10 History Myths Everyone Still Believes

Some historical errors are more durable than the facts they replaced. They survive because they tell a better story, because a film fixed them in place, or simply because someone converted a unit of measurement wrong.

Here are ten of them, each with the real source of the confusion.

1. Napoleon was short

Napoleon Bonaparte stood roughly 5 feet 6 to 5 feet 7 (1.68–1.70 m) — average for a Frenchman of his era, arguably slightly above it.

The error is a conversion mistake. French records list him at “5 pieds 2 pouces.” But the French pouce measured 2.707 cm, against 2.54 cm for the English inch. Read in British units, that produces 5’2” — and a legend.

Two things cemented the image. First, James Gillray’s English caricatures, which depicted “Little Boney” as a raging dwarf in one of the most effective visual propaganda campaigns in history. Second, the grenadiers of his Imperial Guard were selected for height: permanently surrounded by them, the Emperor did look small.

2. Einstein failed mathematics

Albert Einstein denied it himself, during his lifetime: “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”

There is a kernel of truth elsewhere. In 1895, at sixteen — two years below the normal age — he sat the entrance examination for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. He failed the exam overall, on the literary and language sections. His mathematics and physics results were excellent.

The myth spread because it is consoling. It survives no scrutiny at all.

3. Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake”

The phrase appears in the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Book VI, written around 1765. Rousseau attributes it to “a great princess,” unnamed. The French is brioche, not cake — an enriched bread, which changes the sense somewhat.

At that date, Marie Antoinette was about ten years old and living in Vienna. She would not arrive in France until 1770. No source contemporary with her reign puts these words in her mouth.

The attribution spread during the Revolution, when the queen was the target of a pamphlet campaign of remarkable viciousness. The line was too useful to fact-check — and it has stayed that way.

4. Cleopatra was Egyptian

Cleopatra VII belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Ptolemy I, a Macedonian general under Alexander the Great. Her paternal line was therefore Macedonian Greek, and the family had practised close intermarriage for nearly three centuries.

She was born in Egypt and ruled there, and according to Plutarch she was the first of her dynasty to learn the Egyptian language — which tells you plainly that her predecessors had not.

Her mother’s ancestry is uncertain, and some Egyptian descent cannot be excluded. But the picture of an ethnically Egyptian queen does not match what is known of the house of Ptolemy.

5. Columbus proved the Earth was round

The Earth’s sphericity was established among the Greeks by the fourth century BC. Eratosthenes measured its circumference around 240 BC with remarkable accuracy. Medieval scholars never disputed it.

The argument between Christopher Columbus and the Portuguese and Spanish court experts was about the Earth’s size, not its shape. And on that point the experts were right and Columbus was wrong: he badly underestimated the circumference, which led him to believe Asia lay a few weeks west. Had he not run into a continent no one in Europe suspected, his crew would have died at sea.

The flat-Earth medieval myth owes much to Washington Irving’s romanticized 1828 biography of Columbus.

6. Salieri poisoned Mozart

No evidence exists. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in December 1791 of an acute illness; the most discussed medical hypothesis today is a complicated streptococcal infection.

The rumour circulated within weeks of his death, in a Vienna fond of gossip. It was then turned into art by Pushkin, whose short play Mozart and Salieri appeared in 1830, then into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, then into a play by Peter Shaffer — Amadeus, 1979 — whose film adaptation by Miloš Forman fixed the image for a mass audience.

Antonio Salieri was in fact a respected composer and an esteemed teacher, whose pupils included Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt.

7. Galileo was tortured and muttered “And yet it moves”

The 1633 trial was real, as were the abjuration and the house arrest that lasted until his death in 1642. But Galileo was not physically tortured. The procedure included what was called territio verbalis — the formal threat of torture, shown and described, but not applied.

As for the famous Eppur si muove, it appears in no contemporary document. Its first known appearance in print dates to 1757, more than a century after the events, in a book by Giuseppe Baretti.

The trial remains a landmark in the history of science and authority. It never needed embellishing. Our piece on Galileo vs Newton covers what actually happened.

8. Vikings wore horned helmets

No horned helmet has ever been recovered from a Viking burial. The few helmets found — the Gjermundbu helmet in Norway is the only near-complete example — are smooth.

The image comes from nineteenth-century German Romanticism, and specifically from costumes designed by Carl Emil Doepler for the first complete staging of Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth in 1876. It took hold in under fifty years.

Practically speaking, horns would be an absurdity in combat: they hand an opponent a perfect grip.

9. Newton’s apple

This one holds up better than expected. Isaac Newton did tell the story, to several people late in his life. William Stukeley recorded it in his 1752 Memoirs: Newton, sitting in the orchard at Woolsthorpe, watched an apple fall and asked himself why it fell perpendicular to the ground.

Two corrections, though. The apple never hit his head — that detail was added later. And the episode was no flash of instant revelation: universal gravitation took some twenty years of work before the Principia of 1687.

So not everything in the great stories is false. Which is precisely why checking matters.

10. Napoleon shot the Sphinx’s nose off

The Great Sphinx had already lost its nose long before the Egyptian campaign of 1798.

The proof is graphic: the Danish draughtsman Frederic Louis Norden, who visited the site in 1737, drew it noseless in plates published in 1755 — more than forty years before French troops arrived.

The fifteenth-century Arab historian al-Maqrīzī separately reports that the mutilation was the work of a man in the fourteenth century.

How to spot a historical myth

These ten cases share recurring mechanisms. A few reflexes are enough to guard against them:

Find the earliest source. If the first written trace appears a century after the events, be careful. That is what disqualifies Eppur si muove.

Distrust stories that are too well built. The genius humbled by an exam, the queen’s cynicism in one line, the jealous poisoning rival: these are narrative devices, not observations.

Check units and translations. Napoleon’s height turns on a mis-converted inch. That kind of error is more common than you would think.

Ask who benefited from the story. Gillray’s caricatures served the British war effort. The pamphlets against Marie Antoinette served the Revolution. A durable myth has almost always been useful to somebody.

For more on method, see our guide to studying history through biographies.