While Currently taking Western Civilization 2 in University (A course on the Middle Ages) i have read a lot into the time period not just from a text book but also from 1st hand writings like Abelard and Heloise. The stereotype that seems to be seen by westerners of this period is that it’s a time of great religious faith (whether seen as positive or negative) and a time of glory and honor, when in fact it isn’t.
The Medieval time period was generally a time of huge corruption masked in the sense of faith. Sure, there were certain people that did do good things, but really what happened was people used their seats of power in the church or government and used it as a mask of holiness for the bad things they did. Are their exceptions to this? Sure there are, but in a time period where only people in positions of power could read, the general populace was easy to take advantage of.
In Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, Machiavelli pretty much states the guidelines of being a Ruler can’t which basically are all negative but the ruler has to mask them by not making them look that way. For example he says that rulers can’t be nice because others will use it against them, but they have to at least look like they’re nice so people won’t use that against them either.
Much applies even today with positions of power and politics, this is something that the Game of Thrones series did well with, they took and used corruption based on how it actually was in the Middle Ages as opposed to the perversions of it from being raised in western civilization.
The time period was one of corruption in all seats of power, church or lordship. Vassals themselves during this period had as much corruption as those they were vassals corruption to and so on and so forth.
Machiavelli though, made reference to those at the bottom of the Ladder in the most positive light, and i hope that chain of corruption is reflected in this game, because some of that chain holds true still today. It is something that most people can relate to.
One relate these themes to Socioapathy and maybe hint for some psychological themes to be relevant to the game as they always have been in human history, and since, psych is my Major in school you know
Corruption is timeless… right? You can find it, name it in whole history of the nature. It is not a human invention, we can only say we gave it a name - and some perfection -, but it exists on all levels of being…
I have no idea why you keep mentioning western civilization as the corruption has no borders, no frontiers, it only has a perception and that is unique to all of us. I’m pretty sure it will also take a form in this game … so don’t worry. You’ll not going to miss it
It is correct that corruption is timeless, but it is less present today because of the amount of control available through IT Systems and other automated electronic systems. That basically makes it impossible for the middle to lower populace classes to be corrupt. While the higher classes actually have more power to use their corruption, because of these systems that they impose upon the other populace classes.
Hello, i don’t think corruption is less present today. Our government is fully corrupted, with making contracts for finance groups, financing family companies atc… Automatic electronic systems are only effective when the ones that are checking them are not corrupt.
Can’t say I see that stereotype that often in these parts. More often its the “Dark/Dung Age” myth in which the medieval period was one of total depravity and misery wherein everyone was ignorant and stupid because of the evil Church while plague-riddled corpses piled the streets in some sort of antediluvian Mad Max-style hellscape, but I digress. Anyways, we should be careful not to approach the period with modern conceptions and prejudices of what constitutes “real” faith, glory, honor et al, which is a completely uninformative and singularly useless approach to the historical method.
I’ve been (amateurishly) studying the medieval period for several years now and I’ve managed to build a sizable collection of primary sources and scholarly works, and I don’t think many medievalists would agree with this assessment at all. Honestly, your summation of the period reads more like it was cribbed from 18th and 19th century Enlightenment like Voltaire or Gibbon than any of the current scholarship I’m familiar with.
We’ve discussed this before. That the majority was illiterate is a known fact - but then so was the vast majority of the U.S. population up until the Industrial Revolution. In both cases this had nothing to do with sinister social control and everything to do with the fact that both populations were predominately agrarian, and as such literacy was far less in demand than it is in modern industrialized urban societies. Its simply bad history to look back in time with the presumption that the things that we value as necessary skills should have been valued equally by preceding generations and cultures, and its made even worse when we infer that people in the past were somehow lesser than us for not possessing the same values that we do.
You do realize that “The Prince” is a piece of Italian Renaissance literature and was composed and published in the 16th century, right? Not only that, but “The Prince” was hugely controversial on its publication in 1532 largely because it completely rejected the political ideals of both medieval Scholasticism and the emerging Humanist school of thought and instead expounded a purely pragmatic ideal of political power? Given that, using “The Prince” to interpret how medieval people viewed politics is more than a little anachronistic, don’t you think?
Yes, but it is literature toward the end of the middle ages that applies to even “princes” of today. I’m not arguing how medieval people viewed politics, since most people were uneducated peasants that had little choice in their life. Peasantry had little to no influence in politics until the black plague hit Europe.
What i am arguing is how the world and time period should be presented as a whole to us, educated people of the 21st century. Sure Florence was basically a oligarchy of gangs, but if you have actually read The Prince, you would understand is that it applies to many systems of governance, whether it be corporate, democratic, monarchy, you name it.
If this was a perfect Medieval sim where the game was based off of what people of the time peroid thought, then we would be a bunch of uneducated hillbillies going off on glorious quests for god and blaming the Jews for poisoning our wells because that is how a lot of medieval people viewed their world. I am using something to make a point, arguing that this is how things were. Maybe i should mention the Humanist movement in exposing the corrupt clergy and laity to prove my point even more.
When the cat is away the mices dance
A strong king was able to limit the corruption as everybody in the court had less hope to take advantage of it’s weekeness.
Philippe le Bel is a good exemple, he was almost close to make France as a state, a rich european superpower. The corruption was signically reduced during his reign.
After he died, week regency and king came after him, France was almost ruined by corruption and bad décision and the 100 year old war.
“The Prince” was a product of the Italian Renaissance, composed specifically for the court of the Medici family in Florence, and is a repudiation of both the then-emerging humanism and the medieval scholastic models of political authority. We’ve been over this before - I shan’t repeat myself again.
Also, what is your obsession with pointing out that the majority of the population were illiterate peasants? Once again, that was not at all unique to the medieval period. On the contrary, the same statement could be made with just as much truthfulness for the Roman empire or of pre-Industrial America as of, say, Plantagenet England or 18th century France. That western Europe’s population was predominantly illiterate agrarian peasantry was a fact of life until the massive upheavals of the Industrial Revolution was because otherwise the vast majority of them would probably have died of starvation.
Not only that, but as I pointed out in the linked discussion (which I’m guessing you did not read) education and literacy were highly valued in medieval Europe, so much so that many of these “illiterate peasants” you keep pointing to would quite often send off at least one of their sons to be educated as a clerk or notary because they wanted their children to move up the social ladder. Indeed, in many cases the peasantry showed much more interest in having their offspring pursue an education than did nobles. The 12th century English official Walter Map recorded that while the “high born of our country disdain letters, or delay to apply their children to them… on the other hand, those which we call peasants are eager to nourish their base-born…” This wouldn’t make any sense if there was the sort of malicious caste conspiracy of the nobility and clergy to keep the peasants ignorant and stupid that you seem to be convinced existed.
Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” has applicability in all sorts of real world situations even today, but that doesn’t make it an effective manual for, say, trying to understand the thought behind Roman military strategy in the late third century. That’s because it was produced by an author in a very different socio-cultural, geographical and intellectual climate than that which existed in Rome during the reign of Diocletian. What I’m trying to get at is that just because the principles of a manual like “The Prince” or “The Art of War” can be shown to have practical applicability does not actually make them a reliable or accurate standard of measurement for the interpretation of events in a different historical context than the one in which they were composed.
People could be cruel and corrupt, yes - but then so could people in every other era that you point to, from ancient times to the present. Such incidents must be acknowledged and are certainly deserving of historical analysis where they are relevant, but it would be absolutely absurd to assume that they should be taken as representative and the sole thing worth remembering from the period. Good historiography requires an understanding of the whole context in which an event occurred, and cherry-picking whatever confirms our own personal biases from history is just lazy.
Also, why must someone be an “uneducated hillbilly” to do deplorable things? The industrialized, educated and urban world that emerged from the Industrial Revolution has seen some of the most horrific atrocities in human history on a scale unthinkable to prior generations. I’m not a Luddite (elsewise I wouldn’t be using a computer to debate on a video game forum), but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that bigotry and violence is something that vanished from the face of the earth because of education.
As for the Humanists, I rather doubt you’d want to lionize them so much if you’d actually studied them. The Humanist movement was obsessed to the point of fanaticism with bringing about a return to the perceived glories of the Greco-Roman world - indeed, they were often so enamored with this dream that they frequently ignored anything that contradicted their beloved Aristotle. As one 16th century Pisan Humanist reportedly declared, “the touchstone and measuring scale of all sound ideas and each and every truth, lie in their conformity with the teaching of Aristotle, outside of which all is inane and chimerical: Aristotle has seen everything, done everything.”. Personally, I’m inclined to agree with historian of science James Hannam’s verdict of the movement as one of “incorrigible reactionaries” rather than as some sort of prototypical irreligious progressivism.
