In 1996, a German author named Heribert Illig published a theory that became a bestseller: that 297 years of human history were simply invented. The entire Carolingian period. The life and reign of Charlemagne. The Viking Age. The rise of Islam. All of it, according to Illig, fabricated by a Holy Roman Emperor, a Pope, and possibly a Byzantine Emperor — men who conspired to insert three centuries into the historical record so their own reigns would fall at the symbolically significant year one thousand.

Host Shawn Spainhour walks you through the full theory — the calendar argument that started it, the archaeological gaps Illig pointed to, and the case for a fictional Charlemagne — and then through the evidence that dismantles it: astronomical records, tree rings, radiocarbon dating, and the meticulous calendars of the Islamic world, none of ...