Middle Ages - Warlike or Peaceful? Comparison with Modern War

Why medieval people loved WAR
Shadiversity | 7.IX.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut1-IgyfVU8

I

2:26 "when WW-I broke out everyone cheered, when WW-II broke out, everyone cried"

One guy who didn't cheer in 1914 : Pope St Pius X, who died of broken heart after not stopping WW-I.

II

3:04 "mortality rates were so much higher"

Everyone died, and for all except the present generation, this has always been so.

1900, with very few exceptions, everyone died. 1880, with no exception, everyone died. A mortality rate of 100% cannot be topped by Medieval mortality ...

3:10 Don't overdo the difference modern medical technology has done.

1) It's counterbalancing the pandemics of modern communications; 2) the lowering of child mortality (which really was higher) has more to do with advanced hygienic practises, but also with forbidding and stopping people from having children in situations where they cannot afford them; 3) and apart from child mortality, known Medievals seem to have lived perhaps a decade shorter than people today.

My material, gathered from wikis, involve more people the the medical study of 40 - 60 skeleta and assessment on the age when the died, which has been challenged by a dentist making a different assessment.

3:14 How available food was?

Seriously, while starvations happened in episodes, both man made in sieges and acts of God in bad crops, they never reached the murderous proportions of manmade starvations like Irish potato famine (the farmers had been growing wheat which the landlords didn't allow them to eat, bc the contract provided for them to eat potatoes and let landlords sell the wheat in England) or Holodomor (where Ukraine was similarily deprived of the wheat it grew by Soviet policies).

There is no indication that Medievals were permanently starving.

3:26 If you want to see someone worried about freezing to death, look at the next homeless guy - and remember how the Medievals looked at almsgiving, do thou likewise!

III

4:58 What you are really after is death was much more public in the Middle Ages.

You have a corpse at home one morning? You call the hospital, an hour later the doctor, after attesting death, gets the corpse to the morgue.

You had a corpse at home one morning then? You did the washing and everything else up to burial, arguably with neighbours and friends helping out.

Similarily with executions, now a man will die in an electric chair or gas chamber with a few officials looking on and then telling news media "yes, the execution happened" while, back then, a hanging or beheading was public, partly because it was in terrorem for other evildoers, and partly because some of the victims might like cheering. Did you notice when Saddam Hussein was hanged? Some tribes in Iraq were dancing and shouting and sending each other dates and toffee and "cors de gazelle" or whatnot.

But in this sense, the Middle Ages are still not over everywhere and weren't over to very recently on the West either.

They might not be over everywhere in the Ozarks. They are not over in Africa. What you refer to as "Middle Ages" is on this item a very much broader thing.

And what adult in our times has not experienced the death at least of some grandparent?

Obviously, often in hospital, so, less close at hand.

IV

6:24 Are you quite sure the soldiers on the other side were always people just like you?

I mean, in France, the soldiers of English occupant were arguably not married stable guys trying to raise their families, but adventurers who had come to loot your country. Oldcastle, on whom Falstaff is based, is one example.

St Joan of Arc was pretty clear, she didn't know if God loved the "godots" (God wot's!) over in England, she was just sure, He was, through her, chasing them off France.

Obviously they were not drafted normal people.

Look at some volunteers getting back from Iraq, now ISIS is beaten ... I was against ISIS while it lasted, but some of them are looking for any ex-ISIS not regretting (including a married woman, as you may have heard of), and any para-ISIS, any meta-ISIS and so on ... they have been to war for a decade, some of them, and they don't always retain perfectly normal reactions.

I am not saying they should be shut up in mental hospitals, I am just saying, look out a bit ...

One thing, very many wars in the Middle Ages (excluding Crusades) were fairly short things. Chesterton described them as a time when peace could always break out ... if the Christmas of 1914 had been Middle Ages, there might have been peace talks between Kaiser Willy and Clémenceau ongoing from dec 24 to jan 13 ... and they could have succeeded.

But Willy was not a perfect Medieval, neither was Clémenceau. While their religious outlooks differed, neither was a Catholic.

V

9:50 You might know that St Thomas Aquinas was born in a noble family which still lives on (Corazón Aquino on Philippines was the wife of some great grand nephew several generations later), so he was born to show one upmanship.

If he didn't quite like getting physical, he clearly did it in argument ... if you have any kind of interest in philosophy, don't miss out on this knight's son and knights' brother gone theologian and friar.

Summa Theologiae http://newadvent.com/summa/

Also helps to give insights on what the Middle Ages were like ....

VI

12:32 (2*616 if you like) on the "dehumanise and vilify" note, Vikings were (previous to becoming Christians) pretty good at dehumanising monks for "chanting galdr" and "being unmanly" ...

Hence, they were very mercilessly looting ... it seems one who had gone Catholic on Sicily temporarily forbade a Greek monastery to celebrate Greek liturgy, which led to reprisals by Michael Caerularius in Constantinople, which led to schism still ongoing.

What some missed is, the Greek monastery by intervention of bishops and so got back its right to celebrate Greek liturgy.

"about our past"

OK, noted, Russian Revolution, expropriations of German nobility in Slovenia etc are in the past. So is every expropriation which has already happened, and therefore all until the next one happens.

VII

13:43 Bad people are going to exist in the world all the way up to Harmageddon.

Christian Middle Ages were comparatively mild.

From 13th to 20th C, perhaps with "doldrum" in 15th or 16th, certainly with one in 19th, European wars have taken higher and higher percentages of European population, and 17th C was the record previous to 20th. Perhaps because Thirty Years War

In Roman to Frankish times, probably "defending your country" was less important than defending your faith.

Huns were un-Christian. Visigoths were Arian.

Once it was clear that Clovis was becoming Catholic, there was no big deal, a few arrangements of giving away land to his troops, when he became king. Oh, of course some learning "German or Dutch" as well, characterising his language very anachronistically, but it would have been called Theodisc or Thiudisc ... and your needs of learning it would depend on your ambitions.

People like them learning Latin with an accent was probably one reason why we have Provençal and French losing so many syllables of Latin.

If you say "ego habeo illum librum" as "egoaveoilolibro" you may land at "io ho il livro" a few centuries later. If you say it as "ego-HAV-eoillo-LIV-ro" you are better headed for "j'ai le livr'".

We are again living in times when the Catholic faith has enemies.

14:53 For instance, arguably, up to conversion of Clovis, a victory by him over Roman defenders headed by bishop St Remigius would have looked about as bad as Constantine IX loosing to the Turks, i e, as "Antichrist won".

Apocalypse 13:7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them.

You know, while the Western civilisation was concerned with this, it lasted as a Christian one.

Did Bl. Karl of Austria Use Poison Gas?
Tumblar House | 10.III.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejyOmKPq9zg

We are told that Woodrow Wilson allowed his navy to use poison gas, that he allowed them to torpedo civilian boats, that he opened the way for Hitler and Stalin by forcing Germans and Austrians to get rid of their monarchs.

And some virtues of Venerable Charles the First. (I am not sure if Pope Michael has made him blessed yet).

I

The kind of source who says Charles of Austria used poison gas (bc his ally Willy did), it might be the same kind of source that considers Austrofascists differed from National Socialists in name, but not in deeds ...

II

Woodrow Wilson ... do you know what he had more in common with the Kaiser?

The Kaiser sent Lenin on a train to Russia.

Wilson (probably) sent Trotski on a plane to Russia.

I once calculated some abbreviation of it (Woodrow Wilson) as either 666 or 616, but I seem to have forgot how, might want to try with Atbash cipher and Albam cipher ... before applying ASCII of course.

III

3:31 Isn't there a statue of Wilson next to his ally Trotski?

You know, the gentleman who allowed Makhnow to kill off some Czarist troups and then killed of Makhnow, the fine civilised type who recruited the proto-type of KGB (CheKa, back then, right?) from the Rayon, where lots of Jews who had felt bad about being second rate citizens if as much were eager to get "even" with Christians.