A few hundred Cossacks, a Stroganov fortress on the Kama and a khan's capital on the Irtysh: in four years Yermak turned a raid into the Russian entry into Siberia.
The route follows the campaign from Orel-gorodok over the Urals to the battle at Chuvash Cape, the fall of Qashliq, Yermak's death at the Vagay and the founding of Tobolsk. Dates differ between chronicles and modern sources, and the sources mark the death site and the legends as uncertain; the notes at each stop say which.
Spain's oldest surviving epic poem follows Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid, from a humiliating exile out of Castile to the conquest of Valencia, and then to a trial in Toledo after his sons-in-law abandon his daughters.
The route runs from Vivar and Burgos through Cardeña and Valencia to Corpes and Toledo. The poem and the historical Cid differ in many details, and the site of Corpes is disputed.
The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, so David Lean could not shoot his epic there. Instead he built Moscow in a field outside Madrid, turned the pine woods of Soria into the Urals and sent a second crew to the snows of Finland.
The route follows the story in order, from the dam of the frame story to the ice palace at Varykino, and shows where each scene was really filmed. Most pins mark general areas, not exact camera spots.
In May 1804 William Clark and about 30 others left a winter camp on the Mississippi and turned up the Missouri, the first stage of an expedition sent to cross the newly acquired western part of the country. Captains Meriwether Lewis and Clark kept journals, and many of their entries are quoted here in their own spelling.
The route follows them from Camp Dubois past a sergeant's grave, a tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, a winter at Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide and the snowbound Lolo Trail to the Pacific, then home by way of Clark's signature on Pompeys Pillar. Where a camp is lost to the river or to time, the pin marks the nearest place you can visit.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze comes to Constantinople in 1511, an old Assassin chasing five keys that unlock a library sealed beneath Masyaf by Altaïr two and a half centuries earlier. The keys lie scattered across an Ottoman capital caught between the succession claims of the princes Ahmet and Selim, with Byzantine Templars working against the city; the search runs from the Galata Tower and Hagia Sophia to the palace at Topkapı, out to the Maiden's Tower in the Bosphorus and, at the end, into a stronghold of the Byzantine Templars under Cappadocia.
This route starts at Masyaf in Syria and follows Ezio through the real Istanbul of the game, the tower, church, palace and islet that can still be visited, before ending underground in Cappadocia.
Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote The Oregon Trail in two weeks in 1971 for a history class. Its 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, became a staple of American classrooms — buying oxen, fording rivers, hunting buffalo and, all too often, dying of dysentery — and the series has sold more than 65 million copies. The game was built around real landmarks of the real trail, a 2,170-mile wagon route that some 400,000 emigrants travelled to Oregon and California, mostly between 1846 and 1869, across the homelands of many Native nations.
The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.
