Renaissance and

like a bolt from the blue sky. And equally, the bubonic over-intensively farmed and rendered increasingly
plague will come again, spreading from the California infertile. Steadily worsening famine conditions
countryside to conurbations like San Francisco and followed the accelerating rate of bad harvests
Oakland, thence to sweep the country -- if Rockefeller sustained per crop. Such disasters increased the social
is not stopped, dislocations of royal looting expeditions, and made
The Black Death was man-made by predominantly them less profitable. The banking houses of Bardi and
the House of Bardiand their allies the Peruzzi. Such . Peruzzi became increasingly over-extended as their
banking houses were the first monetarists in modern royal clients became concomitantly unable to pay
history and they wrecked Europe with a vengeance in their debts.
essentially the same way that Rockefeller is wrecking When England's King Edward defaulted on loans
the world now. Fortunately for us all, the Bardi did not outstanding to the Bardi for the third year in suchave
the technology available to the Rockefellers to cession, he unleashed a chain reaction process which
deploy in support of their policies. Otherwise, we brought down the Bardi in 1341 and the Peruzzi a year
would surely not be here and the earth would resemble later. The agricultural collapse accelerated as Europe
a scorched rock with maybe some stagnant ponds was hit by three bad harvests in succession.
where there once were oceans. The Bardi, like the It was at that point that the plague hit with full fury,
Fuggers after them, demonstrate just what the conse- ripping through the undernourished, abused and
quences are of allowing realhuman activity in the pro- brutalized population. The population plummeted
duction of tangible useful forms of wealth to become below the brink of tolerance for the maintenance of
subordinated to the demands of debt service organized" social activity. All countries were swept by
payments, waves of dispossessed vagabonds, as, for example, the
The Bardi and the Peruzzi made their moneyby way Flagellants of the German Rhineland, seeking a
of their attachment to the revenue-generating refuge from the spread of the plague and scapegoats
capacity of the Papacy. They ripped off the priests for its devastations. The very fabric of society itself
and Catholic functionaries who ripped off peasants, disintegrated under the impact of combined plague,
Then with their legitimate revenues they would loan at famine, and urban and rural revolts. Europe was
exorbitant rates to sundry royal houses, like the Plant- plunged into the abyss.
agenets of England and the Capetians of France It is in that specific sense that the self-conception of
among other sundry feudal potentates, calculating Renaissance man is a life or death question. He could
almost actuarially the unholiness of kings and the like- not survive without remaking society as a whole.
lihood of default. The kings, in their turn, would en- The old institutions, whether Papal, royal, financial
deavour to repay such loans by conquering adjacent or commercial were finished, shattered under the iraterritories
to rip off peasants, thereby forcing landless pact of the preceeding holocaust. Those institutions
peasants into the neighboring king's army and assist- would only live again as new life was breathed into
ing him to repeat the process, and so forth, them. They were incapable of generating that breath
This process appeared to work to the satisfaction of themselves. The Titans of Florence provided that
all parties concerned as long as there was available regenerative force. It is of no use to ask the traditional
sufficient cultivable land, into which given non- "what would happen if..." kind of question at this
military technologies increasing populations could point. The human race as we know it would not survive
expand. Agriculture flourished. Commercial activity, 'a rerun of that catastrophe no matter what form it
based in military hardware, wool cloth and luxury took. The human race cannot afford itself the luxury of
goods began to boom in parts of Europe such as was allowing another insane banking house to experiment
then called Flanders, now part of Belgium, parts of further with what are known to be the end results of
France, and Italian cities like Genoa, Venice and the Bardi's efforts.
Florence. An approximation of intellectual culture
Such a reality would no doubt shock the hired pens of
' was developed in university cities such as Bologna, England's 19th century finance houses and their
Oxford and Paris where the works of the Arab trans- successors who were actually paid to rework in
mitters of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle in particular,
contemporary garb the policies outlined above. These
were first circulated on a wide scale under the reprov- whores were charged by the House of Rothschild to
ing eyes of Thomas Aquinas. develop an elite which could be politically entrusted to
But as available cultivable lands reached the limits rule the nascent British empire. It should be no surdefined
by existing drainage and deforestation prise that the Rothschilds, who, if the words of brother
techniques, and the horse or ox drawn plough and Solomon from Vienna are to be believed, modeled
water mill, so the burden of the Bardi-held debt- themselves openly on the imbecilic and barbarous
service obligations began to mount. Farmlands were House of Fugger, the lineal descendants of the Bardi
,)