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1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 16 of 19.

901. 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…
902. 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 …
903. 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…
904. 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…
905. 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…
906. 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…
907. 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…
908. 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…
909. 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…
910. 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…
911. 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 …
912. 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 …
913. 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…
914. 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…
915. 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…
916. 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…
917. 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…
918. Kenneth Kaunda led Zambia to freedom, then banned every other partyAt independence in 1964, Zambia had roughly a hundred university graduates. Its first president, a former mission-school headmaster, poured money into classrooms and a national un…
919. Byzantium once refused to adopt a Persian prince, and regretted itAround 520 the Persian shah Kavad asked the Byzantine emperor to adopt his youngest son, to shore up the boy's claim. Constantinople would only adopt him as a barbarian, not a Rom…
920. Metternich married Napoleon to an archduchess, then helped send him into exileAs Austria's new foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich arranged for Napoleon to wed the Habsburg archduchess Marie Louise. Within a few years he had switched Austria to the all…
921. Kofi Annan rose from UN budget officer to secretary-generalKofi Annan's first United Nations job, in 1962, was checking budgets at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Thirty-four years later he became the first secretary-general chos…
922. Before leading West Germany, Adenauer tinkered with inventions and hid from the NazisKonrad Adenauer was dismissed as mayor of Cologne in 1933 with his bank accounts frozen, leaving him without money, home or job. He sheltered in a monastery and moved house repeat…
923. Krishnadevaraya, the warrior emperor who wrote his own Telugu epicWhen Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, sized up India's rulers, he ranked the southern emperor Krishnadevaraya as the mightiest. Portuguese visitors saw a commander who led fr…
924. Khan Krum pushed three Byzantine emperors off their thrones in three yearsBetween 811 and 813, a Bulgar khan whose origins nobody knows killed one Byzantine emperor in battle, saw a second abdicate from his wounds and routed a third, who became a monk. …
925. How a captured trading ship helped Kamehameha begin uniting HawaiiIn 1790 a feud between a Hawaiian chief and an American fur trader ended with the schooner Fair American seized off the Kona coast. Kamehameha took the ship, its cannon and its lo…
926. China's longest-reigning emperor took the throne at seven and ruled 61 yearsEnthroned as a small boy while regents governed in his name, the Kangxi Emperor was barely a teenager when he had the most overbearing of them arrested. He then ruled China for mo…
927. Kanishka's coins show a king hedging his bets among the godsThe Kushan emperor Kanishka never became a Buddhist, yet he chaired a great Buddhist council and put the Buddha on gold coins, some of the earliest images of him ever minted. The …
928. Joseph Goebbels, the failed novelist who ran Nazi Germany's propaganda machineIn the early 1920s Joseph Goebbels was an unemployed doctor of literature whose plays would not sell and whose novel found no publisher. A decade later, as Reich Minister of Propa…
929. Joseph II tried to rule Austria by reason alone, and ran into everyoneJoseph II wanted a state run on Enlightenment logic: religious toleration, a weaker church, freer trade, and peasants released from feudal burdens. He is ranked with Frederick the…
930. Before he was Stalin: seminarian, weather observer and serial escapeeThe man who ruled the Soviet Union for three decades began as Ioseb Jughashvili, a scholarship student training for the Orthodox priesthood in Tiflis. He dropped out, briefly work…
931. Tito tested cars for Austro-Daimler before he led YugoslaviaLong before he defied Stalin, Josip Broz was a locksmith's apprentice who drifted across central Europe repairing bicycles, working at Škoda and Benz, and test-driving cars near V…
932. Franco picked Juan Carlos to preserve his regime; the king dismantled itFrancisco Franco skipped a generation to choose his heir, passing over a father he considered too liberal in favour of a young prince he expected to mould. Juan Carlos swore loyal…
933. How an obscure labour office made Juan Perón Argentina's dominant politicianIn 1943 Colonel Juan Perón took charge of Argentina's labour department, then a minor office. Within two years he had used it to win over the unions so thoroughly that when rivals…
934. Julius Caesar was not born by Caesarean section, and other tidied-up legendsIn Caesar's day the operation was fatal to the mother, yet Aurelia lived for decades after his birth. The fifty-talent pirate ransom is likely literary decoration, and Sulla's fam…
935. Julius Nyerere, the chief's son a headmaster found 'too kind' to be prefectAt Tabora Government School, teachers recommended Julius Nyerere as head prefect, but the headmaster vetoed him as too kind. The bookish son of a Zanaki chief, who learned Swahili…
936. From Siberian exile to Poland's founding marshal: the path of Józef PiłsudskiWhen Poland reappeared on the map in November 1918, after 123 years of partition, Józef Piłsudski became its Chief of State. He had reached that point by way of Siberian exile, an…
937. José de San Martín fought for Spain for two decades, then freed its coloniesBefore he became Liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru, José de San Martín spent over twenty years as an officer in the Spanish army, winning a gold medal against Napoleon's forc…
938. His father jokingly called him Lackland, then John inherited everything and lost much of itAs Henry II's youngest son, John seemed destined for no real inheritance, so his father teased him with the nickname Lackland. Then his brothers died one after another, and in 119…
939. Kenya's first president took his surname from a beaded Maasai beltBorn Kamau, the boy who became Jomo Kenyatta spent part of the First World War living among the Maasai, adopting their customs and jewellery. He favoured a beaded belt called a kĩ…
940. A Khmer king who took the throne in his fifties built 102 hospitalsJayavarman VII was in his mid-fifties when he drove Cham invaders out of Cambodia and was crowned in 1181. Over the next 37 years he built the Bayon with its many towers, the city…
941. Jeongjo's first words as king named the father his grandfather had killedWhen Yi San took the Joseon throne in 1776, the first thing he told his officials was that he was the son of Crown Prince Sado, put to death by the previous king. Rivals had spent…
942. A Ming emperor fought his court for three years over who his parents wereTo make his succession legal, Ming officials wanted the new Jiajing Emperor to become the adopted son of a previous emperor, turning his real parents into uncle and aunt. He refus…
943. Before she was Madame Mao, Jiang Qing was a Shanghai actress called Blue AppleIn 1935 a young actress from Shandong took the stage name Lan Ping, meaning blue apple, chosen for its bluntness rather than any meaning. She later shed it along with her Shanghai…
944. Genghis Khan's eldest son was named Guest, and never escaped the doubtJochi's mother Börte had spent nearly nine months as a captive of the rival Merkit tribe before giving birth to him around 1182. His name meant guest in Mongolian. Genghis Khan al…
945. Canada's first prime minister started earning a living at fifteenJohn A. Macdonald left school at 15 because his father's shops kept failing, and later lamented that he had no boyhood. When he won his first election, as a Kingston alderman in 1…
946. A blown-up toilet seat gave the teenage John F. Kennedy's gang its nameAt Choate, a Connecticut boarding school, young Jack Kennedy and his friends blew up a toilet seat with a firecracker. At the next chapel assembly the headmaster brandished the wr…
947. The king who beat the Ottomans at Vienna had studied their tactics as an envoyAs a young officer, Jan Sobieski volunteered as a hostage in the Crimean Tatar capital and joined a Polish mission to the Ottoman Empire, learning Turkish and Tatar and studying h…
948. A Bulgarian tsar rode into battle waving the treaty his enemy brokeWhen Theodore Komnenos Doukas invaded Bulgaria in 1230 despite a peace deal, Tsar Ivan Asen II led his reserve troops, including 1,000 Cuman horse archers, into battle at Klokotni…
949. One word from two envoys cost Novgorod its centuries of independenceIn 1477 two envoys from the merchant republic of Novgorod addressed Ivan III of Moscow as gosudar, sovereign, rather than the customary gospodin, sir. Ivan treated the slip as for…
950. Nehru spent over nine years in British jails before leading IndiaBetween 1921 and 1945 Jawaharlal Nehru was locked up eight separate times, adding up to more than nine years behind bars. The man who emerged became India's first prime minister a…
951. Ion Antonescu, the Romanian marshal whose wartime regime joined the HolocaustRomania was Hitler's ally, never occupied by German troops, so what happened to its Jews was largely decided in Bucharest. Under Marshal Ion Antonescu, policies of deportation and…
952. Isabella's wedding needed a disguised groom and a permit from a dead popeIn October 1469 Ferdinand of Aragon crossed Castile disguised as a servant while Isabella slipped away from court on the pretext of visiting her brother's tomb. Because they were …
953. Aceh's young Alexander kept 900 elephants and a guard of 3,000 womenIn the early 1600s the Sultan of Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, measured prestige in elephants, and Iskandar Muda owned about 900. He sent twelve as a gift to the Mughal em…
954. Ismail the Magnificent modernised Egypt and borrowed it into foreign handsWhen Ismail Pasha took power in 1863, Egypt owed about 3 million pounds. By the time creditors closed in, the debt had passed 100 million, in a country collecting roughly 8 millio…
955. A teenage shah, and part-time poet, founded modern IranIsmail was no older than fourteen when he was crowned shah in Tabriz, and within a decade he ruled all of Iran, the first native dynasty to unify it since the Arab conquest some e…
956. Japan's first prime minister started out torching a British legationIn 1862 a young radical named Itō helped set fire to the British legation in Edo, sworn to drive out foreigners. A year later he was secretly aboard a ship to London, breaking the…
957. Humayun lost the whole Mughal empire, then won it back fifteen years laterBabur's son Humayun took the Mughal throne at 22, inexperienced and surrounded by ambitious brothers. Within a decade the Afghan commander Sher Shah Suri had driven him out of Ind…
958. Hyder Ali could not read, yet out-counted Mysore's accountantsHyder Ali entered the army as a soldier's son with no schooling and never learned to read. His memory for figures was so sharp that he matched trained accountants, and his tight g…
959. An exiled prince's raid on Riyadh began the making of Saudi ArabiaAbdulaziz Al Saud was 15 when rivals seized his family's city of Riyadh and sent them into exile, sheltering with desert Bedouin and later in Kuwait. In 1902 he retook the town wi…
960. Idi Amin rose from army cook to Uganda's dictatorIdi Amin joined the colonial King's African Rifles in 1946 as an assistant cook. Tall and powerful, he boxed his way to a national title and climbed to command Uganda's armed forc…

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