Yermak Timofeyevich was a Cossack fur-trapper and explorer who started the conquest of Siberia.

The wealthy Stroganov family helped finance the conquest of Siberia and made much of their fortune through fur trading.

The term really started falling out of favor in academia and general usage after the publication of Orientalism in 1978.

For whatever it's worth, though, my late grandparents were both around the same age as Norwich and they often used "Oriental" in conversation — I guess because old habits die hard.

The Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years' War: English vs. Armagnac/Dauphinist French and then there were the Burgundian French who were sometimes allies of the two other sides.

Also, the Russian Civil War. The two main factions were the Reds and the Whites, but there was also various separatists, the Allied and Central Powers, Black Army, and the so-called Green armies of peasants.

After the start of the High Middle Ages, bastard sons of kings held only as much status as their fathers' felt like granting them. Succession of bastard sons to royal and noble titles was far from uncommon in the early Middle Ages (see: William the Conqueror or Ramiro I of Aragon) but it declined rapidly after the mid-11th century, except in Wales and Scandinavia. A number of French and English medieval kings most often arranged for acknowledged bastard sons to marry heiresses or get high-ranking positions in the church.

Examples of the former are Robert of Gloucester, Philippe Hurepel of Boulogne, William Longespée of Salisbury, and Richard de Chilham and an example of the latter are Geoffrey, Archbishop of York. Some royal bastards, such as Philippe Hurepel; Joan, Lady of Wales; Marguerite de Belleville; and the Beauforts; were legitimated by the Pope, though often with the proviso that they were barred from royal succession.

Sometimes, bastard siblings and their legitimate siblings were close; for instance, the unfortunate legitimate sons of Louis I of Orléans seem to have adored their bastard half-brother, Jean de Dunois, who loved them in return and kept watch of the family possessions while his half-brothers were being held captive in England. On the other hand, relations between Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, and his legitimate half-brothers were sometimes tense, though that's not too surprising since relations between his four legitimate brothers put the fun in dysfunctional.

During the times of the Direct Capetians, the official status of younger Capetian sons was no more exalted than whatever title they were granted. This includes such men as Robert of Burgundy, Hugues of Vermandois, Robert of Dreux, Pierre of Courtenay, Robert of Artois, Alphonse of Poitiers, Charles of Anjou (ancestor of the Capetian House of Anjou), Robert of Clermont (ancestor of the Bourbons), Charles of Valois, and Louis of Évreux. In practice, however, being the sons and brothers of kings gave them unofficial levels of clout and often greater wealth than non-royal counts. Charles of Anjou and Charles of Valois, for example, were able to muster the resources try to claim foreign crowns, though only the former succeeded. Charles of Anjou's descendants, who became kings of Naples and Hungary, enjoyed generally close ties with their French cousins: Charles of Valois married his double second cousin, Marguerite of Naples, Countess of Anjou; Louis X's second wife was Clementia of Hungary; and Louis I of Anjou was designated as heir by Jeanne I of Naples, which subsequent Valois, including Louis II of Anjou, Rene of Anjou, Charles VIII of France, and Louis XII of France, became obsessed with making good on.

However, again, this wasn't officially granted precedence. This is best illustrated when Isabelle of France supposedly protested her son, Edward, giving homage to her cousin, Philippe VI of France, because Edward was the son of a king while Philippe was only the son of a count — nevermind that the count had been her own paternal uncle, Charles of Valois.

The accession of the Valois kings, of which the aforementioned Philippe VI was the first, saw the creation of the title prince du sang, though agnatic descendants they wouldn't been given official ranking over all other members of the peerage until 1576.

How the other cadet branches other than Capetian House of Anjou fared differed: the Vermandois went extinct within three generations and the Courtenays' fortunes were ruined by their adventures in Byzantium, after which half of the family that went east took up residence at the court of Charles of Anjou and married into his family and the few that stayed in France declined into genteel poverty and political irrelevance. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Courtenays tried to claim the status of princes du sang, but without success. However, the Dreux and Bourbons did very well for themselves, all things considered: the last member of the House of Dreux was Anne of Bretagne, the twice queen of France, and the Bourbons eventually got to become kings of France and later, Spain and the Two Sicilies.

I'll do bastard sons in another comment.

While not commoners per se, William Marshal, Otto de Grandson, and William Montagu were all members of minor nobility at best who became friends with kings. William Marshal was a companion of Henry the Young King, Otto of Edward I of England, and William Montagu of Edward III of England.

Another example, though later in history, was Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, the favourite and confidant of Peter the Great. Unlike the three I mentioned above, Menshikov was not even of gentry status. Another example was Aleksey Grigoryevich Razumovsky, a Ukrainian Cossack who became the lover and probably morganatic husband of Peter the Great's daughter, Empress Yelisaveta.

Theodore Roosevelt comes close. He spent two terms in office, resigned, and then ran a third time in 1912, but lost.

Probably not: a biographical essay of Gilles in The Hundred Years War Part III: Further Considerations mentions that his parents died in a gruesome hunting accident that he may have witnessed and that at 16, he kidnapped and forcibly married his cousin, Catherine de Thouars, with the connivance of his maternal grandfather and guardian, Jean de Craon. Jean and Gilles later attempted to kidnap and then threatened Catherine's mother, Beatrice de Montjean, who had decided to remarry, as they feared that her new marriage would cause the loss of some Thouars lands. Years later (possibly at the behest of Georges de La Trémoille), they successfully kidnapped Charles VII's mother-in-law, Yolanda of Aragon.

Later, in 1427 (two years before the appearance of Jeanne), Gilles already liked to watch the executions of pro-English French nobles who had been taken prisoner.

>Interestingly, the defeated English were usually allowed to escape with their lives; by contrast, if an anglophile Frenchman fell into Gilles’s hands was invariably executed as a traitor. One historian describes Gilles’ treatment of such men: He would have them all hung from tall poles that were driven into the ground … Gilles would then stay to watch them fitfully kick, their necks in the noose, until the last spasms of their agony.

It's actually one of the more plausible theories. Oswald was a disturbed ne'er-do-well who seems to have been hungry for attention any way he could get it. He initially wanted to kill the ultra right wing general Edwin Walker, but failed and later just happened to be living in Dallas when JFK visited.

Narratively, though, this isn't satisfying, which is a big reason, I think, why the conspiracies continue to flourish.

The Ukrainian anarchist was Nestor Makhno and I think the Admiral was Aleksandr Kolchak.

Neither of them were all that weird compared to Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, but that's only because Ungern-Sternberg was such a massive weirdo, he was in a class all by his own. The only figures who get close to him are Grigori Semyonov, Boris Annenkov, Ivan Kalmykov, and Aleksandr Dutov. An American general, William Sidney Graves, wrote of them:

>Semenoff and Kalmikoff soldiers, under the protection of Japanese troops, were roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people, and these murders could have been stopped any day Japan wished. If questions were asked about these brutal murders, the reply was that the people murdered were Bolsheviks and this explanation, apparently, satisfied the world. Conditions were represented as being horrible in Eastern Siberia, and that life was the cheapest thing there. There were horrible murders committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks as the world believes. I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.

Other rather odd people involved in the Russian Civil War could include:

• Georgi Atarbekov: Armenian Bolshevik and Chekist. Bragged about having personally stabbed Nikolai Ruzsky.
• Aleksandr Eiduk: Latvian Chekist and poet who wrote verses about the joys of killing.
• Naftaly Frenkel: Former smuggler turned builder of the Gulag
• Mikhail Kedrov: Chekist and pianist. Notorious for his cruelty.
• Lavr Kornilov: Cossack and White general who loved mass murder and the Totenkampf
• Béla Kun: Hungarian journalist turned Bolshevik. Tried to start a Soviet regime in Hungary, but failed and was forced to flee back to Russia.
• Vladimir Purishkevich: One of the killers of Rasputin; extreme anti-Semite, proto-fascist, and supporter of Kornilov
• Sidney Reilly: British spy, probably Ukrainian by birth. Involved with an abortive plot with Savinkov to overthrow the Bolsheviks.
• Boris Savinkov: Terrorist, drug addict, novelist, and womanizer
• Maria Spiridonova: Terrorist and assassin who looked like a schoolmarm. Initially an ally of the Bolsheviks, she later turned on them and orchestrated the assassination of the German ambassador, Count Mirbach.
• Semyon Ter-Petrosian: Better known as Kamo. An early friend and ally of Stalin who was responsible for the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery

Root canal therapy wasn't invented until the mid-18th century, so the only real treatment for severely decayed or abscessed teeth was to pull them.

In Europe, this was most often performed by a barber-surgeon and painkiller was limited to a swig of alcohol, if that. This is a quote from a popular history book about Catherine the Great's experience with dentists of her time:

>One day as a teenager, after suffering weeks from a decayed tooth, the future Catherine the Great agreed to have it pulled. A “surgeon” came to her room armed with a pair of pliers and yanked out the offending tooth—and a chunk of jawbone as well. Blood gushed all over her gown. The swelling and pain were so shocking that Catherine did not leave her room for a month, and even when the swelling went down, the dentist’s five fingers were imprinted in blue and yellow bruises at the bottom of her cheek.

Nazi racial ideology posited that all non-Europeans were inferior to Aryans, but since they couldn't blend in as easily with "real" Aryans, sub-Saharan Africans, Arabs, and East Asians were much less dangerous to the Aryan gene pool and didn't need to be exterminated, as Jews, Roma, and most Slavs were.

The attitude toward Indo-Iranians is rather singular, though, because they were regarded as Aryans, but not as pure and superior as the Nordic people of Germany, England, and Scandinavia. Nazi racial ideology was quite popular among elites in Iran, many of whom already had negative views of Arabs, Jews, and Turks, but I'm not sure about how it was received in India.

For the foundations of Western ideas about marriage (most of which were formulated in the Middle Ages out of a mixture of Roman law, Christianity, and Germanic and Celtic law and customs), try:

• How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent by Philip L. Reynolds
• The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France by Georges Duby
• Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe by James Brundage
• Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages by Frances and Joseph Gies

The Gieses' book is the best to start with, because it's aimed at laymen rather than scholars.

For a read about the shift from arranged marriage to companionate marriage based on romantic love came about, try Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz.

The Inn at the Crossroads blog has medieval recipes for Oxtail Soup, Leek Soup, Beef and bacon pie, Pork pie, Fruit tarts, Apple crisps, Hildegard of Bingen's spiced cookies, Spiced plum mousse, Boiled beans, Almond milk, and Mulled Wine, amongst others.

This page on the website of the British Museum also includes recipes to recreate Medieval Creamed fish, Roasted steak, Mushroom pasties, Lamb stew, Haddock in sauce, Cherry pottage, Cream custard tarts, Rose pudding, and Mulled wine.

There are plenty of surviving medieval cookbooks (translations of many of which can be found here), but they're very difficult to use alone. because they tend to be maddeningly vague about measurements. This, for example, is a translation of a 13th century French recipe for pancakes:

>Here is another dish, which is called white pancakes. Take best white flour and egg white and make batter, not too thick, and put in some wine; then take a bowl and make a hole in it; and then take butter, or oil, or grease; then put your four fingers in the batter to stir it; take the batter and put it in the bowl and pour it through the hole into the (hot) grease; make one pancake and then another, putting your finger in the opening of the bowl; then sprinkle the pancakes with sugar, and serve with the "oranges."

The turning point, at least among elites, began in the late 18th century. By the 19th century, the choices of the couple began to count for more and the traditional methods of arranged marriages had began dying out.

For example, Queen Victoria's mother and maternal uncle both wanted her to marry one of their Coburg nephews, but rather than outright arrange the marriage, they just invited Ernest and Albert to visit her often and hoped she would take a shine to one of them (which, as we all know she did). Victoria and Albert then used similar methods to marry off their nine children. Marriages weren't outright arranged as they had been in the 18th century and earlier, but the royal children instead were introduced to other suitable royals in hopes that they would meet someone they liked. This still isn't quite like modern dating and marriage, but it's still not traditional arranged marriage, either.

Among British nobility in the 19th century, there was also a change from more traditional arranged marriages to allowing some degree of choice with the birth of the London social season, which became the time for unmarried children of nobles and gentry to find matches. While they are fiction, Sense and Sensibility and Bridgerton both depict the London season.

It's more difficult to gauge changes among common people, but it is known that the Industrial Revolution is one main catalyst in the changing of marriage and courtship. One problem is that records of peasant marriages in the medieval and Early Modern Period are sparse, so comparing and contrasting is not as easy as it for royalty and nobility.

Likely not. For several reasons.

One, a number of powerful nobles had embraced Calvinism. John Calvin himself believed that the reason the Huguenots were able to flourish was the conversions of nobles like Jeanne III of Navarre and Louis I, Prince of Condé.

Two, the French crown was in dire financial straits, which would have made it unlikely for them to support expeditions in the Americas (which often failed). The lack of funding itself was a major reason why the Wars of Religion kept reoccurring: the crown lacked the funds to either enforce the majority of its edicts of tolerance or destroy the Huguenots entirely. This was because the constant warfare Charles VIII, Louis XII, François I, and Henri II had waged against Italians and/or the Habsburgs had drained the treasury and the reoccurring civil wars disrupted agriculture, which just created something of a vicious cycle.

Third, religious tension in Great Britain wasn't actually eased all the much by having colonies. While some Puritans were fine going off to Massachusetts Bay Colony, there were plenty of them that weren't, like Oliver Cromwell, and that other issues led to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

The relationship between monarchs and their nobility was often extremely fraught, so much so that most of Asian and European history involves monarchs and nobility trying to curb the power of the other.

If enough of the nobility decided that the current monarch was not to their liking for whatever reason, they could and often did choose to back someone else, who could be a relative of the current monarch or someone else entirely. Most of ancient and medieval history in much of Europe and Asia is that happening over and over again.

China did away with its warrior aristocrat class first and replaced them with scholar officials, but that didn't prevent the eventual toppling of all subsequent dynasties when economic and political troubles inevitably occurred.

The general attitude toward nudes in advertising in the 19th and early 20th century were not dissimilar to the attitude toward nudity in fine art.

Generally speaking, nude art that had some kind of historical or mythological background was fine, but nudes of contemporary women in contemporary settings were considered much more shocking and risqué. It's why Cabanel and Bouguereau's depictions of the Birth of Venus were both considered beautiful and respectable works of art, but Manet's Olympia caused a furor. Orientalist nudes, like of Odalisques in idealized harems, were also far more acceptable than those of contemporary European women.

Most nude ads I've seen from the 19th and early 20th century are tended to have ostensibly historical, mythological, or Orientalist subject matter, which is probably why they don't seem to have drawn much contemporary criticism.

Plenty of knowledge has been lost; it's just not of the type that Ancient Aliens and the like imagine. Rather, it's of smaller things, like great works of literature or things that could have given us greater knowledge of the past.

For instance, the biggest reason why we know so little of the ancient Minoans is because their scripts, Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A, are still undeciphered.

There are also numerous lost works of literature, like most of Sappho's poetry, the other six works of the Trojan Cycle, Cleitarchus' History of Alexander, Cato the Elder's Origines, Claudius' history of the Etruscans, the memoirs of Agrippina the Younger, the hypothesized Q document that served as a source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and countless others.

None of these are likely to have contained instructions on how to build a nuclear fusion reactor or whatever, but it's still lost knowledge.

It wasn't that belts were too expensive. As demonstrated in this historical video of Prince Albert's wardrobe, wealthy upper class men also wore suspenders at the time.

The issue was that trousers in the 18th and 19th centuries were high-waisted and belts wouldn't have helped keep them up, especially because trousers weren't made with belt loops.

Trousers became lower waisted and began to made with belt loops in the 1920s.

Women often played a large role in pagan kings' decision to convert.

• Clovis, King of the Franks was convinced to abandon paganism by his wife, Saint Clotilde of Burgundy
• Æthelberht of Kent was converted by his wife, the Frankish princess, Saint Bertha.
• István I of Hungary and his father both agreed to convert so that he could marry Gisela of Bavaria, though István appears to have been a more faithful Christian than his father was.
• Mieszko I of Poland agreed to convert so that he could marry Doubravka of Bohemia.
• Vladimir the Great had a Christian grandmother, Saint Olga of Kiev, and finally agreed to convert so he could marry the Byzantine princess, Anna Porphyrogennētē
• Hermenegild I of the Visigoths was convinced to abandon Arianism by his wife, Ingund of Austrasia. (Though Arianism was a form of Christianity, it still fits the pattern).
• Władysław II Jagiełło agreed to convert to Catholicism so that he could marry Jadwiga of Poland and become king of Poland jure uxoris.

Two books I read recently, The Realm of Saint Steven and East Central Europe in the Middle Ages pointed out that converting often opened the door to Christian marriage alliances and that the idea of one god and one church often fit better with kings' missions to somewhat centralize their authority that the multitude of gods of pagan faiths.

It's difficult to judge what any of them were thinking psychologically, as ancient and medieval chroniclers generally did not seek to uncover their subjects' inner lives and motivations, as modern writers so often do.

To add to the other comment, a lot of Middle Eastern Christians were (and still are) Nestorian and Miaphysite Christians, rather than Chalcedonian, which is what the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches are often called before their schism in 1054.

Nestorianism, today represented by the Assyrian Church of the East, is the belief that Jesus Christ was two distinct persons, one divine and one human. It was condemned as heretical at the Council of Ephesus in 451 and many Nestorians fled Byzantine lands to the Sassanid Empire, because the largely Zoroastrian Sassanids were not interested in enforcing Christian orthodoxy.

Miaphysitism, today represented by the Copts, Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Syria Orthdoox Church, is the belief that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully divine, in one nature.

The Chalcedonians (which today comprises Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and most Protestants) take the position that Jesus was one person with two natures, divine and human.

This differences might seem small, but they led to a lot of bloodshed in Western Asia and North Africa in the 5th and 6th centuries. Further hardening the differences is that the Chalcedonians believed that Greek and Latin were the only acceptable liturgical languages, whereas a number of Nestorian and Miaphysite Christians used Coptic, Assyrian, Armenian, or Syriac instead.

It is worth noting that a number of Byzantine writers tended to assume that Islam was a form of Nestorian or Miaphysite Christianity as did the Catholic chronicler, Guillaume of Tyr.

In the morning, you'd wake up and have a sponge bath using a wash basin and a pitcher. A full bath would likely only be once a week. If you were a poor person, you would probably share the bath water with your family members.

Your hair would likely be washed only once a week and probably with soap. Shampoo was first introduced to Europeans in 1814, but those in rural areas would likely not have had access to it. There were a lot of hair care tonics available, often of dubious benefit, and very wealthy women were known to wash their hair in things like cognac and eggs.

For your teeth, you'd use a toothbrush or a tooth cloth and tooth powder or paste. A tooth cloth would be likely for people in rural areas and their tooth paste or powder would likely be homemade. At this point, the fact that sugar causes cavities was not understood by most, but having bad breath was still a faux pas.

After pooping, you'd probably use a rag, water, newspaper, brown paper, or your hands, unless you happened to be particularly rich. Toilet paper was not made commercially until the 1850s and only the wealthy used it.

I'm also finished with The Realm of Saint Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary. It's political, cultural, and economic history. The weirdest moments, so far, have been:

• András II's wife, Gertrude, getting hacked into tiny pieces on a hunting trip by angry Hungarian nobles. The murder was probably motivated by her favoring of Germans, particularly her own brothers.
• Béla IV begging his nobility to support him against the Mongols and them being like, "LOL, no. Everything will be fine!" (Spoiler alert: It wasn't.)
• László IV abandoning his Neapolitan princess bride for a Cuman, possibly becoming a pagan himself, and getting murdered by another Cuman because of romantic rivalry.
• Lajos I invading Naples to avenge the murder of his brother and then squandering all good will by ordering the beheading of Charles de Durazzo.
• Another Charles de Durazzo (nephew and son-in-law of the beheaded Charles) overthrowing and murdering Jeanne I of Naples with Lajos' OK (because she was the wife of Lajos' murdered brother), but then deciding to claim Hungary too after Lajos' death instead of his daughter, Maria. He then sent away most of his guard and was promptly murdered by Lajos' disgruntled widow, Elizabeta Kotromanić, who put her daughter back on the throne.
• Ulászló II declaring war on Lovro Iločki for calling him an ox.
• The Hungarian nobility right before the Ottoman invasion being more interested in enhancing their own wealth than defending the country. (Much as they'd done before the Mongol invasion 300 years earlier.)

A reverse image search on TinEye shows that it's indeed a fresco from the Nunziatella catacombs in Rome.

However, Wikimedia Commons shows two images from the Nunziatella catacombs and seems to label both of them as frescos of Jesus.

The Quora user's errs, though, in putting a date of c. 3rd century on the frescoes (no one seems that certain and the range could be anywhere from the 3rd to 6th century) and saying that's it definitely the "original depiction of Jesus". There are other depictions of Jesus definitely from the 3rd century such as a slab showing the adoration of the Magi and a fresco from the Catacomb of Callixtus. One of the oldest known depictions of Jesus is actually a painting from a church in Syria that is dated to around 232 CE.