Never Shall They Meet Trivia Quiz

Leader of the Mongol Empire and one of the most famous figures in world conquest, Genghis Khan, born Temüjin in 1162 AD, lived until the age of 65, passing away in 1227 after taking a tumble from his horse on a hunting expedition. By this point, Khan had expanded the Mongol Empire as far west as the Caspian Sea (and his heirs would push even further, reaching past the Black Sea). It's believed that his conquest brought about the end of the Islamic Golden Age.

In modern Mongolia, Genghis Khan is seen as one of the founding figures of the nation, fiercely loyal to his people and his cause in his day while being notoriously ruthless towards enemy forces.

Genghis Khan would never have crossed paths with Dante Aligheri as the Italian poet, born in Florence, Italy in 1265 AD (nearly forty years after Khan's death), would also have lived too far from the Mongol's reach.

Aligheri is, of course, known for his massively influential writings, especially his "Divine Comedy", written in three parts across more than a decade of his life in the fourteenth century. He would be fortunate to finish the third part of these, "Paradiso", before his passing in 1321 at the age of 56, at which time he'd have been exiled.

Today, Dante is one of the most famous former citizens of Florence; his home there is considered a local landmark. His works have informed the writing of some of the most famous and popular authors of prose and poetry, even up to the modern age

Although the two would have lived in Italy in the same century, Dante Aligheri and Donatello would never have had the chance to meet; the former passed away in 1321 AD while the latter was born in 1386. Both of them did, however, manage to avoid the Black Death, which swept through the continent in the mid-14th century.

Italian Renaissance artist Donatello (born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi) lived for nearly eighty years, all the way to 1466, in and around the city of Florence, being one of the main artists commissioned by the Medici family during this time period; he would be followed by Michelangelo in the proceeding century.

Most of Donatello's works were made in sculpture, with a large amount of those inevitably being housed in Florence at the Palazzo del Bargello. His legacy was set during his life, though, as most of his pieces were immediately influential to his contemporaries.

Donatello passed in Florence in 1466, and seven years later, Nicolas Copernicus would be born in Central Poland in the city of Toru?, and as such the pair would never encounter one another, even though Copernicus would be educated in Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara at the turn of the century.

A notable scholar, Copernicus was responsible for a colossal shift in our understanding of the Earth and its place in the universe; it was his insistence that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around, as determined by the sun's effects on other celestial bodies. His claims would subsequently aid astronomers like Galileo Galilei, who would prove this to be truth and fuel the Scientific Revolution.

Naturally, the theory of heliocentricity would become controversial, especially for followers of Christianity. The Catholic Church would accuse him (and Galilei) of heresy. Copernicus would return to Poland to live out the later days of his life, passing away in 1543.

If Nicolas Copernicus helped jumpstart a Scientific Revolution before his death in 1543, Francis Bacon would be one of the many to pick up the torch after his demise though they never would have met-- Copernicus was Polish while Bacon was born in England in 1561 (where he would also die).

A scholar by any definition of the word, Bacon managed an unlikely balance between scientific discovery, philosophy, and devout Anglican faith. In his effort to expose the truths of the world, it was his way of reasoning (through deductions formed by observation and inductive logic) that formed the basics of general scientific methodology.

It helped significantly that Bacon was also well-connected with the monarchy at the time, but he was, notably, believed to be the ghostwriter for William Shakespeare and involved in secret occult societies like the Rosicrucians. He passed away of pneumonia in 1626 and was buried in St. Albans at St. Michael's Church.

There was a six-year gap between the lives of Francis Bacon and Christopher Wren, both of whom made significant advances in the fields of science, though while Bacon's works focused more on the theoretical, Wren put it to practice.

Born in 1632, Wren would eventually take a post at Oxford University during the Scientific Revolution. Though a scholar in astronomy, mathematics, and physics, his greatest fame would come from architecture and design. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Wren would be almost single-handedly responsible for the reconstruction of more than fifty London churches (including St Paul's Cathedral).

Wren would be knighted in 1673 and would live, yet, for another fifty years, dying in his home in his sleep at the age of ninety. His body was laid to rest in the crypt of his own creation, St Paul's Cathedral.

Sir Christopher Wren stayed in England for most of his life, but nine years after his death in 1723, a man named George Washington would be born in the colony of Virginia, quite the distance across the Atlantic Ocean.

Washington's family settled in what would become America in the 1650s, and Washington would be a fourth generation colonist when he was born in 1732. Part of the French and Indian War when it occurred in the 1750s, Washington would rise through the ranks of the military and, by the time tensions rose between the colonies and the United Kingdom, he became Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.

The rest unfolded as the story goes with Washington becoming an American Founding Father and the first President of the United States (in 1789). He would retire eight years later, passing away in 1799 at his home in Mount Vernon at the age of 67.

Though George Washington never saw America in the 19th century, having paved the way for the nation's growth and expansion, Edgar Allan Poe was directly influenced by the President, even though he wouldn't be born until 1809.

Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe would start his adult life in the military (not unlike Washington), but his particular talents would be in writing especially fantastical tales as the Romantic Era shifted into the Victorian era, creating with it a Gothic sensibility at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Though plagued by tragedy in his life and pushed into rampant alcoholism, he would later be recognized a one of the key figures in American literary history.

Before his death at the age of 40 (brought on by his alcoholism), Poe wrote what many consider to be the seminal detective story ("Murders in the Rue Morgue"), darkly Romantic poetry and prose, and tales of horror (like "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Tell-Tale Heart", and "The Pit and the Pendulum") that remain highly influential in the modern era.

Forty-one years after Edgar Allan Poe passed away, H. P. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and by the time he started writing, the era of Victorian Gothic literature had passed in favour of Modernist, truer-to-life texts. In that way, Lovecraft went against the grain, creating surreal, horrifying works about unfathomable, out-of-this-realm evils.

The connection to Poe is apparent; Poe's take on the horrific (and the terrific) was directly influential on Lovecraft's entire catalogue of works. Early critics believed Lovecraft's works to be complex and difficult, but unnoticed pulp fiction while later ones considered him to be visionary. The term 'Lovecraftian' would apply to works by Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, and Junji Ito, amongst others in the literary world, but also to Guillermo del Toro and John Carpenter in cinema.

During the Great Depression, Lovecraft's health deteriorated rapidly. He would pass away in 1937 in his Providence home with a diagnosis of terminal cancer.

H. P. Lovecraft's influence on the world of media persisted after his death in 1937, and this was apparent even in mainstream cinema. And who amongst 20th century's greatest filmmakers may be more well-known than Steven Spielberg, a Hollywood director who has touched on every film genre in one way or another.

Born in 1947, ten years after Lovecraft's death, Spielberg took up filmmaking as a young boy, building up his skills through high school and, eventually, being brought on to film "Jaws" in the mid-1970s. He would go on to become one of the most celebrated filmmakers of a generation with blockbusters like "Jurassic Park", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial".

Despite being known for family films, especially in earlier days, movies like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and even his work producing the Tobe Hooper-directed "Poltergeist" hinted at his ability to take Lovecraft's influences and depict the unfathomable in tangible ways, evoking a sense of wonder in cinema that carried on into the 21st century.