I've heard it said many times that the idea of a medieval "Dark Age" is a historical misconception, but why is that?

This was more or less a quesiton on my final yesterday. One of the options was because he was consul and I think another was because he was pontifex or something, the rest I don't remember.

I know that becoming sacrosanct was from the taking of an oath. But the question seemed to imply that 'because he was x' meant he was sacrosanct.

My understanding is that sometimes armies (such as the Romans) would have formations as thin as three men deep, and yet battles between armies could last hours or days. How is this possible? If two sides with swords collide, I have to think one side will get butchered and begin fleeing within minutes. Did the "battles" actually consist mostly of waiting?

Secondary question: The name Joshua shows up a couple other times in the english bible so why did those instances become Joshua but Jesus becomes Jesus?

I already know that they had no reason to sail east before the Americas were discovered. Europe wanted to trade with China and the Indies more easily, but China was rich enough to not care about a shorter route to Europe. They didn't desperately need anything that Europe would want to sell.

But once word got back that there was a new landmass filled with weird new plants, weird new people, and mountains of gold (and probably a few angels too, with the game of telephone going on), wouldn't they have been interested? There wasn't a major domestic problem to worry about, as far as I can tell. They might not have needed to settle there any more than the US needed to land on the moon, but didn't they at least want to check it out?

As in, is there a connection between the Norse goddess Hel, her domain sometimes referred to as Helheim, and the Christian concept of Hell? I know Christianity has borrowed features from other religions, and this particular example seems like more than coincidence.

There seem to be two black and white camps when talking about sub-roman but pre-germanic england: either the British were completely slaughtered and eradicated in all but Wales, or they were rather quickly assimilated into Anglo-Saxon culture.

The evidence of the former seems to be the historians themselves. Gildas speaks of "rivers of blood", though he seems to be what in modern times we'd call someone who "misspeaks a lot" (i.e compulsively lies). On the other hand, we have Y Gododdin, which seems to hold up to scrutiny quite well. That also claims that all the Northern Britons were defeated in a single battle, with four survivors (and conveniently, one of those surviving soldiers was the poem's author, Aneirin).

My point being... What's the evidence they weren't all eradicated, if historians who were there claim otherwise?

Kind of a strange question that's unlikely to have a precise answer, but is their a way of measuring just how far Roman Society was from having its own industrial revolution had the civilization not collapsed?

I am sure you have heard of the different theories (that Shakespeare was really Bacon, Shakespeare was really the Duke of Oxford). What do you historians believe? I actually do not believe Shakespeare was the man we think it was, considering how little evidence there really is to him

As above do we know how much kingdoms had in comparison to todays money? I.E a knights "Wages" or general wealth right down to a peasant.

Occasionally you'll see them used in media as an obvious sign that the story is taking place in an alternate timeline/universe, but it seems to me they probably would have suffered the same fate as ocean liners, once passenger jets became a thing.

That said, there are still cruise ships, so why aren't there cruise zeppelins?

I'm a bit confused, 20 British shilling was suppose to be worth one pound of sterling silver, but 66 shillings were struck from a pound of sterling silver, which meant the shilling coin itself was over-valued by more than 3 times its weight in silver. Can someone explain how this works?

These sculptures are totally jacked by modern standards, and a modern bodybuilder would have to very deliberately lift weights and pay close attention to nutrition. Even the "strongmen" from 100 years ago don't look nearly as impressive.

Both were parts of the former Russian Empire, and both were occupied at the end of the war. So why one and not the other? I'd be interested to learn both the stated rationale and the likely actual reasons, if they differ.