1. The Emperor who promised to pay them was overthown and the new guy didn't want to pay themI can think of three right off the bat:
1) That the Romans invited the crusaders (4th Crusade) to Constantinople in the early 1200s, then weirdly didn’t pay them after having talked about paying them, at which point the crusaders sacked the city. We think of the eastern Roman Empire as Byzantium, but they thought of themselves as Romans.
2) That the descendants of Genghis Khan seemed to alternate between awesome conquerers and hopeless drunks, and no group of elders or regional leaders rose up to assert political power?
3) That following the successful sea voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the 1400s, China weirdly turns inward?
Ottomans turning from a small beylik into a large Empire from Vienna to the Indian Ocean is pretty... wankish...
It happens but a lot have to go right.
Or the Safaviyya Order takes over entire Persia as a Sufi Order... Imagine the Jesuits or so taking over the Balkans and force convert them to Catholicism within two centuries.
The fact that it happened so much demonstrates that it was normal, not a wank. Or possibly that history is full of wankers.Pretty much everything that happened in Asia till contemporary times is a huge wank. Empires stretching a good portion of the world rose and fell there like nothing.
The fact that it happened so much demonstrates that it was normal, not a wank. Or possibly that history is full of wankers.
@Jared has been knighted by the Queen for his excellence in representing the British people's perspectives on historyhistory is full of wankers.
How much of history was a disproportionate dominance in pertinence to potential?
@Jared has been knighted by the Queen for his excellence in representing the British people's perspectives on history
OTL is the most plausible timeline by definition, If you mean "wank" as in "one group doing better relative to other groups, especially due to luck," history is full of them. But every one of them were fully plausible.
Didn't say he was, the Queen knights foreigners alot (relatively speaking)Great post, but dude's actually an Aussie, though, TBH, not British.
The better you understand the period, the more plausible you realize every major historical event was.there are some things that happened in our universe, that were arguably not all that plausible even by the most objective standards(like, for example, the wild success of the Mongols perhaps being one of the more extreme examples of this).
OTL is the most plausible timeline by definition.
OTL is the most plausible timeline by definition, so there can have been no implausible "wank" IOTL.
If you mean "wank" as in "one group doing better relative to other groups, especially due to luck," history is full of them. But every one of them were fully plausible.
Or not, we don't know the deep details about the guy, why he though flying on the channel (that has a terrible weather) was a good idea, etc. It goes the same point Intransigent Southerner made and Lord_Vespasian illustrated, in a vacuum some event can look freakish and improbable, when you research deeper, link the causes, background and realities such "freak incidents of history" makes a lot of sense.Five days ago a professional footballer (Emiliano Sala) disappeared in a plane voyage, and most likely has perished. OTL now includes this outcome. Can you really argue that the most plausible outcome for the life of this footballing star was to disappear in a plane at age 28? I think a timeline in which he survived would have been more plausible.