Minor spoilers for Game of Thrones (S8 E5) below.

In the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, the Golden Company is defending the walled city of King’s Landing and chooses to place their infantry outside the city gates. This also happens in the 2004 movie Troy. I’m wondering if there is any historical precedent for this in the middle ages?

I understand it may have made sense to send your army out to engage an enemy far from the city, or to send troops out for a sortie, but in both of these cases the armies line up at the foot of the walls.

If you asked me who John Jay was, I'd have to guess - while I'm sure I've heard his name before, I wouldn't have been able to tell you he was a Founding Father. Is there some particular reason he's frequently left out when learning about the founding fathers? Or is Richard Morris in error when he lists John Jay among the other six?

The parliment threatened, if Edward VIII didn't step down from the position of king (or simply not marry Simpson), to resign "en mass". What exactly would that entail? Would every member that disagreed with the marriage simply resign? Would the entire government be dismantled? Would the power go back to the King? Would it just be anarchy? I don't really understand the whole threat of the resignation, especially how important the threat truly was.

Hello Reddit :)

Learning a new, foreign language has never been easier as the internet offers a plethora of free resources when it comes to language learning. Radio, videos, books and manuals exist that make learning even the hardest of languages intuitive, fun and easy! But it wasnt always so easy, therefore Im interested in how people learned languages in the past, a time before the internet and the modern tools we have nowadays. I'd love to hear what you guys have to say, all timeperiods (from the rise of civilization to the late 1800s) and examples (of resources) are more than welcome.

Wish you all the best

My mother noticed this while watching Game of Thrones, when they yell "fire" to shoot arrows. It doesn't really make sense to use that command if you don't have firearms, or am I wrong?

I am currently reading National Geographic's History magazine, March/April 2017 edition, about Caesar's Crossing in which he initiated the civil war against the optimate faction in the Senate and their allies, namely Pompey the Great. According to the reading, leading up to Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C., while Ceasar was facing pressure from his political rivals to step down from his position as governor of Gaul and disband his army in 50 B.C. (which would strip Caesar of the immunity his official position gave him as well as disarm him of his nearly unequaled military clout), he decided to stay on as governor, announcing to stand for election to become consul for a second time. This would foil Pompey and his optimate allies' plot to take Caesar to court under accusations of corruption and abuses of power during his time in Gaul which would effectively kill Caesar's political career. This caused Caesar's enemies to scramble to increase pressure on him, and they reiterated in the Senate, that since his military campaign was over, he must disband his army and a new governor ought to be elected to replace him. Caesar responded by moving his military forces into the north of Italy while expanding his power in Rome. According to the magazine, some scant research and my own knowledge of ancient Roman history, Caesar bribed many of his enemies. In fact, he managed to buy off the consul Lucius Aemilius Lepidus Paullus with a massive down payment of nine million denarii in return for the consul's promise not to support any initiatives against him during his remaining term of office.

Caesar accumulated massive amounts of wealth during his conquest of Gaul which made him the richest man in Rome, and by some accounts, the richest man in history. But still, this got me thinking... how much is nine million denarii in 50-49 B.C.? I tried looking for some past threads that could answer this question in this sub and found little. I understand that the weight of a denarius changed multiple times, and was debased at different percentages of purity multiple times throughout its history of being issued by the Roman Republic/Empire, but I did find (through Wikipedia) that in 44 B.C. the Roman denarii was 3.9g and was 95-98% pure silver. If silver is worth 47 cents per gram today, that would make the denarii worth about $1.88, but assuming it was 95% pure, that would make it $1.79 (rounded) today.

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That would mean Caesar bribed Lucius Aemilius Lepidus Paullus $16,110,000 which seems absolutely insane to me. Given that astronomical bribe, this makes me believe Caesar was easily giving out bribes of lesser amounts too, and maybe other bribes of similar value.

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Did I answer my own question here? Am I missing something here? Basically, I want to know if this is accurate. This seems like an insane amount of wealth for the time period, and maybe I simply have not been able to grasp the sheer amount of wealth that was floating around in higher circles at the time.

Were newspapers, journalists, gossip columns, or just general popular discussions talking or speculating about the potential breakup of The Union or even just the general possibility of civil war in The United States of America, or did the initial first passing of secession votes (and their actual enforcement by state authorities) take the American population by surprise? What about internationally?

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So I'm writing a novel where one of my characters sneaks into a castle under siege and kills the men guarding the gate house. My question is, what kind of mechanism was used to open a gate or drawbridge, and would a single person be able to open it. I can't seem to find an answer anywhere for this.

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Using a lathe as an example, I have access to a lathe that is precise down to 0.0002 inches. This lathe contains various cylindrical parts that had to have been machined by something at least that precise. While I have no doubt we have lathes which are more precise today, something had to make those ones, and the ones before that, and so on until you run out of more precise lathes. Similarly, how did we make measuring tools precise enough to tell us how imprecise our manufacturing tools are?

Tl;dr: Tools started out as rocks and copper accurate down a handful of millimeters, and now we can measure nanometers. How did we bridge that gap?