Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

> According to the historian Orderic Vitalis, William moaned on his deathbed, "I treated the native inhabitants of the kingdom with unreasonable severity, cruelly oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many, and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire....In mad fury I descended on the English of the north like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation and, alas! was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of this fair people."

This is an interesting contrast with leaders like Genghis Khan, who seemed to think (or at least portray to others) that his actions were not only acceptable but noble and religiously desirable.

It'd be interesting to see a study of regret and non-regret among conquerors throughout the ages. Do we have other examples of this, or does William stand out among his contemporaries and predecessors?

How reliable is this, though? Many people (especially religious ones) around him were best placed to pretend he turned very remorseful.

Would they make it up though? Depends on motives and it is likely he died with many people with different motives around him. Some would want to condemn his violence, but others would want to justify it as their holdings would depend on it.

Probably because:

> He had gifts sent to the local churches and to the poor, “so that what I amassed through evil deeds may be assigned to the holy uses of good men." Some of his wealth also went to the clergymen of Mantes, so the churches he had destroyed could be rebuilt.

I can definitely imagine some bishop or cardinal pilfering the king's treasure room while claiming the king decreed it out of remorse.

You can imagine it but its a less probable explanation.

It was common to leave things to the church and the poor so there was no need to make up the story to justify it. It is likely that a dishonest claim would be challenged by someone given that he said the same things to "everyone".

I don't know if I can summarize as what some historian said about rulers in the middle ages. But I'll take a go at it.

Question: Were rulers callous and violent or were they pious and fearful of being judged in the afterlife?

Ans: Yes.

Also I do remember a reference to an actual will by a knight who renounced his crimes and left a bunch of his wealth to charity. I think it's hard to understand how back then the system, especially for a member of the ruling class, was more like the mafia than what we experience today. As such it'd be hard for someone not to get caught up in it.

Yes, people would simply invent things, or a similar process with the same effect. The idea of history as some sort of neutral record of events is itself historically novel, and most of our sources around the Norman Conquest has a very pronounced slant one way or the other. Chroniclers generally were also using a great deal of secondhand information (at best). In the given instance, Orderic Vitalis was cloistered and more or less explicitly writing propaganda for William.

The oration struck me as a little self-serving -- especially since the heir was weak. You'd like the commoners to feel good about the family, and maybe this did the trick.

But, the prison releases do seem to indicate he was in a forgiving mood; I imagine release of the brother couldn't be accomplished without some formal process. "The one jailed for treason? I'd like to see that order in writing."

> This is an interesting contrast with leaders like Genghis Khan, who seemed to think (or at least portray to others) that his actions were not only acceptable but noble and religiously desirable.

Didn’t the Muslims or Christians (or both) think that the Mongols were the Wrath of God? I’d definitely lean into that.

Atilla was known as the scourge of God, but opinions are still divided on whether the name or the man or tribe was Germanic, Mongol, or other. Seems likely they were a surprisingly heterogenous lot, literally mongrels. Fascinating and surprising how little we know for sure. Source: insomniac Wikipedia binges

That’s a cool aside but Attila rampaged many centuries before the Mongols.

Right, and it makes me wonder whether the great Khans in their time knew more about Atilla than we do. Things like leveraging religion to spread intimidation might be part of the playbook they copied, or might just be convergent evolution, hard to say. Any modern would certainly think of it, but back in the day it seems pretty innovative

There is a quote attributed to Genghis Khan:

'I am the flail of god. Had you not comitted great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.'

Considering how total the destruction was that the Mongols visited on the conquered, it is almost believable. And likewise, them not invading Europe was considered to be divine intervention.

The Mongols believed the world was meant to be theirs, by divine right. Saying No to a Mongol when he asks you for something (eg your land or daughter) was considered a religious offense.

The idea that divine intervention places limits on rulers, like Genghis Kahn, could be supported by Genesis 20:3–7, where a king is prevented from sinning through divine intervention.

The other great example as the Emperor Ashoka who regretted the suffering caused by his wars of conquest in his lifetime.

The contrast is likely due to the different religions William and Temujin practiced.

Christianity was an awkward fit to the ethos of the Germanic nobility.

Christianity has been reframed in the context of Roman militarism from its very beginning as an official religion. It's in the myth itself, Constantine converting at the Milvian Bridge. The end result being a system of beliefs that's both socially conscious and allows for violence on behalf of the State. Pre-Christian religion in the Empire was weaker in that sense, as it was mostly concerned with ritualizing arbitrary decisions. It was a good fit for Germanic warriors trying to upgrade to Late Roman land-owners.

Yet, you see William and many other medieval rulers, panicking and repenting on their deathbeds.

Almost as if, morality is something ingrained in every human being in some way, maybe as some higher rules of overall fairness. And fairness is something I can see in our small kids, they didn't have to be taught that.

Or maybe medieval catholicism with their rather primitive views and morals would instill proper fear in everybody. Which was then often overcome ie by greed or envy, but never could go completely away.

No, you see accounts of that happening, and setting aside problems with veracity, you don't necessarily have a good handle on frequency.

> The contrast is likely due to the different religions William and Temujin practiced.

This was my initial gut reaction as well, but then I remembered the incredible violence and devastation that Christian Europeans brought upon themselves and others over the last 1500 years. How many of those kings, popes, and other leaders expressed similar regret on their deathbeds?

> This was my initial gut reaction as well, but then I remembered the incredible violence and devastation that Christian Europeans brought upon themselves and others over the last 1500 years.

Don’t generalise to all European Christians. It was the west European Catholic and Protestant Christians. Orthodox Christians were and are up to these days much more civilised society.

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