Source: Law & Liberty
by James Hankins
“The present period of American history reminds me of nothing so much as the middle of the fourteenth century in Europe. This is not a consoling parallel. That period was marked by a general loss of faith in the great universal institutions of the medieval period — the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire; by the rise of a new and formidable external enemy — the Ottoman Turks … by a ‘forever war’ known as the Hundred Years War, the longest war in history; by the first great international banking failure in 1343, when King Edward III of England couldn’t pay his Italian creditors; by the inability of states to protect themselves from violent predators — the ‘great companies’ of unemployed soldiers who ravaged Italian city-states in the period; and most of all by the greatest pandemic in history, the Black Death.” (09/11/24)