History Corner!
Hey kids,
As promised, I made this thread for those of us that like to get our history nerd on at times. From time to time I'll drop some knowledge nuggets from the random things I have and like to study, summarized thusly from the last thread I jacked:
I have decided, however, in the interests of keeping things civil on my employer's forums, that I won't touch on things in the realm of politics and/or religion that have a bad tendency on the internets to cause heated arguments, even when begun with the purest of intentions.
I'm going to start off answering Lena's question about books on early Renaissance mercenaries, with a little background for those of you that don't know a lot on the subject. The background will, by necessity, be brief and very simplified; just ask if there's something you'd like me to elaborate on. To keep it Telltale, this is going to move into a discussion about Machiavelli and how, in actuality, he's a little like Harry Moleman.
So, to start, mercenaries. As most people know, Italy was where the Renaissance started and that put them in a strong position of leadership in darn near everything that we associate with the period. Most importantly for this topic, a lot of city-states, most notably Florence, Milan and Genoa, became incredibly wealthy. This great wealth gave the people the ability to hire people to fight their wars so they didn't have to, time fighting would be time that they weren't making money of course. So, for a period of approximately 150 years, Italian warfare was dominated by the condottieri (from condotta, or, contract).
There are some books on the subject, of varying degrees of scholarship. The two best are:
MERCENARIES AND THEIR MASTERS: Warfare in Renaissance Italy
Michael Mallett
Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena
William Caferro
Both authors are excellent scholars and pretty good reads as well.
<segue> There was and is a lot of debate about whether the condottieri system was a good or a bad thing. Machiavelli absolutely hated the system and wrote a lot about his feelings. </segue>
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As promised, I made this thread for those of us that like to get our history nerd on at times. From time to time I'll drop some knowledge nuggets from the random things I have and like to study, summarized thusly from the last thread I jacked:
My areas of focus were ancient to medieval Asia and medieval Europe, largely military but also some religious persecution/heretical sects.
I have decided, however, in the interests of keeping things civil on my employer's forums, that I won't touch on things in the realm of politics and/or religion that have a bad tendency on the internets to cause heated arguments, even when begun with the purest of intentions.
I'm going to start off answering Lena's question about books on early Renaissance mercenaries, with a little background for those of you that don't know a lot on the subject. The background will, by necessity, be brief and very simplified; just ask if there's something you'd like me to elaborate on. To keep it Telltale, this is going to move into a discussion about Machiavelli and how, in actuality, he's a little like Harry Moleman.
So, to start, mercenaries. As most people know, Italy was where the Renaissance started and that put them in a strong position of leadership in darn near everything that we associate with the period. Most importantly for this topic, a lot of city-states, most notably Florence, Milan and Genoa, became incredibly wealthy. This great wealth gave the people the ability to hire people to fight their wars so they didn't have to, time fighting would be time that they weren't making money of course. So, for a period of approximately 150 years, Italian warfare was dominated by the condottieri (from condotta, or, contract).
There are some books on the subject, of varying degrees of scholarship. The two best are:
MERCENARIES AND THEIR MASTERS: Warfare in Renaissance Italy
Michael Mallett
Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena
William Caferro
Both authors are excellent scholars and pretty good reads as well.
<segue> There was and is a lot of debate about whether the condottieri system was a good or a bad thing. Machiavelli absolutely hated the system and wrote a lot about his feelings. </segue>
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I've also thought up another question, if that's okay. The Mongols of Genghis Khan's day (or however his name is spelt now) were amazing fighters, but when they were always on the move, how did they forge their weapons? Did they purchase their weaponry from others? Have segments of their population that were sedentary? Carve their arrow heads instead of forging them? I've always wondered about that.
Couldn't Blacksmiths be on the move as well theoretically?
Also, this thread gets the Ribs award of confusion, titled 'And if the player gets to the endzone, it's a touchdown!'
Their armor was primarily hardened leather and skins to A) keep out the cold and
They did have a standard military issue curved sword. These, and the rest of the standard issue metal weapons seem to have come from special workshops set up.
"100,000 strong army of Chinggis Khaan was well armed and possessed the latest warfare technology available. Hundreds of workshops across the Mongol state produced weapons. A suburb was set up in the capital city of Kharhorin, where skilled craftsmen brought from all corners of the vast empire made bows, arrows, sables and armor."
The rich, high ranking soldiers had well crafted halberds and the like, but it seems like these were rather expensive and rare, probably due to the difficulty to make them in quantity.
Finally, they had long spear and javelins made out of wood. They also had various types of siege weaponry, but that's all wood as well.
Ref: http://www.mongoliatoday.com/issue/7/warriors.html
http://ryanwolfe.weebly.com/weapons.html
Blacksmiths, yes.
Forges? That sounds harder.
I'll have more to add about the Mongols and the original topic but it'll have to wait until I get home to my books and notes.
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Mine's the story of "Gaius Popillius Laenas" who was an elderly envoy for Rome trying to stop a war with Egypt. When he met with the Egyptian king and his armies he drew a line in the sand in front of the king and told him not to move untill he'd fully considered his actions. Such was the sheer power and might of the Roman empire, the Egyptian king never crossed the line and our elderly envoy after facing down the ruler and armies of Egypt on his own, returned to Rome.
Yeah I probably told it wrong but the moral shines through. Your turn!
Those of you that play TF2 with us know me as Hathor, here's why:
Once, long ago, Ra/Osiris was pretty mad at the people for not respecting him anymore. He decided to send Sekhmet/Hathor down to punish them. She started killing them, enjoyed it way too much and worked herself into a berserk rage, threatening the destruction of humanity. To stop her, Osiris changed the vast rivers of blood on the ground to beer. Hathor, in her crazy rage, starts drinking it (thinking it's blood) and ends up passing out in a drunken stupor and humanity is saved.
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I really love the way mythology doesn't care much for morals in their stories half the time
Caesar Rodney served in the Continental Congress along with Thomas McKean and George Read from 1774 through 1776 as representatives from Delaware. Rodney was in Dover attending to Loyalist activity in Sussex County when he received word from Thomas McKean that he and George Read were deadlocked on the vote for independence. To break that deadlock, Rodney rode eighty miles through a thunderstorm on the night of July 1, 1776, dramatically arriving in Philadelphia "in his boots and spurs" on July 2, just as the voting was beginning. At least part of Rodney's famous ride was probably made in a carriage. He voted with McKean and thereby allowed Delaware to join eleven other states in voting in favor of the resolution of independence.
I'd like to point out that he was also a sufferer of asthma and had cancer of the skin on his face at this time as well, and died 8 years later at the age of 56. That's the kind of person I think you can admire even if you don't agree with them
The oldest temple in human history, predating Stonehenge by 7000 years, found in Turkey.
Photos of pre-WWI Russia, in color. SO awesome.
I probably should have put a warning at the start that this thread is going to end up a lot like an actual conversation with me: starting out on and interesting point then going off on so many tangents we'll all forget the original point...but it'll be fun so it won't matter.
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It feels like either the dating is wrong, or we've just missed the associated village sites.
As far as the pictures of Russia, those are amazing. I've heard of the glass plate filter method before, but never seen it used even remotely that effectively before. I'm sure a lot of it is due to our ability to retouch images now to clean them up and color balance the image, but still, it's pretty remarkable.
And Will, I'd agree that is is a shaky hypothesis. Granted, it is really old and they wouldn't have gone so public if there wasn't a good amount of evidence but I don't know that I'd agree with his line of reasoning. Religion/respect for forces beyond our control is pretty ingrained in humanity but to suppose that it, rather than survival motivations are what spurred the growth of agriculture is a huge leap to take. I suppose for early cultures the two were intertwined (hope that appeasing the gods/spirits would make sure nobody would starve and all) and I could see individual groups doing smaller scale things but the level of organization the temple structure implies really makes me question.
What's most awesome about the story will be the epic scholarly debates that'll go on for decades.
And I love those photos, saw the link the other day but most of my friends don't appreciate just how awesome they are. Very happy I can share with people that do.
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It's so great to think someone had already invented a way to take colour pictures, so that we can see the colours things were. It's too bad it only works for pictures taken with that camera :P
Of course, that difficulty comes out of study of other cultures, where, as we saw most notably in antiquity with the Greeks, higher spiritual practice didn't take hold until the societies were better established. In psychology, that would be covered in a more simplified manner by Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Of course, given my own educational background, it is entirely possible I'm too conditioned to the old consensus that it's hard to accept these new findings...which is of course, why I think it's so awesome. I'm very open-minded, old-school archaeologists must be having giant fits.
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http://saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200202/art.rocks.in.saudi.arabia.htm
http://saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200605/before.the.mummies.the.desert.origins.of.the.pharaohs.htm
Also, there are the "kites" found in the Middle East. They're far to the south, and estimated to be about 3,000 years younger than Schmidt's find, but it's suspected that they were also built by neolithic nomads. They aren't as impressive as the stone "T"s in Turkey, but they show another ancient, nomadic people used stones to build complex structures, even if they weren't for religious purposes.
http://saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200904/desktop.archeology.htm
And I apologize for listing so many sources from one periodical, but they're the only ones I could think of off the top of my head.
And feel free to post more about Mongolia, Seher. Don't get so excited over this discussion that you forget, okay?
But keep going! It's always interesting to listen to people who know stuff
One of the best resources out there for medieval military history.
A great medieval history blog I ran across while researching.
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I found these today; some photgraphs taken after the battle of Stalingrad.
I feel kind of guilty cause i know that post-battle pics its not the way to cheer up a thread, but they are worth a look at least.
These are not macabre pictures that give you nightmares, they show mostly the war leftovers, but still, since some death bodies appear i fell i should put some "viewer discression" sign somewhere.
http://www.webofentertainment.com/2010/02/photographs-taken-after-battle-of.html
http://weblogs.vpro.nl/ineuropa/2010/01/22/6-episodes-with-english-subtitles/
Hopefully the rest will follow. I highly recommend the original book too.
Here the Wiki Article (Is pretty much the best one I can find in English) about the Great Chilean Earthquake, which was the Greastest Earthquake recorded in the history of Recording. I remembered a trip I did to that zone once, there's branches of the river near to the zone which were created in that earthquake. There's also the Riñihuazo (I think you can read it as Riniihuazo ^^U) which was the massive effort of the whole Valdivia community to stop the flooding of the Riñihue Lake by constructing Dams using shovels at first.
All this earthquakes we have are so in our minds that any earthquake which is under 7.5 in Richter we pass out as "normal". In fact, I still remember the moment I knew about the Haiti Earthquake: I went to tell that to my dad and he told me "It was just 7 degrees, no big deal" and I went "All Haiti collapsed!" and then suddenly he got what's going on! In fact, we felt the earthquake with a energy of 7 degrees in Richter (The same as Haiti's!) and just some very old buildings collapsed partially and some are about to be demolished.
Ironically, we are, probably, one of the countries which send more help to Haiti due our History of Earthquakes. And, equally ironically, we were preparing for celebrate our 200 years of independency.
But, we'll back. We always do.
P.D.1: I have no idea why, but, apparently, all the world is traumatizated thanks to Haiti: our goverment told to the international community to calm down and do not send help at the beginning, because at that point we have no idea what we actually needed. Today will come the first Doctors and Campain Hospitals from Argentina.
P.D.2: She probably didn't lost anything tangible, but a Cousin has her wedding the saturday. Now, half joking, we said please she only get married once.
P.D.3: Thanks to that wedding, my Sister and I (We were doing an intership in Stgo, about 200 kms from our home) were at our parents. Also, my Grandmother who lives alone was with us at the moment of the earthquake. Talk about luck.
P.D.4: And still talking about luck, we have an undercover rack full of glasses and none of those glasses felt out of the rack. In the room were my grandma was sleeping. THAT is luck.
What does P.D. mean?
Post Data. It's a note which comes after the official information. Ussually has something in common and some usefulness but not enough in either department to be part of the actual note. =P
Yes, is a P.S.
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Now, most of the towns which dissapeared thanks to the tsunami, were builded with light material. Thanks godness for them, we also have hills everywhere, and it's easy to run for shelter, but we have problems with the Tsunami alert and... well...
When we are in a situation like this one, we think in funny things. Like, this one:
I searched for this kind of Map on Google and I notice in Germany, they don't have earthquakes. I notice that mostly because I was reading about foreigners in Chile which were here for the earthquake and those guys are always frightest guys of the bunch. And I was wondered if those interns you have there do know how to react in case of Earthquakes.
Yes, I was thinking about THAT. That's called Automatic Pilot and seriously had no idea what going on (We get our Light and Internet Back Sunday Afternoon. The whole world knew more about the earthquake than us).
Anyway, the photos are for the most destroyed places, as ussual. Maule and Bio bio has their places with several problems, but most of them can be fixed. The problem comes with the Hospitals, which a lot of them are old and in bad conditions. The military forces are already out, and they are good at this things. Also the Police (Carabineros) and the firefighters are really good too. For some reason, part of our pride comes to have an earthquake and comes back.
Those are some really neat articles. I particularly liked this quote from the Riñihuazo article "A proposal by some US military to blow up the dams with missiles from a helicopter was rejected." Good ol' America, that's our solution to everything.
It sometimes clears the ridiculous.
(Disclaimer: Don't mean to offend anyone. I just think that image is an unintentional satire of how most of the world views the US. It seemed appropriate.)
I smell a liberal, somebody hold Rove back!!
I've also recently been reading stuff on the Chilean War of Independence against the Spanish, what with Bernardo O'Higgins, Jose de San Martin, and the generally awesome Lord Thomas "Want a war of independence? I'll give you a navy!" Cochrane. Next thing I know, Chile's been hit by an earthquake.
I'd call that man a stereotypical American patriot, but he hasn't bought all home grown American goods there...
I'd personally like to see that happen. Aiyee.
Anyways, this is the history thread, and I get the feeling that not too many people to drag in politics. Since we're on the topic of earthquakes:
- 6 of the top 17 earthquakes happened in Chile. Yeesh.
- The earliest recorded evidence of an earthquake has been traced back to 1831 BC in the Shandong province of China, but there is a fairly complete record starting in 780 BC during the Zhou Dynasty in China. (Source).
- Apparently, Troy VI was destroyed entirely by an earthquake. A single arrow has been recovered in this layer of Earth.
I'm a better source than the wikipedia. (Seriously, if you have any question, just ask).
What happened was the International Aid were too overwhelming and the goverment told to the international community do not send any help YET, until we have a better idea to our actual needs. Chile has already asked for help officially to the ONU, and the first aid comes from Argentina, with a Campaign Hospital and Doctors.
So, if you want to donate, welcome. We are really grateful of any help. The problem with our pride is, well, we aren't Haiti and we have an actual working goverment. So... it's difficult to explain. It's stupid, but we have that feeling. But donate with no problems, really.
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By the way, there's one of my favorite tales about Earthquakes were the one of Valparaíso in 1906: This one were the first one when a whole town collapsed, and an Important one, because Valparaíso was the most important port until the building of the Panana Pass. No one outside the City knew about the disaster and Valparaíso alone and using Martial Law (If any person was catched looting was killed in the act) was cappable to survive 2 days in a row without any help. Santiago, which was recovering from their own problems knew about the disaster thanks to a telegraph and a messenger and just in this moment could send any help.
The Scale in Richter, aprox were 8,39 (Richter wasn't invented yet) and, in this moment were created the regulations about constructions and the Institute of Seismology of Chile.
Here's the source. It's in Spanish, but have some photos.
By the way, the Great Earthquake created the ONEMI (Oficina Nacional de Emergencias del Ministerio del Interior, National Emergency Office).
Now, I think this earthquake will be also remembered as the one with more looting, because the Troops were deployed way too late. Now there a psicosis in the south, but the Troops are working fast. By tomorrow everything must be under control, somehow.