I just feel like a bow has many advantages over an arquebus, including being smaller, lighter, easier to maintain, quieter, versaltility, and being able to shoot at an angle. Why then were arquebuses and early muskets adopted in large numbers by most of Europe?

It always strikes me as odd that so many maritime civilisations in and around the Pacific and Indian oceans, yet it was Europeans who ultimately colonised Australia. Were there specific reasons as to why the Maori or the various Indonesian empires not only didn't colonise Australia, but seemed to have not even discovered it?

This is something I find very often in documents etc about these wars (mainly WWII), but I am not sure what it is ment to mean.

I mean, I get it, soldier need munition, medicine etc (military logistics), but does overstretching the supply line mean, that you are not quick enough to get the supplies to the soldiers?

If this was the case, would the soldiers still attack? And in case of an attack on them, how much would this matter?

Thanks you :)

My friend posed the idea that "spearmen were meta-breaking in the middle ages and were more powerful than any other infantry / cavalry". Is this correct? I was under the impression that heavily armoured (or otherwise) cavalry had the momentum, training and speed to ruin most infantry types. We are talking about the time period before pikes were introduced (i.e. before Battle of the Golden Spurs) and certainly before muskets. So maybe 800-1200? Could anyone please confirm what the most powerful battlefield unit was, as used by most European princes, during this time period.

Thanks.

And if they did so, did they have the same purpose as the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets, which was to bomb enemy positions at and close to the frontline?

I've read that the Aztecs kept dog as pets (the ancestors to the modern chihuahua breed), but I haven't heard about anything else. Domestic cats would have been unknown before European contact, but are the Aztecs known to have kept any other animals as pets?

In this case, police officers from the Weilburg region have found the entry, exit and death books from an insane asylum where hundreds of people have died. They know how many entered and left the asylum and how many died.

For their final report, they create a table containing numbers from these sources. Then they botch reading and evaluating their own data in a way that is almost comical (taking numbers from the wrong column, computing the wrong average). Or could lead one to suspect that they did this on purpose.

Which leads me to the question if a rural police officer from this period would have received any kind of special education for creating and evaluating criminal statistics as part of his training.

I recently read a comment stating that;

"the Purges were orchestrated by Nikolai Ezhov (then head of the NKVD), who was working with Polish intelligence to imprison actual communists and draw attention away from actual traitors. When he was replaced, hundreds of thousands of people were immediately freed and recompensed, and sedition-related imprisonments immediately dropped to close to nothing. Stalin rubber-stamped many of these, but once he found out, he was angry and horrified. He never "started" the Purges."

and I wish to know if this is true or not, as I have not been able to find anything on it.

Helloo, so im a middle school student and I have searched the internet but i cant seem to find anything I was hoping someone could help me, thankss What do you think are the reasons why the rebellion triumphed and was supported in some areas of Spain and failed in others?

I guess what I'm interested in is less a history of a man himself than a history of talking about him, which must still be extensive. I know there are plenty of (armchair) psychological reasons for peoples fascination with the actions of tyrants but I'm wondering if there is a more thorough historical explanation for his current prominence as a figure of historical interest.

On D-Day and in other depictions of naval landings in both game and film, usually the landing craft hits the beach and just stays there after unloading all the troops because it's been grounded typically. What happened to the operators of these landing crafts? Did they know it was a one way trip and just stay in the landing craft and hope for the best or did they get out and fight with the soldiers that had just been unloaded? Or did they never get grounded and they actually unloaded a ways from the shore and then head back to the ship?

I know this sounds a little bit goofy of a question but I'm genuinely curious about what it was like being a landing craft operator.

When we think of Old Norse sources depicting the Viking Age. Is there nowadays a consensus on which sources are considered to be too late in their attempt to reliably* describe the Viking Age? Can it e.g. be concluded that everything written post 14th century is more likely to represent medieval times in general rather than the Viking age? Where's the boundary line, if such exists? Thanks in advance!

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*Though the reliability is contested, to begin with.

It seems that due to the fact the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian and that they shared a monarch and later a country with the Church of England, that English Presbyterians would have been offered some sort of special status. Why were they relegated to a second-class Citizenship status in England when the official religion of a good chunk of the country was Presbyterianism?

Also why was there never legal protection for them like there was for the Scottish Episcopalians?

Thank you.

Honestly, I'm watching LOTR and it's not a trope I've only seen in this series, but many. The beacons are on mountains and they're lit quickly in response to the other. But I can't imagine people actually lived up there with them. How would they get supplies? Wouldn't that be a miserable job with very few people to talk to?

(Crosspost from r/NoStupidQuestions)

I’ve always been baffled as to why infantrymen abandoned the use of protective gear? Wouldn’t it have been helpful wearing armor against gunfire? If it was a matter of equipping large armies with helmets and armor, surely the more economically developed countries( UK, France, etc) Could afford the majority of their forces.

I've found many references citing caravels going upriver, but without many details being given. Theoretically, could they be rowed up large rivers like the Amazon, Mississipi or the Nile? If so, how far inland could they reach?

I'm interested in understanding more about extreme political, social and religious idealogies, however I am more interested in the objective viewpoint or at the very least the viewpoint from those that believe in these systems however write in a way not to sway the reader to their side, or hopefully someone can help me in ways to not be easily convinced by text.

I’ve always been interested as to why the Nazis adopted this ideology as Hitler didn’t have “aryan” or “master race” characteristics. Any help would be appreciated!