Note: this timeline mixes what Britons of the time would be taught with other events the Inferno Club think of interest, and hence is unashamedly Anglocentric.
Note also that Inferno's history overlaps with our own at some points, but differs from it at others. This game is not a historical simulation, or an exercise in alternate-history what-if, but a fantasy game set in a world that is similar to our own. We play very fast and loose with historical events, and encourage you to think in terms of doing likewise.
In particular, try not to think of the game as set specifically in 1865, but rather as in a sort of idealized nineteenth century, combining persons, elements and themes which in our worlds happened at widely differing points in the century.
BC
4004 - World created (probably): initially without form, and void. Dinosaurs born, get fat and die
3200 - Egypt united under Menes
2700 - Pyramids bult at Giza
2100 - Trilithons erected at Stonehenge
2000 - Hammurabi rules Mesopotamia, codifies laws
1700 - Abraham active in founding Jewish settlements
1500 - Cretan civilization destroyed by volcanic eruption
1400 - Akhenaton changes Egyptian religion; Tutankhamen succeeds him and returns it
1300 - Children of Israel in captivity, led to Canaan by Moses
1200 - Troy falls to Mycenaean armies under Agamemnon
1000 - Solomon builds Great Temple in Jerusalem
753 - Foundation of Rome by Romulus and Remus
563 - The Buddha born
509 - Rome becomes a republic
479 - Battle of Plataea, Greeks finally defeat Persians
448 - Athenian Acropolis built
440 - Heraclitus teaches that all things are subject to change
431 - Empedocles's theory of the four humours
386 - Plato founds Academy
335 - Aristotle founds Lyceum
331 - Alexander conquers Persia
265 - Archimedes invents Archimedean Screw for raising water
216 - Hannibal defeats Romans at Cannae
210 - Great Wall of China started
165 - Revolt of Judas Maccabeus
54 - Julius Caesar's unsuccessful expedition to Britain
36 - Antony marries Cleopatra
27 - Augustus becomes Emperor of Rome
AD - Jesus Christ born
33 - Crucifixion
40 - Claudius conquers the important bits of Britain
105 - Chinese eunuch invents paper
122 - Hadrian's Wall built
250 - Chinese invent gunpowder
312 - Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity
391 - Theodosius burns library of Alexandria
407 - Romans withdraw from Britain
449 - Angles and Saxons settle Britain, resisted by King Arthur
496 - King Clovis of the Franks converts to Christianity, founds Merovingian dynasty
529 - Benedictine order of monks founded
550 - Toltecs overrun the Yucatan
590 - Gregory the Great declares papal absolutism
597 - Augustine's mission to convert Britain
622 - Mohammed's Hejira (flight) from Mecca to Medina
700 - Beowulf written
778 - Chanson de Roland composed
793 - Vikings sack Lindisfarne
800 - Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor
809 - Haroun Al-Raschid, Caliph of Baghdad, dies
850 - Astrolabe invented
873 - Alfred the Great becomes King of Wessex, fights Danes
879 - Saints Cyril and Methodius invent Cyrillic alphabet
900 - Gunbjorn discovers Greenland
985 - First printed book, in Szechuan, the Tripitaka (Buddhist scriptures)
1000 - Polynesians reach New Zealand about now
1026 - Musical scale introduced by Guido d'Arezzo
1040 - Macbeth murders Duncan to become King of Scotland
1050 - Temple of the Warriors built at Chichen Itza, Mexico
1066 - Normans under William the Bastard conquer England
1099 - First Crusade results in foundation of Kingdom of Jerusalem
1118 - Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (the Knights Templar) founded
1135 - English civil war between forces of Steven of Blois and Empress Matilda, 'when Christ and his Saints slept'
1167 - Oxford University founded
1170 - Thomas Becket murdered on orders of Henry II
1177 - Khmer capital of Angkor Wat falls to Champa invaders
1215 - Magna Carta signed at Runnymede
1218 - Genghis Khan conquers Persia
1244 - Capture of Montsegur destroys Albigensian heresy
1253 - Nichiren founds his Buddhist sect
1271 - Marco Polo journeys to the Far East
1275 - Moses of Leon writes the Zohar, chief text of Cabbalism
1307 - Templars suppressed in France: Dante Alighieri writes Divine Comedy
1330 - William of Ockham invents 'Occam's Razor'
1345 - Aztecs build Tenochtitlan
1348 - Black Death rages throughout Europe
1374 - Dancing craze sweeps Aix-la-Chapelle
1380 - William Wycliffe translates the Bible into English
1391 - Geoffrey Chaucer writes The Canterbury Tales
1415 - Battle of Agincourt, English under Henry V defeat French most heroically
1429 - de'Medici rise to power in Florence: Joan of Arc has her visions
1440 - Gilles de Rais (de Retz) executed
1453 - Constantinople falls to Turks
1462 - Vlad the Impaler deposed
1478 - Isabelle of Castille launches Spanish Inquisition [bet you didn't expect that - ed.]
1480 - Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus
1482 - Portuguese discover bananas
1485 - Battle of Bosworth ends Wars of the Roses: Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur published
1492 - Columbus discovers New World (much to the surprise of its inhabitants)
1498 - Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper: Savonarola holds Bonfires of the Vanities
1511 - Raphael Sanzio's Sistine Madonna, Portrait of Julius II and School of Athens: Michelangelo Buonarroti's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
1521 - Hernan Cortez defeats Aztecs and burns Tenochtitlan: Ferdinand Magellan's expedition circumnavigates the world
1528 - 'Paracelsus' (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) expelled from Basel
1534 - Henry VIII breaks with Rome, founds Church of England
1543 - Pope Paul III institutes Index of Forbidden Books: Nicolaus Copernicus suggests that the Earth revolves around the Sun
1552 - Nostradamus's Centuries
1556 - Ivan the Terrible conquers Astrakhan: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer burnt at the stake, in Oxford
1569 - Gerald Mercator's first map of the world
1582 - Gregorian calendar adopted
1587 - Virginia Dare born in Roanoke Island colony
1588 - English under Francis Drake defeat Spanish Armada: Christopher Marlowe's The Tragedy of Dr Faustus: Russian Orthodox Church founded
1603 - William Shakespeare's Hamlet: British East India Company's first expedition
1615 - Rosicrucian Manifesto published in Paris
1616 - Galileo Galilei arrested for heresy
1622 - Richelieu appointed Cardinal of France
1632 - Taj Mahal built
1638 - Nicolas Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadie
1642 - Pascal invents an adding machine: English Civil War starts
1651 - Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan
1654 - Queen Christina of Sweden abdicates, dresses as a man and journeys to Rome
1661 - Morin de Villefranche's Astrologia Gallica
1665 - Bubonic plague in London, swiftly followed by Great Fire: city is rebuilt by Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh
1670 - Hindus rebel against Moghuls, Sivaji founds Maratha state: the pirate Henry Morgan is knighted and made Governor of Jamaica
1677 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovers spermatozoa
1682 - French capital moves to Versailles
1684 - The Thames freezes over at London; John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress
1688 - Glorious Revolution, powers of British monarch circumscribed
1692 - Leibnitz develops calculus: Massacre of Glencoe
1694 - Foundation of Bank of England
1697 - Peter the Great tours Holland, France and Britain incognito, works in a shipyard
1698 - Dom Pierre Perignon invents champagne
1704 - America's first regular newspaper published, in Boston
1707 - Most recent eruption of Mount Fuji to date
1709 - At Battle of Poltava, Peter the Great breaks the power of Sweden
1710 - First copyright law introduced, in England
1717 - First Grand Lodge of Freemasonry established in London
1718 - Blackbeard killed; first English banknotes introduced
1719 - Principality of Liechtenstein created
1720 - South Sea Bubble bursts, John Law's Mississippi Trading Company collapses
1722 - Easter Island discovered by Roggeveen: Peter the Great's Persian exppedition fails because of outbreak of ergotism
1726 - Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
1729 - John and Charles Wesley begin Methodist movement, in Oxford
1732 - Swarm of grasshoppers devastates Japanese harvest
1736 - First successful appendectomy performed: John Harrison's chronometer accurately establishes longitude
1738 - Excavation of Herculaneum, Italy
1742 - Anders Celsius invents centigrade temperature scale
1745 - Jacobite Rising in Scotland under Bonnie Prince Charlie
1749 - Thomas Chippendale opens his workshop
1751 - Benjamin Franklin is killed flying a kite in a thunderstorm
1753 - British Museum and Library founded, on basis of Hans Sloane's collection left to the nation
1755 - Giovanni Casanova imprisoned in Venice for spying
1756 - Duc de Richelieu invents mayonnaise: Black Hole of Calcutta incident
1759 - French Canada falls to British forces under James Wolfe
1764 - James Otis denounces taxation without representation
1767 - Daniel Boone enters Kentucky: Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
1770 - James Cook claims Australia for Britain: Voltaire writes 'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him'
1773 - Boston Tea Party: Pope Clement XIV dissolves Jesuit order
1774 - Johann von Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther
1776 - Declaration of Independence signed: Adam Weishaupt founds Illuminati in Ingolstadt, Bavaria: David Bushnell unsuccessfully pioneers the submarine: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
1780 - Sebastien Erard invents the pianoforte: Jeremy Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
1781 - William Herschel discovers Uranus: battle of Yorktown leaves Americans victorious in War of Independence: Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
1785 - Crossing of the Channel by hot-air balloon
1788 - Times newspaper founded: John Lempriere's Classical Dictionary
1789 - Storming of the Bastille, Paris
1791 - Marie Harel invents Camembert: Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man: James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson: Wolfgang Mozart's The Magic Flute: the Marquis de Sade's Justine
1792 - Denmark becomes first country to renounce slavery: Paris Commune seizes power, imprisons Louis XVI
1793 - Jean Paul Marat killed in his bath by Charlotte Corday: Louis XVI and Marie Antionette executed
1795 - Warren Hastings, former Governor-General of India, cleared of corruption charges: Napoleon Bonaparte appointed to command of French armies
1797 - Cigarettes invented, in Cuba
1798 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principles of Human Population
1799 - Humphrey Davy invents laughing gas
1802 - Madame Tussaud opens wax museum in London: Ludwig van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata
1805 - At Battle of Trafalgar, British under Horatio Nelson smash French naval power
1807 - Aaron Burr acquitted of plotting to set up an independent state
1811 - Venexuela declares independence from Spain: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
1812 - Napoleon's Russian expedition devastated by winter conditions
1814 - British troops burn Washington
1815 - Battle of Waterloo finally destroys Napoleon: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Fairy Tales
1816 - Shaka Zulu succeeds his father
1818 - Holkar kingdom in central India conquered by British: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
1819 - Chocolate invented at Vevey, Switzerland: British soldiers kill Corn Law protesters at Peterloo: Walter Scott's Ivanhoe: John Keats's On a Grecian Urn: George Byron's Don Juan
1820 - Venus de Milo discovered: state of Liberia founded
1822 - Jean Champollion deciphers Rosetta Stone
1825 - Stockton-Darlington railway opens: Tsar Alexander I dies after eating poisoned mushrooms: John Nash completes Buckingham Palace, London
1829 - First sewing machine invented: bodysnatcher William Burke hanged in Edinburgh
1830 - Foundation of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints by Joseph Smith: Alfred Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
1831 - Charles Darwin's voyage of the Beagle commences: Michael Faraday dies after inhaling chlorine gas
1833 - Britain claims Falkland Islands: Kaspar Hauser killed
1834 - Victoria succeeds to British throne
1835 - Houses of Parliament built: Dutch settlers in South Africa begin Great Trek inland
1836 - Mexicans capture the Alamo: Charles Dickens's Pickwick papers
1837 - Samuel Morse devises code for telegraph transmission
1838 - In London, Chartists call for universal suffrage: Opium Wars triggered in China
1839 - Kirkpatrick MacMillan invents the bicycle: Charles Goodyear vulcanizes rubber: Belgian independence recognized by Dutch: Edgar Allan poe's The Fall of the House of Usher
1841 - James Baird discovers hypnosis; Rowland Hill launches Penny Post
1842 - First operation under general anaesthetic, in America: Charles babbage's Analytical Engine built, receives generous funding from British government
1844 - Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers
1845 - Irish potato famine starts: Austen Henry Layard excavates Nimrud
1846 - Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense
1847 - Michael Bakunin expelled from Paris; Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles's Communist manifesto
1848 - Insurrections throughout Austrian Empire, Ferdinand abdicates and is succeeded by Franz Josef: John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy
1849 - Hungarian patriots under Lajos Kossuth declare independence, invaded by Russia and crushed
1850 - Richard Wagner's Lohengrin
1851 - Gold Rush in Australia: Great Exhibition opens in Crystal Palace, London
1852 - Napoleon III proclaims Second Empire in France: Roget's Thesaurus
1853 - US Commodore Perry's trade expedition to Japan disappears without trace
1854 - Bejamin Silliman demonstrates that petroleum cannot be fractionated: British and French defeat Russians in Crimea
1855 - David Livingstone discovers source of Nile: Alexander II succeeds to Russian throne
1856 - Remains of Neanderthal Man discovered
1857 - Giuseppe Garibaldi calls, from New York where he is working as a candle-maker, for Italian unity: Indian Mutiny against British rule
1858 - Ferdinand Carre invents the refrigerator: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Mary Magdalene
1859 - Austrians conquer Piedmont from France, and Hungary from Russians: work starts on Suez Canal
1860 - Prussian colony in East Africa founded: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Ludwig III succeeds to Bavarian throne: Piedmont restored to puppet status
1861 - Richard Gatling invents his gun: Kaiser Wilhelm succeeds to Prussian throne: George Eliot's Silas Marner: series of Communist uprisings in Prussia bloodily put down
1862 - British and Spanish troops withdraw from Mexico: Otto of Greece deposed, replaced by Danish prince George: Prussians under Bismarck attempt to invade France, easily repulsed
1863 - French conquer Mexico, Maximilian given throne: London Underground railway inaugurated: Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon: Prussian expedition to Turkey conquers most of Anatolia
1864 - Abraham Lincoln elected President of US to mounting tensions between states: British army under General Gordon helps Chinese put down rebellion: Miklos Toldi leads Hungarian rebellion against Austrian rule
1865 - William Booth founds Salvation Army: Prussians under von Moltke conquer Netherlands, renaming it Wilhemsland, King flees to London: for the current situation, see the history page
To play in Inferno, just send GBP 10.00 to cover your setup and first three turns. Further turns are GBP 3.00 each. Please make cheques payable to Undying King Games. You will receive a copy of the rules, huge wodges of background material, and advice on how to create a character.
Like all our games, Inferno can be played by post or by email, as you find convenient.
