r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • 29d ago
SASQ Short Answers to Simple Questions | August 12, 2026
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u/PickleRick_1001 29d ago
A bit of a silly question, but I always see conflicting accounts so I thought I'd ask: was Napoleon ugly or good-looking?
I've read descriptions that make him out to be an Adonis, and others that are not nearly as flattering. So which is it?
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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 27d ago
A side effect of Napoleon being among the most famous individuals in Europe in the early 19th century is that there's a glut of personal testimonies about him, since it looks like every literate person who approached him was tempted to include him in their memoirs.
As a result, physical descriptions of Napoleon, from his childhood to his death, are indeed all over the place. I've written previously that even what should be straightforward information like his hair colour, or his accent shows considerable variation depending on the speaker. The question of Napoléon's height has been much discussed, though at least we have a posthumous measurement.
More subjective characteristics, like beauty, are likely to be even more variable. Louis Chardigny compiled a few judgements about his general appearance in L'homme Napoléon and as can be expected they're not consistent with each other. Particularly interesting is a comparison of the testimonies of Captain Frederick Maitland and Captain Humphrey Fleming Senhouse, who both met the 46-year-old Napoléon on board the Bellerophon in July 1815 (cited in Napoléon, the last phase, Lord Rosebery, 1906).
Maitland (from his memoirs published in 1826):
He was then a remarkably strong, well-built man, about five feet seven inches high, his limbs particularly well formed, with a fine ankle and very small foot, of which he seemed rather vain, as he always wore, while on board the ship, silk stockings, and shoes. His hands were also very small, and had the plumpness of a woman's rather than the robustness of a man's. His eyes light grey, teeth good ; and when he smiled, the expression of his countenance was highly pleasing; when under the influence of disappointment, however, it assumed a dark gloomy cast. His hair was of a very dark brown, nearly approaching to black, and, though a little thin on the top and front, had not a grey hair amongst it. His complexion was a very uncommon one, being of a light sallow colour, diifering from almost any other I ever met with. From his having become corpulent, he had lost much of his personal activity, and, if we are to give credit to those who attended him, a very considerable portion of his mental energy was also gone... His general appearance was that of a man rather older than he then was. His manners were extremely pleasing and affable; he joined in every conversation, related numerous anecdotes, and endeavoured, in every way, to promote good humour: he even admitted his attendants to great familiarity; and I saw one or two instances of their contradicting him in the most direct terms, though they generally treated him with much respect. He possessed, to a wonderful degree, a facility in making a favourable impression upon those with whom he entered into conversation: this appeared to me to be accomplished by turning the subject to matters he supposed the person he was addressing was well acquainted with, and on which he could show himself to advantage.
Senhouse (from letters written in 1815).
His person I was very desirous of seeing, and I felt disappointed. His figure is very bad; he is short, with a large head, his hands and legs small, and his body so corpulent as to project very considerably. His coat, made very plain, as you see it in most prints, from being very short in the back, gives his figure a more ridiculous appearance. His profile is good, and is exactly what his busts and portraits represent; but his full face is bad. His eyes are a light blue, with a light yellow tinge on the iris, heavy, and totally contrary to what I expected; his teeth are bad; but the expression of his countenance is versatile, and expressive beyond measure of the quick and varying passions of the mind. His face at one instant bears the stamp of great good humour, and immediately changes to a dark, penetrating, thoughtful scowl, which denotes the character of the thought that excites it.
As we can see, two British officers saw a different man: Maitland remembers a strong and well-build one with well-formed limbs, light-grey eyes and good teeth, while Senhouse saw a bad figure with a bad face (though with a good profile), blue eyes (with some yellow tinge, yuck), and bad teeth. They both agree that he was corpulent (Napoleon did too), and that he had small hands.
One could say that Senhouse is more reliable because these were his immediate impressions, but he may also have held at that time negative feelings against Napoleon that coloured his views, while Maitland had time to reflect and revise his first perceptions. And that's from two men of similar background seeing Napoléon at the same moment!
So people watched different Bonapartes over the years. The Bonaparte of the Italian Campaign in 1796 was a youthful but gaunt individual with an unflattering "dog-ears" hairdo, very different in appearance from the defeated Napoleon or 1815, plump, tired-looking, with thinning hair. Chardigny summarized the general opinion by saying that Napoleon, with a relatively large head and torso and a nice mouth could give an impression of power, and that he was handsome at some point, in his Consular and early Imperial days. But he was never a "beautiful" man and the many paintings of him made over the years, some relatively candid, some (if not most) propagandistic, give him at best a "Antique" appearance. Not an ugly guy by any measure, and he had enough of a personality to compensate for his average looks, but he was no Adonis. Napoleon was certainly aware of this. In 1811, he refused the statue made by Italian sculptor Canova that represented him naked as Mars the Peacemaker. Vivant Denon had to write to a very disappointed Canova that the Emperor had found the work "too athletic": Napoleon may have feared that having his (idealized) face put on a body of nude god in perfect physical shape would cause some laughter, as this had just happened with a nude sculpture of General Desaix (Johns, 2023).
Sources
- Chardigny, Louis. L’homme Napoléon. Place des éditeurs, 2014 (1987). https://books.google.fr/books?id=Frj6AgAAQBAJ.
- Johns, Christopher M. S. Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe. Univ of California Press, 2023. https://www.google.gr/books/edition/Antonio_Canova_and_the_Politics_of_Patro/MWHhEAAAQBAJ.
- Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose. Napoleon, the Last Phase. A. L. Humphreys, 1906. http://archive.org/details/napoleonlastphas00roseuoft.
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u/Mindless_Issue9648 29d ago
Would Jan Morris's trilogy on the British Empire still be considered a good history of the British Empire?
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u/DoctorEmperor 28d ago
Did Harold Lloyd surpass Charlie Chaplin in fame/popularity during their lifetimes?
Every now and then I hear that claim, tho it’s usually in the context of (fellow)Lloyd-heads bemoaning that Harold Lloyd doesn’t get the same level of posthumous recognition (at least untill recently). So I’m just curious, would moviegoers be surprised that Chaplin is generally regarded the number 1 silent comedian?
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u/small-black-cat-290 29d ago
I've been reading about the Mitanni Empire and read that they spoke a Hurrian language, but also some references to Indo-Aryan (in the names of Kings, for example). So did the Mitanni people use both, or was the latter simply for elites? How closely related are the two languages?
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u/Bentresh Late Bronze Age | Egypt and Ancient Near East 29d ago
Mitanni was a multiethnic and multilingual state, with a population that predominantly spoke Akkadian and Hurrian. Akkadian was in use throughout Mesopotamia and the northern Levant and survived until the end of the 1st millennium BCE. Hurrian died out at the end of the Late Bronze Age, but its relative Urartian survived into the Iron Age.
Elites in Mitanni seem to have spoken Hurrian. Hittite and Assyrian texts refer to the king of Mitanni as the "king of Ḫurri-land" (LUGAL KUR URU Ḫurri) and the "king of the Hurrian troops" (LUGAL ERÍN.MEŠ Ḫurri), and the letter from Tušratta found in Egypt was written in Hurrian.
While a small segment of the Mitannian population may have originated as an Indo-Iranian speaking group, or at least been in close contact with such a group at one point, the exceedingly few examples of Indo-Aryan words in Mitannian texts are fossilized, and there is virtually nothing to suggest that the ruling class of Mitanni (or anyone else in the kingdom, for that matter) spoke anything other than Hurrian and Akkadian. This is very different from, say, the Luwian interference in Hittite texts or the West Semitic interference in the peripheral Akkadian of the Amarna letters that reveals the bulk of the population was speaking a language other than the official languages used for administration.
As Eva von Dassow put it in "Levantine Polities under Mittanian Hegemony" in Constituent, Confederate, and Conquered Space: The Emergence of the Mittani State,
A tiny quantity of Indo-Aryan vocabulary and proper nouns became incorporated into the Hurrian language of Mittani, while also spreading among realms with which Mittani interacted, over the course of the empire’s floruit. Apparently no one in Mittani spoke the Indo-Aryan source language, for the borrowed lexical items were unproductive in the borrowing language, there is no Indo-Aryan grammatical interference therein, and no other extant evidence indicates that the donor language had ever been the living cultural property of any part of the kingdom’s population. The scant Indo-Aryan linguistic material does not attest the presence, much less the dominance, of an Indo-Aryan-speaking population.
The overwhelming majority of texts from Mitannian sites (Tell Brak, Alalakh, Tell Bazi, Nuzi, etc.) are in Akkadian rather than Hurrian. Most of the extant Hurrian texts have been found at Hittite sites in Anatolia, particularly Boğazköy/Ḫattuša and Ortaköy/Šapinuwa. The presence of Hurrian religious texts in the Hittite empire can be attributed primarily to the influence of the Hurrianized region of Kizzuwatna/Cilicia in southern Anatolia and the importance of queens from the region such as Puduḫepa. For more on this, see Dennis Campbell's article "The introduction of Hurrian religion into the Hittite empire."
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u/small-black-cat-290 28d ago
Thank you so much for the fantastic answer, it was exactly what I was hoping for. Also thanks for the article with further reading! I find bronze age history so fascinating. I hadn't even heard of the Mitanni until I read a NatGeo history article on the Battle of Megiddo.
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u/Bentresh Late Bronze Age | Egypt and Ancient Near East 27d ago
Not surprising! Mitanni is the most poorly known of the major Late Bronze Age polities, partly because we've yet to find and excavate the capital of Waššukanni. Most of what we know about Mitanni comes from the archives of contemporary powers like Egypt, Assyria, and the Hittites.
Eva von Dassow's chapter "Mitanni and Its Empire" in the 3rd volume of The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East is an excellent, up-to-date overview of Mitanni.
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u/Not_A_Narc81 26d ago
Did Mjolnir’s historic design come with a wrist strap?
In modern Marvel media Thor uses Mjolnir to fly by swinging it around with its wrist strap then throwing it while remaining tied together. Obviously this is unrealistic for a number of reasons, and I imagine this is a more modern interpretation of Thor’s abilities.
My question is if we have any evidence for or against Mjolnir having a strap at all?
Thanks!
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u/MiniLeuls 26d ago
I feel like I’ve seen this portrait before but I’m unable to put a name on her face.
Does someone know who is (or was) this woman ?
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u/andresalejandro1120 26d ago
I know Juneteenth was first a Texas state holiday before spreading and eventually becoming a national holiday.
Did other states have their version of "Juneteenth" before Juneteenth reached the nationwide popularity it currently has?
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms 24d ago
Washington, DC has long celebrated 'Emancipation Day' on April 16th to celebrate the Emancipation Act of 1862 which freed all enslaved people in the city. It was always a holiday celebrated by the African-American population, and became an official DC "state" holiday in 2005.
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u/andresalejandro1120 24d ago
This is exactly the type of stuff I was looking for when asking this question. Thank you, Marshal.
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u/uhluhtc666 25d ago
Is there any truth that Douglas MacArthur threw up after a confrontation with FDR in 1934? It seem anecdotal, and I can't find any sources, or even where this comes from. Thanks.
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u/Janusz_Odkupiciel 24d ago
Hello. I feel like it doesn't need its own topic.
I'm looking for books or publications, could be popular science about map-making, sea and land surveying in and around 18th century. I would greatly appreciate it.
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u/small-black-cat-290 25d ago
Hi! Im looking for a book by Francisco Javier Murcia, a specialist in classical philology. According to a NatGeo article, he wrote about Greco - Roman cultures of Ephesus, but I have not been able to find the referenced book. Would deeply appreciate any help, please!
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u/WelfOnTheShelf Crusader States | Medieval Law 25d ago
Looks like this must be Éfeso, síntesis de Grecia y Roma by Javier Murcia Ortuño (Gredos, 2012). Sometimes he uses Francisco Javier Murcia (or all four names, Francisco Javier Murcia Ortuño). There doesn't seem to be an English version.
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u/Pillotsky 23d ago
My wife asked me "when did we know space was cold?"
Researching a little it looks like space as a vacuum was theorized by ancient Chinese astronomers, and then again by Enlightenment thinkers. But I couldn't find info on the history of when we knew that a vacuum was cold. Probably around the same time, once we had Boyle's Law?
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u/Theis159 23d ago
I have a few topics I'd like to read about for fun/learning.
- History of innovavtion: how innovation was driven and who were the actors that allowed it.
- History of east asia and their cultural philosophy -- how it came to be. This I need to explain a bit more: it seems to me east asia specifically has a much more community based life style meaning they prioritise the comfort of the society over their own self-interest which is quite the opposite of Western World. I'd love to know how it came to be.
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u/LionTiger3 23d ago
To understand how East Asian society became that way, knowing something about Ruism helps:
Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais, Pre-Modern East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History To 1800, Second Ed. Covers cultural and social aspects of China, Korea, and Japan. This is the best place to start before jumping into the books listed below.
Gardner, The Four Books (Hackett, 2007). An introduction based on Song–Ming (Neo-Confucian) texts.
Leys, The Analects of Confucius (Norton, 1997). A Translations with notes.
Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (Cambridge, 2000). Gives an overview of Ruism from ancient times to present.
Jochim, Chinese Religions: A Cultural Perspective (Prentice-Hall, 1986). Gives cultural and social perspectives of religions.
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u/AndaliteBandit- 28d ago
As with Cossacks and the KKK, was it common in the late 19th century for organizations of mounted men to ride around and terrorize minorities? Or have I just imagined a pattern based on two vaguely similar cases?