The Vanished Dialogue

At the Scrovegni Chapel of the University of Padua, there was a fresco depicting Jesus driving merchants out of the Temple.

This was the scene described in the Gospel of John in the New Testament: the Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He saw merchants selling oxen, sheep, and doves in the Temple, along with money changers seated there. Jesus made a whip of cords and drove all the oxen and sheep out of the Temple. He poured out the money changers' coins and overturned their tables. Then he told those selling doves, "Take these things away. Do not make my Father's house a place of trade."

What he did was actually unfair, and there was no similar episode in the Old Testament. On the wall facing the chapel's main entrance was The Last Judgment. In the hell section on the right, devils endlessly stuffed "sinners" into their mouths and ate them, then excreted them like shit. There was even a pope among them.

Radical "heretics" were sometimes just that reckless with their lives, but anyone afraid of death would not become a heretic. Back when people coveted Venice's glass trade, there were many spies gathering intelligence. The technical threshold for transparent glass was not particularly high; once someone had a little transparency, they could imitate it.

Likewise, the roasting process for tea and the weaving techniques for silk were simple. By controlling silkworm breeds alone, China had made money from the silk trade for a thousand years. Later, two Indians stole the silkworm eggs. Voltaire ranked gunpowder, silk, and printing among the three great inventions that saved Europe. It was the silkworm eggs brought by those two Indians that freed Justinian from dependence on raw silk from the Silk Road, dropping the price