Hot answers tagged 15th-century
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Columbus is traditionally (and indeed still) credited with the discovery of the Americas for a number of reasons, some dubious but others quite legitimate. First of all, we must qualify this discovery as discovery by Old World people. Clearly, the original "discovery" by the human species was some 40,000 years ago by the ancestors of the indigenous ...
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The fourth crusade was the turning point. The crusade was high-jacked by Venice to take revenge on the Byzantines for past deeds: imprisonments, break of contract, etc... The crusade was aimed to land in Egypt originally, as it was seen as the main threat to taking Jerusalem back. However, since the crusaders could not pay for the large Venetian feet, it ...
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I don't think it is possible to idenitify a single point in history as beginning the "slope toward the end". Such thinking results from the simplistic model of an empire's history as consisting of two segements: "growth" and "decline". In reality, the history of the Byzantine empire is a complex sequence of alternating growth and decline.
I'd say that the ...
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Well there were a few reasons
They pretty much had all they needed resource-wise in the country, trade was not a prerogative and even though Zheng He did go out exploring they were not interested in colonies or mercantilism.
Mercantilism was pretty much frowned upon within the Confucian system, merchants did not produce goods they moved them around and ...
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Were Shakespeare's plays written for “high culture” or “entertain the bawdy masses” during his time?
As I recall from my readings, the floor of the theatre was where the masses sat, when they attended. Most would probably be drunk, considering the state of water sanitation at the time beer was the favored drink over raw water, and most would probably be ill-mannered. The well-to-do when they attended sat in the box seats above the "rabble", so that should ...
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One of the events that led to the War of the Roses was the birth of a son, Edward, Prince of Wales, to (Lancastrian) King Henry VI, and his Queen, Margaret of Anjou.
Prior to that time, Richard, Duke of York (a cousin) had been next in line to the throne, and therefore had no incentive to fight. The birth of Henry's son "disinherited" him.
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According to Ivan Gobry's Martin Luther, Luther thought that
Sin is undefeatable, for lust will inexorably take residencde in each of us, therefore, to condemn oneself to celibacy, intending to please God, is to engage in self-deception and hypocrisy.
Gobry also says that Luther believed the requirement that priests and monks stay celibate to be an ...
7
In Desmond Seward's book on the hundred years war, he introduces Henry thus:
In the national legend Henry V remains the most heroic of English
Kings. He is the glorious conquerer who broke the French chilvary at
Agincourt and won the throne of France for his son's inheritance.
Henry V is obviously best known for his military conquests. His military ...
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This is highly speculative and subjective. After all, you put forth very valid contenders to hold the title, particularly the natives and the Vikings.
But what I find most likely is that Columbus was the first to do it for profit. He (and those who paid him) were the first to capitalize on it. The Viking settlement didn't last all that long, and didn't ...
5
At Agincourt (1415) the English reportedly had 1,500 men-at-arms (aka: Knights) and 7,000 longbowmen. That would be a ratio of nearly 5 longbowmen per knight.
The French side has a lot of conflicting estimates of size, but by all accounts was very heavily weighted toward men-at-arms. Estimates generally run north of 10,000, with only about 5,000 archers and ...
5
As the Portuguese gradually extended their explorations and trade ever further south along Africa's Atlantic coast during the 15th century they needed a larger and more advanced ship for their long oceanic adventures. Gradually, they developed the carrack from a fusion and modification of aspects of the ship types they knew operating in both the Atlantic ...
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A prior article mentions the empire of Justinian (and Leo, by extension), but I would argue that these are 'Roman' empires which are terminated by the eruption of Islam over much of the East Roman Empire.
This was a pretty traumatic event which led to some serious results. Among them, the abandonment of Latin, abandonment (with some exceptions) of universal ...
4
Columbus is credited with discovering "America" (the "Indies," actually), because he SET OUT to do so.
He had been trying to find a trade route west, to India, and thought that he had done so; i.e., that what later became the "Americas" was "India" to him, which is why he called the locals "Indians."
Other peoples, the Vikings, the Chinese, and others ...
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I think this is a valid question. But the answer is a rather resounding no. For one thing, we have no shred of evidence for such a conjecture. For another, this conjecture cannot be squared at all with the fact that Columbus to his dying day insisted on having actually landed in India - had he been dissimulating about his knowledge of the existence of ...
4
Arguably, Henry V laid the foundation for a united, strong, modern England.
After a misspent youth, he put down rebellions against the English crown by Percy, the "Hotspur" of the North, and Glendower of Wales, another dissaffected area. This was basically the last time that "England" threatened to fall apart.
Overseas, his victories at Agincourt and ...
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The equivalent English term is robber baron for which Wiktionary provides the following definitions:
(historical) In Europe, an aristocrat who charged exorbitant fees or otherwise exacted money from people who journeyed across land or waterways which he controlled.
(chiefly US, idiomatic, usually derogatory) Especially in the 19th-century and early ...
3
The equipment for a knight was very expensive to create and maintain, it was therefore reserved for the rich, the nobility. Those were of course also the main group of people who could afford horses trained for riding as warhorses (which is quite different training from general riding and draft horses), so my guess is it would be unlikely to see a knight on ...
2
From what I recall from historical texts that I've read in my travels, the event that seems to have started the irreversible decline was the Fourth Crusade, when instead of heading to free Jerusalem, the crusading armies attacked and sacked Constantinople. With large parts of the Empire fragmented into Latin states by the armies that had attacked them, it ...
2
God said in Genesis 2:18, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:1-2, "Now for the matters you wrote about: 'It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.' But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife..." (Ever notice ...
2
Politics.
An English fleet under John Cabot (actually Giovanni Caboto from Genoa) was the first (after the vikings) to land on mainland North America.
After the American Revolution an Englishman wasn't favorite for "founder of our nation" national hero status and so Columbus legend appears in the early 1780s. He then really took off in chicago 100 years ...
2
Great is not the same as good.
If you look at almost all great men, especially ones who won their primary glory on the field of battle, there are few if any who do not have dark deeds attached to them.
Partly this is because brutality and atrocities were more common and more accepted historically than they are now - the conventional fate of besieged cities ...
2
The Basilica was built next to a bell tower built in 1414. Although the English Wikipedia article states that Alberti's restoration began in 1462, most of the other sources that I found state 1472. Also, Alberti sent a description and a drawing of the proposed site to Gonzago (the patron) in 1470, after 1462.
The construction began in June 1472, shortly ...
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Originally, most knights were robbers. That is to say in the "bad old days" known as the Dark Ages. This was a period when Europe was basically in chaos, central authority was distant or non-existent, the population was declining and losing wealth. In such a vacuum, power rested in the hands of LOCAL authorities. The invention of the stirrup gave the ...
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Just looking over that wikipedia link, I'm seeing a lot of references to British monarchal eras and Highland fashion. So it could be that this was an item primarily prevalent in England and Scottland.
England is not exactly famous for its sunny climate, and average temperatures there even in the summer appear to be a few degrees cooler than in Poland (where ...
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Interesting series of questions, but I'm afraid I don't have an answer to all of them. I'll answer the language-related in order to set them into context.
It's very hard to read the the last line of the fist picture and I can only see:
"[Anteque]ra que vinieron XXX con Señor XXX Don Fernando"
The word you mention in your second question is not ...
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We know the population of the whole Southeast Asia mostly by estimates. Contemporary figures are considered unreliable, and state of the art values are computed by combining the most reliable ones with backward projections from XIX century data.
Estimated Southeast Asian Population about 1600
...
1
As a supplement, there were other reasons.
Money was one of the important reasons. Such fleets cost huge amounts of money. The Emperor Zhu Li (Yongle Emperor) had been spending huge amount of money on the book of Yongledadian (《永乐大典》), moving the capital, and the war with the Mongols. Exploration was definitely not the number one thing to do on an empty ...
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Personally, for me, the turning point was Manzikert. It wiped out a good portion of the fighting men of the empire, and caused the Seljuks to take the eastern part of Asia Minor, which was a large source of manpower for the emperors under the theme system. So with the threat of a Seljuk invasion, Empire responded with a plea for help to the West, launching ...
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