What all this points out is the inherent flaw of history. Let's face it. History is story telling, primarily for the purpose of getting us all on the same page. We turn historical figures into characters, historic events into dramatic ones. For everything we tell, there's something we don't. It's like analyzing a dream, trying to pull a story-modeled after our cultural storytelling preferences- out of a series of images, words, and stuff.
History is the least scientific of social disciplines. But it is the most used. People prefer to use a story from the past to justify how one thing fails or succeeds, often ignoring a lot of the other data, often ignoring new ideas, often idealizing old ideas.
Collection of scientific data is important and I give props to those historians that do use the fragments they get in a scientific rather than anecdotal, episodic, or purely descriptive manner. Bu for the bulk of us, especially a lot of the history buffs- it's mostly just a sacred form of entertainment, a replacement for the pagan traditional side of religion.
Heroes and villains of history are characters. Many who achieved just as much do not exist. Others who achieved relatively little are symbols for entiire events. Events are made to read like literature.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside