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1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 19.

  1. William Blackstone's lectures turned English law into a bestsellerIn 1753 an Oxford lawyer with a stalled career began giving the first university lectures ever offered on English law. They made William Blackstone famous and led to his four-volu…
  2. Gladstone was prime minister four times and left office at 84William Gladstone began in Parliament as a High Tory opposed to reform and ended as the embodiment of Victorian Liberalism. He led four separate governments between 1868 and 1894,…
  3. Vladimir the Great reportedly shopped for a religion before choosing ChristianityAccording to an early Slavic chronicle, the pagan ruler of Kiev sent envoys to inspect Islam, Judaism, Latin Christianity and Byzantine Christianity. Returning from Constantinople…
  4. Vytautas switched sides three times and still became Lithuania's heroVytautas watched his father die in captivity at Kreva Castle, escaped, and allied with the Teutonic Knights against his cousin Jogaila. He changed sides again and again, convertin…
  5. Lithuania's last pagan ruler founded a dynasty by becoming Poland's kingJogaila grew up worshipping Lithuania's old gods. In February 1386 he was baptised in Kraków's Wawel Cathedral, married the young queen Jadwiga three days later, and was crowned K…
  6. The Wanli Emperor spent 48 years on the throne, much of it feudingCrowned at nine, Zhu Yijun was raised by a powerful minister to be frugal and virtuous. Then he learned his tutor Zhang Juzheng had lived in luxury all along. That discovery soure…
  7. Wilhelm I, a second son nobody expected to rule, became Germany's first emperorBorn a younger son, Wilhelm of Prussia was not supposed to reign. He became king at 63, only because his brother had no children and suffered a disabling stroke. With Otto von Bis…
  8. Ulugh Beg, Timur's grandson, measured the year with a 36-metre sextantWithout any telescope, a fifteenth-century prince in Samarkand built a sextant with a radius of about 36 metres and timed the sidereal year within a minute. Ulugh Beg was a brilli…
  9. Umar set out to kill Muhammad and became Islam's second caliphIn Sunni tradition, Umar ibn al-Khattab once took up his sword intending to assassinate Muhammad. A clansman stopped him with news that Umar's own sister had secretly converted. R…
  10. Šuppiluliuma I built a Hittite empire, then a plague followed his captives homeA widowed Egyptian queen asked a Hittite king for a son to marry and make pharaoh. Šuppiluliuma I agreed, but prince Zannanza never arrived. The killing set off years of Egyptian …
  11. Uthman, a rich Meccan merchant, gave Muslims one standard QuranThe Quran most Muslims read today traces back to a single codex issued under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan. He was already 68 and the oldest man ever to take the office when …
  12. Václav Havel went from brewery worker and prisoner to presidentBarred from university for his family's wealth, Václav Havel became a playwright who mocked communist bureaucracy, then a dissident who rolled beer barrels at a brewery and spent …
  13. Sardar Patel let his brother take his ticket to EnglandVallabhbhai Patel scrimped for years to study law in England, but his papers arrived addressed to V. J. Patel, initials he shared with his elder brother. Vithalbhai insisted an ol…
  14. Vercingetorix may be a title, not a name, and Caesar wrote his storyThe man France later adopted as a symbol of resistance is known only by a Gaulish title meaning roughly supreme king of warriors. His birth name is lost, and almost everything abo…
  15. Before Stoker's vampire, Dracula was a Wallachian prince's family nicknameLong before Bram Stoker borrowed it, Dracula was the name a fifteenth-century prince signed on his own letters, spelled Dragulya or Drakulya. Vlad III inherited it from his father…
  16. Lenin's path to revolution began with his brother's execution in 1887Vladimir Ulyanov grew up the son of a school inspector who had earned hereditary noble rank, in a family of loyal monarchists. Then in May 1887 his older brother Aleksandr was han…
  17. The last Inca emperor was hunted down deep in the Amazon forestFor three decades after the Spanish conquest, a small Inca kingdom held out in the forests of Vilcabamba. In 1572 a new viceroy declared war, the city fell empty, and forty soldie…
  18. Túpac Amaru II, a wealthy muleteer chief, led the Andes against SpainJosé Gabriel Condorcanqui was a prosperous Andean chief, educated by Jesuits and at home among Cuzco's elite. After years of petitions against forced mine labour went unanswered, …
  19. Trajan, a provincial-born soldier, pushed Rome to its greatest sizeThe first Roman emperor born outside Italy grew up in Italica, a small Spanish town without a theatre or public baths. Marcus Ulpius Traianus rose through frontier commands, was a…
  20. Tughril turned nomadic herders into masters of Baghdad and its caliphAround 993 a boy named after a bird of prey was born among Oghuz Turks wandering the steppe for pasture. Within his lifetime Tughril led those herders out of Central Asia, crushed…
  21. Timur's official birth year may have been invented to link him to a dynastyTimurid chronicles give Timur's birth as 8 April 1336, the year the last Ilkhanid ruler died. Yet people who knew him described ages pointing to the late 1320s, and several schola…
  22. Tipu Sultan pioneered iron-cased rockets against the East India CompanyTipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, turned iron-cased rockets into a battlefield weapon, firing them at British forces in the Anglo-Mysore Wars. He also commissioned a military manu…
  23. Tokhtamysh rose to power with Timur's help, then lost everything fighting himAgain and again the young fugitive Tokhtamysh fled to Timur's court after losing battles, once escaping by swimming across the Syr Darya while wounded. Timur finally installed him…
  24. Tokugawa Ieyasu spent his childhood as a hostage passed between rival clansAt five, the boy who would found the Tokugawa shogunate was kidnapped by the Oda clan while being sent as a hostage to their rivals. His father refused to break his alliance even …
  25. Toussaint Louverture was nicknamed 'sickly stick' before leading Haiti's revolutionAs a thin boy on the Bréda plantation, Toussaint was mocked as Fatras-Bâton, the sickly stick. He grew into a skilled horseman, won his freedom, and at nearly 50 joined the 1791 s…
  26. Toyotomi Hideyoshi went from begging on the street to ruling JapanToyotomi Hideyoshi's father was a peasant foot soldier, and a contemporary noted that young Hideyoshi was reduced to begging in the street. Starting as Oda Nobunaga's sandal-beare…
  27. A dead seal at a market started Theodore Roosevelt's lifelong love of natureAt seven, Theodore Roosevelt saw a dead seal in a market, got hold of its head, and with his cousins opened the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. That asthmatic boy became the …
  28. The Visigoth king who died stopping Attila inspired Tolkien's ThéodenTheodoric I spent decades fighting the Roman general Aëtius, then joined him in 451 to halt Attila the Hun. His Visigoths helped win the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, but the …
  29. Theodoric the Great grew up a hostage and ruled Italy like an emperorAt seven or eight, Theodoric was handed to Constantinople as a royal hostage to guarantee a treaty. A decade of Roman schooling later, he returned to lead the Ostrogoths, conquere…
  30. Theodosius I was the last emperor to rule the whole Roman EmpireAfter victory over a western usurper in September 394, Theodosius I held every Roman province, east and west. Within months he was dead, his two young sons divided the empire betw…
  31. Thomas Jefferson sold 6,500 books to rebuild the burned Library of CongressAfter British troops set fire to the Library of Congress in 1814, Thomas Jefferson sold the government his own library of nearly 6,500 volumes for $23,950. He used part of the mon…
  32. Thomas Sankara renamed his country Burkina Faso and wrote its anthem himselfIn 1984 Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, land of the upright people, and its young president Thomas Sankara personally wrote the new national anthem. He also planted more than 10 …
  33. Thutmose III took the risky mountain pass to win at MegiddoFacing a coalition at Megiddo, Thutmose III ignored generals who urged safer routes, called them cowards, and led his army through the narrow Aruna pass. He emerged between the en…
  34. Tiberius was forced to divorce the wife he loved to marry Augustus's daughterTiberius was happily married to Vipsania when Augustus ordered him to divorce her and wed his daughter Julia. Suetonius says that when Tiberius later ran into Vipsania, he followe…
  35. Tigranes the Great never appeared in public without four kings attending himAt his peak Tigranes II of Armenia styled himself King of Kings and went nowhere without four vassal kings in attendance. His realm ran from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and …
  36. Tecumseh's shared-land doctrine took hold at a council when he was fifteenTecumseh became famous for arguing that Native lands belonged to all tribes together, so none could be sold without everyone's consent. The idea was not originally his: he heard M…
  37. Tewodros II ended Ethiopia's Era of the Princes and began its modern stateA freelance warrior from Qwara named Kassa rose to become Emperor Tewodros II in 1855, ending the fragmented Era of the Princes, when regional lords held real power. He paid his g…
  38. Æthelstan, grandson of Alfred, became the first king of all EnglandIn 927 Æthelstan captured York, the last Viking kingdom, and became the first Anglo-Saxon to rule all of England. Ten years later he crushed a joint Scottish and Viking invasion a…
  39. Themistocles built Athens a 200-ship fleet, then ended up serving PersiaIn 483 BC Themistocles talked Athens into building 200 triremes, and three years later his ruse drew the Persian navy into the narrow straits of Salamis, turning the war. Within a…
  40. A bear keeper's daughter became Byzantium's empress and talked Justinian out of fleeingTheodora's father kept bears for the Green chariot faction at Constantinople's Hippodrome. She became empress in 527, and when rioters crowned a rival emperor five years later, sh…
  41. Georgia's first woman ruler was officially titled KingNo woman had ever ruled Georgia alone when Tamar took the throne in 1184, and medieval chroniclers marked the novelty by calling her mepe, meaning King. Nobles tried to hem her in…
  42. Sukarno, the trained architect who proclaimed Indonesia's independenceTwo days after Japan surrendered, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared an independent Indonesia on 17 August 1945. The former engineering student, jailed for over a decade by the D…
  43. Suleiman ruled longest of all Ottoman sultans, and wrote poetry tooFor 46 years Suleiman commanded an empire of at least 25 million subjects, taking Belgrade and Rhodes and breaking Hungary at Mohács. Yet the sultan Europeans called Magnificent w…
  44. Sultan Agung conquered most of Java but lacked a navyIn three decades Sultan Agung turned the Central Javan kingdom of Mataram into the master of nearly all of Java. His one great failure came at Batavia, the Dutch East India Compan…
  45. The Khmer king behind Angkor Wat lost most of his warsSuryavarman II gave the world Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple anywhere, dedicated to Vishnu and Shiva. He also reunited a fractured Khmer Empire and reopened relations with C…
  46. Svatopluk betrayed his uncle, then outplayed the Franks tooWarned that his uncle planned to kill him at a banquet, the Moravian prince Svatopluk seized him first and handed him to the Franks. Within a year the Franks locked Svatopluk up a…
  47. Sviatoslav of Kiev slept on a saddle and toppled two empiresSviatoslav travelled without wagons, cooking pots or even a tent. On campaign he slept on a horse blanket with his saddle for a pillow and ate strips of meat roasted over coals. L…
  48. A teenage king built Burma's biggest realm in centuriesTabinshwehti inherited a tiny landlocked principality at 14. By his early thirties he had forged the largest Burmese kingdom since Pagan fell in 1287, hiring Portuguese gunmen and…
  49. A merchant's son founded Goryeo, the dynasty that named KoreaWang Kon came from a family of seafaring traders in Songak, today's Kaesong. He rose as a general under an erratic warlord, and when that ruler turned tyrant, four senior commande…
  50. Ordered to invade Manchuria, General Yi turned his army around insteadIn 1388 General Yi Songgye led an army north to attack Ming-held Liaodong, a campaign he had opposed. At Wihwa Island on the Amnok River he halted, turned back and marched on his …
  51. Solon rewrote Athens' laws, then left town for ten yearsAround 594 BC Athens handed Solon sweeping power to heal its feuds. He cancelled crushing debts, scrapped nearly all of Draco's harsh laws and laid foundations later credited with…
  52. Madame Sun Yat-sen chose a different side from her famous sistersSoong Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, and was honoured by both rival parties as the 'mother of modern China'. When civil war split the country, sh…
  53. Medieval Serbia's mightiest ruler seized the crown from his own fatherIn 1331 the young prince Stefan Dusan marched on his father, besieged him, captured the royal treasury and had him imprisoned, then took the throne. Over the next two decades he b…
  54. A Transylvanian prince married his way onto Poland's elected throneWhen the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth needed a king in 1575, nobles hostile to the Habsburgs found an unusual solution: elect Anna Jagiellon, sister of the last king, as 'King',…
  55. Born Vajk, Hungary's first king built a Christian kingdomThe boy named Vajk, from a Turkic word for hero or prince, grew up to be Stephen, crowned Hungary's first king around the year 1000 with a crown sent by the pope. He crushed pagan…
  56. Stephen the Great kept little Moldavia free between three empiresFor 47 years a prince of a small principality juggled the Ottoman Empire, Poland and Hungary, beating each of them in battle at least once. Pope Sixtus IV hailed Stephen of Moldav…
  57. The Taj Mahal's builder spent his last eight years a prisoner of his sonShah Jahan presided over the high point of Mughal architecture, raising the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal. Yet after a succession war among his sons, the victor, Aurangzeb, locked hi…
  58. An outcast prince rebuilt the Zulu army and a regional powerShaka was the eldest son of a Zulu king, yet he was dismissed as illegitimate and sent away with his mother. He grew up a soldier in a more powerful neighbouring clan. By 1816 he …
  59. Five years on the throne, and Sher Shah left India the rupeeSher Shah Suri ruled northern India for barely five years, from 1540 to 1545, after chasing the Mughals out. In that time he issued the first rupiya coin, organised a postal netwo…
  60. Shivaji built a kingdom from a single captured hill fortAt sixteen, Shivaji took Torna Fort, by trickery or a bribe, while the Bijapur court was distracted by its sultan's illness. Inside he found a large treasure, which he spent build…

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