Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1928037" data-attributes="member: 6533">In pre-modern societies women do still have a far better life expectancy than men if they prove adept at surviving childbirth.  Considering that DnD does nothing to simulate the generally high chance of anyone dying before they hit thirty I think we can abstract around that.  Resistant may have been the wrong term, I have no idea how easily women versus men pick up diseases.  I do know that after most epidemics you have a far higher proportion of women surivors than men.  AIDS may be the exception.  The major Flu epidemics, talking Spanish flu, tend to wipe out men at a higher rate than women.As for the two doctrines: they certainly can be argued to have existed but with the possible exception of Aquinas they were more description and theory than policy or popular/elite attitude.Further: mass conversions, occasionally under some force of soveriegnty or law, sure, that's possible. But even there there would have to be some form of assent given on the part of the group under question.  Particularly if we are discussing the early middle ages.  Gregory the Great sends missionaries to England not armies.  When armies are deployed for religious purposes they generally have a very strategic rather than ideological objective.  Certainly the two can be conflated, capturing Jerusalem is a strategic opbjective for ideological concerns but it is not an attempt to Christianize the Moors.  Charlemagne's little debacle with the Saxons is more an exception under the auspices of a very frustrated secular authority than anything else.  Sure there's religious sentiment there but given what I've seen of the records it strikes me as more a typical conquering massacre than anything uniquely or strongly religious, and he was criticized for it rather heavily.  I mean the Byzantine emperor can blind Bulgars all he likes and while he comes a lot closer to having both secular and non-secular authority than any Latin king he is still a secular authority, noone thinks that was done in the name of religion.My primary point has very little to do with soveriegnty and everything to do with the fact that genocide is not an act you can claim as a de-fault medieval perspective.  Nor could you claim that medieval Christianity thought that any means are justified by the end of Christianizing a people or wiping out a Pagan polity.  Now if you want to go into the whole hoary Spanish phenomena then we have a very differnt kettle of fish to boil.  To my eyes that's the very dividing point of the medieval and modern worlds, but either way you're looking at a very localized phenomena in terms of the vast scope of the period.And, even there, I would argue that genocide was not an option they considered as being true to the Christian character of their mission.  At the very least certainly not in the same way that the Classical and Roman world viewed genocide as a distinct tool of policy.  Even in the case of mass conversions they had to develop a whole new longer regimen of catechetical education and initiation to feel comfortable about it.</blockquote>

Verification