99 Fun Facts About Historical Figures

Cleopatra was the last active ruler of which dynasty, founded by a general of Alexander the Great?

Ptolemaic: the dynasty was Macedonian Greek, and Plutarch says the kings before her never troubled to learn Egyptian; Cleopatra is the only one of its rulers known to have spoken the language of her subjects.

Which river did Julius Caesar cross with his army in 49 BC, starting a Roman civil war?

Rubicon: Roman law forbade a general to lead his army out of his province, so crossing the little boundary stream amounted to declaring war on the Senate; Caesar is said to have remarked that the die was cast.

Which philosopher tutored the young Alexander the Great until he was 16?

Aristotle taught the prince from 13 to 16; as his fee, Philip II rebuilt the philosopher's home town of Stagira, which Philip himself had destroyed, and brought back its exiled and enslaved citizens.

What was Genghis Khan's birth name?

Genghis Khan was born Temüjin, reportedly named after a Tatar chieftain his father Yesügei had just captured; he took the title Genghis Khan at a kurultai in 1206.

Joan of Arc, burned at about nineteen, first won fame by helping lift the English siege of which city?

Orléans had been under English siege since October 1428 when Joan rode in with a relief force on 29 April 1429; little more than a week later the besiegers were in retreat, and France had a heroine.

Under which Florentine painter and sculptor was Leonardo da Vinci trained?

Andrea del Verrocchio took Leonardo on as a teenage apprentice; in Vasari's telling, the angel the pupil painted in their Baptism of Christ so outshone the master's work that Verrocchio gave up painting.

On which island was Napoleon Bonaparte born?

Corsica: Napoleon was born at Ajaccio in 1769, just after France acquired the island; sent to school on the mainland at nine to improve his French, the future emperor long felt himself a foreigner there.

What name is given to Napoleon's brief return to power in 1815, after he slipped away from exile on Elba?

The Hundred Days began when Napoleon entered Paris on 20 March 1815 as Louis XVIII fled; defeat at Waterloo that June ended the comeback, and this time he was shipped to remote Saint Helena for good.

What was the family relationship between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whom she married in 1840?

First cousins: Albert visited Windsor in October 1839 and, since nobody could propose to a reigning queen, Victoria asked him herself within days; they married the following February.

Abraham Lincoln made his career in Illinois, but in which state was he born?

Kentucky: Lincoln was born in a one-room cabin there in 1809; his father moved the family to Indiana when he was seven, and he was 21 before the Lincolns moved on to Illinois.

Gandhi moved to which country in 1893 to represent a merchant in a lawsuit, staying for 21 years?

South Africa: soon after arriving, Gandhi was thrown out of a first-class train compartment because of his colour; he resolved to stay and fight, and spent two decades campaigning for the rights of Indians there.

Gandhi's 1930 march of some 240 miles to Dandi defied British laws taxing which everyday commodity?

Salt: British law barred Indians from collecting or selling it, so on the shore Gandhi picked up a lump of natural salt and broke the law; about 60,000 people were arrested in the protests that followed.

Which wartime leader won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Winston Churchill, prime minister again at the time, was honoured for his historical writing and his oratory; he did not go to Stockholm, so his wife Clementine collected the prize for him.

Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics passed over relativity and instead cited his work on what?

The photoelectric effect: the 1921 committee found no nominee who met its criteria and held the prize over; a year later it went to Einstein for showing that light arrives in packets, with relativity left out of the citation.

Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?

Physics and Chemistry: the 1903 physics nomination at first left her out, and she was added only after her husband Pierre objected; in 1911 she won again, alone, for discovering polonium and radium.

How many years did Nelson Mandela spend in prison before his release?

27 years: Mandela was held from 1962 to 1990, 18 of those years on Robben Island, and he turned down at least three offers of early release because each came with political conditions.

Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, was born a princess in which kingdom?

Prussia: born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, daughter of a minor German prince, she was brought to Russia as a teenager to marry the heir, took the name Catherine, and in 1762 overthrew her own husband in a coup.

The sayings of Confucius were compiled after his death in which collection?

The Analects was put together by Confucius's disciples and their own students over generations; in the Song era it was raised above the older classics as one of the Four Books that educated Chinese studied.

The lawgiver Hammurabi, whose code survives carved in stone, was king of which city?

Babylon: some six centuries after Hammurabi, an Elamite king is thought to have hauled the stone bearing his laws away as war loot; it was dug up in 1901 at Susa in Iran and now stands in the Louvre.

Whom did Pope Leo III crown emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800?

Charlemagne had sheltered Leo a year earlier, after the pope's enemies attacked him in Rome; his biographer Einhard claimed the king would never have set foot in the church that day had he known what was planned.

Elizabeth I of England was the only surviving child of Henry VIII and which wife?

Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, was beheaded while Elizabeth was still a small child, and the girl was declared illegitimate; she came to the throne all the same in 1558 and reigned for 44 years.

Who paid to have Newton's Principia printed?

Edmond Halley had to foot the bill himself because the Royal Society had sunk its publishing money into a costly illustrated history of fishes and could not afford to print Newton's book.

Galileo was tried by the Inquisition and found 'vehemently suspect of' what?

Heresy: in 1633 the Inquisition judged Galileo 'vehemently suspect of heresy' for arguing in his Dialogue that the Earth circles the Sun; he was made to recant and lived out his last years under house arrest.

Which navigator brought Magellan's fleet home to Spain in 1522, completing the first circumnavigation?

Juan Sebastián Elcano took command after Magellan's death and brought the Victoria, the fleet's last ship, into Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 6 September 1522 with just 18 survivors.

During which war did Florence Nightingale earn the nickname 'The Lady with the Lamp'?

During the Crimean War (1853–56) Nightingale ran the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, near Constantinople; a Times report of her night rounds gave her the name 'The Lady with the Lamp'.

Harriet Tubman's work on the Underground Railroad earned her which biblical nickname?

Moses: the name stuck to Tubman as she went back about 13 times to bring some 70 people out of slavery; travelling by night and in secret, she later said that in all her rescue trips she never lost a passenger.

Ada Lovelace, often called the first computer programmer, was the daughter of which poet?

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, born in December 1815; her parents separated weeks later and Byron left England for good in 1816.

Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which kind of electricity supply system?

Tesla championed alternating current: his 1888 induction-motor and polyphase patents, licensed by Westinghouse, underpinned the AC systems that won the 'war of the currents' against Edison's direct current.

Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific in 1937 trying to be the first woman to do what?

Fly around the world: Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan had covered 22,000 miles and had 7,000 to go when they lost radio contact with the cutter Itasca, waiting to guide them in to tiny Howland Island.

Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955 in which city?

Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955; the Montgomery bus boycott that followed lasted 381 days until the city's buses were desegregated in December 1956.

Anne Frank's family fled Frankfurt after the Nazis took power and settled in which city, where she later hid?

Amsterdam: Otto Frank set up a business there selling pectin for making jam; in July 1942 the family moved into a secret annex behind his offices, and they stayed hidden for two years before they were arrested.

Simón Bolívar, 'El Libertador', was born in which city?

Caracas: Bolívar was born into one of the city's wealthy families and lost both parents as a boy; he went on to lead the wars that freed much of South America from Spain, and in 1825 Bolivia was named in his honour.

Mansa Musa, often called the richest man in history, ruled which West African empire?

Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire from about 1312 to 1337; his 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca spent so much gold in Cairo that its price there reportedly slumped for years.

Which female pharaoh built the great mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank of the Nile?

Hatshepsut ruled as king, and her statues show her with a pharaoh's kilt, crown and false beard; late in the reign of her successor Thutmose III her monuments were defaced and her name cut from the king lists.

Who led the excavation that discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922?

Howard Carter had dug in the Valley of the Kings for years with little to show, and his patron Lord Carnarvon had agreed to pay for just one final season when a step cut into the rock turned up in November 1922.

Marco Polo's travels through Asia between 1271 and 1295 brought him to the court of which ruler?

Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan dynasty, at Shangdu around 1275 and by his own account served the Khan for some 17 years.

Which 14th-century traveller left Tangier for Mecca in 1325 and kept going for decades, crossing Africa and Asia?

Ibn Battuta set out at 21 to make the pilgrimage and simply kept travelling, as far as India and China; home in Morocco at last, he dictated the whole story from memory to a scribe, in the book known as the Rihla.

Mozart, who was composing at five, was born in which city in present-day Austria?

Salzburg: his father Leopold, a violinist in the archbishop's orchestra, taught him from early childhood; as a young man Mozart grew restless at the same court, fell out with the archbishop and was dismissed.

Beethoven, almost totally deaf by 1824, set which poem to music in the choral finale of his Ninth Symphony?

Ode to Joy: Schiller's poem crowns the finale; at the 1824 premiere the deaf composer could not hear the ovation, and the story goes that the contralto Caroline Unger turned him round to see the audience clapping.

Vlad the Impaler, also called Dracula, ruled Wallachia, now part of which country?

Romania: Vlad's father joined a knightly Order of the Dragon and was called Dracul, so the son became Dracula, 'son of Dracul'; Bram Stoker found the name in a history of Wallachia and gave it to his vampire.

Rasputin won the Romanovs' trust as a faith healer for the tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from what?

Haemophilia: Alexei inherited the bleeding disorder through his mother Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and Rasputin's seeming power to ease his attacks won him the empress's unshakeable trust.

Which fearsome nickname was given to Attila, ruler of the Huns from 434 to 453?

Attila was called 'The Scourge of God' (Latin Flagellum Dei), a label Christian writers attached to him as a punishment sent against a sinful Roman world; he ravaged Gaul and Italy in 451–452.

Suleiman the Magnificent's advance into Europe was halted by his failed 1529 siege of which city?

Vienna: Suleiman arrived in late September 1529 with a far larger army, but the garrison under Niklas Salm held the walls for over two weeks; short of supplies and with winter coming on, the sultan marched home.

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 from which state?

Douglass fled from Baltimore, Maryland, on 3 September 1838, boarding a train disguised as a sailor with a free Black seaman's papers, and reached New York the next day.

Socrates was put on trial in Athens in 399 BC on charges of impiety and what else?

The indictment accused Socrates of not recognising the city's gods and of corrupting the youth of Athens; the jury of about 500 convicted him and he drank hemlock in 399 BC.

Which queen of the Iceni led a revolt that burned Roman London around AD 60?

Boudica rose after Rome seized her dead husband's kingdom and, Tacitus writes, flogged her and assaulted her daughters; her army left three Roman towns in ruins, London among them, before the legions crushed the revolt.

Which sultan destroyed the Crusader army at Hattin in 1187 and retook Jerusalem soon afterwards?

Saladin lured the Crusader army across waterless hills in midsummer and destroyed it, capturing King Guy and the relic of the True Cross; Jerusalem, left almost undefended, surrendered to him three months later.

Louis XIV, who reigned 72 years, styled himself what?

Louis XIV adopted the sun as his emblem and was styled the Sun King (le Roi Soleil), having danced as Apollo, the sun god, in the 1653 Ballet de la Nuit.

Marie Antoinette, born an Austrian archduchess in 1755, was the youngest daughter of which empress?

Marie Antoinette, born Maria Antonia on 2 November 1755, was the fifteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa and Francis I; her 1770 marriage sealed the Franco-Austrian alliance.

What did Otto von Bismarck create in the 1880s partly to undermine his socialist opponents?

Bismarck built the first welfare state: health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884 and old-age pensions in 1889, intended to bind workers to the Reich rather than to the Social Democrats.

The famous painted bust of Queen Nefertiti is displayed in a museum in which city?

Berlin: Ludwig Borchardt, whose German team dug the bust out at Amarna in 1912, wrote in his excavation diary that describing it was useless and it had to be seen; it is now the star of the Neues Museum.

Ashoka the Great, patron of Buddhism, was the third ruler of which Indian dynasty?

Mauryan: Ashoka's conquest of Kalinga caused such slaughter that, by his own inscriptions, he was filled with remorse; he renounced war and gave the rest of his reign to spreading Buddhist teaching.

Tokugawa Ieyasu was the third of Japan's three 'Great Unifiers', after Oda Nobunaga and whom?

Toyotomi Hideyoshi was born a peasant, rose through Nobunaga's army and finished unifying Japan in 1590; after he died in 1598, Ieyasu pushed aside his young heir and took power for himself.

Which Zulu king turned a small chiefdom into a feared military power before his half-brothers assassinated him in 1828?

Shaka armed his warriors with a short stabbing spear and drilled them to pin an enemy with the 'chest' of the army while two 'horns' closed round it; his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana stabbed him to death.

Which tsar shared the throne with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696?

Peter the Great was crowned as a boy alongside the sickly Ivan V while Ivan's sister Sophia ruled as regent; as a young man Peter overthrew her and shut her in a convent, and Ivan's death left him sole tsar.

The admiral Zheng He led seven treasure fleets between 1405 and 1433 for which Chinese dynasty?

Ming: the Yongle Emperor sent Zheng He's fleets as far as East Africa to show off China's wealth and gather tribute from foreign rulers; among the exotic cargo they carried home were giraffes.

Which Mughal emperor took the throne at 13 under the regent Bairam Khan and ruled for nearly 50 years?

Akbar inherited the throne when his father Humayun died after a fall on his library staircase; Bairam Khan governed and fought for the boy, but in 1560 the young emperor dismissed him and ruled for himself.

Which Persian king founded the Achaemenid Empire by overthrowing his Median overlord Astyages around 550 BC?

Cyrus the Great was a vassal of the Median king Astyages, in Herodotus's telling his own grandfather; when Astyages marched against him, a chronicle of the time records, the Median army mutinied and handed over its king.

Which emperor had the jurist Tribonian recast Roman law in the 530s?

Justinian I put his legal minister Tribonian in charge, and between 529 and 534 the commission boiled centuries of Roman statutes and opinions down into one body of law, later the basis of many European legal systems.

Charles Darwin neglected his medical studies at which university before moving to Cambridge?

Darwin entered the University of Edinburgh in 1825, found its lectures dull and surgery horrifying, and instead studied marine invertebrates with Robert Edmond Grant before leaving for Cambridge in 1828.

Luther is said to have nailed his Ninety-five Theses to a church door in which town?

Luther was a professor at Wittenberg, and the story has him posting the Theses on the door of its Castle Church on 31 October 1517; the account comes from Philip Melanchthon, who only arrived in 1518.

Christopher Columbus was born in which Italian maritime republic?

Genoa: the weaver's son did not make his famous voyages for his home republic; all four of his Atlantic crossings sailed under the flag of Spain, whose rulers Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to back him in 1492.

Which pope commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Julius II gave the job in 1508 to a man known above all as a sculptor, famous for his David; Michelangelo spent four years on the scaffolding all the same, finishing the ceiling in 1512.

Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum, guarded by the Terracotta Army, lies near which modern city?

Xi'an: farmers digging a well in Lintong, just outside the city, struck fragments of clay soldiers in 1974; they had stumbled on an army of thousands buried to guard the First Emperor in the afterlife.

At which battle in 216 BC did Hannibal inflict a crushing defeat on Rome?

Cannae: Hannibal let his centre fall back before a much larger Roman army, then swung his flanks and cavalry in behind it; trapped on all sides, the legions suffered one of the worst defeats in Roman history.

Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was born with what name?

Gaius Octavius was still in his teens when Julius Caesar's will named him heir and adopted son, on condition that he take Caesar's name; in 27 BC the Senate added the title Augustus, by which history knows him.

Constantine built his new imperial capital on the site of which Greek city?

Byzantium sat on the strait between Europe and Asia with a fine natural harbour, so Constantine made the old Greek colony his 'New Rome' in 330; before long the city was known by his own name instead.

Which king ordered the 1086 Domesday survey of England?

William the Conqueror sent his officials into every shire, twenty years after he seized the country, to record who held each piece of land and what it was worth, so that he knew how much tax he could raise.

Which Ottoman sultan captured Constantinople in 1453 at just 21?

Mehmed II was 21 when his army broke through the walls on 29 May 1453; the last emperor died in the fighting, and a Roman empire that had lasted more than a thousand years in the east died with him.

Who became China's only female emperor in 690?

Wu Zetian entered the palace as a concubine of one emperor, became the wife of the next and ruled through her own sons; in 690 she set them aside, renamed the dynasty Zhou and took the throne herself.

King Sejong the Great created which alphabet in the 1440s so that ordinary people could read?

Hangul: Koreans had been writing with Chinese characters, which fitted their language badly and took so long to learn that few could read; Sejong, fourth king of Joseon, had a simple alphabet devised to fix that.

Who was crowned the first Tsar of all Russia in 1547?

Ivan the Terrible began as a reformer, revising the law code and calling a national assembly; he ended by loosing the terror of the oprichnina on his own people and, it is said, killing his heir in a fit of rage.

Which instrument did Frederick the Great play and write more than 100 sonatas for?

Flute: Frederick's stern father despised the boy's love of music as effeminate and unfit for a future king; once on the throne himself, Frederick went on to compose 121 sonatas for his own instrument.

Which British admiral lost his right arm leading a failed night attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797?

Horatio Nelson was hit in the right arm as he stepped from his boat, and the arm was amputated; his right eye had already been badly injured at an earlier siege, yet eight years later he won at Trafalgar.

In July 1793 Robespierre was appointed to which body that came to run the Terror?

Committee of Public Safety: Robespierre joined it in July 1793 and came to dominate it while the Terror ran its course; a year later the Convention turned on him, and he went to the guillotine himself without a trial.

Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand landed in 1860 on which island?

Garibaldi's thousand red-shirted volunteers landed at Marsala in western Sicily on 11 May 1860 and defeated the Bourbon army at Calatafimi four days later, going on to take Palermo.

Toussaint Louverture rose to lead the revolution in which French colony?

Toussaint Louverture led the revolution in Saint-Domingue, France's richest colony, which became independent Haiti on 1 January 1804, after his death at the Fort de Joux in April 1803.

Who challenged Alexander Hamilton to the 1804 pistol duel that killed him?

Vice President Aaron Burr challenged Hamilton after reports of insults during the 1804 New York governor's race; they duelled at Weehawken, New Jersey, on 11 July 1804, and Hamilton died the next day.

Teenage Sacagawea helped which expedition explore the Louisiana Territory?

Lewis and Clark needed horses from the Shoshone to cross the Rockies; when Sacagawea was brought in to interpret, she recognised their chief, Cameahwait, as the brother she had lost when she was captured as a girl.

In 1885 Sitting Bull left the reservation to tour with whose Wild West show?

Buffalo Bill Cody had Sitting Bull ride in the show's opening act, where he was sometimes booed but sold his autograph to eager crowds; he stayed for a single season before going home to the reservation.

Which suffragist was arrested for voting in the 1872 presidential election?

Susan B. Anthony was put on trial, and the judge ordered the jury to find her guilty without deliberating; fined $100, she refused to pay a cent of it, and the court never made her.

Theodore Roosevelt won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for helping end which war?

Russo-Japanese War: Roosevelt brought the two sides' envoys to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905 and helped broker the treaty that ended it; the prize made him the first American to win a Nobel.

The surname 'Atatürk', granted by parliament in 1934, is usually translated as what?

Father of the Turks: parliament gave Mustafa Kemal the surname in 1934, the year a new law required every Turkish family to take one, in recognition of his role in building the republic.

What was Lenin's family surname at birth?

Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Simbirsk on 22 April 1870; he adopted the pseudonym Lenin around 1901, and Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk in 1924 after his death.

Where was Leon Trotsky assassinated in 1940?

Trotsky was struck with an ice axe by the Soviet agent Ramón Mercader at his fortified house in Coyoacán, Mexico City, on 20 August 1940 and died the next day.

In which country was Che Guevara born?

Argentina: Guevara was born in Rosario and was studying medicine in Buenos Aires when he set off by motorcycle across South America; the poverty he saw on the road turned the student into a revolutionary.

Mother Teresa was born in 1910 in which city, then part of the Ottoman Empire?

Skopje: born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu to an Albanian family, she left home at 18 to join the Loreto sisters in Ireland, who ran missions in India, and after a few months' training in Dublin was sent there.

Which Ethiopian emperor, born Tafari Makonnen, took a throne name meaning 'Power of the Trinity'?

Haile Selassie was known as Ras Tafari before his coronation in 1930, and the Rastafari of Jamaica, who came to revere the new emperor as a messiah, took that earlier title as the name of their faith.

Which Israeli prime minister was born in Kyiv and grew up in Milwaukee?

Golda Meir said her earliest memory was of her father boarding up the door against a threatened pogrom; the family left for Milwaukee in 1906, and she moved on to a kibbutz in Palestine in 1921.

In World War II, Alan Turing broke German ciphers at which British codebreaking centre?

Turing reported to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire on 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war, and led Hut 8, which attacked the German naval Enigma.

Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine used material from which milder disease?

Jenner used cowpox: in May 1796 he inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with matter from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, and the boy proved immune to smallpox.

Gregor Mendel, a friar in Brno, worked out the laws of heredity by breeding which garden plant?

Peas: Mendel crossed thousands of pea plants in the abbey garden and published the patterns he found in the 1860s; hardly anyone noticed until 1900, sixteen years after his death, when three botanists rediscovered his work.

Which Russian chemist drew up a periodic table in 1869 that predicted undiscovered elements?

Dmitri Mendeleev left gaps in his table and described the elements that ought to fill them; gallium, scandium and germanium were all found by 1886, close enough to his forecasts to win the table wide acceptance.

Whose 1543 book put the Sun at the centre of the planets?

Nicolaus Copernicus sat on his theory for decades until a young mathematician, Rheticus, persuaded him to print it; the finished book is said to have reached him on his deathbed, the day he died.

Which teacher taught Helen Keller by spelling words into her hand?

Anne Sullivan, herself partly blind, broke through by spelling 'water' into Keller's hand at a pump; she stayed at her side for decades and saw her through Radcliffe College, where Keller took her degree in 1904.

Richard III's skeleton was found in 2012 beneath a car park in which English city?

Leicester: the bones turned up in the first days of the dig, the spine bent by scoliosis; DNA from a descendant of Richard's sister, traced through a family that had moved to Canada, confirmed who he was.

Queen Nzinga, who fought the Portuguese for decades, ruled Ndongo and Matamba, kingdoms in which present-day country?

Angola: at a meeting where the Portuguese left Nzinga only a mat on the floor, the story goes, she had a servant bend down to be her chair so that she sat as their equal; in the 1640s she allied with the Dutch against them.

Diocletian's retirement palace forms the historic core of which modern Croatian city?

Diocletian retired in 305 to the palace he had built on the Dalmatian coast; its walls and streets became the old town of Split, and his mausoleum is now the city's cathedral.

Which explorer sailed aboard Fram in 1910, secretly bound for the South Pole?

Roald Amundsen had Nansen's old ship for a drift across the Arctic; when Peary claimed the North Pole, he secretly switched ends of the Earth, told his crew only at Madeira and beat Scott to the South Pole by five weeks.