Dated History / Early Modern Age

Examples of Dated History that reference events from roughly 1500 A.D. to 1800 A.D.

General

• The Spanish Inquisition:
  • Thanks to the Black Legend, the Spanish Inquisition is seen as one and the same with generic Medieval Church tropes above, to the point of assuming that inquisitions were unique or original to Spain (both Age of Empires II and III include "Inquisition" as a Spanish unique technology), guaranteeing that if an inquisitor shows up he will have a Spanish (Castilian) name even if he's not (Inquisitio), or that the most Sinister Minister in a work with clerics from different countries will be Spanish even if it's set before the Spanish Inquisition existed (The Name of the Rose). In reality, the first inquisition was created in 1184 in France; it was established, but inactive in Aragon and Navarre in the 13th century and Portugal in the 14th, but Castile resisted Papal requests to follow until the Spanish Inquisition was created in 1480. Thus the Spanish Inquisition was largely a Modern Age phenomenon, not Medieval, and unusual in that it was under control of the Spanish monarchy rather than the Papacy (contrary to Candide's portrayal as the real power behind the monarchy, based on old French travel literature and repeated on the Encyclopédie and Encyclopédie Méthodique). Spanish inquisitors didn't even have to be ordained priests, though many were Dominicans. One modern theory is that a prime motivation of the Inquisition was to keep the nobility and high clergy in check, be they from Castile, Aragon, Navarre, or other kingdoms (all having functioning borders and different courts otherwise until the 18th century, despite sharing monarch), as they were disproportionally subjected to investigation by the Inquisition compared to the common people, unlike what might appear from pop culture.
  • In True Blood, the Spanish Inquisition are zealous witch hunters (and vampires), and their methods amount to raping, torturing, and burning women to death For the Evulz. As previously said, the mass witch hunts of the Early Modern Period largely happened in central and northern Europe, while in Spain they can be counted with one hand; they were limited to the Pyreneean region, clearly influenced by events in France, and the Grand Inquisitor intervened to stop the process in almost all cases (as the Inquisition's own position was that witchcraft was not real, as it would give Satan creation powers equal to God). Altogether, it is estimated that 59 alleged witches were executed by the Spanish Inquisition in 300 years of history, compared to thousands killed in Germany or France during the 17th century alone. The 1610 Logroño witch trials referenced in the series were the largest ever in Spain; yet of 7000 people investigated by the Inquisition, only eleven were burned as unrepentant heretics (not witches), five after they already died in prison. Eighteen more confessed to heresy and were pardoned. This would have been unusually merciful in England and France, where the witch hunters Matthew Hopkins and Pierre de Lancre were active around the same time, but in Spain, it was a scandal: the Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition launched an investigation into the previous process, concluded that the original inquisitors had overreached, and that witchcraft was for the most part mass hysteria that appeared only after anti-witch preachers and literature showed up in an area (predating similar realizations in other countries by over a century). In 1614 they even ordered to remove the sanbenitos of the people burned in 1610 from public display so their descendants wouldn't be maligned as relatives of heretics.
  • Were they not stalwarts for Catholic dogma, the Spanish Inquisition would be considered Fair for Its Day: it was the first judicial body in Europe to have established rules of evidence, recognize an insanity plea, ban arbitrary punishments, and dismiss anonymous accusations. It was closer to modern jurisprudence than most secular courts of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, and might have been the most progressive and humane tribunal in its heyday, not the opposite. They even believed that the accuser held the burden of proof, whereas most secular governments at the time required the accused to prove their own innocence; accused persons were also allowed to have counsel, testify on their own behalf, and present evidence, something many secular courts also forbade. Many people died in prison before getting to trial, although this was not unique to the Inquisition - diseases spread like wildfire inside prisons at the time. Inquisitorial prisons actually had better conditions than their lay counterparts, to the point that arrested people would blaspheme so they could fall under religious jurisdiction and be moved there. It is also typical to attribute the Spanish Inquisition to all sorts of bizarre torture machines that likely never existed, like the Iron Maiden, or that were used in other countries. 1000 Ways to Die adapted the story of the Bull of Phalaris as a 15th century Spanish inquisitor inventing the Wooden Horse, which was actually used in France, Britain, and North America to punish soldiers during the 18th and 19th centuries, but not in Spain. Yet one of its names in English is "Spanish Donkey", and the German Schandmantel (one of the possible inspirations of the Iron Maiden) is called the "Spanish Coat". The Inquisition used torture, which again was common at the time, but it had limits that lay and foreign courts didn't have: children under 14 and the elderly couldn't be tortured, torture could only be applied in 15-minute sessions, confessions during torture weren't valid (between sessions and under the threat of torture were), and the only three approved methods were the rack, waterboarding, and strappado - because they didn't draw blood. Finally, the point of torture was to extract confessions, so it was applied sparingly and to people believed to be lying, not systematically to everyone, all the time.
  • Its longevity notwithstanding, the Spanish Inquisition also changed over time. High-profile cases moved from Crypto-Jews to Crypto-Muslims, Protestants and Alumbrados (religious mystics that the Inquisition considered the same as the former, but were much more common in Spain), Jansenists (who identified Catholic but thought the Inquisition should be abolished among other things), Deists, Atheists, and Freemasons. In the 18th century, the Bourbon dynasty severely limited the powers of the Inquisition: they lost their censorship duties, prison conditions improved, common tropes like sanbenitos, Edicts and Autos-da-fé were abolished, and the vast majority of cases ended with the accused being released in a matter of weeks with no penalty. However, the fact that it existed at all, and that it could be potentially weaponized against proponents of the Enlightenment made it a scandal in Spain and the rest of Europe; even after (or because) several pro-Enlightenment figures, critics of the Inquisition, and suspected Jansenists were appointed to the post of Grand Inquisitor themselves, and commissioned studies on the Inquisition's historical misdeeds. Goya's Ghosts is a stereotypical Anachronism Stew, portraying the Inquisition as all-powerful in the 1790s, the King unwilling to oppose it, and accused Crypto-Jews still being arrested after an Edict of Faith, tortured and raped in prison for decades with no trial or charges ever being brought against them. The movie even ends with an auto-da-fé in 1814, with imagery taken from Francisco de Goya's Caprichos without realizing that these were based on the Logroño trials from two centuries before, not in Goya's own time.
  • Most of the time the Inquisition was occupied with more mundane cases like uprooting peasant superstition (like belief in witchcraft), counterfeiting, censorship, blasphemy, and sexual misconduct including bigamy, induction to prostitution, bestiality, and sodomy (both sexes). In the 17th century, only 30% of cases investigated dealt with charges of religious ignorance, and roughly 3% with full charges of heresy, fewer of which were burnt. Most guilty cases ended in confession and light penance. In 1818 the former secretary of the Inquisition Juan Antonio Llorente published Histoire critique de l'Inquisition espagnole, in which he claimed the Inquisition had punished 341,021 people and burned 31,912. This work had great repercussions but was denounced as grossly inflated by American historian Henry Charles Lea already in 1870 (despite Lea not being a fan of Catholicism himself). Notably for a period where Llorente claimed over 11,000 burnings in the Canary Islands alone, Lea found 11. Modern historians estimate that the Inquisition executed about 3000-6000 people total, half during its first twenty years under Tomás de Torquemada. Nevertheless, as late as 1998 the anti-Catholic work A Woman Rides the Beast cited Llorente to claim that the Spanish Inquisition had burned 300,000 (either taking all punished for burnt, or multiplying Llorente's number by 10) before throwing even that out and claiming that the true number must have been "millions".
  • The legend of the Holy Child of La Guardia (a young boy said to have been crucified by Jews and later brought back to life, one of the basis of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's The Rose of Passion) was thought to have been a complete myth due to the similarities of the story with antisemitic blood libels. However, in 1992 historians uncovered evidence that there had been a real Inquisition case in 1491, very reminiscent of the Salem witch trials, in which six men of Jewish descent and two Jews accused one another of crucifying a Christian child, and were burned at the stake for it. The case may even have played a role in the decision to make the Alhambra Decree. Historians believe that the child most likely never existed; Isabel portrays a real child being reported missing, but the accused being completely unrelated to it.

16th century

• Bartolomé de las Casas claimed in his multi-volume History of the Indies that the pre-Columbian population of Hispaniola alone was over three million. Subsequent research has indicated that Las Casas' figures were greatly exaggerated, with 2020 genetic studies estimating the maximum population of the Caribbean islands' indigenous peoples to be in the mere tens of thousands.
• Norwegian historian Yngvar Nielsen concluded in an 1889 study that the Sámi of Norway lived no further south than Nord-Trøndelag county until they started moving south in around 1500. This hypothesis was accepted as the truth until the 21st century when several archaeological finds indicated a Sámi presence in southern Norway and Sweden in the Middle Ages.
• While Juan Ponce de León has long been said to have been searching for the Fountain of Youth, most historians now consider this claim apocryphal, since there are no mentions of it in any of his writings and the first known mention of him wanting to find it is in 1535, more than ten years after his death.
• Traditionally, the subject of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was assumed to not be anyone in particular, with even one extravagant theory positing that it was a 'female self-portrait' of Leonardo. Nevertheless, many fictional works that included Da Vinci as Historical Domain Character would sometimes include a generic woman posing as a model. Turns out they were right: In 2005, it was discovered that Da Vinci was commissioned to paint a portrait of a Florentine noblewoman named Lisa del Giocondo ("Mona" is an Italian honorific, akin to "Miss" or "Madam"). Lisa’s husband was a silk merchant who was friends with Leonardo’s father and it’s believed the painting was commissioned to celebrate a pregnancy.
• The Borgias:
  • Contemporaries viewed Lucrezia Borgia as a scheming, amoral poisoner who abetted her father and brother (Pope Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia, respectively) in their plans to dominate Europe. This belief became even more prevalent in Victorian times when her name became shorthand for "female serial killer" — she's Agatha Christie's favorite murderer to namedrop, it seems. Scholarship casts doubt on this belief, as there is no historical proof that Lucrezia harmed a flea herself, let alone committed multiple murders. If anything, Lucrezia's life might have been easier if she had been a poisoner. It's thought now that Lucrezia was blamed by her contemporaries because she was a safe target compared to her relatives.
    • Old Harry's Game references this in one episode where Edith tells a man that there's no evidence Lucrezia Borgia ever murdered anybody. However, since the person she's talking to is Satan, he knows from personal experience that the rumours are true.
  • The rumor that Lucrezia was incestuously involved with her brother and father was started by Lucrezia's first husband after being forced into an annulment that required him to sign papers declaring himself to be impotent (and thus unable to consummate the marriage). A child of unknown paternity (the Infans Romanus, Giovanni Borgia) appeared around that time, allegedly the son of Lucrezia and either one of her relatives or a man named Pedro who was found dead in the river after delivering letters to her. It's almost certain that the child's parents were actually Rodrigo and his much younger mistress Giulia Farnese, (whose brother Alessandro got a cardinal's hat from Rodrigo and later became Pope Paul III).
  • Then there is the Borgias' alleged poison, la cantarella, a potent yet undetectable brew whose formula could be adjusted so that the victim could die at any time the poisoner wished. Too bad it's not actually possible for such a thing to exist. Rodrigo probably used plain old arsenic while Cesare and Juan strangled their enemies and threw them in the Tiber.
  • Juan, Cesare's younger brother, was found dead in the Tiber in 1497. He had been stabbed 9 times. Cesare is often blamed for the murder, but it was more likely committed by a member of the Orsini family, with whom the Borgias — and Juan in particular — had had several feuds. Both Borgia and The Borgias give Cesare (and Lucrezia) compelling reasons for wanting him gone, which work well in a TV series, but are likely pure fiction.
  • Did we mention that the Borgias were probably no more murderous than any other prominent Italian family of the time? They most likely got the bad rep they did because they were social climbers and had non-Italian origins, not because they were particularly evil. Additionally, Pope Alexander VI's religious tolerance and philanthropy to Rome's Jewish population was seen by his anti-Semitic successors as Not Helping Your Case.
  • The biography The Borgias: The Hidden History by G.J. Meyer maintains that there's actually no evidence that Alexander VI had any children. Cesare, Lucrezia, and Juan were related to him somehow, but the Borgia family tree is tangled and records are uncertain. At a time when diplomats sent their masters every bit of gossip they could get their hands on, Meyer claims that there's no contemporary record of the pope having a mistress or children. Reformist preacher Girolamo Savonarola denounced the Borgias in general and Alexander in particular in the harshest possible terms and accused them of every kind of corruption imaginable, except sexual immorality. In any case, if they actually were his bastards, that still wouldn't make Alexander the only pope with known illegitimate children — Innocent VII and Julius II had them as well. Meyer also claims that Giulia Farnese wasn't Rodrigo's mistress, simply Lucrezia's best friend — certainly enough to get her brother a cardinal's hat.
• Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, was a staunch supporter of the concept of a free republic. So, why did he write The Prince, which tells a leader how to rule with an iron fist? It was his only well-known piece for a long time. Some scholars think that he was most likely a satirist because that was his only pro-Medici screed, and after writing it, he went right back to writing pro-republic stories. He was also often portrayed as a cynical, somber, and shrewd politician. Contemporary data, including his letters and works, portray him rather as a very sociable satirist who also happened to be an observant historian and a good rhetor. On the other hand, we can look at the last chapter of The Prince and Machiavelli's praise of Cesare Borgia ("Il Valentino") throughout, taking the vindication of the Borgias into account (see above). In that last chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli states clearly why he was giving this advice — someone needed to conquer Italy and unify it in order to protect against invasions by France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and plenty of other forces who had invaded in the decades before. Cesare tried, with the backing of his father the Pope, and failed. The then Medici duke of Florence also had an uncle on the papal throne at the time (Leo X, Cesare's college classmate and likely friend). Machiavelli and Cesare weren't the first to dream of it — Petrarch had, and Machiavelli quotes him directly. Dante Alighieri also did, in Monarchia, and in his Paradiso, he gives the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich VII a special place in Heaven for trying to "save" Italy "before she was ready". This is the view taken up by Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, though that series has Cesare and Machiavelli meeting and working together much earlier than they did in real life (as does The Borgias).
• Once, it was universally accepted that Juan Sebastián Elcano and the other survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition became the first people to circumnavigate the globe when they returned to Spain. But now there are many people who believe the first person to do so (albeit not in one trip) may have been expedition member Enrique of Malacca, who left the expedition to return home.
• While the Spanish Empire and Spanish Inquisition were viewed in a resoundingly negative light in other countries for a long time, it's now believed that the bad reputation Spain had was the result of the so-called Spanish Black Legend, demonization campaigns by Spain's rivals, which at the peak of the empire were basically all of the western world.
• The claim that Hernán Cortés was mistaken for a god by the Aztecs (and possibly other Mesoamericans), once widely accepted, is now generally viewed in the historical community as false. Skeptics point to the fact that the story seems to originate from a much older Cortés' chaplain and secretary, López de Gómara, who had never even been to Mexico and whom Cortés' lieutenant and chronicling aficionado Bernal Díaz del Castillo outright calls a liar. As proof, neither Díaz nor Cortés' own surviving writings mention anything about the Spanish being thought of as gods. They only recorded that natives initially thought the Spaniards were teules, a word that does translate roughly as divine yet carries a lot of possible meanings. Applied to a human being, which the natives knew the Spaniards were because they had watched them eat, sleep, have sex, bleed, and die, its meaning became closer to a wizard or a Greek hero, that is, someone of flesh and blood who still could do incredible things (like having those strange four-legged monsters and boom sticks, for instance).
• It was believed that Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha from the Ottoman Empire was married to Hatice Sultan, the sister of Suleiman the Magnificent, though this was based on conjecture and scanty evidence. In the late 2000s, research done by scholar Ebru Turan brought up a woman called Muhsine Hatun and discovered references to her in multiple Venetian and Ottoman texts, including a letter signed by her to Ibrahim. It is now generally accepted that Muhsine Hatun was his wife, and no marriage to the sultan's sister existed.
• The eventful and controversial reign of Henry VIII has engendered many myths:
  • Whig history often depicted Henry as "Bluff King Hal", a jolly Falstaffian monarch whose general good cheer was interrupted only by the tragic necessity of sending his whoring wives to the Tower. In reality, Henry was a complex, mercurial hypochondriac with a horrific temper and a complete inability to accept criticism or see himself as he really was. It was his courtiers who were forced to display forced jolliness, lest Henry's temper be directed against them. Some of his later reputation may have been based on the fact that he was incapable of overt deceit. Even if true, this wouldn't make him bluff but sneaky.
  • It was also said that Henry was unusual for monarchs of his era in that he had more wives than mistresses and was attentive to his wives — at least before he divorced or beheaded them. Evidence from the Letters and Papers of Henry's reign tell a different story: payoffs to numerous women, more grants of land to his laundresses' bastard children than a baron would normally receive, etc.
  • Yet the same historians who claimed Henry was a paragon of marital devotion also claimed that he suffered from syphilis, with the sore on his leg as evidence of the infection. The Letters and Papers again tell a different story. Syphilis was the HIV of the early 16th century; it beggars belief that Henry's team of experienced, educated physicians would have missed the most obvious diagnosis of their time. But Henry's apothecary bills show that he was never treated with any drug that was used to fight syphilis at the time. As for the sore on Henry's leg, there's some evidence that it was much worse than previously thought; instead of a single sore on one shin, both of Henry's lower legs were apparently covered in abscesses. Whether this was caused by a bone infection or by a combination of varicose veins and diabetes is anyone's guess.
  • The belief that Henry went through six wives because he was a misogynist has also been called into question. Henry's father took the throne after a long series of devastating civil wars. These came about because the ruling king was deemed weak and unfit, and there was no clear next in line, setting the stage for various houses to vie for the crown. Henry VII had two sons but one died young of an illness (Henry VIII's older brother Arthur) which served as a reminder that one heir is not enough to declare the succession secure. Reportedly, on his deathbed, he told his surviving son that the most important job of a king was to secure the throne and produce heirs. Henry VIII was married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, for over two decades and did not seek to divorce her until the prospect of her bearing a son became nil. Anne Boleyn bore a daughter but miscarried a son and was then accused of adultery. Jane Seymour gave birth to a prince but died shortly after. He deemed Anne of Cleves too unattractive and said it would be impossible to get aroused by her and impossible to sire sons. Katherine Howard was believed to have been unfaithful and thus any sons she gave birth to could be suggested not to be the king's. Catherine Parr survived the monarch.
• Anne Boleyn gets the worst myths, being given a sixth finger, a projecting tooth, a facial defect, and a goitre in the late 16th century (and a third breast in the 20th courtesy of the Book of Lists). None is contemporary. Rather she was said to be attractive by even her enemies (if not the most conventionally beautiful of women). Had Anne suffered from any obvious defects she wouldn't have been sent to court in the first place.
  • Historians long believed that Anne had been born in 1507, which sat well with Whigs who didn't think Henry would marry a woman much over 25 if he wanted to have children with her. But a letter from Anne to her father has been dated to 1513-1514. The content and penmanship imply that Anne was around 13 when she wrote it, pushing her birth back to c. 1501. It may be that the 1507 date came from a document where the "1" was misread as a "7".
• There is a myth that Jane Seymour died after delivering the future Edward VI via Caesarian section. This sprung up very shortly after Edward's birth; there's even a Child Ballad about it. But there is no evidence either in the historical record; if Edward had been born via Caesarian, Jane wouldn't have survived the birth, let alone been seen by dozens the next day sitting up in bed healthy and hale. There would also be a surgeon's bill in the records, which there is not.
• Anne of Cleves's ugliness is a myth propagated by Henry himself, who was enraged that she didn't recognize him when he showed up in disguise at her lodgings. Courtiers who wrote home about the controversy said that Anne was perfectly pleasant-looking; one calls her Henry's most attractive queen to date. An X-ray of a painting of Anne shows that she may have had a longer nose than we in modern days would deem attractive, but in Tudor times a long, thin nose was considered a sign of royal blood and therefore widely seen as desirable. There is no contemporary evidence for Anne being ugly, pockmarked, or overweight. She may not have fit Henry's tastes, but that doesn't mean she was unattractive.
• Catherine Howard was assumed to be older. Most historians had agreed that this painting◊ by Holbein was of Howard, and that the notation proved that she had reached the age of 21 by the time of her arrest. However, it was found that the painting was originally owned by the Cromwell family, who were unlikely to have commissioned a painting of the queen involved in their downfall.^note The work is now considered to be of an unknown sitter officially, though many suspect that it's Elizabeth Seymour, Jane's sister and Thomas Cromwell's daughter-in-law. There's no consensus for Catherine's date of birth, though few historians believe she was over 20 at her execution, and many that she was as young as 16.
• Catherine Parr was often portrayed by Protestants as well-educated and fluent in Latin and Greek before she married Henry. Recent biographers haven't found evidence that she was particularly erudite, and it appears that she only spoke English when she arrived in court in 1543 and taught herself Latin and Greek so she could read The Bible in its 'original'.
• Due to his untimely demise, Edward VI is often said to have been a sickly child. But courtiers and ambassadors wrote that he mostly enjoyed good health until he caught measles in his teens. It was this infection that weakened his immune system and caused him to fall ill with a fatal chest infection in 1553.
  • It was once thought that Edward's last days were prolonged by the Duke of Northumberland (Jane Grey's father-in-law) feeding the tuberculous Edward a concoction containing arsenic (keeping him alive but in agony) until he agreed to write a will disinheriting his sisters in favour of Jane. This is nonsense, from a medical standpoint as much as a historical one. For one, it's not certain that Edward had tuberculosis in the first place; for another, feeding a patient with terminal TB arsenic is immensely more likely to kill him faster than to extend his life. Most importantly, we have Edward's notes making it clear that the idea to disinherit Mary and Elizabeth and put the staunchly Protestant, undeniably legitimate Jane on the throne was his own idea, taken before his illness. His first intention was to limit the succession to Jane's sons, but he didn't survive long enough for Jane to have any.
• Mary Tudor's most pervasive myth is about her false pregnancy. It was only in the early 20th century that the idea of a "phantom pregnancy" arose, but historians and fiction writers ran with it. Current thinking is that Mary had some kind of tumour that caused abdominal swelling.^note "Phantom pregnancy" may also be a catch-all category for all kinds of pelvic conditions and diseases that have been labelled "neurotic" only because they occur in women. As for the "Bloody Mary" sobriquet, it stems from books published by her religious enemies after her death; her sister Elizabeth ordered about three times more executions than Mary did (but also ruled nine times longer).
• Oda Nobunaga was well known for his use of volley fire, but the idea that he was the first in Japan to use the tactic is now considered questionable since some recently-discovered sources imply that the Ikkō-ikki were using it before him.
• The popular claim that Uesugi Kenshin was assassinated by a ninja is now considered probably apocryphal, and he more likely died of cancer or cerebrovascular disease.
• Catherine de' Medici was one of the cruelest royals of the early Renaissance. She followed the (in retrospect, probably sarcastic) advice of Machiavelli, to ensure that her husband and three of her sons ruled France; hundreds of noble and wealthy Frenchmen died either directly at her hand or otherwise. She even arranged for her son Charles to be sexually abused by courtiers in an unsuccessful attempt to turn him gay so that he would die childless and his younger brother Henry (whom she adored) would eventually become king. Given her deservedly bad reputation, it's not surprising that contemporaries in England blamed her for instigating the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Screeds called her a "Catholic bigot" who washed her hands in the blood of Protestants. This is a tough one to be sure — accounts are confusing and the Massacre seems to have been a spur-of-the-moment occurrence, which makes figuring out the responsible difficult. Modern historians believe that the massacre was actually instigated by the Guise family, who feared Catherine's alliance with the Protestant Navarre family. However, Catherine probably bears the brunt of the blame for making the Massacre an honest-to-God one. As for the Guises, contemporary accounts note that after (quite possibly accidentally) kicking it off by killing Admiral de Coligny, the Duke of Guise went around placing Huguenots under his personal protection — furthermore, he was one of the only Catholic participants to apologize for the affair.
• It was once generally accepted in both the Western world and the Middle East that the death of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent caused the Ottoman Empire to enter a period of stagnation and decline from which it never recovered. However, starting in the late 1970s, the fundamental assumptions of the so-called Ottoman Decline Thesis were re-examined, and studies over the course of the following two decades led to the rise of a new consensus in the 21st century: that the decline of the Ottoman Empire did not truly begin until significantly later than previously thought, and the period after Suleiman's death instead marked the beginning of an era of transformation that lasted until around the year 1700.
• Elizabeth I:
  • There is no evidence of the "Virgin Queen" being accurate or not. Certainly no evidence that she had sex with Robert Dudley. There's also no evidence that she was incapable of bearing children: the old myth that she was born without a vagina (or that she was a man! which would have delighted her father Henry VIII) is disproved by the numerous examinations she underwent as part of marriage negotiations, often in the presence of foreign ambassadors who would have no reason to keep anything they saw secret.
  • The "she was a man" myth is just sexism, a chauvinistic Victorian fantasy that no woman could have made Elizabeth I's accomplishments, so she must have been a man (compare the "Shakespeare didn't write his plays and poems" conspiracy theory, which was also made up by aristocrats who couldn't fathom a commoner writing their favorite works, around the same time). One version promoted by Bram Stoker in his 1910 book, Famous Imposters, claims the real Elizabeth died of illness as a child and the members of her household forced a farm boy who was about her age to dress up as her to keep Henry VIII from blaming them. Forgetting for a minute that lots of people died young in those days (Henry himself lost a brother and a sister), concealing such a thing for the entirety of Elizabeth's life would have required such a massive conspiracy as to render it impractical, and raises the question of why a boy would be used in place of a girl anyway.
  • It's known that while she was living with Catherine Parr and her husband Thomas Seymour after Henry's death, she was in some kind of intimate relationship with Seymour. Whig historians blamed her for the liaison, claiming that since Tudor-era girls could marry at age 12, they must have been fully sexual adults at that age, and that Seymour was the victim of a sexually precocious Elizabeth. No wonder Parr sent her away! But not only is this a misreading of Tudor beliefs on marriage and sexuality, it's one of the most obvious victim-blaming exercises in history. Even in Tudor times, a gentleman was supposed to be proper toward any young girl under his roof. He could offer honourable marriage to a ward unrelated to him by marriage or blood, but a stepdaughter was sacrosanct. But it's only in the 21st century that historians have had the detachment to label Seymour's actions as the sexual abuse they most undoubtedly were.
  • Contrary to some claims, Elizabeth, unlike Mary, did not have an unhappy childhood. She was not sent away in disgrace after Anne's execution; in fact, Henry VIII was seen playing with her and judged to "love her very much" the Christmas after his marriage to Jane Seymour. Court sycophants praised the young Elizabeth to her father — which they certainly would not have had she been in disfavor. She seems to have spent time at court whenever there was a queen to chaperon her and was living there under the care of Catherine Parr during Henry's last years.
• Ivan the Terrible blinding architect Postnik Yakovlev after the construction of Saint Basil's Cathedral was complete so that he could never design anything so beautiful again is now considered to be probably a myth, since it's now known that Yakovlev collaborated with Ivan ShirIai on some projects in Kazan after he finished his work on the famous cathedral.
• One popular explanation for the existence of the "Black Irish" (a dark-haired phenotype appearing in people of Irish origin) was that they were descended from survivors of the Spanish Armada. However, historical analysis has shown that what few survivors weren't immediately killed or handed over to the English couldn't possibly have left such a large impact on the Irish genome, and genetic analysis suggests that the Black Irish have far deeper roots.
• The Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras were once thought to be ancient agricultural relics that were over 2000 years old. However, they were later found to be from the sixteenth century at the very earliest, developed as a response to Spanish colonization of the islands driving lowlanders up the cordillera, where taro was previously farmed.

17th century

• Once, the general consensus was that Native Americans had developed scalping independently of the Old World and practiced it for centuries if not millennia. In the latter half of the 20th century, a competing theory occurred, claiming that scalping was unknown among Native Americans until they learned how to do so from Europeans, who offered to pay allied tribes bounties for the scalps of members of enemy tribes. This competing theory was debunked after the discovery of the Crow Creek massacre site, which proved that Native Americans were scalping people over a century before Columbus first arrived in the New World, and it's now thought that the Europeans paid Native Americans for scalps because they were already known to be good at collecting them.
• Once upon a time, the prevailing view was that Australia was completely isolated from the rest of the world until Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed there in 1606. Today, it's known that there was (admittedly somewhat isolated) contact with other areas beforehand; perhaps most notably, people from Indonesia and New Guinea visited Australia's north coast, developing trading and social relationships with the Aborigines who lived there.
• John Smith never mentioned a romance with Pocahontas. This story first appeared in the 1803 book Travels of the United States of America by John Davis and it stuck. Pocahontas (who was actually about 10 when they met) and John Smith were friends, though. Historians agree that Smith was captured by the Powhatan but was released without Pocahontas' involvement; he didn't write that Pocahontas rescued him from death until 1616 in a letter to the queen of Denmark — possibly to build up Pocahontas' reputation as The Chief's Daughter. In 1995, historians pointed out that this story is suspiciously similar to that of the Spaniard Juan Ortiz in Florida, mentioned in the narrative of the De Soto expedition which just happened to be translated and become a best-seller in England a few years before, in 1609.
• While Jan Pieterszoon Coen was long considered a national hero in the Netherlands, his legacy has become more controversial since the 19th century when certain unpleasant facts about his conduct were brought back to light. Now he's widely criticized for the violence he employed, such as in the final stages of the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands, which was excessive even by the standards of his time.
• The conventional black-and-white view of the Galileo Galilei affair as a conflict between reason and dogmatism is now considered a gross oversimplification of a more grey-shaded reality, in part because Galileo never actually conclusively proved heliocentrism. Tellingly, he had no answers for the strongest argument against heliocentrism: if the heliocentric model were the truth, there should be observable parallax shifts in the position of the stars as the Earth moved.^note There are such parallax shifts, but they're too subtle to be seen with the naked eye; the technology to prove they existed wouldn't be developed until decades after Galileo died Furthermore, before Galileo's trial began, he received a proposal from cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a staunch defender of heliocentrism, that was actually a brilliant workaround to reconcile Galileo's position with the Church: he could teach heliocentrism as a theoretical model, on the basis that the apparent motions of the planets could be better understood if Earth was imagined as if it rotated around the Sun. However, Galileo was too stubborn to settle on a workaround instead of having his theory accepted as it was.
• Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba was a ruthless political operator and certainly had blood on her hands, but contemporary historians are by and large skeptical of certain negative claims made about her (that she murdered one of her own servants to prove a point, that she took the throne by having her brother poisoned, that she forced her lovers to fight each other to the death), mostly because they were originally made by her Portuguese enemies.
• After the death of Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus at the Battle of Lützen, rumors circulated that he was assassinated by Prince Francis Albert of Saxe-Lauenburg. While these rumors continued to be retold as late as the 19th century, it's now generally accepted that he was killed by enemy fire.
• Scottish journalist Charles Mackay's 1841 account of Tulip mania was more or less taken as fact for over a century. But in the 1980s, historians and economists began to examine the story with a more critical eye. Nowadays, Mackay's story is generally considered to have been incomplete and inaccurate. For example, the economic fallout from the bubble is now believed to be greatly exaggerated; contrary to claims that Dutch commerce suffered a severe shock, there's no evidence that anyone besides a relative handful of merchants and craftsmen was seriously affected by the bubble. Some of the anecdotes he recounts are also now considered very unlikely; for example, the story about a foreign sailor who ate a tulip bulb thinking it was an onion and got locked up for it was probably a lie, since tulip bulbs taste nothing like onions and are poisonous if not prepared properly.
• Rembrandt's iconic painting Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq was thought to be a night scene for a very long time, hence the more common (and succinct) name The Night Watch. However, after World War II, it was discovered to be coated in a dark varnish.
• For a long time, it was believed that Oliver Cromwell's son Oliver Cromwell II died in a skirmish. But in the 20th century, letters were rediscovered proving that he died of smallpox.
• Once, it was nearly universally held that the Han Chinese managed to "sinicize" their Manchu conquerors, leading to the idea that the Qing dynasty was run by people who were Chinese in their thoughts and institutions. Nobody seriously doubts that there was strong Chinese influence on the Manchu: Manchu people today are overwhelmingly Chinese speakers, while native Manchu speakers count a few hundreds at best. However, the opening of Chinese archives in the 1990s led to the growth of a competing theory: that the Qing merely manipulated their subjects, used Central and North Asian models of rule as much as they did Confucian ones, and regarded China as only a part (though admittedly a very large and important part) of a much wider empire that extended well into Inner Asia. While there are critics of this new theory, one of the most prominent being the Chinese-American academic Ping-ti Ho, the older conception of the Qing dynasty is now considered debatable.
• When historian John Fiske came up with the name "The Golden Age of Piracy" in 1897, he defined it as lasting 70 years, spanning the era between 1650 and 1720. Between 1909 and the 1990s, the trend for defining the age was one towards narrowing its scope, with some defining it as lasing only ten years or even less. However, in the new millennium, influential research suggested that Fiske was closer to the truth after all and may have actually been underestimating its length (some scholars have proposed ending dates as late as 1730, a full decade after Fiske said it ended), even if the idea of the Golden Age has changed to less of a singular period and more of a series of similar but distinct phases.
• Nowadays, it's believed that the idea of the Great Fire of London putting an end to the Great Plague is a myth. By 1666, the plague was already on its way out, and the city had been on the road to recovery for more than six months. That being said, it did help bring about conditions that helped mitigate the impact of future outbreaks; London was rebuilt to better standards and more sanitary conditions prevailed.
• Traditionally, it has been said that the Sikhs saved the Hindus from the depravations of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Rediscovered information shows that things were more complicated: the Sikhs initially took up arms to defend themselves, the Sikh leadership were more reliant on Hindu Rajputs to train their troops and fight for them than previously thought, and some Sikhs (perhaps most notably Guru Har Rai’s eldest son Ram Rai) actually fought on the side of the Mughals against their fellow Sikhs.
• The Enlightenment was interpreted in the post-revolutionary and early modern era as embodying a largely aristocratic culture and society. The dominant image is still a bunch of cosmopolitan individuals gathering in a salon hosted by liberal nobles and later trickling down to upstart middle-class societies who wanted to be The Team Wannabe and who later misinterpreted ideas during the Revolution, at least as seen by the pro-Enlightenment Anglophones. This exploded when Robert Darnton published The Literary Underground of the Old Regime and explored the fact that many Enlightenment ideas and works proliferated to ordinary people via pirated books or in some cases disguised as cheap pulp and pornography, some of them written by Enlightenment types like Mirabeau specifically to flout censorship and pass Beneath Suspicion, and this played a crucial role in spreading and disseminating ideas to a larger audience than previously envisioned.
• The accounts of multiple great waves in the earthquake that destroyed the Jamaican city of Port Royal were once thought to be exaggerated. That is, until geological surveys of the area showed that it was indeed possible for a tsunami to enter the harbor, hit one side, rebound, hit the other side, rebound and repeat.
• The standard story about 17th century London's private fire brigades has always been that, if a building didn't have a firemark indicating that they were insured with that company, the firefighters would let it burn. Investigating this claim, however, suggests there isn't any evidence it was ever official policy, and that it possibly derives from rival fire insurance firms refusing to assist each other, which wasn't an official policy either, but did happen. As Tom Scott put it, when he discovered one of his sources had removed the claim after he made a video on the subject:
  Scott: I was wrong. QI was wrong. Horrible Histories was wrong. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of pop-history books and storytellers were wrong. (Beat) We think.

18th century

• Charles XII of Sweden was noted during his lifetime for never marrying, having no mistresses, and very likely abstaining from sex altogether. The reasons why continue to be debated, but one popular theory held that he was intersex. In 1917, his remains were examined to test this hypothesis, and it was found that he had no traits of an intersex person.
• The Will of Peter the Great, a document purporting to show Russian ambitions to dominate Europe, is now known to have been forged by French essayist Charles-Louis Lesur as an attempt to justify Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
• King George III's madness was once thought to be a result of Royal Inbreeding. Now, however, it's generally believed to have been a side effect of porphyria, a disease that has nothing to do with inbreeding.
• Some myths about the Battle of Culloden are now understood to be just that:
  • Not only were not all the Highlanders swordsmen, it seems likely that most of them weren't. Only 190 broadswords could be discovered on the battlefield, as opposed to the more than 2,000 muskets that were found.
  • Bayonets were not the decisive factor that allowed the government forces to win the battle. One widely-touted eyewitness account reported that the men of Barrell’s and Munro’s regiments killed one or two men each with their bayonets, but some quick math makes this seem very dubious. Barrell’s numbered just over 300 men; supposing the estimate is correct, that means this regiment alone accounted for 3-600 enemy casualties with just their bayonets. This doesn’t tally. Nor does the historical record. Cumberland instructed his infantry to stab into the body of the man opposing the soldier to his right. This proved effective at first but in fact, while it blunted the Jacobite charge, it neither stopped it nor repelled it. The Clans cut clean through the center of Barrell’s and were only stopped by the concentrated firepower of the second line.
  • Lord George Murray, one of the Jacobite commanders, later claimed that the plain, open flatness of the battlefield inordinately favored the English cavalry and artillery while proving unsuitable for the Highlanders. This was accepted as fact for many years but is now not considered credible because the Highlanders had fought and won on much flatter ground at Prestonpans. In reality, the problem was the boggy state of the field, which actually disadvantaged both sides.
  • While it was once thought that most of the Jacobite casualties occurred at the hands of the government artillery, it's now known that the artillery's effectiveness has been greatly exaggerated. True, it played an important role in provoking the fateful charge, but the softness of the ground prevented the cannonballs from bouncing as they should have. In fact, the artillery didn't become effective until they switched to canister shot after the clans charged. Because of this, estimates have been lowered from a 30-minute-long barrage of unanswered cannon fire that killed hundreds to a bombardment that lasted 15 minutes at most and only killed 150 at a maximum.
  • One popular legend claims that the three regiments of Clan MacDonald on the left flank didn't close with the enemy because they never charged. The story goes that they were in a snit about Lord George allocating the right flank to the Atholl battalions and refused to obey orders. However, while it's true that they failed to strike a blow against the government forces, it's not because they didn't charge. What really happened is more complicated. They stubbornly refused to redeploy when the Jacobite line was moved closer to the longitude of the Culwhiniac enclosure, thus accounting for the strange skewed nature of the Jacobite line. When the main charge went in, the MacDonalds also charged... but they had further to run and they encountered knee-deep bogs in the terrain they had to cover, which impeded their momentum. Thus, when they met with the steady platoon volleys of the Royals and Pulteney’s regiments, their advance was checked and they were forced to withdraw by the movement of the enemy cavalry.
• For a long time, it was believed that after Fort William was captured by Bengali troops in 1756, 146 people (consisting of British soldiers and Indian sepoys and civilians) were locked in a dungeon known as the Black Hole of Calcutta overnight, and 123 of them died from the ordeal. This was thought to be credible due to it being based on an eyewitness account by John Zephaniah Holwell, but in the 20th century, it came to be questioned, not least because it was dubious as to whether it was even possible for that many people to have been crammed into a room 14 feet long and 18 feet wide. Today, more modest estimates are considered far more likely, with the highest considered credible being 64 prisoners (of whom 21 survived).
• Mason Locke "Parson" Weems wrote a hagiographic biography of George Washington that contained many anecdotes about him that later became iconic, such as him refusing to lie about chopping down a cherry tree and praying in the snow at Valley Forge. While these stories were generally accepted as true for many years, they are now considered apocryphal, probably invented out of whole cloth by Weems to provide moral instruction to America's youth.
• As the United States came into increasing conflict with Native Americans over the course of the 19th century, Daniel Boone was falsely characterized as a man who hated Indians and killed them by the score. In reality, Boone respected Native Americans and was respected by them, and by his own admission could only be sure of ever killing a grand total of three Amerindians.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
  • Mozart's composition method was the subject of myths in the 19th century, with a prevalent claim being that he composed entirely in his head and then wrote the music down in a single draft. However, the rediscovery of earlier drafts of his compositions has since proven that his sheet music went through numerous revisions.
  • The idea that Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave is now generally understood to have been based on a misunderstanding of funeral practices in 18th-century Vienna. While it's true that he was buried in the same plot as several other people, this was standard practice for middle-income families at the time; the burial was organized and dignified, a far cry from the images of corpses being unceremoniously dumped into an open pit now synonymous with "mass graves". His remains really were later dug up and moved somewhere else to make room for more burials, but once again, this was commonly done due to grave space being at a premium in Viennese cemeteries; it had nothing to do with the wealth and status of those interred.
• One popular myth is that the kangaroo got its name when James Cook and Joseph Banks asked a local Aborigine what it was called, and the local responded with "kangaroo", which actually meant "I don't understand". This was disproven in 1972 when linguist John B. Haviland in his research with the Guugu Yimithirr people was able to confirm that "gangurru" referred to a rare large dark-coloured species of kangaroo (the antilopine kangaroo, to be exact).
• The American Revolution:
  • It was widely believed that the Revolution was caused solely due to the imposition of British taxes without any representation from the colonists, who held no power in the American colonies. While taxation is still considered to be a major reason behind the revolution, more recent historians cite the Seven Years' War as sowing the seeds for America's independence, as not only did the war drain Britain's economy and lead them to impose heavy taxes on America in the first place, but the Proclamation of 1763 forbade any settlement west of the Appalachians, in order to prevent future conflicts with Native Americans. This angered colonists, who were eager to settle new lands. In addition, the British were initially lenient on colonists who wouldn't pay taxes; it wasn't until the Tea Act of 1773 that they began to seriously enforce these new taxes, which became the straw that broke the camel's back and caused revolution to erupt.
  • While the basic facts of Paul Revere's ride are relatively well known, their interpretation has gone back and forth based more upon the tenor of the times and the personal slant of historians than the known facts of the event itself. A recent history devoted nearly a third of the book to the perpetual debate between Revere's skeptics and partisans. What's certain is that most people get their view of Revere from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem. It gets a lot wrong, the most crucial being that he didn't actually get to his destination. He was arrested, while another rider was the one who got through. But "Revere" rhymed best, so he got the credit (the successful rider in reality was the far more obscure Dr. Samuel Prescott).
  • When 1776 was written, not a lot of information about James Wilson was available. The playwrights tossed in a bit of Artistic License and created a climax where his desire to remain a nobody is the crucial factor in him breaking with Dickinson and voting for independence. They note in the DVD Commentary that this was never singled out by historians as a major misstep, but later findings show that James Wilson was a staunch proponent of independence, and that the delay in the vote which the play attributes to stalling techniques by Adams was in reality partially due to Wilson wanting to go home and check that his constituents were all right with his vote.
  • No, the Hessians probably weren't drunk at the Battle of Trenton. While they weren't as alert as they should've been, it's now generally believed that they (or at least most of them) were sober when they were attacked by the Continental Army. Some of Washington's officers believed that the Hessians would have a boozy German Christmas, and the sheer magnitude of the Hessian defeat makes it easy to believe. However, Colonel Rall had been tipped off that Washington was up to something and asked for reinforcements, only to be denied by British commanders who no longer believed Washington's army to be a threat.
  • The claim that Martha Washington named a feral tomcat after Alexander Hamilton to make fun of his promiscuity was generally accepted as true for decades, but is now considered dubious due to there being no evidence of the story circulating until after Hamilton died. Nowadays, it's widely suspected to be posthumous slander against Hamilton, possibly by John Adams who was still bitter about Hamilton trying to undermine his administration, possibly by vengeful Loyalists who were trying to diminish Hamilton's popularity abroad.
  • Conditions at Valley Forge were indisputably awful, but the idea that inclement weather was a major problem is now considered a myth, or at least an exaggeration. While it was once claimed that the encampment was blanketed in snow and many soldiers were killed by frostbite and hypothermia, no contemporary accounts or sources state that death occurred from freezing temperatures alone, even if some soldiers needed amputations. Rather, snowfall occurred infrequently, above-freezing temperatures were regular, and ice was uncommon. Stories of harsh weather are most likely the result of unintentionally conflating Valley Forge with the later winter encampment at Jockey Hollow in New Jersey, which saw the coldest winter of the war. At Valley Forge, disease and a lack of supplies were far bigger problems than the weather.
• The original Luddites of the 1810s took their name from Ned Ludd, a weaver who, in 1779, broke two stocking frames in a fit of rage. While Ludd's existence was accepted for a long time, he's now considered a legendary figure, since the first mention of him is in an 1811 article in The Nottingham Review that has no independent evidence of its veracity.
• Stories of Thomas Jefferson having children with one of his slaves, a woman named Sally Hemmings, were once considered mere political mudslinging. However, DNA testing has proven that some of her descendants were also descended from a member of the Jefferson family, which almost certainly means that at least some of her children were fathered by Thomas.
• For decades, George Washington was credited with starting the tradition of adding "so help me God" to the presidential inaugural oath. While this wouldn't be out of character, since Washington was one of the most religiously devout founding fathers, an investigation by the Library of Congress found no evidence that the phrase was ever used in that context before the inauguration of Chester A. Arthur, almost a century after Washington first swore the oath.
• One famous story claimed that Grigory Potemkin built fake settlements in Crimea using hollow facades to fool Catherine the Great when she paid the area a visit with some foreign dignitaries. While it gave rise to the term "Potemkin village", most modern historians believe the tale to be an exaggeration or even an outright myth.
• While Frederick the Great is now considered by most historians to have been his period's equivalent of a homosexual, this fact about his life was denied even while he was still alive, with his physician, Ritter von Zimmermann, publishing an entire book claiming that a botched surgery on his genitals had rendered him impotent. Despite this claim being immediately denied by the very surgeon who performed the operation, the idea of Frederick being impotent stuck around for decades after his death. In Nazi Germany, where homosexuality was violently suppressed, it was believed that Frederick simply had a mere hatred towards women, prioritizing administration of the state over romantic pursuits. With the discovery of several love letters exchanged between Frederick and his male partners, it is now generally accepted by historians that Frederick was in fact gay.
• The death of Adolf Frederick of Sweden being attributed to an excessive meal consisting of 14 helpings of his favorite dessert has since been doubted by modern historians, who generally attribute his death to a heart attack.
• The French Revolution, being one of the most controversial events in world history, is often periodically updated and revised:
  • Marie-Antoinette's spending habits were not a major contribution to the financial crisis that helped cause the revolution. Not only do financial records prove that her spending was actually significantly less than that of many other people at Versailles (and certainly not enough to be one of the main causes of the economic problems facing the country), but France's finances were also already in a shaky situation before she arrived. While calling her spending extravagant isn't entirely inaccurate (at least taken in a vacuum), it didn't even come close to bankrupting the country; her "Madame Deficit" nickname was undeserved. If she hadn't spent a single livre between 1770 and 1789, the situation still wouldn't have been salvaged. She was simply scapegoated for a number of reasons.
  • On the topic of Antoinette, the idea that the Petit Trianon royal estate was a completely private getaway where she pretended to be a commoner is now considered apocryphal by most serious historians. While it was described as "private" by contemporary sources, it was only private by the standards of a royal estate; her entourage there consisted of "only" a single footman and maybe some friends, which was small compared to the much larger one she had at Versailles. Notably, contemporary depictions of the estate make it clear that there would have been many guests and servants there. There's no evidence to back up the stories that she pretended to be a farm girl, milkmaid, shepherdess, or anything of the sort when she was there either; claims that she did can be dated to 1798 at the absolute earliest, and even that may be too generous. All contemporary evidence points to her running the hameau de la reine the way any elite landowner of the time would have managed a country estate they owned. Contemporary criticism of the hameau was about its relative secrecy and seclusion, about the supposed unethical sexual and political dealings going on there, about its expense; they make no mention of her pretending to be a peasant woman.
  • Revolutionary propaganda claimed that the Storming of the Bastille resulted in the release of numerous mistreated prisoners who were locked up for political reasons. It's now known that at the time of the storming, there were only seven prisoners, none of their imprisonments were political in nature ^note they included four forgers, an Irishman accused of spying for the British government, a failed assassin of Louis XV, and a "deviant" aristocrat suspected of murder and they were treated quite well. For that matter, contrary to revolutionary claims, the Bastille was stormed to seize armaments said to be inside it, with liberation of prisoners being a secondary concern at best.
  • The Sans-Culottes weren't exactly the prototypical urban proletariat they were long imagined as. In reality, they were a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that included shopkeepers, artisans, unemployed youth, low-rent actors, dissident clergy, and even aristocrats who were Slumming It, among others.
  • Mostly thanks to Anglophone portrayals, the Revolution is often painted as undone by revolutionary excess, thanks to misunderstandings of the original Reign of Terror which is almost never presented in its original context of a series of emergency laws to save France from Civil War and invasion. Later historians see the Terror as being part of the Revolution's war effort, calling it the first Total War. They also note that many key reforms happened during this period: increased participation of citizens with the government, restructuring the army, building institutions like the Louvre and Jardin des Plantes, and in 1794, the abolition of slavery. Almost none of this ever gets so much as an acknowledgement, let alone a depiction, outside France itself.
  • While it was long taught that the French nobility was one of the primary victims of the Reign of Terror, this is now known to be not entirely accurate. In reality, only 8% of the Terror's victims were aristocrats (though since the aristocracy made up less than 2% of the population, they still suffered disproportionate casualties), and for most of its existence, the Terror mainly targeted clergy, food hoarders and actual or accused counter-revolutionaries. There was a greater focus on nobles during the "Great Terror" after the Law of 22 Prarial, but even that was abolished in a matter of days after Robespierre fell.
  • Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was perhaps the most influential commentary on the Revolution in the Anglosphere and is still heavily cited by the most conservative commentators. However, Burke is no longer taken seriously by the majority. Alfred Cobban, a conservative historian himself, noted that Burke did very poor research on France, basing his work on memories of a single visit to the country. Burke's defenders argue that he predicted the Reign of Terror, but the Terror was a consequence of the declaration of war, made by the Girondins and supported by Louis XVI (i.e. the more traditionalist side) and opposed by radicals like Marat and Robespierre. In addition, the essay is dated for its classist dismissal of the Third Estate as malicious rabble and "Jew brokers", and its echoing of Augustin Barruel's conspiracy theory that The Illuminati and Freemasons orchestrated the Revolution as part of a ploy to overthrow Christendom.
    Alfred Cobban: "As literature, as political theory, as anything but history, [Burke's] Reflections is magnificent."
  • Maximilien Robespierre was once often depicted as a proto-Lenin and/or a proto-Stalin when Robespierre never had anything near that level of influence and authority in actual policy-making. David A. Bell remarked that "No serious historian of the French Revolution of the past century has accepted the idea that Robespierre ever exercised a true personal dictatorship." But thanks to Hollywood History and Robespierre being far more well-known than most other revolutionaries, this fact has yet to trickle down to the common public.
  • Speaking of Robespierre, for many years, it was said that the Reign of Terror ended after his fall from power. Today's historians take a more nuanced view. While it's true that certain laws and procedures were abolished after he and his supporters were executed, the mechanisms of the Terror continued to operate for many months.
  • The Revolution has also been misunderstood as being a case of "anarchy" and mob rule with the masses rising against the nobles. In reality, the French Revolution was predominantly a middle-class revolution. The most radical major party, the Jacobins, advocated for what we would call free market capitalism. The Parisian mob so often sentimentalized and demonized rather was a highly literate community for the era (Paris had an almost entirely literate male population). More left-wing factions were actually repressed by the Jacobins.
  • In the years following the Revolution, stories cropped up of Victims' Balls, where people targeted by the Reign of Terror wore mourning clothes and red sashes around their necks to symbolize the guillotine they narrowly avoided. Generations of historians both inside and outside France accepted their existence as fact, but later scholarship suggested that, based on a near-total lack of primary evidence, they were more likely fabrications after the fact. Historian David Bell went so far as to call them "an invention of early 19th-century Romantic authors".
• The 1790 Footprints, a set of footprints discovered near Kīlauea on the island of Hawaiʻi, were long thought to have been left by retreating war parties led by the warlord Keōua Kūʻahuʻula that are known to have been in the area during an eruption that year. However, a 2008 forensic study determined that many of the footprints were actually left by women and children, strongly indicating that at least some of them can be attributed to everyday activities rather than warfare.
• The Haitian Revolution:
  • It used to be generally thought that Haiti's population of black slaves always wanted independence. But it's now known that the majority actually supported continued French rule initially, because the first calls for independence came from slave owners, and the slaves justifiably feared even harsher treatment from their masters without the threat of retribution from the French government to keep their abuses in check.
  • The story used to go that Haiti's population was divided by race. While not wrong, per se, that view is now known to be a considerable simplification of how things actually were. The white population was divided based on class^note the wealthy slaveowners (especially the planters) generally scoffed at the more "common" whites, while the less affluent whites resented and envied the richer ones and origin^note French-born whites often looked down on Haiti-born whites as "provincials", while white Haitians frequently viewed the French as "outsiders". As for the black population, it was also divided between the free and the slaves, as well as between those born in Haiti and those born in Africa (the former tended to view the latter as "savages", while the latter considered the former "lapdogs") and between Christians and Voudoun practitioners. Only the free people of color could really be called united.
  • Until 1938, it was believed that Toussaint Louverture, the most prominent and well-regarded of the revolutionary leaders, had been a slave until the start of the revolution. That year, the discovery of a 1776 marriage certificate that referred to Louverture as a freeman proved that he had been manumitted over a decade beforehand, possibly as early as 1772.