History: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 26

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Q2115

DrivePhilosophy

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Nobody has found this sentence in Gandhi's writings, and researchers have looked hard through millions of published words. The earliest close match appears in 1974, in a chapter by an American educator named Arleen Lorrance. What Gandhi did write, in a 1913 column about snakebite remedies, is quieter and stranger: 'If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.' The slogan promises the world will follow. Gandhi only promised that your relation to it would.

Widely attributed to Mahatma Gandhi; not found in his writingsRead card

Q2117

DriveHistory

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

It gets credited to Marilyn Monroe on mugs and to Eleanor Roosevelt on posters. It was written in 1976 by a young historian in a scholarly article about pious New England women, and Ulrich did not mean it as encouragement. She meant it as a complaint about the archive: these women left almost no record precisely because they gave nobody anything to write down. The slogan escaped, and thirty years later she wrote a book with the same title to explain it.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, American Quarterly (1976)Read card

Q2118

DriveHistory

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful.

It is the most famous job advert in history and there is no evidence it was ever placed. Researchers have combed the London papers for a century, and a standing reward for a copy has gone unclaimed. The earliest known printing is a 1944 American book, which offers it openly as a paraphrase of Shackleton. What is documented is stranger: he said around 5,000 people wrote asking to go, and every man aboard 'Endurance' came home alive.

Attributed to Ernest Shackleton; no copy of the advert has ever been foundRead card

Q2121

WonderHistory

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

Humboldt scholars cannot find it anywhere in his enormous output, and they have searched. The earliest match is a short verse by Moritz Goldschmidt in a Munich arts paper in 1895, thirty-six years after Humboldt died; his name was attached in the 1980s. The irony is that the sentiment fits. Humboldt climbed Chimborazo, crawled through Amazon tributaries, and came home arguing that nature is one connected whole — an idea he could only have reached by going and looking.

Widely attributed to Alexander von Humboldt; traced to an 1895 German verseRead card

Q2123

DriveHistory

In 1090 Hassan-i Sabbah took the mountain fortress of Alamut without a battle — Persian chronicles say he handed its owner a draft for 3,000 gold dinars.

Alamut stands on a rock ridge in the Elburz mountains of northern Persia, approachable by one narrow path. Hassan had spent years quietly winning over the people of the surrounding valleys before he ever addressed the castle itself, so by the time he arrived the garrison was already half his. A state that would outlast him by well over a century began as a property transaction. Patience had already done the work a siege could not.

Alamut, 1090Read card

Q2124

DriveHistory

The Nizaris carved lined cisterns into the mountain, channelled water from distant springs and terraced the valley below, so Alamut could simply ignore a blockade.

Cutting a cistern into limestone and lining it is slow, unglamorous work that pays off only in a crisis that may never come. The Nizaris did it anyway, across a network of mountain strongholds, alongside underground channels from springs and terraced fields of wheat and barley. Their castles were designed around the assumption of being cut off. It is a strange kind of confidence: to build as though the worst will happen, so that when it does, very little changes.

Alamut CastleRead card

Q2125

StillnessHistory

When Alamut fell in 1256, the Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni was given the run of its famous library — he kept the books he approved of and burned the rest.

Juvayni was riding with the Mongol conqueror Hulagu, and he was also a scholar who understood exactly what he was holding. He selected what he considered worth saving, then destroyed the Ismaili theology he had no use for — and afterwards wrote the history in which we read about it. Almost everything we know of the collection comes from the person who ended it. A handful of works escaped, including treatises by the astronomer al-Tusi. The rest survives only as a description by the man with the torch.

Ata-Malik JuvayniRead card

Q2126

DriveHistory

Nizam al-Mulk served as vizier of the Seljuk empire from 1064 and was its effective ruler for two decades, until he was assassinated on a Ramadan night in 1092.

He served two sultans, Alp Arslan and Malik Shah, and after Alp Arslan's death he held the real power for twenty years. He built a network of state-funded colleges and appointed scholars of the calibre of al-Ghazali to teach in them. Then he fell out of favour, and a single assassin ended him — and the empire he had held together began to come apart within months. Institutions outlast men, but only if the man remembered to build them.

Nizam al-MulkRead card

Q2127

StillnessLiterature

Nizam al-Mulk's Siyasatnama, the Book of Government, sets out in fifty chapters how a ruler should handle religion, soldiers, money, courtiers and informers.

It was written late, by a man who had already done the job, and it reads that way: less theory than accumulated practice, illustrated with stories of rulers who got it right or badly wrong. It is unsentimental about power — the ruler's authority should be absolute, the informants should be good, the treasury should be watched. Written nine centuries ago about a vanished empire, it survives because most of what it describes is not medieval at all.

SiyasatnamaRead card

Q2128

WonderLanguage

The word assassin descends from hashishiyya, which medieval Arabic sources used as abuse meaning rabble or outcast — not as a description of anyone's habits.

In the surviving Arabic sources the term is figurative — low-class rabble, irreligious outcasts — the kind of slur one faction throws at another. Crusaders carried it home, where it lost the insult and kept the drug, and by the time it settled into European languages it simply meant murderer. A group's enemies got to name it, and the name outlived everyone involved. Most of what everyone knows about the Assassins comes from people who hated them.

EtymologyRead card

Q2129

WonderHistory

Marco Polo described a hidden garden where recruits woke believing they were in paradise — a tale already circulating in Europe, about a fortress that had fallen before he travelled.

The details are wonderful and that is the problem: gilded pavilions, a sleeping draught, young men waking in an engineered heaven. But the title 'Old Man of the Mountain' was invented by Crusaders for the Syrian Ismaili leader and never used in Iran, Alamut had been destroyed before Polo passed through, and the story was current in Europe before he wrote it down. He was repeating what Europeans already believed. The most famous fact about the Assassins is really a fact about their audience.

Marco PoloRead card

Q2130

WonderHistory

A beloved Persian story has Omar Khayyam, Nizam al-Mulk and Hassan-i Sabbah swear a boyhood pact to share whatever success came to them — but the three were never classmates.

The pact is irresistible: three boys under one master in Nishapur, promising that whoever rose first would lift the others, and each becoming a different kind of legend — the poet, the statesman, the revolutionary. It appears in several classical Persian sources and almost every retelling since. It also cannot have happened. Nizam al-Mulk was a generation older than Khayyam, and Hassan-i Sabbah did not come from Nishapur. Some stories survive because they are true, and some because they are better than true.

Three SchoolfellowsRead card

Q2131

DriveScience

The astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi spent years working at Alamut, and when the Mongols took the fortress he entered their service and won backing for a great observatory at Maragha.

He wrote at Alamut for years under a regime the whole region feared, and some of his treatises are among the few things that escaped the library's burning. When the fortress fell he did not vanish with it — he went to work for the conquerors and persuaded them to fund an observatory whose instruments and star tables shaped astronomy for centuries afterwards. Careers are usually told as straight lines. His ran through the worst thing that could happen to it.

Nasir al-Din al-TusiRead card

Q2132

StillnessHistory

In 1256 Hulagu Khan's army surrounded Alamut, and its last ruler, Rukn al-Din Khurshah, surrendered the fortress rather than defend it.

For a century and a half the fortress had been the answer to every siege — the cisterns, the terraces, the single approach. Then the Mongols arrived, and the thing that ended it was not a wall coming down but a decision. Khurshah came out, the fortifications were dismantled, the library was burned, and the Nizari state was over as a political fact. The defences had been built for the war everyone expected. They were never the part that failed.

Siege of Alamut, 1256Read card