At the time, the first beast - the seven heads were the seven hills of Rome. The seven crowns the emperors.
The thing that many people forget is that Rome initially was vehemently anti-christian. It actively suppressed Christianity nearly everywhere as it also roflstomped Israel. Bit of backstory on Israel, it was not a fully unified nation - nations as we understand them didn't exist and everything revolved around city-states managing territories. Judea, Sinai, and a few other regions were generally governed under Jerusalem.
Part of what the whole drama of Jesus as a Messiah was comes from the fact that Rome generally managed Jerusalem in its greater empire after Babylon sacked Jerusalem. Which is why the old testament likes to rant and rave against Babylon quite a bit - but the Pharisee began to create something of a new, unified religion. Rather than creating a kingdom, they wanted to create a divine province - and they began constructing, from among the tribal gods and histories, their own legitimacy to rule by divine rite. Consider that a key part of this process was the offering of burnt sacrifices. And the idea you could buy a sacrificial animal like one would order a coffee, today, kind of sent Jesus into Reee for all its insults to the concept.
Anyway - The Pharisee created this idea of a warlord messiah who would lead the nation of Israel to conquer the world. It's not entirely clear if the Romans knew what the Pharisee were preaching, or if the whole "not one stone atop another" was what happened when they figured it out - but every few years, there would be some self-proclaimed messiah pop his head up from some town and declare divine conquest for god…. and the Roman army was quite effective at calling that bluff.
So, part of the whole deal with the Pharisee trying to turn Jesus over to Pilate to have him executed was to suggest, because he had declared himself the messiah by their cultural practices, he was plotting treason against Rome. Consider what Jesus was doing for a minute - he was trolling through use of symbolism, never publicly declaring himself as the messiah, yet going about fulfilling the prophecies people would recognize as the claim.
So, the whole "war and rumors of war" thing was in reference to the fact that Jesus' followers were not to follow any wars of conquest because that was just not going to happen.
Anyway - after a while, Rome got smart and decided that whole temple thing in Jerusalem needed to have the army perform a divine residency inspection - which basically put an end to the whole Israel idea because no god was found that was able to satisfy roman skepticism.
Then there were these church things that were following that martyr. Yeah - no. And so the Romans spent the better part of a century or two (if memory serves) destroying pretty much any church they could find.
Then… someone started reading up on that Paul character's interpretation of things, and decided "That… that could be really useful. If we replace the senate with priests and the emperor with a head priest… we could use religion to unite the many disparate regions we control and establish local chapters for administration."
And that's the catholic church.
And the beast… whose head had been wounded. The beast which came as a lamb but spoke like a dragon - IE - a person who approaches as merciful or benign but speaks with intent to rule. The emperor who made christianity the official religion of rome.
It's all there, for those who are willing to read.