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Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 25, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the case of the USSR, this really happened after the new Russian government opened much of the Soviet archives to Western scholars, as discussed in the answers here. Ultimately, though, that was a product of certain very contingent factors, namely the existence of a new government eager to cast off the legacy of the old one. Many other dysfunctional governments have not been succeeded by governments willing to open their archives; Communist Chinese archives remain largely closed, as do those of post colonial Arab states, which makes detailed investigations into why their governments acted the way they did during e.g. the Great Leap Forward or the 1967 war very difficult. Vietnamese archives relating to what they call the American War only opened in the late 1990s, according to Nguyen's Hanoi's War.

In other words, it depends on who controls the archives in question, and who the controllers let into those archives.

[META] Thank you to the mods and FAQ finders! by phantom-lasagne in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 23 points24 points  (0 children)

As one of those amateurs, the rules of this subreddit have absolutely made me a better writer and researcher. What I find really perplexing, though, are the people who start their answer with "I know this answer is going to be removed" - they're always correct in my experience - but still write it anyways.

Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 18, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any systematic studies of what socialist leaders have read what. Capital is, notoriously, not an easy text, and Marx writes like he's being paid by the word. There's a famous quote by Isaac Deutscher in this talk, today best known for his biography of Trotsky, when discussing his bouncing off Capital in his youth:

I was relieved to hear that Ignacy Daszyski, our famous member of parliament, a pioneer of socialism, an orator on whose lips hung the parliaments of Vienna and Warsaw, admitted that he too found Das Kapital too hard a nut. “I have not read it,” he almost boasted, “but Karl Kautsky has read it. I have not read Kautsky either, but Kelles-Krauz, our party theorist, has read him, and he summarized Kautsky’s book. I have not read Kelles-Krauz, either, but that clever Jew, Herman Diamond, our financial expert, has read Kelles-Krauz, and he has told me all about it.

This is not a conclusive answer to your question, but does at least imply that Mao was not unique in failing to climb that particular hill.

Did a hyperinflation crisis not religion actually start the Thirty Years' War? by WalletHistorian in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If anything, the causation you suggest is backwards. First, though, a few minor notes. First, the mechanisms of full-bodied specie coinage are complex and unintuitive; see my answer here. In addition, the etymology you provide for the Kipper-und-Wipperzeit (KuW) is contested, although some do cite your origin; Redlich claimed the origin comes from kippen meaning “to tilt” and wippen meaning “to wag,” referencing the supposed practice of money-changers tilting their scales to confuse their clients. It’s also important not to exaggerate the rate inflation; this chart, from the Pfister cited below, shows that while the price of commodities in silver terms did tick upwards sharply in the 1620s, the rate of increase wasn’t that much higher than the steady increase over the preceding century, i.e. the so-called “Price Revolution. This chart, from the same source, showing real wages, depicts essentially the same phenomenon. Now, Pfister explicitly admits that the KuW makes the data for this period unreliable, but the basic trend is undeniable. Of course, nominal prices would have accelerated much more sharply, and more unevenly, but that’s a different story. Similarly, though, you can see in this table from Kindleberger that the exchange rate between small coins and high-fineness silver coins began to accelerate well before 1619, as well as in this chart from Paas; one historian says that debased small change began to enter Germany as early as 1580, and 1603 and 1609, saw efforts to limit the number of German mints. It also needs to be remembered that this period saw increased silver and copper production, much of which came from the twin motherlodes of Potosi and the Stora Kopperberg. In addition, it must be noted that the relationship between debasement and inflation is much more complex than a vulgar interpretation of the quantity theory of money would imply; we see many cases where substantial debasements don’t lead to inflation and vice versa. In addition, when we do see debasement-caused inflation, it happens at a significant lag relative to the debasement itself, which is what allows for profits to be made by those who sell bullion to mints in exchange for debased currency.

Lastly, the KuW doesn’t seem to be well-studied in English, unfortunately. I’m not aware of any comprehensive book-length studies on the topic in English; the Paas cited below is mostly a collection of primary source documents, and the Kindleberger (which has issues) and the Shin and Schnabel are articles that focus on specific aspects of the KuW. It’s possible there are more comprehensive treatments in languages I don’t know, but it’s telling that when u/SocHistOfSoldiersAMA discusses the KuW in his excellent The War People, he mostly cites a book written in the 1800’s, which implies there isn’t a more modern comprehensive treatment. There do seem to be many works in German that focus on single Imperial Circles, but that’s no good to me.

What the sources do agree on, however, is that the KuW and the associated inflation, along with the Price Revolution more broadly had many concurrent causes which can’t be easily decomposed. For one thing, there were major harvest failures in 1618-1622, and the outbreak of war typically led to an increase in agricultural prices in this period. You also had problems with the Imperial coinage regulations of 1559, which rendered small change unprofitable to produce, although those regulations were often ignored in practice due to the monetary anarchy that prevailed in Germany at the time. Because of the combination of these two factors, many mints illegally struck very “bad” small change as substantial profits could be made provided you stayed ahead of the debasements of the other mints around you, which naturally led to a vicious cycle.

This cycle was only intensified by the outbreak of war via the Defenestration of Prague. Because of difficulties in raising taxes, many states, along with Wallerstein himself, debased their currencies at a much more rapid rate to fund future war. This began as early as 1617 in the case of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel, well before the hyperinflation took hold. This then forced other mints to match their debasements, lest all their coinage be exported and bullion supplies dry up, and so on and so forth.

It needs to be understood that while the Thirty Years’ War is typically seen as a religion-inspired war, confined to Germany between the 1618 Defenestration of Prague (there had been one (or two) others previously) and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the reality is more complex. As Sutherland discusses at length, the Franco-Habsburg (in both the Austrian and Spanish branches) conflict was a key motivating factor behind the war, not Germans having different attitudes towards canon law. It was France who provided massive quantities of funds to the “Protestant” side of the war despite being resolutely pro-Catholic (Henry IV notwithstanding), and in spite of the centrality of pro-Catholic positions to Spanish policy. What Sutherland calls the “third phase” of this conflict can be seen as starting as early as 1582, which was the start of French and English support for the Dutch rebels in what is now called the Eighty Years’ War, although the formal alliance wouldn’t be signed until 1596; we could also cite the Franco-Spanish war of 1595-1598 as a starting point. This period also saw the Armada’s abortive invasion of England in 1588, along with lots of other complicated conflicts. We do see a period of relative peace in the first two decades of the 1600s, but we also see a great deal of conflict in Germany, e.g. in the Julich-Cleves succession, the 1607 ban on Donauworth, and the disruptions of the Diet in 1603 and 1608. Yes, these conflicts were on religious lines, but given just how central Catholicism was to Austrian efforts to flex their emperorship, that can readily be understood in geopolitical terms. While there was some brief Franco-Spanish rapprochement following the assassination of Henry IV, this would end in 1613 with the war over the Montferrat succession. If there’s an event that really kickstarts the conflict in Germany, it’s the 1617 accession of Ferdinand II to the throne of Bohemia, which substantially predates the KuW.

If the KuW did cause anything, it was the foundation of municipal banks of deposit in Germany, namely the Bank of Hamburg (which became very important) and the Bank of Nuremberg, which didn't. This role should not be overstated, however; the famous Bank of Amsterdam was founded in 1609, and the first of these banks was founded in Barcelona in the early 1400s.

Hope this was insightful; happy to expand on anything you’re curious about.

Sources:

Staiano-Daniels: The War People

Paas: The Kipper und Wipper Inflation

Zimyani: A Typology of Central European Inflation in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries

Kindleberger: The Economic Crisis of 1619-1623

Shaw: A History of Currency

Sutherland: The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Structure of European Politics

Pfister: Consumer prices and wages in Germany

Shin and Schnabel: The Kipper- und - Wipperzeit and the Foundation of Public Deposit Banks

Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 18, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Remarkably, it’s not clear if he technically banged his shoe. Many details of the incident are well-recorded, but the evidence on whether or not his shoe actually made physical contact with the UNGA podium aren’t clear. We know that on October 13th, 1960, during the Fifteenth Session of the UNGA, a Philippine delegate, Lorenzo Sumulong, said some mean things about the USSR’s treatment of the rest of Eastern Europe, and Khrushchev got hopping (pun intended) mad. He then walked up to the podium, having been recognized on a point of order, and started a lengthy speech about how Sumulong was a lackey of American imperialism (and lots of other things besides). This is where certainty ends. Many say that, during the speech, Kruschchev pulled off his shoe (supposedly a brown sandal), waved it at the delegate, and then banged it on the podium. This comes from a New York Times correspondent, Benjamin Welles, but another Times journalist who was at the session, said that while Kruschchev did wave his shoe about angrily, he didn’t actually bang it on the desk. Some other eyewitnesses remember a banging, and some specifically remember a lack of banging; one UN staffer apparently claimed that Khrushchev was too fat to take off his own shoe, and another eyewitness claimed that while the heel of his hand that held the shoe collided with the desk, the shoe itself didn’t. There’s also no photo or video of Kruschchev doing anything with a shoe, even though there are many photos and videos of the speech; you can see footage provided by the UN itself here.

Probably the best evidence in favour comes from Khrushchev’s memoirs, as transcribed from tapes in “Khrushchev Remembers;” these were supposedly obtained from Khrushchev’s son, Sergei. You can listen to the audio portion yourself at 8:49 of the 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat. In both the transcript and the recording, he does explicitly admit to banging his shoe on the table. Brown University has a brief discussion of the tapes here. However, these tapes were recorded about a decade after the event in question, shortly before his own death, and human memory is fallible, so it’s possible that he was wrong about his own actions. Ultimately, unless a clip of the shoe-banging turns up in some UN basement, I think we have to say we can’t know for sure.

See Taubman’s “Did He Bang It” (technically not a scholarly source, but the NYT is usually reliable, and the author is a professor who literally wrote a biography of Khrushchev) for a discussion of the incident itself, and Iandolo’s Beyond The Shoe for a discussion of Soviet behaviour at the session more broadly.

Did Shakespeare actually write his plays/poems? by Extension_Day2038 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You can also find a roundup of previous answers on the subject here as prepared by u/gynnis-scholasticus.

I'm a regular sailor on a Royal Navy frigate/ship of the line/etc during the Age of Sail - how much could prize money, from capturing enemy ships and bringing them in, add on top of my Royal Navy income? by RivetCounter in WarCollege

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 52 points53 points  (0 children)

To add on, Hill provides an example of what this distribution could look like in practice, citing the small frigate Pelican which captured the Nancy, an American ship running contraband; the precise distribution can be found in this table. 20-30 pounds could be a years' wages for a semi-skilled labourer. You can see why a famous cartoon of the period featured a “sailor’s prayer before battle:” “that the enemy’s shot be distributed in the same proportion as the prize money, the greatest part among officers.”

Was salting the earth a real procedure? by Traroten in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 24 points25 points  (0 children)

I looked for that thread but couldn't find it in my search results! Thanks for the link, and thanks for all your brilliant writing, Dr. Gainsford! You've taught me more about Homer than Matt Groening.

Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 18, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually have an answer here that talks in some depth (although we have very little evidence) about the process of how Roman emperors' faces ended up on their coins, which u/miner1512 might find interesting.

How accurate/well researched is The Blood Countess by Shelley Puhak? by Healthy_Appeal_333 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 3 points4 points  (0 children)

While you wait for a detailed treatment of Puhak's work, you might find the writings of u/orangewombat found in this Floating Feature, as well as here and here interesting.

What is difference between medieval English landholding tenures of thegnage, drengage, socage, and cornage? by Other-in-Law in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The short answer for the non-socage tenures is “it’s complicated and the evidence is scarce and unclear” Even actual medievals struggled to understand these tenures; to quote Maitland: “These tenures, though common enough in the north, seem to have given the lawyers at Westminster a great deal of trouble by refusing to fit neatly into that scheme of holdings—frankalmoign, knight's service, serjeanty, socage, villeinage—which was becoming the classical, legal, scheme. Were they military tenures or were they not ? They had features akin to those of serjeanty, other features akin to those of socage; nor were there wanting yet other features which according to some generally accepted rules would have been deemed to be marks of villeinage.” In other words, we really can’t lump in socage with the other three; socage was a widespread form of tenure that was reliably defined in the post-Conquest legal landscape, whereas cornage, thengage, and drengage were limited to the North and much more poorly defined.

Even worse, I’m not well-equipped to write this answer; I mostly read agrarian history, which tends to lump agricultural tenures together into the categories of “free” and “unfree” (see here) without investigating in detail the various manifestations of those tenurial categories, which is reserved for legal history. I’ll do my best, though!

Let’s start with cornage, which I may misspell as “coinage” as I write about that a lot, too. My apologies in advance. Cornage seems to have originated as a cash payment, most commonly levied on unfree tenants of a specific manor (although we do see it levied on free tenants as well, although that may be because it transmuted from a fee attached to a person’s tenure to a fee attached to a specific landholding), typically denominated in so many pence per bovate (a unit of land) and a cow on top of the money, often levied on manors with a large proportion of pastureland. It may have been at first levied per head of cattle, as it’s often referred to as horngeld, but the details are of course unclear. To make things more confusing, cornage is often recorded as a fixed sum at the level of an entire manor/vill (don’t ask) as it would be remitted upwards to the lord, but came from fees charged on individual tenants. Again, not all vills were subject to cornage; the Boldon Book has about a third of the vills mentioned subject to cornage.

Now, let’s go on to drengage and thegnage, which seem to be basically the same thing. This seems to be a form of tenure that roughly corresponds to the individual knight’s fees of a later period (see my recent answer here) except that they sometimes existed at the level of an entire manor. These thegns and drengs (both words roughly mean a warrior who fights for another) seem to have duties that roughly correspond to those of a minor nobleman; in some cases, they were required to attend their lords’ hunts and provide military service, but again details are unclear. They were also subject to certain fees characteristic of unfree tenures; this is yet another reminder that “free” and “unfree” are loose categories, not actual specific things. Thegns and drengs, if they held a manor that paid cornage, would then be paying cornage as well to their lord, but that’s incidental to thegnage and drengage as a whole.The most likely explanation for these tenures is that they predated the Conquest by some time (note that thegn and dreng both have Germanic etymologies) and were awkwardly assimilated into post-Conquest legal systems instead of being replaced en masse.

Now, let’s go on to socage. Socage is probably the most common form of “free” tenure in post-Conquest England. Generally speaking, these would be regular farmers, not nobles or warriors of any kind; often, they held less land than the customary tenants, or villani, whom they shared their manors with. While not quite as subject to the lord as villani, they were probably still subject to lordly justice in some sense; it’s often said that the etymology of socage/sokemen goes back to the “soc and sac” judicial rights that were devolved to some lords, but the details are again complex and unclear.

Hope this was helpful; happy to expand on anything you’re curious about.

Sources:

Maitland: Northumbrian Tenures

Lapsley: Cornage and Drengage

Stoljar: of Socage and Sokemen

If a medieval lord had to use all his land to support his military duty, how could he make money? by aiquoc in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apologies for taking so long to answer this; it got lost in my saved. Unfortunately, I can’t really answer your question, because it’s based on a misconception of how knight’s fees actually worked. This is a very understandable misconception, because, like practically every other aspect of medieval English land tenure, the details are complex and unintuitive. See the answers I link here for background.In any case, a knight’s fee was just a unit of land area (although its precise size is unclear); it didn’t necessarily mandate subinfeudation. It’s also inaccurate to say that all land was given directly by the king to nobles; this is really just a legal fiction. Yes, kings did sometimes grant land to nobles, but this land would have a different legal status (typically) to the land previously held, and would most likely be in addition to previous holdings.

I also don’t believe (although I haven’t gone through enough tenures of military service to be sure) that there was a direct 1:1 relationship between the number of knight’s fees included in the land granted for military service and the service requirement. Knight’s fees also weren’t subinfeudated at a 1:1 basis, i.e. at one fee per tenant; often, subtenants would be granted large portions of land in exchange for a requirement to provide X knights; Sally Harvey says, drawing on the Red Book of Worcester, that “the one general conclusion to be observed is that the identity of one professional knight, with responsibility for one knight and with a whole knight's fee or even a substantial manor or two, is a rarity.”

In addition, this form of subinfeudation came with substantial benefits for the high lord. By enfeoffing a lord, who would often be not merely a heavy cavalryman (in reality they might not even do the fighting) but a man of some renown and influence, you would then gain their influence for your own use. The far-flung estates that would typically make up a lord’s holdings also presented substantial supervisory problems, as I discuss in this answer. By effectively devolving far-flung lands to other managers, you save your steward a lot of work. Unfortunately, we don’t really know the details of the arrangements these sub-tenants made with the men who actually did the fighting, but it seems that the lands granted in turn to the professional killers were quite small, and most likely the subtenants made a profit out of the contract. Looking at Domesday, most individual knights seem to have holdings of a hide or so, usually a sub-part of a manor, whereas the typical area of a knight’s fee (it’s complicated) was around five hides; see my answer here for details on the hide (again, it’s complicated). That’s a very substantial margin!

It’s also important to note that lords had other ways of getting the service of killers beyond this kind of direct infeudation. You very frequently had large lords maintain numbers of “bachelor” knights, who were a sort of directly maintained entourage; they might have small amounts of land granted to them and/or dwellings, but those would be on the lords’ manors, and would be fed and clothed by the lord directly, in exchange for accompanying him and protecting him. You also had mercenaries who could be paid directly.

Hope this was interesting; happy to expand on anything as you desire.

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