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1,670 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 28.

  1. There is no single Bible: 24, 39 or 46 books, depending who asksJews count 24 books in the Tanakh. Protestants split the same material into 39 for their Old Testament, while Catholics include 46, adding texts they call deuterocanonical. The Sa…
  2. William the Conqueror's youngest son inherited cash, not land, and still became kingWhen William the Conqueror died in 1087, Normandy went to his eldest son and England to the next. Henry, the youngest, got money, reportedly 5,000 pounds, and no territory. Within…
  3. The White Huns ruled Central Asia for a century, yet their origins remain a puzzleFrom about 450 to 560 CE, a people called the Hephthalites dominated a swathe of Central Asia from Sogdia to the Tarim Basin. Persians, Byzantines, Chinese and Indians all knew th…
  4. The famous Mongol death toll of 40 to 60 million rests on shaky numbersThe Mongol conquests are routinely credited with 40 to 60 million deaths. That figure traces largely to a single 1978 population atlas, since criticised for thin evidence. The dev…
  5. Deus Ex let players pick lockpicks, hacking or guns for every missionIn 2000 a game set in a plague-ridden 2052 did something unusual: almost every objective could be solved several ways. Sneak past guards, hack a door, talk your way through or fig…
  6. For two and a half years, independent India still had a British-style governor-generalIndia did not become a republic on independence day. From 15 August 1947 until 26 January 1950 it was a dominion within the Commonwealth, with Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, …
  7. Medieval Bavaria once stretched deep into what is now AustriaToday's Bavaria is a German state, but the early medieval duchy ran along the Danube to the Hungarian frontier and over the Brenner Pass into South Tyrol. Over centuries it was ca…
  8. Lorraine was traded to a deposed Polish king so France could inherit itIn 1737 European diplomats solved a succession tangle with a strange swap. The Duke of Lorraine got Tuscany instead, and his duchy went to Stanislaw Leszczynski, a Polish king who…
  9. In Guernsey, the British monarch is still officially Duke of NormandyNormandy began as a deal: in 911 a Frankish king handed land on the lower Seine to a Viking chief called Rollo, on condition that he guard it against other raiders and accept bapt…
  10. Duke began as a Roman word for an army commander without formal rankThe grand title of duke descends from the Latin dux, simply meaning leader. In republican Rome it described a military commander with no official rank; under Diocletian it became …
  11. The howitzer is named after a Hussite cannon built to fire into crowdsDuring the Hussite Wars of the 1420s and 1430s, Czech rebels used stubby cannons called houfnice, from the Czech word for crowd, to fire at massed infantry and spook charging cava…
  12. Hugh Capet founded a dynasty that ruled France, on and off, until 1848In 987 Hugh Capet was elected king of the Franks in place of the Carolingians, succeeding Louis V. He reigned only nine years, but the House of Capet he founded held the throne th…
  13. For centuries, doctors blamed almost every illness on four bodily juicesBlood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile: Greek and Roman physicians believed health meant keeping these four fluids in balance, and illness came from too much or too little of o…
  14. Napoleon's famous Hundred Days actually lasted 110On 26 February 1815, with the guard ships away, Napoleon slipped off Elba with about 1,000 men. He retook France without firing a shot, entered Paris on 20 March, and held it unti…
  15. The Hussites fought off five papal crusades over a cup of communion wineAfter the reformer Jan Hus was burned at Constance in 1415 despite a letter guaranteeing his safety, his Czech followers took the chalice as their emblem, demanding that ordinary …
  16. Long before the superclubs, Phoenicians founded a port on Ibiza in 654 BCIbiza is famous for summer clubbing, but its story began in 654 BC, when Phoenician settlers founded a port there. The island later stayed loyal to Carthage against Rome, spent ce…
  17. In India, a million is ten lakh and ten million is one croreAcross India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, big numbers are counted in lakhs and crores rather than millions. A lakh is one hundred thousand, written 1,00,000, and a crore is ten milli…
  18. India's rupee sign fuses the Devanagari letter ra with a Latin RIndia's rupee symbol blends a Devanagari ra with a Latin capital R stripped of its upright stroke, topped by two parallel lines that nod to the tricolour flag and an equals sign. …
  19. Islam's three holiest sites, and the Damascus mosque awaiting Jesus's returnSunni and Shia Muslims agree on the top three: Mecca's Masjid al-Haram first, then Medina's Prophet's Mosque, then the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem. Beyond that the lists diverge…
  20. Málaga has been a trading port for roughly 2,800 yearsPhoenicians from Tyre planted a colony called Malaka on Spain's southern coast around 770 BC, and it has been inhabited ever since. Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Visigoths an…
  21. A Mongol emperor who honoured his predecessor's debts astonished his chroniclersWhen Möngke became Great Khan in 1251, merchants held paper drafts issued under his predecessor Güyük that local officials refused to honour. Möngke paid every one, reasoning that…
  22. Twelve European monarchies survive, including one where France's president is co-princeEurope still has twelve sovereign monarchies: seven kingdoms, three principalities, a grand duchy and the Vatican. Two are elective. The pope is chosen by conclave, and Andorra sh…
  23. Voltaire's one-word name was a disguised anagram of his real oneAfter a spell in the Bastille, François-Marie Arouet rebranded himself in 1718 as Voltaire. The name scrambles a Latinised Arouet the younger, flips the syllables of his father's …
  24. The Ottoman sultan who made a Byzantine emperor pay him tributeMurad I took Adrianople in the 1360s, made it his capital and pushed Ottoman power deep into the Balkans. By the end of his reign Serbian princes, the Bulgarian tsar and even Byza…
  25. An Ottoman sultan abdicated for his 12-year-old son, then was called backWorn down by war and grief after losing his favourite son, Murad II handed the throne to young Mehmed II in 1444. The boy's government floundered, the grand vizier summoned the fa…
  26. Every known language gets a three-letter code, and animal calls get their ownISO 639-3 tries to give every human language, living or dead, spoken or written, invented or ancient, a unique three-letter tag. Published in 2007, it held 7,916 entries by Januar…
  27. A diplomat turned historian made Byzantium and Venice bestsellersJohn Julius Norwich was named Julius partly because he arrived by caesarean section. The son of the politician Duff Cooper and the actress Diana Manners, he quit the Foreign Servi…
  28. Every English monarch since 1399 descends from one unpopular dukeJohn of Gaunt never wore the English crown, yet his son became Henry IV and every later monarch traces back to him. Named after Ghent, his Flemish birthplace, he was among the ric…
  29. An Omani sultan moved his capital from Arabia to the island of ZanzibarAt its peak the Omani Empire reached from the coasts of modern Iran and Pakistan to northern Mozambique. In 1832 Said bin Sultan shifted his seat of power across the Indian Ocean …
  30. Excavations suggest a third of the fallen at one samurai battle were womenWhen archaeologists examined 105 sets of remains from the 1580 battle of Senbon Matsubaru, 35 turned out to be women. There was no castle nearby for them to have been defending, w…
  31. Knightly orders began as armed monks guarding pilgrims and ended as medalsThe first knightly orders were brotherhoods of soldier-monks sworn to poverty, obedience and chastity, escorting pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over centuries kings borrowed the idea …
  32. The dropped-garter origin story of England's top knighthood came a century lateLegend says Edward III rescued a countess's slipped garter at a ball and scolded the sniggering courtiers, coining the motto of Britain's most senior order. The earliest written v…
  33. Hidden desert cisterns let the Nabataeans outlast armies sent to conquer themThe Nabataeans turned an empty desert into a fortress. They dug covered cisterns marked with signs only they could read, so when an enemy came, they simply withdrew into the water…
  34. The Indian kingdom that helped persuade Alexander's army to turn backWhen Alexander's troops reached Punjab after nearly a decade of marching, they heard of a kingdom to the east whose army was said to be five times the size of their own. Exhausted…
  35. A three-and-a-half-year state quietly built the legal skeleton of modern GermanyBetween July 1867 and December 1870, Germany north of the River Main was a single federal state led by Prussia. It lasted barely three and a half years, yet it introduced universa…
  36. After losing China, the Mongol court kept ruling the steppe for 267 yearsWhen Ming armies closed on Beijing in 1368, the last Yuan emperor did not surrender; he rode north. His descendants kept the grand title of Great Yuan and a claim to China for gen…
  37. Turks, Azerbaijanis and Turkmen all trace their roots to one steppe confederationTheir name simply meant tribe in Common Turkic. From the steppes north of Lake Balkhash, Oghuz herders rode west, converted to Islam and became empire-builders. Their descendants …
  38. Two brothers from Thessaloniki gave the Slavs their first written languageIn 862 or 863 a Moravian duke asked Byzantium for a Slavonic liturgy, and the missionaries Cyril and Methodius delivered astonishingly fast: a brand-new alphabet and translated sc…
  39. Orléans has thanked Joan of Arc every May since 1432On 8 May 1429 Joan of Arc broke the English siege of Orléans at the fortified gatehouse guarding its bridge. Three years later the city began an annual festival in her honour, and…
  40. Three shepherd children, a promised miracle and a crowd of thousands at FátimaIn 1917 three Portuguese shepherd children said a lady brighter than the sun was visiting them on the 13th of each month, and that in October she would perform a miracle. Newspape…
  41. Dungeons and Dragons paladins descend from Charlemagne's legendary twelve peersBefore paladins were holy warriors and healers in fantasy games, they were Charlemagne's twelve greatest knights, led by Roland, in medieval French epics. The word itself goes bac…
  42. Rome needed two centuries and a brutal revolt to win PannoniaThe Roman province of Pannonia stretched across what is now western Hungary, eastern Austria, northern Croatia and parts of four other countries, bounded by the Danube. Rome's fir…
  43. The Black Death and three poll taxes lit England's great rising of 1381After plague killed an estimated half of England's people, surviving labourers could suddenly demand higher pay. Lords and Parliament tried to freeze wages, then taxed every adult…
  44. The Pechenegs were named in Arabic, Tibetan, Georgian and Greek textsA semi-nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia, the Pechenegs dominated the steppes of southeast Europe and Crimea in the 9th and 10th centuries and raided the lands of Rus for ov…
  45. Philip the Good sent Jan van Eyck to Portugal to paint his brideBefore marrying Isabella of Portugal, Duke Philip of Burgundy dispatched Jan van Eyck in 1428 to paint her portrait for him. It was typical of a ruler whose court set Europe's fas…
  46. One medieval order of knights now has two rival grand mastersPhilip the Good founded the Order of the Golden Fleece at his wedding in 1430. Three centuries later a succession war split it in two, and ever since the King of Spain and the hea…
  47. The crusade that sacked a Christian capital instead of reaching the Holy LandIn April 1204 an army of the Fourth Crusade, diverted from its original course, stormed Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. The crusaders plundered it for three days,…
  48. Franco's chosen heir turned out to be a key to Spanish democracyFrancisco Franco named Prince Juan Carlos his successor in 1969, and for six years the prince seemed content to follow the dictator's path. Yet after Franco died in November 1975,…
  49. The September Pope reigned only 33 days, and never wanted the jobAlbino Luciani told friends he would refuse the papacy, then accepted it in August 1978 out of duty. He took the first double papal name, John Paul, and died 33 days later, creati…
  50. One threatening letter captured Fort Detroit, and leaflets later helped break armiesIn August 1812 the British general Isaac Brock sent Fort Detroit a letter hinting he could not restrain his Native American allies once fighting began. A day later the American co…
  51. The exiled Khitans who built a Central Asian empire and helped name CathayWhen the Jurchens toppled the Liao dynasty, a Khitan noble named Yelü Dashi led refugees west and founded a new empire in Central Asia. It ruled mostly Turkic and Iranian subjects…
  52. India's upper house can never be dissolved, and a third retires every two yearsThe Rajya Sabha, India's Council of States, is a permanent chamber: members serve staggered six-year terms, with about a third stepping down every second year, so the house itself…
  53. From Vladimir's baptism to Soviet atheism, Russian faith refused to disappearIn 987, according to the Primary Chronicle, Vladimir the Great made Orthodox Christianity the state religion of Kievan Rus', picking it because it was Byzantium's faith. Religion …
  54. Spain's Restoration kept the peace for decades by rigging elections in turnsFrom 1874 to 1931, Spain's restored Bourbon monarchy bought stability with a remarkable fix: Conservatives and Liberals took turns in power by agreement, and local bosses called c…
  55. Russia most likely owes its name to Swedish rowersThe Rus', who gave their name to Russia and Belarus, were most likely Norsemen from what is now Sweden. From the 8th to the 11th centuries they settled and ruled along the rivers …
  56. How a handful of Soviet insiders became billionaires in Russia's wild ninetiesWhen the Soviet Union collapsed, ownership of vast state assets was suddenly up for grabs. A few well-connected men bought key companies at a fraction of their value, bankrolled B…
  57. The Teutons gave Germans a nickname, but they may not have been GermanicTeutonic has meant German for more than a thousand years. The original Teutones, who shook the Roman Republic in the late 2nd century BC, are harder to pin down: their name and th…
  58. The most notorious antisemitic forgery was copied from a satire about Napoleon IIIIn 1921 a Times correspondent laid two texts side by side and showed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sold as secret minutes of a Jewish plot, lifted passage after passag…
  59. A 4,000-year-old empire left behind around 120,000 clay receiptsThe Third Dynasty of Ur lasted roughly a century, yet it is among the best-documented states of the ancient world. Excavators have recovered around 120,000 of its clay tablets, an…
  60. A royal wedding meant to heal France's religious split set off its worst massacreIn August 1572 Catherine de' Medici married her Catholic daughter to the Protestant Henry of Navarre to seal a fragile peace. Leading Huguenots flocked to Paris for the ceremony. …

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