Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history

> now Paris wants to soften the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade.

It's not a building.

Can we talk about the Spanish instead? They killed more.

Awesome book. Students were already gaming the system as extremists in 1200 Paris.

> (the cleric students were) marked by the tonsure, which granted them two major privileges:

> the privilegium canonis, protected their persons, which were regarded as sacred. Any physical violence against them entailed excommunication, which could only be lifted after severe penance. One did not mistreat a cleric without exposing oneself to serious consequences.

> The second was the privilegium fori, which placed clerics under the sole jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts... Philip Augustus is said to have observed the boldness of clerics who rushed into the fray brandishing swords, yet wearing neither armour nor helmets. Hardly surprising, when a shaved head offered better protection than a helmet.

There was already a museum of a Roman era settlement out in the plaza. It's somewhat confusingly named the Archeological Crypt, but it's not the crypt of the Notre Dame Cathedral. (The Cathedral doesn't have a crypt; I think the water table is too low to allow there to be significant spaces below the level of the nearby river.)

So I'm unclear on exactly what this dig is. I get the impression that it's around the edge of the plaza. Perhaps it will be incorporated into the The Crypte Archéologique de l'İle de la Cité?

Not to engage in whataboutism, but every major power or even near-peer power has engaged in those types of atrocities. We like to talk about international law, but anyone who has paid attention understands that the only international law that exists is power.

I wish it were different, but the language they spoke back then was conquest, and every nation and ethnicity spoke that language, and embraced it. And they weren't just unaliving people. They were having their way with the women and unaliving the male children. The Arabs did this. The Persians did this. The Europeans did this. The Asians did this. Everyone.

There's a reason why 0.5% of the male global population today has Genghis Khan's DNA.

I'm not white, but it boggles my mind how modern society has been so radicalized and brainwashed that a particular segment of our population actually thinks white people are the only people in history that have done this.

But yeah, the French...