What are you talking about, the debt is in the form of Treasury bonds, which have a fixed term at which point you collect.
Not if you roll it over.
I meant that China can’t collect tomorrow for example like so many people think they can
Let’s see:
This is a bit like saying the 20th Century was all about rulers murdering millions of innocent people that were their own countrymen. It happened, of course, and was (so far) unprecedented in that respect. But one should not characterize the whole century that way, because it wasn’t all that way.
Quite true. The 20th century is without parallel in the mass killing of peoples. Far worse than the medieval period. Yet the middle ages get criticized?
Think about poor Mary I, kill a couple hundred people you become regarded as evil, her dad was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and he is some big hero
Secular and Muslim countries still fight the Church and the clergy, and Christians(especially Catholics in General) eg. Egypt, Iraq, and China, mass killings of clergy in Mexico in the past century/turn of the 19th 20th Century, The Spanish Civil War, the list goes on…overall I think there was far less violence against the Church in the Middle Ages, at least Western Europe.
Modern armies/military technology has “failed” to defend people as well, for instance there are still, presumably, losing sides in wars. Moreover, modern warfare causes far worse destruction, eg. WW2, millions of people in just half a decade. It alone would have killed the entire population of Medieval Europe. There is no way war/armies are better now. Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared to a viking raid, no comparison - granted it would really be horrible being attacked by vikings…for other reasons
Nothing unique there. Temptation to religious intolerance and superstition has been around since the fall. Communism, by its nature, has religious intolerance as one of its key features. Read anything about the Soviet persecution of the Orthodox Church and its clergy. Superstition now, although different, usually involves New Age concepts, such as spiritualism, or the espousing of Buddhist and Hindu concepts, all incompatible with our understanding of God and the human soul. Not to mention the modern tendency to unquestionably accept any theory “Science”. Don’t get me wrong the medieval ages had their superstitions and idiosyncratic beliefs as well, but I doubt if they were really any more far fetched than what many people think is perfectly reasonable now.
In short, I don’t really disagree with your proposed problems of the middle ages, but I feel that since the problems that you brought up not only weren’t unique to any specific century or local in the medieval ages, but in fact persist and have often become far worse in our own times, I think you might want to reexamine what some of the unique problems of the middle ages were.
The 20th century saw more victims but wars were not as frequent, actually. Depends on the country. But please remember there were fewer people in the middle ages. Percentile values would be more accurate. In the middle ages, there was basically a war every couple of years and often some form of warfare was basically constant, such as borderlands (especially where religion differed), regions with rebels (e.g. Wales), the Reconquista, Crusades, Latin Empire and Byzantine remnants, Mongol invasions, Hundred Years War, War of the Roses). Don’t like the neighbour? Let’s put a couple of border castles or keep to fire. Want to set an example in the Levant? Let’s loot a whole island and cut the noses of all inhabitants, Venetian/Greek-style.
Pope and Emperor going to war about who gets to appoint bishops, where the Pope dissolves the Emperors’ subjects’ oath of allegiance and the Emperor comes to Rome to remove the Pope physically is probably still better than a couple of moments in 20th century but not exactly a merry tale of old. The middle ages get idealised as good old times the family coat of arms goes back to, where some ancestor was knighted in the mud of the battlefield or carried the king’s banner, but little do people think how bloody a period it was. It’s my favourite period in terms of historical study but I wouldn’t like to live then (admittedly preferable to 1939 but let’s not isolate single worst years, the middle ages had a couple of their own too).
Sorry that is a gross distortion and in parts quite false. For example women had property and inheritance rights, the rights to practice a profession, in fact women dominated some trades such as brewing. Women even had the vote in some circumstances. And millions of them became nuns and escaped any interference by men, in fact they often became leaders in the community and even bossed men around. It was the protestant revolt which pushed women back into subservience. It wasn’t until the late 19th or 20th centuries that women’s social status regained what it had been prior to the “Reformation”.
It was actually EXPECTED. for example look how many Medieval pictures of the BVM depict her READING, often being taught to read by St Anne. Whether this is historically true or not, the point is that people in the Middle Ages in Christendom saw it as the normal thing for a poor working-class girl to be taught to read by her mother.
One common way around this (not that I’m suggesting this was the reason they did it) was to join the clergy or a religious order, when you would be the equal of all your bother priests or brother monks or nuns, and highly respected in the community. And although you wouldn’t be rich, you were unlikely to starve. .
Yes but with the exception of the Mongol and the Moslem invasions/sackings/conquests, the death toll from these wars, even on a population proportional basis, was lower than WW1 and WW2, or even the Thirty Years War which occurred after the Middle Ages during the so-called “enlightenment” era.
Yeah, like it’s not as if national rulers in modern times have ever fought or imprisoned the pope eh?
whereas we have standing professional armies and police forces numbering many millions with $billions worth of equipment, and they still can’t protect us from all the terrorists or even the odd drug-crazed junkie mugging us with a knife or maybe a drive-by shooting. They didn’t have to worry about nuclear war in those days either.
Both are more common now.
Basically, feudal nobility was a concept based on service in exchange for land. Service on horseback and in fully body armour wasn’t seen as a woman’s job. Therefore women did not normally govern feudal estates or inherit (this wasn’t a rule, though).
WW1 and WW2 were more one-off events rather than constant warfare over the course of a century (although there were countries capable of keeping a soldier occupied outside practice manoeuvres). Before, the whole of Europe, let alone the world wouldn’t normally be broken down into two alliances, nor were there really weapons capable of mass destruction… so much. Sure, greek fire, diseased cows on catapults, otherwise it was, pardon the expression, manual slaughtering. But I wouldn’t count on mediaeval combatants being more merciful with the defeated armies or civilians than WW2 combatants.
Apart from the assassination attempt of JP2 by a terrorist supposedly affiliated with communist governments, the last aggression against the pope directly was in Napoleonic times and 1525 before then (Emperor).Yeah, like it’s not as if national rulers in modern times have ever fought or imprisoned the pope eh?
I’d still suspect there was more crime in the middle ages. There’s a reason nobility and upper hierarchy lived in armoured residences, even if they couldn’t afford a proper castle. Monasteries were basically castles. Cities had to be walled.
They didn’t have the tech for nuclear power. They’d have to kill everybody manually. They sometimes did.
True there were some women who did. And even some who went into battle in armour specially made to fit a woman. St Joan of Arc was by no means the only one.
Yes sometimes the occasional African or Asian who ended up in Europe faced less racism than he would today.
No human nature wasn’t any better, I was just talking about proportional body counts.
Are you serious? For one thing Napoleon and even 1525 was well after the Niddle Ages ended. And ever since the 16th century there have been millions who would gladly strangle the Pope with their bare hands if they had the chance. And since 1792 there has been a near continuous anti-Catholic and anti-papal militant army on the march. In the late 19th century they launched a totally unprovoked war of invasion against the Papal States, the ninth-largest country in Europe, murdering countless inhabitants including priests, monks and nuns, forcibly closed and seized all convents and monasteries throughout the Italian peninsula, France and elsewhere in Europe, stole 99.99% of the country without compensation whilst all of the rulers of the Great Powers simply looked the other way or even cheered their approval, despite their frequent pious platitudes that every country should be allowed self-determination andf freedom from aggressive war by its more powerful neighbours. They ejected the pope from his house and gave it to their leader who retains it to this day. They imprisoned the popes in the the Vatican for 60 years. Don’t even get me started on the aggressiobn towards the popes by the Nazis, Marxists and the “New Atheists” of our own day.
Well, they stopped building castles and walls around cities when technology developed to the point where cannonballs and bombs could easily blast any wall to pieces. They stopped building forts on hilltops when people invented planes that could drops bombs and shoot machine-guns from the sky. Now our fortifications are not on the “commanding heights” but deep underground where we hope that the nuclear weapons and the “smart bombs” won’t penetrate. That’s “progress” I guess.
Personally if I had the choice between an army armed with swords, bows and arrows beseiging my walled city, or a nuclear missile operator poised to turn the entire city into atoms at the touch of a button along with all its inhabitants (with those on the outskirts doomed to shocking burns, cancers etc.), I’d rather take my chances with the former.