Fact or Legend? Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Great Pyramid was not built by slaves

The pyramids were not built by slaves, but by free laborers. The idea that it was built by slaves can be traced back to the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt almost 3,000 years after the pyramids at Giza were completed. The village that the pyramid builders lived in has been discovered and excavated in recent years, and it shows the workers were well-fed, received excellent medical attention if injured, and were even allowed to be buried near the Great Pyramid itself. Recent studies have also shown that only about 14,000 to 40,000 workers were employed in its construction, and that it could have been completed in as little as ten years.

It is true that the Great Pyramid was the world's tallest structure from its completion around 2560 BC until the construction of England's Lincoln Cathedral in the early 1300s. It is also true that it was robbed in antiquity. When the burial chamber was opened, it contained nothing but an unadorned, broken sarcophagus.

Answer: Nero wasn't in Rome when the fire started

The Great Fire of Rome began on July 19, 64 AD, and lasted for six days. The legend that Nero played his lyre (not the fiddle) and sang a song about the sack of Troy during the conflagration comes from the writings of Cassius Dio, who wrote 150 years after the event. A much more reliable, and contemporary, historian, Tacitus, says that Nero was in Antium, some 35 miles distant from Rome, when the fire started. Tacitus also says that upon on learning about the fire, Nero rushed back to Rome and directed efforts to control it, and distributed relief to those who had been left homeless. Tacitus was no fan of Nero's, so it's unlikely he'd lie about this.

As much as a third of the city may have been destroyed. While it is unlikely that Nero had anything to do with starting the fire, after it was over he built a magnificent palace in the burned out area called "Nero's Golden House." This led to rumors that Nero had ordered the fire to be set. To counteract these rumors, Nero blamed the Christians, and had thousands of them put to death - not in the Colosseum, though; it hadn't been built yet.

Nero was fond of music, however, and fancied himself a great poet and singer. He held numerous contests in which he sang and accompanied himself on the lyre; perhaps not surprisingly, Nero always won these contests. He also gave recitals, and forced people to attend them. Leaving early or falling asleep during one of Nero's performances often led to a death sentence; women were said to have given birth in the theatre to avoid Nero's wrath.

Answer: This is not a legend; it's true

Constantine the Great was a Roman emperor who reigned from 307 to 337 AD. While some scholars have tried to cast doubt on Constantine's conversion to Christianity, there is a lot of evidence to support it. The story goes that before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine saw a flaming cross in the sky, accompanied by the words "in hoc signo vinces," or "in this sign you conquer." Constantine ordered his soldiers to paint the Christian "chi-rho" symbol on their shields, and he defeated his rival emperor, the pagan Maxentius, even though his army was outnumbered almost two-to-one. This story is probably myth, but there is no doubt that Constantine was very friendly towards Christians. In 313, he issued the Edict of Milan, which ended Christian persecution and made the religion legal throughout the Empire. He granted tax exemptions to the Church, and appointed Christians to high offices in the government, and took an active part in matters concerning Church policy, such as convening the Council of Nicea in 325. Around 320, pagan symbols disappeared from the coinage. Shortly before his death, he is said to have been baptized by Eusebius of Nicomedia. And all three of his sons - Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans - were undoubtedly Christians.

There are emperors before Constantine that some have said may have been Christians, such Severus Alexander and Philip the Arab, but there is no real historical evidence to support this belief. Except for the brief reign of Julian II, from 361 to 363, all of the emperors who followed Constantine were Christians.

Answer: He was homosexual

Richard I was the third son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. His two elder brothers predeceased him, so he became King of England upon his father's death in 1189. He spent only about six months of his ten year reign in that country. Most of his time was spent Crusading or fighting in France, where he also held large territories. After the fall of Acre during the Third Crusade he murdered thousands of Muslim captives when Saladin failed to pay the ransom agreed upon for their release.

It seems to be a trend nowadays to claim that almost every historical figure was homosexual. In the case of Richard, there is almost no evidence to support this conclusion. The idea was first proposed by a French historian, Jean Flori, in 1948. He pointed out that Richard was known to share a bed with the French king, Philip II, neglected his wife, Berengaria of Navarre, and twice made public confessions of his sins, including the "sin of sodomy."

In medieval times, it was not unusual for men to share a bed; historian John Gillingham, one of the world's foremost authorities on Richard, claims the sleeping arrangements were a mere political gesture, designed to show the world that the two monarchs had made peace and were political allies. It is true that Richard did not show much interest in his wife, but their marriage had been a political one, not a love match, and his almost constant warfare left him little time for her in any case. Finally, it should be understood that in medieval times, the term "sodomy" covered any sort of sexual activity, gay or straight, that was not approved of by the Church, which was practically everything. Richard was accused of raping women (not men) on several occasions, and fathered at least one illegitimate son. But the strongest evidence that Richard was not a homosexual is that none of his many enemies, either in England or abroad, charged him with being one during his lifetime. Being gay was frowned upon in medieval Europe, to say the least, and if his enemies had thought his sexual orientation was not what it should have been, they would certainly have used it as propoganda against him. The fact that they didn't is strong evidence that Richard was heterosexual.

Answer: He murdered his nephews, Edward and Richard

Poor Richard III - popular conceptions about him are mostly derived from William Shakespeare's play about him, where he is depicted as a deformed, scheming, immoral monster. Think about it: Elizabeth's grandfather had seized the throne of England by defeating and killing Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. What would have happened to a playwright who showed Richard to be a paragon of virtue, and Henry as a grasping Welsh usurper?

There are several contemporary descriptions of Richard; none of them made by foreigners, who had no reason to dissemble, describes him as having any physical deformity at all, much less a hunchback. He was a noted warrior, and any physical handicap would have limited his ability to fight on horseback on the manner of the time.

He had absolutely nothing to do with the death of his brother, George, who was tried and found guilty of treason in 1478.

Richard was a very popular king with the common people, and passed many laws to benefit the lower classes, including ones that allowed the accused to post bail, mandated that laws be written in English instead of French, and standardized weights and measures.

Now, about his nephews. There is no positive proof that Richard murdered them. But there's an awful lot of circumstantial evidence that he did. When Edward IV died in 1483, the throne should have passed to his 12 year-old son, Edward. But Richard managed to have his nephews declared illegitimate on very tenuous grounds, imprisoned them in the Tower of London, and then seized the crown for himself. A short time later, they simply disappeared. In 1674, workmen at the Tower of London found a wooden box containing the skeletons of two children whose ages matched those of Prince Edward and his younger brother, Richard. It was assumed that these were the bones of "The Princes In the Tower," and they were placed in an urn and interred in Westminster Abbey. Defenders of Richard have tried to make a case that they were killed by the Duke of Buckingham or Henry VII, but they disappeared during Richard's reign, and he was obviously the one to gain the most by having them out of the way. One of Richard's followers, Sir James Tyrrell, later admitted to having murdered the princes under orders from Richard (the confession was, however, obtained under torture).

You may have heard about the skeleton that was found under a parking lot in Leicester that has been "proven" to be that of Richard III. This is a classic case for showing that you should not believe everything you read. There were hundreds of articles about how DNA testing had proven conclusively that the remains belonged to Richard. They did not. DNA taken from the skeleton was compared to that of two matrilinear descendents of Richard's sister, and came up with a close, but not perfect, match. The differences were attributed to mutations during the 530 year interim between Richard's death and the present day. Moreover, the only tests that could be performed involved mitochondrial DNA. The skeleton's mitochondrial DNA belonged to haplogroup J1c2c, which is carried by almost 2% of the English population. In other words, there was a one in 50 chance of a random match. Furthermore, Carbon 14 dating was done on the bones in two separate laboratories, and each initially determined that the bones were too old to be Richard's. Tests at the University of Glasgow dated the bones between 1430 and 1460, and those done at Oxford gave a date of 1412 to 1449, both tests with an accuracy of 95%. Since Richard died in 1485, this was a problem. The results were then altered to take into account the fact that, as a member of the royal family, Richard would have eaten a lot of fish, and this would have affected the dating of the bones, so a "corrected" date of between 1475 and 1530 was arrived at. In my day, this was called "fudging the data." I do not think many scientists would regard the DNA evidence as conclusive. I have found no explanation as to why they did not test the rope that bound the skeleton's hands. Perhaps they were afraid it would have shown that the rope had eaten too much fish as well.

Answer: False

The legends are right in this case. Vlad Tepes (1431-1476), also known as Vlad III and Vlad the Impaler, was a bad one by almost anyone's standards. During his reign as Prince of Wallachia, he is estimated to have killed between 40,000 and 100,000 of his own subjects, along with uncounted Turks, Hungarians, Germans and Bulgarians.

Vlad's favorite method of execution was impalement; a sharpened stake was inserted into the anus, and carefully guided along the digestive tract so as not to damage any vital organs (although the intestines were pierced), until it emerged from the victim's mouth or neck. If he was in a playful mood, Vlad might impale his victims upside down. He was also known to have people boiled alive, skinned alive, and burned alive. He once frightened away a Turkish army by setting up a veritable forest of impaled corpses in its path. No one wanted to wind up in one of Vlad's POW camps!

To his credit, Vlad was very successful in wiping out crime in his principality, and successfully fought off many Turkish invasions. He is still regarded as a hero in Romania. But I think it fair to say that most of us would conclude that his faults outweighed his virtues.

Answer: Pope Joan

The legend of Pope Joan has got to be one of the strangest on record. It goes something like this: there was an Englishwoman named Joan who liked to dress in men's clothing, and pass herself off as a man. She went to Athens and studied until she became one of the most learned people in Europe. She then went to Rome, where she became a famous teacher and scholar. After she became pope, she took a lover and became pregnant. As she was leading a procession from St. Peter's to the Lateran Palace, she went into labor, and gave birth to a son, and died shortly afterwards.

The legend of Pope Joan first appeared in the 13th century, and appears to have gained a great deal of credibility during the Middle Ages. In most versions of the story her name is Joan, but sometimes she is called Agnes. In most versions of the tale she is English, but sometimes she is said to be German. She supposedly became pope following the death of Leo IV in 855, and reigned for two years, seven months and four days. She took the name of Pope John VIII.

All of this, of course, is complete nonsense. We don't have a lot of information about some periods of the Dark Ages, but we do know there wasn't a gap of nearly three years between the death of Leo IV and the election of his successor, Benedict III. What is really amazing is how many people believed this story for so long; even the Church seems to have believed it was true. It was not until 1601 that Pope Clement VIII declared that the legend of Pope Joan was untrue. At least two movies have been made about about her. Even today there are people trying to prove she existed. Good luck.

Answer: She died when a horse fell on her

Catherine II, or, as she is more commonly known, Catherine the Great, was born in Prussia in 1729. At the age of 16, she married the future Czar Peter III. Peter became Czar in 1762; he was mentally deficient and unfit to rule. After he had reigned for less than six months, Catherine forced him to abdicate, and shortly thereafter he was strangled by his guards. Catherine was widely suspected as having ordered his murder, although this has never been proven.

In some ways Catherine was an enlightened ruler, at least by Russian standards. She supported the Arts, instituted some social reforms, and greatly expanded Russia's territory, mostly at the expense of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. She had dozens of lovers, but never remarried after her husband's death.

The most scandalous and completely untrue legend about Catherine is that she died while attempting to engage sexual relations with a horse. Her actual death was not all that more dignified. It is generally agreed that she died of a stroke while sitting on the toilet.

Answer: He was extremely short

Napoleon was born in Corsica in 1769 to Carlo di Buonaparte and Maria Ramolino, only a year after France took control of the island from the Republic of Genoa. He changed his name from Buonaparte to the more French-sounding Bonaparte when he was in his 20s. After subjecting Europe to more than two decades of costly and bloody warfare, he was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815, and died in exile on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic in 1821. Why anyone, even the French, would regard this guy as a hero is beyond me.

Napoleon died at the comparitively young age of 51, and it was rumored that he had been poisoned - either by his British captors, or his own staff of servants. Analysis of hair samples showed that there were high levels of arsenic in Napoleon's body at his death. Opinion remains divided whether or not this caused his death; an autopsy following his death reached the conclusion that he had died of stomach cancer.

That same autopsy is the source of one of the more interesting stories about Napoleon. It was conducted by Francesco Atommarchi, in front of 17 witnesses. During the autopsy, various parts of the late emperor's anatomy were removed including his heart, liver, parts of his intestines, slivers of bone, etc. And some of these grisly items were kept as souveniers by the spectators, along with the usual locks of hair. Atommarchi and Napoleon did not like each other, and it is said that either during or shortly after the autopsy, he snipped off the Little Corporal's manhood, and gave it to his priest, the Abbe Ange Paul Vignali. The priest also got his hands on a copy of Napoleon's will, some of his hair, his waistcoat, and his breeches. These were passed down through the Vignali family until 1916, when the entire collection was auctioned off in London; the penis was described as "a mummified tendon." It then passed through various hands until it was purchased, again at auction, by an American urologist named John K. Lattimer. Tests have shown that it is someone's penis, but whether it actually belonged to Napoleon is still a matter of controversy. The French government refuses to open his tomb and check. Maybe they're afraid of what they would find.

There is one legend about Napoleon that is definitely not true. He wasn't short, at least by the standards of his day. Reliable descriptions of Napoleon show that he stood about 5'7", which was average, or even a little above average, for men at that time. He may at present be short his manhood, but he wasn't short in stature.

Answer: Anastasia

This one of my "people will believe anything" stories. On February 27, 1920, a young woman attempted to commit suicide in Berlin by jumping off a bridge into a canal. She was rescued and taken to a mental hospital, where she refused to identify herself. Eventually the woman claimed that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Nicholas II. Many people who had known Anastasia were brought to see her. Most claimed she was not the Czar's daughter, but she somehow managed to convince a number of people that she was, despite not really looking that much like Anastasia, and not being able to speak Russian! This enabled her to sponge off a lot of wealthy people for a number of years. Her story was that she was rescued after the shootings by a Russian soldier named Alexander Tchiakovsky, who took her to Bucharest, where they were married. She also said she gave birth to a son named Alexei in December, 1918, which meant she would have had to have been pregnant at the time of the Ekaterinburg shootings. This was explained by stating she had been raped by some of the soldiers guarding her on the way to Ekaterinburg. The child was placed in an orphanage, and Alexander was killed in Bucharest in 1919, so Anastasia had made her way to Berlin to seek help from her aunt, Princess Irene of Russia. She gave several different versions of why she decided to jump into the canal.

In 1928, the supposed Anastasia made her way to the United States, where she was hosted by several wealthy families. Her erratic behavior earned her another stay in a mental hospital. While in the U.S., she began using the name Anna Anderson. In 1932, she returned to Germany, where she began litigation in an unsuccessful attempt to secure the Romanov assets that had been left outside Russia at the time of the royal family's deaths. In 1968 she returned to the United States, where she married a man named Jack Manahan. She died on February 12, 1984 in Virginia.

In 1994, DNA testing was performed on a tissue sample taken from Anna Anderson when she was hospitalized in 1979. The tests showed that she was most definitely not the Grand Duchess Anastasia, but a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska. The bodies of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of their daughters were found in a mineshaft in 1991, and in 2007 the bodies of Alexei and the missing daughter were found. Despite this, there are still people who believe Anna Anderson's absurd claims. Some legends die hard.