Every Battle in History: Five Thousand Years of Battles in Wikidata, Where War Happened, the Most Fought-Over Places, and How Skewed the Record Is

Maps of ``every battle in history'' circulate widely, but rarely with dates, method or caveats. I map every Wikidata item that is an instance of battle or one of its subclasses: 20,202 items, of which 13,712 have both coordinates and a date, from a legendary battle placed in 3001 BCE to 2026. The record is overwhelmingly recent: 77% of dated battles are after 1500 and 52% after 1800, with the 19th century (3,714 battles) and the 20th (3,630) the best recorded. The spherical median of each century's battles, a ``centre of war'', lies in Greece in the 5th century BCE and in Italy under Rome, and from the 5th to the 19th century lies within 800 km of the Alps in every century but the 7th; it has moved to Syria in the 21st century. On an equal-area hexagonal grid the most fought-over region is Flanders, Artois and Brabant (369 battles in 17 centuries), while the longest fought-over hexagon is Jerusalem, Gaza and the coastal plain, with battles in 16 centuries. The best-recorded wars are the Second World War (864 battle items), the First (532) and the American Civil War (524). The record is strongly skewed: Europe has 51% of mapped battles on 7% of the world's land, coverage of some wars is extraordinarily dense, 7.1% of items lack an English label, and only 79% are labelled as battles at all. I argue that the map is best read as a map of the historical record as much as of war itself. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/every-battle/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/every-battle. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/every-battle/. Data: Wikidata (CC0), all items that are instances of battle (Q178561) or its subclasses, via QLever; English Wikipedia, List of battles by casualties (CC BY-SA 4.0; the derived casualty table is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0); Natural Earth.