Francisco Pizarro conquered and colonized the nation now known as Peru (homeland of the Incan people). Cortez conquered the Aztecs of Mexico, and Ponce de Leon and Coronado are associated primarily with the Caribbean. While similar, Columbus was not a true conquistador and allegedly never saw the Incas.

The Gunpowder Empires got their name from their reliance of black powder weapons as the crux of their military might. They were strictly run dynastic empires focused on aggressive expansion of territories. They all three were located in the Middle East and could trace their lineage back to early Turkish tribes.

Hattusa was the capital city of the Hittite empire in what is today central Turkey.

One of the first capitals of Mayan civilization was El Mirador.

The Babylonian empire's capital was Babylon itself.

Over 3000 years of self-rule, the Egyptian empire had different capital cities, most notably Memphis; Hattusa was not a capital under the Egyptian empire.

The eastern Roman empire was centered in Constantinople, what is today officially Istanbul.

The Tea Act was meant to aide the failing East India Trading Company, which had massive overstocks of tea and other goods in London. Parliament therefore banned the sale of these goods from any other source. While this actually drove down the price of these goods in the colonies, the colonists resented the British attempting to regulate their economy in this way.

The samurai were originally cavalry archers.

Although many samurai were proficient with spears and pikes, they were originally cavalry archers.

Although there may have been some individual exceptions, the samurai were not known to ever use nets and tridents.

Eventually the samurai became proficient with firearms like muskets, but only just before their extinction as a distinct social group.

Japan did have a maritime tradition, but the samurai were never a large part of that tradition.

Although the Hundred Years’ War inflicted pain upon the entirety of both the French and English populations, in both countries, the peasantry was the most devastated of all social groups. This is largely due to the fact that prior to the war’s outbreak, the peasants were already the most vulnerable and troubled social class – their lowly status, coupled with their confinement to their masters’ lands, a lack of education, and chronic malnutrition, meant that any sufferings brought on by the war would already weaken them even further. Furthermore, the French and English governments compounded the peasants’ suffering by recruiting (either willingly or unwillingly) nearly every male of fighting age into the army – and the category of fighting age was set rather low. The national governments also raised taxes on the peasants and forced them to provide more services (such as food and raw materials) for either a reduced price or entirely for free, with the excuse of the necessity of the war effort as justification.

The Industrial Revolution saw many major advancements that helped to improve the day-to-day lives of people the world over. These changes also helped to extend the average lifespan of people, thus making the population grow tremendously. There was, however, no downturn in the amount or scale of warfare during the period of the Industrial Revolution.

Primogeniture was the strict code of inheritance that passed all wealth land and titles down from father to eldest son. This practice severely limited the independence of women in society, and kept wealth from being distributed among lower classes.

During the early medieval period, the upper classes of societies had generally already been established. The elites in society were the landowning classes. During this period, however, the growth of trade meant that some merchants grew immensely wealthy. The elites, in the vast majority of societies, viewed merchants disdainfully and were very reluctant to welcome merchants into the upper class.

After the Napoleonic Wars at the start of the nineteenth century, many states were redrawn and reorganized. Additionally, the romantic and revolutionary movements of Europe in the early nineteenth century highlighted the shared histories of certain peoples. The desire for shared cultural, language, and religious heritages to be united in one state would both create modern Italy and Germany, while also spelling the destruction of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nations like the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the end of World War I in 1918.