It is ridiculous to say that the death tolls of the early modern witch hunts were only in the hundreds. No-one knows how many people died, but current estimates tend to be around the 35,000 mark (although Ronald Hutton, who is one of the biggest experts on this, thinks it was more like 70,000).
It is true, though, that they were mostly done by Protestants, not by Catholics.
It is also worth pointing out that there were witch hunts in antiquity which dwarfed those of early modern times. Livy describes enormous massacres of supposed "witches". Moreover, there are still witch hunts today in various countries around the world.
I tried to respond to Roller123's daft assertions about the Middle Ages, but couldn't because of the forum bug. Fortunately Dachs did a fine job, but this is what I tried to write anyway, just to back him up.
Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca.
What was wrong with that?
Dachs
Technologically. Political freedoms? Rome already had a working democracy. I could agree that middle ages helped separating religion and state. However atheism comes with critical thinking, and critical thinking comes with science. Which was more advanced in Antiquity. Hygiene utterly lacking, which helped spread things like plague, every second dead, survivors selected not by intelligence or adaptability, but by some genes. I just dont see anything good coming from the MAs but setbacks. at best a stagnancy, which can be regarded as a setback as well.
This is absurd. Dachs has answered it well already, but I would also point out that if you think that science and critical thinking are important, then the Middle Ages advanced these things considerably. They were a very rational time, one when people believed that the world was fundamentally rational and comprehensible and could be understood by the power of the mind if you thought carefully enough. Despite your ignorant comments about religion and rationality, this mindset was to a large extent fostered by Christianity, which held that because God created the world through the Logos (his reason), the world is fundamentally rational and comprehensible.
The intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages were subsequently undermined in the Renaissance, when many people argued that in fact the world is irrational and incomprehensible. The result was superstition and obscurantism on a large scale, which was not cleared up until early modern times. In fact it could be said that the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century and the beginnings of the Enlightenment were a matter of undoing the bad work of the Renaissance and getting back to a more medieval way of thinking about things.
In short, if you don't see anything good about the Middle Ages, I'm afraid that says far more about your knowleddge of them than it does about anything else.
Roller123 said:
Pythagoras wasnt endangered of being burned by calculating the Earth is round in, i dont remember, 500 BC?
He wouldn't have been in AD 1200 either. And Socrates was executed partly for saying that the moon is made of rock, which wouldn't have happened in the Middle Ages either. So I don't really see what you're trying to get at.
