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Under the Republic, Rome was supposed to elect two consuls every year, with term limits that prevented the same person from being elected consecutively. Naturally, that system fell apart in practice, but remained in effect de jure.

Publius Gnaeus Dipshitus may have been elected Consul during the era of Sulla or Marius or Pompey, but guess how much real power they executed.

Good points.

This video, while a nice visualization and introduction to the topic, obviously had to simply things a bit. In addition to the aforementioned "two consuls per year" bit, the video usually only listed one of them.

For example, in 216 BC the Roman leader is listed as "Terentius Varro", or Gaius Terentius Varro, who served as consul with Lucius Aemilius Paullus. During this year, the Romans (under command of the two consuls, as they were usually designated as commander-in-chiefs as well) suffered possibly their worst defeat ever at the Battle of Cannae against Hannibal. During this defeat, Rome lost perhaps 20% of its military-age male population. Both consuls apparently died in the battle as well.

Presumably Varro is listed as the leader this year, because most of the blame for the defeat at Cannae was attributed to him. However, this may have been due to Paullus having a more influential family who was able to defend his legacy.

If you're interested more about this, I highly recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGqp2gpo3s

The related channel is also great: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_vLHiWVBh_FR9vbeuiY-A

A lot of the "entropy" of border definitions is that borders were in fact not rigidly defined until recently, and a lot of areas nominally within a state's borders would have had high degrees of autonomy. Therefore any presentation like this must by necessity make many subjective and probably controversial decisions about what constitutes the border at any given time. Lots of the fluidity is just noise.

On the other hand, in some eras there was even greater fluidity, because in the middle ages especially, most of Europe consisted of land controlled by various nobles with often only nominal suzerainty of a king, and every time one of these landed nobles died or inherited or married the borders would change, and there existed hundreds of semi-independent states in modern Germany alone. That can't be represented well on a map this scale.

Secondly, the thing you're observing in Italy is just the normal functioning of the Roman republic, which elected two consuls every year.

Thirdly, the "single malignant character", aka the "Great Man Theory" of history, is honestly very simplified and not really accepted by modern historians. A modern historian would rather say the societal conditions were ripe for a warmongering dictator to arise, and would point to many factors outside the existence of any one individual as instrumental in creating that set of circumstances.

Overall, your observations show just how intellectually dangerous it is to draw broad conclusions from such a simplified presentation. It's neat to see, but it's far too arbitrary and simplistic to draw any sweeping conclusions about history from.

> First, there's a lot of entropy in terms of border definitions and leader turnover. The now Italy region had a new leader every year for a stretch

This is one way that illustrations like this, while cool, are misleading or at least obscure the situation. Rome under the Republic was ruled by two Consuls who served a joint one-year term, hence the seemingly chaotic turnover when in fact the Republic was more-or-less stable for centuries under this system. The yearly turnover was an expected feature. This animation makes it seem like a period of eternal war where rulers are constantly being overthrown.

The now Italy region had a new leader every year for a stretch, until eventually Julius Caesar. We see as the video progresses, the mean leader reign per country/region seems to go up significantly. Like the bubbling cauldron is congealing.

I don't think what you're observing there is plausibly described as an instance of some general law of increasing stability. What you're talking about is the transition from the Roman republic, with a(n unwritten) constitution that mandated annual elections, to the Roman empire, whose rulers (typically) remained in place until death.

Not that I disagree with pretty much all the overall points you make, but I'm really weirded out by Napoleon always being put alongside Hitler in the "agressive conquerors" group. There are plenty of example that would fit, but a man who was fighting defensive wars >90% of the time and mostly ended up conquering because he and his army were better than the others at wars is kind of an odd choice. Even his push on Russia was made defensively since they refused to apply the continental blockade, and the english used the money to fund countries to rise against France. It's especially true since almost every time he tried to turn into the agressor it failed and he didn't conquer anything that way, only when defending.

Also he didn't exactly fit what is usually understood by "dictator that was deposed", he was beloved by the french people, took over by referendum and deposed by the nobilities of the other surrounding countries because they got scared that their own populace would start asking for this whole "meritocracy" thing.

You make a few coalitions with all of europe against a country because they believe their people are all equals, don't be surprised that after a while they try seize control of your resources.

I guess it's because the Napoleonic wars were so bloody relatively speaking. The proportion of the European population that died as a result of them is in the same ballpark* as the proportion that died as a result of WW2. The number of dead bodies is not an unreasonable metric for measuring the actions of "aggressive conquerors".

* difficult to get precise figures but I estimate within a multiple of 2 or 3