Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…I mean, we should make clear that the monasteries had… They were used as almost like storage for gold. Yeah. And this goes all the way back to, you know, the Roman Empire where, you know, think of, for example, the Emperor Augustus. When he was writing his will, he put it in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins as well as Mark Antony and Cleopatra. They’d all done that because there’s this additional protection of religion- … and this taboo against violating that. And the same thing happened when Europe was Christianized. Monasteries were pla— I mean, rich people, their faith had to be an active faith. They had, they couldn’t just say their prayers and go to church on Sunday. They would have to do something to publicly show that they were, you know, worthy of forgiveness or, or whatever. And so they would donate huge sums to the church. I think, you know, by the time of the French Revolution, which is obviously way in the future, the Church is the largest single landowner in France. I mean, the monasteries were… These, these monasteries filled with monks who had taken vows of poverty were some of the richest places in Europe. It’s kind of a strange dichotomy here. And then we should also say that the Vikings, many of them pragmatic people, so a lot of them would eventually then convert to Christianity, so you get-…

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