A Thousand Years of Tithing, and How Europe Came to Rule the World

1. Europe collected the tithe by force

In 779, Charlemagne issued the Capitulary of Herstal, making the tithe a compulsory payment throughout his realm. It wasn't just a religious offering anymore. It became a tax structure in which a tenth of the harvest was collected and delivered to local churches. Farmers had to give a tenth of their crops; craftsmen, a tenth of their products. To store it all, tithe barns were built in villages, often the largest building after the church.
For ordinary people short of clothing and food, it was harsh. But in the end it became an enormous pool of capital for the whole continent. Compulsory collection lasting some 33 generations became the capital that built social infrastructure centered on the church: universities, hospitals and relief institutions.

2. The tithe and the explosion of national power by the 15th century

In the late Middle Ages, the church, which had amassed enormous wealth from the tithe, acted as Europe's largest investment institution. Wealthy Catholics, motivated by the belief that charity would help them reach heaven, founded and ran hospitals, poorhouses, care homes and orphanages through the church. The prototype of the safety net of today's welfare states was already taking shape. Europe's first universities, at Bologna, Salerno and Paris, were born with church wealth and donations as their funding.
Huge sums were invested in clearing wasteland and building irrigation, raising food production.
The investments of the Renaissance also laid the foundations for the art and early science that became humanity's cultural heritage.

Capital from the Vatican and national churches helped fund the missionaries sent out in the Age of Exploration. The number of missionaries often rose with the reach of imperial forces, and they served as key contingents for gathering local information and lending legitimacy to rule. According to Indian economist Utsa Patnaik, Britain drained some 45 trillion dollars from India over 173 years. The colonial banks set up to manage this became the origins of today's global financial system.

3. The current return on Europe's tithe: 5,000 percent

The great cathedrals of medieval Europe are the most successful thousand-year, ultra-high-yield bonds and real estate developments in human history. A single cathedral took centuries and enormous sums to build. But these works of art became permanent real assets.
Before the fire, Notre-Dame de Paris drew over ten million visitors a year, among the most visited sites in France, rivaling or exceeding the Louvre. Barcelona's Sagrada Família, still unfinished, earns tens of millions of euros a year from tickets alone and funds its own construction with the money. The suffering of ancestors who paid the tithe for a thousand years has become a permanent tourism pension that feeds Europe today.

Why blame only European colonialism?

Many condemn European colonial rule, but that's a narrow view. Europe at least left behind systems and infrastructure, while the Mongol Empire slaughtered life wherever it went and erased the very shape of nations. 20th-century communism confiscated private property, purged tens of millions and devoured the nation as a living body. Europe has since granted independence to all its colonies. What about China and Russia?
When Genghis Khan, communist dictatorships or the ancient Korean kingdom of Goguryeo conquer, it's called "unifying the world," but when Europe or America does, it's "plunder"? Isn't it simply that people dislike Christianity?

The blessing of the tithe is a formula

"Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in My house. And thereby put Me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need." (Malachi 3:10)