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1,092 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 15 of 19.

841. An Albanian tax collector's rise made him the founder of modern EgyptMuhammad Ali arrived in Egypt in 1801 as a junior officer in an Albanian unit sent to reclaim the country after the French left. Four decades later he ruled an empire stretching a…
842. Two brothers split an Afghan empire, one facing west and one eastFor thirty years the Ghurid realm had two rulers at once. The elder brother, Ghiyath al-Din, governed the west from Firozkoh and wrestled with Central Asian rivals, while the youn…
843. Mustafa Kemal's second name may have come from a maths teacherHe was born simply Mustafa. One story says a mathematics teacher, also named Mustafa, added 'Kemal', meaning perfection or maturity, either in admiration or to tell the two apart;…
844. Nader Shah went from selling firewood to conquering DelhiOrphaned at 13, the future Nader Shah supported his mother by hauling sticks to market for firewood. Decades later, returning in triumph from Delhi, he led his army to his birthpl…
845. France's first elected president became its last monarchLouis Napoleon Bonaparte won France's first presidential election in 1848. Barred from a second term, he seized power by force in 1851 and soon declared himself Emperor Napoleon I…
846. Moctezuma's name meant 'he frowns like a lord', and he ruled accordinglyIn Classical Nahuatl, Moctezuma joins a word for lord with a verb meaning to frown in anger. The ninth Aztec emperor lived up to it, purging his court and barring commoners from p…
847. Modu Chanyu built a steppe empire that made Han China pay tributeAround 200 BCE, the founder of the Han dynasty marched north and found himself trapped in the city of Pingcheng, encircled by Xiongnu cavalry. The man who had surrounded him, Modu…
848. Mosaddegh nationalised Iran's oil, and output fell by almost 96 percentIn March 1951, Iran's new prime minister cancelled the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's concession, decades before its 1993 expiry, and took over its assets. Britain responded with an …
849. Iran's last shah was crowned prince at six and exiled at 59The day before his father's coronation in April 1926, six-year-old Mohammad Reza was proclaimed heir to the brand-new Pahlavi dynasty. He would inherit the throne in wartime, reig…
850. Afghanistan's last king reigned 40 years without signing a political death warrantMohammad Zahir Shah took the throne at 19 after his father was assassinated, and held it for almost four decades, longer than any Afghan ruler since the Durrani Empire began in th…
851. Mu'awiya turned the caliphate into a family inheritanceThe first four caliphs after Muhammad were chosen, not born to the office. Mu'awiya, founder of the Umayyad dynasty, broke that pattern by naming his son Yazid as successor, an un…
852. A boat-builder's son declared himself the Mahdi and drove Egypt out of SudanWhen Sudan's governor-general heard in 1881 that a Sufi preacher on Aba Island claimed to be the Mahdi, the redeemer awaited in Islamic tradition, he assumed a pension would quiet…
853. Mobutu's favourite book as a schoolboy was Machiavelli's The PrinceAs a mission-school pupil in the Belgian Congo, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu devoured history, admired Napoleon and de Gaulle, and prized Machiavelli above all. Punished with seven years …
854. Before the famous Moctezuma, an earlier one pushed the Aztec realm to the seaMost people who know the name Moctezuma mean the ruler who met Hernán Cortés. His ancestor Moctezuma I, who took power in 1440, did much of the empire-building first: he tightened…
855. Maximilian I became emperor without a pope because Venice blocked his roadHoly Roman Emperors traditionally travelled to Rome to be crowned by the pope. When Venetian forces barred Maximilian's way in 1508, he simply proclaimed himself emperor at Trento…
856. At 21, Mehmed II sailed warships over land to take ConstantinopleIn April 1453 the Byzantine harbour of the Golden Horn was sealed by a chain. So the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II had a road of timber laid for about a mile and hauled roughly e…
857. A six-year-old sultan reigned for 39 years, mostly while out huntingMehmed IV became Ottoman sultan at six, after his father was overthrown, and held the throne for 39 years, second only to Suleiman the Magnificent. Contemporaries nicknamed him th…
858. A Greek king in India became a character in a Buddhist scriptureIn Pali texts he is King Milinda, a sharp debater who cross-examines the monk Nagasena and ends up asking to be accepted as a follower of the Buddha. In Greek he was Menander I So…
859. Menelik II exposed a mistranslated treaty, then beat Italy at AdwaIn 1889 Ethiopia and Italy signed one treaty in two languages. The Italian text made Ethiopia a protectorate; the Amharic merely let the emperor use Italian diplomats if he wished…
860. Michael Collins called the treaty he signed the freedom to achieve freedomMichael Collins spent his teens as a post office clerk in London, then became the intelligence chief of Ireland's war for independence. In 1921 he helped negotiate the treaty crea…
861. Poland's first Christian ruler borrowed his church vocabulary from CzechWhen Mieszko I was baptised in 966, placing Poland in the orbit of Western Christianity, the new faith arrived with a Czech accent. Polish words for baptism, church, prayer, sermo…
862. The last Soviet leader started out driving combine harvesters with his fatherAs a teenager, Mikhail Gorbachev spent five summers helping his father run a combine harvester, sometimes for 20 hours a day, and won a labour medal before he was 20. That peasant…
863. Mithridates VI fought Rome through three wars and outlasted Sulla and LucullusFor nearly half a century, the king of Pontus on the Black Sea kept defying the Roman Republic. Mithridates VI drove Rome out of Asia Minor, won Athens to his side, survived defea…
864. Mary, Queen of Scots, inherited a throne at six days oldMary Stuart became Queen of Scotland six days after her birth in December 1542, when her father died. By sixteen she had married the heir to France; by eighteen she was a widowed …
865. Hungary's greatest Renaissance king was proclaimed on a frozen river at 14In January 1458, nobles gathered on the frozen Danube and unanimously acclaimed a 14-year-old prisoner as King of Hungary. Matthias Corvinus, whose brother had just been beheaded …
866. Before ruling China, Mao Zedong quit soap school and lived in librariesIn his late teens and early twenties Mao Zedong signed up for, then abandoned, a police academy, a soap-making school, a law school, an economics school and a government middle sc…
867. The future emperor who slept on the floor until his mother intervenedAt about eleven, in April 132, young Marcus Aurelius adopted the life of a philosopher at his painting teacher's urging. He studied in a rough Greek cloak and slept on the bare gr…
868. Born in her father's prison, Margaret ended up ruling all of ScandinaviaMargaret came into the world in March 1353 inside Søborg Castle's prison, where King Valdemar IV had already locked up her mother. The youngest of six children, she seemed a minor…
869. Margaret Thatcher was a working chemist long before she became prime ministerAs a Methodist schoolgirl in Grantham, Margaret Roberts told a friend she could not believe in angels: by her reckoning, wings would need a breastbone six feet long. The sceptical…
870. Maria Theresa inherited an empire of promises and almost nothing elseCharles VI spent his whole reign collecting foreign signatures pledging that his daughter could inherit the Habsburg lands. When he died in October 1740, France, Prussia, Bavaria …
871. A remark about crowds at Versailles defused a two-year diplomatic standoffCoached by her husband's aunts, the teenage Marie Antoinette refused to speak to Madame du Barry, Louis XV's powerful mistress. The snub alarmed Vienna. On New Year's Day 1772, pr…
872. A handful of ashes saved the Ottoman sultan later compared to Peter the GreatWhen assassins came for the young prince Mahmud in 1808, a Georgian slave named Cevri reportedly flung ashes in their eyes, buying him time to climb out a window onto the harem ro…
873. The son of a Turkic slave became the first ruler to call himself SultanMahmud's father, Sabuktigin, began life as a Karluk Turkic slave before founding a dynasty at Ghazni. His son went further, ruling from 998 to 1030 and becoming the first monarch …
874. India's great economic reformer shrugged off the phone call that made him finance ministerIn June 1991 P. V. Narasimha Rao sent word that he wanted the economist Manmohan Singh as finance minister. Singh assumed it was not serious. The next morning an irritated Rao tra…
875. History's legendary gold spender had to borrow money to get homeMansa Musa of Mali showered so much gold on Cairo during his 1324 pilgrimage that it reportedly shifted the metal's value in Egypt. Yet on the return trip from Mecca his party ran…
876. The fourth son who won Byzantium because his father judged his temperManuel Komnenos was the fourth son of Emperor John II, with little claim to the throne. But two brothers died in 1142, and in 1143 his dying father passed over the older Isaac, ci…
877. A governess hid a toddler in a closet and saved the French crownIn 1712 measles killed Louis XV's mother, father and elder brother within weeks, the brother partly from the bloodletting meant to cure him. The governess Madame de Ventadour refu…
878. Louis XVI was schooled to hide his thoughts and prize timidityThe last king of France before the Revolution was a studious, shy boy who loved maps, astronomy and locksmithing. One tutor taught him that timidity suited a strong monarch; his c…
879. Sparta's revered lawgiver may never have existed at allSpartans worshipped Lycurgus as a god and credited him with nearly everything distinctive about their society, from communal mess halls to austere living. Yet ancient writers disa…
880. A year teaching poor Texas children shaped Lyndon Johnson's education lawsAt twenty, Lyndon Johnson took a break from college to teach Mexican-American pupils at a segregated school in Cotulla, Texas. Decades later, after signing the Higher Education Ac…
881. Malaysia's longest-serving leader grew up selling banana fritters at a marketWhen Japanese occupation shut Malaya's schools, a teenage Mahathir Mohamad sold coffee and banana fritters at the Pekan Rabu market in Alor Setar. The boy from a one-bedroom house…
882. Senegal's first president was also a poet in the Académie françaiseLéopold Sédar Senghor led Senegal for twenty years after independence, yet he was just as famous for his verse and for helping invent Négritude, a movement that turned a French ra…
883. Lorenzo the Magnificent ended a war by walking into his enemy's courtAfter a papal-backed plot killed his brother in Florence's cathedral in 1478, Lorenzo de' Medici faced excommunication and a Neapolitan invasion. His solution was audacious: he tr…
884. Louis the Great wore two crowns and chased a third in NaplesHungarian historians long remembered Louis I as their mightiest king, ruler of a realm washed by three seas. He held Hungary and Croatia from 1342, added Poland in 1370, and spent…
885. The only French king made a saint was also a harsh enforcerLouis IX abolished trial by ordeal, let subjects appeal straight to the crown, and was trusted to settle quarrels between foreign rulers. The same devout king ordered French Jews …
886. France's last king once joined the Jacobins and fought for the RepublicBefore he became the Citizen King in 1830, Louis Philippe was a teenage revolutionary officer who helped hold the guns at Valmy. Within months he was fleeing France as a suspected…
887. A collapsing gallery pushed Charlemagne's heir to plan his own successionOn Maundy Thursday in 817, a wooden walkway linking Aachen's cathedral to the palace gave way beneath Louis the Pious and his court, killing many. Shaken by his narrow escape, Cha…
888. The Universal Spider rebelled against his father, then outwitted BurgundyEnemies called Louis XI the Universal Spider for the web of plots he seemed always to be weaving. As a prince he rebelled against his own father and spent years sheltering with Fr…
889. The Sun King learned to fear rebels while pretending to sleepOne February night in 1651, an angry Parisian crowd forced its way into the royal palace demanding to see the king. They were shown into his bedchamber, where twelve-year-old Loui…
890. A sacked shipyard electrician climbed a fence and helped end communist PolandIn August 1980 Lech Wałęsa, an electrician fired from Gdańsk's Lenin Shipyard four years earlier, climbed over its fence to join a strike. Within weeks he had signed a landmark de…
891. Lee Kuan Yew once survived a wartime screening by asking to fetch his clothesDuring Japan's occupation of Singapore, a young Lee Kuan Yew was pulled aside with a group of Chinese men, talked his way into another night in the dormitory, and slipped out past…
892. Leo III seized Byzantium's throne months before a vast Arab siegeIn March 717 an Arabic-speaking general named Konon was crowned emperor as Leo III. By August an Umayyad army of perhaps 80,000 to 150,000 men and a huge fleet had reached Constan…
893. Trotsky reportedly borrowed his famous name from an Odessa jailerLev Bronstein escaped Siberian exile in 1902 hidden under a load of hay, and emerged with a new identity. The surname he chose, Trotsky, was reportedly that of a guard in the Odes…
894. Brezhnev's steady rule brought the Soviet Union nuclear parity and then stagnationLeonid Brezhnev, a metalworker's son trained in land surveying, helped push Khrushchev out in 1964 and led the Soviet Union for 18 years. He matched America's nuclear arsenal and …
895. Leopold I was trained for the Church and ended up fighting Louis XIV for decadesLeopold I was meant to be a churchman, schooled by Jesuits and steeped in theology. His elder brother's death in 1654 made him heir instead, and he went on to rule the Holy Roman …
896. Belgium's Builder King personally owned a colony he never set foot inLeopold II gave Brussels grand parks and Antwerp its monumental railway station. He also owned the Congo Free State outright as private property, running it through a mercenary fo…
897. Kublai Khan fought his own brother for the Mongol throne and split an empireGenghis Khan's grandson became the first non-Han ruler of all China, founding the Yuan dynasty in 1271. But his path ran through a civil war against his younger brother, fought ov…
898. Kwame Nkrumah learned politics on Harlem street corners before leading Ghana to independenceA village boy from the Gold Coast washed dishes and sold fish in America while earning four degrees. Ten years there, including evenings arguing with Harlem soapbox orators, shape…
899. Lê Lợi lost to the Ming, regrouped, and won Vietnam backA landowner's son from the Thanh Hóa hills spent a decade fighting one of the largest empires on Earth. Lê Lợi raised his revolt against Ming China in 1418, was beaten so badly by…
900. The Aztecs called Cortés by the name of his enslaved interpreterSold into slavery as a girl, the Nahua woman later called La Malinche was handed to Spanish invaders in 1519. Her fluency in Nahuatl and Maya made her indispensable, so central th…

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