Weekly History Quiz No.242

The Manila galleons sailed to the Americas, mostly bringing cargoes of Chinese produced luxury goods and spices, which were purchased with New World silver.

Beginning with Yekuno Amlak in 1270 and ending when Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974, it is one of the longest lasting monarchical dynasties.

He launched the party after visiting Benito Mussolini in Italy. It was strongly supported by the Daily Mail and grew to as many as 50,000 members. Nazi German influence and funds led to the party becoming more violent and antisemitic. The party was banned in 1940 and 740 members, including Mosley, were interned for the period of the war.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the first common carriage railway to use steam locomotives, their first section of line linked Baltimore and Ellicott Mills.

In a field on the outskirts of Clermont, France Urban called upon the gathered crowd to travel to the East for the Christian cause. Urban told them of how Emperor Alexios I Komnenos of Byzantium had appealed to his Latin Christian brethren for help against the Turks, whose armies now controlled Jerusalem and had amassed near Constantinople.

This culminated in the success of the first crusade, which saw Baldwin of Bouillon form the County of Edessa, the first Crusader state, in 1098 and capture Jerusalem the following year.

Suetonius Paulinus led a Roman army against an army of Britons led by the Icini queen, Boudicca. The Romans prevailed, ending Boudicca’s year long rebellion, which had seen her forces destroy Londinium and other major Roman centres.

Chosen by the Empress Dowager Cixi, Puyi became emperor at the age of 2 in 1908. Regents ruled for him as the final monarch of the Qing dynasty, until his abdication in 1912 as a result of the Xinhai Revolution, at the age of six. After this he lived in the Japanese concession of Tianjin, before being installed as the Japanese puppet ruler of Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945.

After the war he was imprisoned by the Soviets, and then the Chinese Communists, until 1959. Following his release he found work as a gardener at the Beijing Botanical Gardens.

During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese and Cambodian communists had formed an alliance to fight U.S.-backed governments in their respective countries. With the removal of the common enemy of the USA, previous tensions between the countries came to the surface. There were numerous skirmishes between the two countries, culminating in the Vietnamese invasion. This led to the Sino-Vietnamese war, which attempted to pressure the Vietnamese into withdrawing. The Vietnamese resisted this pressure, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge and installing a Vietnamese puppet government which ruled until 1989. This action ended the Cambodian Genocide, which had seen a quarter of all Cambodians die between 1975 and 1978.

Read more about the incredible process by which Austronesian people travelled as far as the mid Pacific Ocean to Madagascar.

This time saw the Mongol empire under Genghis Kahn establish an empire that spanned the medieval Silk Road. This allowed trade across Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and China.