History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VI

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And it was verified on skeletal remains, actually.

BTW - in Early Medieval Northern Europe - where population density was still small and forests were still intact - people were also relatively tall:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ieval-ancestors-just-tall-says-new-study.html

People became smaller later - since the Late Middle Ages, through the Early Modern Era, until the 19th century - when they started to grow again.

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BTW - in the 19th century professor Bolesław Rosiński researched the height of Polish peasants from the typically agrarian region of Miechow, and the height of children of those peasants who emigrated to Texas and became Polish-Americans. It turned out, that already US-born children of Polish peasants who came to Texas from Miechów region, were - on average - 4 cm taller than their parents, who grew up in Poland. Peasants from Miechów were on average 164-165 cm tall (around year 1850) and their children in Texas were on average 168-169 cm tall. So there was a 4 cm growth during just one generation.

Modern Americans are also taller than most of Southern Europeans - even if they are descendants of Southern Europeans.

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European skeletons from the Paleolithic period (before the Neolithic Revolution), prove that average height of those prehistoric men was close to 180 cm.

Those were skeletons of hunter-gatherers, because it was only during the Neolithic Revolution when agriculture was introduced.

Why do you think the Chinese people were so small ??? Because the most important part of their diet was rice for many hundred years.

During less than 100 years, beginning in the 20th century, Japanese people grew on average 11 cm.

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I found these figures for average height in Norway (I suppose it only refers to male height):

9th - 11th c. - 173 cm
12th - 14th c. - 171 cm
17th - 18th c. - 167 cm
2nd half of 19th c. - 170 cm
Around year 1930 - 172 cm

BTW - at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, average height in Europe was also reported to decline (I guess because more people moved to cities).

Only in modern times inhabitants of cities have access to better diet than inhabitants of villages. In the past it was exactly the other way around.
 
I don't think hard work and a "vigorous lifestyle" are meaningfully different though. And I'm not sure how different life would have been for Gallic and Italian farmers.

I don't see how that would apply any different to Italian farmers though? The point about having "little energy left" at the end of the day surely also applies to Gallic farmers. And if it doesn't, why?

Probably not all that much for Gallic and Italian farmers working on their own farms, but the great social problem of the Roman Republic was that independent smallholders were increasingly replaced by large estates, which then employed said smallholders to do the farming work. In this case, you're employed to work as much as you can, and there's almost always more work to be done than you can do. If you own your own farm, not only is there a finite amount of work to be done, but you can also choose your own hours, how hard you work, and so on. I think the Roman literate classes overstated this problem, but the fact remains that these sort of people didn't really exist in 'barbarian' societies.
 
Well, that's what I wrote too.

Plus, Italy was a relatively well-urbanized region of the Empire, and poor urban people were not as tall as rural people.

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One more factor which could contribute to height differences, could be mortality ratio among children.

In Northern Europe children who were malnourished, were simply not making it to their adulthood.

In the Roman Empire, malnourished children could survive, but were decreasing the average height of the society.

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BTW - in 11th century (1000s) Poland, average male height was 171 cm and women 163 - 164 cm. Source:

http://archeowiesci.pl/2010/06/03/w...ochowano-szczatki-ponad-200-krakowian-z-xi-w/

This is based on investigation of 216 skeletons of adult people (who lived in the 11th century) found in Cracow.

This means that average height in 11th century Poland was greater than in late 19th century Poland.

Actually, this means that Polish males were taller in the 11th century (171 cm) than in 1968 (170,5 cm) !!!

This only confirms the article from DailyMail.uk that I linked in my post on top of this page.

Data from Norway also confirms this pattern, because it shows that 11th century Norwegians were taller than Norwegians in 1930.

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And in 1880 it was 165,0.
This data is based on investigation of 21 years old conscripts from 1880. Today most men no longer grow after the age of 21.

But at that time men sometimes grew longer - between 21st and 23rd year of life they could grow even up to further 2 cm.

So the average male height at that time could actually be 166 - 167 cm. Still much less than in the 11th century! :)
 
Why did Luther become a Protestant?
One factor was that he didn't like the way the Catholics cashed in on the sins of people.
During Luther's time financial book keeping became big.
Also, the idea of the purgatory became big. The notion that people would first have to go to the purgatory to pay for their sins until they were allowed into the heaven.
The church offered an alternative. The idea was that sinning was also something which could sorta also be kept book of, where one also sorta had something resembling debit and credit. And loans to be paid.
It came down to the idea that people were able to reduce or perhaps even avoid their time in purgatory by buying a "discharge" from the church.
Luther thought all this was really dumb.

That at least is something I recall hearing in a German documentary on Luther.
 
That's part of it, but it certainly isn't all of it. It makes it seem entirely political. The initial difference was the Sola Fide. The Catholic church preaches that good works are necessary to get into heaven. Luther, however, began to feel that it wasn't how one acted that was necessary for salvation. Instead, through faith alone, we are justified. I was taught that Luther himself pondered this question because he perceived a personal inability to do what he felt were adequate good works for salvation. This led him to question the whole necessity of good works and start to believe he could be saved regardless of works simply through faith.
 
Ha I find this really interesting, thanks! And I feel this aspect got quit a bit short in the by me cited documentary.
It seems to me that that puts into question the notion of individual responsibility way too much and makes look Luther way too much as a sorta sissy looking for a way out to be catered by modern coverage.
Which is a depressing impression for what it says about the open-mindness of contemporary historic coverage. :sad:
 
Don't get me wrong, corruption in the church was a rallying cry, but it wasn't the initial cry. And the church was capable of reforming on abuse of indulgences. They didn't compromise on what was necessary for salvation or whether the Pope was the head of the church (Luther didn't initially challenge Papal authority, but, as he began to reevaluate scripture and was asked to defend his position by the Papacy, he began to believe that as well).
 
That's part of it, but it certainly isn't all of it. It makes it seem entirely political. The initial difference was the Sola Fide. The Catholic church preaches that good works are necessary to get into heaven. Luther, however, began to feel that it wasn't how one acted that was necessary for salvation. Instead, through faith alone, we are justified. I was taught that Luther himself pondered this question because he perceived a personal inability to do what he felt were adequate good works for salvation. This led him to question the whole necessity of good works and start to believe he could be saved regardless of works simply through faith.



That's always been a hard concept for me to grasp in the religious arguments. It seems to me that good works, in the absence of faith, and faith, in the absence of good works, should both be considered problematic for salvation.
 
Don't get me wrong, corruption in the church was a rallying cry, but it wasn't the initial cry.
Yeah okay corruption / ridiculous teachings gave Luther his boost.
Still, if you leave out what initially caused him to rebel you leave out what makes him human and are left with a caricature of self-righteousness. With the arch-type of a hero. I pity my society for this kind of "education".
And the church was capable of reforming on abuse of indulgences.
That is a part you really need to elaborate if I or any other uneducated person is supposed make head and tails of it.
 
That's always been a hard concept for me to grasp in the religious arguments. It seems to me that good works, in the absence of faith, and faith, in the absence of good works, should both be considered problematic for salvation.

The former, not at all - otherwise, you get a situation whereby everyone born in a non-Christian family is inevitably damned. The view I was always taught was a third option, that everybody is saved, because, after all, 'all have sinned and all fall short'.
 
I think with this question you have to distinguish two things. The question was "Why did Luther become a Protestant?" and everyone has answered it as if it were "Why did Luther criticise the church?" - but that's not the same thing. There's also the question "Why did Luther's criticisms lead to the rise of the Protestant churches?" - because, after all, people had criticised what was going on in the church many times before, without starting a Reformation. Think, for example, of the eleventh-century reform movement and figures such as Peter Damian and Hildebrand. Why did that movement not end up starting Protestantism, but Luther's did? Was it just because one of the leaders of the former had the good luck to become Pope whereas the latter didn't? Or was it more complex?

After all, remember that there was a much wider programme of reform in the sixteenth century than just Protestantism. Reform happened within the Catholic Church as well as outside it. We call it the "Counter-Reformation", but that's a bit misleading as it implies that it was purely a reaction to what Luther and co were doing, but that's not true. The question then is why some reformers, such as Luther, ended up being kicked out of the church and setting up their own, while other reformers in the same period, such as Erasmus, did not. There must be more to it than just the issue of corruption, partly because corruption was not a new thing when Luther was around, and partly because the corruption problem was addressed by the church itself and yet Protestantism continued to exist.

And of course, just to add to the complexity, don't forget that Luther never intended to become a Protestant; he started out just raising some issues for debate and then it all spiralled out of control.
 
That is a part you really need to elaborate if I or any other uneducated person is supposed make head and tails of it.

Well, what I meant was pretty straight forward. The church doesn't issue Papal indulgences anymore. They reformed that part of the church. However, when they debated how to bring back those who had broken away, they refused to do any doctrinal changes.

If anything, the Council of Trent (where the church had to decide what to do in response to the Protestant Reformation) hardened dogma. The doctrinal differences with Protestantism: Works being necessary for salvation, Transubstantiation (the bread and wine being literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ), the primacy of the Pope, the veneration of Saints, etc.) were all maintained. On the other hand, the more corrupt practices of the church were reformed or eliminated and greater efforts were made to connect the church to the people who were their followers.
 
I think with this question you have to distinguish two things. The question was "Why did Luther become a Protestant?" and everyone has answered it as if it were "Why did Luther criticise the church?" - but that's not the same thing. There's also the question "Why did Luther's criticisms lead to the rise of the Protestant churches?" - because, after all, people had criticised what was going on in the church many times before, without starting a Reformation. Think, for example, of the eleventh-century reform movement and figures such as Peter Damian and Hildebrand. Why did that movement not end up starting Protestantism, but Luther's did? Was it just because one of the leaders of the former had the good luck to become Pope whereas the latter didn't? Or was it more complex?

I would say the simple answers (as much as there can be one here) to the question of why Luther succeeded when heresies in the past failed are:

1) Luther received political support and patronage from prominent and substantial backers.

2) Luther's arguments were (for the most part) theologically sound and he argued them well

3) Luther was an extraordinarily good writer (as in, changed the course of German language for ever) and happened to emerge in a time of widened literacy and (relatively) easy publishing

4) Luther emerged in the heart of the Empire, a region where the Papal reach was not as strong. Luther comes up in Florence or Milan or anywhere else in France or Spain and he probably would have suffered a similar fate to the Henricians or Fraticelli

5) Luther was lucky enough to come up during a time of relative administrative impotency in the Empire; Charles V was still a relative newcomer and had (at the time) far more significant and pressing matters to attend to elsewhere, giving Luther the key time he needed to find a benefactor and become entrenched.
 
That leaves the question of why Luther did not reform the Catholic Church, and why Protestants had no desire to reintegrate with a less corrupt Church.
 
Well, while at the thread about disputed battles, I've wondered - was the German decision to send over Lenin in Russia, alongside with monetary support, in order to raise (or, to create a long-standing) revolution, so that the Russian troops could eventually retreat, and later on, sign the Brest-Litovsk treaty.

Due to the fact that later on it created a dangerous adversary (for Germany, and later, for USA) in the face of the Soviet Union, would you call this decision wise?
 
Germany was fighting a war the likes of which they had never seen before. And doing it against very powerful enemies that were on opposite sides of them. So any actions which take out the enemies on one direction from them, thus allowing them to concentrate in the other, is worthwhile. What I don't know, and I assume that someone here can enlighten me, is how close was Russia to collapse regardless of any efforts by Lenin, and whether the German leadership at the time knew of it? Would Russia have collapsed anyways, which seems likely, but just taken a somewhat different form afterwards? And, in any case, the postwar USSR wasn't a threat to Germany until Hitler made it a threat to Germany, which wasn't something that could have been foreseen while WWI was ongoing.
 
Germany was fighting a war the likes of which they had never seen before. And doing it against very powerful enemies that were on opposite sides of them. So any actions which take out the enemies on one direction from them, thus allowing them to concentrate in the other, is worthwhile. What I don't know, and I assume that someone here can enlighten me, is how close was Russia to collapse regardless of any efforts by Lenin, and whether the German leadership at the time knew of it? Would Russia have collapsed anyways, which seems likely, but just taken a somewhat different form afterwards? And, in any case, the postwar USSR wasn't a threat to Germany until Hitler made it a threat to Germany, which wasn't something that could have been foreseen while WWI was ongoing.

I honestly believe that the Germans instead should have left Russia to collapse naturally -that way there would be a number of fledging states that would fight between each other and never pose a threat to Russia (at least, not in near future). Instead, he gave the Bolsheviks a leader, and the money necessary to further a successful revolution.
 
I honestly believe that the Germans instead should have left Russia to collapse naturally -that way there would be a number of fledging states that would fight between each other and never pose a threat to Russia (at least, not in near future). Instead, he gave the Bolsheviks a leader, and the money necessary to further a successful revolution.


I don't see how they could have known that, though. And by not knowing it, they did what they thought would be beneficial. And it was, to the extent that it might have mattered, as Russia was removed from the war. And had the US not joined the war at about the same time, there's a strong argument to be made that Germany might have won it.
 
I honestly believe that the Germans instead should have left Russia to collapse naturally -that way there would be a number of fledging states that would fight between each other and never pose a threat to Russia

So you believe that Germany should have acted in favour of Russia? Why would Germany act in favour of their enemy?

That would be against their own interest. Spreading chaos in Russia by sending them Lenin was better for them.
 
That leaves the question of why Luther did not reform the Catholic Church, and why Protestants had no desire to reintegrate with a less corrupt Church.
I don't necessarily think that the Catholic Church was meaningfully less corrupt after Trent.
I honestly believe that the Germans instead should have left Russia to collapse naturally -that way there would be a number of fledging states that would fight between each other and never pose a threat to Russia (at least, not in near future). Instead, he gave the Bolsheviks a leader, and the money necessary to further a successful revolution.
It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Russia would "collapse naturally" in a time frame that would be useful to the Germans. Remember, by late 1917, the United States was in the war. Germany had a rapidly closing window of opportunity; OHL recognized that American numbers would eventually make the Entente unassailable in the West. Therefore, Russia had to be eliminated from the picture as rapidly as possible in order to ensure that Germany could transfer forces to the west adequate to secure numerical superiority for one final push for total victory. All other considerations were secondary to the basic goal of winning the war.

There was no way for the Germans to foresee what the USSR would look like twenty years down the road. In fact, it would have been highly implausible to suggest that Lenin even had a shot at taking over the country. He was sent in to stir things up and make the provisional government even weaker. Bolshevik victory, and the eventual creation of a military-industrial titan in the USSR, was so far beyond the pale that one cannot reckon it as a direct consequence of Germany's decision to send Lenin into Russia. One might as well ascribe ultimate responsibility for the USSR's creation to Napoleon III, for breaking the Anglo-Russian hegemony that obtained throughout the early nineteenth century, sparking geopolitical changes that eventually resulted in the First World War.

In the event, Russia's collapse, and the Bolsheviks' agreement to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, enabled Germany to make that final war-winning push in the spring of 1918, and that push almost worked. I would have to say that dispatching Lenin to Russia was in fact a monumentally successful move from Berlin's standpoint.
 
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