Disputed Statements

King John of England, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States The youngest son of Henry II, John inherited the Angevin realm, England joined by fiefs across western France, on his brother Richard I's death in 1199, and spent his reign fighting to hold it together. He lost Normandy and most of the Angevin lands in France to Philip II by 1204, a defeat that starved his treasury and drove the harsh taxation and arbitrary justice that turned his barons against him. A long dispute with Pope Innocent III over the archbishopric of Canterbury brought England under interdict from 1208 and John himself under excommunication from 1209, a rupture he resolved in 1213 only by submitting England as a papal fief. Baronial rebellion followed anyway, and John sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in June 1215 to buy peace, then had Pope Innocent III annul it within weeks, an act that triggered the First Barons' War and left him fighting rebel barons and their French allies until his death in October 1216. Medieval chroniclers, writing largely from monastic houses he had taxed and antagonized, handed down a reputation as one of England's worst kings, cruel, faithless and incompetent; that verdict has been the atlas's traditional reading, though it is a genuinely disputed one (see the recorded dissent).

Source John, King of England (Britannica)

Krupp, Organizations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Dissolved

Currently States 1999

Krupp did not close; in 1999 Fried. Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp merged with Thyssen AG to form ThyssenKrupp AG, ending Krupp's existence as an independent company while its operations continue within the merged firm.

Source Krupp Family and Firm (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors tier 1

Late Antiquity, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 200

Conventionally placed in the third century CE; the exact starting point is disputed and depends on which region and which historian's framework is used.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Late Antiquity, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 700

Conventionally closed in the seventh century CE; the exact geographical and chronological scope remains a live scholarly debate.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Louis V of France, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 966

The Wikipedia infobox gives the birth year as either 966 or 967; 966 is recorded here as the earlier of the two candidate years.

Source Wikipedia: Louis V of France tier 2

Mali Empire, Civilizations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1670

Mali's central authority had effectively collapsed well before this date; smaller successor polities using the Mali name persisted into the later seventeenth century, so historians differ on when to date its true end.

Source The Cambridge Medieval History

Mansa Musa, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 1280

No contemporary record gives a birth date; circa 1280 is the range commonly cited by modern historians from his approximate age during the 1324 pilgrimage.

Source The Cambridge Medieval History

Mansa Musa, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 1337

Arabic sources disagree on the exact year of his death, with proposals ranging from 1332 to 1337.

Source The Cambridge Medieval History

Moctezuma II, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 1466

The lead section gives circa 1466 while the infobox gives circa 1471; the lead's year is recorded here as the more specific of the two.

Source Wikipedia: Moctezuma II tier 2

Muhammad, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 570

Islamic tradition places his birth in the Year of the Elephant, conventionally correlated to 570 CE, but the precise year is not fixed by a contemporary record and historians' estimates range across a few years either side.

Source The Cambridge Medieval History

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 1881

Wikipedia gives the birth year as c. 1881; no birth record survives and the exact date is conventionally celebrated as 19 May.

Source Wikipedia: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk tier 2

Napoleon Bonaparte, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who rose from relatively minor Corsican gentry through the officer corps of the revolutionary army to rule France as First Consul and then Emperor, and whose wars reshaped the map and legal order of Europe. He built his early reputation on victories in the French Revolutionary Wars in Italy and Egypt, seized power in the 1799 coup of 18 Brumaire that replaced the Revolutionary government with the Consulate, and crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804. Over the following decade he defeated a succession of European coalitions and dominated most of the continent either directly or through allied and client states, while exporting the Napoleonic Code, a codification of civil law drawing on Revolutionary principles, to much of the territory he controlled, where in several countries it remains a foundation of civil law to this day. His invasion of Russia in 1812 ended in catastrophic retreat, and a renewed coalition forced his abdication in 1814; he returned from exile on Elba for the Hundred Days in 1815, only to be finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, after which he was exiled to the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. Historians remain sharply divided over his legacy, between an assessment of him as a moderniser who consolidated and exported the legal and administrative gains of the French Revolution, and one that emphasizes the immense casualties of his wars and his re-establishment of authoritarian, hereditary rule.

Source The New Cambridge Modern History

Opium Wars, Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States Two wars fought by Britain against Qing China, 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860, growing out of the Canton System that confined Western trade to Guangzhou. Qing commissioner Lin Zexu's 1839 destruction of British opium stocks triggered the first war; the 1856 Arrow Incident, a Qing boarding of a Hong Kong-registered ship, triggered the second, joined by France. Both ended in Qing defeat: the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing ceded Hong Kong and opened treaty ports under extraterritorial privileges, and the 1860 Convention of Peking, following the Anglo-French sack of the Yuanmingyuan summer palace, ceded Kowloon and ratified further concessions. The wars are remembered in China as the opening of a Century of Humiliation, a framing that remains politically and historiographically contested (see dissent).

Source Hong Kong and the Opium Wars (The National Archives, UK) tier 1

Pachacuti, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Role

Currently States Sapa Inca of the Inca Empire; the traditional reign span cited most often is 1438 to 1471 (following the historian John Howland Rowe), though other reconstructions of Inca chronology place it as early as 1400-1448 or as late as 1420-1477.

Sources give at least five competing reign chronologies for Pachacuti; Rowe's 1438-1471 is the one most commonly cited in general references.

Source Wikipedia: Pachacuti tier 2

Pachacuti, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 1403

Del Busto dates his birth to 1403; other reconstructions (Lane) place it around 1418.

Source Wikipedia: Pachacuti tier 2

Pachacuti, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 1471

Rowe chronology, used for the reign span already on this entity, dates his death to 1471; Means places it as early as 1448.

Source Wikipedia: Pachacuti tier 2

Prehistory, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States -3300000

Conventionally dated to the earliest known stone tools, the Lomekwian industry at Lomekwi, Kenya. Some historians instead begin prehistory with the appearance of the genus Homo around 2.5 million years ago, or with anatomically modern humans around 300,000 years ago. There is no single agreed starting point, only a shared sense that prehistory has no fixed beginning.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

Prehistory, Eras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States -3200

Conventionally marked by the earliest Sumerian cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, around 3200 BCE. Because writing was invented independently at different times in different regions, in Egypt around 3100 BCE, in China around 1200 BCE, and in Mesoamerica later still, prehistory does not end everywhere at once. The boundary is regional, not global.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

Ramesses II, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States -1303

Egyptian New Kingdom chronology is reconstructed from king lists and astronomical references rather than a continuous calendar; regnal dates are conventionally cited to within a decade.

Source The Cambridge Ancient History

Ramesses II, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States -1213

See birth-year note on New Kingdom chronology.

Source The Cambridge Ancient History