Most Powerful

• #1 Diego de Almagro
  ChilePeruSpain Colonial AdministrationMilitary Early Modern Conquest & TributeTrade Routes Power: 100
  Diego de Almagro (1475 – 1538) was a Spanish conquistador and expedition leader active in Central America and the Andean conquest during the early sixteenth century. He became a principal partner in the campaigns that overthrew the Inca state, then turned into a rival within the Spanish factional struggle over land, titles, and the right to extract wealth from the new colonies.Almagro’s career shows how conquest translated into political economy. Military victory opened access to tribute, forced labor, and mining prospects, but the distribution of rewards depended on royal grants and on the ability to hold territory by force. Disputes among Spanish leaders repeatedly escalated into civil conflict, and Almagro’s final years were defined by a contest with the Pizarro faction over control of Cuzco and jurisdictional boundaries.He is remembered both for launching an arduous expedition south toward Chile and for the internal Spanish warfare that followed the initial conquest. The violence of that period fell heavily on Indigenous communities, who faced expropriation, coerced service, and the collapse of existing political and economic structures.
• #2 Francis Drake
  CaribbeanEnglandPacific Colonial AdministrationMilitary Early Modern Conquest & TributeTrade Routes Power: 100
  Francis Drake (1540 – 1596) was an English naval commander and privateer whose career connected maritime warfare to the growth of English state power and commercial ambition. He became famous for a circumnavigation voyage and for raids on Spanish shipping and ports during a period when England and Spain competed for control of Atlantic wealth flows.Drake’s influence rested on the conversion of sea power into finance. Privateering allowed armed voyages to be framed as lawful seizure under royal permission, turning captured cargoes into profits shared among investors, crews, and the Crown. The practice blurred the boundary between piracy and state policy, and it made the disruption of rival trade routes a central tool of geopolitical competition.His legacy includes major roles in the conflicts of Elizabethan England, including operations against the Spanish Armada. It also includes enduring controversy, because early English ventures in which Drake participated intersected with the Atlantic slave trade and with violence against communities subjected to raiding and coercive extraction.
• #3 Francisco Pizarro
  PeruSpain Colonial AdministrationMilitary Early Modern Conquest & TributeTrade Routes Power: 100
  Francisco Pizarro (1478 – 1541) was a Spanish conquistador whose expedition in the Andes captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa and dismantled the political center of the Inca Empire during a period of internal conflict and disease disruption. Acting under Spanish legal instruments that granted limited but meaningful authority, he converted military victories into a colonial regime by distributing spoils, allocating labor and land through encomienda arrangements, and founding urban nodes that anchored Spanish administration. His career shows how early modern conquest turned concentrated imperial wealth into transferable property claims, tax rights, and office-holding power inside a new Atlantic empire.
• #4 Piet Hein
  CaribbeanDutch Republic Colonial AdministrationMilitary Early Modern Conquest & TributeTrade Routes Power: 100
  Piet Hein (born 1577) is a dutch naval officer associated with Dutch Republic and Caribbean. Piet Hein is best known for capturing the Spanish treasure fleet and strengthening Dutch maritime power. This profile belongs to the site’s study of colonial administration and conquest & tribute, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the early modern period, rulers and financiers increasingly worked through maritime trade, imperial administration, court patronage, chartered privilege, and expanding fiscal systems.
• #5 Sir Francis Drake
  CaribbeanEnglandPacificSpanish Main Colonial AdministrationMilitary Early Modern Conquest & TributeTrade Routes Power: 100
  Sir Francis Drake was an English naval commander and privateer whose career linked sea power, commercial predation, and imperial rivalry in the late sixteenth century. He became internationally famous for the expedition of 1577–1580 that circumnavigated the globe and returned to England with treasure seized in large part from Spanish routes and settlements. In English memory he was long cast as a patriotic seaman who outmaneuvered Spain, helped defend Elizabethan England, and proved that a maritime challenger could penetrate the arteries of a global empire.That public image captures only part of Drake’s historical role. His wealth and influence rested on a system in which violence at sea could be legalized when backed by a crown. Raids on enemy shipping generated prize wealth for investors, commanders, crews, and the monarchy, while also weakening rival logistics. Drake’s career therefore illustrates how early modern states converted maritime predation into fiscal and strategic leverage. The same system also obscured responsibility, because what England called privateering Spain could call piracy, and civilians caught in the path of raids experienced coercion either way.Drake’s reputation remains deeply contested because his early career included participation in slave-trading voyages, and because his attacks on ports and ships were part of a larger expansionary order that enriched European powers through violence abroad. He was not merely a daring captain. He was an operator within a state-building process that weaponized trade routes and normalized profit from coercion.
• #6 Prince Henry the Navigator
  Portugal Colonial AdministrationIndustrial Early Modern Conquest & TributeTrade Routes Power: 87
  Prince Henry the Navigator (1394 – 1460), known in Portuguese as Infante Dom Henrique, was a Portuguese prince whose patronage of Atlantic and African voyages helped launch sustained Portuguese maritime expansion. Although the later epithet “the Navigator” suggests personal exploration, Henry’s primary role was institutional: organizing resources, granting privileges, and backing expeditions that extended Portuguese reach into island colonies and West African coastal trade.Henry’s influence sits at the intersection of war, commerce, and state formation. His sponsorship linked coastal reconnaissance to the creation of new markets in gold, commodities, and enslaved people, and it supported the early construction of an overseas empire. In the logic of , Henry helped develop the administrative and financial tools that turned voyages into durable claims and extraction systems.
• #7 Themistocles
  AegeanAthens Military CommandPoliticalTrade AncientAncient and Classical State PowerTrade Routes Power: 84
  Themistocles stands at the point where Athens ceased to be merely one city among many and became a maritime power capable of shaping the eastern Mediterranean. His importance on Money Tyrants lies in his grasp of systems.
• #8 Amasis II
  Ancient EgyptMediterranean Imperial SovereigntyPoliticalTrade AncientAncient and Classical State PowerTrade Routes Power: 80
  Amasis II ruled at the intersection of royal authority and Mediterranean exchange. His importance lies in the way he used political stabilization, military credibility, and commercial openness to keep Egypt wealthy and relevant in a competitive age.
• #9 Polycrates
  AegeanMediterranean Imperial SovereigntyPoliticalTrade AncientAncient and Classical State PowerTrade Routes Power: 74
  Polycrates is one of the strongest ancient examples of how a relatively small polity can become disproportionately important when it controls shipping, naval force, and a strategic island position. As tyrant of Samos he turned maritime mobility into concentrated power.
• #10 Juba II
  MediterraneanNorth Africa Imperial SovereigntyPoliticalTrade AncientAncient and Classical State PowerTrade Routes Power: 68
  Juba II demonstrates that not all powerful ancient rulers were conquerors. Some became indispensable by operating between empires. As king of Mauretania under Roman oversight, Juba turned dynastic survival into a form of strategic relevance, using trade, scholarship