"Highest Incidence of Major Battles per Square Kilometer?" Topic

Isn't this a knowable fact? Who care what anyones opinion is on this.

This map shows the density by location of major battles throughout history.
link
It appears that the greatest density is along the Franco-German border and the Balkans. The territory of the German Empire, which is not included in this poll, appears to have had the most major battles per square kilometer throughout history. This includes the Thirty Years War, WW1, WW2, the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, 1864, 7 Years War, Austrian Succession, etc.

Belgium would be another likely contender.

It is indeed a "knowable fact" Flashman--once you define "major battle" and "history." You might also have some trouble with modern "battles" which take place over weeks or months and sprawl over hundreds or thousands of square kilometers.

For myself, I'd just mark Belgium and the adjacent parts of France with signs reading ARMY CROSSING: OWN PROPERTY AT YOUR OWN RISK and let it go at that.

Come to think of it, certain parts of the UK--the southern approaches to Inverness, for example--might be posted LISTED BATTLEFIELD. And in North America, though admittedly there has been a dry spell lately, the National Park Service might just as well buy land on the New York-Albany-Quebec "Great Warpath" preemptively. Anything not yet a battlefield will be, sooner or later.

Belgium and Poland.

With williamb and that the Balkan's should the highest.

Might want to go to the map itself and not the Telegraph's picture of it. As you blow up Europe and the Med, you get the expected Belgium and Adjacent, a nice cluster in Lombardy--and one in France just south of the Breton Peninsula which surprised me, evidently driven by medieval conflicts. Greece and the general vicinity of modern Israel are both serious clusters, and this is why I hedged earlier about "history." Battles in those parts of the world in ancient times are well documented for eras when we have no idea what's going on in Iberia or Ireland, for instance.

General rule--look for the military equivalent of plate tectonics: where do major powers butt up against one another? And then--once we're defined "major battle"--consider logistics. The nice thing about Lombardy and the Low Countries is that they can actually feed serious armies. Remember "Spain is a country where small armies are defeated, and large armies starve." But it isn't the only such.

Oh. And notice how the Telegraph, unsurprisingly, flips from "every battle" to "major battles" from one sentence to the next. The map itself has no size distinction: it's just every battle they could find a location for in Wikipedia and DBpedia. I could follow the "Great Warpath" stuff, for instance. There are battles there which helped settle the fate of a continent, but in terms of actual bloodshed, I don't think anyone would have bothered to record actions that size in the FPW, let alone WWII.

Whole countries?

Because Northern Virginia most likely takes the cake.