What was it like to live here bros?
Why do people always conquer east-to-west? Didn't anyone ever go north-to-south?
>>18476642A lot less monotonously Islamic than you might think.A big misconception about the Islamic conquests is that they were ISIS tier jihadists who made everyone be Muslim or slaughtered them. That's the complete opposite to the truth. They actually preferred their subjects to keep their own religion because then they could legally charge them an exorbitant jizya taxation. Early conversion to Islam was a lot slower than is popularly believed and in the case of places like Iberia it didn't happen at all. People converted "voluntarily" because being a Muslim entitled you to lower taxation, participation in government, and full citizenship. They deliberately did not proselytize so they could keep the gravy train rolling.
>>18476675Makes, sense. Incentivize people to not be allowed to vote/participate in government.
Mesoamerica anon here, how did ruling over such wide areas work with the Persians/Islamic Caliphates, the Romans, China etcIn Mesoamerica even something the size of the Aztec Empire or smaller usually relied on hands-off hegemonic systems where they basically left conquered states to self-manage with their existing rulers, laws, customs etc (who even retained enough independence to have their own subjects or wage their own wars against other Aztec subject states, if it didn't undermine the interests of the Mexica of the Aztec capital) because (so the thinking goes) they couldn't logistically handle directly governing or messing with local affairs in subjects outside of the core of the empire (and even there replacing kings, doing local administrative shit etc was only less uncommon, not the norm) due to their distance and the lack of draft animals and the difficult terrain of everything being either mountain ranges, valleys, jungles, or swampsObviously horses, oxen, mules etc would have been a huge help to enable conquering and managing larger empires in Eurasia, but it's still a little mind boggling just how much bigger the biggest Eurasian Empires got (and I guess the Inca down in South America, since they reached a similar size while also not having many draft animals and the whole region being a giant mountain range) >>18476662The Inca
>>18476662Cause East-West involves similar climate zones while North-South involves different climate zones.>>18476675The reason why there were few conversions early on wasn't cause they preferred people to keep practicing their religions. It's cause Islam was literally an Arab-only religion for the first 150 years. Even Non-Arabs who converted were treated like Dhimmi. It was only during the Abbasids Islam became a very proselytizing religion.
>>18476662There's more stuff to conquer and trade along the east and west than there is directly south/north
>>18477371Islami is still Arab supremacist to this day. They don't like the Quran being converted into other languages.
>>18476662>Why do people always conquer east-to-west?aliens
>>18476642Total shithole.
>>18479228Cordoba, Cairo, Isfahan, Samarkand and Baghdad alone were wealthier than the whole of Europe combined
>>18476642Hell on earth. Imagine your intellectual elite burning your native-language books, all in cahoots with each other from Central Asia to Spain to oppress you. The counter-culture elite, those "anti-Arab supremacists"? They also don't care about you and won't ever actually DO anything, just bitch and moan and hurl insults.The government? In some cases, the government is literally allied to the bandits that are harassing you (see; Sistan). Any claims of tolerance are temporary. Once the central government has the capacity to oppress you directly, they will do so, promises of tolerance be damned (see; Egypt).The Umayyads were decent-ish, at least. A true tribal conquering group that self-segregated. Everything post-Abbasid was 10x worse in every single way.
>>18476642as a peasant? awful. as a local ruler with a palace and brown pussy? great. imagine being a mamluke soldier from europe drowning in aegyptussy.
>>18476662North-South have different climates that usually means deserts or other hostile biomes. West-East have more consistent climates/biomes that makes movements easier
>>18479636>Muh giant hive cities for bugmenUtter shitholes then and still are now, unless you are rich. Medium sized cities are the best, and Europe always had a large densità of tnem
>>18479656I too have read Milka Levy-Rubin's translation of the Samaritan Chronicle and can confirm that the 'Abbasids treated their western realms like shit, to fund their heckin-grandiose new cities in Iraq.
>>18476693A very major part of most of those Empires' territories were very sparsely populated swathes of wilderness, some of them barely habitable. Those Empires laid claim to them because there was nobody else there to really oppose them or give a fuck rather than actually controlled all that ground. All they had to actually control were a few population centres that actually mattered. And in many cases it were local lords (or sometimes delegated generals/family members/other trusted people sent there basically for life) who did the governing and only sent tributes and messengers to the capital.
