World at war: The incredible video that shows 1,000 years of conflict in five minutes



War has sadly become pretty much a constant in our lives with the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it wasn't always so as this animated video shows.

To help compare and contrast the history of war over the past 1,000 years, a YouTube user has created this incredible animated video which illustrates all the important battles that have taken place over the last ten centuries.

Video: 1,000 years of war in five minutes

One thousand years of war are represented over a five-minute span. To a soundtrack of 'Ride Of The Valkyries' by Richard Wagner, the video documents the wars in chronological order with the sizes of the explosions and labels proportional to the number of casualties.



The video starts relatively peacefully, but over time the scale and magnitude of global conflicts increases and perhaps the saddest thing is that it is the last 100 years or so which have been the bloodiest.



1072: The Battle of Manzikert, when Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was defeated and captured by the Seljuk Turks

1230: The Battle of Klokotnitsa and victory for the Second Bulgarian Empire over the Despotate of Epirus

1381: The Battle of Kulikovo, when Dmitri Donskoi of Moscow halted the Mongols

1659: The world is relatively peaceful save for some small wars in western and northern Europe

1862: The American Civil War

1915: World War 1 is raging

1942: War World 2 is taking place across Europe and in the Far East

1973: Yom Kippur War aka 6th of October War - Egyptian and Syrian armies attack Israel to regain territory lost in the 1967 Six Day War

2003: The Iraq war begins



