Hey everyone, welcome back to our series on a revisionist count of the Middle Ages.

Looking into what I think is the most misunderstood period in history, many think of it as a time

when society was trading water between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance,

we're really, as I talked about in the last episode, a lot of the foundations for the

modern world were laid at this time.

In the last episode, we talked about the fall of the Roman Empire and what the beginning

of the Middle Ages actually meant, we also looked at the person of Charlemagne and

how you see Western society recover from the fall of Rome, not just in the 1400s or 1500s,

but well back into the 8th or 9th centuries.

In this episode, we're going to look at a few institutions that I think for good reason

have a really bad reputation, including Catholic indulgences, the Crusades, and the militaristic

monastic order at the Knights Templar.

Now I'm not going to argue in favor of any of these institutions because many of them

do have a bad reputation for very good reason, going on an armed mission against people

of another religion is never that great.

But like other things in this series, what I want to do is just move away from this black

and white binary where something is either completely good or completely bad and explore

the nuance.

For example, Catholic indulgences are a thought of a practice where the church uses its

moral authority to exploit Catholics and the poor and extort them out of money.

Now many of the practices were disreputable, but there's some interesting effects that come

about due to indulgences.

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