The 4 Armies That Won by Doing Absolutely Nothing 1. The Mongols at Zhongdu (1214) - Rather than storm the Jin capital's walls, Genghis Khan simply left. He camped outside long enough to trigger a famine so severe the city's garrison began eating each other. Zhongdu surrendered

The General Who Saved an Empire and Was Rewarded With a Life of Suspicion Belisarius is one of the most successful military commanders in recorded history and one of the most poorly served by the historical memory that followed him. He served the Emperor Justinian across five

The Cow That Started a War In 1854, a dispute over a single cow escalated into a massacre and opened three decades of warfare across the northern plains of America. A Mormon emigrant's cow strayed into a Lakota Sioux camp near Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming and was killed,

The King Who Built an Alphabet Because He Thought His People Deserved to Read In the early 15th century, the Korean king Sejong the Great convened a group of scholars at his court and set them a task that the Confucian bureaucracy found quietly threatening from the beginning. He

The Philosopher Killed for Advising the Wrong Man at the Wrong Moment Hypatia of Alexandria was the most prominent mathematician and philosopher in the late Roman world, a distinction that in Alexandria in 400 AD was not honorary but functional. She taught Neoplatonist

The Empire That Conquered by Invitation and Collapsed by the Same Method The Western Roman Empire did not fall in a single catastrophic moment. It dissolved over roughly a century through a process that looked, at many points, like a reasonable administrative decision made by

The Slave Who Nearly Broke the Roman Republic and Died Without Anyone Finding His Body Spartacus is one of the most mythologized figures in ancient history, claimed by 19th century nationalists, 20th century Marxists, and Hollywood screenwriters as a symbol of the oppressed

The Battle That Ended Europe's Belief It Could Colonize Anyone It Chose The Battle of Adwa on March 1, 1896 is one of the most significant military engagements of the 19th century and one of the least discussed in European historical education. By 1895, virtually every

The Explorer Who Reached America, Named It After Someone Else, and Disappeared Into the Atlantic John Cabot sailed from Bristol in 1497 and made landfall on the North American continent, almost certainly somewhere on the coast of Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, becoming the first

The Servant Who Burned So Her Employer Could Escape In 1324, a woman named Petronilla de Meath was flogged six times through the streets of Kilkenny and burned at the stake, becoming the first person executed for witchcraft in Ireland following a formal ecclesiastical trial, and

The Empire That Ran on Paper Money and Collapsed When the Paper Stopped Working The Song Dynasty of China, which governed from 960 to 1279 AD in whole or in part, was by most economic measures the most sophisticated state on earth during its existence, and it produced one of the

The 4 Most Expensive Buildings in the Ancient World 1. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus - Took 120 years and multiple complete rebuilds. The Lydian king Croesus funded its columns alone. When Herostratus burned it down in 356 BC for fame, Alexander the Great offered to pay for

The Revolution That Freed the Slaves and Then Paid Their Former Owners for the Next 122 Years The Haitian Revolution that began in 1791 is the only successful slave revolt in recorded history to produce an independent state. The enslaved population of Saint-Domingue, the French

The 5 Shortest-Reigning Emperors Who Changed Everything Anyway 1. Pertinax (Rome, 193 AD) Ruled for 87 days. In that time he tried to dismantle the Praetorian Guard's stranglehold on imperial finances. They stabbed him for it, then auctioned the empire to the highest bidder

The City That Rome Destroyed So Completely It Felt Bad Watching It Burn Carthage and Rome fought three wars across roughly 120 years. The first two produced the defining moments. Hannibal crossing the Alps, the innovations of the Carthaginian navy, Rome learning to fight at sea

The Admiral Who Never Lost a Battle and Was Court-Martialed Twice by the Country He Was Saving In 1592, the Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin deployed a class of warship called the geobukseon, the turtle ship, against a Japanese invasion fleet during the Imjin War. The turtle ship is

The Language That Died With One Man on a Specific Afternoon in 1992 On October 4th 1992, a man named Red Thundercloud died in a nursing home in South Carolina. He was the last fluent speaker of Catawba, a Siouan language spoken by the Catawba people of the Carolina piedmont for

The Medieval Scholar Who Invented Sociology and Predicted the Decline of Every Civilization Including His Own Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332, survived the Black Death, served as political advisor and judge in courts across North Africa and Andalusia, negotiated personally

The Architect of the Holocaust Who Was Nearly Saved by His Own Victims Adolf Eichmann was the SS officer primarily responsible for the logistics of the Holocaust, the bureaucrat who coordinated the transportation of Jews from across occupied Europe to the extermination camps

The Disease That Shaped More History Than Any Army Smallpox killed approximately 300 million people in the 20th century alone, more than all the wars of that century combined, in a century that contained two world wars and several genocides. Before the 20th century the numbers