SECTION · 30 ARTICLES
History, told carefully: the Crusades, Napoleon, the French Revolution, the World Wars and the people who led through them, with each date and quotation traced to a source.
BACKGROUND · REMBRANDT, BELLONA, 1633 · THE MET, OPEN ACCESS
HISTORY & WAR · 10 MIN
The chess inside the life lessons is often half right. A pawn can become a queen, rook, bishop or knight, not only a queen, and the knight's move is fixed by the rules; what makes it awkward is that it cannot be blocked.
HISTORY & WAR · 12 MIN
Several famous stories are not in the sources the way they are told. Cortés wrote that he had his ships beached, not burned; Caesar's own account of the civil war does not mention the Rubicon; and the sword of Damocles is about the tyrant's fear, not Damocles's danger.
HISTORY & WAR · 10 MIN
The Spanish did not conquer the Aztec Empire alone: about 900 Spaniards began the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and Cortés's own letter puts tens of thousands of Indigenous warriors beside them. Smallpox had struck in 1520.
HISTORY & WAR · 9 MIN
"Algebra" and "algorithm" really do come from al-Khwarizmi, who wrote in Baghdad under the caliph al-Ma'mun: one from the title of his book, the other from his name in Latin.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
There are two Ashokas: the king who speaks in his own edicts, carved on rocks and pillars, and the king of Buddhist chronicles and legends written long after his death.
HISTORY & WAR · 10 MIN
The Mongol conquests were real and terrible, but many famous "facts" about them are modern stretches of narrower evidence.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned: the fiddle had not been invented. Two ancient writers say he sang about the fall of Troy; a third, Tacitus, calls even that a rumour and says Nero was away at Antium when the fire began.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
Mansa Musa's journey through Cairo in 1324 is well recorded, but by writers in Egypt, North Africa and West Africa, mostly relaying what informants told them.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
Medieval scholars wrote that the Earth was round. Bede called it a sphere that "resembles more a ball", a 13th-century astronomy treatise set out proofs of it in its first chapter, and Thomas Aquinas used "the earth… is round" as an everyday example of a proven fact.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
Magellan was killed at Mactan on 27 April 1521 by the island's fighters, after he demanded that its people submit to Spain and to the ruler of Cebu.
HISTORY & WAR · 5 MIN
The killing-machine story begins with a note printed in 1793, not with any medieval record. The man who printed it wrote that he had never read of the device being used, and a historian calls the execution device "a fiction of the 19th century".
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
No single fire destroyed the Library of Alexandria. The ancient accounts describe damage at different times, and one leading modern study argues the Library faded over centuries rather than burned.
HISTORY & WAR · 5 MIN · 6 POINTS
Six well-known comeback stories, checked. Three hold up, and the details are stronger than the usual versions. Two are partly true. One does not hold up.
HISTORY & WAR · 11 MIN
This is a dated snapshot of an unfinished war, first written in March 2026 and brought up to date on 29 September 2026.
HISTORY & WAR · 6 MIN
None of the four chronicles we searched records Baldwin IV offering Balian the crown. That storyline belongs to the film Kingdom of Heaven (2005).
HISTORY & WAR · 8 MIN
The Leper King was Baldwin IV, crowned king of Jerusalem on 15 July 1174 when he was “barely thirteen”. He died in 1185, aged 23 or 24.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
The speech ends Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which opened in New York on 15 October 1940, more than a year before the United States entered the Second World War.
HISTORY & WAR · 11 MIN
Born 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, the year after Genoa ceded Corsica to France; died on Saint Helena on 5 May 1821, aged 51.
HISTORY & WAR · 9 MIN
The Third Crusade ran 1189–1192, after Saladin destroyed the kingdom's army at Hattin in July 1187 and took Jerusalem that October.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
The June Rebellion of 5–6 June 1832 was against King Louis Philippe and his July Monarchy. Charles X had already been replaced in the July Revolution of 1830.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
He did say it, on film. The clip of Oppenheimer saying “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” was filmed for NBC's documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb, broadcast on 5 January 1965.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
Napoleon never said it. The line comes from a TikTok slideshow posted on 15 August 2023, where two cartoon figures drawn as Napoleon and one of his men talk in exile on St Helena.
HISTORY & WAR · 9 MIN
Salah ad-Din means “righteousness of the faith”. It was an honorific title, not his personal name, which was Yusuf ibn Ayyub: Joseph, son of Job. Ayyubi means “of Ayyub”, and it gave his dynasty its name.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
Kerak was two sieges, not one battle, and Saladin withdrew from both: the first in late 1183, ending in early December, the second from late July, with the castle fully surrounded by mid-August, to early September 1184.
HISTORY & WAR · 11 MIN
The Templars began guarding pilgrims between 1118 and 1120, the Hospitallers grew from a Jerusalem hospice named in a papal bull of 1113, and the Teutonic Knights from a field hospital at the siege of Acre in 1190.
HISTORY & WAR · 11 MIN
Privilege and an opaque tax system were part of what led to the Revolution: the nobility and the Church benefited from tax exemptions, so the burden fell mainly on the lower classes, and the system's complexity and lack of accountability caused resentment among all taxpayers.
HISTORY & WAR · 9 MIN
On D-Day Dick Winters led a small group of paratroopers against a battery of four German guns near Brécourt Manor (about a dozen men in a 2014 US Army account, seven in his 1944 medal citation), won the Distinguished Service Cross, and ended the war a major commanding the 506th's 2nd Battalion.
HISTORY & WAR · 8 MIN
Desmond Doss (1919–2006) was a real US Army medic, a Seventh-day Adventist who would not carry a weapon. For his actions on Okinawa in 1945 he received the Medal of Honor, the first conscientious objector to receive it.
HISTORY & WAR · 11 MIN
It was more than 300 men. Herodotus names contingents adding up to about 5,200, plus the Opuntian Locrians, whom he does not count; the later historian Diodorus gives figures that come to about 7,400.
HISTORY & WAR · 7 MIN
Caesar was born in July 100 BC (the usual date; some historians have argued for 102), conquered the rest of Gaul between 58 and 50 BC, crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BC and was stabbed to death on the Ides of March, 44 BC, by a conspiracy led by Cassius and by Marcus and Decimus Brutus.
