Resumo de Book Of Facts - Reader's Digest

KINGS AND QUEENS ? I

ALL IN A NAME

The present British royal family?s surname was chosen by a commoner. Originally the family?s name was Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But in 1917, during the First World War, it was changed as a gesture to anti-German feeling. The name Windsor was thought up by Lord Stamfordham, George V?s private secretary.

ARTIFICIAL SNOW

An Arab king once had a Spanish hillside planted entirely with almond trees- to please his favourite wife. The king, Almotamid, who ruled the region around Seville in the middle of the 11th century AD, when Spain was largely a Moorish colony, ordered the planting near Cordoba because his wife- a Christian slave named Itimad- did not know what snow looked like. In spring, the falling petals of the almond trees turned the slope white, the closest approximation to snow available in southern Spain?s balmy climate.

HARSH JUSTICE

Frederick the Great of Prussia was so badly treated at home that he tried to run away to France at the age of 18. But his father, Frederick Wilhelm I, caught him and threw him into prison. During his imprisonment in 1730, a friend named Lieutenant Katte, who had helped him in his attempt to escape, was executed in front of him. Frederick fainted at the sight. Frederick was kept under arrest for 15 months before being grudgingly set free. As king, though, he far outshone his harsh father. He stayed on the throne for 46 years from 1740- nearly twice as long as his father- and doubled his country?s territory.

GOOD KING MACBETH

The real King Macbeth of Scotland was very different from the tragic hero of Shakespeare?s play. Far from being an ambitious usurper, as Shakespeare describes him, Macbeth had a claim to the Scottish throne which was at least as good as that of his rival, Duncan. Furthermore, Duncan was killed in an open battle in 1040 and not murdered by Macbeth as Shakespeare?s play claims. In fact Duncan was a young, ineffectual king- not Shakespeare?s venerable and gracious sovereign. And after Macbeth seized the throne by force, he went on to reign in Scotland for 17 prosperous years, from 1040 to 1057.

GRANDDAD?S ARMY

The Zulu army which defeated the British at the battle of Isandhlwana in 1879 included a regiment of men in their sixties. They were the oldest troops in a culture which built itself into a nation of warriors under the Zulu king Chaka (who died in 1828) and later his nephew Catewayo (about 1826-84). The youngest troops were about 13 years old.
The regiments were divided according to age, and each regiment lived in a separate village where the soldiers worked the land in peacetime. The warrior culture did not last long, however, Six months after the Battle of Isandhlwana the Zulus, whose major weapons were spears, were decisively defeated by British guns at Ulundi, now the capital of the black homeland of Kwa Zulu in South Africa.

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