Rulers Who Remade Their Worlds

Hammurabi ruled Babylon circa 1792 to 1750 BC (Mesopotamian chronology is genuinely disputed among historians) and is remembered above all for the law code issued in his name, inscribed on a basalt stele discovered at Susa in 1901 and now held in the Louvre.

Alexander became King of Macedon in 336 BCE and within a decade had overthrown the Achaemenid Persian Empire, carrying Macedonian and Greek rule from the Adriatic to the Indus valley before he died in Babylon in 323 BCE, without a settled succession.

Caesar's nine-year conquest of Gaul and his 49 BCE crossing of the Rubicon into Italy ended the Roman Republic's constitutional order; appointed dictator, he was assassinated by senators in the Curia of Pompey on the Ides of March, 44 BCE.

Ruler of the Hunnic Empire from 434 to 453 CE, Attila extracted enormous tribute from the Eastern Roman court at Constantinople and invaded Gaul in 451, an invasion checked at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, before his sudden death fragmented the empire he had unified.

Byzantine emperor from 527 to 565 CE, Justinian commissioned the jurist Tribonian's Corpus Juris Civilis, reconquered North Africa and much of Italy through his generals Belisarius and Narses, and rebuilt the Hagia Sophia after it burned in the Nika riots of 532.

King of the Franks from 768 CE, Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor in 800, uniting most of western and central Europe into the largest western realm since Rome, and his court drove the Carolingian Renaissance's revival of learning and literacy.

Ninth ruler of the Mali Empire, Mansa Musa's 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca, with a gold-laden retinue contemporary Arabic sources numbered in the thousands, reportedly depressed the value of gold in Cairo for years and put Mali on the Catalan Atlas of 1375.

Crowned King of England in 1154, Henry II united England with his continental holdings into the Angevin Empire, and his conflict with his former chancellor Thomas Becket over church jurisdiction ended with Becket's murder inside Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.

Henry II's son Richard the Lionheart, crowned in 1189, spent most of his reign abroad: he departed on the Third Crusade in 1190, took Acre and Jaffa, was held for ransom on his return journey, and died in 1199 of an infected crossbow wound.