A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

speculation as a waste of time. It could only make a man proud of his own abilities and endanger
his eternal salvation. It was not that the Church was afraid of losing its hold on the human mind. It
genuinely believed that the message of Jesus - as interpreted by St Paul - was the total, selfsufficient
answer to the riddle of human existence. Humankind was miserable because Adam had
sinned, and the result was death and misery. But the Son of God had died on the cross to redeem
mankind from original sin. The Church was an organisation established by Jesus to make sure that
all men had a chance of salvation, of getting to heaven when they died. That was all that mattered.
Book-learning was quite irrelevant. Philosophy and natural philosophy (as they called science)
were both a waste of time. In fact, they encouraged man to think that he had the power to make up
his own mind on questions of morality, and so endangered his soul. Leaders like Hildebrand
believed sincerely and deeply that all men were ignorant children and that they were the spiritual
fathers of mankind.
So the Church gave with one hand and took away with the other. Man must try to live the ‘inner
life’, but he must on no account try to think for himself. The result was that the human intellect
marked time for a thousand years. When the Church rediscovered the works of Aristotle - through
the Arabs - in the eleventh century, he was seized upon with delight and voted a kind of honorary
Christian. The reason was simply that he had apparently explained practically everything, from
physics to morality, and the existence of his works gave no one any excuse for indulging in
speculative thinking. The answer to every possible question could now be found either in the Bible
or Aristotle. Aristotle explained the physical world; the Bible explained the spiritual world. What
more was there to know? And if monkish philosophers - such as Peter Abelard - still felt the need
to exercise their minds, they could apply themselves to explaining how the two worlds fitted
together, and how God revealed His eternal goodness by making everything exactly as it is and not
otherwise.
So the medieval world was a strangely static place, rather like a waxworks. People stayed in the
place where they were born - unless they happened to be peddlers - because there was no reason to
go anywhere else. Besides, travel was very difficult because there was almost no money in
circulation. Only the great lords handled gold - and even they only occasionally. In his own castle
he had no need for gold; his tenants brought him the produce he needed, and the beef came from his
own herds. The common people made their own clothes, ate their own eggs and cabbages, drank
their own milk and cider. It was the crusades that changed all that. If a crusader was making his
way to the Holy Land, he needed gold - he could hardly take a dozen cartloads of cabbages and
eggs to pay his way.
Italy, of course, had gold, for - apart from Byzantium - it war the most cosmopolitan place in the
world. The pope owned vast estates - far too vast for his tenants to pay him in produce; he had to be
paid in gold. So when the crusaders made their way through Italy, they took advantage of the
Italian banking system. A bank (or bane) was a table, behind which sat a moneylender prepared to
give gold (or, as the system became more sophisticated, letters of credit) in exchange for mortgages
or documents that promised repayment with interest. Some crusaders paid for their passage by
placing their soldiers and horses at the disposal of the banker. In the fourth crusade, the crusaders
first of all stormed the city of Zara, an Adriatic port, and returned it to the Venetians, then went on
and stormed Constantinople, sacked the city and gave half the spoils to Venice. The cities of Italy
that lay on the route of the crusaders became very rich during the nine crusades. But their
development was not entirely to the advantage of the popes. For riches bring luxury and leisure - as
in ancient Rome - and leisure brings a need for excitement, for travel, for new ideas. The ‘wonder