Empires & states

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.

Alexander conquered from Greece to India by the age of thirty, and almost every anecdote historians repeat about him was written by biographers three or four centuries after he was dead.

-331

Angkor Thom's walls were built to model a Hindu-Buddhist cosmos, not to keep an enemy out, and they still failed to stop the Ayutthaya army that finally emptied the city.

Almost everything vivid about Ashoka's life comes from Buddhist legends written centuries later; his own edicts, the only contemporary evidence, say far less.

His reign survives through a genuine Arabic scholarly tradition centred on Timbuktu, chronicles written by men embedded in the same religious culture he actively promoted.

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.

Augustus's genius was making autocracy look like a restored Republic, and almost every source describing how he did it was written by him or long after him.

Almost everything vivid about Cleopatra, her wit, her languages, her death, comes from Roman writers who had reason to make her either glamorous or monstrous, and rarely both at once.

The two earliest accounts of the vision that supposedly turned Constantine to Christianity do not even agree on whether he was asleep or awake when he saw it.

The treaty he signed in Amharic said one thing and the Italian version said another, and whether he was deceived or simply miscalculated is still argued over.

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.

The most detailed early account of Genghis Khan's life was written by someone in his own circle willing to record his crimes, and later official histories quietly left them out.

A caliph whose real diplomacy and administration are well documented is still known worldwide chiefly as the fictional ruler of a story collection assembled after his death.

The famous poem bearing his name has almost nothing to do with him; it borrowed his identity for an unrelated Ojibwe legend, burying the real political story underneath it.

The institutions he built outlasted the specific decisions, from Kashmir to the 1962 war with China, that historians now judge far more harshly than his contemporaries did.

Almost everything known about the king who built Angkor Thom comes from monuments he commissioned himself, celebrating a ruler no independent chronicle ever describes.

Kublai Khan tried to build an invasion fleet for Japan in about a year, a job specialists say needed closer to five, and the resulting hastily built ships, not just the storms later legend credited, likely doomed both his attempts to conquer it.

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

Every figure attached to Mansa Musa's fortune, eighty camels, thousands of slaves, a specific weight of gold dust, traces back to the same handful of Arabic chroniclers, which is why historians now treat his rank as history's richest man as unverifiable rather than false.

The Meditations show Marcus Aurelius arguing with himself about duty in the middle of a war he never asked for, but the notebook carries almost no dates and cannot serve as its own history.

The man who built a continent-wide system for suppressing revolution was toppled by one in a single day in 1848, which either proves the system was fragile all along or that thirty years is a long run for any settlement.

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

Every detailed account of Nero was written decades after his death by a senatorial class his reign had offended, and the three main sources cannot even agree with each other on what happened.

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.

The chancellor built the first modern welfare state specifically to stop workers from turning socialist, which makes the safety net's origin story considerably less generous than the thing it produced.

The funeral oration that shaped centuries of democratic thought may not be his own words at all; even Thucydides admitted reconstructing it from memory.

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.

-800

The historian who wrote the definitive account of China's first emperor was working roughly a century after his death for the dynasty that had just overthrown his, which is worth remembering every time that account calls him a tyrant.

One of the two traders whose eyewitness accounts built his monstrous reputation admitted urging his co-author to exaggerate it, while seeking a land grant justified by that same savagery.

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

1325

Roosevelt returned part of an indemnity extracted after a rebellion, and called it friendship while telling Congress it was also the surest way to keep China out of Japan's orbit.

1600

1583

395

1815

Almost everything known about Rome's conquest of Gaul comes from the conqueror's own dispatches home, and his casualty figures do not survive contact with basic arithmetic.

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.

1602

1431

Roosevelt built the United Nations around a partnership between four great powers he did not live to see tested, and the Cold War tested it almost immediately.

After Alexander's empire broke into rival kingdoms, three centuries of Greek-speaking dynasties in Egypt, Asia and Macedon produced much of the science and philosophy later credited to a cleaner idea of classical Greece.

1997

1438

1250

-2000

1206

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.

More than double the number Egypt built, these pyramids survived a nineteenth-century treasure hunter who demolished forty of them from the top down searching for gold.

1302

1363

1713

1660

1991

Rome's own historians wrote its early conquest of Italy centuries after the fact, and modern archaeology increasingly disagrees with the story they told about it.

661

Rome's move from republic to empire was declared in a single year, 27 BC, but historians still argue whether anything about the republic it replaced was still real by then.

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.

1492

1603

1842

1648

The betrayed governor, the outraged father, the defiant king's speech: none appear in any source written near the actual conquest, only in accounts compiled centuries later.

1871

The popular story that he vengefully erased his stepmother's monuments out of long-buried resentment turns out, once the dating is checked, to point to his son instead.

A city whose scholars once taught twenty-five thousand students collapsed within years of a foreign invasion that executed or scattered the people who had built it.

421

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.

The claim that Wu Zetian murdered her own infant daughter to frame a rival first appears in the historical record roughly four centuries after her death, which is a strange amount of time for a damning eyewitness detail to wait before surfacing.