They say that the victors write history…and they tended to fudge the details.
Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in the year 1492 to prove that the world was round.
The Earth’s roundness was general knowledge at least as far back as ancient Greece (the 3rd century B.C.). Columbus sailed west (and into America) because he was looking for a better trade route to Asia.
Napoleon Bonaparte was extremely short.
Napoleon surrounded himself with his Imperial Guard, all of whom were very tall, so as to appear imposing on the battlefield. That made the emperor seem shorter than he was. Math helped, too. At the time of his death in 1821, his height was recorded as 5’2”, but that’s in the French measurement system of the era. In English measurements, he was 5’7”, average height for a 19th-century French guy.
Pirates hit the high seas to relieve passing ships of their precious gold.
Only movie pirates steal treasure chests full of gold doubloons. Actual pirates didn’t steal much gold, as it wasn’t transported via transoceanic ships. But expensive and valuable spices were, which is what pirates were really after.
Big public spaces in Ancient Rome were fitted with vomitoria, channels where heavily eating and drinking Romans could vomit their guts up and keep on partying.
While Roman parties were certainly decadent bacchanals of eating and drinking, they didn’t just puke their guts out in front of everybody. A vomitorium is a passageway surrounding a large space (such as the Colosseum) where crowds would enter and exit. The word comes from the Latin verb vomitum, which means “to spew.”
Even geniuses stumble—after all, Albert Einstein failed math as a kid.
He failed the math-loaded entrance exam for Zurich Polytechnic. However, he took that test two years early, and it was in French, a language in which Einstein wasn’t fluent. On his second attempt, he passed.
Albert Einstein helped devise the atomic bomb.
After hearing that Nazi scientists had learned the basics of weaponized uranium, Einstein was terrified and wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, urging him to develop nuclear bombs before Hitler could. The Manhattan Project got started, but Einstein wasn’t a part of it. Because of his socialist politics, he couldn’t get the necessary security clearances.
Vikings wore horned helmets.
Vikings wore helmets, but the first Vikings to wear helmets with horns on them were the actors in an 1876 production of Richard Wagner’s Viking-themed opera The Ring.
To complicate and throw off Nazi attempts to identify Jewish people in occupied Denmark, Danish leader King Christian X wore a Jewish-identifying yellow star.
The Danish resistance movement helped most Danish Jews safely get out of the country. But the Nazi “labeling” program was never enacted in Denmark, and so King Christian X never tried to mess with it.
Buddha was an extremely heavy-set individual.
The real name of the spiritual icon is Siddhartha Guatama, and he was very thin. Over the years, the man called the Buddha became confused and conflated with Budai, a 10th-century Chinese folk hero…and an important figure in Buddhism. All those statues and paintings depicting an overweight Buddha are actually of Budai, who was a bit rotund.
Jesus’s good friend and follower Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.
There are a lot of women in the Bible named Mary, and a prostitute or two. The Bible was compiled by many different writers over several centuries, and over time, the Marys got mixed up.
Say what you will about fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, but he at least “made the trains run on time.”
While that idea is primarily propaganda, Italy underwent a massive infrastructure overhaul a few years before Mussolini came into power in 1922, so things were running smoothly at that point.
Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit, an apple.
The specific fruit isn’t mentioned in the Bible—the first Hebrew texts just said “fruit.” Early Latin translations, however, used mali, a word that means apple.
Columbus reached the New World in 1492 via a trio of ships: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
Two of those were the nicknames sailors had for the boats. The Pinta was called the Pinta, but the real names of the Niña and Santa Maria, respectively, were the Santa Clara and La Gallega.
Iceland was so named to discouragement settlement.
There’s lots of snow and ice on the island—which is why Vikings named it what they named it.
The iron maiden is an especially brutal medieval torture device.
A museum put together a bunch of medieval artifacts to create one…in the 18th century.
People living in repressed, conservative Victorian England thought even table and piano legs were too suggestive, so they covered them up with extra-long tablecloths.
Victorians, especially upper-crust Victorians, liked fancy embellishments and unnecessary decorations. So while many people probably did cover up their table legs, it was a matter of taste rather than one of propriety.
Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
The fiddle wasn’t invented until about 1,000 years after Nero’s death.
Pirates spoke in a particular brogue.
Englishman Robert Newton played a pirate in the 1950 film version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. His character was from southwestern England, so Newton just spoke in an exaggerated version of his own accent, giving the world the pirate. And since real pirates came from all over the world, there’s no universal pirate “accent.”
Pirates wore eyepatches to cover up the unsightly eye sockets left empty due to pirating injuries.
They wore them to be able to quickly adjust to the light or darkness from running up and down a ship’s different decks.
Ninjas wore black, so as to move through the night undetected.
The night sky isn’t black—it’s a very dark blue. Ninjas dressed accordingly.
Catherine the Great was crushed to death in 1767 when a harness holding a horse—in her bedchamber—broke.
The Russian empress’s voracious sexual appetite was well documented. She took dozens of lovers, some of whom she appointed to posts in her government. That behavior made Catherine less than popular, so it didn’t take much for her people to make up, spread, and believe a rumor that exaggerated her carnal activities.
Buildings and statues in ancient Greece and ancient Rome were white.
They’re white now. Those structures were initially painted all kinds of colors with natural pigments, which faded away over the centuries.
Slaves built the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
Egyptologists say they were built by Egyptian peasants, displaced by a series of floods and unable to engage in their regular work of growing crops.
Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.
The Gutenberg Bible was the first mass-produced printed book, but it wasn’t the first printed book. Inventors in China and Korea started printing books utilizing woodblocks as a kind of movable type around 600 years before Gutenberg cobbled together his press in the 1440s.
Each king in a standard deck of cards represents a different king from long ago: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Biblical King David, and Charlemagne.
The design of playing cards developed over many centuries with influences from throughout Europe, India, and China. There’s no single creator of the cards, and thus no specific meaning behind the imagery.
Gladiators in ancient Rome fought to the death.
Gladiators were the sports superstars of their day, and it would have been silly for combat organizers to let their big names die every single day. Gladiator matches ended with a decisive outcome, but rarely the death of a combatant.
The Spanish Inquisition unfairly tried, convicted, and executed tens of thousands of people it found to be heretics.
In its 350 years of operation, the Spanish Inquisition returned a guilty rate of 4 percent, resulting in the deaths of about 1,800 people.
The deadliest bombings of World War II took place when the U.S. military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 80,000 and 75,000 people, respectively.
On March 9, 1945, the U.S. military killed 100,000 Japanese people in a firebombing raid on Tokyo.
Did legendary French painter Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear and then send it to a prostitute? First of all, it would seem that his loss of an ear was an accident. On December 23, 1888, Van Gogh got into an argument with fellow artist—and accomplished fencer—Paul Gaugin…who sliced Van Gogh’s ear off in a violent fit. But Van Gogh idolized Gaugin and didn’t want him to get arrested, so he kept quiet and told people he cut it off himself. And while Van Gogh did send his ear to a lucky lady, she wasn’t a prostitute. She was a brothel maid named Gabrielle whom Van Gogh knew had been disfigured in a dog attack, and in what was perhaps a misguided act of friendship, he sent her a piece of his own flesh to provide comfort and consolation.