Bizarre moments in history .

There was also that one Japanese soldier who fought for Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, all in more or less the same war.
He was Korean, if you're thinking about the same famous one I am remembering. Drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, captured by the Soviets, drafted into the Soviet Army, captured by the Germans, forced into the Wehrmacht, and finally captured by Americans on D-Day, who were not into the habit of forcing prisoners of war to fight for them.
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
Christian VII of Denmark who was nearly always masturbating even so much that it interfered with duties. When foreign dignitaries came he would stop it only to leapfrog over them when they bowed and randomly slap them in the face every so often.

What dafaq?

I'm sorry, but calling BS.

No one, and I mean no one, can be that batshit crazy.
 
Interesting, I didn't know that before! Also, strange that India would be seen as three different countries given that contacts between China and the Indian subcontinent go back at least as far as the spread of Buddhism into East Asia, and they called it Tianzhu then.

The problem was threefold: 1) Different places had different names for the same area; 2) historical records had different names for the same area; 3) There was no 'standardized foundation' by which to compare all these individual placenames.

Chinese cartography up to the 1830s was pretty much in a state of 'geographical agnosticism' - there was no consensus on the shape of the world and even on how to depict the shape of the world. Unlike Western geographers which eventually developed mathematics-based cartography as a way of reconciling competing geographical claims, each new Chinese geographer basically had to reconcile his own research with the historical record to deduce the relative position of foreign lands against each other, which meant that it was easy to miss nuances like duplicate names.

The appearance of European world maps, in this regard, simply meant another piece of source material to be reconciled with the records, rather than being accepted immediately as a definitive depiction of the world.
 
Napoleon's Hundred Days.

The exiled Emperor returns to France with an army of 1000 men, incites soldiers sent to arrest him to defect instead, and reconquers the nation without firing a shot.

What a bunch of romantic nonsense.
 
He was Korean, if you're thinking about the same famous one I am remembering. Drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, captured by the Soviets, drafted into the Soviet Army, captured by the Germans, forced into the Wehrmacht, and finally captured by Americans on D-Day, who were not into the habit of forcing prisoners of war to fight for them.

That should be right. I couldn't remember all the details before.
 
Contrary to both Nationalist and Communist propaganda, the Republican revolution of 1911 wasn't a romantic, glorious uprising of patriotic Chinese against a decadent and corrupt Qing Dynasty. It was all an accident.

It started in the Russian district of Wuchang when a bomb set by one of many feuding rebel groups (see The Life of Brian) exploded before schedule, forcing them to rebel. At around 7 pm that evening, with the city under martial law, the garrison's commander entered the barracks to find them empty, with the sentry dozing off at the door.

The commander yelled, "What the hell are you doing here, rebelling?"

The sentry replied "Yes, we're rebelling. So what?"

The two brawled on the floor until the commander was somehow shot by the sentry's rifle. That became famous as the Accidental First Shot.

The sentry then miraculously killed all the loyal officers sent to subdue him.
 
I was going to leap in and be all "Uhhh no..." but then realised there were two Defenstrations of Prague!

During the second in 1618 the three men thrown out of the windows AND SURVIVED the seventy foot fall.

Also, whilst on the subject of falling out of windows, I give you (via Prof. Wikipedia), Henry II of Champagne, King of Jerusalem 1192-1197:

The second defenestration was the spark that started the Thirty Years War.

According to the Catholics they survived "Held aloft on the wings of Angels",

according to the Protestants ... fell into the castle midden.
 
What dafaq?

I'm sorry, but calling BS.

No one, and I mean no one, can be that batshit crazy.

http://hpy.sagepub.com/content/24/2/227.abstract'

The current thinking is that he suffered from schizophrenia and had serious bouts of hallucinations and mental suffering. By all accounts, however, he was intelligent, charismatic and cultured during his times of clarity. However all accounts agree that he completely insane at other times.
 
An interesting one - when Hitler began dabbling in extremist politics after WWI, he actually looked towards Communism and the Spartacist League for an answer until the Spartacist Uprising in 1919.
 
The Wars of the Roses?

These started because Henry VI leaned on a series of unpopular favourites, then made a highly unpopular marriage which produced a son whose legitimacy was called in question. He went on to quarrel with powerful nobles, and in particular with the Earl of Warwick, whose support enabled the Yorkists to overthrow him after years of civil war. His dynasty was destroyed.

The Yorkist Edward IV replaced him, promptly made an (if possible) even more unpopular marriage, and proceeded to favour various of his wife's relatives, who were soon even more unpopular than Henry VI's favourites had been. This marriage led him to also quarrel with the Earl of Warwick, and almost lose his throne as a result. It produced two sons whose legitimacy was called into question, which led to the destruction of his dynasty within two years of his death.

Talk about an exercise in futility. For all the good those years of civil war did, we might as well have stuck with Henry VI. Would any novelist dare to use such a scenario in fiction?
 
One moment I find rather bizarre, in an ironic way, is the Succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603. Considering all the CENTURIES of bloodshed the two nations had engaged each other in- and how many times England came close to extinguish Scottish independence altogether, it's ironic that on the basis of a claim of seeing the dying Queen Elizabeth I make a crown symbol over her head that THAT was enough to get the English government to set aside Henry VIII's Will [that would had one of Grey female cousins succeed], have them send a messenger with Elizabeth's ring to Edinburgh ASAP and then have James VI race to London to take to English throne with nary an objection much less any protests or English governmental opposition. Had any playwright, author or pamphleteer had written this scenario even a fortnight before, no one in either country would have believed it!
 
Had no idea that the good king came to power that way :confused: Wonder if the reason they chose James in the first place was because the alternatives were even worse ?
 
Not all that bizarre, really-it's the sort of thing that happens all the time in wars-but I have always been fond of the (popular press) story of the death of Union General John Sedgwick.
 
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