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Austria's chief problem there was that the peacetime army was ridiculously small, and was kept that way by (mostly Hungarian-imposed) budget constraints. That smaller army needed to serve as a cadre around which to build a larger mobilized force after the outbreak of war. Instead, it was ground...

But they did try it against Germany. In the Council of Ministers, there were several key voices, but the most relevant to this question were those of Pyotr Durnovo, the minister of the interior back in 1905, and Aleksandr Krivoshein, the minister of agriculture. In February 1914, Durnovo...

An international-relations miscalculation. The Central Powers hoped for a limited war, and also wanted to use the crisis to break the Franco-Russian Dual Alliance if at all possible. This meant waiting until after the late-July French state visit to Petersburg, so that the French could not...

Yes. The Austrian council of ministers had already resolved on the ultimatum, which was designed to provoke a war, before Hoyos delivered the news that Germany would back them. The Habsburg government had been burned by Germany twice in the past two years over Balkan affairs: after both...

Not really. Unlike some pro-German historians/conspiracy theorists (e.g. Terence Zuber or Niall Ferguson) I don't think that the Entente powers engineered the whole war as a way to destroy Germany. Fundamentally, the war happened because the international system of the time was 'stacked' against...

"Continuing to work on Irish Home Rule" would have saddled Asquith with the first shooting war in the British Isles since Wolfe Tone, and the PM knew it. Going to war in Europe was the best way to avoid a civil war at home. Asquith already knew before 1 August that Bonar Law would back him up on...

The UK was going to declare war regardless of whether the Germans invaded Belgium, and in the event that the Germans did not, the French and British both had plans to violate Belgian (and, in the British case, Dutch) neutrality in order to use Belgium as a staging ground for attacks on Germany...

This is semi-possible if "Persia" only refers to Fars and not to Iran. :p

So, what exactly constitutes a "win" for Russia that also would be considered a "win" for Austria and France?

Define "Italy".

Seems like a generalized assumption of European prosperity, cultural and otherwise, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? I don't much like that use of the term, but whatever.

Some of these descriptions seem to be grossly twisted by bias, and that's coming from someone who dislikes all monarchs on principle regardless of whether they have the epithet "the Great" or not. Of course, I imagine that was the point, but still.

While I agree that, for the most part, the perception of the Renaissance is total tosh and that Renaissance propaganda is maybe two-thirds of the reason for most people's understanding of late antiquity and the early medieval period sucking cock, there was an economic discontinuity in the...

Since basically his entire reign was spent defeating them and their allies...nothing changed?

Um, you're going to need to be a bit more specific than that. You just going to handwave the Skleroi and Phokades and Kometopouloi away?

Alareiks was not an enemy of Rome any more than Vitellius was.

What bugs me about the Paris Gun is that it had excellent potential for being at least somewhat useful instead of a pointless terror weapon and contemporary German commanders recognized this: change the targets to the British lines of supply. And then they ignored it.

I don't think there's evidence for that outside Jerome, and he's, ah, not exactly a linguistic authority outside of Greek, Ciceronian Latin, and Hebrew.

Yeah, unlike the Maus or Ratte, the Paris Gun and the B-2 had/have viable military uses.

Actually, I'd say it confirms it. When the Balkans finally were united, they were united by a power - the Ottomans, obviously - that controlled less Asiatic territory than Nikaia had under the rule of Ioannes III Doukas Vatatzes. The Ottomans were clearly a Balkans-first power in those early...