← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Creation of France
02:24:42
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- [00:01]
Rudyard Lynch
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Austin Padgett
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Rudyard Lynch
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Austin Padgett
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- [00:32]
Narrator
To History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Redyard 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.
- [00:45]
Austin Padgett
Bonjour. Comment? Hi everybody. So welcome to the new episode of History 102 with our co host Austin Padgett.
- [01:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Hello.
- [01:11]
Austin Padgett
Austin and I have both lived in France for short periods. You went to the Sorbonne, actually, which is the French, the greatest French university. And I've spent six months there. It was split between Languedoc in the south and Brittany. And I love France. It's one of my favorite, favorite countries in the world. It's my favorite country in Europe. And lots of my friends are weirded out at how much I like France because I'm not ethnically French. I have a few Huguenot ancestors in the 17th century, but that doesn't count. Once you get to the 17th century, you're less than a thousandth percent. So the year 1700 is when you're at a thousandth percent ancestry. So I have a Native American ancestor from 1703. So I my mom and sister come up a thousandth Native American. But I see this video as a sort of test for both me as a historian and a narrator, because our society is really bad at narrating the Middle Ages. And it comes across as really dry. Where in Alice in Wonderland they give a textbook example of something that's boring. And the Alice in Wonderland boring textbook thing is talking about the Battle of Hastings with Harold Godwinson in the 11th century, having to fight both Harold Hadrada up by York and then William the Conqueror down by Sussex. And that was because when Alice in Wonderland was written, the European educational system put a lot of effort into teaching history itself. But they did so in a really boring way. And now we've just given up teaching history at all. When I was growing up, we didn't learn about World War II. We didn't learn at the U.S. civil War. We didn't learn about World War I, we didn't learn at the. The French Revolution. We didn't learn at the Industrial Revolution. We basically learned none of the important historic events. When I went to school, we relearned the American Revolution five times, and we learned the Fertile Crescent period several times as well. But the reason that the Middle Ages is hard to narrate to a modern audience is it has two variables that modern societies have difficulty connecting with. The first is that actually it's three. The first is that we see medieval people as savages, which is not true. High medieval Europe was one of the most advanced societies ever in history by any conceivable metric you'd pick, whether scientific, economic, cultural, technological, whatever. They invented the scientific method as an example. And this is a very personal society where leadership was not based around ideology or party or these bigger or nations or those bigger abstractions, although medieval Europe did have nations. The idea that medieval people didn't have national identities is a modern myth, but it was based around singular cults of leadership, like Richard Lionheart versus Henry II versus John Lackland. And thirdly, it's an incredibly religious society, and we are a society with a profound discomfort about religion. It's. If you watch Hollywood movies. Hollywood movies never talk about religion, even directly. And when they do, they're always portraying it as negative. And so I think our era is disquieted by that combination of variables. And so when people talk about the Middle Ages, they. They give lists of names without any comprehension of who these people were, what their personalities were, what the drama was. Because Game of Thrones is a relatively accurate sort of emotional understanding of medieval politics, because it's all of these different personalities that have bases of support which they pull on in different contexts, and it's this constant court intrigue.
- [05:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. Maybe that's why people are interested in Game of Thrones. Partly. It's a way of exploring parts of that reality indirectly to kind of ease us in. I mean, one example of how it would be a really religious society is. I'm not sure they were able to paint people in 3D at this point, because they considered painting someone like painting Jesus, because men are created in the name of God. So you're like, something about painting the face of a person was blasphemous. So all their paintings were 2D. It was kind of a loophole they got around to still depict humans in pictures.
- [05:48]
Austin Padgett
Not sure that's true. I think it's difficult. It's actually remarkably difficult to paint and draw in 3D, because you need a Mathematical. You need to have a mathematical concept of art. The breakthrough with the Renaissance in the 14th century was them integrating math into art, because you have all these different lines that project distance. And I think the Romans might have painted a little bit in 3D, but it was an invention that came in with the modern world. And lots of thinkers have talked about how this is symbolic for a shift in perception that occurred from the medieval to the modern period of viewing the world innately, mathematically and in abstract terms.
- [06:31]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, well, painting techniques definitely developed, but I think it was connected to it because they had some conception of 3D, because the buildings were in 3D and the landscape and everything. But, yeah, the mathematics was very tied into the development, the religious thinking itself and the development of thought.
- [06:50]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. This video is about the formation of modern France, which is a longer and a more difficult story than we'd think, where when you look at the unified country of France, or as it's called now, the hexagon, because modern France, you can fit it in the image of a hexagon or a five, a five pointed geometric shape, where France in the year 1000 AD was a failed state, like Somalia today, where each county of France was an independent country with an independent dialect, with its own independent culture. And what occurred over the course of the medieval period was that the lords of Ile de France unified all of France militarily through a series of different wars. And in the process, they established French culture through this process of Parisian colonialism until you had a unified country. And so in this video, we're going to go from the fall of Rome until the French Revolution to see the breakdown of the old classical civilization, the barbarian invasions that came afterwards, the unification under the Franks, the collapse into failed state status, and then the gradual pulling together of the different subcultures inside France under Paris.
- [08:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Great summary, and I guess a good place to start is exploring why did the center of power go from the south of France, where it was during the Romans, into being centered around Paris in the north?
- [08:26]
Austin Padgett
So in pre modern France, you had two frances, you had Langueduit and Languedoc. And Langueduis is. They're different. It's how they pronounce different words. And langued, we was the north and Languedoc is the south. And they were completely different legal entities until the French Revolution, where there were tariffs between north and south France, and the king of France was king of two independent countries. And when you look at France's genetics, if you want to compare it to England or the British Isles. In the British Isles, the English are a single genetic pool. Then you have 20 different Celtic genetic pools that the English subjugated. In France, you have north and South France that are independent genetic pools. Then the northwest around Brittany and Normandy is genetically closer to the British than it is the other French. And then you have Italians in Savoy, and you have Germans and Alsace, because those were areas that were never part of the Kingdom of France. They were conquered later in the early modern period. And so in the Roman period, the south was the most important region of France. And I believe the capital of French Gaul was Lugdunensis, or modern Dijon, which I've been to. And I think Dijon could still be the capital of France in a different timeline. There are several cities besides Paris that could have won. Where Dijon sits in this mountain valley. And it's the road you take both. It's on the Rhone river, the upper ranks of the Rhone river, which is flows up from the Mediterranean. And so if you want to go up the up the Rhone river to North France, you sail up to Dijon, then you walk to North France, or you take a boat down the then the Seine river, and it's also the road to Italy across the mountain passes. So Dijon was the financial capital of Europe in the 16th century, because as Italian capital left Italy, Dijon was the first city outside Italy that you would hit. Switzerland is a bunch of barbarian sheep herders at the time. So once you jump over the Alps, Dijon was the first city you hit. So there's a handful of cities in France that probably could have been capital besides Paris, whether Dijon, whether Rouen, Nantes, probably a few others. And under the Roman period, South France was the more important, because in that time period, Roman civilization was attached to the Mediterranean climate. And with the period after the fall of Rome, the Franks conquered North France. And the Franks were a Germanic tribe from the Netherlands and Germany who conquered a stretch of nor of territory of northern France centered around the area of modern Paris. And with the Frankish conquest, they moved the seat of power from the south to the north. And the Franks drove out the Visigoths, who owned all of southern France in the early 6th century. And this was finalized with the Cathar wars in the 13th century, where the King of France, based out of Paris, committed genocide against the south French, completely destroying the economy and social structure of Languedoc as part of a crusade against the heretics there. But it was also an internal power grab where the north of France was conquering the south of France.
- [12:12]
Rudyard Lynch
It Sounds very similar to the English experience of being invaded by Saxons and then raided by Vikings.
- [12:20]
Austin Padgett
Yes, both the English and the French experience to that where they were both part of the Roman Empire. And interestingly, Britain was the poorest and least important province of the Roman Empire, and France was the most populous and wealthiest part of the Roman Empire for a lot of this time period. And it's interesting to keep in mind that in the medieval period, England had 4 million people and France had 20 million people. So you're dealing with completely different scales of population. And that's because most of England is actually England's more fertile than a lot of countries in the world. But it's nothing compared to the amount of arable land France has. Where in the 14th century, a third of. A third of people in all of Western Europe combined were under the rule of the King of France. Another thing to keep in mind is that the king of France only controlled about half of modern France at that time period. And so the king of France had like 14 million people under his governance, and then the modern hexagons, 20 million. And so France got more influence as the Roman Empire went into decline, because the apparatus of the Roman Empire gradually drained Italy of ability, where, because the Italians got such benefits from the empire, they grew soft and weak. And Italy actually saw mass depopulation over the late Roman period. Huge parts of the Italian countryside were just empty, and that went to France. So when you get to the fall of the empire, France, or as it was called then, Gaul, was by far the most populous place in the empire, especially the Western Empire, and the wealthiest place. That's why Attila attacked Gaul, because he wanted to strike at the heart of the Western Roman power. And with the fall of Rome, first of all, you saw these mass peasant revolts, which is a theme that I'll pop up again called the Bacaudi, where the peasants in the late Roman. In the late Roman Gaul formed these war bands that actually made northwest France declare independence as a bandit country. But you saw France split up in different barbarian peoples between the Franks conquering the north of France. And the north of France survived longer than anywhere else in the Roman Empire as a Roman possession, because the local military commander, Syagrius, declared himself king. So if you look at maps of the late Roman Empire, you'll just have this region of North France called Syagrius's dominion. And then the Franks conquered that. Then you saw the Visigoths, who were another Germanic people. They were based out of Spain. They took South France, everything south of the south of the Loire river, which is the biggest chunk of France out of anyone. Then the Burgundians, another German people. And the Burgundians, their relation to the rest of medieval France was, was they were like Texas. They were ethnically French, but they were big enough and self contained enough that they could form their own separate identity inside the French con context. And so I would say there's at least a dozen times in medieval France where the Burgundians split off and became independent. It's as if the US experienced state collapse. Now Texas would make itself an independent country. And then the Burgundians were based around the Rhone Valley, not to, not to be confused with the Rhine. The Rhine is western Germany into the Netherlands, the Rhone is the Alps and Switzerland or that whole region, the Alps, down to the Mediterranean. And so you had that German conquest in the 400s with the period around the fall of Rome. And then in the from 800 until 1100 or 800 till a thousand, you saw relentless Viking attacks on France, where the Vikings settled in 9 11. Hahaha. 9 11. In the year 911. The Vikings led by their commander, Hrolf the Walker, or Rollo the Walker, who was called the Walker because he was 6 foot 8ft tall and so no horse was large enough to carry him. So he walked everywhere. And he was a descendant of, he was, I think he was the grandson of Ragnar Lothbrok. So Hrolf the Walker attacked Paris. And the interesting thing is that after the fall of the Frankish Empire, France split up and became a failed state. And the Duke of Paris, or the Count of Paris, Odo, he held off the Viking attack on Paris where the Vikings attacked and they besieged Paris multiple times. They won the first round, they, they failed the second round. And because France was a failed state, everyone looked at Odo and they said, you seem like a manly guy. We're going to make you King of France. With the knowledge Paris is too obscure and weak to actually unify France. Which was what also happened with the Habsburgs when the Holy Roman Empire or Germany fell apart in the 1200s, where the other German nobility picked the Habsburgs because they were weak enough they would be incapable of unifying Germany. And the same thing happened with France where it's this strange backdoor deal where the French nobility agreed to make Paris the capital with the knowledge that Paris would be because the, the lords of Paris controlled an area the size of Delaware or New Jersey. It was this tiny area. But what they didn't realize is that the Capetian line, based out of Paris, had the most competent dynasty of anywhere in the Middle Ages. So the final joke was on them, where the lords of Paris unified all of France because they were just that capable, the French. After they beat the Vikings at Paris, they gave Normandy to the Vikings, where the Vikings established a. A regime there with a settler colonial society. And that became very influential in later French history because they conquered England, became the kings of England. Well, the Vikings ranged across the entire coastline of France, where they raided Aquitaine and they briefly took Brittany for a few years. So you had the first wave of German invaders during the fall of Rome. Then you had a second wave with the Vikings in the later Dark Ages.
- [18:58]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. And so the logic between putting that dynasty in charge of Paris was the nobles thought they weren't a threat because they didn't have a broader claim to unite France. So they were foreign. Or.
- [19:17]
Austin Padgett
The. The lords of Paris were ethnically French at this point. This was 500 years after they invaded. And you had the Franks. The term French is from Frank, like, because it was called Gaul beforehand. And they put the lords of Paris in charge because they were seen as weak, because they were weak. Where if you gave the Duke of Aquitaine, which was the wealthiest part of France, if you made the Duke of Aquitaine the King of France, he might actually unify France.
- [19:47]
Rudyard Lynch
And which is why the Aquitaine was the last one to be brought into the giant project, because they were the.
- [19:53]
Austin Padgett
Strongest kind of Aquitaine was one of the last places to be brought into France because they became an English possession. And so the English held Aquitaine for 300 years, actually, after the lords of Paris conquered everything from the English Channel to the Mediterranean in the early 13th century, the English held on to Aquitaine, or Gascony, as their only major possession in France. And they really built out Aquitaine. The French only took it in 1453, the same year as the loss of Constantinople. But, I mean, the south of France was, by some metrics. So both north and South France were incredibly wealthy. They were one of the wealthiest places in the world in the high medieval period. So it's difficult to measure which one is wealthier per se. But South France was incredibly influential and powerful, and so they were able to make a distinct polarity for the longest time.
- [20:53]
Rudyard Lynch
Well, no wonder there was no help from Western Europe during the siege of Constantinople, because they were busy fighting over the biggest prize they contesting in a long time.
- [21:03]
Austin Padgett
They had also given up on the Byzantines, where it's, you know, those TV shows that go on for several seasons too long. And, you know, they're just filling it out as a way to get more money. If the Byzantine Empire was a TV show, they'd say that where there was over a century where Constantinople was just a city state surrounded by hundreds of miles of the Turks and the walls were so op the Turks couldn't take it. But everyone in Western Europe knew that the Byzantines were a joke. And the yeah, there's a few other reasons. Like, like most of the you had a complete state collapse in Central Europe and so the English and the French were fighting each other, the Spanish were trying to do state unification, then Germany and Italy were just not countries anymore. So there is, there are a few people who weren't busy who were capable of power projecting to save Byzantium, although In the the 14th century they sent a crusade, mostly Germans and Hungarians to try to go to Byzantium to liberate it from the Turks. And then they were all slaughtered at the Battle of Nicopolis along the Danube River. And this was a huge tragedy in Europe, in European history, where we forget how dangerous the Muslims were. But in the late medieval period, in the early modern period, the Ottoman Turks could very routinely slaughter European armies and that killed off an entire generation of Central European nobility. And interestingly, the Ottoman Turks, for a lot of this time period, they were France's strongest ally.
- [22:44]
Narrator
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [22:48]
Austin Padgett
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- [23:19]
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- [26:05]
Rudyard Lynch
Oh really? How did that relationship work?
- [26:07]
Austin Padgett
This was this was more so the early modern period than the medieval period because the French and the Ottomans both had to unify as countries where they could ally. But it was against the Spanish where the French's greatest rival in the early modern period were the Spanish, as was the case with the Turks where the Turks were the fighting over the Spanish, the Mediterranean and the French and the Spanish over the Low Countries. So they would cooperate with the Turks to create a unified front against the Spanish. And it's funny that this was the era of the wars of religion where Protestants and Catholics would constantly butcher each other and have wars over that. But you'll see at the same time, whenever it was in their self interest, the Protestants and the Catholics would happily kill each other too. This is equal opportunity. This is equal opportunity. Constant warfare.
- [27:02]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I was trying to think of a modern example with maybe you could say Russia allying with China against Europe and the US or something like that being fairly similar.
- [27:12]
Austin Padgett
It's. It's the Communists and the liberal allies allying World War II against the Nazis.
- [27:24]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's lots of examples of this dynamic. Right. Where people underestimate certain bonds relative to their inner competition.
- [27:31]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, I. I'm going to need to get the chronology down for this video because otherwise it's going to be too incomprehensible because there's too many players, there's too many things going on. So with the fall of Rome, the Franks conquered most of France pretty quickly. They drove the Visigoths down to Spain in the early 6th century and they conquered the Burgundians as well. So you saw the Franks take most of modern France, Franchia, Francia, Francais, you can see other words formed. And the one part of France that wasn't incorporated in the Frankish empire was Brittany in the northwest. And Brittany is a term for Little Britain, where the Britons or the Welsh migrated to the north of France in the period around the time of the Anglo Saxon invasions, populating it. Right. I said earlier, the northwest of France is genetically identical to Britain. It's closer to Britain than it is to France. And Brittany was an independent duchy speaking a Celtic language, a variety of Welsh, until the time of Christopher Columbus. And they weren't. They were not part of the kingdom of France for most of this. They were only very faintly part of the kingdom of France, where they were an independent country with an independent. With an independent tradition and all those things. They actually had a parliament where the parliament had significant power in Brittany. And. And they're just. They're one of the interesting players in this story because they're always off doing their own thing. They're always in their own distinct historic current, and then they'll periodically get pulled in and be decisive for the rest of French politics.
- [29:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Interesting. Kind of like a. An Ireland. Yeah, England.
- [29:23]
Austin Padgett
And so Franks take the. That current Region. And if you read 19th century French histories, the first Frankish dynasty, the Merovingians, they became a byword for degeneracy and decadence. Where they were known actually for wearing long hair, where the long hair, like the kind that power metal bands would wear today, that was a sign of royalty in their culture. And they make sure their hair was perfect. And they'd have, they'd have enormous harems, they would just constantly drink and party all day where they were incapable of governance. And this is in the 5th and the 6th centuries. Then what happened is that the mayor of the palace or the steward declared himself military dictator. And this is the origin of the Carolingians. And the Carolingians, they were the dynasty that ruled France from the 8th through the 9th centuries. And the first military dictator of France, Charles Martel, which is Charles the Hammer, he held off a Arab invasion from Spain because the Arabs had conquered Spain in the 8th century. And this is part of the move that, the move that got north Europe to supersede South Europe, because when the Mediterranean was a single coherent system, it was this Mediterranean culture that was just classical Greco roman. And another 19th century French historian, Henry Perenne, he was, he was Walloon. But being a French, Belgian and being French are practically the same thing. It's different countries. They're going to hate me for saying it, but it's true. And he talks about, here's a book called Charlemagne and Muhammad. And the thesis of said book is that until the time of the Islamic conquests, classical civilization would have continued. Because after the fall of Rome, you saw a relative continuity in culture, although it was Christian then with the Muslim takeover of the Mediterranean, because the Muslims, they took Spain, they took Sicily, they took every major islands chain in the Mediterranean, whether Sardinia, Crete, Cyprus, the Balearics. And so the Mediterranean was a Muslim lake for a few centuries. And after the fall of the Carolingian Empire, the Muslims had a base. It was, I think it was Ida Merg. No, it wasn't. It was either Provence at the mouth of the Rhone river, where the Muslims would raid the entire south of France. And they held the area around modern Nime, which is one of my favorite favorite cities in the world. It's such a beautiful place as well in the south of France. And they launched an attack in a central France, around Orleans, which is north central France, where Charles Martel built a shield wall that crushed their cavalry charge. And Tours has since gone down in European history as one of the most decisive battles, because first of all, it's incredibly impressive The Arabs made it to north central France. And imagine if the. Imagine if the most important country in Western Europe at that time, France, had been conquered by the Arabs.
- [32:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. And the army kind of hit him by surprise. I think Charles Martel was outnumbered and they kind of held their ground on a hill fort and eventually exhausted or a high elevated position and eventually exhausted the army into retreat. So it was a very important stand. The shield wall makes sense for how that battle would play out that way. And was, were the shield wall tactics incorporated from the Vikings or anything like that?
- [33:16]
Austin Padgett
So it's a traditional Germanic thing. It's the Skjalborg, where the Vikings also did the shields wall, but the Franks, the Vikings, the Anglo Saxons, they all did shield walls. Where the Battle of Tours is the converse of the Battle of Hastings. The Battle of Hastings was 1066, 300 years later in England, where the Normans attacked the Anglo Saxons. Where Tours they were on a hill. The Anglo Saxons were on a hill with a shield wall. And then the Norman knights were able to wipe out the, the Anglo Saxon shield wall. And in the 8th century, the Franks were mostly an infantry army where they, the Huskarls were the Germanic warrior nobility. They fought on foot in the shield wall. Then what happened over the reign of, of the Carolingians is that you saw the creation of night warfare. And knights are dependent on the stirrup, because when you're charging on horseback and you don't have a stirrup and you charge someone, you can vault over your horse and die because the horses are really heavy. So if you're charging with the weight of your horse, it, there's a big enough chance it just overtakes you. But with the stirrup you can lean in, stab with the spear and, and, and just crush with the weight of just your entire horse and armor. And this caused a complete sociological shift in all of European culture, because northern France was the origin of knight feudalism, where after the fall of the Frankish Empire, you saw France descend into being a failed state. And in order to defend against the waves of Viking, Hungarian and Arab attacks, you saw what were effectively private security companies take over most of Western Europe again, starting in the area between the Loire river and the Rhine in North Germany. And these knights established themselves over certain areas as lords. And through that they destroyed the power of the centralized government because you had the dukes and the nobility and then you had the Castellane.
- [35:27]
Narrator
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [35:31]
Austin Padgett
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- [36:29]
Austin Padgett
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- [36:31]
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- [36:38]
Austin Padgett
A period in 10th century France when the castellanes or the holders of the castles declared themselves independent. And then you had a period where even places like the Duchy of Normandy or the Duchy of Aquitaine, they had to wage wars to unify because power was that decentralized and the knights were more strong than anything else at the time, where knights were expensive to maintain and train. They started training at age 7 and they would finish when they were 20. And so and the armor was so expensive that you had an incentive to train this guy for his entire youth to be able to fight in the armor. And so this made cavalry very strong in medieval France, had the best cavalry in the world. That was the French's big advantage. And the French were seen as the manliest people in Western Europe and they were so aggressive you couldn't contain them. It's funny to the French stereotypes now because they've been domesticated through the state, but knight feudalism, the social structure where you insert the peasantry where they're stuck on their lord's land and they can't leave and then the peasants pay for the knight. That spread to England through Norman Conquest and the rest of the British Isles, it spread to Spain through French knights serving in the Reconquista. It spread to Germany in Eastern Europe through the gradual colonization of those areas by Franks and then later Teutonics. And so you saw it. And even to the Levant in Syria and Greece due to the French knights conquering those places in the Crusades. And so starting from North France, you saw this complete social structure Take over most of the European continent. There's a really interesting book called Europe Emerges by Reynolds and it's an economic history of medieval and early modern Europe. And he picks the rise of feudalism as the turning point for the rise of capitalism because he looks at the areas that had feudalism and it's the exact same place that developed capitalism.
- [38:36]
Rudyard Lynch
It's interesting you mentioned that because throughout this period we've mentioned some of the general agricultural technologies that were developing quite a bit. The horse related plows and also the stirrup is an interesting one that's not farming related. People forget how much technology changes how we use horses. Right. They didn't even used to be able to shoot off horseback. And in the Assyrian days because they didn't have the saddles or something like that. One of the innovations. But it's.
- [39:02]
Austin Padgett
Sorry to cut you off.
- [39:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, go ahead.
- [39:03]
Austin Padgett
It's because the horses weren't big enough to ride. We've been genetically engineering horses for thousands of years. It took thousands of years of crossbreeding to get horses to be big enough that a man could ride them. They were. They were like they're the size of donkeys where you could attach to a chariot. But then we had to cross breed them to get a horse that was big enough that it didn't pull a cart that you could put a person on it.
- [39:26]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. Certainly big enough for Rolo to ride. I just remember there's some Assyrian shooting manuals where they would ride two people next to each other and then the one guy would hold the one guy steady on his horse as he shot his bow. So just kind of like things we don't understand because, you know, you picture horses being the same forever, but that's a chariot thing.
- [39:50]
Austin Padgett
So.
- [39:51]
Rudyard Lynch
Right.
- [39:51]
Austin Padgett
That's how chariots worked. Where in chariots you had one driver and you had one rider. So what they were doing is they were shifting over from the chariot structure to horseback. And it took them a second to train people to both ride and fire at the same time, which is intensely difficult because you have to ride and fire through using subliminal body language through the horse, which is. That's a. That's very high level riding.
- [40:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. And then the economic thing I was going to mention was the water mills. So there were hundreds and then thousands of water mills popping up on the rivers throughout this, you know, 500 to 1,000. Yeah, period. And they made a huge difference because they wiped out like the majority of the processing work. And a huge percent of the farm labor is processing. So this Opened up room for people to engage in textiles and trades and other things. But it was also a way for the government to reinforce its control both on the lord's level and the central level. Because I think Charlemagne, maybe the king, he mandated that the lords maintain their water mill. And so you. They basically confiscated the water mills at the lord's level. And then to use the, the mill you had to pay a tax. So instead of having to have a bunch of tax collectors go out to fields and like measure fields and anticipate supply and have that whole, you know, holding out dynamic, the peasants had no option now because it's like, hey, we can measure your grain at the processing center and we're going to take a certain percent. So it became an important center for tax collection in the mills. But it was also just an interesting societal change because you imagine that's almost like a steampunk Miyazaki world where you have this labor producing mechanismized devices popping up all over the river. And they also were one of the reasons the Viking invasions were so costly, because the mills were a target on the river. And if they couldn't use their mills or their mills were destroyed, it was that that costs the crown like it and the economy a huge percent of their revenue.
- [42:08]
Austin Padgett
Yes. So with the Frankish Empire, you saw the unification of Western Europe into most of Western Europe into a single country where under its peak was Charlemagne. France, Germany, Italy and Catalonia and Spain and Switzerland and the Benelux countries, of course they were brought into the Frankish monarchy. And the Franks were based out of Aachen in modern Belgium, Germany area. And they were ethnically closest to the modern Dutch, although they controlled modern, they were based out of modern France. And this caused a brief Renaissance with a thing called the Carolingian Renaissance where Charlemagne funded all of this science and all this research and Romanesque architecture. But the problem was that there was no pre established bureaucracy or government agency. So the Carolingian Empire was held under the charisma of these singular leaders. And once you stop getting God tier leaders like Charlemagne, the empire lost the will to hold together. And also the, the, the Carolingians and the Franks had a practice of dividing land between the suns. So after Charlemagne's death, it was divided. West Frankia, Lotharingia, a country that no longer exists in East Francia, West Frankia became France Lotharingia, which stretched from the Netherlands through Burgundy down through Italy, that died pretty fast is it's not a coherent territory in any way. And then the East Francia became Germany and under the Dukes of Saxony, they conquered Italy and Lotharingia, where most of eastern France was under the governance of the Holy Roman Empire, or Germany in the medieval period. That's Alsace, that's Savoy, that's the area to the northeast of Picardy. And the West Francia after the fall didn't survive as a unified country for that long. It's funny where France became a failed state earlier on and Germany was able to unify into the Saxons, where the Charlemagne conquered the pagan Saxons, then their grandchildren conquered Germany back from the Franks. So as the descendants of the grandchildren of barbarians themselves who unified Germany. And so in the early in the high medieval period, from, let's say 9,000 until 1250, Germany was the most unified, powerful country in Europe, the Holy Roman Empire. And what happened then is that Germany got into a squabble with the Pope. The Pope was able to use the German nobility to backstab the emperor. So Germany became a mess of 500 failed states, 500 duchies and principalities from 1260 until the 19th century. So the rest of European history was marked by the disunity of Germany. Well, at the exact same time in the 13th century that Germany fell apart, the Duke, the Lord of Paris, unified all of France. So they're exactly paralleled. France was a failed state when Germany was unified. Germany is a failed state when France is unified. And we saw the development of feudalism and all the things you were talking about when France was a failed state. And it's funny, I'll say a failed state, but white people are so cool that even when we have failed states, said failed states are still paragons of military, cultural and technological progress. Where I'll talk about these duchies, where you have the Duchy of Normandy, the Duchy of Aquitaine, Languedoc, Paris, Picardy, the County of Barry, a real place, Brittany. These different places where these were not unimportant, where Normandy, as an example, which was made by, as we said before, by the Vikings who settled there. We've done genetic analyses of the Norman nobility that conquered England, and they're 95% Danish ancestry. So it was the. The settlement of this Viking aristocracy in the north of France. They conquered England under William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. The Norman mercenaries in the south of Italy became lords of the south of Italy, fighting at the Byzantines and the Arabs. So a Norman dynasty ruled Sicily from 1060 until 1190. Then the Normans also became lords of Syria in the Crusades, where in the Crusades, by far, the largest amount of Crusaders came From modern France, normally the area of North France around Flanders and Normandy and Walloonia, whatever. And the Duchy of Aquitaine was the cultural powerhouse of Europe, where Eleanor of Aquitaine, she funded the whole courtly love, which was medieval. High medieval culture was based around these Arthurian myths. Where the Arthurian myths come from. Celtic Brittany, actually. Actually it's about the Britons. But the Arthur cycle is from the northwest of France itself and it came to England with the Norman Conquest. And so these duchies in France were not unimportant places where they would build. The furthest ancestor I've traced back is the lord of Dole de Britannia, this border town between Normandy and Brittany. Because the Normans had a frontier with the Breton, which was much like the Wild west. Because it took longer for the Breton to be unified than it did for the rest of France. They were squabbling tribal chieftains until Brittany was briefly an English possession in the late 12th century. Where Arthur, Duke of. I can't get into Arthur of Brittany now that's a different subplot. But so the Lord of Dol de Bretagne, he built this beautiful cathedral that I visited. Actually it's very nice. It's out by Samalo, also on the Norman Breton border where Samalo is incredible. It's this island in the English Channel where the English Channel is the biggest tides of anywhere in the world besides Nova Scotia. And the tides there are so enormous that for part of the day, San Malo, which is this mountaintop monastery on an island. That's incredible. It's. It's an island for part of the day and it's attached. Attached to the land for part of the day and they walled it off. So in the Hundred Years War, you had this very long siege that lasted for decades where the English were to take somer. But because the mechanism where it's an island part of the day and it's attached to the land another part of the day, it was impossible to do. So.
- [49:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, that's an amazing church. It was the background of my phone for about six years, that town. And I don't know what saint it was made in honor of.
- [49:19]
Austin Padgett
It was.
- [49:19]
Rudyard Lynch
But apparently there's, you know, it was the dragon slayer.
- [49:23]
Austin Padgett
I think it was St. Michael, because St. Michael was the patron saint of France, I believe, and St. Michael. And there's a St. Michael. I think he was from the late. Apparently he's the saint of pig keepers and he was a Welsh middle 6th century saint. I. I know there's the dragon slayer. I know there's A Sun Malo dragon.
- [49:49]
Rudyard Lynch
I think the dragon slayer makes sense. There's a line of monasteries going down to the Middle east, apparently dedicated to the same saint that people like to, yeah. Make conspiracies about on the Internet. This is also Night Temp Knight Templars time. Right.
- [50:06]
Austin Padgett
Yes. Samalo was the patron saint of those who suffered syphilis. So the archangel Michael slayed the dragon. Someone in the comments should. Should fact check me on this because I think it's.
- [50:23]
Rudyard Lynch
I thought it was Michael, but maybe I'm wrong.
- [50:26]
Austin Padgett
No, I think it's Michael. Yeah. But the Templars are interesting where they. They were funded by Hugh de Payon, who was from Anjou, where Anjou was an area south of Normandy where after the Normans conquered England, the. The monarchy transferred to the Angevins. And the Angevins, they held more of France than the King of France did, where until 1200, the king of France had this area around Paris the size of Delaware, and he was lucky even to get that. In the 12th century, the king of Paris went through this active process of conquering every castle that neighbored Paris, because it used to be the King of Paris. The King of France just held the city of Paris in not even towns five miles away. But then he had to unify the whole Ile de France region, well, the Angevin nobility, because Eleanor of Aquitaine, which I said before was the wealthiest area of France, she had married the King of France in the 12th century. And this is. This is hilarious, where the King of France was a very monkish type of guy, where he spent all day praying and he refused to have sex with Eleanor of Aquitaine to consummate the marriage. He didn't like sex. And then the Pope ordered him to impregnate his wife. His. The Pope gave him an order, as the King of France, it is your moral duty to fuck your wife. And then he said intervention, and then he said no. And the funny thing is that Eleanor of Aquitaine was considered to be an incredible beauty. And then so when. When she went on Crusade, she was cheating on. She was cheating on him with this, like, hunky Norman nobleman. And then she left him for the King of England, Henry ii, who was a Chad. And so Aquitaine. And because the King of France never consummated the marriage under Catholic law, she was within her rights to do that. So what that meant is that Aquitaine joined England. And there was this period in the late 12th century, and I'll say the King of England, but the empire was really based out of Rouen in Normandy. One of the things Fernand Braudel talks about is that there are many timelines where Rouen in Normandy is the capital of France. And France would have a completely different outlook because the unification by Paris made this centralized, inward facing, continental military power. If Rouen or Nantes in Brittany became the capital, France would have been England, because the family structure and the culture and those regions of France is more like England. That would have been a seafaring, ocean facing, possibly parliamentary state. And so the unification by Paris created certain conditions. But the kings of England or the Angevins, they held Aquitaine, which went down to the Spanish border with the Basques, they held western France, they got Brittany, Normandy, Anjou, they had England. They had conquered the south of Wales and then they had conquered half of Ireland. Where the sphere of French culture was significantly larger than France itself was. Where the after the Norman conquest, the English nobility all spoke French. The English nobility were transplants from France who saw England as a conquered country. The nobility of Scotland started speaking French because the King of Scotland brought in Norman nobility, including my ancestor, the descendant of the Lord of Dolda Britannia, to civilize Scotland, because the Scottish lowlands are populated by people of English ancestry and with Norman nobles on top, because the king of Scotland thought the local Scots were too unruly to control. And French culture in the high medieval period was dominant across Europe. Where it was French food was dominant, French culture was dominant, French art was dominant. The French men were seen as the manliest and the most heroic where everyone wanted to be. France in the high medieval period, although France was not a unified country because the division of France created such profound cultural dynamism. And Brittany was unified under Arthur, under Brittany was unified under the English control. And there was a point when the English could have conquered all of France. And there's an interesting alternate history about what if Arthur, who I believe he could have inherited the English throne rather than John Lackland, but I think Arthur was murdered due to a court dispute or he was sidelined. And Richard Lionheart went on the Crusades. He was the. The king of England and he got captured. He spent a while on the Crusade. There's an interesting story here where France was run by Philip Augustus, who we'll talk about. And so the Pope bullied Philip Augustus to go on Crusade because the Pope wanted all the major crowns of Europe to go on Crusade to retake the Holy Land from Saladin. And Philip Augustus said yes, he spent the absolute bare minimum amount of time in the Holy Land that the Pope would give him before being excommunicated. Then he left, went back to France. Richard Lionheart was actually there for the Crusade and he got really invested. And then Philip Augustus, Richard Lyon returned from the Crusade. He was captured by the Duke of Austria and kept in Austria for years as a prisoner. He had to get ransomed back to England. Then Philip Augustus, he had to sign a treaty with the Pope that he would not attack England when he was on. When the English king was on Crusade. But he used the time when the King of England was away to build up his forces. And I think he still did attack the English when Richard was on the Crusade. But power went when Richard was gone and after Richard died to his brother, John Lackland. And it's sad to see where England had the worst king in its entire history. Where I feel comfortable calling John Lackland the worst king ever in English history. And I don't even know who the second contender is. And Philip Augustus is the greatest ruler in French history. You could make the argument Philip Augustus was more important than in a better ruler for France than Napoleon was.
- [56:59]
Rudyard Lynch
Even Charlemagne.
- [57:01]
Austin Padgett
Charlotte. I'm not measuring Charlemagne because everyone in Western Europe can claim Charlemagne. Where the Germans claim him, the French claim him, the. The Benelux countries claim him, the Italians claim his heritage. Where in the. The nationalism of the Pre World War I period. It was actually a sticking point among European nationalists who got to claim Charlemagne. So Charlemagne is Charlemagne sleeping with other girls? No one girl can claim Charlemagne. He did practice polygamy.
- [57:33]
Rudyard Lynch
Well, it is funny because he's directly Saxon, so he wasn't interesting to think of. He wasn't. I thought it was the Frank. Right, right. It's just interesting to think of the northern French as German.
- [57:46]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, that was. That was a big sticking point. So the reason I pointed that out is that the Norman, the Franks and the Saxons fought each other and the Franks actually genocided the Saxons. The Franks went through a lengthy process of butchering thousands of Saxon nobility, where Charlemagne killed 4,000 in one day. I think it's the bloody day of Verdun, because the Saxons were the last Germans to hold on to the Norse gods. They would. They'd worship the.
- [58:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Sorry, I was just. I was wondering, I didn't ask earlier, were the Celts mostly genocided out of that region? Not even by the Romans, but by the Saxons and Franks afterwards.
- [58:24]
Austin Padgett
So when modern France was Gaul before the Romans in the modern French are genetically plurality Celtic by a big margin. So the modern French blood is Celtic and you can see some Celtic traits in the French where the French have a very strong honor Culture. They're very individual, individualistic. The French are. They're a free people. The Anglo Saxons don't see the French as free, but the Ang. The French had their own version of individuality and freedom that's distinct from the Anglo Saxon tradition.
- [58:58]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay. I knew they weren't German.
- [59:00]
Austin Padgett
Good. And so during the French Revolution, one of the talking points that the French rebels made is that the nobility are ethnic Germans, we are Gauls. So we are pushing out the alien invaders by doing the French Revolution.
- [59:15]
Rudyard Lynch
It's really interesting to see how they thought of the history.
- [59:19]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [59:19]
Rudyard Lynch
That's one of the most important lenses of history that doesn't get examined. Like, how did they see it during the French Revolution in connection to their history? Yeah.
- [59:28]
Austin Padgett
The society of the French Revolution was the most literate of any ever. The most historically literate of any ever. So they knew all the history really well. And history was part of their public discourse in a way it's not today. And the another thing is that the reason that we can't see the Middle Ages for what they are is partly Protestant historians. Protestant historians trying to make Catholicism look bad. And secondarily, it's atheists and modernists trying to make the Middle Ages look bad. So you had all of this propaganda coming out of the French Revolution about how bad feudalism was. And we've kept a lot of this propaganda where there was a. They said in the French Revolution that the nobility had the right to gut their peasants and use their intestines to warm them. That's completely untrue. But they would make up myths like that to justify killing the feudal system, which held on to feudalism longer than anyone. Or the droits de seignol, which is in Braveheart. It's a myth that in medieval Europe, the nobleman could ask for a woman's wedding night. That's not true either. The Church protected. The church protected the villagers from a lot of the depredations of the nobility. Where the Catholic Church did a lot of really good stuff to keep the nobility from turning the peasants into slaves. It's why West European serfdom was significantly better than Eastern European serfdom or black slavery. The peasants had property rights. They couldn't be sold or broken apart from their families. They just had to stay in their lord's land. And the serfdom in France was genuinely oppressive. France was the country in Europe, in Western Europe treated its peasants the worst. And the nobility had a lot of rights. You brought that up where the rule that they had to mill their grain at the lord's place, that was really hated. And it was a cause of a lot of peasant revolts over the course of the 14th century where French feudalism got more oppressive over the high medieval period, where actually in the beginning the nobility was highly permeable, where if you bought land, you were automatically a nobleman. And so, yeah, there was a huge amount of social mobility at the nobility from earlier on through the 13th century. Then from the 13th to the 14th century, the nobility became a highly specific caste based off lengthy blood or beforehand you could marry into the nobility. But in the 13th and 14th centuries onwards, you had to have a noble line going back centuries, be part of the nobility with no peasant ancestry. But at the same time, that occurred as the French monarchy started establishing the nobility of the, the nobility of the letters. Where in France you had the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the letters, the nobility of the sword was you're an old noble line based around you are nobility because you fight in war. And in exchange for fighting for fighting in war, in the feudal structure, the king gives you, the king gives you your land. So the nobility were really self governing in France was a significantly more internally divided country than England was. England was the first country in West Europe to unify, and they were. And so in the Hundred Years War, France had four times England's population. And it was significantly wealthier country. But the king of England could pull on a similar sized treasury as the king of France, because inside France, for example, the Dukes of Orleans, they had tracks of territory the size of European countries inside France that were basically self governing, where they could tell the king of France no whenever they wanted. And so you had these huge nobilities inside France that were basically self governing, that could tell the king of France to go to hell whenever they wanted. And they were under the rule of the king of France. But the French nobility, they were more predatory of the peasants than they were in the rest of Western Europe. And part of the reason that in the Hundred Years War, the English had a military advantage through the longbowmen is that England had this huge middle class called the yeoman farmers. And the yeoman farmers were those who supplied the longbowmen. France didn't have said middle class, where instead France had a huge nobility, where in England's the medieval England, the nobility were like 3 to 4% of the population. In France they were over 10%. So France had this huge. There were a lot of poor nobility. In the Middle Ages, it was very normal that the wealthiest tier of peasants were significantly wealthier than the lowest tier of nobility where you had a huge group of poor nobility. And these were the people who fought in the Crusades. They were the people who died at battles at Crecy or Agincourt, charging the English longbowmen getting killed by the thousand. Where France had this huge population of highly aggressive poor nobility who were obsessed with their own honor and glory. And they would very frequently cause issues because in their culture the slightest degree of fear was seen as socially taboo. So they would constantly virtue signal who was manlier and braver.
- [64:48]
Rudyard Lynch
It's interesting to see modern Francis like a, a reaction to that cult, like a pendulum. But I know French guys in the military and they take it very seriously. They're probably the most martial country in France today. They probably are making up for some insecurity around the World War II narrative. But like France absolutely still has that potential inside itself. And we're so not used to seeing it. It'll. It will be funny if we ever do how people react. But it's in. And it's interesting with the mills how exactly the, the mechanism was used because you mentioned all these private landowners which then became de facto lords and they were, they were trying to buy land. And the thing is, usually the lesser lords wouldn't be able to buy land. Probably on a, on a river maybe they would. But so then in order to mill your grain, you have to use this other lord's water wheel and then they've got you dead to rights because to use his water wheel you have to sign a contract which makes you then under his dominion. So you're no longer a lord. Like.
- [66:04]
Austin Padgett
Yes.
- [66:05]
Rudyard Lynch
So it diminished, it reinforced the feudal system and diminished free land holders. And you can really see how this is the beginning of a modern capitalist structure.
- [66:16]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, so yeah, that's a very good point. That is how capitalism started. Because feudalism is a legal rules based structure where feudal governance is so incestuous and complex. It's not that it's like what the hell just happened here? Where the conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, which consumed a lot of the high medieval period, this all hinged on in 800 AD when the Pope put the crown on the emperor. The Pope said that he crowned the emperor and the Emperor said that he was acknowledging his pre existing status as Emperor. A 300 year conflict hinged on that specific moment in 800 A.D. when the Pope put a crown on the Emperor. Meanwhile, what happened when the Duke of Normandy conquered England is he made himself the King of England, but inside Normandy, he was Liege. The King of France was his lord. And so there was a specific context where the King of England was completely independent or superior to the King of France. Then there was another specific context where he was the inferior to the King of France. And then furthermore, it got even more incestuous. The Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England were so intermarried that both of them could, could claim that they were related to the other enough that they had the correct title to the other family. Because the King of England, for example, a big part of the Hundred Years War was that under English legal, under the English dynamic, under the English inheritance system through the female line, the English king could be the King of France. But under French law, in which a woman couldn't inherit, the King of France was. So the English were saying, under our legal code, we should own France. And the French said, under ours, we should own France. And so that's why until the time of the American Revolution, the kings of England also called themselves the Kings of France.
- [68:22]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. And it wouldn't be that personal for the local population because their monarchs and the kings of England are the same family, the same genetics. So what's the difference from a, you're going to be no less offended than you already are by your foreign ruling class.
- [68:38]
Austin Padgett
So nationalism developed over the 14th century where the Hundred Years War was the tipping point, when England and France, which were the first countries to develop national identities inside Europe, because European state formation started in the west and then rippled east, where England was the first country to form in the 800s, Scotland actually earlier than England, but Scotland was so small, I'm not going to count them. France formed in the 1200s. And then because the start of the Hundred Years War from which was 100 years war was like 1335 till 1450. So it was over a century long. And it was a series of smaller wars that there were 20 year periods in the Hundred Years War where there was, where there wasn't technically a war, but there was still skirmishes and undeclared stuff going on. So the Hundred Years War is like the 18th century, where the English and the France, England and France, over the course of the 18th century, they fought lots of smaller wars with skirmishes in between them. But we count the War of Austrian Succession, the War of Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic wars as different wars. We count the Hundred Years wars the same. At the start of that war, the English nobility spoke French and they had pretensions to be the kings of France. But the Hundred Years War was a total war where France lost two thirds of its population by the end of the Hundred Years War. The plague was part of that. But the English also waged total war where the English, they were able to keep their class structured together in the middle class and the nobility by raping France. Where the English, all entrepreneurial young English men would serve the King, steal stuff in France, bring it back to England. Meanwhile, the English built up a policy of just destroying as much of France as possible because France had. France had four times England's population. So the English knew the only way to defeat France was to destroy it so much the French would be incapable of economically functioning. So they had these policies of burning all of France and destroying cities and leveling the countryside. So the Hundred Years War manifested enough of the traits of total war that by the end of the war the English nobility spoke English and you had this concept of Englishness and then the French had their own concept of Frenchness.
- [71:10]
Rudyard Lynch
So that competition created the identity space.
- [71:15]
Austin Padgett
Yes, I had a point I wanted to say as well, where you had the, the nobility of the sword, who were the pre established feudal warlords then, then you had the nobility of the letter, who were the, the nobility appointed by the King of France to be bureaucrats. Because the King of France would, if you were a bureaucrat like master of the Hound or Lord of the exchequer. And the French monarchy explicitly used middle class people against the nobility. So they cultivated this middle class bureaucrat. Where the Sorbonne was actually a creation by the French monarchy to establish an independent university tradition against the Catholic Church. Where modern secularism and modern nationalism stems from French intellectuals in the high medieval period who wanted to develop a non spiritual source of power independent from the Church. Where the King of France in the 14th century literally murdered the Pope because the Pope fought the German emperor for over a century and the Pope won. The Pope then picked a fight with France because the Pope's intention was to. The Pope, the Papacy was on this power trip where they wanted to break every major monarchy in Europe and turn Europe into a theocracy. And that failed because the second they picked a fight with the French, the French King just murdered the Pope and then installed the French Pope across the river in Avignon. And I've been to Avignon, it wasn't technically part of France at the time, it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but they were French speakers and it was across the river from France. So it would be like America putting the Pope in Niagara, Canada and which.
- [73:00]
Rudyard Lynch
We almost did recently. But they made an American pope.
- [73:03]
Austin Padgett
So, and, and so what happened is that the French got majority French cardinals. Of course, the French cardinals voted in a French pope. Then after a few decades, because the French pope held most of Catholicism for a surprisingly long period of time. I think it might have been like a decade, maybe longer. Then what happened is the rest of Europe, especially the English, thought, no, we're not going to have your fake French pope. So, right. The English and the Germans and the Italians supported creating a new pope in Spain. In Italy then the French had their own pope in Avignon. And this was a period called, I think it was the Babylonian division, because the French pope was so legendarily corrupt and there were three different popes. At one certain point there was a third pope. I forget what his context was because there was another split in the papacy. This was a big pressure for the Reformation, because the papacy, and especially the French papacy, was so legendarily corrupt, where the selling of indulgences, which was the thing Martin Luther really railed against of you can sell, because the Catholic Church would sell this like coupon where monks would pray for you so you would spend less time in purgatory. But human nature being what it is, this was sold as buy a pass to get into heaven. And that happened because the French pope was constantly bankrupt because they were paying people off in various corrupt deals. And when I went to Avignon, I saw practically no chapels. It was all either rooms to store gold or feasting halls. So Arrantam, the Black Death, the Catholic Church really bottomed out in the 10th century. The church bottomed out in degeneracy, where there was a pope who was a mummy. In the ninth century. They literally. The Pope in the ninth century, or. Yeah, this is the ninth. The papacy was captured by local mafia families in Rome, where this was. This was the one of the bottoms. The bottom points of the Dark Age were in the 10th century as the Hungarians. The Hungarians raided deep into France. In the 10th century, the Vikings raided across North Europe. The Muslims rated Mediterranean Europe. Europe had one really dark period in the 600s. It had another in the 10th century. And in that period, Italy became disconnected from the rest of Europe. So the pope became run by these local corrupt mafia families in, in Rome, while the rest of Europe was Catholic, but it was independent from the papacy. They were doing their own thing. And in one of their intrigue battles, one of the local Roman families literally propped up the mummified corpse of the pope for a few years, used him as a voice box to dictate their opinions And. And then another side kill. Another mafia family killed them and installed the slightly better Pope. But the 10th century and the 14th century were the two low points of the papacy. And then the papacy went through renaissance in the 11th century and in the 16th century or the Counter Reformation, that reinforced the moral authority of the papacy so that they didn't just spiral into complete degeneracy.
- [76:30]
Rudyard Lynch
That makes me think of an obvious corollary. Corollary with the United States presidents getting increasingly corrupt before, you know, it just becomes easier to have a corpse in office.
- [76:43]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [76:43]
Rudyard Lynch
Because they're not controlling anything anyways. Like the Biden. The Biden example. And it's interesting to think of the Reformation as kind of coming after this period of great corruption and obvious corruption in the papacy and the Spanish popes and the Borgias and everything. And basically the. The Church getting, you know, being so cocky. It's like there was no correction mechanism because they had all this cultural authority. So then they just got cockier and cockier to the point where they were pushing France are around or pushing for theocracies and the states basically called their test.
- [77:23]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, exactly.
- [77:25]
Rudyard Lynch
To show the reality of the situation. And after something like that, like it getting disrupted and then going to France and going back, you can. It's hard to maintain the same position of cultural legitimacy and authority after the veil has kind of been broken. Kind of like trying to reform France after the revolution when they.
- [77:48]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [77:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Got rid of all their customs.
- [77:51]
Austin Padgett
That's a good point. And it's difficult to estimate the importance of the Church in the medieval period, because in that time the church had a psychological power over. Over West Europeans you couldn't fake. People's entire identity was based around the Catholic Church and they saw the Catholic Church as spiritual defenders for the souls of Europe. What happened though, is that as the Catholic Church got more power because you needed to have power to compete in that time period as a sort of feudal authority, the Catholic Church became more corrupt as it got more power, as it tried to push more power, it in turn lost the public's respect in it. And then what happened is that that destroyed the Church's power. It's a constant pattern over history and it's similar to today where I frequently am shocked that, for example, people today actually believe in the blank slate. They actually believe there's no differences between men and women, that progress is an innate. And if you thought about these things, you can see that it's silly, but these ideas actually captivate people today and people are actually entangled in them. And I am greatly more favorable to the Catholic Church than the modern left. But when an idea controls someone, it gives cultural institutions a power that would not exist otherwise. And you can say that that's irrational. But humans need to have belief structures and priest classes to survive. Every society needs a priest class. And as if you get rid of your priest class, the people who got rid of your priest class will become your priest class. And that's what happened with the modern left. But back to the chronology. I was going to say phrenology, which is a study of skulls, but no.
- [79:49]
Rudyard Lynch
That'S pretty French. The catacombs.
- [79:52]
Austin Padgett
Yes. And so we're in 1200. Philip Augustus and John Lackland. And Philip Augustus, I think is the most important king in French history because he went from Ile de France, the area that of Delaware, to conquering everything from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea, the Shining Sea, where Philip Augustus, he attacked John Lackland. And John was a terrible commander. Where he lost the old heartland, the former core of Norman France, that being Normandy, Anjou, Poitiers and that north central region to Philip Augustus where he wiped them out at a great battle. And John Lackland teamed up with the Holy Roman Emperor to conquer France. And then the Philip Augustus able to beat the English army, then he beat the Holy Roman Empire's army. And the Holy Roman Empire was the biggest and most populous state in Europe. So that's very impressive. And then the English were never able to regain their old heartland around Normandy until like a five to 10 year period in the early 15th century that became the new French corps. Then what happened? But the English did hold on to Gascony. And Gascony was England's biggest trade partner because Gascony was known for its oil and the southwest region of France. The English built out the area around Bordeaux. And interestingly, you can map on the areas the English controlled in the medieval period. Exactly. To Protestantism in the early modern period. There is some correlation going on there. Where Bordeaux and Bordeaux and the west of France, even the parts of southwest France the English conquered, like the Savann and Languedoc, that was where Protestantism was based. And England was also the most important Protestant power. So something was going on there. I don't know. So after conquering north central France, Philip Augustus actually invaded England because the English nobility told him to. Where John Lachlan was so unpopular and hated because he concentrated to predate off the nobility. He kept raising new taxes illegally. He would predate off them. And in some ways John Lackland was so bad it Helped England because he kicked England off being out of being a French empire. And I think if England was a continental power, they never would have been able to either build the colonial empire because they'd be too busy fighting inside Europe or developing the parliamentary tradition. Democracy, because the more military power you wield, the less well democracy works. Which is why England and the Netherlands, coastal swamp areas or islands became Europe's democracies, not France or Germany. And also the English nobility made the Magna Carta to say no to John Lackland because he was so predatory. They made a list of every single rule John Lackland broke, and they forced him to sign it, to say, no English king will do this forever. But he and Philip Augustus invaded England. There was a period where the English nobility supported him becoming king of England. And then he fought as far north as Lincolnshire in central England, where William Marshall, who was like England's. He was England's professional chad, he was known for being. He was their jousting champion. He was like a pro athlete at jousting. I think he also went to the Crusade. He was England's preeminent military commander. Where William Marshall gathered the English nobility under basically a military dictatorship to drive the French out. And people think that 1066 was the last invasion of England, but no. The French invaded England in 1215, and the Dutch launched the Glorious Revolution. You know you win when it's called the glorious revolution. In 1688, that launched a coup in Britain, Britain. But after the war with the English, Philip Augustus then conquered South France, which was an independent country under Languedoc. And they had their own distinct cultural tradition. They spoke their own language called Occitan, which is actually Occitan and Catalan. Where the Catalans in Spain are linguistically, genetically and culturally closer to the French and Occita than they are to the rest of Spain. And the. The rationalization that the King of France used to conquer Languedoc is Languedoc was the center of a heresy called the Cathars. And the Cathars have gone through a lot of rehabilitation lately because they were. They were heretics. But this is controversial. I frankly think the Cathar Crusade was a good idea, because I think Cathar ideas are not good. Where the Cathars were not Christian, they were Manicheans. And the Manicheans believe that the God of the Old Testament is the bad guy and the Devil is the good guy. Where they think that this earth is. They were Manichean Gnostic, where they think this earth is a dream by the crooked by a crooked and evil God. And that and that. And that the devil, by giving us the fruit of knowledge, was liberating us. And the Cathars were a majority in a lot of the area of France around the Pyrenees, down in the southern border by Spain, with Carcassonne being there, which is a beautiful place, I've been there being their core territory. And, and I think that there was a whole wave of heresies across Western Europe in the 1200s that the Catholic Church stamped due to a combination of popularizing the Franciscans as well as wars. And I think if the Cathars green gained predominance, it would have created something comparable to the rise of communism late later, where the Cathars they practiced literal communism. They would. And the Cathars were weird. Where some of them were complete ascetics, where people were impressed by the Cathar ability to their priest classes, completely abstained from food or sex or worldly things, then other Cathars would engage in degeneracy. Because the end point of the, of the, the. The Manichaean gnostic idea that this world is a sinful place made by the devil is either completely abstain from the world or. Or to not care and engage in the world's gluttony because your physical body means nothing. And so with the highest level of Cathars, you were expected to not have sex, to abstain from the world. And so you saw these Cathar communities that just existed almost like woke people where they just wanted to push away all cultural, the entire world and all worldly things. And a lot of courtly love culture actually has Cathar undertones because the Cathars would say that you had to flee your physical body to find love, to find the faraway spiritual realm. That's good because this world is crooked. And you look at courtly love literature, which came from that part of France that time, it's about finding your soulmate and it's about finding the other person that completes you. It's not that strong a connection, but I've heard serious historians make it.
- [87:35]
Rudyard Lynch
Well, even that. Right. The modern conception of love being the basis of relationships is very connected to Puritan cultures.
- [87:45]
Austin Padgett
Interesting.
- [87:46]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, like in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that was one of the things that they emphasized, which was very unusual at the time because marriage was strictly a function of, you know, matchmaking. And that's really interesting.
- [88:00]
Austin Padgett
Marriages, arranged marriages had gone out by that point. Western Europe hasn't. Western Europe, for normal people got rid of arranged marriages in the early medieval period. So if you went back to England a thousand years ago, if you're. If you weren't nobility, you were peasants, you would just. It's interesting how little sexual norms change. People get. So in the 14th century, people would get married age 29, people get married age 29 today. In the good times, in the Middle Ages, people get married at 20. In 1970, 1960, people got. In 1950, the average person got married at age 20. Let that sink in. And in the medieval period, for most people, the normal thing was that you would have the other sex in town. You would, like, date each other and sleep around. And when you got a girl pregnant, you were forced to marry her. So premarital sex was relatively normal. You were just expected to marry anyone you got pregnant. And so you had this sort of. You had a culture of. They were more practical about this stuff. But you did have a concept of marriage out of love in the medieval period, and you did have a culture of dating and sex.
- [89:10]
Rudyard Lynch
That's super interesting about the practicality of pregnancy. You could see that kind of norm actually returning as, as the only kind of pragmatic, practical segue into restructuring monogamy.
- [89:26]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, you did have. So you had, you had some variety of contraceptives in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, they were weird things. Like you would, you would shove wool up or you'd use. You'd like, put honey up there as a way to stop the semen, or there were certain herbs you'd take that would keep you from getting pregnant. And it was a more sexually loose society than we'd think. Where it was expected from the nobility to have concubines. There was a weird hinge in a treaty in the. So in the early 13th century, the king of England and the king of France were making treaties. In order to have a treaty, the king of England and the king of France would have to sleep naked in the same bedroom together for a night to cement their friendship.
- [90:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Oh, right. Like you said. And that. And that was just normal because people were used to sleeping close in the house, you know, one bed, even with the animals.
- [90:23]
Austin Padgett
It was, it was socially taboo for your wife to not sleep naked with you until the Renaissance or the Reformation, because in medieval culture, your, your, if you were a man, your, Your wife owed you sex, and so you weren't getting, you weren't getting your. Your money's worth if she wasn't sleeping naked with you and you couldn' man sex whenever you wanted.
- [90:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. That would contribute. It is funny how so little changes in some fundamental senses. And, and like you said, the, when you mentioned the, the Cathars and the Catalonians, I was thinking well maybe that's why Catalonia is so communist today. And then you mentioned that the Cathars are connected to communism in some ways. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting because, because you're seeing some of these trends come back today and a lot of, well, there's a lot of people who focus on pre 1400s Christianity and saying that's kind of like the more real Christianity. But I wonder how much that's getting mixed up with actually the Cathari Cathar type like cults and the ideas that they had in Christian places back then.
- [91:39]
Austin Padgett
So you've had the Gnostic undercurrent for thousands of years in the early church. And once you get to these esoteric things, it's hidden on purpose. And there are certain coded language. You can figure out where you see these influences everywhere with the plate, with the Platonists, with the Hermetics, with the Gnostics. There are these undercurrents to Western civilization where you know where to look. You'll see they'll have profound influence, especially among educated people. Each of those three philosophic traditions have radically influenced Western history. But it's mostly because educated people studied these concepts and they would apply them to various intellectual projects. And the, the Gnostics nearly took over. The Gnostics and the Manicheans are kind of wed together. They're different, but they're close enough that there's a lot of intermixing. And the Gnostic Manicheans or the Gnostics nearly took over the Christian church in the 200 years after the birth of Christ. The early church fathers had to wage an active war of persecution against the Gnostics. And in the early church they went through this active effort to crush the heretics because they saw heretics as germs to the collective spirituality because their concept is that the collective mental health of society has to be defended. So we're going to attack anyone who attacks our collective psychological stability because the church saw themselves as guardians of the collective psyche. They, they call themselves knights of the Spirit or warriors of the Spirit. And they did a pretty good job of crushing Gnostic influence in the medieval period. So if you study medieval theology, the Cathar influence was crushed where they, they went through every single intellectual idea the Cathars had and bans them and they would watch field to see if they showed those ideas. Then communism and modern leftism are descendants of the Gnostic and the Manichean tradition, because these were ideas that were batted around by intellectuals for this entire time period. And they would, for example, Germany had. Germany was completely awash in these mystic associations in the early modern period. And so these sorts of mystic associations. And this is something when every single major history of the foundation of leftism I've read touches on this. This is something that academics completely agree with, that the modern left stems from these sorts of mystic associations in 18th and 19th century Europe.
- [94:24]
Rudyard Lynch
And it makes sense because like you said, it caused two reactions, either like withdraw or engage, you know, treat yourself essentially. So in the modern left is a combination of, of both anti consumerism and pro degeneracy.
- [94:41]
Austin Padgett
Yes, that's a good point. Ideas have to come from somewhere. And this isn't one of the ideas I keep hammering home that people forget. If you look at people are just like, whoa, man, wokeness showed up and it just happened to exist. No, wokeness comes from a historic trajectory. Every idea is from some other idea. And so in the early lefts wanted to argue that we are in this crooked world that we need to use progressivism and reform to fix. They went back to these Gnostic Cathar ideas that the world is an innately crooked place where you need to gain consciousness of its crookedness to change it. And so the King of France basically waged a war of genocide against Languedoc, not just the Cathars. He used this as an excuse to bring all these North French knights down to the south of France. France. And a funny thing is that if you fought on crusade, you were given absolution from your sins by the Pope. And then what happened is that rather than going to the Holy Land, which was several thousand miles north, French knights would go to South France, fight for a weekend, gain absolution, go back to North France. And the Pope saw this hack and he said, you have to fight for at least a year for me to absolve you of your sins. It can't just be a weekend trip. And then the North French, they killed, I think they killed like over a million people in South France. And this completely destroyed South France as an independent cultural form. And they colonized it with northerners. And this was all under the reign of Philip Augustus, or right after him. So Philip Augustus as an individual practically built the country of modern France, making it from the size of Delaware to the size of California. And he also built up the structure where he built out the French monarchy, He built out the French. The French bureaucratic system comes from the 13th century because the French nobility. The French monarchy used the merchant classes and the bureaucracy to counteract the nobility. And we have primary sources of. The king picks a middle class person to lead the peasants. And the peasants refused to follow his orders because they only felt orders from the highborn. And that's interesting because it demonstrates this was a social structure that people had internalized to a point where even the lower and the middle classes followed it because it was just obvious to them.
- [97:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. They're like, I'm not going to listen to you. You're a peer.
- [97:10]
Austin Padgett
Exactly.
- [97:11]
Rudyard Lynch
And it's almost like an in. You could see an envy reaction because if you could listen to him, then all of a sudden you have to think, change how you think about yourself and you're in competition for legitimate leadership.
- [97:21]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [97:22]
Rudyard Lynch
It's just disturbing to the whole psychological, like, balance that was previously existing.
- [97:28]
Austin Padgett
France was wealthy and it was a capitalist economy where in total wealth, France was easily the wealthiest country in Europe per capita, though they were beat by the Dutch and the Italians, who were wealthier. And France was. It was a capitalist society. And all of Western Europe became capitalist in the high Middle Ages, where in medieval Europe you had a stock market, you had a banking system, you had practic. Most of our financial institutions stem from the medieval period. And however, France was less capitalist than neighboring countries where there's a term called the blue banana. And the blue banana is this arc of territory. England, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, North Italy. And even Fernand Braudel, the greatest French historian, he says that going back to the high Middle Ages, the blue banana was still the center of European capitalism.
- [98:25]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. Ever since the power shifted from the south to the north, it's really shifted to the blue banana. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about the north.
- [98:33]
Austin Padgett
I need a sex joke there, but I don't know one.
- [98:35]
Rudyard Lynch
Blue was blue balls, something.
- [98:38]
Austin Padgett
Freud loved the blue banana. Because Freud kept on talking about the color of blue being sexual. Yeah.
- [98:46]
Rudyard Lynch
Interesting. And rare in paint pigments for a while.
- [98:50]
Austin Padgett
Interesting.
- [98:51]
Rudyard Lynch
You didn't know that about blue. It wasn't in most. In most cultures they didn't even have a word for blue. And they called the. The sky and the. The ocean. Like things like. Like the color of wine or like. Yeah, like relation, relational. There was no blue in the vocabulary until relatively recent.
- [99:09]
Austin Padgett
In most places in the Homeric period, they didn't have a color for blue. But by the time of Plato and Pericles, they had developed the color. So Greek historians have looked at the symbolism of how the development of the concept of blue paralleled the rise of Greek civilization over the ancient period. But notwithstanding, the 13th century was a golden age for France where they had this arc of territory from the north, from most of northern France, most of south France, the southwest of the country was still held by England. Brittany was still under independent Celtic leadership. And then a lot of eastern France today was under German governance. And Savoy in the southeast, and Marseille was its own independent state. So France in the medieval period had like half the territory of modern France, but it was still by far the most important country in Europe. All of Europe looked up to France for everything. Technology, art, culture, war. And this was a period of profound cathedral building and wealth where it was just a great time. And the French launched many crusades where they, they had a leader, I believe Louis the. It was Louis the Something. There was a Louis the Great who was made a saint where he was such a moral king of France. And he went on crusade several times, failing each time. But he had been remembered as just one of the best kings in French history. Just for me, for being such a noble guy. And the sad thing about history is you skip over the nice time periods like that. It took me a minute to talk about their century of golden age. Now we're going to talk about them getting raped in the Hundred Years War. So keep in mind that when you read ancient and medieval history, it's easy to think Vikings attack this city, Hungarians attack this city, civil war. But then you're looking at a 60 year time frame. My grandpa fought in World War II, World War II, 80 years ago. In a historic timescale, World War II is recent for us, but for our lived experience, World War II feels really far away. And it's easy to forget that in the ancient, the medieval world. That's Barbara. Barbara Tookman wrote the best book on the Hundred Years War. That's her rule. Because you read the Hundred Years War, you'll keep finding that where it looks like constant conflict, but if you looked at an individual person's life, it was mostly peaceful. And the Hundred Years War was caused by the dynastic dispute between the king of England and the king of France that we spoke about before were under certain contexts due to English legal code, the king of England was the king of France. And under the French legal code, the King of France was the king of France. And this caused over 100 years of conflict. The Hundred Years War deserves its own video. It's, it's. I once made 100 years war board game when I was a teenager And I played it with my dad. And the problem is that it was too accurate. The game took way too long to finish because the French were incapable of beating the English as armies, while at the same time the English didn't have enough men to take France. And so the Hundred Years War was this multi step process where England was a better organized country. And it was also a better organized, better motivated country, but it still had a quarter of France's population. So the French were never able to drive England out, but at the same time the English were never able to take take France. The first step of the war was the Battle of Sluys off the coast of Flanders, where the English and the French were backing the Flanders Civil War, where Flanders was the wealthiest place in Europe, it's the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. And the English backed the merchant classes and the French backed the nobility in Flanders. So they had a huge naval battle off the coast of Flanders that the English won, which meant that the French would never be able to invade England. And the English English were on the offensive in France and ultimately the capitalist backed English faction, the capitalist English backed faction won in Flanders. So Flanders kept being a mercantile hub where interestingly you see lots of stuff for the industrial revolution in medieval Flanders they had factories with hundreds of people on these looms and hundreds of people working in singular textile factories. Victories in the medieval period. And so to simplify the Hundred Years War, most of the conflict was fighting over the southwest of France, where the English based out of Bordeaux, they would attack the French possessions in the south, where they tried to destroy the country. And what happened is that the English could routinely wipe out French armies with long bowmen. The English had developed these archers from fighting the Welsh who could fire these incredibly powerful arrows and volleys that could kill the French knights. And this was a huge turning point in European warfare where the knights were unstoppable, but the longbowmen and the pikemen were the Swiss, the Swiss and leader the Germans fought very effectively as pikemen destroyed night warfare. So the English longbows could wipe out the French. And the French would resort to guerrilla tactics under leaders like Bertrand de Guisclin, who was Breton, who is the best French commander against the English. And they would fight over the swath of territory that got progressively depopulated in the south of France. The English would also periodically attack the north of France to take Paris with their greatest battles like Agincourt and Crecy and and Poitiers, where the English could wipe out vastly larger French knight armies and the French didn't fight that effectively because they had all of these excess nobility where they had elite overproduction, where the French nobility would charge into battle fighting for glory across muddy fields, then the English archers would just slaughter them. And so there were points where the French couldn't really fight the English. But then the war got bogged down in besieging castles because every small town in France is a castle. Western Europe had so many castles in this time period that all medieval warfare bogged down these permanent sieges because until cannonades it was really hard to take the castles.
- [105:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And. And the English were building castles are all over southern France in that period. And I'm sure during the French resistance In World War II they probably called back to the Hundred Years War and thought about the Hundred Years War and used it as a cultural reference as they were. Because the majority of French resistance during World War II also happened in the south of France.
- [106:13]
Austin Padgett
I don't know that it must have.
- [106:16]
Rudyard Lynch
Been something they brought up, but I don't know any examples yet.
- [106:19]
Austin Padgett
So. So they were very historically literate. I'm sure if there's a historic parallel in their own history, they would have noticed at the time. And so the Hundred Years War was also just a really bad time in France. And you could view the English intervention as a side effect of France's social collapse where France was the country in Europe that was hit the hardest by the Black Death. Death. The Black Death was in the mid 14th century and it killed half of Europe's population and it killed two thirds of North France's population. So that's a lot. The French had that. On top of it, they had peasant revolts called the jacquerie. Because France experienced a secular cycle in the 14th century with a breakdown of their ability, their government's ability to pay their bills, breakdown in currency, hyperinflation, inequality, all of the nice things. And the French nobility were taxing the peasantry to the bone. So the peasants rebelled. So you had these peasant war bands that seized significant parts of France in the 14th century or ultimately getting crushed. And France, much like the rest of Western Europe, got rid of serfdom in the 14th century and switched over to a free capitalist economy as a side effect of the, of, of the peasant revolts. Because the peasant revolts were beaten across Europe. But after beating them, the Europeans put the. The Europeans gave the peasants what they wanted anyway to keep them down. And on top of that France had a multi decade civil war between the Orleanists and the Arm, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, which were two civil war factions. And, and the Burgundians were based out of Burgundy. They were one claimant on the French royal family. And then the Orleanists were based further west. They were another claimant. And the English allied with the Burgundian faction as Burgundian separatists. Burgundian separatists broke off and worked with the English. But I think the internal French civil war probably did more damage to France than the English did. The English did so much damage that might not be true, but France was just in a really bad place in the 14th and 15th centuries. And in the early 15th century, after the Battle of Agincourt, the French monarchy gave up. And they said that Henry V of England could become king of France by marrying the daughter, the daughter of the king of France. So there's a time when the English nearly became kings of France. Henry V died early, which caused a succession crisis which meant that the English invaded France using Henry V's claim. And the north of France, everything north of the Loire, including Paris, became under the rule of the King of England in the early 15th century. And now we get to Joan of Arc. Do you have anything I, you want to say before I talk about Joan of Arc?
- [109:25]
Rudyard Lynch
No, I was wondering when she would show up.
- [109:27]
Austin Padgett
So. So Joan of arc was a 16 year old Jew. Isn't he Jewish? Joan of arc was a 16, 16 year old French girl who had a vision from God that she had to drive the English out of France. And the King of England, the King of France was a schizophrenic who believed he was made out of glass. Or that was the, that might have been the earlier one, or it was the one. Then the King of France was out of it and France had the men and it had the, the money to drive the English out. But France just gave up. They just stopped trying. Yet they were so beaten down. And Joan of Arc showed up. She rallied the French, she gave them a reason to live. And she went to the French court and they were doubtful that she was sent by God. But they had various tests in the medieval world if son was divinely mandated. And she passed all the tests where she knew obscure elements of theology that no peasant should, should have known. And she knew private, obscure details of the king's personal life that he had never shared. And so she passed their, their, their priest test. And Joan of Arc was backed by the Duke d' Alenon, who was one of the power brokers in France where a Reason that she was able to get into power and push the French nation is the Duke d' Alenon made her his protege, supported her, used her as a way to push the English back. And she was the turning point of the Hundred Years War, where they beat the English in the siege of Orleans, drove them out of North France, and she was the turning point of the war. But then she was captured by the Burgundians outside Paris and sent to the English where they burnt her as a witch. Her charge was wearing pants. They said she was man. She was being. Acting too much like a man, which was wrong. And she was a witch. Witch. And there's a story that an English soldier, the day she died, he turned to one of his English buddies and said, we burnt a saint today.
- [111:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. Well, wearing pants is a slippery slope, to be fair. Look where that ended up.
- [111:26]
Austin Padgett
Yes.
- [111:27]
Rudyard Lynch
But, yeah, there's always a debate. Was Joan of Arc a Greta Thunberg character, or was she someone who actually, you know, contributed to the vision.
- [111:40]
Austin Padgett
And.
- [111:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Was their battle tactics? I mean, it doesn't. It almost doesn't matter, because if you're functioning as a mascot and you're putting yourself in positions, that is a component of leadership.
- [111:52]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. So her military forces performed surprisingly well when she fought the English at Orleans. They. They used legitimately good strategic decisions. My best guess is that it was the Duke d' island making the call. And she was the motivational force where Hearst, I think she was saying, I want to attack. I want to fight the English here and here. And then the Duke d' Alencon figured out the details because you can't.
- [112:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Needed motivation for action. Right.
- [112:21]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. Yeah. And I was going to say she's like gritty, but that's a different rabbit hole. I don't want to go there. Gritty is one of the Philly mascots who's like a local Philly legend. I've spoken to him. I've met him. And so the French won the Hundred Years War. They drove the English out. The last British fortress was wiped out in 1450, 53. And the Burgundians were a real thorn in the side of France for longer than that. Where Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy. European history is so complicated. The Burgundians lost authority over Burgundy pretty quickly. And so the Burgundians shifted out to their base being the. Being Belgium and the Netherlands and an area called French Compte. And the Burgundians are Charles the Bold. They were too innovative where they integrated musket and pike warfare, where the technology was ready for it. And Charles the Bold attacked Paris and he tried to seize. He got to the walls of Paris itself and nearly seized Paris, who were getting defeated. And then after driving the English out and beating the Burgundians, France had a golden age because France's population collapsed by 2/3. So the average Frenchman lived in pretty good conditions due to the population collapse. And the 15th century was an incredibly good time in France where France became. They integrated Renaissance culture a lot. It was a economic revolution, it was a technological, it was a cultural revolution where for the first time France was unified as a single country. Where the French took Brittany and they took the Basque country down by Navarre. And so France matched its current borders pretty well, except for the English held the Port of Calais up by the English Channel until the mid 16th century. And the French only conquered the eastern part of the country later on. And the French, this is when the Hunchback of Notre Dame is said actually, which is a good book. And the French, they got mired in the Italian wars which killed the Renaissance. The Italian wars were a 20 year wars when the French tried to conquer all of Italy and they made it down to Naples. You know, it's interesting to imagine a world where the French conquered Italy. And the downstream effect of the Italian wars was to get these Spanish, the Spanish involved in Italy. And the wars were the people who lost the Italian wars the most were the Italians, because it destroyed. It really weakened Italy's global predominance that it had for over a century up to that point. And the French got kicked out of Italy by the Spanish where Italy became a Spanish, Italy became a Spanish possession in, in reality, although the Spanish only held slightly less than half of Italy in actuality. And so a part of the reason that the Renaissance, Italian Renaissance died was because they were part of the Spanish Empire. And if you look at former Spanish colonies, they don't turn out great.
- [115:38]
Rudyard Lynch
Right? Well, they're not very Renaissance spirit. They were kind of. We talked about it in another episode, but they were pretty culturally conservative, right? Yeah, Spanish in some of those ways. And it makes sense. I mean the Italy had no choice, probably because they were under pressure from the Ottomans too.
- [115:55]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [115:56]
Rudyard Lynch
I don't know if that played into the French invasion, but that's why I made that comparison earlier. I was wondering if that was it. But. So Spain connection makes sense. Yeah.
- [116:04]
Austin Padgett
The Ottomans. The Ottomans were not a consistent threat on Italy. There was a period in the 1500 and they took Bari in the bottom part of Italy and then they also Attacked Italy at the Battle of Lepanta, which the Spanish beat the Italians and the French were allies in this time period. And France formed again. We're going to skip over over a century of golden ages, because golden ages are boring. History is a negativity bias. And France got mired in the Protestant Reformation, where France was initially going to become the greatest power in Europe, which they were in the 15th century. And then the Spanish conquest of the New World gave over a century where the Spanish were artificially the most powerful country in Europe, as well as the Spanish. The Spanish did a lot of good marrying. The Spanish married into the Portuguese ruling family. They conquered Italy, they married into the Holy Roman Empire, and they also married into the Burgundian royal family. So there was a period when Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, he controlled Italy, all of Central Europe, the Netherlands, Spain, and then the Spanish leader got Portugal. And so France spent the early modern period trying to break out of being surrounded on both frontiers by the Spanish. To the east, the Holy Roman Empire, and then south to Spain. So the French were good allies of the English and later on the Dutch and the Swedes, who were Protestants, because the French were just working with anyone who was not the Spanish.
- [117:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. That Spanish empire is really interesting. And it's interesting how they teamed up with the kind of like merchant, separatist, Burgundian states. Yeah, and the Burgundian states have always found interesting because it's. Is that line between France and Germany and at points it is formed.
- [118:03]
Austin Padgett
Sorry, Lotharingia.
- [118:05]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. Yeah. It is formed like a consistent line, but usually gets broken up into three, like Belgium, Netherlands and then Alsace Lorraine and then Switzerland. But occasionally they formed. And they would have been a really interesting country because they were very. They were more innovative and. And merchant oriented for. Yeah, a period. And you can see that in the legacy of all those places.
- [118:29]
Austin Padgett
The French gradually colonized that region over the early modern period, where they took Franche Compte and Alsace and the area around Verdun during the reign of Louis xiv, where I was reading Will Durant. And Will Durant really loses his editorial control with. With early modern period. Will Duran's one of my favorite historians and he has four books for all of human history until the 14th century. Then from the 14th century to the 18th century, just in Western Europe, he drops seven books. So I think Will Duran just got rich and famous enough. He stopped caring. He thought, I'm gonna write an 800 book on the eight. An 800 page book on the Age of Voltaire. These people are going to still buy it. And I'd rather study this than more stuff on Africa or the New World. And Will Durant, he wrote a book, the Age of Louis xiv, where he keeps bragging about Louis XIV taking Franche Comte and Alsace. And Louis XIV constantly just self, flat self. He was constantly just jerking himself off for taking this small area. And. And they're the size of like Maryland, a small east coast state. And it's so myopic that Louis xiv, his minister Vauban, was a genius. He built the star forts where France had the best fortification system in the world, ringing France, especially by the Netherlands, that was built by Vauban. Vauban also tried to make the agricultural revolution happen in France, which the English and the Dutch beat the French because they had the agricultural revolution, which doubled quality of life in those countries because it made food so much cheaper. France, France's farming was not capitalist, where the French government would order farmers what crops to cook to make, although most of the French economy was capitalist. So France never had the agricultural revolution, which is why they slid into. Which is why they slid into. Into poverty and starvation with the French Revolution. Vauban really tried to push the agricultural revolution. And Louis the 14th told him no. Vauban also said that if The French sent 10,000 people a year to Quebec, that new France would have 200 million people in the year 2000. And you can see from the English Americans that was true. And so France had a real potential to rival England as a colonial power. But their desire to get these minimal gains on France's eastern frontier as a European power met, they lost out in the colonial game that the English were able to. The English and the Spanish were able to win. So out of any West European country, France has by far the smallest diaspora today. Any major West European country.
- [121:24]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. It's like Blockbuster trying to get a couple more stores in Seattle while Netflix is shifting to digital or something.
- [121:32]
Austin Padgett
Yes. And France got stuck. They had. After their golden age in the 15th century, France had real issues with the Protestant Reformation, where France was 90% Catholic, but they're 10% Protestants, were the most educated, mercantile, intellectual people. And keep in mind that England was like 10% Protestant when it turned to Protestantism, where the Protestant Reformation was done by small active minorities who converted the king. And there were lengthy periods where the king of France was a Protestant. And the French words of religion are such a clusterfuck that I don't really think it's useful for me to go into depth with Them it's like the wars of the Roses, where what I'll say is that you had these cycling patterns where there was the Protestants became kings of France, but they had to. The Protestant Protestants. Catholics fight Catholics, repress Protestants, Protestants for military organization. Military organization is good enough that they compromise and they're Henry of Navarre. That a Protestant king can rule France if he converts to Catholicism, where you have tolerance, where Catholicism is still the main religion. The Catholics murder a huge amount of the protestants of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, where they killed over 5,000 Protestants in a single day because there was supposed to be a wedding where the Protestant king would marry a Catholic wife. The Catholics betrayed the Protestants, murdered them all under the orders of Catherine Medici, who was a descendant of the Florentine Medicis, who is the queen mother of France. She then forced the Protestant king, who the Protestant Henry of Navarre, who had had all of his Protestant buddies murdered, to still marry his daughter and convert to Catholicism. Where it's just these profound levels of twistedness.
- [123:26]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. Well, they didn't even offer that deal in Game of Thrones.
- [123:30]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [123:30]
Rudyard Lynch
And like, it wouldn't have worked with the plot and the audience and the character emotions.
- [123:35]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. It would have stretched.
- [123:37]
Rudyard Lynch
It would have taken us out of it because we would have been impossible to relate to because then you would have lost respect for your heroes or whatever.
- [123:45]
Austin Padgett
The other thing as well is that in this era of history, when you got married, you would have to. You were legally obligated to fuck your wife on your wedding night in front of all your friends and family. So the other layer of complexity on top of this is Henry of Navarre. All of his backers are murdered. Then he is forced to get into bed with his new wife and consummate it in front of the French nation after he's been destroyed, after. After everything that's happened, it's just levels of mental torture that's hard to understand. But Henry of Navarre was actually a great king. He's considered one of the best kings in French history. But I even left out the French wars of religion are multi decade and they're one of the bloodiest wars ever in European history. I think millions of people died in them because it was the Protestants and the Catholics just brutally kill each other. And it's crazy how much the Protestants punched above their weight for only being 10% of the population. But out of Henry of Navarre, you saw. And also one of the subplots from Will Durant is that he just randomly says one of Henry of Navarre's relatives becomes King of Poland, which was. Watch the 17th century Eastern Europe video we made earlier where the Poles needed foreigners to become their kings. They brought in Swedes, they brought in Saxons, French, anyone besides a Pole, because it would. It would incite the end Polish. Yeah, exactly. And so will Durant's. Just like this relative becomes King of Poland. No explanation. I'm like, like what? That makes no sense in the plot structure. You can't do this, Durant. But. So France had an edict of toleration from late 16th, when the St Bartholomew late 16th century Bartholomew's Day massacre till the mid 17th century when Louis XIV takes power. And this is where I'm going to stop. Where mid 17th century was the second stage of France's early modern crisis, where Louis XIV, he was a teenager, he was really young and he was helped along by the Cardinal de Richelieu, who was a wily minister who invented. He was a hardcore French nationalist. Where France was a Catholic country, but they were. Their form of Catholicism was. We refused to listen to the Pope. We will have the Catholic rites, we will do all the Catholic theology, but we're not going to listen to the Pope. We're self governing. And the Catholics were taken over. A big faction of French Catholics were the Jansenists. And the Jansenists were Calvinist Catholics where they believed that God predetermined whether or not you got into heaven from the St. Augustine tradition. They were really dour and controlled. And all the things we associate with Puritans and the Jansenists had a big impact on helping create the French, a lot of the modern French nation. But Louis XIV faced the Fronde revolt, where in the mid 17th century, under Protestant adjacent leadership, the nobility and the merchant classes allied together to try to make France a parliamentary democracy. And this was a somewhat successful revolt that the King of France crushed. And the King of France also fought against the Spanish in the thirty Years War where the Spanish nearly took Paris itself, but the French drove them back at the Battle of Rocroi. And so Louis XIV was able to pull France together from the chaos and he made France into an absolutist, tyrannical country where he crushed the power of the parliament, basically destroyed it for 200 years. He got rid of a lot of the capitalism that could have developed and he made France a unified country where he domesticated the French nobility, because beforehand the French nobility were proud and they would live on their estates where Louis XIV made them hang out in Paris and party with him. And if they didn't party with him, they would get, they wouldn't get ahead in the world. They had to go there. They had to spend money on these estates and on, on fashion, on food, on wealthy houses. And this was, I consider this to be the turning point where England beat France, where France also had a mass expulsion of the Huguenots who migrated to England or the Netherlands. The Huguenots being the French Protestants, a lot of them went to the American south as well. And the Huguenots, that was bad for France because they were the most entrepreneurial, the wealthiest, a lot of the smartest people in France and they were loyal to France. So Louis XIV backstabbed them and he put his boot on the nobility's throat because he had trust issues after, for reasonable reasons for the wars when he was a teenager. And kicking out the Huguenots was seen as this turning point in French history. Where France went, France went poorly. And Louis XIV is called the Sun King in France today. He's considered one of the greatest kings in French history. But I think he put France in a really bad direction by getting rid of tolerance, getting rid of capitalism, crushing democracy, forcing the nobility to stay in Paris and compete over stupid stuff and focusing on these constant. He waged like seven wars against, mostly for Belgium, which mostly failed while he should have been colonizing the rest of the world. And so he set France up to this, this centralized, absolutist country where he crushed all the provinces under Paris. And you look at England, the English aristocracy was rural, so they spent their time in the countryside developing agriculture, developing science, developing industry, where the English nobility intermarried with the merchant classes in France. Everything was righted through Paris and the nobility got domesticated. And yes, this was a cultural golden age where France was the economic and the cultural and just France was called the sun of Europe. Modern cuisine, appetizer, main course, dinner was from France in this time period. The modern novel was from France in this time period. It was a cultural revolution. But France built this short term unity at the expense of their long term success. Which is why France in the period after the revolution went into decline vis a vis the Germanic countries like England, America, Germany. And furthermore, the French had capitalism, but capitalism wasn't able to fully flower because they did a license regimeization, which is a term I invented for subdividing the economy between different monopolies, where you could buy all, practically all upper class people in France bought out the ability to pay taxes. So poor people paid significantly more taxes than rich people in France because you would just buy your ability to not pay Taxes, you'd buy government offices. So France's economy and society was completely stultified under regulations and monopolies, which is what would have probably happened if the Royalists won the English Civil War.
- [131:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. Were the Huguenots the Calvinist Protestants or were.
- [131:25]
Austin Padgett
They were Calvinists. Yes.
- [131:27]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay. Okay. Yeah, exactly. He, He. He made France work by forcing the nobles to compete for status instead of. Of their own independence of their regime. He basically upheld the monarchy and prevented some, I guess, potential disruption around the conflict that could come with the reorganization of that system. But, yeah, it completely screwed them over and kept them trapped. And I think it's a really interesting theme. I think Paris is a really important example to look into for the tyranny of the city. Yeah, like how, how these bureaucracies form around kind of an unassailable city. And like you have. I mean, I think China is a lot centered on. On major cities you have in the US Now. It's like the cities controlling the countrysides. Like, how do the cities get into this position where they control the country countrysides? And how is it connected to the structure of the bureaucracy being routed through a central point? Right, because you need the monopoly. And yeah, it centers on a city. It's just an interesting dynamic city ruling over the countryside, like the castle with the shadow of the countryside.
- [132:48]
Austin Padgett
Urbanization kills societies, where. That's a theme Spencer talks about, because cities prioritize creativity and dynamism and cosmopolitanism over traditional values and a birth rate and religion and all those things. So societies switch from rural to urban as they grow. That's a correlation for decadence. You have to have an urban society, but in the process, it rots your society out, which was why France was the first country to experience the effects of modernity anywhere in the world. France saw decline in religion, decline in birth rate, all those things a century before Britain or Germany did. And that was due to the effects of urbanization that you saw under Louis xiv, because France industrialized later than Britain or the Netherlands. So it's. There are, there's different curves going on here of urbanization versus industrialization. And the Parisian mob became the deciding fact of French politics, because French politics, the French overcorrected by centralizing in Paris because their earlier system was so decentralized. And so the Parisian mob was the deciding factor from the 18th through the 19th centuries of French politics. Because when the Parisian mob attacked something because everything was centered in Paris, they. They were the deciding variable. And de Tocqueville likes to say, and de. Tocqueville was a Norman, that the.
- [134:18]
Rudyard Lynch
That.
- [134:19]
Austin Padgett
The biggest issue of the French Revolution was centralization. He, his thesis is that France had to become a federalized system and that the ultimate aim of the French Revolution was the unification of France under a centralized managerial bureaucracy, because the French government built out their bureaucracy to control France. But then what the French bureaucracy realized, and Tocqueville is a beautiful example of this, that within a year or two of creating a bureaucratic structure parallel to the king of France, the French Revolution happened. Because the second the bureaucracy realized they could govern France without the king, they launched the French Revolution. And then France came a country run by the bureaucracy, which was the first place in the Western world to do so, because the LC regime established the bureaucracy and that was codified under Napoleon, although it was a. The military gained the deciding variable because the bureaucracy was incapable of actually leading. But then the military was bureaucratized.
- [135:29]
Rudyard Lynch
Right. And they reinforced the domestic bureaucracy just to maintain their own priorities. Yeah, really interesting. And then like London kind of taking on a similar role in England today, and it's so different from the rest of the country. And then it gets into like, political solutions for the modern times. It, it clearly makes sense in this context to have city states be governing themselves to a large degree and have more autonomy to the countryside. And I think that's hard for us because we think of the cities and the country as this, the same country and the same political unit. But that just really means the city's controlling the country. And there, there's plenty of opportunity for like, those things to coexist without, you know, destroying each other quite as much as they do.
- [136:21]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [136:21]
Rudyard Lynch
And just to come back to the mills, it kind of encapsulates everything because the mills are like the capitalism. And then you have the state control, which is the regulation, and then you have the church in that picture too, because they ran a lot of these water wheels and mills. And maybe that also gave them a middleman position to advocate or have some actually leverage to advocate for the peasants, as you said they did throughout that time.
- [136:51]
Austin Padgett
So the reason that part of the reason that France became an agnostic and an atheist country a century before the rest of Western Europe, Europe, is that France had this issue where they had a state sanctioned church where France was a Catholic theocracy, where Protestantism was heavily suppressed until the time of the French Revolution. At the exact same time, France was a society where it was the most educated place in the world. Where in England, what happened is you saw the develop England and Germany, you saw these new varieties of Protestantism develop that could parallel the intellectual development of people. And the French church was surprisingly good. They were not bad faith actors. It's just that they were behind the times and they were incapable of innovating. So you saw this huge intellectual population that was not being served by the religion. So they went for atheism and agnosticism in a way that didn't occur in the rest of Western Europe. Which is why the French Revolution was atheist. And it took over a century for wide scale atheist movements to appear in the rest of Europe. And I'm going to finish, I will finish on this where the last two regions that got added to France were Savoy and Corsica. The French bought Corsica, which is both Savoy and Corsica were ethnically Italian. In the. Were ethnically Italian and they still basically are today. They bought corsica in the 18th century from Genoa because Corsica kept rebelling from the Italian city state of Genoa. So Genoa said, France, you can take this. And Napoleon's from Corsica, which is one of those historic ironies that the French, they never thought about Corsica. It was like, oh, I'm an investor, let me add another 20th stock to my portfolio. And Napoleon came in there, who was the greatest French emperor. So it's a sort of irony about how tiny decisions, that's a real butterfly wing moment. And Savoy, they got Savoy, where Savoy was. Savoy was surprisingly important for being this small Italian mountain state where they consistently worked with the Austrians and the Empire. So lots of the Empire's best leadership were Savoyards. And if you, if you read French sources, the French are very aware of internal French differences that we wouldn't notice. So they'd be like, there are certain stereotypes at the Savoyards. There are certain stereotypes of the Burgundians, the Occitane, the Breton. And so the Savoyards have their own identity in France while being Italians. And interestingly, the Savoyards conquered Italy, where modern Italy was created out of Turin, in Savoy. And then what happened is that the Savoyards in the mid 19th century surrendered part of their homeland after they conquered and united all of Italy, because the French were trying to build an empire where the French held on to Rome. So in order to get Rome to unify Italy, the Savoyards had to surrender part of their homelands to France.
- [139:58]
Rudyard Lynch
So that's just a random thing that got him a little bit more territory.
- [140:01]
Austin Padgett
Yes.
- [140:01]
Rudyard Lynch
And you're forgetting the most important part of France. Oh, right, yeah. The, the colonies. I thought someone might bring that up. But the most important part of Corsica is not Napoleon. It's the vacation destination for all of modern France. I don't know where would they, where they would go without it.
- [140:18]
Austin Padgett
They'd go to Nice, right?
- [140:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Or they'd go to it. They'd be going to Italy and then paying. You know, I find Italy's tourism economy.
- [140:28]
Austin Padgett
I find it nuts that the bullet train from Paris to the Mediterranean only takes two hours. Partly it's that the French have a great high speed railroads, but also France is the size of Texas. We forget how small Europe is. Well, this was a good episode. Next episode is going to be the French Empire.
- [140:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. And sorry for calling the French small. And I would say you mentioned Belgians were kind of similar to French. I would say they are more concentrated French. Like all the snootiness or whatever you get out of France. It's even more concentrated in Belgium. I don't know if you guys have an insecurity complex or something, but you're very French for sure. You're even more French than the French.
- [141:11]
Austin Padgett
You're turning heads when you look through the door or don't need makeup to cover up. Be in the way that Right. Everyone else in the room can see it. Everyone else but you, baby. You light up my world like nobody else. The way you flip your hair get me overwhelmed when you.
- [141:33]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that's how Belgium feels about. About themselves. And just a one more delusion from. For the Belgians. Just because the EU put their capital there does not mean you're the center of the power. And that's the same for you Netherlands. You're not going to be the center of a new empire just because the EU put their bureaucracy there.
- [141:52]
Austin Padgett
There's a story there. Have you been cited by a Belgian?
- [141:56]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [141:57]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [141:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay, but not minorly. I, I love France and Belgium, but I like to make fun of them because everybody has a way, a rationalization for how they could be potentially the most important. And it's always funny when a smaller country gets an idea, especially through a loophole like, oh, we'll get, we'll get the EU centered here and then we'll be the center of this powerful thing. But yeah, it's just comical.
- [142:19]
Austin Padgett
I'm looking at you, Canada. Yeah, Canada constantly thinks they're better than America.
- [142:26]
Rudyard Lynch
They're Europe's warrior to disrupt America.
- [142:28]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. Cool. Well, sounds good. Thank you. Catch you next week for the French Empire. Bye.
- [142:36]
Rudyard Lynch
All right, see you later.
- [142:38]
Narrator
History102 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.