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Why Poor Countries Are Poor

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Re: Why Poor Countries Are Poor

#141

Post by dkimball »

mtts wrote: post #133
dkimball wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, just as it's not really paranoia when they're really out to get you, a protection racket is preferable to being overrun by hordes of Teutonic Nietzcheans. :) Having the same structure doesn't always mean being the same thing.

Except that in the case of the middle ages, if there weren't any bloodthirsty "nobles" to begin with, "protection" wouldn't be necessary in the first place, so to me at seems at least in part not just the same structure as a protection racket but the same substance as well.

There were the Germanic invaders at first, against whom the late-Roman landholders organized; then there were the Vikings, against whom the mixed late-Roman landholders and Germanic invaders organized; then there were the Muslims (who were a threat earlier than the Vikings, and stayed a threat later than them; remember what "reconquista" means, and what happened to Byzantium); then there were the Protestants, and/or the Catholics, and/or the French... and this is leaving out the alphabet soup of East European enemies like the Balts, the Slavs, the Bulgars, and the Magyars (and the Germans themselves were not part of the medieval world until the 8th century or so AD and the conquest of Germany west of the Elbe by Charlemagne).

This is not to imply that the nobility always _did_ oppose the enemies who they should have been opposing; but it's not at all the case that had there been no feudal militaries, medieval Europe would have been a peaceful place.

(I acknowledge that this is a very late post, and I apologize for that; but it's a common mistake to imagine that medieval European history occurred in a vacuum. The primary culprit here is the, ah, _insular_ way that English-speaking schools teach medieval history...)

Re: Why Poor Countries Are Poor

#142

Post by mtts »

dkimball wrote: post #141
mtts wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in the case of the middle ages, if there weren't any bloodthirsty "nobles" to begin with, "protection" wouldn't be necessary in the first place, so to me at seems at least in part not just the same structure as a protection racket but the same substance as well.

There were the Germanic invaders at first, against whom the late-Roman landholders organized; then there were the Vikings, against whom the mixed late-Roman landholders and Germanic invaders organized; then there were the Muslims (who were a threat earlier than the Vikings, and stayed a threat later than them; remember what "reconquista" means, and what happened to Byzantium); then there were the Protestants, and/or…

I'm well aware of the things you describe :-)

And I was specifically talking about the Western European nobility between, say, 1000 - 1300 AD, a period when there were no outsiders invading Western Europe and it was the nobility itself that posed the greatest threat to the lives of "commoners".

I do, by the way, take issue with your description of the Muslims as a threat - that was true only between around 650 - 750 or so, until Charles Martel stopped their expansion at the battle of Poitiers, and it was true again for Romanians and Hungarians in the sixteenth century when the Turkish empire started to expand westward, but between those times (a period commonly known as "The Middle Ages" ;-) ) it was Western Europeans that were threatening muslims by travelling to Palestine in a misguided attempt to "liberate" the "Holy Land" from the "Infidel".

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