Alex > Recent Status Updates

"Those men, though wicked, have one point at any rate, wherein they are approved even by the wise persons, that in speaking against marriage they declare that they ought not to have been born."
Did I misread this or has St. Ambrose just burned antinatalists?

"The new generation of fortifications made the 1522 siege of Rhodes long and difficult and kept the Ottomans from taking Malta in 1565. Once again, taking a major fortress, whether on land or through an amphibious campaign, had become an expensive, time-consuming proposition. This military stalemate produced territorial stability in the Mediterranean world."

"The Ottomans made the Janissaries and field artillery the centerpieces of a tactical system that the Ottomans adopted from the Hungarians, who in turn had learned it from the Hussites (the followers of Jan Hus [1372/1373- 1415], the Bohemian religious reformer)."

"The long process of incorporation gave the conquered populations a chance to recognize the Ottomans as tolerant and fair-minded rulers rather than alien oppressors. The Ottoman policy of mudarra (müdarra, moderation, friendship) had this purpose."

"In general, qanun regulations covered taxation, land tenure, and criminal matters, leaving commercial and familial matters to the Shariah."
The small passage on Ottoman law is very interesting.

Under Stalin, many hundreds of German and Jewish communists or antifascists were extradited to Nazi Germany.

Palmiro Togliatti supported or caused the deaths of several people, and praised the mass murderer Dzerzhinsky. He still acquired the reputation of being an enemy of terroristic methods. What a joke.

Martemian Rjutin likened Stalins position within the Comintern to the position of the Pope within the Church, which was intended as a criticism. I have thought of the communist movement as a kind of Counter-Church myself.

Many opponents of the Hitler-Stalin-Pact landed on the black lists of the French Communist Party. The communists also denounced opponents as Jews, and these lists may have gotten into the hands of the Vichy-Police and the Gestapo.

Also, while it would make some sense those in power, who can get away with it, would be violent, it doesn't make sense that only they would be lecherous, too. Why is Pawels reaction to prostitution disgust, not "I want this too!"? That would be more believable to me.

Gorki did this better. His protagonist is on the way to becoming a violent drunkard before he lifts himself up by the bootstraps and joins the Soviets

I think I notice the same pattern as in "An Inspector Calls": Workers are good people, but on a personal level. Likewise, the priests and waiters (traders?) are horrible people, also on a personal level, and not just due to their function. You might explain this but it isn't explained here (yet?).

On the plus side, Artyom is a bro.

Durchaus reißerisch geschrieben, aber ich erkenne nichts, was faktisch unzutreffend wäre.

It seems there was some personal overlap between Lollardy and Lutheranism, but not in the sense of a strict continuation of Lollardy through Lutheranism. The question isn't settled yet, and the evidence is patchy, to use Marshalls wording.

"The Greek terms which were conventionally rendered in English as ‘do penance’, ‘Church’ and ‘priest’ were given as ‘repent’, ‘congregation’ and ‘elder’, translations with obvious implications for teachings about confession and the authority of the priesthood. Concerns about Lollardy meant that England, uniquely in western Europe, had no authorized vernacular scripture. The English bishops now paid the price for that

"You could see the executioner tremble, as though he himself had been condemned, and his right hand shake, his face grow pale, as he feared the peril of another, while the maiden feared not for her own."
On St. Agnes' martyrdom.

From the introduction:
"These virgins lived at home with their parents, while the times of persecution endured, making it practically impossible for them to live elsewhere. Common life among them would seem to have commenced in the East, and St. Athanasius, when, seeking refuge from the Arians, he came to Rome, introduced the custom to the Western Church."

The Ottoman Empire was strange.

"Apparently, however, from the beginning of the dynasty, the mothers of sultans were concubines, rather than wives, because the sultans had sex with the concubines rather than their wives. The reason was political rather than erotic. According to Peirce, “The admission of female lineage, of nobly born women, compromised the integrity and autonomy of the sultanate.”"
The role of women in the court was whack.

"Mehmed III’s execution of nineteen brothers and twenty sisters caused widespread revulsion. It was the last such mass fratricide, partially because of the emotional reaction and partially because Mehmed III had only two sons, neither of whom had had children, so the execution of either would have put the survival of the dynasty into question."

"From 1446 to 1451, Murad ruled, though Mehmed apparently continued to reign. When Murad actually died in 1451, Mehmed faced no opposition for the throne. The qanunnamah (dynastic law book, discussed below) attributed to him makes royal fratricide, the execution of each generation’s losers in the contest for succession, an explicit policy."

Continued:
"In the language of anthropologist A. M. Hocart’s comparative analysis of kingship, the Ottomans became judge kings rather than warrior kings."

"Later Ottoman rulers emphasized piety and law rather than warfare and universal aspirations. Sulayman in his later years was not sahib-qiran, the messianic lord of the fortunate conjunction, but padishah alam panah (emperor, refuge of the world), the protector of the faith rather than the conqueror of the world."

Gülrû Necipogli:
"Sülaymân’s composite crown—with its combined elements from the pope’s tiara, the emperor’s mitre-crown, and Hapsburg parade helmets with Islamic motifs—was an intelligible statement of Ottoman imperial claims. This idiosyncratic helmet disputed both the Holy Roman emperor’s title of Caesar and the sanctioning power of the pope."

"One Christian scenario, for example, asserted that corruption within Christendom would lead to a victory for the Turks, after which the Turkish emperor would convert to Christianity and rule the world as the perfect ruler."