Sinmonger Chapter 9: One thousand three hundred and fourteen
Chapter 9 1314
There is nothing people can't do if they want to. ——Leon Battista Alberti
This story begins in the late Middle Ages, so it is necessary to explain what the world was like at that time.
In general, the human world in the fourteenth century can be divided into three parts: the Christian world, the Muslim world, and the Confucian world.
If there had been an alien watching Earth from the moon in that era, his first impression of the Muslim world would have been far more impressive than that of the Christian world. He will see a very vast territory, and its territory is constantly expanding.
The earliest Muslims were the Arabs who were first united on the Arabian Peninsula under the religious leader Muhammad. Many readers may not know much about Muhammad, who is, in a sense, another version of Jesus. He believes that he has accepted God's call to warn people that the "doomsday judgment" will eventually come, and the faithful will go to heaven, and the evil will be punished by hell. He requires believers to perform certain rituals, namely the "five functions" of Islam (including daily prayers, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca, etc.). These rituals, combined with the disciplines of the Qur'an, provided not only a religious belief, but also a social law and political system. The believers felt that they were brothers with a common mission, which helped to unite the then fragmented Arab nation.
After Muhammad's death in Park 632, the Arabs burst out of the peninsula and rapidly expanded into the Byzantine and Sassanid empires in the Middle East. It then expanded eastwards all the way to China, westwards across North Africa and into Spain. By the end of the first phase of Muslim expansion in 750, a vast Muslim empire had emerged in the world, from the Pyrenees to India, from Morocco to China. Between 750 and 1500, the Muslims carried out a second phase of expansion. During this period, they moved westwards into Central Europe, northwards into Central Asia, eastwards into India and Southeast Asia, and southwards into the interior of Africa; the Muslim world doubled its territory, far exceeding the size of Eurasia The Christian world at the west end and the Confucian world at the east end.
At that time, in terms of territory, the Arabs were the most qualified group of people to call their territory "the world". Of course, I don't know if there are words such as "the world" in their language.
Speaking of the world, let's talk about the Confucian world. The Confucian world does not refer to China, but the whole of East Asia. China is the ruler, and Korea and Japan on its periphery are subordinates.
The Confucian world is an inward-looking society based on agriculture. So the pace of change is very slow and confined to the basic structures inherited from earlier times. On the other hand, there is one thing in the Confucian world that is very different from the other two worlds, and that is unity.
The kind of puzzling minority groups that resembled the various Balkan Christian groups in the Ottoman Empire, and religious discord between Hindus and Muslims in the Mughal Empire, did not exist in China. This cohesion in China was not a new phenomenon at the time; it existed from the early stages of Chinese civilization thousands of years ago and has persisted. Chinese civilization is the oldest and uninterrupted civilization in the world.
The main reason for the long-lasting continuity of Chinese civilization lies in its geographical conditions. The degree of isolation from other great human civilizations is unparalleled in the world. The Mediterranean connects Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and the Indian Ocean allows India to interact with the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. But China, for most of its history, has been cut off on all sides by mountains, deserts and the vast Pacific Ocean. Now it seems that this isolation is probably a double-edged sword.
Finally, let's talk about the Christian world in the West.
Unfounded national pride aside, objectively speaking, by the twentieth century, most people on this planet would have taken for granted that only Westerners could do the things that changed the course of human life and made world history A new era of historic reforms or discoveries. In fact, this view is completely unreasonable. Muslims and Chinese have great seafaring traditions alike. It was only in the early modern period that the world pattern was reversed and changed.
For most of the Middle Ages, Western Europeans felt isolated and threatened at the western tip of Eurasia. From the vast expanse of prairie across the Eurasian continent in northern China to the Danube River Basin, there was the strongest army on earth at that time-nomadic invaders: Huns, Germans, Avars, Magyars, Mongolians and the Turks; they used their unparalleled mobility to break into the hearts of civilizations once an empire had weakened, giving them an opportunity.
However, in the early modern period, with the rise of a vibrant new West, Westerners gained the upper hand in technology, especially in weapons and shipbuilding, which gave Western Europeans the same Eurasian advantage in the world's oceans. Mobility and advantages enjoyed by nomads on the savannah.
In those eras of change, the Islamic and Confucian empires were closed to themselves and became increasingly rigid. But in Western Europe, the Renaissance and the Reformation brought about profound changes in all aspects of Western European life. A new type of vibrant, expansionist civilization—modern civilization—was born. It is fundamentally different from any other traditional, agriculturally based civilization on the planet. This modernization process has continued to operate at an accelerated rate to this day, and has influenced the historical process of the modern world...
In 1314, it was also a summer. Rome, Italy.
Europeans these days believe everything. Regardless of fantasy, sci-fi, fantasy, or magic, if you set up a table to tell stories, you might be able to name a group of believers.
God, evil spirits, witchcraft, magic, alchemy, black technology, basically everything has been studied. Of course, you can't do things that are not harmonious.
At that time, people at that time could have **** your innocent teenage daughter as a witch, and burned her to death in order to get a good night's sleep.
It was a year of fierce competition between kingship and religious power. It was a dark age. There were many crimes in the Inquisition that sounded unimaginable to modern people, such as "witch crime" and "heresy" crimes. Until a hundred years later, Europeans are still convicted in this way, and Joan of Arc was burned in this way.
Speaking of burning to death, on March 18th of this year, de Morlet, the commander of the Knights Templar, was burned at the stake. As mentioned in the previous article, the brothers cursed two people before their death, one was Pope K. Leiman V, this dear friend went to Huangquan on April 20 of the same year, while the other, Philip IV, was still alive in the summer.
It is said that he was a beautiful man, and he was also a very skilled king. Although he died mysteriously at the end of the year, after all, he was still alive and well at this time.
So, when this old man was still alive, some people were under a lot of mental stress, and that was Morley's nephew, the young Count of Kichet de Beauger.
He had secretly inherited the position of the Chief of Staff a few years ago, on the eve of Black Friday. Of course, now this position has basically become synonymous with wanted criminals.
Importantly, he had a wealth of wealth to his country, and he led a group of most reliable cronies to flee France and come to Italy.
The pile of treasures that he swore to "hide until the end of the world" is like a curse that follows him, as if there is an unknowable force that kills those associated with the treasure one by one. In the past few months, since the smuggling of treasures from the pillars of the tomb, several people close to the Count of Beauger have died for various reasons. As I just said, people in that era were not so much a firm believer as they were afraid of ghosts and gods. The theory of evolution had not been proposed yet, and people had to find some spiritual sustenance to explain those unexplainable things.
The earl has a heavy burden on his shoulders that he can't put down. Treasures are really troublesome things. They can't be hidden, dare not be used indiscriminately, can't be discovered, and can't be carried forever. I also have to worry about whether I will be cursed to death.
It was under that pressure that he came to Rome.
That night, the earl came to an alley. The place was dirty. It smelled like a slaughterhouse. Maybe there was a pig farm nearby? Who knows, anyway, you can see all kinds of disgusting things in this alley, swarms of mung bean flies circling and flying around a pool of swill on the ground; drunken alcoholics are thrown out of the bar~IndoMTL.com ~He slept on the edge of the foul-smelling ditch and snored; the bully beat the skinny old man with poison; even the women in the Fengyue place had rough skin and undisguised underarm odor.
If a Roman man were to write an autobiography, he would probably have this place in his mind when he tried to recall one of the worst nights of his life.
The earl's clothes are very low-key, but the manner in which he walks makes him a little out of tune with this environment. He covers his face with a handkerchief to block those unpleasant smells a little.
After searching for a long time, he finally arrived at the destination, which the Earl spent a lot of money to find out from the "well-informed" people in the city. It is said that the boss here can help you solve all problems.
It was a bookstore, occupying a small area. The words "ks" were casually painted with paint on the walls. The tattered wooden doors were hidden. It looks like someone will visit.
Seeing this, the Count felt a little bit wanting to back down. After hesitating for a while, he sighed and thought: Since everyone is here, let's go in and have a look.
……