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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ferratus" data-source="post: 4674744" data-attributes="member: 55966">And I told you why that is wrong, which you just edited out and ignored.  Secular authorities were as much, if not more, involved in the revival of Roman Law as the church authorities were. Same reason somebody fought against them.  They were promised land and cash.  Why did El Cid fight for both the Muslims and Christians during the reconquista of Spain? Italy was relatively prosperous too, and it was wracked by all sorts of conflict (some of it religious).  I do in fact dispute that the Cathars were live and let live people.  The whole war was started over the murder of a papal legate after all. Because your biases are showing. Given that I'm more familiar with the 6th through the 9th centuries than I am with High Middle Ages or the Rennaissance, I can certainly dispute that.  I wrote a paper in fact on the development of the legal traditions after the fall of Rome in the West.  The Edict of Theodoric was the primary survival of Roman Law before the introduction of the laws of Justinian after the High Middle Ages.The Ordeal is about as Germanic as it gets.  Perhaps you are confused about the decline of the ordeal in favour of compurgation in the High Middle Ages? The rise of the prison system (at least in England) largely came about because people would rather accept outlawry rather than face trial.  So you needed to keep people in one place.   This was not as effective in terms of excommunication, which required social shunning and a belief in punishment after death.Torture was used in secular courts just as much (if not more) as it was in ecclesiastical ones, and secular rulers sponsored scholarship of Roman Law.  The result of that was that nobles were exempt from torture, and lower classes were considered to be unable to give testimony honestly without it.  It does not mean that there was no torture for confessions by lords over peasantry before the revival of roman law, and your whole premise that the church was responsible for bringing torture back to Europe and corrupted the beautiful and free pagan legal system is silly.  Good, you're much older than me.   I'll wait about 5 or 10 years to make sure you'd be easy to deal with.  Unless of course, you have a son. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />   As well, what do you mean by being free?  Thralldom was common, plus tenant farmers were more common than the free farmers with their own land.   In former Roman territories of course, we had germanic overlords who followed some measures of Roman law that were never extinguished, such as serfdom.If you want to know about Germanic legal systems and customs, there is a few good books I have that you should read:  Iceland was a very literate culture, and left behind our best examples of a Germanic legal system.<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/1622.php" target="_blank">Feud in the Icelandic Saga</a>[ame=http://www.amazon.ca/Laws-Early-Iceland-Gragas-I/dp/0887556957]Laws of Early Iceland: Gragas I: Amazon.ca: Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, Richard Perkins: Books[/ame][ame=http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Early-Iceland-University-Icelandic/dp/0887551580]Amazon.com: Laws of Early Iceland: Gragas II (University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies): Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote: Books[/ame][ame=http://www.amazon.ca/Bloodtaking-Peacemaking-Feud-Society-Iceland/dp/0226526801]Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society…Amazon.ca: William Ian Miller: Books[/ame]Perhaps, but it generally fell to a local strongman and his boys to be the dominant power in a particular region.  They owned the land you see.Of course secular authorities conducted inquisitions.  They even held trials for heresy. There were also numerous plagues before the bubonic plague as well, the Black Death was just a particularly nasty outbreak. I know about Giodorno Bruno.  He wasn't prosecuted for his invention for mnemonic systems, but for heretical religious ideas which he kept backsliding about and writing about when he was forbidden to.   Give me a technological device that the church suppressed if you want to prove your point.The post-reformation period was not a safe time to be a scholar who didn't wish to kow-tow to the whims of the local authorities in certain parts of the world.   That was a bad thing for science and intellectual freedom.   But this is not the high middle ages, which is the point we are debating.  You don't seem to want to admit that the Church in different ages had a more open attitude towards radical ideas and dissent in the High Middle Ages before the trauma of the Cathars and the protestant reformation. Here in Canada they banned the hand crossbow, for being a killing machine that was good at killing people silently.  It is indeed no more lethal than a lance, a sword or an axe.But that's exactly what it was.  It allowed for the easy slaying of the rightful authorities and was supposed to be a destablizing way to amass army cheaply.  Local lords were supposed to rule justly in an ordered society.  Crossbows represented aggression because you could stick any shmuck behind it for pennies a day and march all over the established order.  Which resulted in more and more people being killed, especially since the lowborn didn't hold nobles for ransom.   As well, crossbow injuries always caused small deep wounds that wouldn't necessarily kill you, but got infected and you would die a long and horrible death from blood poisoning.</blockquote>

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