MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Cyprus

ONE LAND · 6 ATLASES

Cyprus, on the map of history

What was Cyprus before it was Cyprus? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Cyprus · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

Ptolemaic Cyprus, annexed in 58 BC by simple senatorial decree — its king’s treasury was needed to fund Roman grain doles, so philosophy-quoting Cato was sent to collect it; the king took poison, and Cato shipped home 7,000 talents. Empire as accounting: not every conquest on this map required a battle. The island’s copper (its name and the metal’s share a root) and shipbuilding timber kept it valuable; briefly returned to Cleopatra by Antony as a gift, it settled into quiet provincial prosperity and stayed with the East to the end of this atlas and far beyond.

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Cyprus — Byzantine, then a crusader kingdom · The Crusades, 1095–1291

Byzantine until Richard the Lionheart seized it in 1191, Cyprus became — after a brief Templar interlude — a Lusignan crusader kingdom that lasted nearly four centuries. It was the crusades’ most durable territorial gain and the last Latin foothold after the mainland fell in 1291, surviving under its own kings and then Venice until the Ottoman conquest of 1571.

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Cyprus · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

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Cyprus · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Cyprus · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

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Cyprus · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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