Kingdom of Macedon
Learn about the Kingdom of Macedon — the northern Greek state under Philip II and Alexander the Great that conquered the ancient world.
Macedon was a kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world, long dismissed by southern Greeks as semi-barbarous. That changed dramatically in the 4th century BCE when two generations of extraordinary leadership transformed Macedon from a regional backwater into the master of an empire stretching from Greece to India.
Philip II came to power in 359 BCE and rebuilt the Macedonian army from the ground up. His innovations — the sarissa pike, the combined-arms approach integrating cavalry and infantry, and the professional military organization — created the most effective fighting force the world had yet seen. By 338 BCE, Philip had defeated the combined armies of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea, making himself master of Greece.
Philip's assassination in 336 BCE brought his twenty-year-old son Alexander to the throne. What followed over the next thirteen years defies easy summary. Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, Egypt, Central Asia, and parts of India, creating the largest empire the world had known. His death at thirty-two in Babylon left behind an empire that immediately fragmented — but also a cultural legacy that transformed the ancient world. The Hellenistic civilization that emerged from Alexander's conquests blended Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Indian traditions into something entirely new.