History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VI

[Traitorfish]

Presumably Domen also believes that Renaissance women were typically about nine foot tall.

 

[Domen]

We are talking mostly about proportions of riders to horses in those sculptures.

But apart from this, the sculptures I posted are also natural-sized ones (scale 1:1), IIRC.

 

[Agent327]

There's also the characteristically Classical exaggeration of the fold of skin at his hip - nobody actually looks like that.

People in the Renaissance didn't have body fat?

Hitler persecuted Catholics and was horrendously brutal towards Catholicism in the annexed territories.

That must be why the Vatican concluded a concordate with Hitler Germany then.

Oh? You haven't even attempted to prove that medieval warhorses were bigger than today's horses, or even how big they were.

Well, they certainly needed to be sturdier than a racehorse if they were supposed to carry knights in full armour onto the battlefield. Size apart, horses were in use well into the 20th century as workhorses also - not just to tow artillery, but for farming.

 

[Traitorfish]

We are talking mostly about proportions of riders to horses in those sculptures.

So am I: in Michelangelo's Pietá, if we take Jesus to be the height of an average human male, Mary is about nine foot tall.

 

[Flying Pig]

People in the Renaissance didn't have body fat?

Not body fat that looks like that, especially not with that degree of musculature. I can't actually find a picture which I can post here within the realms of decency, but it's an exaggeration - as, indeed, many elements of Classical sculpture are, because perspective makes things look 'wrong' if they're actually done accurately. Compare the inability of TV producers to actually use horse-hooves as sound effects, because people expect them to sound like coconut shells.

That must be why the Vatican concluded a concordate with Hitler Germany then.

There are many reasons behind that one and I'm not informed enough to elucidate them, but that was from a practical realisation that the Church could do more good if it was not openly opposed to Hitler. There was certainly no love lost between them, simply practicality. Plotinus may have more insight into this.

Well, they certainly needed to be sturdier than a racehorse if they were supposed to carry knights in full armour onto the battlefield. Size apart, horses were in use well into the 20th century as workhorses also - not just to tow artillery, but for farming.

People overestimate how heavy knights in armour were. When you put your armour on, the test of its fit was to be able to dance in it, so it can't have been that unwieldy.

 

[MaxPuster]

Statues showing characters that would in real life only ride on the most expensive horses available are as representative of the contemporary horses as a gallery of superrich dudes with their favourite car is for the modern automotive scene.

There are dozens of prints that show horses, and mostly their heigth is roughly around a human shoulder for warhorses, less for others. Take this as example:

 

[SeekTruthFromFacts]

Looking at the altered maps thread in OT has prompted a question NWIT. Why don't the borders in South America follow the Andes/Amazon line? It seems an obvious natural boundary, just as much as the Alps or the Sahara. But both the Incas and the modern states seem to spread from the Pacific coast across the Andes and into the rainforest. The one exception Argentina/Chile, but I seem to remember that Chilean claims stretched well into Patagonia until a century ago. Is there some geographic factor I'm not picking up on or is it just continent events as usual?

Sent from my ME173X using Tapatalk

 

[Louis XXIV]

"I'm not saying it does...but it does"

Not commenting on the issue itself, but there's a difference between "average" and "in use." He wasn't claiming it was an average size, just that there was at least one of that size.

 

[Flying Pig]

He's still wrong, though.

 

[Tee Kay]

Looking at the altered maps thread in OT has prompted a question NWIT. Why don't the borders in South America follow the Andes/Amazon line? It seems an obvious natural boundary, just as much as the Alps or the Sahara. But both the Incas and the modern states seem to spread from the Pacific coast across the Andes and into the rainforest. The one exception Argentina/Chile, but I seem to remember that Chilean claims stretched well into Patagonia until a century ago. Is there some geographic factor I'm not picking up on or is it just continent events as usual?

Hmm.

Interesting question though South America is my least-studied continent but I'm going to take a stab at it anyway.

I think in the case of the Incas were just curious, having already expanded right down the western side of the Andes from Ecuador down into the middle of Chile, in both cases expansion further north and south being blocked by rather ferocious tribes. In any case they didn't made it very far.

As for the modern states, I think it's mostly historical accident. When the Pope divided the freaking planet into a Spanish half and a Portuguese half, only the eastern bit of Brazil was in the Portuguese half, the rest of South America was nominally Spanish. Of course Portugal eventually expanded Brazil further to the west of the nominal line, but Spain still managed to grabbed some land east of the Andes as per the original division, and when the colonies became independent they inherited them too. Those lands were (and are) lightly-settled on account of logistics and being generally terrible for European-style agriculture (not to mention the malaria), which I guess partly explains why the Llanos didn't secede and become an independent state with the Andes as its western/northern border.

One region did secede though which was Acre, which used to be Bolivian until Brazilian immigrants moved in from the east and detached the region, Texas-style.

 

[Traitorfish]

Ooh, a question I can actually given an informed response to! *ahem*


It's important to remember that the indigenous Andean societies didn't simply live next to the Andes as, the Italians did the Alps or the Arabs the Sahara, they actually lived inside them. The Andes aren't one long wall of mountain, they're a band of highland, with valleys and plateaus as well as high peaks, and its in these valleys and plateaus that the Andean built their farms and cities. To the indigenous Andeans, their mountains weren't a barrier any more than the Greeks saw the Agean as a barrier: the mountains hosted them, rather than containing them. Only Europeans saw the Andes as a barrier, because they were used to a world in which people moved by boats and horses, so the necessity to go everywhere on foot turned the mountains into an impassable mass in their imagination.

The highland nature of Andean society had consequences for the Spanish colonial administration, because for a good century after conquest the Spaniards were absolutely dependent on indigenous social structures at a local level, and the limits of their control consequently mirrored that of the indigenous empires. They could subsist as far as the Inca's tributary system (which they assumed pretty much directly) gave them access to local distribution networks, which allowed them to stray some way down the Eastern slopes of the Andes, but not any further. Colonists and missionaries pushed the boundaries in later periods, but by that point the Spanish and Portuguese had mapped out the broad shape of the Continent and divided it between them, in part because they spent much of this intervening period in union, allowing their shared monarch to play the role of "fair broker". The new states that emerged in the 19th century were all derived from administrative divisions of the Spanish empire, so they reproduced these borders, if not always neatly or directly.

 

[CaptainLost]

Before I start--I apologize for not quoting anyone, if I were on my computer I would but I'm using tapatalk and quoting is insanely tedious.
Also--about horse sizes: weren't ancient (like really ancient) horses too small to ride? Just wondering.

Now, to cataphracts.
I've been doing some reading about cataphracts and it seems that term is very loose. What are you guys defining cataphracts as? As I see it there are several possibilities:
1. Guys with armor on horses. Roles would vary widely in this case.
2. Heavy cavalry in general. Roles would also vary widely.
3. Things called "cataphracts" or something similar by their users--which excludes people like Sarmatians. Roles would vary depending on the nation.

In addition--and this is a genuine question, not an argument--let's assume for a second that Phrossack is right and cataphracts are meant to fight cavalry.
If that is true, why does every site I have read about cataphracts say they were for fighting infantry? Just Google it, see for yourself.

 

[Mouthwash]

Why can I find nothing online about the Persian Gulf's shoreline changes? Apparently all of Al-Basrah was underwater in ancient times.

 

[sophie]

Why can I find nothing online about the Persian Gulf's shoreline changes? Apparently all of Al-Basrah was underwater in ancient times.

Either:

You aren't searching correctly

You aren't searching in the right places

No such scholarship exists online

It's one of those three

 

[Louis XXIV]

He's still wrong, though.

Sure. I'm just pointing out what he said was misinterpreted, not that he was correct to begin with. It's best to understand someone's point before saying they're wrong, even if they are, in fact, wrong.

 

[Agent327]

Not body fat that looks like that, especially not with that degree of musculature. I can't actually find a picture which I can post here within the realms of decency, but it's an exaggeration - as, indeed, many elements of Classical sculpture are, because perspective makes things look 'wrong' if they're actually done accurately.

I thought you just explained how Renaissance sculpture was not supposed to be accurate.

Compare the inability of TV producers to actually use horse-hooves as sound effects, because people expect them to sound like coconut shells.

Coconuts? I expect horses' hooves to sound like horses' hooves.

There are many reasons behind that one and I'm not informed enough to elucidate them, but that was from a practical realisation that the Church could do more good if it was not openly opposed to Hitler. There was certainly no love lost between them, simply practicality. Plotinus may have more insight into this.

Your claim was that Hitler persecuted Catholics. Hitler persecuted Jews and gypsies and other 'non-Germans' and Protestant and Catholic churches alike saw no problem with that. The concordate with the Vatican with right in with that attitude.

People overestimate how heavy knights in armour were. When you put your armour on, the test of its fit was to be able to dance in it, so it can't have been that unwieldy.

Be that as it may, most horses were employed as workhorses. And neither use implies horses being of the slender type.

 

[Mouthwash]

Either:

You aren't searching correctly

You aren't searching in the right places

No such scholarship exists online

It's one of those three

It's not even about scholarship. Nothing even mentioning it comes up, except for the Wikipedia article on the city of Lagash. Heck, nothing comes up when I search for 'Tigris-Euphrates confluence.' The only thing I get is crap about the Persian Gulf's naming disputes. Google has failed.

 

[Masada]

That must be why the Vatican concluded a concordate with Hitler Germany then.

Actually, one of the goals of that was to head off further Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church. The Church for its part had pissed the Nazis off because it had, among other things, used its influence in the Centre Party to attempt to deny Hitler the Chancellorship. When all that failed and Hitler came to power, the Church tried to come to an understanding with the new government. That never really eventuated because the Nazis began breaking the Concordat even before the ink was dry. This provoked the Catholic Church into publishing in 1937 the famous Papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge which castigated the regime. The Nazis retaliated by increasing their persecution and the Church responded with Summi Pontificatus in 1939 and the 1942 Christmas Address to name but two other examples of Church displeasure.

 

[Flying Pig]

I thought you just explained how Renaissance sculpture was not supposed to be accurate.

I said that it's supposed to look believable, which means exaggerations are allowed provided that the viewer doesn't really notice them at first. David and the Pieta don't look like their proportions are warped until you look closely; their exaggerations are subtle, unlike (say) a Picasso painting, where it's immediately obvious that you're not looking at an accurate recording of a human body. As TF and I have pointed out, though, their proportions are certainly not accurate to the human body.

Coconuts? I expect horses' hooves to sound like horses' hooves.

There's an awful lot of things which people only usually see in television which aren't actually made to look or sound like the real thing. Gunshots, particularly suppressed ones, are another good example. I'm not sure if horses' hooves have evolved, though. The stroboscopic effect with car wheels is another example - it's often edited in, because the cameras are actually good enough to avoid it (and we don't see it in reality) but people expect it, so the footage looks 'wrong' without it.

Your claim was that Hitler persecuted Catholics. Hitler persecuted Jews and gypsies and other 'non-Germans' and Protestant and Catholic churches alike saw no problem with that. The concordate with the Vatican with right in with that attitude.

Not quite true. The concordat was mostly pressed for by Catholics, as a means to protect their institutions within Germany. Bear in mind that Britain and France also concluded a similar treaty (the Four-Power-Pact) in 1933 out of largely the same motives; although the treaties were seen as giving international acceptance to Hitler, those negotiating them really saw them as the least bad option given the circumstances.

Wiki actually has a whole article on Hitler's persecution of Catholics - I'll pick out a few points to save you trawling through the whole thing, but it's sometimes surprising:

By 1940, a dedicated clergy barracks had been established by the Nazis at Dachau Concentration Camp. Of a total of 2,720 clergy recorded as imprisoned at Dachau, the overwhelming majority, some 2,579 (or 94.88%) were Catholic - among them 400 German priests

In the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany a severe persecution was launched from 1939. Here the Nazis set about systematically dismantling the Church - arresting its leaders, exiling its clergymen, closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Many clergymen were murdered. At least 1811 Polish clergy died in Nazi Concentration Camps. Hitler's plans for the Germanization of the East saw no place for the Christian Churches.

After constant confrontations, by late 1935, Bishop August von Galen of Munich was urging a joint pastoral letter protesting an "underground war" against the church.[47] By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with the new government, had become highly disillusioned. In March, Pope Pius XI issued the Mit brennender Sorge encyclical - accusing the Nazi Government of violations of the 1933 Concordat, and further that it was sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church".[20] The Nazis responded with, an intensification of the Church Struggle, beginning around April

With the expansion of the war in the East from 1941, there came also an expansion of the regime's attack on the churches. Monasteries and convents were targeted and expropriation of Church properties surged. The Nazi authorities claimed that the properties were needed for wartime necessities such as hospitals, or accommodation for refugees or children, but in fact used them for their own purposes. "Hostility to the state" was another common cause give for the confiscations, and the action of a single member of a monastery could result in seizure of the whole. The Jesuits were especially targeted.

Nazi policy in the Sudetenland saw ethnic Czech priests expelled, or deprived of income and forced to do labour, while their properties were seized. Religious orders were suppressed, private schools closed and religious instruction forbidden in schools

Be that as it may, most horses were employed as workhorses. And neither use implies horses being of the slender type

True, but my point was that they didn't have to be huge, either. We're not talking about Shire Horses, for example.

 

[Louis XXIV]

To be fair, the Pieta was late Renaissance art when the trend was moving away from naturalism towards mannerism. I've seen differing opinions on whether the Pieta itself was a mannerist piece (I was taught that it was), but the point is that previous Renaissance art did prioritize absolute realism, while this work started to move away from that.