1 janv. 331 av. J.-C. - Alexander the Great Conquers the East

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The wars of Alexander the Great were fought by King Alexander III of Macedon ("The Great"), first against the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Darius III, and then against local chieftains and warlords as far east as Punjab, India. By the time of his death, he had conquered most of the world known to the ancient Greeks. However, he failed to conquer South Asia. Although being successful as a military commander, he failed to provide any stable alternative to the Achaemenid Empire—his untimely death threw the vast territories he conquered into civil war.

Alexander assumed the kingship of Macedonia following the death of his father Philip II, who had unified most of the city-states of mainland Greece under Macedonian hegemony in a federation called the Hellenic League. After reconfirming Macedonian rule by quashing a rebellion of southern Greek city-states and staging a short but bloody excursion against Macedon's northern neighbors, Alexander set out east against the Achaemenid Persian Empire, under its "King of Kings" (the title all Achaemenid kings went by), Darius III, which he defeated and overthrew. His conquests included Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, Gaza, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Bactria, and he extended the boundaries of his own empire as far as Taxila, India (now Pakistan).

Alexander had already made more plans prior to his death for military and mercantile expansions into the Arabian Peninsula, after which he was to turn his armies to the west (Carthage, Rome, and the Iberian Peninsula). However, Alexander's diadochi quietly abandoned these grandiose plans after his death. Instead, within a few years of Alexander's death, the diadochi began fighting with each other, dividing up the Empire between themselves, and triggering 40 years of warfare.

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