Re: Larry Niven: Terrorize Latinos to Solve Health Care Crisis

On Mon, 05 May 2008 06:56:35 -0700, Mike Schilling wrote:

> W. Citoan wrote:
>
>> Mike Schilling wrote:
>>
>>>  John Schilling wrote:
>>>
>>>> ...wait a minute, the Dark Age of the seventh and eighth centuries
>>>> was one continent over.  The miserable Arabs, etc, seem to have 
>>>> skipped that part.  Never Mind.
>>>
>>> In fact, if you believe Pirenne (which I tend to), Islam was a 
>>> major cause of the Dark Ages in Europe.  Not because it's Evil, but
>>> because the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa
>>> and the consequent domination of the Mediterranean destroyed the
>>> trade patterns which dated from the Roman Republic (and even
>>> before). It took centuries for the new Europe based in the
>>> northwest of the continent rather than its south to emerge.
>>
>> That would seem to ignore the existence of Constantinople.
> 
> How so?  Note that the Byzantines were having some success in Italy 
> and might have been able to reconstitiute some of the western empire 
> before the rise of Islam, but had no chance at it afterwarrd.

Don't forget that first the Roman Empire's bloody Christian Civil War,
resulting in the brutal imposition of a brutal Christian Theocracy on the
Empire, and then its breaking into the Eastern and Western Christian
Empires, with the new Western Christian Empire's subsequent civil wars
against the "heretical" "Gnostic" and other denominations characteristic
of the North African part of that Empire, all set the stage for the Gothic
Conquest of the Western Christian Empire from the North, and the Vandals'
consequent swath of destruction across North Africa, which all again set
the stage for the Islamic Conquest of North Africa.

-- 

Io non giudico né giudicheròmai essere difetto
difendere alcuna opinione con le ragioni,
sanza volervi usare o l'autorità o la forza.

< Machiavelli