This is a good one that gets repeated all the time.
"Incompetents", yes but "Napoleonic wars" part I never heard.
This is a good one that gets repeated all the time.
Mongolian "Millions" are anything but proved and most of the XX century killings (many tens of millions) were not religion based but are not considered OK.
The "white washing" largely is a result of better historical techniques as opposed to forgiving killings in the name of tolerance.I think they're the only civilization in history that significantly decreased global population by killing as many people as they did. If anything, I think they've been whitewashed way too much of late. Killing millions is a-okay so long as you don't discriminate by religion, apparently.
Honestly, that sounds like a better legacy than being known for impaling your own subjects...
I think I have one:
King John was a pathetic dumbass who couldn't lead his way out of a paper bag.
That doesn't really fit though because that same kind of idea, persecuting religious minorities, was just as true in other countries courts as well, normally with FAR more brutality.The fact that they prosecuted "heretics" who were mostly converted Muslims and Jews is probably a part of why they're seen so dimly. Doesn't really matter how "fair" they are if their main purpose was to persecute religious minorities.
So you think they killed less than a million? Far less, even? I don't know enough to make my own estimate, but that seems like pretty radical revisionism given the estimates I have seen.
I blame Disney's Robin Hood.
Was Herodes really a vile tyrant ?
So if some idiot like Dawkins comes along thinking he's dismantled the entire medieval worldview because "how could there have been days before the Sun was made???", you should know better.
To be fair, that probably comes out of the areas where Union occupation during the war was rather brutal, such as when union soldiers executed this farmer's son because they (inccorectly) identified him as a confederate.
The farmer went on to be a sniper with over 200 confirmed kills in the Mississippi river valley
That doesn't really fit though because that same kind of idea, persecuting religious minorities, was just as true in other countries courts as well, normally with FAR more brutality.
The Inquisition seems largely to have been demonised by its political enemies, particularly in other countries, and even moreso in countries that went Protestant as a way of pretending that their own witch hunts and murder sprees, which both occurred later than the worst of the Inquisition, and were largely more brutal, were better than those barbarous Catholics.
Maybe. But if he'd personally had them killed it would have been done in a way that improves his position. Richard was too shrewd to just bump them off.
Sounds a bit like the plot of a Mel Gibson movie.
(As is well-known, there are two sure-fire ways to die in a movie. One is to be related to Mel Gibson; the other is to kill someone related to Mel Gibson.)
Has anyone considered his Queen, Anne Neville, as a possible culprit?
After all, should anything happen to Richard a few years down the line, the by then near-adult Princes would be a big threat to their young son. And as the Kingmaker's daughter she had been through a frightful series of ups and downs, so might have acted first and stopped to ponder afterwards. And it would explain Richard's silence on the matter as, had the story come out, he would have had no way to clear himself.
The British army of the 19th century was led by incompetents promoted based on chin size (the smaller the better) rather than actual talent.
Related: the generals of WW1 were all a bunch of incompetents obsessed with fighting the Napoleonic Wars.
What did chin size have to do with the quality of the soldiers? I know the duke of Cambridge wasn't interested in brains, but this is the first I hear about chins. Sorry for the dumb question
The latter wasn't totally untrue. There were several thousand deaths after the Armistice had been signed, but before it came into effect. Several officers sought a last bit of glory storming positions from which the Germans had already agreed to withdraw. Some of these may have been due to delays in the news getting around, but by no means all.
What *is* mythical is the surprisingly widespread notion that this was a specifically British phenomenon. In fact, Americans and French were equally prone to it. The latter, indeed, avoided awkward questions by backdating all their 11/11 casualties to the previous day.
The reality: Spanish people in the countryside carried on performing their crypto Christian/paganism and were not threatened by the few people affected by the inquisition.
It's not a mystery that what most people believe about a certain topic isn't necessarily true and about Dark Legends there're a lot of commonplaces that are regarded as "pure gold".
I'd like to have a list of them to help me and anyone else who is interested in Actual and/or Alternate History. I hope you'll help me with your ideas 'cause I know I'm not perfect and I may be victim of some of this Legends too.
I'll start with the most famous ones:
- Christianity caused the end of Rome.
- The Vikings were uncivilized savages.
- The Mongols were uncivilized savages.
- The Renaissance started only after (and because) Costantinople was conquered in 1453.
- The Inquisition burned millions (According to someone even trillions!) of innocent witches/heretics.
- Nobody before Columbus knew there was anything on the other side of the Atlantic.
- Spanish Dark Legend (The one that gave me inspiration.):
- - Military:
- - - Spanish army was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - - Spanish navy was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - Economy:
- - - There were no banks in Spain before 1700.