Reign of Love Trivia Quiz

Answer: Theodora and Justinian

Theodora (circa 500-548) was probably born in Cyprus; as a teenager, she worked as an actress in Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Byzantine Empire. At that time, acting was not a respectable profession, and actresses were expected to put on obscene performances both on and off the stage. She'd already given up that life, though, when she met Justinian (483-565), and they soon fell in love. The law forbade a match between people of two such different social classes, but that law didn't long survive after Justinian laid eyes on Theodora. They married in 525, two years before Justinian became emperor.

Theodora was brilliant and decisive, and Justinian owed much of his success to her -- including even his survival of the Nika riots in 532. Together, they worked against corruption, for the reunification of the Roman Empire, and for a few basic rights for women. They disagreed explosively on religion, and backed different Christian factions in a struggle for spiritual and temporal power, but in all other areas they relied on each other's counsel. He was heartbroken when she died of cancer, and his desolation has been blamed for the rapid way in which his earlier victories dissolved.

Answer: Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan

Shah Jahan (1592-1666), born a prince named Shihab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram, was the fifth Mughal emperor of India. He and the Persian noblewoman Arjumand Banu Begum (1593-1631) married as teenagers; stunned by her beauty, he called her Mumtaz Mahal, "Jewel of the Palace." He had two wives before her, but she was his friend, confidante and true love, and they traveled together on military campaigns and imperial visits. The court chronicler wrote that "the intimacy, deep affection and favor which His Majesty had for [Mumtaz] exceeded by a thousand times what he felt for any other."

She died in childbirth with their fourteenth child, and Shah Jahan was inconsolable. He spent twenty-two years designing and building the glorious Taj Mahal, in Agra, as her mausoleum. Their son, Aurangzeb, deposed him soon after the building's completion, and buried him there upon his death.

Answer: Josephine and Napoleon

Joséphine was born in Martinique in 1763; in 1779, her family found her a husband in France, Alexandre de Beauharnais. They had two children before Alexandre's execution in the Reign of Terror in 1794, which his wife narrowly escaped. Meanwhile, Napoléon Bonaparte (born in 1769 in Corsica) was rising through the ranks of the army. Soon after the two met and married in 1796, he invaded Italy and Egypt. By 1800 he was the most powerful man in France; in 1804 he crowned himself and Joséphine Emperor and Empress.

Joséphine and Napoléon loved each other deeply and exchanged love letters when apart; in one, written in 1797, he called her "you who alone can move and rule my heart." But it wasn't enough. They both had affairs. Joséphine had debts. Their lack of a child frustrated Napoléon's dream of founding an imperial dynasty. In 1810 they divorced so that he could wed Marie-Louise of Austria, an event he ungallantly described as "marry[ing] a womb." (They did have a son, but Napoléon failed to keep the throne for him.) Joséphine died in 1814, the same year Napoléon went into exile for the first time. He died in 1821, during his second exile, having spent some twelve years tearing Europe apart. His last words, translated, were "France, army, head of the army, Joséphine."

Answer: Eleanor of Castile and Edward I of England

Eleanor of Castile (1241-1290) was married to her prince at the tender age of thirteen; her groom, Edward (1239-1307), the heir to the English throne, was not much older at 15, but they were fortunate enough to become sweethearts as well as dynastic partners. Unusually for a king of his era, Edward I -- popularly called "Longshanks" for his height -- did not have any known mistresses or illegitimate children, and they strove so hard not to be apart that Eleanor gave birth to two children while on travels for military campaigns. (Despite his virtues as a husband, Edward was not a gentle man; his other nickname is "Hammer of the Scots", and he expelled the entire Jewish population from England in 1290.)

Eleanor died of a fever on November 28, 1290, in Harby (near Lincoln). Her funeral procession stopped each night on its slow way to Westminster Abbey in London, and her grieving husband commissioned an elaborately carved stone cross to mark each of these twelve resting places. Of these medieval masterpieces, only three remain mostly intact; Charing Cross, the famous London railway station, takes its name from the now-gone cross that was erected there. The bereaved Edward wrote of her two months later as the lady "whom living we dearly cherished, and whom dead we cannot cease to love".

Answer: Alexandra and Nicholas II

Alix of Hesse, a granddaughter of the UK's Queen Victoria, was born in 1872. She was 12 when she first met Nicholas, who was four years older and heir to the Russian throne; five years later, on a longer visit, they fell in love. It took another five years for the couple to persuade their families to agree to the match, and the political requirement that Alix become Russian Orthodox instead of Lutheran was another stumbling block. "I have loved [Alix] for a long time," Nicholas wrote during negotiations, but "... I have resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true." Yet it did, and they married shortly after he became tsar in 1894.

Privately, their marriage was happy; they advised each other and rejoiced in their four daughters and their son, who suffered from the life-threatening illness of hemophilia. But their ruling style was ill-suited to the times, and the revolution of 1917 cut short their reign. In the early morning of July 17, 1918, the entire family was murdered by their Bolshevik guards. They are now venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church as passion bearers, saints who met death with the same spirit that Jesus Christ did.

Answer: Elisabeth and Franz Josef

Franz Josef (1830-1916) became Emperor of Austria at the tender age of 18, in the aftermath of the 1848 wave of revolutions. His mother urged him to marry her niece, the Bavarian duchess Helene, but he fell hard for Helene's younger sister, Elisabeth (1837-1898). They wed in 1854 and soon had three children.

But Elisabeth chafed under her domineering mother-in-law, and the death at age two of the couple's oldest daughter, Sophie, tore them apart. Franz Josef had affairs; Elisabeth found escape in travel. Politics sometimes helped heal the rift; Elisabeth's intervention, and the birth of their fourth child, helped cool unrest in Hungary. The horror of the 1889 Mayerling affair, in which their only son murdered his lover and then killed himself, brought them closer together for comfort and support. She was murdered by an anarchist nine years later; on hearing the news, her husband is said to have murmured, "She will never know how much I loved her."

Answer: Bathsheba and David

By the time David met Bathsheba, he had come a long way from the scrappy shepherd boy with a slingshot. His armies were at war, but he was safe at home in Jerusalem when he saw her bathing from his rooftop. Overcome, he sent for her, and they conceived a child even though her husband, Uriah, was at war. Ultimately, in 2 Samuel 11, David had Uriah killed, and in the next chapter God's punishment became terribly clear: the untimely death of the couple's first child, and turmoil in the House of David.

Yet despite this, and despite David's other romantic attachments, the two became closer over many years. They had other children, including the future king Solomon. And when David was on his deathbed in 1 Kings 1, and his son Adonijah was angling for the succession, the prophet Nathan did not trust in his own ability to rouse the king; he turned to Bathsheba for help, knowing that -- as always -- she had the king's ear and trust.

Answer: Jane Seymour and Henry VIII

Jane Seymour (circa 1508-1537) was born in Wiltshire and served as an attendant to the first two wives of King Henry VIII (1491-1547). Henry's notorious enthusiasm for marriage was rooted in his obsession with having a male heir; after all, he was only the second of his dynasty and England was only five decades removed from a devastating series of dynastic civil wars. He divorced his first wife when she aged past childbearing (founding a new church in the process) and beheaded his second wife on probably trumped-up charges of adultery. He and Jane wed just eleven days after the execution. Seventeen months later, she was dead of an infection following the birth of their son, the future Edward VI.

Was it love? She was the only wife whom Henry mourned and the only one whom he gave a state funeral, though he outlived four of the six. In Henry's will, where he expressed his wish to share a tomb with her, he referred to her as his "true and loving wife." Her real feelings aren't known, but her motto -- "Bound to obey and serve" -- suggests that she kept her immediate predecessor's grisly fate in mind.

Answer: Nefertiti and Akhenaten

Akhenaten reigned from about 1352 to about 1335 BC. He began his reign as Amenhotep IV, but soon changed his name to honor the sun disk Aten, who was central to the new religion the pharaoh strove to impose on Egypt. Nefertiti, whose name translates to "the beautiful woman has come," was his primary consort. Sculptures depict her as roughly the same size as her husband, which, at the time, was a bold statement of equality.

They are shown praying together, acting lovingly toward each other and toward their six daughters, and even sharing some of the traditional iconography of the Pharaoh. Time has erased the details of their relationship, but the evidence that has survived is striking for its show of mutual respect and affection.

Answer: Victoria and Albert

Victoria (1819-1901) ascended the British throne in 1837, at the age of 18, after the death of her uncle (William IV). Another uncle, the King of Belgium, had already introduced her to her handsome cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819-1861). "He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy," she wrote her uncle, and the couple were married in 1840. They went on to have nine children, several of whom married into other European royal families.

Victoria's 63-year reign saw the formal addition of India to the British Empire and the establishment of a more symbolic role for the UK's monarch. Prince Albert, in his position as royal consort, aided in this transition by spearheading reforms and urging his wife to avoid the appearance of partisanship. When he died at the age of 42, she was devastated; she secluded herself from the public for years, and wore mourning black for the rest of her long life. She encouraged memorials to him that appear all over the world, from London's Royal Albert Hall, to the Saskatchewanian city of Prince Albert, to Lake Albert on the Uganda-Congo (Kinshasa) border.