History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII

I think it's also a question of what 'conquering' a place meant to the Romans - there were plenty of Roman camps in Scotland, so it wasn't the case that they simply couldn't or didn't want to send troops that far. Roman 'conquest' essentially meant taking over the towns and apparatus of state that already existed, and in some places founding new colonies to create one afresh. Their narrative, if you like, was that their empire was made up of towns, which were the important things, through which everything was done, but you might equally have argued that it was made up of towns because that was all they could meaningfully control. In most of the Greek world, I doubt that 90% of people even noticed the Romans coming in, and certainly the mechanics and personalities of local government rarely changed. That model didn't work in places without urban centres - which, I think, is a major part of the reason why their expansion stopped at the point where people stopped living in lootable towns. After all, the main motivator for conquest was the glory of it, so as long as there were slaves and movable property to bring home and parade through the streets, it didn't really matter how 'useful' or 'necessary' a war was.

Thanks a lot, no better explanation required.
 
When that tradition start, out of interest? The Tudors and Stewarts seemed to have surnames, so it wasn't simply a case of the British royals declining to adopt the modern practice of fixed surnames. Is it maybe something that came with the Hanoverians?

Stewarts were ultimately descended (paternally) from Alan fitz Flaad:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_fitz_Flaad

It apparently means "Alan son of Flaad". So a surname was adopted later.

Alan fitz Flaad was ethnically a Celtic Breton, descended from Breton knights who came with William the Conqueror.

"Stewart Stuart DNA Project" confirms that the dynasty had R1b-L21 haplogroup, which is Insular Celtic:

Check the "comments" section: http://www.eupedia.com/genetics/britain_ireland_dna.shtml

Insular Celtic among Bretons is of course caused by fact that they are descended from Romano-Briton immigrants.

So here is an epic story of a Briton clan, fleeing from Anglo-Saxons to Brittany, and then taking revenge at Hastings...
 
'Fitz' was the Norman patronymic normally applied to illegitimate children. Had William the Conqueror not been Duke of Normandy etc., he might have started his own FitzRobert dynasty (after his father, Robert the Devil).
 
I looked that up on wikipedia to doublecheck that. It apparently did not have that meaning at that time, although it took on that connotation later with FitzJames. Fitz apparently is from the French Fils, which just means son.
 
Ah yes. Not specifically those who were illegitimate, but those who lacked a surname of their name and needed something to distinguish any offspring they might have.
 
Basically, yes. One notable example was Henry VIII's only acknowledged bastard, but Henry I and Charles II also had bastards called Henry Fitzroy.
 
Why was it that christianity spread to Europe and not as much to Africa/ asia?
 
Why was it that christianity spread to Europe and not as much to Africa/ asia?

The short answer is probably easier modes of transportation. When Christianity was first introduced in the Middle East, the Romans had the best transportation net works around, so Christian missionaries took advantage of that to spread the word of the Lord in the Roman empire, and from there it spread to the rest of Europe. I'm sure someone else can provide a better more detailed explanation.
 
Christianity did spread into Africa and Asia. Specifically North Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia for Africa. Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, Central Asia, Mongolia for Asia.

It was just that later it was superseded by Islam, following the Islamic conquests (except for Ethiopia and Mongolia). Whereas Islam didn't make that deep an inroad into 'Europe' except for Spain and later the Balkans.
 
makes sense! And can anyone tell me specifically why Aethelred the unready was considered so especially "unready"?
 
According to what I read on Wikipedia (read: the following things are to be disregarded), it's actually a mistranslation. It would be Aethelred the Ill-Advised..

..which doesn't really make it better, I guess.
 
The Anglo-Saxon word ræd means 'counsel', as in Æthelræd ("royal counsel"), hence mistranslating unræd ('bad-counsel') into 'unready'.
 
makes sense! And can anyone tell me specifically why Aethelred the unready was considered so especially "unready"?

He wasn't, because he was actually Aethelred the Unread, meaning ill-advised.

Although I don't have the answer to the followup question. I guess the idea is he made poor decisions of some sort. The understanding at the time was that the King could do no wrong, but that he could have bad advisers who wouldn't give him the right information.
 
Christianity did spread into Africa and Asia. Specifically North Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia for Africa. Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, Central Asia, Mongolia for Asia.

It was just that later it was superseded by Islam, following the Islamic conquests (except for Ethiopia and Mongolia). Whereas Islam didn't make that deep an inroad into 'Europe' except for Spain and later the Balkans.

Yes, though there were a few other factors too. In the Middle East it wasn't just Islam in itself that largely wiped out Christianity - Christianity continued to flourish for centuries after the Arab invasions - it was Tamerlane, who had a special grudge against the Church of the East. In China, Christianity was forbidden in the ninth century as part of a crackdown on foreign religions (aimed mainly at Buddhism, but the Christians were collateral damage). Later, in early modern times, Catholic and Protestant Christianity spread more comprehensively through southeast and east Asia, but this time it came up against hostility from various local governments, particularly in Korea and Japan, where people were resistant to western influence.
 
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