Explaining the Mediterranean's Decline

Summary

---

History 102 with WhatifAltHist: Explaining the Mediterranean's Decline

Hosts: Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett

Date: October 19, 2025
Podcast Network: Turpentine

---

Overview

In this episode, Rudyard Lynch (WhatifAltHist) and Austin Padgett dissect the long, complex story of the Mediterranean's decline as the world's civilizational core. They track this shift from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into the Industrial era—mapping how geography, politics, religion, and cultural cycles forged the rise and fall of Mediterranean power. The conversation weaves narrative history, personal anecdotes, and macro-historical analysis to break down why the Mediterranean lost its position, tracing themes that reverberate into the present and the future.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mediterranean's Uniqueness: Geography and Culture

• The "Lab of Civilizations":

  • The Mediterranean's design—with its three narrow exits (Gibraltar, Bosphorus, Suez)—created a contained but interconnected "laboratory" of civilizations.
  • Cities and cultures thrived at an intensity hard to match elsewhere, fostering both unity and division.
  • Quote (Rudyard Lynch, 05:33):
    "The Mediterranean is a cultural generating machine, because it's perfectly designed in that way, if it's all connected so you can transmit ideas, but you have distinct polarity, like Italy or Spain, which can very easily form their own identities because they're peninsulas."

• Cycles of Unity and Fragmentation:

  • History swings between Mediterranean-wide empires (Rome) and fragmented city-states (Athens, Venice, Genoa), reflecting the region’s unique geography.

• Choke Points & Sub-regions:

  • Natural straits and islands split the Mediterranean into sub-seas, fostering unique micro-cultures (Sicily, Crete, Balearics, etc.).

2. Navigational Innovations & North-South Divide

• Evolution of Maritime Technology

  • Advances like accurate maps, compasses, and astrolabes in the Middle Ages allowed Southern Europeans, especially Italians, to expand their trading range beyond the Mediterranean into Northern Europe (12:50).

• Atlantic vs. Mediterranean Navigation

  • Mediterranean seas were relatively calm; the Atlantic represented a leap in peril and complexity—one that most Mediterranean civilizations avoided until later breakthroughs.

3. Decline: Present-Day Reflections & Historical Memory

• Anecdotes: Modern Marseille, Athens, Cairo

  • Lynch and Padgett share personal stories illustrating the contrasts and decline in once-great Mediterranean cities.
    • Lynch describes Marseille as “degenerate” and unsafe, despite its beauty (18:00), while Cairo, though poorer, feels safer and less shattered.
    • Padgett compares Athens unfavorably even to parts of the developing world (23:14).

• Civilizational Dead Ends

  • Lynch notes a poetic reversal: once Egypt was rich and Gaul poor; today both shores are struggling (21:55).
  • Quote (Lynch, 22:59):
    "This is a higher society that you can see is this beautiful place that has utterly degenerated... this has happened is an important historic event no one has ever mentioned to me in a history book."

4. Mediterranean Hegemony: British Domination

• British Control (1701–1945)
  • From the War of Spanish Succession onward, Britain captured key choke points: Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Crete. Competitor nations (France, Spain, Italy) could never regain control.
  • This shift marks the definitive end of Mediterranean self-determination as global power (30:09).
    • “Mediterranean Europe failed on such a profound level that Britain... could consistently hold on to the Mediterranean. Is just embarrassing when you remember that the Mediterranean is the singular spot in history that has generated the most stuff.”

5. Narrative & Method: Problems with Historical Framing

• Why the Mediterranean's Decline Is Understudied
  • Modern (especially Anglo) historiography skips post-classical Mediterranean history, focusing on moments that justify Western ascendancy (34:42).
  • Lynch:
    "Our history writing is all how do we make a set narrative that justifies neoliberalism? ... There isn't a core narrative in our society for why the Mediterranean declined." (34:37)

6. North Europe's Hermetic Switch

• What Changed?

  • Northwest Europe (Britain, Netherlands, later Germany) establishes competitive social institutions—capitalism, democracy, science—that propel rapid industrialization and global dominance (39:00).
  • The Mediterranean misses the transition, becoming a partial or failed adopter; analogy to the varying industrialization levels across cultural proximity to Britain.

• Failed or Stalled Modernization (Italy, Spain, Latin America, Ottoman world)

  • Mussolini's Italy, Lynch argues, couldn't be truly totalitarian because "Italians are fundamentally not capable of being totalitarians. They are not a serious enough nation anymore to pull it off." (41:15–41:36)
  • Latin America as a “decadent extension” of Mediterranean civilization.

7. Civilizational Cycles: The Roman Unification to Division

• Roman High Point & Transformation

  • Rome unifies the Mediterranean, imposing cosmopolitan urban identity at the expense of older local cultures.
  • Over time, empire-wide citizenship and cultural dilution lead to weakening loyalties and eventual fragmentation (45:40).

• Three Heirs to Rome:

  • Western Christendom (Latin/Catholic), Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox/Greek), Islam—each developing distinct civilizational arcs but rooted in the Roman-Mediterranean seed.

• Role of Religion and Philosophy:

  • Elite culture was Neoplatonic, masses adopted Christianity. Neoplatonism allowed for intellectual vibrancy but could lead to detachment (52:21–52:51).

8. The Islamic Golden Age and Its Decline

• Islamic Dominance (8th–11th centuries)

  • The Arab world brings intellectual, technological, and economic dynamism; Islamic civilization is dominant and cosmopolitan (84:30–86:00).
  • Loss of Mediterranean control (from 11th century) correlates with the start of the Islamic world’s stagnation and decline (89:32–89:38).

• Inter-civilizational Interaction

  • Constant 'player vs player' battleground—trade and war link Christians, Muslims, Jews in cycles of piracy, diplomacy, and conflict.

9. Rise of City-States & the Italian Renaissance

• High Medieval Italy

  • Italian city-states (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence) resurrect urban republicanism, democracy, and commerce, rooted in memories of classical and medieval autonomy (98:00–100:00).
  • Italy as "wealthiest place on earth" (100:47).
  • Renaissance culture is cross-pollinated by both Islamic and ancient influences.

• Authoritarian Shift and Stagnation

  • After 16th century, Spanish hegemony, Ottoman expansion, and the rise of large, extractive empires kill the creative, decentralized energy.
  • North and South Italy diverge, South declines under a succession of exploitative foreign rulers.

10. The Mediterranean’s Final Decline: Systemic Breakdown

• Systemic Decline after the Renaissance

  • With Islamic innovation stalls and large empires like Spain and the Ottomans stagnate, the Mediterranean as a system fails to generate mutual progress (113:29–114:46).
  • "...only the north Mediterranean was generative over the early modern period...the locus of civilization moved from Italy to the German Rhineland." (113:40)

• Authority, Elites, and Decay

  • Extractive states, corrupt elites, and a loss of civic culture lock Mediterranean societies into cycles of decadence (127:10–128:05).
  • Quote:
    "Once you have corrupt elites, Corrupt elites create slavish populations because in a healthy society, all social classes have agency and responsibility and they work together..." (128:05)

11. Macro Theory: Geography, Materialism, and Values

• Fernand Braudel and Materialist History

  • Discussion of Braudel’s micro-materialism and French academic fatalism—useful for data, but often neglecting grand narrative, human agency, and values (63:40–73:14).
  • Comparison with “Guns, Germs, and Steel” view:
    • "I do not think that's fair. I think it totally discounts human agency in history. It's comparable to Guns, Germs and Steel, where Jared Diamond says that all of human history is powered off geography." (70:37)

• The Value Landscape

  • Lynch and Padgett explore how agency, worldview, “the value landscape”, and societal soul shape long-run historical outcomes (72:01–73:14).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the fraught present:

  • "This is a higher society that you can see is this beautiful place that has utterly degenerated... this has happened is an important historic event no one has ever mentioned to me in a history book."
    — Lynch, (22:59)

• On history writing and bias:

  • "Our history writing is all how do we make a set narrative that justifies neoliberalism?... There isn't a core narrative in our society for why the Mediterranean declined."
    — Lynch, (34:37)

• On Italy’s unique city-state legacy:

  • "These Italian city states built out this trade system and gained dominance from the Muslims. And so the high medieval period was Italy's growth. And Italy was the wealthiest place on earth from like the 13th or the 12th centuries until the 16th century..."
    — Lynch, (98:00–100:47)

• On the impact of corrupt elites:

  • "Once you have corrupt elites, Corrupt elites create slavish populations..."
    — Lynch, (128:05)

• On the Hermetic Switch and lost potential:

  • "The Mediterranean could become the most successful place in the world when both sides of the Mediterranean fed creative income inputs into the system. What happened with the Islamic Dark Ages...only the north Mediterranean was generative..."
    — Lynch, (113:29)

• Playful banter:

  • Padgett's repeated, intentional misuse of "Norman" to provoke Lynch's correction about Frankish vs. Norman identity (73:14, 75:11, 145:01).

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• [05:33] – Mediterranean as a "cultural generating machine," unity/division
• [09:02–13:19] – Navigation, technology, and "breaking out" into the Atlantic
• [18:00–23:14] – Modern decay of Marseille, Athens, Cairo
• [30:09] – British conquest and long-term domination over the Mediterranean
• [34:37] – Anglophone history's blind spots; difficulty of Mediterranean narrative
• [39:00] – North Europe’s “hermetic switch” and ascent
• [45:40–52:21] – Roman integration, split into heirs, and philosophies
• [84:30–89:38] – Islamic civilization's rise and decline, loss of Mediterranean
• [98:00–102:35] – Italian city-states, the Renaissance, and Italy as global cultural center
• [113:29–114:49] – The collapse of innovation and mutual stimulus in Mediterranean system
• [127:10–128:05] – Mediterranean honor culture, failure of elites, societal breakdown

---

Theoretical & Comparative Reflections

• Comparisons to Present-Day Economic Systems:
  • The decay of the Mediterranean cycle is likened to the risk of American “Brazilification” or adopting elements of Chinese authoritarianism (136:54).
• Globalization Questions:
  • Parallels and differences between ancient Mediterranean connectivity and modern global culture (56:52–63:29).
• Fernand Braudel's "Annales" school:
  • Praised for data collection, critiqued for ignoring narratives and human agency (63:40–73:14).

---

Conclusion and Next Topics

• Summary:

  • The Mediterranean’s decline resulted from a confluence: loss of innovation in the Islamic world, rise of extractive, authoritarian empires, and shifts in global trade and technology sparked by North European breakthroughs.
  • The collapse of shared creativity and mutual dynamism in the Mediterranean system signaled its relegation to the periphery.

• Next Episode:

  • The Enlightenment – continuing the chronological analysis of how the world shifted west and north.

---

“There's so much capability that's wasted. ...I always feel sorry for like people who are too sentient for their environment.”
— Lynch, (139:00)

---

This episode is a deep, sometimes meandering exploration of how geography, cultural synthesis, institutional innovation (or the lack thereof), and historical contingency together spelled both the greatest heights and the eventual stagnation of the Mediterranean—a laboratory of civilizations whose legacy still shapes modern Europe, Africa, and beyond.

---

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator what if All Hists Rudyard lynch and I dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[B]

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102 with me and Austin Padgett. And this episode is on the decline of the Mediterranean.

[C]

Hello. I very much like the Mediterranean. Good food, fun to go around. I think of Porco Rosso and the interesting kind of period of chaos and freedom in the Mediterranean, probably the last one that existed.

[B]

So I have a narrative I'd like to get to, but I just want to say I hate the term Mediterranean food. Where growing up people would say Mediterranean food. And I'm like, are you going to serve French food? Because I've heard it's different in other cultures. But in America, Mediterranean is code for Middle Eastern. It's Lebanese or Arab and sometimes some Greek thrown in. A lot of the restaurant industry in America is run by Greeks, which colors a variety of sort of restaurant businesses.

[C]

Our perception of Mediterranean.

[B]

Yeah, but the thing that annoys me about it is that I was born in 2001. And so I grew up in the wake of 9 11. And one of the crazy things is that adults didn't tell me 911 happened till age 9 when my mom told me, because other adults wouldn't bring it up because they didn't want to shatter the worldview of like children. But in reality, this breed incredible fragility. And it was quite confusing that adults were so sort of fear obsessed and anxious about safety. What they didn't talk about 9 11, but it always. This might is likely not true, but it felt as if they were calling it Mediterranean food to avoid the Arab connotation. And because there was a significant wave of sort of anti Islamic sentiment after 911 and till the present. And you could make arguments that that sentiment is somewhat valid, but it's. It's an interesting sort of cultural disjoint. But it always bugs me that the word Mediterranean is used to isolate a specific subculture inside the Mediterranean.

[C]

That's interesting. I never thought of that connection. I mean, I grew up largely in France and I've been all over the Mediterranean. So when I say I like Mediterranean food, I literally mean I like Turkish food, I like Greek food, I like Italian food, I like French food, I like, yes, you know, some North African fish.

[B]

This leads to a key theme of the video, that the Mediterranean is geographically very weird. The ancients thought it was designed by the gods to be A sort of laboratory. And they divided the world in the oikomene, or the known world that circled the Mediterranean and then everything else. Because the Mediterranean is a sea that has three tiny axes, are three choke points where it nearly or does go out to other seas. Where one is the pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean lets out into the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is all a subsidiary of the Atlantic. Then you have the Black Sea with the Bosphorus, where at Istanbul it connects to from the Aegean part of the Mediterranean to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. And that actually opened up within the course of human civilization. The biblical flood myths are because there was a period like 7,000 years ago when the Black Sea flooded over a week, the Bosphorus broke. And then the Black Sea went from a lake about a third its current size to the current Black Sea, which created a wide scale diaspora across both Europe and, and the Middle East. And then the third sort of connection that the Mediterranean has is with the Red Sea, which is part of the broader Indian Ocean system and that's Suez. So the connection is open to the Atlantic. And in the ancient world they rarely could sail around Spain up to Britain, they would have to walk over France because the technology to sail the Atlantic was really difficult for the Romans and the Greeks. But the Black Sea is open, but the Black Sea is a lake where it doesn't go anywhere. And then the Red Sea they had to dig open that canal in the 19th century, although the Persians made an earlier canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea back in like 500 BC. And so the Mediterranean is very strange because it's a singular almost lake system that's the scale of America. So if you put Spain on the west coast, then Israel and Syria is going to be on the east coast. The Roman Empire is slightly wider across than America is, which is really impressive for society 2000 years ago. But the weird thing of the Mediterranean is it's all an interconnected system where you'll very frequently see trends that start in Spain, end in Anatolia or Syria or from Egypt to France. And there are periods like 2000 years ago where the Mediterranean is a coherent system, that being the Roman Empire and Greco Roman civilization. But also inside the Mediterranean is a series of sub regions like Italy or Turkey or Spain or the Maghreb, which are self enclosed and can develop their own civilizational or national or ethnic identities. And these are all woven together. And if you look at the cycles of history, there are certain time periods when a city state like Athens not Even all of Attica, the sub region in Greece, a not very large company, or Venice or Genoa, where city states are the operating level of the Mediterranean's depth, where not even Italy is unified to systems where the entire Mediterranean is unified. So you can see sort of the ebb and flow of human history, where it's the same geographic area, but there are certain points where it's very small levels of unity and others where the entire system's unified.

[C]

And I guess it was always. There's a lot of competing control over the water, right? A lot of times it was dangerous, basically, if the Ottomans dominated it or the Romans dominated it, someone was always kind of dominating the water.

[B]

The other thing is that the Mediterranean has lots of natural choke points, like the Straits of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy, which was where the ancient Greek monsters Scylla and Charybdis lived in the Odyssey, or the Bosphorus, the Gulf, the Strait of Corinth. Then you have the centralized islands like Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, the Balearics, Crete, Rhodes. Those are the big ones, you know, smaller ones like Malta in the middle. But the Mediterranean is very segmented into a series of subseas like the Tyrrhenian, the Ionian, the Aegean. In each of these subseas can sort of develop identities independently. And it's not just sort of the national identities or the different parts of the Mediterranean. So the Mediterranean is a cultural generating machine, because it's perfectly designed in that way, if it's all connected so you can transmit ideas, but you have distinct polarity, like Italy or Spain, which can very easily form their own identities because they're peninsulas. And so the Mediterranean's good at generating civilizations. But because it combines this unity with the natural division that you don't see in places like the North Indian Plain or China, where it's all a single sort of flat piece of land.

[C]

Right. Even if someone happens to be dominating the water, the land is still distinct. It's usually not been smashed together. Or even when it was under the Romans, there were distinct cultures. And I guess it's interesting, they struggled to sail the Atlantic. You think, why wouldn't the Romans have that technology? Since, you know, the Phoenicians and everybody brought sail technology potentially from that direction. And I guess it's just the. The cost and the error rate is not worth it. If you can't get it down under a certain percent of crashes and you have other options, it's prohibitive, I suppose.

[B]

So they could sail the Atlantic. You could sail from Italy to Britain as a Roman. And there are stories that the Phoenicians circumnavigate in Africa, which we think they did because the Phoenicians gave records of certain areas of Africa that they would only know if they had gone the long way around. Or the Romans would go up to Britain and Scandinavia and there was a Greek explorer who potentially made it to Iceland and he definitely made to Scotland and Norway and those places. So in the classical world, they could sail the long way round. They just chose not to because it was difficult where the Mediterranean is a fairly calm sea and the Atlantic is not. Where the Mediterranean has several issues where it's very difficult to sail in the winter. So it's a common practice for Mediterranean based societies to not conduct military campaigns or wide scale trade during the winter because it's just storms and cold and that stuff. But the Atlantic is just a completely different sort of ball court. You have these huge currents and you can get sucked out forever. And so for a lot of ancient Greece, they called the pillars of Hercules the end of the world. Because there was this stark difference in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. And part of the reason that in the medieval period they put the Champagne affairs in central France was that it was easier for Italy, which was the wealthiest place on earth, to connect with northern Europe through France. But then by the end of the 14th century, the champagne affairs were kind of defunct because they had a breakthrough in naval technology where the Italians just sailed the long way round to North Europe, around the bottom of Spain, up through the English Channel. And so that was an innovation that occurred during the high Middle Ages.

[C]

The technology to make that basically a more reliable trip for them.

[B]

Yeah, they could. So they could, they could consistently sail it. The issue is that it was sort of cheaper and more cost effective to route it over land through France. And that's what the Romans were doing.

[C]

I assumed the reason it was cheaper is because a certain percent of the ships crashed. But like, that's okay, right?

[B]

We're agreeing. It's. So the Italians made an advance where they could navigate it more easily. And I think the difference actually was where by the time we get to the high Middle Ages, navigational charts got really good. So the first map of the world that looked like it could have been made off like a modern Google map projection where it's just exactly right, was made in Norman sicily in the 12th century when the king of Italy, or the Norman king of Sicily got his Christian, Muslim and Jewish experts together to make a map based off navigational charts. And by the time you get to the 14th century, you'll look at things like the Catalan atlas or maps of Europe. And there was this really stark jump from the older maps, which are very blocky and inefficient. And a lot of what the older maps were doing was trying to make a spiritual, symbolic map of the world. They weren't meant to be taken seriously as an actual navigational chart, but that also was an excuse for lower quality work. But then by the time you get to the high and late Middle Ages, you have these photorealistic maps and then once you get to that threshold, you're not dependent on hugging coasts anymore. So you can go straight out into the ocean, count the mathematical degrees, use a compass, which showed up in the high Middle Ages as well, and an astrolabe, and then navigate your position by the stars so you're no longer dependent on hugging the entire coast of Spain. Going the long way around Galicia, you can just go out to the Straits of Hercules, go up to Lisbon and Galicia, then straight out to England and the Netherlands, because you can look at the mathematical chart and correlate your position from your compass in your astrolabe against the map.

[C]

Right. And I guess the the previous Atlantic civilizations who were trading on those waters for a long time, one of their big advantage was probably the local knowledge of how to navigate the areas. And when you get the actual tools, sophistication on a tool level rather than a cultural memory level, then you can go into areas you're not familiar with.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

[B]

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And LifeLock has tips to protect your identity. Use strong passwords, set up multi factor authentication, report phishing and update the software on your devices. And for comprehensive identity protection, let LifeLock alert you to suspicious uses of your personal information. LifeLock also fixes identity theft, guaranteed or your money back. Stay smart, safe and protected with a 30 day free trial at lifelock.com podcast terms apply.

[A]

Freedom begins with privacy. Zcash protects your freedom. The right technology reshapes politics and culture in favor of a freer, wealthier society. Zcash has been called the machinery of freedom because of this. Zcash is unstoppable private money that protects your freedom by using encryption. It's like bitcoin with its 21 million hard cap and fair token distribution, but offers privacy and soon planetary scale. Zcash has been said to be the last thousand X in crypto because unseen wealth is unseizable wealth. Try zcash Out Download Zashi Wallet. You can post your shielded address on X and tag at Gen zcash for encrypted welcome notes to get started, follow nzcash to learn more.

[D]

Being an entrepreneur, I can say from personal experience, can be an intimidating and at times lonely experience. There are so many jobs to be done and often nobody to turn to when things go wrong. That's just one of many reasons that founders absolutely must choose their technology platforms carefully. Pick the right one and the technology can play important roles for you. Pick the wrong one and you might find yourself fighting fires alone in the ecommerce space. Of course, there's never been a better platform than Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style, just as if you had your own design studio with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. It's like you have your own content team and with the ability to easily create email and social media campaigns, you can reach your customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling, just as if you had a full marketing department behind you. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Cha Ching With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com cognitive Visit shopify.com cognitive once more. That's shopify.com cognitive.

[B]

The other thing is that just the Vikings were nuts. I mean the Vikings, so you had Neolithic civilizations which did wide scale trading around northwest Europe and you are correct that that was sort of intuitive local knowledge. And there was. There's also ways that navigators can look at bird patterns or where certain logs are and use it and figure out like how many days it is since we've left Stavanger to figure out their position. And if you're coming from the Mediterranean, that's lots of highly local knowledge. But then the first people who really unified the northern seas in the historic record were the Vikings. And the Vikings were kind of just nuts where they just sail out hundreds of miles into the North Atlantic to find Iceland or Greenland and North America. And, you know, people before them had sort of like the oceanic ballsiness of the Vikings.

[C]

They were like Arctic Polynesians.

[B]

Yes. That's been a comparison that exploration historians make a lot. And so when you look at. There's two examples that ease me into this sort of historic narrative, where the first is that I've been to both Marseilles and Cairo, which are the two ends of the Mediterranean system. In both, they're basically shitholes. I mean, they're very not nice places. And I don't say that lightly. I am from Philadelphia, after all, and Marseille is easily one of the worst cities I've seen in the world. It's just. I see the first day I was in France on my gap year, I was there for three months and I got pickpocketed. And so I had to live off the euro coins I kept in my backpack. They didn't have cars or wallet. Then my dad could wire me enough money to live till I got my car from my bank. In America, I was living off like crappy baguette food for days because that's what I could buy with my coins. And I had to go to the American consulate in Marseille to get a new. To get a sort of a paper so I could leave France as a substitute passport. And so I took the train to Marseille and it's like I was going through Rome after the fall. Because Marseille is an absolutely stunning city. And it's. Its climate and geography is actually a lot like San Francisco, where it's Mediterranean. There's a central bay and it's got some of the best architecture of any city I've seen in the world. There's a lot of beautiful stuff from the lcien regime or like 18th century France. Marseille was part of the Greek colonial sphere. And there's this distinct, distinct shift in the south of France, from Languedoc around Nice or Nimes. No, sorry, Nice is out by Italy, out by Nimes and Montpellier to Marseille, because you go from a temperate climate zone to a Mediterranean climate zone. And so the first was populated by the Gauls and the Celts, and the latter by the Greeks. So you could tell you were going to a sort of more Mediterranean, Greek, Italian society. And the lands changes where it's not these broad broadleaf trees. You're getting to sort of like the sagebrush and the olive oil trees. And there's a distinct Mediterranean look. And Marseille has these ancient Greek cities. And there's the cathedral, which is absolutely wonderful. It's one of the earliest major cathedrals that you've seen in the rise of global Christendom, where it's from the late Roman Empire. And I saw one of those beautiful women in my life in that cathedral. Actually, then Marseille, as a broader sort of city, has the medieval stuff. They have multiple cathedrals. And it's really remarkable that there were, like, five museums I wanted to go to in Marseille, and it was a Wednesday and four out of the five were closed all day and nothing was open up. Immigration had totally destroyed Marseille, where I barely saw any, like, native French people. And it's. It was significantly worse than Philadelphia, which is again saying something where downtown Marseille. I was genuinely worried for my own safety in a way I never was back in Philly. And it's just there's drug addicts all over and there's, like, shit in the street. And, like, I had to always watch my pockets. Yeah, I wouldn't get robbed. Why was I watching my pocket? They didn't have money, but I had to watch my pockets for my phone. And so I was just stuck by this utter polarity of this is a higher society that you can see is this beautiful place that has utterly degenerated. And I thought the fact that this has happened is an important historic event no one has ever mentioned to me in a history book. And then I go to Cairo on the other side of the Mediterranean, and I got a story or two from Cairo. I went with Marek. We were stuck in traffic for, like an hour getting in. We ended up in a native marketplace because Apple Maps got it wrong. No one robbed us in that marketplace. It's funny, Cairo felt significantly safer than Marseille did.

[C]

Really.

[B]

I wasn't even in, like, amazing areas. Like, there were still camels in the street in the place we were staying, and there was traffic everywhere. And they have sexy burka stores, by the way.

[C]

And Victoria Burka.

[B]

Yeah, no, I've seen that. It's very strange. And Merrick and I ate pigeon with couscous at a local. Local street vendor. I try to do all my shopping in the Third World, so, like, I just bought up a lot of stuff there. But also, Cairo is significantly poorer than Marseille. Marseille is still a first world country somehow, and Cairo is not. And I'm thinking this used to be the center of the world, but both sides of the Mediterranean, the wealthiest and the poorest, are both not doing great. They both feel totally civilizationally dead. And it used to be actually Egypt was the wealthy side of the Mediterranean and Gaul was the poorest. So this has been a very stark shift over the last 2,000 years.

[C]

I had a very similar experience. Have you ever been to Athens?

[B]

No, I haven't.

[C]

I. I had already been all over the third world before that and nothing quite prepared me for how third world Athens was because I had something to compare it to. And they were like more than competitive. They, they topped a lot of Southeast Asian countries in terms of like the dilapidation and the percent of like dirtish roads or roads so dirty that looked like dirt roads, I couldn't tell. And then it had kind of a more threatening quality to it than South Asia, which are pretty non aggressive cultures. But Athens was more like, I don't know, the. What's this, Thebes and Hercules or something?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And you mentioned getting robbed in Marseille. What was it specifically that made you feel like Marseille was more dangerous than.

[B]

So Philly's really trippy because you have white suburbs and neighboring countryside that are just incredibly stable first world societies. I don't want to say they're super rich or they're really nice. Some are, some aren't. Philly's not doing great. But it's this huge polarity between like Mad Max areas where you will never go for fear of life, and then you'll immediately cross over to other areas where like, if someone's impolite to you, it's shocking.

[C]

And yeah, I saw a guy beating a. I guess was probably a prostitute, like a woman. So I went up to stop him and then I was like, well, this is probably not a good, good way to get stabbed, but I'm gonna do it anyways. And then the woman was like, like, what the are you doing?

[B]

Yeah. So when I was in, I was staying, I'd left. I was slapped in the face twice. An Arab guy tried to mug me and then I beat him off.

[C]

Then.

[B]

People would just accost me for stuff. And I was served rotting food twice because I didn't have a lot of money. So I would sort of make shortcuts where I eat out at these crappy Arab places to save money. There's surprisingly little French food in France. It's strange. And none of those things happen in all of my years living in Philadelphia, because if you try that stuff, you'll get shot. Because it's understood when it's armed. And then in France it's just this constant low level just in your face. Or like I was, I was in Montpellier and the Yellow vest protests were in full swing where they blocked off the whole downtown. They would shatter glasses I did protest. They'd have like friggin barbecue during the protests. I was on a date and then there was an explosion a block away and I heard it and yeah, it's just, it's just crappy. I mean. And the French do not know how to maintain their country. It's crazy that France is a painting of a nation. Humans have spent thousands of years cultivating the nation of France into a work of art. And it's just, they have. It's really remarkable how much they take it for granted. And then you cross over to the other side of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and people are just living in utter poverty. And it's crazy. These are societies that are right next to each other.

[C]

Yeah. And it's not even. I mean southern France I guess has a different economy than northern France. Right. So there's poverty, but there's also the impact of the immigration and hanging around the train stations, in the parks and then. And the, it's interesting. I don't know. How would you. What do you make of the. The similar struggles between the rich and the poor? Places like everybody's messing it up. How does that work?

[B]

I think I can explain this where. The difference I felt in Philadelphia and Marseille is that no one fucks with you in Philly. Like you'll walk around downtown and, and it's a fairly peaceful experience. Sometimes you'll have someone ask you for money. I once saw a dead corpse outside my school for a few days straight that no one cleaned. But in France they were just always up in your face. And I think he's the public armed there and people, it's just. You'll be walking around, people will bother.

[C]

You and oh, I've seen these videos now of European guys going around parks and they're fighting the, the merchant sellers and like the immigrants who are being rude or doing something illegal. And they're not used to getting pushback and it's like a reversing dynamic and it's oriented completely around the physical pushback.

[B]

Yeah. Because they'd like what these, these immigrants would walk up to me and they're like, will you donate to the EU Commission for Disabilities? And I just say no. And then they'll slap me and I'll like, I'll just like, I got enough with this Arab guy. When I was in France, I was coming home from the bar, I was drunk and then he was trying to ask me for money. I just shoved him off. And like that never happened to me back home. But so Christendom and Islam have More in common than both of them would like to admit. And there was a switch that happened in Islam, it was with Al Ghazali or a little bit after, where they said the Quran is all knowledge and we don't need to study the things that aren't in the Quran. And that set Islam up on a thousand year trajectory of decline and obsession with the ulema or the religious scholars. So Islam could have become sort of a modern society because they had that trajectory in the Middle Ages. They more so devolved into a place like India where it's a third world theocracy. And then Europe with the Galileo, Spinoza, Descartes distinction, embraced a highly sort of autistic worldview where you don't deal with difficult questions by creating mental boxes for different things. And so when you look at Europe's issues, it's a society which uses a very bureaucratic box thinking as a way to get around dealing with the actual systemic issues of their society.

[C]

Right. Segment your way out of the problem.

[B]

And so for both the failures of the northern and the southern reaches of the Mediterranean or former Christendom and Islam is they're both taken in by a certain type of dysfunctional priest class.

[C]

So, yeah, very different results, but both dysfunctional priests.

[B]

Yeah. And the second thing I think about for the Mediterranean's decline, and this has bugged me for years, is that by the time we get to the early 18th century, the British had a stranglehold on the Mediterranean. Where in the War of Spanish Succession, which was started in 1701, the British took the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain. And Spain was the formal naval powerhouse of the world. They had colonies on every single continent, including a few ships on Antarctica. And they had a colony in the Solomon Islands which was made by American conquistadors. And the British took the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain, they took Majorca and the Balearics from Spain. And then the British and the Napoleonic wars took Malta, made it a naval base. They took Crete, I believe in the Greek War of Independence from the Turks and they took Cyprus from the Turks later. So there was a time period when the British held the majority of the important islands in the Mediterranean. And I find this nuts because we think about the West's era of ascendancy and not even just the West, a lot of modernity was the 500 mile circle around France. But then even more so the crazy thing that the British having a throttle on the Mediterranean from the War of Spanish succession in 1701 until the end of World War II in 1945 a 250 year time frame is that even the French weren't able to take control of the Mediterranean. Because you would think rationally the Spanish should have held the Mediterranean. They were a naval power, but the Spanish were a joke. By the early 18th century it makes sense for the Italians to hold the Mediterranean. They have the central position, they had no naval authority. And then the French, finally, they have a Mediterranean coast. And they have consistently been a colonial power. And they, they normally played second fiddle to Britain. But if the French had to, if the Mediterranean was not a French lake. And keep in mind as well, for the 18th century, Spain and France were the same joint monarchy. Their, their navies worked together and they still could not drive the British out of the Mediterranean. That means Mediterranean Europe failed on such a profound level that Britain, an island country that had like half of Spain's population in the 17th century and 1/5 France's, could consistently hold on to the Mediterranean. Is just embarrassing when you remember that the Mediterranean is the singular spot in history that has generated the most stuff with the exception of northwest Europe in the last 700 years. And so you think this civilization produced Cicero and Leonardo, da Vinci, Pericles, Plato, even like Ramses Cortez. And then the British held the entire Mediterranean system for centuries. And then that really sets up the question what happens to the Mediterranean?

[C]

Right. Because it would be kind of like if the Visigoths controlled all the Mediterranean from Tunisia before the Roman Empire fell or something. So like it would be inconsistent or whatever. Just northern people. You know, I pointed up because this.

[B]

Is a history podcast, I'm meant to let non history details slide here.

[C]

But there's been various groups of northerners that have occupied the Tunisia region. So there's multiple ones you could point out. Yes, but it'd be like if they actually controlled the whole thing from, from far away. And so the only thing I can think of to make sense of it is the volatility and scale of the pre industrial era just changed the equations so much more relative to each other than could have been possible before.

[B]

We're going to get will only make sense sort of tragic narrative. The rise and fall of the Mediterranean is much like a Greco Roman tragedy where if you read Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or another example of this, at the time of William Shakespeare, most of his plays were set in Italy, not England. Because at the time of 1500, at the time of 1600, when Shakespeare was writing, even Protestant England looked to Catholic Italy as its cultural leader. And then a century later, by the time of 1700, the English had a stranglehold on the Mediterranean. So in that one century the shift happened. But behind it is centuries or millennia of built up sort of historic trends. So it's a gradual thing that occurred over the course of thousands of years. And I just want to say before we get really get into the chronology here is this is an incredibly hard topic to cover where at least from my perspective making these videos, certain videos are significantly more difficult to make than others. And that's true both on the main channel and also on this one where the video I'm about to, I just finished editing is this entire reality is a lie. And that's a cross analysis of like 10 academic disciplines. But then like the World War II video when history 102, there's a pretty sort of set narrative on World War II that I would argue is largely accurate. I know that's controversial, but I don't think World War II is one of the historic events where our narrative is like super, super wrong. There are some issues, but that's not different topic. And for this topic there's not a set narrative because Anglo modernist history writing does not really think of the Mediterranean past the Greeks and the Romans. Because our history writing is all how do we make a set narrative that justifies neoliberalism? And so we'll mention like Greco Roman logic, we'll mention Jesus Christ, we won't mention their context at all what they were really talking about. Then we'll mention the Magna Carta and then ignore the Middle Ages. And then we're going to cherry pick a handful of authors in early modern Europe like Isaac Newton or the, or Locke or Descartes. And then we won't realize that these figures were had wildly different opinions than sort of the context we attribute to them. So we're cherry picking a single arc of history. And there isn't a core narrative in our society for why the Mediterranean declined. It's much like why Asia declined over the medieval period. And also this is cross referencing like five different civilizations. Where to get this narrative I had to read Islamic, classical, Western and Jewish history among a handful others to see their independent arcs to mix it into the Mediterranean system. Because it's easy to see the Mediterranean as an organic whole when the classical world dominated it. But there's very little writing about the Mediterranean as a whole in the time since. And I'll talk a bit of Fernand Browdale, who's like the one exception.

[C]

Yeah, because I really, I did think of it more as in how much Northern Europe excelled as the difference maker. And I think that could. That could conceivably make the difference on its own. But what about reasons for decline that are separated from reasons for not doing as well? So I haven't had a lot of exploration into that.

[B]

This is as much the Mediterranean's decline as North Europe's success. Where North Europe, I call it flicking the hermetic switch. Because the Northwest Europeans established all of these sort of. I'm making a video about this in the main channel, but they established all of these sort of generative, transcendent forces which you see in the hermetic trinity of capitalism, democracy, science, and our military institutions. And all of these started from the philosophic concept that because humans are flawed, if you pair them in structured competition, you get social institutions that transcend the current barriers of that society. And Northwest Europe established those in the early modern period. And then England and the Netherlands and neighboring countries exploded, and that created the last 400 years. What happened in the Mediterranean is that if you had moved the timescale a few centuries, if Northwest Europe had made this breakthrough and the geopolitical atmosphere was the same as the era of the Italian Renaissance, you would immediately see Italy, Spain and France industrialize and. And take in these modern technologies. And so you would have seen the Spanish taking on the Industrial revolution conquer all of West Africa down to the Congo.

[C]

Right. It's not like they've never done anything like that before. Of course, that makes sense.

[B]

The other kicker is that, and I'm not going to say what I think the actual answer is until later in the video, I need to sort of like drag you guys along is.

[C]

In.

[B]

The world climate of if the Industrial Revolution happened with the sort of social, political, geopolitical atmosphere of the 15th century, is the Muslims would have probably industrialized too. Where the Ottoman Turks had a technological and military parody in what was close to an economic parody, where West Europe was wealthier than the Muslim world in the late Middle Ages, but it wasn't a huge gap. But then with the industrial and modern breakthroughs, the difference for the first wave, with the second one being in East Asia, but for the first wave, is your cultural closeness to Britain determined your degree of industrialization. So America and Germany, countries very culturally close to Britain, industrialized a lot. Italy and Spain industrialized less in Brazil, in Turkey, even less. Where I was reading about, reading Paul Johnson's Modern Times, which is really a wonderful book, and he was talking Mussolini's dictatorship. And one of the things that kept on just striking me is Mussolini reminds me a lot more of Latin American caudillos in places like Brazil or Colombia then he does Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Because Mussolini, in his words, was saying he wanted to have a totalitarian state. And he invented the word totalitarian as a positive where everything inside the state. And he was, in his theory, a hardcore Marxist socialist. There's a whole story there. But if you actually look at Mussolini's country, it was fairly milquetoast. He worked with the Catholic Church. He didn't really get rid of private property. He had something relatively equivalent to freedom of speech for a lot of his time in. The reasoning for that is that Italians are fundamentally not capable of being totalitarians. They are not a serious enough nation anymore to pull it off. Because the thing with totalitarianism is you require a certain degree of cultural seriousness that The Mediterranean had 700 years ago, but they don't have now. And so something happened where if you play the board game Axis and Allies, which is set In World War II, you have the industrial bases and you realize that in the geopolitics of World War II, the Mediterranean was totally dependent on Northwest Europe, where the Italians were militarily dependent on the Germans. And for Christ's sake, the Germans and the English were fighting over Libya and Egypt, where the field armies that were fighting over North Africa or the three were Anglo, American, German and British. Well, they were fighting over the Italians and the French. And it's so crazy to go back even to the high Middle Ages when the Italians were introducing new banking and technology and ideas to England.

[C]

It's hard to get as much into the war if you aren't actually a player. Right. If how are you gonna do anything but LARP in this great European contest if you're, there's no way that your engine is going to be able to come out on, on top. Yeah, like I, I, it's interesting. I mean, Italy was probably even more involved than they may have been because Spain and France basically stayed out of it entirely. It was really just a fight between England, Germany and Russia.

[B]

So France didn't stay out, they lost. There's a difference. And Spain, Spain is another interesting example where as of the time Of World War II, most of Spain was not industrialized. Most of Spain lived in a sort of medieval agriculture and where you still used horses and like farming with shovels. And most Spaniards did not have running water or electricity in the Spanish Civil War. And it was a feudal society where a handful of noble families dominated everything. And Spain is a temperate climate, Western European white Christian society. And then you look at the New World where Argentina was quite similar, Brazil was quite similar. And my friend Samo Berger has an interesting point that when you look at Latin America there, that it's an extension and a decadent version of Mediterranean civilization. And we're going to talk about sort of the shared ideal of Mediterranean civilization over this video. But when you look at Argentina in South Brazil, that are societies that are whiter than America. And so you can't project the idea that Latin America's failures are caused by like brown people. Stupid. Because you see the same sort of trends in very white societies in Latin America. And the reasoning for that is that these societies are extensions of the decadence of Mediterranean civilization, where they're carrying all the cultural baggage of Mediterranean Europe into a new world. In the same way that Amaury Duriancourt said that America is a young country and an old society and that America is pulling on the cultural baggage and heritage of European societies that go back thousands of years, that isn't a new geographic area.

[C]

Right. So this will be very informative for understanding our own hemisphere.

[B]

Yeah. And the way I'll start this. And we're going to go from roughly the Roman Empire until the Industrial revolution where the classical world was the unification of the entire Mediterranean system. And this is the only time it's happened. And so you see the sort of principles of the Mediterranean can support either small eco, small ecosystems or large ecosystems. Because both the Greeks and the Latins started out in very small sub regions, either like the city state of Rome or the coastal areas of the bottom half of Greece. And they formed these cultures that first encapsulated their sort of peninsulas and national identities. And the Greeks were, as Herodotus said, frogs around the pond. Their evolutionary strategy was settling in Mediterranean climate, coastal areas around the Mediterranean. But then classical civilization formed this sort of cultural metastasism that unified the entire Mediterranean, crushing the local cultures in a process of globalization, like the Phrygians or the Egyptians or the Syrians or whatever. But then in the process you saw the arrival of a cosmopolitan Mediterranean civilization that was no longer purely Greek or Roman. The problem though is that this civilization was brittle enough in sort of complex and sort of distinct from actual ties enough that people weren't willing to die for it. And so Greco Roman civilization become Mediterranean civilization. And when you get to the 2nd century A.D. or the 3rd century A.D. you have the Roman Emperor Severus making everyone in the empire the a Roman citizen. But when everyone's a citizen the identity of what being a citizen means, means you're a subject now. And Rome became this highly exploitive, unequal, military, socialist command economy. And you saw sort of two distinct trends. So Mediterranean civilization was an urban identity that over time transcended just being Greek and Romans. You had Syrian Roman emperors, you had North African Roman emperors, Gallic Spanish. And so there was the upper class Roman culture and the lower class Roman culture. And over time both of these degenerated where the Mediterranean cities had more in common with each other than with the neighboring countrysides. It's much like the modern world today. And Peter Brown speaks of this very eloquently. Where in the late Roman Empire a majority of inhabitants of France still spoke Celtic languages. And some historians say that the transmission of Latin languages to France was done by the Catholic Church. Others say that it happened by the end of Rome. But you had these cities that spoke Latin in the western half of the empire and Greek in the eastern half of the empire that had more in common with each other than with the neighboring countrysides. This was the elite culture of the classical world. And you can sort of see its culmination in Plotinus. Plotinus was the, the creator of Neoplatonic philosophy, which was the attempt to turn Plato's religious concepts into a sort of a straight up religion. Then you have the lower class Mediterranean culture, which either manifested in slaves, which cultivated Christianity, which was a religion of the Mediterranean people who didn't belong to the older blood and soil religions that dominated the ancient world. Where beforehand your ethnic identity was your religious identity and religion was passed down through blood. And once you had these multi ethnic populations in the Mediterranean cities, the upper classes could take on sort of things like Platonism or Stoicism and Christianity appealed to the lower classes. And in that lower class culture you also saw the military dictator Roman army culture, which was the culture that converted a lot of the Germanic barbarians. So in modern sort of cultural terms, because there are a lot of sort of civilizational harmonies, the upper class culture was like, you know, those like upper class people in the Northeast who have a very distinct style, they have like a very distinct type of houses they live in, they have uniform political views and it's very managerial class worldview. The city urban, the city Mediterranean culture was sort of like rap. And then you had sort of Appalachian redneck country culture for the military dictators. And so you saw the unification of this centralized Mediterranean culture. And with the fall of Rome you saw that this culture wasn't strong enough to sort of maintain itself. It Lacked sort of the dynamic force. But it was crystallized into the classical heritage of Western civilization. That both being Christianity and the crystallization of Greco Roman wisdom, which was passed down through the Dark Ages. So this Mediterranean culture survived as a crystallized cultural form. As you saw with the fall of Rome, the split into three different daughter civilizations to classical civilization, that being the west, the Greek Orthodox and the Islamic.

[C]

So how did that work with the Platonic philosophy being held up by the elites and the Christian by the more poor people? But there was still, you said this, this preserved the classics in a good way. Because I'm thinking, okay, that parallels with kind of these technocratic religions among the elite compared to Christian revival among the broader population. But then there's also the positive elements of the interplay of these ideas and maintaining them both. So I suppose a lot of the high like a lot of the intellectual stuff that goes on, even if the majority of the technocratic elite are like Platonist oligarchs, there's still a percent of them in which the good elements of those ideas are taken or there's some intellectual vibrancy still.

[B]

You're drawing the parallel too closely. When I say that when I'm comparing the northeastern managerial elite to the classical elite culture, I'm not saying that the classical elite culture had the same issues as the modern managerial. Where that Roman elite culture, it did collapse in a moral degeneracy. Where a big issue in Rome that you later see through Latin America is basically the betrayal by the elite aristocratic culture where they would devolve into very low trust corruptive things. And the ability to stop elite corruption has been a very consistent issue of Mediterranean civilization. However, Neoplatonism is 1000% a better worldview than Marxism where Neoplatonism actually makes sense. It will get you to God. It has a coherent theory on how to find the moral and the good. And it's not fundamentally built off taking other people's stuff. Platonism has its own issues. It can lead to incredible arrogance and overthinking and disconnection from reality. But I'm not trying to draw that connection. And so with this unified Mediterranean culture, you sort of saw Greco Roman classical civilization metastasize across the entire Mediterranean system. Where you had Roman emperors from south Spain and it was widely known by the time of Trajan that the Spaniards could operate as pretty good substitutes for Italians because the Romani tost identity spread across the region. And so it was very normal for aristocratic families to have properties in France and in Spain and in North Africa. And then cycle between these. And so you have the elite culture and then the local regional cultures that sort of kept their own different vibe. Where in, for example, the French language is a descendant from vulgar Latin, where the way Latin was de facto spoken by the peasants in modern France became modern French. And then the elites would write or speak something a lot closer to Cicero's Latin. And this was not a simple process where as an example, Dante in the 14th century is seen as an important figure for Italian nationalism because Dante was the first figure who would write a, write serious works in straight up Italian, where earlier people would write in Latin. And when Dante decided to write in Italian, what he was saying is we as Italians have progressed so much since Rome that rather than pretend that we're speaking Latin, let's just decide that we've Italian has mutated into a new language. Or as an example, the first time that French is mentioned as a distinct language was in the period around Charlemagne where they would talk about the language of the Franks versus just Latin. So it was this gradualistic process where there's a historian of language, I forget his name, where he talks of the two deaths of Latin. The first death of Latin was when Italians and French and Spaniards stopped thinking the language they spoke in their daily life was Latin. And that occurred over the course of the Middle Ages. And then the second death of Latin was around World War I, when the aristocracy stopped teaching basically their young male pupils to read the classics like Cicero or Tato or those people. And so you'll see that even after the end of classical civilization, it survived as this sort of corpus that all three of its descendant civilizations. And I always feel sort of weird, should I put the Jews as a fourth descendant civilization? Because they're ultimately older or as old as classical civilization. But Judaism of this time period took enormous impacts, influence from classical civilization. So the Muslims, the West, the Byzantines and the Jews were all sort of descendants of classical civilization in their own ways and they took different trajectories from it.

[C]

And I mean, all those places are very different. Back in the day, before Internet and travel, the cultural differences must have been even more extreme. How would you compare the globalization to the Mediterranean to the globalization of the world today? Because in some ways we're more connected today. But I just feel like the differences today, if you include the whole globe, are still deeper than the differences in the Mediterranean back then. But maybe that's wrong. So.

[B]

I think they're comparable, but I'm careful about saying that because if I say they're comparable, People might stop looking for genuine differences. So, as a brief aside, I just bought two maps, and they're pushpin maps. And so I'm putting in the location for every place I've been in America and every place I've been in the world. And so I'm sort of mapping the formative experiences of my life. And it's interesting that most of my life sort of living experiences have either been in Pennsylvania or Texas, but I have been to a bunch of other places. So it sort of speaks to your point I'm thinking about, because the way I think is I map my perceptual environment of who I talk to, what the architecture is like, what the trees are like. Then I try to figure out how their motivations make sense. And then I build a mental frame of the world, and then I categorize both my interactions with it and what I've read about the world and heard to see if my perceptual frame is. Is accurate, both on the macro level and the perceptual personal level. And the reason I'm saying that is I look back at my life where there's this degree of conformity around the world, where I've always been struck by this experience. When I was in Phuket, in the Indian Ocean, in Thailand, where I thought, this looks exactly like Florida. But at the same time, if you actually know Thai people, they are so different from Americans in a litany of ways. But you might not think that because the architecture is meant to reflect this conformity. Or what I've found, for example, is that cultural differences even inside America are often greater than cultural differences inside Europe. But it's for different stuff. An educated Greek and an educated German have significantly more comparable views on things like politics or religion or their place in the world or history than a Californian or a Texan. And so globalization today is a series of contradictions that mostly exists at a confluence of either the ease of transportation or the managerial class trying to shove conformity down our throats. And in Greco Roman classical civilization, it was a similar dynamic between sort of the Greco Roman classical elite trying to force the Mediterranean to be unified. And there were weird moments where when Marcus Aurelius, a Roman, worked with the Egyptian Cleopatra and the Syrians and East Mediterraneans to try to subjugate Rome itself. So that's sort of an example of globalized elites using other cultures against their home societies. So there was, or Aristotle said that one of the prime signs of tyranny is bringing in foreigners to subjugate your own nation. The thing though is that the Industrial Revolution is totally its own ball cord, where the Industrial Revolution changes a lot of variables. But also keep in mind, for the perspective of classical civilization, I can fly to the Indian Ocean in 25 hours. It would take weeks to cross the Mediterranean, let alone Britain. And so I think the broader cultural differences are greater in modern globalization between an Ethiopian and a New Yorker than they were between a Britain and an Egyptian. At the same time, the scale of difference from the perceptual frame of classical civilization was comparable where if you're in a world where Athens is actually. Athens is a terrible example to pick. They were always very globalized. If you're in a world where your tiny area of Greece is your entire world rather than France in like 1800, then the scale of the Roman Empire and the Silk Road is as vast as globalization today does. Do those points make sense?

[C]

Yes, and it almost makes it more weird that the technology, shorting, shortening the distances has given us an almost unlimited amount of things that we can relate to with people on the other side of the globe, whether it's fashion, a celebrity, a movie, or. Or knowledge of even the the same politician or politics itself. There's all these crazy relational things with people who have even more philosophical differences than. Than anybody who would relate to. Be able to relate to each other back in the day. So it's a. I guess it's a contradiction is probably the best way to summarize it.

[B]

That's one of biology's best points, where whatifalthist has a big following among Iranian nationalists. That's its own story. I've gone viral on Farsi Twitter, but then there's lots of people In Texas, within 10 miles of where I live, who hate my guts and want me dead. And so that's an example of what you're describing. And it's paralleled in Greco Roman civilization, either by ethnic diasporas or the religious mystery cults where Christianity came out of this atmosphere of cultural syncretism between Mithraism or the cult of Isis or Cybele, whereas these cults or religions that would spread across the Roman Empire. So there were Mithraism in Britain, but Mithraism was a religion from Iran. Or there were Christian outcroppings in France and Britain too. So it's these transnational connections and the nationalist frame of the last few centuries sort of blinds us to how nationalism did exist in the ancient and the medieval world. It didn't as a psyop like Marxists, but there were Certain periods where these transnational connections would matter more to someone's identity than the national identities.

[C]

Well, the perfect example is we worked with all the Libertarian parties in all the different countries across the world. There's at least some sort of libertarian institution or organization, basically every country.

[B]

Yeah. I will return. Before we get to the next topic, I want to talk about Fernand Braudel a little, where he's sort of a meme of a historian. And my dad introduced me to Fernand Braudel, where my dad was talking about him and he was saying that he was really big in 20th century history departments because he was a French historian from Marseilles, and he impacted generations of history in the mid 20th century because his deal sort of autistic obsession over price fluctuations. So he would make his grad students go through private letters of people in medieval Mediterranean world, then compile all the data on grain prices in every city in the Mediterranean, as well as wine prices, the price of gold. And so he developed these highly complex systems about price fluctuations in daily life. So one of his big works is A Daily Life in the Early Modern World. And I think a lot of Braudel's work is admirable. I've read a bunch of books of his, and he's very good at that one thing. And he's also good at building out narratives. But there's a few other things where he fits into a particular Marxist narrative of history, of obsession over material sort of economic things, because in the Marxist religious worldview, those are the only things that drive human nature and the trajectory of history. So Marxists will use this sort of obsession as a way to ignore sort of like the moral evils of Marxism and their complete denial of human nature and reality. In Braudel, I don't think he was a Marxist. He might have been sort of adjacent or for little bits, but it doesn't color his worldview in a totally impractical way, like a lot of French academia of that era, which is basically just ridiculous intellectual masturbating, where the authors often didn't even believe the things they were saying. For a lot of the postmodernists, after they said, yeah, that was all a joke to see how stupid you were.

[C]

And so if they're used to deconstructing everything, then they view everything they produce as deconstructable. I guess there's no bounds to Exactly.

[B]

And a lot of them were like most of those postmodernist authors were signed petitions in favor of legitimate pedophilia. Foucault was A pedophile, that they had a lot of moral degeneracies. Sartre worked with the. I believe Sartre worked with the Nazis during the occupation. Camus fought against it. Fernand Braudel resisted the Nazis. And he wrote his masterpiece on the Mediterranean during the reign of Philip Brown II in his head during when he was in a Nazi work camp, which is a pretty baller move. You have my respect. But Brodallin formed an entire generation of historians who were part of his sort of numeric autistic obsession. And that obsessive phase was actually very good for the field of history, because the patterns of history that I look at from Turchin or these authors, they're pulling on the enormous data sets that the Braudel generation of historians did. But that generation also utterly ignored the existence of grand narratives which sort of made history operate at much less of its creative potential as a field, because it wasn't. It was taboo to use history to understand how the world worked. But Braudel's masterpiece, which I have not read, I have read many of his other books and I think practically any historians who quote this book have not read it. Because I have it here. It's like 2,000 pages and it's all pure autism on the era of late 16th century Mediterranean Europe. And he talks about like, the thing that Browdell does is my dad started reading this and he has a 40 page segment on the rudder structure of Mediterranean traffic. And my dad's just like, no. And I was reading his book the Soil of France, and he has a 30 page segment on roof tiles in France and he doesn't even connect the roof tiles, like regional cultural patterns. Because I read the Soul of France thinking I want to know, like, what makes Norman culture different from Breton from the Walloons? No, it's just him ranting about like the salt price of Brittany in the 15th century. And he goes to like random small towns in France. I'm like, dude, have a fucking point. Like, what's wrong with you? And you can tell that just French academia just flatulated this dude forever, so that he had no editorial ability. And when I went to Marseille, they had an entire wing of the Marseille History Museum dedicated to Fernand Braudel. This book by Fernand Braudel, that's how big he was.

[C]

He's like, I'm not making points, I'm doing analysis.

[B]

Yeah, it's just in the thing is like his. His History of Civilizations is really good. That's like 600 pages where he goes through every major world Civilization alive now.

[C]

And.

[B]

So his big book is basically on the topic we're discussing, where he looks at a snapshot of the Mediterranean system In the late 16th century, at this historic tipping point from the Mediterranean's dominance to North Europe. And it's seen as a landmark book in the field of history because he. He sort of looks at the civilizational differences. He looks at the macroeconomic trends where the Mediterranean system stretches from the North Sea to the Sahel out to the Orient. He looks at the economic and the demographic shift. And Browdell was really big in sort of creating monumental history or history books meant to examine all living variables of a specific sub era of history. But do you have any.

[C]

He only analyzed. So he wanted to include a lot of variables, but he was only really analyzing the materialistic variables. Is that correct?

[B]

Braudel does have some concept of the ideal, as 20th century French academics go, he's more reasonable in less Marxistly autistic than most of them were. But he totally does devalue things like cultural shifts, where one of his quotes is that in my worldview, the Protestant Reformation was just ripples on an ocean.

[C]

Kind of just like poetic dismissals of. And then ripples would be like probably rippling from his information on prices or whatever.

[B]

Exactly. And I do not think that's fair. I think it totally discounts human agency in history. It's comparable to God's germs and steel, where Jared diamond says that all of human history is powered off geography.

[C]

Right. This is a good example because it's really useful. Like the geographical lens is very useful. And I personally love being like, hey, can we take a second to look at. We're talking about these long periods of history or the fall of the Roman Empire. Can we also, besides the battles, can we bring up the fact that this collapse perfectly tracks like the rise of inflation? Yeah, but then you actually have to get into the reasons that they were forced to engage in inflation. And that's going to tie you back.

[B]

To the value landscape in spiral dynamics. Braudel and that generation of historians with level six trying to psyop themselves through level five. So they have level six's moral relativity and nihilism, where in the tiers of consciousness, level six is that everyone's the same and you can't judge others. That was the dominant system of the 20th century. Then they're using the rationalistic methods of level five to psyop themselves. We are at level eight talking through level seven.

[C]

Right. It removes agency too. Finish your point. So.

[B]

Level seven is Looking at the different historic context of a given situation and then understanding how context affects morality. Level 8, which I gained in the last year partly through help from Homath, is to look at the inner soul of a certain historic time period and then compare how both the shifts in context versus the shift in inner soul affects the course of history.

[C]

And that would be what we described, what I described as the value landscape.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And to finish on the removing agency part.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So it's more so okay. When you look at. It's more like a guide or a map than a reason, which we mentioned before. And. But then when you frame it as the ripples or the effects of these kind of statistical prices or geography, it's. You're kind of excusing people for what happened and creating like a fatalistic paradigm, which I suppose is fairly evident on its surface. We don't even need to elaborate on that.

[B]

Another thing to keep in mind is most of these thinkers were French and France did not have a good 20th century. There's the culmination of this Mediterranean trend where France is the least Mediterranean of the Mediterranean countries. France is simultaneously a Celtic, a Germanic and a Latin country. And France over the course of the 20th century started out as a first rate power and they slid to basically be a third right power. They held like a third of Africa colonies all over the world. They could hold their own against Germany in 1914. By the time we get to the 60s, France had given up its colonies. It had gone through multiple regime shifts in the last generation. They had economically decayed far beyond Germany and Britain, the countries they used to be better than. And they were governed by socialists who stopped there from being a free market. A majority of their economy was controlled by the government. The Marxists nearly took over. France hadn't finished industrializing by World War II or even the interwar period, I'd say. But they were in a recession for most of the interwar period with hyperinflation and slow growth. And France took like over a century to industrialize because of the socialist state held them back. And so when you're looking at these highly fatalistic French philosophers, I think at least part of it is just French cope.

[C]

Oh, that makes so much sense. Yeah. We couldn't have done anything different. It's not our fault. And I wonder if it's. Is this like what the Normans get for forcing the south of France to speak French? Because then it created the. It put the southern European culture up into the north.

[B]

So that wasn't the Normans that Was the French. The Normans are Vikings.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, the north, you know, if.

[B]

We were hanging out socially, I would not give you for this. But this is a history podcast.

[C]

It's a bit of a troll too, to call them Normans. I'm like, intentionally.

[B]

It's still incorrect.

[C]

What would you call them?

[B]

I would call them the French, Frank. You could. The Franks.

[C]

I mean, well, I need a word to distinguish besides north and south, because that's boring.

[B]

Call them Franks.

[C]

All right, The Franks. That's what the Franks get for making the south speak French.

[B]

Yeah, they got the malaises of Mediterranean Europe. And one of the points Fernand Braudel talks at the soul of France is North and South French complaining. But the other where Mediterranean Europe's complain that North Europeans are really sort of melancholy and moody and sort of dark. And they claim Mediterranean Europe doesn't like that North Europe cooks with butter or the cold or those stuff. And North Europeans say that South Europeans are disorganized and dirty and inefficient. And it's funny that North Europeans tend to see South Europeans as loud and emotional and rash. And then South Europeans tend to think that North Europeans sort of hold on to resentment for a very long time in their sort of like melancholic and resentful. And so you see like sort of two emotional polarities that are different.

[C]

They're like, basically, get over it. Have a cerveza.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And so to get back to the history, when you look at the fall of Rome and sort of end of civilization cycle two, because keep in mind the Mediterranean is very sort of historically privileged that we can see three civilizational cycles at least work through. End of the first cycle was the Bronze Age collapse. End of the second cycle is the fall of Rome and the third cycle is to be seen soon. And it's the same ocean, but with the three sort of the tilting point of the end of Late antiquity where Peter Brown talked this unified late antique civilization that was the synthesis of basically Platonism in Christianity. And Henry Perenne talks about how at Sutton Hoo, this Anglo Saxon burial site from the 6th century or the worst period of the Dark Ages is they have Byzantine art and armor. So the soldiers of Anglo Saxon England fought as mercenaries in the Middle East. So into the Dark Ages you had this unified Mediterranean system where the fall of Rome wasn't the thing that killed the Mediterranean's trade, that was first the Byzantine reconquest of the west and secondly the Arab migrations where with the fall of Rome and the Death of the unified Mediterranean cosmopolitan culture. You saw the Germanic barbarians come down from the north and they took France, Spain, Italy and North Africa. And in the Mediterranean, the Germanic barbarians were a small minority of the population, like 1 to 5%, and they were Aryan Christians, again, no Nazi relation, who were split up from the majority, what became Catholic populations. And so they were not able to hold on to power sustainably. And a lot of them maintained not very bad tyrannies. So there was still trade, there was still philosophy and poetry in the Vandals in North Africa, the Ostrogoths in Italy and then the Visigoths in Spain. I'm not saying the Dark Ages were good, but it was not a total collapse. But then over time, they sort of grew decadent in these areas. And while civilization collapsed in the Western or where the Roman Empire collapsed in the west, in the east, the Greeks were capable of forming a new identity. Where in Byzantium you saw the attempt to unify on Eastern Christianity first, that did not work because the Middle Eastern regions of the empire had their own sects of Christianity who were in constant civil war with the main Orthodox Church. At this point, the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches were legally the same church, but they started to actually diverge, an outcome as a function of. During the Roman period, the Roman Empire was divided east, west, between the western Latin speaking half based out of Milan and the eastern Greek speaking half based out of Constantinople. And over time, the Byzantine Empire became fused with sort of greater Greek identity because the Greeks were the singular sort of proudest and strongest Mediterranean people, where the Latins had to cobble together these distinct Italian identities. And so when Rome fell, Italy descended back into these regional Latin identities, much like they had before Rome. But the Greeks had enough of an identity, they could form a sort of new empire together and they roped the Anatolians and other Balkan peoples into that identity. So the Byzantine Empire worked because you had the alliance of the tough barbarian hill peoples of the Balkans and Anatolia with the cosmopolitan cultured Greeks of the coast. And the Byzantines were able to launch an offensive across the Mediterranean in the 6th century under Justinian. And they took Italy, North Africa and the bottom part of Spain. But then a version of the Black Death took out half of the Mediterranean's population. And Italy was stuck in constant wars between Germanic peoples and the Byzantines, which killed I think like a third to half of Italy's population. So Italy was utterly denuded of cities. And then what got North Africa off its trajectory, where North Africa was the wealthiest region of the Roman Empire, Tunisia and Egypt were both very wealthy sort of breadbaskets and they were the center of Christianity. If there was a single place that early Christianity was most dependent on, it was North Africa. And the arrival of the Muslims destroyed the irrigation systems in the Maghreb or Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. That made the Maghreb decline. It wasn't per se the fall of Rome that destroyed the Mediterranean system. It was the combination of the Black Death and the Byzantine wars across the region as well as the Byzantine wars with the Persians that burnt all the cities in sea Syria and then the later Muslim takeover.

[C]

Well, I never thought of it the Byzantines as Greece getting kind of a second win because they weren't all of it, but they were kind of a big part of it. And interesting that they're more representative of the Roman culture than Rome, which has a mix of Celtic and other. Yeah, more other influences. And the Germanics coming right down from the continent, which is Greece is very much like splotched right on the Mediterranean, protected by mountains and scattered into the sea and islands.

[B]

Another thing is that the Greek and the Roman identities fused in a sort of strange way where in the early 20th century when the Greek Republic was taking back territory from the Turks that was ethnically Greek, places like the island of Samos off the west coast of Turkey or Thessalonica, is that the Greek called themselves Romanitas. So in the early 20th century, Greek speakers in the Ottoman Empire saw their ethnic identity as Roman because the Greek and Roman identities fused so much.

[C]

Well, that's kind of nice poetic. Because the Romans kind of talk to them, talked about themselves as Greco culture. Right. Is that a thing or is that right? So they. That's pretty nice when you know, one guy says, you know, I'm trying to think of an example, but it's like they're both paying the respects to each other like I am this guy. No, I have you.

[B]

Yeah. They saw themselves as culturally and ethnically similar enough that they could be paralleled. And it speaks to sort of the Mediterranean unity and yet division point where the Romans and the Greeks did worship different gods that had reached Lamech thousands of years years, but their pantheons were practically identical where every single Roman God had a Greek parallel who did the same role. So much so that the Roman Empire could psyop itself that all of the empire worshiped the same gods under different names. Because the Greeks and the Romans had this shared unity where even though the Celts and the Germans in the Egyptians had parallel gods to the Greco Romans, it was, it was still further out.

[C]

But there's sort of more of a stretch.

[B]

This cultural unity is what kept the Mediterranean world together. And so with the three Western civilization formed as a cultural unity of the Latin local population with the new Germanic invaders, Eastern Orthodox was the molding of this earlier Mediterranean culture on top of the Greek ethnic identity. And that was a mix of Greco Roman. It's the sort of Plato Christ unity I spoke about before. And then the Muslims were an outgrowth of a historic trend that went back earlier or the revival of a new of the Fertile Crescent region where under the Byzantines and the Persians, the Aramagans, they were Christian and they were sort of the beating heart of a lot of the world system. The wealthiest areas in the Roman Empire were in the Middle east and Egypt. And so this area was pulling away from the Byzantines because there were different sects of Christianity. And then what happened is that the Muslims skyrocketed across the region really quickly. If there's a single individual who changed the course of history through a single action, it would be Muhammad for Christ, the reason he took over the world was through his followers like Paul, where Paul institutionalized the religion and then you had the fathers of the Church who did a brilliant job of getting it to operate on a civilizational basis. But for the Prophet Muhammad, this one guy built the political apparatus, he built the religion and did all of this stuff. And then within the Prophet Muhammad's death, the Muslims who were already conquering the known world, they made it to Egypt and Iran. And it's a sort of easy narrative that the Muslims were the reason the Mediterranean declined. But it's also not true. Where the Muslims did, for example, degrade the Maghreb's agricultural system and the irrigation that the Romans had built, where the Romans had huge cities out in the desert desert of North Africa that no one lives, were much like the American West. The Roman engineering system could make areas of the desert that were otherwise uninhabitable fertile. The Arabs didn't have that ability. But the Arabs did introduce a lot of agricultural innovations. By connecting the east and the west, they caused a revitalization and learning that wasn't just in one or two things. Things. I was reading Gustave Le Bon's book on Arabic civilization, and he talks about how the Arabs had incredible atlases, understandings of zoology, astrology, philosophy, alchemy, the Greeks, history. So the Arabs had an incredible civilization that was very vibrant and they completely dominated the Mediterranean for a few centuries. In the. In the early Middle Ages, where the Arabs Conquered the area from Portugal and most of Spain across the Maghreb out to India. And at this point, West Europe descended into a dark age where it was split off. And the Muslims would say that West Europeans are savages, like animals. And the only things of value that the Europeans built were made by the Romans or the Greeks. And the Byzantines went through their own crisis phase where they had a civil war between the Anatolians, who thought that having religious icons were evil, and then the Greeks on the coast, who thought that you should have icons religiously. And it was the main focus of their worship. And as the Byzantines were stuck in civil war, the Muslims totally dominated the Mediterranean, where they took all the major islands between Cyprus and Crete and the Balearics, Sicily, Corsica. And the Arabs nearly took Constantinople with the Byzantines were able to fight them off with the Greek fire flamethrowers. The Muslims had a naval base at Aix de Provence in the south of France, where they controlled the entire country coast of the south of France. And they'd raid into Europe. And the Arabs even raided. They besieged Rome, and they nearly took the city of Rome. And in this period when the Arabs dominated the Mediterranean, you saw a flowering of Arab trade across the entire region from Spain to Syria. And this was the golden age of Islam. And Fernand Braudel actually thinks that when the Muslims did lose the Mediterranean to the Christians in the 11th century, that that was the tipping point that caused Islamic civilization to decline because it occurred at the same time around a thousand A.D. why?

[C]

Did winning the Mediterranean make them decline?

[B]

No, losing it.

[C]

Oh, that's when the. Okay, right. At least it's correlated with their decline.

[B]

The Arabs held the Mediterranean from like 800 until like a thousand, maybe a little earlier than 800. But it took them extra time to build up a Mediterranean fleet to first take the Maghreb. But then they used the fleet against the Byzantines were the Greeks.

[C]

And the Byzantines was their fight basically where the Byzantines were more Orthodox and the Greeks were a little bit more into the pantheon of gods. And that related to their desire to continue using figurines like which got mixed up with idol worship.

[B]

Interestingly, Christianity had a reaction to Islam in this time period where because the Muslims were so dominant and there were things like Western authors would fake having Arabic names and scientific documents to look more prestigious. Or when the kings of these north Spanish kingdoms had health issues, they'd go to the Muslim world that the doctors heal them, because it was widely known that Islamic medicine was better than Christian. But so Chris Dawson, who's a great Catholic historian, he talks about how Charlemagne's concept of Christianity was colored by Islam because he was talking like defending the faith in a masculine warrior way. Charlemagne had multiple wives, like a Muslim king. They would make these sort of Christian recitals that sound a lot like Islamic prayers. And then with the struggle inside the Byzantine over icons, there's a theory that the Anatolians who are anti icon, they thought that because the Muslims conquered the known world and the Muslims hated making images like God, that they were trying to react to be more like Islam against the Greek tradition of having these icons.

[C]

So it was the Islamic strength was almost a validation of Europe's warrior priest ethic.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Through the way that Christianity was adopted throughout Europe.

[B]

And the rise of Islam has turned the Mediterranean from a sort of interactive civilizational sandbox to a player versus player C, where having multiple civilizations turn the Mediterranean into a battleground. And there was both cooperation and violence, where Christian powers would work with Muslims to fight other Christians or vice versa, or they'd hire mercenaries from their side or trade. And the Jews were quite. The Jews did well because they had a unified trade system across the entire Mediterranean. One of the best records of medieval Islam we have is the Geniza records in Cairo of Jewish merchants in like 12th century Cairo who would record a trade system that went from London to Indonesia, because Cairo's in the middle of that. But it opened up to the Mediterranean being a sea of pirates. And piracy was a long standing variable in the Mediterranean. And legitimate powers would have pirates where the king would hire up privateers to attack his enemies. The Knights Hospitaller, who were based out of Malta. In the early modern period, they were pirates sanctioned by the Pope to steal from the Muslims. And they operated a slave trade. And the same thing with the Barbary Corsairs, who from the high Middle ages until the 19th century in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, they were pirates who would raid across the Mediterranean. And 1 million white Europeans were brought to North Africa to be slaves. There was an even larger slave trade from the Slavs in Eastern Europe to the Middle East. And the Barbary Corsairs, they were an utter nightmare. They made it out to Ireland and Iceland once, and they were ultimately defeated by the Americans because everyone in the region had developed these sort of deals with the Corsairs, where the King of France would pay off the Corsairs to not attack French shipping. And America just said like, fuck that. And we sent some ships over during Thomas Jefferson's rule in the early 19th century. And these American Guys hired mercenaries in North Africa and then took out the Barbary Corsairs single handedly.

[C]

Right. And it wasn't even that hard. It was basically the relationship with the Europeans stabilized, but it was like, hey, wait a minute, we're in an industrial civilization now. You can just kill them. You don't have to keep paying the ransom.

[B]

A lot of dynamics like that lasted longer than we think. Where I want to, potentially my favorite book ever is Les Miserables, set in the early 19th century. And the main character, Jean Valjean, he's a galley slave, where he's a convict and he's sent to row the galleys. And this is early industrial revolution. Jean Valjean becomes a wealthy factory owner later in the book. And with that, it's just crazy that these galley slaves, which was ostensibly a Roman institution, they still had hundreds of dali slaves in first world countries like France in the 19th century. And the galley slaves were. Because the Mediterranean's wind patterns are somewhat uneven, you have to have large groups of people rowing galleys to keep people going. And one of my favorite movies, Ben Hur has a great galley slave scene and they were often manned by slaves. But galley slave warfare is interesting where the bottle of Lepanto between the Spanish and the Turks is emblematic. We have these huge fleets where most of the men in these galleys were the sort of galley slaves. And sometimes they were free, sometimes they were slaves. Depend on context. But it's crazy that early modern warfare, you have these huge fleets of these enormous ships. They're just being rowed.

[C]

That's. Why did that last so far into modern warfare? Because I know the ship that we, we sent over a few ships, one of them being, I think the primary one being the USS Constitution, which was an early US naval ship that wasn't huge, but was really well made and competitive for its size and had a really thick hull. We have a piece of it in my house and a bench because there was extra wood laying in the harbor for a few hundred years from when it was constructed. So why. I mean, I mean that to me that just points out how far behind they were from the English. It makes it even weirder that the Europeans didn't take them out first.

[B]

So keep in mind it was the Spanish and the French who were using galley slaves too, into the 19th century. And the reason for it is that in. So if you, if you're. If the Atlantic is a very sort of like chaotic and big ocean. So galley slaves don't work in the Atlantic because it's just not going to work because the ocean currents are so big in the Mediterranean. The issue is there's not enough wind. And so you have, you use muscle power to make up the deficiency. And on top of it, these are societies where human life was relatively cheap. In most old world societies, human life was relatively cheap. And you could just get a lot of guys or your political opponents or just medieval Europe's only slaves were Muslim captives because the rest of Christendom abolished slavery. And America is one of the very few societies where life is not cheap due to the nature of the frontier and our constant increases in productivity.

[C]

Right, of course it makes sense. Now that I think about it. It's the same reason that high tech competes with low tech Labor. Because hiring 100 people for a small amount of money equals hiring three people for a large amount of money. That they can do the same thing through technology. It's often comparable.

[B]

So back to the high Middle Ages, the Muslim system was quite dynamic. Where you had world cities like Cordoba or Tunis, Palermo, Alexandria, Damascus, they were all part of this Muslim system. And the Muslims saw themselves as like the end point of history. And they rubbed off on Christendom, where Italy arose to trade with the Muslims. Where in the wake of the fall of Rome and sort of the low pressure equilibrium from the Byzantine Empire pulling out of the West Mediterranean is you saw all of these independent city states in Italy that it sort of devolved into small towns over the decline period of the Dark Ages. But then with the collapse of Frankish power, on top of that, these small town cultures were hooked up to this very wealthy Islamic trade system. And so Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Naples had all of these situations. And most of Italy at this point was actually forest. And it was cut off from the rest of Catholic Europe by the mountains and the forest. So Italy was sort of its own world. And when you look at medieval Europe, you have to remember that the difference between the Italians and the rest of Catholic Western Christendom was the Italians and all of these memories of classical civilization from the old Roman town institutions. And a lot of the Italian states were democracies and they're one of the very few descendants of classical democracy. Most democracy in the west is descended from the Germanic war, the Germanic all thing. But in the Mediterranean you have some sort of classical town polis, Greek style democracies. And you saw them in Spain as well, where Spain had lots of self governing cities. And this was a big element in the Spanish colonization of the New World because the Spaniards identity. And so a lot of these were republics too was like the Greek polis, where Mediterranean civilization naturally develops around city states. My guess is how jagged and divided a lot of the Mediterranean is in valleys and peninsulas and that stuff. And these Italian city states built out this trade system and gained dominance from the Muslims. And so the high medieval period was Italy's growth. And Italy was the wealthiest place on earth from like the 13th or the 12th centuries until the 16th century. And the way to see Italy is it was both its own cultural form where by the time of Dante there was an ethnic identity of being Italian that had to gradually emerge from the Roman identity. But also Italy was subdivided where at no point in this was Italy unified. And also Italy was part of a Mediterranean system where you have the older classical heritage which you see in the Renaissance peeking through, where there were points in the Renaissance when paganism was nearly or more popular than Christianity in the Italian consciousness. I think there were, I think there were certain times in early modern aristocratic Europe when certain like social classes of Europeans would have seen themselves as pagan and they stayed being Christian as sort of social, sort of social technology is. If you look at a lot of the art of the Renaissance is glorifying classical history or civilization or using sort of that symbolism. And that's an undercurrent to Renaissance history. And you see it later on in other periods of early modern history and with the Islamic influence as well. A lot of Renaissance Islamic. A lot of Renaissance Italian art is Islamic origin. And there's even theories that over the course of the Renaissance, women's status shrunk in Italian society. And we think part of that might have been Islamic influence. But through Islam the Italians introduced the stock market, a lot of market concepts, a lot of science and learning and Greek stuff into Western Europe where Italy was the sort of catch of the Mediterranean system.

[C]

When you said the elites were targeting turn name pagan, it made me think of Salva Ren? Ella, who was a big. Yeah, monk, popular monk who took down the Medici part partially. And he was very much like basically just a totally anti consumerist socialist. Yeah. And he caused a lot of problems because the city to collapse and he got executed pretty quickly after that. But I wonder if like, if I don't know which way it's coming from or how it's connected. But when Christianity falls apart and kind of turns to resentment oriented, then it's harder for the elites to adopt it and maybe they lost it first. But it creates just like a separation where you have like either so poor manifestations of Christianity that are not accurate and then Just an abandonment of it.

[B]

Yeah. Will Durant like to say that Dante is the tipping point from medieval to sort of Renaissance society? Because Dante made this beautiful understanding of the Christian mystic theology, and he is the capstone of medieval thought. And he was a florentine in the 14th century. I think he or his parents lived through the Black Death. And you sort of parallel him to Ibn Khaldun at the same time in North Africa, where you have Ibn Khaldun, one of the last great Islamic scholars, as Islam was going into decline. And then Dante was the start of this eruption in Europe. And Savonarola in Florence. He turned Florence into a Christian theocracy where they banned fine jewelry or parties or a variety of other things. And he was actually reacting against the moral degeneracy of the 14th century and atheism, where atheism was a not uncommon philosophic current in medieval Italy. It dominated several universities. And then he took over Florence. He lost power. And a lot of the Renaissance was resentment against Savonarola. So that's why the Medicis were kind of degenerate and weird, but they did fund a lot of art. I mean, degenerate and weird and funds art is the Renaissance's tagline. And then you see classical pagan influences come in from there.

[C]

And.

[B]

I have to cover a few more details before we get to the Renaissance, but the Norman conquest of Sicily was a big turning point, where the Normans were Vikings from Denmark who settled in the north of France in the 10th century. And then they became mercenaries, and they were fighting in Italy, where Italy was a kaleidoscope of conflict between the Pope, between the Lombards, who settled in the north of Italy. The Ostrogoths held that for a surprisingly long time. Then the Byzantines held a lot of places in South Italy for a while. The Arabs had Sicily and Corsica. So the Normans entered this space, and they kind of realized that everyone involved was sort of a pussy. So the Normans seized power of the southern half of Italy as just a band of mercenaries. They drove the Byzantines out of Italy. This was the last time the Byzantines had any interest in the Western Mediterranean. And they drove the Arabs out of Sicily and they made this cosmopolitan, multicultural society that a lot of leftist historians like to say is sort of like an embodiment of modern Western values, which I think is deranged, because if you're looking at Viking warlords conquering an area that's a mix of Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim, and then cynically realizing if we tolerate these different ethnicities, it's going to be easier for us. That is not modern multiculturalism. And the second the Normans lost power, that equilibrium collapsed. But it was a cultural and philosophic and economic golden age where Norman Sicily saw this cross cultural mixing, much like earlier in the video with the first photorealistic map we have. And it's interesting as well, where the Norman takeover of Sicily was paralleled by the Christian dominance of the entire Mediterranean. Especially so Catholic Franks who, where Spain was one of the wealthiest places in the Muslim world. And then the Christians reconquered Spain and they went through a process of assimilation where they would migrate Christians from the north into the south, settling the countryside and then moving the Muslims and the Jews, who had a more advanced level of civilization at that time, into the cities. And so Spain took on this very Catholic nationalist, anti capitalist attitude. The north north Spanish ranchers were populating the south against the more capitalist Muslims and Jews. And so by the time of, by the mid 11th century the Spaniards taken half of their peninsula back. And by the early 13th the Muslims were walled off in the tiny county of Granada in the south. So Spain turned back Christian, the Normans took Sicily in the middle, Corsica and Sardinia became Christian. And then the Byzantines created this. The Byzantines made this renovation under the Macedonian emperors where they retook Crete. And Crete's a weird situation, sort of microcosm, where Crete had a series of sub civil wars between sort of Spanish Muslims who settled in Crete to escape tyranny in Spain. Then you had the local Greek Orthodox, then you had Muslims from North Africa trying to take Spain. And then even the Byzantines used Viking mercenaries to retake it again. Harald Hardrada, one of the greatest chads in history, who was king of Norway, he fought for the Byzantines and he actually guided mercenaries down to Jerusalem and he conquered Sicily and Crete for the Byzantines. So there were Vikings involved, involved in this stuff. And so by the time of the Crusades, the Christians had already wrested the Mediterranean from the Muslims. And this started a long standing process of decline for the Muslim world and rise for the Christian world because the Mediterranean was still an axis of history. And then the Crusades were the culmination of this process where the second Western civilization is attain consciousness in the 11th century. They launched themselves from one shore of the Mediterranean in the south of France down to Israel on the other side, establishing a series of successful states for 200 years, which the Muslims were only able to drive out after a very long time. And the Crusades are emblematic of Western civilization's newfound dominance, because it wasn't just in the Levant. The Crusaders took Cyprus, they took Athens, they took out the Byzantine Empire, and the Crusaders would routinely attack North Africa. So over the course of a little over a hundred years, you saw a dynamic where the Muslims were pressing up on the south coast of France and Rome to one where not even the Byzantines, but the West European Franks dominated the entire Mediterranean through Italian trade and with French muscle.

[C]

Right. And so when you cover the North African part, Athens, the retaking of the Mediterranean islands, it becomes much clearer in context that this wasn't just Europe deciding to randomly bully the Middle East. It was. Yeah, they basically only were able to get to the Middle east once they took back those. The Mediterranean. And it's. What's interesting about it is, as opposed to having the Romans dominated or the Spanish or the English later, what you mentioned here was a very, like, mixed group of Normans taking Sicily, Spain doing its thing, France doing this. Like, everything was. Everyone was kind of doing a little part at the same time.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Is there a comparable period to European history where it was kind of like that, united?

[B]

So it was because Christendom was the predominant identity, not the local ethnic ones. And it reminds me of, again, the Paul Johnson book. He talked about the French colony in Algeria, and he said it wasn't really a French colony, it was sort of the Mediterranean's a unified system. And so I think there were more Spaniards or Italians in French Algeria than actual French. And it was this trans sort of ethnic migration. And another thing to keep in mind is that the Spaniards, the French and the Italians, and especially so the Occitan, the South French, are fairly mutually intelligible. We see different nations on the map. So if we're, for example, at history of the Renaissance, it looks just at Italy in most histories of the Renaissance, that themselves are just North Italy and then Rome. But when you look at the Renaissance world, you have to realize their horizons stretched from the New World out to Asia. And so when you're looking just at northern Italy, you're missing how these people had truly vast mental horizons.

[C]

Right. And how that culture of the Renaissance, even if it was primarily generated in Italy, would probably have transited all along the southern Mediterranean. You know, the current train route from Milan to Barcelona.

[B]

Yeah. And so to get to a core thesis, I think the main variable in the decline of the Mediterranean is the Islamic Dark Ages. And the reason I say that is that in the Hermetica, we are constantly taking out the environmental stimuli around us. Which is unconsciously affecting us. And friends will ask me, rudyard, why is my mental health poor? And what I'll say is, it's because you're in an environment that's designed to give you bad mental health. And that's through your daily social interactions is what you read online. It's your bank account statement, it's the amount of traffic. And so the Mediterranean could become the most successful place in the world when both sides of the Mediterranean fed creative income inputs into the system. What happened with the Islamic Dark Ages, which we'll talk about through the reference of Ibn Khaldun, is only the north Mediterranean was generative over the early modern period. So by the time of the Italian Renaissance, Islam and Christendom were close enough that the Italians could still learn things from the Muslims. By the time you get to the 17th century, a century later, the Christians had basically nothing worth learning from the Muslims. So that meant the north Mediterranean was generating by itself. And then the locus of civilization moved from Italy to the German Rhineland. And then with the Mediterranean, only the north being generative is that they could not do that themselves. Because in the Mediterranean, to have a singular successful government, you need to have a functioning Mediterranean system. And so when the Mediterranean system shuts down, it's a holistic process where the Muslims had a successful civilization when they held the entire Mediterranean. The Italians were the richest place on earth when they had a unified trade system from the Mediterranean. But then when you get to the early modern period, when the Turks and the Spanish divided up the Mediterranean, you saw a holistic breakdown of sort of the. The wealth of the system.

[C]

Right. Because even as funny you say that because once the Islamic control was defeated, it didn't really. That was around the same period where the Mediterranean stopped being the main part of the story.

[B]

Yeah. So by the time of Ibn Khaldun, which is 14th century, and he's probably the best Islamic historian, the Muqaddimah is really remarkable for a book written in the 14th century because it's a guide to world history and it talks about the macro political trends of history. And he is interesting because you can see that the Islamic world in that time period had a high level of cultivation, because he's talking about this entire sort of academic discipline of highly intelligent Islamic authors which did not exist 200 years later. However, Ibn Khaldun is also highly cynical because he writes about everyone's corrupt, Our populations are declining, our economies are declining. And you can see in the 14th century, this gradual tipping point that Islam still had stuff going on but it was no longer a generative society. And we're going to make a video on medieval Islam. Once I finish reading, I have a book by a British author named Glub. I'm his history of the Arabs. Then he has a six volume history of Islam I might read if I feel like it. But the Islamic world switched from sort of generative, capitalist, scientifically minded or open regimes to closed ones, often run by very extractive nomadic regimes. And this was a whole distinct process where Egypt in the 19th century had half the population in the 12th century. So the Islamic world went through their own dark age where they could have become a modern Western society, but they chose instead to become like India or China. They go into the Asian issue of culture. Cultural fossilization in the Mediterranean as a system chose to go the way of Asia. And so in the Gunpowder Empire video, when we're comparing the Spanish Empire to the Turkish empire and there's a lot of similarities between messianic religion, banning of intellectual discourse and often banning of the printing press, singular sort of state run church where the nobility and the church elite works together, suppression of the merchant classes under monopolies, where the Spanish economy was totally dependent under monopolies, and the Turkish economy under highly constructive guild structures. You have declining military competency, small elite controlling a large disaffected population, strong centralized government. And so it's this really stark shift where in the Italian Renaissance where you have this hyper creative dynamic system by the time of the late 16th century, you see, you see the Mediterranean divided between the Spanish and the west, who took a lot of cultural influences from Islam and their conquest of the Muslims in Spain and then Turks in the East. So rather than a society where Venice or Genoa or Pisces Pisa were powers in their own right, where Florence was wealthier than England in the 14th century in total tax revenue, you saw these two empires which are very much extractive, I don't want to use the word socialist, but sort of command economies that split the Mediterranean in half.

[C]

Right. And this gets into your comment about some of the stereotypes of the Middle east or the negative connotations of Islam and it's very associated with this anti market theocracy.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So then when I say something like, oh, you know, actually I, I wouldn't underestimate the potential for countries in the Middle east to turn towards development as a positive goal. And then that sounds like, okay, well you're just doing this like modernist paradigm that's washing over their theocracy or value structure or inherent like religious implications of Violence or something. And obviously, like you don't have to get rid of Islam or become a modern materialist to industrialize because I mean, obviously they've done it before Islam started. It started as a merchant religion, sort of with Muhammad, merchant warrior, among other things, less savory types. And then they were, like you said, very rich in this other period in the 12th, 1400s. So it's not at all incompatible.

[B]

I agree. And I've said that multiple times on this show. And the other thing is the Muslims are desperate and Western Europe isn't desperate enough yet. When you're desperate, your world changes.

[C]

And they've seen some of the countries do well. Yeah. And now the competition in Islam is set on those terms. Whoever is like Saudi Arabia is doing a better job of winning for Islam than Iran, for example.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So it's going to be seen through. It's not seen. It's no longer seen as development being like an embrace of the west and an abandonment of Islam. It's now firmly within the context of we're doing the best for Islam. Yeah.

[B]

There's a handful of threads I want to hit with this topic. I want to forget them. One is that the out part of the reason of the failure of the Mediterranean system was that the Spanish and the Turks were both huge empires that were so big it was hard to rationalize to their elites why they needed have radical innovation. Secondly, the Peru Pakistan axis. And thirdly, you using Italy as a test case. So with the Mediterranean during the reign of King Philip, like the Fernand Braudel book, the Spanish held Italy as a puppet state. They had Portugal and Spain. And the Spanish attacked North Africa at least a dozen times. It's a wonder they didn't turn them into colonies at one point or another. And then the Turks held the Barbary Corsairs and the Maghreb as their buddies as client states. And they had the eastern half of the Mediterranean. And these two powers clashed at the Battle of Lepanto, where the Turks tried to take Italy multiple times and the Spanish stopped them from taking Italy. And you wonder how would the timeline be different if the Turks captured the Vatican? Maybe Protestantism would have taken all of Europe. So the Spanish had an empire that stretched from the Philippines to Bogota and then to Naples. And Naples, by the way, was I think, the second biggest city in Europe, the second biggest city in Western Europe, which is pretty remarkable. And from Patagonia to California. So the Spanish were already sort of stakeholders and Mediterranean civilization was highly intelligent and cultivated. We see the Spanish Empire as sort of reactionary thugs. But their elite were some of the most educated people in the world who studied under the Jesuits or at the University of Salamanca. So they saw themselves as a higher civilization. And the Spanish saw themselves as the ultimate descendants of the Roman Empire and of Greco Roman classical civilization. The Muslims had similar ideas with the Ottoman Sultanate, who owned an empire that stretched from Somalia to Hungary and from Algeria to Iran. And the Ottomans would even send ships out to Indonesia. The Ottomans and the Spanish fought over Indonesia once or twice, and the Turks called themselves the Sultanate of Raoul or the descendant of the Romans. They were the spiritual descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, the Caliph of the Sunnis. And so both of them were enough of stakeholders, they didn't feel the European drive. When people talk about the European age of colonialism, what they forget is that by the time of the 18th century, both England and France basically just had their countries and then a handful of colonies in the New World. And so the reason Northwest Europe was able to make this sort of like hermetic switch of the early modern period of instead stalling these competitive institutions that catapulted them into the modern world was because they didn't have these huge empires already. Secondly, Carol Quigley has this interesting idea called the Peru Pakistan axis. Of the things I spoke about before of the cultural similarities between Latin America, Mediterranean Europe and the Middle east. And I think that's true, and it speaks to a certain thing that the Muslims claim to be descendants of classical civilization. And that's more true than we think, because they took classical civilizations predominant economic system, that being slavery, as their dominant economic system. And also the classical clan structure survived in Islam. And so Western civilization took classical civilization's literary traditional. The Eastern Orthodox took the government tradition with the Roman Empire. Then the Islamics took the social and economic structure. And so when you look at Mediterranean Europe, a lot of these societies have similarities with Islam, especially the Spanish, the Sicilians in the Balkans, they were conquered by the Turks for centuries. And Balkan people are ethnically very similar to Russians or Poles or even somewhat West Europeans. Albanians and Italians look somewhat similar. I say this purely to screw with them. They're going to hate it. But the Balkans is so dirt poor, because first of all, the Byzantines subdivided the local identities. And then when the Turks took power, they stopped the Balkan peoples from developing their own elites and they stopped them from reading new books or being involved in science. And so you're seeing sort of as the Muslim world declined, they dragged a lot of Mediterranean Europe with them. And Marik And I took the train from Naples to Florence. And it's such a stark difference, it's insane. And you can see this sort of like Mediterranean culture form in the Mediterranean culture of this time period. A lot of it was really sort of based on being a petty bitch. Where if you look at the Latino concept of honor, they'll have things like two carriages will face each other and the first man to get of a carriage loses the debate. They just stare days they don't have a treaty. And this is just silly. I mean like I believe in honor, but I believe in honor that's actually based around like following your duty and like having courage, not about these like petty status seeking things. And this Mediterranean concept of honor is both the descendant of Arabic and classical notions that mutated, that lost this sort of dramatic dynamism. And so you're seeing social status in this concept of honor is your status is predicated on how little you have to give to society. The higher your social status, the less you're held to standards and the more you can sort of say no to society. And with this you see a highly extractive, very sort of like my issue when I argue with a lot of Latins is they just say shit to win the argument. And they're not actually trying to argue over truth. It's like a machismo thing where they're just trying to like, sort of like puff up their chest. And this is societies that are not actually that militarily capable or like sort of serious. So they're taking on this machismo air. And then what happens is that because there's utter cynicism and the higher you are in status, the less responsibility you have to the society. These are highly exploitive social structures where these Italian city states were constantly embroiled in family disputes, where the Spanish empire collapsed into corruption, or Arab armies, which have incredibly good equipment, like Nasser's Egypt or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, will constantly lose because they lack the social structure. Because these societies were fundamentally betrayed by their aristocracies.

[C]

Right, Because I was thinking, where does that inversion come from? And a betrayal that aristocracy makes sense because basically they make conditions so bad for people that people have to be maximally responsible or they'll like immediately die or everything will go wrong. And even if they are, they will anyways. Meanwhile they're insulated from consequences so they don't have to worry about God or about correct behavioral types.

[B]

I'm, I'm from Philadelphia, so I know a lot of Italian Americans and they're sort of a snapshot, snapshot into peak Mediterranean culture. Because Sicily is the middle of the Mediterranean. Most Italian Americans are from Sicily and Naples. And it's funny that growing up, everyone said Italian American culture is super different from Italian culture culture. And then you go to Italy and Naples and it's just like everyone here looks like they could be in New Jersey. The pizza tastes the same, they have the same mannerisms, they have the same sense of humor. It's the same people. And I think that's reasonable. Anthropologically, it's just people for blank slate reasons, don't like drawing ties to the old country. And. But Italian Americans, they did not want their children to play with other people outside the family. Where South Italy was dominated by mafias because the governments were so corrupt and the aristocracies were so corrupt that common people viewed the gangsters as people who could protect their interests because crime was more legitimate than the actual governments. And Thomas Sowell talks about this very eloquently of how South Italian life at the time they immigrated to America was all about ignoring the authorities. You can only trust people in your family. Use your extended family for all of your life. Where it's a very low trust society. And it's interesting to read it. The Greeks or the Romans, people that they're genetically identical to who were incredibly high trust societies. There were times when Roman Italy was like middle America. Like you can totally trust everyone. People would die together, that stuff. And you see the Mediterranean decay. I think it's a failure of the elite culture. And once you have corrupt elites, Corrupt elites create slavish populations because in a healthy society, all social classes have agency and responsibility and they work together in unhealthy societies. The upper classes stop the middle classes from forming who create relationships of slavishness. The lower classes develop envy and sort of crabs in the bucket mentality. And then it's a reinforcing negative cycle which we see in Latin America. And that happened in the Mediterranean. And I would argue it happened partly due to the Islamic trend and also the rise of authoritarian regimes where, if you want to look at South Italy, South Italy was wealthier than North Italy during the high Middle Ages, like sicily during the 11th century. And then with the loss of the Normans, the Holy Roman Emperor took over Sicily and it was still wealthy then. But then with control of Sicily going to first the Angevins, who were a French royal family related to the ruling family of England, and then the Aragonese or the Catalonians, you saw the rise of these hyper exploitive Regimes that would just drive South Italy down. And then North Italy radically surpassed South Italy. But then North Italy still ended up under the Spanish Empire's thumb. And I've wondered since high school, why did Italy decline? Because I knew that Italy used to rule the world and it doesn't anymore. And I studied this for so long. I even read Fernand Braudel's book on the topic, and he didn't give an answer. He just said that Italy was very wealthy into the 17th century. Beyond the Renaissance, where you see the Baroque culture, it's where opera comes from. The Counter Reformation. Catholic Europe made a highly distinct and cultivated culture in the early modern period. But Will Durant gave me the answer in a paragraph after I searched for so long. And his answer was that it was a side effect of the Spanish governance in the 16th century, where for the same reasons that Latin America declined, Mediterranean Europe did. Where in the early modern period, in like the 15th century, the Spanish conquered multiple continents very quickly, the Italians had the Renaissance, and the French were considered the manliest and the most cultivated and civilized people in Europe. So Latin peoples in the 15th century were the peak of of global culture. And then that decline coincided with the rise of authoritarian government. And it's also the tipping point when the Catholic Church stopped being creative because Spain saw the rise of an authoritarian government due to their king getting gold from the New World that let him short circuit their parliament, called the Cortez, that initially had power comparable to England. The Spanish conquered Italy in the Italian wars in the early 16th century against the French, who were also conquering the region. The Spanish brought Italy and the Papacy into their circle. And then France also had the rise of an authoritarian government with Louis XIV in the 17th century. And so the double whammy of are the triple whammy of first, Islam's decline, secondly, the rise of authoritarian regimes in the early modern period. And then thirdly, the rise of the New World in the global system made the Mediterranean decline. Because in a world where Eurasia was the entire map, the Mediterranean central to it, but Northwest Europe or Western Europe sort of short circuited the game by creating the age of exploration. And in that new game, Western Europe was able to dominate over the rest. And I think Mediterranean Europe could have caught up if they played their cards right. Germany and Russia did. Who aren't on the west coast of Europe? Austria stayed in the game. But it was this combination of factors.

[C]

Almost as if we all got caught up in the Spanish Reconquista, because we view that solely through the lens of a great victory.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You know, it's like stare into the abyss and become the abyss. Like you fight an enemy long enough, you might pick up some of their characteristics and possibly the competition, the incentives, the, the competition created more, maybe shorter term incentives. I don't know if shorter terms even the correct way or just like not even necessarily shorter term. But they know that this model, they know they can compete toe to toe on the Ottoman model. So why introduce uncertainty and trying a larger innovation. Yeah. And then once they get the Mediterranean, they're stable, they're comfortable. And we talked about how the northern powers did colonialism with which kind of global colonialism which trumped the previous Mediterranean control as the center of the world. But ironically it was the, the innovation. It wasn't like, oh, they Spain has the Mediterranean now we have to go here. It was the innovation from northern Europe taking this more Salamanca Renaissance aligned route which Spain could have taken that created new technology that actually changed, fundamentally changed the map. I agree.

[B]

Where you could go, I think Mediterranean civilization. I think you phrase that very well. I think if you want to simplify to the Reconquista that would not be, that would be a symbol and it would not be an unfair symbol. And Mediterranean Europe was going to go on the trajectory of the Asian civilizations, whether Islamic Vietnam, China, India, where you have a great civilization, you build it over thousands of years and then you end up with these large empires that accept the decay through cultivation and having large enough areas. And that's the Mughals in India, the Turks for the Islamics, the Chinese dynasties and it would have been the Spanish for Mediterranean Europe. And then North Europe said psych. No, this game's too boring.

[C]

This gave me a new fear or theory because I always thought of the competition between the US and China is like if we copy them, we lose. If we go to our strengths and get rid of bureaucracy, blah blah, we win. But I wonder if there's a version where we are actually able to be competitive with something more similar to their model which will actually validate it and keep us trapped in a longer term authoritarian situation.

[B]

That's what biology thinks is going to happen. I people talk about America gradually sliding into Brazil ification and just things gradually getting worse over time. I don't think that's going to happen. America is still a majority North European country and most of our people making decisions or our fighting men are still North European. And when you prod North European societies enough, you get a gutter Dammerung, you hit the wotan switch and you get the Protestant Reformation or the fall of rome, World War II. And we just haven't hit that switch yet. Because keep in mind, I put a lot of effort into insulating myself from the daily news of the Internet because I find this gives me a lot of sort of mental ill illness for not that much gain. You can go back every week and see these were the pertinent pieces of news in retrospect. And it's very easy to judge the civil. And we talked about this yesterday. But it's very easy to judge history's civilizational trajectory by the news of today. But we are in like a five year nothing ever happens period until the thing will happen. And then this is going to appear silly, like a liminal stage. And I told you yesterday you have to be careful about not building the entire human condition to talk about the issues with wokeness today because we're facing wokeness now at the start of the 21st century. But there'd be lots of timelines where Maoism or Nazism or some eugenics ideology or monarchism would be the ideology we're fighting. We probably were going to have a crisis in the early 21st century, but it could be a world where Imperial Japan's our dominant rival. We just happen to be in this timeline.

[C]

Well, that's why I call them all Oriental despotism. Save time.

[B]

So we got to the 70th century. There's a lot of other variables I've left out. We could have talked about the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. We could have talked about how Italy had enormous revolutions in the 17th century. But this is already a complex enough topic. And so we've reached the point when the British have gained a control of the Mediterranean, where these societies have been domesticated to the point where they can't really resist. And it's sad to look at a lot of Mediterranean history because there's so much capability that's wasted. Because you see someone like Napoleon, who's 100% ethnically Italian and he rose to dominate France. And you see Mediterranean thinkers who are often geniuses who are in these societies that do not allow them to realize their own capability. And so Gramsci is an example, the guy who basically mastermind the destruction of, of Western civilization. My Marxist cultural blob, he was the son of a Sardinian peasant. And you look at Franco and the Spanish Civil War and so Mediterranean Europe. I always feel sorry for like people who are too sentient for their environment.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Because there are certain situations where if you're In South Sudan, your life is kind of terrible, but the amount of south. This might be change. This might have changed due to the Internet, but it's sort of. You don't. You're not. In certain third world societies, you're not self aware enough to know what you're missing. But in countries like Italy or Russia or South Korea or Iran, some Indians too is you have people who are self aware and cognizant enough to know exactly what's happening and they're powerless to deal with that.

[C]

Right. They know what good food tastes like, but no one's letting them cook.

[B]

Exactly. Is there anything I left out here?

[C]

The one thread that we didn't examine that I would find interesting is you mentioned that the Italians had this conception of democritus or democracy and that tied into their city states.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And I wonder if they had this perception that because when the Mediterranean culture, Roman culture was more centralized, it was more. Less democratic. Right. It was more through. Associated with Rome, which eventually became the Roman Empire. And, and I wonder if they viewed some sort of like city states as being necessary for democrat. Are they associated with city states as democratic? Inevitably. And then centralization is non democratic Inevitably. Even though we've seen examples where that's not exactly true. I wonder if that's why they stayed as city states because they like the idea of democracy and couldn't see how democracy could apply to a centralization which they associated with Rome because that's how it was.

[B]

Yeah, so that's totally correct. There's two democratic traditions in Europe. The, the. The Mediterranean and the Nordic. The Nordic tradition is what America pulls predominantly from and it's due to the Germanic war band, where you have aristocracy that conquers a region and the nobility get the right to vote and then they amass the three estates or the church, the nobility and the common people to be representative of the nation under the national identity that was first established under Odin and then Christianity with the classical. And that's freedom from the old Germanic Freyacht, which you can see the Germans talking about even when they're fighting the Romans under Arminius, where the Romans say the Germans would rather live free than die slaves. And you also have the Mediterranean concept. And the Mediterranean conduct of democracy stems from the Greco Roman polis, or the unified city state, where when Aristotle wrote his political theory, his assumption is that all states would be city states because that was how Greece was. And his home country, Macedonia was sort of an exception. Same thing with Thebes as well. Or Thessaly. No, sorry, Not Thessaly. Thebes. Yeah, Thebes was sort of. They had the entire plane. And so one of the things the Romans did very well was municipal governance. And this is part of why Rome lasted so well, because almost all day to day interaction, the Roman Empire wasn't managed by the centralized government, not until the very end of the empire, instead by local municipal government, which were the local nobility. So the Romans bought off the local nobility and then they managed their own ethnic group. And so you had this sort of democratic municipal tradition that survived way longer in Rome than the centralized democratic tradition. And Peter Braun writes out this really well for the. The fall of the Roman Empire period. And so with the fall of Rome and the breakdown of the central authority, you saw power collapse back onto these local municipal governments that had democratic traditions. And in the Mediterranean, rather than the nation being the centralized unit of democracy, it's the city state.

[C]

Right. So even though that kind of democratic structure was technically possible under a centralized Roman structure, it's not. It developed directly out of the fall of a centralized, tyrannical, non democratic Rome. So state still. Yes, but they have. Yeah, potential. And I guess that's with the. The separation between the northern democracy and the southern democracy is one of the reasons I was kind of describing the northern France as, as Norman, specifically because Frank works too, because it's the German. What I was trying to get was like I was trying to make a connotation that they were German.

[B]

Basically you're just objectively wrong. They're not Normans. You could just say Frank or German.

[C]

Right, right. But what you get, my point is, the point is to highlight their Germanicness, which. And Norman in people's mind is more associated with north than Frank, which can just be considered like French in their head, even though it's obviously corresponds to German.

[B]

I have put a sword over this bridge. Do not cross him. So next, next, next video. Do you want to do the Enlightenment or do you want to do like corporate 20th century America?

[C]

Probably the Enlightenment. And we'll build up from there because it's chronological.

[B]

Okay, next video.

[C]

Yep, go ahead.

[B]

I was just gonna say bye. Anything else?

[C]

All right, that works.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

No, that's good. Ciao, ciao.

[A]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Eric Thornberg 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.