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Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the
Peaking Yona Show. Thomas is back and after a little
hiatus due to travel, we're going to continue the thirty
Years War series.
Speaker 2: How are you doing, Thomas, I'm doing well. I was
very pleased that the first episode was so well received
because it's a huge subject matter and I feel comfortable
speaking on historical topics. But there's so much here. There's
there's there's deep cultural anthropology here, there's ecclesiastical heritage, there's
military science stuff, you know, so I was worried that
maybe I wasn't presenting the material in a way that
people found worthwhile. But there's been a lot of effusive praise,
and I really appreciate that because I work hard this
to deliver a you know, content that people actually benefit from.
You know, there's a few different ways we can go
in proceeding. I kind of want to. I realize I'm
kind of dealing in broad strokes. That's because if I don't,
will be on the same subject matter for the next
five years. I've whittled down to what I think is
most important in the During the in the seventeenth century,
there was a revolution in military affairs. That's important, and
there was a power political paradigm that preceded that that
led to a sort of technological shock when the Thirty
Years War arrived because it was so different than the
preceding paradigm. Also, when I think of what became Germany
in political terms, you know, Brandenburg Prussia was utterly devastated
by the conflict, but it also solidified its militant Protestant identity,
you know, And that's important too. But also the way
that the the way that the modern battlefield developed, I
think is ill understood, especially because the way in which
military science textbooks were written then there was these very
very geometric models presented and in manuals that dealt with
things like infantry drill. There was exaggerated depictions of kinesiology
and human motion. So for a long time that led
a lot of war college types to think, oh, well,
there was this overemphasis on drill. That's not why, Especially
when most people weren't literate. They're trying to convey sort
of the mechanics of human motion and the difference between
the parade ground and the battlefield, as well as trying
to convey to everybody from NCOs and and UH and
battalion level officers to UH to conscripts and and you know,
infantry grunts. They were trying to convey a concept in
visual terms. Okay, there was actually a great deal of
flexibility in the Thirty Years War, and in terms of
how combined arms were were oriented, and make a mistake,
there were real combined arms. You know, cavalry in cavalry,
infantry and artillery was uh. It was incredibly complicated to
deploy these forces in concert. And there was a technologic
revolution underway then too, whereby if they came clear, particularly
with respect to field artillery. Weapons designers realized there were
certain potentialities too large guns, but there wasn't There wasn't
the materials and the tools available to make them yet.
So there was all these sort of intermediary designs where
the bore wasn't quite right for the range desired, but
the men making these things knew that this was possible.
So military science was kind of overshooting military technology. Usually
it's the opposite. So I've got the I hold the
minority opinion a lot at a lot of subject matters,
to the point where I'm sure some people are convinced
I'm merely a contrarion. I don't think that I am.
But this is yet another case, I think thirty years
more tactics, that strategic orientation was light years ahead of
everything before it, but they didn't have the tools to
effectively deploy in totality, you know, within that complete paradigm
also mission oriented tactics. And this becomes important owing to
the conceptual biases born in the preceding military paradigm. For
one of the major powers, you know, say like you
know the Holy run Umpire or you know Poland Lithuania,
or you know the that the Swedish Confederation, in order
for them to feel an army, it would cost about
seven million gulders just just to raise you know, like
an army that could you know, uh that could uh
you know, stand and face a peer competitor and not
get slaughtered just out of the gate. And then you
need to feed and pay these grunts and calvary men
and artillery men. Then you need to feed all these animals.
So this was astronomically expensive. So what I'm getting at
is that if you wanted to sustain that level of
operational effectiveness, you you had to copd had to resolve
pretty rapidly. But also in the Thirty Years War, the
way that it broke down where uh you know, you had, uh,
you had adjacent principalities going to war with each other
all at the same time. There was a you know,
civil wars raging within a common polity, usually with the
Protestants as the element and rebellion, but not always. So
you had you had basewood amounted to war bands of
zealots kind of like Christian muja deen, as well as
mercenaries that were deployed as essentially uh, counterinsurgency elements, you know.
And then you had the you had you had the
arms of the the king or the reigning lesser nobility,
and and these guys were like a war band living
off the land, you know, they were not conventional military forces,
so mission oriented, techic some some primitive iteration of it
just became the order of the day. And uh this
led to a lot of rapine, figurative and literal brig injury.
Awful stuff happened. But even basically upright and civilized troops,
you know, you they had to live off the land,
you know, so you were fighting not just you know,
your your your day to day wasn't just you know,
in operational terms, locating, closing with and killing the enemy
or if you know, you were licking your wounds. As
a unit, you know, as as a company or as
a battalion, you were basically moving only at night and
hiding during the day until you could refit and regroup.
But in either one of those, under either one of
those conditions you had to feed yourself, you'd starve, and
especially two in these battle spaces, it's not like normal
commerce was was being totally interrupted. You know. It's not
like you go to a marketplace and buy a wunch
of loads of bread or something. You know. So this, uh,
this changed everything. And when I talked about the shock aspect,
it wasn't just technological or or historical the way to
understand Europe really for the preceding couple of centuries, but
in earnest for the preceding fifty years. You know, I
made the point about the Turkish War that the Habsburgs
fought against the Ottomans between fifteen ninety three and sixteen
oh six. That was the largest mobilization of military force
in habsburg Lands since the fifteen sixties. And to be clear,
the Ottomans were still in comparative terms, were still a superpower,
albeit went in decline in this sixteenth and seventeenth century,
and Europeans all viewed the Ottomans as a common threat
to Christendom. And this did two things, and they were
that wasn't just a fiction that was exploited for you know,
political reasons, but this Europe needed that external military and
uh political threat to sustain anything approaching unity between these
diverse polities, but also the Eastern European the Central and
Eastern European frontier especially. You know, we got into talking
about Transylvania and Morovia and to a lesser degree, Bohemia
in the last episode. It was impossible to truly fortify
this frontier in a linear kind of garrison capacity. There
were a large Swas territory that were just impassable, you know,
because they were triple canopy forest populations were concentrated in
these scattered towns. You know, it didn't it lent itself
to a strategic thing. He was oriented very much to
countering this discrete threat and creating what amounted to a
defense in depth by garrisoning lead elements at key junctures,
you know, almost like almost like NATO dated at the
faulted gap in the north German plane just because there
was only a handful of avenues of assault ingress, okay,
and then as a secondary defensive court on you know,
deployment would be more linear, all right. But this informed
military doctrine from top to bottom and pretty much throughout
the continent. And at the odd time of hostilities in
sixteen eighteen, basically every officer in NCO serving in Halfsburg
like bearing arms for the Habsburgs had had cut his teeth, uh,
you know, in in the in the Turkish War. So
this fluid and diffuse pattern and combat and deployment that
ensued in the Thirty Years War, which was one part
civil war, one part pretty conventional conflict between adjacent polities.
No nobody was prepared for that, you know. And so
the this the learning curve was a trial by fire,
you know. And uh, the people who are most towards
that end to the the people who are kind of
unsung and overlooked. And I'm sure again people will say
this is a conceptual bias line towards the Protestant side.
But these counts and dukes like like Count Thurn, like
hone Lob and Mansfield, they led the Bohemian rebel element
you know, in the eastern hasper Lands, and they really,
they really put a huge amount of hurt on what
was viewed as kind of the the top infantry and
cavalry elements of the day. And this is this is
overlooked in favor of a you know, the battlefields farther west,
where these military science types basically look at their their
view is basically that the Spanish style of warfare was
deteriorating and becoming obsolescent, and that's whatever. Butod he abided,
including the Habsburgs. Then you know, after about a decade
on the Swedes intervened and the Swedes revolutionized warfare. I
don't accept that for a lot of reasons. But you know, this, uh,
this paradigm that wasn't quite unconventional, but also is not
at all conventional warfare. And the way we think of
it as was extant, you know, before or after. That's uh,
that's important and uh it's not unlike uh, in my opinion,
what happened uh in the Balkans and on the Eastern
frontier in World War two, you know. And uh so
this this also had a conceptual aspect to it too,
because as as innovation and tactics and new ways of
fighting and incorporating you know, truly effective gunpower weaponry as states, uh,
like what became Prussia. You know. There they're claim to
prestige and their power political ambitions were facilitated by their
excellence at warfare almost exclusively. I mean, yeah, I there's
obviously there's a huge amount of culture produced by you know,
kingdoms like Prussia as well. But there, but that that
was that that was the the singular most significant variable
in their ascendency and the degree to which military considerations
either direct or directly or obliquely, it's sort of coded
European development. That's a hugely important point. And uh, that's
one of the things that sets europe apart and European
people apart, you know. And uh, Europeans are kind of
the ultimate warrior race, you know that I don't think
they can be denied, you know. But the uh and
another way the reason this is important, and another way,
I part way from a lot of court historians. You know, again,
this this idea that for really the first decade of
the Thirty Years War, you know, it was a matter
of obsolete tactics and strategy and technique being exposed as such.
Like that's that's not really true either. You know, innovation
happened rapidly and immediately, and you know it, Uh, those
commanders and those elements that couldn't adapt essentially immediately upon
first contact with an opposing force, that they just ceased
to exist. You know. So there's a flexibility built in
too tactical doctrine by necessity. That sounds tautological, but that
there is a there is a totological aspect to the
way military affairs play out at particularly at company or
battalion level. I don't think serious people dispute that, you know,
it's uh. Also to it. Another thing that changed brutal
is the wars. What the Turks were, you know the
Turks basically, the Turks would probe, they'd see what avenues
of assaulting grass were available, and again on the frontier
and especially in Transylvania and Marouvia, these were few, and
then they'd exploit those breaches when they had overwhelming force
on their side. When they met resistance you know that
couldn't be overwhelmed, they frequently evade and shelter behind fortifications,
you know, uh, in in anticipation of the counter attack,
you know, in in in the Hungarian theater though, and
you know, in what became the the Bohemian theater. The
order of the day was I mean, this wasn't part
of not completely you know, a sectarian war, a holy war.
Even the objective really was the stack of bodies, you know,
it was it was it was a headhunt, you know,
exploit uh like like you know, locate close with the
enemy and annihilate them as as an end in itself
was oftentimes the mission orientation, you know, but this differed
by that, you know what battlespace we're talking about, and
there was just like a malagamat diverse mission orientations, tactical doctrines, terrains,
weather patterns, you know, you name it. It was a
there's probably more data other than in the twentieth century,
the other than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In
the nineteenth century it oh, so the American War between
the States, the twentieth century obviously, I don't need to
lably explicate this. But other than that, other than those
two examples, there was more data gleaned on the practical
business of combined arms tactics and infantry war fighting, and
from you know, glean from the Thirty Years War than
any other conflict paradigm. And I'll die on that I'll
die on that hill proverbially another and yeah, the technology
revolution too. It's probably like you know, people, it's probably
become some of cliche, but you know, warfare is the
mother of invention, you know, even like what we're doing
right now. I mean, the the Internet exists because it
was it was a survivable command to control platform, you know,
in in anticipation of nuclear war. You know, the entire
telechrome revolution came out of the Cold War. You know,
air power or you know as we know it, you know,
came out of military exigencies. You know, the space program,
you name it. Like I I'm the first person to
criticize the the the rent seeking, and the parasitic nature
of the of the military apparatus. Okay, I mean, I
think people who read my content are well aware of that.
But this talking point that a lot of both liberals
and libertarians are prone to, where they say that like
wartech never produced anything, or that it's a worthless expenditure
of human energies and capital. That's complete nonsense. There's warfare
produces all kinds of innovations, that have broad application and
claiming otherwise is just moronic, you know. And simultaneously, in
the seventeenth century there was just a lot of punctuy innovation,
particularly on the side of mathematics and engineering and things.
But something big that happened between handheld firearms basically appeared
in the battlefield between the fourteen seventies at about fifteen
twenty or fifteen thirty, but they hadn't really been perfected.
They were largely perfected by the time of the Opposite
of Hostilities in sixteen eighteen, and that led to the
development of a new kind of shock deployment pattern which
is really fascinating and I'll get more into this as
we get into this series. But your firearm infantry they
would deploy basically like a fe lanx and the Dutch
developed this technique of constant fire even while retreating where
stated simply essentially like the uh, the the lead line
of the faylanks would fire and then break off, you know,
and then the second line and then third line, and
uh they'd each line would reload, you know, as the
line in front of them was uh finding their target
and and discharging their weapons. But uh this uh, your
pikemen thus are who traditionally had a defensive role because
pikemen and fixed formation horses will not charge and throw
themselves on pikes. Horses are really smart, and war horses
are bred for those kinds of instincts some of other things.
But your pikemen essentially need to protect the they they
need to protect the your uh, your your shot FLANX
from enemy cavalry and UH. Traditionally, when the sort of
earliest combined arms UH tactical paradigms developed, and some of
this endoored the Thirty Years War, but it mostly didn't. Traditionally,
your cavalry assaults uh its counterpart, you know, your infantry
assaults its counterpart, you know, having to rush your infantry,
or having this kind of light cavalry element light in
terms of not really being armored, but that's loaded down
with handled firearms that essentially like zig zags in skirmish formation,
and UH then swoops in, you know, to provide extra
firepower to a FAILANX that's being out gone, nder, overwhelmed
or threatened by cavalry. All these sort of innovations and
tweaks the paradigm you know, became necessary, you know, and
h productive techniques and conventionally, uh, Transylvania was conventionally the
it was almost like Krupp or the scot To arms
works of its of the Middle Ages, an early modern period.
They built really great siege engines, and they built really
great artillery, the Transylvanian Saxons, you know, they they were
this uh, there there were these you know, Germans who
settled in Transylvania, and you know, one thousand eighty or
even earlier. They were another population that was ethnically cleansed
after World War Two. Incidentally, but uh, productive techniques in
metal urgy and things became such that, you know, guns
and artillery, you know, they couldn't be mass produced in
the terms that we think of it, but they could
be produced at a scale that was there before basically unprecedented.
Interestingly too, and this added, uh, there's nuances of the
command structure of armies in the Thirty Years War in
military culture that are they're not just anthropologically interesting as
fascinating stuff, but artillery men, the loading of artillery, the
practice of targeting fighting as an artillery man, these guys
belonged to the same guild as miners because it partook
of medals and things, and so if you wanted if
you wanted the artillery in your in the army you
were raising, you had to deal with the miners guild.
I can't remember who their patron saint is, but point
being so you basically you had to be on good
terms if you were a prince or a duke or
whatever with the guild under which artillery men you know,
fell and they'd view their guild as having authority that's
superseded dead of commanding officers. Then, to be clear, the
guild system, it wasn't just some glorified version of a
Freemasons or something. The idea was that productive techniques and
artisanal techniques and things, this is all part of like
God's revelation. This is a sacred aspect to the preservation
and maintenance and passing on to this knowledge. It's very
deeply theological and it was taken very very seriously, you know.
So there was a certain prestige and fraternal and celerity
that attended you know, guys who served in the artillery branch.
But it also it caused problems. You know, people think
inner service rivalry and like late modernity is like a
big deal. I mean this plus two when you couple
it with sectarian divisions, you know, like we talked about
in the first episode. Yes, there you know, the protest
the Calvinists and the Lutherans were nominally allied and and
you had Lutherans and Protestants serving in common formations. But
there was a lot of tension there, you know, they
there there, There wasn't some sort of there, There wasn't
sort of deeply felt you know, generically Protestant identity quite
the contrary. So there's all there's all kinds of complicated stuff.
That's what I'm getting at. That we'd associate with the
medieval period, you know, like what mainstream Anglophone history uses
the medieval era, but you know that that was still
that still held significant psychological sway over at military organizations
and and putting institutions, you know, in into the sixteen hundreds.
You know, it's really fascinating. And again too, like I said,
there was there was real difficulty with uniformity of ammunition
as well as bores for these guns because there's all
kinds of experimentation going on because like I said, these designers,
they they were experimenting with designs that they knew were possible,
but there there just wasn't the material or the technique
perfected to make a battlefield viable yet. So this led
to a lot of failures of discreet platforms because the
testing grounds literally the battlefield, but also even those that
even those guns that were viable, there was such a
diversity of models that you know, it caused combatibility issues,
you know, or even if there was plenty of ammunition
on deck, you know, you'd have men who hadn't trained
on whatever guns that they you know, were able to
get hold of, you know, and things like that. So
it's kind of amazing things worked as well as they did.
And like I said it, the sophistication on display in
you know, these these tactical treatises and stuff is pretty
it's pretty incredible. But yeah, at the same time too,
it uh there was a self conscious uh emulation of
the Greek failanx and and that kind of drill technique,
you know, and and a lot of that endoors to
this day, you know, but it's not merely it's not
merely ceremonial and it's not merely parade ground stuff that
looks pretty. There's certain even today, I mean, even as
uh the modern battlefield is has become truly fluid and
what have you. And and in a lot of ways,
you know, all private assumptions relating the wan and particularly
infantry combat are no longer particularly relevant. But there's certain
there's certain geometric realities that are constant no matter what
you know. And there's the added benefit with some of
these techniques and practices that there's the way to tradition
behind them. That's the way to understand the aforementioned you know,
like I can't remember we were talking. I was talking
to you or talking to our dear friend Jay Burden
about the spirit of the bayonet and how at the
end of the day, you know, the the bayonet and
the cold steel blade, when not affixed to a rifle,
remains a relevant implement of the infantry and of warfare generally,
and that will never change. You know, it's the same, uh,
it's the same sort of principle. But it also what
this was further complicated. I touched on the presence of
pikemen and you know, faylanx of gunners in the battle
space of the Thirty Years War. Optimizing this combination was
incredibly difficult, and even if it could be optimized in
UH parade, ground exercises and in training. You know, gun
smoke made visibility very very difficult something in the heat
of battle, trying to shout orders as a battalion commander
when you don't have the benefit of, you know, a
clear visual perspective. That means you've got to be able
to rely upon regular movements, you know, and anticipating how
those movements are going to break down, and how they're
going to adapt and how they're going to reconstitute in
the midst of all manner of configurations of assault, you know.
And it's a rare man who can do that effectively.
But it also meant that UH, you know, again, these
challenges were emerging owing to immediate military exigency. You know,
this wasn't more college UH exercises that were then being
parlyed into operational doctrines in the field. You know, these
things are being innovated as it happened. The Dutch need
to be credited with pioneering a lot of what became
pike and shot battlefield doctrine. The UH. The Dutch had
deployed the way we talked about a moment ago, with
the pikemen flanking musketeers. And to be clear too, in
most European armies, even even handgun infantry were still referred
to as musketeers. The Spaniards, in contrast and the imperial infantry,
you know, the Holy Roman Empire, they were more conventional.
They favored the depth, elaborate depth within their formations, I mean,
because they had the man power. But also they practiced
something not unlike what we consider to be deep battle,
you know, like the Soviets did and now the Russians do,
albeit in an an altered form, you know, which makes
I mean, forgive the digression, but you know, like we've
talked about, and like I'm not sure a lot of
people know this. You know, the reasons why the our
approach of the Russian Federation, the reason why they perform
a modified goostep. You know, they they were drilled by Prussians.
I mean Klauds of Witch was observing the Battle of
Moscow from Moscow, you know, Russian deep battle. Uh, there's
the DNA of uh. You know some of these imperial
infantry doctrines you know, which admittedly uh, the where it
was was someone at odds with Prussian sensibilities, but you
had plenty of Prussian officers who were drilling the Ivans
and and what I'm wanted to do has for techniques.
I find this fascinating.
Speaker 1: Yah.
Speaker 2: And of course too it you know, the the Imperial
Habsburgs and the Spaniards generally could field more musketeers than
a lesser force could. And you know it if you can,
if you can overwhelm the enemy with firepower at the
point of contact, you know, that's that's always a massive
force multiplier. And to be clear too, there there wasn't
only one type of cavalry. This this evolution of distinct
cavalry elements, this preceded the Thirty Years War, but not
really by as much as you might think. What there
is why cavalry was king for so long. It's not
just because of the mystique of it and the fact
that equestrian was the exclusive domain and nobles, you know,
in in European societies for the most part. But there
was distinct there was this there's about there's basically five
distinct rules in the cavalry by the turn of the
seventeenth century. There was the chack role, there's firepower and reconnaissance.
There was the mobile you know, reinforcement element, you know,
and there was the U there's the probing element. For
lack of a better I'm gonna guess that would fall.
I mean that that they fall into the within the
number of the scouting function. But these these are all
very different kinds of roles, you know. And the way
they train these horses is fascinating. Horses being smart, you know.
The battlefield is frightening, you know, not just for men,
but also for bees, especially intelligent beasts like horses. And
if horses are amiss dead things, they'll instinctively go to
avoid them, you know, like rotting corpses and stuff. So
the way they train war horses the the armies of
the day, they haven't performed these charge drills amisstuh piles
of carrion and rotting animal carcasses and bonfires like. Meanwhile,
they have men like squeezing shots off, you know. So
the horse that get used to you know, overcome its
fear of of of fire and firepower, as well as
become habituated to literally the smell of death, you know,
because they've been exercise and fields full of blazing straw
and piles of detritus, you know, and they were all.
They were also training to kick out and maneuver information
without falling over. It's really incredible, but uh cavalry, A
proper war horse, uh with a mount could technically gallop
at about forty kilometers per hour. With a with a
with a rider weighted down with armor and weapons, I mean,
it's top speed would be considerably less than that, but still,
I mean that that's insane. You know, a warhorse with
a mounted calorieman bearing down at you with that speed,
at point of contact, it will tear you to pieces,
you know, and thus the shock element. And that's why
the pike developed the pikes of versatile weapon. Even though
it looks essentially just like a great big spear. You
had to be very, very physically strong to be an
effective pike man. You also had to have very stealing nerves.
But and even even trained and experienced pike man who'd
been in battle before, there were times where their nerves
failed them and they, you know, the the pike FAILANX
fell apart because just got a fear, you know, and
a skilled infantry commander or a skilled calory commander he
could discern when that was going to happen, sometimes by
literally how shaky, you know, the pike formation was, you know,
in which case you go in and assault it, you know,
assume you know, one of the presumption they'll break ranks,
and because horses won't throw themselves on pikes, they'll break off,
you know. And the way the way pikemen were deployed
in a fixed defensive FAILANX, they were staggered such that
it was essentially a veritable, like tightly contained forest of pikes.
You know, it became an it became an insurmountable obstacle
that uh was also mobile, you know, So I mean
there was like any any one of these elements in
and of itself is ah just an incredible task to coordinate,
you know, intellectually and everything else let alone and you know, correct,
uh congress with one another. And uh. Now, of course
the abiquity of firepower and and handle firearms that battlefield
that dramatically reduced the role of cavalry. So cavalry became
fewer and fewer in absolute as well as relative terms.
They also became more elite. Interestingly, in the East there
were Hungarians as well as Polish nobles, still with some adaptations,
obviously to the reality of the of the of battlefield tech.
They retained a lot of conventional calorie doctrines, and uh
they called themselves Hussars, you know, the UH Hussars like
Prussian Hussars, which is actually where the totemkov comes from,
was the death set Hussars. That is a totally different
meaning in uh in in German armies. But famously there's
the Polish, Lithuanian and winged Hussars. They'd wear full armor,
including with a face plate, but they'd they create these
elaborate wings out of wooden or metal frames and at
a full gallop, one of these hussars, these wings had
become violent and this high pitched sort of that way
between what sounded like a scream and a hiss would
whistle through the apparatus, which is incredibly evocative and and
just kind of badass, I think. But those are the
winged Hussars of you know, of a myth and lore cavalman. Also,
obviously they they had to learn to handle firearms, they
had to learn to shoot, they had to learn to
you know, take down targets at relative range as well
as in close combat. And the problem was even even
one of the flint lock pistols of the day, they
are comparatively long, you know, and all but the lightest
ones generally needed something to stand or brace in order
to be steady. But even though it's light enough to
manage the way they'd be holstered. For a cavalryman, they'd
be holstered lengthwise on either side. But with the UH,
you'd have to they'd have to be drawn cross chest
because the barrel would be facing opposite the rider, so
you'd have to draw one length wise like that. And
because most riders are right handed, they'd have to tip
the horse left, then fire to the right, and like
do all this one handed, you know, because obviously like
fire rode, the horse's head is gonna. The horse doesn't
go death, it's you know, you're gonna it could be
powder burned or injured otherwise, but you know, they're in
in addition to the risk presented by infantry guns in
the battle space, you h every every every caloryman had
had to become essentially a like a competent infantryman as well.
You know, it was just uh and in an incredibly
artuous litany of skills. And this is kind of you know, Americans,
one of the reasons Americans are romantic about, you know,
the Confederacy and stuff is you had these guys who
could fight mounted, but you could also we're competent you know, gunmen,
and you know had all these where we're competent in
in in all these skill sets you know, like Confederate
officers were, and uh like a lot of these Revolutionary
War guys were. But I mean that that's basically the
origins of this. You know, that's where those who those
were who could were physically and psychologically capable. I mean
that that's where you you know, these uh the Thirty
Years War is when men like that, you know, appeared
on the battlefield. And I find that kind of fascinating,
you know. And the uh the gun the rogue gunfighter,
the old one gunfighter. He's kind of like the ran.
He's kind of like the bastard run and offspring of
this tradition too. I just I find that incredibly cool.
You know, I don't know if I don't know if
other people are grabbed by it that way, but you know, uh,
I was gonna get into the confessional aspects of this,
because you know, competing varieties of Christianity. I think that's
overstated when people asserted it was, you know, somehow like
the approximate cause of hostilities, but it was the most
significant anthropological element. And even with that not the case,
these confessional identities emerged in true earnest at the same
time as this conflict paradigm began taking shape. You know,
we talked about last week how the Hasspurgs and trying
to revive the Imperial mandate. They very much they tried
to insinuate their political ambitions into a general Catholic revival.
And that wasn't just cynical. I mean, first of all,
a lot of a lot of the Hassburg nobles they
were believing Catholics, and a lot of them are good Catholics.
But it's also, you know, Calvinist and Lutheran identity was
providing a serious challenge to what had been a very
integral Catholic uh political ontology. And uh but I I
that deserves an episode unto itself, so we'll get into
that next time. I hope this wasn't formative and it
wasn't too scattershot. Like I said, I don't want to
I'm not trying to go o release alf conscious, but
this is an important subject matter, not just the historical record,
but for our people and for Christians especially, you know,
so I want to make sure I present it properly.
And plus I what as I want to do is
waste anybody's time. So yeah, I uh I uh, I'm
really looking forward to continuing the series. Man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the uh, the concentration on the different
confessions definitely deserves its own episode, and this one, you know,
I mean talking about battle and talking just about yeah,
how much battle after this would be informed by it
is uh is important to to share.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a good deal. If you and the subs are happy,
I'm happy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, sir. All right, until the next time, I'm
going to ask you to go over to Thomas's sub stack.
Thomas's Twitter disappears and comes back, and disappears and comes back.
It may not be the best place to get them,
but over on sub stack you can get you can
connect to pretty much anywhere Thomas is. And also you
know he's got a chat over there and you can
reach out to him there. So please do that and
uh Thomas until the next time.
Speaker 2: Pete s