Yeah, it took quite a while for Europe to recover from all that ethnic strife.

  The Pope and the Catholic church preserved their "authority" in a more spiritual sense than in an expanded way--as they had done in the Black Plague times.  There are times in history when it's just lessons learned and bodily survival that furthers the generations of humanity!

  We sort of go through that culturally in America especially when drugs wipe us out, and the economy's all screwed up.  People survive but for little times we're all over the place with our feelings about it all.  Our Country still exists, in part because, we get basic in Constitution and business.