Quaint quiz

Think you know anything about leaders? Then test your brain-power with this quick quiz.

If you are clever you’ll get ten out of ten. If you are a great leader you will get 11 out of ten.

 

1 Louis XIV of France (1638–1715) had a girlfriend, Madame de Montespan. When he got bored with her she fed him a magic love drink. What was in it?

a) Toad poo

b) Toad warts

c) Toad blood

2 Gian Gastone (1671–1737) was ruler of Tuscany. He was a drunkard, and when he drank he threw up. What did he use to wipe his spew-stained mouth?

a) His socks

b) His pet cat

c) His wig

3 General Kitchener of Great Britain (1850–1916) dug up the skull of the Mahdi of Sudan. It was a bit of revenge. Queen Victoria made him bury it again. Kitchener had been using the skull to hold what?

a) Ink

b) Soup

c) His pet caterpillars

4 Ibrahim I ‘The Mad’ of Turkey (1616–1648) was a jealous man. He heard that one of his wives had another boyfriend. But he didn’t know which wife. What did he do?

a) Divorced them all

b) Drowned them all

c) Blinded them all

5 The rulers of Irian Jaya in Indonesia would hang above the roofs of the village houses. Why?

a) They were dead.

b) They were bird-spotting.

c) They were rat-catching.

6 The Russian royal family had a favourite monk called Rasputin. He was a peasant and often shocked people at feasts by doing what?

a) Filling his mouth with wine and spitting it back into the cup (to warm it up)

b) Picking his nose and using snot balls instead of salt

c) Eating fish soup with his bare hands (very grubby hands at that!)

 

7 Why is a soccer ball the size of a human head?

a) Because King Henry III of England passed a law saying all footballs must be the size of his head

b) Because the first football game in England was played with the lopped-off head of a Viking lord

c) Because Roman footballs were made from the skin of a human head, sewn up and filled with air

 

8 When Russian leader Josef Stalin died in 1953, about 500 other Russians died. How?

a) They were blown up with the bomb that killed him.

b) They were so upset they starved themselves to death.

c) They were trampled to death in the crush to see his body at the funeral.

 

9 President Idi Amin of Uganda (1925–2003) had many people murdered. But he worried that his minister Michael Ondanga would come back and haunt him. How did Amin try to stop the murdered Ondanga returning as a ghost?

a) He had a ton of garlic scattered round the dead man’s grave.

b) He had part of the dead man’s liver cut out and ate it.

c) He left a note in the coffin saying he would kill Ondanga’s family if he ever rose from the grave.

10 Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (or Mao Zedong) of China (1893–1976) ran the country so badly that the crops failed and millions of people began to starve. It was Mao’s fault. What did Mao blame?

a) Alien visitors – they were stealing corn to power their flying saucers

b) Television – workers were watching when they should have been weeding

c) Sparrows – they were eating the corn before it was ripe

Answers:

1a) Toad poo. If you want someone to fall in love with you, and you don’t have any toad poo handy, then other rulers had other odd ideas you could try. For example, sheep’s eyelids soaked in tea (Chinese emperors) or crushed animal glands (Hitler). Maybe you’d enjoy what kings in the Middle Ages learned to love – a mixture of powdered pigeon poo and snail poo; the snails made sure it didn’t work too fast. Pope John XXI used pig poo to shove up the nostrils to stop a nosebleed.

2c) Gian Gastone had some disgusting habits. His dogs shared his bed and it smelled of pipe-smoke, booze, vomit and poo. His sister-in-law tried to keep it clean but she died – wouldn’t you? As he grew older he became blind and let his nails and beard grow till he looked disgusting. He probably scared his dogs.

3a) Kitchener used it as an inkwell. The Mahdi had killed Kitchener’s friend General Gordon. But the Mahdi died before Kitchener could get his own back, so he blew up the Mahdi’s tomb and pinched the skull. Before the days of ballpoint pens most schoolchildren used inkwells – but none as gruesome as Kitchener’s. Ask your grandma what she used.

4b) Ibrahim decided to have all of his 280 wives thrown into the Bosphorus river. They were tied up in sacks with stones. One girl escaped, because her sack had been badly tied up. She was rescued by the sailors of a French ship. After too many cruel acts like this Ibrahim was locked in a cage; he ended up strangled with a bow string.

5a) When a ruler died he was hung over a smoking fire for a few months. This stopped his corpse from going rotten and turned him into a smoky mummy. He was then hung from the roof of his palace so he could watch over the village and look after his people.

School pupils who smoke round the back of the gym could end up mummified.

6c) Rasputin had terrible manners and was filthy. His long, black beard was stained with food and probably smelled like a dustbin. He was very popular with women (honest!).

Of course, a lot of Russian rulers were no better. Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725) had awful manners, too. He often trampled over the dinner table, crushing food under his filthy feet.

7b) Legend has it that the Viking raider was lopped and his head kicked around. The Saxon slayers enjoyed it so much they wanted to keep on playing the game – but the dead head fell apart. They made a new ball from pig guts, but it had to be the same size as the Viking head.

And, amazingly, in 2001 a Swede became head of English football again.

8c) Thousands of people lined up in the snow to see Stalin’s corpse on display at the Moscow Hall of Columns. The crowds were so thick that some people were trampled underfoot when they slipped on the snow. Others were crushed against traffic lights, and some choked to death. Around 500 Russians died trying to get one last look at their hero.

9b) Evil Amin killed around 300,000 of his own people, including his wife. The heads of his enemies were fed to crocodiles. When Queen Elizabeth II had been on the British throne for 25 years, Amin said:

She didn’t. He must have been disappointed.

He was also disappointed when the Scots turned down a kind offer from him – he said he would be King of Scotland and lead them to freedom.

The Brit Prime Minister called him ‘a madman and a buffoon’.

10c) Mao blamed sparrows for eating the Chinese corn. It wasn’t true – the sparrows would have been too fat to fly if they’d eaten enough corn for a billion people. Chinese peasants were ordered to bang gongs for two days so the sparrows flew up in a flap. The sparrows dropped dead from lack of sleep. It worked – sparrows died, but the sparrows had been killing the insects that ate the crops. The insects had a lovely time and the famine grew worse than ever.

Mao grew fat.