One powerful factor for rulers is that Christianity and the church's seal of approval solidified their basis for kingship and eased dealings with local Christian subjects and with other kingdoms. Formal conversion of the crown was generally preceded by conversion among part of the population as Christian missionaries journeyed through pagan lands, and contact with (and bringing of captives from) Christian territories was fairly commonplace, so the break wasn't wholly abrupt, while as a Christian monarch you now enjoyed the support of church and clergy so long as you didn't seriously misbehave.

Most pagans didn't quite believe their religion to be "true" the way Christianity purports itself to be true.

To be a member of a pagan religion, you just had to be the ethnicity of that religion and participate in it's ceremonies and rituals. Christianity, on the other hand, is partly a philosophy that was debated, attacked, and defended. You'd be hard pressed to find a Norse shaman who wanted to discuss Christianity, while on the other hand Christians were the ones who had very compelling arguments for their religion, or I guess the point is that they at least had arguments.

Are we talking about converting from pagan to catholic? The conversions were mostly top down with the king and court converting and putting a catholic layer over lingering paganism that lasted underground for generations afterwards. The biggest reason is the King went from being in charge because blood and force to anointed agent of God, making fighting the King the same as fighting god. Then you had the ease of dealing with few bishops rather than dozens of local priests in religious matters. The priests brought in bureaucracy as they were literate and many became clerks for the King allowing greater control and communications. laws were written down and taxes became more formalised and legal agreements such as treaties and land holdings stopped being based memory.

There's a gigantic organization. It has connections to natural resources, contacts with traders and political leaders, and has an armed force. There's an opportunity to get your family/clan/town/region access to those resources, people, and arms. That same opportunity is probably being offered to rivals.

Enthusiastic embrace is the most logical option in a lot of situations.

Women often played a large role in pagan kings' decision to convert.

• Clovis, King of the Franks was convinced to abandon paganism by his wife, Saint Clotilde of Burgundy
• Æthelberht of Kent was converted by his wife, the Frankish princess, Saint Bertha.
• István I of Hungary and his father both agreed to convert so that he could marry Gisela of Bavaria, though István appears to have been a more faithful Christian than his father was.
• Mieszko I of Poland agreed to convert so that he could marry Doubravka of Bohemia.
• Vladimir the Great had a Christian grandmother, Saint Olga of Kiev, and finally agreed to convert so he could marry the Byzantine princess, Anna Porphyrogennētē
• Hermenegild I of the Visigoths was convinced to abandon Arianism by his wife, Ingund of Austrasia. (Though Arianism was a form of Christianity, it still fits the pattern).
• Władysław II Jagiełło agreed to convert to Catholicism so that he could marry Jadwiga of Poland and become king of Poland jure uxoris.

Two books I read recently, The Realm of Saint Steven and East Central Europe in the Middle Ages pointed out that converting often opened the door to Christian marriage alliances and that the idea of one god and one church often fit better with kings' missions to somewhat centralize their authority that the multitude of gods of pagan faiths.

It's difficult to judge what any of them were thinking psychologically, as ancient and medieval chroniclers generally did not seek to uncover their subjects' inner lives and motivations, as modern writers so often do.

Most scribes were fairly well off since their abilities were in demand — it’s been estimated that only 1% of ancient Egyptians were literate — but some were far more powerful and wealthy than others, and their duties and level of literacy varied. There is quite a difference between a personal scribe of the vizier, an army scribe, and a local village scribe! Keep in mind that the people we lump together as scribes held a wide variety of positions that partially determined their status and responsibilities — priest, butler/cupbearer, physician/exorcist, construction foreman, treasury official, etc.

For more info, see Ancient Egyptian Scribes: A Cultural Exploration by Niv Allon and Hana Navratilova and the chapter “Scribes” by Alessandro Roccati in The Egyptians edited by Sergio Donadoni.

It wasn't easier to track via the moon, it was MUCH easier. How exactly do you calculate the solar cycle in ancient times? You won't have accurate-enough timekeeping for centuries to know the exact day of the solstice by tracking duration of day, you're basically stuck trying to accurately measure shadows or the angle of the sun, which takes years of observations to establish. That's a lot of effort for anyone and is very not-portable. It's something only the elites can do or will care about.

But anybody can see the moon, and it's not even 10 fingers' worth of counting from full or new to a quarter moon. It's very easy for everyone to observe and to track with. It's also not ambiguous--a full moon is a full moon, you might be off by a day at most, and there would be general agreement in a community.

And the primary thing you need timekeeping for is agriculture (because that's what 90% plus of the population do, and what 100% eat). But, due to weather variability, knowing when spring astronomically begins doesn't help you all that much. Temperature trends, rain, likelihood of a frost, all of those are more important. IIRC, lunar calendars (the Islamic calendar being a notable exception) usually start counting in the spring, when X crop needs to be harvested and Y crop planted for just this reason.

Mark Jarrett's The Congress of Vienna and its legacy (IB Tauris, London 2013) has received favourable reviews and is rated fairly in-depth (522 pages), though it covers the pre-1814 background and post-1815 multilateral efforts down to Greek and Belgian independence, so it may not be quite what you're after.

Frederick the Great had several of these. I would also say the Russians pushing Napoleon back to France.

Napoleon's 1815 return springs to mind, expanding his realm from little Elba to the whole of France before meeting his Waterloo. I'd say though that the greatest or at least most lasting comebacks from defeat or conquest haven't been military at all, they've involved the subject population absorbing its conquerors and largely continuing as if nothing had happened (an exaggeration, of course) - I'm thinking Mongol or Manchu-ruled China, western Europe's Romano-Celtic peoples after the 5th century, etc.: make love, not war, perhaps.

England is an obstinately un-revolutionary land for all its impacts on the international status quo (or perhaps because it found such outlets for its restlessness?), and modest relaxation from the 1820s of the harsh 1815 law allowed it to import grain during periods of shortage around 1830 and 1840, though prices remained high: the real crisis in 1846 was in Ireland, where the devastation of the potato crop left people unable to buy grain even at post-repeal prices, and worse followed in 1847 even as England more than doubled its grain purchases.

An upheaval was possible in the England of the 1840s, but not even the denial of the vote to the great majority of the population could rouse the masses to rise up when the issue came to a head in the spring of that year. "No revolution please, we're British."

[deleted]

[removed]

Anything more than cleaning and oiling: not really. Airing the tires would be next to impossible without extremely precise fittings that most artisans wouldn't be capable of. Any replacement parts would require materials (rubber) or manufacturing precision (chain, spokes, etc) that would be very difficult if not impossible to reproduce.

With enough time and money, an artisan could probably figure out workarounds (like casting replacement links out of brass or bronze) but the bicycle would be more and more of a frankenstein's monster and would be less efficient and usable.

There was a brief Anglo-Afghan conflict in 1919 and the frontier districts were long considered only partly pacified, but a more likely culprit in late 1918 may well have been the influenza pandemic whose second wave killed millions in India in the last four months of the year: troopships docking at Karachi are thought to have been one of its principal routes into the country, so those posted to the frontier may have been significantly affected (the CWGC's criteria for commemoration rightly include those falling to "disease contracted or commencing while on active service" alongside combat-related deaths. Frustratingly the MoD too seems not to give cause of death, so I'm not sure how to find that without a copy of the death certificate.

One other thing to remember is that the Armistice (with Germany) was November 11, 1918, but the various treaties didn't get signed until mid-1919. There was sporadic fighting but more importantly, the soldiers are still deployed, still training, standing guard, etc. Your great uncle probably did die from influenza, but it might have been a training accident or pneumonia or something else caused by still being deployed.

IIRC, the earliest usage of the word "Eurasian" was used to describe the children of British colonists and their Indian wives.

Anyway, I saw in another comment that you seem to be pretty annoyed by this, but man, language is messy; words change meaning over time, and the same word has different meanings in different contexts.

Like if I told you I'm amped up, I'm not describing the amount of elecrical current in my body.

Indeed, it's most frustrating for those of us who use it for the wider whole. The concept in this narrower sense was originally Russian, seeking to emphasise the cultural distinctiveness of the Tsarist and later Soviet space in relation to western & central Europe - some seeking in it a "greater Russian" identity, others a non-nationalist fusion of European and Asiatic elements.

Western usage seems to derive from post-Soviet scholars and political commentators for whom the Soviet-era concept offered a more convenient label than "former USSR". The less objectionable "northern Eurasia" enjoyed a brief vogue but was apparently too long for those who popularise these things.

And it gets even messier: the journal Soviet Studies became Europe-Asia Studies, while its peer Eurasian Studies covers a distinct though overlapping area "from the Balkans to Central Asia and Iran". I'm sticking with the original meaning.

The Soviet Union stretched from East Germany to the Pacific ocean with many aligned states or at least using Soviet military equipment in the middle east. The Soviet had close trade and political links leading the to some Western commentators to use the "Eurasia" for a shorthand for this area. This usage of the term lacks nuance but is not broadly inaccurate if talking about modern history.

It wasn't that belts were too expensive. As demonstrated in this historical video of Prince Albert's wardrobe, wealthy upper class men also wore suspenders at the time.

The issue was that trousers in the 18th and 19th centuries were high-waisted and belts wouldn't have helped keep them up, especially because trousers weren't made with belt loops.

Trousers became lower waisted and began to made with belt loops in the 1920s.

It's not lost, it was an allegory. Plato didn't hold knowledge of a lost civilisation that no one else did, but he did create stories to make people think and to prove his point. It would be like if I told you that there was a great land of Reddites where the civilians all paid for products with not money but their words, and the best words gained the best money, so people began to copy each others words word-for-word to try and make the same amount of money they all got, but this just created a world where no one knew how to make an original argument anymore and it descended into madness and fell into itself. In fact, I stole that example from someone else.

But it's a good description. People in antiquity were made fun of for thinking it was a real place. It was only in the last couple hundred or so years that people really started to miss the context of the story and begin to think it was real. Just like if my post about the land of Reddites was found 1000 years later away from all the other context I provided people might think that I was describing a real place. But most people who argue that Atlantis is real can't read Ancient Greek, aren't familiar with Plato, and haven't actually studied the topic well. There's a reason for that.

The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum seems a good place to start:

>On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was riding in the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third and Main with a white woman named Sarah Page. The details of what followed vary from person to person. Accounts of an incident circulated among the city’s white community during the day and became more exaggerated with each telling.
>
>Tulsa police arrested Rowland the following day and began an investigation. An inflammatory report in the May 31 edition of the Tulsa Tribune spurred a confrontation between black and white armed mobs around the courthouse where the sheriff and his men had barricaded the top floor to protect Rowland. Shots were fired and the outnumbered African Americans began retreating to the Greenwood District.
>
>In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Greenwood was looted and burned by white rioters. Governor Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa. Guardsmen assisted firemen in putting out fires, took African Americans out of the hands of vigilantes and imprisoned all black Tulsans not already interned. Over 6,000 people were held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.
>
>Twenty-four hours after the violence erupted, it ceased. In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, more than 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. Historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died.

A commission appointed by the state government reported in 2001 that:

>Black Tulsans had every reason to believe that Dick Rowland would be lynched after his arrest. His charges were later dismissed and highly suspect from the start..... As hostile groups gathered and their confrontation worsened, municipal and county authorities failed to take actions to calm or contain the situation.
>
>At the eruption of violence, civil officials selected many men, all of them white and some of them participants in that violence, and made those men their agents as deputies.... In that capacity, deputies did not stem the violence but added to it, often through overt acts that were themselves illegal. Public officials provided fire arms and ammunition to individuals, again all of them white.
>
>Units of the Oklahoma National Guard participated in the mass arrests of all or nearly all of Greenwood’s residents, removed them to other parts of the city, and detained them in holding centers.... Entering the Greenwood district, people stole, damaged, or destroyed personal property left behind in homes and businesses. People, some of them agents of government, also deliberately burned or otherwise destroyed homes credibly estimated to have numbered 1,256, along with virtually every other structure — including churches, schools, businesses, even a hospital and library — in the Greenwood district..... Although the exact total can never be determined, credible evidence makes it probable that many people, likely numbering between 100-300, were killed during the massacre.
>
>Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level: municipal, county, state, or federal.

[deleted]

It's very old. A Babylonian merchant borrowing to transport goods could pay a surcharge to cancel repayment if the cargo was lost in transit, a system adopted in Europe from ancient Greece onward. Rome had contributory societies to support families of deceased members, a practice likewise continued by medieval guilds which also offered support in the event of illness. The modern insurance market is commonly traced to 17th-century London, especially after the devastating fire of 1666 demonstrated the risks to property.

Alexander the Great and Roy Cohn come to mind. It used to be much easier for people to maintain their privacy. There are plenty of figures throughout history where there were rumors about their sexuality, but where there is no way of knowing for sure.

There is a large portion of people that its very hard to tell, because not many people would be openly LGBT and claims to be part of LGBT was easily used to discredit/disparage someone (e.g. roman emperor Elagabalus and claims of him being trans). However there are much more clear example for the poet Sappho and prussian king Frederick the Great.

Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and probably Harun alRashid for a start.

This is a serious inquiry: in reading the definitive book on Thomas Jefferson by Jon Meacham, the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Merriweather Lewis (of Lewis and Clark fame) appears to paint a picture of a extremely close relationship to the point where a homosexual relationship could thrive. Is there any scholarly report of this?

>how everyday european medieval life worked? For example some questions I have:

When it comes to medieval questions you first of all need to decide when and where. In some definitions 'medieval' covers 1,000 years, and even people who unironically use the term 'Dark Ages' admit there was change over that time. The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer is a good, informal place to start.

What story? We need to hear it before we can find out if it's true. If all you have is a snippet from the internet it's almost certainly made up.

>I thought Alexander was just a conqueror basically, the same as any other empire like Rome

Rome, who famously didn't colonise anywhere? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_(Roman) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonies_in_antiquity

Although people tend to talk about colonisation as being a modern process, it's arguably much older, and empires have been doing it as long as they have existed. It's what makes them empires.

>and I realized I am not sure of what exactly qualifies as 'colonization'.

You colonise a place when you assert control over it, and physically establish your 'superiority' in matters of law and culture, compelling the indigenous people to either remain subservient and/or convert to your ways. Rome is one of the best examples of this, constantly seeking a controlled influx of people via the foederati, establishing Roman citizenship as something to be sought after, etc.

Surprisingly (to me anyway) it's first recorded in the second enclosure wave of the 18th-19th centuries, but it's widely thought to originate in the first (16th-17th centuries). It's an objection not to state but to private ownership, specifically the conversion of common land (where all villagers shared rights, notably in letting their livestock feed) to individual property, a process dating back to the Tudor wool boom but renewed with rising agricultural returns in the 18th century.

So it's a rhyme of protest against social & economic inequality, invoking the particular plight of smallholders but adopted more generally among workers and radicals: here the state is with the landowners who dominated political life into the industrial period, but it's they (and by extension later privileged economic interests) rather than the state itself who are the real target.

I think there is a mistake in your question. The Holy Roman Empire was a medieval state that existed in Germany from the 9th century onward. It was a Christian kingdom, the Holy in its name refer to the fact that pope crowned the Emperor.

So no persecution there. unless you refer to the wars of religions between catholics and protestants in the 16th century. If that's the case say so and I can answer that.

​

Now. What I think you mean is the Roman Empire when it was still Pagan (before emperor constantine converted in the 4th century), right?

​

In that case the answer is very interesting. Rome had a public religion, the religion was the religion of the state/government. All Romans participated in its rites (and no one else. You were Romans because you participated in the cult, you participated because you were Roman). The idea is that if all the citizens worship the gods of Rome, the gods are happy and Rome stays a world power. Often you hear that Rome was tolerant of other religions, it's usually true but the idea is that they literally didn't care about your religion as long as: as a Roman you still participate in the official religion and your foreign faith is not done inside the limit of the city of Rome... as a Roman if you do that you can worship Isis or Mithras or whatever on your own, that's no problem at all.

Now the problem with Christianity is that it claims to be the one true god and one true faith (which while not new is not the norm at this time for other religions) and explicitly forbids the worship of other deity. So Christians didn't go to the temple of Jupiter to do their yearly sacrifice and didn't participate in the city wide worship of Venus and all the other religious duties expected of Roman citizens... and that's a problem for Rome. The citizens needs to participate in the official religion for the gods to help Rome. But not participation you are endangering Rome. And that's they were persecuted.

Add to that that the Roman society is extremely hierarchical, and that Christianity is very egalitarian, this is also seen as an attack against Rome. So persecution too.

​

Christianity was not the first religion to be persecuted that way, the Bacchanalia (a mystery cult that also forbid the official religion and blurred hierarchical lines) was persecuted violently in 200BC. But it's important to keep in mind that it wasn't really about the religion itself. There were a lot of Roman Monotheists at the time or Romans who practiced other faiths... but also the main city cults.

In conclusion: The main problem was that Christianity forbid the practice of the official religion, which was a religious duty. So the state persecuted them for violating the law pretty much as if they refused to pay taxes. It's wasn't religious discrimination in itself but actions against the fact that Romans refused to do their legal obligations.