History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII

[Phrossack]

Which was overall more destructive economically and population-wise for German-speaking regions: World War II or the Thirty Years' War? Relatively speaking, of course; if WWII killed more people but a smaller percentage of the population, I'd say the Thirty Years' War was more destructive in that regard.

 

[Flying Pig]

Almost certainly the Thirty Years' War, in both senses. There were several states - Brandenburg and Wuerttemberg, for example - which lost an absolute majority of their populations, and as a whole Germany lost a majority of its male population. That said, it has been suggested (in a similar way to the Black Death) that the war's devastation actually improved the economic position of the survivors - now that several villages had severe labour shortages, the comparatively poor had a much stronger bargaining position than they had previously, and feudal restrictions tying people to the land were increasingly under pressure.

 

[Kyriakos]

Didn't the 30 years war ruin Poland* (edit) too?
And served as the rising point of Sweden (along with the relative collapse of Denmark, -edit).

*may very likely be confusing this with a bit later conflict re Poland. It did - of course- make the three partitions later of Poland easier, given Catholicism was so weakened.

 

[Ajidica]

I read some pretty in depth discussions on this a long time ago that I hardly remember any more, but just curious if anyone here has any knowlege on it; did archers generally use the typical "volley fire" we know from movies and such (talking about large-scale battle warfare ofc)? I remember hearing some quite good arguments that they in fact did not, but for all my google-fu I can't find any good info on this. Just reading random stuff it seems the concept of volley fire becomes much more prominent with the dawn of the gunpowder age, think this may have to do with the speed of fire in particular, gunfire volley is a devestating blow at once but takes a long time to repeat, a trained archer can keep firing quickly whittling down the enemy over a longer timespan with a higher rate of fire.

There are Byzantine and Roman records suggesting Parthian and Sassanid infantry fought with archers providing massed volley fire although given the poor state of Late Roman/ Early Byzantine sources determining how much of that was artistic flair is an exercise in futility.
As with many things in warfare, archers probably would do volley fire as the situation demanded but it probably wasn't very common.

Which was overall more destructive economically and population-wise for German-speaking regions: World War II or the Thirty Years' War? Relatively speaking, of course; if WWII killed more people but a smaller percentage of the population, I'd say the Thirty Years' War was more destructive in that regard.

I'm with FP, 30 Years War hands down. If you lived in a smaller German farming village you were unlikely to have any direct experience with the Allied militaries until 1945. Allied soldiers -even Soviet soldiers despite their poor reputation- were supplied through a reasonably effective logistics corps which is a far cry from the "find the nearest farm and steal their pigs" school of logistics practiced during the 30 Year War. Plus, the 30 Years War did last Thirty Years. Even if people weren't as effective and murdering and pillaging in 1640 they had a lot more time to do it.

 

[Agent327]

There are inscriptions to be found in the country. Namely, at rural shrines to native gods, you can't get more down to the "popular" level of society than that, except also in the army as Flying Pit pointed out. I've found and held pieces of such inscriptions. We can't know who carved them, but we do know that latin was used among the rural people and was valued enough for them to go through the expense to have those dedications made. And it is reasonable to assume that most were written in perishable materials and are gone.

For inscriptions that is not only unreasonable, but highly improbable. Consider though, that in Egypt papyrus and inscriptions are found 'all over the country'. But we know that writing was limited to clerks for most of ancient Egyptian history. The fact that finds are made 'in the country' means that there were people present that could make inscriptions and/or write. It certainly doesn't follow that there was an empire wide, standardized education system. That is a far too general conclusion.

 

[Flying Pig]

Hang on, we know that those Greek and Roman papyri across Egypt are not just the writings of scribes - there are simply too many of them for that, and the subject matter is too mundane. This is before we look at the large number of letters that we know were exchanged between the upper classes, political officials, Christian bishops and abbots, soldiers, and so on - all with each other.

 

[Agent327]

Perhaps you should read my post again. It was worded very carefully - unlike this claim of an empire wide standardized education, which suggests at least a standardized education system, for which there is no evidence (like, for instance, empire wide schools). Not to mention your counterargument still leaves out the overwhelming majority of any pre-industrial society: the peasants. Which is consistent with the remarkable breakdown in literary evidence associated with the collapse of the Western empire: if literacy really was as widespread as suggested, that most likely would not have occurred, because the literary classes would not have disappeared with the empire.

 

[Flying Pig]

A lack of preserved written material does not mean a lack of produced written material. For one thing, no complete work of Classical literature survives in a manuscript from Classical times. The oldest physical books which survive today are early Medieval: the literature survived only because people kept copying it onto relatively perishable materials, and then copied those, and so on. Classical and early Christian texts had particular value placed upon them, so they survived. However, there is a fairly constant stream of preserved (largely) historical, legal and theological writing from the West throughout the fifth to the tenth centuries, both in Latin and (mostly later) in the vernacular. Take a look here. So even if we ignore the big question of preservation, it is definitely not correct that literacy, or the Latin language, died out with the end of effective Roman control of the provinces. If anything, it's all the more remarkable that Latin survived despite ceasing to be an everyday language.

 

[Agent327]

Seeing as Latin was the language of the educated in Western Europe until well into the 17th century, and the official language of the Roman Catholic church until well into the 20th, that is not really that surprising. Whether Latin was ever an 'every day language' is another matter. Vulgar Latin perhaps, yes.

But you are correct that focusing on literary evidence can skew our picture of the past. There is a similar drop in literary evidence in the Eastern empire in the 8th to 9th centuries. But the same goes for ancient Egyptian history at large: from the early dynastic period onwards texts that remain are virtually limited to mortuary and royal texts, and this continues for centuries. Which goes to show the importance of non-textual archaeological research, I guess.

 

[Flying Pig]

I think treating 'Vulgar Latin' as it if were a single language across Europe, for at least five hundred years, and as something always and objectively different from not-Vulgar Latin is a mistake. After all, all that marks out a language from a dialect is an army and a navy, to paraphrase Bismarck.

 

[JohannaK]

I think treating 'Vulgar Latin' as it if were a single language across Europe, for at least five hundred years, and as something always and objectively different from not-Vulgar Latin is a mistake. After all, all that marks out a language from a dialect is an army and a navy, to paraphrase Bismarck.

I'm not sure that linguists would agree...

 

[schlaufuchs]

https://books.google.com/books?id=WwKwvHFYORsC&pg=PA337#v=onepage&q&f=false

In particular read section 2.1

Unfortunately the real meat of the discussion is not available, and there's nothing in the book particularly interesting enough for me to go buy a copy from amazon.

 

[Agent327]

It's interesting that that paragraph contains an incorrect assumption: that Latin started from the urbs Roma. Latin was spoken before Rome gained prominence in Latium, obviously.

I think treating 'Vulgar Latin' as it if were a single language across Europe, for at least five hundred years, and as something always and objectively different from not-Vulgar Latin is a mistake. After all, all that marks out a language from a dialect is an army and a navy, to paraphrase Bismarck.

A good thing then that nobody is making your presumption. (At least not anyone in historical linguistics. We'lll ignore the Bismarcks and such.)

 

[schlaufuchs]

It's interesting that that paragraph contains an incorrect assumption: that Latin started from the urbs Roma. Latin was spoken before Rome gained prominence in Latium, obviously.

Variants of Italic localized to Latium which eventually emerged as "Latin" had obviously been around far before the foundation of the city, certainly, but Old Latin is generally dated emerging as distinct from Italic around the mid-5th century (see: Kieckers (1960: 1: 8) or Safarewicz (1969: 272)). So no.

 

[Ajidica]

I've noticed in a lot of strategy video games camel units are really good against horses, apparently on the grounds horses are scared of camels for some reason. (Smell?) Is there any actual evidence for this, or is it just something that has been accepted in popular history, like all medieval Arabs dressing as Bedouins?

 

[Lexicus]

Wiki says "according to folklore." So I'd guess scientific support is lacking.


http://library.sandiegozoo.org/factsheets/camel/camel.htm#physical

This also says camels scare horses but doesn't discuss the issue at all.

Then there's this dude posting on a forum

There is absolutely no support for the myth that camels scare horses. It's an ancient wive's tale with zero support and can easily be refuted by talking to people who actually handle both animals, or just watching Lawrence of Arabia (your stage horses will walk next to a thousand camels but a destrier is going to balk? Please!)

This means the combat tables really ought to be redone so that cavalry (knights, etc.) are more likely to smash camelry and less likely to be smashed by them. Camelry are not some rock-paper-scissors anti-horse weapon, they're just an inferior form of cavalry necessitated by the environmental and cost considerations of the armies that used them. They shouldn't have any 'advantage', they should just be slower horses who don't charge as hard. This may screw with 'balance', but balance is for ninnies, anyway.

I see nothing wrong with some armies just being inferior, although DBA's 'tournament' style skews away from that, this whole 'camel' mechanic - in whatever game it manifests, which is a bunch - is rubbish.

Camels handle extremely sandy terrain better. But their vulnerability to caltrops and plain sharp rocks - and the fact that no one likes to fight on sand dunes - makes this generally useless in combat, as nice as it is overland.

But then his assertions are contested in the rest of the thread.

 

[Agent327]

Variants of Italic localized to Latium which eventually emerged as "Latin" had obviously been around far before the foundation of the city, certainly, but Old Latin is generally dated emerging as distinct from Italic around the mid-5th century (see: Kieckers (1960: 1: 8) or Safarewicz (1969: 272)). So no.

That conclusion doesn't quite follow. At the very least it's not an indication of Latin emerging from the urbs Roma. One should also keep in mind that most sources are, of course, Roman. In short, it's still an assumption, and not a very correct one. Simply posting rough dates at which Old Latin becomes discernible and suggesting that this must be related to the urbs Roma is hardly evidence otherwise.

 

[Flying Pig]

His definition of the urbs Roma has a radius of at least 20km. That's not really 'the city' in the modern sense so much as in the Roman - the urban centre, plus the large rural area that interacts with and more or less depends on it.

Owen - it won't actually show a preview of 2.1, could you summarise it? I can however see the very start of the book, and wonder what the line is with eo/vado between dialect and synonym. I mean, there are (for example) at least three Latin words for 'kill' (neco, occido, interficio), two for 'man' (vir/homo), a couple for 'assembly' (comitium, concilium, consilium, coetus), and so on. I wonder whether anyone has studied those to see whether there was a pattern in who tended to say one rather than the other, and whether that could be called a dialect. In England, for example, 'daps', 'sandshoes' and 'plimsolls' are the same thing, but you hear 'daps' in the West Country, 'sandshoes' in the North, and 'plimsolls' in the South-East. In a similar way, 'tea', 'supper' and 'dinner' are the same meal, but which one you use depends partly on your social class and partly on where you grew up.

 

[Arakhor]

If concilium and consilium were both Latin words for the same concept, would you say that's evidence for the softening of the C sound to have been happening even in Late Latin?

 

[Flying Pig]

It may also be the difference between 'council' and 'counsel'. 'Concilium' can only mean 'council' in the sense of a group of people making decisions, as far as I know, but 'consilium' also means 'plan', 'advice', 'counsel' etc. That may also, of course, suggest that the C had softened (at least when it wasn't the first sound) by Classical times. Owen is probably better placed on this one, though.