CHAPTER IX 1314

As long as people want to do it, there is nothing they can't do. No pop-up update fast // - Leon Battista Alberti

The story begins in the late Middle Ages, and since that is the case, it is necessary to explain what the world was like at that time.

Overall, the human world in the fourteenth century can be divided into three parts: the Christian world, the Muslim world, and the Confucian world.

If there had been an alien in that era who was watching the Earth from the moon, his first impression of the Muslim world would have been much more impressive than that of Christendom. He will see a very large territory, and its territory is constantly expanding.

The earliest Muslims were the Arabs who united for the first time in the Arabian Peninsula under the leadership of the religious leader Muhammad. Many readers may not know much about Muhammad, but in a sense he is another version of Jesus. He thought he had been inspired by God to warn people that the "Last Judgment" was coming, that the faithful would go to heaven and that the punishment of evil would be hell. He asked the faithful to perform certain rituals, the "five pillars" of Islam (including daily prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca, etc.). These rituals, together with the precepts of the Qur'an, provide not only a religious belief, but also a social and political system. The believers felt that they were brothers with a common mission, which helped to unite the Arab nation, which was still scattered at the time.

After the death of Muhammad in 632, the Arabs rushed out of the peninsula and rapidly expanded into the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanids in the Middle East. It then expanded eastward all the way to China, and westward through North Africa into Spain. By the end of the first phase of Muslim expansion in 750, a vast Muslim empire had emerged in the world, stretching from the Pyrenees to India, from Morocco to China. Between 750 and 1500, the Muslims underwent a second phase of expansion. During this period, they moved westward into Central Europe, northward into Central Asia, eastward into India and Southeast Asia, and south into the interior of Africa, and the territory of the Muslim world doubled in size to far exceed the size of Christendom at the western end of Eurasia and the Confucian world at the eastern end.

At that time, the Arabs were the most qualified people to call their territory "tianxia" in terms of territory, and of course, I don't know if there was a word like "tianxia" in their language.

Speaking of the world, let's talk about the Confucian world. The Confucian world does not refer to China, but to the whole of East Asia, with China as the ruler and its periphery Korea and Japan as dependents.

The Confucian world is an inward-looking society based on agriculture. So the pace of change is very slow and confined to the basic structure inherited from earlier times. On the other hand, the Confucian world is very different from the other two worlds, and that is unity.

The puzzling minority groups of the various Balkan Christian groups in the Ottoman Empire, or the religious discord between Hindus and Muslims in the Mughal Empire, did not exist in China. This kind of cohesion in China is not a new phenomenon at that time, it has existed since the early stages of Chinese civilization thousands of years ago and has continued to do so. Chinese civilization is the oldest and uninterrupted civilization in the world.

The main reason for this long-lasting continuity of Chinese civilization is its geographical conditions, which are unparalleled in the world in terms of isolation from other great civilizations of mankind. The Mediterranean Sea connected Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and the Indian Ocean allowed India to interact with the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. But China, for most of its history, has been cut off by mountains, deserts and the vast Pacific Ocean. Now it seems that this isolation is probably a double-edged sword.

Finally, let's talk about Christendom in the West.

Unfounded national pride aside, objectively speaking, up to the twentieth century, most people on this planet would have taken it for granted that only Westerners could make historic reforms or discoveries that would change the course of human life and usher in a new era in world history. In fact, this view is completely unreasonable, Muslims and Chinese also have great seafaring traditions, and it is only in the early modern period that the pattern of the world has been reversed and changed.

For most of the Middle Ages, Western Europeans felt isolated and threatened at the western tip of Eurasia. The vast steppes that stretched across Eurasia in northern China to the Danube Valley were the most powerful armies on earth at the time—nomadic invaders: the Huns, Germans, Avars, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks—who used their unrivaled mobility to break into the heart of civilizations as soon as an empire weakened and gave them an opportunity.

However, in the early modern period, with the rise of a vibrant and new West, Westerners had the upper hand in technology, especially in weapons and shipbuilding, which gave Western Europeans the mobility and advantages enjoyed by nomads in the Eurasian steppes across the world's oceans.

In that era of change, the Islamic and Confucian empires were closed and more and more rigid. But in Western Europe, the Renaissance and the Reformation brought about profound changes in all aspects of Western European life. A new type of civilization full of vitality and expansionism, modern civilization, was born. It is fundamentally different from any other traditional, agriculture-based civilization on the planet. This process of modernization continues at an accelerated pace to the present day and shapes the course of the history of the modern world......

In 1314, it was also a summer. Rome, Italy.

Europeans in this age believe in everything. Whether it's fantasy, science fiction, fantasy, magic, if you set a table and tell a story, you might be able to name a group of believers.

God, evil gods, witchcraft, magic, alchemy, black technology, basically everything is studied, of course, you can't do more discordant things openly.

At that time, people could have tied up your teenage innocent daughter as a witch and burned them to death in order to be able to sleep soundly.

It was a time of fierce competition between the royal and clerical powers, a dark age, and the Inquisition had many charges that would sound unthinkable to modern people, such as "witches" and "heresy". Until a hundred years later, Europeans were still convicted in this way, and Joan of Arc was burned to death.

Speaking of burning, on March 18 of that year, the head of the Knights Templar, de Molay, was burned at the stake, and as mentioned above, this brother cursed two people before he died, one was Pope Clement V, who went to Yellow Springs on April 20 of the same year, and the other, Philip IV, was still alive in the summer.

It is said that he is a beautiful man, and he is also a king with some means, although he died mysteriously at the end of the year, but after all, he is still alive at this time.

So, while the old man was still alive, there was a great deal of mental pressure, and that was Molay's nephew, the young Count of Couchet de Beauge.

He had secretly inherited the position of Grand Master a few years ago, on the eve of Black Friday, and of course, this position has now become basically synonymous with wanted criminals.

Importantly, he fled France with some of his most trusted cronies and fled to Italy.

This pile of treasures, which he vowed to "hide until the end of the world", was like a curse that followed him, as if there was an unknowable force that caused those who had anything to do with this treasure to die one by one. In the months since the treasure was smuggled from the pillars of the tomb, several of the Count Beauge's cronies have died for various reasons. As I just said, people in that era were not so much firm in their beliefs as they were afraid of ghosts and gods, and the theory of evolution had not yet been proposed, so people always had to find some spiritual sustenance to explain those unexplainable things.

The Count carries a very heavy burden on his shoulders, the kind that cannot be put down, and the treasure is really a troublesome thing, which cannot be hidden, dare not be used indiscriminately, cannot be discovered, and cannot be carried forever. Mentally I also have to worry about whether I will be cursed to death.

It was under that pressure that he came to Rome.

That night, the Count came to an alley, which was so filthy that it smelled like a slaughterhouse, and perhaps there was a pig farm nearby? Who knows, in this kind of alley you can see all sorts of disgusting things, swarms of mung bean flies circling around a puddle of swill on the ground, drunken drunkards being thrown out of the bar, sleeping on the edge of a foul-smelling ditch and snoring, bullies beating thin old men, and even the women of the place of the wind and moon have rough skin and the smell of their armpits.

If a Roman man were to write an autobiography, he would have such a place in his mind when he tried to recall the worst night of his life.

The Count's dress was very low-key, but the manner in which he walked made him a little out of place, and he covered his face with a handkerchief to block out the unpleasant smells.

After searching for a long time, he finally came to his destination, which the Count had spent a lot of money to inquire about from the "well-informed" people in the city. It is said that the owner here can help you with all your problems.

It was a bookstore, covering a small area, with the word "pooks" painted on the walls very casually, the tattered wooden doors were hidden, and the shop was in this kind of area, which did not look like it would be patronized at all.

Seeing this, the earl wanted to retreat a little, hesitated for a while, he sighed, and thought to himself: Since you have come, let's go in and have a look.

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