What books should ultimately be saved

[otters]

The Ottomans...for a short time....held the military advantage in Eastern Europe...but their sophistication, as you call it...was nothing more than their "acquisition" of Byzantine culture, dressed up in their Ottoman custumes.....The Ottomans in no way challenged the supremacy of Spain...that would be left to the English barbarians....and their infernal "pirates" such as Francis Drake...

thanks to the greedy Venetians e.g.?

 

[belamyi]

Scrabble, Vacuum Cleaning, and Thermonuclear Warfare (I'm actually referencing something here. Anybody "get" it?)

Stanislav Petrov?

 

[kallipolis]

thanks to the greedy Venetians e.g.?

The Venetians were a highly successful trading power, along with their competitors...Genoa....and played one nation off, against another..to their advantage..the sacking of Constantinople by the Western Crusaders..financed by Venice.. hastened the decline, and fall of Byzantium...in this sense you are correct to remind us that the great trading nations employed Machniavellian strategies to further their goals...as had Byzantium in earlier centuries....empires come, and go....

 

[belamyi]

The Ottomans...for a short time....held the military advantage in Eastern Europe...but their sophistication, as you call it...was nothing more than their "acquisition" of Byzantine culture, dressed up in their Ottoman custumes.....The Ottomans in no way challenged the supremacy of Spain...that would be left to the English barbarians....and their infernal "pirates" such as Francis Drake...

First off, you are naively mistaken in ascribing all possible "sophistication" to mere looting of an already ruined civilization: only the educational and hygienic system of the empire, evident in the mosque complexes and the system of baths that had disappeared centuries before in the Greek Empire, were their own work, not something acquired. Even the actually false pretense, so often repeated in old Western historiography, which considered the Greek Empire as having just acquired a capital inherited from classical Greek and Romans, and which they would have progressively wasted without adding anything of their own, for all its being false, is much closer to what you say about the Turks.

Then, I was not talking about the Turks challenging the supremacy of Spain IN THE WEST, which has always a private coop for Western European nations, but referring to their respective positions as a global power, and that in terms of their general development, and more as a whole civilization than as a military power. But even from the military perspective, just like the Spanish might was not over after the Armada disaster (go tell the Dutch, in particular), in Lepanto the Turkish were not actually bent by the Spanish. Cheap national pride and propaganda can present things as they please, but any historiographical effort minimally aspiring to accuracy must always bear into account that there is a capital difference between surpassing (punctually) and bending... and, of course, smashing. It has happened the same with the American in Vietnam or even Somalia... although Somalia is more like Afghanistan: nobody, from Alexander to the British and the [STRIKE]Soviet[/STRIKE] Russians, could ever aspire to impose anything, let alone military, in a territory like that, were armies do not fight armies and not even "elements", but the ghost of a war spirit, more agile and deadly than Spanish guerrillas. And please, Drake and piracy in general were just mosquitoes: the bigger problem of Spain has always been Spain herself.

I wasn't extolling their nature, I was pointing merely to the fact that the higher place and power was theirs... faute de mieux, for over one century: just like with the case of Spain. The fact that they became progressively irrelevant after the mid-XVIIth century is greater proof that they were not solid powers.

Even accounting for the brief period in which all powers indisputably held sway over the rest, both the Spanish and Turkish empire were propped more by mere military strength than by a political and economic system that has given Britain one more century of brilliant decadence. In the case of Spain, more than a true economic system, is te huge stash of wealth from the American colonies what availed them of the resources to remain, not so much a relatively relevant power, which they were actually not, as a pure presence in the political board until the early 1800s.

So your post was basically a string of old-fashioned, "acquired" [pseudo]historiographical commonplaces and inaccuracies one after the other.

 

[belamyi]

Add to the above: Drake and piracy in general were just mosquitoes: the bigger problem of Spain has always been Spain herself, and the giving up the administration of their own economy to foreign bankers was far more deadly than a few punks and hooligans working for a still unborn global British majesty.

 

[kallipolis]

First off, you are naively mistaken i

I am neither naive, nor mistaken....your retrospective view on modern European history...is duly noted...

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Add to the above: Drake and piracy in general were just mosquitoes: the bigger problem of Spain has always been Spain herself, and the giving up the administration of their own economy to foreign bankers was far more deadly than a few punks and hooligans working for a still unborn global British majesty.

I'm sure that you are correct...now back to my coffee...Turkish, of course...

 

[belamyi]

I am neither naive, nor mistaken....your retrospective view on modern European history...is duly noted...

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I'm sure that you are correct...now back to my coffee...Turkish, of course...

One can be naively mistaken, hypocritically mistaken, unawarely mistaken... you mean noted on your loo paper: I know. You are in no age to refurbish a mind... however wholly the action and however whole the object.


In any case, you forget the obvious fact that the pirates were not just "British", but also Dutch or French: how could the other relatively bigger and business-oriented, that is, "modern" Western nations indifferent to the possibility of looting the riches passing so close to their territories, both in America and in Europe?

 

[kallipolis]

One can be naively mistaken, hypocritically mistaken, unawarely mistaken...

So you often demonstrate....here...

 

[Alnitak]

In any case, you do not even need to go so far: in the Golden times of glorious Elizabeth I, the Anglos were globally filthier and less sophisticated than the Turkish empire that was the real greater power in Europe, holding sway even over the great Western power in Spain.

"She certainly is a great queen, and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs; she is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all."

Pope Sixtus V

 

[belamyi]

So you often demonstrate....here...

But nobody should be ashamed of, nor resentful, concerning the public demonstration and exposure of naive, hypocritical and unaware mistakes of the naive, the hypocritical and the mindless.

 

[belamyi]

"She certainly is a great queen, and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs; she is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all."

Pope Sixtus V

That describes being a relevant power, not a domineering one: Vani Hari is just an ordinary woman and he is feared by big corporations and the whole scientific community.

 

[belamyi]

Why are we saving them? From what?

What would WoB do?

 

[frankfrank]

Stanislav Petrov?

No, this...