Why succession is only one section
The site began as a single thread through the Iranian Intermezzo, where one polity really does become the next with unusual density — slave-generals taking their masters’ provinces, governors inheriting the empire that appointed them. That thread is still here, and it is still the part that no reference work gives you.
But most of history is not a thread. Rome, Srivijaya, Aksum and the Inca have no succession relationship to the Samanids and never will. All four are here, with full pages and full rankings, and a site organised around continuity would have had to either leave them out or invent a connection. So continuity became a section rather than the spine. A polity that seceded from nothing and was inherited by nobody gets a full page and a full ranking here, and simply has no thread to stand in — which the page says in one sentence, as a fact about what has been read rather than a hole in the record.
How the chapters were written
The chapters on this site were drafted by an AI model and reviewed by the person who runs the site. That is a deliberate trade-off, and the honest alternative was not a hand-written version of this site — it was no site at all.
What limits the damage is the method. Drafting is done one polity at a time, against a named source that is opened first, and that source is printed at the top of every chapter where you can see it before you read a word of the prose. Nothing is drafted from several sources at once or from general recall, because that is precisely how unsourced claims get in.
So: this is a set of structured reading notes with visible provenance. It is not generated content presented as authority, and it is not a substitute for the works it cites. Where a chapter says something you want to rely on, the source line above it is the thing to go and read.
What the numbers are, and are not
No figure on this site is estimated, interpolated, or inferred. Where two sources disagree, both are kept and the range is shown — which is why several longevity bars are ranges rather than lines. Where no citable figure exists, the axis reads No cited figure, is excluded from the weighted total, and is never quietly treated as zero.
That last rule matters more than it looks. A polity with two documented axes must never appear to score lower than one with four, so every total states how many axes it was computed from and is renormalised across those only. The Ghurids produced the Delhi Sultanate and have 2 empty axes; the empty bars are a fact about what scholarship has bothered to quantify, and they are content rather than an apology.
Influence is never published as a single number. It is three separate counts — descendant scripts, religions carried, successor claims — coded against a written rulebook that is applied to every polity including the ones where the answer is inconvenient. The sliders on the rankings view will fuse those three if you want them fused, in your view, and the result travels in the address bar rather than being published as this site’s opinion.
What this is not
- Not a wiki. No editing, no accounts, no contributions. Corrections are made by editing files in the repository and redeploying.
- Not a ranking. There is no greatest-empire ordering published here as the site’s own view.
- Not complete. Coverage follows one person’s curiosity and grows one polity at a time, each drafted against a source that is opened first.
- Not a claim that the regions here were separate worlds. A region is a browsing group and the boundary of a thread, nothing more.
Sources
Every citation on this site resolves to a work in one list, and the build fails if one does not. 678 works, cited across 419 narrative polities, 49 reference polities and 431 succession edges.
The full bibliography shows each work with the number of claims resting on it, the polities that rest on it, and the ones where a single book carries an entire page.