I know Louis XIV is typically held up as THE example of an absolute monarchy, sort of setting the standard, but the more I read about his administration, the more it sounds like an Oligarchy or the robe nobility, or more accurately of his advisors.

The writings of Colbert and Louvois seem to suggest that they ran most of the country, making the decisions in their respective fields, and used "His Majesty" as a sort of "get it done ASAP" stamp.

Louis was involved in the affairs of these advisors and attended their meetings, but how much was he an absolute monarch, rather than a powerful centralizing figure who kept the nobility from splintering the country?

If I want to volunteer, and my father gives the OK, to I just go to the Temple in London? Does my father just sign me up? Are there recruiters who travel the countryside?

Title.

And if they did, did anyone ever try to clear them up and/or replace them so the churches and cathedrals are brighter lit?

In the game Crusader Kings 2, if you're playing as a Nordic ruler, you can get an event where your son will try to join the Varangian Guard. If you let him join, one of the possible outcomes to the event will be your son returning a few years later, talking about "greek love", and he will gain the "homosexual" trait.

Does this have any basis in history? Did the Varangian Guard have a reputation for it's members being gay? Or is it just some joke the devs added to the game?

I've always wondered if in movies like, Gladiator or Alexander, the great military leaders gave speeches before battle. And if so, were only a few people able to hear them?

For clarification, I'm referring to the Transatlantic slave trade. I'm aware that Europeans did periodically enslave other Europeans throughout their history, and I've heard that some slaves in the Americas were European (I'm going to conflate "European" with "white" and "African" with "black" for the purposes of this post). But the vast majority of slaves in the Americas were black, to my knowledge.

So... why didn't Europeans just enslave other Europeans and ship them overseas instead of enslaving Africans? I've read one explanation from Frank Wilderson, professor at UC Irvine, from "Red, White & Black: Cinema and Structure of U.S. Antagonisms", that:

"[Europeans] could easily have provided 50,000 [white slaves] a year [to the New World] without serious disruption to either international peace or existing social institutions that generated and supervised these potential European victims" and that "the costs of enslavement would have been driven down exponentially had Europeans taken white slaves directly to America [...] shipping costs... composed by far the greater part of the price." He continues that "not only would European civil society have been able to absorb the social consequences of these losses (i.e. class warfare would have been unlikely even at this rate of enslavement), but civil society 'would [also] have enjoyed lower labor costs, a faster development of the Americas, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the Atlantic."

He concludes that "what Whites would have gained in economic value, they would have lost in symbolic value". Basically, Wilderson's explanation seems to be that white Europeans are simply driven by an evil obsession with dominating and subjugating people based on skin color (that there isn't really an economic or practical reason why they do this - in fact, they do this despite strong economic incentives not to), because Whiteness/White Culture is based on exploitation and violence.

Is this actually the case? Did Europeans have no real reason to pick blacks for slavery other than not liking dark-skinned people? One of the traditional explanations I've heard for the origins of racism against blacks amongst whites is that, because of the strong commercial incentives to get cheap labor for the Americas, White European colonialists enslaved Africans because labor shortages meant the costly practice makes economic sense. However, European liberalism seemed to imply that enslaving your fellow man was wrong, so Europeans had to come up with an ideological justification why the principles of liberalism (human rights, agency, freedom, etc.) would not apply to slaves, thus originates the racist theory that blacks are categorically different than whites in moral character. In other words, modern racism has its origins as an ex post facto justification for an economically motivated practice (instead of just being an irrational superstition that white people made up so they could be sadistic). But I'm not sure if this "squaring liberalism's circle" argument makes a whole lot of sense.

Anyone?

I have always read that the Byzantine Empire was mainly a greek speaking empire and had a greek character to it. So why did the Anatolian peninsula become more important to the empire but not greece itself?

I've noticed that cookbooks are filled with terms like "saute," "julienne," and so on and so forth, even in "eastern" recipes that don't appear to have been influenced by "western" cuisine. Is there any particularly interesting historical reason why details of the French culinary tradition have become so widespread?

Considering that the conquistadores were often semi-private adventurers with little to no prior military service, where and how would they have learned how to fight?

Where and how would they have acquired the sword / crossbow / arquebus / martial skills they would need when it came time to fight the outraged native warriors?

How would, say, a desperate Extremaduran peasant or a Sevillian immigrant come to the New World or to the Philippines have learned how to fight with arms and armour?

I've heard that OE may have been mutually intelligible with Old Norse but how would a viking communicate with a Gaelic, Pictish or even Frankish speaker?

If the treaty of Versailles left Germany with a broken economy, hyperinflation, unemployment and limited military resources, then how did the Germans manage gather the resources to build a massive army to fight wars on two fronts.

Did they have Peoples they were referring to as what we now call ancient?