historical myths people somehow still believe

What are some known historical myths or exaggerations that a lot of people somehow still believe are fact?

I was reading through very old posts on this forum and saw Elizabeth Bathory mentioned several times. Each time, people bring up how she supposedly bathed in and drank virgin's blood to stay young forever, and I was SHOCKED that nobody corrected that. It's absolutely not true at all. She NEVER did that - it's a historical legend often used by vampire movie scripts, but historians know it's no more truthful than the claim that Vlad Tepes drank people's blood and sometimes turned into a bat.

She probably killed between 50 and 650 girls, and probably tortured them. There are debates about the true extremity of the torture and bodycount, since some had political reasons to want her put away, and much witness testimony was obtained by torture. But even among all the savage acts that she was charged with (including mutilation of faces and genitals, performing surgery on victims, and even BITING them), blood baths or drinking blood was not mentioned ANYWHERE in the charges, witness testimony, or any historical records. The first mention comes in 1729, over 100 years after the trial. And historians pretty much all agree that it's nothing but a myth, a combination of urban legend created to shock, and an attempt at an explanation of motive in a time when nobody believed women capable of sadistic violence for the sake of sadistic violence, and tried to attribute the cause to something more "feminine" like vanity. But of course it's the perfect story for vampire movies, so the myth's remained, and I am shocked at how many people talk about Elizabeth Bathory but parrot this legend.

I always wondered why Hollywood never made any movies about the Byzantine Empire. These movies would be a great source of historical misconceptions - just think, for example, of the gigantic CGI mutant rhinoceros that Turks used to break Constantinople's walls in 1453.

A lot of people still think that Catherine the Great had sex with a horse.

People think that the West did way more than they actually did compared to the USSR in WW2.

I recently found out that a Unitarian started the Columbus/flat earth rumor back in the late 1800s. Damn, one of my own. And it gets debunked so often, that I have no idea how that idea even gets passed on. But still, most of my students come into my class thinking it's true.

George Washington's wooden teeth is another myth that everyone believes but no one actually seems to spread. Another GW misfact is that he was the richest man in British North America. He wasn't even the richest man in his county (his next door neighbor George Mason had a bigger spread and many more slaves). You can thank Howard Zimm for helping to spread that untruth along to the next generation.

Oh, from another thread here in CivFan, I found out that the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt. Man, where do these crazy myths even get started?!

BuckyRea said:

Oh, from another thread here in CivFan, I found out that the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt. Man, where do these crazy myths even get started?!

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That one got started in the Bible, both to cover up where they got their creation myths, and to give a nice grand story to the creation of the ruling house at that time.

The siege of Masada by the Romans did not last 3 years. In reality it only took approximately 6-7 weeks.

People still believe the Columbus was the first from the Old World to get to the Americas.

The first middle-ages nation to hit America was Ming China.

Terrance888 said:

The first middle-ages nation to hit America was Ming China.

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Too many to count. Read any piece of current historiography and you'll find one.

Example: Tokugawa Japan, not really all that isolationist
Elizabeth I of England: Kinda sucked
WWI: Not people running blindly into machine guns

etc, etc.

There was more to the Middle Ages then Plague and Vikings.

My most recent history article was basically "lol so how bout that Schlieffen Plan thing and how it didn't really exist"

The Roman Empire's fall was caused by Christianity. But there is really a laundry list of things that could be substitued for Christianity.

How long have people been believing in Nostradamus?

The Columbus myths are amazingly long-lived. I still think more than half the people believe he proved the world was round when everybody thought it was flat.

Copernicus was the first to propose that the Earth went around the sun is an old myth. Oh, well, what's 2,000 years?

Movies make myths faster than they can be debunked. One of the Elizabeth movies said that England was the most powerful nation in the world when she died.

That Constantinius the Great was Christian himself. Also, I thought the fact that the Earth revolved around the sun had been forgotten in the Dark Ages.

Some people seem to believe Gerald Massey's claims that Christianity is an offshoot of the Ancient Egyptian religion, even though more than a century of excavation and research has shown he was just making stuff up(or making odd conclusions with little evidence).

west india man said:

That Constantinius the Great was Christian himself.

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Constantinus Magnus was a Christian. The myth is that he wasn't.

I thought that he merely changed the state religion to Christianity, but was Pagan himself until he was baptised on his deathbed?

Deathbed baptism was pretty common for Christians back then, because it was regarded as one of the few things that could make somebody sinless again. It wasn't quite the same statement of belief as it is now.