Conservapedia talk:World History Lecture Five

So, to dered or not to dered? Also, could the fact that so much of this article is red show communist bias? - Sρΐяαl.Дгсђıτέςτ stand up and shout  05:29, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
 * It is a straight copy from CP. It was uploaded during CP's unstable period after the MediaWiki upgrade, when we were considering refuting Andy's historical revisionism. So I wouldn't bother attacking the red links, it needs a side by side. Генгис    05:51, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
 * I guessed that it was taken from CP, I was just wondering if we should purge the redlinks. Thanks. - Sρΐяαl.Дгсђıτέςτ stand up and shout  06:32, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
 * Sort of done - not pretty but not red. Marghanita Laski 07:15, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
 * Better! Marghanita Laski 07:22, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
 * Thanks. It looks a lot less red now. - Sρΐяαl.Дгсђıτέςτ stand up and shout  07:24, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
 * I cheated: Copy/paste into gedit (notepad); find/replace ' with nothing & ' with nothing & copy/paste back. Initially I tried replacing '''Marghanita Laski 07:32, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
 * I was wondering how you did it so fast. And yeah, I saw the cp version. It was somewhat messy. The links aren't really necessary, I guess, so this is fine.

Suggestions by RobertWDP
On Feb 25th, 2009, 8h 25, cp:User:RobertWDP stated a list of 25 suggestions/corrections for lecture five. cp:User:Aschlafly answered one day later:

Thanks for your suggestions. I reviewed them carefully, accepting some and changing the text, while rejecting others.--Andy Schlafly 11:09, 26 February 2009 (EST)

So, let's see how many were accepted - and which were rejected:


 * 1) "Both the beginning and end of the Middle Ages occurred in what is now Italy" I think the exact meaning of this sentence needs to be clarified. REJECTED
 * 2) I think you have chosen a somewhat extreme interpretation of why the term 'middle ages' is used. I do not think it was intended as a derogatory term by most. REJECTED
 * 3) I'm quite certain the claim that "Except for the Carolingian court of Charlemagne discussed below, there was no kingdom in Europe from the fall of Rome to A.D. 1000." is incorrect. Whilst the Carolingian empire was certainly one of the most notable there were certainly others. REJECTED
 * 4) The phrase "but they were constantly cooperating or arguing with each other" seems ambiguous. ACCEPTED
 * 5) Simply as a suggestion of my own, I think it would be much easier to simply state how much older Christianity roughly is than Islam rather than using a percentage. REJECTED
 * 6) The date of the battle of Yarmouk (636 AD) should be specified. ACCEPTED
 * 7) "causing concern by the Sunnis" should read "causing concern amongst..."ACCEPTED
 * 8) You suggest that Sunnis are viewed more favourably by the west, although I would rather not dwell on generalisations, it should be noted that Bin Laden's group is entirely Sunni, though of course very much a minority group amongst them. REJECTED
 * 9) I'm not sure what is meant by saying that Shi'ites "slashing their forwards" REJECTED
 * 10) The part concerning the 2006 election and Keith Ellison needs updating. REJECTED, but changed Koran to Koran (Qur'an)
 * 11) You mention that "western Europe was declining" at one point without clarifying in what respect there was a decline. REJECTED
 * 12) The most recent data suggests that Russia now has the 9th largest population rather than the 8th. ACCEPTED
 * 13) I would disagree with the characterisation of the Saxon rule of Britain as being chaotic, I think it was much more stable than many others. REJECTED
 * 14) The Picts did not really settle in Scotland, they were a distinctive group that emerged from the existing population and dominated for a time. ACCEPTED
 * 15) Saxon's generally cremated their dead, as the term pyre itself implies, and did not simply leave the bodies for animals as you suggest. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 16) You incorrectly state that the peasants in the Feudal System were not bound to their Lord. In fact they had to swear an oath to the Lord and were bound to them, or perhaps more specifically, to the land. The Feudal System was a massive system of oaths and mutual ties which form are what held it together. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 17) It would be more correct to refer to the 'invention' of the iron plough rather than its 'discovery' <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 18) You state that the serfs paid rent in the form of food. This was not universally true temporally or geographically. Generally early on the serf's rent was paid as labour on the lord's own land as opposed to that which was given over to peasant subsistence farming. This developed into a system of paying rent in the form of commodities, such as food, and eventually money. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 19) You are incorrect in stating that everyone under the Feudal System had the ability to buy/sell land. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 20) There was in fact a form of centralized government but it was nowhere near as powerful as it became in the centuries that followed. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 21) You should clarify your definition of 'useless lands and forests'. I assume you mean this from a purely economic perspective in the context of the time. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 22) The sentence "On the humorous side, it became popular to use battering rams and catapults in warfare" is puzzling in my opinion. <font face="comic sans ms">corrected by cp:User:ETrundel
 * 23) You suggest there were frequent battles between rival manors. For one thing, a manor was generally the fief of a single knight and as such battles on this scale were unlikely. Although there were civil wars of course, you unfairly characterise this as an inherently unstable system. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 24) I think you need to clarify for where the 'invasions stopped' <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED
 * 25) I disagree with you statement about modern property law being based on the feudal system. This system did not recognise the concept of 'private property' and in many ways was almost the complete opposite of today. The private property system was developed by monarchs, particularly following the plague which decimated the population, thus reducing the rent they received. This, along with more expensive military technologies led to the need to increase income, which they did by creating laws regarding personal property and collecting taxes on the back of this. As such, private property was in fact one of the things that led to the collapse of the feudal system. <font face="comic sans ms">REJECTED, of course

So, some:  6, others:  19 -- 08:53, 27 February 2009 (EST)

Feudilism something not covered in the recent Ironclad critique
"The system developed very good soldiers, and they kept their skills sharp by engaging in frequent battles with rival manors or estates. Through competition and free enterprise, the warriors became fighters superior to the foreign invaders, and the invasions stopped."

Not sure if this is worth adding to the main article so I thought I would throw it up here for discussion, but European feudal armies were not good soldiers at all. They were good thugs, or more politely warriors. Good for taking on loosely organised raiders, peasants, and each other. As soon as they met some one with organisation (Mongol), or someone that stopped playing by feudalism's unwritten rules (English longbows) they generally went down to heavy defeats.
 * You're right. I'll pop it in.--Ironclad (talk) 12:10, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Problems with the Description of Bernal Diaz's The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
I don't think that this article's description of Bernal Diaz's account of the conquest of Mexico is accurate. One of the reasons that Diaz wrote The True History of the Conquest of New Spain was to counter other accounts of the conquest of Mexico. In The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Diaz tries to disprove the claim that the conquistadores were cruel monsters bent on committing atrocities. He was not, as this article claims, writing to the king of Spain to inform him of the atrocities committed by his fellow conquistadores and I don't recall many of the atrocities listed in this article being described in The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. This article's description of The True History of the Conquest of New Spain sounds a lot like Bartolome de Las Casas's A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. I think that the original author of the article managed to confuse the two works.

I'm not sure how this would best be corrected. I could add text saying that Diaz was trying to counter what was said about the conquest of Mexico by people like Las Casas and then use the current description of The True History of the Conquest of New Spain to describe A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies or I could simply delete this article's description of The True History of the Conquest of New Spain entirely. Does anyone have any advice/opinions on what I should do? Anathema (talk) 01:47, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Commentary on the status of Dhimmi
While it is absolutely true that Islam is far more tolerant of other religions than medieval Christianity it must be included that by modern standards it was not (and is not) equality and should not be portrayed as such. Muslims could (and still do) accuse non-Muslims of blasphemy for which the penalty was conversion (and repentance) or death. This commentary comes dangerously close to apologizing (used in the traditional sense of the word) for Islam which is inappropriate for a wiki dedicated to advancing rationalism (which includes secularism). The fact of the matter is that comparing the harshness of Islamic laws and customs to medieval Christian laws and customs is fallacious precisely because Christian states (even those which still have there official religion as Christianity) have largely discarded those laws whereas Muslim states (most countries where Islam is the majority have Islam as the official religion) by and large have not (atheism is a crime in more than a few Muslim countries). The commentary also denies that Islam converted early adherents by force which is simply ridiculous. It often depended on who was in power but early Muslims most certainly did convert people at sword-point just as Christians did. The two particular offenders that I can think right off the top of my head are the Timur and the entire Almohad dynasty which ruled north Africa and Al-Andalus for a century and a half. Some rulers like Nader Shah, Mahmud of Ghazni, and Tipu Sultan were tolerant towards friends and allies who followed differing religions but were absolutely ruthless towards enemies who followed an opposing religion. One could claim that they were political motivations for the crimes, however one could also make the claim for the Crusades, it does not make the crimes any less heinous. Lastly this article points out there were very few Zoroastrians left in the Middle East by the time of Saladin. This is largely true but what the article fails to mention (and the reason why it is that there are so few Zoroastrians left in the world) is that in practice rulers felt more open to persecute the followers of religions which weren't directly mentioned in either the Hadith or the Quran as being accord the status of Dhimmi. There is a reason why more than half of the world's modern Zoroastrian population lives in India, it is because they were fleeing the threat of forced conversion and persecution. Now, do I consider these events, these laws, and these occurrences to be representative of Islam or Muslims? Of course not, because they are not, the Quran says in very exact terms that no one should be forced to follow a religion. However it is simply silly to claim that Muslims have not ignored this ideal because they have (and in many places continue to) and it is equally silly to claim one religions intolerance to be "more humane" than the other which is what the commentary seems to do. Alsto003 (talk) 06:58, 1 October 2014 (UTC) Alex

On the Blind-spot of Western Scholarship, the Byzantine Empire
"The simple answer as to who preserved knowledge? The Muslims. Simple." Ironclad of all people should know that history is not that simple, at least not in this case. Seriously, what is it with westerners and western educated people being completely oblivious to anything about the Byzantine Empire other than the fact that it existed? How can anyone expect Westerners to acknowledge the contributions to humanity made by non-western societies when westerners won't even acknowledge the contributions to humanity made by the eastern heir of the empire that they themselves once belonged (for the most part) and to which they too considered themselves the heir? Do not fall into the trap of taking the Byzantines for granted. And we in the west do take them for granted as anyone who has talked to a Greek person about that specific subject can attest. Saying that only the Muslims copied down ancient classical literature is simply not true. Philosophical works are extant from both Byzantine and Islamic sources, the reason why we emphasize the Islamic contribution is because Islamic scholars greatly expanded on the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato. Byzantine scholarship played a huge part in transmitting ancient writings that Muslims weren't interested in, like stuff related to western history, geography, and Greek Mythology. Alsto003 (talk) 02:04, 7 May 2015 (UTC) Alex

Western Monasteries and the stuff for which they were useful
The western monasteries had their uses. Most of the Classical texts that western monks copied were distinctly secular works, much of it directly related to warfare, such as De Re Militari by and De Architecutra by ; nevertheless it is rather important to remember that we don't actually know how much the western monks copied down or preserved. This is because a considerable amount of western literature from those medieval monasteries was lost after the west began suppressing the Monastic establishments during the Protestant reformation and the more rabidly anti-clerical phase of the Enlightenment (though the adherents of the enlightenment to their credit, often went through the trouble of putting the stuff they confiscated from the monasteries into proper Libraries, for the Protestant reformers that was an afterthought at best). Alsto003 (talk) 05:59, 3 March 2015 (UTC) Alex

P.S. I doubt my comments will have any effect, after all, Ironclad's last edits were way back in 2012. But I'm bored and got nothing better to do so what the hell right? Alsto003 (talk) 06:04, 3 March 2015 (UTC) Alex
 * For the notion of lost knowledge during the Reformation to be true, we'd have to envision a lot of manuscripts which only existed in Northern and North-western European monasteries and these being destroyed. This is an extremely unlikely scenario, considering that these manuscripts would have had to "skip over" those monasteries which remained Catholic on their transmission trail from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and Baltic areas. And do we actually have a lot of examples of Protestants destroying writings that weren't viewed as specifically Catholic? I'd suggest that mere accident and the problem of mustering the resources necessary for copying and thus preserving ancient manuscripts prior to the age of print were probably the greatest forces of "attrition" vis-a-vis the sum of transmitted ancient texts. ScepticWombat (talk) 19:38, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Chivalry as an Early Modern Concept
The concept of chivalry, is not entirely a 19th century construct. The idea of Chivalry as we would know it today shows up a lot in literature dating from Early Modern Era. After all the central theme of one of the most famous works of that era, the literary masterpiece that is Don Quixote, revolves around satirizing those who were still clinging to the idea (in the late 16th/early 17th century). Alsto003 (talk) 03:30, 7 May 2015 (UTC) Alex

P.S. I read the stuff Andy wrote about Feudalism and, wow, just wow. As a Jew, it makes me want to throw up to read crap like that. If a neoreaciontary ever asked me in which medieval state I would have like to have lived in, than the answer I'd give them would be the Most Serene Republic of Venice. They were prosperous, treated Jews halfway decently, and weren't subject to the whims of petty tyrants. So yeah, the state I would have wanted to live in had I been born more than five hundred years ago was one of the few with a Republican (albeit oligarchical) form of government. That shows you just how much I think of feudalism. Alsto003 (talk) 03:59, 7 May 2015 (UTC) Alex