I’d have no problems with that claim, if it were true. Inventing new weapons is an aspect of technological superiority, whether we like it or not.
However, the ‘peaceful Chinese used gunpowder in colourful fireworks, while the practical Euros quickly made cannon using it’ meme is, I think, a bit of a fairy tale.
According to Firearms: A Global History to 1700 by Kenneth Chase (2002):
“The earliest known formula for gunpowder can be found in a Chinese work dating probably from the 800s. The Chinese wasted little time in applying it to warfare, and they produced a variety of gunpowder weapons, including flamethrowers, rockets, bombs, and land mines, before inventing firearms.”
The Chinese originally used gunpowder in flamethrower-type weapons:
Later, they developed “fire lances” (basically, flamethrowers that shot shrapnel out also, like a primitive shot-gun) and, eventually, what we now know as cannons and guns:
Wiki says that types of different sails in ocean going ships were developed in different parts of the world independently of each other.
Also, hull forms (Galley > Cog > Caravel > Galleon> Fluyt etc.) continued to evolve throughout the eras in question, with, of course, the “biggest” changes coming towards the end of that time frame. I imagine a lot of little detail changes occured to make the later hull forms more practical (how to assemble a wood structure for more strength, rope making, tar/pitch, rigging designs, sail weaving, navigation, for example).
I am not an expert. Just tossing out ideas.
I think the Catholic Church got a lot of flak for repressing or retarding science, but why in the world would the church care (in a negative way) about sail design? Pigmentation experiments (art)? Pressing/growing grapes? Better ways to get a finer weave of cloth?
However, I am not going to go as far as the OP though.
I can understand the OP’s point - that the nasty rep of medieval Europe has traditionally been overblown. The very term was coined during the Renaissance, to differentiate the new, brighter, shinier Europe emerging from a period of “decline” - the periodization attributed to this fellow:
Needless to say, the Renaissance and Reformation did not of necessity create any improvement in the things compained about in this thread - if anything, in some places things got worse (the history of the Renaissance popes, and the repeated bashing of Italy by various national armies of France, Spain, HRE, etc. during the ‘enlightened’ Renaissance era; the religious persecutions triggered by the Reformation, leading to genocidal conflicts like the 30 Years War … )
The traditional historical metric of ‘Roman Empire - decline - dark age - medieval dreariness - oh wow, Renaissance!’ does conceal as much as reveal. Though the OP is, I think, not on solid ground with many of his claims, as discussed in detail above.
You may have missed that the Cathars more or less started it. Despite their colorfully charming reputation, they were a deeply nasty people who sponsored mass banditry and murder. The Albigensian crusade fell to killing them all because they broke every vow to stop doing bad shit. It was only after the Albigensians proved they wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. Killing off the populace wasn’t nice, but it made the point and stopped the killing others, no less than we nuked the shit out Hiroshima and for basically the same reason.
But I’m sure you can find lots of specific examples of Catholics being nasty. I could happily find you a number myself. This does not hcnage the fact that the Church changed the very nature of war, changed the very nature of what moral rights people had, and changed the very nature of what civilized people did. It was not the religious men of the Church who tried to end all that and return the world of the cruel and heartless wars of theft and destruction, but the more secular men. Even the Spanish, cruel as the were in the New World* wound up building new nations entirely.
*Though with the charming habit of letting the least devout control the most. The early priests who ministered to the Spanish were basically hired frauds, while the real priests ministered to the AmerIndians.
Do you have a cite for this? It’s clear that the Albigensians were, theologically speaking, very far from Christian orthodoxy, but even the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia does not seem to claim they were violent bandits and habitual mass murderers (“War and capital punishment were absolutely condemned”), though there are some mentions of apparent tit-for-tat atrocities–and that source would surely emphasize it if there were any basis for such claims.
Well, Malcolm Lambert in his book about the Cathars actually references the Archbishop of Pisa at the time claiming that one of the reasons for the early success of the Cathars is that they managed to restrain the mountain lords from banditry. The Albigensian crusade was sparked in the first place by the assassination of Pierre de Castlenau, the Papal Legate, by forces loyal to the pro-Cathar Count of Toulouse, and there was some violence against inquisitors and Church lands, but a lot of that happened after the Albigensian Crusade and inquisition started. There was also the endura, of course, where perfecti would starve themselves to death, but that was inner directed violence.
I don’t think it’s right to say that the Cathars were particularly violent or sponsoring of banditry, or at least not any more than the general public. In general, about the Cathars, I think part of the reason for the violence is simply that groups are harsher towards heretics and apostates than they are towards non-believers, because the non-believer is ignorant of the truth, while the apostate knows the truth and rejects it.
[QUOTE=sh1bu1]
I like the idea that moving from using gunpowder for fireworks to using it for cannons is an example of how European culture was superior.
[/QUOTE]
I would rather be shot to death than killed by any of the weapons used on the battlefield before the invention of firearms. I understand the supposedly-clever point being made here, but under scrutiny, there’s really nothing clever about it. Nobody said that European culture was morally superior to anyone else, just that they found a more efficient way to fight wars.
Even if the Chinese did not use gunpowder for warfare - and, as has been posted previously, it seems that they did - they also had no problem using arrows, swords and spears, all of which are orders of magnitude more grisly and painful than bullets and cannonballs. So it’s very silly to try to idealize the Chinese in any way just because they (supposedly) used gunpowder only for fireworks.
So you assert. I have yet to see any evidence for this assertion. Against which there is a mountain of historical evidence that Christian armies continued to behave like barbarians all over the world for hundreds of years.
The Catholic Church was and remains to this day a moral blight on humanity and any attempt to claim the it somehow was a humanitarian force in the middle ages is pissing into the historical wind.
[QUOTE=Smiling Bandit]
You may have missed that the Cathars more or less started it. Despite their colorfully charming reputation, they were a deeply nasty people who sponsored mass banditry and murder.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I’ll second that request. Both your claims - that they started it and that they sponsored lawlessness - are at odds with what I’ve read, i.e. that the Cathars’ main “crimes” were heresy and unwillingness to give a shit about the RC church’s demands.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I did: “Someone in the Middle Ages came up with the bright idea of using a water mill to pulp the fiber, and since that time paper has been cheap and plentiful.”
The three-field system is the same as crop rotation. The Romans planted one crop in a field. They didn’t know about the fact that cycling through different crops could help restore the soil. What they did was not crop rotation.
Why consign them to a moral blight any more than their contemporaries? As even your own quotation shows, the only ones who made any noise at all in defense of the native population were churchmen. The Church actually defended against the abuses of the Conquistadors, very much moreso than any other institution at the time. That it did not do so sufficiently does not mean that they were worse than the lay leadership.
Of course the church wasn’t wholly evil - a couple of bad popes could be followed by some genuinely good ones, but the trouble was that both good and bad ones had such enormous power that the bad ones were able to act out their wickedness to very ill effect. Papal bulls like Dum Diversas mentioned above and Ad Extirpanda (which was used against the Cathars) are shocking evidence of this. These were frightful partisan laws legitimising violence against an out-group, written by some thoughtful theologian sitting down and devising reasons why it was not just legal to kill and torture that other lot, it was actually your moral duty to God to do so. Oh and by the way lads, when you’ve finished torturing them, help yourself to their stuff:
[QUOTE=Ad Extirpanda]
The bull conceded to the State a portion of the property to be confiscated from convicted heretics.
[/QUOTE]
Well, they started it in the sense that Raymond of Toulouse’s assassination of the Papal legate was what triggered the crusade, but it’s quite possible the place would have erupted in violence anyway later.
Yes, but Smiling Bandit claimed it was necessary to “nuke the shit out of” them.
What’s the appropriate response for an assassination?
(a) find the killers and punish them, or
(b) nuke the shit out of the whole population?
I suppose so, but that boy was going to get capped one way or another.
He didn’t do much to endear himself to… well, to anybody really. The local Catholic clergy didn’t like getting bossed around by a man from the Papal FBI who threw his weight around like it was no thang; the nobles certainly didn’t like getting told what to do on their own turf; and as for the people they were quite fond of the Cathars, the prosperity they brought to the region, and their veneer of non-corruption which in their eyes was a step up from Catholic “business as usual”.
Besides, that’s not what **smiling **said. He said the Cathars were sponsors of banditry and mass murderers. I have never read anything of the sort.
Most of the Cathars were fat burghers and city meisters rejecting materialism and promoting ascetism, I don’t really see where they’d go from there to banditry or violence to others. They weren’t *fraticelli *going around plundering monasteries and murdering bishops. Wasn’t them who killed the Papal legate, either - that’s on Raymond VI of Toulouse who, while a friend and protector to the Cathars, wasn’t one himself. And the assassination was probably motivated more by politics and local power plays vs. Rome and Paris than religion anyway.
Of course, the same could be said of the crusade itself. It might have been called by the Pope, but the men-at-arms doing the fighting were in it more for the lootin’ and rapin’ than to save their souls while the nobles were probably in it to take the arrogant Southerners down a peg or two.