1799, headed by an executive of five Directors over a two-chamber legislature. Dependent on the army, it was overthrown in the coup of 18 Brumaire (November 1799) that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power.; Related:Reign of Terror Haitian Revolution
Eastern Question: The name nineteenth-century European diplomats gave to the problems raised by the Ottoman Empire's weakening: its vulnerable territories, the rise of nationalism among its subject peoples and the danger that one great power would gain at the others' expense. Tsar Nicholas I of Russia is usually credited with calling the empire "the sick man of Europe" in 1853, though some accounts date the label earlier.; Related:Ottoman Empire July Crisis
Estates-General: France's traditional representative body of the three estates, clergy, nobility and commoners (the Third Estate), each voting as a single bloc. It had not met since 1614 when Louis XVI, facing bankruptcy, summoned it; it convened in May 1789, and the dispute over voting "by order" or "by head" helped start the Revolution.; Related:Old Regime (ancien régime)National Assembly
Fall of Constantinople: The Ottoman capture of the Byzantine capital on May 29, 1453, after a siege of about fifty days in which Sultan Mehmet II had warships hauled overland into the Golden Horn to get around the harbor's defenses. Mehmet made the city, which the Turks called Istanbul, his capital and converted the cathedral of Hagia Sophia into a mosque.; Related:Byzantine Empire Ottoman Empire
Fall of the Western Roman Empire: The end of Roman imperial rule in the West, conventionally dated to 476 CE, when the Germanic commander Odovacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, commonly called the last western emperor. It followed Diocletian's power-sharing Tetrarchy (293 CE), the division of the empire between two emperors, one in the West and one in the East, after 395, and the Visigoth sack of Rome in 410; the eastern half survived as the Byzantine Empire.; Related:Byzantine Empire Principate
Glorious Revolution: The events of 1688-89 in which William of Orange landed in England with an invasion force on November 5, 1688, James II fled to France, and a Convention transferred the crown to William and Mary. Nineteenth-century Whig historians such as Macaulay praised it as a constitutional triumph for Parliament won with little bloodshed in England, overlooking how bloody it became in Ireland and Scotland, while later interpretations see something closer to a palace coup; the UK Parliament's own history asks, "Was it glorious? Was it even a revolution?"; Related:Bill of Rights (1689)Interregnum (England)Social contract
Haitian Revolution: The uprising of enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which by the 1760s had become the most profitable colony in the Americas. It began on August 22, 1791, led to the French Convention's abolition of slavery in all French colonies on February 4, 1794, and, under leaders such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, produced the independent state of Haiti in 1804, the second independent country in the Americas.; Related:Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen Directory
Interregnum (England): The years between the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649, and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, after the English Civil Wars. England was first a Commonwealth governed by the "Rump" Parliament, then, from December 1653, a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector.; Related:Glorious Revolution Bill of Rights (1689)
Jacobins: Members of the Jacobin Club, one of the Parisian political clubs that flourished during the Revolution, and in the National Convention the radical group that believed it had been elected to carry out the will of the people through decisive action. Their rivals, the Girondins, were purged by June 2, 1793, after which the radical deputies of the Mountain controlled the Convention.; Related:Reign of Terror Sans-culottes
Janissaries: The elite troops of the Ottoman sultan, many of whom were taken as boys from Christian families in the Balkans through the devshirme, a levy of children, then converted to Islam and trained for service. They became a political force in their own right (in 1703 rebellious janissaries forced Sultan Mustafa II to abdicate) until the sultan disbanded them in 1826.; Related:Ottoman Empire Millet
July Crisis: The five weeks between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and Britain's declaration of war on Germany on August 4, during which decisions were made that led to a European war that soon became a world war. Austria-Hungary's forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia on July 23 was a turning point. Historians have argued over responsibility for more than a century, and historian Annika Mombauer concludes that there is still no consensus on the war's origins.; Related:Blank cheque Triple Alliance and Triple Entente Treaty of Versailles
Legion: The main unit of the Roman army. In the mid-Republic described by Polybius, a legion had 4,200 infantry (or 5,000 in times of danger) plus 300 cavalry, with infantry sorted by age and equipment into light-armed velites and three heavy lines: hastati, principes and triarii.; Related:Consul Punic Wars
Linear B: The script used by Mycenaean palace scribes to keep records on clay tablets. Michael Ventris, building on the painstaking work of Alice Kober and Emmett Bennett, showed that it records an early form of Greek.; Related:Mycenaean civilization Cuneiform
Millet: In the Ottoman Empire, a non-Muslim religious community, such as the Greeks, Armenians or Jews, organized under its own religious head. Millets ran their own schools, religious institutions and courts based on their customary law.; Related:Ottoman Empire Janissaries
Mixed constitution: The idea, set out by the Greek historian Polybius in Book 6 of his Histories, that Rome's strength came from blending three forms of government: the consuls were monarchical, the senate aristocratic and the people democratic. Each part could check the others, so that, in his view, even a Roman could not say for sure which kind of state it was.; Related:Consul Tribune of the plebs Roman Republic
Mongol Empire: The empire created by Genghis (Chinggis) Khan (about 1162-1227) and his successors, which spanned Asia from the Pacific to modern-day Hungary; the Metropolitan Museum of Art calls it the largest empire ever to exist. At its greatest extent, two generations after Genghis, it was divided into four main branches: the Yuan dynasty in China, the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia, the Golden Horde in southern Russia and the Ilkhanate in Greater Iran. Genghis's title itself was conferred in 1206 by a khuriltai, an assembly of the Mongol nobility, after he united the Mongol tribes.; Related:Pax Mongolica
Mycenaean civilization: The culture of mainland Greece from about 1600 to 1100 BCE, named after the fortified palace site of Mycenae in the Peloponnese, which Homer called the seat of King Agamemnon. Its palace centers, such as Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes and Pylos, traded across the Mediterranean, kept records in Linear B, and declined amid a wave of destruction in the late thirteenth century BCE.; Related:Linear B Bronze Age collapse
National Assembly: The body that deputies of the Third Estate proclaimed on June 17, 1789, declaring that they alone represented the nation. The deputies reaffirmed that stand in the famous "tennis court oath," and after July 14 the Assembly began drafting a constitution, a task that took until the summer of 1791.; Related:Estates-General Storming of the Bastille Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
October Revolution: The seizure of power in Petrograd that culminated on October 25, 1917 (November 7 in the Western calendar), in which forces of the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee took government buildings and arrested the Provisional Government's ministers. Some historians call it a Bolshevik coup d'état; others stress that it was conducted largely by the Soviet rather than the Bolshevik party leadership, in a power vacuum left by the failed Kornilov affair.; Related:Bolsheviks Provisional Government Soviet
Old Regime (ancien régime): The social and political order of France before 1789, in which society was legally divided by birth into three orders, or estates: clergy, nobility and commoners. Privileges attached to orders, places and groups, and were mostly inherited, though they could also be bought.; Related:Estates-General National Assembly
Ottoman Empire: The state founded in early-fourteenth-century Anatolia by Osman I, whose dynasty ruled for about six centuries under thirty-six sultans. In theory the sultan held supreme political, military and judicial authority, while day-to-day government ran through the grand vizier and his council; in diplomacy the government was called the Sublime Porte, after the "High Gate" of the buildings where that council met. The empire ended after the First World War: the sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on October 29, 1923.; Related:Janissaries Millet Eastern Question
Patricians and plebeians: The two broad orders of Roman citizens: patricians, a privileged class whose status was inherited and who controlled religious offices in the early Republic, and plebeians, the rest of the citizen body. In the long struggle known as the Conflict of the Orders, plebeians formed their own assembly and officers, and by 287 BCE wealthy plebeians had won political equality, producing a mixed patrician-plebeian ruling class.; Related:Tribune of the plebs Roman Republic
Pax Mongolica: Latin for "Mongolian Peace": the term for the political unification of Asia under Mongol rule and the active trade and cultural exchange that came with it. Envoys carrying a paiza, a safe-conduct pass, used a relay system of horse stations that could carry a letter from Beijing to Tabriz, some 5,000 miles, in about a month. The phrase sits alongside the very real destruction of the Mongol conquests, and historians weigh both.; Related:Mongol Empire
Polis: The ancient Greek city-state, such as Athens or Sparta: a relatively small, self-governing community in which political, religious and cultural life were closely intertwined. The English word "political" comes from the Greek politikos, "of the polis," and Aristotle argued that human beings are by nature political animals who naturally want to live together in such communities.; Related:Diadochi Mixed constitution
Principate: The system of one-man rule that Augustus built after the civil wars while keeping the outward forms of the Republic; it is usually dated from 27 BCE, when the senate granted him the title Augustus. In his Res Gestae he claimed, "I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the senate and the Roman people" (translated by Frederick W. Shipley, 1924), and historians weigh that claim against the real concentration of power in his hands.; Related:Roman Republic Fall of the Western Roman Empire
Provisional Government: The government formed in Petrograd in the February Revolution of 1917 (dates in the Russian calendar), which took power as Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on March 2 and promised elections to a Constituent Assembly. It shared the stage with the Petrograd Soviet; historians often call this "dual power," though some argue the Soviet at first saw itself as a pressure group rather than a rival government. The Bolsheviks overthrew it in October 1917.; Related:Soviet Bolsheviks October Revolution
Punic Wars: The three wars between Rome and Carthage. The first, which Polybius calls the war for the possession of Sicily, began when Roman forces first crossed to Sicily in 264 BCE; the second is the Hannibalic war, in which Hannibal invaded Italy; and the third ended with the destruction of Carthage.; Related:Legion Roman Republic
Reign of Terror: The period from September 1793 to July 1794 when the twelve-member Committee of Public Safety used the state's coercive power, revolutionary tribunals and the guillotine against suspected enemies of the Republic. It ended on 9 Thermidor, Year II (late July 1794), when the Convention turned on Robespierre, who was arrested and executed with his followers.; Related:Jacobins Sans-culottes Directory
Revolutions of 1848: The wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848, fed by economic crisis, mass poverty and demands for constitutional rights and national unity. In the German states it produced the Frankfurt National Assembly, Germany's first national parliament, which met in St. Paul's Church from May 18, 1848, and adopted a constitution in March 1849; the revolution collapsed when the King of Prussia refused the imperial crown it offered him.; Related:Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen Provisional Government
Roman Republic: The form of government that replaced rule by kings at Rome, traditionally dated from 509 BCE, in which elected magistrates, a senate and popular assemblies shared power. Over its last three centuries Rome acquired a Mediterranean empire through conquest and diplomacy, while a long series of civil wars and political crises culminated in Julius Caesar's dictatorship, his assassination in 44 BCE and the rise of Augustus.; Related:Consul Mixed constitution Principate
Royal Road: The Persian highway that Herodotus describes running from Sardis in western Anatolia to Susa, with 111 royal stages and resting places along its length; at 150 furlongs a day, he reckons, the journey took just ninety days (Histories 5.52-53). For urgent news the Persians used relays of mounted messengers, of whom Herodotus writes that "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night" kept any rider from finishing his stage (8.98, translated by G. C. Macaulay).; Related:Achaemenid Empire Satrap
Sans-culottes: "Without breeches": the name radical Parisians, many of them artisans and laborers, took to show they were working people rather than fancy-trousered lawyers. The city's political clubs supplied the shock troops who unseated the monarchy in 1792, and sans-culotte pressure helped push the Convention into the Terror.; Related:Jacobins Reign of Terror Storming of the Bastille
Satrap: A provincial governor in the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Under Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE) the empire was stabilized with roads for communication and a system of satraps governing its provinces.; Related:Achaemenid Empire Royal Road
Sea Peoples: Marauding groups, known to us only by this collective name, who invaded Egypt at the end of the Late Bronze Age and were defeated by the pharaoh's army and navy, an event Eric Cline dates to 1177 BCE (a 2023 study in Nature notes that, depending on the Egyptian chronology used, the record of it dates to about 1188 or 1177 BCE). Who they were and where they came from remain uncertain, and Cline is among the historians who argue that the Sea Peoples alone could not have caused the wider Bronze Age collapse.; Related:Bronze Age collapse
Social contract: The idea that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, understood as a kind of agreement among the people, rather than on divine will. Its classic theorists include Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Rousseau.; Related:Declaration of Independence Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Soviet: In revolutionary Russia, an elected council of workers', soldiers' or peasants' deputies. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, formed in February 1917 and led mainly by radical intellectuals from the left-wing parties, became the national focus of the left, and soviets spread across the country.; Related:Provisional Government October Revolution
Storming of the Bastille: The seizure of the Bastille, in the artisan districts of eastern Paris, by Parisian crowds on July 14, 1789, amid rumors that royal troops would dissolve the Estates-General and after the dismissal of the popular minister Necker. Historians still debate whether it was a conscious political act to protect the assembly or a bread riot that took on political meaning as events unfolded.; Related:National Assembly Sans-culottes
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: The separate peace between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers, signed on March 3, 1918, after talks broke down and Germany launched a new offensive. Lenin accepted what was called a "dictated peace" that cost Russia eighteen provinces and nearly 30 percent of its prewar population.; Related:Bolsheviks October Revolution Treaty of Versailles
Treaty of Lausanne: The peace treaty concluded in July 1923 between the Allies and Turkey's nationalist government, the only defeated power of the First World War to negotiate with the Allies as an equal; it recognized nearly all of the territory of modern Turkey. Alongside the settlement, Greece and Turkey arranged a compulsory exchange of their Greek and Turkish minorities, with some exceptions.; Related:Ottoman Empire Treaty of Versailles
Treaty of Versailles: The peace treaty with Germany that came out of the Paris Peace Conference and was signed on June 28, 1919. Its 440 articles stripped Germany of all its colonies and a substantial share of its prewar European territory (about 10 percent according to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian, one eighth according to historian Susanne Brandt), created the League of Nations, and in Article 231 declared Germany and its allies responsible for the war's loss and damage, the basis for reparations and a long "war guilt" debate.; Related:July Crisis Treaty of Lausanne Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Tribune of the plebs: An officer elected by the plebeians to protect their interests; Polybius notes that the tribunes were the only magistrates not bound to obey the consuls. Polybius notes that if a single tribune interposed his veto, the senate could not reach a decision or even meet, and that tribunes were expected to act as the people wished.; Related:Patricians and plebeians Consul
Triple Alliance and Triple Entente: The two blocs of great powers before the First World War: the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and the Entente of Russia, France and Great Britain. In 1914 German leaders saw the Entente as encircling Germany and its weakening ally Austria-Hungary, and feared the balance would tip further against them as Russia strengthened its army and railways.; Related:July Crisis Blank cheque