AskHistorians

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Accounts of Baldwin I of Jerusalem's narrow survival after escaping the Battle of Ramla note that he commandeered an English Pirate ship to get to the besieged city of Jaffa. Is it unusual for an Anglo-Saxon pirate vessel to be so deep in the Eastern Mediterranean in the early 1100s?	5
The Travels of Marco Polo were, according to wikipedia, a "rare popular success" for being published hundreds of years before the printing press. What was the publication process like at this period? Was there enough of a literate, low-skill laity to staff hand-copying publishing houses?	5
Since 1908 the New York Times has endorsed three Republicans for president: Wilkie in 1940, Dewey in '48, and Eisenhower after him. What made these men uniquely palatable to the NYT editorial board and audience when it had otherwise been so consistently democratic?	3
Turkish people sometimes claim the Hagia Sophia was purchased by Mehmed II or a successor, rather than taken as a mere spoil of war after conquest. Is this claim based in anything historical? Who "owned" the Hagia Sophia in the 15th Century?	3
How would an upper class Italian's education in the works of plato differ in 500, 1000, and 1500 AD?	2
What portion of the literary and philosophical content that was produced and propagated in antiquity do we have surviving copies of? If I stepped into a random nobleman's library in 100 AD in the eastern med, would I recognize most of the works?	2
An American politics writer claimed present irish is a conlang with questionable connection to historical irish. He analogized it to trying to revive Middle English by recording the speech of appalachians, mixing in Middle English grammar/orthography + neologisms. How much continuity was there?	1

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