Historical Figures Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
This historical figures trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and runs from Hammurabi's Babylon to Nelson Mandela's presidency, one famous person at a time. Fifty questions cover the rulers (Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Suleiman, Catherine the Great, Queen Victoria, Louis XIV), the thinkers and scientists (Socrates, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla), the explorers (Magellan, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta), the fighters and reformers (Joan of Arc, Boudica, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gandhi, Rosa Parks) and a few whose legends outgrew them, from Vlad the Impaler to Rasputin. Easy questions ask where Napoleon was born and who found Tutankhamun's tomb; the hard ones want Genghis Khan's birth name, how far Ibn Battuta travelled, which Nobel Prize Churchill won and what Bismarck built to undercut the socialists. Made for history buffs and quiz nights, and useful as a classroom warm-up. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biographies of each figure, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cleopatra was the last active ruler of which dynasty, founded by a general of Alexander the Great?
Ptolemaic
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.
Q 02Which river did Julius Caesar cross with his army in 49 BC, starting a Roman civil war?
Rubicon
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.
Q 03Which philosopher tutored the young Alexander the Great until he was 16?
Aristotle
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.
Q 04What was Genghis Khan's birth name?
Temüjin
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.
Q 05Joan of Arc, burned at about nineteen, first won fame by helping lift the English siege of which city?
Orléans
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.
Q 06Under which Florentine painter and sculptor was Leonardo da Vinci trained?
Andrea del Verrocchio
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.
Q 07On which island was Napoleon Bonaparte born?
Corsica
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.
Q 08What name is given to Napoleon's brief return to power in 1815, after he slipped away from exile on Elba?
The Hundred Days
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.
Q 09What was the family relationship between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whom she married in 1840?
First cousins
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.
Q 10Abraham Lincoln made his career in Illinois, but in which state was he born?
Kentucky
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.
Q 11Gandhi moved to which country in 1893 to represent a merchant in a lawsuit, staying for 21 years?
South Africa
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.
Q 12Gandhi's 1930 march of some 240 miles to Dandi defied British laws taxing which everyday commodity?
Salt
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.
Q 13Which wartime leader won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature?
Winston Churchill
Q 21Elizabeth I of England was the only surviving child of Henry VIII and which wife?
Anne Boleyn
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.
Q 22Who paid to have Newton's Principia printed?
Edmond Halley
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.
Q 23Galileo was tried by the Inquisition and found 'vehemently suspect of' what?
Heresy
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.
Q 14Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics passed over relativity and instead cited his work on what?
The photoelectric effect
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.
Q 15Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?
Physics and Chemistry
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.
Q 16How many years did Nelson Mandela spend in prison before his release?
27
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.
Q 17Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, was born a princess in which kingdom?
Prussia
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.
Q 18The sayings of Confucius were compiled after his death in which collection?
The Analects
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.
Q 19The lawgiver Hammurabi, whose code survives carved in stone, was king of which city?
Babylon
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.
Q 20Whom did Pope Leo III crown emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800?
Charlemagne
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.
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.
Q 24Which navigator brought Magellan's fleet home to Spain in 1522, completing the first circumnavigation?
Juan Sebastián Elcano
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.
Q 25During which war did Florence Nightingale earn the nickname 'The Lady with the Lamp'?
Crimean War
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'.
Q 26Harriet Tubman's work on the Underground Railroad earned her which biblical nickname?
Moses
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.
Q 27Ada Lovelace, often called the first computer programmer, was the daughter of which poet?
Lord Byron
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.
Q 28Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which kind of electricity supply system?
Alternating current
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.
Q 29Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific in 1937 trying to be the first woman to do what?
Fly around the world
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.
Q 30Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955 in which city?
Montgomery
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.