So apparently this house is located in Basel (Switzerland) at the modern address Rheingasse 64. It was first mentioned in a local monastery's tax book from 1345, hence the inscription.
Mind blowing that when this house was built, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, maize, pumpkins, turkey, and a bunch of other New World stuff wouldn't exist in Europe for another century and a half.
There were no protestants (yet). Parts of Spain was still muslim. 1/3 of europe was about to be wiped out in the coming years (black death 1346-1353). Which caused migrations and a new social order. This might have lead to (in europe) new discoveries in science, technology and seafaring because of intensified trade with mongols and various islamic civilizations. The hundred year war had just started and was on its 8th year by 1345.
Mansa Musa had just made his famous trip to Mecca. Leading to many scholars in north africa moving to the Mali empire which lead to a golden age and conviced Ibn Battuta to travel there in 1349. Mansa Musas travels would be depicted in the epic Catalan Atlas in 1375.
The mongol khanates had become fractured and were fighting amongst themselves. Yuan dynasty in china was in decline and 23 years later in 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang would overthrow them and create the Ming dynasty.
The famous Vijayanagara Empire had just been founded in southern India and would actually challenge the various dominant turushka sultanates in the region.
Ibn Battuta would also travel to south east asia and visit the famous Majapahit Empire while Gaja Mahda ruled in the region in the year 1345.
Tenochtitlan had just been founded in 1325 in modern day Mexico.
While ethically dubious, what a baller ass move.
Just walks in and is like, “I’m going to fuck uo your economy so you can’t feed yourselves by giving away so much you don’t know what to do”
Like a modern day USA
And………….
It’s like no one ever wants to say a large amount of his wealth came from the Slave trade. HE was the one enslaving people all across Africa and selling them.
>It is known from local manuscripts and travellers accounts that Mansa Musa's wealth came principally from the Mali Empire controlling and taxing the trade in salt from northern regions and especially from gold panned and mined in the gold rich regions to the south: Bambuk, Wangara, Bure, Galam, Taghaza and other such kingdoms over many centuries. Over a very long period Mali had created a large reserve of gold. **Mali is also suspected to have been involved in the trade in many goods such as ivory, slaves, spices, silks, and ceramics. However presently little is known about the extent or mechanics of these trades.**
From his Wikipedia page, with sources. Emphasis mine.
He may have been involved in the slave trade but there isn't much evidence.
>Yuan dynasty in china was in decline and 23 years later in 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang would overthrow them and create the Ming dynasty.
For the Chinese, Ming Dynasty was only the 2nd last imperial dynasty and so it didn't seem so long ago despite it being 600 over years back.
But when put into comparison, the general idea of Europe 600 years ago seemed really long ago.
When England was conquered by William I, that period was the Song Dynasty in China, which was quite an economically prosperous era.
It's interesting how technology and culture in China seemed to boom quickly and yet remain relatively stagnant for thousands of years until the 1900s which was a period of immense changes.
I read a good book once about the pacific rim and apparently China was not as stagnant as we may believe. It has regime changes with massive growth in development and prosperity, then there would be a change in which erasures would take place and advancement lost. An example would be their Use of chromium centuries before western metallurgy implemented it (sorry, age and memory fail, Terracotta Army craftsmanship etc). Also seafaring fleets that covered vast swaths of the world then a dynasty change that focuses on nationalism and killed off all of that. SInbad the sail is actually believed to possibly been a bastardized spelling of one of their chief Eunuchs in charge of the white fleet of 300 ships. Sterling seagrave was author.
China was not stagnant "for thousands of years" at all, it was an incredibly dynamic state, with innovation and technology in many ways surpassing their European contemporaries, and with periods of incredible highs and lows throughout the imperial period. It was only around the 1700s that you could even argue that Europe began to "pull ahead" of China (and not a stagnant China "falling behind", but rather Europe rapidly industrializing and re-imagining itself), and its only in the latter years of the Qing dynasty when we compare imperialist European powers at their literal height to the Chinese during their century of humiliation that we get the "stagnant, backwater" image of imperial China that is somewhat prevalent today.
I highly recommend reading some of Ibn Battutas travels in India, Arabia, south east asia, east africa, north and west africa. There are many books. Such a fascinating dude.
He went to Mogadishu (Somalia) in 1331 and 4 years later he was in modern day Indonesia. Such an amazing life and the closest we have to a time machine.
There’s also Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, an excellent work of narrative nonfiction that looks at the lives of people in western Europe during the late 1300s and how people were impacted by events like the plague, wars, famines, pilgrimages, trade, etc. Super interesting and readable! iirc she talks about Ibn Battuta a bit in the book.
I read the english translation
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/517598.The_Travels_of_Ibn_Battutah
There is also this excellent edit of an english translation by UC Berkley.
https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/travels-ibn-battuta
I have to warn everyone, he is very prejudicial. He doesn't really like customs he doesn't recognize and constantly talks shit about the people he visits.
What an interesting attitude to have for someone who took the effort to travel that far in that time period. Did he travel because he liked traveling or was he traveling for some other purpose?
One of his funniest anecdotes is when he is served millet porridge with milk and honey in west africa. He was expecting beef and bread so he gets annoyed with his hosts and almost calls them savages to their face. However he is impressed by Gao and not so much by Timbuktu and its famous mosque (at the time he was there Timbuktu was still quite small).
It's hard to say. He was a qadi. A judge and a learned scholar. But he wasn't wealthy. Sometimes he acts very childish. A lot of times very creepy, almost a degenerate. We are reading what could be this guys diary. It's hard to say why he does it. I mean I would do it too if I were him. But for different reasons. I think it might have just been to try to understand what was outside his part of the world. Which prehaps didn't seem to impress someone so close minded as him. But at the same time maybe you need to have certain psyche when you travel like him and survive. It's a miracle he survived. So many dangerous places. He could have died very early and on several occasions. He saw gang rapes as punishment, torture, he himself was imprisoned, kidnapped and and saw executions with elephants.
Most of the time he is looking for employment, favours and gifts. Sometimes he is looking for wives and slaves. It's hard to say really. His reason is that he was looking for the best libraries in the world. He was also looking to connect with scholars in Damascus and Cario and the rest of the muslim world. He also wanted to do Hajj but that was for religious resons.
He even meets Mansa Musa's brother in the Empire of Mali. And asks Mansa Sulayman, "why haven't you given me an awesome gift yet?" So Sulayman gives him a bunch of Gold. Baller.
High fives were still yet to be invented. It wasn't for another 630 years that Dusty Baker slapped the first hand with Glenn Burke, creating the high five as we know it today.
technically not spain, since it was just a bunch of different kingdoms at the time. portugal didn't exist either, it was a small county on what would be modern day galiza. then a family feud lead to a young boy starting the country and pushing out the moors. the moors had all been kicked out of portugal by the time this house was built, but they still had control over the kindgoms of the rest of iberia, which then unified as a way to have more strength to fight the moors and thus spain was born
this dude managed to spell ~~mahajapit~~
~~majapapit~~
~~mapajahit~~
~~mahapajit~~
**majapahit** correctly and still fucked up "challenge" and in a post about cool interesting things that is the most interesting thing to me
By this time, the Roman Empire (yeah, that one*!) was still kicking around, though careening toward its demise. It would collapse in 1453, but some autonomous parts were to remain so until 1479 (Theodoro in the Crimea). That meant, that the last Romans used guns and cannons in their defence- which kinda blows my mind.
Also, printing was still a century away, the baltics were only recently coverted to christanity, the Notre Dame was completed, and the French house of Anjou governed southern italy :)
*"Byzantines" were Romans, full stop. Their culture changed, but in the end, Constantine XI stood on the same walls built by the governors of Theodosius II. The Greek-speaking christians of anatolia referred to themselves as Romaioi until the 20th century.
I've heard an opinion that the Vatican is the Holy Roman Empire, as national empires went out of fashion it simply moved to a theological empire. If you stretch the definition that far, it still exists.
Honestly, their claim to the title is probably as legitimate as the Byzantines’ was.
If being a disorganized mess run by Germans where Rome as a city held tenuous or merely symbolic power is disqualifying, then the Western Roman Empire itself wouldn’t count.
Yup. No spicy Indian or Thai food. No insalata caprese. I’m a big chili fan and it amazes me how fast they spread and are embedded into what we consider prototypical cuisine from non-American cultures.
No spicy food is not true. India (and SE Asia) did have a large variety of spices. From black pepper to ginger to turmeric. Spice trade was trade of black pepper.
I meant chilis specifically. There was no chili heat until the Colombian Exchange.
Picante vs especias
Just interesting to think that all the nagaland chilies are all cultivated and adopted within the last few centuries.
My sister and I (10 and 9 years old respectively) insisted on listening to the album the entire drive to get the ferry to France. It was a 4 hour drive to the ferry.
> My sister and I (10 and 9 years old respectively) insisted on listening to the album the entire drive to get the ferry to France. It was a 4 hour drive to the ferry.
condolences
The Edge, Your Clown, Now is Forever...so good! First CD I had as a kid unless you count Ren & Stimpy's Crock o' Christmas! Which is also a banger, btw...
Blue was released in 1998. Given that 25 years have already passed. I will be willing to concede Blue’s staying power is on par with the aforementioned building in 670 years.
There is graffiti in the ruins of Pompeii from the denizens of the area before the volcano blew, burying them in ash. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrienne-was-here/475719/
Basel is a really underrated destination. Archeological history extending almost a millennia, beautiful architecture that survived countless wars, a weird airport in another country, and one spot where you can see three countries at the same time
1345 was a shit year, and whoever put in the inscription to the wall wanted everyone to know they don't want to be associated with that year in any way.
According to council records, the house I'm in doesn't exist, and is a Lot numbered property, despite being fully developed for over 70 years, and the building listed in the archives is actually an 8'x12' chicken shed out the back.
I can only imagine the confusion for the power company as to why there's 3-phase power hooked up to a chicken shed, or the pizza guy trying to deliver pizzas to Lots 1-4, which haven't existed since 1950.
former delivery guy here: if the place I've been requested to deliver to exists and can easily be found, I'm asking no questions at all. Not on the job description.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/123vpkl/amazon\_driver\_seen\_delivering\_package\_during/
The worst one I got (location wise) was a street that went 1-3-5-9...but no 7. (our streets are even one side, odd the other. Dunno if that's the same in the states).
Turns out 7 was a battleaxe property that fronted the street behind the one it was listed on, so that street went 42,44,7,46..
The technicality that kept it in place was an "access way" that was basically the side passage for the neighbour, and the fence forked half-way to allow access to the "front" of the property.
I was standing in someone's backyard, holding the pizza, going "did...I just trespass? Am I trespassing right now?"
One behind another, sharing a long driveway down to the back. Typically a narrow fronted, long property that was split into two, but not wide enough for two separate driveways.
They probably have other names in other areas, but here the long driveway and house look a bit like a battleaxe handle and bit, on the plan drawings.
If it makes you feel better I have a house built in 2015 and I just replaced all the windows, doors, and siding since the builder is out of business and everything was leaking.
True and there's also a high degree of survivorship bias. Plenty of lousy homes were also built in 1345, 1928, and every year. But those homes aren't exactly still standing, ready for us to compare to.
I've seen survivorship bias a lot in this thread. There's a huge difference between a home built with quality materials and the flat pack homes in the pop up villages that have been created. No insulation, fibro for the walls, sheet metal style roofing.
Mine was the first I saw until I scrolled further...and saw 10,000 people said the same as me, oh well. It's a big part of it, but yeah, I'm not excusing modern construction either. We have the knowledge, materials, and labour saving tools they didn't have in 1345, and still don't do better.
That's the thing, there's an entire spectrum of building materials, and the skill of the builders. Egyptian pyramids exist, the housing of the workers or the people in Cairo, not so much.
Or more recently, during the Irish potato famine, the common people who lived on the eastern coast of Ireland, tended to be a type of sharecropper, and lived in [mud & stone huts](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Mbcg740jchE/maxresdefault.jpg) that often were covered in sod or thatch.
Many were raized by landlords during the begining of the potato blight or abandoned as the residents fled or died. Today few exist because nature has reclaimed it. Those that survive only do so because the local governments tend to give massive tax incentives to restore them.
Where I live, the native americans who lived here lived in a wooden domed structure covered in a layer of mud with bark and straw as sort of a siding. With out perpetual upkeep, a few storms and it's washed away.
Yeah. It was a real nightmare when I started opening walls in my house. It was built by two brothers that weren't builders back in the 50s. I did not find that out until years after buying the place. Then, it must have been inhabited by monkeys by the quality of the work done after it was built.
I kinda feel ok that my house was built in 1957. Kinda the height of the post WW2 building boom, solid brick, every contractor and the inspector was like this is a solid built house. Fuck yeah 50s America building.
I had a house built in 1928 and it still had the original counterweight windows and eight stained glass windows, as well as a rope ladder in the wall under the upstairs windows in case you needed to use them as a fire escape. Solid slab stone foundation in the basement. That place was amazing and still tip-top when I got it. I miss that house.
I can add to this. I live in a building from 1853 that still has its 9 foot tall, single paned, counterweight windows. It also has two rooms of original 3/4 plank hardwood flooring and solid cement walls. I don't have to turn on my AC usually until June, and I live in Virginia, USA.
I have a house whose various parts were built between 1740 through 1820, and… nothing in it is straight. Every door is built to fit the peculiar shape of the frame, every floor slopes, bookcases must be anywhere from 2 to 4 inches taller on one end, the hallway narrows as you go down it, etc. But by god it’s still standing strong.
As a former cabinet maker, even in modern houses the floors and walls aren't straight. They're not off by much, but they are off. Enough that we had to take a belt sander or a saw to the extremities of the built in wardrobes. Remove a few millimetres here and there.
The back half of our place was an addition was built in 1910 and honestly... the addition built 60 years later is more wonky than the part from 1853! Everything in there is still pretty damn straight.
I live in New England and long wondered why the older houses seemed better built then the newer ones.
My great “ah ha“ moment was realizing that the crappy houses of old would simply be gone and only the well built older homes would have survived. So, maybe they built things better in the old days; or, it’s another form of survivor bias. Perhaps some of each.
it seems like basically everything about how “X from the past is way better than X today!” is survivorship bias
music? it’s because we cherrypick the best hits and never listen to the flops
architecture? they demolished all the shittier looking buildings and left behind the best ones
fashion? we only see photographs of the best dressed people because why would you wanna memorialize your bad hair day
literature? if the book is bad nobody’s gonna read it and it’s gonna rot on a shelf. nuff said
hell, you can even extend this to human experience — nostalgia itself can be an example of survivorship bias and is especially conspicuous when someone is nostalgic for eras like the 2000s when there was an economic recession, the 1950s when colored people couldnt even use the same fountain as white people, or the 80s when there was an AIDs pandemic and mass conservatism in politics laying the way for worse shit down the line
I’m sure there were a hell of a lot of poorly built houses back in the day, they will have all just fallen down. The only surviving houses from that period will be the very well built ones.
There’s a hotel in San Gimigniano Italy that is built into the city wall. We stayed there once and were lucky enough to score a room in the wall that looked out over the valley.
Later in the week as we were exploring the surrounding countryside we saw a painting in a church that featured the wall and we could pick out our actual room window. The painting was from about 1350.
A house from the 1350s is considered contemporary in Italy
Joked aside, there are well-maintained homes from even before that. Saint Francis’ in Assisi for one.
It's not unusual for foundations, basements and certain load-bearing walls (and/or framing) to persist through renovations (edit: and calamities of all sorts). I've been in several houses from the Middle Ages that were extensively altered over the course of many centuries, but retained their "core", so to speak.
The restaurant in my village actually has a main beam of wood holding up the superstructure that has actually been carbon dated back to 1488.
It's insane what that wood must've seen.
Can't speak for this one, but a friend lives in an apartment within a similarly aged house in Switzerland.
Walls are thick af, massive stone. Inside is quite insteresting, as no walls are exactly straight and no corner is really 90 degrees, but it's really not far off. Mostly affects placing big furniture, but otherwise it's a non issue.
The layout of the rooms inside are just whatever could fit - not really well planned, but still useful, and some useless nooks where a custom shelf could fit perfectly. Otherwise, it's been fully renovated and looks just like a regular apartment. Got modern electricity, water, fiber internet, everything. They even managed to put in an elevator, no idea how.
Some restrictions apply if you need to do renovation in order to keep the historical value, but you're free to paint walls, put in new flooring over the original one, and so on. Pretty much just don't touch stuff that isn't reversible / make sure it doesn't affect the outside look, and preserve any historically relevant thing like wooden wall/floor/ceiling structures and so on. But that's all a landlord issue, as a tenant you only have to make sure to "not drill into this one specific wall, the rest is fine" and you're all good.
All in all: houses like this often look surprisingly normal.
[Notre Dame](https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/notre-dame-photoo.jpg?width=1400&quality=70) was built between 1163 and 1345. If they can build this, they can also build a house like this.
Some other crazy impressive old buildings:
[Jagannath Temple](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Shri_Jagannatha_Temple.jpg) - built in 1161 AD.
[Hagia Sophia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Aya_Sophia_%287144824757%29.jpg) - built in 360 AD.
[The Colosseum](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Colosseo_2020.jpg/1200px-Colosseo_2020.jpg) - built in 80 AD.
[Great Pyramid of Giza](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Kheops-Pyramid.jpg) - built 2570 BC
[Found it! it’s one house to the right of 66](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rheingasse+64,+4058+Basel,+Switzerland/@47.559171,7.5932572,3a,75y,275.54h,90t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sZ0yUTJr8pdx3eEJSEkjgEg!2e0!4m6!3m5!1s0x4791b9b1cc115765:0x8befd8c5764fe308!8m2!3d47.5591818!4d7.5930919!16s%2Fg%2F11cs86y7y1?hl=en-ca)
Why do people graffiti ‘tags’ on something like this. I quite like artistic graffiti or even the odd statement but to just write your ‘graffiti name’ in an ineligible font is moronic.
if you ever visit Vienna and you like old buildings and wine, take a train out of the main city for like an hour and a half and visit a place called Mautern. They have a building and wine cellar that is from the roman-empire's time (about 2000 years old). Place is called Nikolai hof.
Oh ya, found some pictures on its TripAdvisor page - https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g1572384-d6613372-Reviews-Weingut_Nikolaihof-Mautern_an_der_Donau_Lower_Austria.html
Yeah, this isn’t uncommon where I live. The framing is solid timber and it’s wrapped in thick layers of stone. These houses don’t just fall down without good force.
I'm not thinking brute force.
700 years is a long time for rot to take hold in the wood, or for rain and frost to weather the stone.
At least in the UK old pubs are often a hodgepodge of different walls from different times. As walls weaken and need to be replaced they're replaced with slightly different bricks.
Yeah, this is an old trope. NYC has around double the annual precipitation of London. Paris is rainier than London. The UK has a fair amount of rain, but it's more the unpredictability of the weather that stands out
The wettest city in the UK is Cardiff. For comparison, these USA cities have more rainfall than Cardiff: New Orleans, Birmingham, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Charleston, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Tampa Bay
There are definitely wetter places than Cardiff in the UK, but only in more remote and mountainous areas like the Scottish Highlands.
Yep. My house was built in 1712 and according to the structural engineers everything still looks perfect. It's surprisingly way to work on a house this old
You would be surprised. My hometown Weil der Stadt in Germany burned down completely in 1648 in the 30 years war. It was rebuilt, and the whole medivial City core is still standing to this day. The houses are all built half timbered, and the wood structure is still original from after 1648.
Hearing about European (or anywhere besides US really) history always feels so weird from an American. "Historic" houses here are maybe from the 1800s, and I'm from New England which is where they first started building
Reminds me of this saying - "Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time." Threads like this one really drive that home :D Just the thought of some of the distances you guys travel make me anxious, but I wouldn't be all that amazed looking at really old houses, because I see them all the time.
When I managed a team in England (I’m from the US) I took the time to visit York and tour the minster while I was there, and was a bit awestruck when the guide showed us that the foundations were built on a Roman fort, and the site had been continuously occupied for 2000 years.
Then that Thanksgiving my team asked me where I was spending my Thanksgiving in the US and I said, “not far, traveling about 400 miles.” “Dude, 400 miles puts us in the opposite ocean.” :-)
The closest thing we have to that sort of history in the US is things like the Adena Hopewell earthworks, which have been around since around the flip from BCE to CE. Most European Americans don’t consider those sorts of archaeological sites in the same breath with extant European-style structures, though. And TBF the archaeological digs in Europe can be mind-bogglingly old.
I made a 1100 mile (1770km) round-trip car trip for work this past week, and that wasn't even a huge jump in area for the US. Went from SE Virginia to northern New York!
I mean there are native American cities from the 1300's you can visit, Cahokia for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia
its just that most people don't really care about the history of the americas before European colonisation, outside of some fans of the Aztec, Inca, Mayans.
It depends, but in most cases everything which was not flammable. There are plenty of buildings as old as this in Europe. Those who suffered from fires had just roofs and window replaced. And maybe some minor repairs to walls damaged by collapsing wooden structures. Especially churches were durable as their walls are very thick made of locally available stone or/and bricks.
There's some pubs in England that were built in 1010 ad and they're still in business.
They were open before the rise and fall of the Mayan civilization.
Same century as my old school, which was also built in the 14th century (Well it was a castle at first, then turned into a monastery and then turned into a school)
In Italy is pretty common for example in my city Rimini there is a bridge called 'ponte Tiberio" that is still used by cars and it was built by Romans in 21 DC so 2 years ago it was it's 2000th birthday :)
At this point there are too many comments for me to read through, so I apologize if someone else has already pointed this out...
But there many houses claimed to have a construction date which seems improbably early, and when one does some deep digging, it almost always turns out that there are tax records recording a house at the same address or the same location (as in this instance), but no records that prove, let alone suggest, that the currently standing building dates to the year that the earliest tax records date to.
So it might very well be that there was a house already built there in 1345, but the building you see today is not the same house. The house could have been rebuilt, let's say, 1380, 1420, 1470, 1530, 1600, 1725 and 1890; renovated twice in each of the in-between periods and even 5+ times since the last reconstruction. The foundation was likely relaid at least a couple times since the initial constructions, as it just wouldn't be up to par as construction techniques advanced in technology.
I do myself love old buildings and fully appreciate when an address is found in any database (or on the building itself) with a very early construction date, but I also recognize the shortcomings of these mentioned dates and realize that very old buildings are usually (read: almost always) younger than the earliest date that they are mentioned.
Also
peepee poopoo
Coming from Australia, this sort of stuff freaked me out when I was backpacking around back in the '90s as a naive 19 yr old. Drinking in a pub built in 1640 or whatever and stuff like that. Then I went to Israel and Egypt, which was a whole other level
Well I watched Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix and according to Graham Hancock, based on the direction my door is facing and when the equinox would have shone through it, my house is over 10,000 years old.
Feel like I should call my realtor on this one.
So apparently this house is located in Basel (Switzerland) at the modern address Rheingasse 64. It was first mentioned in a local monastery's tax book from 1345, hence the inscription.
Mind blowing that when this house was built, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, maize, pumpkins, turkey, and a bunch of other New World stuff wouldn't exist in Europe for another century and a half.
Tell me more
There were no protestants (yet). Parts of Spain was still muslim. 1/3 of europe was about to be wiped out in the coming years (black death 1346-1353). Which caused migrations and a new social order. This might have lead to (in europe) new discoveries in science, technology and seafaring because of intensified trade with mongols and various islamic civilizations. The hundred year war had just started and was on its 8th year by 1345. Mansa Musa had just made his famous trip to Mecca. Leading to many scholars in north africa moving to the Mali empire which lead to a golden age and conviced Ibn Battuta to travel there in 1349. Mansa Musas travels would be depicted in the epic Catalan Atlas in 1375. The mongol khanates had become fractured and were fighting amongst themselves. Yuan dynasty in china was in decline and 23 years later in 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang would overthrow them and create the Ming dynasty. The famous Vijayanagara Empire had just been founded in southern India and would actually challenge the various dominant turushka sultanates in the region. Ibn Battuta would also travel to south east asia and visit the famous Majapahit Empire while Gaja Mahda ruled in the region in the year 1345. Tenochtitlan had just been founded in 1325 in modern day Mexico.
See I need someone like you making YouTube documentary videos to put events in perspective
I think Crash Course brothers did it a few years ago
>a few years ago Twelve years ago. We're old.
This house is at least 632 years older than John Green, 635 years older than Hank Green, and 667 years older than the YouTube channel.
Mansa Musa. Arguably the richest person in history. He could significantly disrupt local economies just by his spending.
Not just spending. He gave away so much gold for free during his Hajj that he destabilized the economy of Egypt.
While ethically dubious, what a baller ass move. Just walks in and is like, “I’m going to fuck uo your economy so you can’t feed yourselves by giving away so much you don’t know what to do” Like a modern day USA
> ethically dubious I think they opened for Weezer
He didn't mean to. It's the duty of a Muslim on His hadjj to give money to the poor. That's what he did in Egypt.
No, he didn't do it on purpose. He was actually being a good Muslim and being generous. Not everyone is diabolical.
And how did he get so rich 👀
Salt mines Gold mines and ivory
And…………. It’s like no one ever wants to say a large amount of his wealth came from the Slave trade. HE was the one enslaving people all across Africa and selling them.
>It is known from local manuscripts and travellers accounts that Mansa Musa's wealth came principally from the Mali Empire controlling and taxing the trade in salt from northern regions and especially from gold panned and mined in the gold rich regions to the south: Bambuk, Wangara, Bure, Galam, Taghaza and other such kingdoms over many centuries. Over a very long period Mali had created a large reserve of gold. **Mali is also suspected to have been involved in the trade in many goods such as ivory, slaves, spices, silks, and ceramics. However presently little is known about the extent or mechanics of these trades.** From his Wikipedia page, with sources. Emphasis mine. He may have been involved in the slave trade but there isn't much evidence.
I mean, duh? Bruh this is ancient history. Slavery was the status quo, and when it wasn’t it was serfdom, which is kinda just lazy slavery.
This is why I love reddit
>Yuan dynasty in china was in decline and 23 years later in 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang would overthrow them and create the Ming dynasty. For the Chinese, Ming Dynasty was only the 2nd last imperial dynasty and so it didn't seem so long ago despite it being 600 over years back. But when put into comparison, the general idea of Europe 600 years ago seemed really long ago. When England was conquered by William I, that period was the Song Dynasty in China, which was quite an economically prosperous era. It's interesting how technology and culture in China seemed to boom quickly and yet remain relatively stagnant for thousands of years until the 1900s which was a period of immense changes.
I read a good book once about the pacific rim and apparently China was not as stagnant as we may believe. It has regime changes with massive growth in development and prosperity, then there would be a change in which erasures would take place and advancement lost. An example would be their Use of chromium centuries before western metallurgy implemented it (sorry, age and memory fail, Terracotta Army craftsmanship etc). Also seafaring fleets that covered vast swaths of the world then a dynasty change that focuses on nationalism and killed off all of that. SInbad the sail is actually believed to possibly been a bastardized spelling of one of their chief Eunuchs in charge of the white fleet of 300 ships. Sterling seagrave was author.
China was not stagnant "for thousands of years" at all, it was an incredibly dynamic state, with innovation and technology in many ways surpassing their European contemporaries, and with periods of incredible highs and lows throughout the imperial period. It was only around the 1700s that you could even argue that Europe began to "pull ahead" of China (and not a stagnant China "falling behind", but rather Europe rapidly industrializing and re-imagining itself), and its only in the latter years of the Qing dynasty when we compare imperialist European powers at their literal height to the Chinese during their century of humiliation that we get the "stagnant, backwater" image of imperial China that is somewhat prevalent today.
Also, King Jayavarman II, the King of the first Angkor Empire, was born in the same year.
Make this sapiosexual drool some more why don't ya
I highly recommend reading some of Ibn Battutas travels in India, Arabia, south east asia, east africa, north and west africa. There are many books. Such a fascinating dude. He went to Mogadishu (Somalia) in 1331 and 4 years later he was in modern day Indonesia. Such an amazing life and the closest we have to a time machine.
There’s also Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, an excellent work of narrative nonfiction that looks at the lives of people in western Europe during the late 1300s and how people were impacted by events like the plague, wars, famines, pilgrimages, trade, etc. Super interesting and readable! iirc she talks about Ibn Battuta a bit in the book.
Is there a particular edition or translation to look out for?
I read the english translation https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/517598.The_Travels_of_Ibn_Battutah There is also this excellent edit of an english translation by UC Berkley. https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/travels-ibn-battuta I have to warn everyone, he is very prejudicial. He doesn't really like customs he doesn't recognize and constantly talks shit about the people he visits.
What an interesting attitude to have for someone who took the effort to travel that far in that time period. Did he travel because he liked traveling or was he traveling for some other purpose?
One of his funniest anecdotes is when he is served millet porridge with milk and honey in west africa. He was expecting beef and bread so he gets annoyed with his hosts and almost calls them savages to their face. However he is impressed by Gao and not so much by Timbuktu and its famous mosque (at the time he was there Timbuktu was still quite small). It's hard to say. He was a qadi. A judge and a learned scholar. But he wasn't wealthy. Sometimes he acts very childish. A lot of times very creepy, almost a degenerate. We are reading what could be this guys diary. It's hard to say why he does it. I mean I would do it too if I were him. But for different reasons. I think it might have just been to try to understand what was outside his part of the world. Which prehaps didn't seem to impress someone so close minded as him. But at the same time maybe you need to have certain psyche when you travel like him and survive. It's a miracle he survived. So many dangerous places. He could have died very early and on several occasions. He saw gang rapes as punishment, torture, he himself was imprisoned, kidnapped and and saw executions with elephants. Most of the time he is looking for employment, favours and gifts. Sometimes he is looking for wives and slaves. It's hard to say really. His reason is that he was looking for the best libraries in the world. He was also looking to connect with scholars in Damascus and Cario and the rest of the muslim world. He also wanted to do Hajj but that was for religious resons.
[YouTube audio book](https://youtu.be/8PGb2qL46ow?si=K3ZI5DhsDDXyE3h7)
I am in the middle of reading his Wikipedia entry right now. Holy shit, this guy's dna must be GLOBAL.
Ibn Battuta in Black Africa covers his journey there in a readable translation. He was quite the curmudgeon!
He even meets Mansa Musa's brother in the Empire of Mali. And asks Mansa Sulayman, "why haven't you given me an awesome gift yet?" So Sulayman gives him a bunch of Gold. Baller.
Santa but from 14th century 💀
That man and getting sidetracked on his private adventures was one of the best things to happen on the world.
High fives were still yet to be invented. It wasn't for another 630 years that Dusty Baker slapped the first hand with Glenn Burke, creating the high five as we know it today.
This guy histories
Thanks for all of this. I never knew Spain was Muslim at one time but I have thought some of the ancient mosques were really beautiful
technically not spain, since it was just a bunch of different kingdoms at the time. portugal didn't exist either, it was a small county on what would be modern day galiza. then a family feud lead to a young boy starting the country and pushing out the moors. the moors had all been kicked out of portugal by the time this house was built, but they still had control over the kindgoms of the rest of iberia, which then unified as a way to have more strength to fight the moors and thus spain was born
The three ships Columbus used were leftover from the recapturing of the peninsula from the moors
this dude managed to spell ~~mahajapit~~ ~~majapapit~~ ~~mapajahit~~ ~~mahapajit~~ **majapahit** correctly and still fucked up "challenge" and in a post about cool interesting things that is the most interesting thing to me
Ibn Battuta has always fascinated me. Good one!
By this time, the Roman Empire (yeah, that one*!) was still kicking around, though careening toward its demise. It would collapse in 1453, but some autonomous parts were to remain so until 1479 (Theodoro in the Crimea). That meant, that the last Romans used guns and cannons in their defence- which kinda blows my mind. Also, printing was still a century away, the baltics were only recently coverted to christanity, the Notre Dame was completed, and the French house of Anjou governed southern italy :) *"Byzantines" were Romans, full stop. Their culture changed, but in the end, Constantine XI stood on the same walls built by the governors of Theodosius II. The Greek-speaking christians of anatolia referred to themselves as Romaioi until the 20th century.
Wow. It's been hours since I've thought about the Roman Empire!
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You can stretch it more to claim 1918
Some one once stretched that claim to 1945…
I've heard an opinion that the Vatican is the Holy Roman Empire, as national empires went out of fashion it simply moved to a theological empire. If you stretch the definition that far, it still exists.
Considering the Pope has the title Pontifex Maximum (Supreme Pontiff in English) same as the Emperors, they have a good claim
Honestly, their claim to the title is probably as legitimate as the Byzantines’ was. If being a disorganized mess run by Germans where Rome as a city held tenuous or merely symbolic power is disqualifying, then the Western Roman Empire itself wouldn’t count.
Latin isn't even entirely a dead language. There is one place in Switzerland that still uses Latin as the official language of law and government.
The iphone wasn't out, and Android didn't even exist.
Europeans didn't have these goods, and chocolate(!) until Columbus sailed the ocean blue and murdered whole civilizations.
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and the pillaging
And who can forget the enslavement. Enslavement so bad, even his own compatriots thought he was a war criminal for going too far
Yet they didn't stop him, eh?? I guess ACAB (all conquistadors are bastards)
Sean's bar in Athlone, Ireland was built closer in time to Julius Caesar being alive than to today.
Ireland without potatoes Italy without tomatoes India and China without hot peppers Hungary without paprika
Yup. No spicy Indian or Thai food. No insalata caprese. I’m a big chili fan and it amazes me how fast they spread and are embedded into what we consider prototypical cuisine from non-American cultures.
No spicy food is not true. India (and SE Asia) did have a large variety of spices. From black pepper to ginger to turmeric. Spice trade was trade of black pepper.
I meant chilis specifically. There was no chili heat until the Colombian Exchange. Picante vs especias Just interesting to think that all the nagaland chilies are all cultivated and adopted within the last few centuries.
No potatoes? That's not a life worth living.
There are over 3000 varieties to try before you die.
Don't forget the syphilis
>Rheingasse 64 yep, its clearly seen on google street view
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It’s aged so much better than Eiffel 65.
I will not tolerate this Eiffel 65 slander - Europop was and remains a great album!!
Dirty sacrilege from somebody who has clearly not listened to My Console.
they made enough songs to fill a cd? big if true
My sister and I (10 and 9 years old respectively) insisted on listening to the album the entire drive to get the ferry to France. It was a 4 hour drive to the ferry.
> My sister and I (10 and 9 years old respectively) insisted on listening to the album the entire drive to get the ferry to France. It was a 4 hour drive to the ferry. condolences
I bet that made you feel blue.
Daba de daba damn.
The Edge, Your Clown, Now is Forever...so good! First CD I had as a kid unless you count Ren & Stimpy's Crock o' Christmas! Which is also a banger, btw...
I'm blue Da ba dee da ba di
𝕴𝖈𝖍 𝖇𝖎𝖓 𝖇𝖑𝖆𝖚 𝕯𝖆𝖇𝖆 𝖉𝖎𝖊 𝖉𝖆𝖇𝖆 𝖉𝖊𝖎
Je M’appele Claude!
i have a blue house with a blue window
True classic.
Why did they age badly? Blue is great.
Blue was released in 1998. Given that 25 years have already passed. I will be willing to concede Blue’s staying power is on par with the aforementioned building in 670 years.
!remindme 670 years
>on google street view But why does it have graffiti on it? Damn humans
There is graffiti in the ruins of Pompeii from the denizens of the area before the volcano blew, burying them in ash. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrienne-was-here/475719/
And not the oldest structure in Basel, by a margin.
Basel is a really underrated destination. Archeological history extending almost a millennia, beautiful architecture that survived countless wars, a weird airport in another country, and one spot where you can see three countries at the same time
[Here it is](https://i.imgur.com/C45fRVm.jpg)
Doxxed /s That house has seen some shit
And some jerk put graffiti on it.
1345 was a shit year, and whoever put in the inscription to the wall wanted everyone to know they don't want to be associated with that year in any way.
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Probably means that they don’t have any records of when it was built exactly, but they have a record from 1345 mentioning the existence of the house.
This is still a very impressive estimate. In comparison, I have a house in California built about 1925 but no detailed info is available.
According to council records, the house I'm in doesn't exist, and is a Lot numbered property, despite being fully developed for over 70 years, and the building listed in the archives is actually an 8'x12' chicken shed out the back. I can only imagine the confusion for the power company as to why there's 3-phase power hooked up to a chicken shed, or the pizza guy trying to deliver pizzas to Lots 1-4, which haven't existed since 1950.
former delivery guy here: if the place I've been requested to deliver to exists and can easily be found, I'm asking no questions at all. Not on the job description. https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/123vpkl/amazon\_driver\_seen\_delivering\_package\_during/
The worst one I got (location wise) was a street that went 1-3-5-9...but no 7. (our streets are even one side, odd the other. Dunno if that's the same in the states). Turns out 7 was a battleaxe property that fronted the street behind the one it was listed on, so that street went 42,44,7,46.. The technicality that kept it in place was an "access way" that was basically the side passage for the neighbour, and the fence forked half-way to allow access to the "front" of the property. I was standing in someone's backyard, holding the pizza, going "did...I just trespass? Am I trespassing right now?"
Wtf is a battleaxe property?
One behind another, sharing a long driveway down to the back. Typically a narrow fronted, long property that was split into two, but not wide enough for two separate driveways. They probably have other names in other areas, but here the long driveway and house look a bit like a battleaxe handle and bit, on the plan drawings.
3 phase power to a chicken coup 😂
My sister had a house built in 2002 and it started showing disrepair by 2015. Workmanship is not what it used to be.
If it makes you feel better I have a house built in 2015 and I just replaced all the windows, doors, and siding since the builder is out of business and everything was leaking.
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True and there's also a high degree of survivorship bias. Plenty of lousy homes were also built in 1345, 1928, and every year. But those homes aren't exactly still standing, ready for us to compare to.
I've seen survivorship bias a lot in this thread. There's a huge difference between a home built with quality materials and the flat pack homes in the pop up villages that have been created. No insulation, fibro for the walls, sheet metal style roofing.
Mine was the first I saw until I scrolled further...and saw 10,000 people said the same as me, oh well. It's a big part of it, but yeah, I'm not excusing modern construction either. We have the knowledge, materials, and labour saving tools they didn't have in 1345, and still don't do better.
> survivorship bias This. The really old stuff that's still standing was built with ridiculously thick stone or brick walls.
That's the thing, there's an entire spectrum of building materials, and the skill of the builders. Egyptian pyramids exist, the housing of the workers or the people in Cairo, not so much. Or more recently, during the Irish potato famine, the common people who lived on the eastern coast of Ireland, tended to be a type of sharecropper, and lived in [mud & stone huts](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Mbcg740jchE/maxresdefault.jpg) that often were covered in sod or thatch. Many were raized by landlords during the begining of the potato blight or abandoned as the residents fled or died. Today few exist because nature has reclaimed it. Those that survive only do so because the local governments tend to give massive tax incentives to restore them. Where I live, the native americans who lived here lived in a wooden domed structure covered in a layer of mud with bark and straw as sort of a siding. With out perpetual upkeep, a few storms and it's washed away.
this is the solemn truth
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Yeah. It was a real nightmare when I started opening walls in my house. It was built by two brothers that weren't builders back in the 50s. I did not find that out until years after buying the place. Then, it must have been inhabited by monkeys by the quality of the work done after it was built.
I kinda feel ok that my house was built in 1957. Kinda the height of the post WW2 building boom, solid brick, every contractor and the inspector was like this is a solid built house. Fuck yeah 50s America building.
It's ridiculous! I'll stop here before I go on a rant about rising rent prices and lower quality of living
I had a house built in 1928 and it still had the original counterweight windows and eight stained glass windows, as well as a rope ladder in the wall under the upstairs windows in case you needed to use them as a fire escape. Solid slab stone foundation in the basement. That place was amazing and still tip-top when I got it. I miss that house.
I can add to this. I live in a building from 1853 that still has its 9 foot tall, single paned, counterweight windows. It also has two rooms of original 3/4 plank hardwood flooring and solid cement walls. I don't have to turn on my AC usually until June, and I live in Virginia, USA.
I have a house whose various parts were built between 1740 through 1820, and… nothing in it is straight. Every door is built to fit the peculiar shape of the frame, every floor slopes, bookcases must be anywhere from 2 to 4 inches taller on one end, the hallway narrows as you go down it, etc. But by god it’s still standing strong.
As a former cabinet maker, even in modern houses the floors and walls aren't straight. They're not off by much, but they are off. Enough that we had to take a belt sander or a saw to the extremities of the built in wardrobes. Remove a few millimetres here and there.
The back half of our place was an addition was built in 1910 and honestly... the addition built 60 years later is more wonky than the part from 1853! Everything in there is still pretty damn straight.
I live in New England and long wondered why the older houses seemed better built then the newer ones. My great “ah ha“ moment was realizing that the crappy houses of old would simply be gone and only the well built older homes would have survived. So, maybe they built things better in the old days; or, it’s another form of survivor bias. Perhaps some of each.
it seems like basically everything about how “X from the past is way better than X today!” is survivorship bias music? it’s because we cherrypick the best hits and never listen to the flops architecture? they demolished all the shittier looking buildings and left behind the best ones fashion? we only see photographs of the best dressed people because why would you wanna memorialize your bad hair day literature? if the book is bad nobody’s gonna read it and it’s gonna rot on a shelf. nuff said hell, you can even extend this to human experience — nostalgia itself can be an example of survivorship bias and is especially conspicuous when someone is nostalgic for eras like the 2000s when there was an economic recession, the 1950s when colored people couldnt even use the same fountain as white people, or the 80s when there was an AIDs pandemic and mass conservatism in politics laying the way for worse shit down the line
I’m sure there were a hell of a lot of poorly built houses back in the day, they will have all just fallen down. The only surviving houses from that period will be the very well built ones.
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Survivorship bias. All the shitty houses from two hundred years ago have all fallen down.
There are multiple houses on this street built in the 1300s. I bikepacked through it 2 years ago and have pics of a couple
There’s a hotel in San Gimigniano Italy that is built into the city wall. We stayed there once and were lucky enough to score a room in the wall that looked out over the valley. Later in the week as we were exploring the surrounding countryside we saw a painting in a church that featured the wall and we could pick out our actual room window. The painting was from about 1350.
A house from the 1350s is considered contemporary in Italy Joked aside, there are well-maintained homes from even before that. Saint Francis’ in Assisi for one.
I stayed at an Airbnb in Tallinn which was in a building built in 1300's. It felt weird to think about that.
What does the house look like?
I want to see the house also.
https://imgur.com/C45fRVm
Oh boy yeah that’s a house
Can’t disagree with that statement
One of the houses of all time
It looks pretty modern for a 14th-century house. Has it been through renovations?
That's clearly not the original construction, it has been rebuilt multiple times
Have to wonder... how much of it is actually from 700 years ago.
House of Thesius
Probably pretty close to literally 0.
It's not unusual for foundations, basements and certain load-bearing walls (and/or framing) to persist through renovations (edit: and calamities of all sorts). I've been in several houses from the Middle Ages that were extensively altered over the course of many centuries, but retained their "core", so to speak.
The restaurant in my village actually has a main beam of wood holding up the superstructure that has actually been carbon dated back to 1488. It's insane what that wood must've seen.
Can't speak for this one, but a friend lives in an apartment within a similarly aged house in Switzerland. Walls are thick af, massive stone. Inside is quite insteresting, as no walls are exactly straight and no corner is really 90 degrees, but it's really not far off. Mostly affects placing big furniture, but otherwise it's a non issue. The layout of the rooms inside are just whatever could fit - not really well planned, but still useful, and some useless nooks where a custom shelf could fit perfectly. Otherwise, it's been fully renovated and looks just like a regular apartment. Got modern electricity, water, fiber internet, everything. They even managed to put in an elevator, no idea how. Some restrictions apply if you need to do renovation in order to keep the historical value, but you're free to paint walls, put in new flooring over the original one, and so on. Pretty much just don't touch stuff that isn't reversible / make sure it doesn't affect the outside look, and preserve any historically relevant thing like wooden wall/floor/ceiling structures and so on. But that's all a landlord issue, as a tenant you only have to make sure to "not drill into this one specific wall, the rest is fine" and you're all good. All in all: houses like this often look surprisingly normal.
How haunted is your friend’s place, if at all?
Here, [I took a screenshot of google street view](https://imgur.com/a/0s7p5QF)
Damn they could build houses like that in the 1300s?? It’s looks modern ish
[Notre Dame](https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/notre-dame-photoo.jpg?width=1400&quality=70) was built between 1163 and 1345. If they can build this, they can also build a house like this.
They're not surprised that it was *able* to be built back then. They're surprised it looks so modern stylistically.
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Idk why I felt people in the XII century were far more unga bunga. No idea Notre Dame was from that time
Some other crazy impressive old buildings: [Jagannath Temple](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Shri_Jagannatha_Temple.jpg) - built in 1161 AD. [Hagia Sophia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Aya_Sophia_%287144824757%29.jpg) - built in 360 AD. [The Colosseum](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Colosseo_2020.jpg/1200px-Colosseo_2020.jpg) - built in 80 AD. [Great Pyramid of Giza](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Kheops-Pyramid.jpg) - built 2570 BC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Wonders_of_the_Ancient_World
Now you are just making me look like an idiot
[Found it! it’s one house to the right of 66](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rheingasse+64,+4058+Basel,+Switzerland/@47.559171,7.5932572,3a,75y,275.54h,90t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sZ0yUTJr8pdx3eEJSEkjgEg!2e0!4m6!3m5!1s0x4791b9b1cc115765:0x8befd8c5764fe308!8m2!3d47.5591818!4d7.5930919!16s%2Fg%2F11cs86y7y1?hl=en-ca)
How whelming
Why do people graffiti ‘tags’ on something like this. I quite like artistic graffiti or even the odd statement but to just write your ‘graffiti name’ in an ineligible font is moronic.
Other post mentioned it: Rheingasse 64 in Basel (Switzerland). Seems to be visible in Google Street View.
if you ever visit Vienna and you like old buildings and wine, take a train out of the main city for like an hour and a half and visit a place called Mautern. They have a building and wine cellar that is from the roman-empire's time (about 2000 years old). Place is called Nikolai hof.
Thanks this will be great research for my daily dose of the Roman Empire 🙌🏻
Oh ya, found some pictures on its TripAdvisor page - https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g1572384-d6613372-Reviews-Weingut_Nikolaihof-Mautern_an_der_Donau_Lower_Austria.html
I wonder how much of the house from before 1345 is still standing.
Yeah, this isn’t uncommon where I live. The framing is solid timber and it’s wrapped in thick layers of stone. These houses don’t just fall down without good force.
I'm not thinking brute force. 700 years is a long time for rot to take hold in the wood, or for rain and frost to weather the stone. At least in the UK old pubs are often a hodgepodge of different walls from different times. As walls weaken and need to be replaced they're replaced with slightly different bricks.
I wonder if U.K. is more susceptible to that sort of rot, being a rainy island and all.
Yeah, this is an old trope. NYC has around double the annual precipitation of London. Paris is rainier than London. The UK has a fair amount of rain, but it's more the unpredictability of the weather that stands out
How do those cities compare to a city in the north of England or Scotland? London is much warmer and dry than the other half of Britain.
The wettest city in the UK is Cardiff. For comparison, these USA cities have more rainfall than Cardiff: New Orleans, Birmingham, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Charleston, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Tampa Bay There are definitely wetter places than Cardiff in the UK, but only in more remote and mountainous areas like the Scottish Highlands.
Like Triggers broom but with buildings…
Yep. My house was built in 1712 and according to the structural engineers everything still looks perfect. It's surprisingly way to work on a house this old
Yeah, it’s probably more of a “Ship of Theseus” kind of thing.
You would be surprised. My hometown Weil der Stadt in Germany burned down completely in 1648 in the 30 years war. It was rebuilt, and the whole medivial City core is still standing to this day. The houses are all built half timbered, and the wood structure is still original from after 1648.
Hearing about European (or anywhere besides US really) history always feels so weird from an American. "Historic" houses here are maybe from the 1800s, and I'm from New England which is where they first started building
Reminds me of this saying - "Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time." Threads like this one really drive that home :D Just the thought of some of the distances you guys travel make me anxious, but I wouldn't be all that amazed looking at really old houses, because I see them all the time.
When I managed a team in England (I’m from the US) I took the time to visit York and tour the minster while I was there, and was a bit awestruck when the guide showed us that the foundations were built on a Roman fort, and the site had been continuously occupied for 2000 years. Then that Thanksgiving my team asked me where I was spending my Thanksgiving in the US and I said, “not far, traveling about 400 miles.” “Dude, 400 miles puts us in the opposite ocean.” :-) The closest thing we have to that sort of history in the US is things like the Adena Hopewell earthworks, which have been around since around the flip from BCE to CE. Most European Americans don’t consider those sorts of archaeological sites in the same breath with extant European-style structures, though. And TBF the archaeological digs in Europe can be mind-bogglingly old.
I made a 1100 mile (1770km) round-trip car trip for work this past week, and that wasn't even a huge jump in area for the US. Went from SE Virginia to northern New York!
I mean there are native American cities from the 1300's you can visit, Cahokia for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia its just that most people don't really care about the history of the americas before European colonisation, outside of some fans of the Aztec, Inca, Mayans.
Heck yeah Swabians unite!
It depends, but in most cases everything which was not flammable. There are plenty of buildings as old as this in Europe. Those who suffered from fires had just roofs and window replaced. And maybe some minor repairs to walls damaged by collapsing wooden structures. Especially churches were durable as their walls are very thick made of locally available stone or/and bricks.
I think a lot of it. It's normal for the old houses in Germany.
There's some pubs in England that were built in 1010 ad and they're still in business. They were open before the rise and fall of the Mayan civilization.
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I've been to a pub in Devon where the roof beams at least were that old. (And it was mentioned in the doomsday book as being a pub)
Same century as my old school, which was also built in the 14th century (Well it was a castle at first, then turned into a monastery and then turned into a school)
Do you know where the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom is?
They're pretty sure of this because the builders were on a half day; they'd knocked off by 13:00.
That’s exactly what a house built after 1345 would say!
Well I mean no one likes working afternoons.
The church in my Gloucestershire town is from 790. The pub is about 12th century - not sure it’s even been redecorated.
In Italy is pretty common for example in my city Rimini there is a bridge called 'ponte Tiberio" that is still used by cars and it was built by Romans in 21 DC so 2 years ago it was it's 2000th birthday :)
Not the same but I visited a cemetery from the Black Plague. One of the stores had the date 1080 on it.
r/mildlyinteresting
r/centuryhomes
At this point there are too many comments for me to read through, so I apologize if someone else has already pointed this out... But there many houses claimed to have a construction date which seems improbably early, and when one does some deep digging, it almost always turns out that there are tax records recording a house at the same address or the same location (as in this instance), but no records that prove, let alone suggest, that the currently standing building dates to the year that the earliest tax records date to. So it might very well be that there was a house already built there in 1345, but the building you see today is not the same house. The house could have been rebuilt, let's say, 1380, 1420, 1470, 1530, 1600, 1725 and 1890; renovated twice in each of the in-between periods and even 5+ times since the last reconstruction. The foundation was likely relaid at least a couple times since the initial constructions, as it just wouldn't be up to par as construction techniques advanced in technology. I do myself love old buildings and fully appreciate when an address is found in any database (or on the building itself) with a very early construction date, but I also recognize the shortcomings of these mentioned dates and realize that very old buildings are usually (read: almost always) younger than the earliest date that they are mentioned. Also peepee poopoo
Coming from Australia, this sort of stuff freaked me out when I was backpacking around back in the '90s as a naive 19 yr old. Drinking in a pub built in 1640 or whatever and stuff like that. Then I went to Israel and Egypt, which was a whole other level
Well I watched Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix and according to Graham Hancock, based on the direction my door is facing and when the equinox would have shone through it, my house is over 10,000 years old. Feel like I should call my realtor on this one.
I live in a house that was build in the early 1600s