It's odd that you admit you don't know what went down but are still passing judgement.
Even if he did, he didn't interfere or impede rescue efforts and gave them a tool they could possible use in the future. It's cool and a nice thing to do, and doesn't really seem like a big deal.
He did impede rescue efforts if the people on location had to spend even one second on thinking about some half baked solution instead of the task at hand. Why did he do all his stuff in public attracting a lot of attention away from the people risking their lives instead of working on it quietly?
Doubtful it was either. The fact that everyone washed their hands, the sick and immunologically compromised didn't prepare food or partake in regular group activities, and those working manual labor (ie- hands covered in bacteria) didn't handle the food was probably 80% of the reason for their longevity.
Hygiene, lower alcohol consumption, and the regular access to an extensive support system were probably the top 3 factors. Less uncertainty, less stress, fewer serious health/mental issues being ignored - all good things in the long run. I'd expect alcohol to be a major contributor to illness at the time (compromised immune system in an already filthy environment and less social pressure to drink in moderation), so the fact that they didn't drink in excess was probably pretty significant
The article mentions 'meat' three times per week, but then implies that eggs and fish were not considered 'meat', which leads me to think they also didn't consider poultry 'meat' either. No special spices or bizarre rituals, so their diet was probably very similar to the old food pyramid, and less so the new food plate thing. The wealthy saw a very minimal increase in lifespan, which was probably not caused by the addition of spices and honey but living in cleaner, less cramped, and more isolated living conditions.
The only thing surprising about the article was that how NOT special their diet was.
I think both. Poor people died because of lack of nutrients and even calories, while the extremely rich died of gout and diabetes because of excess.
It seems the templar got all the nutrients they needed (feast on large amount of protein once a week, plant based diet the rest of the week) while using moderation most of the week and even a fast once a week.
They did a Lenten fast once a week, which is not usually the same as abstaining from food. From the article, it sounds like they were eating but not eating meat. However, note that fish is not considered meat for the purposes of Lenten fasting.
It is the same today... Catholics in my pueblo do not eat carne on Fridays (during Lent) which is to say no air breathing animal. Tuna fish salad is a very popular meal on Fridays if you have a house full of Catholics during Lent.
"So three times a week, the knights were permitted to eat meat"
those two paragraphs were a little scattered, but it's 3x per week... Definitely Sundays and then maybe Tuesday/Thursday, but sometimes one of those days was a fast.
The article also suggests that better hygiene and protective measures against infection played a role. Infectious disease was a huge case of death in medieval Europe (the plague for ex). The Knights had better hygiene as they learned from Arab doctors, who had superior medical knowledge compared to their European peers
That's a great question, my understanding was that if one survived birth (infant mortality skews average lifespan quite a bit) and had food, one could live about as long as a modern human. From the sound of it, the knights certainly weren't going hungry.
> One source suggests that cooks loaded enough meat onto their plates “to feed two poor men with the leftovers.”
> That's a great question, my understanding was that if one survived birth (infant mortality skews average lifespan quite a bit)
Infant mortality does, but that's more than just surviving birth, but more like the first five years to get past the point where it skews results.
> From the sound of it, the knights certainly weren't going hungry
Well, sure, and you wouldn't expect knights—a narrow elite class—to be goings hungry even if food insecurity was common for the masses. But they probably lived longer mostly because the average expectancy for people who had survived to the age at which you become a knight of the order was much greater than the average population-wide life expectancy, because the large proportion that died very young did so earlier.
Which is misleading for a whole bunch of reasons as generally people were dying due to the incredibly dangerous life it was then plus lack of medical care.
If you survived your 20s without being killed you were likely to live into your late 50s with little problem.
Being young was dangerous. Being a religious knight meant you basically skipped all that until later (and then put yourself in less harm than the average peasant soldier did)
Totally incorrect, the Knights Templar were an elite group with a code of fighting to the death. They were often found in the middle of battle, making suicidal charges and fighting against superior numbers. Unlike other soldiers they were often executed by Arab commanders if captured.
There certainly was some of that but they were, for the first 100 years or so, glorified bounty hunters fighting bandits & marauding highwaymen around the Holy Land. Basically a religious police force.
They also were the favored money donation/papal favor buying scheme used by nobles. Quite quite rich.
The certainly DID fight of course in things like the defeat of Saladin at Montgisard but they were usually not a very present force (for example there were less than 500 knights in that battle but about about 9000 infantry)
In fact relatively few Knights were combatants! The others acted in support positions to assist the knights and to manage the finances.
They were mostly a rich proto-banking guild by the mid 1100s tbh and by the 1200s they rapidly became utterly pointless.
They had about 50 years of being involved in any real combat and it wasn't very involved when it did. You've been paying attention to too much myth making about them and not their actual deeds.
I'm sure that diet and control of food was very important to them, it is for lab mice. I wonder how much things like ritualised hygiene played a part too.
They certainly would've had better nutrition than most people - as I recall from reading about this quite fascinating topic some years ago, the men who joined the Templars were generally quite rich, mostly the sons of the nobility. (They were also required to donate all of their money and land upon joining, which is how the Order became so preposterously wealthy) I would imagine that the rich had much higher life expectancies than average, regardless of whether they joined the Order.
The question is also "Did they live longer?". The article gave the ages of some individual knights as being greater than the average lifespan at the time, which is not incompatible with the average knight's lifespan being the same as the average peasant.
The whole first half of the article was about the knights living longer than the average peasant.
The very first paragraph of the article:
>For even wealthy landholding males, average life expectancy was about 31 years, rising to 48 years for those who made it to their twenties. The Knights Templar, then, must have seemed to have some magical potion: Many members of this Catholic military order lived long past 60.
That exact paragraph is the one I'm complaining about. 31 and 48 are qualified averages (for wealthy landowning males and the same who survived to age 20). "Many lived long past 60" is talking about the outliers of the Templar population. What was the average?
There likely is no average available, as coronors, undertakers, public health departments, and general statistics were poorly kept. So if rigorous comprehensive data are your requirement, you'll likely be disappointed.
What data were available favoured the wearthly, and from them and other, nonstatistical, contemporaneous accounts, it is apparently clear enough to note that the wealthy lived longer lives than the bulk of the population
Many of the poor who died, particularly infants, children, and women, may have left no documentary trace at all.
The average lifespan for a subset of those people who lived to age 20 was 48.
The reason for the distinction is infant mortality and other childhood diseases which lingered much longer than they do today because we now have more treatments.
The article mentions that he used Velpar. A large part of his sentence may stem from him having contaminated ground water (in centuries past, a crime only punishable by death most cruel).
Is this your blog or is it a coincidence that your hn username is the same as the 'chinese 3d-printing expert' from the article?
It's not really that unbelievable that there's a woman who's capable of using tools and building the things that she wears...
Whoever wrote this blog is either really close to the subject or has a very unhealthy obsession.
