--- title: Where the Romans Fought (interactive map) | daily.dev description: This interactive project catalogs every named Roman land and sea battle from 753 BCE to 1475 CE, totaling 1,709 battles. A map lets you filter by period or... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/where-the-romans-fought-interactive-map--qujgs2yjw twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Where the Romans Fought (interactive map) | daily.dev og:description: This interactive project catalogs every named Roman land and sea battle from 753 BCE to 1475 CE, totaling 1,709 battles. A map lets you filter by period or... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/where-the-romans-fought-interactive-map--qujgs2yjw og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/QUJGs2YJw.png og:image:alt: Where the Romans Fought (interactive map) og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Where the Romans Fought (interactive map) **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 114 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary This interactive project catalogs every named Roman land and sea battle from 753 BCE to 1475 CE, totaling 1,709 battles. A map lets you filter by period or drag a year slider through 25-year windows, with dots sized by battle count and sliced by opponent. Of 1,469 battles with a known result, Romans won 62% overall. Their best record came against the Peoples of Italy (83% won, 752-60 BCE), their worst against Arabs (40% won, 25 BCE-1169 CE). The full list cites sources and flags battles historians consider traditional or doubtful. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What was the overall win rate of the Roman army across its entire history? Romans won 62% of the 1,469 battles with a known result, spanning 752 BCE to 1475 CE, with 916 wins, 41 draws, and 512 losses. This excludes 236 civil war battles and 4 battles with unknown results. A battle with multiple opponents counts against each opponent but only once in the total. _Explore the full battle-by-battle breakdown on daily.dev for anyone digging into long-running historical datasets._ ### Against which opponents did the Roman army have its best and worst win rates? Romans had their highest win rate against the Peoples of Italy at 83% (168 wins out of 202 battles, 752-60 BCE). Their lowest win rate was against Arabs at 40% (66 wins out of 166 battles, 25 BCE to 1169 CE). Steppe peoples, Seljuks, and Ottomans came in at 49% across 144 battles from 49 to 1475 CE. _Compare historical datasets like this one on daily.dev when evaluating how to visualize long-term trend data._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 60 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-26). **TL;DR:** Reactions split between people enjoying the interactive map's data and visualization, and others dismissing it as unpolished 'AI slop' with confusing presentation and unverified sourcing; a side debate also erupted over whether 15th-century Byzantines should count as 'Romans'. **Sentiment:** 30% positive · 35% mixed · 35% skeptical **The case for** - Several found the underlying data and visualization genuinely interesting and worth building on. - It works well and renders cleanly on various devices (desktop, some mobile browsers). - One commenter praised it as a nice open-source proof of concept that can be improved further. - A detailed anecdote noted the map's accuracy held up even for an expected-but-nonexistent battle. **The pushback** - Many called it 'AI slop' with messy, hard-to-parse presentation and no editorial polish. - Navigation and rendering were reported as broken or confusing on iOS mobile. - Some worried the underlying data vetting is weak given how easy AI makes it to spin up such sites. - Lack of acknowledgment of AI usage and missing links to primary sources/translations was seen as a missed opportunity. - A side-argument contested whether the later 'Roman' empire (through 1475 CE) should really be classified as Roman at all. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Opinions split sharply between praise for the data/visualization and dismissal of it as sloppy AI output, with a lengthy tangent on Roman identity continuity. **Hottest debate:** Whether the Byzantine-era 'Romans' through 1475 CE should be considered a continuation of Rome or a distinct civilization. **Open questions** - How rigorously was the underlying battle data vetted given the ease of generating such a site with AI? - Could linking to Wikipedia or primary sources improve trust in the data? **Highlights** > Man, I was about to go on a proper rant and claim that the site didn’t have every battle because it’s missing the battle of Maiden Castle… I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0]. But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight. Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight. There never was any big battle. There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up. Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century. So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened. I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site. [0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”. > — [bartread on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236420) > > Play runs through them from the founding of Rome. Each dot is a place, its area the number of battles there, and its slices the opponents, starting at 12 o'clock and running clockwise in the order of the legend; grey is civil war. Diamonds are sea battles; dashed rings are battles placed only within their region, in the colour of the most frequent opponent; triangles at the edge point to Caledonia, Nubia and Arabia. Nearby dots merge as you zoom out and split as you zoom in. Hover or tap a dot for its battles; select it to list them with their full records. This is technically "clear", because each clause is declarative, and states a fact. But it's unreadable because there's no rhythm, transitions or structure, which leaves a human reader's eyes glazing over. > — [hyperpape on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50242035) > The Romans in the 1400s still called themselves Romans and saw themselves as Romans (in Greek: Rhomaioi). They never stopped. So, no, it's not at all like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour. It was our own much later civilisation that made the historical distinction between the older East and West combined "Roman Empire" and its continuation in the East (and sometimes in the West) post ~476 AD ("Byzantine Empire"). The Romans themselves never saw the distinction. > — [epihelix on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238296) > The map is good but you need to spend some time getting rid of all the crap that claude added around it. Make the map the focus, spend some effort thinking about how you want to present additional information, figure out how to tell a better story. People are saying "slop" because it looks like every other AI website out there right now. > — [smallerfish on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238461) > I find it always interesting that the Romans never reached modern Czechia or slovakia, even though they invaded Britain or went so far in the middle east. > — [epolanski on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50240823) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234879) · 126 points · 60 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Ancient Rome's version of Google Maps: how long to reach the beach](https://daily.dev/posts/ancient-rome-s-version-of-google-maps-how-long-to-reach-the-beach-nmkveucgx) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Some recent discoveries](https://daily.dev/posts/some-recent-discoveries-wnlc1k01n) · Arthur O'Dwyer · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Historic Engineering Wonders: Photos That Reveal How They Pulled It Off](https://daily.dev/posts/historic-engineering-wonders-photos-that-reveal-how-they-pulled-it-off-lthxjstdo) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Durations of wars by @ellis2013nz](https://daily.dev/posts/durations-of-wars-by-ellis2013nz-sczkpzrcu) · R-bloggers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [itiner-e](https://daily.dev/posts/itiner-e-gs9bp7vtl) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#data-visualization](https://daily.dev/tags/data-visualization) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/where-the-romans-fought-interactive-map--qujgs2yjw) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/where-the-romans-fought-interactive-map--qujgs2yjw","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/where-the-romans-fought-interactive-map--qujgs2yjw"},"datePublished":"2026-10-26T01:50:35.946Z","dateModified":"2026-10-26T13:21:58.334Z","description":"This interactive project catalogs every named Roman land and sea battle from 753 BCE to 1475 CE, totaling 1,709 battles. 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