Actually, they were, but the attempt was abandoned.
History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII
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Actually, they were, but the attempt was abandoned.
sophie
Break My Heart
His son was placed under the guardianship of a protestant, Mary's reign was relatively brief, and Elizabeth was raised a protestant (and reigned for a longass time).
More fundamentally, there were people who cared about Protestant ideals and were invested in the notion of a Church of England in a way that Henry never was. Theologically, Henry was a Catholic who just didn't like the Pope. If he hadn't had a bunch of keen fans of Martin Luther as his advisers to actually set up the church, write its prayer book and liturgies, etc., then there probably wouldn't have been any reason for it to survive its death.
(Although it probably still would have, because ecclesiastical schisms have a habit of persisting well beyond the end of any good reason for them to do so; consider the Antiochene schism of the fourth century, the persistence of the Novatianists, and for that matter the continued existence of the Methodist church.)
(Although it probably still would have, because ecclesiastical schisms have a habit of persisting well beyond the end of any good reason for them to do so; consider the Antiochene schism of the fourth century, the persistence of the Novatianists, and for that matter the continued existence of the Methodist church.)
I didn't think there was very much in the way of doctrinal differences between the Church of England and the Catholic church. Mainly organizational. The few times I've been to an Episcopalian church ceremony it was hardly different from what I remember of Catholic ceremony.
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Anyone can answer what kind of army the Mongols would field?
Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
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What do you mean? Size-wise? Equipment? Organization?
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Size and organization of the army.
Ajidica
High Quality Person
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This should get you started, along with plenty of links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_military_tactics_and_organization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_military_tactics_and_organization
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Thanks for the link.
Why did the East (China, India, Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, to an extent Eastern Europe) consist of various shifting empires, but Western Europe have relatively stable polities that maintained their existence for a thousand years?
I don't really agree with your basic conditions - 'Japan' has existed in pretty much its current state for most of history, 'China' has shifted around but been a reasonably coherent entity since several thousand BC - meanwhile in the west I don't see the Roman Empire around, and the borders of nearly all states have changed massively. Spain dates to the Middle Ages (and then only with difficulty), Italy to the 1860s, Germany to the 1870s. 'England' has been around for a long time, but the territory controlled by the people who control it has only been stable since the 1920s. Belgium is a product of 1815... there are many examples.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
Well I would hardly call China not a stable polity that maintained its existance for a thousand years. The last big split before the 1911 revolution brought warlordism about was with the invader dynasties which overlapped and ruled different chunks of China separately before the Mongols united it again. This is Taiping rebellion notwithstanding, but of course most of Europe has had a much more volatile history than that. Germany and Italy are the prime examples. So is Poland. In fact almost all the countries countries west of France and East of Russia (possibly including Russia) did not exist or ceased to exist for long periods of time in the last 200 years.
EDIT: Basically what Flying Pig said
EDIT: Basically what Flying Pig said
I think a European history class is in order... Have you ever heard of the Holy Roman Empire? (Just one example containing hundreds of non-stable political entities.)
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
In fact, if we look just at Western Europe and Eastern Europe, you'd notice that, at least in the Medieval, there were far more broken up in many pieces feudal states in Western Europe, while in Eastern Europe, big fat states (is that a historic term? Hopefully not) like Byzantium/Bulgaria/Hungary/Kiev Russia and others were the norm rather than the exception at least until the mid-13th century, when crusaders and Tatars broke them up which led to shrinking of the most states there. Coincidentally, this was also why in 14th century the Ottomans managed to smash everyone in their way, due to the weak and decentralized opposition, and because some clever Byzantines decided it would be a cool idea if they invite them as mercenaries in their eternal fights for the Imperial throne.
Yeah, Japan's an exception.
That's definitely not the way I learned it. The was even a century where splintered Chinese states would rise and fall by the decade. Maybe they all referred to themselves as 'Chinese', but we don't accept that Byzantium is the same entity as Rome because they declared themselves Roman.
I meant post-Rome, in the early Middle Ages.
I'm not talking about borders. Castille existed for quite some time, and absorbed other states into it. But it was never replaced by some other polity. Let's look at Iran, for contrast. It almost united itself under the Medes, succeeded in doing so with Cyrus, whose empire was conquered and replaced by the Macedonians, who fell to the Parthians of Central Asia, who were themselves removed by the native Sassanians. Arabs, Saffarids, Samanids, Buyids, Seljuks, Ghaznavids, Khwarazmians, Mongols and the Ilkhanate, Timurids, Safavids, and Ashfarids all followed until modern Iran takes shape. These were not just different family names ruling over the same countries, as in Europe. Each dynasty to an extent was its own empire, with a different power base, ethnicity, ruling class, and often religion. All of them had borders which fluctuated wildly; even Rome's borders remained stable long after completing its expansion. It's more extreme than if an equivalent of the Norman conquest happened to England every couple centuries.
I don't think that modern nationalism really counts. It spread to the rest of the world within a century of your time frame and by its nature fixes borders between ethnic groups.
Plenty of those also lasted for centuries and some formed the precursors to modern states and provinces. I don't imagine Luxembourg would exist as an independent state outside of Western Europe.
Another thing: with very few exceptions (Crusades, Russia) the migratory pattern in Eurasia for the past millennium was been east to west. I think this is very illuminating for the topic, but I'm not sure why it happened.
That seems like an awful lot of exceptions - it's cases like this that make grand general rules like that not particularly useful. You have to smooth what actually happened out so much to make the overall narrative that you're better off acknowledging that things are messy and don't fit neat patterns, or that the patterns that do exist are smaller. In particular, I find missing out modern nationalism in any conversation about European history to be a bit odd.
That's all very well, but it's only one example. If you want to ask why Iran came under lots of different rulers, that's a reasonable question - and one that could be posed about Alsace, the Central Peloponnese, or Belgium.
I think part of the problem is that you're thinking in terms of modern countries, which don't necessarily map into the past very well - the phrase 'Iran had many rulers' ignores the fact that most of them had no concept of 'Iran' as something which occupied the space that it does today. However, we're much more likely to come up with that than phrases like 'parts of the English Channel/North Sea coast have had many rulers', even though it's equally true, and probably more likely a category that the rulers in question had in their minds.
If you're going to talk about migration/political expansion from Europe, you also have to factor in a great deal of German expansion into the east, the expansion of British 'soft power' (and hard power) into Central Asia from the Levant, and perhaps the mass movement of Europeans into the colonial territories of Asia and Australasia. That gives you a statement something like 'mass movements (being the Huns, the Mongols and the Timurids, essentially) tend to come from Asia into Europe, as long as we don't count the Drang nach Osten, either World War, or the Great Game', which doesn't sound like much of a rule at all.
That's all very well, but it's only one example. If you want to ask why Iran came under lots of different rulers, that's a reasonable question - and one that could be posed about Alsace, the Central Peloponnese, or Belgium.
I think part of the problem is that you're thinking in terms of modern countries, which don't necessarily map into the past very well - the phrase 'Iran had many rulers' ignores the fact that most of them had no concept of 'Iran' as something which occupied the space that it does today. However, we're much more likely to come up with that than phrases like 'parts of the English Channel/North Sea coast have had many rulers', even though it's equally true, and probably more likely a category that the rulers in question had in their minds.
If you're going to talk about migration/political expansion from Europe, you also have to factor in a great deal of German expansion into the east, the expansion of British 'soft power' (and hard power) into Central Asia from the Levant, and perhaps the mass movement of Europeans into the colonial territories of Asia and Australasia. That gives you a statement something like 'mass movements (being the Huns, the Mongols and the Timurids, essentially) tend to come from Asia into Europe, as long as we don't count the Drang nach Osten, either World War, or the Great Game', which doesn't sound like much of a rule at all.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
Yes, which was well over 1000 years ago. China has remained united since then except for the periods I already mentioned in my previous post
Because Spain is not a... Wait! That's why Catalans don't fit in Spain! There's no such thing. It's Castille, and even Americans know it!
Well then. I will only say that those borders in the Middle East sure delimit clear ethnic groups.
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