Search results

And they could conscript troops to fight in the Roman army, and they could procure slaves to work for Roman patricians... look at the role of the client states in the Roman system in our time line.

We're not talking about the same thing here. When someone refers to feudalism, I don't think of the details of the ruling class, I think of serfdom, and maybe manorialism. Now it's debatable whether late medieval feudalism serfdom was a long continuation or a revival of late Roman feudalism...

Well, they did launch the Hundred Regiments Offensive. Both Mao and Chiang adopted waiting/build-up strategies at times, but Chiang held more important territory.

What? I'm not familiar with his views on present-day politics, but he seems naturally disgusted with Roman anti-immigrant practices, when he refers to Roman concentration camps, and the like. I disagree with some of his theories about immigration in antiquity, but having read some studies of...

I really don't see the Romans holding on to northwestern Germany. It would be too expensive, and too poorly-suited for villa agriculture. For comparison, the Romans conquered, or almost conquered, Caledonia twice, and abandoned it both times.

The Late Roman Empire practiced serfdom. Nominally-free peasants faced ever-increasing impositions, and by the late third century, these were written into laws effectively enslaving the coloni.

In which period? In the Strategikon, the battle cavalry [defensores] are paired with half as many scouting/archery cavalry [cursores]. In theory, both forces were supposed to train with the others' weapons. It's unclear how often the early Byzantine defensores used horse armor, but, given their...

Zhmodikov argues, on the basis of battle narratives, that the Romans didn't use all their pila in the initial charge; they used some during the battle; to me, this suggests that the gap between Roman and Anglo-Saxon fighting techniques might not have been so wide.

The Republic was facing an enemy as powerful as itself. The Empire was not, apart from the recurring civil wars, and its only rival was in the east, with only relatively minor powers in Europe. So it didn't have much reason to mobilize it's full resources against the Gothic refugees. The Empire...

The Confederacy was based on the idea that inequality should be the basis of society. Marx had some messed-up proposals, but he seems to have held the basic socialist view that equality should be the basis of society, and inequality would create conflict. I don't see the Confederacy becoming...

Either that, or you would need something like the Kapp Putsch to happen in 1919, and discredit cooperation between the SPD and the FKs. Get rid of Noske, get rid of the collaborationist leadership in the SPD, and leave the rest of the SPD with the sense that the Freikorps and the rest of the far...

I don't know. Julian strikes me as being as megalomaniacal as Constantine. Of course Ammianus admired Julian, so we'll never really know whether Julian scuttled peace with the Alamanni to gain glory in battle... Frankly, Procopius seems better than Julian, and relatives who weren't emperor seem...

He consistently overestimated Confederate strength. If he had better intelligence, he might have been more aggressive, especially in the Peninsula.

All these were designed for use against various fortifications, and then adapted for use against tanks. So if shaped charges were becoming common weapons for use against fortifications, they would make things more dangerous for tanks. And a lot of new weapons technologies were introduced in the...

POD: Shaped charges come into widespread use during the First World War. The principle had been known for decades. The German engineers had spent the pre-war years looking for technologies, such as super-heavy mortars, suitable for attacking fortifications. Many armies had introduced...

Most of the Russian armies invaded Galicia, and only two armies invaded Prussia, at French insistence. And the invasion of Galicia seems to have been better-prepared than the fiasco in Prussia. Basically, the what-if is what happened, until, because of the course of the war in the west, the...

I think this would also be more interesting with militant Cybellines.

I think the Saxon and Frankish Christian traditions might result, on the fringes, in syncretism regarding Woden, while the Gutisk Christian tradition might result, on the fringes, in syncretism incorporating anyone but Woþins. Gutisk Christianity faced persecution from the early Woþins-religion...

The Russian plan was to conduct a holding action in Poland and Lithuania and an all-out offensive through Galicia. The French, during the crisis, demanded an offensive into Germany. But the offensive into Prussia was far smaller than the offensive into Galicia.

I think that if one power controls the most productive land, it will have a strong position to, sooner or later, extend its control over the marginal lands. So to retain Pictish, Scottish, Cymric and Cornovian independence, you would probably want more than one England - such as Wessex, Mercia...