10 Obscure Historical Events
There’s a lot of history, and we’re making more every year. As a result, many history textbooks have to focus on the grand sweep of events rather than individual stories. Which is understandable, but kind of a shame, since it means missing some of the most amazing stories of our shared past.
10 I Am Manco Inca
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Before he journeyed to America, Smith was a pirate-turned-mercenary fighting the Turks in the Balkans. According to his enormously entertaining memoirs, he even defeated three Turkish champions in single combat. (He used a coat of arms with three Turkish heads on it for the rest of his life.) Unfortunately, Smith’s luck ran out and he was captured and sold into slavery.
Things were looking dark, but Smith’s new master sent him to work for his Greek mistress, Charatza Trabigzanda, who quickly fell madly in love with her handsome new servant. Worried that her overbearing mother would sell Smith, she sent him to her brother’s Black Sea farm, where she instructed him to learn Turkish and wait until she was out from under her mother’s thumb. But Charatza’s brother didn’t approve of the relationship and decided to work Smith to death instead. Malnourished and desperate, Smith eventually snapped, beat his boss to death in a wheat field, and escaped into Russia on his stolen horse.
Smith’s exploits attracted an invite to help establish a colony in America. Typically, he was arrested for mutiny on the way there, barely avoided hanging, and was running the entire colony within a year. After not romancing Pocahontas, he returned to England to recover from a gunpowder accident that probably blew his genitals off. For years, historians assumed his memoirs were total fiction, but recent work actually corroborates some details. As historian Philip Barbour put it, “let it only be said that nothing John Smith wrote has yet been found to be a lie.”
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