Explanation: The mad Roman Emperor Caligula pissed off the commander of the Praetorian Guard, whose job it was to guard the Emperor. He would regularly denigrate the commander by calling him gay and a cuck, and being the Emperor, and a loose-cannon Emperor at that, the commander had to sit there and take it like the cuck he was

For obvious reasons, pissing off your bodyguard is not a smart move; between the personal enmity and Caligula’s own senseless reign, the Praetorian commander organized a coup which assassinated Caligula.

Caligula’s uncle, Claudius, was a bookish man with a limp and a stutter who was largely kept around by Caligula and his court to torment with practical jokes. Once Claudius realized the Praetorians were butchering the Old Regime™, he suspected that being a victim of the regime wouldn’t matter nearly so much as his closeness to it. Claudius hid behind a curtain in the imperial palace, having no other way out and hoping that he could survive just long enough for their wrath to subside.

Instead, he was discovered by a low-ranking Praetorian, who opened the curtain and recognized him as Caligula’s uncle. Rather than killing him, however, this Praetorian saw an opportunity, whether ideological, practical, or… pecuniary. The Praetorian proclaimed Claudius Emperor, and rounded up some of his comrades to add their voices to the ‘vote’. One expects that Claudius did not feel he had much choice but to agree if he wanted to keep his head attached to his body. An ever-growing crowd of Praetorian troops whisked Claudius away to their encampment ‘for his safety’ and spread the word of the new Emperor, even as unknowing Praetorian officers were arguing with the Senate over what to do next.

Claudius, who had remained reasonably popular even through Caligula’s reign, was supported by the crowds, and so the Senate and Praetorian brass proclaimed him Emperor as well, seeing a fait accompli that would be hard to reverse. Claudius went on to rule as a reformer and deeply involved administrator who strengthened the Empire and the fairness of its legal systems.

… however, he never forgot what happened to his nephew. Not out of a sense of vengeance, as there was little love between the two, but out of… reasonable caution. So every year he paid the Praetorians a bonus multiplied by the number of years he was in power, as a celebration of the ‘longevity’ of his reign. The Praetorians remained loyal to him.

Money makes the world go 'round!

Explanation: The mad Roman Emperor Caligula pissed off the commander of the Praetorian Guard, whose job it was to guard the Emperor. He would regularly denigrate the commander by calling him gay and a cuck, and being the Emperor, and a loose-cannon Emperor at that, the commander had to sit there and take it like the cuck he was

For obvious reasons, pissing off your bodyguard is not a smart move; between the personal enmity and Caligula’s own senseless reign, the Praetorian commander organized a coup which assassinated Caligula.

Caligula’s uncle, Claudius, was a bookish man with a limp and a stutter who was largely kept around by Caligula and his court to torment with practical jokes. Once Claudius realized the Praetorians were butchering the Old Regime™, he suspected that being a victim of the regime wouldn’t matter nearly so much as his closeness to it. Claudius hid behind a curtain in the imperial palace, having no other way out and hoping that he could survive just long enough for their wrath to subside.

Instead, he was discovered by a low-ranking Praetorian, who opened the curtain and recognized him as Caligula’s uncle. Rather than killing him, however, this Praetorian saw an opportunity, whether ideological, practical, or… pecuniary. The Praetorian proclaimed Claudius Emperor, and rounded up some of his comrades to add their voices to the ‘vote’. One expects that Claudius did not feel he had much choice but to agree if he wanted to keep his head attached to his body. An ever-growing crowd of Praetorian troops whisked Claudius away to their encampment ‘for his safety’ and spread the word of the new Emperor, even as unknowing Praetorian officers were arguing with the Senate over what to do next.

Claudius, who had remained reasonably popular even through Caligula’s reign, was supported by the crowds, and so the Senate and Praetorian brass proclaimed him Emperor as well, seeing a fait accompli that would be hard to reverse. Claudius went on to rule as a reformer and deeply involved administrator who strengthened the Empire and the fairness of its legal systems.

… however, he never forgot what happened to his nephew. Not out of a sense of vengeance, as there was little love between the two, but out of… reasonable caution. So every year he paid the Praetorians a bonus multiplied by the number of years he was in power, as a celebration of the ‘longevity’ of his reign. The Praetorians remained loyal to him.

Money makes the world go 'round!

Explanation: The mad Roman Emperor Caligula pissed off the commander of the Praetorian Guard, whose job it was to guard the Emperor. He would regularly denigrate the commander by calling him gay and a cuck, and being the Emperor, and a loose-cannon Emperor at that, the commander had to sit there and take it like the cuck he was

For obvious reasons, pissing off your bodyguard is not a smart move; between the personal enmity and Caligula’s own senseless reign, the Praetorian commander organized a coup which assassinated Caligula.

Caligula’s uncle, Claudius, was a bookish man with a limp and a stutter who was largely kept around by Caligula and his court to torment with practical jokes. Once Claudius realized the Praetorians were butchering the Old Regime™, he suspected that being a victim of the regime wouldn’t matter nearly so much as his closeness to it. Claudius hid behind a curtain in the imperial palace, having no other way out and hoping that he could survive just long enough for their wrath to subside.

Instead, he was discovered by a low-ranking Praetorian, who opened the curtain and recognized him as Caligula’s uncle. Rather than killing him, however, this Praetorian saw an opportunity, whether ideological, practical, or… pecuniary. The Praetorian proclaimed Claudius Emperor, and rounded up some of his comrades to add their voices to the ‘vote’. One expects that Claudius did not feel he had much choice but to agree if he wanted to keep his head attached to his body. An ever-growing crowd of Praetorian troops whisked Claudius away to their encampment ‘for his safety’ and spread the word of the new Emperor, even as unknowing Praetorian officers were arguing with the Senate over what to do next.

Claudius, who had remained reasonably popular even through Caligula’s reign, was supported by the crowds, and so the Senate and Praetorian brass proclaimed him Emperor as well, seeing a fait accompli that would be hard to reverse. Claudius went on to rule as a reformer and deeply involved administrator who strengthened the Empire and the fairness of its legal systems.

… however, he never forgot what happened to his nephew. Not out of a sense of vengeance, as there was little love between the two, but out of… reasonable caution. So every year he paid the Praetorians a bonus multiplied by the number of years he was in power, as a celebration of the ‘longevity’ of his reign. The Praetorians remained loyal to him.

Money makes the world go 'round!

Explanation: The Antikythera Mechanism is a fascinating Greek artifact of Classical Antiquity which acted as a very primitive computer for predicting astronomical movements. A marvel of civilization, to make machines do mathematics!

Logically, if there is a Antikythera Mechanism, there MUST be a Kythera Mechanism lurking out there; its opposite and bane!

(There is not, Antikythera is the name of the island)

Explanation: France and the UK began WW2 fighting as allies against the unprovoked aggression of Nazi Germany. However, a lightning campaign fueled by a dictator’s madness and meth - literally on both counts - Hitler insisted on a maneuver his generals (and French generals) considered impossibly risky, and methamphetamines were widely distributed to Nazi troops, especially tankers, in 1940 - knocked France out of the war.

Under Field Marshal Petain, who was appointed the head of the French government on the basis of his national popularity and WW1 service, the French Third Republic surrendered to Nazi Germany. While France was in a poor position, it was nowhere near destruction - Petain surrendered because he was a fascist sympathizer, and an opponent of the ‘liberalism’ of the Third Republic. Those who sided with Petain became known as “Vichy France”, while those who fled France to continue the fight and refused to recognize the surrender became known as “Free France” (by the Allies, obviously; both claimed to be the legitimate government of France).

After France’s surrender, a humiliating peace treaty was imposed on Vichy France, and Vichy France changed to ‘neutrality’ in WW2. Winston Churchill, prime minister of the UK, made a demand of the Vichy French government - to take their fleet out of the reach of the Nazi regime. They refused, considering it a matter of pride that they could defend their own fleet from seizure.

Churchill did not think pride a sufficient guarantor, and ordered an attack which crippled the French fleet. This has been a sore point ever since, with defenders and detractors of the course of action.

Explanation: A lunatic proposal that sometimes is passed around is that many of the great architectural marvels of antiquity were constructed or assisted by ANCIENT ALIENS despite the utter lack of evidence to even vaguely suggest such a thing, and often with very basic mistakes about the history or construction of the questioned structures. Curiously, such accusations of assistance by ancient aliens are almost exclusively leveled towards non-white civilizations by extremely Eurocentric authors.

This is only a coincidence, I’m sure. /s

Explanation: Ibn Battuta was a traveler of the medieval world who wrote one of the widest-ranging and most in-depth travelogues of the period (highly recommend, btw, not just for the insight into the peoples Ibn Battuta visits, but also the contrast with Ibn Battuta’s own thoughts and opinions on how things should run!)

Starting from his home in Morocco, Ibn Battuta undertook the hajj to Mecca, an obligatory religious pilgrimage for Muslims, which would have taken maybe a year or two for most folk at the time. However, once he reached Mecca, he realized, from all the exciting things he had seen just on the way, that his wanderlust was only whetted! He would continued to travel for 24 years instead of the expected 2, at most.

His father died 9 years into the journey, though Ibn Battuta did not discover this until he was nearly home.

Explanation: A large and very curious array of peoples claimed descent from the Trojans, including some peoples under the Persian Empire, the Romans, the Franks, and the Ottoman Turks. Mostly claimed when fighting the Greeks, in order to claim the right of VENGEANCE FOR TROY!

Explanation: Of the many horse-riding nomadic tribes of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Mongolian Plateau, almost all have interacted and intermarried to a much greater degree than sedentary societies of the same period. This is largely because travel is much easier when you’re on horseback, and especially when you aren’t tied down to a cultivated fields, or a house! A tent is good enough for my forefathers; it’s good enough for me! This allows a much wider range of marriage candidates to select from than some sedentary farmer restricted to the five nearest villages.

For that reason, you see some really interesting cultural fusions, and a vast array of phenotypes amongst nomadic peoples of the region - famously, Genghis Khan of the Mongols had reddish hair and green eyes according to one account (and his son, Ogodei Khan, in a posthumous portrait) both traits still seen (albeit very rarely) in modern Mongolia!

Russia was so close to greatness… a democratic and socialist supermajority government…

What if the might that went to the Soviet Union went to a democratic and at least somewhat genuinely socialist polity instead? What a better place we would all be in. Even if the Cold War and all of its bullshit still went down in the end, if the preferred government of Russian vassals had been “Multiparty socialist democracy” instead of “Single-party totalitarian regime”…

Makes me want to weep.

Like I said, perhaps not wholly fairly blamed for WW1.

There are some super fine pieces but I always wonder about that too! Which ones are the ‘normal’ ones? Which are an ordinary artisan’s work? Which are botched jobs? Are the really refined ones the sort of thing you hear about four kingdoms away? Or is it just that so much has been broken, lost, and melted down through the years that we have only a fragment of a picture?

It’s why I’m immensely awed by archeologists who study this stuff and can identify periods and styles of even small artifacts by very real and clearly explained criteria. Piecing together the past.

I also imagine the elements have done a number on many of these.

Well, I laughed!

I guess we’ll never know.

… no, we very much do know. Have you forgotten the Holocaust? Generalplan Ost? The whole fucking second World War?

You do realize “This shit is horrific” does not need to imply “It would have been no big deal if the Nazis won”, right?

Funny enough, the election was actually by a proportional system. Some of the great gripes of the Bolsheviks was that there was universal suffrage (instead of just people in careers they deemed ‘proletarian’ enough), the ballots were secret (something to HIDE, comrade?), and not delegated to the local Soviets/workers’ councils - where everybody knows your name! 😊

Hessians were big even in my elementary school education. And, I mean, I get it - it’s a real easy ‘point’ to score for Patriot sympathies. “King George literally hired foreign mercenaries to come and kill our troops, but we beat them and gave them land instead because we are Just Nice Guys™ (please ignore the crippling labor shortage in the colonies at the time)”

Yeah, I remember hearing about that and being disheartened.

It’s like, fuck. We can’t even get a majority of voters on a single issue like that to agree not to be shitheads towards other people? No major issue of liked or disliked personalities, no (nominal) issue of party loyalties, just “Do you want to keep perpetuating a modern form of slavery, Y/N?”

… trying to improve society is like fucking herding cats.

https://heliosgallery.com/antiquities/catalogue/west-asian-antiquities/central-asia/khorvin-pottery-jug-with-animal-head/

Explanation: Kicking off the Russian Civil War, after couping the provisional government of Russia which had organized free and fair democratic elections, the Bolsheviks under Lenin decided to dissolve the newly elected legislature the very first day it met. You see, this legislature, with a socialist supermajority, had committed a very terrible crime - being full of socialists who didn’t swear allegiance to Lenin’s party!

This would plunge Russia into ~4 years of civil war and ~60 years of totalitarian dictatorship.