- Location
- Barcelona, Catalunya, EU (for now)
Wrong. Archimedes had nothing to do with it.
Aeolipile - Wikipedia
It was a Roman inventor that did it. Also, the Romans and Greeks lacked the metalurgy needed to build a decent boiler, or the pipelining needed to send the high pressure steam to a place where it could do something useful.
It's been commented that progress only happens when the synergy of a lot of different results in a lot of different areas happens. First and foremost, the implantation of the scientific methodology, which made research go from somewhat whimsical to systematic. Without that, you cannot truly advance.
So, for a technological advance to happen, all pieces have to be in place one way or another. So, when all techs for making trains were known, someone put them together and made a train. Similarly, even with the invention of the steam machine, you needed a different kind of engine, the internal combustion engine, to make a machine that could actually fly. And even in that case, the ICE had to be small and light enough to fit in a plane.
Oh, religious intolerance was a thing way before Spain existed. The Romans "tamed" the Hebrew religion to make it more pliable to Roman society by killing lots of Hebrews, and allowing to survive only the more moderate Rabis to further have a more mellow version of it. And they relentlessly and brutally crushed Christianism because it was sensed as a massive threat to Roman society.
When Christianism became the state religion, suddenly paganism and in general any non-Christian religion was bad. You can check what happened to Hypatia of Alexandria.
As for the Inquisition, it started as a temporary office to make inquiries into heresy and deviations of the accepted doctrine. Like when the only crusade that occured in European territory was fought in Occitania against the cathars who, among other horrible things had the gall of appointing female priests (the horror! Imagine that!). There were friars and priests that "interrogated" prisoners until they "confessed" what the "interrogators" wanted to hear. So, it was a thing in the Middle Ages.
It was queen Elisabeth of Castille that turned it into a permanent office. It was also her that ordered the Jews to be expelled from her territory. It also shows the fact that Spain didn't exist at this point, that when they were expelled, the Jews moved to either Portugal or the other neighboring kingdom where Elisabeth had no authority, i.e. the one ruled by her husband, Ferdinand of Antequera, AKA Ferdinand the Catholic. Ferdinand later allowed himself to be convinced by his wife to expel the Jews from Aragon too.
It was at this point that the Pope decided that having a permanent Inquisition was a good thing for Christianity and mandated it for all Christian kingdoms. As the only ones with "experience" with inquisitioning things, it's no surprise that the early Inquisition was full of Castillian names. It started in Spain, and it was globally known as the "Spanish Inquisition".
All countries have monsters that commited atrocities in the name of God, but dropping the blame somewhere else is, from their point of view, a good thing. It happened more recently with the so-called "Spanish flu", which should rightfully be called "US flu", because there is where it started.
And you are wrong in saying that Castille and Aragon were the last to expel the Jews. Most kingdoms didn't, but some other kingdoms expelled Jews from their territory later for different reasons. Usually to get their hands on the supposed wealth of the Jews (which it didn't exist), or to have a convenient scapegoat to blame for something.
Okay, enough history.
Back to ensou's latest comments, I cannot help but draw a parallel with the light novel series (and later awesome anime) called "Overlord".
Reader's digest version to provide context to the ones not interested in anime: "Overlord" happens in the future, where a virtual MMORPG called Yggdrasil is about to close its servers. A human player, Guildmaster of a group called Ains Ooal Gown, by the name of Momonga decides to stay within the Guild's Headquarters, the Great Tomb of Nazarick, until the servers close. But when the closing time passes, and the Tomb is still there, he realizes something is wrong: the whole Tomb and its contents, including the player-developed NPCs, have been moved to a different world.
Quite early in the anime, (episode 2 or 3, I think), he's checking the surrounding area and sees a small village being attacked by soldiers. He sees those soldiers mercilessly killing defenseless peasants and feels... nothing. Momonga realizes he should feel horror, outrage, or something before that display of brutality, but he only watches uninterested.
That detachment from mankind progresses with the story, and provides a stark contrast with the "humanity" displayed by the interactions among the different NPCs and even himself, like when NPCs Albedo and Shalltear start arguing about who beds Momonga first.
Taylor seems to be experiencing something similar to that divorcing from mankind, only that she does have anchors to keep her more tied to the rest of mankind. Also, the Mental Models of the Fog gain, as someone else stated, human traits by interacting with humans and among themselves. Which also provides an interesting counterpoint to Overlord, where the NPCs see their prejudices against mankind confirmed with almost every interaction with humans, and any positive human traits they gain are basically by interacting with themselves.
when Isaac Abravanel ask to pay for the cancel of the expel, the main inquisitor throw 30 silver coins at the Catholic kings and ask if it was enought for Jesus. And we have to remember that it was a great moment for spain as the Reconquista was at her main moment and Granada has just fall they have to look strong ... all very bad idea
