Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople, been a long time gone, no Constantinople, still, it's Turkish Delight on a moonlit night.
It got changed because of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, it got changed in 1922 when Turkey became a republic. Basically the goal was to nationalise Turkey, and to "Turkify" all conquered cities and minorities.
I knew of the Borgias, but I didn't get this one because I reasoned that "Borgia" couldn't possibly be a Spanish name, based on the spelling. Should have been more adventurous.
Me too. It's not really a complaint because I really enjoyed the quiz, but I do think these are more interesting when there's more world history - even if I and most other quiz users get much lower scores.
From your user name I'm guessing there is a reason it was easy for you. I can remember dodo but not moa. No idea why, but I always miss it on these quizzes.
I do think the number should be required for English kings. Too easy to guess otherwise given how many Richards, Henrys, Edwards and Georges there were.
And Richard III was not a hunchback - his skeleton proves it.
It's also too easy to just start adding numbers in order to the names, so we could still easily get the correct answer without specific knowledge. If there were twenty or thirty of each name I might agree, but for the sake of time I'm for keeping it simple.
Why are there names in English for Munich and Moscow, but not Peking or Bombay? None of them are really close to the originals in the native language. Why are some changed and not others?
It's just a change in cartographical conventions. English used to use Anglicised names for foreign places, but somewhere in the last few hundred years the convention changed to using "native" names. The other thing to remember is that sometimes the English name for a place preserves an older form that changed in the foreign language itself - so for example the English name "Florence" is closer to the Latin "Florentia" than the modern Italian "Firenze." Once upon a time it was the same word, but then language shifts happened and the words became further apart.
It happens in other languages, too. San Francisco used to be known as "San Franzisko" in German, but that would look quite odd today. Nonetheless, we still Germanize Warszawa as Warschau, for example.
Seems like a reasonable way to acknowledge that whisky making may have been happening earlier, but we haven't found evidence to show that. How would you propose to say that?
I don't think the air quotes you used in your title about Columbus fit here. While the Vikings were the first foreigners who discovered the Americas, it wasn't until Columbus landed in what is now the Bahamas that the world began to learn extensively of the Americas. Political correctness strikes again.
That's not political correctness. It's an allusion to the fact that the land had already been discovered. A stubborn insistence on dismissing demonstrated but uncomfortable facts as "political correctness" strikes again.
@camus Essentially they weren't, which is why the terms 'Old World' and 'New World' exist. They weren't part of our world (speaking as a European), and we weren't part of theirs, until the Old World discovered the New World, which could have gone the other way if history's dice had landed a bit differently.
That Norse settlement question made me wonder what it would have been like for the last person left alive as "leaving no survivors" makes it sound like they all died out. Chilling thought. Did a little reading though and it seems there isn't any definitive evidence for that and they may have simply gone home. According to the lead author of a 2012 University of Copenhagen study: "If anything they might have become bored with eating seals out on the edge of the world."
Recent research suggests rising tides due to climate change pushed them away, as their villages and fields were slowly getting flooded. Very slowly, but still. Also, increased salinization of the earth probably made cultivating more difficult.
I remember reading in "Collapse" by Jared Diamond that they found bones from baby cows dated to the final couple years of settlement. Meaning that the settlers were so desperate that they ruined their future means of subsistence to survive a little while longer. That said, it's not impossible that the settlers were able to escape back to Iceland (though there's no record of that).
Just finished doing this whole chain in a row (some of them not for the first time), and maybe two of them do not have Constantinople as an answer. It's now my phone's first suggestion when I type C
What?
Constantinople had been referred to as "the City" by Byzantines, due to it being the Reigning City/City of all cities.
You gotta be kidding me...
Nearly always, the people doing the complaining are woefully ignorant themselves.
And Richard III was not a hunchback - his skeleton proves it.
How about a question on the Battle of Castillon which effectively ended the war with a decisive French victory?