Longest Wars in History (774 Years of Conflict)

Data

💡 Note: What Makes a War the "Longest"?

When historians talk about the longest wars in history, they are usually measuring the span between a conflict's opening shots and its final peace, not counting every single year of active fighting. Most of the entries on this list are actually series of related wars separated by truces, ceasefires, and quiet decades. That is why the numbers look so enormous compared to a modern war like World War II.

The Reconquista (roughly 718 to 1492) tops the list at about 774 years. It was the slow, piecemeal process by which the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia pushed south and reclaimed the peninsula from the Muslim states of Al-Andalus. It was not 774 years of nonstop battle. It was centuries of campaigns, truces, alliances, civil wars, and diplomacy, with fighting flaring up and dying down repeatedly. What makes it a single "war" is that every generation knew the same overarching goal: driving the last Muslim rulers out of Iberia, which ended with the fall of Granada in 1492, the very year Columbus sailed.

The Anglo-French Wars (1109 to 1815, about 706 years) are an even clearer example of a packaged series. This label bundles together a long chain of conflicts between England (later Britain) and France, including the famous Hundred Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and everything in between. The Roman-Persian Wars (54 BC to 628, about 681 years) similarly group centuries of clashes between the Roman/Byzantine Empire and the successive Parthian and Sasanian Persian empires, fought mostly over Mesopotamia, Armenia, and the Caucasus.

Continuous vs. series: why it matters

• Continuous wars have fairly unbroken fighting, like the Thirty Years' War (1618 to 1648) or the Eighty Years' War (1568 to 1648). They are long by modern standards but never reach the multi-century scale.
• Series wars (most of the top 10 here) are collections of separate conflicts grouped because the same rivals and the same underlying dispute kept producing new wars. The Russo-Turkish Wars, for example, were at least ten distinct conflicts between 1568 and 1918.
• The famous Punic Wars were actually three separate wars between Rome and Carthage (264 to 146 BC), yet the list counts them as one 118-year conflict.
• The Hundred Years' War lasted 116 years (1337 to 1453). The name was a round number chosen later; nobody in the Middle Ages called it that.
• The Han-Xiongnu War (200 BC to AD 91, about 290 years) is the longest entry from East Asia, pitting China's Han dynasty against the nomadic Xiongnu confederation, and it helped push the Great Wall frontier deep into Central Asia.

Wars that are still running

Several conflicts on the longer lists are ongoing, which means their durations keep growing. The Arab-Israeli conflict has run since 1948 (over 78 years and counting). The Korean conflict technically continues because the 1953 armistice was never replaced by a peace treaty. The Tuareg rebellions in the Sahel have passed the 110-year mark, and the Rohingya insurgency in Myanmar has passed 79 years. These modern "long wars" are measured the same way as the ancient ones, as a chain of flare-ups with uneasy pauses in between.

Fun facts about war durations

• The shortest war in history is the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, which lasted about 38 minutes between the British Empire and the Sultanate of Zanzibar.
• The American Indian Wars (1609 to 1924, about 315 years) are among the longest colonial conflicts, spanning the colonial era through the closing of the frontier.
• The Yaqui Wars (1533 to 1929, about 396 years) pit the Yaqui people of northwest Mexico against Spanish and later Mexican governments for nearly four centuries.
• Duration is not the same as cost. The deadliest wars (World War II, the Taiping Rebellion, the Mongol conquests) all lasted under 30 years each, while the longest wars on this list were often low-intensity by comparison.
• The Byzantine-Bulgarian Wars (680 to 1355) are so long largely because the two sides were neighbours for centuries, so wars kept restarting whenever a new generation of rulers came to power.
• Historians disagree on some figures, which is why the same conflict can appear with different durations in different sources. The exact start year of the Reconquista, for instance, is debated between 711 and 718 depending on how you count the Muslim conquest of Hispania.
• Peace treaties occasionally end wars decades after the fighting stops. The Korean conflict still lacks a formal peace treaty, and the US Congress did not formally end World War I's state of war until 1921, three years after the armistice.
• Long wars tend to change the world more subtly than short, intense ones: the centuries-long Roman-Persian rivalry drained both empires and left them vulnerable to the rise of Islam in the 7th century, which then produced the Arab-Byzantine Wars (629 to 1180, about 551 years).

So the next time you see a war "lasting 700 years," remember it rarely means 700 years of daily battle. It usually means a rivalry so deep that generation after generation picked up the fight again, until one side finally disappeared, converted, or made a lasting peace.