Transcription
Meet John Philpot. He was an obscenely wealthy 14th-century merchant in London. Basically, the closest we can get to a medieval Jeff Bezos.
1378 was not a good year for the English government, or really England as a whole. The last few decades of King Edward III's reign had been a disaster. And now Richard II was sitting on the throne. Easily one of the worst and most incompetent English kings in the Middle Ages. England was also at war with France at this point. And so, the English Channel wasn't safe for merchant ships. Spanish pirates were raiding the coast. And the king, who may or may not have been pretty severely mentally ill, was basically doing nothing.
So, our boy Philpot is like, "I've got a bunch of money and influence, and also I'm a G. If the king isn't going to solve this, I'll solve it." So, he just went ahead and kitted out his own naval squadron of a thousand men, went out onto the high seas himself, and hunted the pirates down. I have to emphasize that he was out there fighting like Russell Crowe and Master and Commander. Like, this is crazy stuff.
So, this all-English badass, John Philpot, ended up capturing 15 ships and pretty much single-handedly saved the English marching fleet. But in an unbelievable twist, when he got home, the government tried to arrest him for fighting without the king's permission. His response to this incredible accusation was actually written down, and it was pretty ice cold. He said, "I expose myself and my property for the safety and deliverance of our country since you would not lift a hand in its defense."
It didn't stop there either, cuz Philpot paid out of pocket to clean the city ditches in London to prevent disease. He built stone towers along the Thames to protect the city. Compare that to the other Jeff, our good friend Jeffrey Bezos, who asked the city of Rotterdam to dismantle a 140-year-old historic bridge just so his $500 million super yacht could fit through it to reach the ocean. So, you have Philpot building infrastructure to save his neighbors, and then you have Bezos asking to destroy it for his own convenience.
Somehow, we went through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution just to end up back in this incredibly unbalanced medieval society, which means we should do some studying to understand the medieval mind. So, first, let's talk about what they inherited. We think now of history in these neat little eras, which I always thought was a little funny. Obviously, the actual chronology of our ancestral past is extremely messy and it's all interconnected and overlapping, which means that medieval Europe didn't just appear out of thin air. They were the heirs to a continuous line of civilization that stretched back thousands of years. They took from the Romans, who took from the Greeks, who took from the Egyptians, who took from the Mesopotamians.
So, let's start with the Mesopotamians and see if we can do a speedrun to understand money, power, and respect. The idea of a small, ultra-wealthy, aristocratic class ruling everything actually predates history. The earliest Mesopotamian tablets archaeologists have ever found already talk about an established rich elite. Anatomically modern humans have roamed the earth for about 300,000 years. But it wasn't until around 10,000 BC that we figured out how to farm. And the first complex urban settlements didn't spring up until about 3,000 BC. So now you have these self-sustaining societies, which means you get specialized classes: priests, merchants, craftsmen, and these wealthy aristocrats.
But in these early civilizations, wealth was obviously about having a lot of stuff. You wanted to have a big stockpile of shiny things to impress the yals. But being rich was also a role in society. In ancient Mesopotamia, the rich aristocrats considered themselves to be the shepherds of the people. From a modern perspective, I think that feels a little patronizing, and it definitely was, because it implies the commoners are like these dumb sheep who need to be managed. But it made for an effective social contract. Even the king's legitimacy as a political leader was directly tied to his ability to uphold justice and protect the poor. And if he wasn't doing that, there were big problems.
In the epilogue of the Code of Hammurabi, which was written sometime around 1750 BC, the king Hammurabi says he was commanded by the gods to make justice appear in the land, to destroy the evil and the wicked that the strong might not oppress the weak. To all my Bible readers, this might sound familiar, because King David expresses the same idea a lot in the Psalms, which is that with great power comes this divine debt to the vulnerable. Also, just a fun fact, my first ever AOL Instant Messenger screen name when I was in middle school was Hammurabi 1782 for some reason. So, even back then, I was already a soft little nerd.
Now, I know what you're thinking. "But, John, there were other social structures that existed in the ancient world. What about Athens? What about the Roman Republic?" Well, I would say those are the exceptions that prove the rule, which is why you can literally name them off the top of your head. I will admit that in the Roman Republic, there was this brief shining moment where the new rich and the old rich had to actually share power and answer to the public. I think a big part of what made Rome different in this regard from what we have today was actual public accountability. If you were an elite Roman, you had to, I don't know, earn your status. You couldn't just be rich. You gained your reputation through public service and building temples and leading armies. And this was a thing rich people did all the way up until super recently. There are cities in the US even still where you can't go a block without seeing a building or a bit of infrastructure named after like J.D. Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt or any of these obscenely wealthy turn-of-the-century industrialists who are, of course, quite devious and morally bankrupt, but at least felt like they should give back in some regard. This was the inheritance of Rome.
But the winds had already started to shift by the 1st century BC. Basically, because Rome's territorial expansion reached a point where the wealth became too concentrated. I mean, what happens when this group of rich, greedy families who run everything can't share power equally anymore? At some point, you stop being a shepherd and you turn into a sovereign. You can't really have a big group of sovereigns. The Roman Republic ultimately collapsed because the super-duper wealthy stopped caring about the good of the people and started caring more about beefing with each other and trying to outdo the other families with more and more lavish estates. If you've ever seen the HBO show *Rome*, which I highly recommend if you haven't, it depicts this whole paradigm. It's basically what Atia of the Giulii is all about. Eventually, the Julio-Claudian line went out in this power struggle headed up by a man known to history as Julius Caesar. And this put the imperial model into place, which is where one guy at the top owns everything. This kind of became the blueprint for the next 2,000 years.
By the time we get to the Middle Ages in Western Europe, the Roman collapse had settled into this new social contract called the Three Orders. You have to keep in mind that these Western societies were picking up these shattered cultural remnants of the fallen Roman world, but then they were also blending them with Catholicism and then some of the Germanic traditions as well. It created something totally new. But now, with the gift of hindsight, we can kind of see everything that went into the social cocktail.
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An 11th-century French bishop named Adalbero of Laon famously described society as being divided into three parts: those who pray, those who fight (bellatores), and those who work (laboratores). In the medieval mind, the nobility, which were those who fight, were granted land and wealth from God only on the condition that they spilled their blood to protect the peasants. So, when you think of the Middle Ages and you picture knights in shining armor on horseback, those are the wealthy nobility who have been trained since birth for combat, ostensibly for the good of the people, but also for their own glory.
When I first started getting into medieval history years ago, and I fell down the whole rabbit hole of the knightly class in the West, that was the weirdest part. Because now, I feel like the idea of the richest families in society sending their sons to fight in wars sounds so insane that to believe it happened regularly a thousand years ago is actually hard to wrap your head around. We, of course, now know with our enlightened modern minds that the rich are supposed to start the wars, but it's the poor who are supposed to fight and die in them.
But anyway, thinking of themselves as chivalrous protectors of the poor and vulnerable did create an insane sense of ego among the medieval elite. But to be fair, it was a tethered ego. If you've played *Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2*, there's a scene where Hans Capon explains this whole hierarchy. If I remember correctly, it's from the very beginning of the game at the tavern in Troskovitz, where Hans is explaining why his noble blood prevents him from being able to do the same manual labor that the lowborn main character Henry has to do. "Look sucks. Are you yanking my noble pisle? I'm serious. I can't work. I'm a noble. What if someone saw me?" What's important for us is that this wasn't just about the nobility feeling like they were better than the peasantry, which of course they did. It was also about the nobility feeling like they had a higher duty, so they couldn't be wasting their time rolling around in the mud. The price of their own blood and sometimes their own lives was the tax that medieval nobles had to pay for their social privilege. That's really the point I want to drive home here.
This ties us into the broader philosophy of the medieval mind, which means it's time to get super logical. By God, is that St. Thomas Aquinas's music I hear? Maybe you've heard of his 13th-century masterpiece, the *Summa Theologica*. And I'm not going to pretend like I've read the whole thing, because I don't think anyone has, but I've read excerpts. And in one of them, Aquinas argued that while private property is necessary for a functioning society, it is conditional. Conditional on what, you ask? Well, Aquinas claimed that a person should not hold exterior things as their own, but as common, so they can readily share them for the necessities of others. In other words, you might own the field, but if your neighbor is starving, the fruit on your trees belongs to him.
Now, compare that to Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman or whoever the tech lizard of the week is, trying to set up these massive data centers in these rural towns, which has been happening more and more. We all know that the data center will inevitably mess up the local power grid and drive up everyone's utility costs and drain the water supply for cooling. But we have to pretend like we don't know this and kid ourselves and pretend that the data center will somehow bring more jobs to the area in the long run, even though we know Lord Zuck is bilking us. In the eyes of Thomas Aquinas, Zuckerberg is actually breaking the law of God. He's taking a common resource, water and air, and treating it as private property without fulfilling the necessity of the community.
But you know me, I always want to know why. Why don't modern billionaires feel this Aquinas-level debt? I think a big part of it is because of the meritocracy myth. So, let's dive a little bit into what that even means. As we've established, in the Middle Ages, status was sacred. And I know if you're a fan of this channel, you're probably sick of me mentioning the Great Chain of Being, but status was part of the Great Chain of Being. Deep down, whether he openly admitted it or not, a noble knew he was a noble because he was born into it. Like, yes, it was God's will, which also meant it was kind of luck. And because it was luck, he felt like he owed a debt.
There's this really interesting part of the medieval mind at work here, which was this constant desire to fully understand God's will and actually carry it out. Of course, part of the reasoning for this was because if you didn't carry out God's will, you were going to pay for it for all eternity. And hell was as real to medieval Christians as the sky or the trees. So, it behooved these rich nobles to look around and remember that they had to give alms to the poor and protect the vulnerable, even though there were still plenty of rich medieval sociopaths. At the end of the day, people will always be people.
Today, we're really big on acting like billionaires are totally self-made and that the only thing separating you from being a billionaire is that you need to wake up earlier and stop buying coffee out at Starbucks or whatever. "You're lazy. You don't put the effort in." Obtaining a level of wealth so insane that you yourself can't even quantify it really just comes down to elbow grease and hustle. So, get going. This is called the tyranny of merit, and the Harvard professor Michael Sandel wrote an incredible book about it that was one of the biggest influences for this video. I'll cite it in my sources in the description. I think when you believe your success is 100% your own doing, none of it's luck, none of it's God's will, I think it's extremely hard to stay grateful and humble. And then from there, it's a slippery slope where you're not really that old Mediterranean rich shepherd of the poor. You're one of the rare winners in a world where everyone else who isn't filthy rich is a loser.
But let's put the finishing touches on this Mesopotamian masterpiece. The idea I'm trying to make here isn't that having money makes you evil. I just want an answer to one fundamental question, which is: why did we stop expecting the rich to be useful? Historically, the elite commissioned cathedrals and public works to make themselves immortal. Most of the great medieval and Renaissance artworks that you know and love were commissioned by wealthy private patrons. The rich gave something back to the common visual and spiritual landscape. Now, they build bunkers or they go party apparently all on the same island, and I don't know what that's about. "And by the way, I never went to the island and Bill Clinton went there supposedly."
In the Middle Ages, there was this concept that I've mentioned in previous videos called the Rota Fortunae, or the Wheel of Fortune. Medieval people knew that fate could be a fickle mistress. Today, you're at the top; tomorrow, the wheel spins and crushes you into dust. They didn't think they could change the world, but they did believe that the wheel would eventually spin for everyone. So, I guess the question we need to ask ourselves is, are we just comfortable with this being the way things are? Or are we, I don't know, like the peasants before the Great Revolt of 1381, just waiting for the wheel to turn and maybe getting ready to apply a little of our own grease to it? Sound off in the comments. I actually really want to know what you think. As always, I'm John. This is the Medieval Mindset. And remember, the past isn't gone. It's simply waiting to be rediscovered.