Why Europe?

[Unkotare]

....

2. Militarily Europe embraced the concept of closing with the enemy and risking death in order to achieve victory.......

You're contradicting the influence of firearms.

Nope. Even with firearms the willingness to expose one self to certain danger in the pursuit of victory is an inhuman but effective idea.

It requires extensive cultural and social conditioning to overcome natural survival instinct.

NORMAL ancient conflict was more what we Western Minds think of as Non-conventional warfare, raids, terrorism, guerrilla tactics, hit and run tactics, ect..

You're way off

 

[Unkotare]

There are many theories as to why a continent full of bloodthirsty, inbred, filthy savages should emerge from the so-called 'Dark Ages' and become the dominant region of the world for a long time. Just wondering which one y'all find most compelling. It's a fascinating historical question, in any case.

1. Your statement is racist and ignorant.

2. Militarily Europe embraced the concept of closing with the enemy and risking death in order to achieve victory.

3. A rural based political culture, ie feudalism ....

That's not what feudalism means.

I wasn't explain what Feudalism means, I was describing the aspect of it that made it more effective than other ancient cultures that were left behind, imo.

It was the END of feudalism that allowed Europe to surge ahead economically.

 

[Correll]

There are many theories as to why a continent full of bloodthirsty, inbred, filthy savages should emerge from the so-called 'Dark Ages' and become the dominant region of the world for a long time. Just wondering which one y'all find most compelling. It's a fascinating historical question, in any case.

1. Your statement is racist and ignorant.

2. Militarily Europe embraced the concept of closing with the enemy and risking death in order to achieve victory.

3. A rural based political culture, ie feudalism ....

That's not what feudalism means.

I wasn't explain what Feudalism means, I was describing the aspect of it that made it more effective than other ancient cultures that were left behind, imo.

It was the END of feudalism that allowed Europe to surge ahead economically.

Improvements in agriculture technology, and higher percentages of Peasants as opposed to serfs or slaves were the foundation for the next phase, developed UNDER feudalism.

 

[Unkotare]

There are many theories as to why a continent full of bloodthirsty, inbred, filthy savages should emerge from the so-called 'Dark Ages' and become the dominant region of the world for a long time. Just wondering which one y'all find most compelling. It's a fascinating historical question, in any case.

1. Your statement is racist and ignorant.

2. Militarily Europe embraced the concept of closing with the enemy and risking death in order to achieve victory.

3. A rural based political culture, ie feudalism ....

That's not what feudalism means.

I wasn't explain what Feudalism means, I was describing the aspect of it that made it more effective than other ancient cultures that were left behind, imo.

It was the END of feudalism that allowed Europe to surge ahead economically.

Improvements in agriculture technology, and higher percentages of Peasants as opposed to serfs or slaves were the foundation for the next phase, developed UNDER feudalism.

You're a little off. The Black Death undermined the feudal system, opening the way for new opportunities for trade. The reduced population increased the value of the product of craftsmen and artisans. The process of repopulation coincided with a warming period in Europe that led to increased yields and more surplus available for trade. A fortuitous confluence of factors that were exploited to great effect.

 

[rightwinger]

1. Europeans had firearms and artillery and were efficient in their use
2. Europeans had Navies where they could bring military forces and supplies to isolated regions
3. Europeans spread disease which wiped out those they were conquering

 

[Correll]

1. Your statement is racist and ignorant.

2. Militarily Europe embraced the concept of closing with the enemy and risking death in order to achieve victory.

3. A rural based political culture, ie feudalism ....

That's not what feudalism means.

I wasn't explain what Feudalism means, I was describing the aspect of it that made it more effective than other ancient cultures that were left behind, imo.

It was the END of feudalism that allowed Europe to surge ahead economically.

Improvements in agriculture technology, and higher percentages of Peasants as opposed to serfs or slaves were the foundation for the next phase, developed UNDER feudalism.

You're a little off. The Black Death undermined the feudal system, opening the way for new opportunities for trade. The reduced population increased the value of the product of craftsmen and artisans. The process of repopulation coincided with a warming period in Europe that led to increased yields and more surplus available for trade. A fortuitous confluence of factors that were exploited to great effect.

Smaller political units closer to the actual economic production led to more reasonable and productive responses to labor shortages than would have been enacted by a central Imperial City far, far away.

Such as giving ground on raising serfs to peasants, with all the increase in productivity associated with THAT.

Workers who actually got to keep the majority of their produce were strongly motivated to produce more.

THis lead to development of and rapid spread of new technologies and methods., such as Heavy Plough, or the Three Field system as two examples.

To as you put it, "exploit to great effect" a good bit of climate.

 

[Picaro]

There is no doubt that the Catholic church viewed anything which did not agree with its teaching as heretical. We all know that even before the Renaissance it was widely accepted that the world was a sphere and that certain tenants of modern society were acknowledged. On the other hand, the church clung on the Aristotelian geocentric model of the solar system and the universe. Copernicus' heliocentric model was heavily criticized and was even entered into the Index of Forbidden Books along with works of Kepler, Newton and Kant among others.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To argue that these prohibitions were not attempts to stifle progress in the West is ludicrous.

Much like the Chinese of today, once unshackled from the blinding bondage of dogma, men progress.

This is nonsense and ignorant, from the first sentence to the last. I've already posted elsewhere on the 'Flat Earth' myth, for instance; turns out it was the supposedly 'enlightened' and 'scientific' types who perpetuated the nonsense, ironically. And, any reading of the works of Thomas Aquinas among others clearly shows they were very informed on science and objective reason and empiricism, and well before the mis-named 'Enlightenment'. It's also obvious the so-called 'Deists' were themselves merely aping Aquina's works, and weren't even original in their 'mechanistic' approach.

Quit mindless just accepting old Protestant propaganda at face value; it wasn't accurate and wasn't intended to be; it was merely pamphleteering and political polemics, not based on facts.

Since you like wiki, you really spend some more time there instead of just repeating memes and tropes you read from some other ignorant 'scholar'.

Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The myth of the flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages in Europe saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.[1][2]

During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among the educated was almost nonexistent, despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.[3]

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[4] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[5]

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.[6][7][2]

...

The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model. Aristotle provided evidence for the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds by around 330 BC. Knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on.[9][10][11][12]

In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Russell describes the Flat Earth theory as a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization and creationism.[6][2]

James Hannam wrote:

The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.[13]

 

[Meathead]

There is no doubt that the Catholic church viewed anything which did not agree with its teaching as heretical. We all know that even before the Renaissance it was widely accepted that the world was a sphere and that certain tenants of modern society were acknowledged. On the other hand, the church clung on the Aristotelian geocentric model of the solar system and the universe. Copernicus' heliocentric model was heavily criticized and was even entered into the Index of Forbidden Books along with works of Kepler, Newton and Kant among others.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To argue that these prohibitions were not attempts to stifle progress in the West is ludicrous.

Much like the Chinese of today, once unshackled from the blinding bondage of dogma, men progress.

This is nonsense and ignorant, from the first sentence to the last. I've already posted elsewhere on the 'Flat Earth' myth, for instance; turns out it was the supposedly 'enlightened' and 'scientific' types who perpetuated the nonsense, ironically. And, any reading of the works of Thomas Aquinas among others clearly shows they were very informed on science and objective reason and empiricism, and well before the mis-named 'Enlightenment'. It's also obvious the so-called 'Deists' were themselves merely aping Aquina's works, and weren't even original in their 'mechanistic' approach.

Quit mindless just accepting old Protestant propaganda at face value; it wasn't accurate and wasn't intended to be; it was merely pamphleteering and political polemics, not based on facts.

Since you like wiki, you really spend some more time there instead of just repeating memes and tropes you read from some other ignorant 'scholar'.

Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The myth of the flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages in Europe saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.[1][2]

During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among the educated was almost nonexistent, despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.[3]

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[4] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[5]

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.[6][7][2]

...

The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model. Aristotle provided evidence for the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds by around 330 BC. Knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on.[9][10][11][12]

In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Russell describes the Flat Earth theory as a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization and creationism.[6][2]

James Hannam wrote:

The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.[13]

Your entire premise for your argument is "flat earth". No one is arguing that people thought the earth was flat in the latter middle ages.

What is wrong with you?

 

[Picaro]

]Your entire premise for your argument is "flat earth". No one is arguing that people thought the earth was flat in the latter middle ages.

What is wrong with you?

Actually, I used it as an example of the kind of myths you're babbling about , and your link doesn't support your fantasy premise, either; you didn't read it, did you?

"This is nonsense and ignorant, from the first sentence to the last. I've already posted elsewhere on the 'Flat Earth' myth, for instance ..."

 

[Meathead]

]Your entire premise for your argument is "flat earth". No one is arguing that people thought the earth was flat in the latter middle ages.

What is wrong with you?

Actually, I used it as an example of the kind of myths you're babbling about , and your link doesn't support your fantasy premise, either; you didn't read it, did you?

"This is nonsense and ignorant, from the first sentence to the last. I've already posted elsewhere on the 'Flat Earth' myth, for instance ..."

All you've got is a strawman. Quit wasting my time. I don't suffer fools gladly. Ciao

 

[Picaro]

All you've got is a strawman. Quit wasting my time. I don't suffer fools gladly. Ciao[/QUOTE]

So you're suicidal? You're just some ignorant uneducated drone who repeats stuff he read somewhere and liked the sound of it; you don't know what you're talking about, but insist on blathering anyway.

 

[Unkotare]

There is no doubt that the Catholic church viewed anything which did not agree with its teaching as heretical. We all know that even before the Renaissance it was widely accepted that the world was a sphere and that certain tenants of modern society were acknowledged. On the other hand, the church clung on the Aristotelian geocentric model of the solar system and the universe. Copernicus' heliocentric model was heavily criticized and was even entered into the Index of Forbidden Books along with works of Kepler, Newton and Kant among others.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To argue that these prohibitions were not attempts to stifle progress in the West is ludicrous.

Much like the Chinese of today, once unshackled from the blinding bondage of dogma, men progress.

This is nonsense and ignorant, from the first sentence to the last. I've already posted elsewhere on the 'Flat Earth' myth, for instance; turns out it was the supposedly 'enlightened' and 'scientific' types who perpetuated the nonsense, ironically. And, any reading of the works of Thomas Aquinas among others clearly shows they were very informed on science and objective reason and empiricism, and well before the mis-named 'Enlightenment'. It's also obvious the so-called 'Deists' were themselves merely aping Aquina's works, and weren't even original in their 'mechanistic' approach.

Quit mindless just accepting old Protestant propaganda at face value; it wasn't accurate and wasn't intended to be; it was merely pamphleteering and political polemics, not based on facts.

Since you like wiki, you really spend some more time there instead of just repeating memes and tropes you read from some other ignorant 'scholar'.

Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The myth of the flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages in Europe saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.[1][2]

During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among the educated was almost nonexistent, despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.[3]

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[4] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[5]

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.[6][7][2]

...

The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most Pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model. Aristotle provided evidence for the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds by around 330 BC. Knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on.[9][10][11][12]

In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Russell describes the Flat Earth theory as a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization and creationism.[6][2]

James Hannam wrote:

The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.[13]

The problem that almost killed Columbus wasn't the shape of the earth, but the circumference.

 

[Unkotare]

]Your entire premise for your argument is "flat earth". No one is arguing that people thought the earth was flat in the latter middle ages.

What is wrong with you?

Actually, I used it as an example of the kind of myths you're babbling about , and your link doesn't support your fantasy premise, either; you didn't read it, did you?

"This is nonsense and ignorant, from the first sentence to the last. I've already posted elsewhere on the 'Flat Earth' myth, for instance ..."

......I don't suffer fools gladly. Ciao

Ah, self-hatred...

 

[Yarddog]

There are many theories as to why a continent full of bloodthirsty, inbred, filthy savages should emerge from the so-called 'Dark Ages' and become the dominant region of the world for a long time. Just wondering which one y'all find most compelling. It's a fascinating historical question, in any case.

They had a competition for resources between each other that also involved a great amount of seafaring because of their unique geography, and they also had to trade over waterways, this would have forced them to develop certain technologies. Also they had weather variations they didnt have to deal with such as in Africa. The Europeans had to also develop food storage for winter. even cheese making was a way to have food put aside for winter.

They were also invaded somewhat by the Roman empire and probably learned a great deal from them as well. They had quite a bit of foreign influx over the centuries as well as their geography so I see it would have been a natural gathering place of Ideas as well as resources due to their ocean trade routes. Controlling those trade routes also created need for military advancement because of many factors.

Well, thats just my opinion though, off the top of my head

 

[Yarddog]

It could be argued that the Black Death itself led Europe to global dominance.

Or on a somewhat larger scale, perhaps it would be better to say that pathogens propelled Europe to global dominance.

Yes, I recall this now, there ended up a smaller population with more resources left between them, or something like that.

 

[Unkotare]

It could be argued that the Black Death itself led Europe to global dominance.

Or on a somewhat larger scale, perhaps it would be better to say that pathogens propelled Europe to global dominance.

Yes, I recall this now, there ended up a smaller population with more resources left between them, or something like that.

Well, a bit more complicated than that. After the plague had done its worst and about half the population of the entire continent was dead, recovery presented a number of opportunities. Supply and demand applies to labor. A warming period resulted in significantly increased agricultural output. The Ottomans started to weaken just as the Europeans were starting to surge.Later, resistance to diseases related to living in close proximity to domestic animals would enable at first the accidental and then the deliberate deaths of peoples in the New World.

What is often overlooked in study of the period is the fact that at least as many people were killed by the plague in China (though not as high a percentage) as in Europe.

 

[Toro]

In no particular order

1. property rights
2. capitalism
3. human rights
4. The Enlightenment
5. technological innovation