Histories

"We cannot judge him [Richelieu] fairly unless we see him wholly, including features that will take form as we proceed. He was a pioneer of religious toleration. He was a man of wide and sensitive culture: a connoisseur of music, a discerning collector of art, a lover of drama and poetry, a helpful friend of men of letters, the founder of the French Academy. But history properly remembers him above all as the man who freed France from that Spanish dominance which had resulted from the Religious Wars and which, in the League, had made France a pensioner, almost a dependency, of Spain. He achieved what Francis I and Henry IV had longed and failed to do: he broke the cordon strangulaire with which Hapsburg powers had encircled France. (P. 494)"

"Like the others, he came from the middle class; the aristocracy is too interested in the art of life to spare time for the life of art."

"Christianity had come to Japan in 1549 in the person of one of the first and noblest of Jesuits, St. Francis Xavier. The little community which he established grew so rapidly that within a generation after his coming there were seventy Jesuits and 150,000 converts in the empire. They were so numerous in Nagasaki that they made that trading port a Christian city, and persuaded its local ruler, Omura, to use direct action in spreading the new faith. “Within Nagasaki territory,” says Lafcadio Hearn, “Buddhism was totally suppressed—its priests being persecuted and driven away.” Alarmed at this spiritual invasion, and suspecting it of political designs, Hideyoshi sent a messenger to the Vice-Provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, armed with five peremptory questions"

"The Argives ascribed the foundation of their city to Pelasgic Argus, the hero with a hundred eyes; and its first flourishing to an Egyptian, Danaus, who came at the head of a band of “Danaae” and taught the natives to irrigate their fields with wells. Such eponyms are not to be scorned; the Greeks preferred to end with myth that infinite regress which we must end with mystery."

"His [Montaigne's] loquacity is redeemed by quaintness and clarity; there are no shopworn phrases here, no pompous absurdity. We are so weary of language used to conceal thought or its absence that we can overlook the egoism in these self-revelations. We are surprised to see how well this amiable causeur knows our hearts; we are relieved to find our faults shared by so wise a man, and by him so readily absolved. It is comforting to see that he too hesitates and does not know; we are delighted to be told that our ignorance, if realized, becomes philosophy. And what a relief it is, after St. Bartholomew, to come upon a man who is not sure enough to kill! (p. 523)"

"What he [Richelieu] had above all was will. Few lives in all history have been so unified in their aim, so undeviating in its pursuit; the laws of motion could not be more constant. We must admire his devotion to his tasks, his wearing himself out in them through years of labor and nights without sleep. He dedicated those labors to those who could sleep without fear under cover of his sleepless care. We must concede him a surpassing courage, which faced powerful nobles and scheming women, stood them off, killed them off, dauntlessly, amid repeated plots against his life. He risked his head time and again on the issue of his policies.(p. 493)"

"The greatest of his [Rubens] portraits is that which he painted of himself in 1624 for the future Charles I: immense gold-tasseled hat, revealing only the great forehead of the bald head; penetrating eyes in quizzical glance; the long sharp nose that seems to go with genius; the bristling mustache and fine red beard; this is a man well aware that he is at the top of his craft. Yet something of the physical vitality, sensuous enjoyment, and calm content that had shone in the picture of himself with Isabella Brant has gone with the years. Only failure wears out a man faster than success. (P.593)"

"As long as he fears or remembers insecurity, man is a competitive animal. Groups, classes, nations, and races similarly insecure compete as covetously as their constituent individuals, and more violently, as knowing less law and having less protection; Nature calls all living things to the fray. In the broil of Europe between the Reformation (1517) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), this collective competition used religion as a cloak and a weapon for economic or political ends. When, after a century of struggle, the combatants laid down their arms, Christianity barely survived among the ruins. (P.424)"

"To minds frozen in the perspective of today, the royal absolutism desired by Richelieu seems but a reactionary despotism; in the view of history, and of the great majority of Frenchmen in the seventeenth century, it was a liberating progress from feudal tyranny to unified rule. France was not ripe for democracy; most of its population were ill-fed, ill-clothed, illiterate, darkened with superstitions and murderous with certainties. (p. 485)"

"[On the Spanish and French war of supremacy] We must not follow all the moves of that sanguinary chess; they add nothing to our knowledge or estimation of mankind. It was a contest of strength, not of principles, each side shelving religion for military victory: [Catholic] Richelieu financing Protestant armies in Germany against Catholic Austria, [Catholic] Olivares sending 300,000 ducats yearly to the Duke of Rohan to prolong the Huguenot revolt in France. In the end Spain was crushed; her power on the seas was ended by the Dutch in the battle of the Downs (1639), and her power on land was ended by the French at Roussillon (1642) and Rocroi (1643).(P.370)"

"He [Philip II] had done the best he could with an intelligence too cramped by education, too narrow for his empire, too inflexible for his diverse responsibilities. We cannot know that his faith was false; we only feel that it was bigoted and cruel, like almost all the faiths of the age, and that it darkened his mind and his people while it consoled their poverty and supported his pride. But he was not the ogre that the fervent pens of his foes have pictured. He was as just and generous, within his lights, as any ruler of his century except Henry IV. He was decent in his married life, loving and loved in his family, patient under provocation, brave in adversity, conscientious in toil. He paid to the full for his rich and damning heritage. (P.366)"

"The Duke [of Lerma, Philip III's minister] was a man of some benevolence, for he promoted nearly all his relatives to lucrative offices. He did not neglect himself; in his twenty years as chief minister he grossed so fat a fortune that popular resentment estimated it at the impossible sum of 44,000,000 ducats. (P.367)"

"The [Royal Palace] symbolized Philip’s power, the [Simple] room expressed his character. He tried hard to be a saint, but could not forget that he was a king."

"What was he [Richelieu] like, this Cardinal who was hardly a Christian, this great man who felt that he could not afford to be good? Philippe de Champaigne sent him down the ages in one of the most famous paintings in the Louvre: the tall figure saved from absurdity by raiment, given authority by red robe and hat, posing as if in some forensic plea, proclaiming his nobility in his clear-cut features and delicate hands, challenging his enemies with his sharp eyes, but pale with exhausting years and saddened with the consciousness of inexorable time. Here is the worldliness of power crossed with the asceticism of dedication. He had to be strong to keep his faults from defeating his purposes... He was (like most of us) vain of his appearance, avid of titles, resentful of criticism, eager for popularity. Jealous of Corneille, he wished to be known also as a dramatist and a poet; actually he wrote excellent prose, as his memoirs show. As readily as Wolsey he reconciled the following of Christ with a cautious attention to Mammon.(pp. 491-492)"

"But even perfection palls when it is long continued. Change is necessary to life, sensation, and thought; an exciting novelty may seem by its very novelty to be beautiful, until the forgotten old returns on the wheel of time and is embraced as young and new. So the Renaissance drove Gothic out of Italy as barbarous, until artists and patrons, irked by pretty proportions and cramping symmetry, and laughing like cathedral gargoyles at classic columns, architraves, and pediments, brought the Gothic spirit back in the exuberant irregularities and elaborations of baroque. (p. 340)"

"History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules. History is baroque. (p. 342)"

""Witches were burned, and Jesuits were taken down from the scaffold to be cut to pieces alive. The milk of human kindness flowed sluggishly in the days of Good Queen Bess." (p. 54)"

"It was an astonishing career. He [Rubens] was not the uomo universale of the Renaissance ideal; yet he realized his ambition to play a role in the state as well as the studio. He was not a universal artist, like Leonardo and Michelangelo; he left no sculpture, designed no building except his home. But in painting he reached high excellence in every field. Religious pictures, pagan revels, gods and goddesses, nudity and raiment, kings and queens, children and old men, landscapes and battle scenes all poured from his brush as from a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of color and form. Rubens ended the subjection of Flemish to Italian painting, not by rebellion, but by absorption and union. (P.595)"

"All the problems that disturb us today—the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the emancipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural supports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West—all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own."

"The historian, like the journalist, tends to lose the normal background of an age in the dramatic foreground of his picture, for he knows that his readers will wish to personify processes and events. Behind the rulers, ministers, courtiers, mistresses and warriors of France were men and women competing for bread and mates, scolding and loving their children, sinning and confessing, playing and quarrelling, going wearily to work, stealthily to brothels, humbly to prayer."

"[On Phillip II of Spain] Here is one of the strangest, strongest figures in history, fanatical and conscientious, hotly hated outside Spain, passionately loved within it, a challenge to any student struggling for objectivity. His ancestry was his fate: his father was Charles V, who left him a kingdom and an obligation to bigotry; his paternal grandmother was Juana la Loca, the insane daughter of Ferdinand the Catholic; mysticism and madness were in his blood, dogma and absolutism were in his heritage. (p 356-357)."

"Like most statesmen he thought of religion chiefly as an organ of social discipline, and regretted that the variety of human beliefs canceled half this good by the disorder of hostile creeds. To his completely political mind the traditional faith of the Japanese people—a careless mixture of Shintoism and Buddhism—was an invaluable bond cementing the race into spiritual unity, moral order and patriotic devotion; and though at first he approached Christianity with the lenient eye and broad intelligence of Akbar, and refrained from enforcing against it the angry edicts of Hideyoshi, he was disturbed by its intolerance, its bitter denunciation of the native faith as idolatry, and the discord which its passionate dogmatism aroused not only between the converts and the nation, but among the neophytes themselves. Finally his resentment was stirred by the discovery that missionaries sometimes allowed themselves to be used as vanguards for conquerors, and were, here and there, conspiring against the Japanese state. In 1614 he forbade the practice or preaching of the Christian religion in Japan, and ordered all converts either to depart from the country or to renounce their new beliefs. Many priests evaded the decree, and some of them were arrested. None was executed during the lifetime of Iyeyasu; but after his death the fury of the bureaucrats was turned against the Christians, and a violent and brutal persecution ensued which practically stamped Christianity out of Japan. In 1638 the remaining Christians gathered to the number of 37,000 on the peninsula of Shimabara, fortified it, and made a last stand for the freedom of worship. Iyemitsu, grandson of Iyeyasu, sent a large armed force to subdue them. When, after a three months’ siege, their stronghold was taken, all but one hundred and five of the survivors were massacred in the streets."

"What appears as his unfeeling cruelty was to him a necessity of rule: he took it for granted that men—certainly states—could not be managed by kindness; they had to be intimidated by severity. He loved France, but Frenchmen left him cold. He agreed with Cosimo de’ Medici that a state cannot be governed with paternosters, and with Machiavelli that the ethics of Christ cannot be safely followed in ruling or preserving a nation. “A Christian,” he wrote, “cannot too soon forgive an injury, but a ruler cannot too soon punish it when it is a crime against the state…. Without this virtue [of severity]—which becomes mercy insofar as the punishment of one culprit prevents a thousand from forgetting it—states cannot survive.” It was Richelieu who gave currency to the phrase raison d’état: i.e., the ethical code must give way to reasons of state.(p. 492)"

"[Henry VIII, Continued] The inner source of his deterioration was the repeated frustration of his will in love and parentage. Long disappointed in his hope for a son...here was a king possessing all England but denied the domestic joys of the simplest husband in his realm. Suffering intermittent agony from an ulcer in his leg, buffeted with revolts and crises throughout his reign, forced at almost every moment to arm against invasion, betrayal, and assassination—how could such a man develop normally, or avoid degeneration into suspicion, craft, and cruelty? And how shall we, who fret at the pinpricks of private tribulation, understand a man who bore in his mind and person the storm and stress of the English Reformation, weaned his people by perilous steps from a deeply rooted loyalty, and yet must have felt in his divided soul an erosive wonder—had he freed a nation or shattered Christendom? Danger, as well as power, was the medium in which he lived. He could never tell how far his enemies would go, or when they would succeed.(p. 727-728)"

"History is in some aspects an alternation of contrasting themes: the moods and forms of one age are repudiated by the next, which tires of tradition and lusts for novelty; classicism begets romanticism, which begets realism, which begets impressionism; a period of war calls for a decade of peace, and peace prolonged invites aggressive war. (P. 856)"

"[On England's Henry VIII] Born to royalty, he was surrounded from birth with obeisance and flattery; only a few men dared withstand him, and they were buried without their heads... This was the external source of Henry’s retrogression in character—that the absence of resistance to his will, after the death of More, made him as flabby in moral sense as in physique... sexual looseness was not his worst failing. He was greedy for money as well as for power, and seldom allowed considerations of humanity to halt his appropriations. His ungrateful readiness to kill women whom he had loved, or men who, like More and Cromwell, had served him loyally for many years, is despicable; yet in result he was not one tenth as murderous as the well-meaning Charles IX sanctioning the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or Charles V condoning the sack of Rome, or German princes fighting through thirty years for their right to determine the religious beliefs of their subjects. (p. 727-728)"

"Only by observing with what devout enthusiasm some of our contemporaries adopt economic heresies can we understand the fervor with which pious rebellious minorities followed, even to the stake, one or another turn of the religious revolution in the sixteenth century. (p. 508)"

"To all Christian governments Christianity was not a rule of means but a means of rule; Christ was for the people, Machiavelli was preferred by the kings. The state in some measure had civilized man, but who would civilize the state? (p. 303)"

"The “communism” that was now set up [by Anabaptists in Munster] was a war economy, as perhaps all strict communism must be; for men are by nature unequal, and can be induced to share their goods and fortunes only by a vital and common danger; internal liberty varies with external security, and communism breaks under the tensions of peace. (p. 513)"

"[On Luther] And yet his faults were his success. He was a man of war because the situation seemed to demand war, because the problems he attacked had for centuries resisted all the methods of peace. His whole life was a battle—against the sense of guilt, against the Devil, the Pope, the Emperor, Zwingli, even against the friends who would have compromised his revolt into a gentlemanly protest politely heard and carefully forgotten. What could a milder man have done against such handicaps and powers? No man of philosophic breadth, no scientific mind restricting belief to the evidence, no genial nature making generous allowances for the enemy, would have flung down so world-shaking a challenge, or would have marched so resolutely, as if in blinders, to his goal. If his predestinarian theology was as repugnant to reason and human kindness as any myth or miracle in the medieval faith, it was by this passionate irrationality that it moved the hearts of men, It is hope and terror that make men pray, not the evidence of things seen. It remains that with the blows of his rude fist he smashed the cake of custom, the shell of authority, that had blocked the movement of the European mind. If we judge greatness by influence—which is the least subjective test that we can use—we may rank Luther with Copernicus, Voltaire, and Darwin as the most powerful personalities in the modern world. More has been written about him than about any other modern man except Shakespeare and Napoleon. (p. 577)"

"Both the Inquisition and the witch-burning were expressions of an age afflicted with homicidal certainty in theology, as the patriotic massacres of our era may be due in part to homicidal certainty in ethnic or political theory. We must try to understand such movements in terms of their time, but they seem to us now the most unforgivable of historic crimes. A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind. (p. 288)"

"Nomad tribes sooner or later conquer settled communities because nomads are compelled by the conditions of their life to maintain the martial qualities of courage, endurance, and solidarity. Nomads may destroy a civilization, but they never make one; they are absorbed, in blood and culture, by the conquered, and the nomad Arabs are no exception. (p. 871)"

"Many of these legal or social taboos [of Puritan Republican England] proved too severe for human nature. We are told that a large proportion of the population under Cromwell became hypocrites, sinning as usual, pursuing money, women and power, but always with a long face, a nasal twang, and religious phrases dripping from the tongue."

"He [Hieronymus Bosch] is a man of the world who has survived his satirical rage, and can look upon life with the humor of one who will soon be out of the mess. He could not have painted these ghoulish fancies so skillfully if they had still possessed him. He stood above them, not so much amused as angry that humanity had ever harbored them. (P. 195)"

"Chaucer knew the faults, sins, crimes, follies, and vanities of mankind, but he loved life despite them, and could put up with anybody who did not sell buncombe too dearly. He seldom denounces; he merely describes. He satirizes the women of the lower middle classes in the Wife of Bath, but he relishes her biological exuberance. He is ungallantly severe on women; his mordant quips and slurs reveal the wounded husband revenging with his pen the nightly defeats of his tongue. Yet he speaks tenderly of love, reckons no other boon so rich, and fills a gallery with portraits of good women... For the most part his humor is healthy—the hearty, lusty, full-bodied humor of well-fed Englishmen before the Puritan desiccation, marvelously mixed with the sly subtlety of modern British wit.(p. 88)"

"Order is the mother of civilization and liberty; chaos is the midwife of dictatorship; therefore history may now and then say a good word for kings. Their medieval function was to free the individual in rising measure from local domination, and to centralize in one authority the power to legislate, judge, punish, mint, and make war. The feudal baron mourned the loss of local autonomy, but the simple citizen thought it good that there should be, in his country, one master, one coinage, one law. Men rarely hoped, in those half-illiterate days, that even kings might disappear, and leave no master but the laws and blunders that men had freely made. (P. 200)"

"Probably the business class was the least pious; as wealth mounts, religion declines... The failure of the Crusades had left a slowly fading wonder why the God of Christendom had permitted the victory of Islam, and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks refreshed these doubts... The recovery and publication of classical texts nourished skepticism by revealing a world of learning and art that had flourished long before the birth of that Christian Church which, at the Fifth Council of the Lateran (1512–17), had denied the possibility of salvation outside her fold... The discovery of America, and the widening exploration of the East, revealed a hundred nations that with apparent impunity ignored or rejected Christ, and had faiths of their own as positive, and as morally efficacious, as Christianity. Travelers returning from “heathen” lands brought some rubbing of strange creeds and rituals with them; these alien cults touched elbows with Christian worship and belief, and rival dogmas suffered attrition in the market place and the port. (P.40)"

"Religion normally thrives in an agricultural regime, science in an industrial economy. Every harvest is a miracle of the earth and a whim of the sky; the humble peasant, subject to weather and consumed with toil, sees supernatural forces everywhere, prays for a propitious heaven, and accepts a feudal-religious system... The city worker, the merchant, the manufacturer, the financier, live in a mathematical world of calculated quantities and processes, of material causes and regular effects; the machine and the counting table dispose them to see, over widening areas, the reign of “natural law.” (p. 38)"

"Chaucer’s Troilus is the first great narrative poem in English... All long poems, however beautiful, become dull; passion is of poetry’s essence, and a passion that runs to 8,386 lines becomes prose almost as rapidly as desire consummated. Never were so many lines required to bring a lady to bed, and seldom has love hesitated, meditated, procrastinated, and capitulated with such magnificent and irrelevant rhetoric, and melodious conceits, and facile felicity of rhyme. (p. 81)"

"The supreme figure in the Scandinavian dynasties of this age was Waldemar's daughter Margaret... Her prudence, tact, and courage astonished her contemporaries, who were accustomed to male incompetence or violence; and the feudal lords of Denmark and Norway, after dominating many kings, proudly supported this wise and beneficent queen. When Olaf came of age (1385) her diplomacy won for him the succession to the Swedish throne. Two years later he died, and her patient, far-seeing plans for the unification of Scandinavia seemed frustrated by his death. But the royal council of Denmark, seeing no male heir available who could match “Margrete” in ability to maintain order and peace, overrode Scandinavian laws against a woman ruler, and elected her Regent of the Realm (1387). Proceeding to Oslo, she was chosen Regent of Norway for life (1388), and a year later the Swedish nobles, having deposed an unsatisfactory king, made her their queen... No other European ruler of the age had so extensive a realm, or so successful a reign. (p. 201)"

"Science gives man ever greater powers but ever less significance; it improves his tools and neglects his purposes; it is silent on ultimate origins, values, and aims; it gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by death or omnivorous time. So men prefer the assurance of dogma to the diffidence of reason; weary of perplexed thought and uncertain judgment, they welcome the guidance of an authoritative church, the catharsis of the confessional, the stability of a long-established creed. (p. 25)"

"Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance. Now life is rarely agnostic; it assumes either a natural or a supernatural source for any unexplained phenomenon, and acts on the one assumption or the other; only a small minority of minds can persistently suspend judgment in the face of contradictory evidence. The great majority of mankind feel compelled to ascribe mysterious entities or events to supernatural beings raised above “natural law.” Religion has been the worship of supernatural beings–their propitiation, solicitation, or adoration. Most men are harassed and buffeted by life, and crave supernatural assistance when natural forces fail them; they gratefully accept faiths that give dignity and hope to their existence, and order and meaning to the world; they could hardly condone so patiently the careless brutalities of nature, the bloodshed and chicaneries of history, or their own tribulations and bereavements, if they could not trust that these are parts of an inscrutable but divine design. A cosmos without known cause or fate is an intellectual prison; we long to believe that the great drama has a just author and a noble end. (p. 25)"

"If religion had not existed, the great legislators—Hammurabi, Moses, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius—would have invented it. They did not have to, for it arises spontaneously and repeatedly from the needs and hopes of men. (p. 26)"

"If such arrangements [by the parents to try to find a mate for their children] left some adults still unmarried, several men might be pushed into a dark room with an equal number of girls, and be left to pick their life mates in the darkness; the Spartans thought that such choosing would not be blinder than love."

"We hope that this is not quite true; but it was unconsciously true for the old Japan. She died four years after Hokusai. In the comfort and peace of her isolation she had forgotten that a nation must keep abreast of the world if it does not wish to be enslaved. While Japan carved her inro and flourished her fans, Europe was establishing a science that was almost entirely unknown to the East; and that science, built up year by year in laboratories apparently far removed from the stream of the world’s affairs, at last gave Europe the mechanized industries that enabled her to make the goods of life more cheaply—however less beautifully—than Asia’s skilful artisans could turn them out by hand. Sooner or later those cheaper goods would win the markets of Asia, ruining the economic and changing the political life of countries pleasantly becalmed in the handicraft stage. Worse than that, science made explosives, battleships and guns that could kill a little more completely than the sword of the most heroic Samurai; of what use was the bravery of a knight against the dastardly anonymity of a shell?"

"Religion is the last subject that the intellect begins to understand. In our youth we may have resented, with proud superiority, its cherished incredibilities; in our less confident years we marvel at its prosperous survival in a secular and scientific age, its patient resurrections after whatever deadly blows by Epicurus, or Lucretius, or Lucian, or Machiavelli, or Hume, or Voltaire. (p. 24)"

"Throughout the fourteenth century the Church suffered political humiliation and moral decay. She had begun with the profound sincerity and devotion of Peter and Paul; she had grown into a majestic system of familial, scholastic, social, international discipline, order, and morality; she was now degenerating into a vested interest absorbed in self-perpetuation and finance. Philip IV [of France] secured the election of a Frenchman to the papacy, and persuaded him to move the Holy See to Avignon on the Rhone. For sixty-eight years the popes were so clearly the pawns and prisoners of France that other nations gave them a rapidly diminishing reverence and revenue. (p. 28)"

"Greek travelers marveled at a life so simple and unadorned, a franchise so jealously confined, a conservatism so tenacious of every custom and superstition, a courage and discipline so exalted and limited, so noble in character, so base in purpose, and so barren in result; while, hardly a day’s ride away, the Athenians were building, out of a thousand injustices and errors, a civilization broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to every new idea and eager for intercourse with the world, tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, innovating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free. It was a contrast that would color and almost delineate Greek history."

"From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day (p. 256)"

"Every empire passes through successive phases. (1) A victorious nomad tribe settles down to enjoy its conquest of a terrain or state. “The least civilized peoples make the most extensive conquests.” (2) As social relations become more complex, a more concentrated authority is required for the maintenance of order; the tribal chieftain becomes king. (3) In this settled order wealth grows, cities multiply, education and literature develop, the arts find patrons, science and philosophy lift their heads. Advanced urbanization and comfortable wealth mark the beginning of decay. (4) The enriched society comes to prefer pleasure, luxury, and ease to enterprise, risk, or war; religion loses its hold on human imagination or belief; morals deteriorate, pederasty grows; the martial virtues and pursuits decline; mercenaries are hired to defend the society; these lack the ardor of patriotism or religious faith; the poorly defended wealth invites attack by the hungry, seething millions beyond the frontiers. (5) External attack, or internal intrigue, or both together, overthrow the state. Such was the cycle of Rome, of the Almoravids and Almohads in Spain, of Islam in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia; and "it is always so" [According to the great Muslim historian, Ibn Khaldun] (P. 872)"