Dated History / Middle Ages

Examples of Dated History that reference events from roughly 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D.

General

• Most Hollywood History of the Medieval period (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is probably the Ur-Example) is patently untrue, as it is heavily based on the accounts of Protestant, Enlightenment, or Republican writers who would fabricate information and present hearsay as fact to advance their point of view. The actual Middle Ages were a colorful epoch, with significant advancements in science, cultural crosstalk (Gothic architecture, almost synonymous with the Middle Ages, was inspired by Indian and Muslim building styles), and not as much dirt as later accounts would have you believe. The problem started with Renaissance writers considering the entire epoch between Antiquity and them to be just like recent history — and recent history was the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War. But the Middle Ages lasted over a thousand years and Medieval Stasis did not apply in reality. The High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries) could be called a time of prosperity, and some retaking of Roman heritage (the deed the Renaissance authors were so proud of) already happened. But then the Black Death arrived, and with it a whole host of new wars and troubles, which ended that boom.
• The whole Middle Ages are often referred to as "Dark Ages" because of widespread illiteracy and lack of civilization. A common conspiracy theory is that the Catholic Church intentionally inhibited people from learning to read in order to keep the monopoly of thought. The actual reason for illiteracy was that there simply was no accessible writing media in Medieval Europe. Learning to read and write requires a medium upon which to scribe. Papyrus decomposes quickly in the cold and humid European climate, and parchment and vellum are atrociously expensive. Papermaking from linen was either introduced or invented independently in the 12th century, and once paper became ubiquitous in the 14th century, literacy spread like wildfire, especially in cities and towns. Learning the Roman alphabet and phonemes is very easy, and literacy can be assumed in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile literacy was commonplace in Russia and Scandinavia already in the High Middle Ages, as they used birch bark as writing media. Birches are rare in Central Europe, but ubiquitous in the North.
  • The use of the term "Dark Ages" actually began as a cleverism when Petrarch said his era was "surrounded by darkness and dense gloom," in the 1330's. The phrasing was supposed to be irony because Medieval people thought they lived in a "bright age" compared to the "dark age" of Rome before Christianity.
• Added to the above is the myth that Catholic churches chained up Bibles and Gospel books to keep laypeople from reading them. As mentioned above, the majority of laypeople in Western Europe were illiterate. The actual reason the books were chained up was because they were valuable—the Gospels, in particular, could easily have gold covers, studded with jewels, which made them tempting targets for thieves. Even without such embellishment, books in the time before the printing press were expensive, time-consuming to make, and hard to obtain themselves. Secular libraries such as those at universities also chained their books up.
• Renaissance and especially Enlightenment scholars put in a lot of work to prove how few books had been written in the Middle Ages: by throwing away anything written in that time-period. Later researchers bought into the propaganda and genuinely believed nothing of note was written during Medieval times. The books that weren't destroyed ended up in the hands of private collectors and only became accessible to scholars in the late 20th century with the Internet. They also introduced the idea of Medieval people being obsessed with religion. Not an entirely wrong idea, given the importance of pilgrimages and piety to most commoners (as well as uglier forms, such as anti-Semitic riots), but the ordinary people weren't falling at the knees of the sinister church-men. On the contrary, the Latin Church was frequently criticized for its priests failing to live up to their presumed holy standards, to the point laymen acted as preachers just so somebody would get it right. Rulers weren't shy about arguing over political matters with Popes, making war on them and even deposing them, without considering themselves less Catholic for it (the papal infallibility dogma only dates back to 1870), and Crusades tended to disintegrate into We ARE Struggling Together on national grounds. People, especially those in power, were happy to "pick and choose" or ignore parts of Christianity if it suited them or if they could make money (a bit like how there's technically a speed limit on highways but it's not uncommon for people to drive faster). Rather than a laicist movement, the Renaissance was also a time when many turned to Christianity and wanted to purify and reinvigorate it; differences in how and what this meant led to the various Protestant and Catholic reformations.
• The medieval Catholic Church never burnt anyone at the stake for practicing witchcraft. Its official position was that witchcraft was superstition, and belief in it was against Church dogma. The Church considered those who made accusations of witchcraft to either be superstitious fools, or to be making malicious false accusations against others; this could get the accusers into serious trouble, and there are records of ecclesiastical courts holding people accountable for making accusations of witchcraft. Of course people were killed as witches (not always by burning), but it was uneducated and superstitious authorities who did it, very often secular. The Church, as an institution, fought against this.
  • Robin of Sherwood includes the once popular theory that trials for witchcraft and heresy were partly attempts to stamp out a pre-Christian pagan religion that persisted well into the Medieval period. This is now considered pseudohistorical and based on a very selective reading of primary sources.
  • The Malleus Maleficarum, or "Hammer of the Witches", was not held up as a guide and example by the Church, even if many individual Catholics did. It was later banned, though too late by then.
  • Witch hunts actually peaked after the Reformation, particularly in areas where central authority was lost due to war, like in the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, the Low Countries during The Eighty Years' War, Germany during the Thirty Years' War, Scandinavia after the Kalmar War, and Hungary around the Great Turkish War. Italy and Spain, with its ill-reputed Inquisition, were internally stable and the witch craze there was negligible. This did not stop later Protestant and secular authors from citing the witch trials to prove how dumb and evil Catholics are.
• Trials by Ordeal were not the illogical or comic farces they are seen as today where the only logical result was guilt or death. In societies where religious belief was strong the guilty would be inclined to confess (often to a reduced punishment) while the innocent would request the ordeal. Modern research shows that judges had ample opportunities to determine the results of the ordeal, with two-thirds typically being found innocent. Trials by Ordeal vanished during the Enlightenment as society-wide belief in religion weakened, but had been largely replaced already by legal reforms that even the Catholic Church instituted, like forbidding priests to participate in them in 1215.
  • As dumb as the "Trial by Cold Water" sounds (a person is dunked in water: if it sinks, it's innocent; if floats, guilty), witnesses were actually supposed to retrieve the "innocent" before they drowned, using the same rope and pulley used to lower them into the water. Pope Joan and the Back to the Future cartoon forget this part.
• "Feudalism", once considered the defining characteristic of Medieval government and society, is now considered an invention of historians. The notion of a pyramid of obligations linking king to lord to knight to commoner goes against many primary sources; kings held (or were expected to hold) the allegiance of all their subjects, not just the most prominent ones, and the gifts and homages of the ruling class were an unkempt web of reciprocal obligations. Having said that, poor communications meant that while kings held the allegiance of all their subjects, they (like present-day governments in large countries) relied on local representatives for day-to-day governance. And again like many present-day governments, poor supervision by the higher-ups often led to local representatives accumulating more power/wealth than they were supposed to.
  • Droit du Seigneur, the supposed right of feudal lords to take the virginity of their serfs' daughters (more recently re-popularized by Braveheart), is considered a myth. No evidence has surfaced that it was ever codified in the laws of any country, though saying that your enemies did it was a good way to motivate your troops in times of war. 16th century rulers would also claim that some illustrious ancestor of theirs had banned the practice, and fiction authors liked to include such scenes for obvious reasons. Niccolò Machiavelli pointed out that engaging in such practices would have offended religious authorities and outraged one's own subjects.
• While it was once believed that the marriage of prepubescent girls to grown men was common practice in Medieval and early Modern Europe, the marriage registries of the period show that most people waited until at least their late teens to get married. Marrying young girls was reserved almost exclusively to the nobility, who did it for political reasons, and even then the marriage was rarely consummated before the girl was old enough to get pregnant without complications. The Byzantine emperor Andronikos I was criticized in his time for consummating his marriage with the twelve-year-old Agnes of France.
• Medieval arms and armor have long been depicted as heavy and cumbersome. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court again, with its easily dogged knights weighed down by armor and swords, popularized this and may have as well created this subtrope for Armor Is Useless, still played unironically in the Bronn vs Ser Vardys Trial by Combat of Game of Thrones. Only relatively recently has this prejudice begun to be overturned in popular culture:
  • Swords were believed to be little more than heavy iron clubs, inferior to Eastern swords, and it was thought that knights simply bashed away without finesse. However Medieval and Early Modern swordplay treatises reveal a highly-developed, formalized school of martial arts. Furthermore, most samples that led to the popular depiction were ceremonial and display pieces that were never intended for combat. Surviving battlefield weapons (which are rare, as they were to be used, not preserved) reveal light, well-balanced, often sharp blades of higher-quality steel than their Eastern counterparts. An actual longsword would range between 2-4 pounds, with the median range being much more common. Compare this to 6lb longswords in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons.
  • The idea that plate armor was so heavy that knights couldn't even get on the saddle themselves (the films A Connecticut Yankee (1931) and Henry V (1944) both have knights humoristically hoisted onto horses with cranes) also owes much to display pieces, particularly heavy tournament armor. None were intended for practical use and the latter was the period's equivalent of football pads, overengineered to protect the wearer. Armor made for battle weighed no more than the kit of a modern soldier and was better distributed; plate was even lighter than the mail used in earlier periods, and offered very little restriction to motion. Contemporary accounts even describe knights testing out new suits by doing cartwheels in them. A short film by Daniel Jaquet on YouTube shows an obstacle course run by a firefighter, a modern soldier in full gear, and a man in plate; the latter comes in between the soldier and firefighter, outrunning the soldier by 14 seconds. Another video shows a reenactor in full plate getting on the saddle in one jump, among other athletic feats.
  • It is also understood that knights in plate generally did not carry shields, as these barely improved on a fully armored body for the weight they added. In turn, the shield's absence allowed knights to fight with two-handed weapons (longsword, polehammer, halberd) that were better at breaching plate. The exception is, again, tournament armor, which did have a shield — because jousting knights were deliberately aiming at them! In the Game of Thrones example above, the lightly armored fighter turns down a shield, while his fully armored opponent uses a massive kite shield (historically used before plate was invented).
  • A related misconception is that medieval warhorses needed to be huge and lumbering draft-horses, like Shires or Clydesdales, to carry the weight of an armored knight. Draft horses (and horse BREEDS in general) are much Newer Than They Think at only a few centuries old, and even if they existed back then, they were bred for farming, not war. An ideal destrier is often compared to a modern sports car, as they were able to stop, sprint, and turn on a dime, which draft horses are not known for. Moreover, while it is often believed that knights couldn't even mount their horses by themselves, real knights were trained to mount and dismount from the ground in full armor, and many specifically preferred shorter horses to make that easier.
• Katanas themselves have been the victim of a lot of myths regarding their effectiveness. While the Katanas Are Just Better trope has been very widespread, the pushback against this depiction has caused the modern misconceptions to swing completely in the other direction. To list just a few:
  • A very popular misconception is that Japanese iron sources were extremely poor and very sparce. However a broader examination of the various iron sources of the time reveal that they actually did have quite pure sources of iron known as "Mochi Tetsu" which could have a purity rating as high as 60%, comparable even to the famously pure iron of Sweden. The famous iron sand was used because it came with large quantities of carbon already in it, though even that could manage a level of iron purity as high as 58% depending on the region. These were hardly found in low quantities either, as accounts as late as the 17th century attested to the quantity of their iron being plentiful.
  • As a pushback to the notion that they were more durable than European blades, it's now become quite common for people to claim they were actually quite brittle and bent easily. While it's true that the Japanese didn't use spring tempers for their swords (a heat treating process used to make steel very flexible and spring back into shape), they did temper their blades using a process called differential hardening, which still allowed for some degree of flexibility as well as a harder edge. Coupled with the overall blade geometry this means that while the blade wouldn't spring back quite as readily and could end up bent, a blade of reasonable quality wouldn't be much more likely to break than a European sword if at all, and was much harder to bend than the myths would have you believe. In fact, it was extremely common for swordsmiths to do very abusive testing on their blades in a practice known as "aratameshi", where a new sword would be used on things like bamboo, deer antlers and even iron tools and armor to see how it held up.
• The idea that everyone in the Middle Ages believed that bathing was unhealthy is pervasive in modern times. In reality there were public bathhouses and saunas throughout the Middle Ages (inherited from the Romans), despite nudity taboos and opposition by liturgical factions. Bathing did not start to decline until after the Renaissance when, on the one hand, there was a shift from wool to the much easier to clean linen, allowing people who had not regularly bathed to maintain a clean and well-groomed appearance (that the decline in bathing saw a significant increase in the importance of laundry and perfume should also be noted); on the other, diseases like the Black Plague and syphilis spread like wildfire in bathhouses. In the second case this was helped by the fact that bathhouses also were often places of illicit sex and prostitution; it is only natural that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation's tightened sexual mores both fed from this and put the final nail on public bathhouses. But even without bathhouses people would wash themselves otherwise, and outside large polluting cities it was typical to bathe in rivers and lakes. The origin of this trope lies in part in anecdotes like Louis XIV (who lived centuries after the Middle Ages) only bathing twice in his life, and Queen Isabella vowing to not change shirts until Granada fell (a baseless myth).
  • This is perhaps more popular in Mexico and some other Latin American countries, where "clean, well-groomed natives" are contrasted with "dirty, smelly conquistadors", and there is nationalist pride in the belief that Latin Americans today shower daily and Europeans don't. Thus while promoting the Mexican period series Hernán, Spanish actress Aura Garrido made the rare criticism that the hairdressers were always tousling her hair.
• The idea that alcoholic beverages like beer and wine were used as replacements for water due to concerns about potability is, by and large, hogwash. In reality neither is antiseptic despite containing alcohol; the fermentation process that creates both is made by microorganisms in the first place. Like today, alcoholic drinks were consumed for their intoxicating effects and for variety in the diet. The origins of this trope are unclear, but could be a mix of pre-World War I Whig History and its belief in the inherent progress of human society, backdating the 19th century cholera epidemics to the more remote past, and the Middle Ages being a plain acceptable target. It is also a much more popular idea in countries with a Protestant tradition, just like many Medieval tropes listed here.
  • In a misguided attempt to subvert readers' expectations, Household Gods gives this trope to the Roman Empire, which Hollywood History usually has as Ye Goode Olde Days of indoor plumbing and aqueducts before The Dung Ages.
• Another that gets tossed around is that the average human life expectancy in the Middle Ages was 35 years old (the same is true for any pre-Industrial time, but it is a mocked subject like the Middle Ages and more rarely Prehistory, as shown by Far Cry Primal, which mostly get hit by this), which is morphed into claiming that people at 35 would be considered elderly in their time and appear elderly to us. This is a wild misinterpretation that ignores the meaning of the word average: the reason it was so low is because up to 30% of all people born died before they were five, and the vast majority of those died before reaching one. If a person didn't fall to untreatable disease, they could realistically expect to live into their 70s. It goes without saying, however, that the fact that life expectancy was lower did play a role in the perception of elders, as an individual approaching their 80s would have been treated with the same reverence we would show today to people in their 90s or to centenarians.
• The notion of Europeans importing spices to disguise the flavor of rotten meat is more nonsense. Meat preservation techniques like salting, drying, or smoking were effective, plus spices were extremely expensive (much more than the best meat) and wouldn't have magically made spoiled meat safe to eat anyway. If anything, Medieval people would have been more averse to eat suspicious food than us, since they couldn't count on artificial conservatives or medicine to treat food poisoning.
• The Old Prussian religion was once generally accepted to be polydoxic — to be more specific, a faith defined by a belief in the sacredness of all natural forces and phenomena (not personified but possessed of their own magic), as well as a belief that the world is inhabited by a limitless number of spirits and demons. But in the 21st century, a competing theory emerged, with some historians arguing for a well-developed, sophisticated polytheism with a clearly defined pantheon of gods.

Migration Period (5th-8th centuries)

• The very concept of the Fall of Rome as a singular event in 476 AD, a big part of the premise in the original Age of Empires II, is discredited and really came about because Renaissance and Enlightenment historians in Western Europe wanted to make a clear line between the glory of Rome and themselves. This meant dismissing or outright ignoring the Byzantine Empire, which remained the dominant superpower in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa until the 7th century (and may well have remained so, if the rise of Islam had not coincided with the end of over 20 years of total war with Persia that left the Empire exhausted), held Rome until the mid 8th century, and large portions of Italy well into the 11th century. After that, it remained a regional power until the 4th Crusade of 1204 (and even then, it stuck around in diminished form until finally being conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453). It also remained a magnet for scholars, traders, and adventurers, being at the Western end of the Silk Road and the Varangian trade route from the Baltic. It wasn't even called Byzantine until the 16th century, when it was dubbed as such to separate it from Rome, in a long tradition that previously had referred to it as 'the Empire of the Greeks', among other things. The so-called Byzantines very much considered themselves to be 'Romaioi', and were called that by their eastern neighbors — the Ottomans even kept the title of Roman Emperor as 'Kayser-i-Rum', dubbing their Christian subjects 'Romans', into the 20th century. When discussed, it was at best dismissed as the effeminate and corrupt remnant of the noble and macho Roman Empire, save for honorable mention of 6th century titans like Justinian and Belisarius. Some historians have directly blamed Edward Gibbon's disinterest for the Byzantine Empire in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, despite including it all the way to 1453, for the lack of attention given to it by Western researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
  • The roots of this are complicated, but have to do with the Iconoclasm controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries. The idea was that the very iconoclastic Muslims were God's punishment on the Byzantines for violating the commandment on worshiping graven images, leading to about a century and half of wrangling over the status of icons (eventually the pro-icon party won out). At one point in the late 8th century, the Empress Irene took the throne, and the Pope — who opposed her and had been trying to wrangle more independence for Rome — took it as an excuse to declare the position of Roman Emperor vacant and crown Charlemagne. He didn't take it overly seriously, but later successors did. The Byzantines, meanwhile, didn't have too much problem with the idea of a foreigner being considered Emperor of their own people (i.e. the Franks), but had a big problem with someone calling themselves Roman Emperor, as it implied a claim to Constantinople itself. Add in geopolitical squabbling over Italy, some of the more ambitious Sicilian Normans trying to conquer the Empire, and a growing rivalry with Venice and you have a recipe for trouble. The Crusades absolutely did not help, with plenty of pre-existing xenophobia on both sides, culminating with the sack and occupation of Constantinople in 1204, until The Remnant Empire of Nicaea took it back in 1261. However, at the same time, the West and East maintained active diplomatic relationships, traded royal brides, and the Pope was horrified by the sack of Constantinople, excommunicating the entire Crusade on the spot — though the sheer amount of cash later won him over.
  • Even a common "excuse" for using the term "Dark Ages" nowadays (i.e. that it is wrong for the whole Middle Ages, but somewhat accurate for the first centuries after the Fall of Rome, when political disruption affected record-keeping negatively, and there is a dearth of this period's historical knowledge as a result (thus the name "Dark Ages" is not about diminished quality of life, but current knowledge) ...is really only valid for the British Isles, which were thrown into chaos after the legions left in 410. In Gaul, Spain, Italy, Tunisia, not to mention the Byzantine Empire, Roman institutions survived (just with Germanic kings replacing Roman governors in the first four), and we have a generally solid idea of what was going on there in this time. We lose the picture in more faraway areas outside of Roman civilization like northwest Africa and central, northern, and eastern Europe, but this is because we only had second-hand Roman narratives about them in the first place.
  • Despite common Western interpretations later on, the division of the Roman Empire wasn't seen as the division of a state when it happened, but the division of its government, and the deposition of Romulus Augustus by Odoacer wasn't considered a cataclysm, or a notable event at all (unlike how it's shown in The Last Legion). Romulus had himself usurped the previous emperor, Julius Nepos, the year before. Odoacer named himself King of Italy but also claimed Nepos as his superior (who was still ruling The Remnant in Dalmatia), and after Nepos's murder he pledged himself to the emperor Zeno in Constantinople, thus reuniting the Roman government under him (if only on paper). The common people of the West continued to call themselves Roman and follow Roman law, which was different from the laws of the Germanic kings and peoples. These different law codes were unified and the ethnic lines blurred as the kings asserted independence from Constantinople over the 6th century.
• The supposed fall of Western culture was once thought in part to have been caused by a series of massive tribal migrations collectively known as the "Völkerwanderung". Specific examples included the migrations of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes to England; the Lombards into Italy; the Vandals and Visigoths into Spain; and the Franks into northern France. The belief was that these tribal migrations displaced the original inhabitants of these areas, sending them into less hospitable areas (such as the "Celtic fringe" of the British Isles) and disrupting cultural progress. But DNA comparisons of ancient and modern peoples show very little evidence that the Völkerwanderung ever occurred; modern Englishmen, for instance, are far more closely related to ancient Britons (and to modern Scots, Irish, and Welshmen) than they are to modern Saxons. This DNA evidence is so new that historians are still grappling with the implications, but one possibility is that the Völkerwanderung only displaced the elite — about 0.5% of the population in most areas — leaving the bulk of the population unaffected except by cultural changes.
  • England is the unusual case in this. Genetics vary a lot based on region; Midlanders cluster closest to Northwestern Europeans (being about equidistant with them and Insular Celts), while people in western and northern England are virtually identical to their Celtic neighbors. Modern consensus is that there was a significant migration of Anglo-Saxons to Britain, but still not to the extent once believed: a minority of 10-25% of the total population assimilated the native Britons, rather than the old theory that they massacred and drove out all of the natives. King Arthur references the debunked theory in its portrayal of Cerdic as A Nazi by Any Other Name that doesn't want Saxon and Briton blood to mix.
  • Some of those erroneous assumptions are due to upper-class historians of previous eras preferring to write about elites, often treated as identical to the peoples they led. Also, there seems to be a difficulty distinguishing between armies and peoples during the 5th and 6th century. Also also sometimes the linguistic evidence leads one astray — while the Spanish language has little to no Germanic influence (indicating a quickly assimilated small elite) French has much more "Frankish" loanwords, and the decidedly Germanic Old English all but replaced the previous Celtic (and Romance-British) languages — so absent genetic evidence and with chroniclers talking of "utter defeats" and "cataclysms", it is understandable they thought Anglo-Saxons all but replaced the prior Celtic population.
• The idea that the Slavs descended from Scythian and Sarmatian peoples is now generally considered pseudohistory. There is some evidence of cultural cross-pollination, but they probably weren't directly related. It is generally believed that Scythians were to various degrees displaced and/or assimilated by Turkic migrations during the Late antiquity. This remains a highly controversial topic however, as both Russian and Turkic nationalists have an interest in hijacking Scythian historiography to claim them as ancestors.
• One idea that gained significant traction in the 19th century is the notion that there was a "Celtic Church" in the early medieval British Isles separate from the "Latin Church" of Continental Europe. Nowadays, the notion that Celtic Christianity was inherently distinct from the Catholic Church has been rejected by mainstream scholars due to lack of evidence; while Christians in the Celtic world developed unique traditions and practices not seen in Christendom as a whole, they respected the authority of Rome and the Papacy as much as any other region. In any case, the histories of the Irish, Welsh, Scots, Breton, Cornish, and Manx Churches diverge significantly after the 8th century, so even if they did reject the Holy See's authority, there wouldn't have been a unified Celtic Church.
• In The Divine Comedy, Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali are shown in the Eighth circle of Hell for promoting Schism. This is a reference to the then new belief that Islam was not a Pagan religion (as previously assumed and shown in the Chanson de Roland, for instance) but a heretical offshoot of Christianity that began when a monk variously named Simon Magus, Nicholas, or Sergius led Muhammad astray. Today we know that Muhammad never was a Christian.^note Certainly Muhammad was influenced by Christianity, given that he names Jesus as his immediate predecessor as a Prophet, but his interpretation of Jesus was very different from any known Christian sect. Harry Turtledove's Agent of Byzantium series make an Allohistorical Allusion to the legend in having Muhammad become a Christian (and eventually, the Saint who christianized Arabia) as the point of departure with our timeline.
• The survival of Greco-Roman works in the Muslim World while they were lost in Christian Europe was though to have been because of conscious preservation by the Muslims (and/or direct persecution by the Christians), but that is seen now as a myth. For climatic reasons, papyrus documents survived better in the countries the Muslims conquered. There were also Christians and Jews in those areas who preserved ancient works, but the Muslims rulers got the credit. Most lost books and plays weren't destroyed deliberately, they just weren't copied, and rotted away.
• Before the late 20th century, it was unchallenged that Rodrigo (Roderic) was the last king of the Visigoths in Spain, that he was legitimately elected in 710 after the natural death of the previous king, Witiza, and that "Witiza's children" were sore losers who had invited the Muslims to invade in 711 and collaborated out of spite or naivety. However...
  • Sources closer to Roderic's time were uncovered, claiming that he had been "elected by the Senate", but "in a revolt", and that he had "conquered the Palace" after a period in exile (location unknown, but could very well have been Ceuta, where some Andalusian stories after the conquest, long considered legendary, had placed him).
  • Revised chronologies also showed that Cixilo, the presumed mother of Witiza, had only married his father Egica some 25-30 years before Witiza's death. So either Witiza was born from an undocumented first marriage of Egica, or he was a young man when he died, not old as assumed. If the latter, Witiza's children (had he any), would have been literal children in 711, and young ones; several "sons of Witiza" recorded as collaborators might have been other relatives of his, or just his partidaries. Sure, it is still possible that Witiza died of natural causes since sources don't say either way, and that Roderic just took advantage of it to seize power, but a simpler explanation is that Roderic murdered Witiza.
  • Finally, archaeology revealed that while Roderic was minting coins in the capital, some Achila II was doing his own in the northeastern part of the kingdom. Was Achila one of Witiza's children? A third claimant to the crown, also swept aside by the Muslim invasion? Either way, it shows Roderic wasn't even in control of the whole kingdom when he went down fighting the Muslims. A 12th century list of Visigothic kings was also found in France, which does not include Roderic (unlike lists made in Spain) but has Achila II reigning in 710-713, followed by a last one called Ardo in 713-720. The end of Ardo's reign coincides with the Muslims conquering the last Visigothic province (Septimania, in what is now southern France) nine years after Roderic's death at Guadalete.
• Spaniards (everybody forgets the Portuguese) have long been assumed to have considerable non-European ancestry as a result of the Muslim conquest. Martin Luther thought this made them naturally wicked, Adolf Hitler was surprisingly cool with it, Jorge Luis Borges derided antisemitism as self-hating, and so on. In fiction, it is used to justify instances of Latino Is Brown and Black Vikings (Sir Bryant in The Legend of Prince Valiant, Tariq in George and the Dragon, Lina and Oviedo in The Spanish Princess, General Alaman in The Musketeers), or portraying historical characters as much darker than we know they were, even when they had recent non-Iberian ancestry (Isabella Clara Eugenia in Ruled Britannia, Queen Isabella in The Spanish Princess). Fans have used it to defend casting Antonio Banderas as Ahmad ibn Fadlan in The 13th Warrior. Yet, studies have shown repeatedly that Iberian genetics are typical of westernmost Europe and largely unchanged since the Paleolithic, with "Middle Eastern" genes being less common than in Italy or the Balkans. "North African" genes are more common (though still negligible), but they cluster to the west of the Peninsula, not south, and may indicate that Medieval diffusion from North Africa was a drop compared to Atlantic coastal movement going back to Megalitism and continued through the Punic and Roman periods. This makes sense because there was no mass die-off and policy of settlement after the Muslim conquest like there was in the Americas (and if anything, there was a policy from the Late Middle Ages to displace the Muslims for Christian colonists, sometimes from beyond the Pyrenees). Most "Moors" were descendants of local converts and the ones who came from abroad were few and overhelmingly male, dilluting themselves in the majority.
• The Battle of Talas, where the Tang dynasty was defeated by the Abbasid Caliphate and the Tibetan Empire, was once said to have been a crucially important event that ended Chinese hegemony over Central Asia and ensured Islam became the dominant religion there. While the battle may have been significant in other ways (many sources claim it indirectly resulted in papermaking technology being introduced to the Islamic world), scholarship has disputed this particular claim. It's now believed that the diminished Tang influence afterwards had more to do with the collapse of the Western Turkic Khaganate and the devastation of the An Lushan rebellion than the battle itself. Moreover, some evidence suggests that Tang power in Central Asia reached its zenith by 755, four years after the battle and the year the rebellion broke out. While the Tang's Karluk allies did defect to the Abbasid-Tibetan forces, the Karluks as a whole didn't turn against the Chinese. Indeed, the Karluk Yabghu polity continued its alliance with China. Other religions continued to play major roles in Central Asia for some time after the battle: The Qara Khitai Empire, for example, had a population that largely followed the traditional Khitan religion, Buddhism, and Nestorian Christianity; even today, the Khitan people's modern day descendants, the Daur, are mostly Buddhist and Shamanist, with Muslims being only a minority.
• The traditional view of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, influenced by the Chanson de Roland, of a joint Basque-Muslim ambush of Charlemagne's rearguard. A 2018 review of the area's geography and Carolingian sources suggested that the army's core was attacked instead (probably after being chased from Pamplona) and the Franks fought their way through 14 kilometers of pass with great losses, beginning at Errozabal plain (later morphed into Roncevaux; not the town of Roncevaux, founded later and named after the battle). Roland died, but also the Mayor of the Palace Eggihard, Royal Paladin Anselm, and many other paladins that the chronicler (Einhard) does not name because he considers their deaths common knowledge. This would only have happened if Charlemagne's own life was in danger and they died protecting him, which is consistent with Charlemagne covering 27 km in one day when the normal speed of his army was around 8.5. Finally, there is no mention of Muslims at the battle, which makes more sense for the area and the time; in fact, contemporary Muslims do not mention the battle at all. It seems the Franks hid Charlemagne's presence in the defeat and flight, and the Chanson later misrepresented the campaign as a Crusade and the battle as a Muslim attack on the rearguard, in order to include an External Retcon ending where Charlemagne learns of Roland's death and returns to bury the fallen and conquer Spain.
  • The official synopsis of Irati says that an alliance of "Basques and Muslims" ambushes Charlemagne at Roncevaux, but in the film the Muslims are just ambassadors watching from afar and the Basques do all the fighting. The movie then continues by referencing the (historical) Altar Diplomacy between the Basque kings of Pamplona and the Muslim Banu Qasi of the Ebro valley, but this ends being so irrelevant to the plot that you will question why it was included at all (moreso because it's absent from the original comic).

Viking Age (9th-10th centuries)

• Real Vikings did not have horned helmets. The idea that they did results from early archaeologists mixing together scattered evidence from several time periods, when not mistaking drinking horns for helmet ornaments. Actual examples of horned helmets are much older and appear to be ceremonial. Vikings were professional raiders, and their actual gear was Boring, but Practical: they'd know not to wear something so cumbersome as a horned helmet into battle; once an opponent got past the intimidation factor, those horns would be little more than handles to grab onto. The novel Pope Joan included horned helmets in its first edition; after receiving reader complaints, Donna Woolfolk Cross listed the evidence in the Author's Note before concluding that the complainers were most likely right, and wrote the horns out of later editions (though not without lamenting the loss of the cool imagery).
• Reports of the Classic Maya collapse between the 8th and 9th centuries are now known to have been exaggerated. Maya civilization as a whole did not collapse in any meaningful way; rather, it shifted from the Southern Lowlands to the Northern Yucatán, though admittedly with very different artistic and architectural styles. Because of this, a number of scholars have gone on record opposing the use of the word "collapse" to describe this event.
• In the 19th century, a theory emerged that most Ashkenazi Jews descended from Khazars, a Turkic people that inhabited the Pontic-Caspian steppe and apparently converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century. According to this, they abandoned their homeland during the Mongol invasions and fled to Central and Eastern Europe, becoming the Ashkenazim except for the Jews of Germany, who were a minority of actual Israelite stock. It also postulated that the Yiddish language evolved from Crimean Gothic rather than German. Most scholars today view this with skepticism, due to the lack of any evident link between Khazars and Ashkenazim:
  • For one, the conversion of Khazars to Judaism itself is poorly understood, and it's impossible from the current body of evidence to determine if it was a mass conversion or only the elite took part in it (which is more plausible).
  • Yiddish's characteristics, grammar and vocabulary are undoubtedly of High German origin, making any attempts at connecting it to other Germanic languages just complicating things. Some suggest that Khazar Jews learned Yiddish from German Jews, but again, it's just complicating things.
  • Genetic studies failed to show connections between modern Ashkenazi Jews and steppe Turkic populations. Ashkenazim form a genetic cluster with Southern Italians and Greeks, suggesting that they intermixed with Southern European populations before migrating to Germany, then Eastern Europe. It makes sense when you look at a map and see what's between Central Europe and the Near East.
  • Descendants of the Khazars are believed to be Turkic peoples still inhabiting the North Caucasus, such as Kumyks, who are Muslim. There are also Turkic-speaking Jews in Crimea, the Krymchaks and Crimean Karaites, but consensus suggests not even they originated from converted Khazars (though there could have been intermixing with them).
  • Annoyingly, this theory has been hijacked by fringe anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists who believe Khazars converted to Judaism to infiltrate and destroy European peoples, that Ashkenazi Jews are actually Khazars and "fake Jews" or "impostors" whose current claim in Palestine is illegitimate, that the "Khazarian Mafia" leads a worldwide conspiracy... you get the rest.
• Pope Joan was widely accepted as real in The Late Middle Ages, but was exposed as a legend by historians in the 16th century already and denounced by the Catholic Church in 1601. Records indicate that she couldn't possibly have reigned in the mid-850s as claimed and no contemporary sources make any mention of a Pope who turned out to be female, not even ones from enemies of the Papacy like the Holy Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire. Photios I, who became Patriarch of Constantinople in 858 and was deposed by Pope Nicholas I in 863, vehemently asserted his own authority over Rome's and would have made the most of any scandal regarding the Papacy; yet he never once brings up the story in his voluminous writings, even saying at one point "Leo [IV] and Benedict [III], successively great priests of the Roman Church", without a hint of Joan ruling between them. The first written mentions of Joan are from the 13th century, and are basically Dominican priests' cautionary tales for women to Stay in the Kitchen - a fierce contrast to the anti-clerical (e.g. Emmanuel Rhoides's The Papess Joanne) or feminist spins (Pope Joan) that modern portrayals give to the story.
  • In Pope Joan, Cross attributes Joan's "erasure from History" to the Vatican archivist Anastasius Bibliothecarius, who was her supposed contemporary and the author of the Liber Pontificalis ("Book of the Popes"). However, though Anastasius was attributed most biographies in the book for centuries, modern scholarship attributes him only two, both after Joan's supposed pontificate.
• The Magyars were once thought to be closely related to the Scythians or the Huns. Linguistic analysis in the 19th century disproved this (again, some cultural cross-pollination can't be ruled out given the dynamics of the Eurasian steppes), but the idea of a Hunnic connection has continued to exert influence on Hungarian nationalism.
• The Vinland Sagas claim that Erik the Red deliberately gave Greenland a misleading name to attract settlers from Norway and Iceland. This was accepted without much thought until the Medieval Warm Period was identified in the late 20th century, which made some wonder if this was a just-so story, and Greenland was green enough when Erik settled in 985 AD, some 300 years before the Sagas were written.^note This doesn't mean that the whole of Greenland was iceless at any point in history, as sometimes misreported, but that the area near Erik's estate in Brattahlid was (in fact the Greenlandic ice sheet already started forming 18 million years ago). The same area turns green in the summer today and is home to Greenland's only forest and most of its farms. Historical accounts also speak of devastating winters and famine in Greenland even during the Medieval Warm Period, which was about one degree colder than the present global average, despite its name.
• The Sadlermiut (a now-extinct circumpolar people who lived on a few islands in Hudson Bay) were once thought to be the last remnants of the Dorset culture, due to their technology and culture being different from those of the mainland Inuit. Research published in 2015, however, proved that they were actually descended from the proto-Inuit Thule people. Now it's believed that their differences are a product of isolation, though in the absence of any evidence of genetic admixture, it remains a mystery how they acquired Dorset technological and cultural features.

High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries)

• It is now believed that there wasn't really a specific people known as the Kurds until the High Middle Ages, the first unambiguous evidence of Kurdish ethnic identity being from the 11th century. Prior usage of "Kurd" was more likely a social term to designate northwestern Iranian nomads, partially as a means of distinguishing them from the Persians.
• The "Thirisadai", a claimed massive battleship class of the southern Indian Chola dynasty, appears in the 2018 novel The Conqueror and is a unique ship of the Dravidian civilization in the 2022 Dynasties of India DLC of Age of Empires II. It was later exposed that both had been based on an extensively vandalized Wikipedia article on the Chola Navy, with several madeup ship classes, fake sources, and even a photograph fraudulently identified as a Chola anchor, but that actually belonged to a ship sunk during the Mongol invasion of Japan. Most fake info was written in 2008 and was not challenged due to the obscurity of the subject. By the time it was exposed, the article's creator had not edited Wikipedia in several years.
• El Cid Campeador:
  • Most things people may remember — that he killed his future father-in-law in a tourney, witnessed Sancho II's murder, forced Alfonso VI to swear he was not involved in his brother's death at St. Gadea's church, won a battle while dead — are just literary creation, and have always been known to be. Still, historians were willing to believe that the rivalry between the Castilian El Cid and the old Leonese nobility in the Cantar del mio Cid had a basis in El Cid being, or descending from, a Self-Made Man who had gained noblehood through military service. However, genealogical and documentary research in the 21st century showed that he descended from Leonese nobility on both sides of his family (his ancestors included the Flaínez, which were of Gothic origin and among the oldest lineages in the kingdom). He may have been born in Castile as per tradition, or not, and just accompanied Sancho there when he was given it by his father. The c. 1200 Cantar may have introduced or exaggerated a Castilian-Leonese conflict because it was written when Castile and Leon were separate kingdoms with border disputes and opposing views on their relations with the Almohads, while in El Cid's time (c. 1045-1099) there was almost no difference between the two.
  • The name "El Cid" itself. Nowadays, and for centuries used exclusively for Rodrigo Díaz. Pop history will always note that it derives from the African Arabic word Sidi (a corruption of the Arabian Sayyid, "Lord"), have him receiving it as a title from either his Muslim soldiers or employers (as in El Cid and Age of Empires II), and highlight how strange it is for a Knight in Shining Armor of the Crusader era. However, contemporary documents show that "cid" was just a common word for war leader in 11th-century Spain, used by Christians and Muslims alike, and that it continued to be used as a courtesy until the 14th. The historical Rodrigo was known and signed as El Campeador ("Master of the Field"), which was an actual accomplishment. He went from El cid (one of many), to El Cid Campeador (the one and only), to El Cid (the one, after the common meaning of "cid" was forgotten). Christians serving Muslim kings and leading Muslim troops as Private Military Contractors, even against other Christians, wasn't uncommon in the 11th century either. The Muslim south was richer but militarily weak after the fragmentation of the Caliphate of Cordoba (though there are examples from the time of the Caliphate as well), and outsourcing was convenient to get around the taboo of fighting other Muslims. What made Rodrigo exceptional was that he was exiled beforehand, won every battle he fought, and wound up as de-facto King of his own Muslim state.
  • El Cid (2020) refrains from showing Rodrigo go by "El Cid" and instead has other characters use "El Campeador" to talk about him, which he is shown as gaining for his role in the Battle of Graus (1063). Ironically, this could also qualify as Dated History, as some historians believe he might have been too young to have fought in that battle, and general consensus is that he gained the title later on. The first season is also big on showing Rodrigo as a young nobody climbing his way up, though the second season mentions that he has noble ancestry.
  • On the opposite end, the Siege of Alcocer from the Cantar was deemed an invention due to the implausibility of El Cid taking a detour from his ride between Burgos and Zaragoza to fight the king of Valencia in southern Guadalajara, an area that was ruled by Toledo at the time. In the 21st century it was discovered that there was another Alcocer just southwest of Zaragoza, and sure enough, the archaeological remains of the castle and El Cid's siege camp were found. Same almost happened to Sancho's murder at the siege of Zamora; surviving chronicles don't say how he died, and his death at the hands of Vellido Dolfos was considered legendary, along with Dolfos himself. However a document was found showing that a 'Vellit Adulfiz' was living in Zamora in 1057, which naturally makes people wonder.
• Though Crusader forces resorting to cannibalism out of desperation during the Siege of Ma'arra is widely accepted, the idea that they tortured and murdered captive Muslims to eat them rather than sticking to eating people who were already dead is now in dispute. Examination of Muslim sources shows no mention of the Crusaders killing people to eat them, something the Muslims would have capitalized on to demonize their enemies.
• Despite modern associations with the word, Gothic architecture actually wasn't all that dark; churches used to be painted bright colors, and there was plenty of light let in by typically Gothic pointed, tall, stained glass windows. After centuries, the paint faded away, everything was covered in grime and dust, and the colors were lost. Emulators in later centuries made buildings that looked like the old churches ended up looking, with all the gloominess and intimidation that entails, despite the fact that they didn't look like that originally. Modern tourists sometimes complain after a cathedral gets its windows washed because suddenly the interior is "too bright".
  • In terms of art history, the idea that the Renaissance was an improvement over Gothic art became this in the 19th century, when Medievalism and folklore became a topic of interest, and many sought to restore and preserve Europe's Medieval past. Art historian E. H. Gombrich argued that art as a profession flowered to a greater degree in the pre-Renaissance age when artists were part of guilds, patronized and subsidized by the Church than they were in the post-Renaissance age, where they had to struggle in the marketplace to sell their paintings for a living and barely struggled over the poverty line. While there were some who were able to avoid this through attracting wealthy patrons (like Michelangelo) or their own business savvy (like Albrecht Dürer), artists generally had less financial security in the Renaissance than they did in the Medieval era.
  • The very name "Gothic" is a misnomer maintained out of force of habit. It is rooted on Renaissance writers deriding Late Medieval architecture as "the ways of the Goths" (maniera dei Goti) and proposing a return to Roman architecture, unaware (willingly or unwillingly) that the Goths were gone for centuries before "Gothic" architecture appeared, and that the actual period of Gothic rule in Italy was one of stability and continuation of Roman architecture (Justinian's wars, plague, and the Lombards should be the ones blamed for its end).
• Traditionally, the First Swedish Crusade of the 1150s was seen as the first attempt by Sweden and the Catholic Church to convert pagan Finns to Christianity. However, not only is it now accepted that the Christianization of southwestern Finland began in the 10th century, whether this supposed crusade even happened is now a subject of debate.
• Matilda of Flanders, wife of William the Conqueror, was for a long time believed to have been incredibly short, around 4 feet, 2 inches tall. The first estimation was calculated in the early 19th century but her tomb had been ransacked centuries before leaving some of her bones missing. However a more modern scientific study was undertaken in the late 1950s that estimated her height around 5”0 which was average for a woman of her time. Modern scientists also don’t believe it would be plausible that a woman who was as short as she was originally thought to be could have given birth to at least ten children like Matilda did.
• Rosamund Clifford, a mistress of Henry II of England, had some longstanding myths about her, such as that she was the mother of Henry's illegitimate son Geoffrey Plantagenet (it's now believed that he was born before Henry met Rosamund, and his mother was a woman named Ykenai), and that she was murdered by Henry's jealous wife Eleanor Of Aquitaine (in reality, she probably died of an illness; Eleanor was under house arrest at the time Rosamund died).
• The Name of the Rose was titled after a quote from Bernard of Cluny, Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus ("Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names"), which is also the last line in the book. It was later discovered that this was a transcription error; Cluny's original read "Yesterday's Rome endures in its name..."
• The view popularized by Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe of plucky "Saxon" commoners still resisting their "Norman" overlords a century or two after the conquest has been shown to be hogwash — but that doesn't stop it showing up in many subsequent Robin Hood adaptations, where the Sheriff's soldiers are referred to as Normans to make it OK for Robin to kill them. In the Robin Hood story, the Merry Men also long for "Good King Richard" to return and oust the evil Norman usurper, John. But Richard was John's brother, so a Norman, as well. Also it's often forgotten in the stories that although John did take control of England when Richard was held prisoner in Austria, he also succeeded him as king after his death (not without a rebellion, though it was put down).
  • This idea either dates to the Hundred Years War, when Henry V's propagandists started to play up an imaginary antagonism with France (despite Henry's whole claim in the war being based on him being technically a member of the French royal family), or to the Reformation, when it was even more useful to play up a nationalist narrative. Such was the strength of the legend that people were referencing the "Norman yoke" which had supposedly derailed English freedoms as justifications for rebellion in the 17th century. There was no sense of Norman and non-Norman by then, but it was a handy reason to demand more rights. Scott was clearly on a well-trodden path when he penned his work.
  • The fact that the Norman/Saxon distinction eventually evaporated as they blended together doesn't mean that the "Norman yoke" of, say, William the Conqueror didn't exist or that he didn't persecute the Saxon aristocracy and their allies during the "Harrying of the North" in 1069-1070. But on the other hand, he and the Normans did introduce liberties and achievements, such as the end of Saxon slavery and a reduction of serfdom. Likewise, the Norman-Plantagenet King Henry II would introduce The Common Law.
• Multiple beliefs about the history of civilization on Easter Island once taken for granted as true have been seriously challenged.
  • The Rapa Nui people were once generally thought to have arrived on Easter Island around 300 CE. However, archaeological evidence has cast doubt that they were there that early, with some suggesting arrival dates as late as 1200 CE.
  • Since at least the Victorian era, it was assumed that the Rapa Nui cut down the island's trees to use the timber as scaffolding and rollers for the transportation of Moai, which resulted in environmental and civilizational collapse. As the environmental movement gained steam, it became frequently cited as a cautionary tale, a warning of what might happen on a larger scale if humanity didn't use natural resources responsibly. This made its way into fiction: one story beat in Rapa-Nui (1994) is the island's last tree being cut down to move yet another moai, and works with environmentalist themes would frequently mention it. Starting in The New '10s, however, this once-predominant theory now has multiple question marks hanging over it.
    • Though experiments in the 1950s seemingly proved that it was possible for the Rapa Nui to have used timber to move the Moai, it's been pointed out that these experiments used the wood of eucalyptus trees, which never grew on Easter Island. Later experiments with palm trees similar to the ones that actually grew on the island found them unsuitable for the task due to their soft and spongy interiors. While it's not impossible that Easter Island's trees had different properties that made them more suited to moving heavy loads, or that the Rapa Nui devised some way of working around their limitations, Occam's Razor suggests that the trees weren't used for moving the moai after all.
    • When the Rapa Nui were asked how the moai moved to their spots, they would consistently answer that they walked. This was long assumed to be mere myth, or possibly some kind of joke, and since the Rapa Nui had long stopped making moai by the time of first contact with the outside world, there was nothing to contradict this perception for a long time. However, there is some evidence to suggest that these stories hold more truth than previously thought. Archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo proved that it was possible to "walk" a moai to its destination by using ropes to rock it back and forth. Using this method, it would have been possible to move a moai weighing 20 metric tons as much as 100 meters per day. Since this method uses very little wood, then assuming it really is how the Rapa Nui transported the moai, it's extremely unlikely that it would have necessitated the clear-cutting of the island's forests.
    • So what did cause Easter Island's deforestation? A new, competing theory has emerged that the forests were destroyed by a combination of slash-and-burn agriculture and introduced Polynesian rats eating seeds before they could grow. This new scholarship puts the entire ecocide theory of the Rapa Nui civilization's collapse into question. While the debate is far from settled, the traditional narrative is no longer taken for granted as the only plausible explanation as to what happened.
• While it was long rumored that there was a secret agreement between the Republic of Venice and the Ayyubid Sultanate of Egypt to redirect the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, this is no longer considered credible by historians.
• Historia de la provincia de Ciudad Real en cómic depicts the church of Calatrava la Nueva with a frontal staircase. Archaeological excavations later uncovered that the staircase was built sideways to free space.
• Traditionally, it was thought that the Mongols ceased their push into Central Europe and withdrew east in 1242 because they learned that Ögedei Khan had died and his commanders were obligated to return to Mongolia and help choose his successor. Due to the timing and distances involved, as well as the fact that the Ilkhanate's official histories make no mention of this, this is now deemed unlikely. Other explanations have been given more weight recently, such as unfavorable weather, unexpectedly stiff resistance, a Cuman rebellion, or just disinterest in continuing the campaign.
• The Islamic Golden Age was traditionally said to have come to a sudden end with the Sack of Baghdad by Ilkhanate forces and their allies in 1258. However, re-examination of evidence led to a theory that the Golden Age was already on its way out by that time and the Mongols just caused it to end sooner and more violently than it otherwise might have. For example, the Sunni Revival of the 11th and 12th centuries led to a series of institutional changes that resulted in Islamic scientific output declining until the Ottoman Empire breathed new life into it.
• The Travels of Marco Polo says that The Hashshashin drug their recruits with hashish, making them "see" a paradisical garden, then tell them that only their leader has the means to get them there again. This is now generally considered a myth.
  • Marco Polo did not introduce pasta to Italy after eating it in China. While it is true that the first concrete information concerning pasta products in Italy dates from the 13th or 14th century (i.e. his era), Italians had been eating similar dough products for centuries by the time he made his famous Asian travels (see laganon).

Late Middle Ages (14th-15th centuries)

• It was believed that the Igneri, the original inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles, were conquered and displaced by the Kalinago. However, linguistic and archaeological evidence does not agree with a mass emigration and conquest, but a kind of cultural fusion between the two peoples.
• There was once a widely-held theory that the Māori displaced a pre-Māori population of nomadic hunter-gatherers when they arrived in New Zealand, and that the supposedly Melanesian Moriori of the Chatham Islands were the last remnant of this people. Some folklorists speculated that beings appearing in in Māori legends (such as the savage Maero) were based on corrupted accounts of the supposed earlier inhabitants. Starting in the 1920s, however, studies showed that the Māori were the first humans to arrive in New Zealand, and that the Moriori were actually a Māori offshoot. While there are still fringe theories about pre-Māori settlement of New Zealand, these are generally considered pseudohistory and rarely taken seriously.
• The Romani people in Europe were once thought to have originally come from Egypt; indeed, the common term "gypsy" is derived from "Egyptian". This is why the leader of Paris' Romani population in The Hunchback of Notre Dame is referred to as the Duke of Egypt. However, genetic and linguistic research points to them descending from inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent.
• The plague:
  • For centuries it was assumed that Europe's first introduction to plague (The Black Death) was in 1348-1350, when roughly one-third of the population died. Nobody knows exactly when plague arrived in Europe for the first time, but later scholarship suggests that plague was behind many ancient epidemics, including the Plague of Justinian, the Plague of Athens, and the epidemic that affected Egypt in the reign of Amenhotep III.
  • The 1348 plague was not exclusive to Europe either: By the time it arrived, it had already ravaged the Middle East and Asia, killing an estimated 25 million people in China alone. In the 21st century historians, linguists, and geneticists also found evidence that the Black Death had ravaged Sub-Saharian Africa to the point of causing the abandonment of several cities; the reason this wasn't known before was because nobody had bothered to look it up. So much for Alternate History works like The Years of Rice and Salt and In High Places, where a worse Black Death results in Europe becoming depopulated and colonized by Africans and Asians.
  • Plague can infect people in three ways: through the lymph system ("bubonic plague"), through the lungs ("pneumonic plague"), and through the bloodstream ("septicemic plague"). Most of the descriptions handed down to us by Medieval doctors describe bubonic plague, so it was once thought that it was the most common form; many people even today think that "bubonic plague" is the correct name for the disease. But the main reason doctors described bubonic plague so often was because bubonic plague victims lived long enough for the doctor to arrive, unlike victims of pneumonic and septicemic plague who generally died within hours of the first symptoms. Meanwhile, evidence from the 20th century plague pandemic supports the idea that pneumonic plague is actually slightly more common than bubonic.
• There was a famous story that claimed the Biscayan privateer Martín Ruiz de Avendaño took shelter on the Canary Island of Lanzarote in 1377 and slept with the Guanche queen Fayna, fathering a daughter named Ico who later gave birth to the future king Guadarfia. It's now believed that this story is apocryphal due to the ages involved: Guadarfia was a grown man when he met French explorer Jean de Béthencourt in 1403, so Ico would've had to have given birth to him at an impossibly young age if he was the grandson of an affair that had only happened 26 years prior.
• For most of the 20th century, it was believed that the initial expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century was accomplished by attracting recruits to fight in the name of Islamic holy war against non-believers, due to later Ottoman writers characterizing their ancestors as ghazis. Starting in the 1980s, this idea came under attack, with many pointing out that the Ottomans didn't act the way one would expect zealous religious warriors to: they tolerated many heterodox and syncretic beliefs and practices, willingly recruited Byzantines into their ranks, and fought wars against other Muslims. It's now believed that the idea of early Ottomans being "holy warriors" was an exaggeration or outright myth promoted by later generations because it suited their political interests.
• Serbian claims about the Battle of Kosovo (such as the betrayal by Lazar's son-in-law Vuk Branković and the assassination of Sultan Murad by Miloš Obilić) were extraordinarily influential in the South Slavic world and generally accepted as fact for centuries. Nowadays, however, most historians acknowledge that surprisingly little is reliably known about the battle, with many claims about it arising decades or even centuries after it happened. There is no evidence of a betrayal by Branković (many say the legends confused Vuk with his son Đurađ, who refused to join Hungary's regent John Hunyadi in battle), it's not clear how Murad died, and the battle may not even have been a Serbian defeat at all! Not only that, but the Battle of Kosovo was not as decisive as portrayed in the myth, since the final downfall of the medieval Serbian state only happened 70 years later.
• It has been claimed in Serbian historiography that Albanian national hero Skanderbeg's great-grandfather was a Serbian noble who was granted possession of Kaninë Castle by Stefan Dušan. This reading is now known to be based on a mistaken translation by German historian Karl Hopf, but the claim still appears in Serbian nationalist circles.
• Joan of Arc was lionized in the Third French Republic as a symbol of the nation and the French people. Consequently, they turned her into a rival and victim of those opposed to the Republic — the monarchy, aristocracy, clergy — and diminished their own role in the fight against the English. This view (with his own anti-Medieval biases tacked on) was imported to the United States by Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. The real Jehanne Darc was not a poor peasant, but the daughter of the Dean of Domremy, and could ride a horse before she met the Dauphin; she never decided strategies or fought in battle, but served as a standard-bearer and rallying point while the nobles led the army (part of her defense at her trial would be that she never killed a person, in battle or otherwise); and Charles VII really tried to take Paris (several times, in fact) instead of withholding resources to engineer Joan's defeat out of jealousy. As for Joan's trial, it was the work of the Bishop of Beauvais who was an English ally, so it is not surprising that his verdict was undone by the French King and the Pope as soon as they could. She was also not burned as a witch. Her 'crime' was relapsed heresy, having to do not with her voices but with her cross-dressing; she promised she would never again do so, then her captors stole her skirt and replaced it with pants. In any case, her real crime was opposing the English, and she was reviled as a witch and a whore in England for centuries because of it, as seen in Shakespeare's Henry VI.
• After a long time surrounded in mystery, in 2021 Machu Picchu was established to have been built around 1450 through carbon dating. In 2022, however, dating of other remains pushed inhabitation back to 1420 at least. The difference is not as trivial as it might seem: due to Machu Picchu's remote location, it could indicate that Pachacutec reigned and began the expansion of the Inca Empire a generation before he's traditionally believed to have done so.
• Until the late 20th century, it was part of the Greek school curriculum that education in the Greek language had been banned after the Ottoman conquest of Greece, and that Greek culture had survived because of an underground system called Krifo Scholio ("Secret School") which taught the language at night (best shown in Nikolaos Gyzis's 1885 painting Greek school in the time of slavery, popularly known as The secret school). Already in the early 20th century, several Greek historians denounced that neither the ban nor Krifo Scholio had existed; rather there were Greek schools operating openly through the Ottoman period and their organization was left to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, as most matters pertaining Greeks under Turkish rule were. Krifo Scholio was a myth created during the Greek War of Independence, but it was so intertwined with Greek nationalism that people wouldn't let it die for a hundred years (and rumor has it that it is still taught as fact in some schools, extra-officially).
• Henry IV of Castile was said to have a broken nose by the contemporary chronicler Alonso de Palencia. Surprisingly, when their tombs were opened in the 20th century, Henry was found to have a normal nose, and his father, John II, the broken one. It is unknown if this was an honest mistake or a deliberate manipulation because Palencia was a supporter of The Catholic Monarchs and an enemy of Henry.
• While there's still some debate over Richard III's overall character and culpability for certain actions (specifically the disappearance of his nephews), this trope is in play for Richard's appearance. As part of the Historical Villain Upgrade he received from Tudor historians and playwrights, Richard was depicted as a deformed hunchback. Later historians concluded that this was anti-Richard propaganda, and is dismissed as such in the "Sweet King Richard III" song of Horrible Histories. However, it was proven when his remains were found under a parking deck in 2012 that he did have moderate to severe scoliosis. His portrayal in Richard III complete with hunchback, withered arm and limp was more than just an exaggeration of his appearance — had he been as Shakespeare wrote, he wouldn't have been capable of mounting the horse he offered to trade his kingdom for — but the kernel of reality within the myth was there. The team at the University of Leicester who researched his remains concluded that it wasn’t quite so severe that he would be considered physically disabled by modern understanding but also believed that it was severe enough that were he alive today, he’d probably elect to have corrective surgery to improve his quality of life.

Not yet sorted

• Regarding Christopher Columbus' landfall on The Americas:
  • First of all, Columbus was not the first European to make such a landfall.
    • The Vikings beat him there by some five hundred years.
    • Adding another layer, pop history writers sometimes accuse hidebound academics of having clung to a Columbus-first paradigm until the past few years. That hasn't been the case for decades; it's pop history that's clinging to an outdated image of what academics believe.
    • Recent genetic and linguistic testing, particularly genetic tests on sweet potatoes, has lent considerable weight to the theory that the Polynesians also reached as far as the east coast of the Americas.
  • The complete lack of anybody other than Native Americans—no, not even Vikings—living in the Americas when Columbus arrived didn't stop posterior racists from declaring that no Native Americans could have built the Mesoamerican pyramids or the Mississippian mounds. No, it must have been a "lost race". Even attributing them to "Giant Jewish Toltec Vikings"^note Turns out the Toltecs themselves were Native American, too... was considered more plausible than admitting that Native Americans built them. Such racist notions were finally discredited by 20th-century scientific archaeology. Fringe theorists still sometimes revive them, though, or turn to Ancient Astronauts as an "updated" answer.
• More about Columbus:
  • The concept of a Flat World is a Dead Unicorn Trope. In Medieval times, people not only knew Earth was round^note Well, those who gave it any thought at all, that is. Most people at the time were farmers, not geographers. Mariners pretty universally knew, though, since the horizon is incredibly obvious at sea., they knew (and had known since the Hellenistic era) roughly how big it was^note Greek polymath Eratosthenes, who lived in the 3rd century BC, calculated the Earth's circumference around 252,000 stadia, corresponding to 39,375 km. That's a mere 1.4% less than the current estimate of 40,075 km. Columbus, however, either got it wrong or shaved a third of the established value off to make it a better sell. He underestimated the size of the globe and overestimated the size of Asia, so that the distance that he predicted between Europe and Asia was much shorter than in reality^note he calculated the distance from Canary Islands to Japan to be around 4,400 km, when in reality it's around 22,000. That's why all those monarchs before Isabella refused to fund him: they were right and he was wrong. He and his sailors would have died en route or been forced to turn back if not for his big stroke of luck: an entirely unknown land mass at just about the distance from Europe that he predicted. What makes it worse is that he really should have known he was wrong. The very method ships used to navigate are not just based on the fact the world is round, but they also give really good estimates of how big the world is. Although in his defense they work best for latitude, not longitude, so maybe to him the world was cigar-shaped?
    
    If he was genuinely wrong, his reason for believing that the distance between Asia and Europe was a lot smaller than it actually is wasn't entirely unreasonable (though it was still wrong, technically). His theory was based on driftwood reaching the Canaries from the west, with a frequency that was far too common to be from as far away as Asia actually is. So while he was wrong about the size of Earth, he was right that driftwood washed ashore in the Canary Islands far too frequently to have come as far away as Asia is. He knew something was close enough to reach on a sailing voyage, he was just wrong in assuming it was Asia.
    
    The "he fudged the distance" theory is used in Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus and Alejo Carpentier's novel El Arpa y la Sombra. The former describes Columbus desperately looking at ancient records to try to find "proof" that his size of Earth was the correct one. He is pretty obviously shown to be disregarding any piece of evidence to the contrary. Interestingly, the novel shows that by the time he brought his case before the Spanish royal court, his case was solid enough to rival the established proof, leaving the tie-breaker up to the Queen, whom he convinced by his sheer piety. Also, according to the novel, Columbus thought he was looking for China, not India, because a hologram sent from the future pretending to be God told him to. The latter proposes that Columbus knew of the Vikings' travels, so he knew he'd find new lands, and he used the wrong size on purpose to get financing for the expedition and return a hero for the discovery.
  • People who want to strip Columbus of his usual heroic portrayal risk falling for the opposite fallacy and labeling him an idiot. In these cases, pointing and laughing at the "fact" that he confused the Caribbean with India and its inhabitants with Indians is common. In reality, however, Columbus didn't sail in search of a route to India, but The Indies, which is how East Asia (China and the Spice Islands, i.e. Indonesia) was called in Europe at the time (hence why after America was confirmed as a new continent Indonesia was called the East Indies and the Caribbean the West Indies, which is the appellation that survives today). In fact, when Columbus first made landfall in the Bahamas he assumed he was on an island close (but not even in) to what Europeans called "Cipango" — Japan. A very honest mistake to make given the current European knowledge of Asian geography, since the Bahamas are at the same latitude as Taiwan and they don't even look that different from the Okinawa archipelago.
• The media following King Solomon's Mines that feature lost and always foreign civilizations in the mists of Darkest Africa:
  • These myths have their roots in the plain racist interpretation of Great Zimbabwe after its discovery by European explorers in the late 19th century, who stated that the place was "too advanced" to have been built by the "obviously primitive" black Africans. This view was debunked by archaeologists as early as 1905. When the hardline white minority regime came to power in Rhodesia, they promoted the myth of Great Zimbabwe as having been built by a "lost" white or Asian civilization to the extent that archaeologists excavating there had their work interfered with by the government who were keen to suppress anything which contradicted the official story, which persisted until white minority rule in Rhodesia came to an end... in 1979.
    
    Also, Great Zimbabwe wasn't really discovered in the late 19th century so much as rediscovered. The place had been visited and documented plenty by the Portuguese in the 16th century, when it wasn't abandoned, and there was even an unfortunate Englishman named Jonas Wright who traveled there during a civil war, in 1632, and was killed. Making Great Zimbabwe any mystery required a big deal of self-delusion from the beginning. It wasn't the only time this happened in the history of European exploration in Africa: James Bruce's account of his "discovery" of the Blue Nile's source spends a few lines trying to convince the reader that two Iberian Jesuits who had been there more than a hundred years earlier, Pedro Páez and Jerónimo Lobo, totally weren't, when not plain insulting them. Unfortunately for Bruce, not even his nation's historians agree with him anymore.
  • The Benin Bronzes were apparently also the subject of crackpot "lost civilization" nonsense by European racists who refused to believe that they had been created by Africans.
  • Ethiopia's famous monolithic churches were widely speculated to have been built by Arab, Egyptian, and Iranian Christians exiled to the Horn of Africa, even though the Ethiopians maintained the tradition of carving them out and haven't stopped doing so in the 21st century, let alone the 19th.
• Similarly to the above, the Mound Builders and other advanced civilizations in the Americas were later denied by Europeans as being Native American, a view which thrived in the 19th century. They ignored even the accounts from Spanish and French explorers who'd met the people there, or those who knew them, in previous centuries, instead positing that they were actually Europeans, Chinese, Phoenicians, Indians (from India), or Jews (the ten lost tribes of Israel-this theory was used in The Book of Mormon for instance). Tropes like Precursors and Ancient Astronauts are often recycled versions of these, just replacing Old Worlders with aliens.
  • Critical to this was the still persistent myth of the "empty America", a.k.a. the stereotype that North America was wholly inhabited by small bands of nomadic, egalitarian hunter-gatherers until the Europeans arrived. This naturally tied into ideas of European innate superiority and how colonists were morally entitled to drive the natives away because they were incapable of making anything productive out of the land. We know now that the Midwest and the Southern US were instead occupied by highly populated and stratified agricultural societies from about 800 to 1600 A.D., and that these presumably collapsed as a result of epidemics and increased warfare brought (ironically) by the introduction of European horses, iron, gunpowder — and the early European colonies' own demand for pelts and slaves. Thus, the nomadic plains tribes later encountered by colonists as they crossed the Appalachians were actually the recent few, Mad Max-esque survivors of their collapsed civilization, rather than an example of how things had always been.
  • Archaeologists are just starting to find evidence that the same happened in the Amazon, and that Francisco de Orellana wasn't exaggerating when he claimed to have seen large settlements while sailing along the course of the river (as he's been assumed for centuries).
• Much like the "empty America" myth, the idea that Siberia was underpopulated until its colonization by Russia is now considered discredited and outdated. While it did have a sparse population for such a large territory, it wasn't as uninhabited as previously believed. Russian explorers, merchants, and missionaries (along with the Cossack hunters and fighters often credited with colonizing Siberia) unintentionally introduced new diseases that devastated the indigenous Siberians; some populations may have declined as much as 80%.
• Lost continents such as Atlantis also stem from outdated ideas. It was originally thought that land masses such as this were needed to explain similar plants and animals on multiple continents, with the lost ones between acting as bridges. Cultural similarities were also claimed between Egyptian and Mayan people among others, having a common descent from the Atlanteans.^note In particular, the fact that both cultures built large pyramids was claimed to be evidence of them being linked. Never mind that when building entirely with stone, pyramids are the only viable design that can be built as tall as the largest Egyptian and Mayan monuments. The former were debunked by the discovery of continental drift, with the latter going as well after more knowledge from these cultures was found, with no evidence to show they had a common origin along with distinct differences, or debunking most claimed similarities (with the ones that did exist now being seen as mere coincidence). However, by then it had been taken up by occult groups and is still thriving among fringe pseudo-history theorists.