“YOU’VE BEEN DRINKING POISONED WATER FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH…”

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By now, all my friends, as well as a very large number of people who will never be my friends, know that I have a kind of gift for online brawls and battles. I once made carlanime laugh by remarking that there was something unnatural about having a great big online brawl without me. That was a joke; in point of fact I am not particularly happy about this

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Thanks for reminding me of serfdom in the Middle Ages - it points to another point in which the civilization of the eighteenth century had greatly degenerated from its ancestors. In the Roman Empire, slavery had been the norm; in its later years, it had effectively been extended to the whole class of cultivators by the reforms of Diocletian. However, by the twelfth century slavery had been reformed out of existence in Europe. Serfs were not slaves: they were tenants with obligatory, fixed dues to be paid to their landlord - dues which over the course of time were monetized and turned into pure rents. Medieval European society had no slaves. However, the concept was reintroduced in 1436, when the Portuguese, trading on the coast of West Africa, received a supposedly temporary permission from the Pope to trade in human beings. With the discovery of America in 1492, the trade in African slaves ballooned, while at the same time the rising autocracies of continental Europe, especially France and Russia, drove down the status of serfs in various ways. In Russia especially, serfs, who had been a variety of tenants in the first written Russian code, were reduced practically to slaves by Catherine II's rule, and were not coincidentally freed from their obligations at the same time as America was freeing her blacks with gunpowder. In this field, too, we observe how atrociously the Europe of absolutism - including even free commonwealths such as the USA - had degenerated from its medieval ancestry, and what a price it cost to recover our soul.