9 Historical Myths That Most People Still Believe

Napoleon's supposed height of 5'2" derives from a unit confusion. His height was recorded as 5 pieds 2 pouces in French imperial units — which translates to approximately 5 feet 7 inches in English measurement. This was slightly above average for a French man of his era.

The myth was actively cultivated by British propagandists, particularly the caricaturist James Gillray, who depicted Napoleon as a tiny, raging figure to ridicule him. The image stuck. His nickname "le petit caporal" (the little corporal) was a term of affection from his troops, not a reference to his height.

Napoleon's personal physician, Barry O'Meara, recorded him as 5'7" at St Helena. The confusion between French and English inches was noted by historians as early as the 19th century but the myth proved more durable than the correction.

Educated Europeans had known the Earth was spherical since at least the 3rd century BC, when Eratosthenes calculated its circumference with remarkable accuracy. By 1492, the spherical Earth was not a matter of debate among scholars, navigators, or the Spanish court that funded Columbus.

The actual dispute was about the size of the Earth and therefore the distance to Asia by sailing west. Columbus's critics weren't flat-Earthers — they correctly calculated that Asia was much farther away than Columbus claimed. Columbus was wrong about the distance; he survived only because an unexpected continent was in the way.

The flat-Earth myth about Columbus was largely invented by Washington Irving in his 1828 fictional biography A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which dramatized a confrontation with religious authorities that never occurred.

Medieval scholars, theologians, and educated people universally accepted the spherical Earth. Dante's Divine Comedy (1320) depicts a spherical Earth explicitly. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and virtually every major medieval philosopher accepted it. University curricula across Europe taught the spherical Earth as fact.

The myth that medieval people believed in a flat Earth was manufactured in the 19th century to make the medieval period look ignorant by contrast with Enlightenment reason. John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896) are the primary culprits — both were polemical works with clear ideological agendas.

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell spent a career documenting that virtually no educated person in Western history after the 3rd century BC believed in a flat Earth.

Exactly one Viking-Age helmet has been found with anything resembling horns — the Oseberg helmet, discovered in a Norwegian burial. It was a ceremonial object, not a battle helmet, and predates the Viking Age proper. No archaeological evidence supports horned helmets as standard Viking military equipment.

Actual Viking helmets were simple rounded iron caps, sometimes with a nose guard. The Gjermundbu helmet, the only complete Viking battle helmet ever found, is a plain rounded dome with an eye guard. Horns would have been actively dangerous in combat — a sword blow to a horn could wrench the neck.

The horned helmet image was popularized by 19th-century Romantic artists, particularly Carl Emil Doepler's costumes for the first production of Wagner's Ring Cycle in 1876. Hollywood cemented it. The image has no basis in the archaeological or textual record of the Viking Age.

Einstein excelled at mathematics throughout his education. In his Swiss school leaving certificate, he received the highest possible marks in mathematics and physics. He taught himself calculus at 12 and had mastered integral and differential calculus before he was 15.

The myth originates from a grading system inversion. In the Swiss educational system, 6 is the highest mark and 1 is the lowest — the reverse of the German system. Early biographers saw Einstein's Swiss grades and misread a 6 as a failing mark. The error was perpetuated unchecked for decades.

Einstein did fail his entrance exam to the ETH Zurich polytechnic in 1895 — but he was two years younger than the typical applicant and scored very high in mathematics and physics. He was admitted the following year after completing his schooling.

The Great Wall is extraordinarily long but very narrow — typically 4 to 5 metres wide. At orbital altitude, the minimum resolvable width by the naked human eye is approximately 10 kilometers. The Wall is simply too narrow to resolve visually from space, regardless of its length.

Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei, the first Chinese person in space, specifically looked for the Wall during his 2003 mission and could not see it. NASA has confirmed that the Wall is not visible from orbit with the naked eye under normal conditions, though it has been photographed with zoom lenses from the International Space Station under specific lighting conditions.

The claim appears to have been made as early as 1932 in Ripley's Believe It or Not, decades before anyone had been to space to verify it. It was repeated so often it became assumed fact.

The Magna Carta of 1215 was primarily a feudal document negotiated between King John and a group of rebellious barons who wanted to limit royal power over themselves. Most of its 63 clauses concerned specific grievances of the nobility — inheritance rights, feudal dues, forest laws, and the treatment of debtors.

However, two clauses — principally Clause 39 — did contain language with broader application: "No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land." The phrase "free man" excluded serfs, who were the majority of the population.

The Magna Carta's importance as a foundation of constitutional liberty was largely a later construction — particularly by 17th-century parliamentarians who needed historical precedent for their conflicts with the Crown. Its transformation into a symbol of popular rights happened centuries after it was signed, through selective emphasis and creative interpretation.

Gladiators were expensive professional athletes — trained, fed, housed, and given medical care by their owners and schools (ludi). A skilled gladiator represented a significant financial investment. Letting them die in every bout would have been economically ruinous.

Archaeological evidence from gladiatorial graveyards — particularly the remarkable find at Ephesus in 1993 — shows that gladiators typically suffered injuries consistent with non-lethal combat: healed fractures, blade wounds that missed vital organs, and evidence of surgical intervention. Many gladiators fought multiple times across careers spanning years.

The thumbs-up/thumbs-down gesture is also almost certainly wrong. Ancient sources use the Latin pollice verso ("turned thumb") but don't specify direction. The Hollywood version was popularized by Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1872 painting Pollice Verso, which the director Ridley Scott explicitly cited as inspiration for Gladiator.

The figure is technically accurate as a mean average — but it is almost entirely driven by catastrophic child mortality. In medieval Europe, roughly a third of children died before their fifth birthday from disease, malnutrition, and infection. This drags the average down dramatically.

A medieval person who survived to age 21 could reasonably expect to live into their 50s or 60s. Records from medieval English noble families — admittedly better-documented and better-fed than peasants — show that men who reached 21 lived on average to 64. Chaucer lived to approximately 60. Edward I to 68. Eleanor of Aquitaine to around 82.

This matters because the "35 average" leads people to assume medieval adults were aged and worn out at 40, that marriage at 14 was normal for adults (it was rare and remarked upon), and that medieval people had no concept of old age. None of these are accurate.