Early modern

A widely repeated legend has two Rajput warriors' statues honouring their loyalty to Akbar, but a modern historian traced the story back only as far as a Dutch chronicle written decades after the event it claims to describe.

Even his birthplace is disputed between rival national historiographies, and one chronicler questions whether the standard story of his capture during the civil war happened at all.

The priest who spent decades pleading against enslaving Native Americans initially told Spain to import Africans instead, then wrote in his own history that he had come to see that stance as equally unjust, a reversal historians rarely put beside his more famous advocacy.

Dias proved the sea route to India existed a full decade before Vasco da Gama sailed it, and received strikingly little reward or recognition for making that more famous voyage possible.

A runaway printer's apprentice became the one man to sign the Declaration, the peace treaty with Britain, and the Constitution, having spent decades as a slaveholder before turning into a public abolitionist.

Columbus died still insisting he had reached Asia, and the continent he crossed the Atlantic to find ended up named after a different Italian entirely.

Hume dismissed his own most original book as immature work and asked to be judged by his later writing instead, a request modern scholars have quietly overruled.

Magellan is remembered as the man who circled the globe, but he died three-quarters of the way through the voyage, and it was his subordinate Elcano who actually sailed the last ship home.

The story of Bacon dying after stuffing a chicken with snow to test refrigeration comes from a biographer known for embellishment, while his own secretary's account says only that he caught a lung ailment.

Even his own bones were misidentified for nearly a century, and his most famous act of daring, the line drawn in the sand, rests on no independent confirmation at all.

A king beaten into obedience by his father grew into a philosopher-warrior whose wars built Prussia and whose afterlife was claimed by people he never met.

A young officer's ambush of a French detachment helped start a world war, and the general it made famous later gave up power twice, on his own terms, which is rarer than the story usually admits.

UNESCO calls it the largest slave trading centre on the African coast; researchers who counted the actual numbers put its share at under five per cent.

He wrote the letters that justified his own unauthorised conquest to the king, and several of the flattering claims in them have not survived independent scrutiny.

The story that Konigsberg residents set their clocks by Kant's daily walks is probably later embellishment, a small warning about how much of his popular biography deserves the same scrutiny.

Newton spent enormous private effort on alchemy that never appeared in his published work, and his own students found his lectures so unengaging that he reportedly cut them short whenever no one showed up.

The theorist behind a landmark treatise on raising children placed several of his own in a foundling hospital, and even he could not settle on one consistent explanation for why.

Entire decades of Gutenberg's life pass without a single surviving record, and the fullest evidence of his famous invention comes from a lawsuit accusing him of misusing borrowed money.

Kepler's mother was tried for witchcraft and briefly imprisoned in a case historians now read as an attack on Kepler himself through his family, not a routine local accusation.

Locke argued natural rights belonged to everyone while personally profiting from colonial ventures tied to slavery, a contradiction historians still weigh rather than explain away.

Leonardo's most famous biographer wrote thirty years after his death and is now known to have invented, or at least dressed up, some of the best stories, including, probably, the one about how he died.

The line most people quote to sum up Louis XIV's absolutism does not actually appear in the standard record of what he said when he took personal power in 1661, which was a considerably more measured statement about governing for himself from then on.

1450

Michelangelo's grandnephew rewrote the pronouns in his love poetry after his death, and it took a nineteenth-century translation to restore what he had actually written.

Montesquieu's account of English government, quoted in colonial America more than any source but the Bible, may not have described how England was actually governed so much as how he wanted it to look.

Decades of successful imperial expansion are remembered chiefly through the disputed, contradictory accounts of how he died at his empire's collapse.

Napoleon's own legal code freed Jews and abolished feudal privilege across Europe while, in the same years, he reinstated slavery in France's colonies, a contradiction his admirers and critics still tend to argue separately rather than together.

Nur Jahan was the only Mughal empress to have coins struck in her own name, a real and unusual mark of power that later chroniclers then padded with achievements a modern historian has called beyond all realistic possibility.

Cromwell described the mass killing at Drogheda as righteous divine judgment in his own words, leaving little room for historians to soften what he believed he was doing.

1096

Peter the Great's tour of Western Europe was meant to secure allies against the Ottomans and instead produced a Russia modelled on Dutch shipyards, an outcome shaped less by diplomacy than by what a curious tsar happened to find fascinating along the way.

Petrarch's own famous account of climbing a mountain just for the view turns out to claim a novelty earlier medieval climbers had already managed, which says something about how carefully he built his own legend.

Raphael ran the largest painter's workshop of his era, which means a fair share of what carries his name was finished by other hands under his direction.

The scholar who inherited Descartes's papers edited his letters into a more saintly shape after his death, and even the standard story of his fatal illness has since been challenged.

Ottoman subjects called their longest-reigning sultan the Lawgiver for his legal code, Europeans called him Magnificent for his conquests, and the Ottoman title itself may not even date from his own century.

1707

European sailors called it an age of discovery for lands that were, in every case, already inhabited, and historians now argue the word itself was doing political work.

The document most Americans picture being signed on the Fourth of July was mostly signed a month later, and the vote that mattered had already happened two days earlier.

1325

The idea that Moctezuma took Cortes for a returning god only appears in European writing decades after the conquest, undercutting the legend that supernatural dread paralysed Aztec resistance.

Disease and civil war had already gutted the empire before Pizarro's ambush; steel and horses finished what a smallpox epidemic and a succession war had already begun.

1787

1598

Historians still cannot agree on what to even call this war, and that disagreement over the name reflects a genuine, unresolved argument over what actually caused it.

Historians cannot agree when it started, cannot agree when it ended, and disagree over whether it was even one movement rather than several running in parallel.

Only one of the five ships that set out made it all the way around the world, and only eighteen of roughly two hundred and seventy men were aboard it when it finally arrived.

1688

Official records counted eight deaths; one historian argues the real number, once you count the poor nobody bothered to record, could run into the thousands.

1439

1438

Fewer than one percent of Scots were Catholic by 1745, which makes the romantic image of a Highland Catholic uprising sit badly against who actually filled the Jacobite ranks.

1755

One emperor's tax records survive well enough that historians still argue, streets and centuries later, whether Mughal cities were more or less urbanised than Europe's.

1302

1713

No complete record survives of how the Gutenberg Bible was financed or exactly how many copies were printed, only physical clues in the roughly two dozen complete copies that remain.

Historians can't even agree Luther nailed anything to a church door; the story rests partly on a secretary's note that was not found until nearly four hundred years after the fact.

1680

The most successful sustained indigenous resistance to European colonisation anywhere in the Americas is barely known, and its organiser survives mostly through the words of people who feared him.

Historians still argue whether the Renaissance was a genuine break from the medieval world or a later label pasted onto centuries that were never as separate as the name implies.

1660

Nineteen people hanged in a colony of a few thousand, during a decade when witch panics were already fading out across the Europe that colony had come from.

Nobody called it a revolution until a century after it supposedly happened, which is one reason historians still argue about whether it was one.

Britain's bill for winning a war fought on five continents came due in its American colonies, which makes this war's real ending arguably the Revolution it helped provoke a decade later.

Japan's two-century closure was never as closed as the word suggests, and the historians who study it now prefer a different term for what actually happened.

Suleiman the Magnificent brought perhaps a hundred thousand men to Vienna's walls in 1529 and still lost, mostly to mud, lost cannons, and a Habsburg defence that had two weeks to dig in before he arrived.

1492

1789

1603

Twelve million people loaded onto ships across four centuries, in a trade historians still argue over calling a partnership rather than simply naming who held the power in it.

1763

1783

1494

1648

1498

Britain's insistence that Austria hand Silesia to Prussia as the price of peace wrecked the very alliance the subsidies had been meant to strengthen, and set up an even bigger war within a decade.

Louis XIV got the Bourbon king on Spain's throne he had spent the war fighting for, and still ended it financially exhausted while Britain rose without placing its own candidate anywhere near that throne at all.

1789

Even Hobbes's own mother's name was lost to record, and much of what fills that gap comes from a biographer known for mixing solid research with credulous anecdote.

The man who wrote that all men are created equal held more than six hundred people as property, and for two centuries historians were reluctant to say plainly what that meant for one enslaved family in particular.

A man freed from slavery years before the revolution that made him famous led the only successful slave uprising to found a state, then died in a French mountain prison denied medical care because of his colour.

Multiple independent chroniclers, not just a single hostile source, describe da Gama burning a ship of pilgrims and mutilating a captured messenger, which leaves little room to treat these as later exaggeration.

Voltaire's most famous line about defending a view he despised was never actually written by him, invented instead by a biographer paraphrasing his attitude nearly two centuries later.

William rewarded some of the men responsible for lynching a Dutch statesman with money and high office, a detail his own defenders have never quite managed to explain away.