The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

by Will Durant

Poverty seemed rooted in geography, and manners in poverty; so parsimony grew out of the grudging soil.

The basic fact in the history of the Scottish state is fear of England.

“if God gives me but a dog’s life I will make the key keep the castle and the bracken keep the cow”—

And yet it is our hindsight that sees his mistakes and their enormity; our historical sense can condone them as rooted in the limitations of his mental environment and in the harsh delusions of the age.

Piety sublimated poverty into a preparation for paradise.

A proper visitor, before saluting his hosts, saluted the icons first.

Commerce was favored in peace and wounded in war.

money is the last thing that a man should save.

The Church remained the real ruler of Russia, for the fear of God was everywhere, while Ivan’s reach was limited.

Byzantine, was ripe to die. But so rich had it been that—like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy—it was able, by its salvaged fragments and memories, to civilize its conquerors.

an admiring Moslem assures us, Rashidu’d-Din could give to his writing only the time between morning prayer and sunrise; however, there are cloudy days even in Azerbaijan.

For in Persia every other man wrote verses, and kings honored poets only next to mistresses, calligraphers, and generals.

Hafiz means rememberer; it was a title given to anyone who, like our poet, had memorized the whole Koran.

When warned that hostile forces were preparing to attack his capital, Shiraz, he remarked what a fool a man must be to waste so fair a spring on war.

Hafiz was one of those blessed and harassed souls who, through art, poetry, imitation, and half-unconscious desire, have become so sensitive to beauty that they wish to worship—with eyes and speech and fingertips—every fair form in stone or paint or flesh or flower, and suffer in stifled silence as beauty passes by; but who find, in each day’s fresh revelation of loveliness or grace, some forgiveness for the brevity of beauty and the sovereignty of death.

When he died his orthodoxy was so doubtful, and his hedonism so voluminous, that some objected to giving him a religious funeral; but his friends saved the day by allegorizing his poetry. A later generation enshrined his bones in a garden—the Hafiziyya—flaming with the roses of Shiraz, and the poet’s prediction was fulfilled—that his grave would become “a place of pilgrimage for the freedom-lovers of all the world.”

They ate gluttonously when supplies were plentiful, but they could bear hunger and thirst, heat and cold, “more patiently than any people in the world.”

27 He excused his harshness as needed in ruling a people not yet reconciled to law, and he justified his massacres as means of forcing disorderly tribes into the order and security of a united and powerful state. But, like all conquerors, he loved power for its own sake, and spoils for the grandeur they could finance.

on the northern border of his realm, he died. His last orders were that his troops should march

History is in some aspects an alternation of contrasting themes: the moods and forms of one age are repudiated by the next, which tires of tradition and lusts for novelty; classicism begets romanticism, which begets realism, which begets impressionism; a period of war calls for a decade of peace, and peace prolonged invites aggressive war.

We are too far away in space and years and thought to feel these grandeurs, and those who worship in them have little taste for our Gothic audacities or the sensual images of our Renaissance. Yet even we must be moved when, standing before the ruins of the Blue Mosque at Tabriz (1437–67), we recall its once famed glory of blue faïence and golden arabesques; and we are not unmindful that Mohammed II and Bajazet II raised at Constantinople (1463, 1497) mosques almost rivaling St. Sophia’s majesty.

To view it for the first time is like discovering the odes of Keats.

His treatise On Plague (c. 1360) contained a notable heresy: “It must be a principle that a proof taken from the Traditions” of the companions of Mohammed “has to undergo modification when in manifest contradiction with the evidence of the senses.” 53

History has for its true object to make us understand the social state of man, i.e., his civilization; to reveal to us the phenomena that naturally accompany primitive life, and then the refinement of manners... the diverse superiorities that peoples acquire, and which beget empires and dynasties; the diverse occupations, professions, sciences, and arts; and lastly all the changes that the nature of things can effect in the nature of society.

The true subject of history, says Ibn-Khaldun, is civilization: how it arises, how it is maintained, how it develops letters, sciences, and arts, and why it decays.61 Empires, like individuals, have a life and trajectory which are their own. They grow, they mature, they decline.62 What are the causes of this sequence?

There is no inherent inequality of potential ability among the peoples of the earth; their advancement or retardation is determined by geographical conditions, and can be altered by a change in those conditions, or by migration to a different habitat.

Economic conditions are only less powerful than the geographical. Ibn-Khaldun divides all societies into nomad or sedentary according to their means of getting food, and ascribes most wars to the desire for a better food supply.

Nomads may destroy a civilization, but they never make one; they are absorbed, in blood and culture, by the conquered, and the nomad Arabs are no exception.

His actual writing of history falls far short of his theoretical introduction;

and as he left the Shah a servant spread purifying sand to cover the Christian footprints that had polluted the Shi’a court.

the artist was interested in decoration rather than representation, and valued beauty, which, subjective, is sometimes attainable, more than truth, which, objective, always escapes.

Suleiman may have been saved by Luther, as Lutheranism owed so much to Suleiman.

Every government strives to extend its borders, partly to enlarge its resources and revenues, partly to create additional protective terrain between its frontiers and its capital.

The conscripted and converted sons of Christians formed most of the administrative staff of the central Turkish government.

“all that Ibrahim Pasha says is to be regarded as proceeding from my own pearl-raining mouth.”

This was one of the great friendships of history, almost in the tradition of classic Greece.

The institution of public baths, which the Persians seem to have taken from Hellenistic Syria, was transmitted to the Turks.

The story sank out of record for a while, but reappeared in the sixteenth century; and excited Europeans claimed to have seen Ahasuerus—as der ewige Jude or le Juif errant was now called—at Hamburg (1547 and 1564), Vienna (1599),Lübeck (1601),Paris (1644),Newcastle (1790), finally in Utah (1868). The

no man is a hero to his debtor.

They scorned the Christians as superstitious polytheists, a little slow of mind, mouthing gentle hypocrisies amid merciless brutalities, worshiping a Prince of Peace and repeatedly waging fratricidal wars.

Such legends of a bleeding Host were plentiful in late medieval centuries.

Nationalism added another note to the hymn of hate. Each nation thought it needed ethnic and religious unity, and demanded the absorption or conversion of its Jews.

Despite such edicts the general Christian public behaved toward the Jews with the good nature that actuates nearly all men, women, and animals when their purposes are not crossed.

It would be hard to find, before our time, or in all the records of savagery, any deeds more barbarous than the collective murder of Jews in the Black Death.

“My wife, my sons, and my books are far from me, and I am left alone, a stranger in a strange land.”

When we consider the similar efforts of Averroes and Thomas Aquinas to harmonize Mohammedanism and Christianity with Aristotle, we might almost say that the impact of Aristotle on medieval theologies inaugurated their disintegration and the transition from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason.

Civilization is a parasite on the man with the hoe.

Wealth was honored, thrift was lauded, work was encouraged as a virtue, interest was accepted as a legitimate reward for risking one’s savings.

It was some consolation that enforcement was rarely as severe as the law. Escape was easy; a kindly, bribed, or intimidated judge or jury let many a rascal go lightly punished or scot free. (“Scot” originally meant an assessment or fine.)

Virginity had to be protected by every device of custom, morals, law, religion, paternal authority, pedagogy, and “point of honor”; yet it managed to get lost.