Most undeserved Dark Legends in History

It's not a mystery that what most people believe about a certain topic isn't necessarily true and about Dark Legends there're a lot of commonplaces that are regarded as "pure gold".
I'd like to have a list of them to help me and anyone else who is interested in Actual and/or Alternate History. I hope you'll help me with your ideas 'cause I know I'm not perfect and I may be victim of some of this Legends too.
I'll start with the most famous ones:
- Christianity caused the end of Rome.
- The Vikings were uncivilized savages.
- The Mongols were uncivilized savages.
- The Renaissance started only after (and because) Costantinople was conquered in 1453.
- The Inquisition burned millions (According to someone even trillions!) of innocent witches/heretics.
- Nobody before Columbus knew there was anything on the other side of the Atlantic.
- Spanish Dark Legend (The one that gave me inspiration.):
- - Military:
- - - Spanish army was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - - Spanish navy was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - Economy:
- - - There were no banks in Spain before 1700.
 
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The British army of the 19th century was led by incompetents promoted based on chin size (the smaller the better) rather than actual talent.

Related: the generals of WW1 were all a bunch of incompetents obsessed with fighting the Napoleonic Wars.
 
- - Military:
- - - Spanish army was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - - Spanish navy was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.

Do you mean like the worst behaved army? Or the worst at fighting? The latter would not make much sense.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
1. "The Middle Ages were a period of darkness and stunted learning." Complete and utter bullshit, invented by people of latter ages, trying to make themselves look better by comparison (and stressing their own supposed connection to a romanticised image of Antiquity). One may argue that the lack of centralised order had certain ill effects, but that was a relatively short-lasting issue, and things soon picked up again. (Can you say "Carolingian Renaissance"?)

2. "Christianity destroyed endless amounts of classical knowledge." Again, bullshit, although not as complete as the above example. Early Christianity, after it managed to acieve dominance in the Roman Empire -- and having faced persecution previously -- went on a bit of a vengeance kick, sure. They destroyed certain institutions and certain works. Again, this was a relatively short period, and it's also often not mentioned that for the most part, temples and centres of learning weren't destroyed, but just converted into Christian institutions. More importantly, christianity later became the most important preserver of classical works. This in a period where post-imperial chaos (rather than any purposeful agenda) was the big threat to that preservation. That chaos would've been there no matter what when Rome fell, and the fact that an organised Christian Church existed was ultimately a great boon to the preservation of classical works.
 
- The Mongols were uncivilized savages.

I think they're the only civilization in history that significantly decreased global population by killing as many people as they did. If anything, I think they've been whitewashed way too much of late. Killing millions is a-okay so long as you don't discriminate by religion, apparently.
 
  • Queen Mary I is worse than her half-sister, Elizabeth as far as death rates are concerned.
  • Marie Antoinette is brainless twit, Louis XVI is a spineless idiot.
  • Ekaterina II is an insatiable nymphomaniac
  • Richard III killed his nephews
  • Templars are goat-worshipping atheists who are behind anything that happens (okay, that sounds more like conspiracy theory), or just anything to do with the Templars being nothing but evil.
  • The death of Hypatia was linked to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria
  • And my personal favourite (that I heard in a university classroom from the professor!): Felipe II of Spain was so evil that he was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands before he was even born (not what the professor said, but he spoke of King Felipe doing xyz to the "good Protestants" in the Netherlands in the early 1520s)
 
The French were a bunch of flag-waving surrender monkeys.

Obviously complete nonsense and only makes sense if you focus only on 1940 while ignoring the rest of French history. And even then it still requires total ignorance of the circumstances and causes to be viable.
 
The French were a bunch of flag-waving surrender monkeys.

Obviously complete nonsense and only makes sense if you focus only on 1940 while ignoring the rest of French history. And even then it still requires total ignorance of the circumstances and causes to be viable.

I blame the Bourbon Restoration, for replacing the Tricolor with a literal white flag.
 
I blame the Bourbon Restoration, for replacing the Tricolor with a literal white flag.

The famous painting by Cogniet suggests that it had the coat of arms on it.

800px-Lar7_cogniet_001z.jpg
 
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I think they're the only civilization in history that significantly decreased global population by killing as many people as they did. If anything, I think they've been whitewashed way too much of late. Killing millions is a-okay so long as you don't discriminate by religion, apparently.

Actually, come to think of it, Mongol fanboying is basically the politically correct version of Wehrabooism.

The famous painting by Cogniet suggests that it had the coat of arms on it.

According to Wikipedia, both were used.
 
Accused witches were burned alive in Puritan New England. (They were hanged.)

The US government deliberately spread smallpox among the Indians. (The government actually sent vaccinators to protect the Indians - who were valuable to the big fur-trading companies.)

Arms manufacturers fomented WW I to sell more munitions.

Joe Kennedy was involved in bootlegging during Prohibition. (By the 1920s, Kennedy was already a successful banker, Wall Street operator, and Hollywood mogul. He had no need to get involved in an illegal business that could get one killed. He did make a fortune at Repeal because he had bought the import rights for some major liquor brands for next to nothing.)
 
It's not a mystery that what most people believe about a certain topic isn't necessarily true and about Dark Legends there're a lot of commonplaces that are regarded as "pure gold".
I'd like to have a list of them to help me and anyone else who is interested in Actual and/or Alternate History. I hope you'll help me with your ideas 'cause I know I'm not perfect and I may be victim of some of this Legends too.
I'll start with the most famous ones:
- Christianity caused the end of Rome.
- The Vikings were uncivilized savages.
- The Mongols were uncivilized savages.
- The Renaissance started only after (and because) Costantinople was conquered in 1453.
- The Inquisition burned millions (According to someone even trillions!) of innocent witches/heretics.
- Nobody before Columbus knew there was anything on the other side of the Atlantic.
- Spanish Dark Legend (The one that gave me inspiration.):
- - Military:
- - - Spanish army was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - - Spanish navy was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - Economy:
- - - There were no banks in Spain before 1700.
Vandals as exceptional savages.
 
Spain’s inquisition was uniquely torturous cruel and overbearing on Spanish society.


The reality: Spanish people in the countryside carried on performing their crypto Christian/paganism and were not threatened by the few people affected by the inquisition.
 
- The Vikings were uncivilized savages.
I think the Vikings get a little too romanticized these days, albeit by people who buy into that "warrior culture" nonsense and thinks it made them awesome, rather than the reality that a lot of Scandinavians from a certain time period were pirates who made a living running a massive slave market but aside from being good at piracy weren't too terribly different from everyone else nor innately stronger or tougher.
- Spanish Dark Legend (The one that gave me inspiration.):
Likewise, a lot of people I feel understate or underestimate the totality of the demographic catastrophe that was the Spanish colonies in the New World.
Richard III killed his nephews
But he did. He almost certainly did, I continue to see no reason to doubt that he did. Is Yorkism really that strong to this day? Why? If he didn't kill his nephews what happened to them? Why couldn't he just show them alive to quell the rumors he killed them?
Spain’s inquisition was uniquely torturous cruel and overbearing on Spanish society.


The reality: Spanish people in the countryside carried on performing their crypto Christian/paganism and were not threatened by the few people affected by the inquisition.
Same can't be said in the Americas however where the Inquisition was far stronger and more murderous.
 
Spain’s inquisition was uniquely torturous cruel and overbearing on Spanish society.


The reality: Spanish people in the countryside carried on performing their crypto Christian/paganism and were not threatened by the few people affected by the inquisition.
for that matter, the entire concept of the Inquisition--not just the Spanish one--as a bunch of evil church dudes mutilating people who refused to convert is also false. in fact, holy men were/are forbidden to draw blood entirely. i don't know enough about the Inquisition to judge it further than that, but it's not like it was uniquely evil.
 
I don’t know... their disappearances were awfully convenient for him...

Yeah, Richard was the only person with the means, motive and opportunity to bump them off. Plus, he lost a huge amount of support due to the widespread belief that he was a nephew-murderer, so if the princes were still alive he'd surely have had them shown publicly to prove that he wasn't.

for that matter, the entire concept of the Inquisition--not just the Spanish one--as a bunch of evil church dudes mutilating people who refused to convert is also false. in fact, holy men were/are forbidden to draw blood entirely. i don't know enough about the Inquisition to judge it further than that, but it's not like it was uniquely evil.

It certainly wasn't. It's often forgotten that the Inquisition was actually introduced to make sure that people accused of heresy were given due process before being punished -- i.e., to make it harder to punish people, not easier. The Inquisition's methods consisted mostly of getting a judge to investigate the evidence and decide whether or not the accused was guilty, which ended up being adopted by most of the secular courts, as well; torture was sometimes used, but it was less common and less severe than in the secular courts. And its sentences were generally quite lenient; since the aim was to get heretics to repent rather than to kill them, unless you were a repeat offender you could generally get off by signing a statement along the lines of "I thought this view was correct, but now that the nice people from the Inquisition have explained matters to me, I see that I was wrong. Hurray for Catholicism!"
 
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