1) Did Europeans from east of the HRE take part in Levantine Crusading? Poles, Hungarians, Russians, Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians? Why, why not?
2) Did Russians invading the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th century cite Crusader antecedents, or no antecedents except anti-Ottoman ones from Romanov/Muscovite history?
2) I know that Scythian, Sarmatian, Alan/Ossetian and Armenian are closer to the eastern, Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. Are the Slavic languages linguistically closer to Indo-Iranian, or to the language groups to their west, Germanic, Baltic, Greek, Romance, Gaelic?
3) How long did the Abbasid Caliphate last as a relatively centralized state under Arab rulers rather than effectively separate states under the rule or Turkic, or Circassian slave soldiers?