Kingdom of Thrace

A successor kingdom that existed for one man's lifetime and vanished with him. Lysimachus was one of Alexander's bodyguards and took Thrace in the first division of the empire in 323 - the least promising share, a frontier of tribes between the Danube and the Aegean that Macedon had never fully held. He spent two decades subduing it, was captured by the Getae and released on terms, and founded a capital named after himself on the Gallipoli peninsula. He took the royal title in 306 with the others, and at Ipsus in 301 his army did much of the work of destroying Antigonus. His reward was western Anatolia, which made him briefly one of the richest men in the world: the Lysimachus gold stater, struck with a portrait of Alexander wearing the horns of Ammon, circulated for two centuries after his death and was still being imitated by Black Sea cities in the first century. He then added Macedon in 285 and had, at seventy-five, most of what Alexander had held in Europe. It came apart over his family. Persuaded by his second wife that his heir was plotting, he had his own son executed; the resulting defections brought Seleucus across the Hellespont, and Lysimachus was killed at Corupedium in 281. Nobody inherited. His kingdom was divided between Seleucus, who was murdered within months, and the Gauls who poured through the Balkans three years later. Thrace has no continuous state again until Rome made it a province in AD 46.

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