Thomas_More
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But this was specifically England, and was prior to the Counter-Reformation – which transformed the Catholic Church into an apt vehicle for mercantile capitalism.
I think your point would be better made in returning to an age when Catholicism did in fact represent feudalism, causing the rift between the Pope and the rest of the universal Church in 1054 (which held sway in non-feudal lands still under the old chattel slave system of Imperial Rome).
The western Church changed with western European society from that time onward; the eastern Church stayed still, like Byzantium itself.
The popes granted dispensations allowing the Lombards exemption from the usury laws and the Church was often in a position of championing – like in Liege – the rights of towns against nobles, as the towns increased in importance.
Obviously, England has a unique history here, which cannot be transposed abroad.
I’m not denying that, but i’m challenging the view that the Catholicism of the early modern period stood for feudalism and that protestantism of all schools stood for capitalism. I have shown that this was not the case.
Capitalism began in the Mediterranean, specifically Italy, where both bourgeoisie and nobles were Catholics. In Germany Luther became the representative of the feudal lords. Most of Europe entered capitalism as Catholic and remained so, as members of a reformed Catholic Church. Central European nobles fighting centralising monarchies embraced protestantism.
Already by 1948 in the areas of China controlled by Mao’s forces, between 500,000 and a million people had been executed.
Byzantine Orthodoxy was not the religion of a feudal, but of a chattel-slavery society.
As for protestantism, it is variable. Calvinists tended to be bourgeois, but Lutheranism appealed more to the German feudal princes opposing centralisation by the Catholic Emperor.
Protestantism was also chosen by the feudal magnates of parts of Hungary, such as the Nadasdys and Bathorys.
We must be careful to be aware of variables, otherwise we become like the Leninists, pushing everything into neat compartments when they really don’t fit.
The Counter Reformation Catholic Church was just as suited to capitalism as Calvinist protestantism was, and in Germany the Catholic emperor was the progressive option and Lutheranism served the reactionary feudalists.
In France the Gallican Catholic Church represented by Richelieu was the arbiter of progressive royal centralism, opposed by the reactionary feudal aristocracy.
I remember Basil Davidson’s series AFRICA in the 1980s, which was excellent.
The idea of the “dark continent” was a later, colonialist, image. Ethiopia, as a Christian country, was very much part of christendom’s orbit. There were Nubian crusaders fighting alongside Richard Coeur de lion, namely one who was canonised by the pope.
North Africa, of course, as part of the Roman Empire, was very much part of Europe’s knowledge and experience. St. Augustine was African. Egypt was an important contributor to “Dark Age” theological disputation, and Alexandria was (still is, in fact) a papacy.
Writers such as the 12th century knight Wolfram Von Eschenbach, the first European novelist in the proper sense, show us the equality between Christian and Muslim nobles. They regarded each other as equals, and, if often enemies, they were no more so than Christian lords often were to one another. The code of chivalry operated across the religious divide, and there is romantic love between the sexes of both.
Eschenbach’s hero Gahmuret fights for a north African Muslim princess against Christian forces attacking her lands and has a child with her, who joins King Arthur’s court. Another hero, Willehalm’s sweetheart is a Muslim queen.We also have to specify what we mean by the fall of the Roman Empire. For one thing, it was already a Christian empire. Paganism was outlawed by Theodosius.
As far as Rome was concerned, the capital was moved to Byzantium by Constantine. Are we to suggest that the ferocious police state of Byzantium was “civilization”, and the migratory tribes that captured western Europe were “barbarians”?If the fifth century marked the “fall of civilisation” there were very many who would rightly have cried GOOD! Thank goodness Rome is over!
In the next century the civilised sociopaths Justinian and Theodora attempted the reconquest, for Roman “civilisation”, of the western Mediterranean … And Procopius tells us what they were like!
When I was on the Yahoo Groups forum the vitriol was so bad that I left the party for several years.
By far the greatest loss was the destruction of the Alexandrian library and other Eastern libraries, but you cannot lay this at the door of western christendom or the Middle Ages.
Prester John stories were very popular but there was real fear of the Mongols too. The interesting thing is that we don’t see any racism. Perceived differences are purely religious, and that of course was true of the Crusades, but colour didn’t come into it.
The Crusades were bloody, and there can be no doubt that it was better to fall into Saladin’s hands than the Latins’. Yet there were customs which are less well known.
The Templars in Jerusalem reserved space for Muslims to worship. It was also forbidden to mock any Muslim, and soldiers were subject to punishment for doing so.
There was more distrust for Greek Christians, who were schismatics.Of course there was a loss of material culture at the fall of the old Roman empire, baths for instance. The Crusades in fact brought into western christendom Arab knowledge, but so did the 12th century renaissance, via the Moorish kingdoms of Spain. The monasteries gave us the codex, the spined book, which at last freed readers from the inconveniences of the ancient scroll. Volumes could be bigger. They also gave us minuscule script, instead of having to write always in capitals, and separated words.
Knowledge that was lost was regained, medical knowledge too. The 16th century reformation lost us a lot more than the fall of Rome did!All I have to do to see people living as you describe is get a bus across town. I don’t need to travel abroad to see it.
There will be many deaths this winter from cold in this, the “imperial core”, and also suicides by people unable to make ends meet.
And even closer to the core, in the U.S., miles of tent cities of the homeless, freezing to death. And those in the slums not much better off.
I don’t see Putin huddling there, no more than Truss or Peskov, Biden or Lavrov or Hsi.“Or it might just be that there are around 1 billion people living in the collective west. A collective west that is lording it over all the rest.”
I wasn’t aware that I, as one of the one billion of the collective west, was lording it over anyone. I don’t even lord it over my cats. But I see that the one billion, only 1% of whom are capitalists, if that, are, all of us, in TS’s eyes, an enemy to be obliterated in the interest of the Russian ruling class!
