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Chinese is not an alphabet at all, and neither are any of the abjads, technically, though even all the abjads (including all Indian, Ethiopian and Central Asian scripts) are cousins to Greek via Aramaic. Glagolithic, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic etc. are all Greek-descended or co-evolved. And...

So how about simple "no alphabets" then because all major modern alphabets are related to each other and Greek is the direct source of the vast majority of them.

The Magic Goes Away?

Considering that everyone in this thread has heretofore talked of NOTHING but actual historical for-reals no-jokes mass-produced plate, this statement is just startlingly bizarre. At all grades, from cuirassier to pikeman, plate armour was indeed mass-produced. Most of that armour covered more...

Lithuania (later, granted) even had its own orthodox metropolitan. So a non-trivial chance of this, yes.

Yes, I'd say that the colonization of Zalesye would not stop at all but rather continue. The intermixing of population is also an open question: Cumans and Black Hats are an integral part of every period Rus (and Georgian and sometimes Hungarian and later Bulgarian) armies. It might just simply...

The Almain Rivert factory basically produced all kinds of plate armour including infantry half-harnesses. I'd agree that yes basically that's the way to go. Some kind of jack-of-plates as a second life for broken plate could also be a backup option. Making mail is cheaper on the materials and...

Goncharov describes something similar with Putyatin's Nagasaki mission. During the first meeting, the Russian side cooperated a little bit (without taking boots off), but the moment they understood this was going to get dragged out they insisted on chairs and the whole thing.

I confess to sharing the very same sentiment. This is just such an... unexpected topic.

I don't really know about that. Most domestic servants were paid rather poorly compared to skilled craftsmen, and basically my theory is that they made up for it by taking bribes left and right from those who needed information or access to their master. I guess it might be folded into the...

There are medieval baths all over Europe. Didn't help with the diseases at all. Neither did the plagues spare the Sauna belt (Russia, Baltics, Scandinavia). To be honest, I don't think that pubic shaving fashion (as a narrow subject treated here) could maintain itself absent a commercial...

No potatoes in the narrow sense not only affects Europe but literally everywhere else, including the Mediterranean and China, where they're an under-emphasized but major source of calories in various forms. In the wider sense of "no Columbian exchange" it probably affects some parts of the world...

So just as an aside, "Chinese tea for Russian furs" is a serious oversimplification of the Kyakhta trade. It's more like "Chinese tea and some other stuff for manufactured goods and livestock products" - from the 17th to the 19th c. Russia exported live cows and horses, leather and leather...

No dice. Arab categories for themselves and their European slaves are easily distinguishable. Wrong again. Being any kind of non-Muslim other than Christian made no difference. And slaves weren't marketed as "Christian" either but by colour or regional provenance. And the answer is a clear...

White. They captured and sold pagans too (or bought them from other vendors, Jewish, Christian or pagan. Lots of slaves were also sold by their own people or even their own families). And heterodox believers of all kinds got treated similarly. How they'd be classified once they reached the...

The unarguable existence of massive slave-hunting and slave-trading networks (mostly Barbary and Ottoman) of early modernity that specifically sought out slaves from European people racialized as "white" or its Arabic category-equivalent would instantly dismiss that notion. There were racial or...

A shoe that you can eat with ketchup? Belarus is not a failed country. It has an illiberal government. That's all. Belarus has a diversified economy with a per-capita in line with former Yugoslav countries including those in the EU, decent employment situation, universal literacy, functional...

Okay, wild crazy idea: if Britain won't, how about some OTHER state offers to ship the Irish to THEIR colonies/countries? Perhaps some Catholic settler colony that desires more of that specific kind of workforce. Thinking France, Spain or the Latin American countries here. Possibly protestant...

Most of all, I don't think the meager resources spent on conquering the New World (mostly not by the Crown but by private ventures anyway) would make even the slightest dent in fighting the Ottomans and their client states, really. This isn't to say that Spain cannot be a lot more successful on...

FWIW at the time of conversion, the early Russian princes weren't even aware of the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic. The presence of some saints and feasts in the yearly calendar attests that. If there was such a thing as eastern rite Catholicism in the 11th c. (so that Rus could still...