Tamim Ansary

“Out of this constant interaction, a cultural uniformity emerged, as if the whole valley were, in a sense, a single enormous social constellation.”

“Egyptians needed the belief that could never be disproved in order to carry out projects requiring the coordinated efforts of thousands.”

“A doubter would have threatened the security of everyone. Hardly anyone wants to be that guy, the guy who threatens the security of everybody. Doubt threatens the social constellation's internal order.”

“Mesopotamia's many little city-states spawned an entrepreneurial individualism and a competitive pluralism that came to characterize both Islamic and European civilizations.”

“When a dike broke or a storm surge came downstream, there was no time to negotiate who should obey whom. A structure of authority had to be already in place.”

“But ideas rippled from tribe to tribe as neighbors dealt with neighbors who then dealt with further neighbors.”

“It was situated in an environment too harsh to support farming, or even herding.”

“By 2000 BCE, several overlapping trade networks were emerging in Eurasia and each was its own galaxy of cultural constellations.”

“But no, the Egyptians had plenty to trade but little incentive to go trading. They were so rich the world came to them.”

“They were oriented less toward their own hinterland and more toward the open waters, the lands they faced looking out.”

“The Cretan version of this event would probably be different if we but knew it.”

“But the Dorians must have felt related to the Mycenaeans, for the stories they told about their legendary past featured Mycenaean heroes, and for later Greeks, two such stories acquired a prestige comparable to that of scriptures in other cultures.”

“The monsoons made Southeast Asia a place where sailors from several worlds languished for months, rubbing shoulders and bumping back ends as they waited for the winds to change.”

“This consequently became one of the world's great pots of culture stew, a region where elements from India, China, East Africa, and Arabia sloshed together, resulting in a complicated fusion.”

“They had no written language.”

“Culturally, in Noctimes, sub-Saharan West Africa may have been one large social constellation, but the individual stars that comprised it are not now knowable.”

“Their migrations were slow because they were mostly a side effect of their environment.”

“In any given generation, they did not think of themselves as migrating. They were just farming, but their way of farming ensured that over time they would keep moving on to places where they had not yet been.”

“People who share such a narrative resist ideas and information that undermine their framework and welcome ones that enrich and confirm it.”

“Confucius made no claim to prophetic originality, only to scholarship.”

“Even thinkers who laid out alternatives to the Confucian system, as many did, made their argument within the framework he established.”

“society was a scheme of agreements among strangers.”

“Lies and broken promises threatened the order of the universe just as surely as droughts and crop failures did in a world of farmers.”

“In Babylon, the captive Hebrews had only their traditions, memories, and scrolls. The word, therefore, took the place of the temple.”

“Out of their own tribal history, the Jews forged a religious narrative capable of incorporating not just past historical events, but current and future ones.”

“Learned scholars called rabbis who were able to interpret this law became community leaders rivaling, and eventually superseding, priests.”

“His thinking resonated with his contemporaries because they were no doubt swimming in the same sea.”

“Philosophers who came after him didn't agree on his answer, but they agreed on his question.”

“Socrates and his ideas could not have gained traction in the Middle Kingdom.”

“When the governor's next order arrives, it might no longer fit the situation.”

“The speed at which a message could travel determined how big an area one authority could govern.”

“Out there, if an emergency comes up, people can't wait for orders. Someone closer to the scene has to make a decision.”

“The more links in a chain of transmission, the greater the message degradation.”

“With the same few phonemes, indivisible units of sound, people could make a virtually infinite number of words.”

“it meant that through the use of documents, one authority could govern people speaking many different languages.”

“a language that could cross cultural borders without the meanings changing.”

“In a social constellation, just as in the human brain, the center is not in any one place nor in some single human figure, but in the coherence of the whole”

“Credit thus came into existence before cash.”

“which obliged individuals under the rule of a particular king to use their own initiative, ingenuity, and resources to maintain the army that kept them ruled.”

“Whatever the king accepted as payment of taxes became currency”

“Among these captive peoples were the Judeans, who became the Jews during their captivity and wrote the books that made Babylon a synonym for cruelty and corruption, proving that in the long run, the pen really is mightier than the sword.”

“It's probably no coincidence that the political reach of the Persian emperors matched the territory permeated by these narratives.”

“a master narrative made the field a single whole, which gave the Persians something to conquer and hold. It's easier to grip a rock than a pile of pebbles.”

“Some have entered history because, like Cyrus, they caught a wave just as it was cresting. Others died unknown because their context gave them nothing to work with.”

“Persia grew about as big as it could for the master narrative that held it together and the technology it possessed.”

“It's true that they had no single ruler, but a single ruler can be overrated as a source of strength.”

“But the people of these many states shared a single network of thought.”

“an identity that included not Persian as a feature”

“At that distance from home, beyond the limits of the Persian narrative, Darius was not so great.”

“It fired up the Greeks, stoked their pride, and fueled the Golden Age.”

“They were a mustered group self, capable of forming an agenda.”

“They were not protagonists here. They were extras in a world historical story expanding from another center far away.”

“Chi Hoang Di and his ministers had burned the ancient classics, hoping to create a new world in their own image, but they didn't get all the books.”

“They could say no. They could veto anything the senate proposed. On the face of it, this system looked like one that could not possibly function on the face of a crisis.”

“an explicitly secular treaty between groups of people angling for a way to function as a social whole. No one said these laws derived from the gods.”

“the Romans did enshrine an abstraction as the highest authority in the land, higher than the Senate, higher than the councils, higher than any human being.”

“The Romans had no such genius to put in the field. All they had was their ungainly governing system”

“Say what you will, something about the Roman system seemed to work.”

“Rome was a super-militarized society.”

“They were living in the epic story of Rome itself, from which even the poorest of citizens apparently derived a sense of identity and pride.”

“Culture didn't need particular humans to carry it, so long as there were people living in between.”

“presumably without any single human being having made the journey”

“At the time, no one called it the Silk Road because no one realized there was any single thing deserving of a name, for the Silk Road wasn't actually one road but many, and no one really traversed the whole length and breadth of it.”

“They didn't know, or need to know, where those items had originated or how their local market was situated with respect to some planetary pattern.”

“Ideas don't drift about as single motes. They link together to form structured wholes, constellations of concepts. When they fit snugly as coherent parts of a larger structure, they resist fragmentation.”

“Constellations that originated in different cultures might bump together in an in-between zone and form new constellations of ideas, constellations that include elements from both originals and exclude ones that do not fit.”

“Buddhists started making sculptures of the Buddha to express, through his features and postures, the spiritual equanimity they sought. These Buddhist sculptures looked sort of Hellenic.”

“a new notion was born into Buddhism of certain exalted spiritual luminaries who made it right to the edge of nirvana, but instead of crossing over into bliss, paused down that line, and reached back to help others.”

“It was a joint venture, led by a bodhisattva steering a boat that was carrying many ordinary folks.”

“The ordinary person living an everyday life could inch closer to the ultimate goal just by helping and supporting the monks.”

“monasteries directed their capital into grand enterprises requiring more money than any one individual could afford.”

“Through the monasteries, therefore, ordinary Buddhists could invest their wealth directly in salvation, but indirectly in trade.”

“The two frameworks were incompatible and there was no larger framework that could incorporate the ideas of both Buddha and Zoroaster”

“unlike the Western world, the Chinese had no tradition of jealous gods demanding exclusive worship.”

“In China, the same person could practice Taoist rituals, bow to Confucian values, and burn incense to minor spirits inhabiting some particular place. They didn't have to choose.”

“Traders were the very people converting to Buddhism in ever greater numbers at this time, so Taoists and Buddhists were breathing the same air. Buddhism made slow headway in China as long as the Han emperors kept a strong grip on social reality.”

“In those conditions, Taoism found a growing audience, and as Taoism flourished, cultural space opened up in China for Buddhism too.”

“by the 4th century, Mithraism had died out completely, but not before imparting particles of itself to the Christian narrative that came later.”

“You have to fill your belly before you can indulge in spices, and the primal necessities could only be gotten from the urban agricultural civilizations of the great river valleys”

“Middlemen have to worry about consumers and producers trading with one another directly, so spice traders tended to keep producers and consumers ignorant of each other. They held their sources, routes, and destinations as closely guarded secrets. They told fanciful stories about the hardships and dangers of getting the products they were selling.”

“Many a good man must have died bringing this spice to market. No wonder it cost so much. Herodotus got this from a reliable source, some spice trader, no doubt.”

“Because they were so inherently rootless, spice traders developed cultural styles distinct from those of the sedentary people with whom they traded. They tended to favor portable gods, associated more with ideas than places.”

“Judaism as such could not have spread throughout the Roman world because it was a belief system tied explicitly to a particular group of people.”

“To feel included in the Jesus movement, you just had to get baptized and believe in Jesus. Anyone who wanted to could join.”

“Christianity emerged right where these two apparently contradictory narratives overlapped. It represented a synthesis that took some themes from each and rejected some that didn't fit.”

“First, it fit in well enough with the Greco-Roman idea that the secular and the divine both existed but were separate spheres.”

“For them, by the start of the Common Era, the pagan narrative described a world without meaning.”

“The state could launch horrific stories but could not control what people heard when those stories reached them.”

“The very steps the Roman state took to erase Christianity instead fueled its growth.”

“It's not with physical weapons that one narrative beats another. It's with meaning-making prowess.”

“As Roman society grew ever more bloated on slavery and inequity, its bureaucratic apparatus lost coherence. Meanwhile, the Christian network kept developing. Christians took care of their own.”

“For its own people, the Christian network gradually took on some of the functions of government. As the life force of pagan Rome rotted from within, Christianity flowed into its exoskeleton.”

“admitted he could govern his far-flung empire more effectively with the administrative apparatus built by the Christians than with the rusting machinery left over from ancient Rome.”

“In 395, Emperor Theodosius went that one final step and outlawed paganism.”

“In converting to Christianity, Constantine not only turned the Christian network into his own Roman bureaucracy, he also made himself, in effect, the head of the Christian church.”

“when doctrinal disputes threatened the unity of the global Christian community, the emperor himself called a council of bishops and charged them with deciding what Christians believed.”

“When Ulphilas used Gothic words to express Christian ideas, he produced a Bible subtly different from the one used by the churches of Rome and Constantinople.”

“People who lived through the fall of Rome didn't know Rome was falling. They just thought Rome was changing.”

“The community of Islam was a metatribe that anyone could join by simply embracing its core doctrine”

“If you wanted to join, all you had to do was say the words.”

“The Chinese translators had to render Buddhist texts into Chinese using terms that already existed in the Chinese script. These terms all had established meanings and connotations”

“Inevitably, Chinese Buddhism absorbed some of the flavors of Taoism and imparted various subtle flavors back. Out of this blushing came Chan Buddhism, a uniquely Chinese version of a faith born in India.”

“Every world history is really a somebody-centric story framed by a master narrative that puts itself at the center.”

“Most of the monads knew of the other monads, but situated them as peripheral regions of what it saw as the world, which is to say, as peripheral parts of itself.”

“But Buddhist themes had worked their way so thoroughly into the Chinese aesthetic that they had become invisible.”

“Political fragmentation did not mean cultural fragmentation.”

“No governments ordained this system. No authority figures organized or controlled it. The culture itself generated these interlocking puzzle pieces, which performed somewhat the same function here as guilds later did in other societies.”

“These prescriptions and proscriptions were probably knocking about as part of Hindu oral tradition. But now that they were written down, they tended to set caste and concrete as an institution.”

“No one saw it as heresy, because heresy had no meaning in a universe defined by multiplicity. This social milieu, however, put the very coherence of Buddhism at a disadvantage.”

“The Buddhist narrative could not absorb motley Hindu sects and still be Buddhism. Hinduism, by contrast, was big, diverse, adaptive, open, and absorptive.”

“Hinduism didn't defeat Buddhism or drive it out so much as digest it”

“Indians could tolerate political fragmentation because they derived unity from that vast web of ideas known only later as Hinduism.”

“But if ever-increasing interconnection is an important through-line of history, there is nothing trivial about translation.”

“Muslim intellectuals were the first ones in a position to make direct comparisons among the ideas of the great Chinese, Indian, Greek, and Persian thinkers. They were uniquely situated, therefore, to start asking the question, how could all of these things be true?”

“Let's get everything anyone knows about this subject into a single book so we can compare, was the impulse.”

“When Muslim scholars delved into Greek thought, they weren't looking to meet the Greeks halfway. They were studying how Greek thought might help them complete the Islamic model of reality.”

“They understood their model of the world to be not some model, but the world itself. That's everyone's understanding of their own model.”

“The church secured the authority to decide who was and was not part of the church.”

“The overarching framework offered by the Catholic Church gave Western Europe a cultural unity that offset its political fragmentation.”

“Whatever the original reason, the jaguar was picked early, and so it held on. That's how it goes with narratives.”

“Once a kernel forms, new kernels adhere to it, because once a framework has coalesced, it shapes the judgments and values of people living within it.”

“A cultural framework becomes a screening device that allows a narrative to continue inventing itself in its own image.”

“Why did this happen? What made the table tilt? No single answer will do. History is never about single answers.”

“launching a dramatic struggle between two great world historical narratives, a struggle that remains unresolved to this day.”

“These weren't a bunch of different stories unfolding in a bunch of different worlds. It only looks that way if you think of history as the story of what happened in urban civilizations. If you include the pastoral nomads as part of the single human story, then all these dramas were happening in one region of the world, the long perimeter of the central Eurasian steppes.”

“These fluctuations weren't enough to make much noticeable difference in the South, but in the far north, at the extreme edges of human habitation, even such slight degree changes had outsized effects. People living on the edge went over the edge.”

“From the 8th to the 11th centuries, the environment worked Scandinavia like a bellows. It let the population grow, then clamped down and blew out boatloads of predatory warriors with nothing to lose.”

“Their values, myths, stories, and ideas fleshed with the Germanized, Christianized, Roman, Greek culture already in place. In this process, the Viking ingredients went through some predictable modifications.”

“The Norse believed in figures they called elves, man-sized, rather menacing creatures with supernatural powers. These became ever smaller and cuter and more harmless as the Vikings became Christianized.”

“So the children of the Rus were often born of Slavic mothers and grew up connected to their mother's culture, speaking Slavic languages. Within a few generations, the Rus had vanished into a Slavic-speaking local aristocracy without much connection to their distant cousins in Scandinavia.”

“with the Bible as their gateway book, these former pagans became a literate society, just as the Goths had done earlier in Western Europe.”

“The rise of Russia compressed the Central Asian grasslands, setting off ripple effects that were felt across thousands of miles of territory.”

“Somehow their royal masters imagined that these boys would be as loyal to them as sons to fathers. Somehow it never quite worked out that way.”

“It didn't matter that the new raiders were also Turkish. Rulers had to keep out raiders or they'd be goners themselves. Strangely enough, the new rulers went about this in the same way as the old rulers.”

“But what these new Turkish Muslims favored was a rough-and-ready warrior's version of Islam. The subtle similarities between Greek philosophy and Islamic theology made them yawn. These warlords leaned more toward Islam as a book of rules and a corps of experts to interpret those rules and a cadre of armed officials to enforce them.”

“The cosmopolitan curiosity of the past, which had led Muslim intellectuals to the edge of science began to wane. What the disruptions fueled instead was theology, mysticism, poetry, and war.”

“Sultan Mahmud claimed to be serving God with his Indian forays, for he was destroying pagan idols”

“The Turks were always, however, a militant Muslim minority trying to rule an overwhelmingly more numerous native Hindu majority. From this time forward, two narratives occupied the same geographical space and stubbornly refused to blush, perhaps because their core doctrines were mutually exclusive.”

“these dramas loom large in the world historical narratives of China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe. From the panoramic point of view, however, they look like a single interwoven drama that began in northern Europe, rippled through the Asian steppes, created disruptions in the urban civilizations along the whole perimeter of that region”

“During this process, the physical goods didn't have to move with each trade. As the dealmakers were all in the same place, they only had to keep track of their agreements.”

“An agreement by one party to pay another party a set price at some future time for a set quantity of a product that didn't yet exist allowed both parties to do business in accordance with the financially predictable future. And that meant more business got done, because business is mostly about the future, not about today.”

“But at least all had a place to live, a job to do, a social constellation to be a part of, and thus a way for their lives to be meaningful. If fewer people could produce all the food needed to keep the whole society fed, some number of people were going to be surplus labor, which is to say they'd be out of work.”

“Even as Europe's productivity increased, therefore, so did the number of displaced people.”

“This institution sopped up some of the excess beggars while helping steep society even more thoroughly in the Catholic narrative.”

“There were Christians in the world who were not part of Christendom.”

“All of these details added up to a dividing line.”

“This showdown revealed something crucial. Both men could not possibly have the authority to excommunicate. It had to be one or the other.”

“The otherness of this other helped reinforce Western European's sense of their Christianity as a special bond.”

“The pilgrims went home with many a resentful horror story to tell.”

“Now with the invasions waiting and peace on the rise, the knights of Europe were all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

“All Christendom needed now was a great enterprise to fund.”

“A thrill ran through Christendom at the prospect of uniting as one to achieve a single apocalyptic goal, recover the Holy Lands.”

“Walter the Penniless and Peter the Hermit led a motley mob of beggars and unemployed townsfolk east to Asia Minor, where bemused Seljuk warriors casually wiped them out.”

“Honorable bankers paid whoever presented a note that bore their signature, in part because bankers who wouldn't honor their own signatures probably didn't stay in business long.”

“a well-regarded banker's note might go on circulating indefinitely as if it were the specified quantity of gold. In fact, it might never come back. It might simply turn into money, a new kind of money, a banknote.”

“Bankers quickly recognized how much easier it was to multiply 8,976 by 125 using the long division algorithm of the Muslim world than it was to multiply MMMCMLXXVI by CXXIV.”

“They could trust the Templars because the church itself guaranteed their honesty.”

“The money could not be stolen by thieves because nothing was moving except information.”

“Money was not actually a thing. Money was information. It all came down to accounting.”

“Commercial considerations had started to complicate the religious idealism of the Crusades.”

“But all those impregnable defenses were irrelevant when the knights of the Fourth Crusade came knocking, because these guys were not the enemy.”

“When rumors of this storm first reached Europe, many Christians rejoiced.”

“They thought a mighty force was coming to their aid. They thought it was Prester John, a mythical king of Christian lore.”

“And now he was coming. Except he wasn't.”

“By the time the Mongols had eviscerated Russia, Europeans realized that these were not the other Christians. Joy turned to dread.”

“The Pope had previously sent envoys to Genghis Khan proposing a grand alliance. Now he sent missives pleading for mercy.”

“Europe was saved by a fluke.”

“The top Mongol leaders put the conquest of Europe on hold while they rushed back to Mongolia to work out which of them would now be the Grand Khan.”

“It took two years to sort out the succession”

“In 1260, the Mamluks met the Mongols at a place called Ain Jalut and stopped them in their tracks.”

“Given the technology of the time, it had surely reached its absolute administrative limit.”

“But the bottom line is, they did it.”

“What had been for centuries a loose collection of regional trade networks now became a single busy web of traffic that spanned much of the eastern hemisphere.”

“So parasites come to an accommodation with the higher life forms within which they live, the parasites grow less virulent and the host species builds up a biological tolerance.”

“It went mostly unnoticed there because it no longer killed people very much.”

“An infected flea hitchhiking in the saddlebag of such a horseman would end up a thousand miles away from its point of origin before it died.”

“The disease turned virulent there, as disease does when it finds new hosts to prey upon.”

“it happened because the Mongols had produced such a spike in Eurasian interconnectedness.”

“At the time, however, it's safe to say that no one in Europe made a connection between the Mongols and the plague.”

“unlike a military invasion, an epidemic doesn't damage infrastructure.”

“paid workers had unprecedented bargaining power.”

“This sort of mobility had been illegal in Europe since the days of Roman Emperor Diocletian, but now lords were powerless to stop it.”

“It didn't last as patriarchal institutions pushed back”

“Unprecedented ideas began to be heard among women.”

“Europe came out of the pandemic as Earth's most volatile social landscape.”

“The Tang didn't have any real need for guns.”

“Europe was not a single empire, but a multitude of distinct, autonomous, more or less evenly matched political states competing with one another, about 500 of them in the year 1000.”

“If some weapon gave one state a slight edge, Its rivals quickly adopted the same technology to stay even.”

“many with no job skills outside of violence.”

“if money made the difference in war, the new elites would be the people most adept at making money.”

“a man could make his fortune by building a better gun.”

“they took no deep interest in the time of day.”

“And if the clock was competing with time of prayer, the clock was bound to lose.”

“In China, movable type technology went nowhere because the Chinese script is not alphabetical.”

“Communities of reading and learning and intellectual discussion formed around monasteries with good collections of books.”

“Any new fatwa had to fit in with all previous fatwas, and once it was issued and accepted by scholarly consensus, all future opinions had to fit in with it.”

“Islam had no formal structure of authority, no bishops, no pope, no one to certify that any particular person had the authority to issue a ruling.”

“the university was a constellation of ideas that could hold together as it moved across borders.”

“a certificate called a baccalaureate, which is Latin for beginner.”

“His argument said nothing against God, mind you. It merely didn't mention God.”

“They were just adding more stars to the constellation, filling in the picture, as it were.”

“the questions people ask shape the kinds of answers they come up with.”

“They didn't realize that talking about something other than God implied that something other than God existed.”

“the threat to the feudal Catholic constellation that was germinating within the bosom of the church itself.”

“when people fixated on observation, they began to spot little things that didn't quite add up.”

“A society's ideas about those lights tended to reflect the narrative that gave its world meaning.”

“Each time a new glitch was found, another disk was added.”

“But it couldn't be disputed because it worked almost perfectly, almost being the key word here.”

“It aided the construction of a monolithic other.”

“The more binary the two sides, the stronger the identity shared among Europeans.”

“They didn't have to do any actual crusading to feel pride of ownership in the heroic quest.”

“Only a minority actually went east to fight, but everyone knew there was an east to go to in a war to fight.”

“An identity shaped by the otherness of the other gains coherence by eliminating all traces of the other from itself.”

“the emerging constellation needed witch-hunting to help construct itself.”

“Spain needed to function as the spearhead of the Catholic cause, which required a permanent other against which to rally.”

“The Jews could not be allowed to escape their otherness simply by converting.”

“But they didn't manage to replace the master narratives of the people they had conquered with a narrative of their own.”

“Their system did not provide enough resonant meaning once the Mongols were no longer pastoral nomads”

“as the Mongol Empire weakened, local populations firmed up their own identities by closing ranks against the invasive other.”

“going easy on the Orthodox Church, which they saw as the harmless opiate that kept the conquered people sedated. In Russia, therefore, an Orthodox Christian identity emerged even before a Russian national political identity.”

“It was under Mongol rule then that Russia became Russian”

“But in the rubble left behind by the Mongols, it was easy to mythologize and imagine past as real and enshrine the restoration of that past as the fundamental project of civilization itself.”

“The restoration narrative looked different from one society to another because each had a different past to restore, but the fundamental impulse was much the same.”

“Scholars derived their authority from their mastery of the known, not their explorations of the unknown.”

“Plenty of people wanted to be part of a constellation that held its shape. They wanted a future that was predictable.”

“The Hongwu Emperor pursued his project with such bloodshed and brutality that he actually exacerbated the hunger he was bidding to alleviate. But that only helped his successors consolidate his work.”

“Their traumatized society wanted to get back to normal, and back to normal fell right in line with put things back the way they were. In this context, the restoration narrative had profound meaning-making power.”

“The exams did not reward innovative interpretations.”

“Those who went through the school system graduated with the same skill set and the same worldview.”

“the Ming centuries saw no important new scientific or technological breakthroughs to speak of.”

“In this milieu, innovation did not enjoy prestige. The unheard of was best not heard of again.”

“If all else failed, current scholars could exercise ijtihad, or free reasoning, but they could resort to this only if all else had failed.”

“But a structure made up of specific regulations about specific matters works only in a world that never changes.”

“The fact that things kept changing only meant that perfection had not yet been restored.”

“Both were inherently conservative in that new rulings could not overthrow old rulings. They had to fit in with rulings of the past.”

“The scholars legitimized the rulers. The rulers protected the scholars. One hand washed the other.”

“held together by a fabric of ideas and lifeways that seemed, from the inside, universal.”

“The inhabitants of Dar al-Islam had every reason to believe their world was the world.”

“They had different answers to life's great questions, but they had the same questions.”

“A major question of the age was Sunnism or Shiism? It couldn't be both.”

“In the neighboring Mughal world, a great question was Islam or Hinduism? It couldn't be both.”

“People argued, but they knew what they were arguing about.”

“there was no reason to doubt that each society's restoration narrative was not just a model of the world, but was the world.”

“In the year 1500, restoring the past didn't have much appeal in Europe.”

“And the further back you went, the worse it got.”

“Today was usually better than yesterday, so why shrink from tomorrow? In this context, discovery had glamour.”

“Disruption smacked of adventure and innovation gained prestige, a prestige it was losing in the further east.”

“But the Black Death loosened the grip of the master narrative entrenched here for seven centuries.”

“People had done everything the church recommended, and still they kept dying.”

“The power of the feudal church came from its monopoly on access to heaven. If people could get to the coveted afterlife on their own, they wouldn't need the Catholic Church and its narrative anymore.”

“A narrative rendered unnecessary is a dead man walking. Its lifeblood starts to ebb from the moment its relevance, not its accuracy, but its relevance comes into question.”

“Incompatible ideas threatened the coherence of the constellation. And if the social constellation lost coherence, all its human parts stood to lose their identity.”

“But as the Crusades began to wane, indulgences devolved into something more like a purely commercial product.”

“Works are visible. Anyone can see whether a person is praying and whether or not he or she is doing it correctly.”

“No outside observer can know if a person has faith.”

“In fact, if faith trumped works, they couldn't even know who was getting in.”

“And if the officers of the church were not the instruments of grace, but mere building managers, they were no different than the janitors who kept the church clean”

“There was no way the church could keep Scripture locked up. The Bible was going to get out there.”

“And as religious information poured into Christian society from a variety of competing sources, all the static made the master narrative of the past hard to even see.”

“It wasn't a case of this church versus that church. It was fundamentally about one monolithic church versus everybody building his or her own church.”

“which established the interesting principle that secular rulers would henceforth decide which version of Christianity would be practiced in their secular realm.”

“The trailblazers of science were men of the church, one and all.”

“he thought God's creation must reflect God's perfection.”

“What they shared was not a faith, but a restless appetite for a truth that felt more true, a willingness to try something new.”

“In this narrative, time was linear but had no end point.”

“What was slippage and what was forward motion might be open to argument, but progress was the ultimate goal of human effort, and there was no final destination.”

“Eventually, it generated the conviction that explaining something scientifically was exactly the same thing as explaining it.”

“Today, that title vests Prince Henry with the image of a man driven by curiosity, an early modernist, a proto-scientist almost. That's not how he thought of himself.”

“Henry was a man of his times, and his times were the late stages of the long crusades.”

“Actually, Columbus was wrong and everybody else was right”

“No one in Europe had any inkling of the two enormous continents that stretched across that passage from pole to pole.”

“The Catholic monarchs were looking around for an enterprise equal to their grandeur.”

“He thought he'd reached India. Later, when he reached Cuba, he thought it was Japan.”

“If we don't start the calendar there, it's only because dating systems around the world were too firmly entrenched by the time Columbus set sail.”

“Was it because Columbus symbolized the heroism of a man sticking to his beliefs against the world of naysayers. Nope.”

“But these earlier voyages lacked epochal significance because they didn't launch much of anything.”

“As for the Vikings, they came, they saw, they left. End of story.”

“After Columbus made a seminal voyage, bankrolling an expedition to the West was no longer a roll of the dice. It was a business decision. Something was over there.”

“Columbus matters because he came to America just as Western Europe was poised for the greatest growth spurt of any cultural region in history.”

“They were victors living in an epic story, eager to incorporate the whole planet into their vision of the world”

“To his triumvirate, however, I would add one more term, narrative. Of these four factors, germs were no doubt the most decisive.”

“Disease leapt ahead of explorers, conquerors, and missionaries, for everyone was connected, though most had no inkling of it.”

“as is reliably the case, success confirmed their narrative. If they weren't so right, how could they be such winners?”

“Their solidarity and certainty made them all that much more formidable”

“Surely, for the natives of America, the world stopped making sense.”

“In Europe, when the Black Death was rampaging across the land, there was not another coherent narrative pressing in on Europeans, asserting itself as an alternative to their own crumbling belief system.”

“There was no rival narrative competing with the one they were constructing. Native Americans, however, had no such luxury.”

“Every day, in every way, material reality told them they were wrong and the strangers were right, for they were dying like ants and the newcomers were walking through horror untouched.”

“Yes, technically, the natives could abandon their own ways, accept baptism, and join the church. Many did. But this didn't make them the fellow Christians of the conquistadors.”

“The narrative they were joining assigned to them the role of stud worker.”

“Native Americans faced quite a challenge constructing a healthy sense of self within this framework.”

“It didn't just clip short a history, it destroyed a universe of intertwined narratives”

“They didn't put much money into building up Spanish productivity because why go to the bother of making stuff when you can just go out and buy it and have it delivered?”

“But the social system wasn't set up to distribute the silver evenly. Instead, the rich got much richer.”

“In the long run, limitless supplies of silver didn't end up making Spain richer or more powerful than its neighbors, because it was not invested in ramping up Spanish productivity.”

“In effect, the silver was invested in England, France, and the Netherlands.”

“Inflation raises prices only where the number of items made and exchanged remains fixed.”

“Wherever the influx of silver fueled more energetic production and commerce, society absorbed the silver and grew more powerful from it.”

“Instead of buying what they found and looking for markets, they found markets, took orders, and contracted to have the products manufactured”

“But that also meant that women's contributions to the economy were hidden from public view.”

“Not only did mercantile companies place orders, but they increasingly supplied patterns, delivered raw materials, specified quantities, and dictated designs.”

“In this emerging system, producers and consumers never met. The merchants were the only people in contact with both ends, so they gained control of the whole production process.”

“because in the feudal framework an odor of moral criticism was attached to the landless rich.”

“This fit right in with the progress narrative, which conferred ultimate meaning and purpose upon doing better every day, gaining ground, having more.”

“Profit was different. Profit had no ceiling.”

“People had to believe their king was a king. If they didn't, he wasn't.”

“Royals had to generate the illusion of power in order to carry out the operations needed to secure the power they already seemed to have”

“men able to create an illusion of wealth that would hold together long enough for the wealth to actually materialize.”