Search results

Yeah, no. In the 1500s it's a major city about as big as any in Europe, sitting in a pretty good agricultural region. By 1600 it's also the place where the wealth of Siberia and the Volga goes through (along with local production and Bukharan/Caspian trade). The reason why they didn't expand...

Moscow was over 100K inhabitants in the 1500s. Russia settled all of the Volga, Urals and Siberia by mid-1600s. Russia had a permanent, uniformed army, permanent government ministries, and administered a territory not too far off from modern day's. 1500s England couldn't manage any of that. It's...

England's dominance isn't really any earlier than Russia's or that of Qing. Even the population explosions happened in the same timeframe. Early period: France, Ottomans. Later period, England, Russia, Netherlands.

It's a pretty challenging journey and kind of out of character for what the Norse adventurers did in the area. If you're looking for historical things to build on...well. There's this (fragmentary and not totally reliable summary, but a place to start): Caspian Raids And this: Journey Beyond...

I'm sorry, how and since when is "white" a genetic category? White and European are not interchangeable terms and neither are really meaningful. Then again OP started the confusion from the get-go.

And while there were cossacks in Siberia after Siberia's conquest (so called Siberian Service Army) and service cossacks (gorodovye) had settled there ever since (my people, incidentally), Siberian Cossacks in the sense of the Siberian Line Host only date back to 1808 (which included lots and...

As they all made different choices in the 20th c. from a similar baseline, I think comparing Seychelles, Comoros, Mayotte and Mauritius is as close as we can get to an actual real-life case study about how post-Colonial (or in Mayotte's case, continued association with the colonial power)...

Prussia also had to mandate potato cultivation from above, only a little earlier and with a bit less violence than Russia (as you'd expect really). I think this wasn't an uncommon situation, really.

I'm sure that's just Crusader Kings II. :p As for people being really stubborn in the face of obvious-in-retrospect improvements: some Russian peasants used sokha instead of a plough into the 19th c. despite their neighbours (say, German settlers) using actual ploughs for centuries. And of...

No idea, especially since this is all by different authors from different generations, but the Geats are Gutii and the Goths are Goths. Russian chronicles really didn't deal with Swedish matters very much at any point, so the Geats are mostly mentioned during the Invitation of the Varangians...

Glad someone else shares my hobby-horse. I think that honestly, the truly unique Petrine innovations were 1. the (de-facto) lifelong conscription (in fact, the whole country was subordinated to the army for generations because of that, IMO) 2. amazing amounts of new gentry created (which both...

Yes there is no real reason to assume it talks about Crimea specifically, only the seashore is a given. Primary Chronicle does mention the Swedish Geats and uses a slightly different word for them (Gutii/Gutiane vs. Goti, Gotfi). That could mean there's a distinction or simply usage changed over...

Not a good assumption: there are no Russian-written Greek-language texts that survive. The Russian church used Church Slavonic instead, in which there are lots of documents. It was a related and somewheat mutually intelligible language to various East Slavic dialects. This is a very very...

Tale of Igor's Campaign mentions Goth maidens singing along the sea (so this would be late 12th c.), which I think is evidence for at least some medieval Goths in southern Rus. It's fairly decent with the geography otherwise so I wouldn't think it's just a piece of antiquarian literary flourish.

Britain of course, because it has the ships, the interests and the contacts. But in interests of the alternate part of alternate history: RAC (not Russia per se) had some interest while no French entity did, though neither are completely out of the picture as far as establishing a protectorate...

I would imagine they'd call for the Estates to elect another noble house, but who it could be at the time, I don't know. Especially post-Peter: new nobles and old nobles will definitely not align.