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WhoWasRuling.com

About WhoWasRuling.com

What is this?

WhoWasRuling.com answers a simple but fascinating question: if you pick any ruler in one country, who was holding power elsewhere in the world at the same time?

The site maps rulers across major world powers, including Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden, Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, Austria, the Papacy, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Mughal India, China, and Japan. It covers monarchs and emperors to shoguns, popes, and heads of state such as Lord Protectors. Each ruler page lists contemporaries with overlap percentages and a proportional timeline, so you can see at a glance how long two rulers' reigns coincided.

Data sources

Ruler names, reign dates, polity membership, and Wikidata entity IDs are fetched from Wikidata using SPARQL queries against the public query service. The build script runs periodically to refresh data/rulers.json.

Portraits are resolved from Wikidata P18 (image) claims, served via Wikimedia Commons. License and artist metadata are pulled from Commons API responses at build time.

Editorial overrides live in data/overrides.json , used for exclusion lists, custom hooks, and curated “connections” between rulers.

Editorial choices

Wikidata is comprehensive but not always tidy. We apply several filters and manual decisions:

  • Reign dates required. Rulers without a Wikidata reign-start date are excluded, since otherwise contemporaries cannot be computed reliably.
  • Bounded reigns. Pre-1900 rulers with no reign end and no death date are excluded as phantom “forever” reigns.
  • China imperial cap. Chinese rulers whose reign began before 221 BCE are excluded to keep the dataset within the imperial era.
  • Japan: Emperors and Shoguns. Japan is unusual in having both a symbolic Emperor and a de facto military ruler (the Shogun) for much of its history. We include both lines because each answers a different question: who was the legitimate sovereign, and who actually governed? Showing both gives a fuller picture of who “ruled” Japan at any moment.
  • British Isles. England, Scotland, and Great Britain are separate polities. England covers the English crown (and Commonwealth Lord Protectors); Scotland covers the King of Scots; Great Britain covers the united crown from the Acts of Union in 1707 through the United Kingdom today. Personal unions (e.g. James VI of Scotland / James I of England) appear on both timelines.
  • Polity scope. Each polity is defined by Wikidata position-held IDs (e.g. monarch of England, monarch of Scotland). We do not merge unrelated successor states into one list.
  • Overlap display. Same-day successions within a polity (e.g. Mary I ending the day Elizabeth I begins) are filtered from contemporary lists to reduce noise. Overlaps under 1% of the hero ruler's reign show as “<1%”.

Image credits policy

Every portrait on this site is a Wikimedia Commons file used under its original open license. We do not claim copyright on these images.

On-page attribution

Each ruler's main portrait has an ⓘ button in the corner. Tap or click it to see the artist name (when known), license shorthand, and a direct link to the file page on Wikimedia Commons.

Thumbnails

Small portraits in contemporary lists, year grids, and browse pages hide the attribution toggle to reduce clutter. The full credit is always available on that ruler's own page.

Share images

Open Graph and downloadable share cards are compositions created by WhoWasRuling.com: they combine Commons portraits with site typography and layout. The underlying portraits remain under their Commons licenses; the card design is © WhoWasRuling.com. Share cards include a watermark linking to www.whowasruling.com.

Missing images

When no suitable Commons portrait exists, we show a monogram placeholder with the ruler's initials. This is not a substitute for a historical likeness. It simply means Wikidata had no linked image at build time.

Corrections

If an image is wrong, outdated, or missing attribution, please use the “Spotted an error?” link on any ruler page. For Commons licensing disputes, the authoritative source is always the file's page on Wikimedia Commons.

Contact & corrections

Found a wrong date, missing ruler, or bad portrait? Use the feedback link on any ruler page, email us at hello@whowasruling.com, or browse the full ruler index. We welcome pull requests and issue reports on the project repository when available.