# 5. Vikings What would a Viking be without his trusty
battle helmet and its impressive horns? The answer is: a more historically accurate
viking. Think, for a moment about wearing headgear
like that into battle: the horns are just easy targets for your opponent to hit and
knock off your helmet. Or, if you strap on your helmet, now your
opponent has a convenient lever with which to drag you to the ground and something to
hold onto while slitting your throat. Horned helmets are a terrible idea, which
is why archeologists have never found them at viking battle sites and there's no evidence
that they were ever used. It was poets and artists -- people not known
for caring about facts and reality -- who gave the Vikings their silly hats during the
late 1800s, long after the vikings could 'correct' their misconceptions. 4. Lady Godiva The story of this 11th century English noblewoman
is that her mean husband the Earl raised taxes on the townspeople of Coventry which Lady
Godiva -- and not surprising the locals -- thought were too high. She badgered her husband and he conceded in
exasperation to lower the taxes if she rode through town naked -- assuming that she never
would, but she did. Because people don't likes taxes -- even though
they're how civilization is purchased -- Lady Godiva's story lives on notably in the Godiva
logo and in popular songs. But while Lady Godiva was a real person and
Coventry is a real town there is no record of her nude ride from the time when it happened
-- so we can assume the story is false. Just as with the Vikings, again poets and
artists are to blame, who made up the tale long after Lady Godiva's death. 3. Napoleon Famously this tiny, tiny general -- perhaps
to compensate for his short stature -- took control of France greatly expanded its influence
and dubbed himself emperor. Napoleon's official height was indeed 5 foot
2 inches but at the time French inches were longer than English inches, so doing the unit
conversion, Napoleon's height should have been reported as 5'7 in England's imperial
units -- which is short by today's standard but was average or slightly above average
in the early 1800s. However England, with it's eternal love for
all things French, didn't care and went the Napoleon-is-so-short-LOL version of the story
in newspapers and cartoons. Meanwhile, Napoleon was busy introducing the
Metric System to France and the wider world to standardize measurements so this sort of
confusion would never happen again -- and thankfully the whole world now uses metric. Mostly. Sort of. 2. Roman Vomit Ah, the Roman empire, so great and powerful,
but corrupted by decadence from within. And what could be a better symbol of that
decadence than the Vometorum: where Romans, after stuffing themselves with delicious foods,
could vomit them all up to make room to feast anew. Vometoria are real but this idea of them is
not, though confusion is understandable because their name -- Vomit-orium -- seems to make
their purpose so clear. Even if for some reason you know latin -- perhaps
because you live in a country that insists you waste hundreds of hours of your life learning
a dead, useless language -- this knowledge still won't help you because the root word
'vomitum' means 'to spew forth'. So what is it really? If you've ever been to a big stadium, like
say, the ones made by the romans, you have already used a vometorium. This is what the vometoria are -- the passageways
that lets lots of people enter or exit at once. The people are what spews forth in the vometoria,
not the contents of the people. 1. Columbus There is so very much wrong with the common
retelling of the story of Christopher Columbus that it's hard to know where to begin, but
the biggest misconception is that everyone else thought the world was flat, but Columbus
was the only guy smart enough to know that it's round. It makes a daring story, but knowledge of
a spherical earth goes back to at least 5,000 BC that's six and a half thousand years before
Columbus set sail -- and that knowledge was never lost to western civilization. In 200 BC Eratosthenes calculated Earth's
circumference and his estimate was still well know and being used in Columbus's time. The argument Columbus had with queen Isabella
was not over the shape of the earth, but of its size. Columbus estimated the Earth was much smaller
than Queen Isabella and her scientific advisors did which was way he thought he could make
it across the empty Atlantic to India. But Columbus's size estimate was wrong -- again,
just like Napoleon's height -- because of mixed up units. However, his error did send him West to become
the first European to discover America -- as long as you ignore the hornless vikings who
beat him by 500 years.
came here for this, wasnt here, so:
5: vikings didn't wear horned helmets
4: lady godiva never rand through a town naked to raise/lower taxes
3: napolean wasnt really short in comparison to average height of the time, also, the metric system
2: vomitoriums are entrances/exits to stadiums, not rooms for vomiting
1: columbus argued with queen izabella about the size of the earth, not the shape (flat vs round) and he was wrong, which eventually landed him in america
edit. fixed entrance/exits
I think I saw a Minecraft creeper in the Lady Godiva bit edit: check out the pic at 1:05
The biggest one that is missing, but you hear on Reddit all the fucking time:
It was not unusual to live to 70-80 in pre-modern times. The drastically lower life expectancy was largely a function of horrific infant/child mortality. Once you made it to 20 or so, you generally had a life expectancy on the order of 50 more years (ie, you could expect to live past 70).
You especially hear this a lot in connection with Game of Thrones, where GRRM made his main characters hilariously young based on this misconception. Nope, people in power weren't really any younger than they are now, and the main difference, the fact that noble men and women got married at a drastically younger age, was largely a function of the fact that these marriages were political, and the participants mere pawns. Note that the common men have almost always gotten married older than 20, and, in societies where they had any status at all, common women would be only a little younger.
All the videos from this guy are hilarious.
That godiva thing just ruined my Engineering undergrad
I love the vikings getting across the Atlantic first story; they landed in Newfoundland and instantly got into a fight with natives. They got their asses kicked, said "fuck it" and immediately went home.
Does anyone know if the Teutonic Knights actually had horns on their helms?
Love CPG vids
i'm gonna wind up watching all these videos dang it