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1,092 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 14 of 19.

781. The Thai king credited with inventing the alphabet may have only tweaked itThai schoolchildren learn that King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai created their alphabet, and his portrait on the 20 baht note honours the feat. Historians read his famous stone inscr…
782. Europeans branded Madagascar's Queen Ranavalona mad; historians now see a defiant sovereignFor more than a century Western books called Ranavalona I the Mad Monarch of Madagascar. Since the 1970s scholars have recast her as a ruler guarding her island's independence aga…
783. The only US president to resign also created the Environmental Protection AgencyRichard Nixon is remembered above all for Watergate and for resigning in August 1974. His record is stranger than that single scandal. He founded the Environmental Protection Agen…
784. A troublemaking company clerk laid the foundations of British rule in BengalRobert Clive arrived in Madras in 1744 as a trading-company clerk, tallying accounts and haggling with suppliers. Thirteen years later his victory at Plassey put Bengal, India's r…
785. Robert the Weasel arrived in Italy leading bandits and ended up a dukeAround 1047 the sixth son of a minor Norman knight rode into southern Italy with five horsemen and thirty men on foot, and soon led a band of robbers. His nickname, Guiscard, mean…
786. British police are called bobbies because of Prime Minister Robert PeelLondon's police officers got their nicknames, bobbies and peelers, from the man who created the force: Robert Peel. He also had a habit that infuriated his own party. Again and ag…
787. Robert the Bruce's heart, body and organs rest in three separate Scottish churchesScotland's hero-king was buried in three places: his body at Dunfermline Abbey, his heart at Melrose Abbey and his embalmed organs in a church at Dumbarton. Robert the Bruce's pat…
788. The Dominican dictator who renamed the capital, and the highest mountain, after himselfFor a quarter-century the Dominican capital was called Ciudad Trujillo, the nation's tallest peak was Pico Trujillo, and churches displayed a slogan pairing God in heaven with Tru…
789. Rajaraja Chola turned a small Tamil kingdom into an Indian Ocean powerIn 985 a prince named Arulmozhi Varman took the Chola throne and the title Rajaraja, King among Kings. He inherited a modest realm around Thanjavur still recovering from invasion.…
790. Thai kings are called Rama because a later king studied in EnglandThe founder of Thailand's ruling Chakri dynasty never called himself Rama I. Thai history books name him after a Buddha statue, Phutthayotfa Chulalok. The numbered Rama title came…
791. Victoria's lonely childhood ran on a strict code called the Kensington SystemThe future Queen Victoria slept in her mother's bedroom every night, rarely met other children and was kept from most of her father's family. The rules, devised by her mother and …
792. Nepal's unifier scouted his rivals while travelling incognito to VaranasiWhen Prithvi Narayan Shah became king of Gorkha in 1743, it was a minor hill state among dozens. Before expanding, he slipped away incognito to Varanasi, then one of India's great…
793. Most of what people 'know' about Prithviraj Chauhan comes from legendPrithviraj Chauhan ranks among India's most celebrated medieval kings, yet solid facts about him are scarce. Only a few inscriptions survive from his reign, and none were issued b…
794. Ptolemy hijacked Alexander the Great's funeral procession to claim EgyptIn Macedonian custom, burying the previous king strengthened a claim to the throne. So when Alexander the Great's body was passing through Syria toward Macedon, around 322 or 321 …
795. China's last emperor cried through his own coronation at age twoOn 2 December 1908, a toddler was carried onto the Dragon Throne by his father. Frightened by the crowd and the thunder of ceremonial drums, the new Xuantong Emperor burst into te…
796. Pyrrhus beat Rome in battle so expensively that his name became a warningPyrrhus of Epirus defeated Roman armies at Heraclea and Asculum, yet each victory cost him so dearly that it weakened him more than his enemy. Those battles gave the world the phr…
797. The Qianlong Emperor stepped down so his grandfather's reign would stay longestAfter exactly 60 years on the throne, the Qianlong Emperor abdicated in 1796 rather than surpass the 61-year reign of his revered grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor. The gesture was …
798. China's first emperor invented the very word for emperorWhen King Zheng of Qin finished conquering the rival states in 221 BC, the old title of king felt too small. He coined a new one, huangdi, fusing names used for the mythical Three…
799. A betel traders' family produced one of Vietnam's greatest generalsQuang Trung, born Ho Thom in 1753, came from humble stock. His great-grandfather worked as a servant, and his grandfather gave up farming to trade betel, marrying a rich trader's …
800. Before becoming pope, Rodrigo Borgia spent 35 years as a Vatican kingmakerRodrigo Borgia did not wait for the papacy to wield power. Named vice-chancellor of the Church in 1457, one of its richest and most influential posts, he held it for 35 years, cas…
801. Dante reserved a spot in Hell for Pope Boniface VIII while he still livedIn the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri anticipates that Pope Boniface VIII will soon arrive in the eighth circle of Hell, among those who sold church offices. The poet was one of m…
802. Gregory VII fled and hid when a crowd shouted for him to be popeDuring the funeral of Alexander II in April 1073, clergy and people in the Lateran Basilica began shouting that Hildebrand the archdeacon should be pope. Hildebrand promptly ran o…
803. Innocent III wrote a medieval bestseller about the misery of being humanBefore he became perhaps the most powerful man in Europe, Cardinal Lotario de' Conti wrote a gloomy treatise, On the Misery of the Human Condition. It was hugely popular for centu…
804. The Warrior Pope who hired Michelangelo also led his own troopsJulius II commissioned Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings and Raphael's famous rooms, founded the Vatican Museums and began rebuilding St. Peter's Basilica. He also personall…
805. Nobody wrote down Urban II's crusade speech as he gave itThe sermon Pope Urban II preached at Clermont in November 1095 set off the Crusades, yet no exact transcript survives. Five versions exist, all written years later, and they diffe…
806. Porfirio Diaz won power opposing re-election, then ruled Mexico for decadesPorfirio Diaz rose up against two presidents in the name of one principle: no re-election. After seizing power in 1876 he briefly honoured it, handing over to an ally in 1880. The…
807. Prince Henry the Navigator never ran a famous navigation school at SagresTradition pictures Prince Henry gathering pilots and map-makers at his villa on the Sagres peninsula, a kind of academy of exploration. Modern historians call that a misconception…
808. Philip V quit the Spanish throne, then took it back months laterIn January 1724 Philip V handed the crown of Spain to his seventeen-year-old son Louis and stepped away. Seven months later Louis died of smallpox. After much persuasion Philip re…
809. Pierre Trudeau lost out on a Rhodes Scholarship and chose politics insteadAt the Jesuit college Jean-de-Brebeuf, young Pierre Trudeau collected what its head called a hundred prizes and honourable mentions, then set his sights on a Rhodes Scholarship. H…
810. Peter the Great learned to sail on a stray English boat, then built Russia a navyAt sixteen, exiled to a country estate, Peter found an old English boat, had it repaired and taught himself to sail. He went on to launch a Russian fleet, found Saint Petersburg a…
811. Philip Augustus spent his reign turning England's kings into losers in FranceBefore Philip II, French rulers called themselves kings of the Franks. He was the first to use the title King of France, and he earned it by grinding down the English Plantagenets…
812. Before Alexander there was Philip, the one-eyed king who remade MacedonAlexander the Great inherited his world-conquering army rather than building it. His father Philip II took a backwater kingdom beset by invaders and, in under 25 years, made it ma…
813. Philip II ruled lands on every known continent and still went bankrupt five timesSpain's Philip the Prudent held crowns from Portugal to Naples, was briefly king of England through his marriage to Mary I, and gave his name to the Philippines. Yet he defaulted …
814. Philip the Fair crushed the Templars, humbled a pope and doomed his own dynastyHandsome enough to be called le Bel, yet so cold that a bishop said he was neither man nor beast but a statue, Philip IV ran France through lawyers rather than lords. Deep in debt…
815. Otto the Great's victory at Lechfeld ended decades of Magyar raidsIn 955 the Saxon king Otto crushed the pagan Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld, ending Hungarian invasions of western Europe and earning a reputation as Christendom's saviour. Sev…
816. Bismarck built the first welfare state mainly to undercut the socialistsThe Iron Chancellor who unified Germany through three short wars also created the world's first welfare state, less from compassion than as a tactic against his socialist rivals. …
817. Machu Picchu was probably built as an estate for the Inca ruler PachacutiPachacuti turned the small chiefdom of Cusco into the Inca Empire, and most archaeologists think Machu Picchu was his private estate. Yet some scholars doubt he was a single histo…
818. Park Chung Hee's rule fuelled Korea's economic miracle and a bitter dictatorshipSouth Korea's rapid rise, known as the Miracle on the Han River, took off under a general who seized power in a 1961 coup. Park Chung Hee fostered giants like Samsung and Hyundai,…
819. Patrice Lumumba led the newly independent Congo for barely three monthsIn June 1960 Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of an independent Congo. By September he had been dismissed, and within months he was killed by Katangan separatists w…
820. Pedro I founded an empire in Brazil, then fought for his daughter's crown in PortugalA Portuguese prince who arrived in Rio as a nine-year-old refugee from Napoleon ended up breaking Brazil away from his own father's kingdom. Pedro I ruled the new empire for nine …
821. Brazil's last emperor took the throne at five and reigned for 58 yearsWhen his father sailed for Europe in 1831, a five-year-old boy was left behind as emperor of Brazil. Pedro II grew into a shy, bookish ruler who oversaw the longest and steadiest …
822. Pericles built the Parthenon and argued Athens into radical democracyComic playwrights mocked his oversized skull as a sea onion, but for roughly three decades Pericles was the man Athens listened to. He turned an alliance into an empire, paid poor…
823. Obasanjo handed power to civilians in 1979, then returned twenty years laterAs Nigeria's military ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo did something rare: he organised an election in 1979 and stepped aside for the winner. Later imprisoned under Sani Abacha on coup ch…
824. The founder of the Ottoman Empire is almost a historical black holeOsman I gave his name to an empire that lasted until 1922, yet not one written source survives from his own reign. Ottoman chroniclers began recording his life more than a century…
825. The Persian vizier who effectively ran the Seljuk Empire for twenty yearsSultans held the title, but for two decades a Persian scholar named Hasan from a village near Tus held the reins. Known by his honorific Nizam al-Mulk, Orderer of the Realm, he be…
826. Nigeria's first president grew up speaking all three of its major languagesNnamdi Azikiwe, called Zik of Africa, was born in the north, raised partly in the east and schooled in Lagos, so by college he spoke Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. That rare fluency suit…
827. Nurhaci began with thirteen suits of armour and laid the groundwork for the QingAfter Ming-backed forces killed his father and grandfather in 1582, a young Jurchen chief set out for revenge with little more than thirteen sets of armour. Nurhaci ended up uniti…
828. Queen Njinga fought Portugal for three decades and won a second kingdomHer name comes from the Kimbundu word for twisting, because she was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, and such births were thought to mark a proud, powerful person. Nj…
829. Japan's first great unifier was once mocked as the Fool of OwariAs a teenager Oda Nobunaga wore sleeveless bathrobes in public, ate melons riding backwards on his horse and danced in women's clothes in taverns. People called him the Fool of Ow…
830. Cromwell's head spent three centuries in private hands before its burialTwo years after his death, Oliver Cromwell was executed anyway. His body was taken from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn, and his severed head went up on the roof of Westmin…
831. Nebuchadnezzar's own inscriptions boast about buildings, not the wars that made him infamousIn Jewish history Nebuchadnezzar II is the king who destroyed Jerusalem and carried its people into exile. Yet his own inscriptions talk mostly about temples, palaces and the Isht…
832. Nefertiti's name was a whole sentence: the beautiful one has comeOne of the most copied artworks from ancient Egypt is the painted bust of a queen whose own origins remain a mystery. Nefertiti helped her husband Akhenaten overturn Egypt's relig…
833. Mandela's birth name, Rolihlahla, is a Xhosa word loosely meaning troublemakerThe boy from the Thembu royal line was given a name that meant troublemaker, and he lived up to it. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid, then walked out…
834. Rome's elite hated Nero, but ordinary Romans liked him enough to expect his returnAncient writers paint Nero as a debauched tyrant who may even have started the Great Fire of Rome. Yet he was popular with common citizens, who loved his games and performances. A…
835. Nicholas I became tsar on an unlucky Monday and faced a revolt the same monthNicholas I never expected to rule Russia; two older brothers stood ahead of him. When he did take the throne in December 1825, it was on a bitterly cold Monday that Russians read …
836. The last tsar was a first cousin of both Britain's king and Germany's kaiserWhen Europe went to war in 1914, three of its rulers were family. Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra and Kaiser Wilhelm II were all first cousins of Britain's George V. Wit…
837. Ceaușescu began as a reformer cheered for defying Moscow, then ruled Romania by fearIn August 1968 Nicolae Ceaușescu stood up and condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Romanians loved him for it. Two decades later his own people chased him fro…
838. A herdsboy from a desperately poor village rose to denounce Stalin in secretNikita Khrushchev's village teacher said she had never seen a place as poor as Kalinovka, where he tended herds as a boy and got four years of schooling. He went on to lead the So…
839. Burma's dictator Ne Win ruled for 26 years and died without a state funeralNe Win began as a failed biology student, became one of the Thirty Comrades who fought for Burmese independence, and seized power in a 1962 coup. For a quarter-century he steered …
840. Pakistan's founder owned over 200 suits and never repeated a silk tieMuhammad Ali Jinnah was famously exacting about appearance. He dressed in heavily starched shirts with detachable collars, took pride as a barrister in never wearing the same silk…

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