With his new cultural tools, the northern man built up a civilization of his own, one that surpassed, in worldly treasure, the Mediterranean civilization he had plundered. In the Reformation, the northern peoples threw off the last restraint of Mediterranean culture, the spiritual and ecclesiastical authority of the Roman faith. In the centuries that followed, a new commercial and industrial order arose in northern Europe and in its colonies in North America, creating riches that far outshone “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.”
Now it’s the Mediterranean man’s turn for revenge. The Germanic marauders used fire and the sword to plunder their more prosperous neighbors in the Mediterranean littoral. Today, the peoples of the Mediterranean nations are using the redistributive machinery of the social state to do pretty much the same thing to their better-off neighbors to the north.
