Like for example Albania, Kosovo, and the Bosniak people all converted but Greece remains Orthodox.

My 10th Great Grandmother, Isabel Holguin (b. ~1582), was "accused by the church of trafficking 'magic roots' in 1626" (The Origins of New Mexico Families by Fray Angèlico Chàvez, pp. 14-15). Is there anything historically that could provide clues as to what these roots were and why they were illegal? This took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by the way.

If this violates any rules or is unclear in any way please let me know.

I was just watching a movie, and I noticed a trope that I had seen in other media before. Travelers come into a village that is wholly abandoned because some kind of contagion had killed everyone several months prior to their arrival, but nobody from the village had ever ventured out into the world and told anyone else of the tragedy that was occurring back home.

Did anything like this ever actually happen, and did it happen often?

To be specific, I'm not talking about plague times where deadly contagions were fairly common/expected. I'm talking about just one village becoming infected and nobody surviving long enough to alert others to the plight of their people.

It sounds like it was a chaotic situation, obviously, but how much would life have changed for the lower levels of society during the succession crisis and subsequent civil war? I'm sure it kind of sucked for the ruing classes. Hearing it described as a time when "men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep" makes it sound like a dystopian hellscape, but on the other hand, I would assume the general situation for a peasant, i.e, mostly just working and occasionally being levied into the army of some lord or another, wouldn't be terribly different from any other period of time from the era.

If some form of precious metal coin was being used, it seems like way more of it would be leaving Latin America and entering Spain via tributes than would be moving in the opposite direction. Over time I would think this would lead to a shortage of coin in the Latin Americas?

If a representative currency like US dollars was being used, were they forced to mint more of it to replace cash loss?

I'm sorry if I've got some facts wrong. I just work as a transcriber of university courses, and I was recently working on one for the history of colonial Latin America. The instructor mentioned this move by the King of Spain, and I immediately started wondering how the communities in Latin America would recoup their losses.

Thanks! Quothefool

I know that the US wanted to open up Japan so that they would have a market for their goods, but that can't have been the stated reason, could it? "US Sends Fleet To Trample Foreign Sovereignty" doesn't seem like a headline they would write.

Russia seemed like such a backward power under the Tsars and was still so poor during WWII that the invading Russian conquerors looked enviously at the German houses and neighborhoods they entered.

Yet over the next few decades, they produced world-class submarines, missile cruisers, jet fighters, and rockets; and to this day have a very highly regarded armaments industry. They are competitive with the United States, the incumbent power over two world wars with a world-spanning economic and financial empire. How is this possible?

I'm interested in historic food recipes, and I keep seeing the marsh mallow plant near me. I'd love to try making a real marshmallow, like the Ancient Egyptian kids enjoyed.

Anybody looked into this? I'm guessing it's some sort of tahini-style food, but I can't find any definitive sources on it...

Did Nazi ideology inspire the shift? Prior to the Nazis did people think of Jews as a race that plagued nations?

Further, how was Greek able to survive so well in Greece and Anatolia after centuries of Latin domination?

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As a followup question from a different era of history, maps of ancient empires (e.g. the empires of Rome, Persia) often look like consolidated blobs, similar to map portrayals of modern states. Does this mean those empires were truly more consolidated and centralized than feudal Europe?

I understand that answers will be even more speculative than is normal for ancient history, due to the paucity of sources. When I ask a question that seems to be looking for concrete answers, I just mean to ask for prominent theories in the field.

From what I understand, the canonical story of Celtic is that what we could call the original Celtic cultural-linguistic phenomenon originated in the Hallstatt cultural area in the early-mid 1st millenium BCE, then spread out from essentially what is now Bavaria to cover huge swathes of Europe. What are the most prominent theories for the cause of the expansion of Celtic language/culture? To ask about a particular case of expansion, what would cause a group of Celts to upend themselves, go all the way to Greece to raid/settle, and then eventually move over into Asia Minor to finally settle down? Would the founding population of Galatians have mostly been a warband of men that intermarried with locals, or would there have been mass migration of women and children comparable to the number of men?

Centuries later, the original Celtic area would become Germanic - how did this process occur? What are the prominent theories regarding the pre-Migration Period expansion of Germanic peoples/cultures in general? The expansion from the homeland along the North Sea and the Baltic across Central and Eastern Europe is comparable in spread to the earlier Celtic expansions. What do we know about the replacement/assimilation of the Celtic populations in Pannonia and the Balkans, re: when and by what other peoples?

I heard this from a friend of mine, and while he is knowledgeable about some things from ww2, I wonder if there's actually any truth to this.

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I've read several ancient history books and heard several lectures series that mention things along the following lines:

"The sources say the enemy numbered 120,000 troops, but of course you shouldn't take that seriously."

I understand that we can tell through alternative methods that armies were much smaller. My question is about the frequent rationales historians give for why those numbers are often so inflated.

Sometimes the rationale is said to be making the victory seem greater (we fought off a horde and won!) or the defeat manageable (there were too many of them!), and I would categorize that under "exaggeration", and that's reasonable, and that's not what my question is about.

But sometimes the rationale is given as "Ancient authors weren't trying to be precise, they were just trying to convey A Very Large Amount". I would put this under 'symbolic'.

So I guess my question is: how do we know that's what the authors were going for?

If I tell my friend "There were like a million mosquitos at the lake!", I expect him to understand it is an exaggeration. If he said to me "Be serious now, how many were there really?" I might sheepishly reply "oh, I guess maybe...100?"

Is this the same situation? Do we think if we could go back in time to these ancient authors and ask them "Did you really mean 120,000?", they would say "Heavens no, of course not, everyone knows that's just A Large Number. It was probably, like, 10,000", or would they say "I think it was 120,000, sure, why not?"

I'm intentionally separating this Symbolic/Mistake distinction from 'Exaggeration', which can happen for various reasons as listed above.