Recent content by Creticus

No one better at squirming their way out of an awkward situation than Caesar.

Being of the right lineage is less important when one can be adopted into the right lineage. The position of kampaku was supposed to be limited to a very small number of kuge families, but Hideyoshi pressured one of them into adopting him anyways because he wielded the true power. Having said...

By that point in time, the Ashikaga shoguns had been puppets for quite some time, which was following an even longer period of decline before that. For that matter, they weren't exactly the first line of shoguns to fall into that state, seeing as how the very second Kamakura shogun was a puppet...

Hideyoshi's position was stronger than Ieyasu's position. After all, Kanpaku was a higher rank than Shogun. Oh sure, Hideyoshi was born a commoner, but that's why he had himself adopted by Konoe Sakihisa, thus turning himself into a Fujiwara. Taiwan is worthless in this period. Like, even...

Wei was multiple times bigger and more populous than both Shu and Wu put together. I'm very skeptical that one man's contribution can overturn that.

Speaking bluntly, the line between easterners and westerners is ridiculously arbitrary, thus rendering this pretty much pointless.

I don't have any in-depth knowledge of the topic, but the one documentary that I saw depicted her as an absolutely horrendous mother. Like, she entrusted a son with hemophilia to a servant who was physically abusive.

Oh hey, is that a Nobunaga no Shinobi reference that I hear?

Presumably he'd clean house before heading out on the Parthian campaign. Curious if that'd push him enough for him to proscribe when he was a notable exception to Sulla, Marius, the Pompeians, and the Second Triumvirate.

Man, I can already hear the attack ads. In any case, a lot of Chinese people (and thus presumably Chinese-American people) have relatives in the CPC. The party isn't quite at 100 million members, but they're not that far off from that figure.

I'm not sure. I think there were officials who held much higher offices than him at the time. However, Yuan Shao was the one of the individuals who led the killing of the eunuchs plus others, meaning that he's already in something of a leadership position by this point in time. Those senior...

Someone else takes control of the imperial court, which results in a further weakening of the already fragile control of the center over the rest of the empire. Bear in mind that the imperial leadership has been pretty much decapitated by this point in time because of the killing of He Jin as...

The Mandate of Heaven isn't a path to legitimacy. It's the acknowledgement of legitimacy that has already been acquired.