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Some Catholic Church fun facts off the top of my head: The high point for clerical influence on society (not necessarily politics) probably wasn't the Middle Ages, but for the Catholic Church the Baroque. You can see this with simple statistics: Depending on where you were in Europe, the percentage of clergy in the population could go from 0,2% (Northern and Eastern parts of the Austrian monarchy) and 2-3% (most of Italy). In some cities in Tuscany, more than 10% of the population was clergy! Pope Gregory XVI (reg. 1831-1846) was an ultra-reactionary who opposed gas lighting and railways, seeing them as satanic harbingers of liberalism and modernism. On the other hand, he was a great supporter of art and archaeology, and the last non-bishop to be elected Pope (and consequently being ordained bishop after his election). Teodolfo Mertel (1806-1899) was the last cardinal who never even was ordained a priest (this was made impossible by the new Code of Canon Law promulgated in 1917) Until the early 20th century, various Catholic monarchs claimed the prerogative to "suggest" (i.e. appoint) so-called "crown-cardinals" who were supposed to represent the monarchs' interest in the college of cardinals, especially during the conclave which elects new popes. Three Catholic monarchies (France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire) claimed for themselves the right to veto any candidate brought forth during a conclave. Though never officially recognised by the Church, such a veto still carried heavy political significance. The last time this right was actually used was by the Austria-Hungarian emperor Francis Joseph in 1903. Poppe Pius X, who instead emerged out of the conclave as Pope, banned this practice under threat of excommunication shortly afterwards. For medieval and early modern Catholics, the baptism was a necessary requirement to be able to enter heaven after death. This opened up some problems, especially in the case of stillborn children or infants who died before receiving this sacrament (infant mortality was much, much higher than it is today). For most Catholics it was the usual practice to baptise children at the very latest three days after their birth, far into the 20th century. To ensure that as many children as possibly could enter heaven, it was even common for midwives to baptise endangered children immediately after birth or, in some cases, even when they were still in utero (laypeople could and still can baptise others when those are in grave dangers of dying soon). For those babies who still didn't make it, there was still the possibility of a miracle occuring in sme chapels and churches where dead infants were said to be revived for a short time - just enough to quickly baptise them. Most of those altars where this was possible were found in France and Central Europa, but none in Italy and Spain/Portugal. Not all of the dead children benefitted from this miracle (it was probably a reddening of the cheeks due to the altar candles or similar) and had to be buried outside of a church's graveyard, as those were reserved for the baptised. Many could be baptised though, to the great relief of their parents. Many of the clergy, especially the other echelons, staunchly resisted this practice and repeatedly forbade it, but throughout the Late Middle Ages and then again in the Baroque era, tens of thousands of dead infants could be "revived" and therefore baptised. Some cases of that are reported even into the 20th century. Catholic theologians speculated about the existence of a "limbo of infants" for a long time - those children who died before being baptised were said to go there. It was never officially made to dogma, however. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI authorised the publication of a theological paper which stated that their souls probably go to heaven directly. Media reports of the Pope "closing Limbo" are nonsensical, though, as the Catholic Church's position was and still is that you cannot say anything for certain concerning the infants' fate after death.And some non-ecclesiastical ones: During the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern Era, doctorate students at the University of Salamanca in Spain were supposed to meditate in the university's chapel for the entire night before their final exam without food and drink. After passing the exam, he was treated as a hero, paraded through the city and even a bullfight was given in his honour, after which he would paint his name with the bull's blood on the city walls (some of these are still legible). If he failed it, he was booed instead and pelted with rotten fruit by the people of the town who had hoped for a good party. In 1813, the 14th King's Hussars, a British cavalry regiment, were part of the Battle of Vitoria and captured the chamberpot of Napoleon's brother Joseph, then the King of Spain. They still retain it (though they've been combined with other units to the "King's Royal Hussars" now), and the officers traditionally drink champagne out of it on mess nights. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (where Jesus is said to have been crucified, buried and where he rose from the dead) is entrusted to the care of six different churches (Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Coptic, Ethiopian Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox), and generally the respective custodians despise each other, with fistfights over trivial matters being a regular occurence. One wooden ladder has been leaning on the church's outer wall for at least 258 years, as the walls are defined as common ground and nothing can be changed there without the consent of all six churches - and in 1964 Pope Paul VI decreed that this ladder shouldn't be moved before all the churches had reunited as a visible sign of the division between the churches now, so it'll probably remain in place for a long time to come. In 1325, the constant tensions between the rival city-states of Bologna and Modena came to a head when a couple of Modenese soldiers managed to slip into Bologna's city centre and stole a bucket full with minor loot. A humiliated Bologna demanded the bucket's return, and, when it was refused, declared war. 2,000 people died for the retrieval of this loving bucket. The Bolognese lost, and it can still be admired in Modena's town hall to this day. The shortest war known to history would be the Anglo-Zanzibar War fought for 40 minutes on 27 August 1896. To make it short: in Zanzibar a sultan acceded to the throne whom the British didn't like, and when he refused to step down, they shot his palace to pieces until he was forced to flee. Around 500 people were wounded or killed during the bombardment.
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Nov 4, 2015 14:11
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I once watched a documentary on traditions in British military units and the officers said that the chamberpot was probably the best-cleaned item in the entire barracks. Some more for the road: Czar Peter I "the Great" of Russia (reg. 1682-1725) was determined to drag his realm kicking and screaming into modernity after being enormously impressed with what he saw on an incognito 18-month tour through Western Europe (which he had initially begun to ask for aid against the Ottomans). Not only did he upgrade his army, reorganise Russian beueaucracy and create a powerful navy out from virtually nothing, he also thought that even European fashion should be emulated. Most men in Russia wore beards back then, as opposed to the clean-shaven trend that was popular in Europe at the time. In 1698 Peter met with a number of high-ranking military officers and noblemen when he suddenly pulled out a massive barber's knife and started shaving them (they were too stunned by this turn of events to protest and probably also frightened by the loving 6'8" tall czar leaning over them with a sharp knife). Afterwards, he sent out police officers with the order to forcibly remove the facial hair from everyone who wasn't a clergyman or a peasant,. When this proved deeply unpopular for some reason, he instead instituted a (progressive, so a rich merchant would have to pay much more than a poor craftsman) "beard tax". After paying the tax, you would receive "a copper or silver token with a Russian Eagle on one side and on the other, the lower part of a face with nose, mouth, whiskers, and beard. It was inscribed with two phrases: 'the beard tax has been taken' (lit: 'Money taken') and 'the beard is a superfluous burden'" Early modern Spanish confraternities (i.e. religious organisations consisting mainly of laypeople) knew how to party; we know of confraternities organising bullfights, others employing a full-time "dance master" and one installing a wine fountain for its patron saint's feast day. In the early 19th century, the various German states and principalities forcibly annexed and confiscated enormous amounts of Church.owned lands and goods. As retribution, they dioceses were promised annual monetary payments instead. These payments are transferred to them by the federal states to this day. Until recently, the state of Bavaria paid the rent for all its Catholic prelates and bishops as part of that deal, for example. The Austrian president stands in a direct line of continuity to the Austrian emperors and therefore to the Holy Roman Emperors as well. Part of this legacy is that he still has the power to grant academic titles to whomever he likes as well as legitimise children born out of wedlock. Matthias Kneißl (1875-1902) was a Bavarian outlaw who grew immensely popular with the common rural populace of his day, while being all the more hated by the authorities. He was captured after a massive gunfight and eventually sentenced to death - on a Monday, which led to his legendary saying "What a great start to the week!" All extant Celtic languages (Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Welsh and Breton) are members of the Insular Celtic Group, whereas all Continental Celtic languages have gone extinct. Cornish died a slow death during the 17th and 18th century, and the last native Manx speaker died in 1974. Both languages undergo revival efforts, though, and for both there's even a handful of native speakers again! The Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha (1634/34-1683) was the commander of a 100,000-man army set to destroy the Austrian Empire. After having besieged Vienna for amost two months, his army was routed by an international relief force led by the Polish king John Sobieski. As punishment for his failure, he was strangled to death with a silk cord in Belgrad on the orders of the sultan three months later.
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Nov 4, 2015 17:23
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Frogfingers posted:I think you'll find Breton quite continental. Besides this, Basque is a Celtic language, too, is it not? While Breton is indeed spoken on the continent, it was brought to the region by Britonic settlers from south-west England and Wales in the 4th century and therefore forms part of the "Insular Celtic" linguistic subgroup. You can still see this in the names of the petty kingdoms formed by them there: Domnonée (Devon), Cornouaille (Cornwall) and Léon (Caerleon in southern Wales). Basque is a so-called "language isolate", i.e. there are no known relatives of it. It is quite possibly the only remaining pre-Indo-European language of Europe. Samovar posted:I remember hearing (hearing, mind you, so it could be wrong) that the only European country that never had anti-Jewish laws on the books was Scotland. While that appears to be true, the reason might have been that there were simply no Jews in Scotland. The first verified account of a Jew living there permanently is from 1691, and in 1707 Scotland was incorporated into the United Kingdom and thereby also became subject to various anti-Jewish laws which were applied to Britain as a whole.
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Nov 4, 2015 18:16
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The Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was for three years in a relationship with the widow of composer Gustav Mahler, Alma. After they separated in 1914, Kokoschka volunteered as a soldier in WWI and got almost killed, but that proved to be not enough to get over her, so he commissioned a sex doll with Alma's face ( ) to be built in 1918. He was disappointed by the result and destroyed it shortly afterwards.When the Vienna state opera was built from 1863-69, public opinion soon turned against the building, calling it a "sunken box" and even "the Königgrätz of architecture" after a horrific defeat of Austrian forces to Prussia in 1866. Even the Emperor was reported to hate it, so architect Eduard van der Nüll succumbed to despair and killed himself, even though his wife was eight months pregnant. The Emperor was reportedly so shocked by the suicide that for the rest of his life he would comment on all matters of art and architecture simply with the stereotypical words "It was very nice, I enjoyed it". Near St Peter's Cathedral in Rome there is a small cemetery which is reserved for German- and Dutch-speaking Catholics who died in Rome. The "Campo Santo dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi" (Graveyard of the Germans and the Flemish) belongs to Italy, but is only accessible via Vatican City and is also administered by it. To visit it you have to go to a Swiss Guard and ask for it in German. Sorry, non-German-speaking tourists! 
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Nov 5, 2015 10:29
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Samovar posted:The Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismark, once challenged a member of the German government to a duel. His opponent chose sausages as the weapon. Sadly, this is probably untrue  While his opponent Rudolf Virchow (the famous doctor, who at the time was also sitting in the Prussian Diet for the liberal Progress Party which he had co-founded) was indeed challenged to a duel by him, it appears that he simply declined the duel and offered an apology instead.However, Bismarck once entered a real duel with Georg von Vincke, another old rival of his in the Prussian parliament! Vincke had alluded to an anecdote in which Bismarck as the Prussian representative in the German Federal Convention had started smoking in the plenary chamber to one-up the Austrian representative, who as president of the convention had been the only one allowed to smoke before then. Bismarck was highly annoyed by that indiscretion and openly doubted Vincke's education, upon Vincke challenged him to a duel by pistol. They met the following day and shot at each other, but both missed (probably deliberately?), and so the whole affair was ended amicably. Duels between politicians even happened after World War II. In 1967, two French parliamentarians fought a duel with swords (the winner even drew blood), and in 1971, the interior minister of Uruguay challenged the former minister of industry to a pistol duel after the latter had called him a coward. All four shots (each of the opponents was allowed to shoot twice) missed, however.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:49
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edit: ^^^ ^^^ lmaoI don't know why the English Wikipedia doesn't really mention this, but this account and especially the number of casualties is grossly exaggerated. The only contemporary source (the court report from 23 September 1788) mentions that baggage and retinue were sent forward to Karánsebes, with Austrian cavalry being supposed to protect it from Ottoman forces. In the dark it came to great confusion when parts of that cavalry mistook each other for Ottomans and opened fire, upon which a part of the retinue led the waggons behind and fled to Karánsebes on horseback. Some waggons were lost in the ensuing chaos, and a good number of Austrian soldiers died in the skirmish, but the official account mentions "only" 150 dead. 10,000 KIA with nary a contemporary source sounds suspiciously like a later legend (there are no Ottoman or Hungarian sources on this at all, by the way), and indeed this number only appears in accounts of the battle written at least 60 years later.
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Nov 10, 2015 16:03
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Red Bones posted:In the 1690s Scotland attempted to get in on the colonialism business by trying to make a land route across Panama. This involved a huge chunk of Scotland's national wealth, because very few international backers were keen on the project, so the Scottish public contributed a lot of the funds in small donations. The plan was a complete failure, bankrupted large chunks of Scotland (it took away roughly 25% of Scotland's net wealth iirc) and was a significant factor in the country forming a union with England a few years later. I once made an effort post about that in the old pictures thread of D&D. Fascinating stuff. Regarding other relatively unknown colonial ventures:
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Nov 11, 2015 16:16
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Batman, son of Suparman, jailed in Singapore 
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Nov 11, 2015 19:06
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Honj Steak posted:Jeanne Calment (1875-1997) met Van Gogh as a teenager and she remembered the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Apparently van Gogh didn't leave the best impression, either - she called him a "dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable" man I remember when I was reading random Wikipedia articles a couple of years ago and then stumbled on the article on a Puerto-Rican man who was still alive then and remembered when American forces annexed the former Spanish colony in 1898.  See this man? This is Conrad Heyer, an American farmer from Maine who posed for this portrait in 1852. He was 103 years old at the time. You're looking into the eyes of the earliest born person known to be photographed - Heyer was born in 1749 and fought in the Revolutionary War under George Washington.  In the same vein: this picture (though it is till debated) shows the Bavarian composer Max Keller (1770-1855) in the front of his house in Altötting along with his wife Josefa (to his left) and a number of friends. A hand-written signature on the back of the photo identifies the woman on his right as "Constanze Mozart" - no-one else than the widow of legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself! Apparently this photograph was taken in 1840, which is also the reason why some still claim the picture to be a hoax - the earliest known group photograph shot in the outside dates from 1843 (Association of Hamburg artists), and there is no known photograph from Altötting this early besides from that one. On the other hand, the man in the middle is definitely Keller (so the people you'll see sometimes online claiming that the photo looks more like it was shot in the 1870s can be easily dismissed), and experts from the Bavarian police identified several facial features found in both the photograph and older painted portraits of Constanze Mozart. Personally I think that this shows Mozart, and I also think that this is unbelievably cool. The 1843 group photo I linked has a much better quality, so one effect it also has is even stronger on me: the realisation that this photo was taken over 170 years ago!  There was no Germany yet, in most European countries monarchy was still seen as the God-given standard of governance. In Austria (which at the time still held Venice) Emperor Ferdinand was ruling along with his trusted chancellor Metternich, while central Italy was still ruled by the the Pope. The revolution of 1848 was still years away - Marx was still in Cologne, preparing for a move to Paris after being forced to leave the newspaper he had been working for. Slavery was still legal and widespread in the American south, and the Civil War was still 18 years away. And yet here we are, looking at photographs of people who were alive back then. I love this stuff.
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Nov 13, 2015 11:43
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Disinterested posted:Frederick William of Prussia, Frederick the great's father, hated the French so much that he had people executed in traditional French clothes. He was also an appalling father and had canes with which to beat William placed around his palaces so that something was always on hand during his episodes of gout. Frederick William was a complete nutcase. He loved his army so much that 85% of all state expenses were directed to the army. The entire society was militarised, so much that at its peak 5% of the entire population stood in arms with God knows how many being in a supporting role. He despised the Baroque showmanship at his father's court so much that he cut down expenses on literally everything except the army. When he was a kid, he grew up togerther with George August of Hanover, the later King George I of England. He beat him up on the reg, and George loving hated Frederick for that for the rest of his life. And when his son, the later Frederick the Great, tried to escape his father's madness together with a friend, Hand Hermann von Katte (who may or may not have been his lover). The escape attempt failed, and Frederick William forced his own son to watch as Katte was executed. And the funniest thing? Even though Frederick William built up Prussia's army to one of the strongest forces of its time, he was still super cautious in all of his foreign policy. Some say that he simply treated his army as others might their model trains: they will spare no expenses to build up a massive collection, but actually use them in a way that might (even slightly) hurt them? Never.
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Nov 14, 2015 00:16
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xthetenth posted:Pretty sure he only really tried to start one war, the Seven Years' War was looming when they went into Saxony. After that he tried to increase power by modernizing rather than fighting wars. Nah, he did more than that. When he came to power in 1740, he was hailed as one of the biggest hopes of the enlightened/"liberal" wing all over Europe, and at first he seemed to actually fulfill this role, for example when one of the first tings he did after ascending to the throne was abolishing torture. For a time people even dared to dream that he might be a fitting successor to Emperor Charles VI of Austria, who had died unexpectedly a couple months into Frederick's reign - this was doubly significant, as the Imperial Crown was traditionally linked to the Catholic Church, and even considering the possiility of a Protestant Emperor showed how many hoped were directed towards him. This all pretty much ended when he ordered Prussian troops to march into Silesia, which was then part of the Bohemian crown and belonged to the Hapsburg Empire. Charles VI had left only one daughter, Maria Theresia, and for her he had to change the Austrian order of succession as female rulers hadn't been possible beforehand. To ascertain the other powers' recognition of a possible female successor he had negotiated the so-called "Pragmatic Sanction" of 1713 which changed the order of succession to the throne and to which pretty much all the powers of Europe had declared that they would recognise his daughter as his legitimate successor to the Austrian possessions. Only two months after Charles' death Frederick took a big fat dump on all this when he pretty much blackmailed Maria Theresia by demanding Silesia in exchange for a renewed recognition of her rule. He didn't even wait for an Austrian reply to arrive and ordered his troops into Silesia only five days later. Together with a powerful coalition of other powers who smelt blood he started a war against Austria just because he could. When the outmatched Austrian military had to surrender soon afterwards, he again gave his other allies a sudden "gently caress you" and negotiated a separate peace with Austria... ...only to ignore this peace again shortly afterwards when it looked like Austria might actually win its war against the other powers. This time he invaded Bohemia, but retreated once it became apparent that the Austrians wouldn't be beaten that easily there. And ten years after that, he started the Seven Years' War when he had Saxony invaded without any declaration of war. Frederick had always tried to play his wars up to a hly war of Protestants against the dastardly Austrian Catholics, but when his troops laid the Saxon countryside to waste and he had Dresden shot to pieces with his artillery, this support pretty much evaporated as well. IMO Frederick was in many respects a great king, but he was an absolute warmonger as well who didn't give a poo poo about all the dead his politics caused. He only gave a poo poo about the enfranchisement for Catholics and Jew when it was convenient, and the same went for freedom of the press as well. He even had one reporter who had been consistently criticising him be beaten up by paid thugs  Two centuries of Protestant and Borussophile hagiographic historiography have made him into much more than he really was: a power-tripping rear end in a top hat with some good ideas.
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Nov 14, 2015 16:42
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SeanBeansShako posted:You can pretty much say the same about most of histories more liberal leaning non elected leaders with this statement. Kind of amusing that Napoleon beats old Frederick on both counts of war mongering and the occasional good deed thrown about to not make him look like a total rear end. I know, but good ol' Frederick irks me somewhat special, probably because I'm a Catholic historian from Germany. The denominational divide in Germany still runs deep in some areas, and I never said I was free from biases
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Nov 14, 2015 18:35
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Silmarildur posted:If anyone missed this early photo it is pretty amazing. It's not just for the time warp factor, it's a really interesting photograph. These two guys were my favorites of the many interesting characters. Steves Wozniak and Jobs on a steampunk time travel adventure? Then you might also enjoy this photo, which was taken later the same day I believe. I wholeheartedly concur with your assessment, btw
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Nov 14, 2015 22:29
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Frostwerks posted:Was FtG the guy who had the mother of all comebacks, at least w/r/t conflicts on the continent in his era? Like snatching victory from the jaws of defeat despite being completely hosed on paper? Yeah, but it wasn't really because of his own merits. For like the longest time during the seven years' war it looked really bad for Prussia, especially after the battle of kolsdorf where Frederick almost died himself and where his army had been utterly routed. The allies could have marched on Berlin afterwards, but spent the time with internal bickering instead and didn't get to an agreement on how to proceed in time. The second stroke of luck happened in 1762 when czar Elizabeth died unexpectedly and was succeeded by Peter iii - a massive Frederick fanboy who then not only ended the war on his behalf but instead even signed an alliance treaty with Prussia instead, turning Russian troops on their former allies. This event is often titled as the “miracle of the house Brandenburg“, even though this name originally came from a letter by Frederick written after Kolsdorf in which he made fun of the inability of his enemies to use his weakness and end the war
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Nov 15, 2015 08:53
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Nooo, don't die on me thread! When the Spanish colonised the New World, they found that the indigeneous people there made heavy use of cacao beans not only as food (or beverage, which was limited to the elites who drank it mostly cold, and often unsweetened), but also as a means of payment, something which the Spaniards eagerly adopted. For a long time, they continued to collect cacao beans as tribute, and baptised natives would bring beans to church altars as a sacrifice. During the 1530s, it gained popularity as a beverage within colonial elites, especially with the women (it might have been a nunnery where cacao was first turned into cocoa by serving it hot and spiced with vanilla and honey or cane sugar). Members of religious orders spread cocoa throughout the Spanish colonies and eventually also brought it home to Spain, where by the early 17th century the royal court had an annual demand of 450kg of cacao beans, 50kg of vanilla and 300kg of cacao paste cakes. Chocolate and cocoa also gained a religious dimension, when the question sprang up whether it was proper to consume during Lent and other fast days; there was also a controversy of the clergy with its flock when many noble Spanish women in the New World took to the habit of bringing hot chocolate into church and drinking it during long sermons (one bishop who wanted to ban this practice under threat of excommunication was supposedly even poisoned by said women). The question of chocolate breaking fast or not was decided in 1569, when a delegation of Mexican prelates presented Pope Pius V with the question and even made him a cup of it. Pius found the taste abhorrent and declared that a beverage as vile as this couldn't break any fast. Without various religious orders promoting it and the Pope declaring it fit for consumptiony year-round, chocolate may never have spread from the Spanish colonies to the rest of Europe! Sources: Byker, Samuel: "No hay tal cosa en el mundo". How Mesoamerican Chocolate Colonized the World, 1519-1825, in: Brown Journal of History (2009), pp. 7-22 Zander, Hand Conrad: Warum waren die Mönche so dick? Wahre Komödien aus der Geschichte der Religion, Gütersloh 2011.  In 1961, a team of archaeologists went searching for Dead Sea scrolls in a cave the small Nahal Mishmar valley in Israel. When they rolled a large boulder at the end of the cave away, they found a massive bronze-age hoard instead, carefully wrapped in straw mats and consisting of 442 artifacts mostly made of bronze, but some also made out of stone, copper or ivory. Carbon dating of the mats suggested that the items were at least 5,500 years old and may have been used for rituals and ceremonies in the ancient temple of Ein Gedin seven miles to the north of Nahal Mishmar. The crown you see in the picture above is adorned with vultures and doors and was probably used during funeral rites.Source: Moorey, P.R.S.: The Chalcolithic Hoard from Nahal Mishmar, Israel, in Context, in: World Archaeology 20 (1988), pp. 171-189.
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Nov 26, 2015 14:07
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Sometimes I wonder how I ever managed to do anything without it. 10 years ago I got my first mobile phone, 15 years ago my family got internet, and my 4 year old sister is now playing Minecraft on a tablet and skyping with me when I'm in another country and it's completely unremarkable to her.
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Nov 27, 2015 19:33
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Hmm, some alcohol-related facts: * When Vladimir the Great decided to find a proper religion for his realm, the Kievan Rus', he sent envoys to all the major religions of his time who were supposed to find out whether they would be a good fit for his people. While the Byzantine liturgy impressed them so much that Vladimir settled for it (well, the liturgy and a host of political reasons), the mission to the Muslims was doomed from the start as Muslims don't drink alcohol, after all. Or, in Vladimir's words: "Drinking is the joy of all Rus'. We cannot exist without that pleasure."  * After the 1918 revolution had broken out in Germany, a train full of revolutionary-minded soldiers was approaching Cologne. The city's mayor (Konrad Adenauer, who would become Germany's first chancellor after WWII thirty years later) failed to have the Imperial Rail Agency stop the train (they had a schedule to follow, after all, revolution or not). Instead he organised a welcoming committee for the soldiers, gave them every reason to enjoy their stay in the city - and ordered 300,000 litres of alcoholic beverages to be poured into the Rhine, so that noone would get drunk and start some poo poo. * In 1964, Congress declared Bourbon to be the official spirit of the US * In 1844, the Bavarian King Louis I ordered beer prices to be jacked up by one penny. The very same day, more than two thousand Munich citizens stormed the local breweries and vandalised them in a fit of rage. The king ordered soldiers to enter the city, but they refused to act against the people. Louis reacted by not only resetting the price, but actually even reducing it from 6.5 to 5 pence a couple of months later. 29 years later, similar riots in Frankfurt didn't end as well when the military opened fire, killing about 20 civilians. * The Ancient Babylonians knew at least 20 different varieties of beer. * In 1780, the average Viennese drank about 267 litres of wine and beer per year.
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Dec 3, 2015 01:25
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WIthin German Catholics during the Baroque, pilgrimages were immensely popular, we're talking about tens of thousands of small and large pilgrimage churches dotting the landscape from eastern France to Hungary and from the northern reaches of the bishopric of Münster all the way down to northern Italy. Most people went on week-end or even single-day pilgrimages at least once a year, mostly more, and maybe a week-long tour thrown into there for good measure. Bavarian farmhands commonly had a passus in their employment contracts which guaranteed them several free days a year to go on pilgrimages. The reasons for that are religious, of course - praying at holy shrines, asking for the intercession of powerful saints, receiving the indulgence connected to visiting shrines and thereby shortening your soul's time in purgatory... but the main reasons that pilgrimages were especially popular with young people was that it was an easy opportunity to get away from your town or village for a bit, together with the town's girls. Several days' worth of pilgrimage, girls and boys mostly unsupervised, probably even away from their parents...  There was a whole lot of romancing and smooching and shagging going on during pilgrimages, and all the clergy's admonishments couldn't change that. What happens in Mariazell stays in Mariazell, I guess
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Dec 5, 2015 13:23
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The legend would also require the Drevlians to be dumber than a sack of bricks. “What's that, our ambassadors to Lady Olga whose husband we've killed brutally never returned? Oh, must've been a coincidence. Why does she wish to host our best and brightest now? She's just a swell person, obviously. Oh, those thousands of people never returned as well? Too strange. And now this lady who's shown nothing but goodwill towards us wants a couple of birds per household, birds which are known to fly back, and she's massing troops around our villages? Looks quite normal to me!“
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Dec 9, 2015 11:41
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It is awesome, but this is the historical fun fact thread, and as a historian I'm somewhat cautious when it comes to telling unverified and probably embellished stories. hard counter's analysis was in fact even more interesting to me than the original story, because it tells us much more about what the author(s) thought would be cool and impressive and thereby gives us more insight into their worldview than what a literal reading of the story would give us. Sorry, university has broken me, I guess
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Dec 9, 2015 13:08
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goose fleet posted:Truly the weirdest season of Friends The season after that was pretty strange, too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC5Gi1hS6PQ System Metternich has a new favorite as of 16:46 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 27, 2015 16:43
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I like the full title of the Austrian emperors which schoolchildren had to learn by heart: Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, of Croatia, of Slavonia, of Galicia, of Lodomeria, and of Illyria, King of Jerusalem, and so forth, Archduke of Austria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and of Cracow, Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, of Styria, of Carinthia, of Carniola and of the Bukovina, Grand Prince of Transylvania, Margrave in Moravia, Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Auschwitz and Zator, of Teschen, Friuli, Ragusa and Zara, Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca, Prince of Trent and Brixen, Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and in Istria, Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, and so forth, Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro and of the Windic March, Grand Voivode of the Voivodship of Serbia, and so forth, Sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece, etc. etc. It was last used at Otto von Habsburg's (the last crown prince) funeral in 2011, though without the titles of "King of Jerusalem" and "Archduke of Austria" (as the former had always been just a claim and the latter fell away after Otto formally retiring all his claims to Austria in 1961). If you've got some time to spare and are interested in stuff like this you should take a look at video of his funeral on youtube, it's pretty rad (and was hilariously filed as "totally not a state funeral, you guys")
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Jan 4, 2016 16:13
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Anosmoman posted:Yeah let's change the subject. Pope Gregory IX condemned cats as satanic and issued death warrants for them resulting in a sustained cat holocaust. One century later the bubonic plague, spread by rats, killed 100 million people. While not the cause, the lack of cats in Europe may have been unhelpful. Eh, I'm not too sure about this. Gregory only mentioned that black cats were supposedly part of the Satanic rituals he condemned; he doesn't actually call for them to be killed, and the only source I can find for this is one historian who again doesn't give any primary sources.
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Jan 7, 2016 13:55
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Matthias Buchinger was a German quadriplegic who was born in 1674 as the youngest of nine children. Normally this would mean that a short and hard life would be laid in front of him, if even that at all. But Buchinger persevered, and even more: he proved to be one of the most talented artists, magicians and even illustrators of his age, touring at first Germany and then even Europe. In the 1720s he moved to Ireland, where he soon become famous and well-respected. Buchinger was not only a talented showman and artists (some of his illustrations are extremely detailed, which becomes even more remarkable when you remember, well, no arms) but reportedly also a great marksman and musician. Besides his work he had two hobbies: building ships in bottles, and loving. He had at least 14 children by four different women (all of them, especially the last one, beat him up on the reg though) and may have had even more, noone knows for sure. In 1726 a poem was written about him and his exploits, titles "The Greatest German Alive" . Buchinger died in 1740 after a long and eventful life. It doesn't get much more badass than this, imo. Buchinger in a 1705 self-portrait.  A 1709 portrayal pf Buchinger along with various pictures showing off what he could do, e.g. "woodcutting", "shaving himself", "reloading a gun", "playing dice" etc.  Another self-portrait made in 1724. Do you see something special with his hair? Let's zoom in...  Oh my God, it's full of psalms! 
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Jan 8, 2016 16:05
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This isn't the same? Oops 
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Jan 9, 2016 19:13
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Barber comes from Latin barba, "beard" (which comes again from PIE bʰardʰeh₂), the similarity is coincidental. The onomatopoetical origins of "barbarian" are better visible in the first instance it's been attested: pa-pa-ro in Mycanean Greek.
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Jan 11, 2016 19:46
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Samovar posted:Who... who sent the letter? The trees, duh.
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Jan 16, 2016 12:10
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Alhazred posted:At age eight Sun Yaoting was castrated by his father so that he could serve the Chinese emperor as an eunuch. Eight months later the emperor was deposed. Castrati were extremely popular in European music throughout the Early Modern Era, especially when it came to Italian opera. Historians estimate that at its peak in the 1720s and 30s more than 4000 boys were castrated - per year. This practice only declined in popularity from the late 18th century on. The last role explicitly written for a castrato was in a 1824 opera. In 1861, the newly unified Kingdom of Italy forbade castration. The practice lingered on in the Vatican, but even there no new castrati could be hired by papal decree from 1878 on. Alessandro Moreschi, he last papal castrato (and probably the very last altogether) continued to sing in Rome until 1914. He's also the only one who was recorded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6U8VZ6riNk Don't be too surprised when he sounds rather bad in your ears: he was already past his prime when the recordings were made in 1904, and while some say that he just wasn't very good, other scholars point to contemporary listening habits and expectations being substantially different from back then.
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Jan 30, 2016 20:15
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My castrati post made me wonder what other interesting "lasts" I could find The Beguines were a monastic community of women which was started around 1200 in what is today Belgium and the Netherlands and quickly exploded in popularity. They weren't a canonically defined order, so the vows the members had to say had to be periodically renewed, and it was absolutely possible to return to a "normal", non-monastic life thereafter. The Beguines (and their male counterpart, the Beghards or Lollards) directly catered to men and women from the lowest classes: former prostitutes, beggars, and so on who otherwise would have a hard time entering a convent. During the 14th century, many Beguines became part of mystical movements within the church which were views by the authorities with much scepticism and later suffered from full-on persecution. You can't write a cultural or religious history especially of the 14th century without mentioning the impact of the Beguines. The last Beguine was called Marcella Pattyn and died in 2013 in Kortrijk, Belgium. The last public execution in the US was that of Rainey Bethea who was hanged in 1936 in Kentucky after being convicted of raping and murdering a 70-year-old woman. The growd which had gathered to watch his execution was estimated at about 20,000 people. The last woman to be (legally) executed as a witch was Anna Göldi from Sennwald, Switzerland. Göldi had worked as a maidservant for Johann Jakob Tschudi, one of the richest and most powerful men in Glarus. After being accused of literally spitting nails and conjuring even more nails into the milk of one of Tschudi's daughters, she finally confessed to conspiring with the Devil under torture and was sentenced to death by the sword, a sentence which was carried out immediately. Her trial and death were regarded as scandalous by people all over Europe even at the time, though, which was probably the reason why the reason for her sentence was changed to "poisoning" in the official documents. Later historians discovered that Göldi probably had had an affair with Tschudi who wanted to remove all evidence of his infidelity. The Etruscans were a people living in Northern Italy who greatly influenced the early history of Rome (which originally was an Etruscan colony). The last known person to be able to speak and write the language (which remains mostly undeciphered and unknown today) was the Roman emperor Claudius (died in 54 BC) who was married to an Etruscan. Claudius compiled several works about Etruscan vocabulary and grammar by personally interviewing some of the last remaning speakers of the language he could find. Sadly, all his works about the language are lost. There are exactly two people still living who were born in the 19th century: Susannah Mushatt Jones from the US and Emma Morana from Italy. Both were born in 1899. (I know that formally speaking the year 1900 still belongs to the 19th century if we count that too, the number of still living people rises to four with Violet Brown from Jamaica and Nabi Tajima from Japan added to the list)The last person to die from smallpox (one of the deadliest diseases throughout human history) was the British photographer Janet Parker in 1978, who had contracted it in a Birmingham medical laboratory. Smallpox is one of only two diseases (the other being rinderpest) which is officially considered to be totally eradicated.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:31
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Alhazred posted:The last witch trial took place in 1944. During a seance Helen Duncan spoke with a deceased sailor from HMS Barham and revealed that the ship had been sunk in the Mediterranean, although the War Office did not officially release this fact until several months later. Fearing that Duncan might reveal more the government arrested her and sentenced her to nine months in prison. The Witchcraft Acts wasn't repealed until 1951.Which didn't stop the police from raiding Duncan's apartment in 1956, this time trying to arrest her for fraud. Five weeks later she died. The Witchcraft Acts only made it illegal for any person to claim to possess magical powers, though, and the Navy was only interested in who could have leaked that information to her. WIkipedia posted:During World War II, in November 1941, Duncan held a séance in Portsmouth at which she claimed the spirit materialization of a sailor told her HMS Barham had been sunk.[9] Because the sinking of HMS Barham was revealed, in strict confidence, only to the relatives of casualties, and not announced to the public until late January 1942, the Navy started to take an interest in her activities. Two Lieutenants were among her audience at a séance on 14 January 1944. One of these was a Lieutenant Worth who was not impressed as a white cloth figure had appeared behind the curtains claiming to be his aunt but he had no deceased aunt. In the same sitting another figure appeared claiming to be his sister but Worth replied his sister was alive and well.[9] Worth was disgusted by the séance and reported it to the police. This was followed up on 19 January, when undercover policemen arrested her at another séance as a white-shrouded manifestation appeared.[20] This proved to be Duncan herself, in a white cloth which she attempted to conceal when discovered, and she was arrested. 
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Jan 30, 2016 21:54
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Oops! Yeah, AD, sorry. I also forgot to say just when Göldi was killed: it was in 1782 - at the same time the Enlightenment was in full swing someone thought it to be a good idea to kill his lover by accusing her of witchcraft.
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Jan 31, 2016 10:00
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Michaelangelo also participated in art fraud by painting up a statue of his so that it looked like a Roman antique. He then sold it to a Cardinal Raffaele Riario for a hefty price. He got doubly trolled as karmic revenge, though, because a middleman cheated him out of the money and because after realising he'd been had, Riario was quite impressed by the work and invited Michaelangelo to Rome where he began working on a statue of Bacchus for the cardinal - only for Riario to say (after completion, of course) that he didn't really like it all that much and wouldn't buy it after all.
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Feb 2, 2016 23:55
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Clarence posted:Is this certainty, or just a very high probability? I seem to remember that it's something like a 98% probability
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Feb 24, 2016 21:38
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e X posted:No, you see, he didn't invent all that bullshit, he stole all that bullshit. I wasn't aware that occultists were patenting their ideas and theories I know next to nothing about Wicca, but I know that ideas don't simply pop up in a vacuum. Disregarding whether the New Forest coven existed or not, Gardner clearly is part of a tradition in Western thought concerned with occultism and ritual magic going back millennia. The texts on which the Hermetic tradition is based probably date back to the 1st to 3rd century AD (and were themselves probably heavily inspired by ancient Egyptian thought). They were rediscovered during the Renaissance and were quite popular until the 17th century and then again from the late 18th century onward (just read Edgar Allan Poe's writings, which are chock full with this sort of stuff). Gardner didn't simply come up with Wicca all on his own, he was part of a larger school of thought popular in late-19th and early-20th century England which again can be traced back to what I mentioned earlier. There's no need to believe in any of his stuff (I don't), but just going "lol he made it all up am I right fellas!? " is both smug and dumb
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Mar 1, 2016 15:26
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Magic is made up. So what? 
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Mar 1, 2016 16:02
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:See! So smug! You're the spherically fat harry-potter-kin here, Megyyyn with three Ys and also it's in ye olde timey script or you're spelling it wrong, DAD, so the burden of proof is on you. I bet you're exactly this insufferable about people with Wrong Opinions about Dr. Who you should get your anger issues sorted out, hth
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Mar 1, 2016 19:40
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Nice to see that the PYF Historical Fun Fact thread is indeed full of history-minded people who would happily recognise their personal feelings about a patricular religious practice as irrelevant regarding the matter to take a closer look at how the practice came to be and by what school of thoughts it was inspired. Oh wait no, just a bunch of assholes throwing verbal abuse at some dude who afaik isn't even wiccan, lol
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Mar 1, 2016 22:02
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Okay, less of a fact and more of little story: Agnes Bernauer was a young German woman about whose early years we know next to nothing. She was probably born somewhere around 1410, and as tradition says that her father was an Augsburg-based barber surgeon, it seems likely that she was born there as well. When we follow that notion, she then enters history in early 1428, when Albrecht, eldest son of Duke Ernst of Bavaria-Munich, participated at a tournament in Augsburg where he likely saw Agnes for the first time. We don't know how it happened, but Albrecht must have fallen heads over heels in love with her - no wonder, as we're told that she was incredibly beautigul (a later chronicle describing her thus: "It is said that she was so beautiful that, after she had drunk red wine, you could see the wine going down her throat." Standards of beauty change as well, I guess ) - and took her promptly with him to the ducal court in Munich (where she appears as a member of court several months later that same year). By 1432, Agnes had become a influential figure at court due to her connection to the heir, drawing the ire of other players, especially the Duke as well as Countess Palatine Beatrix, Albrecht's sister.Albrecht and Agnes probably married in secret in 1432 or 1433 (a contemporary of the two, Pope Pius II, denies this. He never came close to Munich, though, and probably heard about the story when he patricipated as a cardinal at the Council of Basel). The two lived together, mostly at the ducal castle in Straubing north of Munich, and when Duke Ernst had at first thought that Agnes was nothing more than a fling or a fancy, he soon had to realise that the marriage of his son and heir to a common-born woman was reality. In Ernst's eyes, this didn't only drag the honour of his family through the mud, it even threatened his entire legacy, as Albrecht was his only son and any offspring of the marriage with Agnes would very likely have been declared illegitimate and unfit to the throne by the rest of the House of Wittelsbach. He also saw how his son, who now spent nearly all of his time in Straubing, grew more bold and independent every day, and in his opinion, the only reason for that was the bad influence of a woman who acted way beyond her station. In October 1436, Albrecht received an invitation to a hunting trip together with Duke Henry XVI of Bavaria-Landshut, a cousin of his father. Albrecht gladly accepted and immediately set off, leaving his wife behind. Whether Duke Ernst had organised the whole affair with his cousin or whether he simply took the opportunity could never be said with certainty, but the results are known: Ernst's goons arrested Agnes in Straubing and drowned her in the Danube. Or, as the contemporary historian Andreas of Regensburg tells us: "In this same year (1435), on October 12th, an extremely beautiful woman was thrown off the Danube bridge in Straubing on order of Duke Ernst of Bavaria; she was the lover of his son Albrecht, though some say that she was his true and lawful spouse [...] By using the one foot which wasn't chained [probably to a stone or something? He doesn't tell] she swam for a bit and approached the shore, crying in a hoarse and miserable voice: Help! Help! The torturer though, who had thrown her off the bridge, ran to her and, fear the ire of Duke Ernst, wound a long pole into her hair and forced her underwater again." It's unclear what exactly happened afterwards. We can assume that Albrecht wasn't happy at all, and indeed for a time it looked like he might take arms againsst his arms. What instead happened was that he and his father reconciled - we don't know how - and that Albrecht remarried roughly a year later, this time to a noblewoman of very high standing, much to the joy of Duke Ernst, presumably (the town chronicler of Munich wrote: "Let's all be glad that it wasn't a Bernauer again"). Part of the deal was that Ernst built a chapel in Straubing in the memory of Agnes, where even today, almost 600 years after her death, every year a mass is read for her soul, now paid for by the State of Bavaria as the legal successor to the murderous Duke. The life and death of Agnes Bernauer gave rise to tons of stories, poems, songs and plays, too, many of which are still highly popular in Bavaria today. Source: Marita A. Panzer, Ermordung der Agnes Bernauer, in: Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, URL: http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Ermordung der Agnes Bernauer (1.03.2016)
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Mar 1, 2016 23:06
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I take it you've never heard of Austrian occultist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels then?
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Mar 1, 2016 23:40
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Welsh is the Celtic language spoken by the most people today (~560,000 native speakers in 2011), so there's that. It's quite stable when compared with most other Celtic languages. Breton (about 200,000 native speakers) is under a lot of pressure from France, especially since a unified language for the French Republic in form of Parisian French has been the goal of most French governments since the 1789 revolution. Regional language support is still in a bad shape in France, Occitan for example (the language was was by the 50s still spoken by the majority of people living in the south of the country) is nearly extinct today. Scottish Gaelic and Irish both compete for the third place; there were about 57,000 Scottish Gaelic native speakers by the 2011 census (with an additional ~1,800 in Nova Scotia, though I think that that number's diminishing fast). The numbers for Irish are a little less clear-cut, with somewhere between 40-80,000 native speakers. They're both endangered, and we may well see their disappearance in our lifetime depending on whether those languages can resist the pressure and cultural influence of English. They probably won't go completely extinct, though, as there will always be a number of enthusiasts concerned with keeping them alive, as can be seen with Cornish and Manx - both died out and got resurrected again, with native speakers numbering about 700-800 between them. All other Celtic languages are extinct, the continental ones much earlier than the languages spoken on the British Isles, owing to the bigger pressure they had to suffer from Latin and the Germanic languages. Gaulish was the strongest Celtic language in the continent, and it appears to have died out by the 6th century (though some scholars suggest that in the Normandy it may have gone extinct only in the 9th century). In what is today northern England, Cumbric probably had died out by 1200, maybe even later. It's best-known remnant is probably the numbering system still used by some shepherds in the area to count their sheep (Yan tan tethera). Pictish in Scotland is virtually unattested, so we can't even say for sure that it's a Celtic language (though it probably was); it appears to have vanished by the 12th century.
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Mar 2, 2016 20:57
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