Good point on Italy--it's been mentioned in the past that urban life never died out there as it did north of the Alps, so the line between bourgeois and aristocracy was never too sharp.
Of course, royalist ideologies are also never as strong in northern Italy as they are elsewhere--republics...
The Bohemian ritual fell out of use by the 14th century, anyway. The class stratification you note was something that set in with time—not just in William the Bastard’s kingdom but elsewhere. Perhaps part of the reason was that New Money (in the form of a mercantile class) became relevant again...
That analysis makes some interesting points, though somewhat limiting in their implications--like the remark that Indian cotton was important to get the textile industry demand for reciprocal motion going. That would seem to exclude any landlocked heartland for the IR (including my own dark...
Thought I'd follow up on this thread because of an interesting article I read on the French birth rate in the 18th century. France's average family size began declining precipitously, largely driven by societal secularization, in the 1760s--by the 19th century, England's average family size was...
It varies from place to place, and the idea of a divine hierarchy like that was something of a later invention written backward onto the Middle Ages by Late Medieval and Early Modern absolutists. Consider that England was ruled by William the Bastard, grandson of a tanner, while the Bohemian...
This is an interesting point, and reminds me of France's other demographic issues in the 19th century--the country started going through the demographic transition even before the first Revolution, and already in the 19th century there was an awareness that their birth rate was not particularly...
Per Wikipedia, Soviet forces in Poland numbered 58,000 by 1991--though I don't know how many of those were combat troops instead of things like logistics or maintenance personnel. As of 1993, there were only 2,500 Soviet soldiers in Lithuania...
They wouldn't be charitable at all to a request from Yeltsin for access by land. But the question is timing--they might not necessarily have a choice, since occupation troops did not fully vacate those countries until 1993, and attempting to stop those troops from moving against Kaliningrad...
Orthodox Christian wishes on monkey's paw that the Pope had not committed heresy in the 11th century
Finger curls
Europe now dominated by Old Believers and Skoptsy
This is my take as well.
The Tsarist state was part of the Concert of Europe. Its culture was celebrated in London and Paris, and not in that orientalizing way they would treat colonial products but as something that spoke to the universal human condition. Their monarchs intermarried with...
A Bonapartist Greece allied to the Turks is an interesting concept. One reason Napoleon I sought a bride from the Romanov dynasty IOTL was, apparently, that he thought joining his lineage to a remote relative of the Palaiologoi was a good idea--going full Byzantine Restorationist would annoy the...
My thought is they would also unite to oppose domestic opposition--better to support one another against opposing parties than to stand separately.
Last time a Rump USSR scenario was discussed, it was also proposed that Azerbaijan would be inclined to stay in the union--which would be massively...
I could definitely see Kazakhstan and the other central Asian republics organizing themselves as a Rump USSR to preserve the benefits of a common, integrated economy, though the Balts and Ukraine and Belarus would go their own way.
The issue is, given how much of a dump the RF turned into the...