Spain

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.

Historians cannot agree whether Franco's postwar killings numbered thirty thousand or two hundred thousand, a gap wide enough that the uncertainty itself is one of the clearest facts about how his regime operated.

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.

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.

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.

2004

2002

1492

1494

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.

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.