← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Holy Roman Empire
02:23:39
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- [00:01]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [00:31]
Austin Padgett
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Radiard 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.
- [01:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102 with our co host Austin Padgett. And this episode is the Holy Roman Empire. So the WI fi in my office isn't working and so I have to film this in my living room and that's why my microphone is poorer. I'm going to have to call my WI Fi company to figure out why it isn't working because normally my WI fi is pretty good in the office, but. So, Holy Roman Empire. We're about to cover a thousand years of European history from 800 AD until 1800. And this is one of those topics. I should probably read another 2000 pages if I want to fully understand it. But I won't because it's so complex and doesn't really have a lot of other implications and I have too many other things going on in my life. But you're going to get a greater depth of complexity here than a lot of other places because the study of basically pre Hitler Germany and the Holy Roman Empire is like greater Germany. It's Germany and then most neighboring countries and there's practically nothing on pre Nazi Germany in the English speaking world. So in the past when I tried to research this topic, you'll, you'll be lucky to find one or two books on.
- [02:44]
Whatifalth
Is a really kind of foundational topic to modern Europe and kind of explains the Germany that you have before they were pressured to nationalize through Napoleon. As we usually speak about, we've seen.
- [03:00]
Rudyard Lynch
A profound disconnection from European history since World War II. And if you read books written by educated people in the pre World wars world, it was just commonly assumed that every educated person would have a pretty good knowledge of European history where you'll read like the Jeeves comedy book set in the 30s. They go to a costume party where one of the characters dresses as Edward the Confessor who was an Anglo Saxon king. And it was widely assumed that among their friends they would know who Edward the Confessor is. And if you read like high school senior graduation exams from the 1890s, they're expected to know where the city of Odessa in Ukraine is. And European history is so complicated that you kind of have to treat it on its own terms. And our era of history, we kind of have this very warped view of Whig history, where Whig history is the history. And I remember looking at my school textbook when I was in middle school or something where it had Egypt, Mesopotamia, then you have the Greeks and the Romans, then you have the Magna Carta, then you have the Enlightenment and modern European. And that narrative is just a straight line, but it leaves out places that have profound implications on our current society and which dominated their civilizations for a thousand years. Like the Holy Roman Empire.
- [04:46]
Whatifalth
German is the second largest ethnic group in the U.S. it's a huge part of our population. And not that many people really have any idea of Germany in the medieval era before that's distinct from anything else. I mean, we don't even know the context in which the fairy tales that we're familiar with came from.
- [05:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. In the broader schemes of things, Germans are one of by far the closest populations culturally to Americans. They're possibly closer or as close as the French. And as I tried to study this topic, you see that there's been this active attempt to remove the memory that Germany had this highly advanced cultured society before World War II. And I think a lot of that was anti German resentment that came from the war, where the. We all know that Italy and France are places of culture, but Germany has produced as much culture, as much art, as much architecture, philosophy, just all tenets of higher culture, as did those countries. And you would know about it. And people talk about how Dresden or Cologne or Strasbourg were just these masterpieces of cities that were just. You could tell that a lot has happened here. And one of the things that I read a lot about from German authors who lived about a century ago is that the old Germany is not the new Germany. Germany in the 19th century experienced one of the most rapid cultural shifts of any society ever in history.
- [06:37]
Whatifalth
Interesting. So that kind of sets up the. The World War II changes. What caused that shift?
- [06:43]
Rudyard Lynch
It was the unification of Germany under the Prussian system. And it's recently become a talking point in sort of like live right circles about the Prussian school system, which is the modern American school system, where it trains you for skills to be a good factory worker or a good cannon fodder. And that School system was developed because Prussia, which is now in Russia, actually Stalin took that area and ethnically replaced all the Germans there with Russians. After World War II, that area was in the middle of the map. So their evolutionary strategy was doubling down on war, government centralization and standardization. And they unified all of Germany over the course of the 19th century. And then Germany was, which was a patchwork of independent states beforehand. They forged it together under conscription because all young German men had to serve in the military. And so that was where they were socialized. And so the social norms that came from the military and furthermore the schools in the university system that fed into the military because German academia, we forget this German academia from the 19th century until World War II was super conservative. It was hyper monarchist, hyper reactionary. So their entire, their entire education and military system indoctrinated the public in these very statist, militaristic social code. And as an example, Hayek said that the West Germans in the North Germans, the Rhinelanders in the area around the North Sea, it was just widely considered in the 19th century that they were closer to the English culturally than the Prussians. And so that's why German Americans give off such a different vibe from German Germans, although there are similarities because we were importing the West Germans who didn't like the Prussian system. So you have these hugely different selection pressers for German Germans and American Germans. And then if you read Gustave Le Bon, he also talks about how it was widely seen at the time, even by outsiders, how much Germany's culture changed over the 19th century. And you can view a lot of Nietzsche's work where Nietzsche was actually an anti nationalist. He thought nationalism destroyed individuality because he belongs to this very freedom loving German tradition that was quite strong that got crushed by the Prussian state. And there's another German thinker who I'm trying to. Oh yeah, Weber, the founder of the field of anthropology, writing in the 1870s, he would say that it was widely considered that Germans were seen as more laid back and chill than the English or the Americans in the mid 19th century where the Prussian state and the Industrial revolution had completely changed the culture of Germany. And so when you're looking at Germany in this time period, you have to understand that it's a very different society from Germany today.
- [09:50]
Whatifalth
Before they were almost kind of more romantic. Like you said. People think of Italy as a place of high culture, but it's really northern Italy which bleeds into southern Germany, culturally, Switzerland, and then at the top being more like England. But they had this cultural pressure from Prussia. And then when they were put under pressure to nationalize in response to the French, they kind of just gave it over to that Prussian.
- [10:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [10:19]
Whatifalth
Cultural influence.
- [10:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that's correct. And yeah, you're right as well. Where I was, I read this book on medieval German, like medieval German epics and romantic stories. Where I was, I was interested in Siegfried and. And there's this whole Siegfried and the Niva Longliad and what's Dietrich of Bern. They're the German equivalents of King Arthur. So the Germans have their own stories from the medieval period which are equivalent to the British myths of King Arthur, of just these medieval epic stories of great kings who slay dragons and princesses and the foundations of the fantasy genre. But then western Germany had this incredibly advanced romantic tradition which. Where the biggest thing they were known for culturally were romance stories. And these normally ended with highly depressing and kind of melancholy endings where it was a lot like Romeo and Juliet with two lovers who are just so intertwined and they kill each other to avoid their parents not allowing them to marry. Another thing as well is that western Germany was known for being one of the best wine producing areas in Europe where German wines before World War I were seen as better than French or Italian wines.
- [11:48]
Whatifalth
There are a lot of kind of accounts of that and used to be. Where'd you hear about that one? Just curious.
- [11:55]
Rudyard Lynch
That was from a BBC documentary in 2002. Before the BBC was Gay Manor House where it's set in the 1904. They're trying to reenact in 1904 British Manor House. And they were going through. One of the best parts of the TV show is they hire this French chef who studies all these Edwardian cookbooks and he goes through what was popular in 1904 cuisine. And it's interesting because you realize that pre World War British cuisine was actually good. There was a point when British food was competitive with continental cuisine where if you go to rural England you'll find that the English have their own independent culinary tradition that was very advanced, which the industrial revolution and the rationing of the World War is just crushed. But he also talks about how German wines were the most enjoyed and the most best wines in Europe. Probably because the Germans had just integrated the artisanal skill which they had perfected in the pre industrial era into an industrial economic system.
- [13:07]
Whatifalth
Part of this is just the politics of the 1800s and it's nice to. And it's of course totally logical because you look at the. The economic situation and the wealth and the culture of Germany at that time, that they were very much part of that 1800s laissez faire golden age. It's just hard to associate them with it. There's not a lot of content of the Gilded Age in Germany.
- [13:35]
Rudyard Lynch
So I'm going to keep this short because Imperial Germany deserves to be its own video. I don't want to make a video on the Middle Ages and talk about the 19th century for 20 minutes. But. So there are two models of industrialization and this has been something people have known for a century. There's the British model and the German model. And the British model is laissez faire where you have independent capitalists build factories out of profit. And the German model is that the government builds out these huge industrial mega corporations, mostly for military production, and then they're given special privileges, they dominate. And what happens is the German model allows more rapid industrialization and it's normally done by militarily threatened countries who want to industrialize as quickly as possible. The problem is that this system allows state overreach and gradually domesticates the population. So when you look at the countries with the lowest birth rates in the world, whether Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan, they're all countries who had this model because the government overreach basically killed. It killed the social structure of the society so much that they don't have a reason to procreate. Meanwhile, the English speaking model, which was America, Britain, skip, I think it was Scandinavia and France. That model takes slower, but it also does less damage to the social structure and the natural innovation of the, of.
- [15:09]
Whatifalth
The population more sustainable and kind of like Germany caught the Prussian bug and then gave it to Japan and then it ended up going to China and now it's threatening to come back to the US because people are like, oh, you have to do this China model to compete fast with China. And it's a wait. That's the German model and we can probably survive a sustainable growth path.
- [15:35]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. So to get to the Holy Roman Empire, there's three different sub eras of the Holy Roman Empire. The first being the Frankish Empire, the second being the unification, mostly under the Hohenstaufens, and the third being the division. So the first part of the Holy Roman Empire's history was when Charlemagne got crowned Holy Roman emperor in 800 AD until the Frankish Empire then went through a series of civil wars. The Hohenstaufens, sorry, the Saxon emperors unified the Second Empire in the mid 10th century and then that fell apart in the mid to late 13th century. And the third holy Roman Empire or the series of squabbling duchies and feudatories that was from the late 13th until the early 19th century with Napoleon. So the entire trajectory of the Holy Roman Empire is that it was founded on Christmas in 800 AD by Charlemagne, and then it fell apart and was wiped out by Napoleon in the early 19th century. So you're looking at a thousand years of European history with this singular empire being sort of the spine of Europe.
- [17:01]
Whatifalth
Also took on the legacy of Rome. And they thought, speaking of understanding their history, they thought of themselves very much as being in the context of Rome. So it, the name very much mattered in that sense. And I think a later emperor ended up trying to govern from Rome, but was always on the trail in Germany.
- [17:24]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. So the Rome bits difficult for us to understand because we fundamentally changed mental frames since that era of history. Because keep in mind, people in previous eras did not see the direction history was moving in. They had to look backwards through history to find mental frames with which they could understand the world. And until the French Revolution, when educated people, until the 19th century, whenever educated people tried to understand how the world worked, they would first route it through the classical civilizations like Greece and Rome or the Bible. Those are the two frames they used to understand the world. And then science gradually caught up and then beat them, and then scientistic ideology beat science. And. And the whole thing with the legacy of Rome, the best way I would explain it is they just saw Rome as the empire. Rome was the constant. That was the one true great state. And all the states that came after Rome were inferior to it. And this is why every single major European country went to great efforts to copy Rome with the Russians. They call themselves the Third Rome. Byzantium is obviously a successor to Rome. The Turks called themselves the Sultanate of Raoul or the Sultanate of the Roman People because they conquered Byzantium. The Spanish modeled almost every single part of their empire off the Roman precedent. The French did the same thing. The English constantly imitated the Greeks and the Romans. The founders of the early American republic took enormous influences from the Romans. And the Holy Roman Empire is one of the easier examples of it because a lot of European states were heavily repetitive of the Romans, but the Holy Roman Empire were the West European state who grabbed the title and said, we will hold the title of being the true descendants of Rome. And it's an interesting story where the parent empire to the Holy Roman Empire was the Frankish Empire. And the Frankish Empire was formed by these barbarians from western Germany and the Netherlands who conquered the North Plain of France, and the Frankish Empire based out of Aachen, which sits at the borderland between Belgium, Germany and France. And Aachen is Aachen. The Franks were like, culturally and linguistically closest to the modern Dutch. And the Frankish Empire reached its apogee under Charlemagne, where they controlled modern France, Catalonia and Spain, most of Italy except the bottom boot. They controlled Austria, Hungary, all of modern Germany, the Benelux countries. And so the core region of Western Europe was unified under the Frankish Empire. And the Holy Roman Empire started when Charlemagne went down to Italy, where there's this band of territory in central Italy that was called the Papal States. And this was a region that Charlemagne's ancestor, I believe, Pepin, he had set out for the Pope because all of Western Europe in this era was Catholic. And it's hard to overestimate the power the Catholic Church had over the minds and the souls of the Europeans. Where Pepin, Pepin gave the Pope this territory in central Italy because the Lombards, who were a Germanic people originally from Scandinavia, who had populated northern Italy, calling it Lombardy, they kept on harassing the Pope. So the Pope asked the Franks to come over the mountains from France, wipe out the Lombards, then give them this stretch of central territory. And the Franks must have done this half a dozen times. The Franks were constantly invading, invading northern Italy. And because there was no centralized system of government, all government was based around the personal charisma and abilities of a capable leader. So each Frankish king, because there was no bureaucracy, there was no government system, they had to cross the mountains and then crush the Lombards again and again and again because they couldn't standardize their power. And Charlemagne had to do that once again. And the Pope, in order to thank him, crowned him Holy Roman Emperor because the Byzantines in the eastern Mediterranean, they were the, they were a direct descendant of the Roman Empire. The Romans survived in the east and died in the west. And they had already. The Byzantines had already de facto split off as a different sect of Christianity from the Pope, even though they wouldn't say that would happen for another 200 years. And the Pope basically to stick it to the Byzantines because the Byzantines had conquered the papacy and kind of strong armed the Pope multiple times already in the previous few centuries, named the Franks a new Roman Empire as a counterweight to the Byzantines because he could trust that the Franks would consistently support his interests against the Byzantines. However, the single moment when the Pope put a crown on Charlemagne's head, then set up 300 years of doctrinal and political disputes between the future Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, about whether or not the Pope merely acknowledged the Holy Roman Emperor's legal rights, or if the Pope had the power to choose who the Holy Roman Emperor was.
- [23:21]
Whatifalth
It seems like the reality here is whoever protects Rome is the emperor. And the Byzantine part of it became too far away from Rome politically to protect it from the Lombards. And then when the. I think the Holy Roman Empire was at its most, Holy Roman Empire was when they controlled northern Italy, because that. That's essentially the trade. So for all the papal states, whenever they're under pressure, they have this extra lever that they can offer for protection, which is the symbolic meaning of it.
- [23:59]
Rudyard Lynch
You know, the autistic screeching meme.
- [24:03]
Whatifalth
Yes.
- [24:04]
Rudyard Lynch
So when I heard your statement, I could hear centuries of medieval legal theoreticians autistically screeching.
- [24:13]
Whatifalth
Yeah, I've cut through that one a bit too much for. To respect the academic discourse, probably.
- [24:21]
Rudyard Lynch
And so Charlemagne's empire collapsed pretty soon after his death, for the reason I described before, where it just required too much capability as leaders. And after the first few generations, after the Carolingian monarchs became military dictators, they just lost the collective will to maintain their empire. And so the Frankish Empire, because there was a tradition of. Because there was a tradition of dividing lands between sons, it got consistently split into three states. West Francia, which became France, Frankland Francais, then Lotharingia, which was this sort of Frankenstein country that existed in the borderlands in France and Germany with the Low Countries and the Alsace and Franche Comte southeast of France, and then most of Italy, Lotharingia got wiped out pretty quickly because it had no coherent ethnicity, it had no coherent. Just anything. No geography, national identity. When you name your country off after one of the sons, Lothar, it's not a real country. And then East Francia, which became Germany. And this was during the Dark Ages, when Europe was socially and economically recovering from the fall of Rome. And there's this whole debate of the Dark Ages I'm not going to get into. Life was better for a lot of the average people, but the civilizational level had vastly degraded on almost every conceivable metric since Rome. And Germany was even more so. Where. When you look at maps of the places the Vikings raided, I was always curious why the Vikings raided nearly every place around them except Germany and Poland. The Vikings attacked the British Isles, France, Spain, Russia, whatever. And the reasoning from that is that Germany and Poland were still frontiers. There was nothing the Vikings wanted to steal. And so if they sailed up into Germany they just see this huge forest and classical authors and medieval forests. Sorry, classical and medieval authors were always just struck by the scale of the German forest. So Germany in the beginning was a mostly empty country populated by tribes that had a sort of vague sense of ethnic unity. But the German nationality had not yet existed. Where you'd people like the Saxons or the Alamani or the Franconians or the Franks or the like. Austria is Austria. The old term for Austria was east frontier because Austria was the frontier against the Hungarian nomads. And so Germany was a largely unformed country at this point.
- [27:27]
Whatifalth
Since when you look at maps back then, at that time, they always. Not necessarily maps made then, but just maps that try to be descriptive. They always include the forest. It's like the Black Forest or this forest, like this country X country Y country forest. Because it's such a significant part of. Of the landscape. And the cultural connection to Italy probably stem from the south up rather than the north, I suppose.
- [27:56]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. I'm very fond of the Warhammer fantasy universe. I think it's actually my favorite fantasy universe ever. And the reason for that is that the Warhammer fantasy universe, it's. It's a fantasy universe, it's like an alternate history of our world set in a board game universe. Is that the Warhammer universe is how people in history genuinely perceived their lived experience. And so it's truer to history in some ways than actual histories, because when we try to understand the past, we project a lot of our nihilism onto them. Well, in the Warhammer universe, and one of the details I love is that the authors who made it were. I think they had like, advanced degrees in history. The guys who initially made the Warhammer universe, they picked Germany as the focal point of it, where the Holy Roman Empire is the main human civilization, not like a surrogate version of England, which is true for most fantasy novels. And they also fill it with this huge forest populated by monsters like minotaurs or hydras and centaurs and all that cool stuff. And the thing with the Warhammer universe is that it's this constant battle between different gods. And there are different priest classes which pull magic from different gods in different ways, and you have different civilizations. And the further you get away from Europe, the more odd things are, the more you see monsters, enormous jungles, and people so strange you can't understand them. And that's a pretty honest depiction of how people in the medieval world perceived the world itself. And I think there's something that's quite beautiful about that.
- [29:48]
Whatifalth
Gets us back to that era of mystery, like the unexplored map, you know, born too late to explore the world, too early for space, etc. And it makes sense, because as things get more and more clear, unclear on the margins, you can extrapolate that into assuming. It just gets weirder and weirder, into as much fantasy as you can imagine.
- [30:12]
Austin Padgett
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [30:16]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [30:19]
Whatifalth
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- [30:22]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [31:00]
Austin Padgett
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Rudyard Lynch
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- [31:15]
Austin Padgett
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- [33:37]
Rudyard Lynch
The Peters, the Peter Zeihan types like to talk about Germany being heavily handcuffed, handicapped by their geography. Because Germany has a geography which can dispose it towards disunity. Where you have the Rhineland in the west, which is the river that flows from Switzerland through Germany down to the Netherlands. And then you have East Germany, which is centered around Prussia, which has since been taken over and popped with non Germans. Then you have down by the Danube valley, where the central region of Germany is forest and mountains. And then you have the edges that have their own coherent trade systems, whether the Danube, the Rhine, the Baltic, the North Sea. And they say that that predisposes the region to disunity. But the thing with a lot of the geographic determinist school of history, that geography determines history, is what they're basically doing is completely removing human agency. And I could talk about this more, but you look at history where Germany's unification had been predicated by the cultural actions of the humans involved. Where yes, Germany does have a predis. There is a genetic argument, sorry, there is a geographic argument that could lead to having it being disunited. But look at America. America has a geography so much more predisposed towards disunity, and yet we're a unified country due to the historic circumstance in Germany in the medieval period, until around the late 13th century, Germany was consistently the most powerful and unified country in Western Europe, where people always say that France is a more good geography for unity than Germany does. But there's sort of the mirror images where when France was disunited from the 10th through the 13th centuries, Germany was united. And then from the 13th through the 19th centuries, when France was united, Germany was disunited. And the reasoning for that was just a critical failure of the German leadership against the Pope. Where with the division of Frankia into West Francia or France, Lotharingia and East Francia or Germany, the mantle of leadership for Germany was taken up by Saxon leadership. Where the Saxons, who are the same ethnicity as the Anglo Saxons or the predominant population of England, they were conquered by the Franks in the early 9th century. They were one of the last people conquered by the Frankish Empire, and they were the last pagans in Germany. Where Charlemagne had to kill the great tree. That was the great Tree. They had to cut down the great oak tree. That was part of their culture. And there was this massacre of the local pagans, about 4,000 of them, by the Christian authorities. The bloody day of Verdan. And because the Saxons were domesticated last by the Frankish government, they were the wildest and basically the most untamed of the German peoples. And in the 10th century, which was this real low point in European history, where there's a book called the Birth of Europe by Paul Collins, and it's about how Western civilization faced all of these horrible attacks from the Vikings in the north, the Arabs in the Mediterranean, and then the Hungarians in the east. For Germany, the Hungarians were the greatest threats. Where Charlemagne had wiped out the powerful Avar Confederacy, who had had this series of forts called the Ring. The Ring was this huge, one of the greatest fort installations in Europe. And Hungary, Charlemagne wiped it out, destroyed the Avar Confederacy, who were another nomad people who had gone decadent. Because Hungary is a mini grassland inside Europe's forest climate, which is why nomads settle there. And the destruction of the Avar Confederacy had meant the Magyars or the Hungarians who were coming out of the Urals in Siberia, smashed into the region. The Hungarians are one of the few non Aryan cultures in Europe where they have a Finnish language which is completely unrelated to any of the neighboring ones. And the Hungarians destroyed a lot of Central Europe, where they reached as far as South France in Spain. And the Saxons were able to defeat them at the Battle of Lechfeld and Thus, the Duke of Saxony became the King of France. Because the other German nobility were so just they liked his great victory against the Hungarians, they decided to make him the ruler. Then the Saxon king invaded northern Italy and conquered Lotharingia, where because France was a failed state in this time period, the Germans could just gobble up all of Lotharingia, which is why a significant part, I guess a third of modern France was part of the Holy Roman Empire. And the Holy Roman Emperor went again into Italy to again help the Pope from the Lombards and he reinstated his power. But then once the Holy Roman Emperor started to get involved in central Italian politics, you saw the centuries long dispute between the Pope and the Emperor which would ultimately kill the Holy Roman Empire's unification.
- [39:38]
Whatifalth
And the more you dig into the context, the more absurd it seems that we don't talk about this because we mostly focused on England post Rome, which is one offshoot of one Germanic tribe that was on the edges of this great expansion and civilization.
- [39:58]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. Now that we're in, I'm just stuck to you. I'm just stuck thinking about, do I talk about the church dispute or the economic and social shifts? We're starting with the church dispute. So the 9th and the 10th century Papacy was a mess. Europe was in a really bad place. And so the papacy had become run by these corrupt Roman mafia families. And there was a point where legitimately a mummified corpse was the Pope, because that was the easiest option for whatever local mafia family was in charge. You get into these like sitcom plots where everyone's relative has to be put in charge. And for weird, bizarre reasons, this mummified corpse happened to be the legal claim for this specific mafia family. But the rest of Europe didn't listen to anything the papacy in Rome said. They were Catholic, right? But the Pope had almost no power. But through the late 10th, through the 11th century, the Papacy saw this moral revolution which was connected with monasticism across Europe, with this moral revolution across Europe that caused stuff like monks were. This was when monks were expected to start being celibate. There wasn't the celibacy rule for monks before this. And you saw the rise of huge monasteries across Europe. And you saw the Church go into things like marriage, which were seen as a contract between two families. Or the Church get into stuff like this is when the first rules of war or prisoner of war laws were invented by the Catholic Church. And so the Church saw this new rise of power. And there was the issue where the Emperor had a lot of power over north and Central Italy. The Pope and the Emperor were stuck in this sort of battle over Italy because the Emperor concentrated his power in Germany, but he had the territorial claim over northern Italy. Northern Italy was interestingly mostly forest in this time period, with the handful of the old Roman towns left. And these towns were self governing merchant societies and they developed a lot of just civil pride and they were practically self governing. And then the Pope had his band of territory in central Italy. And so you have this, this just area which is completely rife for cultural squabbling between the north Italians who are de facto independent but legally under the German Emperor. You have the German Emperor who has a much larger territory, but who can. Has difficulty power projecting due to just this not being a very advanced society. And then you have the Pope who has complete spiritual and cultural power over the society, but has no military. And so you're pairing these different kinds of force, which are radically different against each other.
- [43:15]
Whatifalth
I guess. Yeah, that's how Germany became a focal point of the Papal States. Because they were the player that the Vatican needed to have on their side. Yes, whoever's the most relevant player at that time.
- [43:30]
Rudyard Lynch
And the German Emperor kept on having the need to get involved in Italy because Italy was a significantly wealthier place than Germany. Germany was still a frontier while Italy developed cities and markets and all that sort of thing. Earlier than Germany, the German Emperor would invade Italy to get gold coins to fund the German, the, the German military and patronage networks he had back home. And so the German Emperor ironically liberated and helped the Pope. Then the Pope had a series of issues with the Roman mob and with the local governance. So they started having these falling outs where the German Emperor would have to keep getting involved in Italy. And so as an example, the Italian Pope gave the Normans, who are these Vikings from the north of France, he gave them the legal title to all of South Italy because they had helped him against the Holy Roman Emperor. And this was a game where it could have gone in each direction. And I don't think it's really worthwhile for me to tell you all of the political squabbles between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, they were concentrated most so in the 11th century. And there's a famous story called Going to Canossa, where this was the general binary in the struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, where the Holy Roman Emperor's great advantage was that he had a territory probably over 20 times the size of the Pope. The Pope's great advantage was that Germany was so disunited under a Very powerful nobility, that the Pope could destroy the empire if he could get the nobility to work together against the centralized government, because the centralized government was so weak. And that's ultimately what worked. Where the Pope pushed an anti centralization faction in Germany, the nobility backstabbed the Emperor and then the empire fell apart. However, the Pope could also pull from the north Italian city states that did not want the Emperor to get involved. But then the Emperor could also pull on the north Italian states which the Pope had affronted. So the closer you got to the papacy, the more northern Italy was sympathetic to the Emperor, with states like Bologna, as an example, was the great European center of atheism. Because the Holy Roman Empire would fund Atheism in the University of Bologna and because they were right next to Rome, like we don't like the Church either. Atheism was a, it was not a non existent philosophic principle. In the Middle Ages you could find a good amount of closeted atheist philosophers, especially in Italy. They took over several universities in the medieval period. And Florence was also more sympathetic to the Emperor. Well, once you get further north, like Milan or Milan or Lombardy, the states were more sympathetic to the Pope. But because medieval politics is the way it is, you can expect people to. It's a really good libertarian equilibrium. Although this is a site where most people were serfs, where everyone was backing whatever faction could exert the least power.
- [47:04]
Whatifalth
Which like the original king in northern France to start the Paris as the center point. Like we talked about the other episode.
- [47:12]
Rudyard Lynch
That'S going to happen again in Germany. So the story at Knossa is that in one of these squabbles, the Holy Roman Emperor really lost out to the Pope. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Protestant Reformation started in Germany, a place where they had been fighting the Pope for centuries. Because the Pope started out with this near complete mental control over the collective psyche of West Europeans. And then over time, as the papacy gained more power, the papacy got morally corrupted until North Europeans made the calculation, we don't need the Pope anymore. And the Protestant Reformation happened. And so in the earlier part of this, the Pope was winning in the mid 11th century. And so in order to stop the German nobility from launching a revolution that would destroy him, the Holy Roman Emperor had to walk barefoot through the snowy mountains of Italy at Canossa, walk up to the Pope's door, and there's this story where the Holy Roman Emperor waited politely outside the Pope's door in the freezing cold for several days until the Pope would let him in and remove his excommunication. Because the emperor, when he was excommunicated by the Pope, all of his subjects had the legal right to backstab him. So he had to go begging and simping for the Pope in order for the Pope to give him the excommunication so he could go back to being Holy Roman Emperor. This is how powerful the Catholic Church was at the time.
- [48:43]
Whatifalth
It's a perfect example of the tension between the military power and the spiritual cultural power. Because you can imagine that this king has probably thought multiple times of just crushing this guy outright. But ultimately it's always more effort than it's worth because of the cultural importance of the Church.
- [49:02]
Rudyard Lynch
The thing that saved the Pope in that regard were the Normans, where the Pope could pull on the Normans, who were probably the best soldiers in Europe to fight against the Emperor. And another interesting variable is that Rome was malarial. And so. And they had imported malaria from Africa. So these Germans who had never experienced malaria, they would go into central Italy, they'd catch the disease. And the locals who had gotten malaria, immunity from drinking their mother's breast milk, they didn't have the same issue. And so this is a big issue why northerners struggled in a lot of Italy. And you saw the shift from the Saxon monarchy. I was trying to remember the name of the Saxon king who fought off the Magyars at Lechfeld and its Otto. And so it shifted over to the Hohenstaufens, who I believe were Swabians. I'm like 7% German ancestry. My ancestry is from Swabia, which is where your German ancestry is from. And it's the largest origin of German American ancestry. The reasoning for that is that Swabia lost 3/4 of its population in the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, because it was this island of Protestants surrounded by Catholics. And so the second they could the Swabians mass evicted to mass migrated to America to get away from being surrounded by Catholics. But the so Hohenstaufens were Swabians. And they were really the peak of the Holy Roman Empire. They were the period when the empire was most powerful. Where Germany had gone through this cultural and economic transformation. In this time period, we're around a thousand A.D. germany was a frontier. And by 1200 A.D. germany was one of the wealthiest places in the world because they had gone through the high medieval Renaissance that all of north Europe did. And that included introduction of capitalism, a stock market logic, studying the ancient Greek thinkers, rise in literacy, the rise of a new plow Mechanics like the wheel, or mechanics like, what's the windmill? And, like moving like the trebuchet. It was just this. This profound revolution in technology and society and economy from a thousand until 1300, where Europe's population more than. I think it either doubled or tripled. And in Germany, this saw the rise of knight feudalism, which spread peacefully from northern France. And knight feudalism was a system with serfdom and feudal lords in castles. And feudalism in Germany took on a slightly different air than it did in Britain or France, where Germany never had serfdom in the same way those places did, although they had their own variant. You have weird variables where, for legal loophole reasons, large parts of the German nobility who were on church lands were de facto legal serfs. So you had this huge subclass of very powerful and wealthy nobility who were legally serfs. And in Germany, if you were a serf, your lord had to approve who you were going to marry. And so you have these. Some of the wealthiest men in Germany who had to beg the church to like, I want to marry this girl. And keep in mind medieval Europe, most people in the population still married out of love, and you still had a concept of dating and that stuff. So it's not like this was like China, where arranged marriages are just totally normalized. And Germany, you had a large peasant freeholder population in the west, even in the high medieval period. And then eastern Germany was the frontier where the Germans were constantly pushing up against the Slavs. So the area of modern Berlin, they took that from the Slavish Wendish people, and we've got a Wendish community in Texas in the 12th century. And so the Germans were pushing up on this frontier against the Baltic peoples, where they colonized Brandenburg and Pomerania and then later Prussia, where oftentimes the most important areas of historic Germany are no longer Germany, where the Baltic area, the origin of the Prussian state, is now populated by the Poles and the Russians and those peoples. Because after World War II, Stalin forcibly migrated, I think, at least 10 million Germans west in these places that had been German since the 13th century. And the core of the German state suddenly got ethnically replaced.
- [54:10]
Whatifalth
It's hard to underestimate how much World War II hurt Germany's, like, ethnic expansion. Ironically, considering their plan against the Slavs ended up getting all of their huge diasporas killed. Third of the country. Yeah, it's just like a huge part of historic Germany gone. And they. There's not even really. There's no. Even the part of Russia that's in Europe now used to be completely German town. I just saw your friend Caleb did a video there somewhat recently. It was really interesting to see because it was like a Russian colonized German city that still has a lot of German buildings. Yeah, right in the middle of the Europe.
- [54:52]
Rudyard Lynch
There's a huge Volga German community in America. One of my good friends is a Volga German ancestry. Because I'm going to throw this out before I forget this. The regional differences inside Germany are huge. And you actually had two German languages in the pre modern period. You had High German and Low German. High German with South Germany. Low German was North Germany and they were practically two different languages. And for example, the Pennsylvania Dutch, they speak a dialect of Swabian that's nigh incomprehensible to native German speakers. And I believe High German won out, although I don't know why, because the North Germans conquered the South Germans. And so you have these huge regional and ethnic differences where even In World War II Rommel was a Swabian. And that was weird because the general staff tended to be Prussians. And you still had these regional differences. And over the medieval period, the Germans had this huge migration eastward. And this partly included places that became majority German, like the Sudetenland in modern Czechia or Silesia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, the area around Danzig. The entire northern coast of Poland was German, as was Prussia. And this was part of a process called the Teutonic Knights. And it always saddens me that no one knows the Teutonic Knights because medieval Europe had its own. I was going to call it Wild west, but it's the Wild east where knight feudalism spread west. And the Teutonic Knights were originally this order from Israel who when the Crusaders were evicted in the 13th century, they first migrated to Hungary to fight against in Transylvania to fight against the nomadic tribes of South Ukraine, like the Pechenegs and the Cumans. And then they moved up to fighting against the pagans in the Baltic. And the Teutonic Knights were Germans and they were Teutonic. Teutonic is an old term for German where this German knight nobility conquered the entire Baltic area of Latvia and Estonia, as well as Prussia, where that was all the Teutonic State. And the Teutonics held that region from the early 13th century until the early 16th century with the Protestant Reformation. And they were a military order. And the will and the military skill of the Teutonic Knights is what created the Prussian state, where when the Prussians unified Germany, it was due to a military caste called the Junkers and Junker is German for junghur, or young lord, because the Junkers or the Knights of the Teutonic Order who conquered that region, they were young lords because they were adventurers or second sons of nobility who just showed up in the Baltic, conquered their own territory, and then insurfed the local population. And if you look at the genetics of modern Germany, the Germans are actually three different sub ethnic groups. You have the Germans, the ethnic Germans or Scandinavians in the north, the south, and the west of the country's got a lot of Celtic ancestry. And then in Prussia in the east, around modern Berlin, it's like a third Slavic ancestry in Baltic ancestry. Because the Germans conquered this region, outbred the locals, and assimilated the ones that were left. So the Germans had this constant frontier in the east that they would expel people to. And this doesn't even include the German colonies in the east where you had these. This was a big reason for World War II, because Hitler wanted to protect the ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, where they had these enclaves in Ukraine, in Poland, in Czechia, in Romania and Hungary. And these were often economically and culturally dominant. The Germans controlled a lot of the trade in most of Eastern Europe. And a lot of the major Cities until the 18th century in Poland or Czechia were all Germans. The Slavs were just the peasant peoples. And so part of the big thing with the Hussite wars was that the Czechs, who were attaining national consciousness in the 15th century, they fought a war of borderline genocide against the Germans, who had a monopoly on the cities. And so you had. Outside even the official conquests, you had this huge area of indirect German authority from the Middle Ages onward across Eastern Europe because the Germans were just more skilled and entrepreneurial and talented than the local population. So the governments of Eastern Europe and the kings actually openly invited Germans to populate their lands to help them develop economically and socially, as they also invited Jews and Armenians and Greeks.
- [59:51]
Whatifalth
The Germans were the Jews of Eastern Europe, in a way. But that's another. That's another bringing them in for the industry. That's another what?
- [60:00]
Rudyard Lynch
That's another autistic screeching moment. If you said that to someone in that society, they would fucking die in front of you. But they work in different industries. The Germans. The Jews make beer. Sorry, the German beer.
- [60:13]
Whatifalth
And right? We're like, we do this, they do that. What are you talking about? Well, another good example is China, right? China and Southeast Asia, because they have the merchant class and a certain level of genetic representation that was fairly equivalent to Germany. And East Europe.
- [60:29]
Rudyard Lynch
This is Thomas Sowell posting. Thomas Sowell is like the greatest scholar on diaspora ethnic groups. He wrote a book. Thomas Sowell is actually probably one of the best anthropologists of the last century. And no one noticed. People just think of him as a conservative pundit. But his anthropology work is the best. And his book Conquests and Cultures is really good because he looks at the British and with the British it's the English, Scottish, Irish, all those sub ethnicities, then the Slavs, then sub Saharan Africans and then Native Americans. And in that book he goes through how each of these ethnic broader ethnic groups under different contexts are conquerors and imperialists or the conquered and the enslaved. The argument of the book is basically historic context changes everything. So there's no pure like master and slave ethnicities. And I think that's a reasonable take. And then Migrations and Cultures is his study of diaspora ethnic groups. So he looks at the Italian diaspora, the German diaspora, the Chinese diaspora, the Indian diaspora, the Jewish Diaspora, etc. And even later on into the 18th century, the German Empress of Russia, Catherine, invited huge populations of Germans to settle out by Kazakhstan. And that population had a huge demographic impact on the upper Midwest in America because the czarist government started oppressing them and Stalin ultimately genocide them off the face of the earth. But Anglo Saxons didn't really want to settle Minnesota and the Dakotas and those places, it gets too cold and they chose to go to Nebraska or Iowa or Missouri. And so the railroad companies went to Eastern Europe to places with comparably inhospitable climates. Which is why there's this huge Romanian and Ukrainian population in, in like Manitoba and Saskatchewan, because they Eastern Europe's winters are equivalently bad. And it's why you have so many Scandinavians and Eastern European Germans in like the Dakotas in Minnesota, where in a lot of the Midwest it's mostly Germans from Russia.
- [62:51]
Whatifalth
So as well as the Scandinavian migration kind of a different angle that we don't think about with the population of the Midwest.
- [62:58]
Rudyard Lynch
It's also interesting that America has a tendency to have ethnic diasporas that are larger than their home countries. That's true for every subpopulation in the British Isles. It's true for especially so for Celtic populations where it's normal that North America has six to seven times as much basically Celtic DNA as the home countries do. And it's true for Scandinavia. It's just people don't realize it where there's enough Scandinavian ancestry to be competitive with the old countries. It's just that they have like 5 million people. And so it's not numbers people really think about. And there's nearly as many German Americans as Germans, but Germany's got a lot of people. And so I have to actually get to the geopolitics again. Knosset, Hohenstaufen. So the Hohenstaufens have this big, growing, wealthy, advancing society. And the Hohenstaufens were really the point. And I'm always shocked. This is easily one of the greatest hinges in European history. And no one notices where if Germany had unifi had maintained the Hohenstaufen monarchy across the medieval and early modern period, this would be the most powerful state in the world. Because Germany, the Holy Roman empire had 20 million people. That's an equivalent population to France. And the Germans are just killers. I mean that in a positive, not a negative sense. The Germans are just incredibly advanced in a variety of fields and they would have taken on a healthier cultural development than under Prussia. And you could imagine I had made an alternate history about this when I was a teenager, that if Germany had kept their early medieval empire, they could have huge colonies, which was the huge point of resentment for the Nazis and that generation of German thinkers and statesmen that Germany, because it was disunified over the late medieval and early modern period, that they had never gone on the colonial binge that Britain, France, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Russia, even Belgium did. Germany just got a few crappy colonies. And so history would have been totally different and you would have completely seen a different dynamic where Germany was the chessboard of Europe because it was surrounded by all these unified states. Instead, Germany would be projecting power outwards. And there were several victories that stopped Germany from winning. And I've read several books by German historians on the papal Holy Roman Empire dispute in this era. And I'm not, I'm not really a good historian at memorizing highly complex political negotiations between the French Revolution or the wars of the Roses or like Italian Renaissance politics. I just see the historic trajectory. People die. Historic, historic trajectory shifts. And so assume that there's all of these multi century political negotiations in the Pope and the Emperor and the North Germans and the German nobility. And across all of this, the sort of equilibrium where both sides can win. And there's two battles that really did not help the Germans, one of which was the Battle of Legnano, where Frederick Barbarossa, who is a great man, we'll talk about him more. He invaded northern Italy, where the Lombard Confederacy built out these militias of spearmen and the spear Militias slaughtered the German knights. And this is the late 12th century. And this is a real historic turning point where it's the long death of night warfare. And it's interesting that night warfare hadn't really reached its peak in the late 12th century, which is normally the case. Cultural forms tend to reach their peak after they're already declining. And so it's like two charts where Legnano with these Italian spearmen. It's the start of both mass warfare and democracy. Because these north Italian states were frequently merchant democracies. Venice, Milan. And over time they devolved into being military dictatorships as they got wealthier. But you have this republican sense of we are banding together like the ancient Greek city states against the Germans. And so this is why northern Italy was the wealthiest place in Europe for the medieval period. It's why the Renaissance started there. And they fought off the emperor, which gave northern Italy de facto independence from Germany, which cut Germany off from that wealth and that road to the papacy. So the Battle of Legnana was a huge historic turning point. And then from there you saw pike warfare popularize in Switzerland and Scotland. And then by the time you get to the late 15th century, knights had been practically eradicated from the battlefield. And that shifted the social structure as well towards democratization. And the other battle is the Battle of Bouvines in northeast France. And this was a real fumble by both the Germans and the English, because in this time period, Philip Augustus, who was probably the greatest French ruler in French history, I put Philip Augustus above Napoleon in importance, because Philip Augustus got France to stretch from an area the size of Delaware around Paris to an area the size of California from the English Channel down to the Mediterranean. And he wiped out the entire English empire in the north of France because the English held half of France vastly more than the king of France. And so Philip Augustus, and he was my age when he did this too, he was in his early 20s, he wiped out the English in North France, then the Holy Roman Empire, who was scared that France would become this great new power that would outpace them. They declared war on France. So after beating the English army, the French, outnumbered, beat the German army. And so you saw that, you saw the rise of both North Italy and then you saw the rise of France, two forces that would later result in Germany's weakness.
- [69:33]
Whatifalth
That's when the French were invading Italy around the 1400s. And going back and forth, Is that the time period we're at?
- [69:42]
Rudyard Lynch
No, it's a 300 year gap.
- [69:44]
Whatifalth
Where are we right now?
- [69:46]
Rudyard Lynch
We're in like 1170-1200.
- [69:51]
Whatifalth
So this is just the beginning of that unfolding dynamic.
- [69:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Welcome.
- [69:54]
Whatifalth
And it is 1200, basically where also the spread of common law started throughout Germany because you have all these kind of individual merchant towns and they got into like Roman legal code and they developed their own practices and they kind of, they kind of spread. And that was kind of the basis of the arguments around tort law versus top down law.
- [70:20]
Rudyard Lynch
Very good catch. I wanted to cover that. Yes, the Holy Roman Empire was actually a very free society. And the Holy Roman Empire was seen as a paragon of freedom across Europe because it had a division of powers in the different sub regions. It was actually an elected monarchy where you had, I think like half a dozen electors in every generation. They would elect the emperor, they happened to elect the same dynasties. But then Germany was awash in independent city states with their own contracts, their own understandings and independence. So you'll hear about serfdom. But because Germany was so politically disunited, and much like France, Germany overreacted to their earlier disunity by becoming too unified. And if your lord, if your lord was too oppressive to you, you could just flee to a neighboring lord. And there was a term in Germany at the time and across Europe, city air is free because the city started developing and they were self governing and the lords would give away. The lords were not particularly forward thinking. They would happily trade away the, the rights to these towns that grew to become some of the wealthiest places in the world for extra money to party or go on crusade or that stuff or war.
- [71:41]
Whatifalth
Trying to start a free city in Africa, it's like, hey, no, you're not using this island. Let's make a Singapore next to your country. Like you can make that pitch.
- [71:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. And, and it was an archetype in medieval life that the nobility grew indebted to the merchant class. So Even in the 13th and the 14th centuries, when the nobility still had political and social power, they were financially dependent upon the merchant class, who were not Jews, they were Gentiles, I want to point this out. And the Holy Roman Empire. So it was a center of freedom and it did get pretty bad at times. For example, South Germany had the most oppressive nobility of anywhere in Western Europe in the 14th century. They got to the 3/4 rule. The 3/4 rule is that when your society is taking 3/4 of the income from common people just for them to survive, your society is going to collapse. We have hit the 3/4 rule. The 3/4 rule is like when rent and taxes and that stuff take a majority of a poor person's income and then society falls apart. But the Holy Roman Empire because there was so much diversity, it allowed genuine political and social experimentation. With an example being the Hanseatic League where the Hanseatic League and my mom was obsessed with them for some reason. They were this alliance of north German merchant states and. And they went down the Rhine and they started around the Baltic and the North Sea. But the Hansa controlled the northern seas in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries. And they would period, they would frequently go toe to toe with England. And the Germans controlled England's trade until the English. The English got a heads up in the 13th through the 14th centuries. They shepherded a lot of the trade around the Flemish seaports. And Flanders nearly had an industrial revolution in the medieval period. They were super advanced. And then the Baltic Strait too, where the Hanseatic League was this hyper powerful merchant coalition. And they fell and went into decadence for comparable reasons to a lot of the medieval institutions where the guilds and the Hansa became this hyper, this hyper whatchamacallit. Again they became this hereditary uncompetitive caste. And so the Hansa had a big battle with Denmark. Denmark was their big rival because Denmark controlled the Sund where the Baltic lets out into the North Sea. And they finally beat Denmark. And half of Denmark became populated by German nobility as the Danish monarchy became basically completely incompetent for a century. And then they unified again under the Kalmar union of all Scandinavia. But then once they defeated Denmark they kind of went decadent. And then you started seeing non Germans yield to out compete the Hansa. And then you shifted from guilds to genuine capitalism years that around. So.
- [75:05]
Whatifalth
Eventually yeah.
- [75:06]
Rudyard Lynch
The problem with the Holy Roman Empire is you have so many different things going on, it's hard to say. So in a lot of Germany they were throttled by guilds until the French Revolution where the guilds just completely control the economy. And then other parts of Germany saw significantly more social changes. And capitalism where West Europe developed a fully capitalist economy around the time of the Black Death with the end of serfdom. And when you read European history, you'll read, you'll hear about things like church structures or guilds or nobilities. But if you add all of these things up, they all exist within a capitalist social frame. So we tend to focus on the exceptions. Well, Europe as a society was animated by capitalism significantly more than today, which is because today we pretend to be capitalist. So you have the huge managerial system for them. They had the. They had various other institutions, but then the underlying social structure was significantly more capitalist than even today with words.
- [76:13]
Whatifalth
It's really hard to put a picture on it because there you get waves of the same thing happening to different degrees. And it's fun to picture. Like you have this pop up of the merchant towns and then the city states and they are able to kind of leverage themselves and grow and. And then they're part of the landscape and then they get pushed back on and then those guys want to protect their wealth. So the guild stuff really annoys me because it's like internal protectionism.
- [76:43]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [76:43]
Whatifalth
Like if you're going to do external protectionism, at least you're competing with other countries. But the internal protectionism is just Paris parasiting your own society.
- [76:56]
Rudyard Lynch
As an example, in my readings of the 17th century, a lot of the German Rhineland actually increased the constrictiveness of guilds as a side effect of the thirty Years War. What then happened is that the capitalist revolution of that time period forced the later generations to adapt. So you have all these different pressures going on at once. And that's. That's why I said I would need to read another 2,000 pages to master the topic. But if I did, the narrative would be even more confusing for you guys. So Frederick Barbarossa, he was a great man. He kept the empire together. He fought against the Pope. I think he put the mate, made the Pope deal with him on his.
- [77:39]
Whatifalth
Terms.
- [77:41]
Rudyard Lynch
And he installed price controls, actually, to continue with the theme of misguided economic decisions. There's an Age of Empires 2 campaign about him. And he was called Barbarossa Red Beard. And he was one of the German emperors who spent a lot of his career campaigning in Italy, which is why he had the Italian name. And he decided to go on Crusade at the end of his life. And he died in Turkey on the way to the Crusade. And it's widely considered by historians of the Crusades that if Barbarossa had made it down there, that Richard Lionheart would have beaten Saladin. Because the Third Crusade was the Crusade of the kings, unlike the earlier crusades were due to the unification of European countries rather than just dukes and counts. It was the King of England, king of France, king of Germany. And after Barbarossa, there was a period where the Germans could have beat the Pope. And Frederick II is a very interesting character because after 1193, I believe the Germans inherited the throne of Sicily. And Sicily was a Norman kingdom in the central Mediterranean of southern Italy and the island of Sicily one of the wealthiest places in the world. And so the Germans had northern Italy. In fact, although they had legally got. They had actually gotten independence. They had a few dots like Bologna or Florence that were sympathetic to them. Then you had. The Germans had a very strong control over Sicily, and then they had Germany as well, with the Pope in a band in central Italy. So this put the Pope in a very dangerous place. And that put the Pope in a very, like, aggressive mood. And Frederick ii, the Holy Roman Emperor, he grew up and was mostly culturally Italian, and he was quite scandalous where there were rumors that he had a harem of women, There were rumors that he had converted to Islam. There were rumors he loved to associate with Arabs and Jews and those peoples. He was also a philosopher, where he was well read in the Greek texts. He was widely considered to be a Renaissance man and just a cultured figure. And so he has been remembered quite fondly by modern intellectuals. But he was widely considered to be, like, a degenerate and a heretic at the time, although he had a lot of respect. And he was widely considered to be a deeply moral man. And as a great example of this, the Pope forced him to go on Crusade. He went on crusade to the Holy Land, said hi to the Muslim ruler, made a deal where he had, as a technicality, could get Jerusalem, and the road to Jerusalem never fought, went back to Germany. So he. He secured Israel. He secured Jerusalem peacefully from the Muslims, said hi to the Muslim ruler, they hung out and then just went back to Germany. And the Pope said, you can't do that. You have to actually fight the Muslims.
- [80:43]
Whatifalth
It's exactly like what Trump just did in the Middle East. He was like, all right, cobalt bombs here. A couple of bombs here. You guys good? Yeah. Let's get the rich interests involved to develop Palestine, and then that'll put a check on Hamas and Israel. We'll make a little deal, works out for everybody. And there we go.
- [81:04]
Rudyard Lynch
I always wondered why South Italy went from becoming probably the wealthiest part of Italy to being the poorest part of Italy. Because you look at. You can look at anthropological maps of interest Italy. And in the same way that in America, the south will perform the worst on any HDI stat, in Italy, their south will perform the worst. And it's often by a huge margin. And if you look at the Norman period, Sicily was incredibly wealthy. Where the first almost photorealistic map in the world, a map of the world where this map, you could show it to someone today and they would think someone hand drew it off, like A modern map projection was made by the Norman Lord of Sicily because he brought Christian, Jewish and Muslim experts together, cross referenced their information. And he actually made a map off navigational charts, not off the previous maps, which are spiritual symbolism. And so in the 12th century, you had the ability to make these photorealistic maps. And that came out of Sicily because Sicily was an engine of everything. And it was seen as this tolerant, free thinking society. And I always wondered, by the time you get to the Renaissance, how come Sicily was this backwater? And the reason is that after the Hohenstaufens lost it, it shifted over to the Angevins and then it was conquered by the Spanish. And the combination of the Angevins and the Spanish destroyed property rights, thus plunging Sicily into poverty. Which is why, if you know Sicilian Americans, as I know many, they operate in this very low trust mindset where Sicilians, until recently, they were scared to let their kids play with their neighbors. They wouldn't trust anyone outside the immediate family because their government and nobility had installed these highly corrupt, almost Latin American systems due to a combination of French and Spanish colonization.
- [83:03]
Whatifalth
Italian families are so close because they have to be. Yes, you're not hanging out with anybody outside.
- [83:10]
Rudyard Lynch
So the reason Italians operate in luxury fields is that the Italians are very intelligent and skilled, but they don't have higher degrees of social trust. Northern Italy built up more social trust due to a combination of the German invasions and the town culture. But the thing with luxury production is that a singular. It works well with family systems, because if you can trust your neighbors and your family and people in your town, you can make an artisanal bag. Operating off the level of skill. It's hard to build a factory because you can't trust the government, you can't trust the broader country. And so that's why Italians thrive through luxury production, while the Germans and North Europeans, who have a higher degree of social trust across the entire nation, win on an industrial scale.
- [84:01]
Whatifalth
Actually dig into these differences and find the causes, because these are things that everybody's aware of on some level. Like my dad would say that in Italy everything is beautiful and nothing works.
- [84:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [84:12]
Whatifalth
You know, which is very much in line with this.
- [84:17]
Rudyard Lynch
I think the best thing I'd say is that Latin Europe kind of developed a tolerance for corruption in their social structure. And I think that for a combination of everything in history, if you don't find at least five variables to cause it, you're not doing it right. But because the Spanish, the French and the Italians in the medieval period, they were all Seen as masculine and technologically advanced and creative and wealthy. And then across those regions, due to the rise of absolutism, you saw the rise of these just like passively corrupt governments. And there's multiple types of. When we think of tyranny in America, we tend to think of the Soviet Union or Assyria, these huge just Oriental despotisms which crush everyone into the state. But you also have just Latin American tyranny, which is a small elite, hoards everything for themselves. And Latin Europe really fell to that. And you notice that if you read enough histories, where the Spain of 500 years ago, which conquered the New World is not the same Spain as today. The French were culturally very different from what they are now. And the reason, Germany. Germany went through that process of domestication later and it occurred under the Prussians. The Germans are seeing a similar trend now as Latin Europe as their government domesticates the population.
- [86:00]
Whatifalth
Germans are seeing a similar trend now as Latin Europe did in the year 1400 or.
- [86:08]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, yes. And I always wondered why Italy declined because in the Renaissance. And I read an entire. I read a lot of different books to figure this out, because it bugged me. Why did Italy go into decline where in the 18th century Italy was a total backwater, in the 15th century it was the wealthiest and most technologically and culturally advanced place in the world. And I read several books which did not give me the answer. And then Will Durant just said it in a paragraph. Will Durant said it was the Spanish takeover in the 16th century because under the local governance they had all these good social structures. And then when, as a side effect of the Italian wars, around the year 1500, all of Italy became a de facto colony or puppet state of the Spanish Empire. So you started seeing all of these trajectories which you would also see develop in Latin America.
- [87:04]
Whatifalth
So they not only became more pinned in in the Mediterranean, but they became culturally. There was a cultural leak. Yeah, and not a good one. So what's the one dominating Germany today? Causing them to become more pacified as a population is I guess the, the progressive US EU influence, English influence.
- [87:31]
Rudyard Lynch
Germany is more on the oriental despotism side of things than they are on like the Mediterranean despotism side of things. If we want to make three despotisms, individualist despotism is wokeness. Latin despotism is like anarchy. It's like the despotism of anarchy. And then oriental despotism is the despotism of like the all powerful state stepping on your neck. And Mediterranean Europe drifted towards just Low trust behavior as their issue. And in Germany it's the all consuming state where I was reading Gustav Lebanon and he speaks about this shift in the German character where they had bottled up all of this cultural tension from the thousand years of highly disunified governance. And so they built up all of this social capital, they spent it with a unified government system in the world wars to nearly conquer all of Europe. The Prussians unified Germany through a purely authoritarian militaristic social structure. Then said educational and social system became too mechanized, removing the genuine humanity and creativity. Which is why if you look at the chart of Nobel Peace Prize winners at the start of the 20th century, it's plurality Germans and now it's almost all Americans because as a side effect of the world wars. And this is another theme Gustave Le Bon speaks to to Europe installed big government due to the world wars and socialism. America did to a lesser degree because we were less militarily threatened. That gave us about an extra century. But we're going to have to have a social and political revolution to stop the same implications from destroying us in the same way. Rome was destroyed by the same rot as Greece, but it took Rome longer. And so when you're looking at the issues in Germany, there's a special German flair to them where German decadence is. It's a very well oiled machine pushing to suicide. And for the British it's this very nanny state tyranny like Canada.
- [89:46]
Whatifalth
So they basically already had an uphill battle to reinstate a high trust society as a mechanism for escaping oriental despotism. And that high bar has just been thrown through the roof even higher by their Muslim immigration situation. Yes, because that obviously further breaks down unity.
- [90:09]
Rudyard Lynch
The, the Memer Kunly Drupka has this really funny meme of how to like the, the Germans are always ideology maxing. And so he has how can the Germans autistically push each ideology to its natural culmination? And they've done that with monarchism, with the Holy Roman Empire. They did it with like the Prussian model, which is kind of Nietzschean. They did so with fascism, with communism, where the most vociferous communists in the world were the Stasi of East Germany. They had the most active, they had the most active secret police network of anyone in the world. When they opened up the East German police's files, people were horrified that like I think like a third of the population had a file on them. Is that the Germans have this tendency. And I was speaking to a friend who told me Rudyard, you think philosophically in a very English, Anglo Saxon way, because you operate with principles, then you feed the world through your principles. He said Germans tried to develop and then the Anglo Saxon mind has principles and they try to feed the principles through common sense. The Anglo Saxons put common sense as their top principle, which is why for the American Constitution, the assumption is that everyone's a self interested actor. The French try to put reason as their top principle, but their reason isn't. They're not actually fact checking if their assumptions are correct, which is why they get to the French Revolution and socialism. And then the Germans put fraternity as their dominant virtue. So this is an idea one of my friends had that French Revolution. Igalite, liberte, fraternite, igalite, France, the Latins liberte the Anglo Saxons and fraternite the Germans. And the reasoning for that is because Germany became divided, they had this yearning for unification that was very strong. And the way they unified the group is through these abstract philosophic standards removed from reality. Because the German mind, the German mind is highly organized through hierarchical structures. Anglo Saxons can exist outside social structures more easily than Germans can. And the Germans evicted, the Germans used to have a stronger tendency against this and those people moved outside Germany. And the German mind due to the militarization of the Prussians is highly hierarchical. So the top of the hierarchy has to be some abstract, unreachable concept like Hegel's one nation or the Nietzschean will to power or those things in order to unify the hierarchical social structure. And so one of the things my father would tell me is he said it's very rare outside America to have the attitude that you just do something because you want to. Where Americans are like, I want to start a lumber company, I'm going to move to Michigan, I'm just going to start cutting down trees. In Germany just do things. Yeah. In Germany or France your social superior supposed to tell you to do that. And these are societies that are ostensibly incredibly close to the Anglo Saxon.
- [93:26]
Whatifalth
That is peak Orientalism is the inability to operate outside of, yes. Hierarchical command structure or without a specific directive from your boss.
- [93:38]
Rudyard Lynch
This was a huge part of 19th century philosophy where they would talk about how the Romans and the Greeks were orientalized by their large empires. And they would, they worried that the rise of these great European empires would have comparable effects because they were constantly looking to the parallels of the Greeks and the Romans where they said that if we have these huge empires it's going to gradually orientalize us.
- [94:05]
Whatifalth
They were right. But Europe in general's shown at least parts of Europe have demonstrated a fairly good ability to resist that. Which is just like the difficulty of managing decentralization while maintaining unity. Right. Which is kind of like vaguely federalism or subsidiarity or even more organically Christian medieval Europe, which was decentralized but unified broadly on a value structure. And so why did the Germans have a hard time with not falling into the false dichotomy of decentralization and unity? This. Yeah, go.
- [94:53]
Rudyard Lynch
Europeans have vastly more hunter gatherer and herder ancestry than most Asian peoples. And that means Europeans are naturally more comfortable with chaos than Asians are. And the further east you get, the more they care about tradition for its own sake. So you have China, the great empire. It's existed for 4,000 years. And the purpose of China is to continue being China is to not lose the good thing they have. Then as you get west, you get, you reach on the other side of it, the Anglo Saxons and the Celts who go crazy when they don't have a new project to do, it's the opposite. It's the west east gradient. And like, once we could no longer colonize space, we started killing ourselves as a society. And if Mars was a fertile planet that could support human life, we would have a vastly more intact social structure due to the Faustian spirit. But we don't. And German. So European societies are more creative. They overreach, they fall into decadence, they fall apart, and then they restart. This has happened at least three times at the Bronze Age collapse, the fall of Rome, and then the current times. And it's happened in miniature versions. Just look at the Holy Roman Emperor, the French Revolution. Europeans constantly.
- [96:18]
Whatifalth
That's like break things and move forward faster.
- [96:20]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly.
- [96:21]
Whatifalth
It's like, yeah, rocket thing.
- [96:23]
Rudyard Lynch
That's the European strategy. And the Muslims are between the. The Middle east is between Europe and further east in these cultural sorts of things we have. Europeans have vastly more in common with Muslims than they do with easily any other civilization in the world besides the Greeks and the Romans. If you look at anthropological metrics, Islam and Europe are vastly closer to each other than almost any other civilizations. And so the reason Germans have this attitude, and if you look at earlier Germans, this wasn't the case, is because I was just thinking how the managerial classes dominance over the mechanizations of power means that they have total overriding power for a while, until the Internet. So the reason that things like the blank slate that were demonstratively false were pushed for so long is because the managerial class had power over the connecting mechanisms through which the society operated. The Prussian state became the connecting mechanism. So all Germans had to operate through the Prussian social structure to communicate with other Germans. It became the bridging effect. The same thing is true in France where the militaristic governments became the connecting variable across the social structure. And so that meant that people from all these different subcultures are to take on those attributes, which is the same.
- [97:56]
Whatifalth
Thing with the us with northeast mass media and the institutions coming out of there. So yeah, it's like this really interesting circumstance of the last hundred years where these ideas were able to blanket over large groups of people that don't normally function in an oriental system.
- [98:20]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [98:20]
Whatifalth
And kind of condition people to it. And this is perfectly fits in with being comfortable with chaos. I love that because part of the pathos of the managerial bureaucracy is the denial of. And the modern nihilism is the denial of uncertainty.
- [98:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [98:40]
Whatifalth
And that uncertainty is a fundamental part of life. And if you're not comfortable with chaos, then you're more likely to deny uncertainty, which fits right into the blue pill.
- [98:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [98:50]
Whatifalth
Helicopter parent dynamic. So yeah, that's a great lens to look at it through.
- [98:56]
Rudyard Lynch
So let's actually talk with the Roman Empire. I don't want these videos to be three hours. This was a wonderful conversation, but I've got 500 years left.
- [99:07]
Austin Padgett
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- [99:11]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [104:40]
Whatifalth
It's like Truman, that's why he was picked to be president. You know, it's that same dynamic.
- [104:45]
Rudyard Lynch
I watched the Truman show like last week for the first time. Keep in mind, I'm. I'm like a zoomer. So I don't have any of these like cultural references, but it's a good movie. I'd recommend it. It's free on YouTube.
- [104:59]
Whatifalth
Truman, the president, like, oh yes. After World War II because he was chosen because he was a non threat when everybody was vying for power after fdr, I once. For the vp. Yeah.
- [105:12]
Rudyard Lynch
When I was, when I was in high school, I had a conversation with my mom where I said, I want more presidents like Harry Truman. And my mom said, I don't want a small town Midwestern shop owner to be my president.
- [105:24]
Whatifalth
Harry Truman is the auto pen. That's what that means. Harry Truman's the same as Joe Biden.
- [105:29]
Rudyard Lynch
He was such a good president. He fought, he got us through Korea, he got us through. He started the post war prosperity end of World War II.
- [105:39]
Whatifalth
And Truman.
- [105:41]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, Harry Truman. Same thing as Eisenhower. We, Yeah.
- [105:44]
Whatifalth
I don't consider much of an entity, but like it's pretty easy to do well with the auto pen after World War II, a little bit harder with Joe Biden.
- [105:54]
Rudyard Lynch
My mom wanted to have like an aristocratic nobleman be the president, not Harry Truman. And so German histories have different emphases than Anglo Saxon history. So they have moments in their history we'll talk about. And so the anarchy is one of the things that Germans care a lot about. Same thing as Canossa, but we don't. And I believe this is so complicated. The Habsburgs conquered Bohemia or they married into it, which was a huge shift in medieval German history. Which was why the Holy Roman Empire was based out of Prague, which was a majority German city inside the surrounding Czech areas. Where Prague was part of the Prague was part of Bohemia, which was. That's where King Wenceslas was from. Wenceslas, one of their last independent kings. Where Bohemia was folded into the empire in the 11th century with an honorable status comparable to Scotland in the United Kingdom. And we forget this, but the Bohemians were often wealthier and more technologically advanced than the Germans. Bohemia was not a primitive place and it was a center of culture where the Habsburgs held Bohemia for a while. Then in the 15th century, as an example of two kinds of three kinds of progress. I, you know, you guys know I hate the word progress, but you also know what I'm saying. They were ahead of their time. The Bohemians launched a nationalistic revolt using Protestantism and gun warfare Nearly a century before those were popularized in the rest of Europe. Where there's a great video game called Kingdom Come Deliverance about this. Where under Jan Hus, who. And this is mid 15th century, 70 years before Martin Luther, he made this version of Protestantism called the Hussites. The Hussites became this focal point of Czech nationalism against the Germans. They fought for independence, made Bohemia independent, and it worked. Where the Catholic church was forced to acknowledge the Hussites were a valid sect of Christianity even though they were Protestants. And they did it by having these wagon circles. They'd park their wagons and fortresses with guns. And so the Hussites were the first people to use musket warfare successfully in Europe, where they wiped out multiple imperial German knight armies. Vastly outnumbered.
- [108:38]
Whatifalth
Hausburg's meeting with the Bohemians is such a funny historical event because there's so many things you can project onto the future from it. From the wagon circles to the elite class that came out of the Habsburgs being kind of Bohemian, you know, as the stereotype. Yeah, that might be more of a wordplay connection.
- [109:01]
Rudyard Lynch
But the Habsburgs realigned back to Austria, which was poorer and less developed than Bohemia. And they ultimately got revenge on the Bohemians 200 years later in the 30 years war when they conquered it forcibly under Wallenstein. And they forcibly converted Czechia to Catholicism where Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in the world for that reason because their dominant religion was forced upon them. And the Habsburgs also. We haven't gotten to Protestantism yet, But they forcibly converted most of central Europe where there was a point in the 16th century when Austria, Czechia And Hungary were all plurality Protestant. And then the. The Austrian Habsburgs were the Holy Roman Emperors. They forcibly crushed Protestantism because their right to rule stemmed from the Pope. So if they turned away from Catholicism, they would lose their right to rule. And Germans tended to convert actually to. Screw it, we're going to Protestantism. Martin Luther was. He was a monk and he was a quite. He's quite a character. He. Yeah, that's all I'll say. He had quite a large personality. He's one of the more interesting figures in history, just from a personality read on him, because he was a pretty open. He was. It's funny that the founder of Protestantism, he was a drunk. He was very sexual. He would. He was obsessed that the devil was constantly stalking him. And so he would have weird things that he'd throw his glass at the wall to scare the devil away because he sensed the devil's presence. He was violently anti Semitic, where he said, we should forcibly convert every Judaism to Christianity, Jew to Christianity, and if they don't immediately convert, let's kill them all. So. And his thing with the 95 theses is that Germany was one of the most advanced places in Europe, so they didn't really feel an inferiority to the Italians, although the Italians of a cultural edge over them. And the papacy was also so morally degenerate due to the Renaissance and the Babylonian captivity, where the papacy was divided in the 14th century. So the Germans started thinking to themselves, why do we need the Pope? And Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to a cathedral at Wooten. I always forget if it's Wittenberg or Wurtenberg. One of them's in the southwest of Germany and other ones in Saxony. And this started this forest fire across Germany where the Protestant Reformation spread to most of the Germanic peoples, whether the English, the Scandinavians, the Dutch, most of the Germans, with the Austrians being the exception, where the Austrians who were ethnic Germans stayed Catholic. And then the Rhineland, which was in France's influence, did as well. So Germany was heavily split between Catholic and Protestant areas. And this became this huge segment of discord on several different fronts where the Austrians were constantly trying to stabilize Central Europe under Catholicism. And the Austrians had this sort of strange moment where they were the Holy Roman Emperors, but they did not actually own most of the Holy Roman Empire. Where firstly, the Holy Roman Empire got into a joint monarchy with Spain. And in that time period in the early 16th century under Charles V, Portugal and Spain, which had these huge colonies which spanned every continent on Earth. Then Burgundy in eastern France, which also held the Netherlands, as well as they held almost all of Italy, directly or indirectly. And then they had the title of the entire Holy Roman Empire, but they actually only held Austria, Slovenia, and Bohemia, and they didn't even hold Bohemia at this point. And so it's. You have this weird deal where most of the Holy Roman Emperor's power is outside the Holy Roman Empire. In the place that is most difficult for the Holy Roman Emperor to actually conquer is his main title, which is most of Germany's functionally independent. And so you get into. Into the clusterfuck that's the wars of religion. I haven't even thought the peasant revolts yet. It's just the Holy Roman Emperor was trying to use Catholicism to take out the Protestants, and that became the next 200 years of European history.
- [113:41]
Whatifalth
I mean, maybe that that video requires another deep dive. Speaking of the Protestant first Catholics, you said that your family came from an area that was surrounded by Catholics. Yeah, my family came from. In Germany, from Bavaria on my mom's side, and then moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but they were Catholics, so we might have been. We might have been following you a little bit later.
- [114:06]
Rudyard Lynch
So it's funny, I have a friend who's from the Dakotas, and he was my former employee, actually. We're the same age and very sharp guy, and we're both half Irish. But then our mom's on our father's side. Their mom's sides are flipped. I'm 40% British. Like, I'm over 40% British, like 7% German. And he's the opposite. And so we had this conversation. Why am I Protestant? Because my dad's Catholic, my mom's Protestant, and it's opposite for him. Why did my family convert to Protestantism and his convert to Catholicism? And he said the reason is that his German ancestors were Catholic. So that provided critical mass to overpower his German and English ancestry to get his family to convert to Catholicism. And then because they were in both of our ancestral trees, there was a choice for Catholic or Protestant. And then my family, my German side were Protestants. So I added up 50% total Protestant, 50% total Catholic. Protestant overpower Catholic. Well, he had more Catholic ancestry, unified. And I'm saying this partly because you should know your genealogy, it's quite cool. But secondly, it shows the complexity of this time period. And there were genuine issues of, especially when Germany unified, how do you get the Protestants and the Catholics to work together? Because they developed on very different cultural lines. And ultimately, the Catholics won this battle in a secular sense, because after the end of World War II, the Russians gobbled up more than half of Protestant Germany. And that area became atheist, one of the most atheist places in the world. So the modern West Germans took on lots of Catholic cultural traits after the Protestants had already been the one to unify Germany. So there was a sort of cultural equalization of these descendants strands. But to talk about some cultural changes, because Germany experienced the Renaissance and the modern period and that stuff, the peasant revolts were really big in southwest Germany. And they were a downstream effect of the Protestant Reformation, where Martin Luther created this fairly sane sect of Protestantism called Lutheranism that the courts of Europe took up. And the nobility loved Lutheranism because it allowed them to take the church's property for themselves. And then the Protestant monarchs became the spiritual heads of their countries. And then it opened the floodgates for this radical messianistic ideologies like Anabaptists and people who later became Mennonites and this sort of Christian. A lot of them migrated to America, especially Pennsylvania. And a big reason America cares about freedom so much is that these religious communities built out huge cultures of independence from the government so that the state religions couldn't oppress them. And so you saw these peasant wars across Germany, which were unilaterally crushed by the nobility, and they often killed over a million people. They were concentrated in the southwest or the areas which migrated to America. And I've talked about the story of Munster before, this city in northwest Germany where Anabaptists thought it was the end of the world. And they walled themselves up in the city, and then the Catholics besieged them and they devolved into complete social anarchy with political and social and economic and sexual communism with competing prophets uttering the words of God. And that was just a mess. And so there's a. A lot of the early Protestants were just highly socially conservative radicals. And Protestantism was significantly more reactionary and socially conservative than the Catholics were, which is not how we think these things are now. And. And Protestants Catholics. So this created this shift culturally to the right across the entire Holy Roman Empire, because the Catholics were also forced to become more socially conservative and reactionary to compete with the Protestants. So it was this cultural shift. And also night warfare died out. And in Germany, you saw Swiss pikemen and the Longsknechts, where the Longsnechts were. They were a German military caste, and they were often nobility who decided to fight with guns and pikes rather than horses. And the Long Snakes were legendary warriors where they'd carry the zweihander or the two handed sword, like the claymore and the pikes in the guns. And the Lansknechts became mercenary bands that went across Europe.
- [119:02]
Whatifalth
It's pretty cool. They got like the most maxed out and utility oriented weapons rather than trying to maintain like a specific noble tradition. They're like nobles who entered the fray.
- [119:15]
Rudyard Lynch
The European nobility did a really good job at integrating the modern warfare, which is something we forget. So when, when knights died out, the nobility learned how to fight with guns and spears. And so the military leadership cast of most European countries until World War I was the nobility. The other flashpoint that lost the Holy Roman Empire territory was that the Netherlands and Belgium had become the wealthiest place on earth. And they had these proto industrial cities. It was super advanced. They even had like the equivalent of factories. In the 14th century they converted to Protestantism because Protestantism was useful for high agency people like the merchant, merchant classes, where these were merchant republics, where it was, the Dutch Republic had, it was a limited voting franchise of just the upper classes. They had religious toleration, they had a free market where the Dutch took up Protestantism to fight against their Spanish overlords who were Catholic, because the Spanish married into the Burgundian monarchy, sorry, Burgundian duchy, which ruled the Netherlands independently from the emperor. And this caused an 80 year war which ultimately resulted in the Dutch getting independence and Belgium joining Spain because Belgium stayed Catholic or was forced to stay Catholic. And so that we're concentrating the Holy Roman Empire more and more just around Germany, greater Germany, losing the wealthier exterior areas like Italy and the Netherlands. And Germany was just awash in wars, just because Protestants and Catholics and then petty wars and that stuff. And I'm going to state this so I don't forget it, but German thinkers thought a lot about how the German nobility became fairly degenerate because they were ruling these tiny principalities. And so the German cultural identity was made predominantly by the middle classes, professors, merchants, those peoples where they were seen as the builders of culture, while the nobility later on became completely dependent upon French culture.
- [121:38]
Whatifalth
Interesting. And then they kind of got phased out in relevance. And that kind of follows really well from the tension between the nobility and the merchants around the Renaissance and the few hundred years after that, which is like a deep insecurity around the nobility, which we've kind of covered in many cultural contexts.
- [121:59]
Rudyard Lynch
It's funny how the history of the Holy Roman Empire gets less interesting as the history of Europe gets more interesting, because as we enter into the 17th and 18th centuries, you have so many Cultural trends like the Enlightenment or science or the discovery of the new world. But then the Holy Roman Empire itself as an institution was decayed. Germans were doing this stuff. The Germans happened to be stuck in this fossilized corpse where Voltaire once said, the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. And that was a huge clip at the time, because at the time of the Enlightenment everyone was like, why is this thing still here? And the Thirty Years War deserves its own video. I got. I ordered like three different. I don't want to read the thousand page book in the Thirty Years War. My business manager and my dad read it. They said it was excruciating. So I bought several shorter books. I have to read them. But the Holy Roman. The Thirty Years War was indicative of the incestuous nature of Holy Roman Empire politics, where what happened is that Bohemia was plurality Protestant and they got a new dynasty who were Protestants. If Bohemia became Protestant, it would flip the electors of the empire to being majority Protestant. So they would pick the King of Bohemia, who was married to the Queen of England, to become the Emperor. This would unseat the Habsburgs who had had that position for 300 years. The Habsburgs then invaded Bohemia, conquered it. And keep in mind the Habsburgs are part of a transcontinental empire with this just being one manifestation where. So this was often done mostly by Spanish arms. And sorry, just thinking of the long snakes fighting as the Terceos. That was pretty cool. But. So they beat the Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain, secured that the Habsburg would keep the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Then the Danes stepped in on the side of the Bohemian. On the side of the Bohemians. The Habsburg army attacked across North Germany, wiped out the Danes, parked themselves next to Copenhagen, being unable to take the island. France then paid Sweden to invade Germany, which they attacked in Pomerania. Sweden's leader was a military genius who had reformulated their military structure to be more fluid and cavalry oriented and gun oriented over spear oriented. They wiped out the Austrians in several major battles like Lutzen and Breitenfeld. The Swedes nearly won, making themselves Holy Roman Emperor. But their king died halfway through Germany. Then they parked their military and Austria. Then the war bogged down into decades of infighting. And this I'm not even covering half of it. There was also fighting in the Netherlands. Bunch of other stuff going on. I'm making this too easy. I'm throwing a lot of facts at you already. But I want you to know I'm simplifying already. And France got involved in the war when the Habsburgs could have won, the Spanish invaded France, then failed. Then it bogged down for another decade of infighting until people made the deal to return the borders to basically where they were at the start, at the Treaty of Westphalia. And the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 is considered one of those European history moments. If you read the history of Europe, it's always the benchmark of the end of the wars of religion, the start of the scientific and Enlightenment world, the start of the modern nation state. Whenever you read a history of diplomacy in Europe or whatever, that'll always start with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. And in the process, Germany had lost a third of its population because the thirty Years War was such a brutal war. And the Germans had this horrifying collective trauma from it, where even sub regions like Brandenburg, which became the Prussian state or Swabia, they lost three quarters of their population. And so you can view the German desire towards dominance and unity and all those things as a sort of trauma reaction from the Thirty Years War and just the centuries of other European powers treating them as a chessboard.
- [126:33]
Whatifalth
They were. Well, it sounds like a lot of their troubles came during periods where they were trying to unite. Like they were too different to unite, but too similar to really fight, except for when they were trying to unite.
- [126:47]
Rudyard Lynch
And.
- [126:48]
Whatifalth
And so maybe that's why it didn't work. And every time they tried, it created trauma and it didn't work until yeah, they had a real external threat. And Napoleon that was. That maybe didn't exist relative to German culture before Rome. So yeah, maybe it's the external threat thing.
- [127:09]
Rudyard Lynch
You're totally right. Where the Germans had an enormous paranoia in the early 20th century that all of their neighbors were scheming against them. And that was true. It was even more true earlier in their history. If any enterprising German nobleman tried to unify the country, he'd find the French and the Spanish and Russians, every neighboring country to say, no, you can't unify Germany. So Germany was artificially held back by unification because it was inside the self interest of the neighboring countries. And out of this time period he saw the rise of two genuinely great German states which were mostly built off conquering non Germans, that being Prussia and Austria, where Austria, which was ruled by its German group, German Bohemian group, which built up its social cohesion against the Hungarian frontier and they conquered a huge area from the Turks. As the Turkish empire went into civilizational Decline over the 8 18th century, they took Transylvania and Hungary and Serbia and the Austrian Empire was this multi ethnic thing held together by the monarchy, the joint monarchy. Because none of these populations had attained national consciousness yet. And so the singular Habsburg monarchy could control this whole region. Where In World War I the soldiers were expected to memorize the entire ancestral line of the emperor because that was the. The social cohesion.
- [128:59]
Whatifalth
No, no, no. Yeah, I was just agreeing with that part. And it's just interesting to think of this is where Germany really changes because this whole Germany we're picturing is incredibly decentralized for such a long time. And you have these ideas of these little German towns with their slight differences and the merchant towns and you, you kind of lose that connection in modern Germany. And which is why I really want to someday visit Lichtenstein. Because it has about 40000 people. It's the only German province that didn't federalize with Otto von Bismarck, that didn't join. And it's just like a ridiculous little manufacturing town city happy town with absurd statistics. And it went through no civilizational collapse in the last 200 years or 300 years. So I don't know if that would have been possible for the rest of Germany. But it's fun that that kind of idea of Germany still exists.
- [130:00]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, in tiny Lichtenstein. Prussia formed as a reaction to the thirty Years War because they were conquered more than anyone else and raped and tortured by more than anyone else. And they developed a really strong monarchy and Prussia was. They were built off the foundations of serfdom. And it was widely said, I think Voltaire, who was a cunning and witty fellow, that Prussia is a military with the state is a. Is a military with a country attached to it. Because they had the draft before anyone else in Europe. The state had near total power. And the Prussians used the edge they got from being on the frontier to basically will their population. Where you look at Nietzsche's philosophy, it's the attempt to take this militaristic serf society and reconcile it with Christian values by saying psych, no, we don't believe in Christian values. Where one of the biggest proponents of atheism were Prussian or German philosophers who were studying Greco Roman civilization as a way to say why the Prussian state was actually not highly immoral. And so it's also why German philosophy took such huge influences from India as well as Greece because they were looking to oriental traditions where Germany was the center of scholarship in the entire world world in the 19th century. And Prussia, they got big from dividing Poland. And there was a period in the start of the Napoleonic wars when the vast majority of people in the Prussian state were Poles. And if you look at a map of Prussia, mostly not in modern Germany. And they survived due to incredible leadership by Frederick the Great and his father. Where Frederick the Great took Silesia from Austria, which is a German speaking area in modern Poland. And Frederick the Great was able to fight a three front war against Austria, France and Russia. Countries with vastly more people. And he was able to win, which is really a remarkable cultural moment. And with Frederick the Great you start to see the Holy Roman Empire will be dead within a generation. Where Prussia could hold off the rest of Germany and most of Europe combined. Which meant that Prussia was really a great force and they could aspire to unify Germany. Where most of Germany was still principalities and small territories. And the final thing that killed the Holy Roman Empire was Napoleon. Where Napoleon steamrolled across Germany. And the main locus of warfare in the Napoleonic wars was actually around Saxony and Czechia. So Germany got more destroyed by the Napoleonic wars out of anywhere. And Napoleon got rid of the legal status of the Holy Roman Empire, saying that it was unnecessary in the current world with the French revolutionary logic. And so he made all of these substates like the Confederation of the Rhine or he gave a lot of Germany to France directly. And Napoleon was the best thing that ever happened to Prussia. Partly that the Napoleonic wars gave Prussia a lot of West Germany as a way to simplify the map. Because Napoleon didn't like the 500 states. And also because Napoleon beat the Prussian military at the Battle of Jena. That forced the Prussians or the Prussians really did a good thing by fixing themselves where they got rid of serfdom, they made a modern military. And so that meant that when the Prussians fought the French again, they won. And also the French implanted. Implanted modern nationalism into Germany. Where the Germans had had a national consciousness since the medieval period, but it hadn't manifested in this country concept of a centralized government where the French recruited hundreds of thousands of young German men. Because the German men there was an entire generation of young German men who worked with the French. Because the French were an avenue outside of the traditional feudal institutions like the nobility or the guilds. And so this was a huge pivotal moment in German thought which you can see with Hegel or Goethe or those thinkers. And so even after Napoleon lost and there was the German Union, which was the kind of crappy new version of the German Empire, that it was a matter of time. Actually I want to give Bismarck more credit for that. The Bismarck Prussia had lots of very good leaders. So I don't want to consider their ultimate victory being preordained. But you saw the trajectory with the Napoleonic wars and the final destruction of the Holy Roman Empire in which Germany would ultimately be unified by the Prussian state. In 1871.
- [135:10]
Whatifalth
You said, you said Prussian was. Prussia was an army with a nation rather than vice versa. Which makes a lot of sense considering they started out with the Teutonic Knights on the frontier, literally started as an army and then became a nation. And then the Prussians latching on to the cultural capital of Germany by filling the role that Germany required at the time. Slash, just overcoming them was like the Mongols using the Chinese capital to launch their conquest of the entire world. Like you, you combine the frontier warrior with the capital of the civilization and it's. I'm not sure how many other examples you have of that combination.
- [135:58]
Rudyard Lynch
It's happened before in history and that was actually something people said at the time because they were more historically literate. They said the Prussians combined the warrior barbarian spirit with the industry and capital of West Germany which was concentrated in the Rhineland. And Germany was a highly caste oriented society where a nobleman would never be seen in social company with a wealthy merchant and highly big regional differences. The top ranks of the military were recruited from the Junkers or descendants of the Teutonic Knights. So they thought about all this stuff and the Germans were hyper intelligent. They were the most educated nation in the world. So if you think of an idea, a German at the time would have thought of it.
- [136:44]
Whatifalth
And so it was that, that merchant noble tension kind of.
- [136:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [136:49]
Whatifalth
Really One dimensional in each society.
- [136:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. So that's the Holy Roman Empire. That's. I think this is a. If any topic warrants an over two hour video, it's this one. Because this could have been. I am simplifying so much for this video. There's so much that we've left out. It's just European history is pretty remarkable. I think of like when you drive from Austin to Dallas. You see an area of wealthy countryside and then you, you imagine driving 400 miles in Europe. How much more history have you passed in the same area?
- [137:36]
Whatifalth
It's too much to keep track of. Like you said, if you, if you talk about every single back and forth and exchange of territory.
- [137:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [137:43]
Whatifalth
So it's been fun to try and capture a general essence of it. But yeah, we could break down. We could have like an hour long discussion just on the common law part.
- [137:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. One of the trippy moments of my life is I grew up When I was in high school, I would walk past the Delaware river nearly every day. And it's trippy to go to these European countries that are vastly more historic. Where you see the Thames or the Tiber or the Loire, and you're like, wait, this is half the size of the Delaware. And so that always tripped me out, just the difference in scale. Where I'd see this insane historic river that European authors like, this is so mighty. And it makes you realize how much the Europeans did with such a small scale. Where Britain is the size of Alabama or Michigan, and Britain totally changed the world. So what that means is that singular states in America could change the course of history in the way European countries have if we set up our social structure right.
- [138:43]
Whatifalth
Barely anything has happened yet. The the future is ready to be unveiled.
- [138:49]
Rudyard Lynch
That is Mega Facts. And I will catch you next week for the Volkerwanderong. That's the migrations of peoples in the Dark Ages.
- [139:00]
Whatifalth
I was going to ask you.
- [139:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay, bye.
- [139:02]
Whatifalth
Bye. All right, see you.
- [139:04]
Austin Padgett
History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.