Historical Misconceptions - Where is "popular" history completely wrong?

[Sturn]

I'll start:

"The Battle of Thermopylae was a Greek Victory"

Why it's not true:

While you can argue that it didn't inspire the later Greek victory (very subjective even if you lived during the time of the battle), it's hard to argue it wasn't a victory. A smaller Greek force did delay the much larger Persian force while inflicting more casualties.

From your Wiki link:

The vastly outnumbered Greeks held off the Persians for seven days (including three of battle) before the rear-guard was annihilated in one of history's most famous last stand.

Greek 5,000 to 11,000 versus Persian 100,000 to 2.6 million. 4,000 Greek casualties versus 20,000 Persian casualties. I can still call that a victory even if it didn't permanently stop the Persian advance or inspire a later battle.

[Maithanet]

While you can argue that it didn't inspire the later Greek victory (very subjective even if you lived during the time of the battle), it's hard to argue it wasn't a victory. A smaller Greek force did delay the much larger Persian force while inflicting more casualties.

From your Wiki link:

Greek 5,000 to 11,000 versus Persian 100,000 to 2.6 million. 4,000 Greek casualties versus 20,000 Persian casualties. I can still call that a victory even if it didn't permanently stop the Persian advance or inspire a later battle.

Inflicting more casualties does not make it a victory. The Persians (desperately!) needed to control the pass to continue into Greece and avoid supply problems. The ground was so defensible that it provided a great opportunity to the Greeks to turn the invasion back. Nonetheless, after inflicting losses which could be easily replaced by the Persians, the pass was captured and the opportunity to stop the Persians was lost.

Perhaps if the battle was part of a larger campaign of retreat and attrition by the Greeks then you could call this a victory, but it was not.

[Aemon Stark]

I find it hard to believe that any state in antiquity could have marshalled an army of hundreds of thousands let alone 2.6 million.

[Maithanet]

I find it hard to believe that any state in antiquity could have marshalled an army of hundreds of thousands let alone 2.6 million.

According to the wiki and what I've read, the battle was likely between 5,000-7,000 Greeks and 100-200 thousand Persians. That's still a massive army for the time, but a lot more believable.

[thecryptile]

I find it hard to believe that any state in antiquity could have marshalled an army of hundreds of thousands let alone 2.6 million.

Well, we're getting the information from Herodotus. They used to call the guy "The father of lies" so, he might have been exaggerating just a teensy bit. Still, recent scholarship has validated many of his claims. It's safe to say that the Greeks were greatly outnumbered.

[giant snake]

Edward II was murdered by a red-hot poker up the arse. I've even read this in supposedly serious history books, when it's almost certainly a nasty bit of homophobic propaganda that emerged a couple of centuries after the purported act.

I don't see where you're going with any of this. First, what is the evidence that it was fabricated years later? Also, surely you realize that the concept of 'homophobic propaganda' would be completely inane at any point in history. Regardless of that, forced sodomy has been a popular form of torture all over the world and it still is, especially in the middle east.

I'm as skeptical as anyone when it comes to sordid tales from history, and this one seems more unlikely than some, but nobody is going to be convinced either way if you argue that it's some kind of propaganda.

Depends on whether you think the Eastern Roman Empire counts as the Roman Empire I suppose.

I mean that the misconception, in general, seems to be that the Empire either came crashing down over night, or that there was some other catastrophic event that caused it to reach critical mass. The history of its decline is one thing, but the reasons for that decline are another, and in my opinion, they took root before the actual empire even existed.

As for your question; I'd consider the Eastern Roman Empire to be different, yes. It had its own history, its own language, and its own rise and fall. They called themselves Roman, but they had less in common with the original Roman state than the modern US does with Great Britain.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

As far as we can tell, western europeans also did not marry particularly young: Median age of first marriage seems to have been around 25 for women and 28 for men. (generally once the first child was on the way, engagements could be really, really long back then, and usually often weren't confirmed with marriage until the woman was pregnant...)

If marriages weren't confirmed until the woman was pregnant, then does that mean that most people waited until their mid to late twenties to have sex?

[MinDonner]

I don't see where you're going with any of this. First, what is the evidence that it was fabricated years later? Also, surely you realize that the concept of 'homophobic propaganda' would be completely inane at any point in history. Regardless of that, forced sodomy has been a popular form of torture all over the world and it still is, especially in the middle east.

I'm as skeptical as anyone when it comes to sordid tales from history, and this one seems more unlikely than some, but nobody is going to be convinced either way if you argue that it's some kind of propaganda.

Eh? Edward II was gay; that much is largely undisputed. He was also almost certainly murdered (there's a slight dispute about that, as some people think he escaped into exile, though this is pretty dubious). What we do know is that the first record of "lol guess how that gay king got murdered, ironic eh?" didn't happen till a good many years after the fact; contemporary accounts don't mention it. We're talking a political assassination here, not the torture and murder of some dissident.

[Ouroboros]

Women as baby factories, particularly during the middle ages. Women worked, produced trade goods, created art and wrote scholarly texts, maintained businesses and managed estates all through the middle ages. They trained as doctors, held positions of power in government, went on crusade and occasionally fought wars as general and foot soldier both. Some women even held knighthoods during this period, though often these knighthoods were only honorary as they had inherited them from their fathers or childless brothers on their death. Amongst all strata of society women had lives beyond just the stereotype of wife and mother.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Hitler had one testicle.

No, he didn't. That was simply wartime propaganda.

[thecryptile]

Hitler had one testicle.

No, he didn't. That was simply wartime propaganda.

The idea originated in a song...

Hitler has only got one ball,

Goering has two but very small,

Himmler is somewhat sim'lar,

But poor Goebbels has no balls at all.

[Fragile Bird]

I'm intrigued by this baby stuff. Being a Catholic from Poland, everyone I knew talked about their grandmothers and great-grandmothers having endless numbers of children, many of whom died, but still, I have heard lots of stories about families with 5 to 15 children. And I used to be fascinated with settlers lives here in Canada, and if I drove through an old town or village I'd stopped at the churchyard and look at headstones. The graveyards were full of headstones proclaiming women dead in the late teens and twenties, died in or shortly after childbirth, and often with the grave of a child with it or beside it. And, sometimes, a row of headstones of two or three or even four wives of the same (I assume) man, all of whom died young.

I've always assumed the most common age for marriage was the mid to late teens and early 20s, because childbirth was so dangerous and so many women died. The ones who had 15 or more pregnancies were women who's bodies coped well with pregnancy and delivered babies without complications. It's hard for me to think of this as a myth, it doesn't seem to make sense.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

Medieval western europeans lived in extended families and had arranged marriages at an early age.

This does seem to be true among female nobility, though. Not just for reasons of pure politics, but because male nobility wanted to maximize their chances of having sons.

[thecryptile]

"Cleopatra was black". How you get black from generations of Greeks inbreeding in brother-sister marriages is beyond me. Source: Not Out of Africa:How "Afrocentrism" Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History by Mary Lefkowitz 1997 New Republic

"A medieval Knight's armour was so heavy, that if he fell down he would be unable to get up again." Medieval Knights actually carried less weight than modern soldiers. The famous French Knight Boucicaut supposedly was able to do cart-wheels in full armour. Source: Knight: The Medieval Warrior's Manual by Michael Prestwich 2010 Thames and Hudson

edit to add sources

[Ded As Ned]

Some sources for info in this thread would be helpful... if I'm to be convinced some of my preconceived notions of history are wrong and should be altered, I need something more to go on than your word. No offense intended.

[Ouroboros]

It's hard for me to think of this as a myth, it doesn't seem to make sense.

Its a myth to say this is -all- that women were to society, even at its lowest rungs, a womb with arms and legs stuck at home feeding her menfolk. Child mortality rates meant that married women (and by no means did all women marry, in any particular social group at any particular time in history) had to keep trying to have children who would grow up to be teens or adults, but this is not a universal story. There has never been a point in history where a woman wasn't part of the work force in some measure, with the possible exception of the post-war/baby boomer generation when the west saw a big explosion in the middle class with wealth all around, excluding the idle rich and wealthy that is.

The modern concept of the house wife is very much that, a modern concept.

[Werthead]

1) Henry VIII wrote the music to 'Greensleeves' - except he didn't. No record is found of the tune's existence before 1580 (Henry VIII died in 1547) and the tune is based on an Italian style of composition which did not reach England until after Henry VIII's death. The tune had become quite well-known by 1602 (when Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor mentions it) and it may be that the tune was attributed to Henry VIII to increase his post-death reputation as a renaissance man active in martial, artistic, political and spiritual pursuits, or possibly to please his daughter, Elizabeth I.

Whether he wrote the words is another matter, and it has been suggested he did write them in reference to Anne Boleyn, although the interpretation that the song is about a prostitute or 'loose woman' doesn't really make that very flattering. If he wrote the lyrics but not the music, that would also explain the confusion in attribution. However, he definitely didn't come up with the tune and the evidence for the words is not entirely convincing. Amusingly the TV show The Tudors continues the mistake by showing Henry VIII casually knocking the song off in an afternoon whilst musing on the Cardinal Wolsey scandal and the court musicians playing it five minutes later (of course, The Tudors also features an assassination attempt on Anne Boleyn which is pure BS).

2) The British won the Battle of Waterloo and defeated Napoleon single-handed in a glorious victory for the King and Country.

Not really accurate. The 'British' army actually mostly consisted of Dutch, Belgian and German troops, although under British command. It's also common to see the battle depicted as being won by a 'British' army slightly smaller (68,000 to 72,000) than Napoleon's forces, making it a great victory against a numerically superior enemy. Those depictions which do mention that an entire Prussian army of 50,000 troops was also present usually depict it arriving only at the end of the battle, after the British had already effectively won, and merely only convincing Napoleon the jig was up after he'd already effectively lost to Wellington (the Christopher Plummer 1970s film Waterloo and the Sharpe's Waterloo novel and TV movie are both quite bad for this). In reality the Prussian forces began arriving (somewhat piecemeal) three hours before the final advance of the Old Guard and played an active part in the battle, reinforcing Wellington's left when it was about to collapse and taking an active part in the battle. The Prussian arrival was actually probably crucial to the victory.

Of course, suggesting that the British owe their greatest-ever land victory to Germans still doesn't go down well in some quarters :)

3) The Russians only won WWII because of American Lend-Lease support.

This is a new-ish fallacy. After the fall of communism and the opening of warmer relations between the USA and Russia, we started learning a lot more about the sheer scale of the Nazi-Soviet war, the losses the Soviets suffered and the massive achievements in took for them to recover and win. For a good decade or so the Russian contribution to the war was lauded. Then, about ten years ago, as American-Russian relations started cooling a bit, I started seeing articles and numerous web arguments that the Russians only achieved what they did with American material support and without it, they would have lost.

This argument is based on the fact that, towards the end of the war, the Russians did indeed receive substantial shipments of aid from the USA and material support in the forms of railroad trucks, jeeps, tanks and aircraft. However, the argument ignores the fact that the USSR was only in realistic danger of losing the war outright on two occasions, when the Germans attacked Moscow in November and December 1941, and when the Germans came close to cutting off the USSR's entire supply of oil and petrol in October/November 1942, during the Stalingrad and Caucasus campaign. In the former case, almost no aid at all had reached the USSR from the USA and the Russians defeated the Germans in the battle for Moscow with their own weapons, equipment and soldiers. In the latter case, though more material had started arriving, it was still not substantial and again the Russians defeated the Germans at Stalingrad (triggering the mass, panicked withdrawal of the German forces from the Caucasus) with their own equipment, weapons and troops.

American material aid starts arriving in substantially larger quantities later in 1943, and it is arguable that the victories at Kursk and later Operation Bagration in 1944 were helped significantly by the American railroad cars, jeeps and trucks (American tanks were laughed out of the room, however, with the Shermans sent to the USSR assigned to back-room guard duty way behind the lines as they were so helplessly awful compared to the T-34 and other Russian tanks; the Russians did make use of some British and American aircraft later in the war, however), all of which greatly sped their advance. However, by this time the strategic initiative had moved to the Russians, whose own internal resources were so overwhelming compared to the Germans that their victory by that point was inevitable. Without the American and British aid, it may have taken a bit longer, but would still have happened.

[The Iceman of the North]

Being a Catholic from Poland, everyone I knew talked about their grandmothers and great-grandmothers having endless numbers of children, many of whom died, but still, I have heard lots of stories about families with 5 to 15 children. And I used to be fascinated with settlers lives here in Canada, and if I drove through an old town or village I'd stopped at the churchyard and look at headstones. The graveyards were full of headstones proclaiming women dead in the late teens and twenties, died in or shortly after childbirth, and often with the grave of a child with it or beside it. And, sometimes, a row of headstones of two or three or even four wives of the same (I assume) man, all of whom died young.

First point, Poland is not part of Western Europe. Point two, we were talking about medieval times, not 19th and 20th Century.

That said, looking at my own family history (in Norway, that probably isn't representative for all of Western Europe, but is after all in Western Europe), my Saami female ancestors that got married during the 18th Century seems to have married 'relatively' young at early 20'ies, while my Norwegian ancestors got married at around 30. I'm using the 18th Century because modern medicine started to have an effect during the 19th Century, with the last 'catastrophe' year (year with a drastic peak in mortality) being 1812. But until my grandparents generation (mid-20th Century), most married women in Norway had a rather large number of children, they just tended to start late. (An example, one of my Great Grandmothers had 7 children between her 24th and 40th birthday.)

A surprisingly low number of my ancestors died in child labour during the 18th and 19th Century, probably due to the lack of any medical doctors present.

[Fragile Bird]

Well yes, I know Poland is in Eastern Europe, but it was a big medieval power, and Polish kings and nobles married lots of Western Europeans, and married off their daughters to them as well. And I don't know how big my ancestors's families were, past what my parents knew, but I assume women were baby machines 600 years ago as well as 100 years ago, because there was no effective method of birth control (other than, perhaps, starvation when crops were bad, and that old stand-by, abstinence) and women were chattels.

I assume someone somewhere has done a study of medieval family size. When I get home I think I'll try looking it up. :)

[Reposado]

my favorite is the galileo myth. popular history tells us that galileo was tossed out for suggesting against orthodoxy for saying that the earth revolved around the sun. and is often attributed the quote "and yet it moves" (probablya 19th century invention.

in reality his theory was rejected because it did not fit the data.his circular earth orbit proposed fit the data less well than the previously accepted theory.

when kepler proposed an elliptical earth orbit, his ideas were accepted readily enough.