Explaining the Volkerwanderung

Summary

History 102: Explaining the Volkerwanderung

Episode released on July 12, 2025, hosted by Turpentine featuring Rudyard Lynch of WhatifAltHist and co-host Austin Padgett.

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1. Introduction to the Volkerwanderung

Rudyard Lynch introduces the central topic of the episode—Volkerwanderung, a German term meaning "people's wandering." He expresses his admiration for the German language's ability to encapsulate complex historical concepts in singular words. [00:43]

Notable Quote:

"The Volkerwanderung was a period where you saw complete demographic transfer over half of Europe." – Rudyard Lynch [00:43]

2. Historical Context and Timeline

The Volkerwanderung, occurring roughly from 500 BCE to 200 CE, was a transformative era between the ancient and medieval worlds. This period saw significant migrations of Germanic, Hunnic, Slavic, and Arabic peoples, reshaping Europe's demographic and political landscape. Lynch emphasizes the lasting impact of these migrations, which fundamentally altered the map of Europe.

Key Points:

• Transition period between the Bronze Age collapse and the fall of Rome.
• Defined by large-scale movements of various tribes and ethnic groups.
• Resulted in the fall of many established states, with Byzantium as the sole survivor, albeit internally altered.

3. Germanic Migrations and Their Impact on Europe

Lynch delves into the specifics of Germanic migrations, originating from Scandinavia and dispersing across Western and Eastern Europe. He highlights how geographical and climatic changes, such as the end of the Baltic Bronze Age and subsequent cooling periods, propelled these movements southward.

Notable Quote:

"The Germans migrated across central and Eastern Europe and that was from starting around 500 BC and they fully settled into their full region around 200 AD." – Rudyard Lynch [30:11]

Key Points:

• Germanic tribes like the Franks, Saxons, and Vandals played pivotal roles.
• Migration patterns led to the establishment of new cultural and political centers.
• Genetic and cultural assimilation significantly influenced modern European identities.

4. Interaction with the Roman Empire

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the dynamic between migrating Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire. Lynch explains how Germanic incursions challenged Roman supremacy, leading to crucial battles and eventual territorial losses for Rome.

Notable Quotes:

"Julius Caesar invaded Gaul to protect the Gauls from German migration. And then Caesar used this as a casus belli to conquer all of Gaul." – Rudyard Lynch [12:16]

"Arminius built out a confederacy, wiped out a Roman field army of 20,000 men and that basically never happens." – Rudyard Lynch [18:08]

Key Points:

• Romans initially underestimated the Germanic threat, leading to significant defeats.
• Key figures like Arminius exemplified Germanic resistance and strategic prowess.
• The fall of Rome was accelerated by these constant external pressures and internal decay.

5. Cultural and Genetic Implications

The migrations led to profound cultural exchanges and genetic mixing across Europe. Lynch discusses how Germanic tribes integrated with local populations, influencing languages, governance structures, and societal norms.

Notable Quote:

"The German region became pretty big around the period of the fall of Rome. And the Germans had solidified into these larger confederacies or sort of ethnic identities." – Rudyard Lynch [50:17]

Key Points:

• Formation of macro cultures stemming from historic migratory events.
• Germanic influence on modern Western European languages and legal systems.
• Genetic studies show significant mixing between migrating tribes and indigenous populations.

6. Alternate Histories Discussed

Lynch and Padgett explore hypothetical scenarios, pondering how Europe might have evolved differently had the Volkerwanderung not occurred or followed an alternative path. They consider the potential continuity of Celtic civilizations and the preservation of classical knowledge.

Notable Quote:

"I think the Gauls would have been able to develop their own society. I think they would have been able to fight off the Germans." – Rudyard Lynch [14:20]

Key Points:

• Potential for Celtic societies to parallel Roman civilization with their own advancements.
• Speculation on the resilience of indigenous cultures against external migrations.
• Impact on the development of modern European states and cultural identities.

7. Conclusion and Future Topics

The episode concludes with reflections on the enduring legacy of the Volkerwanderung, emphasizing its role in shaping contemporary Europe. The hosts hint at future discussions on the Crusades and the Mongol Empire, promising to delve deeper into subsequent historical events that continued to influence European and global dynamics.

Notable Quote:

"It's a good episode. You want to cover the Crusades or the Mongol Empire for our next episode this week?" – Rudyard Lynch [115:21]

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Key Takeaways

• Volkerwanderung was a critical period of mass migrations that reshaped Europe's demographic and political structures.
• Germanic tribes played a central role in challenging and ultimately contributing to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
• These migrations led to significant cultural and genetic blending, influencing modern European identities.
• Understanding these historical movements provides insights into the formation of contemporary European states and cultural dynamics.

Further Insights

The hosts' in-depth analysis underscores the complexity of historical migrations and their multifaceted impacts. By examining both historical facts and engaging in speculative alternate histories, they offer listeners a comprehensive understanding of how pivotal events like the Volkerwanderung have long-lasting effects on civilization's trajectory.

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For more detailed discussions and future episodes, subscribe to History 102 on the Turpentine podcast network.

Transcript

[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Austin Padgett]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Austin Padgett]

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[Narrator]

102 where YouTube creator whatifalth hist Redyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hi everybody, I'm Rudyard lynch and this is our co host Austin Padgett. And today's video is the Volkarwanderung.

[Austin Padgett]

I don't know what that is exactly. I'm looking forward to it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the Volker wandering is one of my favorite words ever. And it's a German word, as you probably guessed, where Volker wandering. Volker is people wandering, is wandering, the people's wandering and the Volker wandering. And I just love that word because the Germans can pack such complex concepts in a singular word. Where there was a word I heard in German for like the gross national wealth or character of a nation and I've always wanted to re remember the word. It's like gross national bisphotz. I got the word wrong. But someone in the comments should, should get back to me. It's either the resources or the natural will of a nation. It's like the natural character of a country. But Germany has lots of words like that. And the thing with the Volkerwandering, and you don't have to say that often, you can call it the people's wandering, but the Volkerwandering was a period where you saw complete demographic transfer over half of Europe. And it occurred in a transitionary time period between the classical world. I don't really like saying the ancient world. I split it between the megalithic period that ends with the Bronze Age collapse and then the classical world, which ends with the fall of Rome. But between the ancient world in the medieval world and it's a period called Late Antiquity, which the historian Peter Brown, who I've met, invented where Late Antiquity is said transition period, also known as the Dark Ages. And during the Volkerwanderung, you saw three large migratory patterns. And starting around before the birth of Christ and ending with the rise of the Islamic caliphate, you saw the Germanic, the Hunnish, the Slavic and the Arabic migrations. And the map of Europe at the start and the end of the Volkerwanderung was completely different. Where the Germans conquered all of Western Europe and the former Western Empire, the Slavs populated a huge territory stretching from Greece to Russia and from Berlin out into Siberia. And the Muslims took North Africa and the Mediterranean. The only state that survived before and after the Volkerwandering were the Byzantines. And the Byzantines themselves built out. The Byzantines themselves were taken over by internal barbarians inside their empire. So it wasn't as if the Byzantines had maintained continuity. It's just that their rednecks and barbarians had seized power inside them. And the thing about this time period, and this is because the study of central and Eastern Europe is highly lingually German, so it's very hard to get books on that area of the world in English. And this is just a profound era of history that no one really remembers.

[Austin Padgett]

There's a huge gap in the migration. We. We talk about the German migration in Northern Europe as it relates to England and everything. But yeah, all those spreads are highly relevant. I mean, the entire Middle east changed.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, it's. I've said before that Rome in the classical world was the central basically magnetic point of civilization where all roads led to Rome and for the barbarian world, because the barbarians and the civilized exists in polarity to each other. And this is a point that historians of this era always say that you can't have. You can't have barbarians without civilization is that their center of mass was the Sund in Denmark. And Tacitus called the Sundance, which is where the Baltic goes into the North Sea around modern Copenhagen as the womb of nations, because that was the place where the Germanic peoples originated in. And the Danes, of course, the Nordics, like the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Anglo Saxons, the Franks or the French, the Alamani or the Swabians, the Lombards who took over North Italy, the. The Vandals and the Geats and so many other peoples I'm not remembering all came from this area of Denmark, which was a swampland. And that swampland created very tough people. And so they would migrate outwards and caused a lot of issues. And you ultimately saw the creation of this German cultural region in, in Central and Eastern Europe over the Roman period. And I'm going to get to that later. And the Germans went pretty far east. There were Germans out by the Caucasus and Ukraine and Poland and Belarus and down by Romania and Moldova. And I was reading an interesting book by Chris Dawson, who is my new. Like, I Periodically have phases where I ordered Gustav Le Bon's entire back catalog and I read over half a dozen of his books in a row. I read like 10 of his books in a few month period. Doing that for Chris Dawson. I read three of his books in a row. And he talks about how the Germanic migrations are an extension of the end of the Baltic Bronze Age, where the Baltic experienced a quite wealthy Bronze Age, where they had very advanced artifacts, they had an artistic system. We have records of battles of thousands of people with chariots and huge armies and kingdoms where Bronze Age North Europe was not as advanced as the Mediterranean. But it definitely had a lot of stuff going on. And that ended where the period before the Bronze Age collapse in north Europe was a period significantly warmer than today, actually where you could grow wine in Scandinavia. Then you saw an ice age or a mini ice age where the climate got dramatically cooler and you saw the collapse of the Baltic culture. From there you saw the migration of Germans southwards.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, that makes a lot of sense because I was wondering how this Iceland spit out a huge population. I guess they settled there when it was warmer and then maybe were partly pushed out by the cold.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm also going to say this. Nowhere in Europe is that cold. Europeans complain about weather. If you go to France or England, they'll all be like, oh my God, the weather's so bad here. But having, having lived in. God, Canada was terrible. But having lived in even Pennsylvania, the winters are significantly worse in North America than they are in Scandinavia, where if you go to, if you go to Denmark, they don't have huge blizzards, it's not caked in snow, It's a fairly temperate climate. Norway and Sweden are worse, but it's still a habitable climate, if you know what I mean. Where you're not going to stream. You can work outside every day of the year in Denmark.

[Austin Padgett]

For sure. Especially if you're wearing wool.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, so when I talk about Germans, I really mean Scandinavians because there's a conflation going on here where the Roman term get money, which was a term for men of the spear because the Germans were known as spear warrior warriors. The Germany were from Denmark. What then happened is they migrated south south and they took over modern Germany. And as the Romans called them, Germans, the area of modern Germany took on the character of the Germans. But said cultural groups stemmed from Denmark and Scandinavia initially. And if you look at modern Germany's genetics, you'll find that there's the north central group of Netherlands, north Germany, Scandinavia, and they are Ethnically Scandinavian, slash German. And there's. They had a huge population distribution in England. Um, and then you have the Celtic ancestry in south and West Germany into Austria and Czechia. Then you have Slavic ancestry in the area around Berlin in East Germany, and then the former colonies in the east. And the Slavs, they were not here at that point, but the Germans saw migration south and west against the Celts. And what Julius Caesar, when he was writing at the time of the first century B.C. when he was conquering Gaul, said is the reason that the Romans could conquer Gaul, even though Gaul had a greater population than Italy, was that Gaul was stuck in this weird position where they had already been in contact with the classical world for centuries. So the Gauls had cities and wine and in a writing system and they had the trappings of civilization. But the Romans were capable of using civilization and its administrative structure to build out their military and social system so that they could negate the Gauls. Even though the Gauls were ferocious warriors who really put up a hard fight. I mean, the Romans needed their best commander ever to conquer the Gauls. And then the Germans were coming down from the north. They were known for being ferocious and savage. Where the reason Julius Caesar invaded Gaul was that a Germanic people had migrated south and they were around the area of modern Lyon in eastern France. And so Caesar invaded Gaul to protect the Gauls from German migration. And then Caesar used this as a casus belli to conquer all of Gaul. But this is a pretty good example because the Germans didn't just drive the Celts out of. Out of the area of modern Germany, they drove them out of Czechia. There were Celts out in Poland, there were Celts in Bavaria. And you see trace Celtic influence to a greater degree in areas like Switzerland in the mountains. But you saw the gradual removal of the Celts from continental Europe, where the southern region west of the Rhine and south of the Danube became part of classical Latinate civilization. Where those places have a Roman language, they have a Roman legal code, a Roman religion, a Roman government and social structure. And then to the north, the Germans filled in the rest and the Celts only survived on the Atlantic fringe.

[Austin Padgett]

Do you think Caesar delayed or accelerated the Celts getting pushed out by the Germans? Because I always thought of it as he killed a bunch of Celts, you know, kind of weakened them and then that accelerated the German conquest. But was there a period where with Roman ruled Gaul that had actually delayed that?

[Rudyard Lynch]

You know, this has been a question among historians for centuries that has been hotly debated there's two, there's two schools of thought, one of which that if Caesar hadn't invaded Gaul that the Germans would have conquered it and turned it into an extension of Germany. That's the Will Durant and Edward Gibbon school. Then you have the, you have a different school of which I'm part of, that the Celts would have been able to form an independent country and build their own civilization. And this of course has no relation to my majority Celtic ancestry. None. But the Gauls. The Gauls had more people than Italy. They were fairly advanced and they were actually able to unify against the Romans under the Arverni with Vercingetorix. So I think the Gauls had enough civilization and they did have a pretty strong warrior culture as is. They really gave the Romans a fight for their money. So I think the Gauls would have been able to develop their own society. I think they would have been able to fight off the Germans. And it would have been really interesting because you would have seen the Gauls exist in a sort of parallel setting to classical civilization where they, the Gauls did have their own Alphabet, they had their own religion, but they, in order to modernize, they'd have to take in a lot of classical stuff, but they'd also be able to maintain their culture. And my best guess would be that they would be a Japan to China, where Japan is this state next to China that taken on all these trappings of their culture. But at the same time the Japanese have their own religion, that being Shinto. They have their own Alphabet, they have their own tradition which exists in China's orbit, but they're never fully suckered in by China.

[Narrator]

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[Austin Padgett]

Being Germany and Japan being the Celts.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is getting too. This requires too many hypotheticals for me to process it where. Because there's. There's other things. Where, for example, the Germans have a lot of cultural connections to the Japanese. Where. Because anthropology.

[Austin Padgett]

It's not a total analogy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. Because anthropologists like to say that the Japanese are the Germans of Asia. And so I'm just stuck thinking about if I'm making the Japanese the French in the. Or the Gauls, then I also have to make the Japanese the Germans. And I guess Western Europe's just Japan now.

[Austin Padgett]

It's a simple relational analogy. I guess it. But maybe it's kind of like a rock, paper, scissors thing where the Gauls could fight the Germans better because they didn't have to deal with the building. But the Romans had a hard time invading Germany because they didn't have really a relatable city. Administrative structure to even plug into as a colony.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So.

[Austin Padgett]

But, you know, they tend to think without losing all those warriors in a gargantuan effort, they might have done a little better.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I don't think the Gauls could have beat the. I'm off to think this through. You. You gave me a difficult question. The Gauls and the Germans had roughly comparable military systems. They were really heavy on cavalry. And they also would have these heroic charges where they just get a group of men and they'd use. It was called the highland charge later on. And it was only wiped out in the 18th century where they just have a bunch of guys and they just try to smash their opponents. And the reason that the Macedonians and the Romans developed such good infantry militaries was they did all this drill and all of this stuff in order to be able to resist the. The Celtic charge. And the Romans, I think what would have happened is the Celts could have stabilized a border on the Rhine or west of the Rhine, because there was a huge shift in population density from France to Germany, where France had cities, it had millions of people, it had an established trade system. And so when. Although France, The Romans saw Gaul as a savage place, they still saw it as several steps closer to civilization. And when the Romans invaded Germany, they just said, this is an infinite forest there. We'll go for weeks without seeing a single person. And that would have made it difficult for the Gauls to resist the. It would have made it. I don't think the Gauls could have invaded the Germans, but that could have held the frontier.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. It's a much better fighting style for them to go against because it's just, it's what they're. How they're used to fighting versus obviously we saw how the walls turned out. And then in terms of the Arabs, would they have pushed out Italians and Greeks. Okay, out of the. The Mediterranean and Middle East? If the Germans are pushing out Celts and then who are the Slavs pushing out?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I made an alternate history. I made an alternate history of this when I was like 15. And God, my life has changed so much since then. But what I think, what I think I did in that alternate history is that the Gauls develop as their own parallel civilization and then Rome falls. I think I made two different timelines, one of which is that because Rome centralized around the Mediterranean, they can evolve into China. Because whenever the Romans went north of the Mediterranean climate zone, it became a liability for them because they just.

[Austin Padgett]

Their.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Their cultural technologies were not suited for the climate that was the issue in North France and Britain. And so maybe if the Romans centralized in the Mediterranean, they would have. They would have stopped themselves from getting overextended. On the other hand, they'd have a powerful, more barbaric state on their northwest frontier against Italy. And so I was stuck on does the Roman Empire fuse along the Mediterranean or does it fall earlier because they have this, this rival on their borders. And the thing with trying to predict the foundation of religions is you end up in very strange sort of logical rabbit holes about God's, God's intervention in history. Because from one perspective, the Prophet Muhammad showing up is his free will. And from the other perspective, God makes sure that Prophet Muhammad shows up to carry out his will. And I think it's probably a combination of both. I think it's because I don't want to do the Prophet Muhammad disservice for all the work he had to do to, like, found his religion. At the same time, it's also clear that it's not the will, it's not just the will of a single man. And so you end up with these weird situations where could a handful of variables in Jesus Christ's life have stopped him from founding a religion? Maybe I don't know if his father was less of a role model or if the local. Because Christ was supposed to have trained with Rabbi Hillel, who was one of the. The most wise rabbis in Israel at that time. And Rabbi Hillel's core teaching was that all of the Torah can be combined, can be explained through love, and love, love others. And so, like you wanted, you run into these sort of, these sorts of paradoxes when you try to factor in the foundation of religions into alternate history. And I don't really know how to.

[Austin Padgett]

Answer that exactly, because I was thinking the relationship with Rome and the Celts started with the Celts encroaching into Northern Italy, and then it pushed back the other way. If the Celts didn't fall, it would have eventually continued. I mean, and even in, you know, with the regular France, Germany and Italy, they continually invaded each other. Yeah, much after that. So none of that would have changed. But it's interesting to think about when was the last migration as big as the voyager wanderer? And I guess that would have been the last one. And it comes down to the value landscape, right? Because eventually you have Southern Europe and Northern Europe united along a value structure. Is that, does that, do you think, contribute to slowing down of the giant genetic migrations and replacements?

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of the ideas I've developed on the Appalachian Trail five years ago that I'm surprised I haven't made a video about is I've compiled almost every major culture in the world into one macro cultures where they stem from a singular historic event that created their modern culture. Those macro cultures are the Latinate cultures like Italy, Rome, France, stemming from the Roman Empire, the Germanic cultures like England, Germany, Scandinavia, which stem from the Volkerwandering, the Slav migrations, the Turkish migrations, the Arab caliphate, the Bantus, China, India, the conquistadors and the British diaspora. So what that means is that almost every major culture in the world stems from one of these macro historic events where you see a sort of in the Hermetica, life is a series of vibrations. And then certain people in certain religions and ideas emit vibrations that conquer other vibrations. And so what that means is that these 10 different historic events emitted large enough vibrations that they were capable of creating these macro social regions that still bear the mark of that initial period of history. And so the reason that I'm separating the British diaspora from the Volkerwanderung, although England and America are culturally and genetically very close, is I'm looking at the historic moment that created itself. Was it leaving Denmark due to the swampland, or was it poor English people migrating across the ocean? Because the historic moment that that culture formed in informs its entire life. Because cultures are predominantly influenced by their cultural childhood. Which is why so many sociological institutions in the modern west stem to various conditions that existed in the high medieval period between the structure of science, between capitalism, the separation of church and state, the parliamentary system. The social conditions of Europe in around 1200 inform the social structures of the west today. Because when once we made the social structures, it became very difficult to rebuild them without a dark age.

[Austin Padgett]

So the English migration and all the migrations in that era are the biggest event created under separate conditions since the Book of Wonder.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Because I've considered making a book on this topic, but I was stuck for do I make a cultural event for non white societies that were established by European colonialism? Where for example, I have sub Saharan Africa, most of it is the Bantu migration, where that's because that's the culture they came from and I'm operating on a cultural basis. But their government system is completely dependent on European colonialism. Same thing as their, their economy, their governments, their social and political elite structures are all based off European colonialism. But the biggest recent transfer, mass migratory transfer, is the, is basically the Anglo Saxon migrations in the last few centuries, I'd say That.

[Austin Padgett]

It'S funny because it's like with the Bantu migration, what's more consequential, the Bantu migration or this other migration that happened somewhere far away. It's kind of interesting, it shows you how, how much Europe affected the world in that period. Because I don't know if there's a lot of historical examples where so many other people are more affected by someone else's migration than their own.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I mean, if you want to get really trippy about this, Rome would have seen themselves as comparable because Rome conquered the entire civilized world except Persia. And they, they knew somewhat about India and China, but they weren't on their mental radar. And so from their perspective, Rome and the Greeks were equivalent to the Western world in its global predominance today because they had a word called the oikomene or the known world. And the equivalent would be if 2,000 years from now, if we found separate dimensions that we could communicate with. And so we would look back on the future where they're like, oh my God, the world was so small they weren't dreaming across dimensions. Right.

[Austin Padgett]

The scale shift. I mean, I guess we're out of physical land so we can only scale shift into dimensions or space.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, this is a very interesting discussion. However, it is not the Volker wandering.

[Narrator]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Germans migrated across central and Eastern Europe and that was from starting around 500 BC and they fully settled into their full region around 200 AD and it's interesting how much the Germans fronted up on the civilized world before the Romans built the frontiers, where in 100 BC, which is pretty early, the Cimbri and Teutones tribe, which had come down from Denmark, they were attacking across the Alps. And the Romans had to summon their best general, Marius, who only barely defeated them in 100 B.C. rome, they're like America today. This is a great power. And so if the Germans could offer what was seen as an existential threat to the Romans at their peak, it really showed how dangerous the Germans were. Or the Germans were raiding all the way out to Spain. And so there was this earlier wave of German migrations which the Romans sort of bottled up and stopped in the Republican period with leaders like Julius Caesar or Marius. And the Germans filled out the region where they migrated deep into Eastern Europe. And Hitler, when he conquered Eastern Europe, he was using the raison d' etre of the Germans were here before the Slavs. And that's actually factually true. The Slavs were in North Ukraine. And so the Germans have a better claim to Eastern Europe historically than the Slavs do. But I don't also believe in those arguments either. I think whoever conquers the land gets it. You can't play any other game. But it gets stupid, especially for the.

[Austin Padgett]

People living there, because people have all these arguments over Israel, Palestine, and is it the 2000 year claim, the whatever claim. And it really doesn't matter at all because if people are somewhere for two or three generations, they're gonna, they're gonna fight for it. They're gonna feel like. Because people don't care about history, they care about where they were born.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I fight over my property when I get it yesterday.

[Austin Padgett]

I care about history also. But yeah, keep caring about history because we're doing a show. But just a rhetorical point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's your moral duty to fight, to defend your property. But so the Visigoths got down to Romania and they, the Romans had to evacuate the Dacian province, which is. They filled with a lot of ethnic Italians. They genocided the population and replaced them with Italians, who are the genetics for a third of modern Romania. Then the Germans populated Romania. When the Romans had to evict, they had to pull their military out of Dacia because they couldn't hold a line north of the Danube. And so the Germans mediated the entire frontier from the Rhine with the Netherlands at Zonden down to the Alps and then out to the Black Sea. And there were either Germans out in the Caucasus in Ukraine, where the, the Ostrogoths were based out of Ukraine and the Al people of the Caucasus were Iranians who mixed with and took in a lot of German cultural traits. And so you saw German influence pretty far east. And the Germans genocided the Scythians out of this region. And the Scythians were an ironic people who are, who are fascinating because the Scythians actually know the. First the Scythians, then the Sarmatians, they grew weak and got replaced by the Germans. And the Germans built up this horse culture on the step. And this is actually what Rohan in Lord of the Rings is based off because Tolkien was a Germanic history expert. So when he's talking at the writers of Rohan, he's pulling this from Ostrogoth culture or the German tribes in Ukraine. And the Germans kept on fronting up against the Roman Empire, where Marcus Aurelius had to fight a brutal multi year war against the Marcomanni people of the Netherlands, based out of modern. His military base was modern Vienna. And Augustus tried to conquer Germany west of the Elba river, where he briefly did for a 20 year period around the birth of Christ. And then Arminius, who was a Cheruski leader, and the Cheruski are actually the ancestors of the modern English, he built out a confederacy, wiped out a Roman field army of 20,000 men and that basically never happens. And that kicked the Romans out of, out of Germania. And he was actually a former Roman ally who backstabbed the Romans. I really love Arminius, he's one of my favorite historic figures. And yeah, because he fought for his people's freedom and he kept them from being grounded the Roman state. And the Romans pulled back to their line on the Danube and the Rhine, where Augustus, he made the calculation that Rome should keep its current borders and he thought he'd add Germania as like an extra side project, but that didn't work. And so you saw the development of this German cultural space which saw a huge cultural shift from the period between Augustus until the fall of Rome, where first, and this was a bit earlier, the Germans had a religious shift where they stopped worshiping a fertility God and they instead picked Odin as their dominant God. And this shows a cultural shift because Odin was the God of strategy and wisdom and leadership and, and mysticism and all those things. And so it showed that the Germans were becoming a more virile and a more warlike and a more masculine culture. And it also, you see this gradual increase in the complexity of German society where they would initially just come across as complete savages to the Romans. There was no one in Germany. The Germans basically lived in their own crap. They weren't even full time farmers. Where the reason Germany was lightly populated was there was a mixed herder farmer society where they were short term farmers, mostly of cows. And if you know anthropology, you know that herder cultures are more violent and masculine than non herder cultures, which explains their moral code. And by the time you get to, let's say Attila the hun in the 5th century, the Germans were on a comparable level of development to the Romans in a lot of ways. And that was partly the Romans collapsing in their levels of development, but it was also the Germans rising up where by the time of the fall of Rome, German soldiers were actually better armed than Roman soldiers, they were better trained than Roman soldiers, they could fight just as well. The Germans weren't as good at siege warfare and supply trains, but they could more often than not beat Roman armies. The Romans would actually hire Germans to be their bureaucrats and bookkeepers and a lot of merchants. And that was partly because plenty of Romans fled Rome to Germania to escape the horrible taxes of the late empire, where taxes got so bad and the bureaucracy and the corruption of the Roman Empire got so bad that there was a significant cultural trend of Romans fleeing to Germany. And this spread their culture. Where the Germans, they developed their own Alphabet, that being the runic Alphabet, they became a money economy. The German nobility were actually literate and the German nobility were as cultured as the Roman nobility. They knew the classics, they were quite worldly because they fought as mercenaries where the Roman army became completely dependent on Germans by the end of the empire because the Romans grew too decadent and corrupt to have the will to fight. So they needed Germans to fight for them. And when you look at the governance of Attila the Hun, who had this huge empire, Attila was completely dependent on German administrators and military people and merchants and that stuff. Because by the end of the empire, the Germans were on a comparable enough level of cultural development to the Romans that they were capable of managing a civilization.

[Austin Padgett]

Which is why I suppose all the Germans left in Eastern Europe were the wealthy and more, you know, sophisticated towns and areas. They attained higher levels of culture, which.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Is definitely in comparison to the Slavs, where the Slavs were seen as basically the most backwards people in Europe. And that's not really their fault. They're, they're stuck in, in the region of Europe that's most far away from any coastline, where they were from the Belarus Ukraine region that didn't really have a lot of trade and they were living in the Pripit Mar, where the Germans took the land of the south. And so when the Slavs migrated into the Balkans and further west, the Byzantine chroniclers would just say, these people can barely do agriculture, they're illiterate, they don't have large scale social organizations, they don't have government, and we're going to get to the Slavs later. But the Slavs were used as the henchmen for the nomadic confederacy like the Huns or the Avars and that stuff. And that's what spread them across Europe. And there's this interesting line from Mircea Eliade, who's the best author on religion, where he calls the Slavic religion of the 5th century decadent. And I find this hilarious because if you read enough Mercer Eliade, that's basically him just burning them, where if you know his writing, because if you call a barbarian religion decadent, that it's just sad. Do you understand what I'm trying to convey here? Because he says that the Slavic religion, before they converted, the sign of a decadent religion is a religion that doesn't actually think God does things, where if you believe in this abstract concept of like, like Spinoza, God is the universe and we just follow the natural laws. That's not a religion where God can actually impact your life. If it's a life affirming good religion, if you follow the will of God, first of all, you're spiritually connected to him. Secondly, it makes you more successful, you make more money, you get laid more. And it also gives you social organization around a new dynamic force. And it's interesting, this is just sticks in my mind where Eliade is talking about this culture from a very low level, already attaining decadence. And that always puzzled me because I'm thinking, how does that even happen?

[Austin Padgett]

Tongue in cheek. They managed to get decadent without getting sophisticated first.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that is a super interesting example. It would be cool to see other. I mean that. Yeah, that's a classic dynamic where there's. There's ways to get the end goal without the forces that generally cause it. It'd be interesting to study because you might learn something. My bet, because you get the pure incentive.

[Rudyard Lynch]

My best guess is they were so deeply traumatized by being next to the steppe that they just assumed the gods didn't care because they were on the highway of the Huns and those peoples. And so I think if they just got like smashed by the Huns so much and by these nomadic peoples they would just slide into the assumption the gods aren't on our side.

[Austin Padgett]

If you're never going to be able to save up for a feast, then you might as well like act like you're having a feast when you don't have it or something like, be waste. You'll never get a chance to save up to be wasteful. So just be wasteful with what you have.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I have read more than a few 19th century racial textbooks and they're actually less racist than you think. A lot of the authors from that time period have highly sophisticated, complex understandings of race, which we've basically papered over. A lot of them still were bigoted and racist and they always write pretty good reviews of the Slavs. And for example, two of them I've read say the Slav has a sturdy constitution and they are the people with the most fortitude of anywhere in the world while maintaining most of the positive racial traits of West Europeans.

[Austin Padgett]

They're probably an admiration that's we've talked about before with any civilized area. Looking at a more nomadic area. Right. They admire the primal and like you said, virile constitution. That's a very, very much a trait that would be held more by a nomadic culture. Like they're hardy, so that's. And then they're attached to old value so that you could see them having that admiration. And it's interesting that we talked about the Celts and the Germans the same way we talked about the Germans and the Slavs. So there's almost a gradient there along at that time.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, there is.

[Austin Padgett]

How developed they were.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, the, the genetic gradient still there. The Slavs are still the predominant population of West Europe. The Germans in the north, the Mediterraneans have their own cluster. Then you've got the Slavs. And so the genetic. If you look at a map of Europe in 500 BC, it's basically the same genetic groups. And then you've had some other stuff like the Germans had a big impact on England with the Anglo Saxon period, but it's mostly the same. And so you have this German region that is pretty big around the period of the fall of Rome. And the Germans had solidified into these larger confederacy is, or sort of ethnic identities. And there was a centralized concept of Germanness, but it didn't manifest like a national identity. And you saw as example the Franks or Franconians around the Netherlands, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes around the North Sea, the Suevi and Swabia, the Marcomanni in the, in Bohemia, the Bavarians, Thuringians in Germany, the Ostrogoths in Ukraine, the visigoths in Romania, etc. And you have several groups like the Vandals or the Lombards, who are basically just wanderers, where both of them started in Scandinavia, followed the Baltic coast. Because all of Germany, all of Poland was German at this point. Poland was as German as Germany. And so most of these German tribes actually were conduited, were shoved through Poland, not Germany. And you saw this split between the western German peoples in the eastern German peoples, where the western German peoples like the Franks or the Saxons or the Bavarians, they were more farming based peoples, they had higher population densities, they had larger kingdom structures. And the tribes in the east, like the Goths, who are from Geatland in Sweden, which is where Beowulf is set, and they ended up around the Black Sea. They were partial nomadic peoples, same thing as the Vandals, and they would alternate between doing partial agriculture and stock raising and all that stuff. And with the fall of Rome, the kingdoms from the western region of Germany survived, like England or France, while the kingdoms from the eastern region, such as Spain or North Africa or Italy, they were not able to last or form long lasting German communities where they assimilated because first of all they didn't have the population density of the western peoples. And secondly, they were conquering more populous regions than at a higher concentration of native ancestry. Where when you're dealing with England, at least half of the local population died in the Anglo Saxon period because England had a population of 1 million people killing half a million. And most of that was disease, actually that's. England had a million people killing half of that's not too difficult. Spain had 6 million people and hundreds of thousands of people migrated from Germany to England because they make up like half of modern England is like half German, half Celtic ancestry. And it's of course the men are Germans, the women's are Celts, so they just murdered all the men, married the women. And then once you get to Spain it would be like a hundred thousand Goths on top of 6 million Spaniards. So they would form a small ruling caste that was the nobles in the military who later assimilated, unlike population transfers. And you run into these weird hangups around the history writing of this time period because the historic, the history writers don't want to portray these as ethnic identities because that feeds the 19th century narratives where they'll be like, oh my God, the Goths were like a multicultural identity that included Roman runaway slaves and other people. And it was based around the charisma of a singular leader. And no, the Goths had their own language, they had their. They had their own ethnic identity. And I think you can't view a lot of these groups, especially in the migratory patterns as unified whole things like the Vandals. The Vandals were this. This group of people who migrated from Scandinavia down to North Africa, which is pretty impressive. And. And they were constantly having demographic transfer and importing new people. But the Vandals were more of like a. They were an ethnic group, but they were also sort of on the edge between bandit and I think the nuance there is that because this was a society based around a leader's personal charisma, where the Germans had pretty strong social mobility, where most of the German city states were actually republics, which then we forget where they would have several noble families which were known for being quite chadly. And then the free men or the warriors would vote on which noble family got the hold power, a sort of war leader. And there was a lot of social mobility. And the top virtue of the Germans was freedom. Where it was said that the Germans would rather die free than live in slavery. Where the Romans would have to kill the Germans rather than make them live as slaves. Although there were Romans, there were German slaves. And in that society you have high social fluidity where a single leader has charisma, builds a posse of men or the manor bund and then rewards them. He conquers and he rewards the manorbund. If his son lacks said charisma, the manerbund breaks up and then it goes to someone else. So in this sort of environment you have these ethnic identities with war leaders and then the war leaders recruit people. And so it's hard to draw really straight lines.

[Austin Padgett]

Really clear example of the war band dynamic being transferred or evolving into a form of government.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting to think of a republic as fundamentally the same as Herder warband formation.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It is Anglo Saxon. England had a parliament called the Witenage and operate under similar principles. And the Icelandic and the Scandinavian parliaments were the all things. Which is funny the thing that's the name of it. And almost every country in medieval Europe had a parliament. So it's not like democracy is a modern invention. Democracy stems back to the Germanic war band. The classical trajectory did not. The reason America is a democracy is because England is because the Germanic manorbund conquered England. And then the lord or the Brett Walda. The Brett Walda who is the king of England had to subdivide his. He had to get buy in from the nobility to govern the country. And that's where our trajectory of democracy comes from. And have I covered everything about Germany up to that era? So here come the Heinz and the Huns are an interesting player where they started out in Mongolia when this has been a huge debate in anthropology where whether the Schwing knew or the same as the Huns. And I, I read a. I sunk more information, I sunk more time into this than I care to admit. But short answer is yes, this, I read this book the Age of Attila. It's just academics talking about the fall of Rome era. And the Xuangnu were the first great nomadic confederacy. They fought China in 200 BC. Qishi Huang Di, the guy who built the Great Wall in the Terracotta army. His predominant enemies were the Shuang Nu. And they beat the Chinese a few times. Then the Chinese launched a campaign of genocide where they just torched the entire grassland and destroyed all their water sources. And so the Chuangnu migrated west, so it became Cheng Nu, then Shenu, Hunu Hun. And so as the Huns migrated west, they gradually changed their character. But by the time they reached Europe, they were still, they were the first people Europeans related to who appeared Asian. And so and we have records of that because the natives of Siberia, of Central Asia in the western steppe were originally European. And then Asians migrated west from Mongolia over the Roman period. And the Huns slammed into the Pontic grassland or the area of modern Ukraine, where it was strange the Germans had it all because normally in the pre modern period the nomads can just drive farmers off the grassland with military advantages. And they were called the Scourge of God because the Roman Empire converted to Christianity. And you hear these strange stories where the Huns would elongate their heads like Martians as a sign of beauty by pressing their children's skulls to make their heads pointy. And they were said to cook meat by shoving it between their legs and the horse. So as they ride the horse, it cooks the meat up. And they were known to only wear animal skins. So they were seen as several quantum levels more savage than the other nomadic peoples the Romans had dealt with.

[Austin Padgett]

Survive on horse blood and milk. Etc. I guess that's the Mongols. Did they leave any genetic trace in Eastern Europe and even going in close to Germany?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Not really, because the Huns themselves were a fairly small group where they ended up owning a huge empire which stretched from Kazakhstan in the east. And this is in the mid-400s. They had Kazakhstan, they had Ukraine, they had a lot of Russia, Romania. They were based out of Hungary as their capital. Then they had Germany and even, like, stuff out in the Netherlands and Poland where they were trying to build their own empire, which was nearly the scale of the Roman Empire in this opposition to Rome. And most of the subjects of their empire were Germans or Slavs. And this book says for every single hun, you had 12 slaves who were either Germans or Slavs. And they used the Germans more as the administrators and the soldiers. Where their greatest German allies were the Ostrogoths, and their greatest enemies were the Visigoths. Two varieties of Goth. One went to the dark side and one chose the light side. And they really caused a lot of grief where they were dependent on raiding neighboring countries where under the leader Bleda and later Attila, they. Starting in Hungary as their capital, where their capital was actually modern Budapest, which is Hungary because of the Huns. And Hungary is this grassland in Central Europe that has this climate where you can have nomadic militaries based out of there because it's a comparable enough climate zone. And they first attacked the Byzantine Empire, nearly taking Constantinople. They genocided the entire population of the Balkans, which is actually a historically important moment because the Balkans were the. They were the. The beating heart of the Roman Empire, especially the Eastern Empire, where places like Albania, Croatia, Bulgaria, they produced the best soldiers in the Roman Empire. They produced the best leadership. And they, they, they. They also were quite wealthy and advanced. Where there was a period when the Balkans was one of the most important places in the world and they were populated by the relatives of modern Albanians. Attila genocided every major city in the Balkans, which depopulated it. And as a side effect, the Slavs migrated down from Ukraine, filling out the region, because there was just this opening up of pressure valve. And the thing to keep in mind is that the way you have these large population transfers is Eastern Europe was incredibly lightly populated where it's like driving across Canada today, where Canada is just infinite trees and you just drive forever and you don't see a single person. And that's how Eastern Europe was, where you could wipe out entire populations or shift entire populations, like the Vandals or the Slavs or the. The Magyars, because these were small groups of people, so you could just kill and. Or enslave them and then migrate into their land.

[Austin Padgett]

Canadians are an interesting one because it's not Italian or Greek or any of the other groups we've talked about, but it's a group that used to be bigger, that kind of got squeezed out. Yeah, a little bit like the CELTS and would the other losers be the Persians? They got kind of swamped by the Arabs or.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

What are the. Are there some that probably disappeared?

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's plenty. As an example, you had this huge Christian Middle Eastern culture that existed with the Nestorians and the Gnostics and the Eastern sects of Christianity where that was shaping up to be its own completely distinct civilization. And then that was almost completely wiped out by Islam. Same thing as you said with Persia. The Greeks used to hold the Mediterranean. The Volker wandering really consumed everyone except Byzantium. Under, under those migrations.

[Austin Padgett]

Like we said, Byzantium fell because it was literally in the middle of Arab populated areas for miles and miles and miles. It was just a city on the water. Lasted past the demographic shift. And I was going to ask which side did better, the Ostrogoths or the Visigoths? The ones that chose good or evil.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So after the fall of Attila's empire, the Ostrogoths migrated into Italy and became lords of Italy. They kicked out a group called the Hay Rules who were this tiny tribe from Denmark. A pattern or the Hay Rules because their, their leader. How am I going to forget his name? This was in 476. He kicked out Romulus, their leader. Not Frutiger? No, Fritigern was a Visigoth. Their leader just announced himself king. But there weren't enough hey Rules to protect Italy. So the Ostrogoths took Italy, the Visigoths took Spain. So they both got a lot. The Visigoth rule ultimately lasted longer by a matter of a few centuries because the Byzantines and the Lombards divided up the Ostrogoth Empire. So the Ostrogoth lost control of Italy earlier.

[Austin Padgett]

They were just playing good cop, bad cop.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. It's also that the. I don't think the Austrian. No, I'm not going to give them slack. They should have fought back harder. They could have migrated west. It's not cool to cooperate with the Huns. But the Huns, they nearly took Byzantium and they were dependent on huge supplies of gold from Byzantium. They even attacked out by Persia and the Caucasus. And the Huns under Attila were really a terror where they tried to take down the Western empire. And there's this story of Empress Honoria was the empress of the Western Empire or she was a princess and she was having a love affair with some like lower class boy. And that wasn't acceptable because she had to marry a nobleman and so her father had her lover killed and then forced her to Marry the nobleman. And then she sent a letter to Attila saying, hey, daddy, Attila, if you come to Italy, you can take all of Gaul as a dowry and I'll marry you. Because she hated her dad that much. So Attila used this as a casus belli to invade France, the wealthiest province of the Western Empire. And they were only narrowly able to defeat him, where Aishius, the Roman commander who was raised among the Huns as a hostage, so he knew their tactics, he built out a coalition of the Visigoths, who were a German people inhabiting the southwest of France at the time, the Bacaudi, or the bandit tribes, and then the local Gaul nobility. And so this coalition fought against the Huns at the Battle of Catalonian Plains in North Central France, which was a three day multi part battle, which was known as the bloodiest battle of that era, where the peasants would say for generations afterward that they could hear the screams of the corpses across the battle and they couldn't use the land. And they were finally able to attack the beat the Huns by the Visigoths, launching a cavalry charge on their flank, which wiped out. Wiped them out. And after they lost at Catalonian fields, the Huns had to pull back. But then they attacked Italy, where the Roman Empire was so dysfunctional, Aisha couldn't get a new army. They went to the edges of Rome. The Pope and Attila had a conversation. In said conversation, Attila made the decision to pull back his armies for a little because the Pope threatened the wrath of God on him and he was facing malaria, so he thought God hated him anyway, where his troops couldn't handle malaria. Then his new wife, who in the Germanic tradition was the empress of the Burgundians, a people which he had worked with the West Romans to destroy when the Huns were earlier mercenaries for the West Romans, he killed them. He took their princess, married her, she murdered him and killed him in her sleep because she would rather live free than marry Attila. And that's how Attila died. And he was supposed to attack Rome soon after.

[Austin Padgett]

Another question. Why are we making all these redundant fantasy universes when we could do a movie about the Huns fighting in France? What the heck did I tell you.

[Rudyard Lynch]

About the TV show I wrote in high school about the. About this time period?

[Austin Padgett]

Sounds cool.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So I was very self directed. And so we had an independent study program at my school. So I told my Latin teacher, I said, if you're going to let me have an independent study, I'm going to write a TV show about the fall of Rome, about four families. An Egyptian monk trying to find God, a Swedish war chief trying to conquer England with Beowulf, a Gaulish family trying to survive in a collapsing. A Gaulish noble family and Gothic tribesmen fleeing into the Roman Empire. And so it's about all of their life at the sort of snapshot at the time of the fall of Rome. And I wrote 250 pages.

[Austin Padgett]

Maybe you should pull it out because you can do multiple completely separate shows that converge on an event like this with the Gauls, the Visigoths and the Huns, like you know, Avengers combination or whatever.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The other thing as well is this was. This is the central period of basically heroic literature where you have all these other stories where it's funny, I talk about Attila with his marrying his bride who murdered him. That is the end of a completely distinct, multiple completely distinct Germanic heroic sagas where that. I believe that's Brunhilde, who is Siegfried's lover. Where Siegfried was a mighty man who slayed a dragon and then a princess fell in love with him, but then he couldn't get with her and it caused drama and he got with a different girl and then she like. And then one girl was jealous so she poisoned someone and then he was betrayed by a dwarf. It's complex. And so in the Germanic there's the Volsung saga and the Nibelung Lian, which are the same rough story, the Volsung. I've read all of these by the way. The Volsung saga is Siegfried. It's more Old Norse. It's like Odin through Siegfried, Siegfried kills the dragon and then it ends with him killing the dragon. The Nibelungliad was dragon. The dragon's already dead. It's Siegfried having drama with the lord of Zonten. And it's like I read this entire book on medieval German like medieval German stories and it's all depressing romance things of like melancholy lovers killing each other, killing themselves because they don't want to have an arranged marriage or various drama like that. And so you can pull from the stories of Dietrich of Bern, who I believe also slayed a dragon. He's based off Odoric the Ostrogoth. You could pull from Beowulf. You have this pre established story structure which you could layer on top of the historic insanity. This could be Game of Thrones.

[Austin Padgett]

Arranged marriage violated their sense or like cultural legacy of merit and like warrior culture. So they're trying to go after a manly man or something and they might get you Know, some random.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, this is one of those. We are a very, like, schizophrenically earnest society. And what I mean by that is when we do something, we're insanely earnest about it without actually understanding what it is. And so we lack the wisdom to just incorporate chill. Where, like, you go to Latin America and there is a moral code, it's just no one follows it. And that's the accepted rule. And that's how most societies work in history. And so in pagan Europe, there was this sort of understanding of, yes, your parents should arrange a marriage, but also, kids are kids and they'll tell you no if they don't want to. So I was listening to a book on Julius Caesar where Julius Caesar was just sleeping around with random girls in Rome at the time, where that was like, Rome had a pickup artist scene. And so the parents were not happy about it, but there was this understanding that the kids would sleep together. And if the marriage is too bad, it's going to cause the family drama. And you don't want to get. You don't want to have that last for generations. And so in pagan Europe, you had these sort of like, archetypal moral codes which people just chose not to follow sometimes. Or like, if you have a great leader like Cuchulain, who is the Irish Hercules, Cuchulainn's father can no longer arrange a marriage for him because Cuchulainn is already so mighty. And so you have this warrior culture where it's might makes right. And so you can choose to discard the moral code at certain times.

[Austin Padgett]

More of a guideline than a rule. And then also just the transition and blending of. And making it within cultural context, I guess.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So the Huns did not survive past Attila's death because they were held together by Attila's charisma. And the fall of the Hun empire was like a whimper. And it created this. This new piece where the Huns had set the ball rolling for the German migrations. Where the Huns, because they went from Central Asia to Germany and France and Italy into Western Europe. They had all of these German groups migrate west into the empire. And these were large migrations where when I think of the Volkerwandering, I think of this insane map that I kept on seeing in books as a child of all of these migratory patterns. You see the Huns migrate from Central Asia to West Europe. You see the vandals start in Sweden, through Poland, Hungary, Italy. The vandals went. The vandals are a great example, actually. Where they went through Scandinavia, central Europe. The Vandals were both allies of the Huns and the West Roman Empire in different contexts because the Romans were completely dependent on German military forces. So they would divide up sub regions of the empire as payment because their currency was worthless. They couldn't pay the Germans in money because there was no money. So they gave the Germans land and it was normally ruled. The Germans could take a third of the land of the previous property and they left 2/3 of the pre established property of the region. And those were called the Foederati. And modern England and France both started out as Foederati. That just grew to became the new ethnicity city as well as a bunch of other areas, Spain too. And the Vandals they were federati around modern Hungary. And then the Huns pushed them west where there's this historic moment in 400 AD on Christmas Day when the Huns were pushing the Vandals, the Suebi and the Alans up against the Rhine river and they were terrified they were going to die. But then the Rhine river froze over and the Germans marched over the Rhine river and took France. And this on this one day when it was cold enough to cross the river, that initiated the invasion and the subjugation of the wealthiest province in the empire, Gaul.

[Austin Padgett]

When they crossed the river, I guess. Did the Huns do a lot of damage when they left or they just kind of turned back at that point I was thinking about the conflict with the Huns and then it transitioned right into Gaul. It's like what happened to the Huns that were chasing them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I don't think the Huns followed them into Gaul because the reason the Huns went out west was they were allies of the Romans where this is all a kaleidoscope of chaos. Everyone's constantly switching sides and just acting out of their self interest where storm.

[Austin Padgett]

But yeah, it's interesting that it created this dynamic where they all got up on the river and then it just froze and they popped over. It created the perfect circumstance to get a mass. It's interesting to think of the river as being a similar kind of barrier and difficulty to like the English Channel.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I mean it took time to build bridges, to build boats. It would have taken them I think days or weeks to build the pontoon boats to cross the Rhine.

[Austin Padgett]

Doing in secret too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And it's this sort of strange period. Whereas the Vandals as an example, they were Federati in Hungary, then they were forced west across Germany into France and the Germans did not have the men to really take the Roman Empire where they were wandering around as these bands and they would pick certain areas. Like the Visigoths became quite attached to modern aquatic. They actually started in Aquitaine and then conquered south into Spain. And they picked these regions and you have crazy stories of the German town, the Roman cities not even having a concept. The Germans could beat them especially earlier on and they wouldn't defend the cities. Factions inside cities would betray and open the gates to the Germans because they hated the local, their other rivals so much. And the Germans would just take protection rackets. And because Rome was this socialist command economy failed state, the Roman state was too corrupt and broken to raise armies to pay the Germans. And the Germans had no concept they would destroy the Roman Empire because the Roman Empire had been there for 600 years. And so they thought they were just eating at the corpse. But what no one realized is that if you eat at the corpse enough there's not going to be a corpse anymore.

[Austin Padgett]

With room degrading relative to the house. And it's just interesting to think about what makes people betray their end group in a really obviously like self destructive way. Because like the rivalries that are closest to you are just so much more important to people even over the overall shared goal which is like that. Then is it really about the shared goal? It's like very nihilistic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It spurred love where like a lot of young guys, myself included, I hate the left more than I hate the Chinese. Even though the Chinese are an existential threat. I would not trade out America to the Chinese against the left. But the thing with the left is that they have like this visceral degree of hatred against their own people that the Chinese can't replicate. Where spurned love is so much more dangerous than just you are prey and I will eat you. And so the Greeks and the Babylonians did similar things. Where the Greeks opened the gates to the Romans because they hated the other side so much they would rather them. They would rather, they would rather the other side lose than their society win. And the Babylonians opened the gates to the Persians where it's a sign of moral degeneracy and decadence. Where Rome had just become so extractive and so corrupt, where Peter Brown's got a book through the eye of the needle about the inequality of that era where the reason the Roman Empire converted to Christianity was it was super unequal. The nobility converts. Everyone who's dependent on the nobility converts too. That's the entire population. And it's also why the fall of Rome Actually increased height and health and diet across Europe because you got rid of the extractive government system so the general people could live happier and healthier lives because the state had become parasitic. But it was the fall of Rome came at the expense of the higher civilization, like the cities or in places like Britain, literacy or the trade or the ability to do stuff where the fall of Rome improved the lives of average people at the expense of the collective civilization.

[Austin Padgett]

Like you said, they had lost their cultural engine. They were an extractive socialist mess and didn't even think that they could lose to Germans. Meanwhile, the Germans are actually, you know, they've caught up to their fighting techniques, their, their weapons and things like that, like you mentioned earlier. And there's. It reminds me of the story about the Portuguese selling guns to the Japanese or the Dutch or whoever. Basically all colonialism. Right. It's like you're giving away a really big advantage. It's like there's an instinct to be like, oh, you shouldn't ever sell a gun to a foreign country. Or there should have been a rule, like in the colonial period to not transfer that technology. Like there's a. There's a protectionist instinct in that regard. But it seems like you can never stop incentives and you can never stop cultural transfer.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And the only way to really stay ahead is to maintain your cultural engine. Otherwise, just like holding on to a lead in a game which psychologically, you know, you start to lose.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What normally happened was that the German and the Roman nobilities mixed to create a new culture. And the Roman tended to go into the church and the Germans tended to be in the military and the warriors. And you could view a lot of medieval philosophy as the Latin south trying to use words to argue why the German military force shouldn't be as worthwhile. And as examples of this, the military dictator who held Rome together for like 50 years because Rome had an emperor, but this military dictator was really in charge, named Stilicho. Stilicho was half Vandal, German ancestry, and he was fighting against other Germans. The Eastern Roman Empire became completely dependent on colonies of Germans in the Balkans and in Anatolia, which they used for their military and political system. And the reason Byzantium did not fall to German conquest was they could pull on their own internal barbarians, first in the Balkans and then the Isaurians, who are a bandit, a bandit warrior people from the area of Turkey next to Syria, around Tarsus. The Isaurians launched a coup inside the Byzantine Empire to kick out the German faction which had been dominating the empire.

[Austin Padgett]

This Would be a good time to have a map, because just from this episode, you kind of expanded my view of how far the Germans went.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Both south on the Mediterranean side I was familiar with. But how far into almost towards the Middle east is insane.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. To go through a few examples of some of these migratory patterns. As I said before, the Vandals started in Scandinavia, through Central Europe, Hungary, out west of France. The Romans paid the Visigoths to kick the Vandals out of France and then Spain. And this is how the Visigoths are spread through France and Spain, where the Visigoths became the lords of Spain. Starting out in Aquitaine, in the south of France, because the Romans. The Romans lost Spain because they paid the Visigoths to kick the Vandals out of Spain. And people were just grabbing up regions of the Roman Empire. And the Vandals didn't utter Chad move, where they sailed to North Africa, became mercenaries in North Africa, then conquered the area of Tunisia and Algeria and parts of Libya, which was Rome's granary, which meant the city of Rome started to starve. And so the Vandals, this German tribe, initially from Scandinavia, they held. They held North Africa for over a century. And the Vandals then raided Rome because the Romans weren't giving them appropriate protection money payments. They sacked Rome, which is the second time that happened in a generation. And the Vandal sack was. Both the Vandals and the Visigoths were quite civil. It was like a structured sack where they sacked certain things. They didn't rape or torture the public, they just took the stuff because they were Christian by that point, and they respected the shared sacredness of the space. And then they took one of the Roman Empire's princesses. And so the Vandals became mixed with the Roman imperial blood. And the Visigoths, as an example, they also started in Scandinavia. They went out to Romania and they were forced into concentration camps in. Because the Huns were pushing the Visigoths across the Danube into Bulgaria. And then the Romans shoveled them into concentration camps where they. Or refugee camps. Camps where they didn't feed them appropriately. So the Visigoths had to sell their children into slavery to get money to feed. But then the Visigoths hid their weapons because the Romans made them pretend to give their weapons away. But they hid them under hay bales, took their weapons, beat a Roman field army at Adrianople, which was the first time that it happened in 400 years. And then the Romans gave them a Federati around modern Belgrade.

[Austin Padgett]

What year was that?

[Rudyard Lynch]

376.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And it's really interesting how Tunisia is just Carthage.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

How this spot just situated across the Mediterranean where you could grow a lot of grain was like the constant focal point of weakness for the Roman Empire. So that they burned it, they salted the earth. It's like better to not have build up the dependency on grain in that region.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Then exactly. What then happened as well is. And that point's very correct, I want to point it out. But what happened was that the Visigoths, based out of modern Serbia, they demanded the West Roman Empire give them high military titles because the German tribes would compete over who got to be general. And they perceived their social status through where they were in the Roman military. The Roman military said no. Then the Visigoths, their lord Fritigern, they just sacked Rome in 403. And then they migrated to France and then they working with the Roman authorities, they just took all of Spain except for the northwest, which was populated by the Aulani peoples which had migrated from the Caucasus. And the Swaby. It's the Alani are so weird. They were like super good cavalry. They were part Persian ancestry. They ended up in Galicia in northwest Spain. They're one of those peoples you look at the map and you think what was their story? And so by the time you get to after the battle of Catalonian Fields, within a generation the Roman Empire fell. Where the Germans took, sorry, the Vandals took North Africa first. The Heruli people took Italy, which with the fall of Rome in 476 when the child emperor Romulus lost power, the final generation of Rome was just pathetic. They had to be put out of their misery. And then the Heruli got replaced by the Ostrogoths who came in, in from Hungary into Italy. They built a kingdom which was actually an enlightened despotism where the, the. The Ostrogoth kingdom of Italy was a place with philosophy and art. And that's where the philosopher Boethius was based out of. And it's comparable to the Vandals were also patrons of culture and art. Where the, the German tribes, especially in the Mediterranean, kept Greek Greco Roman culture going. Where the Mediterranean still had cities and trade. And then North France and England was where civilizational collapse occurred. But that was also where the Germans saw the most long lasting cultural influence. And the last two places in the Western empire to survive was the Balkans, which had both the area around Croatia and northern France had independent military commanders who were Roman who just took independence. And when you look at maps, you'll see Syagrius's domain, which is a weird thing to see on a map. And the Franks took North France, populated it with the Merovingians, who were first known for being vigorous. And then they became a byword for degeneracy. And then the Anglo Saxons migrated into England. And the nature of England was that it was way more expensive than what it was worth for the Romans. They probably shouldn't have taken it because it was a lot of men to hold for a fairly sparse land. And they were facing constant invasions from the Celts, from the Irish especially, and even the Picts from modern Scotland made down to London. And the Romans pulled out in 400 due to the Germans fronting up on their French frontier along the Rhine. They just couldn't hold England, so they pulled their armies out. The English didn't know to fight or, sorry, the Romano Britons didn't know how to fight because it had been 400 years since they had fought for themselves. And the crazy thing as well is that the Roman troops in Britain had become a hereditary caste. So by the time these soldiers were pulled back to defend Gaul, they had already been in Britain for 200 years. And then they, the, the, the, the, the Romano Britain king leader Vortigern invited the Angles, Saxons and Jutes from, from Denmark and North Germany to fight off the Celts. He then didn't pay them and they immediately took the eastern third of England, becoming the modern English, eventually pushing the Celts west. And there probably was a leader comparable to King Arthur because they, they held against the Saxons for a generation. But then, as I said before, the Anglo Saxons killed the men and married the women, creating the modern English ethnicity.

[Austin Padgett]

Infighting. I've mentioned the story before, but the mythos surrounding King Arthur, the thing that it was about kind of in history was the Celtics. It was representative of the Celt struggle against the Saxons. Like, like you said, except for the story only focuses on the Celts. It's literally King Arthur is about familial infighting. It's literally his son who forms the opposing army. And the question of the story is, can we beat the Saxons? It's not about can we beat the Saxon army, it's about can we not fight each other? Because if we do, then beating the Saxons is inevitable. You made that point in early not the story. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You made that point in the Medieval Britain video. And I think it's a really good point. And it's funny too. You read about Siegfried or these great heroic epics, and a lot of it is just like Rom com infighting, which is not what you expect from some, like, ancient text that's 2000 years old.

[Austin Padgett]

Historical perspective. I don't care about their family drama. I care about the Celts versus the Saxons. And I'm. It's like, so it's like, why are you.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

There's a disconnect.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They're not having, like a grand strategy view of this. It's also that the society was so familial and so personal that the character of the leadership of an individual person determined an entire country because there was no bureaucracy, there was no standardization. So it was just the charisma and the chadliness of any given leader is what was holding the country together. And so when you saw that charisma and leadership collapse, like the Franks or the Huns or those peoples, they just fell apart. And so that's why they were focusing on individual leaders. And so Rome fell. You saw the rise of these barbarian kingdoms which carried on certain classical traits. Where Henry Perenne has an interesting argument with Charlemagne and Muhammad, that the rise of Islam is the thing that really killed classical civilization. Because there was a continuity after the fall of Rome culturally between the Greco Roman culture mixed with the Hellenistic and with the Muslim takeover of the Mediterranean. It split West Europe off from the Byzantines. And Henry Biren looks at Sutton Hoo, or an Anglo Saxon burial site from the 6th century. And it's clear from there that the commanders involved were veterans who had fought in the Middle East. They were people who had fought for the Byzantine Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. They were people who were cultured and knew the classics and who were quite wealthy and had a quite developed artistic system. So even England, which had lost the Latin Alphabet, they had the runic Alphabet, they had lost cities, they had lost the ability to build in stone. England became quite savage. They still had people who were culturally aware of what was going on in the Middle East.

[Austin Padgett]

Pretty amazing people definitely underestimate the general connectivity going back to the point like we were talking about where there's Atlantic maritime trade going into connecting to India 3,000 years ago.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Vandals were huge patrons of the arts. And so there was more of that that was going on. Although this was a civilizational dark age. Like, I don't. I don't read this stuff in my free time. I had to read some primary sources from the Vandals and the Visigoths when I went to college for a semester. But I'm not. This isn't like historic grade art. They just had not Collapsed into complete savagery. And as I said before, the East German states were not really capable at maintaining their long term dominance where they became a ruling caste as sort of nobility in Italy, Spain, North Africa. But then that ruling caste kind of slid back into the degeneracy of the general public. And so you see stuff, for example, where 7th century Visigoth Spain had enormous anti Semitism because the Jews were an obvious out group to unify the German colonizers. The different subgroups inside Spain who were all distinct ethnicities. Then the different types of German conquerors like the Alani or the Swaby or the Visigoths, then like peasant peoples, the cultured Romans. And so because they were all Christian, although there were different varieties of Christian, where the south German migrants, people like the Vandals, the Visigoths, sorry, the Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, they were Aryan Christians, which is not a Nazi thing. The Aryan Christians believed that Christ was a man. And I don't think they believed that. There was a lot of like autistic screeching about was Christ divine at the moment of resurrection? Was Christ both divine and mortal? Was Christ, I don't know, before and after the resurrection different? And I just see this as nerd shit. Where what they were doing is they were trying to rationalize different ethnic identities. This is one of the points Will Durant makes where the Byzantine Empire was torn apart by multiple of these. The first was the Orthodox Church, the ancestor of the modern Orthodox Church. They fought against the Nestorians and the Oriental churches like the Copts. The Nestorians were in Syria and Iraq, the Copts were in Egypt. And they were fighting over the nature of Christ, they were fighting over the Nicene Creed. Then you have the stuff of the nature of Christ's divinity, like the Arians. Then you have like the. I like the Pelasgians. The Pelasgians were this British guy who said if you're a good person you go into heaven and if you're a bad person you don't get into heaven. St. Augustine, who was writing in this era, the biggest Catholic theologian, he didn't like that because he was a Manichean who believed in predestination and lots of stuff like original sin or the idea that like the flesh and sex are bad. These are Manichean or gnostic ideas which St. Augustine ported into Christianity because he was a Manichaean, he was a Manichean who had converted. And so lots of the ideas, because Catholicism's got this double sided image where some Catholic teachings say that life is innately good and stuff like reproduction and making art and inhabiting your physical body is good. Then there's the other Catholic tradition for St. Augustine, which is the physical body is bad, sex is bad, you should abstain from life. And the Catholics and Christians alternate between these two based on context.

[Austin Padgett]

We were talking about this a little bit the other day, and with the gut, with the good and bad is a little bit of a simple way to put it, because you have to interpret that. But yeah, it's. The basic point is, like, to be good, you're gonna have to follow God. So, yes, it fits, you know, with. Within the religion.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And this was a period of a lot of what we would call Oriental asceticism, where Europeans tend to not go for what has Oriental assess. Asceticism is stuff where you stand on top of a pillar for six years straight to honor God. You, like, live naked in a barrel. You don't talk to someone for years straight. In Oriental asceticism, you see it, it was really big in Syria and the Middle East. The sort of monasticism, it's been really big in India, maybe China. I haven't heard about it there. And then Westerners tend to. Our concept of religiosity is more like monastic and integrated into society and that stuff. But this was the period where Europeans were most amenable to Oriental asceticism around the time of the fall of Rome because the society was falling apart. So you would see people in places like France or Italy, like, do those sorts of ascetic, very denying of the physical body things.

[Austin Padgett]

This is so stupid because it speaks to me as, like, insecurity. Like you're insecure about your relationship with God, so you make yourself suffer just to prove how much you care. Like, how much suffering. The more suffering you take on, the more anxiety can go away relative to your relationship. But that's like the. At very best, that's neutral. Likely it's destructive, but. And it's like, if you actually care about being good according to. To God, then do something useful instead of like, you know, not eating for two weeks.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's a control thing.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like. It's a weird bastardization of the concept of suffering because it takes it away from its purpose. It's kind of like making people go to school for, you know, 18 years or whatever for a credential.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

That's not related to the task you're doing. It's like, just start serving God. Stop. Like, proving that you can serve God by making yourself suffer.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Both humans and animals that experience trauma pick up certain like tick behaviors and they use them as a self soothing thing, as like a sense of control. And I see a lot of religious asceticism as an extension of that. And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna knock it completely because I'd rather be they be doing that than like committing crimes or, I don't know, like engaging in antisocial behavior. This is also not the Volkerwanderung. And although this is, you will understand the nature of this era of history from it. And so the Byzantines, they launched a counterattack under Justinian, which wiped out the Vandals in North Africa. They took a little bit of Spain from the Visigoths, and the Visigoths lost all of South France in the early 6th century to the Franks. The Franks did quite well because they were the major, only major kingdom in West Europe that had converted to Catholicism, not to Arianism. They had more of the cooperation of the locals. And the Byzantines conquered Italy from the Ostrogoths. However, they invited the Lombards into North Italy. The Lombards settled down and then took north Italy, made it independent. The Ostrogoths survived for a very long period in South Italy, the area north of the Boot. They held south Italy until the 10th century. These like Spoleto, Benevento, where these Ostrogoth mountain kingdoms, they held on forever. And the Byzantine wars in Italy were just such a slogan because the Byzantines held the central strip and a lot of the coastline. And I think like a third to half of Italy's population died. Rome was significantly more hurt by the Byzantine wars over Italy than it ever was by the fall. So Italy was completely empty. Most of it was trees by the end of the Byzantine invasions because it was just constant death and destruction where even the Franks came down to join in for the fun. And. And so Italy became this sort of clusterfuck of these different city states because no one was able to unify the country due to the constant infighting between Ostrogoths, Lombards and Byzantines. But this also allowed the Pope to establish his own independent authority in the constant chaos, because the Pope was an agent of the Byzantine Empire in technicality, but he was actually his own player. And with this you've seen a sort of stabilization of the German migrations in the West. The Franks form a kingdom and the Visigoths solidified in Spain before ultimately being conquered by the Muslims. But you do see the Slavs migrate and the Slavic migration was around the 6th century, the Slavs started in Ukraine, Belarus and with the Hun genocide of the Balkans, they migrate into the entire region. And the Byzantines were incapable of holding the Balkans because their military system was city based. And so when you kill all the cities, there was no way to police the land. So the Slavs just moved in and they would start procreating and populating the land. And the Slavs actually got down to central Greece and the Peloponnese. And there's been this whole debate in genetics. Are the modern Greeks even the descendants of the ancient Greeks? And the Greeks have vociferously hated this. They need to be the descendants of the ancient Greeks for their identity. And genetically there is some Slavic influence, but it is the same people because the Slavs settled in so much of Greece, in Bulgaria and Serbia, they're like 50% Illyrian ancestry, 50% Slavic ancestry. And once you get out to like Croatia, they might as well be Poles and Ukrainians. Where the Slavs they're ethnically Slavic in Hungary. Hungary is mostly genetically Slavic, although they have an ethnically Finnish language and ruling class, because the Magyars who later invaded the region in the 9th century, they built a slave state on top of the Slavs, which was the general pattern. And the Slavs were pagans, they were illiterate and they set the region back centuries. And of course I love the Slavs, I do not want to engage in anti Slav racism. But if the Illyrians held the Balkans, it could have been a country like France or Germany or Italy. It would have been a first world country because it had an earlier track record. But first of all, the Slavs migrating into the Balkans split it up into these different sub ethnicities. Where it was earlier a broader ethnic region under the Thracians and the Illyrians, it split up in the Serbs and Bulgaria. And these peoples and the Byzantines furthermore divided them. When they conquered them, the Byzantines split it up to try to keep the Slav at each other's throats. And the Slavs were under the Bulgar confederacy, who were Turkic peoples from Siberia. But over 90% of their population were Slavs, which is why the Bulgars speak a Slavic language and they're identical to other Slavic peoples. But the Bulgars nearly took Constantinople, which there was a double sided siege where the Persians were on the Asian side of Constantinople and the Bulgars were on the European side. So they were both attacking Constantinople. And the Byzantines pulled some badassery where they were able to wipe out both armies to survive, because Constantinople would remain undefeated for a thousand years. And the Bulgars really gave the Byzantines a run for their money. But the Byzantines were first able to convert them to Christianity in Orthodox Christianity, which then allowed their civilization to percolate through them, gradually domesticating them and turning them into good Greek Orthodox. And secondarily, Basil Bulgar slayer destroyed their entire nation. Where Basil the Bulgar slayer was one of the great Byzantine commanders, part of the Byzantine Renaissance, he conquered them. And he was known for tearing out the eyes of an entire Bulgar army, leaving one man with a single eye to watch, to carry them back. Because seeing all their men walk back with no eyes would be worse than seeing them dead.

[Austin Padgett]

Totally. I remember. I think I remember that story. Yeah, that would be a really downer of a walk.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It was one of my dad's favorite stories. It's funny, I once had a conversation when I was in high school with my dad about the Byzantine Emperor Marcian. And I was making fun of him, and he was like, no, he was a patriot. Don't make fun of him. He was trying to save his nation. Show some respect. Because I think. I don't know if it was Marcian. It was one of those guys, he like, died defending Byzantium against one of his rivals to the north. But with the Slavs, you see this differentiation between the Western branch and the eastern branch, where the Balkans and Russia converted to Orthodox Christianity, which had long term civilizational impacts on them because it percolated their entire social structure. And then the Poles and the Czechs and the Baltic peoples converted to Western Christianity, which makes them part of the broader Western civilization. And so if you're like a white American, the cultural distance in you. And a Polish person is vastly closer than a Bulgarian person or a Russian.

[Austin Padgett]

American is closer to a Polish person. Sorry, I was thinking about the eyeballs still.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay. Yeah, it's pretty disturbing, which is the point. An American is vastly culturally closer to a Pole than to a Bulgarian or a Russian. Poles are culturally much closer to Western Europe than they are to the Orthodox world. And it's funny because the Slavs are. You can. You can see genetically the Slav migrations were real, where the Russians and the Poles are genetically very close. But it's a sort of indication of how much culture can affect it, because Poland was a democracy, they were Catholic, and Russia was not. And so you can see the cultural differentiation split genetically identical peoples.

[Austin Padgett]

It's a really interesting example of that dynamic not underestimating that, that tendency. And right now Poland is pretty hot right now and they're doing pretty well. I think they're starting to pass some parts of Western Europe and statistics that they haven't in a long time. And certainly so they're kind of like a bridge between that potential Eastern European development and you could see Eastern Europe seize an opportunity and have of profound cultural shift of a similar nature.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Poles are pretty hot, much like other Eastern Europeans and with so final steps of the Volkha wandering. Because there's the map and the map stretches. There's a great book. I've like started and tried to finish this book five times. Empires and Barbarians by Peter Heather. I'll read little bits of it, I'll get. Get bored. I'll read other bits, I'll say I read it. But his, the thesis of that book is how did Europe go from Mediterranean dominated to North Europe dominated? How did you. In the thesis he gives, he gives two interesting examples. The first is he tries to compare a lot of these migrations to an event we'd see in Rwanda where in Africa you see these genocides where one group pushes another group out. And the Second Congo War, the bloodiest war since World War II, was actually started by events very similar to the Volkerwanderung where one group in Rwanda genocide another group, that group fled into the Democratic Republic of Congo, which created a series of triggers which destroyed the entire Congo out to the Atlantic and the Congo the size of Western Europe. So it's a comparably similar size. And then every country bordering the Congo also declared war on the Congo. And it's called Africa's World War for that reason.

[Austin Padgett]

Reason.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And the second example he uses is when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul, that was the south projecting dominance onto the north. And then when the Franks were invading Italy under Charlemagne in 800, it was the north projecting onto the south. The Volker wandering resulted in a sort of quantum shift in Europe going from a Mediterranean civilization to a civilization based around the Blue Banana. The Blue Banana being the central arc of west, the central croissant of Western civilization from England through Netherlands, Rhinelands, down to North Italy.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting how close the Blue Banana is to the spawn point of the German people. You know, coming out of Scandinavia and the North. It's like basically the top of the continent is the Blue Banana.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Blue Banana is the intersection between Latin and Germanic civilization. So it can pull on the sort of like character and precision and that stuff of the Germans with the more pre established higher civilization of the Latins. The Spawn point for the Germans was Scandinavia.

[Austin Padgett]

So they spawned out of the Scandinavia. And the Blue Banana is like. Like the first place they hit on the continent. It's like the top of the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, correct.

[Austin Padgett]

So the land mass, I guess Scandinavia is part of the continent also. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I want to make a sex joke at the Blue Banana, but I don't know how.

[Austin Padgett]

Something like that, but.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So there were several invasions from the Step. First you had the Huns, then you had the Avars. The Avars took Hungary and they grew decadent, and they had this beautiful fort system called the Ring. And Charlemagne shattered the ring and took their gold, which might have been his most impressive accomplishment. And Charlemagne conquered Hungary as the Frankish lord. Then the Magyars migrated in because it left a void. And the Magyars, based out of the modern. The Magyars are the modern Hungarians. And they were called Hungarians because the West Europeans processed them as the same people as the earlier Huns. And they raided and destroyed a lot of Europe. They got as far out as Spain. They really caused the German empire a lot of hurt, which the Germans ultimately beat them at Lechfeld. And you also saw the Viking migrations. And the Vikings are the last major Volkler Wanda. Wrong. And I won't get too much in the Vikings or the Arabs because they have their own videos, but the Vikings are in Scandinavia from, let's say, 790 to 1060. They invaded most of the British Isles. They raided the coast of France. They made modern Russia. They sailed out to the Mediterranean and North Africa. They went to. They got it far out of Central Asia. You'll find Indian and Chinese artifacts in Scandinavia, huge piles of Persian and Arabic gold in Scandinavia. It was just. They had currency levels of Arabic gold in Scandinavia because they were trading with them so much. And the Vikings are really the final example of the Volkerwanderung, because they were the last Germanic people to be civilized. And they. And so they had this sort of barbarian tenor to them because Scandinavia was the furthest large population center in Europe. So it was the furthest one to incorporate Christianity and develop countries and civilizations. And so by the time you get to a thousand ad, the last major Germanic people had become countries and had converted to Christianity, that being Scandinavia. And this started the growth phase period of Western civilization, where the incorporation of the Germans on top of the Latin civilization using the Hebrew religion of Christianity is the treaty that created the West. So once they were no longer migrating across Europe, they could cultivate that energy for the Crusades, for colonialism, for the age of discovery. And all of modern European history is pent up tension from the Volkerwandeurung. And the Latins had lost a lot of their earlier virility, which the Germans were able to reincorporate so that peoples like the Italians or the Spanish were capable of doing more cool stuff later on. And then the Arabs, they took the Mediterranean and they forced Europe onto its own turf. They split up old classical civilization and they built modern Spain, which had to be developed to fight back against them. And so we end this period with Charlemagne and Charlemagne and Muhammad, where Muhammad made his own supernova, which took out the entire region and Charlemagne built out this Frankish empire that became the new core region of Western civilization. While Charlemagne was the first major leader to fight against the Vikings in Charlemagne's dying years, he said, the Vikings are going to become a horrible threat that's going to nearly destroy us. You have to be really careful about them, because you would see these huge fleets along the coast of his empire. And he knew that when he was going to die, these huge fleets would start to dig into the empire because they would know that his descendants would not be strong enough to fight them.

[Austin Padgett]

He knew it was only a matter of timing. And yes, they could wait. And so did the. Did Christianity create unity? Because the Scandinavians. Right. So it was the Christianity that changed the nature of the invasions and occupations.

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of the interesting anthropological things Peter Turchin talks about is you need different side, different types of religion for different numeric scale. So once you get past the 10 million tipping point as a population, you're going to have a religious breakthrough. Because once you're operating past a scale of 10 million people, you need a different type of social structure. Same thing with the rise of most modern religions, with the axiolate as a side effect of the rise of currency. That's Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism. And Charles Dawson likes to say, Chris Dawson likes to say you have the religion of the hunter, the religion of the farmer, the religion of the city dweller, the warrior and the empire. And each of these breakthroughs require philosophic and religious changes. And these societies converted to Christianity when they wanted to form countries. And that's what happened across the region. Because when you form a unified country, which you see with Russia, with Scandinavia, with England, you need to first of all, train bureaucrats to manage it. That only the church could do that. In the Dark Ages, most literate people in Europe were church people. So you needed to have the church to train people who can read and write, you need to have a shared moral code where you can operate outside of interpersonal relationships, where you have cities and bigger countries. You can't just say like blank person insulted my honor. I'm going to kill them over were guild. You need to have these sort of like quid bro crows of I love you. Quid bro co I like. I like quid bro quo of I like you. We believe in love as this shared moral code. We can use Christianity as the shared cultural operating system. And so whenever these societies passed a certain threshold, they converted to a monotheistic religion. You can see that with the Khazars, this Turkic people from the Caucasus, they converted to Judaism because they needed to pick some monotheistic religion to run their society. But if they picked Islam or Christianity, they would become dependent on the Arab caliphate or the Byzantine Empire. So they picked Judaism.

[Austin Padgett]

Third party monotheism.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So I think we covered that. It was a good episode. You want to cover the Crusades or the Mongol Empire for our next episode this week?

[Austin Padgett]

The thing popping up in my head is the Crusades. Okay, Mongols might fit better with the Huns, but either one works well.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I will see you for the Crusades. Goodbye.

[Austin Padgett]

Excellent. To the Crusades.

[Narrator]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.