>Early Middle Ages were probably a point in history where Europeans were at their highest level in terms of overall health and quality of life.
No antibiotics, modern sanitation, internet, refrigeration orcentral heating, not much education, massive infant mortality and no way to travel faster than a horse. I don't see how that equates a high quality of life.
Would you swap places with them - given that you are far more likely to be a serf than an aristocrat?
"No antibiotics" - true
"Modern sanitation" - only really necessary in cities. But 90% of populace lived in the countryside. My grandparents did just fine without any kind of modern sanitation.
"Internet" - true, but also irrelevant for quality of life.
"refrigeration" - completely unnecessary when you have fresh food.
"central heating" - completely unnecessary as medieval houses weren't massive and could be heated just fine with a fireplace
"not much education" - true... to an extent.
"massive infant mortality" - true, but if you didn't survive infancy, you wouldn't worry about living in Middle Ages, would you?
"no way to travel faster to a horse" - so not having something completely useless is relevant for quality of life?
All and all, your objections a) completely miss the point and b) are kinda weird.
That is why I specified Early Middle Ages. Not much serfdom during that time, and there was a lot of food to go around due to low population density - and that included meat, and yes, even for the peasants.
Syrio literally says that knight's swordsmanship is "hacking and hammering":
“Just so. Now we will begin the dance. Remember, child, this is not the
iron dance of Westeros we are learning, the knight’s dance, hacking and
hammering, no. This is the bravo’s dance, the water dance, swift and
sudden. All men are made of water, do you know this? When you pierce
them, the water leaks out and they die.” He took a step backward, raised his
own wooden blade. “Now you will try to strike me.”
Which is a direct reference to the myth of heavy and unweildy longsword.
Whether George Martin himself believes the myth or merely made Syrio misinformed, is anybody's guess.
Also, no, knight in full plate with a longsword is not certainly much less agile than someone with a rapier and no armor. He will be somewhat less agile... if the level of training is equal... but neither longsword nor armor are so heavy that they will significantly limit agility.
Main issue with full suit of plate is actually overheating and tiring out sooner due to added weight and insulation (and possibly restricted breathing depending on the helmet).
That sounds more like GRRM is writing Syrio as saying their swordfighting is inelegant, not that the weapons themselves are heavy. From what I understand, there was often a lot of hacking and hammering to get through the armor, even if the weapons were light. From here:
> Half-sword is used for leverage advantage when wrestling with the sword, as well as for delivering a more accurate and powerful thrust. Both of these are critical when fighting in plate armour because a slice or a cleaving blow from a sword is virtually useless against iron or steel plate.
That is not hacking and hammering, though - not even close. What it in fact describes is grabbing the sword by the blade in order to achieve fine control, with the goal of thrusting through gaps in armor.
Since when I shared the link with my friend from Croatia - he commented:
"Ha. Tamo pak povijest ne bi išao gledati" (Losely translated as "Lol. Yeah I wouldn't be reading about history there")
To which I've replied:
"Eh pa to kao i vesti - pogledaš/proveriš sve verzije, pošto je 'istina' negde između." (Losely translated as "Yeah it's like news, you check all variants/versions, because the 'truth' is somewhere in between").
Hot take: Why is there even a Croatian, a Serbian, a Bosnian, a Montenegrin and a Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia? It's the same thing, why split the knowledge base into five? Not like there's a UK, US and an Australian Wikipedia.
Serbian is typically in Cyrillic - but everyone knows/uses both Cyrillic and Latin. First year of elementary school you learn reading/writing in Cyrillic, second year it's Latin, and in third you get first foreign language (e.g. German, French, English... My parents had Russian, but both my 11 years older sister and me had German as first foreign language). And in 5th year of elementary school it's another foreign language (for sister and me it was English). Street signs - especially highway/cities are in both scripts.
Croatian is Latin only - and IIRC only people born before ~1980 or so were taught Cyrillic in school (unless they are "Serbians from Croatia"). Street signs are only in Latin, but in past I think they had kind of dual script signs like in Serbia.
Bosnian ... Ugh well Serbian/Orthodox-Christian majority parts (Republika Srpska) have signs only in Cyrillic. Non Serbian parts (so Croatian and Muslim/Bošnjak parts) have signs only in Latin.
So I guess BiH (Bosnia & Herzegovina) might be the only valid use case for Serbo-Croatian?
Montenegrin used to be exactly the same as Serbian (so Cyrillic, and different dialect/accent and very few actually different words). But they also started inventing new words to distinguish themselves from Serbian - so I'm not really sure which version of Wikipedia they would default to.
BTW all the words can be transliterated between Latin and Cyrillic with dummy search/replace. For example "đ" = "ђ" = "dj" (if you don't have "fancier" version of "d" on your Latin typewriter/keyboard)
Meanwhile (Former Yugoslav Republic OF /and now known as just Northern/) Macedonia was always Cyrillic (except like in Kosovo there's many Albanian speaking people there, and they use mostly Latin, though I can't say for sure about Christian Orthodox minority in Albania).
And despite being rather different than Serbian/Croatian (let's not stir up flames by saying mix of Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian). When I run into random Macedonian people - they literally say "Two countries (Serbia and Macedonia), but one nation".
PS. I'm originally from Belgrade/Serbia; Wife is 1990s refugee from Croatia; When we were born it was one bigger Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia; We're living in The Netherlands; Our kids have Serbian and Croatian citizenship; Friends and Family are scattered across that former/bigger Yugoslavia (mostly Serbia and Croatia) and some live in the rest of Europe.
