History consists of a lot of times and places when it would have been the opposite of awesome to exist in the prescribed role for women. Certainly ancient Greece checks this box, as, in the worlds of a museum website, “Greek women had virtually no political rights of any kind and were controlled by men …
Cleopatra VII Philopater, mistress of Julius Caesar, wife of Marc Antony, Pharaoh of Egypt, killed herself on 12 August 30 BC. With her death the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt ended. Except, actually, it didn’t. Cleopatra was, genetically, Egyptian-in-name-only. The Ptolemaic Dynasty came to power in Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 …
A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough. — epitaph on the tomb of Alexander the Great Kings who conquer huge swathes of the known world before they are in their mid-thirties generally don’t die outside of battle, so it should come as no surprise that the rumors of poisoning began …
In August 1963, one month after an earthquake decimated the capital of Skopje, an open topped car zipped around the Socialist Republic of Macedonia carrying two powerful men who were dancing around a renewed relationship. Josip Broz Tito, whose fantastic response to Stalin’s constant dispatching of assassins ended Soviet/Yugoslav relations for many years, was showing …
God Will Protect Us All A White Rose in the Land of Eagles The Words of the Leader The Contrary Communist And the Walls Came Tumbling Down A Princess Most Brave We Must Stop the Bear! Three Players in the Balkan Sandbox Yet Another Balkan Crisis French Artillery in the Balkans The War That Wasn’t …
The Balkans has always been a point of contention between the East and the West, and although the various incarnations of Hungary, Austria, and Austria-Hungary tended to dominate next to the advancing Ottoman Army, Russia was always nipping at the edges and creating leverage with the large number of Orthodox Slavs in Central Europe. That …
The last thousand years of Balkan history is a tale of three powers pulling on the limbs of an infant, as in the Biblical parable of Solomon’s wisdom. The Balkan baby is yanked first toward Austria, then toward Russia, and all the while the Ottoman Empire is pulling steadily on its legs. The arguments between …
The provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina shall be occupied and administered by Austria-Hungary…Austria-Hungary reserves the right to maintain garrisons and to have military and trading roads over the whole area of that portion [the Sandjak of Novi Pazar] of the ancient Vilayet of Bosnia. The diplomatic coda to the Pig War of 1906-1908 became, like …
Very rarely is a shooting war in the Balkans about the subject which everyone claims was the Cassius Belli. Sometimes it is about a political slight related the the topic, but usually it’s about money. The same is true of economic wars. The Great European Imperial Spheres of Influence criss-crossed the Balkans, and frequently collided …
On 1 March 1906 Austria-Hungary decided they had enough of what they considered Serbia’s perfidy and decided to hit the Balkan country back where it would hurt – by denying Serbian products entry into the Austro-Hungarian market. This decree hit one economic sector in particular, and it is that sector that gave this crisis its …