European History Trivia
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This European history trivia quiz has 214 free questions with answers and runs from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC to the night the Berlin Wall opened in 1989. In between you will meet Charlemagne, the Black Death, Magna Carta, the Defenestration of Prague, Luther's theses, the Spanish Armada, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the unification of Italy and Germany, the Romanovs, Stalingrad and the Treaty of Rome. It is built for pub-quiz regulars, history teachers looking for ready-made rounds, and anyone who wants to test whether the dates and names from school actually stuck. Roughly a third of the questions are straightforward, a third are medium, and the rest will stretch even confident historians with details like who chaired the Congress of Vienna or how many exemplifications of Magna Carta survive. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference page, and the source sentence is shown under each question, so you can settle arguments on the spot.
30 of 214 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animals' fleas were long blamed for carrying the Black Death across Europe in the 1340s?
Rats
Rats long carried the blame: their fleas' bites were thought to pass the disease to people. A 2018 study found the outbreak's spread fits human fleas and body lice better.
Q 02What did Mongols besieging Kaffa in the 1340s reportedly hurl over its walls?
Plague corpses
Plague corpses: the tale comes from the Italian notary Gabriele de' Mussi, who was probably never there. Genoese ships are still thought to have carried plague to Sicily in 1347.
Q 03Which sultan's forces captured Constantinople on 29 May 1453?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II was just 21. He made the ruined city his capital and set about repopulating it, handing back the houses of Greeks and Genoese who had fled so that they would return.
Q 04Which Constantinople church became a mosque in 1453?
Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia: the sultan went straight to the church as the city fell and had it made a mosque. It became a museum in 1935 and a mosque again in 2020.
Q 05During the 1453 siege of Constantinople, Ottoman ships were dragged overland on greased logs into which waterway?
The Golden Horn
The Golden Horn was closed by a great chain across its mouth, so the Ottoman ships were hauled over the hill behind Galata on greased logs and launched inside it on 22 April.
Q 06Weeks before losing at Hastings in 1066, Harold Godwinson won which battle on 25 September?
Stamford Bridge
At Stamford Bridge, east of York, Harold's army killed both Harald Hardrada of Norway and Harold's brother Tostig on 25 September 1066, nineteen days before Hastings.
Q 07The 1618 Defenestration of Prague is credited with triggering which war?
Thirty Years' War
The 1618 defenestration launched the Bohemian Revolt that opened the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648); an earlier 1419 defenestration by Hussites had set off the Hussite Wars.
Q 08Protestant pamphleteers claimed the men thrown from a Prague window in 1618 survived by landing on what?
A dung heap
A dung heap was the Protestant retort to Catholic claims that angels or the Virgin Mary had caught the men; all three, Martinitz, Slavata and the secretary Fabricius, survived the fall from the castle window.
Q 09The indulgences Luther attacked in 1517 were sold to help rebuild which church?
St Peter's Basilica
St Peter's Basilica got only half the money. The rest repaid the Fugger bank loan that had bought Archbishop Albert of Mainz his office, and it was to Albert that Luther sent his theses.
Q 10Which preacher's 1517 indulgence campaign near Wittenberg drew locals to buy pardons, provoking Luther?
Johann Tetzel
Johann Tetzel was barred from Saxony by its elector, so he preached at nearby Jüterbog and Wittenbergers travelled there to buy. The jingle about a coin ringing in the coffer was pinned on him.
Q 11How many prisoners were inside the Bastille when it was stormed on 14 July 1789?
Seven
Seven men were inside: four forgers, two held as insane and an aristocrat locked up at his family's request. The crowd had come for the fortress's gunpowder, not its prisoners.
Q 12Napoleon Bonaparte was born on 15 August 1769 in which town?
Ajaccio
Ajaccio had been French for barely a year: Genoa handed Corsica to France in 1768, so Napoleon grew up speaking Corsican and Italian and was sent to the mainland at nine to improve his French.
Q 13After abdicating in April 1814, Napoleon was exiled to which Mediterranean island?
Elba
Elba held Napoleon for under a year; he escaped, lost at Waterloo in June 1815 and was shipped to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.
Q 21Which pope crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800?
Leo III
Leo III owed Charlemagne his throne: attacked in a Roman street in 799 by rivals who meant to blind him, he fled over the Alps to the Frankish king, who restored him and was crowned a year later.
Q 22Charlemagne built his great palace and chapel in which city?
Aachen
Aachen drew Charlemagne for its hot springs: his biographer Einhard says he loved to swim in them and built his palace there for that reason. He spent most winters there until his death in 814.
Q 23Who commanded the Spanish Armada that sailed from Lisbon in May 1588?
Duke of Medina Sidonia
The Duke of Medina Sidonia, a reluctant landsman, took command after the Marquis of Santa Cruz died in February 1588; Philip II sent the fleet against Elizabeth I.
Q 14What did Napoleon sell to the United States in 1803?
Louisiana
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred about 828,000 square miles to the United States for roughly $15 million, nearly doubling the young republic's territory.
Q 15What did Napoleon's doctors record as the cause of his death on Saint Helena in 1821?
Stomach cancer
Stomach cancer was the verdict of the autopsy reports. Arsenic theories arose later from traces found in his hair, but his father Carlo is also thought to have died of stomach cancer.
Q 16At which site beside the Thames did King John agree Magna Carta with his rebel barons in June 1215?
Runnymede
Runnymede was neutral ground: a meadow long used for assemblies, lying between the king's castle at Windsor and the rebel barons' base at Staines.
Q 17Which pope annulled the 1215 Magna Carta, helping trigger the First Barons' War?
Innocent III
Innocent III declared the charter 'null and void of all validity for ever' in a bull of 24 August 1215; it was reissued in revised form after John's death in 1216.
Q 18How many copies of the original 1215 Magna Carta survive today?
Four
Four survive, though the pope declared the charter void within months: two are in the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral, thought the best preserved.
Q 19What did East German authorities officially call the Berlin Wall?
Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart
The GDR called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the 'Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart', as if it kept Western aggressors out; its real job was to stop East Germans fleeing to the West.
Q 20At which Berlin landmark did Reagan urge Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall'?
Brandenburg Gate
The Brandenburg Gate stood sealed in the border strip for 28 years. It reopened on 22 December 1989, six weeks after the Wall was opened and two and a half years after Reagan's speech.
Q 24Atlantic gales wrecked many ships of the retreating Spanish Armada in 1588 on which country's coast?
Ireland
Ireland's rocky west coast wrecked ship after ship as the fleet, driven north by the English, tried to sail home around Scotland; most survivors who struggled ashore were handed over and killed.
Q 25Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the summer of 1914 in which city?
Sarajevo
Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were shot in Sarajevo, capital of Austrian-annexed Bosnia, by Gavrilo Princip, one of several young conspirators posted along the route.
Q 26Why did Franz Ferdinand's car stop right beside Gavrilo Princip in 1914?
The driver stalled it while reversing
The driver stalled it while reversing out of a wrong turn, a few steps from Princip, who had moved to that corner after the morning's bomb attack on the motorcade failed.
Q 27Which Portuguese navigator first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488?
Bartolomeu Dias
Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving a sea route to the Indian Ocean existed; Vasco da Gama reached India by that route in 1498.
Q 28Which weapon won the English their victories at Crécy and Agincourt?
The longbow
The longbow won Crécy in 1346 for an English army the French greatly outnumbered: in a brief archery duel its bowmen routed the Italian crossbowmen who opened the French attack.
Q 29Which English king won at Agincourt in 1415?
Henry V
Henry V won at Agincourt in 1415; the tide turned against England after the Siege of Orléans in 1428–29, and Joan of Arc was executed in 1431.
Q 30Which town was England's last foothold in France after the Hundred Years' War, held until 1558?
Calais
Calais, English since 1347, fell to a surprise winter attack by the Duke of Guise in January 1558; Mary I reportedly said its name would be found written on her heart.