Only briefly does this sacrilege interrupt history's dreadful flow: the faded Byzantine Empire retreating across an Albanian river before the Ottoman advance.
The notion that countries like Germany and Japan would advance as the American empire retreats comforts some liberals by preserving U.S. power projection beneath a veneer of multilateralism.
Sympathy for the Palestinian cause is common in Ireland, a country where partition along ethnic lines as Britain retreated from empire in the last century contributed to decades of sectarian violence.
Exhausted, we retreated to the calm of the Empire Palace Hotel, whose rooftop restaurant offered a more manageable window on the city.
The German and Ottoman forces had been put on the defensive and retreated from Bir el Abd on 12 August 1916 towards the Egyptian Ottoman Empire frontier, the day after being attacked by the Anzac Mounted Division.
During this period, the city was affected by the two Great Serbian Migrations, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs, led by their patriarchs, retreated together with the Austrians into the Habsburg Empire, settling in today's Vojvodina and Slavonia.
During its heyday, the Spanish empire sucked the island dry – people were treated as serfs and retreated inland to form their own, separate society.
Once the treaty had been settled, the Jurchens retreated north and trade resumed between the two empires.
The Visigoths and others retreated, forcing further migrations, while the weakness of the Roman Empire encouraged encroachments of its territory, the whole scenario resulting in the fall of its western part.
Pre-mobile, Bob Hoskins's It's Good to Talk was the last hurrah of BT's retreating landline empire.
