As Rockefeller wrote in his letter to his son: Find a good pretext for competition—preferably compete in God's name.
To him, Standard Oil had been built upon faith. If anyone criticized Rockefeller's practices for damaging the oil market, he would angrily say, "This is not damage, nor is it destruction. It is entirely well-intentioned. It is God's will. It is sacred."
The Crusades had actually been intended to solve the problem of noble second sons as well. Everything their fathers owned was inherited by the eldest sons, and if those second sons remained in Western Europe, they would only intensify social tensions.
Everyone knew this perfectly well. Protecting pilgrims and redemption were merely "good pretexts." Sanctification allowed converts to believe they had distanced themselves from sin and face the infidels with calm and fearlessness.
During the Reformation, Protestants could disparage the Dark Ages brought about by Catholicism, but fairly speaking, the Renaissance had not simply sprung out of nowhere.
The Church's tolerance gave artists greater freedom to create, like a compassionate father opening his arms to welcome home a prodigal son returning from distant travels.
Commercial Europe and Christian Europe were not the same world, though they stood upon the same land.
When many ordinary people took pride in not believing in God, families from ancient domains still lived according to the Church and the moral standards established in the Middle Ages.
Yes, chivalry demanded courage, humility, perseverance, loyalty, honor, and honesty. But people raised according to those standards died young, and such idealized knightly morality could never truly take root in every family.
It took at least three generations to cultivate an aristocratic family. The first generation were nouveau riche. Whether they had made their fortunes speculating in stocks like Wall Street Bear Jesse, climbed upward through political means