Explanation From Original OP:

Türkiye-backed Sudanese Army destroyed 4 Chinese-made FK-2000 air defense system belonging to the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with Bayraktar Akıncı.

There is some sense to it - insofar as besieging armies occasionally did destroy their own supplies in order to force their own troops to commit to a (usually costly) assault on the besieged location. Thus, “I want to convince my nobles to surrender, but they think you’re just going to wait out there and that they can outlast you. They need to think you’re going to storm the walls soon if we want them scared enough to entertain the idea of surrender” is a legitimate thought…

… but that’s a lot of fucking faith to put in one’s literal fucking enemy XD

psych

Explanation: The Eastern Roman Empire, sometimes known as the Byzantine Empire, survived after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But the Byzantines were FAKE and GREEK and DIDN’T EVEN OWN THE CITY OF ROME

Explanation: After WW1, the League of Nations was formed in the hopes of avoiding another war like it in the future. During the proceedings establishing the basic rules and axioms of the League, Japan, as the only majority non-white major power at the time, proposed a clause mandating the recognition of racial equality between the League of Nations. If accepted, this would have been a major step forward in dismantling the then-weakening notion of white racial superiority.

Notably, a majority of the members forming the League voted for it, and no votes against it were cast!

Unfortunately, the archracist American President Woodrow Wilson, who had reversed what meagre racial progress had been achieved in the US under his domestic administration, was chairman of the meeting. He insisted that that proposal alone needed unanimous support to pass, and not just majority support, despite majority support being the basis for most other proposals during the formation of the League.

That aside, Imperial Japan at this time was not quite the anti-racist polity is sought to portray itself as - while it very loudly proclaimed itself the defender of ‘colored peoples’ and of a united, ‘brotherly’ union of East Asian peoples, the truth was that racial minorities in the very expansionist Japanese Empire were subject to official discrimination based on pseudoscientific racism of Japan’s own formulation, which conveniently placed Japanese people as the ‘highest’ on the racial hierarchy.

Explanation: While in popular history, the Greco-Persian Wars are emphasized as an attack by a foreign power which united disparate, quarrelsome city-states in defense of their common liberty, the truth is more complex.

First, that Persia always had allied Greek city-states which sided with it, giving them an arguable case for ‘liberating’ rather than ‘conquering’ Greece. They are, after all, only acting in favor of their allies, who are themselves native Greeks!

Second, that the hegemony of powerful Greek city-states over smaller city-states was often so severe that many considered Persian hegemony to be better - or at least no worse - than hegemony by a fellow Greek city-state. Speaking of ‘liberty’ for Greece is all very well and good, but even if you exclude unfree populations like slaves, clearly not every polity is getting an equal share of this ‘common’ liberty.

Third, after getting their nose bloodied in open warfare and having a rather large empire of other concerns to attend to, Persia largely opted to fund the internecine wars of Greek city-states against each other, especially the ever-burning rivalry between Athens and Sparta. Despite the lionization of Sparta and Athens, neither city-state was too proud to take an alliance with Persia against against their fellow Greeks.

Explanation: Santa Anna was the strongman leader of Mexico who repeatedly came to, and was ousted from, power. In fact, it happened so many times that historians can’t agree how many times he was actually in power, with numbers from 5 to 11 separate administrations of Santa Anna.

Who keeps calling this guy!?

Explanation: In the medieval period, a series of wars known as the “Crusades” were undertaken by Catholic Christians from Western Europe, nominally in support of the Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire, roughly modern day Greece and Turkiye. The goal of these expeditions was to reclaim the “Holy Land”, a subsection of the Levant important to Christianity, from Muslims.

During the utterly botched Fourth Crusade, which ran into numerous other mishaps and misadventures along the way, a significant body of the crusaders not only utterly failed to engage their nominal Muslim enemies, but they also warred on, besieged, overthrew, and conquered the Byzantines. This despite the Pope explicitly forbidding them from warring on any Christian polities.

But hey! Loot, land, and power! What’s not to like?

Explanation: Just an old bit of OC from me comparing two very-unlike rulers of the Classical period who have no real reason to be compared against each other (except insofar as CYRUS is always peak rulership).

Fuck/Marry/Kill but WW1

I dunno, the ID is pretty convincing.

You remember correctly that the rescue in battle was an actual event! But not nearly in the circumstances depicted.

In the actual event, both of them were centurions, and both trying to outdo each other in feats of daring and valor during a long and eventless siege by Gauls. They were both being ‘Pullo’ in the opening scene, in a sense. By daring, they keep the morale of their men up during long periods of inactivity. Centurions were expected to do so when circumstances allowed - no breaking ranks in the middle of battle, but in quiet moments, starting trouble on your lonesome (or in a small group) was perfectly valid as long as it didn’t endanger the unit (or as long as it wasn’t completely reckless and throwing your life away).

That kind of ‘combat by champion’ was very common in societies of that era, not to decide entire battles, but as small events before the big clash which could invigorate or dampen the spirits of the army as a whole. Centurions, as men from the ranks who were expected to be the hardest motherfuckers around, were to some degree expected to participate in daring actions like that, to reassure their men that they were being led by example (centurions also had horrific casualty rates).

Anyway, if memory serves, in one of these skirmishes Pullo is hit by a javelin that narrowly misses impaling him, but fucks with his scabbard and stops him from drawing his sword as the enemy rushes him. Vorenus, who was watching up til this point (rather than assisting, since the two were rivals for promotion, and the point was each trying to show off their individual valor), rushes out of the fortifications alone to cover Pullo until he can unfuck his sword, saving his life. As the two of them withdraw, Vorenus loses his footing and almost gets killed by the Gauls, but Pullo valiantly saves Vorenus’s life in turn, helping him make it back to the safety of the fortifications.

Their enmity ended after that, and everyone clapped the onlooking legionaries cheered to see a couple of brave centurions save one another and ice a half-dozen barbarians in the process.

The show dynamic between Vorenus and Pullo is fantastic though, unironically, I’m glad they went with it instead.

The actual event was significantly different - the only thing they really share is the names of the two people in question. But other than that (and the needless slander of Atia), the attention to historical detail and nuance was astounding, easily one of the best/most accurate Roman media out there, up with I, Claudius.

!anarchychess@sopuli.xyz

Well, yes, there’s that too. XD

He was a noted poet in French and Occitan, though!

Richard is one of those unusual historically-relevant figures who really embodies that ancient ‘warrior ethos’ of many pre-modern societies, with all of its paradoxes. He will absolutely butcher your mass of peasant levies, or send in his mass of peasant levies to be butchered, without a second thought. He’ll start a war over a line in a feudal contract that can be disputed to his favor. He’ll gleefully split your skull with a battleaxe in NOBLE AND HONORABLE COMBAT, even if he may prefer the ransom of a capture.

But he was also capable of great generosity of spirit, and largely (though not always - Richard’s temper was noted as volatile) acted in accordance with a kind of ‘golden rule’ treatment. If you were on the battlefield, he expected no more from you than he intended to give.

Notably, his last act was to pardon and reward the Frenchman who killed him with the equivalent of a few years’ wages. The Frenchman, also notably, killed him with a crossbow, which was considered a brutal and cutting-edge weapon… which Richard was very fond of despite the constant moral condemnations of it. “Live by the sword…”

Unfortunately, one of his more monstrous mercenary companions tortured said Frenchman to death once King Richard had breathed his last and could no longer interfere. One of the… caveats of keeping dangerous company is that you can no longer direct whom they’re dangerous towards once you’re gone…

He was noted as very close with several of his military companions, who ran the gamut from common-born to lower nobility, and likewise from monstrous to chivalric. He suffered with his men on campaign, even when he could very easily have lived an easy life at relatively little additional cost, and was always noted as generous to his troops, at a time when monarchs cheating their men even of their promised pay was common.

Some real Beowulf shit, ‘heroic’ and loyal to his friends, but not necessarily ‘good’.

Explanation: Depicted is the murder of Wat Tyler during negotiations in the 1381 AD Peasants Revolt in England.

The text is a mockery of those who insist on addressing only one political issue at a time, such as insisting that LGBT rights must wait until economic reform is achieved, or that women’s rights must take a backseat to international alliances, and are willing to sabotage or ally against movements they otherwise ‘agree’ with in order to prevent an ‘out-of-order’ success. ‘Campism’ in particular is in reference to the tendency of some political partisans to split the world into different ‘sides’ which take precedence over all other concerns - including their supposed ideological aims.

While this post is from !tankiejerk@piefed.social , the phenomenon is by no means limited to authoritarians or leftists. If you’re an American and reading this, most likely you know someone personally who is a campist without the slightest hint of left-sympathy - only they take the opposite side. Like the US backing any number of brutal military juntas because “gommunism bad”, despite the supposed democratic inclinations of many supporters of that foreign policy.

The Mamluks were eradicated by… well, this Albanian in question XD

I doubt it was a majority of the Albanian population, but certainly the Ottomans recruited very heavily from the region, both for officials and troops.

Always happy to spread a little trivia!

The danger of long-tenure imperial appointees - they might end up sympathizing more with the locals than the empire!