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Great response. Thanks for that. Not historian but I’d like to add that the danish language has a similar counting system whereas the rest of the Scandinavian countries does not (although very similar languages (besides Finnish)).
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There is no real metric for measuring how oppressive a country is. Having said that, Germany was unremarkable in this regard. Neither at the forefront of being progressive and also not particularily repressive.
The german constitution provided little in terms of what we think of as civil rights. For the most part, this was governed by the individual states and could vary substantially. The constituion of Prussia as the largest state did include a chapter on civil rights (Art. 3 to 42). This included equality before the law, the rule of law in general, freedom of religion and other things. This was up to the standards of its time, and represents the liberal understanding of what a constitution should do.
In german legal terms, the idea is called "status negativus". This means that the constitution is primarily meant to protect citizens from actions taken by the state. The idea of social security in the sense that the state is supposed to actively help the less unfortunate, had not taken root to nearly the same degree as it had today.
So the average citizen did not face much repression by the state in his day to day life. For certain groups, the opposite was true. The German Empire actively tried to germanise minorities like the Danes in southern jutland, the Poles in Silesia or the French in Alsace-Lorraine. The policy was not always the same, but public use of danish, polish or french was either prohibited or at least regulated. Children were taught german in school.
It should be noted that the ideal of a "pure" national state was widespread at this point. Many nations tried to (forcibly) assimilate minority populations into the majority populaton and used similar instruments as Germany did.
In terms of political repression, the most likely target was the far left and to a lesser degree political catholicism. The terms "Sozialistengesetze" and "Kulturkampf" can be a starting point for further research into this matter. It should be noted that the severity of the repression was substantially reduced after Wilhelm II became Emperor, as Bismarck had been a main proponent.
The political repression was, in my opinion, not much different from that practiced by many other european countries at this point. Heinrich Mann was able to publicise "Der Untertan", a scathing critique of society in imperial Germany, until the outbreak of WW1. Further publication was prohibited during the war, but Heinrich Mann faced zero legal consequences. Rosa Luxemburg could travel and agitate mostly free until 1915, when she was taken into custody for undermining the german war effort. The SPD was the target of repression, but had become the largest party in the Reichstag nevertheless.
In total, "middle of the road" when compared to Western Europe would be a fair assesment of how repressive ther German Empire was.
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For those of a literary bent, Robertson Davies wrote about a Canadian who becomes a contributing Bollandist. It's most entertaining in a light-hearted entirely fictional manner.
The idea that "gods are whatever people agree gods are" is a big part of secular humanism. Both Warhammer and Discworld have that as a huge part of their worlds, because they were both written by secular humanists who knew about Chaos magic and shit. it was all the rage in the early 80s now it's in every sci fi fantasy property.
This is broadly true, but there's also a much more specific vector when it comes to tabletop RPGs in particular. A lot of folks who were in the the tabletop roleplaying biz at the time that the trope was popularised have cited Harlan Ellison's 1975 short short collection Deathbird Stories as a direct inspiration for how faith and gods work in their original settings, and Gygax et al. were almost certainly aware of it. It's not the ultimate source of the idea by any means, but it's arguably the single most influential proximate source through with the idea entered tabletop RPG culture, so it's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in tracing the trope's antecedents.
(Of course, it's not just RPGs where this specific work's influence is felt; it's anecdotally reported that Terry Pratchett cited Deathbird Stories as one of his inspirations for how the gods of Discworld work, as exemplified in his 1992 novel Small Gods, while Neil Gaiman – yes, I know, but Sandman and American Gods played an enormous role in popularising this particular trope outside of tabletop RPG circles, so it's relevant even if the author is a shit – cited both Deathbird Stories and Richard Garnett's 1888 collection The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales. The latter is an especially interesting case because it clearly represents a transitional state between the secular humanist idea of gods' power being directly proportionate to the strength of their worshippers' faith, and older notions of gods deriving physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their names.)
You can also go back to the Epic of Gilgamesh in which Utnapishtim describes the gods, having wiped out all life with a flood, crowding around his fire and they had no followers left. So I suppose the idea could have started then. Several thousand years ago.
You need to be careful there. While the idea of gods being weakened by humanity's failure to perform the appropriate observances is of course an ancient one, uncritically equating this with the idea of a god's strength being directly proportionate to the strength of its worshippers' belief will lead you to peculiar conclusions. These are two different notions. That's why my previous comments explicitly draw a line between "gods deriving physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their names" and "gods being directly powered by faith alone"; the latter is a very modern idea, and claimed examples of it in the ancient world are almost always modern misinterpretations.
I'm having trouble picturing this. To be honest, I can only think of the skit from I Think You Should Leave where Tim Robinson realizes he accidentally showed his barber a picture of a dog (like this). Your previous take seems to be making the point that accounts varied. But was a "dogs ears" hairstyle a real thing (whether Napoleon had it or not), or was it just a humorous description by Würstemberger's son? He finishes the quote with "dog's ears as one says" so I assume the former, but do we know exactly what this looked like?
Yeah, but 100 attackers assaulting a position with 1000 defenders MIGHT inflict more than 100 casualties. The defenders cannot inflict more than 100 casualties.
It's more relevant for equipment, which I mentioned in my answer because OP specifically asked about tanks.
As I said, if you are using a lot of tanks, you are going to lose a fair number, even to artillery and infantry weapons. But if you don't have sufficient tanks, enemy anti-tank units simply don't have that many tanks to kill.
First of all ancient Roman shops are divided in 4 typologies thanks to Kleberg’s literary survey:
tabernae considered, very generally, as shops and taverns;
cauponae as restaurants and hotels;
popinae as restaurants and bars;
thermopolia as bars.
This distinction is not fixed as there are a lot of subtle differences and similarities between shops.
Thermopolium, …, is the least commonly used term in any form of the written word, found only—and astonishingly, given its broad use to describe so many buildings—three times in the world of Roman literature and epigraphy, and only in Plautus.23 As rare as its usage may have been in antiquity, still its use by Charles Mazois to describe a “café,”24 or August Mau to confidently inform us that “[i]n view of the provision for heating water, we are safe in calling this [the bar at VI.10.1] a thermopolium, a wineshop which made a speciality of furnishing hot drinks” is to some degree unsurprising. [Cit. Steven J.R. Ellis - The Roman retail revolution]
We know for sure that it sold drinks and food of fast consumption or that it could be taken outside like take-away.
How many of them?
First of all. Romans were practical and chaotic. At the same time they tried to put order to anything.
We see that the created streets for specific purposes or entire city parts.
And it is in such parts that we see how popular these shops were.
Just in Ostia alone we had over 800 of them.
The difficulty is: how to distinguish them?
We have only a few certain thermopoliums. Because it is really really difficult to distinguish them from others depending on the quality of ruins.
We know for certain that they cooked/ heated food and drinks near the counter containing dolias or in another room.
The problem is that even tabernas and the others did it.
Normally if they had a counter near the entrance it is safe to assume them as thermopoliums, but sometimes they had counters inside the building, thing that other shops did too.
Anyway we can see, from the sheer magnitude of shops with counters found in cities such as Rome, Pompeii, Ostia and others that they were really popular.
Well sure, but both of those examples are more about the dynamics of attack/defense than anything to do with the numbers of troops. Sometimes 100 defenders can exact high casualties on a numerically superior attacking force, but 100 attackers almost always loses to a higher number of defenders.
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/u/crrpit on How would western Europe handle the mongols of Ghenghis Khan didn't die?
Oct. 17th, 2025 09:18 amPosted by /u/crrpit
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o8whis/how_would_western_europe_handle_the_mongols_of/njxyr4f/
Sorry, but your submission has been removed because we don't allow hypothetical questions. If possible, please rephrase the question so that it does not call for such speculation, and resubmit. Otherwise, this sort of thing is better suited for /r/HistoryWhatIf or /r/HistoricalWhatIf. You can find a more in-depth discussion of this rule here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o8whis/how_would_western_europe_handle_the_mongols_of/njxyr4f/