LIBRARY BLOG

Five Wild Historical Facts

1. The Keys to the City

Saddam Hussein was given the key to the city of Detroit in 1980 after donating $250,000 to the then-struggling Chaldean Sacred Heart Church. This is what prompted the mayor of the city, Coleman A. Young, to dole out the honor.

2. Three Hundred and Counting…

Pedro A Lopez, also known as “the monster of the Andes,” has claimed to have murdered over 300 people, mostly young girls, throughout Columbia, Peru, and Ecuador. He was convicted in 1981 and pled guilty to over 50 murders in Ecuador. After serving the maximum sentence of sixteen years in prison for his crimes he was deported to Columbia. Lopez was institutionalized in Columbia for two years and released in 1998…his whereabouts are presently unknown.

3. Don’t Cross Pope Gregory IX’s Path

During the 13th century when the culture was ripe with condemning heretics, Pope Gregory IX wrote the Vox in Rama in which he stated that black cats are instruments of Satan. So, along with the witches and devil worshippers, cats were sentenced to death in huge numbers. Over time the people’s weariness of cats persisted resulting in there being fewer of them, which meant that the rat population was rising. Some historians believe there is a connection between this and the bubonic plague pandemic. As the plague was spread through infected fleas on rats more and more rats were carrying the disease and there were less cats around to exterminate the flea infested rats. Instead, the rats were stowing away on cargo ships and spreading the plague across all of Europe. Even today black cats hold a reputation of being bad luck or cursed.

4. 1,001 Uses

The ancient Romans used human urine as mouthwash. It was common up to the early 1800s to use human or animal urine as a cleanser for laundry, a leather softener, and to make dyed cloth colors brighter. All of this was due to the ammonia found in urine. As we know, ammonia lifts stains away so before scientists discovered how to produce it in a lab, we were using our, or someone else’s, pee.

5. A Bloody Rise to Power

Cleopatra VII (her formal name) was not Egyptian but Macedonian. Phillip II of Macedon, a small territory on the Bulkan Peninsula, effectively ended Greek dominance after defeating them in 338 BC at the battle of Chaeronea. Philip II later had a baby who, similar to his father, became one of the most successful conquerors in history, Alexander the Great. However, when Alexander died suddenly at age 32 with no heir, his closest advisors and generals battled to take his throne. The massive territory was then divided into four main kingdoms. Alexander’s Macedonian general, Ptolemy I, took the territory of Egypt in 323BC. It is from this line that Cleopatra VII is a descendant and upon her death the Ptolemy dynasty was ended in 30 BC. Before becoming Caesar’s mistress at the beginning of her rule, Cleopatra was married to her ten-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII. Once he died from drowning in a river during a battle, she was married to another of her brothers, Ptolemy XIV. However, it was at this time Cleopatra had captured the attention of Caesar, ruler of Rome, and produced a child from this relationship. Later, Cleopatra had Ptolemy XIV poisoned and one of her sisters executed, all in the name of protecting her throne.