A Short History of the World in 50 Lies

by Natasha Tidd

But killing your brother tends to come with consequences. For Cambyses, this was that when he died, in July 522 BC, there was no direct heir to take his place. With the role of ruler up for grabs, a very unusual frontrunner appeared – Bardiya. Of course, this wasn’t the real Bardiya, but a fake in the form of a magus called Gaumāta, who in early 522 BC had begun impersonating him. While Cambyses was in Egypt, this fake Bardiya was back in Persia rallying support against his ‘brother’, leading to a short-lived rebellion that was quelled when Cambyses died and the usurper Bardiya was crowned King of Kings. For those who had been close to Cambyses II, this was an injustice that could not stand – they knew that the real Bardiya had been secretly killed and so this new king had no right to rule and could jeopardize the entire empire. In September 522 BC, Cambyses’s lance bearer, Darius, led a group of men to entrap and murder Gaumāta. With the false king dead, Darius had saved the Achaemenid Empire and was duly crowned its new ruler, Darius the Great.

So, what actually happened to Bardiya? The likely answer is surprisingly simple. There was no fake Bardiya. Bardiya wasn’t killed in 525 BC but was in Persia acting as regent ruler while his brother was fighting in Egypt. From Babylonian documents, we can see that in 522 BC Bardiya appears to have started a campaign against his brother, being named ‘King of Babylon, King of Lands’ in the spring of that year, several months before Cambyses’s death and Bardiya’s official accession. As to why Darius the Great fabricated the story of the fake Bardiya, it’s another simple answer – to gain power. Much like Cambyses, Bardiya had no heirs, so if he died, the rule of the Achaemenid Empire would be up in the air. Darius almost certainly took advantage of this situation, killing Bardiya and creating the myth of the fake Bardiya to cement himself as the saviour of the empire and secure his place at the head of it.

A now substantially richer Caesar had found a winning formula – go to war, get out of debt, gain power. And so began the Gallic Wars. Yet, Caesar’s plan had one big flaw. To keep climbing the ranks of the Roman Republic, he needed to maintain his image, and going to war as a debt crisis measure wasn’t exactly a good look. He had to offer the Republic a different rendition of the truth, one that made his actions seem beneficial, not just for him, but for all Romans. So Caesar decided to publish his own version of events in a series of ongoing reports, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War). Here, Caesar explained that he had to pursue the Helvetii as they were planning to migrate next to a Roman Province and as such were a dangerous threat to all Romans (the Helvetii were in fact migrating 320 km (200 miles) away from this area).

Perhaps the most outlandish piece of spin comes from Caesar’s 55 BC massacre of civilians from the Germanic Usipetes and Tencteri nations, claiming that most were not killed by Caesar’s forces but tragically committed mass suicide after losing ‘any hope they were getting away’.

Interestingly, Caesar’s spin was taken as fact, not just by the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, but by history. Indeed, Commentaries on the Gallic War was actually celebrated as one of the greatest war reports of all time until the mid-twentieth century. What eventually tipped historians off to Caesar’s lies wasn’t his dubious justifications, but his use of numbers. In Commentaries Caesar claims to have conquered huge armies; for example, he declared that the Usipetes and Tencteri had been 430,000 strong and that in their defeat, no Roman soldier had died. Unlikely Roman fatalities aside, when comparing Caesar’s statistics to those found in modern research of the era, it became apparent that the Usipetes and Tencteri having a force of that size was an impossibility for the time and Caesar had inflated the magnitude of his enemy in a calculated effort to boost his reputation. This investigation of military figures opened the floodgates, and soon every aspect of Caesar’s claims was under historical investigation. It took over two thousand years for Julius Caesar’s clever web of lies to be untangled and today Commentaries on the Gallic War is seen not as a piece of historic fact, but as one of the earliest examples of political spin and the dangers that come with it.

Caesar’s pioneering of the art of spin didn’t end with him. In fact, his assassination would open the door for another Roman statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, to take Caesar’s methods one step further, blurring the lines between propaganda and spin to birth one of the earliest incidences of fake news.

Unsurprisingly, Mark Antony did not react to this well and on 19 September he gathered the Senate together again and angrily responded to Cicero, falsely accusing him of being the mastermind behind Caesar’s murder. Cicero was furious and unable to contain his rage. He threw out his original plan of using Philippics for under-the-radar spin and instead embarked on an all-out slanderous campaign. Second Philippic is by far the longest and most explosive of Cicero’s fourteen Philippic instalments, an unrivalled rant: ‘oh how intolerable is his impudence, his debauchery, and his lust!’ Cicero’s vitriolic claims run from Antony reeking of vomit from three-day revelries to thievery, violence, and claims he was a former sex worker. Cicero does not substantiate these stories and they mostly contained little to no fact, yet they proved incendiary to Antony’s character and 2,000 years later he is still thought of as a reckless philanderer.

In December 43 BC, Cicero was beheaded, and in a further act of grisly revenge, Antony ordered that not only would Cicero’s head be displayed at the Roman Forum, but so too would be his writing hand – the pen no match for his sword.

Procopius had set in stone the history of Justinian, and his writings remained undisputed fact until the early 1600s, when a mysterious manuscript was found deep within the annals of the Vatican library. On translating the document from its original Greek into Latin, antiquarian Niccolò Alamanni discovered that this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill accidentally mislaid archival object; it was a hitherto unknown third book of Procopius titled Anecdota or Secret History. To say that nobody anticipated how explosive the book’s contents would be is a vast understatement. Secret History upended what historians thought they knew about Justinian’s reign, with Procopius starting the book by explaining that much of what he’d written up to that point had been a lie: ‘I have been forced to conceal the real causes of many of the events recounted in my former books. It will now be my duty, in this part of my history, to tell what has hitherto remained untold, and to state the real motives and origin of the actions which I have already recounted.’ Adultery, abortions, secret children, murder, corruption and deceit all played major roles in Procopius’s retelling. Particular aim is taken at Theodora, who Procopius claims was a former sex worker. Indeed, he goes into such lurid details of her rumoured sex life that the 1623 publication of Secret History actually edited those portions out. As a couple, Justinian and Theodora are likened to demons: ‘… scourges of mankind, who laid their heads tog...

China’s Tang dynasty is often called the Golden Age of Ancient China, and at the helm of one of its most illustrious turning points was Wu Zetian, the only woman in Chinese dynastic history to rule not as a dowager or consort, but as empress in her own right. During her 690–705 reign, Wu expanded the empire, reopened the Silk Road and funnelled government funding into endeavours to care for the poor and sick. Prior to her death in 705, Empress Wu chose to leave her grave’s epitaph blank, wanting her reign to be judged only by history. This may not have been such a good idea. History has not remembered Wu as a strong and effective ruler, but as a callous murderer, who would later be described in this way: ‘She killed her sister, slaughtered her brothers, murdered her emperor, and poisoned her mother. Both gods and humans hate her.’

In 1718, one Aaron Thompson published the first English translation of The History and was so worried that by reprinting Monmouth’s writing he’d be opening a Pandora’s box of misinformation that he included a hefty tome of an introduction, going to great pains to remind the reader that The History is: ‘barbarous and in many places obscure’.

The twelfth-century Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniata gave Andronikos I Komnenos the nickname ‘Hater of Sunlight’ for how often he blinded his enemies as punishment.

The rule of Andronikos would be one of an iron fist, symbolized by his legions of spies, disappearances of enemies in the night, and some of the most brutal public executions within historic record.

In August, when William’s forces sacked the city of Thessalonica, resulting in the massacre of thousands, Andronikos tried to make light of the situation – it was fine, cities had fallen before, it was no big deal. Unsurprisingly, this flippant take didn’t go down well and as his people turned against him, Andronikos ordered the executions of anyone who he saw as a traitor.

By the next morning, word had begun spreading through the city of Andronikos’s latest planned arrests, and now thoroughly fed up with his rule, a mob quickly formed, calling for Isaac to take the throne. Isaac baulked at the idea – he didn’t want to be emperor, but the mob demanded it and a kind of semi-forced coronation took place. As Isaac was crowned, Isaac II Angelus, the last of the Komnenoi fled, hoping to seek a safe harbour in Russia. However, Andronikos was quickly captured and sentenced to a barbaric execution, first beaten by surviving nobility, before being paraded through Constantinople and hung by his feet at the Hippodrome, where a baying mob was set loose on him. The Komnenoi dynasty once heralded as saviours of the empire was dead.

On 13 October 1307, Philip IV ordered the arrest of every Knights Templar member in France. The heresy accusations were at the heart of this, but to bring down the whole order Philip would need more, so allegations were built upon and hastily invented. For example, it was known that order members would exchange a ‘kiss of peace’ on the lips. This singular piece of evidence was mutated to accuse the order of ritualistic sodomy. To gain the confessions Philip wanted, order members weren’t just interrogated but tortured, leading to a slew of false confessions – even Molay confessed to defacing a crucifix and denying Christ. In all, an estimated thirty-six Templars died under torture, refusing to admit to the charges.

However, when Olivier was executed, Jeanne didn’t do what was expected – instead of using what little money was left to move away and live quietly, she vowed revenge on Charles of Blois and Philip VI. Jeanne sold everything that wasn’t nailed down and used the money to raise a small army. Her first target was a castle being managed by Galois de la Heuse, a friend of Charles of Blois. Allegedly, in the middle of the night, Jeanne appeared at the castle gates surrounded by her children and begged to be let in. Of course, the gates were opened for this poor woman in distress, at which point Jeanne’s army flooded in behind her. The castle’s occupants were slaughtered, their goods stolen, and – in what would become a marker for Jeanne – one survivor left alive to tell the story. As Jeanne continued her rampage across Brittany, she allied herself with Charles’s foe, John of Montfort. With the English now backing her, Jeanne had become an even bigger threat and French forces were sent to dispatch her. With the heat too high in France, Jeanne hot-footed it across the Channel to England. Edward III was well aware of Jeanne and her bloody vengeance spree and wanted to help her however he could; after all, any enemy of Philip VI was a friend to him.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presents an ideal of cultural homogeneity. There are four types of people. The first are Mandeville and his readers, the good Christian West. The second, those who are ‘strange’ and different, but may be turned into participants of the first’s culture. The third are Jews, whose difference makes them a threat that must be eliminated. And the fourth, those too different to be considered more than subhuman and who mostly form a monstrous margin beneath all others.

The same way so many terrible things begin – with a conspiracy theory. From the mid-twelfth to the thirteenth century, the myth of Jewish blood libel had spread throughout Europe; it was believed that Christians, and particularly Christian children, were being captured and killed by Jews, their blood then used in Jewish religious ceremonies. There didn’t need to be evidence or witnesses; if you had a body or a missing child, it was enough.

Kramer’s main job was finding religious heretics, but around 1480 he became obsessed with the idea of witchcraft and went somewhat rogue. In the autumn of 1484, he travelled to Ravensburg in southern Germany, where he wasted no time in ardently preaching the dangers of demonic witchcraft. In a matter of days, he was presiding over the trials of eight women, who were found to be witches. As the women burned at the stake, Kramer realized he’d hit something big – witch finding. Unfortunately for him, there was an immediate roadblock – Kramer might have said that killing the eight accused witches was the right thing to do, but there wasn’t actually any legal precedent for it and now local officials in Ravensburg were starting to kick up a fuss. Hoping to fix this snag, Kramer journeyed to Rome in the winter of 1484 and requested the papal authority to prosecute witches. Pope Innocent VIII accepted Kramer’s plea and issued the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, which officially recognized the existence of witches and gave inquisitors the right to prosecute them as they saw fit.

Kramer and Scheuberin had already crossed paths – upon his arrival in Innsbruck she had urged the community not to attend his sermons and had even suggested that if anyone was a witch, it was Kramer; after all, he was the one obsessed with them. Kramer accused Scheuberin of using witchcraft to commit murder, and as evidence, he delved into her sex life, claiming sexual immorality. This didn’t go down well at the trial. The Innsbruck officials were incensed by Kramer using a woman’s sexual history as a means to prove witchcraft. This might seem surprising for 1485, especially as women’s rights were minimal at best, and for the officials, this really wasn’t a question of gender equality, but what counted as heresy. Kramer might say that Scheuberin’s sexual history proved heresy, but that was based on his word alone. Kramer was here to find witches, not to punish women based on his own classifications of correct female behaviour and so Scheuberin was acquitted. An infuriated Kramer would not let the ruling lie.

Unsurprisingly given Kramer’s humiliation in Innsbruck, Malleus Maleficarum also details how women, as the weaker sex, are far more likely to be witches than men. The most common candidate for witchcraft was an outspoken woman, one with a bad reputation, a high sex drive, or rumoured sex life beyond the boundaries of marriage. Concrete evidence wasn’t needed to bring charges; a rumour was enough, and when confessions were not forthcoming, Kramer advocated torture or lying to the condemned as means of extraction.

In total, an estimated 50,000 people, mainly women, were killed. All of this hysteria and death, because of one man and his inability to let a failure go.

As the violence reached its apex in 1525, leaders of the rebellions released their list of demands, which included multiple Reformation ideals, such as the ability to elect preachers, to be preached to in an understandable way, and for barriers to be put in place to prevent unnecessary funds being funnelled away from the community and to the Catholic Church. There were of course other demands – freedom from serfdom, reduced compulsory labour, and return of land seized by the nobility – however, it was the ones that condemned the actions of the Catholic Church that sparked fear and rage; the Reformation threat had spiralled so far out of control that now even peasants, the lowest of the low, had taken up its banner. Martin Luther quickly jumped ship, publishing Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, which likened the rebels to ‘the devil’s own’ and urged swift and bloody punishment. This was deftly dealt out, the peasants quashed, their rights taken away and an estimated 100,000 dead by the rebellion’s end. Yet it wasn’t only the peasants who’d lost; the wheels of reformation slowed almost to a stop. Those outside the nobility were left with a bad taste in their mouths, following Luther pushing the German rebels under the bus.

Joseph Pulitzer struggled for the rest of his life to come to terms with his role in the Maine frenzy and its abandoning of journalistic ethics. Perhaps in an effort to make good, Joseph Pulitzer requested in his will that an award be made in his name to incentivize excellence and public service in journalism, which became known as the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1896, the new head of French Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, uncovered the mound of evidence linking Esterhazy to the crime; however, his efforts to investigate were blocked and he was hastily relieved of duty and reposted to Tunisia. That didn’t mean that Picquart stopped calling for justice, and nor did Dreyfus’s family, who made complaints about Esterhazy to the military. Word was starting to creep out and eventually in January 1898, in a bid to avoid total scandal, Esterhazy was put on trial. This was very much for show, as despite the evidence against him, it would have been too humiliating for the military for Esterhazy to be found guilty, and so on 11 January, he was acquitted. This was what sparked Émile Zola to publish J’Accuse, declaring: ‘the truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it.’

Following the end of the First World War, the delight with which British propagandists vied at dinner parties to take credit for the corpse factory hoax shows both how much propaganda meant to the war and how easy it had been to lie. For the victors, there were no immediate consequences, while the losers bore the brunt. The war had popularized something called atrocity propaganda, a technique that had existed throughout history, but had never before been so utilized by so many nations. If you can demonize your enemy, and prove – falsely or otherwise – that they are capable of the unthinkable, then you can transform them into a monstrous other that must be defeated. It’s an ingenious way of gaining support and marshalling action – a kind of psychological warfare that is often only discovered once it has completed its job. The First World War had finessed atrocity propaganda, proved its worth, and since then, it has become a key part of international politics and warfare.

The name of the Spanish flu comes from Spain being so vocal about the pandemic. This led many to believe it had originated in Spain, with other popular names for the virus including the Spanish Lady. Interestingly, in Spain, the outbreak was often referred to as the French flu. We still don’t know exactly where the virus originated, but many historians cite America as the most likely source.

However, in 1933, the experiment hit two mammoth hurdles. The first was that neurosyphilis takes years to develop, and none of the men was anywhere near the advanced stages that the USPHS hoped to study. They wanted to research the absolute last part of the disease’s effect on the brain and then autopsy the body. As one of the leaders of the programme, Dr Oliver C. Wenger, put it: ‘We have no further interest in these patients until they die.’ That wouldn’t be happening for years, yet the experiment had only allotted itself enough money to run for six months. But the USPHS were impressed with the progress so far and so governmental funding was granted to continue the experiment indefinitely. With that issue solved, attention turned to the second problem – the participants. The men now needed to be tied into the experiment for their entire lives and made to believe that they were being cured of syphilis even as they actually died from it. Not only that, but each participant had to willingly sign their body away for autopsy. On the programme management’s part, they only really cared about getting the body – not about the potentially decades’ worth of lying they’d need to do to get there. This was flippantly discussed in a series of letters between Wenger and the experiment’s on-site director, Raymond A. Vonderlehr. Wenger wrote: ‘There is one danger in the latter plan and that is if the coloured population become aware that accepting free hospital care means a post-mortem, e...

The remaining Jewish people were dressed in fashionable clothing and, under the constant eye of the SS, spent weeks practising their parts, whether that be watching children play in the park or ‘shopping’ in the town’s centre. Finally, the day of the visit arrived, and over eight hours, the Red Cross were shown the Nazi-built fantasy. Apparently they were fooled, as in his final report, Dr Rossel, the representative from the Swiss arm of the Red Cross, happily noted: ‘certainly there are few populations whose health is as carefully looked after as in Theresienstadt.’ For the Jews that had been forced to take part in this charade, realizing that the Red Cross would not intervene was crushing. According to Leo Baeck, a leader in Theresienstadt’s council of elders: ‘They appeared to be completely taken in by the false front put up for their benefit. … Perhaps they knew the real conditions – but it looked as if they did not want to know the truth. The effect on our morale was devastating. We felt forgotten and forsaken.’

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, America’s FBI and multiple military intelligence agencies requested access to census data pools of individuals, primarily to assess the number of citizens whose ancestry was linked to the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan. However, William Lane Austin, the director of the US Census Bureau, denied access, as it went against the 1929 omnibus census statute, which stated that census data was for ‘statistical purpose only’ and ‘the Director of the Census [could not] permit anyone other than the sworn employees of the Census Office to examine the individual reports.’ As a result of his defiance, in 1940, Austin was forced to retire and, after a lengthy administrative back and forth, in March 1942, the Second War Powers Act became law. This entitled government agencies to have access to any data that was otherwise legally protected as confidential so long as it was ‘for use in connection with the conduct of the war’. Just like that, the 1940 census was free to be used in rounding up and interning America’s Japanese citizens.

As the British Empire crumbled into the abyss in the twentieth century, from the 1940s onwards, several decades of decolonization programmes took place. Inherent to the handover of power was the passing on of governmental records, both past and present. Theoretically, Britain would hand over every document to incoming governments, but realistically, Britain didn’t want to. To do that would mean handing newly independent nations evidence of every dark deed that had been committed against them during colonial rule. And so began a process of separating the so-called ‘embarrassing’ records to be smuggled back to Britain. The problem was that sending so many documents back was incredibly time-consuming and most of the colonial offices lacked the manpower to do it with the secrecy it necessitated. So, a plan B quickly came into effect – send back what you can and just destroy the rest, or as one officer put it: ‘What’s burnt won’t be missed.’ To begin with, these burnings were ad hoc and often poorly thought out and executed. In 1947, over-eager officials at the Delhi colonial office burned so many records that a fog of smoke clung to the city for days.

Yet the cover-up was poorly executed, as the sisters had been snatched on a road in front of civilian witnesses. Despite Trujillo’s censorship, the Dominican people saw through his story and understood that the faces of the resistance had been murdered in cold blood. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back – a cornerstone of Trujillo’s regime was the domestication of women, framing them as figures of maternal propriety to be looked after. Though he tortured and killed women in the opposition, this, like his sexual abuse, was censored. However, the Mirabal sisters’ deaths could not be contained. The president had killed three women – three wives and mothers – undermining his own institution. By murdering the Mirabals, he hadn’t broken the resistance, he’d just made it stronger. In the following months, dissent against the dictator snowballed, until finally, on 30 May 1961, Trujillo’s own car was ambushed, and the president was shot and killed.