Key Takeaways:

• The Sheer Horror of the Black Death Defies Comprehension

• The Labor Shortage Caused by the Black Death Set the Stage for Modern Economics

• The Black Death Broke the Intellectual Dominance of the Roman Catholic Church

The Sheer Horror of the Black Death Defies Comprehension

The most infamous plague in history arrived in Europe during the autumn of 1347. In October of that year, a dozen Genoese merchant galleys made port in Sicily with deathly ill crews. Their lymph nodes were swollen into the painful black pustules of the Bubonic plague.

The Black Death went on to kill half the population of Europe. The survivors left behind grim accounts of a total collapse in social order. One such chronicler described the horrific scene in his Italian hometown of Siena:

Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices ... great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night ... And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug ... And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.

That account reads like the most terrifying passages in the book of Revelation. It evokes the raw despair that gripped Europe in its icy fist during the Black Death.

But the traumatized survivors could not know that a drastic labor shortage left by the pandemic would catalyze a momentous transition away from the feudal economic system of lords and peasants, ushering in a new era where labor was instead performed by employers and employees.

The Labor Shortage Caused by the Black Death Set the Stage for Modern Economics

The Black Death killed half the European peasantry between 1347 and 1351, creating a drastic labor shortage. With so many formerly productive fields laying fallow for want of laborers to till them, it slowly dawned on the surviving peasantry that they could play one feudal lord off against another in bidding wars for their labor.

But the nobles were politically well-connected. And they were used to making demands, not entertaining them. So the feudal lords of the late Middle Ages leveraged their political connections to introduce laws capping wages.

The result was total chaos. In 1381, a hundred thousand enraged peasants marched on London. King Richard II was only 14 years old when he rode out to meet the rebel leader Wat Tyler on June 15th of the year.

Richard almost died that day after an argument erupted during the negotiations and Wat Tyler was abruptly killed. But as the rebels moved to hack their king and his retinue to pieces, Richard galloped his horse directly into the mob screaming, “Captains, will you kill your King? I am your leader! Follow me into the fields, and you shall have all that you ask!”

Awed by this show of royal courage, the peasant army stood down and followed him out of the city, where Richard agreed to the total abolition of serfdom in England. But Richard later went back on his promise. Instead, he hunted down the ringleaders of the Peasant’s Revolt and had them brutally murdered.

But the Black Death had set in motion a chain of events that couldn’t be stopped. The labor shortage it created swung the balance of economic power in favor of the peasantry. Feudal lords desperate for laborers had no choice; they begrudgingly paid the higher wages demanded, even when forbidden by law.

Slowly but surely, a new economic paradigm emerged. As workers across Europe won the right to offer their labor to the highest bidder, new production roles of employer and employee gradually replaced the old Medieval roles of lord and peasant. That’s how the horror of the Black Death gave birth to the modern world we recognize today.

The Black Death Broke the Intellectual Dominance of the Roman Catholic Church

The Black Death pushed Western Europe away from the feudal economic system of the Middle Ages and toward modern capitalism. Simultaneously, it also shattered an intellectual monopoly held by the Roman Catholic Church.

Prior to the outbreak of the plague, few questioned the teachings of the Church. The public passively accepted it as the sole conduit for God’s grace on Earth. But as huge swathes of the population succumbed to the pathogen, it became clear that the Church was utterly powerless to stop the dying.

Before the advent of a germ theory of disease, Europeans could only interpret the catastrophic loss of life as some kind of divine judgement. It appeared that the Church had fallen out of favor with God. This perception was reinforced by the uncomfortable fact that priests died in even greater numbers than the laity—as their performance of Last Rites brought them into disproportionate contact with infected persons.

Doubts about the Church’s supposed connection to God began to fester like the painful pustules that tormented the afflicted. Bold characters like John Wycliffe and Jan Huss took it upon themselves to break long-standing taboos against questioning Church doctrine. They grumbled about the naked corruption of that institution, paving the road to the Protestant Reformation and beyond.

The horror of the plague demolished the intellectual monopoly enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages. The rise of Protestantism was only the beginning. Eventually, a Scientific Revolution overturned the religious cosmology endorsed by the Church.

While a labor shortage caused by the Black Death created a new economic paradigm, the dismal performance of the Church during that pandemic opened up space for a new intellectual paradigm to take root. Today, scientists—rather than priests—separate myth from fact on behalf of the public.

Conclusion

Economic systems have lifecycles. They arise well-suited to a certain set of historical circumstances, but as those circumstances evolve, new systems inevitably arise to take their place. Pandemics are a hallmark of turbulent transition periods when old systems break down. The Roman Empire was struck by multiple plagues as it declined. A thousand years later, the Black Death caused a labor shortage that disrupted the feudal economic system and undermined the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. These terrifying events seemed like the end of the world, as depicted in the book of Revelation. But in the fullness of time, they set the stage for new systems to arise. While the mortality of the recent COVID-19 pandemic was not on the scale of the Roman plagues or the Black Death, it mirrored earlier pandemics in that it disillusioned the public and eroded faith in authority. It’s a sure sign that we’re currently embarking on a new historical transition period.

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The epidemic had effects in every sphere of life. As the poor died in greater proportion than the rich, a shortage of labor followed; thousands of acres were left untilled, millions of herring died a natural death. Labor enjoyed for a while an improved bargaining power; it raised its wages, repudiated many surviving feudal obligations, and staged revolts that kept noble teeth on edge for half a century; even priests struck for higher pay. Serfs left farms for cities, industry expanded, the business class made further gains on the landed aristocracy.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 65

Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, 1978, page 188

Key Takeaways

• The Codex Was a Powerful Weapon in a War of Ideas that Consumed the Dying Roman Empire

• St. Jerome’s Latin Translation of the Bible Unified Western Christianity During the Fall of Rome

• Books are Magical Artifacts that Facilitate Telepathy

The Codex Was a Powerful Weapon in a War of Ideas that Consumed the Roman Empire

The invention of the bound book during Roman times facilitated a momentous transition from a polytheistic conception of reality to a monotheistic one.

Before the advent of the bound book, papyrus scrolls were the most common medium for written language. But in the first century AD, some clever individual thought to slice a scroll into convenient pages. The Romans called this new invention a “codex,” and human civilization would never be the same.

The first surviving mention of a codex comes down to us from the Roman poet Martial, writing during the 80s AD. Almost 50 years later, the historian Suetonius suggested in his The Twelve Caesars that the clever person who invented the bound book was none other than Julius Caesar himself.

Initially, the Romans used codices alongside scrolls. But bound books quickly gained popularity because they were far more practical. Scrolls could be extremely lengthy when unraveled, but books permitted readers to instantly jump to any specific passage in a lengthy text.

Because Christians were early adopters of this remarkable innovation in communication technology, the rise of the codex coincides with the rise of Christianity. The power of the bound book spread Christianity to every corner of the Roman Empire with the speed of a raging wildfire.

Anyone who’s ever played a game of telephone knows that verbal transmission garbles any message beyond comprehension after just one or two iterations. But by referencing a common written text, Christians on opposite sides of the vast Roman Empire were able to present a cohesive challenge to imperial power.

According to his own autobiography Confessions, St. Augustine converted to Christianity after hearing a child’s voice repeating “take up and read.” He obeyed the ghostly voice, opened up a book of Paul’s epistles at random, and felt his doubts melt away. By using his finger to mark the spot, Augustine was able to share with others the passage that had converted him.

Though the Bible would not be demarcated into the chapters and verses we are familiar with until the 1500s, Augustine’s story illustrates the advantage that the codex granted early Christians in spreading their new faith.

Christians went from being thrown to lions in the Colosseum to running the Empire as its ruling class. The bound book was a decided advantage that allowed Christianity to overcome fearsome political repression and win a war of ideas. Over the course of just three centuries, all of Western civilization migrated from a polytheistic conception of reality to a monotheistic one.

St. Jerome’s Latin Translation of the Bible Unified Western Christianity During the Fall of Rome

Jerome is the anglicized version of the Latin name “Hieronymus.” Saint Jerome was born in 347 AD somewhere on the Dalmatian coast in present-day Croatia. He spent his youth as a student in Rome before he single-handedly altered the course of human history.

Jerome discovered Christianity during the course of his studies. He also found that he was a brilliant linguist. St. Jerome’s colossal contribution to history was using this facility with letters to translate the Bible into Latin.

Rather than the stuffy, old-fashioned version of Latin that was standard among Roman scholars, Jerome instead wielded the vibrant, living version of his day. Because he used the “vulgar” Latin of common people, his inspired translation became known as the Vulgate.

Previous Latin translations of the Bible already existed before Jerome’s work. But these were the products of multiple copyists and varied greatly in quality. The result was a patchwork body of literature that sometimes contradicted itself.

Christianity had already won a war of ideas against the Roman political establishment by the time Jerome began translating the Bible. Nevertheless, his work stands as a remarkable achievement. He packaged Christianity for the Middle Ages that emerged out of Rome’s smoldering ashes.

Jerome’s Bible standardized the vocabulary and grammar that are still baked into the modern Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese that are the modern descendants of Latin. Through loanwords and idioms, his translation also left a lasting mark on the English language.

St. Jerome’s Vulgate was a monumental scholarly achievement that unified the Western Church, influenced a dozen languages, and laid the groundwork for future biblical scholarship. It went on to become the definitive Bible of the Middle Ages, read by everybody from Saint Augustine in the 4th century to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.

Books are Magical Artifacts that Facilitate Telepathy

Books are nothing short of magical. In modern times, their mass-production has made them so plentiful that we dismiss books as pedestrian and ordinary. It’s easy to forget how profoundly they’ve influenced the grand trajectory of human history.

For most of history, literacy was an arcane art peculiar to priests, scribes, and mystics. Physical books were objects of reverence, fear, and wonder. Modern depictions of witches and wizards still include books as ever-present accessories for these practitioners of magic.

The ancient technology of arranging words and sentences into linear progressions—like boxcars behind a locomotive—is the closest thing to telepathy humans have yet devised. Mark Twain once quipped, “In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”

Each of us is trapped within the chamber of our own mind. But words allow us to whisper to each other through the keyholes locking us out of each other’s consciousnesses. And when words are written down, they become time machines capable of reanimating the past.

Marcus Aurelius, for example, wrote Meditations while on a military campaign in Central Europe. His words have the power to instantly transport any reader directly into the mind of the Roman Emperor, as he was commanding the greatest army the world had ever known.

This transmission of language across time and space stitches together our individual consciousnesses into a single vast network, where ideas spread from person to person like a virus. The triumph of Christianity over the pagan authorities of Rome is the classic example of this phenomenon.

Because early Christians organized themselves around a definitive written text, the Christian God outcompeted a Pantheon of old Roman gods in the marketplace of ideas. This momentous transition from polytheism to monotheism is a hallmark of the Fall of Rome. And it could never have happened without the magical power of the book.

It’s no wonder Bibles are still held up before Christian congregations as direct objects of worship. Like the books commonly associated with practitioners of magic, this veneration of the bound book is an acknowledgement of the unique magical capacity of the written world to shape human destiny.

Conclusion

During the Fall of Rome, the bound book democratized the flow of information such that the Roman authorities lost control over the popular narrative. The use of the Bible as a common textual reference spread Christianity to every corner of the Empire, replacing polytheism with monotheism during Rome’s twilight. A thousand years later, the invention of the printing press undermined the authority of the Church in exactly the same way—propelling Europe into the Renaissance and beyond to the Scientific Revolution. Today, we are witnessing the internet democratize ideas all over again. If the historical pattern holds, we’re in for another revolution comparable to the transition from polytheism to monotheism that characterized the Fall of Rome and the shift from monotheism to science that resulted from the Renaissance. Buckle up!

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Further Materials

It has been suggested that it would have been much easier to locate a particular passage in a Biblical text written in codex form than it would be in a roll, and that this would have been a decided advantage in the cut and thrust of theological debate. Since a codex could be opened at a particular place much more quickly than a roll could be unrolled to find the same passage, this certainly appears to be a strong argument: one thinks of Augustine in the famous ‘Tolle, lege’ episode, when he kept a finger in the codex of the Pauline Epistles to mark the place of the providential passage he had found.
Roberts & Skeet, The Birth of the Codex, 1983, page 50

Culture Cross

Documentary | Herculaneum Scrolls

In May 2024, I travelled to southern Italy with grand plans. I returned (exhausted) with thousands of photos and hours upon hours of videos…

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2 years ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · James Binks

Key Takeaways

• The Gospel Writer John Prophesied that Pandemic Would Accompany the Apocalypse

• A Pandemic Ended the Pax Romana, the High-Water Mark of Roman Civilization

• A Pandemic Caused the Crisis of the Third Century that Brought Rome to its Knees

The Gospel Writer John Prophesied that Pandemic Would Accompany the Apocalypse

At the end of the first century AD, the gospel writer John sat down on the Isle of Patmos to pen the infamous book of Revelation. His hand was guided by his belief that the end of the world was at hand. Two thousand years later his Chapter 6, Verse 8 remains one of literature’s most chilling passages:

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

That rendering is from the 1611 King James translation of the Bible into English. But John himself wrote in Greek. He used the Greek word thanatos, which means “death.” Footnote #37 in the New English Translation of the Bible clarifies that “θάνατος (thanatos) can in particular contexts refer to a manner of death, specifically a contagious disease.”

That’s why the dread specter of 4h Horsemen of the Apocalypse is commonly interpreted as representing plague, pestilence or pandemic.

Economic dysfunction causes pandemics. Our immune systems falter when we lose access to food, water or shelter. But pandemics also cause economic dysfunction, as shrinking populations curtail economic productivity, cutting off even more access to these essentials of good health.

That feedback loop explains why pandemics and economic collapses are linked in popular imagination. The book of Revelation reflects this linkage. Apocalyptic prophecies laid down by John seemed eerily accurate to Roman citizens living in the 2nd and 3rd centuries—as deadly plagues figured decisively into the Fall of Rome.

Thanks in no small part to the prophecies of John, the Roman populace lapsed into mass religious hysteria as their Empire collapsed around them. Christianity exploded in popularity as they collectively braced themselves for the end of the world.

A Pandemic Ended the Pax Romana, the High-Water Mark of Roman Civilization

The Roman Republican period lasted for 500 years. The transition from Republic to Empire took place around the year 0, an era when both Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ rose to prominence in opposition to a cruel economic hierarchy. Within a few decades of each other, they died two of the most famous deaths in history; both were publicly murdered for their advocacy of the downtrodden Roman working class.

The Republican period was five centuries of constant economic strife and political assassination that finally culminated in a bitter civil war. These deep divisions were temporarily resolved in 27 BC with the coronation of Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew, Augustus. Thereafter, Rome was ruled by emperors while the senate was reduced to a largely ceremonial role.

The Emperors managed to preserve Roman society for another century by forcibly binding Rome’s warring economic factions together with autocratic political power. But like the Senate, the Emperors came from the fabulously wealthy Roman aristocracy. And like their Senatorial predecessors, the Emperors proved unwilling to save Rome by redistributing its vast wealth.

Either the land reforms proposed by Julius Caesar or the debt forgiveness demanded by Jesus Christ could have created a more equitable economy for all Roman citizens. But the aristocracy sealed Rome’s fate by consistently choosing alternative policies that preserved their own fortunes—at the expense of societal stability.

As a result, the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD were marked by the precipitous economic decline of Roman society. Romans converted to Christianity en masse during this period, in part because the new faith championed the poor and castigated the rich. But also because apocalyptic prophecies contained within the book of Revelation appeared to come true before everybody’s eyes.

Revelation predicts that the end of the world will be attended by the four ghostly Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The most terrifying of these was the Pale Horse—who is said to represent the plague.

The Antonine Plague hit the Roman Empire in 165 AD, less than a century after the book of Revelation was written. It killed some 10% of the Roman population. Mortality was closer to a third in densely populated settings like the army or the major cities, where great masses of the desperate poor lived on top of each other in squalor.

With so many casualties, food production collapsed and the Empire’s tax base shrank even further than it already had from economic mismanagement. The imperial treasury was forced to debase its currency just to keep functioning. Meanwhile, the plague decimated the ranks of the Roman legions, who suddenly lacked the manpower to defend the frontiers of the Empire.

The famous Pax Romana—or “Roman Peace” that epitomized the height of that civilization—finally came to an end after the borders of the Empire began to shrink back from their furthest advance. As apocalyptic Christian prophecies began coming true, tens of thousands of horrified Romans flocked into churches for the first time. The Pale Horse had come to Rome.

The Crisis of the Third Century That Brought Rome to its Knees was Caused by a Pandemic

Pandemics played a massive role in the Fall of Rome. The decline began with the Antonine Plague in 165 AD. A century later, the Plague of Cyprian pushed Rome to the brink of total collapse between AD 249 and AD 262.

The plague was named after the Christian Bishop of Carthage at the time. Cyprian himself described its gruesome symptoms in his contemporary treatise De Mortalitate (“On the Plague”):

With the bowels in continuous discharge, the strength of the body is gone; the fire that begins deep within burns all the way up to the wounds in the throat; the intestines are shaken with continuous vomiting; the eyes are set on fire by the force of the blood; for some the feet or other extremities are cut off by the infection of diseased putrefaction; as weakness comes from the failures and losses of the body the ability to walk is enfeebled, the hearing is lost or the eyes are blinded.

An estimated 15-30% of the Roman population lost their lives in the Plague of Cyprian. On the Nile Delta, the city of Alexandria lost a staggering 62% of its inhabitants. The pandemic was attended by the familiar economic fallout of rising prices and labor costs, collapsing tax bases, and currency debasement.

Economic dysfunction soon accelerated into a hyperinflation that paralyzed the Roman economy. This catastrophic Crisis of the Third Century brought Rome to its knees. Generals in the Roman Army began installing themselves as Emperors whenever they could seize power, leading to frequent, violent succession contests that badly disrupted continuity of governance.

Foreign powers like Sassanian Persia took advantage of the mounting chaos. Their militaries began helping themselves to formerly Roman territories across its frontiers. Where the Antonine Plague marked the beginning of Rome’s decline, the Crisis of the Third Century made it abundantly clear to Romans that the end of the world was at hand

Apocalyptic Christian prophecies from the book of Revelation disturbingly matched the grim reality Romans were living though in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The Pale Horse of Revelation symbolized the role pandemics play in civilizational collapse, and terrified citizens began converting in droves to that new faith. That’s why Christianity exploded in popularity as the lights of Roman society blinked out.

Conclusion

The book of Revelation would once again seem eerily prophetic in the 1300s, as Europe suffered through the horrors of the Black Death. By creating a drastic labor shortage, that pandemic was a primary cause of the collapse of the feudal economic system of the Middle Ages. It also discredited the Roman Catholic Church which—without a germ theory of disease—was utterly powerless to stop the dying. Though nothing like the Black Death in terms of mortality, the recent COVID pandemic was similar to the Black Death in that it undermined public perception of authority. The official response to COVID also created a host of economic problems such as rising rents and home prices, and skyrocketing inflation. The appearance of the Pale Horse from Revelation in our own modern era is part of a long historical pattern of pandemics heralding the end of major economic systems. A popular perception that we live in an era of “late-stage” capitalism matches the words laid down by John of Patmos when he wrote Revelation in the first century AD.

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Lucius brought with him the invisible victor of the war—pestilence. It had appeared first among the troops of Avidius in captured Seleucia; it spread so rapidly that he withdrew his army into Mesopotamia, while the Parthians rejoiced at the vengeance of their gods. The retreating legions carried the plague with them to Syria; Lucius took some of these soldiers to Rome to march in his triumph; they infected every city through which they passed and every region of the Empire to which they were later assigned. The ancient historians tell us more of its ravages than of its nature; their descriptions suggest exanthematous typhus or possibly bubonic plague. Galen thought it similar to the disease that had wasted the Athenians under Pericles: in both cases black pustules almost covered the body, the victim was racked with a hoarse cough, and his “breath stank.” Rapidly it swept through Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Gaul; within a year (166-67) it had killed more men than had been lost in the war. In Rome 2000 died of it in one day, including many of the aristocracy; corpses were carried out of the city in heaps. Marcus, helpless before this intangible enemy, did all he could to mitigate the evil; but the medical science of his day could offer him no guidance, and the epidemic ran its course until it had established an immunity or had killed all its carriers. The effects were endless. Many localities were so despoiled of population that they reverted to jungle or desert, food production fell, transport was disorganized, floods destroyed great quantities of grain, and famine succeeded plague. The happy hilaritas that had marked the beginning of Marcus’ reign vanished; men yielded to a bewildered pessimism, flocked to soothsayers and oracles, clouded the altars with incense and sacrifice, and sought consolation where alone it was offered them—in the new religions of personal immortality and heavenly peace.
Will & Ariel Durant, Caesar & Christ, 1944, Page 428

Key Takeaways

• The Transatlantic Slave Trade Was Fundamentally Different Than Prior Slavery

• Roman Slavery Illustrates the Key Difference Between Historical & Modern Slavery

• Slavery Caused The Fall of Rome & Created the Feudalism That Followed

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Was Fundamentally Different Than Prior Slavery

The gorgeous island of Madeira lies some 350 miles off the coast of Africa. There, date palms sway lazily in the balmy tropical trade winds. But this idyllic paradise conceals a dark history.

Though Genoese sailors were the first Europeans to map the island, it was rediscovered and colonized in 1418 by the Portuguese. Madeira remains a part of Portugal to this day; its capital city of Funchal is that country’s sixth largest.

The Portuguese repatriated sugarcane plants from Sicily to Madeira’s fertile volcanic soil. But sugarcane cultivation is a brutally labor-intensive process. The tough and sinewy plant must be boiled down in fierce open furnaces to yield molasses and sugar.

In Madeira’s tropical climate, few workers were willing or even able to tolerate that kind of heat. So the Portuguese imported black Africans from the mainland and forced them to perform the labor. Mass production of the profitable sugar crop that the Portuguese referred to as “white gold” was fed by human sacrifice.

To assuage a guilty national conscience, Prince Henry the Navigator turned to Portugal’s most famous writer, Gomes Eanes de Zurara. Zurara accepted the commission and wrote Crónica dos feitos da Guiné, which translates into “Chronicle of the Deeds of Guinea.” This document rivals the infamous witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum as the most blood-soaked in human history.

Zurara justified the use of black Africans for forced labor by suggesting that their capture would expose them to Christianity, which would then lead to their salvation. His dubious logic suggested that the enslavement of Africans was actually to their benefit.

As the Age of Exploration matured, this horrific production model of race-based slavery was copied and pasted onto the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands and the cotton plantations of the Southern United States. In these places, the descendants of black Africans formed a distinct economic underclass of slaves.

That is how modern slavery came to be defined by the pernicious racial component we recognize today. Prior to the Transatlantic slave trade, slavery could happen to people of every race and economic background. It was only with the proto-capitalist colonialism of the Age of Sail that an entire race was enslaved.

Roman Slavery Illustrates The Key Difference Between Historical & Modern Slavery

It was only with the rise of the Transatlantic slave trade that a particular race of people were subjugated exclusively as slaves. Up until that time slavery was an embarrassing misfortune that could befall a person of any race, rather like a bankruptcy.

Julius Caesar, for example, was almost sold into slavery in 75 BC. A famous anecdote has him being captured by pirates on his way to the island city of Rhodes off the Turkish coast. His captors threatened to sell him into slavery unless they received a ransom of 20 talents of gold. Insulted by this relatively inexpensive sum, Julius Caesar demanded that his ransom be raised to 50 talents.

This story illustrates how even the scion of a prominent aristocratic family could find themselves temporarily embarrassed by slavery. In addition to being captured by pirates, insolvent debtors could be enslaved by their creditors until their debts were repaid. People whose homes were conquered during Rome’s military adventures also found themselves enslaved.

Though the Roman legal system granted slave owners the power of life and death over the people who were their property, some slaves were fully integrated into their masters’ households. They were occasionally true romantic partners instead of mere rape victims. Slaves could also be beloved tutors and mentors to their owner’s children.

Some of Rome’s most significant historical figures were slaves, such as the gladiator Spartucus played a lead role the downfall of the Republic. The Roman poet and playwright Terence—who coined the phrase “fortune favors the bold”—also began his career as a slave before ultimately being freed.

These aspects of Roman slavery illustrate how that grisly institution was an economic class with some mobility in the centuries before the Transatlantic slave trade. People of all races and economic backgrounds transitioned in and out of slavery. Only with the rise of sugar and cotton plantations during the Age of Sail did one particular race comprise a permanent underclass of slaves.

Slavery Caused The Fall of Rome & Created the Feudalism That Followed

Rome’s ruling class utterly failed to distribute equitably the slaves and land won during their military conquests. Instead, they hoarded these spoils of war for themselves, combining them into the vast slave farms called latifundia that drove Rome’s free farmers out of business.

Unable to pay their mortgages, those small farmers saw their property foreclosed upon. A rigid Roman legal code systematically awarded their collateralized farms to ruling class creditors, who turned around and added that land to their existing latifundia—further exacerbating the wealth inequality that dangerously destabilized Roman society.

Great masses of displaced farmers descended on the capitol, where they were subjected to further abuses by the landlords of squalid tenement housing. Meanwhile, the oligarchy-controlled Senate blocked any redress of political grievances. This unstable political situation finally erupted in January of 43 BC, when Julius Caesar marched on Rome as a populare, or a political representative of the working class.

But Julius Caesar was assassinated by oligarchic conspirators before he could implement any of the land reforms he had planned to relieve the desperate masses. From that point forward, only an Emperor wielding autocratic political power could hope to contain Rome’s white-hot class war.

Julius Caesar was not the only economic reformist to make a big splash in Rome. Within a few decades of his assassination, Jesus proclaimed the good news (evangelion in Greek, gospel in Hebrew) that the debt forgiveness enshrined in Jewish scripture was finally at hand.

By softening the wealth inequality that tore it apart, this demand for debt forgiveness might have saved the Roman Empire from collapse. Small farmers unable to pay their mortgages could have kept their land, instead of seeing it transferred to the already-wealthy through the foreclosure process.

But in the end Jesus Christ was murdered for his attempt to mitigate Rome’s wealth inequality, just like Julius Caesar. But his death became the focal point of a powerful new religious movement that challenged Roman authority.

As the Roman Empire sank into decline, the Roman oligarchy gave up their suppression of the new Christian faith. In 313 AD, the pagan Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. In 380 AD, Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the new state religion of his collapsing Empire, and the Roman Catholic Church was born.

As Roman civilization vanished from the Italian Peninsula, its former oligarchy retreated into fortified homes at the centers of their vast latifundia estates. The individuals who worked their fields became attached to the land as colonoi, or serfs.

That’s how the stage of history was set for the Middle Ages. The nobility, the peasantry, and the church arose from the ashes of the Roman Empire to form the three famous estates of the Medieval feudal economy.

Conclusion

The poisonous institution of slavery drove the United States into a catastrophic civil war, and the unique racial component of modern slavery remains a complex legacy still unresolved within American society today. In the history of Rome that parallels US history in so many ways, slavery drove Roman wealth inequality all the way to that society’s breaking point and beyond. It eventually culminated in a debt crisis that destroyed the Roman Empire and molded the rise of feudalism in Europe.

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The causes of revolution were many, the results were endless, the personalities thrown up by the crisis, from the Gracchi to Augustus, were among the most powerful in history. Never before, and never again till our own time, were such stakes fought for, never was the world drama more intense. The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in the towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with these latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promiser, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.
Will & Ariel Durant, Caesar & Christ, 1944, page 111

Key Takeaways

• Magic & Miracles Demonstrate That We Live in The Matrix

• The Jesuits Were The World’s First Intelligence Agency

• Faith vs. Science is a False Dichotomy

Magic & Miracles Demonstrate That We Live in The Matrix

The Greek philosopher Plato popularized the notion that we inhabit a false reality, just like the characters in the 1999 film The Matrix. 500 years after his death, that idea became all-the-rage within a collapsing Roman Empire.

As economic conditions deteriorated, a deep despair settled over the declining Roman Empire like a miasmal fog. But Plato’s assertion that the world confronting our senses is only an illusion was very comforting—along with his promise that an invisible realm of perfection lay beyond the chaos and pain of the observable universe.

Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Christianity were all brands of Platonic thought. Each emphasized Plato’s invisible realm of perfection in their own way as they competed in the marketplace of ideas. But after Christianity became the official state religion of the Empire, Roman authorities outlawed the other brands of Platonism as heresy.

A thousand years later—during the late Middle Ages—the supreme authority of the Roman Catholic Church began to wane. As Medieval society lapsed into chaos, underground schools of Platonic thought were revived and became the basis of Renaissance magic.

The same fundamental controversy marked the late stages of both the Roman Empire and Middle Ages: are human minds contained within the universe, or is the observable universe contained within the mind?

Both the miracles of Christ and the magic of the Renaissance were supposed to prove the latter, Platonistic view. Lucid dreamers can control their dreams because their minds create the dreamscapes they experience. Magic and miracles were meant to be demonstrations that the universe we observe when we are fully awake is similarly a product of the mind.

The Jesuits Were The World’s First Intelligence Agency

The Renaissance was an intellectual showdown between the long-dead Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Where Plato considered the observable universe to be a mere illusion, his protégé reckoned that sense data is the only true reality.

Christianity got its start among the many competing schools of Platonic thought in the late Roman Empire. During the 4th century, St. Augustine persisted as a devoted Neoplatonist even after his conversion to Christianity. But in the 1200s, the Dominican Friar St. Thomas Aquinas reconciled the Church with Aristotle’s materialist conception of reality.

Two centuries later, Plato re-infiltrated Europe under the guise of Renaissance magic. As the credibility of the Roman Catholic Church withered after the Black Death, some Europeans began to seriously reconsider the Platonic possibility that the observable universe is a product of the human mind. And that it can therefore be manipulated by the human will.

The Spanish and Roman Inquisitions were violent reactions against this heresy. Among the very first groups persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition were the Alumbrados, or “Illumined Ones.” This group of mystics sought divine power through intense mental concentration and altered states of consciousness.

Ignatius Loyola was a Spanish street preacher with a following of female acolytes who were prone to fits and trances. These bizarre public spectacles landed him in front of the Inquisitors on suspicion of being an Alumbrado in 1526, and then again in 1527. He was cleared of charges of heresy both times, but fled Spain after his second acquittal.

In the fall of 1540, Loyola prevailed on Pope Paul III to issue an official papal bull approving the formation of a Society of Jesus. He became the first Superior General of this new Jesuit order, who were referred to as the “shock troops” of the Papacy.

Instead of trying to change minds through violence, the Jesuits printed pamphlets, made arguments, and infiltrated universities to combat the rise of Platonism. They reasserted a materialist view of reality in which humans are limited to observing God’s grand creation, which preserved the Church’s highly lucrative monopoly on communion with God.

The Jesuits were essentially the world’s first global intelligence agency. Figures like Marin Mersenne maintained a vast correspondence network with luminaries in the burgeoning Scientific Revolution like René Descartes. The two attended the Jesuit College of La Flèche together, and Descartes went on to become instrumental in establishing the mechanistic, Aristotelian framework upon which all of modern science is based.

Faith vs. Science is a False Dichotomy

Modern history books make much of a Renaissance conflict between faith and science. The replacement of the geocentric model of the solar system—with earth at its center—with the modern heliocentric model is represented as a momentous transition from religious faith to scientific rationalism.

The Trial of Galileo is a famous case-in-point. Those proceedings were never about whether the earth or the sun sat at the center of space; Jesuit astronomers who worked for the Church also had access to the same telescopes and data sets. It was actually about Galileo’s intransigence on the question of which heliocentric model to adopt—and on certain scriptural interpretations—that condemned him to house arrest for the remainder of his days.

Both church and science were actually on the same side of the classic debate between the Plato and Aristotle. The real controversy was whether the human mind is contained within an objective universe, or whether the observable universe is contained within the human mind.

Church and science asserted the former view, while the alchemists and astrologers of the Renaissance opposed them at great peril. The experiments conducted in the bubbling retorts and smoldering alembics of the alchemists were supposed to reveal as much about the nature of the observer as they were about the observable universe.

White lab coats replaced the wizard’s robes of the Renaissance as the authorities installed an Aristotelian, empirical worldview into institutions of higher learning. Alchemy calcified into modern chemistry, astrology morphed into astronomy, and the Platonic insight vanished from popular consideration.

But today, quantum mechanics has reignited incandescent debate about the relationship between the observer and the observable universe. Hard data strongly suggests that there is no objective universe out there without an observer to construct it. Plato is overdue for a comeback.

Conclusion

Platonism is the idea that we live inside a Matrix-like false reality, and this way of thinking has historically exploded in popularity when major economic systems decay and crumble. Plato burst onto the intellectual scene during the calamitous Fall of Rome. And during the late Middle Ages, his ideas enjoyed a revival in the form of Renaissance magic. It’s no coincidence that the film The Matrix was released in 1999 during the late stages of the capitalist economic system that replaced the Medieval one. This historical pattern arises from the fact that authorities in all times and places don’t want their subjects thinking of reality as some sort of illusion. They want us waking up and reporting to work every morning, where we earn them money. If this fascinating historical pattern holds, we should expect a revival of Platonism in modern times as deteriorating economic conditions once again undermine the credibility of the authorities.

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Perhaps he felt now that though he was master of his body he was subject to his imaginations. He determined to chasten his mind with education. Though now thirty-three, he joined schoolboys in studying Latin. But the itch to teach is stronger than the will to learn. Soon Ignatius, as he was scholastically called, began to preach to a circle of pious but charming women. Their lovers denounced him as a spoil-sport, and beat him brutally. He moved to Alcalá (1526), and took up philosophy and theology. Here too he taught a little private group, chiefly of poor women, some of them prostitutes hungering for redemption. He tried to exorcise their sinful propensities by spiritual exercises, but some of his pupils fell into fits or trances, and the Inquisition summoned him. He was imprisoned for two months, but he finally convinced the inquisitors of his orthodoxy, and was released; however, he was forbidden to teach. He passed on to Salamanca (1527), and went through a similar sequence of teaching, trial before the Inquisition, imprisonment, acquittal, and prohibition of further teaching. Disappointed with Spain, he set out for Paris, always on foot and in pilgrim garb, but now driving before him a donkey loaded with books.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 907

But though the Reformation had been saved, it suffered, along with Catholicism, from a skepticism encouraged by the coarseness of religious polemics, the brutality of the war, and the cruelties of belief. During the holocaust thousands of “witches” were put to death. Men began to doubt creeds that preached Christ and practiced wholesale fratricide. They discovered the political and economic motives that hid under religious formulas, and they suspected their rulers of having no real faith but the lust for power—though Ferdinand II had repeatedly risked his power for the sake of his faith. Even in this darkest of modern ages an increasing number of men turned to science and philosophy for answers less incarnadined than those which the faiths had so violently sought to enforce. Galileo was dramatizing the Copernican revolution, Descartes was questioning all tradition and authority, Bruno was crying out to Europe from his agonies at the stake. The Peace of Westphalia ended the reign of theology over the European mind, and left the road obstructed but passable for the tentatives of reason.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins, 1961, page 571

Key Takeaways

• Ancient Secret Societies called “Mystery Schools” Informed Christianity

• The Knights Templar Carried On a Tradition of Secret Societies into the Middle Ages

• Secret Societies Flourished in the Wake of the Protestant Reformation

Secret Societies called “Mystery Schools” Informed Christianity

Mystery Schools were major cultural influences in Classical Greece. These secret societies hid their core teachings from new initiates, and gradually revealed them as members swore oaths and performed sacred rituals. Famous examples included the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Pythagorean School, and the Cult of Orpheus.

During Roman times, the Mystery School of the wine god Bacchus became such a cultural phenomenon that the Senate was threatened by it. In 186 BC, a Senatorial decree outlawed the Bacchanalia except under conditions of strict state supervision.

Two hundred years later, a new movement became all-the-rage in the Roman Empire. This new Mystery School was eerily similar to the Bacchic cult. It borrowed many of the symbols of that wine god, and it was also centered around a divine figure from the Near East who had long hair, turned water into wine, and was resurrected from the dead.

Having executed thousands of Bacchic cultists during the crackdowns two centuries before, the Roman authorities dusted off the same playbook to deal with Christianity. Thanks in no small part to the fact that they organized themselves into a secret society, early Christians proved resilient in the face of brutal political repression. They used secret greetings and symbols to evade the authorities, and covertly gathered in grisly underground burial chambers—away from prying eyes but surrounded by bones and rotting flesh.

In the end, the Roman state co-opted Christianity just like its Bacchic predecessor. But it was forced to accomplish this through conversion rather than repression. And after the Fall of Rome, the Roman Catholic Church remained the highest political authority in Europe.

During the Middle Ages, the Church revived another classic tenet of the old Mystery Schools. Because virtually every literate person was a member of the clergy in those days, Christians were forced to accept whatever they were told about the contents of the Bible. The Medieval Church recreated the old Mystery School hierarchy in which secret knowledge was reserved for inner circles.

The Knights Templar Carried On a Tradition of Secret Societies into the Middle Ages

During the Crusades, the Knights Templar emerged as a Medieval secret society. They performed rituals and swore oaths like the Greco-Roman Mystery Schools that had so influenced early Christianity. And like those ancient secret societies, the Knights also found themselves targets of persecution.

By acting as proto-bankers for travelers between Europe and the Holy Land, the Knights amassed a fortune so vast that it threatened established power structures. After the Knights were arrested and tortured, Pope Clement V officially disbanded their order in 1312.

Though Clement’s decree made them outlaws, rumors of the Knights Templar persisted long after their downfall. Whispers abounded that they were hiding out in Scotland—geographically distant from the Vatican—and that they fought alongside Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314.

Prior to their political persecution, the Knights Templar had counted the Sinclair family of Scotland among their major supporters. More than a century after their persecution, Sir William Sinclair financed the construction of Rosslyn Chapel just a few miles south of Edinburgh and adorned it with Templar symbols.

Rosslyn Chapel’s overall layout features two prominent pillars called the Apprentice Pillar and the Master’s Pillar. These are said to reflect the twin pillars—named Jachin and Boaz in Bible—that supported the roof of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem during Biblical times, the very same site where the Templars had been headquartered during the Crusades.

In addition, a pillar cap depicts two figures sharing a single horse. This same icon had served as the famous seal of the Knights Templar during their heyday. Furthermore, Rosslyn Chapel is garnished with “engrailed” crosses with distinctive indented edges. These heraldic crosses were associated with the both Sinclair family and the famous Cross Pattée of the Knights Templar.

Today, the gift shop at Rosslyn Chapel is bursting with Templar-themed souvenirs. The abundance of old Templar symbology evident at Rosslyn demonstrates how secret societies similar to the Mystery Schools of Antiquity remained fixtures throughout the late Medieval period.

Secret Societies Flourished in the Wake of the Protestant Reformation

The Thirty Years War was the final culmination of the Protestant Reformation. It was a bitter struggle that claimed up to 8 million lives. By the time the last blood had been spilled and the dust settled in 1648, the Pope had forfeited his position of political dominance over Europe.

In 1717, the Freemasons publicly announced themselves in London. Documents such as the 1390 Halliwell Manuscript and the 1598 Scottish Schaw Statutes prove that these fraternal lodges existed well before 1717. But the deposition of the Popes a half-century before made it safe for them to emerge from the shadows without fear of reprisal from the Vatican.

Just as early Christianity borrowed symbols from the Mystery Schools that preceded it, the Freemasons adopted and adapted the trappings of the Knights Templar. There is a Masonic degree explicitly called the “Knight Templar.”

Furthermore, the Temple of Solomon—from which the Knights derived their name—is also a common theme in Freemasonry. Its Apprentice and Master pillars form the basis of the foundational Masonic allegory of Hiram Abiff, where a master Mason is killed by jealous apprentices.

Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland is famous for Templar symbology like the Master and Apprentice pillars. But its various relief carvings also depict the square and the compass, the same mason’s tools featured in the emblem of Freemasonry. The architecture of Rosslyn Chapel stands a tantalizing clue about the continuity of secret societies during the late Middle Ages.

After 1717, Freemasonry exploded in popularity. Prominent figures in banking and government—including many of the Founding Fathers of the United States—were members of that secret society.

Today, we’re encouraged to regard notions of secret societies operating in our modern world as baseless conspiracy theories. But the Mystery Schools of Antiquity, Christianity, the Knights Templar, and Freemasonry are historically linked by a shared genealogy of secret rituals and symbols. The modern world was largely built by people carrying forward this tradition of secrecy.

Conclusion

Markets are a key component in the modern economic paradigm that arose in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. Under such a system, knowledge is money. Because he’d received word of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 a day early, British banker Nathan Rothschild was falsely accused of using that information to buy up huge swathes of the London Stock Exchange at massive discounts. The fact that insider trading is today considered such a serious crime reflects how lucrative knowledge can be when a small group knows something that the broader market doesn’t. Secret societies compartmentalize knowledge by definition, and we live in an era where secret knowledge is highly profitable. That idea that secret societies belong exclusively to bygone eras is impossible to countenance when the structure of our modern economy so heavily incentives them.

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When the pope’s orders to arrest the Templars arrived at the English court, young Edward II took no action at all. He protested to the pontiff that the Templars were innocent. Only after the pope issued a formal bull was the English king forced to act. In January, 1308, Edward finally issued orders for the arrest of the Knights Templar in England, but the three months of warning had been put to good use. Many of the Templars had gone underground, while some of those arrested managed to escape. Their treasure, their jeweled reliquaries, even the bulk of their records, had disappeared. In Scotland, the papal order was not even published. Under those conditions England, and especially Scotland, became targeted havens for fugitive Templars from continental Europe, and the efficiency of their concealment spoke to some assistance from outside, or from each other.
John J. Robinson, Born in Blood, 1989, page 3

In 1810 Nathan Rothschild (1777-1836) established in London a branch of the firm that his father, Meyer Amschel Rothschild, had founded in Frankfurt-am-Main. Nathan seems to have been the ablest of the financial geniuses who distinguished the family through several centuries and in many states. He became the favorite intermediary of the British government in its financial relations with foreign powers; it was he or his agents who transmitted from England to Austria and Prussia the subsidies that enabled them to fight Napoleon; and he played a leading role in the industrial and commercial expansion of England after 1815.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, 1975, page 360

Key Takeaways:

• A HORRIFYING Betrayal of the Knights Templar Made “Friday the 13th” Unlucky

• Secret Societies Transformed England With a SHOCKING Peasants’ Revolt

• Secret Societies Played a CRUCIAL Role in The Protestant Reformation

A HORRIFYING Betrayal of the Knights Templar Made “Friday the 13th” Unlucky

The Knights Templar were an order of warrior monks who made a name for themselves during the Crusades. These Knights served as protectors to the pilgrims who began making their way to Jerusalem after that city was captured by Crusaders during the scorching summer of 1099.

Like virtually all monastic orders, the Templars took vows of extreme poverty. They were permitted neither money nor land. The Knights’ symbolized this lack of ownership by using the image of two knights riding the same horse as their signature.

Because they were said to have been buried with their legs crossed, legend also associates the grisly symbol of the skull-and-crossbones with the Knights Templar.

Despite vows of poverty, the Templar order grew immensely wealthy during two centuries of Crusades. By the time those holy wars drew to a close in the late 1200s, King Philip IV of France found himself deeply indebted to the warrior monks. So he prevailed on the Pope to help him outlaw the Templar Order.

On Friday, October 13th, 1307, Frankish authorities unsealed simultaneous orders to arrest the Knights Templar. At the crack of dawn, Philip’s Inquisitors burst into the Knights’ Paris headquarters. They arrested Grandmaster Jacques de Molay along with hundreds of his men.

The Knights stood accused of blasphemy and sexual perversion. The Templar symbol of two knights riding a single horse became evidence of their sodomy. Deep in Philip’s dank dungeons, his Inquisitors brutally tortured the prisoners until they screamed confessions.

These coerced confessions gave Philip the legal pretext he needed to cancel the debts he owed to the Templars. The proceedings were complete by 1312, when Pope Clement V formally dissolved the Order of the Knights Templar.

But their story was far from over. During the interrogation, a knight named Jean de Châlons testified that a senior Templar commander had fled the port of La Rochelle just before the October 1307 arrests—with 18 galleys carrying treasure, arms, and men.

Rumors persisted that the Knights carried on after 1312 as an outlaw secret society, possibly on the high seas. We’ll never know if there is any truth to those rumors, because underground organizations intentionally cover their tracks to evade the authorities.

All we have are the legends. And in the popular imagination, the chilling skull-and-crossbones symbol used by the Knights Templar became a maritime symbol on the very first “Friday the 13th” in 1307. That combination of day and date still bears an unlucky connotation in modern times.

Secret Societies Transformed England With a SHOCKING Peasants’ Revolt

Two years after Pope Clement V outlawed the Knights Templar, the English King Edward II marched on Scotland to face-off against Robert the Bruce in the First War of Scottish Independence. But the English army suffered a catastrophic defeat at Bannockburn in 1314.

Some accounts of the Battle of Bannockburn mention an unexpected cavalry charge that tilted the fortunes of war against the English. Legend has it that this cavalry was none other than the former Knights Templar, who were still operating as an underground secret society after the Pope officially disbanded their order. These accounts were fueled by the fact that the Pope had also excommunicated Robert the Bruce.

35 years after Bannockburn, the Black Death struck Europe like a detonating bomb. The pandemic killed almost half the peasantry who populated the English countryside. With so many formerly productive fields lying fallow for lack of laborers, the surviving peasants realized they finally had their feudal lords over a barrel.

Instead of swearing fealty to any particular lord—as was the custom at the time—the remaining peasantry began playing one lord off against another in bidding wars for their labor. The labor shortage destabilized the entire feudal economic system of peasants and lords. Former peasants began demanding the freedom to sell their labor to the highest bidder, and the modern production roles of employer and employee began to emerge.

But the nobility was accustomed to making demands, not listening to them. They prevailed upon King Edward III and the English parliament to freeze maximum wages at pre-plague levels, making it illegal for laborers to refuse work, and imposing stiff fines on employers who dared to offer higher wages.

This attempt to preserve feudalism by legal decree ripped English society apart. In the summer of 1381, a hundred thousand aggrieved peasants marched on London, led by a mysterious figure known as Wat Tyler. Barbara Tuchman, in her classic history of the 14th century entitled A Distant Mirror, wrote that this rebellion spread “with some evidence of planning.”

In his capacity as a historian, Winston Churchill wrote in The Birth of Britain, “Throughout the summer of 1381, there was a general ferment. Beneath it all lay organization. Agents moved round the villages of central England, in touch with a ‘Great Society’ which was said to meet in London.”

Because secret societies intentionally conceal their activities, their histories are nearly impossible to unravel. There’s no historical evidence directly linking the whispers of surviving Knights Templar in the British Isles to rumors of an underground “Great Society” fomenting the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. But the significant role played by secret societies in the English transition from feudalism to capitalism is beyond dispute.

Secret Societies Played a CRUCIAL Role in The Protestant Reformation

During the 1370s, a firebrand Oxford preacher named John Wycliffe defied the Vatican by publishing the first English translations of the Bible, and railing against the ostentatious wealth of the Catholic Church. Itinerant so-called “poor preachers” delivered Wycliffe’s message from academic lecture halls to the surrounding countryside. The most famous of these was John Ball, who used Wycliffe’s critiques to provoke the Peasants’ Revolt that finally boiled over in 1381.

During the summer of that year, a hundred thousand enraged peasants descended on London. They beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, and smashed Church property wherever it could be found. Because the Peasants Revolt was a wholesale rejection of wealth accumulation, looters were murdered alongside church officials.

Amidst the chaos, a 14-year-old King Richard III had no choice but to meet with the angry mob and to hear their demands. Initially, he agreed to the abolition of serfdom. But violence soon erupted during negotiations, and a member of the King’s retinue crippled the rebel leader Wat Tyler with a sword stroke.

Richard went on to hang Tyler and renege on all the concessions he’d made during negotiations. The young king mobilized his army and systematically rooted out remaining rebel forces wherever they hid.

Though a horrified John Wycliffe publicly condemned the Peasants’ Revolt, his political opponents successfully laid the blame for the incident on his doorstep. His followers, the Lollards, were forced underground to evade the law. For over a century-and-a-half, secret networks of weavers, merchants and artisans kept English Bibles hidden in their homes and privately rejected papal authority.

When King Henry VIII finally broke with the Catholic Church a century-and-a-half later in 1534, his success was thanks to the existence of the underground Lollard movement. Henry’s own Lord Chancellor opposed the break and complained that the new Protestant movement was just the old Lollard heresy resurfacing.

The Reformation was the most significant challenge to authority since the rise of Christianity itself during the Late Roman Empire. And like the early Christians of that period, early Protestants were forced to live underground as outlaws. Far from being baseless conspiracy theories, secret societies have been key ingredients in the sweeping political changes that punctuate human history.

Conclusion

The Peace of Westphalia ended the pope’s political dominance in 1648 by establishing international borders around sovereign states. These countries were afforded the legal right to choose for themselves between Catholicism and Protestantism. Except as an act of war, the agreement forbade the plunder of sailing ships flying the colors of newly-created nation-states. But it took European powers almost a century to impose this new international order across the Atlantic. During that time, the skull-and-crossbones associated with the Knights Templar instead marked the stateless pirate vessels who preyed upon the merchantmen of the Spanish Main. The same symbol was later taken up in occult circles during the Victorian Era, and from there inspired the Skull and Bones Society of Yale University. Ever since the very first “Friday the 13th” in 1307, the icon of the skull with crossed femur bones has been the symbol of underground secret societies operating in the shadows.

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Throughout the summer of 1381 there was a general ferment. Beneath it all lay organisation. Agents moved round the villages of Central England, in touch with a “Great Society” which was said to meet in London. In May violence broke out in Essex. It was started by an attempt to make a second and more stringent collection of the poll-tax which had been levied in the previous year. The turbulent elements in London took fire, and a band under one Thomas Faringdon marched off to join the rebels. Walworth, the mayor, faced a strong municipal opposition which was in sympathy and contact with the rising. In Kent, after an attack on Lesnes Abbey, the peasants marched through Rochester and Maidstone, burning manorial and taxation records on their way. At Maidstone they released the agitator John Ball from the episcopal prison, and were joined by a military adventurer with gifts and experience of leadership, Wat Tyler.
Winston Churchill, The Birth Of Britain, 1956, page 301

In the year 1312 the Knights Templar had been attacked and destroyed by the King of France, Philippe Le Bel, in connivance with his puppet Pope Clement V of Bordeaux. Their vast fortune in bullion and land was confiscated by the Crown, and most of them were tortured and burned at the stake. However, warned by their allies, the Templar mariners slipped their moorings in the French channel harbours and stood out to sea. They steered for England, and sought the protection of King Edward II. Since then, they had opened their lodges in Scotland and England under new names, but with the basic tenets of the Order intact.
Wilbur Smith, Birds of Prey, 1996, page 73