Magna Graecia

Southern Italy Series

-----Origins-----

Throughout much of the peninsula dwelt the Italic tribes. They had migrated around 1000 BC from somewhere within modern Slovenia, near the ancient town of Hallstatt. By 500 BC the strongest of the tribes were the Samnites.

Across the Adriatic Sea lived the Illyrians. Sometime around 1000 BC one of their tribes, the Messapians, crossed and established themselves in the heel of the peninsula.

The great power on the peninsula was the Etruscans [link] who origins are unknown. Their power extended beyond Tuscany to other areas that accepted their suzerainty.

There were also two great colonizing powers in the region, the Greeks and the Phoenicians [link] . The greatest of the Greek colonies was Syracuse, founded in 734 BC. By 500 the city-state had a population greater than that of any city in Greece. The Romans spoke of the Greek colonies in the south as Magna Graecia (Greater Greece).

The greatest of the Phoenician colonies was Carthage, founded in 814 BC. By 580 BC Carthage had become the recognized leader of all the Phoenician colonies after protecting Lilybaeum from a Greek attack. The Carthaginians then began to ally themselves with the Etruscans, and together they sent a fleet to Corsica in 539 BC to defeat the Greeks and take Alalia.

Then, in 509 BC, the city-state of Rome overthrew its Etruscan king and became a republic. Rome would later fight the Samnite Wars, [link] and establish its rule over the center of the peninsula. In the Pyrric War [link] against the Greeks and Etruscans the Romans were again successful. By 264 BC Rome was master of the peninsula and Magna Graecia.

edit: I decided to erase the modern national borders to make the map look cleaner

Southern Italy Series

500 BC Origins
264 BC [link] The Punic Wars
115 AD [link] The Roman Empire
405 [link] East and West
526 [link] Collapse of the West
565 [link] Reconquest
572 [link] Lombard Invasion
751 [link] Lombard Italy
814 [link] Charlemagne's Italy
1000 [link] Italy and the Holy Roman Empire
1095 [link] The Norman Conquest
1154 [link] The Kingdom of Sicily
1250 [link] Hohenstaufen Italy
1280 [link] Anjou Sicily
1300 [link] War of the Vespers
1400 [link] Black Death
1492 [link] Renaissance Italy
1559 [link] Italian Wars
1715 [link] Habsburg Italy
1780 [link] Bourbon Italy
1799 [link] Revolutionary Italy
1812 [link] Napoleonic Italy
1860 [link] United Italy

2/19/12 EDIT:
map base source [link]
map base created by Citypeek [link]