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Welcome to English Tacitus.nu, a translation of select parts of
the original Swedish website which has existed
since 2002. The English version consists of two distinct parts, a historical
atlas which presents an overview of European history in the form of maps,
population statistics and lists of regents. The other part covers the Great
Northern War (1700-1721), with a strong emphasis on uniforms and colours.
The name of my website comes from the Roman historian Cornelius
Tacitus. In AD 98 he was the first to mention a Germanic tribe called Swedes (Sueoni).
The topic of the site was from the beginning restricted to just the history of
Sweden and I had also named the site "Svensk historia" (= Swedish history), but
I thought it needed a more original name so I named in honour of Cornelius
Tacitus.
Many have wondered why the site uses the top-level domain ".nu"
which belongs to the pacific island of Niue instead of the more logical Swedish
top-level domain ".se.". Well, the reason to this is that my website is quite
old and when I named the site after Tacitus the rules for ".se" domain names
were very strict. A private person like me could not have the address "tacitus.se",
instead I would have been forced to name the site "Tacitus.pp.se" ("pp" as in
"private person") if I was going to use the ".se" domain. The difficulties in
obtaining ".se" domain names had the result that the ".nu" domain became very
popular among Swedes as "nu" happens to be the Swedish word for "now".
Örjan Martinsson
The image above is Pierre Mignard's (1612-1695) painting "Clio" from 1689. Clio (or Klio) was according to Greek
mythology one of the nine muses and she was recognised as the muse aiding
historians. Since 2009 an image depicting Clio has been the logotype of Tacitus.nu (upper
inner corner on all pages except this one).
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