Many "well-known facts" about history were invented long after the events: by 19th-century painters, opera costume designers, satirists and textbook writers. Here are the most stubborn ones, and what actually happened.
How tall was Napoleon?
Where the confusion comes from: after his death Napoleon's height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches — but in French feet and inches, which were longer than English ones. Converted, that is about 1.68–1.69 m (5 ft 6–7 in). For a Frenchman of the early 19th century, whose average height was around 1.65 m, that is average or slightly above.
The image of the "angry little Corsican" was fixed by British cartoonists: James Gillray drew Napoleon as a tiny man in a huge hat. The cartoons travelled across Europe faster than any accurate description. It didn't help that he was usually surrounded by his Guard, who were recruited for their height.
See what was happening around the world in the year Napoleon crowned himself: shoguns ruled Japan and Lewis and Clark were heading for the Pacific.
Vikings in horned helmets
Vikings did not wear horned helmets.
Archaeologists have found only one nearly complete Viking Age helmet, from Gjermundbu in Norway. It has no horns: just a rounded cap with a guard for the eyes. Horned helmets did exist in Scandinavia, but almost two thousand years earlier, in the Bronze Age, and they were ceremonial rather than for battle. In a fight, horns would only give an enemy something to grab.
The Viking Age is usually dated from Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793.
The Middle Ages: dirt, a flat Earth and beer instead of water
Did people bathe in the Middle Ages?
They did, and they enjoyed it. Medieval towns had public bathhouses: late 13th-century Paris had more than twenty, and the bath-keepers even had their own guild. Soap was nothing new by then either: Soap is older than the Egyptian pyramids.
Bathhouses began to close only in the 16th century, out of fear of syphilis and plague and because of their reputation as places of vice. So the "unwashed centuries" belong to the early modern period rather than the Middle Ages.
Did they think the Earth was flat?
Medieval scholars knew the Earth was round. And the story about medieval flat-Earthers is younger than you might think: The idea that medieval people believed in a flat Earth is a 19th-century invention, popularised among others by Washington Irving's romanticised 1828 biography of Columbus.
Columbus is a myth of his own: Columbus's critics were right — about size, not shape.
Did they only drink beer?
Medieval people did drink water; beer was not a forced substitute for 'unsafe' water.
Did everyone die at 30?
A life expectancy of around 30 did not mean people grew old at 30.
Four more medieval myths
- Knights were not winched onto their horses.
- Chastity belts were almost certainly not worn in the Middle Ages.
- The iron maiden is not medieval: it was dreamed up in the late 18th century.
- Medieval cooks did not use spices to hide rotten meat.
The ancient world: Nero, gladiators and Cleopatra
- Nero could not have fiddled while Rome burned: the violin was invented in the 16th century.
- No one knows which gesture Roman crowds used to doom a gladiator. 'Thumbs down' comes from Gérôme's 1872 painting Pollice Verso — the Latin just means 'with a turned thumb', direction unknown.
- Caligula never made his horse a consul.
- Julius Caesar was almost certainly not born by caesarean section.
- Cleopatra was not Egyptian: her Ptolemaic dynasty was Macedonian Greek.
- Claims that the Great Wall is visible from the Moon were printed in 1932, 37 years before anyone got there.
- The Library of Alexandria did not vanish in a single blaze.
Things nobody actually said
- Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said 'Let them eat cake'. Rousseau attributed the line to 'a great princess' around 1765, when the future queen was nine and living in Vienna.
- 'And yet it moves!' first appeared in print in 1757, 115 years after Galileo's death.
- The head of the US Patent Office never said 'everything that can be invented has been invented'. The line is pinned on Charles Duell in 1899, but there is no evidence for it, and his reports in fact looked forward to new inventions.
- Bill Gates says he never claimed '640K ought to be enough for anybody'. The line has been pinned on him since 1981, but he has called it made up, and there is no record of it.
Myths about great scientists
- No apple hit Newton on the head.
- Einstein never failed maths: he had mastered calculus before he was 15.
- Edison did not invent the light bulb: some twenty inventors made incandescent lamps before him, among them Russia's Alexander Lodygin, patented in 1874.
- Galileo probably never did his famous Leaning Tower experiment.
- Salieri did not poison Mozart.
Revolutions, witches and executions
- When the Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789 it held just seven prisoners: four forgers, two lunatics and one aristocrat.
- Dr Guillotin did not invent the guillotine and opposed the death penalty.
- No one was burned at Salem.
- Witch hunting was early modern, not medieval.
- George Washington's false teeth were not wooden.
- Paul Revere never shouted 'The British are coming!' The ride was secret, British patrols were about, and colonists still saw themselves as British; witnesses recalled him saying 'The Regulars are coming out.'
Food and everyday things
- Marco Polo did not bring pasta back from China.
- The croissant was not invented to celebrate the 1683 victory over the Ottomans at Vienna.
- The monk Dom Pérignon did not invent champagne; he tried to get rid of the bubbles.
- Ninja did not wear black suits.
- Magellan did not sail round the world: he was killed in the Philippines in 1521.
Myths from Russian history
- Potemkin's fake villages most likely never existed.
- Catherine the Great did not sell Alaska: she died 71 years before the deal.
- The cruiser Aurora never shelled the Winter Palace: on 25 October 1917 it fired a single blank shot as the signal for the assault.
- Ivan IV's nickname Grozny meant 'formidable' or 'awe-inspiring' rather than 'terrible' in the modern sense; the English word 'terrible' once meant the same, but its sense has drifted.
- The Tsar Cannon, contrary to the saying, seems to have been fired.
Why myths are so hard to kill
A good myth is simpler than the truth: "short Napoleon", "horned barbarians", "the Dark Ages" are ready-made pictures. Many were born in the 19th century, when history went mass-market: opera, the historical novel, the school textbook and the newspaper cartoon all needed vivid images. The correction usually sounds duller: "apparently not quite, the sources disagree".
The easiest way to catch a myth is to look at what else was happening at the same time. If "medieval people didn't know the Earth was round", how were Arab and European astronomers calculating its circumference? On the Panchronia globe you can pick any year and see every continent at once.
More debunks are in Amazing facts, and you can test yourself in True or false?.
How tall was Napoleon in feet and centimetres?
About 1.68–1.69 m, or 5 ft 6–7 in. His recorded height of 5 ft 2 in was in French units, which were longer than English ones. That was average or slightly above average for a Frenchman of his time.
Did Vikings wear horned helmets?
No. No Viking Age helmet found so far has horns. Horned helmets became "Viking" in the 19th century thanks to painters and the costumes for Wagner's operas.
Did people bathe in the Middle Ages?
Yes. Medieval towns had public bathhouses, and soap had been known since antiquity. Bathhouses started closing in the 16th century, during epidemics of syphilis and plague.
Did medieval people think the Earth was flat?
No. Educated people in the Middle Ages knew the Earth was a sphere. The flat-Earth myth was spread in the 19th century, partly by Washington Irving's biography of Columbus.