---
title: 10 of the Strangest States to Ever Exist
description: "Strange states. Who doesn't love them?\n\nWell, depending on what you'd characterise as 'strange', it actually turns out that *lots* of people don't love them. Some of the strangest states in history have had short-lived, precarious existences, often because the exact quirk that made them unique also meant—to some—that they should never have actually existed.\n\nToday we're going to take a look at some of them—flicking through the centuries to find examples of states whose quirkiness could be seen as the dominant feature of their entire profile.\n\nA quick note, however: some of the entries listed today are—or were—clearly-defined, unquestionable states. Some just *wanted* to be clearly-defined, unquestionable states. And at least one never was—and never tried to be—a real state of any kind.\n\nWe're just going to refer to all of them as states, sometimes only for lack of a better idea as to what exactly to call them.\n\nEnough said. Let's jump in.\n\n## Sparta\n\nLet's start with Sparta. And to be honest, where to *even* start with Sparta.\n\nWe actually covered this prizefighter state of Ancient Greece in one of our recent videos, '10 of the Deadliest Jobs in History'. No prizes for guessing which particular profession we were referring to there.\n\nAnd in that video, we described exactly what little fun it was to have to grow up as a Spartan lad: to spend the bulk of your early life in barracks, enduring severe tests of endurance and hazing, before disappearing into the rank and file of the army for the next couple of decades. Spartan men would finally be able to retire at age 60—or at what was basically the tail of life expectancy for the time. To have its citizens spend their entire lives as human battle droids would really be enough alone to qualify Sparta for this list, and we really could end this particular entry right there.\n\nBut it was actually a different feature of this war-obsessive culture that is the focus of today's list. You see, Spartan men being able to take up a normal dayjob like farming or craftsmanship only at age 60—when physical strength and energy is usually nobody's forte—wasn't really all that great for the economy. Moreover, to be a professional warrior came with another rather obvious hazard: you could *die*, leaving whatever property your family owned in limbo, whatever livestock or farmland they tended at risk, and eliminating whatever further contribution you could make to the upkeep of the state. Put simply, there was a reason that the Athenians, Macedonians and others devoted themselves to things like pottery, fishing and merchantship. Aside from being safer, it was also because the state *needed* those things—and to be forever primed to fight an unexpected war, presumably, it did not.\n\nThe result was that it was left to the Spartan women to basically be the driving force of the state economy.\n\nOkay, not really—since the bulk of any economic heavy lifting was done by the Helots—a group of non-Spartan slaves (and more on them in a bit). Still, estates passed through female relatives, and Spartan women could own land parcels, which allowed them to consolidate wealth over generations. Elite women became managers of agricultural labour, giving them economic authority rarely afforded to ancient women elsewhere. They were even able to own multiple properties, something absolutely unheard-of in states like the famously self-righteous philosophy hub that was Athens.\n\nDid this make Sparta a strange state? Well yes, for the time—although you could fill this list with another 20 reasons, with this particular one not even featuring that highly amongst them. And by the way: this was still Ancient Greece, so do not think that this relative economic empowerment meant that Spartan women had any political clout. They were to be kept *nowhere near* the political affairs of the state, which was governed by the Gerousia—alternatively known as the Spartan senate—made up of two Spartan kings plus 28 elite male citizens (who, of course, had to be beyond the age of sixty).\n\nHence, Sparta was sort of a strange affair: male power was political and military; female power was economic and domestic. So you could say this made Sparta a kind of egalitarian society, ahead of its time—right?\n\nAbsolutely not. Because the vast majority of Sparta's inhabitants were the aforementioned Helots, a population of *seriously* discriminated-against people that the Spartiates (male and female) looked at with a mix of exploitativeness and revulsion. Not that much is actually known about the Helots except that there were a lot of them and they had almost no rights under Spartan laws. In fact, according to Aristotle, Sparta simply declared war every Autumn on the Helots, allowing themselves to purge the population without fear of religious consequences. Unsurprisingly, the Helots sometimes revolted, leading historian Paul Cartledge to summarise that:\n\n> \"the history of Sparta is fundamentally the history of the class struggle between the Spartans and the Helots.\"\n\nSparta's weird class structure and obsessive militarising didn't stop it from being overrun and sacked by the Visigoths in 396 CE, after which the state never achieved the same greatness again.\n\n…what a shame.\n\n## The Kingdom of Jaintia\n\nAlright: pause. Time for a bit of fun with words.\n\nDo you know the difference between primogeniture and ultimogeniture succession? If you don't, it's quite simple. Primogeniture means that in any system of succession or inheritance, the firstborn child gets the spoils. Ultimogeniture means that the last-born does.\n\nFor most societies throughout the ages, the first of these predominated. As recently as 1998, the Ethnographic Atlas described how inheritance by the elder prevailed in 248 societies, while inheritance by the younger prevailed in just 22. As a footnote, inheritance by the individual judged 'best qualified' did exist: but in only 20 societies, the lowest count of all. Kind of a depressing statistic on its own.\n\nAnyway, the point is that the oldest first descendant has always been far more likely to take the lion's share of family stuff than the youngest. This remains the case in many current systems of monarchy—where the oldest child is the crown heir—or even in legal inheritance: where the oldest sibling is usually the estate executor. And of course, there are many justifications for this. The oldest would, by virtue of age, theoretically be the wisest, the most experienced, and the best-positioned to fill whatever role was being vacated. They would be perhaps, even, the most deserving—because of the length of time spent in waiting. I mean who would really fault Charles III for his Kingship after almost three quarters of a century of being a prince.\n\nBut strong arguments could also be made in favour of the youngest as the successor. They'd be most likely to live on longest, thereby keeping the property or role inherited in the hands of direct offspring for the longest period. There's another good reason for inheritance by the youngest. A head of family doesn't really choose who is their eldest child, and would be forced to hand over their assets or reign to whomever came next, regardless of their actual ability to fill that role. But in an ultimogeniture system, if the first born proved too much of an oaf to govern or were just less than ideal for it, the parents could just keep on having more descendants until they found one that fit the bill.\n\nAnyway, all this is to say that ultimogeniture succession did exist and some states had their own unique take on it. Step forward the Kingdom of Jaintia, in modern-day northeast India. Because there, not only was it the youngest child who would inherit the assets, but it would be the youngest *female* child who would do so.\n\nThe Kingdom existed for more than 1,000 years in what is now northern Bangladesh and the Assam and Meghalaya states of India. It existed for so long that it is not even well-established when exactly it was founded, only that it clung on to existence until—common story—it fell foul of the British and was taken over in the 1800s. Admittedly, not every aspect of the Jaintia Kingdom's culture was really all that noble: they reportedly practiced human sacrifice, something the British didn't particularly admire and told the Jaintia Raja to stop. Unfortunately, the Jaintia did the complete opposite, kidnapping four British soldiers in 1832 of whom three were reportedly sacrificed. When the Raja declined to hand over those responsible, the British stormed in and by 1835 the Kingdom was no more.\n\nBut right up until then, the Kingdom continued its matrilineal succession, which manifested itself in an unusual, somewhat confusing manner. Being a Kingdom, the state was run by a man. But being matrilineal, the successor of the Raja would be not *his* son but the Raja's *sister's* son. The social order of the society was run more or less along the same lines. After marriage, Jaintia husbands would move into their new wife's family home, and in any given household, the youngest daughter—or 'khaddu'—would inherit the ancestral property, thereby becoming the 'anchor' of the family home. The children in any household would all inherit the family name of their mother, and two individuals would be considered kin only if they shared an ancestor from the maternal side of the family.\n\nAfter the British dissected the Kingdom in 1835, the Khasi, Jaintia (Pnar), and Garo tribes of Meghalaya experienced some pressure toward patrilineal practices by the colonial administration and Christian missionary influence. However, the three groups have largely retained unusual traditional systems to this day, manifested by greater involvement of women in the economy, continued use of maternal clan names, and even relatively common rates of divorce by comparison with other communities in India.\n\n## The Novgorod Republic\n\nRight, skipping forward to the middle of the Medieval Era, and to a curious little state that existed for about 300 years in modern-day Russia.\n\nOf course, by 'little' we mean *strictly* in terms of population size—because the Novgorod Republic was *absolutely* not little in its geographic size. Its lands reached from the western city of Novgorod all the way across northern Russia and into Siberia, so a parcel of territory roughly comparable in size to today's Mongolia.\n\nUnsurprisingly, not many people lived there—since northern Russia (then as now) is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The Republic, existing between 1136 and 1478, probably never had more than half a million inhabitants at its height. About 30,000 of those lived in the capital, Veliky Novgorod—which doesn't sound like a large amount, but this actually made it a fairly sizable city for the 12th and 13th centuries. And the Republic of Novgorod—despite its smallish population and frozen environs—was one hell of a goofy state.\n\nFirst, there was its name. The state was literally formally known as *Lord Novgorod the Great*—which, obviously, sounds more like a person, maybe a Tsar. But no, that was just what the proud people of Novgorod called their country. In later years, historians began to refer to the state as the Novgorod Republic. And to not make it too confusing, we'll do the same.\n\nAnother thing: despite being located in the frozen north of Russia and populated mostly by impoverished serfs, the Republic was actually kind of wealthy.\n\nNovgorod was one of the richer cities of medieval Europe due to its strategic location linking the Baltic Sea with the Volga and Caspian regions of the Russian hinterland, as well as the sparse but mineral-rich Siberian Arctic. It was also located far enough north for the pesky Golden Horde and Tatar raiders not to be that much of a headache. And so the state was free to trade in furs, honey, waxes, fisheries, leathers and other tidy materials with the Hanseatic League, mostly unabated. Thus Novgorod became not only one of the wealthiest states in Europe in the 12th century, but one of the most commercially-sophisticated and domestically stable.\n\nBut perhaps its strangest feature of all was the high level of individual rights and freedoms afforded to its citizens. Unlike the nearby Principality of Muscovy—not so shockingly, run by a Prince—Novgorod's greatest political power was a citizen council known as the *Veche*. This was composed of the city's male citizens, and it elected not only the Novgorod leadership, but even mayors and the local archbishop. In 1136, the citizens basically fired Prince Vsevolod for being a liar—after which the role of prince was downgraded to a kind of symbolic one. The Prince would operate alongside the *posadnik*—a kind of mayor—and the *tisyatsky*, the de-facto head of military: both of which were also formally elected by the *veche*.\n\nThis was definitely unique in the Middle Ages, at a time when European nations had mostly discarded the idea of democracy in favour of good old-fashioned, centralised autocracy. Of course, this being the Middle Ages—and Russia, no less—also meant that Novgorod's so-called democracy wasn't *really* democracy. In practice, the voting was dominated by powerful clan rulers known as boyars, with true power basically remaining in the hands of oligarchs and subject to tribal bickering. The *veche* usually just elected the most powerful ruler in Rus as their prince, making the whole democratic process a little bit pointless.\n\nAnd in the end, Novgorod's flawed system of democracy wouldn't last. Perhaps by virtue of having had to fend off the Tatars for so long, nearby Muscovy got rather good at fighting, and became much stronger than their neighbours—although not before having their city completely sacked by the Golden Horde in 1382. By 1478, Lord Novgorod the Great (the country) was taken over by Tsar Ivan the Great (the person), and fell completely under Moscow rule. Ivan turned out to be uninterested in continuing the system of rule by the people and so the *veche* system was discontinued. Novgorod became a part of Russia without further fuss, as it has remained ever since.\n\n## The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia\n\nRight, so moving a little bit west and to modern-day Latvia.\n\nThe Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, located on the Baltic Sea, might easily have been a trading partner for nearby Novgorod—were it not that it came into existence in 1561, about half a century after Novgorod *stopped* existing. But there was nevertheless something that both entities had in common: small states, *big* ambitions.\n\nCourland came into being following the collapse of the Livonian Order, a local branch of the Teutonic Knights, who had run the area for about 150 years. The Livonians probably didn't have all that great a relationship with Novgorod, since the Order tried and failed to invade their wealthy neighbour in the 1200s. But they were defeated by a prince whose name you might recognise—Alexander Nevsky—at the Battle on the Ice in 1242. Must have been a pretty cool battle.\n\nAnyway, by the 1500s Novgorod had been swallowed up by Muscovy and a Moscow Tsar whose name you might also recognise—Ivan the Terrible—decided he wanted to have a crack at taking on the Livonians. So he swept in and crushed the Order, but was quickly forced out again by Sweden, Poland, and Denmark. This left a power vacuum, and a local noble, Gotthard Kettler (ironically the last Grand Master of the Livonian Order) smelled an opportunity. So he signed an arrangement with Poland and Lithuania to be a vassal ruler and suddenly the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was all his to reign.\n\nQuite a tidy little piece of business.\n\nCourland went on existing for more than 200 years, until the dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. Although almost insignificant in population and geographic size, Courland was fairly economically active, dining out on a strong merchant fleet and connections on the Baltic Sea, one of the most lucrative trade routes in the world at the time.\n\nBut the question is: why was this one of the strangest states to exist? Well, the thing is that, by the 17th century, the Age of Discovery was in full flow. European powers, armed with ships, enthusiasm, and useless maps, sailed off to establish colonies in places they found themselves in, all across the world. And Courland, despite its size, had no intention of missing out on the action. So they put together a fleet and sailed off to claim some of the New World for themselves—and, bizarrely, they were actually rather successful.\n\nYes it may sound crazy, but for a brief moment in the mid-17th century, this tiny peninsula in Latvia had two overseas colonies—both located in the most random locations. One was Tobago (today part of Trinidad and Tobago) where the Courlanders established a colony with two settlements in 1639. And the other, albeit more minor, was located not in Trinidad, not anywhere in South America, but in today's *Gambia*—located the full breadth of the Atlantic Ocean away.\n\nTobago was the most lucrative of the two, being a plantation colony which the Courlanders very unimaginatively called New Courland and used to export sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, rum and feathers from. The Gambia colony, founded in 1651, served primarily as a trading post from which the Courlanders hoped to tap into Africa's lucrative trade networks: gold, ivory, hides, and some luckless slaves—as well as to have strategic control over the Gambia river—used for access to the continent by rival European powers.\n\nBut both colonies were lost when Courland's Swedish neighbours took advantage of its weak defences during the Northern Wars of the 1650s. Then-Duke Jakob Kettler, grandson of the original Kettler, was taken captive by the Swedish Army from 1658 to 1660, during which time his fleet was ransacked and Courland's overseas colonies stripped away. After the end of the war, the island of Tobago was returned to the Duchy. However, it could not hope to regain its pre-war level of wealth and Courland ended up abandoning its colonial ambitions by 1666. It limped on as a colonyless vassal of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth for a further century, when it did like Novgorod before it and became incorporated into the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great in 1795.\n\n## The Republic of Pirates\n\nSo here's the thing about piracy.\n\nUnless you really had no other option—such as by being a captive—becoming a pirate wasn't really the wisest career move. For much of the early modern period, being caught and accused of piracy meant a fairly predictable fate—*death*, usually by hanging, with your body left on public display as a warning to others. European empires took their maritime trade routes seriously, and anyone who disrupted the flow was treated as an existential threat to be swiftly and decisively wiped out.\n\nWith that said, there were occasions when being a pirate could actually be rather lucrative, and could come with subsided travel opportunities, cultural exchange, and even professional growth. One could rise through the ranks to become a master, First Mate, or even Sea Captain. And yes at one point, belonging to the piracy came with the opportunity to be part of an entire pseudo-state operating out of an island located in the Caribbean.\n\nStep forward the Republic of Pirates, otherwise known as the Flying Gang, which existed between 1706 and 1718 in the modern-day Bahamas.\n\nCentered in Nassau, the Republic was another example of something that was less a formal state, more like a rough confederation of outlaws who turned a neglected colonial outpost into their stronghold. The pirates established their own informal codes of conduct, shared resources, repaired vessels, and offered refuge to newcomers. This attracted privateers out looking for work—and for more than a decade, the community limped on as a highly-dysfunctional, improvised state. They even appointed a magistrate—none other than Blackbeard—and used their base in Nassau as a springboard from which to cause havoc with trade and shipping across the West Indies.\n\nThe Republic of Pirates was neither officially recognised nor very big but it did manage to blend some standardised principles with unadulterated chaos. It offered democratic voting, compensation for injuries (such as up to 800 pieces of eight for a lost leg), and strict prohibitions against stealing among residents. Nassau became a bustling port with taverns doubled as meeting halls, ships' carpenters running dry docks, and market stalls selling everything from plundered gunpowder to plundered French wine. The day-to-day must have looked something like the island of Tortuga from the *Pirates of the Caribbean*, and various renowned pirates such as Benjamin Hornigold, Edward England and Samuel Bellamy frequented the peculiar Republic during its existence.\n\nUnfortunately, the utopia didn't last very long. Britain and other maritime powers had no desire to tolerate a lawless base for attacks on its merchant fleets, and sent in Captain Woodes Rogers—a former privateer turned colonial administrator—with a series of warships to put an end to all the fun. Some pirates accepted his offer of pardon, others fled, and some mounted a half-hearted defence of Nassau without realising they were badly outmuscled by the guns of Rogers and the Royal Navy. So in 1718, Rogers blistered into Nassau, cleared out its occupants (mostly just pirates and fugitives), raised the British flag, and became Governor of the Bahamas for the next three years.\n\nMany of the pirates were—unusually—still issued pardons, although some went straight back to attacks on merchant fleets before the Golden Age of Piracy eventually petered out in the 1730s.\n\n## The Paris Commune\n\nThe period 1870 to 1871 really wasn't a good time for France.\n\nNearly 100 years on from the French Revolution, the state had already endured periods of stability, including several bouts of democratic rule alternating with non-democratic rule by various emperors called Napoleon. By 1870, France found itself at war—under Emperor Napoleon III, this time—with Prussia, during the course of which the Emperor was deposed and France declared itself a Republic…for the third time.\n\nUnfortunately, only a few months later, the war came to a humiliating end for the French, as Prussian troops marched into Paris and declared the formation of the German Empire right on France's homefield, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. They also whisked away the contested region of Alsace-Lorraine—which would remain in German hands until the French whisked it back at the end of World War I.\n\nMany French—understandably—were not pleased with the humbling nature of the defeat, as well as the constant instability of the previous few years. Moreover, recent years had seen an influx of workers from the regions to the capital, workers whose opportunities had vanished due to the plummeting of the economy caused by fighting. Socialist agitators went to work, inciting the disillusioned workers and causing revolutionary movements to spawn and fester. And things got even worse about two weeks before the inglorious collapse of the French forces in January 1871. Prince Pierre Bonaparte, nephew of Emperor Napoleon III (who'd spent the past year very publicly losing the war), got into an argument with a pair of journalists and shot one of them, Victor Noir, dead. The killing led to outrage, which only got worse when the French forces collapsed, and worse still when Pierre Bonaparte was acquitted of murder by a Bonapartist judge. Enormous protests sprang up, exploited by members of the French far-left like part-time philosopher, full-time criminal Louis Auguste Blanqui. In Paris, these protests went as far as to shut down the city's communes entirely, and the locals, many of whom had joined the National Guard to defend Paris from the Germans, began to confront state troops sent to quell the unrest. When two Generals were shot dead on March 18th, the French Army folded for the second time in two months and withdrew from Paris to Versailles.\n\nWith that, Blanqui (who was actually already in prison for being a revolutionary nuisance) and his followers had got their reward. Their control over Paris gave birth to a short-lived pseudo-state which, it was hoped…\n\n…okay, realistically, it wasn't clear what the objective of this was ever going to be.\n\nThe Paris Commune went on to exist for about two months, during which time its ideologues mostly preached about various egalitarian ideas and then argued amongst themselves as to how exactly to realise them. The National Guard turned into the Commune's de-facto defence force, and its government introduced socialist reforms including worker cooperatives, cancellation of debt, various women's rights initiatives, and the aggressive separation of church and state. Perhaps especially the latter, which led to the detention of religious figures as ransom leverage for imprisoned leftist leaders. But many of the Commune's hostages weren't ransomed and were simply shot within a few weeks—notable victims included Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris.\n\nUnfortunately for the Commune, the French (by-now) Third Republic—weak as it was—realised it could not allow a bunch of revolutionary upstarts to declare a new state right in the heart of the state capital. So in May 1871, it sent in the Versailles Army under General Patrice de MacMahon (terrific name, by the way) to crush the revolutionaries and restore law and relative order. So commenced the *Semaine Sanglante*—or Bloody Week—during which around 15,000 people were killed as the Commune entered its death throes. The authorities also arrested around 43,000 people, going on to execute a small handful of those, imprison some more, and also send more than 1,000 out of sight and into exile in New Caledonia.\n\nThe latter became a rather favoured tactic of France in dealing with undesirables, and the falsely-accused Alfred Dreyfus would suffer a similar fate a few years later, when he'd be convicted of treason in the Dreyfus Affair and sent to French Guyana for four years.\n\nSo the Commune didn't live long, and its bloody end was probably as decisive of a deterrent as the Third Republic could have asked for. But France being France, this wasn't the last occasion of similar upheaval. Almost another century on, the Paris Student Riots and workers' strikes resulted in another shutdown of the capital—albeit one treated this time much more gingerly by the state, who probably realised that a massacre of Paris' citizens twice in one century wasn't a good look.\n\nBlanqui, in the wake of the failure of the Commune, basically just continued as ever he'd done before.\n\nHe was condemned to colony life, but his sentence was commuted due to ill health and after a general amnesty was issued to Commune agitators. He was freed, and threw himself straight back into revolutionary rabble-rousing. Luckily, he died of a stroke in 1881, before being able to get up to too much more mischief. He was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, nearby Victoir Noir—whose death he'd helped exploit to set the whole misadventure into motion.\n\nAnd Victoir Noir's grave, by the way, has since become a pilgrimage point for one of the most bizarre reasons. His gravesite featured a sculpture depicting him just after he'd been shot dead by Pierre Bonaparte. For some reason, sculptor Jules Dalou decided to add a large protuberance to Noir's trousers, which led to the grave becoming a sort of good luck charm for those seeking enhanced…fertility.\n\nTo this day, many visitors to Pere Lachaise flock to Noir's gravesite to rub his…well, you know.\n\n## The Independent Sultanate of the Anglo-Zanzibar War…I Guess\n\nYou may have heard about the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War before.\n\nIt was chaotic. It was brutal. It was 38 minutes long.\n\nYup. Basically, the east African territory of Zanzibar was, in the late 19th century, a wealthy trading island and a British protectorate. When the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini died in 1896, a man named Khalid bin Barghash found himself next in line to replace him. Unfortunately the British did absolutely not like Khalid, and declared he could not take the throne without their approval, in accordance with a treaty signed with Germany in 1886. But Khalid decided the British-German treaty could take a hike, and seized the Sultan's Palace in the Zanzibari capital, Stone Town, rather than waiting for approval to arrive. He was obliged to back down, but refused—and buttressed up the palace with nearly 3,000 armed guards, various artillery pieces, and…a royal yacht. Better than nothing I suppose.\n\nWell all this just wouldn't wash, and on the 27th August 1896, British patience expired. The Royal Navy, under Rear Admiral Harry Rawson, swooped in to clear Khalid and his band of upstarts out of the Sultan's Palace. They adopted the less-than-surgical tactic of obliterating the entire building with artillery bombardment from the harbour. So at 9am on the dot, British warships unleashed a barrage that reduced the palace—and many of its occupants—to smithereens. The so-called war was a rout, with an estimated 500 Zanzibari casualties against exactly one British casualty—and within minutes, Khalid's forces began to scatter. By about 9:40, the conflict was over—with Khalid having fled to safety in the nearby German consulate. The royal yacht sank, having failed to put up much meaningful resistance.\n\nNow, Khalid was obviously not a very good choice of Sultan—but he *was* the Sultan. He became head of the Zanzibar Protectorate on the 25th of August after Hamad—who was his cousin—died, probably because Khalid allegedly poisoned him. The British had actually been wary of conniving cousin Khalid for years—and his ambition to be Sultan wasn't ever that much of a secret. He'd been a candidate to inherit the Sultanhood many years before, but had been passed over in favour of much-less-unpredictable Hamad. As visiting British diplomat Rennell Rodd put it, Khalid was just too much of a dick to be the Sultan (the actual phrasing he used was \"undesirable.\"). Anyway, being Sultan by succession meant that Khalid would logically also be Sultan when the Zanzibaris broke with the Protectorate by act of war that August morning. *Technically*, under his leadership the state was now independent—kind of—thus becoming the shortest-lived sovereign state in history at 38 minutes of existence.\n\nAnyway, the quasi-state didn't outlive the British barrage, and the Sultan's Palace was also flat out destroyed. It was rebuilt a few years later, and once again became the residence of the Zanzibar Sultans under the restored British Protectorate. The Sultanate lived on until the Protectorate ended in 1963, at which point Zanzibar—*once again* managed to stake a claim for one of the shortest-lived states in history. The People's Republic of Zanzibar was established that year and lived for about three months before being replaced by the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, later just Tanzania—as the state remains today.\n\nAs for Khalid, he received political asylum in German East Africa (modern Tanzania) and for a while, came out of his stunt unscathed. That is until World War I, when Britain and Germany went to war and German possessions in Africa were now fair game for repossession.\n\nKhalid was captured, and Britain pulled the send-them-to-Saint-Helena trick on their old adversary, exactly as they'd once done with another problematic foe, Napoleon. Khalid spent several years on Saint Helena before being eventually allowed to return to East Africa, which is where he died in 1927.\n\n## The Republic of Minerva\n\nOkay so now skipping forward to the late 1960s.\n\nThe Cold War was raging and—in the West—the hippie movement was in bloom, with ideas of personal freedom from tyranny and state control blossoming with it. In the US, communes like Drop City in Colorado and Hog Farm in California sprang up—which saw people attempt to live in their own liberal communities, free of the ills of the world and materialistic distractions.\n\nIn the East, obviously no comparable level of personal freedom existed, but renegade states with their own odd personalities also began to emerge. Albania had just cut itself off from the Eastern bloc—which it saw as just not *communist enough*—and North Korea was also starting its retreat into self-isolation and extreme outward paranoia. The idea of cloaking oneself up in state sovereignty seemed to blend with the Western-style idea of free living, giving rise to the idea of just creating a new state out of nowhere to suit very specific ambitions.\n\nAround this time, a man born in a country in the Eastern Bloc but who was now a millionaire in Las Vegas, decided that to magic a new state up might just be the ticket to achieving a personal dream: dodging tax responsibilities back home in the United States.\n\nEnter Michael Oliver, a Lithuanian-American subscribed to an ideological mixture of anti-communism, libertarianism, anti-taxation, gold enthusiasm, and probably a reasonable amount of boredom to boot. He founded the Phoenix Foundation—which aimed to create an independent libertarian state through freebooting: that is, an expedition into a foreign territory to foster political revolution or secession. To this end, Oliver hatched a bold plan: finding an unclaimed chunk of territory and declaring it a free country to suit his and the Phoenix Foundation's libertarian goals.\n\nSo the group glanced at a map and realised that Tonga—an island nation in the South Pacific—had failed to claim a bunch of partially submerged reefs to its southwest, when it proclaimed its sovereign territory in the late 19th century.\n\nIn late 1971, a group of Americans led by Oliver's emissary Bud Davis arrived at Minerva Reef, on a barge loaded with sand and cement. Workers dumped fill onto the reef, creating a platform which they grandly described as the 'first phase' of an artificial island. Within weeks, a state flag had been erected, a provisional constitution was drafted, Bud Davis was declared President, and the Republic of Minerva was declared open for business. What this 'business' meant was no taxes, no welfare, no central bank, no government interference, and an economy based on tourism, fishing and light industry (whatever that meant).\n\nNeither the Tongans nor nearby Fiji immediately responded—although both indicated disapproval of the project—and for several months, the Republic limped on towards further establishing itself. The vision was for Minerva to function as an offshore financial center, hosting a community of up to 30,000 settlers—each of whom would each pay a base rate for a 3-acre plot of land. Funds for the country would come by way of these leases, along with the support of ideological fellow-travellers elsewhere, who'd contribute investment in return for a share of Minerva's profits.\n\nUnfortunately, the plan soon started to go in the direction of the Paris Commune—as the libertarians started squabbling as to exactly what their exciting new state should look like. The only thing all of them seemed to agree on was exactly something that *didn't* turn out to be true: that Tonga would be absolutely fine with their presence and make no attempts to upend it. Unfortunately, Tonga was having exactly none of it.\n\nIn June 1972, Tongan King Taufaʻahau Tupou the Fourth convened a conference of Oceanic states, who collectively agreed that the reef should belong to Tonga and recognised Tongan sovereignty over it. The King then immediately declared Minerva a territorial threat, and mobilised the least-terrifying suppression force in history to chuck the libertarians off their island. An expedition of Tongan officials, soldiers, policemen, and (for some reason) a four-piece band of musicians arrived at Minerva a few weeks later, where they pulled down the Republic's blue flag, planted a Tongan flag and a plaque asserting sovereignty, and kicked out the band of trespassers. Around the same time, Michael Oliver quite unconstitutionally fired President Bud Davis, and the entire project fell into disarray.\n\nThe Minervans did try to regroup, and thirteen years later, Davis arrived back on the reef with a new band of supporters to attempt to reinvigorate the project. But they were again kicked off, this time after only three weeks—and with time, the reef faded back into the sea from whence it came.\n\n## The Mercenary Republic of the Congo\n\nSo around the same time that Minerva was starting to get its libertarian statehood off the ground, the Congo in Central Africa was facing major labours of its own. Following independence from Belgium in 1960, the state found itself plunged straight into crisis, and what resulted was a several years-long, devastating civil war.\n\nThis was the Congo Crisis, whose early stage saw the southeastern region of Katanga—backed by Belgium—attempt to break away and create its own independent state. To do so, the Katangans invited in a large group of mercenaries—mostly Belgians—to take the fight against the central government, led by pan-Africanist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. What this would eventually result in was a reimagination of the Republic of Pirates, this time located dead in the heart of Africa. Ironic, perhaps, given that the plunder most commonly associated with the Age of Piracy—gold—just so happened to be one of the most-plundered resources in Congo as well. Even more ironically, the central figure among the mercenaries just so happened to have a more pirate-sounding nickname than anything writers like Daniel Defoe or Herman Melville could have come up with. \"Black Jack\" Schramme was neither black nor actually called Jack, but he was a man who discovered his keen passion for mercenaryhood with the help of Katanga's secessionist President, Moïse Tshombe.\n\nAnyway, the Katanga rebellion failed—although not before the Katangans succeeded in kidnapping, torturing, and killing Lumumba in 1961. After the state was crushed by the UN in 1963, Tshombe packed up and fled abroad with a large pile of cash. In the meantime, a new rebellion was beginning to unfold—the Simba Rebellion, inspired by followers of Patrice Lumumba, who were understandably furious that their leader had been killed and dismembered. As the rebellion grew, Tshombe arrived back from his luxurious exile and became the 5th Congolese Prime Minister in 1964, seemingly forgetting all about his three years of secessionism against the same state which had ended only the year before.\n\nAnd so Tshombe immediately resorted to his old tactic to deal with the Simbans, of relying on mercenaries to help out with the fighting. He hauled Black Jack and his friends back from where they'd been hiding in Angola, with new orders to no longer fight against the state, but on this occasion to fight *on behalf* of it and to put down the Simban agitators.\n\nAs it happened, this didn't take much convincing. Since the Simbans were being supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, Black Jack had no difficulty in hiring European, Rhodesian and South African anti-communist hired hands to bring the good fight to the insurgents. Unfortunately, Tshombe lost power and was ousted after only a year in charge. A man named Mobutu Sese Seko replaced him, who later changed the name of the country to Zaire and went on to establish one of the most kleptocratic regimes in history. None of this was good news for Jean Schramme and the mercenaries, who were out manifesting destiny in a conflict that was—by now—going in a very weird direction. Many faced arrest or reprisals—and so instead of surrendering to such a fate, Black Jack decided to start a sort of rebellion of his own. With a few hundred mercenaries and about 2,000 Katangan allies in tow, he began an eastwards rampage towards the region of Kivu, near Rwanda. There, the mercenaries managed to seize several valueless towns and the city of Bukavu, where they dug in around mid-1967.\n\nBlack Jack and Co probably hoped to force a re-overthrow of the government as well as the return of Tshombe—who had wound up in Algeria, where he was placed under house arrest. For a couple of months, the mercenaries maintained control over a territory which operated effectively as an independent enclave—except that it had no state arms, no formal governmental structure, nor recognition of any kind. They administered checkpoints, collected supplies, repaired airstrips, and just held on hoping for a relief offensive by the Katangans elsewhere. Visiting foreign journalists described it as \"a wild, cinematic outpost,\" where European adventurers, Congolese fighters, and civilians navigated a precarious coexistence.\n\nBut it was all rather hopeless. When the mercenaries started to run out of ammunition by late 1967, Schramme managed to scram to Rwanda, leaving a ruined Bukavu behind. From there, he was airlifted out and arrived back in Belgium in 1968. In 1986, Black Jack was convicted in Belgium of the murder of a compatriot in the Congo, for which he was handed a sentence of 20 years in prison. He didn't serve a single day, however. He took a tactic from fleeing Nazis and moved to Brazil, where he died in 1988 at the age of 59. Tshombe didn't fare any better, and died under suspicious circumstances while still under house arrest in Algeria in 1969.\n\nSo the mercenary state lived in history as a short-lived footnote of the Congo crisis of the 1960s.\n\nUnfortunately, the writer who wrote this just realised that this did absolutely *not* make it a real state of any kind. Nice job, Phil.\n\nSo we'll conclude this entry with a different state which fumbled into existence around the same time all the way north in Europe.\n\nThe Republic of Rose Island was a short-lived micronation, which rose out of the Adriatic Sea near Italy, and lived for a couple of weeks in the early summer of 1968.\n\nNow, with a name like Rose Island, you might be picturing a scenic mediterranean islet complete with natural flora, basking beneath the sun. It was nothing of the kind. The Republic was basically a big concrete block on stilts, located in the middle of the Adriatic, several kilometres off the coast of the Italian resort city of Rimini.\n\nIt was called that because of the name of its founder, an Italian engineer named Giorgio Rosa. Rosa built the platform, declared it an independent state and made himself President on the 1st of May, 1968. He was later dubbed the \"prince of anarchists\" by the press—which was also a misleading title. Rosa wasn't an anarchist, and built the Republic with his pals in order to—at least, according to the Italian police—profit from tourism while ducking laws against gambling and excess partying. The location of Rose Island just so happened to be right where Italian territorial control ended—about 11 kilometres out from land.\n\nStill, the Republic of Rose Island had some interesting features. It reportedly had a restaurant, bar, nightclub, souvenir shop, and post office with its own stamps. Rosa declared his fiefdom to have its own currency—the mill—although no hard currency was ever known to have been produced. He also declared the official language of the Republic to be Esperanto…for some reason.\n\nAnyway, the Republic punctuated its existence by several weeks of hard partying in the early summer of 1968, buoyed by thrillseekers arriving on small boats after work from Rimini and under coastal Italian towns. That is, until the Italian Navy put an end to it all by chucking Rosa off his platform in June 1968, and blowing the Republic up less than a year later.\n\nEven so, the Republic of Rose Island did live on in the fond memories of locals and veterans of its platform parties, and it was even eventually commemorated in a film—'Rose Island', released on Netflix in 2020.\n\n## Liberland\n\nYup, the Libertarians at it again.\n\nNow, many of those watching this video may have already heard about this curious little geographical oddity, and some of you might even be citizens of it. The Free Republic of Liberland is the invention of libertarian activist Vít Jedlička who decided one day that the prospect of making a free-market paradise out of any existing European states was all just a bit too much hassle. So Jedlička went the Minerva Republic-route and consulted a map of the Balkans, where he found a small parcel of land claimed by nobody, and decided that *that* was exactly where his nation-building startup was going to get itself off the ground.\n\nSo in 2015, the Free Republic of Liberland was founded on a 7-square kilometre riverside parcel of territory, located on the Danube and between Serbia and Croatia.\n\nHow was this possible?\n\nWell you see, in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Serbia and Croatia couldn't quite figure out the border delineation between them. In practice, the Danube river became the dividing line, but this didn't offset the territorial dispute between the previously-warring nations. The use of the river as a frontier suited Serbia just fine, but Croatia argued that the border should follow old cadastral lines (or historic land registry boundaries), which pre-dated the shifting course of the Danube. This left a few small portions of territory claimed by neither one side nor the other—effectively becoming *terra nullius*. It was on the largest of these plots, Gornja Siga, that Jedlička saw his opportunity. If neither Croatia nor Serbia were willing to assert ownership over this marshy, forested scrap of terrain, then—according to him—nothing prevented a private citizen from marching in and declaring it a sovereign state. Thus, on April 13th, 2015, with a few supporters, a camera crew, and a draft constitution in hand, the Free Republic of Liberland announced itself to the world.\n\nNow, founding a country in the 21st century isn't as simple as posting a press release and printing some stamps. It is a tall order, requiring diplomatic acknowledgment, permanent population, and a functioning government. Liberland *has* since attempted to tick these boxes—kind of. After Jedlička appointed himself President, he set up a provisional government-in-exile (since neither Croatia nor Serbia will allow Liberlanders to actually live on the land), and opened citizenship applications online. He added a national motto—\"To Live and Let Live\"—and a flag, as well as a cryptocurrency-friendly economic model based on the libertarian maxims of minimal tax, maximum personal freedom.\n\nCroatia was not amused. Despite claiming the Siga belongs to Serbia, it simultaneously barred anyone from entering the area, citing border-security concerns. Over the years, multiple Liberland supporters have been detained or turned away by Croatian police for attempting to visit their would-be homeland. Serbia, meanwhile, maintains that the land is Croatian responsibility, although it has occasionally expressed a shrugging tolerance toward Liberland's ambitions. Neither side currently recognizes Liberland as an independent state.\n\nDespite this, the project attracted a large number of supporters, and has persisted since its establishment more than ten years ago. Liberland hosts conferences, promotes itself at international gatherings, and maintains its \"diaspora government\" abroad. It also runs an eco-village, known as ARK, a few kilometres south of the Siga in Serbia (this time, uncontestedly in Serbia). It was here that \"Liberpulco\"—an annual freedom event—began to be hosted from 2024, on the bank of the Danube in full view of Croatia—which they must just love.\n\nLiberland has also received a large amount of press coverage, being featured in various newspaper publications and having been visited by high-profile travel vloggers such as Drew Binsky and Niko Omilana.\n\nStill, the Free Republic sits in a kind of geopolitical limbo, sort of a quirk rather than defined state, sustained by the promise of absolute freedom.\n\nWhether it ever becomes more than that, remains a question for the mapmakers of the future.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Some of the strangest states in history had short-lived existences due to unique quirks.\n- Sparta's economic power was largely held by women, who managed agricultural labor.\n- The Kingdom of Jaintia practiced matrilineal succession, with the youngest female child inheriting assets.\n- The Novgorod Republic was wealthy and had a high level of individual rights and freedoms.\n- The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia had overseas colonies in Tobago and Gambia despite its small size.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What was unique about the economic role of women in Sparta?\n\nSpartan women were the driving force of the state economy. They could own land parcels, consolidate wealth over generations, and manage agricultural labor, giving them economic authority rarely afforded to ancient women elsewhere.\n\n### What was the succession system in the Kingdom of Jaintia?\n\nThe Kingdom of Jaintia practiced ultimogeniture succession, where the youngest female child inherited the assets. The successor of the Raja was not his son but his sister's son.\n\n### What was the Novgorod Republic known for?\n\nThe Novgorod Republic was known for its high level of individual rights and freedoms, including a citizen council called the Veche that elected the Novgorod leadership, mayors, and the local archbishop.\n\n### What were the overseas colonies of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia?\n\nThe Duchy of Courland and Semigallia had two overseas colonies: Tobago (today part of Trinidad and Tobago) and a trading post in the Gambia.\n\n### What was the Republic of Pirates and where was it located?\n\nThe Republic of Pirates, also known as the Flying Gang, existed between 1706 and 1718 in the modern-day Bahamas, centered in Nassau.\n\n### What was the Paris Commune and how long did it last?\n\nThe Paris Commune was a short-lived pseudo-state that existed for about two months in 1871, during which time it introduced socialist reforms and faced a bloody suppression by the French Third Republic.\n\n### What was the Anglo-Zanzibar War and how long did it last?\n\nThe Anglo-Zanzibar War was a 38-minute conflict in 1896 between the British Empire and the Zanzibar Sultanate, resulting in the shortest-lived sovereign state in history.\n\n### What was the Republic of Minerva and why did it fail?\n\nThe Republic of Minerva was an attempt to create an independent libertarian state on Minerva Reef in the South Pacific. It failed due to internal squabbles and opposition from Tonga, which asserted sovereignty over the reef.\n\n### What was the Mercenary Republic of the Congo?\n\nThe Mercenary Republic of the Congo was an independent enclave controlled by mercenaries led by Jean 'Black Jack' Schramme during the Congo Crisis in the 1960s. It operated effectively as an independent state for a few months before collapsing.\n\n### What was the Republic of Rose Island and why was it destroyed?\n\nThe Republic of Rose Island was a short-lived micronation built on a concrete platform in the Adriatic Sea near Italy. It was destroyed by the Italian Navy in 1968 due to its founder's activities related to gambling and excessive partying.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Side Projects video: 10 of the Strangest States to Ever Exist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQR3IuRWwPQ)\n- [https://www.nytimes.com/1968/06/28/archives/exmercenary-leader-charged-with-murder.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1968/06/28/archives/exmercenary-leader-charged-with-murder.html)\n- [https://reason.com/2022/07/07/the-quest-for-a-libertarian-island-paradise/](https://reason.com/2022/07/07/the-quest-for-a-libertarian-island-paradise/)\n- [https://youtu.be/3OUy28gPOAI?si=4xVomgEcpU5QQYPf&t=46](https://youtu.be/3OUy28gPOAI?si=4xVomgEcpU5QQYPf&t=46)\n- [https://grokipedia.com/page/Matrilineal_society_of_Meghalaya](https://grokipedia.com/page/Matrilineal_society_of_Meghalaya)\n- [https://d-place.org/parameters/EA075?utm_source=chatgpt.com#1/30/152](https://d-place.org/parameters/EA075?utm_source=chatgpt.com#1/30/152)\n- [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/liberland-hundreds-of-thousands-apply-to-live-in-worlds-newest-country](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/liberland-hundreds-of-thousands-apply-to-live-in-worlds-newest-country)\n- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usjo33yxuck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usjo33yxuck)\n- [https://youtu.be/YF3TQKV-IOE?si=Sy9XL3JIL7khArXc](https://youtu.be/YF3TQKV-IOE?si=Sy9XL3JIL7khArXc)\n- [https://youtu.be/Jb8T9X5K1AA?si=5HTryBtnNaY8ZgGf](https://youtu.be/Jb8T9X5K1AA?si=5HTryBtnNaY8ZgGf)\n- [https://liberland.org/events/15-liberpulco-2024](https://liberland.org/events/15-liberpulco-2024)\n- [https://theshillongtimes.com/2019/12/30/the-kiang-nangbah-led-rebellion-the-last-battle-of-the-pnar/](https://theshillongtimes.com/2019/12/30/the-kiang-nangbah-led-rebellion-the-last-battle-of-the-pnar/)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Heiligenhafen_sunset_-_Baltic_Sea_-_2025_%2855256656656%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original) by Karlheinz Klingbeil from Germany / openverse, by.\n\n## Related Coverage"
url: https://sideprojects.pub/article/strangest-states-ever-exist.md
canonical: https://sideprojects.pub/article/strangest-states-ever-exist
datePublished: 2025-12-23
dateModified: 2026-07-28
author:
  - name: Simon Whistler
    url: https://sideprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler
publisher: Side Projects
image: "https://media.sideprojects.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/YQR3IuRWwPQ/hero.jpg"
type: NewsArticle
contentHash: 66a1116a72bc3002f1fac69f5e88d3dffaabce4a40a6e23890ab3a04f80fd9df
tokens: 13305
summaryUrl: https://sideprojects.pub/article/strangest-states-ever-exist.md.summary.md
---

<!-- aeo:section start="lede" -->
Strange states. Who doesn't love them?

Well, depending on what you'd characterise as 'strange', it actually turns out that *lots* of people don't love them. Some of the strangest states in history have had short-lived, precarious existences, often because the exact quirk that made them unique also meant—to some—that they should never have actually existed.

Today we're going to take a look at some of them—flicking through the centuries to find examples of states whose quirkiness could be seen as the dominant feature of their entire profile.

A quick note, however: some of the entries listed today are—or were—clearly-defined, unquestionable states. Some just *wanted* to be clearly-defined, unquestionable states. And at least one never was—and never tried to be—a real state of any kind.

We're just going to refer to all of them as states, sometimes only for lack of a better idea as to what exactly to call them.

Enough said. Let's jump in.

<!-- aeo:section end="lede" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sparta" -->
## Sparta

Let's start with Sparta. And to be honest, where to *even* start with Sparta.

We actually covered this prizefighter state of Ancient Greece in one of our recent videos, '10 of the Deadliest Jobs in History'. No prizes for guessing which particular profession we were referring to there.

And in that video, we described exactly what little fun it was to have to grow up as a Spartan lad: to spend the bulk of your early life in barracks, enduring severe tests of endurance and hazing, before disappearing into the rank and file of the army for the next couple of decades. Spartan men would finally be able to retire at age 60—or at what was basically the tail of life expectancy for the time. To have its citizens spend their entire lives as human battle droids would really be enough alone to qualify Sparta for this list, and we really could end this particular entry right there.

But it was actually a different feature of this war-obsessive culture that is the focus of today's list. You see, Spartan men being able to take up a normal dayjob like farming or craftsmanship only at age 60—when physical strength and energy is usually nobody's forte—wasn't really all that great for the economy. Moreover, to be a professional warrior came with another rather obvious hazard: you could *die*, leaving whatever property your family owned in limbo, whatever livestock or farmland they tended at risk, and eliminating whatever further contribution you could make to the upkeep of the state. Put simply, there was a reason that the Athenians, Macedonians and others devoted themselves to things like pottery, fishing and merchantship. Aside from being safer, it was also because the state *needed* those things—and to be forever primed to fight an unexpected war, presumably, it did not.

The result was that it was left to the Spartan women to basically be the driving force of the state economy.

Okay, not really—since the bulk of any economic heavy lifting was done by the Helots—a group of non-Spartan slaves (and more on them in a bit). Still, estates passed through female relatives, and Spartan women could own land parcels, which allowed them to consolidate wealth over generations. Elite women became managers of agricultural labour, giving them economic authority rarely afforded to ancient women elsewhere. They were even able to own multiple properties, something absolutely unheard-of in states like the famously self-righteous philosophy hub that was Athens.

Did this make Sparta a strange state? Well yes, for the time—although you could fill this list with another 20 reasons, with this particular one not even featuring that highly amongst them. And by the way: this was still Ancient Greece, so do not think that this relative economic empowerment meant that Spartan women had any political clout. They were to be kept *nowhere near* the political affairs of the state, which was governed by the Gerousia—alternatively known as the Spartan senate—made up of two Spartan kings plus 28 elite male citizens (who, of course, had to be beyond the age of sixty).

Hence, Sparta was sort of a strange affair: male power was political and military; female power was economic and domestic. So you could say this made Sparta a kind of egalitarian society, ahead of its time—right?

Absolutely not. Because the vast majority of Sparta's inhabitants were the aforementioned Helots, a population of *seriously* discriminated-against people that the Spartiates (male and female) looked at with a mix of exploitativeness and revulsion. Not that much is actually known about the Helots except that there were a lot of them and they had almost no rights under Spartan laws. In fact, according to Aristotle, Sparta simply declared war every Autumn on the Helots, allowing themselves to purge the population without fear of religious consequences. Unsurprisingly, the Helots sometimes revolted, leading historian Paul Cartledge to summarise that:

> "the history of Sparta is fundamentally the history of the class struggle between the Spartans and the Helots."

Sparta's weird class structure and obsessive militarising didn't stop it from being overrun and sacked by the Visigoths in 396 CE, after which the state never achieved the same greatness again.

…what a shame.

<!-- aeo:section end="sparta" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-kingdom-of-jaintia" -->
## The Kingdom of Jaintia

Alright: pause. Time for a bit of fun with words.

Do you know the difference between primogeniture and ultimogeniture succession? If you don't, it's quite simple. Primogeniture means that in any system of succession or inheritance, the firstborn child gets the spoils. Ultimogeniture means that the last-born does.

For most societies throughout the ages, the first of these predominated. As recently as 1998, the Ethnographic Atlas described how inheritance by the elder prevailed in 248 societies, while inheritance by the younger prevailed in just 22. As a footnote, inheritance by the individual judged 'best qualified' did exist: but in only 20 societies, the lowest count of all. Kind of a depressing statistic on its own.

Anyway, the point is that the oldest first descendant has always been far more likely to take the lion's share of family stuff than the youngest. This remains the case in many current systems of monarchy—where the oldest child is the crown heir—or even in legal inheritance: where the oldest sibling is usually the estate executor. And of course, there are many justifications for this. The oldest would, by virtue of age, theoretically be the wisest, the most experienced, and the best-positioned to fill whatever role was being vacated. They would be perhaps, even, the most deserving—because of the length of time spent in waiting. I mean who would really fault Charles III for his Kingship after almost three quarters of a century of being a prince.

But strong arguments could also be made in favour of the youngest as the successor. They'd be most likely to live on longest, thereby keeping the property or role inherited in the hands of direct offspring for the longest period. There's another good reason for inheritance by the youngest. A head of family doesn't really choose who is their eldest child, and would be forced to hand over their assets or reign to whomever came next, regardless of their actual ability to fill that role. But in an ultimogeniture system, if the first born proved too much of an oaf to govern or were just less than ideal for it, the parents could just keep on having more descendants until they found one that fit the bill.

Anyway, all this is to say that ultimogeniture succession did exist and some states had their own unique take on it. Step forward the Kingdom of Jaintia, in modern-day northeast India. Because there, not only was it the youngest child who would inherit the assets, but it would be the youngest *female* child who would do so.

The Kingdom existed for more than 1,000 years in what is now northern Bangladesh and the Assam and Meghalaya states of India. It existed for so long that it is not even well-established when exactly it was founded, only that it clung on to existence until—common story—it fell foul of the British and was taken over in the 1800s. Admittedly, not every aspect of the Jaintia Kingdom's culture was really all that noble: they reportedly practiced human sacrifice, something the British didn't particularly admire and told the Jaintia Raja to stop. Unfortunately, the Jaintia did the complete opposite, kidnapping four British soldiers in 1832 of whom three were reportedly sacrificed. When the Raja declined to hand over those responsible, the British stormed in and by 1835 the Kingdom was no more.

But right up until then, the Kingdom continued its matrilineal succession, which manifested itself in an unusual, somewhat confusing manner. Being a Kingdom, the state was run by a man. But being matrilineal, the successor of the Raja would be not *his* son but the Raja's *sister's* son. The social order of the society was run more or less along the same lines. After marriage, Jaintia husbands would move into their new wife's family home, and in any given household, the youngest daughter—or 'khaddu'—would inherit the ancestral property, thereby becoming the 'anchor' of the family home. The children in any household would all inherit the family name of their mother, and two individuals would be considered kin only if they shared an ancestor from the maternal side of the family.

After the British dissected the Kingdom in 1835, the Khasi, Jaintia (Pnar), and Garo tribes of Meghalaya experienced some pressure toward patrilineal practices by the colonial administration and Christian missionary influence. However, the three groups have largely retained unusual traditional systems to this day, manifested by greater involvement of women in the economy, continued use of maternal clan names, and even relatively common rates of divorce by comparison with other communities in India.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-kingdom-of-jaintia" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-novgorod-republic" -->
## The Novgorod Republic

Right, skipping forward to the middle of the Medieval Era, and to a curious little state that existed for about 300 years in modern-day Russia.

Of course, by 'little' we mean *strictly* in terms of population size—because the Novgorod Republic was *absolutely* not little in its geographic size. Its lands reached from the western city of Novgorod all the way across northern Russia and into Siberia, so a parcel of territory roughly comparable in size to today's Mongolia.

Unsurprisingly, not many people lived there—since northern Russia (then as now) is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The Republic, existing between 1136 and 1478, probably never had more than half a million inhabitants at its height. About 30,000 of those lived in the capital, Veliky Novgorod—which doesn't sound like a large amount, but this actually made it a fairly sizable city for the 12th and 13th centuries. And the Republic of Novgorod—despite its smallish population and frozen environs—was one hell of a goofy state.

First, there was its name. The state was literally formally known as *Lord Novgorod the Great*—which, obviously, sounds more like a person, maybe a Tsar. But no, that was just what the proud people of Novgorod called their country. In later years, historians began to refer to the state as the Novgorod Republic. And to not make it too confusing, we'll do the same.

Another thing: despite being located in the frozen north of Russia and populated mostly by impoverished serfs, the Republic was actually kind of wealthy.

Novgorod was one of the richer cities of medieval Europe due to its strategic location linking the Baltic Sea with the Volga and Caspian regions of the Russian hinterland, as well as the sparse but mineral-rich Siberian Arctic. It was also located far enough north for the pesky Golden Horde and Tatar raiders not to be that much of a headache. And so the state was free to trade in furs, honey, waxes, fisheries, leathers and other tidy materials with the Hanseatic League, mostly unabated. Thus Novgorod became not only one of the wealthiest states in Europe in the 12th century, but one of the most commercially-sophisticated and domestically stable.

But perhaps its strangest feature of all was the high level of individual rights and freedoms afforded to its citizens. Unlike the nearby Principality of Muscovy—not so shockingly, run by a Prince—Novgorod's greatest political power was a citizen council known as the *Veche*. This was composed of the city's male citizens, and it elected not only the Novgorod leadership, but even mayors and the local archbishop. In 1136, the citizens basically fired Prince Vsevolod for being a liar—after which the role of prince was downgraded to a kind of symbolic one. The Prince would operate alongside the *posadnik*—a kind of mayor—and the *tisyatsky*, the de-facto head of military: both of which were also formally elected by the *veche*.

This was definitely unique in the Middle Ages, at a time when European nations had mostly discarded the idea of democracy in favour of good old-fashioned, centralised autocracy. Of course, this being the Middle Ages—and Russia, no less—also meant that Novgorod's so-called democracy wasn't *really* democracy. In practice, the voting was dominated by powerful clan rulers known as boyars, with true power basically remaining in the hands of oligarchs and subject to tribal bickering. The *veche* usually just elected the most powerful ruler in Rus as their prince, making the whole democratic process a little bit pointless.

And in the end, Novgorod's flawed system of democracy wouldn't last. Perhaps by virtue of having had to fend off the Tatars for so long, nearby Muscovy got rather good at fighting, and became much stronger than their neighbours—although not before having their city completely sacked by the Golden Horde in 1382. By 1478, Lord Novgorod the Great (the country) was taken over by Tsar Ivan the Great (the person), and fell completely under Moscow rule. Ivan turned out to be uninterested in continuing the system of rule by the people and so the *veche* system was discontinued. Novgorod became a part of Russia without further fuss, as it has remained ever since.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-novgorod-republic" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-duchy-of-courland-and-semigallia" -->
## The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia

Right, so moving a little bit west and to modern-day Latvia.

The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, located on the Baltic Sea, might easily have been a trading partner for nearby Novgorod—were it not that it came into existence in 1561, about half a century after Novgorod *stopped* existing. But there was nevertheless something that both entities had in common: small states, *big* ambitions.

Courland came into being following the collapse of the Livonian Order, a local branch of the Teutonic Knights, who had run the area for about 150 years. The Livonians probably didn't have all that great a relationship with Novgorod, since the Order tried and failed to invade their wealthy neighbour in the 1200s. But they were defeated by a prince whose name you might recognise—Alexander Nevsky—at the Battle on the Ice in 1242. Must have been a pretty cool battle.

Anyway, by the 1500s Novgorod had been swallowed up by Muscovy and a Moscow Tsar whose name you might also recognise—Ivan the Terrible—decided he wanted to have a crack at taking on the Livonians. So he swept in and crushed the Order, but was quickly forced out again by Sweden, Poland, and Denmark. This left a power vacuum, and a local noble, Gotthard Kettler (ironically the last Grand Master of the Livonian Order) smelled an opportunity. So he signed an arrangement with Poland and Lithuania to be a vassal ruler and suddenly the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was all his to reign.

Quite a tidy little piece of business.

Courland went on existing for more than 200 years, until the dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. Although almost insignificant in population and geographic size, Courland was fairly economically active, dining out on a strong merchant fleet and connections on the Baltic Sea, one of the most lucrative trade routes in the world at the time.

But the question is: why was this one of the strangest states to exist? Well, the thing is that, by the 17th century, the Age of Discovery was in full flow. European powers, armed with ships, enthusiasm, and useless maps, sailed off to establish colonies in places they found themselves in, all across the world. And Courland, despite its size, had no intention of missing out on the action. So they put together a fleet and sailed off to claim some of the New World for themselves—and, bizarrely, they were actually rather successful.

Yes it may sound crazy, but for a brief moment in the mid-17th century, this tiny peninsula in Latvia had two overseas colonies—both located in the most random locations. One was Tobago (today part of Trinidad and Tobago) where the Courlanders established a colony with two settlements in 1639. And the other, albeit more minor, was located not in Trinidad, not anywhere in South America, but in today's *Gambia*—located the full breadth of the Atlantic Ocean away.

Tobago was the most lucrative of the two, being a plantation colony which the Courlanders very unimaginatively called New Courland and used to export sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, rum and feathers from. The Gambia colony, founded in 1651, served primarily as a trading post from which the Courlanders hoped to tap into Africa's lucrative trade networks: gold, ivory, hides, and some luckless slaves—as well as to have strategic control over the Gambia river—used for access to the continent by rival European powers.

But both colonies were lost when Courland's Swedish neighbours took advantage of its weak defences during the Northern Wars of the 1650s. Then-Duke Jakob Kettler, grandson of the original Kettler, was taken captive by the Swedish Army from 1658 to 1660, during which time his fleet was ransacked and Courland's overseas colonies stripped away. After the end of the war, the island of Tobago was returned to the Duchy. However, it could not hope to regain its pre-war level of wealth and Courland ended up abandoning its colonial ambitions by 1666. It limped on as a colonyless vassal of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth for a further century, when it did like Novgorod before it and became incorporated into the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great in 1795.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-duchy-of-courland-and-semigallia" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-republic-of-pirates" -->
## The Republic of Pirates

So here's the thing about piracy.

Unless you really had no other option—such as by being a captive—becoming a pirate wasn't really the wisest career move. For much of the early modern period, being caught and accused of piracy meant a fairly predictable fate—*death*, usually by hanging, with your body left on public display as a warning to others. European empires took their maritime trade routes seriously, and anyone who disrupted the flow was treated as an existential threat to be swiftly and decisively wiped out.

With that said, there were occasions when being a pirate could actually be rather lucrative, and could come with subsided travel opportunities, cultural exchange, and even professional growth. One could rise through the ranks to become a master, First Mate, or even Sea Captain. And yes at one point, belonging to the piracy came with the opportunity to be part of an entire pseudo-state operating out of an island located in the Caribbean.

Step forward the Republic of Pirates, otherwise known as the Flying Gang, which existed between 1706 and 1718 in the modern-day Bahamas.

Centered in Nassau, the Republic was another example of something that was less a formal state, more like a rough confederation of outlaws who turned a neglected colonial outpost into their stronghold. The pirates established their own informal codes of conduct, shared resources, repaired vessels, and offered refuge to newcomers. This attracted privateers out looking for work—and for more than a decade, the community limped on as a highly-dysfunctional, improvised state. They even appointed a magistrate—none other than Blackbeard—and used their base in Nassau as a springboard from which to cause havoc with trade and shipping across the West Indies.

The Republic of Pirates was neither officially recognised nor very big but it did manage to blend some standardised principles with unadulterated chaos. It offered democratic voting, compensation for injuries (such as up to 800 pieces of eight for a lost leg), and strict prohibitions against stealing among residents. Nassau became a bustling port with taverns doubled as meeting halls, ships' carpenters running dry docks, and market stalls selling everything from plundered gunpowder to plundered French wine. The day-to-day must have looked something like the island of Tortuga from the *Pirates of the Caribbean*, and various renowned pirates such as Benjamin Hornigold, Edward England and Samuel Bellamy frequented the peculiar Republic during its existence.

Unfortunately, the utopia didn't last very long. Britain and other maritime powers had no desire to tolerate a lawless base for attacks on its merchant fleets, and sent in Captain Woodes Rogers—a former privateer turned colonial administrator—with a series of warships to put an end to all the fun. Some pirates accepted his offer of pardon, others fled, and some mounted a half-hearted defence of Nassau without realising they were badly outmuscled by the guns of Rogers and the Royal Navy. So in 1718, Rogers blistered into Nassau, cleared out its occupants (mostly just pirates and fugitives), raised the British flag, and became Governor of the Bahamas for the next three years.

Many of the pirates were—unusually—still issued pardons, although some went straight back to attacks on merchant fleets before the Golden Age of Piracy eventually petered out in the 1730s.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-republic-of-pirates" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-paris-commune" -->
## The Paris Commune

The period 1870 to 1871 really wasn't a good time for France.

Nearly 100 years on from the French Revolution, the state had already endured periods of stability, including several bouts of democratic rule alternating with non-democratic rule by various emperors called Napoleon. By 1870, France found itself at war—under Emperor Napoleon III, this time—with Prussia, during the course of which the Emperor was deposed and France declared itself a Republic…for the third time.

Unfortunately, only a few months later, the war came to a humiliating end for the French, as Prussian troops marched into Paris and declared the formation of the German Empire right on France's homefield, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. They also whisked away the contested region of Alsace-Lorraine—which would remain in German hands until the French whisked it back at the end of World War I.

Many French—understandably—were not pleased with the humbling nature of the defeat, as well as the constant instability of the previous few years. Moreover, recent years had seen an influx of workers from the regions to the capital, workers whose opportunities had vanished due to the plummeting of the economy caused by fighting. Socialist agitators went to work, inciting the disillusioned workers and causing revolutionary movements to spawn and fester. And things got even worse about two weeks before the inglorious collapse of the French forces in January 1871. Prince Pierre Bonaparte, nephew of Emperor Napoleon III (who'd spent the past year very publicly losing the war), got into an argument with a pair of journalists and shot one of them, Victor Noir, dead. The killing led to outrage, which only got worse when the French forces collapsed, and worse still when Pierre Bonaparte was acquitted of murder by a Bonapartist judge. Enormous protests sprang up, exploited by members of the French far-left like part-time philosopher, full-time criminal Louis Auguste Blanqui. In Paris, these protests went as far as to shut down the city's communes entirely, and the locals, many of whom had joined the National Guard to defend Paris from the Germans, began to confront state troops sent to quell the unrest. When two Generals were shot dead on March 18th, the French Army folded for the second time in two months and withdrew from Paris to Versailles.

With that, Blanqui (who was actually already in prison for being a revolutionary nuisance) and his followers had got their reward. Their control over Paris gave birth to a short-lived pseudo-state which, it was hoped…

…okay, realistically, it wasn't clear what the objective of this was ever going to be.

The Paris Commune went on to exist for about two months, during which time its ideologues mostly preached about various egalitarian ideas and then argued amongst themselves as to how exactly to realise them. The National Guard turned into the Commune's de-facto defence force, and its government introduced socialist reforms including worker cooperatives, cancellation of debt, various women's rights initiatives, and the aggressive separation of church and state. Perhaps especially the latter, which led to the detention of religious figures as ransom leverage for imprisoned leftist leaders. But many of the Commune's hostages weren't ransomed and were simply shot within a few weeks—notable victims included Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris.

Unfortunately for the Commune, the French (by-now) Third Republic—weak as it was—realised it could not allow a bunch of revolutionary upstarts to declare a new state right in the heart of the state capital. So in May 1871, it sent in the Versailles Army under General Patrice de MacMahon (terrific name, by the way) to crush the revolutionaries and restore law and relative order. So commenced the *Semaine Sanglante*—or Bloody Week—during which around 15,000 people were killed as the Commune entered its death throes. The authorities also arrested around 43,000 people, going on to execute a small handful of those, imprison some more, and also send more than 1,000 out of sight and into exile in New Caledonia.

The latter became a rather favoured tactic of France in dealing with undesirables, and the falsely-accused Alfred Dreyfus would suffer a similar fate a few years later, when he'd be convicted of treason in the Dreyfus Affair and sent to French Guyana for four years.

So the Commune didn't live long, and its bloody end was probably as decisive of a deterrent as the Third Republic could have asked for. But France being France, this wasn't the last occasion of similar upheaval. Almost another century on, the Paris Student Riots and workers' strikes resulted in another shutdown of the capital—albeit one treated this time much more gingerly by the state, who probably realised that a massacre of Paris' citizens twice in one century wasn't a good look.

Blanqui, in the wake of the failure of the Commune, basically just continued as ever he'd done before.

He was condemned to colony life, but his sentence was commuted due to ill health and after a general amnesty was issued to Commune agitators. He was freed, and threw himself straight back into revolutionary rabble-rousing. Luckily, he died of a stroke in 1881, before being able to get up to too much more mischief. He was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, nearby Victoir Noir—whose death he'd helped exploit to set the whole misadventure into motion.

And Victoir Noir's grave, by the way, has since become a pilgrimage point for one of the most bizarre reasons. His gravesite featured a sculpture depicting him just after he'd been shot dead by Pierre Bonaparte. For some reason, sculptor Jules Dalou decided to add a large protuberance to Noir's trousers, which led to the grave becoming a sort of good luck charm for those seeking enhanced…fertility.

To this day, many visitors to Pere Lachaise flock to Noir's gravesite to rub his…well, you know.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-paris-commune" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-independent-sultanate-of-the-anglo-zanzibar-war-i-guess" -->
## The Independent Sultanate of the Anglo-Zanzibar War…I Guess

You may have heard about the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War before.

It was chaotic. It was brutal. It was 38 minutes long.

Yup. Basically, the east African territory of Zanzibar was, in the late 19th century, a wealthy trading island and a British protectorate. When the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini died in 1896, a man named Khalid bin Barghash found himself next in line to replace him. Unfortunately the British did absolutely not like Khalid, and declared he could not take the throne without their approval, in accordance with a treaty signed with Germany in 1886. But Khalid decided the British-German treaty could take a hike, and seized the Sultan's Palace in the Zanzibari capital, Stone Town, rather than waiting for approval to arrive. He was obliged to back down, but refused—and buttressed up the palace with nearly 3,000 armed guards, various artillery pieces, and…a royal yacht. Better than nothing I suppose.

Well all this just wouldn't wash, and on the 27th August 1896, British patience expired. The Royal Navy, under Rear Admiral Harry Rawson, swooped in to clear Khalid and his band of upstarts out of the Sultan's Palace. They adopted the less-than-surgical tactic of obliterating the entire building with artillery bombardment from the harbour. So at 9am on the dot, British warships unleashed a barrage that reduced the palace—and many of its occupants—to smithereens. The so-called war was a rout, with an estimated 500 Zanzibari casualties against exactly one British casualty—and within minutes, Khalid's forces began to scatter. By about 9:40, the conflict was over—with Khalid having fled to safety in the nearby German consulate. The royal yacht sank, having failed to put up much meaningful resistance.

Now, Khalid was obviously not a very good choice of Sultan—but he *was* the Sultan. He became head of the Zanzibar Protectorate on the 25th of August after Hamad—who was his cousin—died, probably because Khalid allegedly poisoned him. The British had actually been wary of conniving cousin Khalid for years—and his ambition to be Sultan wasn't ever that much of a secret. He'd been a candidate to inherit the Sultanhood many years before, but had been passed over in favour of much-less-unpredictable Hamad. As visiting British diplomat Rennell Rodd put it, Khalid was just too much of a dick to be the Sultan (the actual phrasing he used was "undesirable."). Anyway, being Sultan by succession meant that Khalid would logically also be Sultan when the Zanzibaris broke with the Protectorate by act of war that August morning. *Technically*, under his leadership the state was now independent—kind of—thus becoming the shortest-lived sovereign state in history at 38 minutes of existence.

Anyway, the quasi-state didn't outlive the British barrage, and the Sultan's Palace was also flat out destroyed. It was rebuilt a few years later, and once again became the residence of the Zanzibar Sultans under the restored British Protectorate. The Sultanate lived on until the Protectorate ended in 1963, at which point Zanzibar—*once again* managed to stake a claim for one of the shortest-lived states in history. The People's Republic of Zanzibar was established that year and lived for about three months before being replaced by the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, later just Tanzania—as the state remains today.

As for Khalid, he received political asylum in German East Africa (modern Tanzania) and for a while, came out of his stunt unscathed. That is until World War I, when Britain and Germany went to war and German possessions in Africa were now fair game for repossession.

Khalid was captured, and Britain pulled the send-them-to-Saint-Helena trick on their old adversary, exactly as they'd once done with another problematic foe, Napoleon. Khalid spent several years on Saint Helena before being eventually allowed to return to East Africa, which is where he died in 1927.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-independent-sultanate-of-the-anglo-zanzibar-war-i-guess" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-republic-of-minerva" -->
## The Republic of Minerva

Okay so now skipping forward to the late 1960s.

The Cold War was raging and—in the West—the hippie movement was in bloom, with ideas of personal freedom from tyranny and state control blossoming with it. In the US, communes like Drop City in Colorado and Hog Farm in California sprang up—which saw people attempt to live in their own liberal communities, free of the ills of the world and materialistic distractions.

In the East, obviously no comparable level of personal freedom existed, but renegade states with their own odd personalities also began to emerge. Albania had just cut itself off from the Eastern bloc—which it saw as just not *communist enough*—and North Korea was also starting its retreat into self-isolation and extreme outward paranoia. The idea of cloaking oneself up in state sovereignty seemed to blend with the Western-style idea of free living, giving rise to the idea of just creating a new state out of nowhere to suit very specific ambitions.

Around this time, a man born in a country in the Eastern Bloc but who was now a millionaire in Las Vegas, decided that to magic a new state up might just be the ticket to achieving a personal dream: dodging tax responsibilities back home in the United States.

Enter Michael Oliver, a Lithuanian-American subscribed to an ideological mixture of anti-communism, libertarianism, anti-taxation, gold enthusiasm, and probably a reasonable amount of boredom to boot. He founded the Phoenix Foundation—which aimed to create an independent libertarian state through freebooting: that is, an expedition into a foreign territory to foster political revolution or secession. To this end, Oliver hatched a bold plan: finding an unclaimed chunk of territory and declaring it a free country to suit his and the Phoenix Foundation's libertarian goals.

So the group glanced at a map and realised that Tonga—an island nation in the South Pacific—had failed to claim a bunch of partially submerged reefs to its southwest, when it proclaimed its sovereign territory in the late 19th century.

In late 1971, a group of Americans led by Oliver's emissary Bud Davis arrived at Minerva Reef, on a barge loaded with sand and cement. Workers dumped fill onto the reef, creating a platform which they grandly described as the 'first phase' of an artificial island. Within weeks, a state flag had been erected, a provisional constitution was drafted, Bud Davis was declared President, and the Republic of Minerva was declared open for business. What this 'business' meant was no taxes, no welfare, no central bank, no government interference, and an economy based on tourism, fishing and light industry (whatever that meant).

Neither the Tongans nor nearby Fiji immediately responded—although both indicated disapproval of the project—and for several months, the Republic limped on towards further establishing itself. The vision was for Minerva to function as an offshore financial center, hosting a community of up to 30,000 settlers—each of whom would each pay a base rate for a 3-acre plot of land. Funds for the country would come by way of these leases, along with the support of ideological fellow-travellers elsewhere, who'd contribute investment in return for a share of Minerva's profits.

Unfortunately, the plan soon started to go in the direction of the Paris Commune—as the libertarians started squabbling as to exactly what their exciting new state should look like. The only thing all of them seemed to agree on was exactly something that *didn't* turn out to be true: that Tonga would be absolutely fine with their presence and make no attempts to upend it. Unfortunately, Tonga was having exactly none of it.

In June 1972, Tongan King Taufaʻahau Tupou the Fourth convened a conference of Oceanic states, who collectively agreed that the reef should belong to Tonga and recognised Tongan sovereignty over it. The King then immediately declared Minerva a territorial threat, and mobilised the least-terrifying suppression force in history to chuck the libertarians off their island. An expedition of Tongan officials, soldiers, policemen, and (for some reason) a four-piece band of musicians arrived at Minerva a few weeks later, where they pulled down the Republic's blue flag, planted a Tongan flag and a plaque asserting sovereignty, and kicked out the band of trespassers. Around the same time, Michael Oliver quite unconstitutionally fired President Bud Davis, and the entire project fell into disarray.

The Minervans did try to regroup, and thirteen years later, Davis arrived back on the reef with a new band of supporters to attempt to reinvigorate the project. But they were again kicked off, this time after only three weeks—and with time, the reef faded back into the sea from whence it came.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-republic-of-minerva" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-mercenary-republic-of-the-congo" -->
## The Mercenary Republic of the Congo

So around the same time that Minerva was starting to get its libertarian statehood off the ground, the Congo in Central Africa was facing major labours of its own. Following independence from Belgium in 1960, the state found itself plunged straight into crisis, and what resulted was a several years-long, devastating civil war.

This was the Congo Crisis, whose early stage saw the southeastern region of Katanga—backed by Belgium—attempt to break away and create its own independent state. To do so, the Katangans invited in a large group of mercenaries—mostly Belgians—to take the fight against the central government, led by pan-Africanist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. What this would eventually result in was a reimagination of the Republic of Pirates, this time located dead in the heart of Africa. Ironic, perhaps, given that the plunder most commonly associated with the Age of Piracy—gold—just so happened to be one of the most-plundered resources in Congo as well. Even more ironically, the central figure among the mercenaries just so happened to have a more pirate-sounding nickname than anything writers like Daniel Defoe or Herman Melville could have come up with. "Black Jack" Schramme was neither black nor actually called Jack, but he was a man who discovered his keen passion for mercenaryhood with the help of Katanga's secessionist President, Moïse Tshombe.

Anyway, the Katanga rebellion failed—although not before the Katangans succeeded in kidnapping, torturing, and killing Lumumba in 1961. After the state was crushed by the UN in 1963, Tshombe packed up and fled abroad with a large pile of cash. In the meantime, a new rebellion was beginning to unfold—the Simba Rebellion, inspired by followers of Patrice Lumumba, who were understandably furious that their leader had been killed and dismembered. As the rebellion grew, Tshombe arrived back from his luxurious exile and became the 5th Congolese Prime Minister in 1964, seemingly forgetting all about his three years of secessionism against the same state which had ended only the year before.

And so Tshombe immediately resorted to his old tactic to deal with the Simbans, of relying on mercenaries to help out with the fighting. He hauled Black Jack and his friends back from where they'd been hiding in Angola, with new orders to no longer fight against the state, but on this occasion to fight *on behalf* of it and to put down the Simban agitators.

As it happened, this didn't take much convincing. Since the Simbans were being supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, Black Jack had no difficulty in hiring European, Rhodesian and South African anti-communist hired hands to bring the good fight to the insurgents. Unfortunately, Tshombe lost power and was ousted after only a year in charge. A man named Mobutu Sese Seko replaced him, who later changed the name of the country to Zaire and went on to establish one of the most kleptocratic regimes in history. None of this was good news for Jean Schramme and the mercenaries, who were out manifesting destiny in a conflict that was—by now—going in a very weird direction. Many faced arrest or reprisals—and so instead of surrendering to such a fate, Black Jack decided to start a sort of rebellion of his own. With a few hundred mercenaries and about 2,000 Katangan allies in tow, he began an eastwards rampage towards the region of Kivu, near Rwanda. There, the mercenaries managed to seize several valueless towns and the city of Bukavu, where they dug in around mid-1967.

Black Jack and Co probably hoped to force a re-overthrow of the government as well as the return of Tshombe—who had wound up in Algeria, where he was placed under house arrest. For a couple of months, the mercenaries maintained control over a territory which operated effectively as an independent enclave—except that it had no state arms, no formal governmental structure, nor recognition of any kind. They administered checkpoints, collected supplies, repaired airstrips, and just held on hoping for a relief offensive by the Katangans elsewhere. Visiting foreign journalists described it as "a wild, cinematic outpost," where European adventurers, Congolese fighters, and civilians navigated a precarious coexistence.

But it was all rather hopeless. When the mercenaries started to run out of ammunition by late 1967, Schramme managed to scram to Rwanda, leaving a ruined Bukavu behind. From there, he was airlifted out and arrived back in Belgium in 1968. In 1986, Black Jack was convicted in Belgium of the murder of a compatriot in the Congo, for which he was handed a sentence of 20 years in prison. He didn't serve a single day, however. He took a tactic from fleeing Nazis and moved to Brazil, where he died in 1988 at the age of 59. Tshombe didn't fare any better, and died under suspicious circumstances while still under house arrest in Algeria in 1969.

So the mercenary state lived in history as a short-lived footnote of the Congo crisis of the 1960s.

Unfortunately, the writer who wrote this just realised that this did absolutely *not* make it a real state of any kind. Nice job, Phil.

So we'll conclude this entry with a different state which fumbled into existence around the same time all the way north in Europe.

The Republic of Rose Island was a short-lived micronation, which rose out of the Adriatic Sea near Italy, and lived for a couple of weeks in the early summer of 1968.

Now, with a name like Rose Island, you might be picturing a scenic mediterranean islet complete with natural flora, basking beneath the sun. It was nothing of the kind. The Republic was basically a big concrete block on stilts, located in the middle of the Adriatic, several kilometres off the coast of the Italian resort city of Rimini.

It was called that because of the name of its founder, an Italian engineer named Giorgio Rosa. Rosa built the platform, declared it an independent state and made himself President on the 1st of May, 1968. He was later dubbed the "prince of anarchists" by the press—which was also a misleading title. Rosa wasn't an anarchist, and built the Republic with his pals in order to—at least, according to the Italian police—profit from tourism while ducking laws against gambling and excess partying. The location of Rose Island just so happened to be right where Italian territorial control ended—about 11 kilometres out from land.

Still, the Republic of Rose Island had some interesting features. It reportedly had a restaurant, bar, nightclub, souvenir shop, and post office with its own stamps. Rosa declared his fiefdom to have its own currency—the mill—although no hard currency was ever known to have been produced. He also declared the official language of the Republic to be Esperanto…for some reason.

Anyway, the Republic punctuated its existence by several weeks of hard partying in the early summer of 1968, buoyed by thrillseekers arriving on small boats after work from Rimini and under coastal Italian towns. That is, until the Italian Navy put an end to it all by chucking Rosa off his platform in June 1968, and blowing the Republic up less than a year later.

Even so, the Republic of Rose Island did live on in the fond memories of locals and veterans of its platform parties, and it was even eventually commemorated in a film—'Rose Island', released on Netflix in 2020.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-mercenary-republic-of-the-congo" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="liberland" -->
## Liberland

Yup, the Libertarians at it again.

Now, many of those watching this video may have already heard about this curious little geographical oddity, and some of you might even be citizens of it. The Free Republic of Liberland is the invention of libertarian activist Vít Jedlička who decided one day that the prospect of making a free-market paradise out of any existing European states was all just a bit too much hassle. So Jedlička went the Minerva Republic-route and consulted a map of the Balkans, where he found a small parcel of land claimed by nobody, and decided that *that* was exactly where his nation-building startup was going to get itself off the ground.

So in 2015, the Free Republic of Liberland was founded on a 7-square kilometre riverside parcel of territory, located on the Danube and between Serbia and Croatia.

How was this possible?

Well you see, in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Serbia and Croatia couldn't quite figure out the border delineation between them. In practice, the Danube river became the dividing line, but this didn't offset the territorial dispute between the previously-warring nations. The use of the river as a frontier suited Serbia just fine, but Croatia argued that the border should follow old cadastral lines (or historic land registry boundaries), which pre-dated the shifting course of the Danube. This left a few small portions of territory claimed by neither one side nor the other—effectively becoming *terra nullius*. It was on the largest of these plots, Gornja Siga, that Jedlička saw his opportunity. If neither Croatia nor Serbia were willing to assert ownership over this marshy, forested scrap of terrain, then—according to him—nothing prevented a private citizen from marching in and declaring it a sovereign state. Thus, on April 13th, 2015, with a few supporters, a camera crew, and a draft constitution in hand, the Free Republic of Liberland announced itself to the world.

Now, founding a country in the 21st century isn't as simple as posting a press release and printing some stamps. It is a tall order, requiring diplomatic acknowledgment, permanent population, and a functioning government. Liberland *has* since attempted to tick these boxes—kind of. After Jedlička appointed himself President, he set up a provisional government-in-exile (since neither Croatia nor Serbia will allow Liberlanders to actually live on the land), and opened citizenship applications online. He added a national motto—"To Live and Let Live"—and a flag, as well as a cryptocurrency-friendly economic model based on the libertarian maxims of minimal tax, maximum personal freedom.

Croatia was not amused. Despite claiming the Siga belongs to Serbia, it simultaneously barred anyone from entering the area, citing border-security concerns. Over the years, multiple Liberland supporters have been detained or turned away by Croatian police for attempting to visit their would-be homeland. Serbia, meanwhile, maintains that the land is Croatian responsibility, although it has occasionally expressed a shrugging tolerance toward Liberland's ambitions. Neither side currently recognizes Liberland as an independent state.

Despite this, the project attracted a large number of supporters, and has persisted since its establishment more than ten years ago. Liberland hosts conferences, promotes itself at international gatherings, and maintains its "diaspora government" abroad. It also runs an eco-village, known as ARK, a few kilometres south of the Siga in Serbia (this time, uncontestedly in Serbia). It was here that "Liberpulco"—an annual freedom event—began to be hosted from 2024, on the bank of the Danube in full view of Croatia—which they must just love.

Liberland has also received a large amount of press coverage, being featured in various newspaper publications and having been visited by high-profile travel vloggers such as Drew Binsky and Niko Omilana.

Still, the Free Republic sits in a kind of geopolitical limbo, sort of a quirk rather than defined state, sustained by the promise of absolute freedom.

Whether it ever becomes more than that, remains a question for the mapmakers of the future.

<!-- aeo:section end="liberland" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="key-takeaways" -->
## Key Takeaways

- Some of the strangest states in history had short-lived existences due to unique quirks.
- Sparta's economic power was largely held by women, who managed agricultural labor.
- The Kingdom of Jaintia practiced matrilineal succession, with the youngest female child inheriting assets.
- The Novgorod Republic was wealthy and had a high level of individual rights and freedoms.
- The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia had overseas colonies in Tobago and Gambia despite its small size.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### What was unique about the economic role of women in Sparta?

Spartan women were the driving force of the state economy. They could own land parcels, consolidate wealth over generations, and manage agricultural labor, giving them economic authority rarely afforded to ancient women elsewhere.

### What was the succession system in the Kingdom of Jaintia?

The Kingdom of Jaintia practiced ultimogeniture succession, where the youngest female child inherited the assets. The successor of the Raja was not his son but his sister's son.

### What was the Novgorod Republic known for?

The Novgorod Republic was known for its high level of individual rights and freedoms, including a citizen council called the Veche that elected the Novgorod leadership, mayors, and the local archbishop.

### What were the overseas colonies of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia?

The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia had two overseas colonies: Tobago (today part of Trinidad and Tobago) and a trading post in the Gambia.

### What was the Republic of Pirates and where was it located?

The Republic of Pirates, also known as the Flying Gang, existed between 1706 and 1718 in the modern-day Bahamas, centered in Nassau.

### What was the Paris Commune and how long did it last?

The Paris Commune was a short-lived pseudo-state that existed for about two months in 1871, during which time it introduced socialist reforms and faced a bloody suppression by the French Third Republic.

### What was the Anglo-Zanzibar War and how long did it last?

The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a 38-minute conflict in 1896 between the British Empire and the Zanzibar Sultanate, resulting in the shortest-lived sovereign state in history.

### What was the Republic of Minerva and why did it fail?

The Republic of Minerva was an attempt to create an independent libertarian state on Minerva Reef in the South Pacific. It failed due to internal squabbles and opposition from Tonga, which asserted sovereignty over the reef.

### What was the Mercenary Republic of the Congo?

The Mercenary Republic of the Congo was an independent enclave controlled by mercenaries led by Jean 'Black Jack' Schramme during the Congo Crisis in the 1960s. It operated effectively as an independent state for a few months before collapsing.

### What was the Republic of Rose Island and why was it destroyed?

The Republic of Rose Island was a short-lived micronation built on a concrete platform in the Adriatic Sea near Italy. It was destroyed by the Italian Navy in 1968 due to its founder's activities related to gambling and excessive partying.

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources

- [Original Side Projects video: 10 of the Strangest States to Ever Exist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQR3IuRWwPQ)
- [https://www.nytimes.com/1968/06/28/archives/exmercenary-leader-charged-with-murder.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1968/06/28/archives/exmercenary-leader-charged-with-murder.html)
- [https://reason.com/2022/07/07/the-quest-for-a-libertarian-island-paradise/](https://reason.com/2022/07/07/the-quest-for-a-libertarian-island-paradise/)
- [https://youtu.be/3OUy28gPOAI?si=4xVomgEcpU5QQYPf&amp;t=46](https://youtu.be/3OUy28gPOAI?si=4xVomgEcpU5QQYPf&amp;t=46)
- [https://grokipedia.com/page/Matrilineal_society_of_Meghalaya](https://grokipedia.com/page/Matrilineal_society_of_Meghalaya)
- [https://d-place.org/parameters/EA075?utm_source=chatgpt.com#1/30/152](https://d-place.org/parameters/EA075?utm_source=chatgpt.com#1/30/152)
- [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/liberland-hundreds-of-thousands-apply-to-live-in-worlds-newest-country](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/liberland-hundreds-of-thousands-apply-to-live-in-worlds-newest-country)
- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usjo33yxuck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usjo33yxuck)
- [https://youtu.be/YF3TQKV-IOE?si=Sy9XL3JIL7khArXc](https://youtu.be/YF3TQKV-IOE?si=Sy9XL3JIL7khArXc)
- [https://youtu.be/Jb8T9X5K1AA?si=5HTryBtnNaY8ZgGf](https://youtu.be/Jb8T9X5K1AA?si=5HTryBtnNaY8ZgGf)
- [https://liberland.org/events/15-liberpulco-2024](https://liberland.org/events/15-liberpulco-2024)
- [https://theshillongtimes.com/2019/12/30/the-kiang-nangbah-led-rebellion-the-last-battle-of-the-pnar/](https://theshillongtimes.com/2019/12/30/the-kiang-nangbah-led-rebellion-the-last-battle-of-the-pnar/)
- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Heiligenhafen_sunset_-_Baltic_Sea_-_2025_%2855256656656%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original) by Karlheinz Klingbeil from Germany / openverse, by.

<!-- aeo:section end="sources" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="related-coverage" -->
## Related Coverage
<!-- aeo:section end="related-coverage" -->