AP World Unit 3: Land-Based Empires

This is Constantinople, now called Istanbul, in modern Turkey — sitting precisely on the Bosphorus strait where Europe and Asia are separated by less than a kilometre of water, exactly the narrow…

This is Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey — perched on the promontory where the Bosphorus strait separates Europe from Asia, exactly where the Black Sea funnels into the Sea of Marmara. In 1459…

On 2 January 1492 the forces of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella entered Granada as its last Muslim ruler, Boabdil, surrendered the Alhambra palace-fortress. This ended the Emirate of…

This is Tabriz, in what is now northwestern Iran — set on a high plateau between the Caspian Sea to the east and Lake Urmia to the west, ringed by the Zagros and Armenian mountain systems. In 1501, a…

The Battle of Chaldiran took place in 1514 near what is now Caldiran, in the Van Province of eastern Turkey — on the high Anatolian plateau where the highlands of Anatolia give way toward the Zagros…

This is Cairo, Egypt — where the Nile Delta meets the northeastern edge of Africa, just west of the Sinai Peninsula that links Africa to Asia. In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I crushed the Mamluk…

On 31 October 1517, the German monk and theology professor Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 arguments — known as the 95 Theses — to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The list…

The city is Worms, Germany, sitting on the western bank of the Rhine River as it flows northward across the broad central European plain toward the North Sea. In 1521, the religious reformer Martin…

This is Panipat, in present-day India, sitting on the flat plains south of the Himalayas and north of the Gangetic heartland — exactly the kind of open ground where cavalry armies could manoeuvre…

The battle unfolded near Mohács, Hungary, on the broad floodplain beside the Danube that sits almost exactly midway between the Carpathian arc and the Adriatic coastline. On August 29, 1526, the…

This is Vienna, now the capital of Austria, sitting on the Danube where the Alps give way to the vast flat basin stretching east toward the Black Sea — exactly the geographic bottleneck the title…

In Westminster, England — on the north bank of the Thames just inland from the channel that separates the island from the continent — Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, declaring King…

In 1541 the French-born reformer John Calvin returned to Geneva and, through his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, reorganised the city as a Reformed Protestant republic governed by scripture. Geneva sits…

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, arguing that the Sun — not the Earth — sits at the centre of the universe, and that all planets…

This was Trent, a city in what is now northern Italy, sitting in the Adige River valley just south of the Brenner Pass — the great Alpine gateway connecting the Italian peninsula to central Europe…

Augsburg, in present-day Germany, sits on the Lech River just north of where the Alps rise from the Bavarian plateau — exactly the central European heartland the title clue described. In 1555, the…

Amasya, a city in northern Turkey, sits on the Yeşilırmak River in the highlands of Anatolia — the broad peninsula between the Black Sea to the north and the Mediterranean to the south, forming the…

The Battle of Talikota was fought in 1565 near the town of Talikota, in what is now the state of Karnataka in southern India — on the broad, semi-arid Deccan Plateau that stretches across the…

This is Agra, in present-day India, sitting on the Yamuna River on the broad Indo-Gangetic Plain — the flat, river-crossed heartland stretching south from the Himalayas. In 1632, Mughal Emperor Shah…

This was Münster, in the Westphalia region of what is today northwestern Germany, sitting on the broad North European Plain between the Rhine to the south and the North Sea coast to the northwest. In…

In 1687, Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica from Cambridge University, England. The book set out three laws of motion explaining how and why objects accelerate and…

Moscow, Russia — a fortress city on the Moskva River, which feeds into the Oka and then the Volga, sitting west of the Ural Mountains in the vast country that straddles both Europe and Asia, exactly…