Christianity

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.

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.

Only one ancient writer ever names Cyril of Alexandria as responsible for Hypatia's murder, and that writer also demeaned her intellect elsewhere in the same text, a contradiction later admirers of Hypatia rarely mention.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No original copy of the Edict of Milan survives, historians increasingly doubt it was ever a formal edict at all, and it did not make Christianity Rome's religion, whatever the name suggests.

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.

1439

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.

The Roman Curia has been rewritten by nearly every kind of pope going, and the latest version, in force since 2022, quietly let a nun run one of its departments for the first time.

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.

1925

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.

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.