Medieval

A jurist exiled for fourteen years after a foreign invasion still produced work specialists treat as the best surviving source on his field, proof of how portable book-based scholarship could be.

970

A scholar who may have arrived in Ghazni as a prisoner of the sultan who conquered his homeland went on to write the most even-handed medieval account of India that survives, sponsored by the same military campaigns that made study of it possible.

He walked away from the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world at the height of his career, and only then wrote the work that made him a renewer of the faith.

The words algebra and algorithm both trace to one Baghdad scholar, yet almost nothing about his personal life survives beyond a bibliographer's secondhand book list.

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.

1200

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.

Dante wrote his epic in everyday Tuscan rather than Latin, and that single choice did more to shape Italian than centuries of the political career his exile had just destroyed.

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.

Whether he marched to Kufa out of ambition, principle, or a deliberate wish for martyrdom is a question the evidence supports three ways and settles none.

Some of his most important writing was produced while fleeing suspicious rulers or hiding from arrest, in an unusually direct autobiography rare for a medieval scholar.

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

Joan of Arc's own words survive in unusual detail because two hostile courts, one convicting her and one clearing her decades later, both wrote everything down.

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.

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.

Its main surviving account comes from a monk who broke his own country's travel ban to get there, and whose reliable observations sit mixed in with tales scholars regard as legend.

The tactic historians credited to Nobunaga for a century, three-stage volley fire at Nagashino, turns out to be a misreading by twentieth-century army generals rather than anything his own contemporaries described.

1096

England's most celebrated medieval king spent perhaps six months of a ten-year reign actually in England, a fact twentieth-century historians turned into a damning verdict before more recent scholars pointed out he had an entire continental duchy to defend as well.

938

680

732

Plague pits in Siena were dug so deep the chronicler said dogs dragged out the dead, but nobody recording the disaster could say how many people the plague actually killed.

Genetic testing on teeth from medieval graves finally confirmed in 2010 what centuries of chroniclers had only described in symptoms, that a single bacterium caused a pandemic whose recurring waves lasted from the 1340s into the early nineteenth century.

395

Four states built by a permanent minority of settlers, which lasted nearly two centuries only because their Muslim neighbours were often more interested in fighting each other.

Medieval chroniclers could not even agree on what Pope Urban II promised the men who signed up for the First Crusade, and historians still argue how much religion had to do with any of it.

1431

The river running black with ink is a literary trope recycled across several sieges, and death toll estimates for 1258 still range from two hundred thousand to two million.

Eyewitnesses who watched the same fifty-three day siege could not agree afterward whether the attacking army numbered fifty thousand or three hundred thousand.

1358

800

A war named for its length actually ran on and off for a hundred and sixteen years, and its opening dispute was less about the French crown than about who an English king had to bow to as a landlord.

A caliph-funded translation project in Baghdad is credited with sparking centuries of Islamic scholarship, but the historian who named it a 'House of Wisdom' may have mistranslated what the place actually was.

1250

1397

1206

William's claim to England rested on a promise and an oath that no English source ever mentions, only the accounts written by the side that won and needed a justification.

661

The samurai code most people picture, honour, loyalty, ritual suicide, was written up as a bestseller in 1899, three decades after the samurai class had already been legally abolished.

Historians cannot agree on the year the Sengoku period even began, with three separate incidents each argued as the true starting point of a century of Japanese civil war.

A name coined by a German geographer in 1877 for a network no ancient traveller, including Marco Polo, ever actually called by that word.

1150

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.

The chronicle that gives us most of what we know about the Viking raids was written by the side that eventually won, which is part of why its numbers for enemy fleets and armies do not entirely agree with each other.

Aquinas stopped writing after a single Mass in 1273, calling everything he had produced straw, and historians still cannot agree whether that was revelation or the effects of a head injury weeks earlier.

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.

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.

The claim that Zheng He's largest ships stretched over 400 feet traces to a 1597 novel that has the vessels built with help from an immortal carpenter god, and archaeological digs at the actual shipyard suggest something closer to half that length.