Empire

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Caesar wrote his own war reports to sell his campaigns back home, and his account of the Gallic Wars is still the main source historians have for what happened in them.

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.

1450

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.

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.

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.

Simon Bolivar founded a union of South American republics meant to outlast him, then spent his final years being voted out of the offices he had created for it one by one, a dissolution the record notes without fully explaining.

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.

1325

938

-490

-480

Muhammad's biography was written more than a century after his death, by which point, one historian notes, almost nothing of documentary use to a historian remained beyond confirming he had lived.

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.

1583

395

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.

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.

476

1911

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.

1438

Sukarno declared independence on a borrowed typewriter within hours of Japan's surrender, wording it so ambiguously that Japan and Indonesia could read the same sentence as meaning entirely different things.

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.

-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.

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.

China spent over a century trying to ban a drug its trading partners insisted on selling, and lost the legal argument twice before losing it by force.

1302

1363

France's canal effort killed an estimated 22,000 workers and bankrupted 800,000 investors before America even began digging its own version of the same idea.

1713

A war fought over roughly fifty years survives mostly through one Greek writer working decades later, and the numbers he gives for Persian armies remain the most argued-over figures in ancient history.

Carthage came close to winning the first war outright and held Rome off in Italy for fourteen years during the second, yet the only history of any of it survives through the eyes of the winner.

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.

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.

1898

1603

1842

1763

1783

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 ancient histories that describe Qin's conquest of six rival states report casualty figures running past a hundred thousand dead at a single siege, numbers the Wikipedia article itself flags as unsourced and that no independent record survives to confirm.

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.

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.

421

Voters who had just won the war under him removed him from office within weeks of victory, a rejection that fits awkwardly beside the near-unanimous later verdict that he was among the greatest prime ministers Britain ever had.

One historian has compared the Sarajevo assassination to a modern terrorist attack, a single event 'charged with historic meaning' rather than proof that war was already unavoidable before the shot was fired.