lush-retina:

littlejotuncrybaby:

anarchistlovesongs:

tilthat:

TIL Pope Gregory IX condemned the black cat as an incarnation of Satan, and consequently, it was the death warrant for the animal. This worsened the Black Death a century after Gregory’s time because the plague was spread by rats which were unchecked in Europe due to the decline of cat numbers.

via reddit.com

What I’m hearing is the Catholic Church was responsible for the plague.

What im feeling is not surprise

Funny, but also from that Reddit thread:

“This gets posted every few months and keeps getting debunked over and over. Notice how this and the article for Vox in Rama use the words “according to scholars” and “some historians believe”, when literally the only historian who’s ever put forward the idea is Donald Engels, who wrote one book about Alexander the Great in the 70s, and one book about cats in the 90s.

I had a look at the book, and the source he cites for his historical information is a magazine article by one S.J. O'Brien, a geneticist. I’ve also looked at the article, and O'Brien mentions nothing about the history of cats, Papal or otherwise. Engels just made it up.

Reading more of the book, Engels appears to be genuinely insane, and I’m not trying to be flippant here, it’s like the ramblings of a gibbering lunatic. He mentions how cats were “excommunicated” from the Church and writes of a continent-spanning war in which groups of Monks roamed across Europe massacring women wherever they could find them. He says a “reasonable estimate” for the number of women killed by these Monks is 200,000.

He also writes:

• People stopped cleaning their houses because brooms became associated with witchcraft
• Celtic Pagans joined forces with the Christians to eliminate cats
• The Catholic Church declared a crusade against all cats but had this wiped from their archives in the 19th century
• All women who owned cats actually were witches
• The Knights Templar were a sect of cat-worshipping pagans
• The Catholic Church engineered the development of feudalism to get rid of cats

I wish I was making this up. The dude has donkey brains.”