Frederic the Great and Napoleon did not
introduce new ideas into Europe; they attempted to revive medieval ideas
in a changing world. Austria in its annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Germany in its ambition to annex Belgium and the colonies
which other Powers have laboriously cultivated, are following their
example. They are not inventing new forms of criminality; they are not
returning to Pagan ideals: they are reverting merely to ideals which
were accepted throughout Europe for more than a thousand years. In the
more brutal features of war to which they have descended they are even
more emphatically reverting to the Middle Ages. The Romans did not
commit such outrages at the command of educated officers. Medieval
Christians did: the record of Papal warfare, down to the "Massacre of
Perugia" in 1859, is as deeply stained as any by these abominable
methods.
My further point, that the Christian Church or Churches made no serious
resistance to the prevailing brutality, is just as easy to establish. It
is a sheer travesty of argument to put forward the gentle exhortations
of a Francis of Assisi as characteristic of the Christian Church when
the Pope of the time, one of the most powerful and conscientious Popes
of all time, Innocent III, was threatening or directing the movements of
ferocious armies all over Europe.
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