Medieval Italy; why did the Christian north succeed where the Orientalized south failed ?

One of the major factors in Italy today is the dichotomy between north and south. Why is the north rich, progressive, dynamic and innovative, whilst the south is lethargic, crime-ridden, apathetic and slow ? Is it the warmer weather ? The food ? The fact that the north is but a slave of the Anglo-American capitalist system, or knaves to Jewish bankers ?

Southern Italy is not modern because it never developed the political, cultural, economic and capital attributes of a successful state, or states. Sicily was 'orientalized' first by the Romans, then by the Byzantines and Muslims, and lastly by the recurring wars between Normans, local gangs, Arabs and the Papal states, all of whom desired to rule in a top-down, centralized fashion, which is the anti-pathy of how modern states developed and how real wealth is created.

We know the above to be true because northern Italy was the world's first center of modern capitalism. This occurred long before the Renaissance, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, deep in the so-called 'Dark Ages' of Europe; when according to modern scholars, Europeans were little better than uneducated baboons, running amok in deer skins, toothless, witless, and cowering under the sun of civilization emanating from the superior, perfect, wondrous and advanced Muslim states. Crass idiocy. Europe by the 7^th century was far ahead of anything that Arabia or Islam could or would produce. Islam is a squatting imperialism. Islam has never had the political-economic, or cultural attributes to produce anything of value. It simply squats on territory, plunders, takes, and extracts. This is a main reason why Islam is Jihadic. Like all fascisms it has to be to survive.

Northern Italy highlights the poverty of the Muslim example. The Arabs took Sicily and controlled other parts of southern Italy from the mid 7^th century onwards until they were ejected by the Normans in the 11^th century. For some 400 years the life of southern Italy was permanently retarded and degraded. Islam expropriated slaves, money, tribute, and did nothing to generate wealth, trade, economic development, ideas or innovations. This has to be true, since southern Italy was always poorer than its norther counterpart. Open to piracy, slave-trading attacks, incursions, wars, and annual devastation, there is no possibility that during Arab primacy, southern Italy could have been anything else other than a land defiled and infertile.

In Arab Italy the Islamic hierarchy was firmly in place. There were no quaint Christian ideas about free-will, responsibility, ethical conduct, or a better future in the real world, based on optimism, hope and reason. In Arab Italy society was split into two – the Arabs who ruled; and the rest who were engaged in various degrees of slavery, including product and monetary tribute to their Muslim masters. The extraction of monies to pay for the elite was a concept well known in the ancient world – it was one of the factors which ensured the 'decline' of Rome. In such a system premised on slave labor and slave institutions the constructs of the modern world cannot possibly develop. There is no reason, no impetus to innovation, technological advancement or productivity – why should there be when slave labor is so abundant and slave trading so profitable ? Rather like the Roman world, the Islamic was and is deeply conservative. Follow patterns. Obey rituals. Engage in repetitive dogma. Justify all actions of the cult.

Northern Italy developed along completely different lines. Its strong Christian heritage – so out of vogue today – created capitalism. It is well known that the Christian call to faith leads to reason. Christian truth seeking mandates a rational approach to ethics and to understanding the modern world. Northern Italy by the 10^th century was far ahead of its southern contemporaries, setting the stage for a literal explosion of capital and rent-seeking banks and businesses. All of this stemmed from its Christian legacy. Capital accumulation began on the monastic estates in northern Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Specialized productive labor, agricultural innovations, new technologies and rapid deployment of capital to highly profitable sectors grew apace with revolutions in literacy and financial tools. All of this conspired to make northern Italy by the late 13^th and 14^th centuries the largest commercial empire yet seen in history. Italian banking and capital investments were the basis of trade and exchange from the Sahara, to England to Southern Russia. It was a remarkable testimony to northern Italian culture, and capital accumulation.

This Christian heritage stood in marked contrast to the superstitious moon-cult ideology of Islam, which did nothing to further the development of either capital or the modern world. No evidence exists within Islamic history, which is even remotely comparable to the revolutionary output of northern Italy in the fields of business and commerce from the 11^th to 14^th centuries. Part of this Italian 'miracle' was certainly cultural. The Northern Italian Christian theology encouraged long term views, optimism, morality and contractual obligations. In Islam contracts and oaths are to be broken when it is convenient and appropriate. Not so in the Christian world. The ideas of keeping your word and your vow, and upholding your responsibility, is entirely a Christian invention - it does not exist in the Koran and does not exist in Islamic theology where Muslims are the ruling elite and non-Muslims are viewed as inferiors, pigs, or slaves.

Out of this cultural development the creation of a rational firm with established personnel, accounting, and other functions is possible. Nothing like a rational firm existed in Islam – ever. The rational firm grew out of the rational society – a society we are told which was mired in the depths of a 'Dark Age'. Such a calumny is laughable when one uses common sense and facts. In Florence for example, we know that by the mid 14^th century half of all children were attending school. Today in the US by comparison little more than 50% of students finish high school. Yet 700 years ago the same level of Florentine children were being schooled [at a fraction of today's cost], a feat being replicated throughout Europe leading one to believe that literacy was likely widespread. Universities which had developed in the 12^th century, had nearly 10-15.000 students in the larger ones by the 13^th century, a fact which again cannot be replicated or made for any of the Islamic cities.

Also uniquely to northern Christian Itay was the development of financial and accounting literacy.  In the early 13^th century an Italian genius named Fibonacci created a textbook codifying math and accounting, using standard modern number sets, not Roman numerals which made calculations easy to understand and teach. This was enormously important. Finance and accounting became much simpler with Fibonacci's textbook, and it allowed for efficient double entry bookkeeping to be invented; not to mention the quick calculations of profits, margins, and costs. Fibonacci's method was taught in the newly created 'Abacus schools'. These private schools educated new employees and young boys between the ages of 11 and 14 in the areas of finance and accounting. They were highly coveted as training schools for the best and brightest. Abacus schools also spread to Flanders and Germany. They were the first 'business' schools in history. Another innovation that cannot be found in Islam but which emanated from 'Dark Age' Europe.

The nexus of a business-trained cadre of literates, combined with excess capital from the monastic system, and the trade in wool [see here how that developed]; along with innovations in accounting, bills of exchange, bank branches, transport and communications, truly revolutionized the application of capital to businesses and markets. Northern Italians developed the trade fairs, routes, and pre-modern industries across Europe. Nothing like this deployment of capital, banks and talent can be seen anywhere in Islamic history. Yet we are constantly told that Europe was a Dark Age backwater, and those wondrous Muslims the carriers of civilized light and innovation.

Mental bunk.

Capitalism developed in Northern Italy for very good reasons. The Italian city states developed along Christian – rationalist lines, and limited the amount of pillage, plunder and theft that the elites could extract from the powerless. All across Northern Italy during the medieval period we see city-state development in which oligarchical powers are checked by labor [or guilds]; common assembles and the rule of law. This helped to limit conflict, and the destruction of money and wealth through civil war, or external aggressions. Though Northern Italy did suffer its fair share of war and violence; it was minor when compared to the south of Italy which from 650 AD to about 1600 AD experienced nothing else other than war, pilfering, and variegated despotic orientalist governance. There was little chance that the antecedents of the modern world – capital, representative government, ethics, morality, frugality, contracts and laws – could develop in southern Italy. The culture, and the political-economic frameworks had no opportunity to take root and grow there.

It is no surprise that today southern Italy is poor in comparison to its northern Italian neighbours. The culture which informed the development of capitalism and which created the richness of the medieval and Renaissance periods did not, and will never exist in southern Italy. When Islam conquered Sicily and parts of the Italian peninsula the fates of these lands was assured. The bastardization of the culture and the corruption of the political-economy, not to mention the vast wealth plundered in humans and in specie can never be redeemed nor recovered.