← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining Medieval Eastern Europe
02:29:24
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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi, everybody, I'm Rudyard lynch with our co host Austin Padgett. And today's video will be on the creation of Eastern Europe.
- [00:26]
B
Very exciting. And it turns out my mic was not connected last week. It connected to my webcam. It's not connected this week either. I need fancy cables. So, yeah, I'm gonna keep it here because it looks cool, but it doesn't work.
- [00:40]
A
You don't tell them that stuff. You just talk into the mic and see if they can figure it out.
- [00:46]
B
Oh, they know the ones that know. Now, this is for the ones that know. The ones that are getting woken up by my sudden loud audio bursts.
- [00:56]
A
The audience picks up on really weird details and then it doesn't pick up on other obvious things. I've been doing this for over a decade. I'll be shocked that the audience picks up on certain, like, oh, you got this thing wrong. And then they don't pick up on an obvious, like, subtext thing of something that's like, unstated, but it's implicit in the video. I'm gonna put three asides before we get started. First of all is that the lot next to me is doing construction. Zoom is normally good at cutting that out, but I apologize if there's any background noise. Secondly is I'm seeing floaties now, which is something where in my perceptual frame I'll see sort of floating lights normally or sometimes through the presage to migraines where every. And I've taught you enough stuff. I'll take these editorial asides as sort of debt I've incurred, but I'll get these migraines where I go blind for three to four hours. And then I'll have stabbing pains in my head and my stomach. I haven't had them in years, but I'll get sort of the. The presages of them. I think I'm going to be fine for this video. I haven't had one in a while, but if I'm sort of loopy, that's why normally once I get into these videos, I can feel a sort of rhythm. And then once I ride the rhythm, a lot of that other stuff goes away. And the third thing is this is a time period that people will have a very strong urge to believe is boring, but in fact is not. And I stand by that is similar to the medieval Islam video, where our era of history does not know how to write topics like this. And so when you think of the creation of Poland or Russia or the Balkan countries, we imagine it in the most dryly written historic way possible. And it's comparable between a lot of the Middle Ages, where we don't know how to write it. The Middle Ages is too religious, it's too personal. It's to all of these given things. And so we default back onto doing dates and sort of this leader did blank thing in blank year. But what that leaves out is the human character of the history, where when you look at Eastern Europe in that time period, you saw the formation of these countries, and each of these countries had a wildly different frame of life than the others. And what I mean by that is that when you look at them, we see these countries as similar sort of places on the map, especially if you're an American. Americans have a tendency to sort of flatten the rest of the world. But when you look at Hungary or Poland or Ukraine or Russia, these were societies that each had a wildly different social structure and a wildly different background that were pitted in a battle royale against one another. And so when you're looking at Eastern Europe in this time period, you're seeing the attempt to form a potential world civilization that did not in fact, happen. Where Eastern Europe had the potential to become a world civilization, I believe on the scale of the west, the Middle East, India or China, but it ultimately failed in that aim. We will not talk about why it failed in this video. This is a video about the ethnogenesis of the Eastern European nations. And ethnogenesis is a Latin term for the national formation. And this is something that's nearly entirely written out, where when Westerners do perceive Eastern European history, they look at the age of empires, which is what we'll cover next, or the 20th century, which both sort of, in retrospect, betray these kind of grim visions of the time period where, because you see the push towards the total state and this area is gutting. But when you're looking at the medieval establishment of these countries, you're seeing the buildup of a potential that was never realized.
- [05:25]
B
Kind of like a Western European civilization with an Eastern European skin. Like their same interpretation of a similar value set through their national identity with the various kind of differences on show. And we never really got to see it because they got subsumed in the Soviet Union. And we don't have to think about their national characteristics because they didn't make us think about it. They're not super relevant. But Eastern Europe is getting more relevant and it has a ton of potential is what part of it exactly you're talking about. But there's a lot of potential. So maybe we'll start to see what those nations would have looked like if they form along Western values in the 21st century. Western values being like the broad Christendom, you know, interpreted through east and West.
- [06:18]
A
In this video, we're going to cover the period from the formation of the Slavs until the development of the social structure of the countries that led into the dissolution of Poland, Lithuania between Prussia, Austria, Poland, Russia, and then also the Balkans. And we're not actually going to end with the dissolution of Poland, Lithuania into those three different countries. Instead, we are going to look to when those countries formed cohesive social structures and they became the societies that could later develop into the age of empires. And each of these distinct societies were based on a wildly different trajectories about how they formed their society. Because Eastern Europe was a wild east where there was too much space with not enough people. And so each of these societies on an individual basis, had to figure out how do we construct our social structure in a manner that is independent from the others? Because we have to figure this out from scratch. Where the western half of Europe, they had the sort of luxury of Roman colonization, which is a. That's something that would have made sense in the 19th century. It would be totally taboo to say where France and Italy and Spain and even the English or the Germans, through sort of mirror images of Rome, had a model of state construction from Rome, and multiple Eastern European regimes claimed descent from Rome. But that was functionally not what they were doing. And so to start this story, the Germans were a population that stretched from the Caucasus a little bit with the Aulani people, through Ukraine and Belarus and Poland, across most of Eastern Europe, as well as Hungary and Romania. And we talk about that more so in the volkerwanderong video, where during the Roman period, the Germans migrated from Denmark across Eastern Europe. But what happened with the Hun migration into Europe, which came from Asia, rupturing through the continent, building their base around Budapest and reaching out to France and Italy, is that the Germans got pushed west into the former Roman Empire and different German peoples populated there. But this created a pressure movement where Eastern Europe had a truly vast amount of migrations before the rise of the Germans, where you had the Scythians or the Aryans of the Corded Ware culture, or there are Greek colonies, whatever. And so the region was able to do that because it was very lightly populated. The Romans would talk about taking days to walk across Germany with no end of the forest. In Eastern Europe was even more lightly populated. It's important to see the way Eastern Europe was back then to the way Canada is today, where if you drive across any stretch of Canada besides central Ontario, you'll just see infinite forest that goes on forever with periodic settlement. And that's how Eastern Europe was. So when you're seeing these various barbarian peoples push up against each other, remember that these were all semi nomadic, semi hunter gatherer, semi farming peoples. The peoples of Eastern Europe straddled this line between all three ways of life. And they would migrate to a place for a generation, use up all the soil, migrate somewhere else, wait for the soil to come back up. And so you could see these entire populations migrate over huge areas because they were already semi nomadic. And the fall of the Hunnish empire, which was built around the charisma of a handful of great leaders, including Attila, when that died, it meant there was this huge power vacuum in Eastern Europe, where the Germans had been pushed west and the Slavs filled this incredibly rapidly. And the Slavs were sort of a dark horse of the Volker wandering period, because you're inclined to think about the Germans or the Arabs as these sort of charismatic political events. The Germans have like the glorious Viking longships and the sack of Rome, the Arabs of the prophet Muhammad and an entire religion. But for the Slavs, they were right place, right time, and then they filled the void really quickly and they grappled on onto it. And the Slavs were slightly known to old Roman authors, where the Romans had a sense of the world, where the Mediterranean was the oikomene or the known world. And the further you got away from the Mediterranean, the more savage you were. And the Chinese were sort of in a. The Chinese knew, the Romans knew, the Chinese were equivalently advanced, but they were so far away, they had their own rules. And so the Romans put the Slavs in the same categories as the Finns and the bottom of Ethiopia. They said the Slavs are utter savages who live up by the frozen north. They live in animal skins and all these things. And the Slavs were alongside the Finno Ugrians. They were the European peoples who had been attached to the larger civilizations in Europe, where the Germans were equivalently savage before the birth of Christ. And then over time they had sort of integrated into the Roman system. But when the Slavs migrated Across this huge area, they were not literate, they did not do full time agriculture. They were pagans. They did not have government structures, they did not have a warrior nobility. I don't even think they had a legal code. So they were one of the more primitive peoples in Europe because they started around the Pripitmarsh area of North Ukraine, north of the Germans. And they were the henchmen of a lot of these nomadic confederacies, because the Avars or the Huns or these peoples, they needed these large populations to help out their small cavalry armies, where some estimates think there were at least, at least four and at most like eight to 12 slaves for every warrior in the Hun empire. Because the Huns would have these huge slave populations so that when the warrior goes out into battle, he can just fight. And then the slaves take care of him, they supply him with an income, they take care of the horse. And that was the sort of Hun aristocracy. And so the Slavs did that for first the Hun Confederacy and then the Avar Confederacy, which were another. We think the Huns were Finno Ugrian, we think the Avars were Turkic and they settled in the same area around Hungary. And so. And then the Bulgars after, who were another Finno Ugrian group who came off the steppe. But then they went into the Balkans. And so the Slavs migrated across a huge area of Eastern Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries and they went through the Balkans down to, down to the Peloponnese or the bottom of Greece. And there's been a whole debate in history departments about are the ethnic Greeks actually Greek or are they ethnically Slav? And the genetics say there's a significant Slav component, but they're mostly ethnically Greek. And the Slavs also starting around Ukraine, went west into Austria, Czechia, Brandenburg, or the area of Germany around Berlin and then Poland. And so after their initial diaspora, the Slavs were actually further west than they are today. And the Germans went through a medieval process of pushing the Slavs back east.
- [15:06]
B
Right. So that German re pushing into that territory was actually kind of a reclamation of an earlier time.
- [15:15]
A
Yes.
- [15:16]
B
I mean, these, the things always go back further than you think. I wonder if there were roads through those massive forests. Were there ever forest roads or did you just have to go completely around.
- [15:29]
A
Roads involve advanced societies to build them. They did not have that. There were no cities, no roads. The only trade systems were like fur pelts and amber and slaves.
- [15:41]
B
Wow. And I guess they carried those on horses instead of wagons. Or on boats through the rivers. And do you think the space prevented them from having to kind of develop into more of a stable cities?
- [15:57]
A
Civilization in Europe started in the Mediterranean. So keep in mind this is an era where England and Germany are mostly forest. So it's not that Eastern Europe failed, it's that they were just further away from the original central area of civilization.
- [16:15]
B
Oh, and when you said they considered them more kind of barbaric than Western Europe, that applies more post Roman conquest of Western Europe, basically. Which gets back to your original framing.
- [16:28]
A
Yeah, because the Germans had been in proximity with the Romans for centuries and they had since become soldiers in the Roman military, bureaucrats in the Roman government system, merchants, even generals and administrators. And it was perfectly normal for the German nobility to speak Greek and Latin, to read the classics and to be Christian, so that the Germans at the time of the birth of Christ were as slightly less barbaric than The Slavs were 500 years later. But by the time you get to the fall of Rome, where we're talking, the Germans had moved themselves up where in a lot of metrics, the Germans were equivalently advanced to more advanced than the Romans. And the Slavs had never gone through that process because they were, they were north of the German area where the Eastern Europe's connection to civilization was. The Greeks had colonies in Crimea that went back before the Axial Age into like the 6th century BC. So the Greeks have. If any country in the world wants to claim Crimea, the Greeks have the best bet.
- [17:40]
B
That's funny.
- [17:41]
A
And then the Germans, originally, it was ironic peoples like the Scythians and the Sarmatians and then the Germans and then the Slavs. And so the Slavs could fill the void because everyone else in the Volkerwanderung game had kind of been beaten up. The Byzantine Balkans used to be one of the most important places on earth. They got genocided by the Huns, the Germans got pushed west by the Huns, the Huns had self imploded. And so because the Slavs were on the edge of the board, they could populate all of Eastern Europe or a significant part of it without in this critical juncture. And then the Slavs held onto the terrain and then populated it, which is. That's a real accomplishment. It is genuinely impressive that the Slavs have held Eastern Europe for the 1500 years since, because they are basically the only population in Eastern Europe that has done that. Right.
- [18:42]
B
And they basically had scattered movable settlements with calvary going in between, reinforced with foot soldiers in the population areas. So it's kind of like a flexible flat plane strategy. The.
- [18:58]
A
The Slavs weren't really strategic about it. And to go through the different areas up. So you have West Slavs and you have East Slavs and you have South Slavs, and these are different. West Slavs are Poles and Czechs and Wends. The Wends were the Slavic population around Brandenburg or Berlin. The South Slavs were the Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Yugoslavia Slavs. Hungarians are genetically mostly Slavic, although they speak a Turkic language. The Magyars or the Hungarians have not yet entered this region. And then the East Slavs are the former Rus or the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and there's varying degrees. A Pole is somewhat intelligible to Ukrainian. The Slavs are significantly closer to each other genetically and culturally than the Germanic peoples are or the Latin peoples are. So you guys. The Slavs had a more recent migration and they had a smaller genetic pool at their origin. Even though the area where the Slavs did genetically mix was the Balkans, most of the Balkan areas are half Slavic, half local ancestry. And so even if you look at a Russian and a Serb, they. They know that they're genetically and culturally cousins, which is why Serb and Russian nationalists have so often worked together. Where the Slavs have this pan. Have had a Pan Slavic current In the late 19th and early 20th century, in a way the Latins or the Germans did not.
- [20:42]
B
It's almost like you could say they kept fighting each other longer than everybody else because obviously the Celts always used to fight the Celts and the Germanic people would fight each other, but the Celts kind of got pushed against Rome. And I don't know, it feels like they stopped killing each other quite as often as the Slavs did later, which I guess fits with the pattern of them developing later.
- [21:08]
A
I'm not. I'm not sure how agentic players the Slavs were here, if I'm honest. That's kind of mean for me to say, but. So up in the north, they were repopulating areas like modern Canada with a handful of German tribes that migrated out. Then there were two Turkic nomadic confederacies that conquered areas, used Slavs as their majority populations that they would exploit. And then the nomadic confederacies died and the Slavs took over. So you have the Avar Confederacy around Hungary. They were originally great warriors, but then they settled into Hungary. And Hungary is this miniature grassland of the Eurasian steppe that's wedged into the European forests. And so it's been this microcosm that's allowed these steppe peoples to attack outwards and reach as far as France or Italy. And that's been true of both the Huns and the Magyars. And so the Avars eventually grew decadent and soft, and they built a series of forts called the Ring. And Charlemagne destroyed the Ring and took the Avar gold that was considered one of the wealthiest treasures on Earth. Which is. That's like something out of Lord of the Rings.
- [22:35]
B
Yeah. Or a fantasy novel, or. It would make. It's another example of something that would make a good movie. Like all that gold at the end, you know, like the crew. Like National Treasure plus Kingdom of Heaven.
- [22:47]
A
Yeah. And so the Avars were around the Hungarian plain, and then the Bulgars smashed into the Byzantine Balkans. And the Byzantine Balkans were. Were depopulated by the Huns. They originally had millions of people who were ethnically Illyrian, and the Albanians are the only Illyrians left. And I am purposely restraining myself from a nerd rant about the Illyrians because they were. They had several brilliant religious breakthroughs. They were militarily, some of the best soldiers on Earth. It was a wealthy society. A lot of the Roman emperors were Illyrians. And the modern Albanians are the only Illyrians left. And the Albanians survived as Illyrians, much like the Romanians as Latins, because they were a poor mountain people, where the Albanians, they live in these. What was often the poorest country in Europe, it's across from Italy. And they were these mountain clan peoples that had never really attained political consciousness. And they have a lot of traits comparably to the Irish, such as honor culture or clans, or they're some of the toughest fighters in that area. And they were largely sort of off the map or unconquered until the Ottoman Turks and the Ottoman Turks were willing to. The Ottoman Turks made a deal with the Albanians. They could use the Albanians to conquer the other, to subdue the local other peoples. So the Albanians were on board with that. But even during the Roman Empire, the Romans would avoid Albania. It was sort of like a pirate coastline that was part of the Roman Empire. They just didn't want to police it. And so the Albanians are the former Illyrians. The other population that survived in the Balkans after this Bulgar period were the Romanians. And the Romanians are culturally and linguistically Italians. They're like a third Italian genetically. And the Romanians are called Vlachis. Where Romania fits into three different subcomponents. You have Transylvania, you have Wallachia in Moldova, and the Ethnic Romanians are the majority in Wallachia and Moldova, which should be the same country. But Moldova is part of the Soviet Union, which is why it's independent. It was part of Romania earlier. And inside Transylvania, you have a variety of other populations who had not yet arrived at that point. But we have to get to Eastern Europe's diversity as it forms historically. And the. It's really remarkable that the Vlais have survived that long because they live in the alluvial bottomlands of the mouth of the Danube River. And it's always wonder. I've always been curious why the Vlaes survived, because this area has been consistently conquered by nomadic peoples. For most of the last 2000 years. Wallachia was under nomadic governance, and the nomads killed most of the rest of the people. The farmer population of Ukraine had been killed multiple times, but for some reason, the Wallachians survived as this Latinate descended people in Romania. And I think it's just because they were far enough west that the nomads didn't kill them. And they made useful farmers for the nomads, because the nomads did periodically enslave people around the bottom of Ukraine and then make them grow grain for export.
- [26:21]
B
Which is the similar pattern that you mentioned earlier about using slaves to watch the farm. And then you go around riding on horseback, fighting people, which is kind of Spartan. And Helot.
- [26:33]
A
It is. I was thinking. I was thinking of that as well. As I said it. It's a very similar dynamic to the Spartan nobility and the Helots. Slavery was such an omnipresent variable in this time period. You could potentially argue that the East European slave trade was more important to history than the African one. Millions of people were involved, and the Slavs were. The term Slav is a same word as slave for a reason. And the Slavs were sold into slaves for Western. Into Western Europe for a brief period. They were sold into slaves in the Muslim world the most. So the Slavs were used as a litany of different roles, especially so concubines. The favorite slave concubines for the Muslim rulers were from Circassia, which is the Caucasus. And they have their own culture we can get to that goes back thousands of years. But the Vikings, I think that's still.
- [27:27]
B
The case for male brides. I mean, like male brides, like post postage.
- [27:36]
A
And the Slavs were sold by the Vikings, who we'll get to. But the slavery was a huge variable here, and we'll see it as late as the end of this time period. Where the Crimean Tatars sold millions of Russians into slavery during the early modern period. And I was thinking of the human. I can say stuff like that, but I just. There's a staggering human toll to stuff like this that it's easy to write off and you can sort of just talk about it, but you can't really. It doesn't really register until you take a moment to jump back to the Bulgar confederacy. They were a Turkic people from beyond the Urals, and they migrated first across the Pontic grassland, which is the area of South Ukraine that has the steppe climate, where all of the European. All of the nomadic peoples that entered Europe came to the Pontic grassland. But then the Bulgars turned south into the former Byzantine Empire. And because the Byzantine Balkans had been so depopulated, the military system the byzantines used, and McNeil articulates this brilliantly, was dependent on them having a professional army of night cavalry, because the Byzantines got the knights of Persia who used them to fight the nomads in Turkestan. And the Byzantines were not willing to create a landed nobility until later in the empire because this strategy hadn't worked, where they would hire these men, keep them in the cities and then ride out to attack the invading barbarians. The problem was that the Byzantine Balkans had been so depopulated, there weren't enough cities. The Byzantines could actually hold the region except along the coastline. So the Slavs migrated in, populate the entire interior of the Balkans, Byzantines, just through moving their people in, and the Byzantines could hold the coast. And so it's really weird. Even in the bottom of Greece, the Byzantines held like three or four coastal cities. In the interior were the Slavic barbarians. And same thing along the coast of Albania or illyria, even within 30 miles of Constantinople was Bulgarian territory. And the Bulgars today are a Slavic people who speak a Slavic language, and they're genetically Slavic, but the original Bulgars were Turks. And what happened over time is that they intermarried with the Slavs, much like the later Vikings. And the Bulgar confederacy was a surprisingly powerful and developed country at a certain point. The Bulgars, because they were fighting the Byzantines for centuries, they built out their own parallel structure. They had towns, they had a government system. And the Bulgars and the Byzantines fought for many centuries. And they became the greatest thorn in the Byzantine side, sometimes even more so than the Arab caliphate, which was much larger, where they besieged Constantinople, nearly taking it. And at the mid to late 9th century, the Bulgars converted to Orthodox Christianity, which was a huge move because they had been pagan barbarians. But they too had to take in the Christian structure to manage a more complex society, like everyone else who had to convert to Christianity in this region. And with that they became culturally dependent on Byzantium. And then the Slavic Alphabet which we see in Russia, it's a derivation of Byzantine monks going to the Bulgars and figuring out how the Slavic languages worked, then turning the Greek script into the Slavic Slavic language. And this was the Alphabet that eventually spread up from the Bulgars to Russia to become their current Alphabet. And this was done by a Byzantine monk named Cyril, which is like the Cyrillic Alphabet. And this was part of a two sided process where the Franks in the west and the Byzantines in the south were both courting the new Slav civilization. Where the Bulgars would listen because the Catholics and the Orthodox had already de facto split up as different civilizations, although they were technically still the same religion. They would compete against one another, they acted at their own interests. Where the Bulgars considered converting to Catholicism while the Byzantines had missionaries and agents up by Bohemia and Poland. And so there was a point where this entire region was being divided up between the Catholics and the Byzantines.
- [32:31]
B
It kind of makes sense that the Roman Empire split along the like averages of the differentiating cultures on around the Mediterranean and the West. Makes sense. And then the, the Turkics, you had the Turkic Slav mix and then they became Christian. Yes, and they became Orthodox Christian. And do Russians have any speech patterns that are similar to Greek or like an accent? Because I know Portuguese people, like if you hear Portuguese it sounds a little bit like Russian. I wonder if it's, if there's any connection lingually through Greece.
- [33:14]
A
I don't know. I would assume so. Especially for high class philosophic or religious terminology. Because when the Russians and we're not going to get there yet, but when the Russians converted to orthodoxy in the 9th century, the Greeks had a throttle on their church system until the Mongol period when where even in the early 13th century, something like 80% of monks of important church leaders in Russia were people from Greece. So because the Greek controlled their church, they filled out the Russian structure through the Middle Ages with people who were ethnic Greeks from Greece and the church.
- [33:54]
B
So they act as they're Italy, they're Vatican, like Greeks. Italy. Yeah. And it's hard to even think of the Byzantines as Greek. I don't even. It's like I stopped thinking about the Greeks 2,000 years ago. But was really the majority of the Byzantine Empire kind of like Greek and Greek controlled?
- [34:10]
A
Oh, it was all Greek controlled.
- [34:13]
B
Right. And I know that it just. It's hard for me to, like, I call them Byzantines, not Greeks. We should call them Greeks. They were given a little credit.
- [34:21]
A
They were called Greeks at the time. The Vikings. Vikings called them. The Vikings called them Greeks. And I think.
- [34:27]
B
Right. Because.
- [34:27]
A
Yeah, I think the Franks might have called them Greeks to invalidate them being Romans.
- [34:34]
B
And it is significant that Greece was that significant that much later. That's not that long ago in the history of people.
- [34:41]
A
If the Byzantines survived, I think they'd be a state of importance equivalent to Germany, something like that. They'd have Anatolia and the Balkans, or over 100 million people. They'd almost certainly be industrialized. And so the Bulgars were eventually defeated in the early 11th century as part of the Byzantine Renaissance, which involved several good emperors, where the Byzantines had been on the defensive for a while, and then they sort of pulled things back together after their lengthy religious civil war. And under Basil Bulgar Slayer, the Byzantines conquered the entire Balkans up to the Danube. And he was called Bulgar Slayer because in his great battle against the Bulgars, he clawed out their entire defeated army's prisoners eyes, except for one man who he left with one eye to walk them back to their capital because he said it will be worse if they have an entire blind army they have to take care of than to just kill them.
- [35:50]
B
Yeah, I would never feel happier to have one eye than if I was that guy. Yeah, like, it'd be the only time you lost an eye and we're, like, really happy.
- [35:59]
A
Whoa, man.
- [36:00]
B
What about. The odds of that are so low that you're the guy with the one eye left.
- [36:04]
A
What about Odin sacrificing an eye to see Yggdrasil?
- [36:09]
B
Yeah, well, he just did that for the metal. These guys were forced in. It's not as much fun if you're forced into the situation. You have to do that of your own volition to make it fun. But don't do that, though. Keep your eyes.
- [36:22]
A
I like having two eyes. It's fun. So Byzantines took over the Balkans, and then the Balkans became a center of one of the greatest heresies of the Bogomils, where the Bogomils were these Gnostic Cathars, who became one of the dominant sects of the Balkans to fight against the Byzantine authorities. This was a widespread heresy. And so a lot of the Cathars in the south of France were called the Bogomils because these former Bulgar areas didn't want to submit to the Greek Church. The Bogomils weren't actually Christians, although they pretended to be also, I believe Bosnia or. No, it was Montenegro. Montenegro. Montenegro. The Catholic Church took them in and then openly said they were heretics and. But it was okay that they were heretics and did not follow Catholic doctrine at all because they were so irrelevant. And they pledged complete submission. The Pope was like.
- [37:24]
B
I was going to say, because there's like three of them and then there's still not that many. My friend moved there and took over the government.
- [37:32]
A
Really?
- [37:33]
B
One of some political operator from Arizona? Yeah. He just helped their freedom movement organize and they won. It's like really easy.
- [37:40]
A
I was part of Praxis, which was an organization to build a city state in the Balkans. They have one of the most crazy corporate histories I've seen of anywhere. I will not share it out of. Just. I don't want to get involved in this right now. But it was what it was, and so Montenegro. Strange. Wait, no. How did you do. Is there more to that story?
- [38:08]
B
I mean, that's basically the summer summary, but it's a. He. He has a house there now, and it's really, really nice place, like really cheap. You can build a whole new awesome house. It's all in the mountains because it's such a small population, because it's literally the top of a mountain range, like, with tons of trees.
- [38:27]
A
I heard about Andrew Tate before he was popular because he was part of the same sort of digital nomad. Sort of. I was living with a bunch of like, frat boy fuck boys during my digital nomad phase. And so he was part of those circles. He'll be like, I heard of this guy named Andrew Tate who went to Romania as this wealthy guy and just took it over and he just does whatever he wants there. And that was the narrative about him before he got popular. And so to see the disjoint between Andrew Tate being like this idolized expat bro to being the public figure was such a stark thing.
- [39:01]
B
That's funny. This is a very different type of guy. He's more like a Ron. Long time Ron Paul Republican liberty libertarian operative. And it's not that big of a country, but it's a really nice place. So, I mean, they have some potential as well. Like they're one of the areas in Eastern Europe that is. And they're in a nice moment in their country because things are just getting better.
- [39:26]
A
Romania?
- [39:28]
B
No, no, Montenegro.
- [39:29]
A
Oh, okay.
- [39:30]
B
Yeah. I don't think Andrew Tate controls Romania because I'm pretty sure. Did they protect him or they arrested him?
- [39:35]
A
Yeah, we're not going to talk about entertain. This is my. I. I freaking have to deal with this presentist garbage all day. Whenever I open my phone, it's some like, you brought him up. Okay, fair, Fair. The thing about standards is you will break them. But Montenegro, it's crazy that they were an independent mountain from centuries. The Ottomans did not conquer them for centuries. Well, they had the entire rest of the Balkans. So if you look at a map of 16th century Europe, it's just little Montenegro surrounded by the huge Ottoman Turks. Because again, much like the Catholic Church, they were so irrelevant. People like you can have your thing.
- [40:22]
B
And no one goes up there anyways. We're not going to bother walking. It's not on a road. It's just like they don't even know they exist.
- [40:29]
A
It's a black mountain, which is the name. Yeah, in Latin. And Bulgars fell, Byzantines took the Balkans, made it provinces. And this is actually important for the Balkans later history, where if the Huns had not generated the genocide of the region in the 5th century, the Balkans could have potentially been an England or a France or a Spain, because they had a comparable level of development. Roman history. And the Balkans does have hard geography, but so does Scotland or Norway, which are staggeringly wealthy countries. Or Switzerland and so Hong Kong. Yeah. It's weird that I'm saying the Albanians are one of the most primitive people in Europe. But it's weird that I'm saying the relatives of the Albanians could have had this great sort of civilization. But I mean, imagine if. If the only Britons that were left were the Highland Scots. Do you look at the Highland Scots in their tartan up in the mountains? You think this people kept the rest of this island, could have conquered the world. Things are weird. Life is queer.
- [41:37]
B
That's crazy. That's a great analogy for it. Montenegro is kind of like if Robin Hood won.
- [41:43]
A
Exactly.
- [41:44]
B
Like they just made their own village in the forest.
- [41:47]
A
The Balkans has a lot of Robin Hood myths. That's actually an archetype in their mythology. You see it in Albania.
- [41:53]
B
Interesting.
- [41:54]
A
A lot of the neighboring countries, I think Greece modern. Oh, God, I can't get into that now. I was thinking about how Greek culture had altered over the Byzantine through the Turkic period. But I cannot contain that within the plot line now. And Byzantine Balkans. This matters because you saw this wide scale dispersion of Slavs south of the Danube. And it was yet to be understood what ethnic identity these people would develop because they could have been a single pan Slavic ethnicity like the Bulgars, because they'd all been Bulgarian territory. And that would have made it more like Poland or Russia, a single unified Slavic country. And one of the trends you're going to keep seeing over the course of this video is these. These ethnic formations are more arbitrary here than they are in a lot of the world. Although there are cases where that's very much not fair. It's Eastern Europe is a place of empires, it's not a place of nation states. And I'm reading a really brilliant book called Visions of Empire by an author name, whose last name is Kumar. And it's about the ruling ideologies of five great empires. And it was. I was really lucky to be reading it today because it taught me all of these lessons about Eastern Europe that are very applicable for this video and next video. But one of which is that in nation states you try to artic. You try to build the separate unity of that people like the English or the French or the Spanish, who form from a series of distinct ethnicities. What you have in empires is the creation of an elite culture that can span the different conquered people of an empire. Because a nation is a single people under a government. An empire is one people who subdue many others. So imperial cultures require a sort of upper class that has the ethnic identity of the dominant population. But the upper classes of other conquered peoples can imitate it and become part of that ruling culture. But often imperial cultures end up backstabbing the majority original population that built them. And so that's what you see in Eastern Europe, where in Western Europe you saw these unified nation states. But in Eastern Europe, in Russia, their elites did that, backstabbing their own population. Poland did it too, with their greater empire. The Ottoman Turks did it and the Hungarians did it as well. Where you have these broader elite cultures in Eastern Europe's potential was destroyed firstly by concentrating on just an elite level. But the elite culture was quite refined. But then killing the elites is what really destroyed Eastern Europe. Where interesting, Eastern Europe is all peasant societies today because they killed the upper classes.
- [44:54]
B
Sure, sure.
- [44:55]
A
I was talking to my dad about what were the populations with the highest degrees of interiority today. And interiority is basically the introspective ability to enter your mind and then build a worldview from your mind that you can bring out onto the world.
- [45:10]
B
And we agree, thinking independent of data or whatever.
- [45:14]
A
And we came to the conclusion the two Interior populations left are Northwest Europeans and their diaspora and the Japanese and the Jews. And we were talking about how the Middle east and Eastern Europe used to have high degrees of interiority. In Islam too. Sorry, Islam's Middle East. We were talking about how Middle east in Eastern Europe used to have high degrees of interiority, but that was concentrated among the upper classes. So when you wipe out their elite populations, you destroy all levels of interiority. And so in Eastern Europe, with these countries like Poland or Russia or the Teutonic Knights or the Ottomans, they don't develop clean nations. There's the upper class imperial culture and then the peasants who operate on a lower level inside their communities. And the national identity of the peasants is very much up for grabs. So it wasn't until the mid to late 20th century, actually entire 20th century, that eastern Europe had to think about what its nationalities were in the 19th century.
- [46:19]
B
And if you.
- [46:20]
A
In the 19th century, the nationality sort of screamed out of these bigger empires, we want to be free. But then when they got freedom, they had to sort of divide up. This is for this, this is for that. And so in the Balkans, you have a variety of populace relations. I would guess a little bit more than a majority of the population of the Balkans is Slavic. And among these Slavs, it's very much unclear what the boundaries are. Being a Bulgarian or a Bosnian or a Serb or a Fyramite. I like the term, I like the term fyram purely for ironic reasons, but we can get to that. So the Byzantines built the Orthodox churches of the Balkans in a manner to naturally subdivide these populations, so that when these populations were governed by larger empires like the Byzantines or the Turks, the imperial cultures of their upper classes would reflect the ruling families. And then their populations, which had identities built upon the local church would have these smaller subdivided local identities which would not be able to cooperate against the larger governance. So the Byzantines established the Orthodox churches of the Balkans by the sort of each of these independent countries. And this is one of my dad's rants that I got from him. This was. He's been studied the Balkans for a while and it's. He's told me this like five times. Is the establishment of these independent churches by the Byzantines in the medieval period metastasized into creating these distinct national identities whenever the higher government was removed. And so it's an example of social engineering working very well.
- [48:05]
B
Interesting, because they basically set up a church in all the different areas and then that forms some kind of basis for communication. Between them while also enabling or creating some sort of self expression. So it wasn't exactly the same, but there was still a layer. And does, does lack of elites correlate with empire? Because if you don't have enough elites then you need like a bigger territory with, you know, if you have three people, you know, I'm not going to do a math example, but you know what I mean.
- [48:39]
A
You are completely correct and that is a point so few people know, but matters so greatly. I like to say the most important thing for an army is a good officer corps. And you could write a significant amount of the history of the world through the lens of mid level leadership. A society's mid level leadership will determine literally every single thing in its social structure.
- [49:02]
B
Wow, that's fascinating you say that because like I've said before, when I went to work in Asia, one of the reasons I went to work there is they have a huge shortage of middle managers. Yeah. So it's a great way to get middle management experience like right out of the gate early in your career. Because people don't do anything unless their boss tells them to. And you know, that's like largely culturally ingrained because I know they can think of more things than they do because they know what they could do, but they don't. So like it's not like a fatalistic thing, but that is like a very clear condition, cultural condition.
- [49:40]
A
I often think about how hard it must be for a lot of East Asians that there are populations with very high degrees of interiority and sentience and they live in these brutally restrictive societies where.
- [49:51]
B
Well, that's why Japanese fantasy is so crazy because they can't. They can think of it, they do have the ideas. They just can't do a lot of stuff.
- [49:59]
A
East Asians, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, they'll do school for like 16 hours a day for a lot of their high school as just the baseline 12 to 16 hours. Then they get stuck in these brutal, brutalizing work conditions. And then there are these societies obsessed with family and they spend no time with their family.
- [50:17]
B
They have to be in school all day because their parents are at work all day.
- [50:20]
A
Yes, it's a. I could speak to this. I choose not to. So bag a meals.
- [50:28]
B
The bag. These are new.
- [50:30]
A
Yeah, I had to pick the keyword to reorient my mind. The friggin. What's the. For video games, the hotkey you play to like.
- [50:40]
B
Oh yeah, control, whatever.
- [50:42]
A
Yeah, the. The Control X hotkeys. Yeah, the Control X in Starcraft to build more resource centers so we have the Byzantine Balkans. It remains part of the Empire until 1204 with the West European takeover of Constantinople and then it fractures. But let's get back further north and then return to the Balkans because we're entering like 600 year time gaps. Further north in Poland, in Czechia and these places, the Slavic tribes could evolve more in sort of organic independence from the larger societies. And when they later did, it was from the Franks in the West Europeans, where the largest force, the two largest sort of non civilized forces that were acting upon the Slavs, besides the ones I've already articulated, are the Khazars and the Vikings. The Khazars were another Turkic people, much like the Avars or the Bulgars, and they were also from Asia. And their base was around the Caucasus diocese in the old Aryan homeland between Ukraine and Kazakhstan. And their capital was around Stalingrad. And they converted to Judaism because they were trade partners of both the Byzantines and the Arabs. And if they had converted to either country's religion, it would have turned them into vassals of them. And instead they picked Judaism because like everywhere else in Eastern Europe, the monotheistic religions had the social technologies to move past a population of like 1 million people beneath a garment of like 1 million people. You can have the old pagan religions beyond that threshold. You need to have the Abrahamic religions to be the social scaffolding. And so they picked Judaism because it had all of the prescriptions of an Abrahamic religion without being related to the others. This was a strategy that peoples in Central Asia solved by converting to Manichaeism or Gnosticism or Buddhism or other non Christianity Islam religions. And the Khazars have for a long time been the origin of a lot of conspiracy theories. But this was largely a historic glitch. Modern Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe have no genetic impact from the Khazars. They're half Levantine, half French and Italian. And they migrated in from the West. In the high Middle Ages, the Khazars converted to Judaism. It's unclear how serious the population was about this. It might have just been a larp among the elites. And then the.
- [53:53]
B
Did they stay Jewish like.
- [53:55]
A
So they were destroyed by the Vikings. Where the Khazars had their own society. They, they could go toe to toe with the Byzantines and the Arabs in a few wars. They had a city called Ityl that was surprisingly big for the step. They had a bureaucratic military system, wealthy trade. The Khazars were a genuine, merely civilized outgrowth on the steppe in a way you did not see before or after. So I want to give these medieval kingdoms justice where others would ignore them. And the Khazars were wiped out by the Vikings who came down from the north. And the Vikings, or as they were called, the Ross, they started in Sweden and they were trying to trade with the Byzantines in the Middle east, where there were huge markets at Constantinople or during the Islamic Golden Age, where the Vikings would bring slaves and. And amber and furs, where Eastern Europe's relationship with the Middle east at this point was comparable from Africa to Europe today, all developing economies start with raw material production and then move up value added through manufacturing, and then up to intellectual or philosophic, and then you degenerate back into poverty. And so Eastern Europe started large influxes of capital from the Middle east due to this. Where we found these huge silver hoards in Scandinavia of Arabic gold. We found Buddha images, we found Buddha icons from India, Scandinavia, Chinese things. And Eastern Europe was part of this. This trade system held together by the Rus. And the Rus are the origins of modern Russia. But there's a complication there between Rus and Russia, which we'll talk about soon. And the historic legend for how the Rus started was that the Slavic peoples were in disorder and they invited the manly Rurik over from Sweden to be their king because they knew they needed a king and Rurik was manly enough to do so. This was likely not what happened. Rather, the Vikings showed up to go on the river system. No, it's pretty good.
- [56:12]
B
And then they said, I need a strong man. Oh, and you're so strong. He looks so strong. And I said, yeah, sure, I'll do what I need.
- [56:22]
A
And, yeah, the Middle Ages is funny sometimes. And so the Vikings established these forts along their trade network through, like, the Dnieper and the Nester and these rivers where there is a consistent trade pattern from the Baltic down to the Black Sea and the Caspian, through Russia's river systems. That unifies the core of the European Russian nation. And the Vikings started with this. And the Vikings reached out as far as Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, North Africa. They really got far. And they likely went even further than we know, because this is not a very well recorded era of history. And the Vikings established a series of forts, and then the Slavs sort of entered their orbit, because the Vikings were the first people who established a frame for the region. And the Vikings weren't too oppressive. At their worst, they would just sort of herd the Slavs together and enslave them. Eastern Europe had this weird dynamic of treating populations like cattle, which because both the Vikings and the steppe nomads and the Slavs to a lesser extent were cattle herding peoples. So the Vikings might just periodically see a population, say you've got good slaves and take you, or otherwise just build a fort and then have them grow food for them. It was a chaotic time.
- [57:46]
B
Just like Mongols in China. Yeah, just like the Mongol China relationship.
- [57:51]
A
Yes, very, very like that. And there's a lot of dynamics. You would have seen the African slave trade of tribes trying to get people from each other, or brutal warlords who built their power off the slave trade. I have heard that the Vikings would have these Slav sub commanders in the rust, where the guy in modern Belarus was supposedly just this barbaric commander who would just keep his people in punitive conditions on the threat of sending them out to slavery, just periodically butcher people. And there was stuff like that. But the Vikings, they were pretty good. Where Kievan Rus was one of the wealthiest places in Europe, it was one of the freest societies in Europe. And these cities such as Novgorod in the north, Kiev in the south, Even in the 11th century, they were seen as good places. They were wealthy, they were well built, they had rule of law. And Russia until the period of the Mongol governance. It's really stark to compare it to later eras where the Kumar author I'm reading, he was saying that when you look at Mongol, the Russia that the Mongols faced, this is a society in decadence, where the Rus had built a society, where Novgorod had a parliament, there were parliaments across Russia. They had property rights. Russia did not practice serfdom. They had some of the highest meat consumption rates of anywhere in Europe. And people who were wandering through would comment on how vigorous and happy Russia was. And so in the 12th century, you would think that Russia would become a society like England or France or Western Europe. It had all the same traits. The Orthodox Church had been spreading civilization where that was a really strong undercurrent. And the Rus monarchy fell apart in the early 11th century, subdivided into these different principalities. And we're not going to get to the Mongols yet. But when the Mongols attacked Russia, they could defeat these subdivided Russian states because Russia was a society that had worked.
- [59:58]
B
They could defeat them because it worked, I thought, because they didn't get ally with each other like we talked about in the other episode. How does that relate?
- [60:06]
A
Decadence is an outcome of a society that has succeeded.
- [60:10]
B
Oh, because they worked too well. Decadence. Okay, I get it.
- [60:13]
A
Maybe I'm glazing the Kevin Russ too hard. Maybe I haven't heard that. Like the one or two bad variables, that sinks my estimation of them. But for the things I've pieced together, Kevin Russ seems to have been a. A healthy society.
- [60:24]
B
And so, I mean, the more impressive thing would be that if they did unite the idea that they would have beaten the Mongols, because nobody beat the Mongols. So if, if they could have beaten them united, then that's a sign in of itself of how impressive it is. And the, the Danube is super interesting in all of this because it's super underrated because it's a river. Doesn't stick out on a map. You don't think of it like the Mediterranean, but it's just as important as the Straits of Gibraltar. It's a direct connection into that trade network. My only question is, how do they get back up? Or which way does the river run? I mean, all rivers run north, so except for the Nile. I mean, they would have had to walk one way. Right. I mean, how'd that work?
- [61:09]
A
So Danube flows from the Alps east until the Black Sea. And it's one of the most ethnically diverse rivers. And along the world today, the Danube flows through Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and maybe one other. Most of those are distinct ethnic groups with their own history. So if you go along the Danube, you'll find so many nations, and that doesn't even include the former diversity. Where I saw this crazy map of the 19th century Balkans, where it was just like someone vomited on the map, where you had Albanian populations by Athens and Greece. You had Romanian populations up by like Attica, central Greece. You had Turkic, Crimean Tatar populations that were huge at the mouth of the Danube that have since been kicked out. You had huge Turkish population, huge Jewish populations, German populations, where the 20th century in Eastern Europe was a tragedy for multiple reasons, but it was in large part a tragedy of the genocide and ethnic replacement of a very diverse Eastern Europe, with the Balkans being the most so and so with the river traffic, it's south, right?
- [62:29]
B
Yeah.
- [62:29]
A
No, it goes east.
- [62:32]
B
Right, right, right.
- [62:32]
A
Danube goes.
- [62:33]
B
But down, they go down from Scandinavia.
- [62:36]
A
So you are thinking of the neighbor. The Danube is.
- [62:41]
B
Okay, okay.
- [62:41]
A
The Danube is Vienna to the Black Sea, the Nieper and the Nester. And there's a third one, the Nieper, Nester, Neva. They flow from St. Petersburg down to Crimea.
- [62:56]
B
Got it. Right. And the Scandinavians connect from the ocean. Yeah. Into that.
- [63:01]
A
And so when going upriver, it's significantly harder than going down river. You have to row and stop your boat at night rather than just flowing the current. So as an example, I think it would take 10 times as long to go up the Mississippi as down the Mississippi in early 19th century America.
- [63:22]
B
Wow. Yeah, that makes about sense.
- [63:24]
A
Yes it does. It was. You had to get pretty strong to go up the Mississippi. But water traffic was always vastly cheaper in the pre industrial world than lands traffic. So you would still go up the river like that even if it was so much harder.
- [63:42]
B
Right. And then we have workarounds around the rapids where you have to carry your boat or something like Cordova.
- [63:49]
A
I will humor this.
- [63:50]
B
I mean it would have been, it would have been a challenge. But yeah, maybe they brought heavier goods on the way down and lighter on the way up.
- [63:58]
A
I will humor this tangent, but I was just thinking about if we had YouTube shorts in different historic time periods. I was imagining a French Coolio Dubois just saying, you know, me and the Mandan people of Iowa, we're eating buffalo together and I just brought my canoe. This is Pierre Lefebvre and I'm out by Montana. In this you'd have to use Starlink. But I'm just thinking of how.
- [64:25]
B
Oh yeah, of all the historical, like if someone from 300 years ago did the insta reel. Those are hilarious.
- [64:31]
A
You know, of any given era of history, we are the one that has the most boring Internet. If you drop the Internet in the Napoleonic wars you would have Goethe and Hegel and Rousseau and Napoleon, all these influencers. Now I have to friggin watch like Ishowspeed and Keemstar.
- [64:51]
B
Well that's why we watch those videos of Russians playing with bears and stuff. Because that's another example of metal Internet. Like back in the day, you know, the animal videos that there would be 2,000 years ago.
- [65:02]
A
I mean I share so many animal videos and people find it annoying.
- [65:08]
B
You're supposed to say timeline cleanser and.
- [65:10]
A
Then they understand why do I give a.
- [65:12]
B
Unless you're. The videos you're sharing are like. Well when I went first went to Thailand and I got on there, I went YouTube in Thailand. It was all like lion fights tiger and like real, real fights between lions and tigers and different animals. Just like in these arenas. Zoos or not zoos. I don't know.
- [65:31]
A
My mom made me take an etiquette course as a child. It was, it was something in my town. A lot people, other people in my school did it. You would, you'd get taught table manners and had like European style dancing. And I remember seeing that and thinking this will not be applicable to my life. And so when people explain Internet etiquette to me, I'm like, oh, this is an equivalently silly level of etiquette, I think.
- [65:53]
B
I think, oh, yeah, it's not going to be relevant.
- [65:56]
A
I think politeness very. Does. Very does matter. Matters tremendously. I think politeness is very important. Look at the Internet etiquette. I'm like, this is equivalently silly to like having a fish fork because they'd say, this is your fish fork, this is your soup spoon versus your main course soup spoon. I'm like, I will never use this.
- [66:18]
B
Oh, yeah, I probably don't even. I'm not even familiar with Internet etiquette. I don't even know how to do. What do you call them acronyms or. Not acronyms, the shorter words. I don't know what almost any of them mean.
- [66:29]
A
Yeah. When I was in college, I don't know what.
- [66:32]
B
What it's called.
- [66:33]
A
When I was in college, I would ask girls for their phone number and people. You probably just ask them for their. Your snap. And I was like, why, why does it matter if it's Snapchat or the phone? I still have a contact.
- [66:44]
B
Oh, that's interesting. Little cultural things. I bet those are. Those are going to be really temporary and they're based on the technology because Snapchat is less committal. It's less linked to your profile.
- [66:55]
A
Yeah, I also.
- [66:56]
B
You can go to Snapchat to Instagram after. That's the upgrade.
- [67:01]
A
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, like Pennsylvania, and I went to college in Maine, which was a huge cultural jump no one told me about. New Englanders have completely different social rules and there were a lot of weird interactions due to that. But we could have a culture. We do have a cultural America video in the future. But Daka, Daka, Dhaka, the Rus have worked. You had the Byzantine Balkans. You have around a thousand ad, the region converted to monotheistic religions en masse, where the Poles in the Czechs converted to Catholicism, while the Balkans converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, as did the Russians, which is still the great civilizational fault line in Eastern Europe between the Western civilization and the Orthodox civilization, because, as I said before, the identity of these peasants, and in most cases, the entire nation was religious because the religion spanned these diverse ethnic groups. Eastern Europe had to rely on religion for its national identity more than Western Europe, because they were often fighting people of different religions with ethnically diverse empires. And so if you were to ask a Russian, during the period of the Russian Civil War, during the period of the Tsarist empire, what their identity was. They would say, I'm Orthodox first. And that's how the Russians bridged the ethnic gaps inside their empire, because, like 20% of the modern Russian genomes of Finnish origin, a lot's Turkic, Siberian Muslim. And as these societies developed, they were dependent on these larger civilizations, where the Slavs were never able to make a distinct identity as a civilization distinct from the larger ones. And so the Slavs were always divided between what civilization they were a part of. And later the Muslims converted other Slavs. And so there's this undercurrent of ethnically similar populations divided up by empire, divided up by religion. So you could have an area like the South Slavs around Yugoslavia where Croats, Slovenians, Bosnians, Serbs, Fyramites could technically be the same ethnicity. However, that technicality is very thin where de facto, they have split into those different peoples, where even people who the Croats were more different from the Serbs, Although that was caused by the Croats converting to Catholicism and the Serbs converting to Orthodox. But that religious division had happened enough earlier on that they were clearly distinct ethnicities, even though the social planners around Roman War one thought they'd be close enough. So the Croats genus. The Croats genocided the Serbs, and then the Serb genocided the Croats back. Meanwhile, the Bosnians had converted to Islam during the Ottoman period, and then the Christians gobbled onto an identity that the Bosnians had that made Bosnian independent from the religious identity. But the Serbs said the Bosnians were. Were part of them. Well, if you look at Faeram, which I will keep saying, ironically, former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was a name that was invented because the Greeks were angry that the Fajran people were claiming to be Macedonia because that would suggest that they were relatives of Alexander the Great, while the Macedonians are Slavs. And so the Greeks were so angry that the Macedonians were claiming relation to Alexander the Great that they demanded they change their name. The Macedonians built this huge statue of Alexander, probably the most thing in their country, and they build all of their society and their propaganda around him. And the Bulgars claim that the Faeram people are. Okay, they're Macedonians. I'm sorry, the Macedonians. The Bulgars claim that they're Bulgars. They are, in fact, ethnically closest to the Bulgars. The Serbs claimed they were Serbian, and then the Greeks claimed that this area is theirs, and then the Albanians fought over it too. So tiny country, probably the size of, like, Delaware has been claimed by so many different nations.
- [71:38]
B
Is there, like, a mix of all of them on the 23andMe test just getting pulled apart in every direction.
- [71:45]
A
I am surprised. I know this, but 23andMe subdivides Balkan ancestry by larger genetic pools rather than by the sub region. So you have a singular Balkan ancestry in the 23andMe data set. And then they subdivide their data sets based on regions that are not large enough to be small enough to be contentious. So they'd say South Balkans, Greater Romania, they'd say Bulgaria, etc. So they've gotten around.
- [72:13]
B
They try and make it less contemptuous.
- [72:15]
A
Yeah.
- [72:15]
B
But I'm sure that the recent DNA testing has brought some answers to a lot of these long term debates. Right. And is that shaking out in the culture of those societies? Are they kind of ignoring that?
- [72:28]
A
The developer of spiral dynamics, which is the theory of consciousness development, he did like sort of piecework in the Balkans and he said the region was completely. Was the singular place in the world where he found no 1 above level 4 of consciousness. Level 4 is the ability to perceive the world through your tribe's lens. Literally no one involved was capable.
- [72:52]
B
But they're all at level four. There's no one above it. But they're all there.
- [72:56]
A
Yes, they're all at level four.
- [72:58]
B
They've got it down. They've mastered level four.
- [73:01]
A
Yes. And the churches are part of this as well. And the churches encourage them in this nationalism.
- [73:08]
B
It doesn't matter if you actually find differences or similarities because people will fight who they want to. And it's funny how this like tribal, even genocidal logic can get all the way down to like the McCormick's first, the O'Reilly's Family Feud or whatever, where that's. They're actually trying to, you can say from the outside, hey, they're similar, but in their minds they've identified themselves as separate.
- [73:31]
A
Yeah.
- [73:32]
B
Literally genetic families that they're trying to exterminate.
- [73:35]
A
That's how I always perceive the Israel Gaza conflict. And I can't believe others don't perceive it this way. Or when I saw Israel Gaza, I thought, oh, this is a clan dispute. This is north and South Ireland. I can look at north and South Ireland and think these are people who are genetically and culturally nearly identical. But they got stuck in this honor dispute over the lands that they have to continue for generations until it's over.
- [74:01]
B
Because there is some genetic bleed into Israel. It's not like a totally clear.
- [74:05]
A
And so when you look at the Israel Gaza conflict or a lot of the Balkan things like this is a Clan honor dispute. I mean, both sides spurred the other's honor. They have these series of insults on one another's honor code. So they're going to fight over this. I am not part of this honor dispute. I am unclear why.
- [74:21]
B
Imagine trying to. Yeah, imagine trying to jump in and go like, well, they settled here first or they were after. Or, you shot me first. And then like, bro, it's an honor dispute. They don't even remember. That's not the point.
- [74:32]
A
Are you nuts? Are we gonna go to the hatfields and the McCoys and say, hey, no. Imagine trying to arbitrate the hatfields and the McCoys.
- [74:39]
B
Yeah, or just like if the Hatfields and McCoys were youtubing. And then the comment section was like, fight. One side aligned completely with the one and one with the other. It's like, hey, why are you guys jumping on this dude? And it connects to the broader Arab world, right? Because Palestine is a way for the Arabs to have influence towards their outcome or whatever. And at this point, like, the broader Arab world is more over this honor fight than a lot of the US Is like, yeah, it's friggin. Which is hilarious.
- [75:11]
A
I know exactly what you're saying. I mean, if you go to Qatar, they don't care. I haven't been to Qatar. I would assume if you go to Kuwait, the upper classes have moved past it and the populations are still obsessed with it.
- [75:23]
B
Peace in the Middle east is not conditional on whatever resolution you think needs to happen.
- [75:29]
A
And I can't imagine you look at like an honor dispute like that and think, yeah, this is something we can resolve easily. These centuries of just utter hatreds, blood spilt and that stuff. And it's just very naive and silly. But I might cut this out.
- [75:43]
B
There's only one way to solve this. Trump casinos.
- [75:46]
A
I might cut the story out. But my dad's obsessed with the Balkans and he's been there to go to different countries. And. And he was in. In Kosovo where he saw this. He was in this monastery and there was this monk who was arguing why he was not guilty for collusion in a genocide to UN peacekeepers. And he was just arguing, saying, I was not here at that specific moment where I specifically said. And my dad said, my dad walked past me like, this dude's definitely guilty.
- [76:20]
B
He's like Fuentes at Jan6. Well, all I did was yell on the megaphone to go in the building. I wasn't there.
- [76:28]
A
Yeah.
- [76:28]
B
What are you talking about? Are you crazy?
- [76:30]
A
And a great example of these East European disputes. Is the. The division in Rus and Rossia, where Russ was the ethnic group of the Kievan Rus that modern Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians are contained within. And. This was a distinct ethnic group, like how the Romans evolved as the Italians, Spanish and the. Sorry, just the noise is killing me. Italians, French, Spanish. But it's between the Rus and the Russians, the Russians and the Ukrainians. And these peoples had their own distinct ethnogeneses that were informed by being conquered by Poland or the Mongols later. And so Russia, or the country that formed around Moscow as a political unit, they have said that they are the descendants of the Rus, so they can take Ukraine and Belarus as parts of them. And then the Ukrainians and the Belarusians more so the Ukrainians. The Belarusians don't care as much. They say that Kievan Rus is different from Rossiya. And my attitude towards this is I don't think there's real justice in this world. And this is as if the American south won the Civil War and they became a distinct independent country. And it would be genuinely arguable if the American south is a distinct ethnic group because they formed independently, they've been governed independently, different genetics, but also they are American. And I don't think there is an answer to questions like this.
- [78:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, it just is what it is and you do whatever you want with it. Like, you can describe it pretty clearly. There's these ethics places and they're in this region and it's easier to pretend that doesn't exist when you have an empire or maybe you're incentivized to play those differences down. And then in an opposite situation, you might play them up, but they just are what they are.
- [78:39]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [78:40]
B
Impact what they do.
- [78:41]
A
And as an example, there have been points where Ukraine's worked with the Russians. There were lengthy periods where Ukrainian was a pure peasant identity and anyone above a certain social class was. Was Russian. Then there were other periods where Ukraine was independent or persecuted by the Russians or it had its own very vibrant other culture. So it's not an easy question. It is what it is. And I support Ukrainian independence because I support a free people against getting conquered.
- [79:17]
B
Oh, Ukraine is clearly like west, east split, like the voting patterns are. Exactly. And you're. Okay, so that's what you're referring to with like the south winning if the east wins through Russia and takes over the west or something.
- [79:30]
A
Politically, if the American south had won the US Civil War and they had maintained legal independence for, let's say, at least another 50 years, maybe until the Present, the American south would have evolved in its own convergent direction with its own institutions, government, media. So they would have developed as their own nation over a distinct period. And then if, let's say we had reconquered the South, Northern and Southern Americans would look at this and say, are American Southerners their own ethnicity? They've been independent, period. They've been unified with the rest of the country. They have a distinct genetic pool. Their roots go back to England, not to their roots both go back to England, not to one another. They have their own climate. And so a Northerner could say you are Americans because of blank historic variables, and a Southerner could say we are Southerners because of blank variables. And the actual truth would be muddy.
- [80:31]
B
Yeah, that's a really great analogy to help us understand what it's like on the ground in Eastern Europe, because that exact kind of example happens all over in all sorts of crisscrossy ways.
- [80:43]
A
As an example of this with Belarus, Belarus is White Russia. So you had white, black and Red Russia, which are the distinct sub regions of Ruthenia or the western part of Ukraine, which their local title is the Rusyn. And so the Slovakians will claim to be closer to the Rusyn than the Rusyn are to the Ukrainians. But it's a continuum where Slovakians are quite ethnically close to both checks and Ukrainians. The Czechs have claimed Slovakians as one of theirs because they were part of the Austrian Empire, where all educated people in Slovakia were culturally similar to the Czechs, while the Slovakians, who were almost all peasants, did not have a clear identity. But then the Slovakians will often claim kinship to the Ukrainians. But the only reason the Slovakians and the Czechs are distinct, distinct identities is they were stuck on different sides of the mountain during the Hungarian period, medieval period. That is how complicated.
- [81:52]
B
Right. And I mean, that might add to the complication, is that normally they're not separated by mountains, I guess. No, that. That the part of Eastern Europe where it's more split up ethnically are around land barriers. Right. Versus the plains.
- [82:08]
A
Yes, the plains tend to be. So it's complicated with the Pripet marshes of North Ukraine. They act like a distinct geographic feature, like a mountain. So the Slavs around there and then the Pripet marshes block entire militaries. So you can use the Pripet marshes as a sort of lake or mountain range where everyone has to work around them. That's the line between Ukraine and Belarus, where Belarus is an example. If it's unclear if Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are the same ethnicity, Ukraine and Belarus is even less. Where Belarus did not desire independence from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, it just happened to be a distinct SSR due to them being under Polish governance in the early modern period. And so Belarus has remained the puppet of Russia and they've continually had plans to politically integrate with Russia. The Russians move military forces through them all the time. The dictator is good friends with Putin, although they've had issues in falling out, they're not a total puppet. But then they are the same ethnicity as the Ukrainians, more so than the Russians. So the Belarusians are. They are both closer to the Ukrainians and the Russians than the Ukrainians and the Russians are to each other. But they are somehow a distinct ethnicity. And this did not matter because Belarusian was a purely peasant identity. Everyone who was educated was a Russian and no one cared what the peasants thought. And so in Eastern Europe, the destruction of the elite culture meant all of these peasant identities emerged which were not formed intellectually. So.
- [83:51]
B
Right.
- [83:52]
A
Baltic, Finnish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, these were all creations of the 19th century of small, educated intellectual movements who were pulling on these peasant trajectories before using Western European terminology to articulate peasant cultures. And in most cases, they only got power because an external authority destroyed the larger empire.
- [84:21]
B
Right. So they were intellectualizing as they were going. It was like the car had already started and then they had to work on the engine as it was moving.
- [84:30]
A
Yes. As an example, the Finns were conquered by the Scandinavians for their entire history up to a certain point. And then the Russians gave them near functional independence when they were an empire. And so the Finns had this small Scandinavian nobility and over time they had to artificially create a Finnish identity. And so the Kalevala, which was a big inspiration for the Lord of the Rings, a the great Finnish epic, that was them going through their oral storytelling and creating a Lord of the Rings style heroic saga from all of these distinct elements. Because the Finns were a nomadic herder people. It's really remarkable they're one of the wealthiest countries on Earth because they jump from barbarism to civilization asap. I guess cold weather does that to you. And the Finns did that the best of any ethnic group in this region because they're more separated from the actual sort of bloodlands of the North Eurasian North European plain.
- [85:29]
B
And it's why the Germans Roman better than the Italians, because they're maybe the cold. They already have the organizing principles. So when you bring organized society, they're pretty good at it.
- [85:41]
A
Yes.
- [85:41]
B
It's like I say, conservatives would be better libertarians than libertarians. Libertarians more like sun Belt people, island culture.
- [85:50]
A
It's like that already happened.
- [85:53]
B
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's how it always happens. These psychologies get associated with politics, but they're. It's a consistent psychological spectrum.
- [86:02]
A
You ever think about.
- [86:05]
B
What'S up?
- [86:05]
A
You ever think how big the world is?
- [86:10]
B
Yes.
- [86:12]
A
Yeah, I remember.
- [86:14]
B
Fun to walk across.
- [86:17]
A
I remember when I hiked the trail and I stopped in a gas station.
- [86:20]
B
You haven't mentioned that in a while.
- [86:22]
A
I hadn't, no. I mean, I did it to brag about it. I mean. Yeah.
- [86:25]
B
Appalachian Trail gas station.
- [86:27]
A
And I just thought, there's a hundred little things in this gas station. This is one building. I could live out of this gas station for months if necessary, and then magnify that across the entire planet.
- [86:43]
B
Oh, why? Just the amount of time you could live off of gas stations. My mind went to zombie apocalypse movies and how they're. They're eating Cheetos 20 years after civilization fell down. As if there's any nutritional value in that bag.
- [86:55]
A
As an emotional.
- [86:56]
B
Learn some medieval crafts.
- [86:58]
A
I remember thinking about, you're in a gas station, there's a hundred things here. Medieval peasants would not have any. Would have so much less stuff than this. There is so much prosperity in this singular building. We drive past and never think about. You go to the airport, it's 100 flights to anywhere in the world. And you think to yourself, yeah, I could take a flight to Marrakesh. I could take a flight to Calcutta, Brazil, Cleveland, Dubuque. And the world is so big, and now the entire world's dying. And it's like, it's so weird to see the incredible amount of potential and wealth and vibrancy of even 2005 and see what we choose to live with now. And I often feel like I'm the only person who sees this, who saw how much potential the old world had that we just wasted.
- [87:52]
B
Yes. A lot of it is a matter of perspective, because I like this perspective. You take it back in the other direction and. And you think of what would these people do if they saw this? Like, if they got a tractor in ancient Mesopotamia when they were first digging ditches, like, they would go crazy with that thing, and it would be awesome. And so it's not. And so we look at it, we're like, oh, it's like just stuff. But that's because we've already had the life sucked out of us by other things, like the frost. Like you mentioned if we didn't have the life sucked out of us, all this stuff would be awesome because we'd be able to put it towards very interesting, awesome things that we wanted to do. So it's not. And like, people find this correlation between development and meaninglessness as if, like, having cool stuff means that you have no meaning. But they're confusing, like bureaucracy and destroyed society with just stuff. Like if you're in space, traveling from planet to planet, doing crazy stuff, like there's a lot of meaning. Like, you can. You don't even have to go to space. You can transform things within your environment in a way that's incredibly meaningful. But we're not doing that for various reasons, because of blue pill, oligarchy, cart, whatever. And so then people have no meaning. And they look at the stuff. They're like, it's not enough. Well, no, it's not enough, but it's part of this is false dichotomy of stuff means meaninglessness.
- [89:27]
A
I will say this and then we'll return to the topic, but the grocery stores around me regularly serve rotting food. I find it very disturbing. I've stopped shopping, especially the meat. The meat's really bad. I've thrown up like six times in the last few months from bad food. I've had to throw like 30 things in the last few months. And it's just I consistently do not shop at the major grocery stores because those have blackened meat at the counter. It's already black when you're buying it. You open it up and it's rotting and it's rotflation.
- [89:57]
B
Normally, like, they make the meat smaller or they raise the price. Now they're just selling it a little later.
- [90:02]
A
Yeah, it's the worst I've seen. And I started only shopping at farmer's markets and places like sprouts that source from certain farms. And I remember eating like the food again. And I compared to the stuff at the grocery store, I thought this tastes what real food used to be. Like 15 years ago, when I'd eat it tasted like real food. And I thought what we do now is the symbolic equivalent of the sort of rotting pallid. I see these sort of like glimmers of fat in chemicals and plastic in watery soup around the chicken. I see that and it freaks me out. And what we do now is that chicken compared to like the farmer's market. Real chicken.
- [90:51]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's like toxic and dying as the life sucked out of it. And it's super unnecessary because we could precisely. The stuff that we're talking about that is meaningless. If it was legal, could be used to create supply chains with awesome chicken that was as available as crappy chicken. Like all that is easily possible. It would have happened already if it wasn't being held back.
- [91:16]
A
Literally. The only thing you have to do is get rid of regulations in dei.
- [91:21]
B
That's it.
- [91:21]
A
And we have many.
- [91:23]
B
It's really simple.
- [91:23]
A
We have many other cultural issues. But making sure we're not eating rotting food.
- [91:29]
B
We would just need Joel salad.
- [91:32]
A
We would just need to have a system where we could correlate all the local farmers. In Texas, we don't have to have a certified slaughterhouse, but the government, which kills local farmers. And then you just do it directly. And then you.
- [91:46]
B
Joel Salatin's chicken farm is just like the best chickens ever. Way less bacteria. The USDA tried to shut him down. He's like, all my metrics are better than your standards. What are you talking about?
- [91:59]
A
These are evil days. Back to.
- [92:01]
B
We're making progress that.
- [92:03]
A
Thousand A.D. the region was subdivided into these distinct kingdoms that gained independence and formed national identities at the exact same time. And thousand AD was a general bellwether for when these societies around the world built out governments and functioning societies. That's what happened in France formed around then as a sort of functioning society from the Franks. Germany did England's did the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden did Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Sahel in Africa. A thousand AD was when the game map just grew like a DLC package. And in Eastern Europe, Poland formed as a country that was Catholic almost exactly in a thousand. The Hungarians had been a nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia that migrated into the region after the Franks had wiped out the Avars and the Hungarians or the Magyars. They conquered all the neighboring peoples where historic Hungary is about twice the size of modern Hungary. And they raided out to France and Italy. And they were originally defeated by the new German empire with Otto. And afterwards the Hungarians had to turn inward and they converted to Catholicism. That was in 1000. And the Rus converted a little bit before then, I think. And so you saw these concert of states in Eastern Europe between the Byzantines and the Balkans, the Poles, the Hungarians and the Rus. And the rest were tribes. The Baltic region was still tribes. Finland were tribes. The Ukrainian grassland were tribes. And the Turks were the peoples who inhabited the steppe lands while it was reindeer herders further north among the Lapps or the Ugrians and those people. And it's easier to think this era was more peaceful than it was. I was reading this Osprey military history about. About medieval Poland, because I was curious at the topic. And apparently the Germans invaded Poland nearly every year in the 12th century. I was reading every single. All the records. German Invasion of Poland, 1193. German invasion of Poland, 1194. German invasion of Poland, 1196. German invasion of 1196, number two. And so it's easy to look at a time period like this and think that because the borders are static, it's peaceful, but because this is the Middle Ages, it's constant. Low level warfare in Eastern Europe was bloodier than Western Europe. Medieval England had a murder rate comparable to modern South Africa. In Eastern Europe was even bloodier. And when you see these countries, you have to imagine them sort of as weak creations earlier on, where Poland as an example, collapsed into different warlords in the 13th century after being unified for 200 years. And the Hungarians had several periods where they could not maintain power because a lot of the Hungarian governance was split between these sort of semi nomad peoples and then the monarchy and then the nobility, because Hungary is a mix of grassland and forest. So all of these distinct factions vie against each other. Where some Magyars were more nomadic, others had settled in the cities. Then they had perhaps a majority of the population in the Kingdom of Hungary were non Hungarians. And then they had to subdue them. And you saw the Croats, for example, they formed a duchy, which Hungary then conquered. And they were part of the Kingdom of Hungary, although they had some identity. And the Hungarians went into Romania, taking a majority of it with Transylvania. And Transylvania was an ethnic mix. But when you think of how weak medieval governments are, it's even more so in Eastern Europe, which created weird dynamics where most peasants in Eastern Europe were free, which meant they were significantly freer than the serfs in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. But at the same time you had.
- [96:22]
B
Sort of free to get raided.
- [96:23]
A
Yeah, you get raided and alternative to slaves. Or your lord is not really a nice guy and turns you into slaves. It was a wild.
- [96:30]
B
It's more like Bug's Life where like in Bug's Life, the bugs are technically free, but the grasshoppers still show up once a year to tax them. It's just not through an official process. It's like how poorly is your gold hidden?
- [96:43]
A
I never saw that movie growing up.
- [96:45]
B
Bug's Life, that's an absolute iconic.
- [96:48]
A
My mom banned, like all modern cinema, we didn't have. So we lived in the countryside, we didn't have tv, we didn't have Internet. And it was just my mom's CDs. So I would just like. I didn't. I never saw SpongeBob. I never saw children's TV. Didn't watch the Disney Channel. It was just like my mom's CDs. She kept lying around. And my mom had eclectic interests.
- [97:10]
B
Like music CDs.
- [97:11]
A
No, my mom would have, like, BBC documentary. She'd have, like, BBC.
- [97:16]
B
Oh, sure. Or, like, Civil War documentary.
- [97:20]
A
Or, like, north and south by Elizabeth Gaskell. Or, like, she'd have, like, French cinema. My mom was, like, culturally elevated as one of her. Although she had many negatives. And so that's part of the reason why I am the way I am. I grew up in the countryside. Nearest neighbors were miles away.
- [97:37]
B
Just with those things are awesome when you first see your first, like, documentary on Rome. I saw one when I was 11, and I was like, this is just amazing. It was the most basic documentary ever. Yeah, but it's awesome. Yeah. I didn't have TV either. Cartoons, but I had movies.
- [97:57]
A
Yeah, we had a similar upbringing in that manner. But I'm trying to avoid the views being three hours. It's been, like, a consistent goal of mine. They're getting too long.
- [98:05]
B
We're just chatting now. We're gonna hang out after so we can stop chatting.
- [98:09]
A
My mental register cannot sustain more than what we're currently doing. But Poland, Czechia, so weak centralized governments. Russia fell into principalities, and the Holy Roman Empire started pushing west again, where there was a period called the Wendish Crusade, where the Holy Roman Empire did ethnic replacement against the Slavs, where the area of modern Berlin was inhabited by the Wends. And the Wends are still the genetics of, like, a third of Brandenburg. A lot of Germans did migrate in, but it was near complete cultural replacement. And there were several winds who were left. The final ones died around. The final ones died around World War II due to the Nazis. And they're actually a windish community in Texas as a sort of adjunct to the fairly large Czech community in Texas. And so you saw the creation of this German colonial movement that would keep pushing outwards, as well as the integration of Bohemia into the empire in Bohemia, or modern Czechia. They formed as a distinct empire in the 9th century under Wenceslaus, like the Christmas Song, where Wenceslaus was a great king and he built out the Bohemian state. And then they were integrated in with the Holy Roman Empire as a respected partner. They were an independent kingdom. The Germans were not allowed to exert authority over them, and they were given the only honorary monarchy within the Holy Roman Empire. So Bohemia was a monarchy distinct from the rest of the Holy Roman Empire's identities. And it's a weird.
- [99:54]
B
Why did they get an exception?
- [99:55]
A
Because they were a distinct ethnic group and kingdom. It's like Scotland with Britain. Because they had done it that way, Scotland could maintain legal independence. And then the rest of Germany could not be a monarchy because it was the kingdom of Germany. And so if anyone inside that tried to break away, it would insult the honor of the Kingdom of Germany. But because Bohemia had already been distinct, there was no honor violation.
- [100:23]
B
Got it? Simple.
- [100:26]
A
Yeah. Welcome to feudal politics. Ends in the year 1517.
- [100:33]
B
And.
- [100:37]
A
Bohemia was part of this system where although they were legally independent, they were dependent on German migrants. And so by the time of the Hussite wars in the 15th century, the cities of Bohemia were entirely German. Until the 19th century, their academic institutions were German dominated. A lot of their clergy was, as was much of the nobility. And so in the 15th century, the Czechs were starting to develop their own nationalism where they were in this weird relationship with Germany and they thought that their identity was getting destroyed. And the Hussites were the initial Protestants. They were 60 to 70 or the other Protestants and they rebelled against the Catholic authorities. And they were very innovative. Where Bohemia and this has really been written out, they were one of the more impressive places in Europe. They're one of the wealthiest places. They're one of the centers of philosophic breakthroughs. Where Galileo was based in Bohemia for a little bit, I believe Copernicus was a lot of the developers of early science. John Dee was based there. Yeah, it was a huge intellectual center.
- [101:49]
B
And the original Protestants, because they were kind of like separate, so it was easy for them to separate from the Catholic Church.
- [101:55]
A
Bohemia is next to Saxony and Martin Luther Saxon, and it's the middle of Europe. And so that's why Bohemia converted to Protestantism. It's why they had Marxist influences. It's why they had early science. Because the Bohemians are or were equivalently to more technically skilled in the Germans at certain points. And then they were the middle of Europe and they were the furthest east manifestation of sort of Western civilization's core area, where they were the.
- [102:29]
B
It was like a Singapore. Singapore and Asia, where you're allowed to do stuff there. So everybody does stuff there.
- [102:35]
A
And there's a. There's a video game called Kingdom Come deliverance set in 15th century Bohemia. That's pretty cool. And so Bohemia's in the middle of it and they're the most atheist country in the world. Due to that, because they got this sort of ideological cynicism partly because Catholicism was shoved down their throat and these Bohemian Hussites rebelled. This was partially a justification for war against the Germans to drive them out, because there was definitely the ethnic component. The Czechs were trying to get these elite positions that the Germans had built. And the Czechs were using wagon circles in musket warfare. They were the first pioneers of musket warfare. And they were able to wipe out German field army after German field army until they gained independence and the Catholic church negotiated. They were allowed to be Protestants peacefully. And this was 70 years before the Protestant Reformation.
- [103:31]
B
Fascinating. This is a super important little piece. I don't know how I missed, but it's almost like Germans blame Bohemians as a scapegoat. Because I don't think a lot of this stuff was really necessarily Hussite culture. It sounds like because it was an independent territory, it became the. What do you call it, the valve, escape valve for European intellectuals and Protestants to go try stuff before they were allowed to and the rest of it. And that culture got ascribed as Bohemian, even though it had really nothing to do with the Hussites.
- [104:08]
A
Bohemian's different. So the term Bohemian is from 19th century France and it's a synonym for sort of gypsy Eastern European. Because in 19th century France you had these Eastern European ghetto communities. And the Bohemians were artists who lived in these cheap ghettos because they were affordable. So they conflated the degeneracy of the artists with the degeneracy of these Eastern European ghettos and called them lisboam.
- [104:41]
B
Oh, fascinating. So that kind of term is the way bohemian as a term got picked up, is kind of loosely related as a kind of a vague reference of Eastern Europeans, but it also fits with the ethos of this kind of free city. Right. So.
- [104:57]
A
And the Bohemians did go through degenerate phases. We ascribe sort of moral puritanism to everything pre 1960s, which is insane because you had very degenerate periods in like the 16th and the 17th centuries or the Middle Ages. Yeah.
- [105:12]
B
Taverns and maids and all that. Yeah.
- [105:15]
A
So and the other thing as well is that you had the formation of these nations over the medieval period and after the Black Death, which Poland escaped the Black Death for reasons, because Poland was not part of trade routes. So it just didn't have the effects, which is why Poland was able to conquer so much of the neighboring area after, because they didn't have the same hit. Eastern Europe fell into serfdom and Serfdom was less bad in Czechia than in the rest of Eastern Europe, which is partly why they were freer where in Poland, in Brandenburg and Prussia and even Austria, Hungary, Russia, serfdom became really bad. And as I've said many times beforebeast it's true, East European serfdom is more comparable to American slavery than West European serfdom. Because the landlord had total authority over his serfs. He could do anything to them and completely control them and manipulate them and sell them off or whatever, work them all day.
- [106:19]
B
It's like Roman slavery instead of serf.
- [106:22]
A
So when you're looking at, let's say Poland and Russia, which are two countries that are culturally and linguistically close, they're very divided by civilization and by religion and by social structure. Poland is indivisible.
- [106:35]
B
Poland's an interesting one.
- [106:36]
A
Yeah, Poland, there's a lot of stuff going on in Poland, and Russia is Asiatic and collectivist and Orthodox. But both of them were serf societies. So it's an interesting microcosm where both of them had really bad serfdom. Poland's nobility was democratic and locally based, where Poland's developed a parliament that was the freest of anywhere in the world and it was run by the SLA and the SLA was the Polish parliament, where about 12% of the population, which was the largest suffrage of anywhere on earth at the time, way more than Britain. And the nobility gained a complete throttle on Poland, same thing as Hungary, where in their nation building phase, because Eastern Europe hit their population tipping point after the Black Death. And by that point Eastern Europe was connected with Western Europe through a trade system where as Eastern Europe became more populous, they felt the same pressures towards freedom or slavery. But because the towns were less powerful and there was this trade connection to West Europe, the landlords enslaved the peasants to keep control of their labor supply in a lightly populated area, which created huge downstream effects. And because it inserted their population, made them permanently economically dependent on Western Europe, where I think Eastern Europe has like 10% of the economic size. If you take up Russia of Western Europe, a staggering difference.
- [108:09]
B
And so it probably leave Russia in.
- [108:12]
A
It kept Eastern Europe poor, it stopped their population development in a way that didn't have to. Where Poland, if it was a democratic, free, capitalist society, it could have had America's demographic pressures because the Poles were up against the Ukrainian grassland, where they could have gone to Asia. And so if Poland was a free society, and free societies have radically higher birth rates than slave societies, it could have had the Anglo American thing where you have 10 kids and then another 10 kids. And then the Poles could have steamrolled Russia, assimilated the Ukrainians and the Lithuanians, as they nearly did, and then gone out to China. And that didn't happen. It's very.
- [108:58]
B
The Germans probably handicap them a little bit. And it's interesting because it seems like Poland is serving a similar role as Bohemia and that it's like a Slavic population that's kind of encased more within Western culture. So they're not limited by the societal trends of the west, but they can still pick up the info. So if things were going crazy in Germany, that might be like, Poland's a good refuge for good or the good Western ideas to form. And it kind of shows you that, yeah, like, the Slavs could have gone this way in Eastern Europe as well, if they are in Western Europe. And right now, Poland, I think, is competing with Germany on some economic metrics in a way that they have never done in their entire history. History.
- [109:48]
A
Eastern Europe's really interesting because there's these micro. There's all of these dynamics where Poland culturally, economically similar to Russia, where in values, in religion, in constitution, in these other things, Poland is a Western country. And in most anthropological metrics, Poland is way closer to Western Europe than it is to Russia because it has the core values of Western civilization. And you can see this Poland regularly producing democracies, caring about freedom, where the Poles were the freest people in Eastern Europe and they consistently fought for their own freedom. And Poland has consistently been my favorite country in this region of the world.
- [110:36]
B
Fascinating. And every time they try and get free, Germany kind of shuts them down. And it's not working this time with the eu. Not that Poland's never on the negative side of the trends, but I feel like they never. It's hard for them to break away from the rest of Europe. They've.
- [110:51]
A
They've made a few incorrect choices over their history. They didn't have to be the sort of middle country between Russia and Germany where they formed first around a thousand ad. Then they split up into independent countries, and then they had to fight the Teutonic Knights. And through going up against the Teutonic Knights, they reunified, married Lithuania. And Lithuania was the last pagan nation in Europe. They converted to Christianity in the early 15th century and they worshiped the old sort of. They were Baltic peoples. They worshiped East European gods like Peruna. Peruna is the Slavic Thor, who's the head of their pantheon. And with the integration of Lithuania, because Lithuania was the biggest country in Europe and it stretched onto the Black Sea. Because after the fuck this is Nero we had to do chronologically as the Lithuania. As the Mongol Empire fell, Lithuania conquered the Ukrainian regions of the Mongol Empire and the continent of the Golden Horde wasn't able to hold. And through that they became the biggest country in Europe with these large populations of Rusyn who they had cowed. And Poland, through marrying into Lithuania against the Teutonic Knight threat, they integrated modern Belarus and Ukraine under Polish culture where the Lithuanian ruling class became completely enmeshed with the Polish ruling class class. The Poles then overextended themselves. They bullying the Orthodox people too much, making them resentful. And they attacked Russia and Moscow, seizing Moscow briefly. And they were fighting the Turks down in the south. They were up in the on the frontier and then the Russians pressed them back south and the Prussians allied with the Ukrainians. And from that point onwards, Poland became a joke of a country. Because Poland's constitution was so democratic that it gave the leader no power. Where the king was often because Poland had killed its king, where Hungary as well established its own Magna Carta at the same time. So Hungary had as many legal freedoms as England's did in the Middle Ages. And in Poland they were so free and democratic that the king and central government had no authority, which was really an issue in that area of the world because you have to use authoritarian power over the military in order to maintain sort of the rigid militaristic hierarchy necessary for the constant wars. And the Polish SLA made a rule that, that if any person on their ruling council said no to a law, they would not pass it because they were hyper libertarian conservative. So their attitude, as if the US government had a position where if anyone tried to pass a new law, it would immediately be invalidated if one person said no. So there would be no new laws because our old legal structure is so perfect at preserving freedom that we're not going to change any it. And so what happened?
- [114:12]
B
It's like the blue slip tradition.
- [114:14]
A
What would happen is that the neighboring governments would just bribe one of these councilmen so that nothing was accomplished in Poland, Lithuania in Poland, Lithuania had this significant area, the largest country in Europe for a lot of this period besides Russia of East Central Europe, that all of the neighboring countries would just walk over. Poland, Lithuania, they'd march armies through, they'd bribe it. And when Poland, Lithuania actually, actually tried to renovate and make themselves not a joke at the end of the 18th century, Austria, Russia, Prussia subdivided them because their survival was solely Contingent on them being useless.
- [114:53]
B
That, I mean, it wasn't a bad idea because they're taking some of these trends towards freedom. That's like, hey, this is going to work. But the problem is, like you said, not only are you surrounded in the middle of the map, but if you try to go free, then you're going to put to get rid of your monarchy and you maybe break a cartel, whatever. You're going to have a huge target on your back because there's going to be economic consequences to that that affect the neighboring countries, it might affect the culture if they see your reforms are successful. And so they like try to turn a light on in the middle of the ocean. Got electrocuted.
- [115:30]
A
Yeah, it's.
- [115:32]
B
You got to get on a hill before you start with a light. Make sure maybe get across the ocean, build the light, get that fire going. And I.
- [115:46]
A
My favorite history of Poland is Adam Zamoyski's history. And he's from one of Poland's great noble families. He's an incredible writer. He wrote the best, the best Napoleon biography too. And I read this during COVID when I went on a huge reading bench. I was nearly crying at the end of the dismembering of Poland because I was just looking at how the Poles were resisting the neighboring countries and they fought back and they re industrialized and they put in a democratic constitution modeled off America had fought in the American Revolution already with Washington. They had built up a fort system, they established a free market system just to get utterly dismembered by all the neighbors. And you just think, what could Poland have been?
- [116:28]
B
They're like, but I did all the right things. Yeah, they had great ideas. They're just in a bad spot for it. But that's why now they have huge potential and they are surging. Like Eastern Europe has potential. Poland is like, is living it right now.
- [116:43]
A
Yeah, I have, I have faith in Poland's future. The issue that Poland's golden age, the issue that this region. I'm going to say this too. Poland is one of the great centers of the Italian Renaissance. The nobility there od'd done Renaissance culture in a way that almost no one else in Europe did. And Poland was also one of the most tolerant nations in Europe where their parliament nearly converted to Protestantism because so many of them were Protestants. Because Poland had near complete religious tolerance. The Jews migrated into the region because Poland was so tolerant in the late 14th century when they were kicked out of Western Europe and a majority of the world's Jews lived within Poland, Lithuania and the Poles would use the Jews against the Ukrainians as tax collectors and bankers. And that was part of the merchant middlemen minorities we should get to. And the issue a lot of Eastern Europe had was the nobility got too powerful where in the era of commercial agriculture, where Eastern Europe's most important export was grain from out to Western Europe, where a lot of the cities like Amsterdam or London or Paris were dependent on these Eastern European grain supplies in the early modern period. So when Denmark cut off the trade with Eastern Europe, it sparked the English Civil War in the Fronde because the people just couldn't eat. And so this puts the nobleman in a position of profound power. And in Poland the nobleman dismembered every other element of the society. Where Poland was not a capitalist society because 80 plus percent of people were serfs, the nobility kept it artificially poor and pre industrial. And with this huge phase of Sarmatian obsession, I have a whole rant. I read this book by this czarist Russian reactionary nobleman who was writing a history of Russia, Russia Pre World War I. He was part of this school of saying that the slobs were Scythians and so the Persian, the Polish in the 17th century would dress like they were Iranian and Persian. To say that we are truly Scythians and the lower classes are a different ethnicity from us, that's a high level larp.
- [118:53]
B
Yeah, I was, I was literally going to call it a larp, but I wasn't sure if it's the right word. They're like, yeah, dressing up with turbans and gold and like, yeah, we're hot.
- [119:02]
A
As a, as a side note, the history I read of the Russian reactionary nobleman's history of Russia was insane. Where he would say like the Slavs are the, are the same as the Scythians. They're native to Eastern Europe. And you talk about the Russians being.
- [119:16]
B
Like, bro, you're a Slav.
- [119:17]
A
Like the Russians are. The Russians are God's chosen people and they learned from the Greeks and the Slavs are relatives of the Greeks and they grabbed get gained civilization from them. Then he just goes into all heroic epics from the Kievan Rus and then pretends they're actual history. And so the entire like 200 pages is like. And then the noble bearing of Y. Yaroslavl the Great was so grand that he seduced a princess and then he arm wrestled his companion who killed him. And.
- [119:49]
B
Right. It's weird. They conquered them because he was manly and they wanted a man.
- [119:53]
A
It's that narrative. He literally wrote that in. And so it's weird to see that an industrialized country and this guy was one of the top noblemen in one of those Imperial Russian organizations. And this was the. The standard narrative of czarist Russian history.
- [120:10]
B
It's kind of memey. It's kind of like fun. That's kind of good. Lore like that reminds me of the guy you said that. I didn't know Tolkien's was inspired by that. What was it? Finnish chronicle, which all the way back then, when that finished thing was written, it was expressly written to kind of create a lore for their people, which was, I thought, Tolkien's idea. But if he's drawing inspiration from that finished story, he's probably also drawing inspiration that probably gave him the idea for why it was important to write a lore in the first place.
- [120:42]
A
So national epic myths are a consistent thread across every society, and people consciously create them. The Aeneid was written a thousand years after Homer, when Rome was already a, quote, modern society. And they stopped believing in the myth. They gathered one together from their history that they could believe. And Charlemagne is another version. America doesn't have a national myth or a national epic, but most societies do. And they often form organically. I mean, the Portuguese formed one for their Indian Ocean colonies in the 16th century, the Lusiads. But the nobility gained such a chokehold on East Central Europe that they stopped its development. And Hungary was similar, where they were one of the great states of medieval Europe, consistently maybe in the top three most, three or four most powerful countries in Europe, and they fought against the Turks. They would launch pretty effective crusades periodically, and they could really hold their own. They stopped being a unified monarchy because in the 15th century, their king was trying to make a professional military, which I think he called the Ironsides. MacNeill has a good book about this. And they shut off that king and his line. Then the nobility installed a weak king, which was a consistent threat in this region of the world, where they'd often bring in foreign kings who would not have local loyalties. And the nobility utterly throttled Hungary, keeping it as a sort of primitive society. And Hungary was super diverse between a lot of ethnicities, a lot of economic styles, but a lot of rural Hungary might as well have been Brazil or a Third World country, even though it was in Europe. A lot of the Hungarian grassland was not populated until the 18th century, when the Austrians went on a very explicit process of colonization. And they would bring in peoples like Serbs or Croats or Germans. To populate Hungary. And so that was what weakened Hungary and allowed the Ottomans to conquer it. Where the Ottomans steamrolled Hungary after taking it the Battle of Mohawks. And Hungary was an Ottoman possession until the late 17th century when the Austrians conquered it.
- [123:11]
B
Right. Which is. That's really recent. That's quite a bit after gunpowder and like English Civil War even to go.
- [123:19]
A
Through a few other trajectories. The Germans were a force from the west. And Germany had modern. Had developed faster in the high Middle Ages. So they had a growing population. And they would send settlers out along the Baltic coastline where all of Poland's north coast became ethnically German. And the Germans also populated Prussia, which is an area currently controlled by Russia that juts out to the eastern bank of the Baltic. And this area was all unpopulated swamps populated by Baltic peoples. And the Germans brought a higher level of culture. They were quite industrious. And it was free German settlers, often from areas like the Netherlands or Frisia or even England, who would populate this Baltic coastline. And this leader became the foundation of the Teutonic Knights and the Prussians. And the Prussians were the latest, one of the greatest empires in European history. Where the Teutonic Knights were a military formation originally from Jerusalem, who fought against the Arabs as the knights, as I think they protected the sacred mountain. They were monk warriors. And when the Holy Land was lost to the Muslims, they first moved to Hungary in Transylvania to fight against the Turkic Cuman peoples of the Ukrainian grassland. And then they migrated up to Prussia in Riga, up by Latvia. And Latvia was beforehand controlled by an organization called the Brothers of the Sword, who were Scandinavian monks who conquered Latvia. And Latvia had not been earlier conquered by the Vikings. It was a pagan Baltic people. And the Teutonic Knights conquered Latvia and Estonia as well as Prussia. And they did so through this German military. It was called Teutonic because they're mostly ethnically German. And they would conquer the region, build these beautiful red brick castles and then subdue the local population, turning them into serfs. And the ruling nobility of the German Empire until World War II were called the Junkers. Junker is a term for junghe, where these young he German for young lord who started in Germany. They didn't have a title back there where they were a second and a third son. Then they'd go out to Prussia or the Baltic and they would establish themselves as a new nobility. So they were a young lordly line. So you differentiate the old German nobility versus the new upstart nobility. And they had Quite strong social cohesion. Where the Baltic Germans were often the ruling group in the Imperial Russian military under the Czar, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and the Junkers in Prussia were the population that unified the rest of Germany. Later where these German colonies in Poland and the Baltic became the Prussian state, that was the nucleus of the reconquest of the rest of Germany. And Prussia was a surf state like the rest of Eastern Europe with this highly draconian, militaristic, really tough leadership class.
- [126:49]
B
It's the opposite of Europe in the US It'd be like if Europe's diaspora went to the US and then got more powerful and then conquered them and made them more authoritarian, which is what we did, except we kind of made them more, more free a little bit. Not really. I mean we're getting there.
- [127:06]
A
There's a lot of similar, similar though it's, there's a lot of similar dynamics of freedom and slavery. It's just slavery and authoritarianism won out in Eastern Europe and freedom won out here. Black slavery, the Spanish surf plantations were our manifestation of, of bondage, bondage versus freedom. And you see those trajectories on frontiers because when you have a low population density, the logic is either force everyone who's there to work for you or let everyone be free.
- [127:43]
B
Interesting, the volatility in that, how they can produce like opposite responses, the frontier being it.
- [127:50]
A
McNeil has a really brilliant book called Europe Step Frontier 1500-1800. And it's one of those topics where you get an A tier historian who makes a book on a region of the world you would otherwise have not studied. And that just ignites your interest in the topic where he talks about each of these societies as a function of what social structures they had. And so the Germans had a wide scale migration across Eastern Europe during the medieval period. And it was because they had a higher level of civilization where they were more literate, they were harder working, came from a capitalist society and all those things where the Germans became a majority along the Baltic, in Silesia, in Poland, but you had German populations in Transylvania, in Romania you had German populations in Hungary, they were a majority in a lot of Czechia. Then you had Germans out in Ukraine and under the czars. There were Germans who migrated to the Volga and then those Germans later migrated to the upper Midwest and then Germans down by Crimea. And the Germans were instrumental in a lot of governance and trading and that stuff because they were invited by the local monarchies where these middlemen minorities like the Germans or the Jews or the Greeks or the Armenians, who were all pivotal and important in this region, where the Slavs were never the merchant or the bureaucrat or the literate class classes. The Slavs were the nobility and the peasants. And these groups like the Germans, the Jews, the Armenians and the Greeks, they were the sort of intermediary middle classes. And so the Jews were most concentrated in sort of Ruthenia and Eastern Poland. They migrated in the 14th century and lived in these ghettos completely distinct from everywhere else. They were never a majority anywhere and often horribly repressed. The Greeks were the dominant merchant class in Romania and Bulgaria, and the Greeks were the dominant merchant class of the Ottoman Empire. So wherever the Ottomans went to a place, they'd use the Greeks as their sort of henchmen. And then the Armenians were biggest in Russia, where the Armenians had a trade network that stretched from Scandinavia to India. And the Armenians were the dominant merchant class in India through the 18th century.
- [130:14]
B
Interesting. I wonder if that got created any of their conflicts with the Turks. Yes, because the Turks were fighting the Russians.
- [130:24]
A
The Turks. So it very much did because the Russians played with the Armenians and the Georgians because they were Orthodox Christians. And so they could always use the Armenians and the Georgians against the Ottoman Turks. And the Turks got tired of it and genocided them.
- [130:46]
B
Right. And where were the Russians when that happened?
- [130:50]
A
The Russians, they were in the middle of a civil war.
- [130:53]
B
There you go. I guess that was why they waited for the right time. The Turks did.
- [130:57]
A
Yeah.
- [130:58]
B
Very sneaky.
- [130:59]
A
I have some stories from Turkey. The Turks are not apologetic.
- [131:03]
B
That's funny.
- [131:03]
A
Yeah, well, we've had like 10 tangents. Tangents.
- [131:10]
B
Tangerines.
- [131:11]
A
And so you have these middlemen minorities and the pressure from the West. And so now we've talked to the formation of Hungary, Poland, the Germans and the Teutonic states, Ukraine, and then the two external forces that we have not yet discussed or the Mongols. The Turks and the Mongols came in from the east in the 13th century like a storm where this wrecked the region. There was nothing that was comparable beforehand. The Vikings were able to sort of keep a boundary against the other steppe peoples, where the Cumans and the Pechenegs were bad, but they were not the supernova that the Mongols were. Where the Mongols incorporated all of the nomadic peoples of the western steppe into a new Mongol ethnic identity. And so the Crimean Tatar people of Ukraine, they would call themselves mongols through the 18th century. The are people who the Russians fought against till the 16th century. They were also Mongols. And. And even though most of the armies that the Tatars used Against European Russia were ethnic Turks. They identified as Mongolia. And so a lot of these people would have looked identical to white people. If you look at the Volga Khazars, there's multiple Khazars. The Volga Khazars, they're lily white. And that's Mongol is like a cultural identity, not a pure racial one, much like Latin is. And the Mongols decimated Russia. Russia was the place in the Mongol Empire that they treated the worst. And they would periodically burn cities down. They would utterly devastated the region and they totally changed its structure. Where the reason Moscow gained dominance over the rest of Russia is that they were an edge state of the Kievan Rus. They were on the far frontier and they weren't even populated till the 10th century where they were on the sort of semi nomadic fringe and they were a minor barony. And under the Tatars, as they were called, Moscow was given the taxing ability of the rest of the Russia because it was unimportant. And then Moscow used this to develop the loyalty of these other Russian states until Tamerlane had weakened the Golden Horde or the European Mongol territory enough that the Russians could declare independence in 1481.
- [133:41]
B
And they used the centralization through Moscow to take out the Mongols. Yes, like their own weapon again, their own organization, which is ironic because they originally failed to push them off because of the failure to organize. The Mongols set them up through Moscow and fixed their error. And that got rid of the Mongols. But it also left Russia with an altered structure which would have been better if they had changed it themselves.
- [134:08]
A
Probably Russia took a huge hit from this, where the new Russia was completely disconnected from the west, where it used to be that Anglo Saxons served in the Kievan Rus or the Varangian Byzantine guard. So there are plenty of Anglo Saxons in Kievan Rus, where there was even an Anglo Saxon colony in Crimea of people fleeing the Battle of Hastings. But the English had to rediscover Russia under Queen Elizabeth because they were that cut off. And the Russians had become serfs and totally disconnected from other societies. You'll hear stories of even the wealthiest Russian nobility wearing sort of animal furs into the 16th century because they had no connection to finer linens. Where a few Italian architects went out to Russia in the 15th century to build the Kremlin. And that was like worlds colliding where such as Marco Polo going to China. And even earlier on, Russia was pretty. It was pretty open and outward thinking where it was a medieval society where Russia was nearly Brazil. But Ivan the Great was the figure who gained Russian independence from the Mongols. And this occurred roughly around the time of Christopher Columbus. And that was a brutal war. It took many years. And he declared Russia the third Rome through marrying a Byzantine princess. And Russia and Muscovy were the same thing. It was a city state around Moscow at the neighboring areas. And then they killed Novgorod, which was a merchant republic in north Russia. And they burned to the ground.
- [135:49]
B
Which matters Swedish coded.
- [135:52]
A
Yes. Where Novgorod was a parliamentary democracy, it was won by the merchant classes. There is a Russian saying. Novgorod is our father, Kiev is our mother, Moscow is our heart and St. Petersburg is our head.
- [136:07]
B
Interesting.
- [136:07]
A
Yeah. So wiping out Novgorod brought Russia in a different direction. And it also shows that Russia could have been something different. Novgorod was well known for Alexander Nevsky, who was their leader, who fought off the Teutonic knights in the 13th century. And there's an interesting Soviet film with one of the best battles in film history about lake. There's a lake between Estonia and Russia where they killed near Pskov, but it's not Pskov. There's a lake battle in the 13th century over the ice between the Teutonic Knights and Novgorod. And the Novgorod forces won, which was the great accomplishment of Alexander Nevsky's career. While he had earlier submitted to the Mongols and Novgorod was the only Russian state that survived the Mongol tyranny as just a client state. And then Muscovy destroyed them. And Ivan the Terrible continued this trend through making the Russian nobility dependent on the ruler, not on the population like they were in the rest of Europe. He created his own private military called the Streltsi, launched multiple purges against the population and also made his own secret police called the Opera Operation. And so Even in the 16th century, Russia was setting itself up to the autocratic totalitarian state that would later evolve into. And so it's Ivan the Terrible was also mentally ill. He would torture his children. But even at the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia did not have a major coastline, was a medieval society. And the Russians really made a good decision by working with the Cossacks, who were a free. A free Slav pirate people. Where the Mongols had gone a little further west, where to backtrack a little bit. This entire era is a jumble. I am sorry. The Mongols made it out to Czechia. They defeated Hungary, they defeated Poland and the Teutonic Knights. The Battle of Leknet. And then their leader died out in Siberia. So they had to go back to have the Mongol Council, which saved Europe from Mongol conquest. Although the Mongols beat the European militaries and they Made it out to nearly the Mediterranean or Germany. The Pope was considering launching a crusade against the Mongols.
- [138:43]
B
Fascinating.
- [138:44]
A
And so the Mongols were this near miss. What the Mongols did, genocide Poland. They burnt all the cities in Slovakia. So there was collateral damage here. And part of the reason Poland grew was because they were defeated by the Mongols. But the Mongols did not devastate the cities of Poland. And with the fall of the Mongol Empire, the entire grassland region was depopulated because the nomads were hit especially hard by the Black Death. And so what happened was that the surviving Muslim state, the conate of Crimea, retreated back to the bottom of the Crimean peninsula. The entire rest of the grassland was utterly depopulated, leaving, leaving it open. And then the Crimean Tatars would venture out from their fortress and then enslave millions of Slavs for the Turkish market because they were an independent Turkish subsidiary state. And they were the last Mongol vestige state that survived into the end of the 18th century. Where the Russians only took Crimea in the 1780s. And it was just this vortex of slavery in harbor where the Russians built their own version of the Great Wall against the Tatars. And it was almost an industrial scale operation, but it opened up all of these space where these Slavs who were escaping the rising serfdom of Eastern Europe, they formed these independent horse pirate republics on the south Ukrainian grassland that were people who populated Siberia. And the Cossacks initially worked with the Poles because they thought the Poles were freer. And then when the Poles tried to insert them, they worked with the Russians under the contract that the Russians would keep them free. But then their own nobility betrayed them against the Russians after they had already worked with the Russians to defeat the Poles and ultimately conquer Poland and then conquer Siberia. The Russians central government used the Cossacks freedom until it was useful and then turned them into serfs.
- [140:56]
B
Interesting. I love the term horse pirates. Yeah, I think we call that cowboy. But so, so they killed the father and. And no Novgorod. Basically, yes. The final father and al final country.
- [141:13]
A
We have to cover is the Turks. And then we've established we have to cover the Austrians too. So Turks started in Anatolia. No, the Turks are their own video. I'm sorry, I can't get to do the Turks like this.
- [141:33]
B
I think that makes sense.
- [141:35]
A
So Austria, no offense, the Habsburgs, they were from Switzerland and they were a minor noble family. And in the chaos of the German anarchy after the fall of the Hohenstaufen Central European Holy Roman Empire, they conquered Austria in a sort of good military campaign, moved their operations There the disunited Holy Roman Empire voted the Austrians as emperors of the empire because they were weak enough they would not be a centralized authority. And so it was this weird situation where the Holy Roman Emperor was actually governor of Austria and Slovenia, but he could not actually control the territory he was legally governor of or the Holy Roman Empire. And so all of his possessions were stuff he conquered outside of it. So the Austrian Habsburgs, they for a certain period had the Spanish Empire with its colonies across Latin America and every continent. They would later conquer parts of Italy. And the Holy Roman Emperor, even over the medieval period, often conquered into Italy and they even made it out to Austria, out to Hungary and Slovakia and Transylvania. And that was an area they conquered from the Turks in the mid to late 17th century. And the book that I'm currently reading, and this is a transition outwards to our next video on Eastern Europe's age of Empires is I've become significantly more positive in my view of the Austrian Habsburgs because I used to see them as sort of like a less dynamic version of France or Prussia. But from the book I'm reading written by Kumar, he instead portrays it as this was the highest level of civilization that the populations involved could have attained. He said, you have 10 different subpopulations that has this country that's held together for centuries with the freest they've ever been. Highest degree of industrialization and capitalism they ever had, highest degree of cultivation. And I had perceived the Austrians as weak, but I thought, wait, they've held that territory down for centuries. This was when this area was happiest and achieving the most. And they only make sense in a sort of Catholic frame because Austro Hungary is this organic Catholic society of all of these sub nations which agree to have this shared imperial ethos as the sort of organic society that doesn't really make sense with all of these sort of negotiated agreements. And it's sort of like a. The political version of the Catholic Church.
- [144:31]
B
Interesting. Yeah, it's like German Catholic, Dom.
- [144:34]
A
Yes.
- [144:35]
B
Or something that area. And it's like almost like water pocket in between Germany and Italy where it's never like the main show, but it's always just imbalance.
- [144:48]
A
Yeah. For the final bit, the Balkans under the Turks, before the Turks in the medieval period, they went through a period of small nation building. After the fall of the Byzantines, before the rise of the Turks, when Serbia briefly had a larger empire. They conquered the northern Greece. They have Gordon glorified that ever since the Bulgarians did Albania was Epirus and they conquered into Greece. And this has been widely glorified by the Balkan nations. The sort of historic vacuum they had for over a century. And then the Turks utterly conquered all of them. And so the Battle of Kosovo is something the Serbs obsess over because it was the last time they could have been a greater nation that conquered outwards and instead were under centuries of Turkic governance where they had someone else to blame for their failings.
- [145:45]
B
Makes sense. So is that most of the topics?
- [145:48]
A
Yeah, we're done. This video was. It was hard to do. This was so many.
- [145:52]
B
Yeah, it's.
- [145:52]
A
God, I didn't even have a.
- [145:54]
B
Sorry for keeping your brain going. More than three hours with the.
- [145:57]
A
This is more than three hours. This is three and a two and what? This is two and a half hours or.
- [146:02]
B
Yeah, approaching the three hour mark.
- [146:04]
A
Okay, well, getting closer, so follow your dream.
- [146:10]
B
Final thoughts. I just wanted to say how insane it is with the timeline of the Mongols because they killed. And a lot of Europeans died from disease. Like 50% black death or whatever. Yeah, that's not that dissimilar or that far of a time difference between when the Americans began to be settled. It's like the same time period.
- [146:31]
A
Yes. I have pretty much.
- [146:33]
B
It's wild. And a lot of them died of disease. Even more died of disease. But it was followed up with population movements. Where the Mongols. It wasn't followed up with population movements. It would have had different kind of resistance. But it's just crazy that that's basically the same time.
- [146:47]
A
Yeah, I've said that before. Where Vladivostok in Russia and Siberia was populated at the same time as the U.S. civil War. The Russians only knocked out the last of the East European Caucasian tribal peoples at the time of the US Civil War.
- [147:04]
B
Yeah, that's wild. Which has all sorts of interesting political implications. I would love to spend more time in Eastern Europe and learn more about it. And like, I feel like we're going to learn a lot about it and about humanity through how they develop. I think there's going to be some interesting insights. We're going to see all those little national cultures play out in their own way and they'll all be interesting. It's kind of like when age of Empires 2 did a stiff expansion and they threw in like four Eastern European civs. It's like that's what it's going to be like. We're gonna get to kind of experience those, I think, in an interesting way.
- [147:39]
A
The rapper Pitbull once said, I have the world in the palm of my hand wherever I touch it. That's where I land.
- [147:45]
B
And he always lands in Miami. Yeah. And then I guess just final not thoughts on the video but check out our merch store buyer bookmark for fun. And check out my YouTube show Ludwig never Misses is the at Austin Padgett is the name. I just did an episode responding to Dave Smith on something that I thought was pretty interesting. So check that out if you are into it.
- [148:12]
A
Sounds good. And I will see you next week for the Balkans Age of. Sorry, Eastern Europe's Age of Empires.
- [148:18]
B
Yes, I'll see you in an hour.
- [148:20]
A
Bye bye. History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.
- [148:39]
B
Hablas Espanol spries to Joy if you.
- [148:42]
A
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