Weekly History Quiz No.258

The Spanish Empire expanded from 1492, and by the 1700s controlled much of North and South America, the Caribbean and the Philippines. It began to decline from 1800, which accelerated during the wars of Independence in the Spanish Americas, which began in 1808. Read more about the largest empires in history here.

British artist Paul Nash was also commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee along with Sargent and his brother John Nash. Although known as an official war artist, Nash was a soldier himself too, part of the Hampshire Regiment sent to the Western Front in 1917.  In The Menin Road, he depicts a gloomy war landscape covered in smoke. The foreground highlights flooded trenches and stray remnants of machinery, framing a few soldiers navigating their way through destroyed trees.

Read more about the paintings of WWI here.

A team of doctors at the Pasteur Institute in France including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier isolated a new retrovirus that they believed was the cause of AIDS. A year later two US groups also independently identified the virus.

The Dresden Frauenkirche featured one of the largest domes in Europe. It was destroyed by the Allied firebombing raid on the 13th of February, 1945. Its restoration was begun after the reunification of Germany and completed in 2005.

Simon de Montfort led the baronial opposition to King Henry III of England which culminated in the Second Barons’ War and the overthrow of Henry III. Montfort ruled England for over a year, calling two famous parliaments, one of which included citizens from the towns. Because of this Montfort is regarded today as one of the progenitors of modern parliamentary democracy.

The Battle of Plassey was a decisive victory of the British East India Company over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies on June 23, 1757. The battle consolidated the Company’s presence in Bengal, which later expanded to cover much of India over the next hundred years.

Exocannibalism refers to the ritualistic consumption of outsiders, often accomplished to assert dominance, revenge, and control.

According to Celtic mythology, the white mare, Eiocha, emerged from the sea and consumed white berries from sacred oak trees, which led to the birth of the fertility god, Cernunnos, and the sea giants. Cernunnos and Eiocha then created the primordial gods Maponos, Tauranis, Teutates, and Epona, who then carved humanity out of the same oak trees.

The Ottoman Empire took over the Caliphate with the death of the last Caliph descended from Muhammad in 1543. They maintained control until the end of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of a secular Turkish state in the wake of WWI.

Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess defected to the USSR in 1951. Kim Philby defected in 1963. In 1964 Anthony Blunt was interrogated by MI5 and confessed in exchange for immunity from prosecution. John Cairncross confessed in 1964 but this was kept secret and he was given immunity from prosecution. The public became aware of his treachery in 1979 when Cairncross made a public confession to a journalist.