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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to the Peking Yana Show. Paul fahrenheits back and
we are going to continue the Spain series. How are
you doing, Paul.
Speaker 2: I'm doing very well, mister Pete. Thank you again for
having back. I know it's been a while since we
have done an episode of the Spain series, but I've
been busy, You've been busy. It's been the holiday season,
and it's been a very interesting couple of months.
Speaker 1: So yeah, very interesting and strangely calm couple of months.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: So let's let's talk about them Italians.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Italian Wars. So the next episode of the
Spanish series, we're going to be talking about the Italian Wars,
which is so first and foremost. I'm gonna let all
of your readers, readership, listenership know that this is not
going to be a history of the Italian Wars. That's
not what this series is. It's a history of the
Spanish Empire, but it's it's from a certain perspective. I
am not here to give you a play by play
of the Italian Wars. Rather, I would recommend you all
go watch Apostolic Majesty's eight hour plus maybe exaggerating a
little bit, but very long coverage of the Italian Wars,
of the surrounding Habsburgs, of their policy objectives, of the
Kingdom of France, of all this other stuff. This rather
remember the point of this series is world systems theory,
all right, that is the point of this And we're
looking at the Christendom world system, and specifically, mister pet
the series through the you know, Spain is the key
to the latter part of the of the Christendom world system.
And what we're looking at is the decline and breakdown
of the Christendom world system, which coincides with the rise
of the Spanish Empire. And one of those things that
we're going to be looking at today is the Italian Wars. Now,
what were the Italian Wars? Well, they were called the
Italian Wars because there was like eight of them, you know,
eight different ones, and they all happened like two years,
four years apart, stretching between fourteen ninety four and fifteen
fifty nine. Some people even argue that, you know, some
people would even include the a lot of the smaller
wars on the Italian Peninsula previous to fourteen ninety four
as a part of the Italian Wars. And some people
argue that the Italian Wars never really ended after the
end of them in fifteen fifty nine, but I will
give the viewership, the listenership the broad strokes. So the
Italian Wars are called such because they largely took place
in Italy. They didn't only take place in Italy. They
kind of spilled out into wider Europe, but primarily they
took place in Italy, and primarily in Italy. It took
place in northern Italy, all right. And there were two
ish three broadsides depending on Yeah, there were about three sides,
all right. And what this demonstrates, what these three sides
kind of represent are the differing ideas that are starting
to come into place in the Christendom world system, especially
towards its end. We've talked before, mister Pete about the
rivalry between France and the Habsburgs, which Spain kind of
gets subsumed into. And this is the unfortunate thing about
doing a history of the Spanish Empire, because the longer
you analyze it, Spain was in fact the foremost power
in Europe at the time. It was the strongest by
far in both economy and military, and it was infiltrated
and occupied by a foreign cosmopolitan elite and utilized to
further that cosmopolitan elites political agenda rather than a Spanish
national political agenda. Please stop me if this sounds familiar. Now,
It wasn't entirely that, you know, there was you know
that the Spaniards weren't entirely powerless. But and I may
be exaggerating a little bit, but the Kingdom of Spain,
especially once the Habsburgs come into power, really does walk
the line of a independent sovereign nation with a Habsburg
king and a Habsburg fiefdom subordinate to continental Habsburg policy.
And the Spanish and the Italian Wars actually kind of
exemplify that that sort of transition because the Italian Wars,
Spanish involvement in the Italian Wars actually pre dates Habsburg
rule because Spain, before it was even Spain, the unified
kingdoms of Aragon and Castile had Italian provinces. Aragon was
an outside part. So so let me. I'm getting a little
b ahead of myself, So first let me, and by
the way, stop me at any time if you have
any questions or you want to add something, I will.
So in order for me to explain why the Italian
Wars occurred, I must first explain what Italy is at
this time, Italy, the Italian Peninsula is at this time
the richest part of Europe. It is the most well developed,
It is the cleanest, it is the most modern.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: The Italian Peninsula has been the beneficiary of Mediterranean trade
for the past several hundred years. This trade largely flows
into you know. In addition, the Italian Peninsula is not
a unified country. It's not even a sort of federation
of feudal provinces like the Holy Roman Empire is, or
England is, or France at this time, because France is
a national concept isn't as solidified yet, or Spain is.
Italy is just a whole bunch of different principalities that
don't even pretend to have unity with each other. Now,
nominally Northern Italy what we called it, you know, going
down to not Rome, but Northern Italy nominally is a
part of the Holy Roman Empire. And the Holy Roman
Empire even claims Rome. It does not claim Naples, it
does not claim Southern Italy. That has always been and
everyone knows this has always been a historically distinct part
of Italy. Naples and Southern Italy. Northern Italy has in
the past the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg's hold
on Italy was a lot more decisive and strong. But now,
especially with all this wealth that's flowing into Italy, and
I'll tell that, I'll tell your listeners why in a minute,
that is no longer the case. So Italy is kind
of an an caps paradise at this time. It is
a smattering of ten thousand city states. Some of them
are duchies, some of them are republics, some of them
are somewhere in between. In the middle of them, you
have the papal states, which is a geopolitical entity that
is under the authority of the Pope, who also we've
talked about that before, who also claim spiritual authority over
all Christendom. And the temporal role of the pope is
something that's actually going to play into the Italian Wars
because there's a disagreement as to what role the pope
has to play, and the Pope himself has an opinion
that is actually at odds with the two major players here,
which are the Habsburgs and the French. So anyway, besides that,
the reason that Italy is so wealthy, or at least
one of the many reasons, is like I said, they
were the sort of the gateway of you know, prior
to the Ottomans conquering Constantinople in fourteen fifty three, the
Byzantine Empire was the terminus of the Silk Road, which
brought all kinds of commodities from Asia that Europe could
not produce. And not just Asia. I mean, I say Asia.
You know people think of China, but really Central Asia, India, Iran, Anatolia,
the Slavic countries, all of them flow into Europe largely
through the Mediterranean Sea, and Italy and the Italian city states,
particularly the merchant republics of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and there
was a fourth one. It's not Naples, it was. It
was in southern Italy though, and it's like a blue
background with a white cross. Get the name of it.
But there were a variety I might remember it at
some point, but there were a variety of Italian merchant republics,
and there were some more minor ones too. There was Siena,
there there were a lot of and a bunch of
other minor cities. And these all have basically their own
privately funded trade fleets. They have kind of trade out
posts or an early nascent version of colonialism. The Mediterranean
has all of these like little islands scattered throughout them,
So that's part of the reason why trade. Not only
is the Mediterranean sort of self contained c that isn't
very far to go anywhere, it also has all of
these very convenient rest stops in it with these little islands.
So this is what makes the Mediterranean such a trade center,
not only because of the inertia that's behind it, but
because it's geographically very easy to trade in the Mediterranean.
You know, you can take a ship from Venice and
you have fifteen possible stops, it's very unlikely you're going
to lose that ship. That the seas are very calm generally,
and everything is close enough to each other that trade
is very salubrious. But an early nascent version of colonialism
is these some of these Italian city states gobbling up
these little islands and little pieces of coastline throughout the
Mediterranean to make its trading easier, basically giving them a
whole bunch of rest stops so they can have really
reliable trade routes. Portugal would later replicate this, and this
is how Portugal was able to get around Africa so
quickly was it. It kind of took from the Italian's
playbook and establishing their Fae torahs along the African coast.
But when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in fourteen fifty three,
what they did was they banned you know, this was
partially a religious move, partially a cynical economic one. They
banned all export of Asian commodities into Western Europe as
a part of their jihad against Western Europe. And so
who was the only one who could secure alternate routes
the Italian cities. This is why Spain and Portugal started
going exploring in the first place. Was they wanted to
find a different source of those East Asian and Indian
commodities that the Ottomans had blocked off. But the Italians
had to help fill in the gap, and they did
so by sailing all around the Mediterranean, sailing all around
the Black Sea, going to Georgia, going to the Southern Levant,
going to other places where the Ottomans didn't have dominion
over yet and attempting to do business there. In addition,
the Italian Renaissance which have been going on led to
advances in lots of domestic economic technology, most notably the
Florentines figuring out double entry bookkeeping, which I'm going to
be honest with you, mister Pete, is probably one of
the best inventions for white guys. Ever. I don't know
if you've ever had to balance a balance sheet in
your life, but the first time that you see that
total assets and total liabilities plus equity number match and
the whole spreadsheet just balances, it's like you're chasing that
high for the rest of your life. If it makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, being old enough to have done it on paper, yes.
Speaker 2: It's frigging great and I can understand why thes liked
it so much. But this causes lots of innovation in
banking and it. You know, there's also different economic theories.
You know. The wealth is starting to be seen less
as a horder mindset in the Italian Peninsula, and this
is why the Italians were able to develop earlier than
a lot of other places, was that the psychic concept
of wealth in the mind of Europeans changed, right. Wealth
was no longer seen as a sort of fixed horde
that everyone is kind of competing for. Rather, wealth started
to be seen as something that you could invest in
turn into capital that you could put into productive enterprises
that you could use to to you know, beyond financing
trade missions, beyond you know, buying gold coins, beyond building
up an army to take more land. And part of
this too was the decline of feudalism, because the reason
that in the Middle Ages a lot of Europeans didn't
fight over money, they fought over land is that in
a society where you know, agricultural production is is basically money,
which is what a feudalist, a feudal, feudal society was
closer to money is kind of secondary. It's the land
and the land production value that is what's important that
people are fighting over. But now as the Italians are demonstrating,
particularly with very small geographic areas comparatively, a lot of
these cities did not have a lot of territory around them,
they're demonstrating the power of basically taking in the capital
from the rest of Europe and reinvesting them into their
own cities. Right. So this is why Italy is important.
Italy is important to a lot of the larger European
powers because of historical claims, desire for expansion, personal grudges,
all of these lovely things that cause wars and strife
of various sorts. First, I will be talking about France.
So France at this time is under the Capecian House
of Valois. All right, I'm not going to get into
French dynastic politics, but suffice it to say the House
of Capet is the is the grand house, and there's
various sub cadet branches of it, the House of Anjou,
the House of Valois, the House of Burgundy was one,
the House of Friggin Bourbon, the later House of Bourbon,
which was the last royal dynasty of France, was a
Capecian dynasty, a Capecian cadet branch, that is, and it's
it's it's split out in various places. But the House
of Anjous is no longer in does no longer rules
the Kingdom of France, but it does rule a minor
county in the south of France on the border of
Italy called Provence. Why is Provence interesting, Well, if you'll
remember our Western schism episode that we did, was that
the last one? I think that was the last one,
the previous one. Provence is where Avignon is. Avignon is
where the I don't want to say the French papacy,
but the Avignon papacy sat during the Western Schism. And
so when the Valois king of France inherits Provence from
I think it was Charles of Anjou, I think that
was his name. The people aren't so much important in
this that the individual rulers aren't so much important here.
This places the Kingdom of France in a very salubrious
good position to start looking at getting some Italian provinces,
getting some of that Italian wealth to enter into the
Kingdom of France. In addition, there were historic French claims
to the Kingdom of Naples because the Kingdom of Naples,
part of their symbol is the French of Fleur de Lis,
because the House of Aange, you ruled the Kingdom of
Naples for a very long time, and even all the
way back to the Norman conquest. Naples as a concept
was founded by Norman knights from France. On the other side,
all right, on the other side of this, you have
the Habsburg interests in Spain, and this is not in Spain,
in Italy. Sorry, I'll talk about Spain in a minute,
because Spain actually has separate interests in Italy from the Habsburgs,
because at this time Spain is not under Habsburg dominion.
It is still under the control of Isabella and Ferdinand.
The Habsburgs are the new imperial dynasty. They are in
charge of the Holy Roman Empire and Northern Italy. These
were the pretty much the entirety of these very rich
city states, these rich duchies, you know, very whatever, whatever
the specific political name they give themselves, are nominally a
part of the Holy Roman Empire. And now I say
nominally because, like I said earlier, the Habsburg grip on
these territories is very much slipping. Because these Italian states
are you know, they're they're the richest place in Europe.
They're the best developed and they've got some of the
some of the best economic technology anywhere to be found.
The problem is is that they do not have the
land and agricultural bases to support large standing or not
standing army. That's a little bit further in the future,
although that develops because of the Italian Wars. Rather, they
can't muster large feudal levees, peasant levees, which is what
the basis of military power in Western Europe. At the
time is built on the back of this is why
agriculture is that one of the big reasons why agriculture
kind of was the cornerstone of feudal Europe because it
dictated how many men at arms you could put into
the field. And the Italians, though they're extremely cash rich,
are extremely asset poor in the sense of assets being land.
On the other hand, the French, the Habsburgs, the Spanish
are very asset rich, but they're very cash poor. They
don't have the money the gold, and at this time
money and gold was still more or less synonymous. The
Spanish hadn't yet tested that theory of how far you
can push that gold was. There was actually a gold
shortage in Europe at the time, so gold and silver
were very much still considered a rare enough commodity that
people could more or less universally accept it as money.
So in a battle between in a military battle between
cash and assets, rather the assets usually went in the
long run. Because the Italian city states, in terms of
military strength, could not rely on their own domestic populaces,
they had to rely on a very particular type of
mercenaries called condottieri. I don't speak Italian. But basically it
literally means I think contractor is what it means. And
you know, there's lots of stories about Condottieri's you know,
they were you know, Machiavelli was one. There were these
roving bands of professional soldiers from a lot of them
were from Italy, a lot of them were for all
over Europe. And they would just go around make deals
with the city state to go bully another city state.
But a lot of the time they would go to
the other city state and say, hey, this city state
said they'd pay us this much to bullyu. How much
will you pay us? And then back and forth, and
you know, sometimes cities would hire Condottieri to fight each other,
but the Condatieri would may in the middle of the
battle make a deal and go sack one city and
sometimes go sack the other. And this is the thing,
this is, you know, this is the background where Machiavelli
and makes makes the assertion in his book The Prints
that you know, you can't rely on mercenaries. And this
was in a very specific environment in Italy where these
Italian states could not furnish their own armies except for Naples.
Except for Naples, Naples is the exception, because they had
and you know, Venice to a certain extent, you know, Milan.
Some of the bigger states could furnish some standing armies.
The smaller ones couldn't, but Naples very much could. Anyway,
Besides that, Spain moving over to Spain. Spain has interests
in the Italian Peninsula, mostly through its constituent Kingdom of Aragon.
The Kingdom of Aragon was an outside player in this
Mediterranean trade game because Aragon is the part of Spain
that faces inward of the Mediterranean. It's where Barcelona and
Valencia and some other cities are, and these also got
very rich off of Mediterranean trade, not the least of
which because the Kingdom of Aragon possessed the overseas territories
of the Balaric Islands, Sardinia and Sicily itself, as well
as the Kingdom of Naples for a time under that
House of Trastamara, which we talked about, I think in
the first couple of episodes. And so Aragon was a huge,
outsized influential player in Italian politics. It was Alexander the
sixth that one pope everyone talks about, the you know,
the the one that was heinously evil and has all
those you know things of accusations of incests and stuff
like that about him. Well, his family, the Borgias, were
from Aragon. They were not Italian, they were Spanish. And
this is one of the actually the polemic lines that
people took against him. So the Spanish are interested in
the Italian peninsula mostly the union of the Iberian Union
between Castile and Aragon inherits Aragons and Aragon actually tried
to was in a lot of for a certain time,
Aragon was the strongest naval power other than other than Venice,
it was the strongest naval power in the Mediterranean, and
it tried to implement a one of the first instances
of international law. A It tried to implement a sort
of how should I say, international maritime law. I forget
I think it was the Codex, the Codex Marinus or
something like that. I don't remember the exact name, but
it was specifically, they tried to implement an international maritime
law that all powers of the Mediterranean were a party two.
And now they didn't have enough strength to pull that off.
But you know, this kind of tells you that the
idea of universalism is not new at all. I digress.
So this is is I'd beloath to mention the Ottomans,
this huge is law threat from the East, who have
all of these you know, these Asian commodities backing them.
They have this this brand new technology, They've got this
great leadership. The Ottomans are starting to knock at the door,
and these European polities Habsburg Austria very specifically feels very
very anxious about this Ottoman neighbor and they want to
secure some you know, enough of a power base, enough
of a money base that they can fund these wars
against the Ottomans, because wars, especially at this time, one
of the I mean, mister Peter, I know you did
an episode recently talking about how Spedley Butler's War as
a racket is is the stupidest thing ever written. And
war makes very few people money? Am I getting that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean there are people who are going to benefit
from it, But you know that was me, that was
Stormy and I and even Thomas says, nobody wants nobody
wants war because yeah, sure some people are going to
benefit from it, But to think that people are just
going to war to make money that's retarded. It's normally
people decide to go to war and then the people
who are going to come in and profiteer off of it.
That's a secondary action.
Speaker 2: And you know, and for a war of like territorial expansion,
there may be this idea that the long term benefit
of the of the gained territory will outweigh the short
term expense of the war. There may be some of that.
I'm not going to say there's zero of that. But
war is expensive, especially at this time. War is extremely expensive.
You know, the amount of the amount of money you
need to levy in loans, the amount of in a
lot of instances, you have to divest capital, you have
to divest your asset. A lot of times you have
to divest assets that you've taken loans against. And this
was true for European monarchs and principalities in the fifteenth, sixteenth,
and seventeenth centuries, as true as it is today. This
is one of the things why I'm a short break here.
This is why I'm so glad we're doing this series,
is because I hope it's apparent to your readers, but
this the current era that we live in is closer
to the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries than it is
to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. And that is
what's throwing so many people for the loop, because we
have the twentieth century right before us, and we think that, oh,
because it's chronologically closer, it has more to do with
our lives. No, the twentieth century has more in common
with the eighteenth, with the Baroque period than it does
with the seventeenth the sixteenth. Right why because we are
in a period of transition, just as those were periods
of transitions. The seventeenth, eighteenth, or rather the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and twentieth centuries were marked by a remarkable cultural coherency,
technological coherency, homogeneity almost almost everywhere. You know, even colonialism
remains somewhat homogenous, if that makes sense to you, mister Pete.
Borders were not broken down the same way it was.
It was a very rigid, it was a very well
defined period of history. We do not have that. But
our forefathers in the sixteenth seventeenth century also did not
have that. Because Europe was coming out of this thousand
plus year long world of proto feudalism, of feudalism, and
you had these very old legacy systems that were so
big that couldn't they couldn't really be innovated in a
convenient way. And you had these brand new systems that
were untested that could work on very small scales, but
people hadn't figured out how to scale them up yet
without utter failure. And so you have this huge disconnect.
This this this uneven development throughout Europe, you know, exemplified
by the Renaissance. You also had, like similar to today,
you also had and we'll talk I don't want to
get too far afield, but regardless, basically the Italian Wars
are one of the first examples of that because the
reasons for fighting the war are extremely midi evil, right,
It's dynastic intrigues and disputes between wives of various duchies
and you know, inviting in your cousin who's the king
of France and pressing old dynastic claims. That is what
starts the Italian Wars, you know. But the wars themselves
were fought with you know, imagine like eight year olds
holding ar fifteens. That's the wars themselves. Because military technology
had started advancing to such a point you had arquebusks,
you had mass firearms, you have mass artillery. The Italian
Wars were actually the first instance of mass artillery being
ubiquitous in warfare, and it made a thousand years of
Europeans warfare functionally obsolete, which a lot of the Italian
city states had to learn the hard way. But the
Italian Wars begin when one of these Condottieri families, the
sports does basically coup the Duchy of Milan and set
themselves up as as the Dukes of Milans and wanted
the French to back them, and so they they encouraged
the French to come and make good on their claim
on the Crown of Naples in the south south of Italy.
Now the Crown of Naples, I think at this time
was independent, but the monarch was related to the House
of Spain, and so this this did not go very well.
And once again, like I said, I'm not going to
go into the wars too much. Kicks off about sixty
or so years of fighting because but I will go
over the high points. The high points are you have
the War of the League of Cambrai, which lasts from
trying to remember how long it was. Sorry, I'm pulling.
I've decided to start fact checking myself mid episode. So
instead of giving out a bunch of bunk information, I
have the dates in front of me. It went from
fifteen oh eight to fifteen sixteen. And what it was
was it was a bunch of Italian states getting really
scared at Venice, having a lot of influence in the
north of Italy, and then inviting in the French, in
the Spanish, and the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope.
Matter of fact, it was the Pope who was the
center of all this. So actually that actually gives me.
It gives me a nice little off ramp. So I
haven't talked about the Pope and all of this. These
three different polities, these three sort of big powers in
Italy the whole, the Habsburgs and the Holy Rown Empire,
the French and the Spanish all have differing ideas as
to what role the Pope is supposed to play. The
French very much like this sort of the French conception
of Catholicism is like a Protestant conception of Catholicism. They
conceive of Catholicism as the French state Church, and this
is you know, Gallicanism is a later development of this.
That's the that's the actual official name for it. But
this goes back all the way to the Western Schism,
when you had a French papacy and an Italian papacy.
The French wanted the papacy, or at least their own papacy,
to be within the borders of France, inhabited at all
times by a Frenchman, and friendly to the interests of France.
This is opposed to the imperial view of the papacy
that the Habsburgs have, that the papacy is the legitimizing
force for his left hand, which is the Holy Roman Empire,
which is the continuation of the Roman Empire, which the
pope is the spiritual head of right. The Spanish, on
the other hand, have a third view of the pope,
and this is actually you could say this is sort
of a continuation of the von Velf view or a
reinvention of it, of what would later be called ultramontanism,
the idea that the pope has complete and total dominion
over all things. And you could argue that it's very
similar to the half view, but it's a lot more
servile to the pope rather than how should I say,
I don't know what the right word is. Rather, I
don't want to say that the Habsburgs didn't see themselves
as subordinate, but they saw his role as excuse me,
mostly spiritual legitimization. Does that make sense, yes, So the
pope has his own view, and this is largely due
to the fact that the papal state has a geopolitical entity,
has a civil government that has subjects, collects, taxes, et cetera,
which is functions more or less outside of the Catholic
Church hierarchy and how the Church is across Europe function
And so this, as we've talked about in the past,
raises interesting questions as to as to what the pope,
what role the pope should play, and the pope as
kind of a part of this. I forgot to mention
the Italian city states, particularly under one Lorenzo di Medici,
that some of you might know, created this Italian League
which was sort of this this league of nations for
the for the for Italy, and it was meant to
be this rules based order between all these different republics
and duchies and all of that that kept peace and
kept the French and kept the Habsburgs out of Italy.
And you could argue that. You know, a lot of
people make a lot of hay about the nineteenth century
and how nationalism was like these entirely invented, fabricated concept
but I'm not so sure it was as fabricated as
people think it was.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: It's one thing to read the past. To read the
present onto the past, that's a big mistake. You can't
do that. App That's how people still believe that the
earth is millions of years old. But you have to
read from the pass forward. And I think the Italian
League existence exemplifies that there was a sort of a
nascent idea of a unified Italy separate from France and
the Holy Run Empire in Spain without foreign influence. It's
just it was kind of strangled in the crib as
were a lot of national ideas. But I digress. So
the War of legat the word of the Leagua Cambra,
you have, you know, a whole lot of side switching
going on. First the French and the Spanish and the
Holy Run Empire coming on the one side, but then
the Spanish and the Holy run Empire switched to the
other side, and France stays on the first side, and
then Scotland gets involved at some point, and it's it's
it's a big mess. And this is this is why
I'm not going into the history of it, because it's
it's the Italians. You know how much side switching there is.
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's, it's it's exceptionally complicated, but you know,
it's it's and it's it's a lot like the Wars
of the Roses too, because the French gained dominion over
Naples at one point, and they also I think gained
dominion over Milan at one point, but it doesn't stick
because the Spanish come back in the Spanish start wars
against the French and second high point War of the
League of Cognac.
Speaker 2: Why am I mentioning this, all right? I'm mentioning this
because this is when the one thing that you might
have heard of of the Italian Wars occurred, which was
the Sack of Rome in fifteen twenty seven. Mister Pete,
do you know anything about the Sack of Rome in
fifteen twenty seven?
Speaker 1: Not as much as I should, So I.
Speaker 2: Mean it's it's it's not that in the grand scheme
of things, it's not that. Another interesting thing about the
Italian Wars they take place before and during the Protestant Reformation.
They started before the Protestant Reformation. But once the Protestant
Reformation occurred in fifteen seventeen, I want to say, this
spread like wildfire even throughout the armies of the of
the Empire, particularly amongst German soldiers, and there was a
lot of growth, and I mean growing resentment against the
Papacy as an institution, against the Catholic Church as an
institution has hundreds of years of precedent at this point.
We did a whole episode on that, but it really
starts to spill over when a lot of these soldiers,
with a lot of this animosity towards the Papacy, are
fighting a war in his general vicinity and he is
on the enemy side. Right, So what was the Sack
of Rome in fifteen twenty seven, Well, basically, in the
War of the League of Cognac, the Pope and the
Habsburgs were at one point on one side, later on
on one side, but in this instance they were opposed
to each other because the papal states were backing France
at the time. A lot of this was over the
Duchies of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples. Milan was
the richest part of Italy I think it still is,
or the Piedmont is and the Kingdom of Naples was
extremely well developed at the time. But basically the Emperor,
Charles the fifth and Charles the fifth was emperor at
the time, rounded the city of Rome with his forces
in order to get the pope to come to terms. Unfortunately,
and this is something we'll talk about later, this is
another thing that started undoing the Christendom world system, I
think largely because it just frankly got too big and
they didn't adopt the technologies to manage it, or the
technologies couldn't be adopted at scale to manage it. One
of the two an army of a couple I think
like twenty thirty thousand Holy Roman and soldiers went without pay,
and that is the primary reason why they mutinied against
Charles the fifth broke into the city of Rome and
just started raping and pillaging and holding people hostage and
killing and all this o and looting and everything else. Now,
a lot of Lutherans were in that army, or at
least they weren't. They didn't even call themselves Lutherans. A
lot of followers of Martin Luther were in that army,
and I am not going to sit here and say
that that played zero role in it. But soldiering in
these days was awful. It was a horrible thing to
do because you had a combination of all of the
medieval plagues, all of the medieval difficulties of heavy plate armor,
of melee combat, of all this other stuff, combined with
the modern threats of getting shot, getting exploded by a
cannon paul. It was. It was not a fun time
to be a warrior. For those of you who are
more interested in military history, this is the sort of
the beginning of the of the pike and shot era,
where infantry, for the first time in a very long time,
becomes the centerpiece of armies as opposed to heavy cavalry,
which marked the sort of end of the feudal world,
because the feudal world was largely based around heavy cavalry,
and largely because the Spanish developed something towards the end
of the Italian Wars called the Tarthio, which was the
first proper implementation the first proper mix of pikes and
arquebusks in warfare. You know, it's it's it's It's well
known that the pikes were in front and the arquebusks
were behind, firing over their shoulders. I digress. That was
a couple of lines of thought. I'm trying to pick
up one, but basically, yeah, the Sack of Rome, basically
the Holy Roman Empire, and particularly both both the Age
are the Habsburg's domains generally were terrible at accounting, horrible
at accounting, could not They had a lot of money,
a lot of gold and a lot of silver was
coming in from the colonies into Spain, and the fuggers,
who were the personal bankers of the Habsburgs, were able
to come up with a lot of money to loan
to them, but their accounting was just abysmal, and so
whole armies of tens of thousands would go unpaid. These
soldiers who were suffering from plagues gangreen uh uh, confronting
almost certain death. The problem with these pike and shop formasons,
if you tripped, you would get trampled to death by
your fellow soldiers because they just couldn't stop moving, because
of because of the structure of the formation, you know,
the just to say nothing of the mud, of the
of the of the you know, physical fatigue. Syphilis by
the way, had started becoming a thing, and so that
was wreaking havoc amongst the ranks. So have I painted
a good enough picture as to how much it sucked
to be a soldier during these times?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you know, and those formations were not new.
I mean you can go back to Alexander in some
of his formations where yeah, you were going to get
trampled just as easily.
Speaker 2: Yeah, precisely. The novelty was in in adding in finding
a way to make mass firearms useful in at scale.
That was the innovation that the Spanish were able to do.
But yes, a matter of fact, they took a lot
of inspiration and the foundation of these units were taken
from the Macedonian Phalanxes, who used similar sized pikes. Imagine
a whole army of this who don't get paid. You know,
they don't get that little bit of money that they
can you know, have their fun gambling or you know,
I don't condone sin, but visiting ladies of the night.
Basically they can't buy those little creature comforts that you know,
because these soldiers just I don't even a lot of
them were press ganged. A lot of them were there
not by choice. Some of them were mercenaries who did
make a lot of money, and some of them weren't,
and so they weren't really even profiting off of this.
But that was how they were able to get their
creature comforts that made life even somewhat bearable. Imagine not
paying them in the middle of a siege, and what
do you think they're gonna do at this time? Armies
mutinying and sacking cities, whether it be friendly or not.
It it became a common thing, and there was a
and we're going to talk about this this very specifically
later on, mister Pete, when we get into the to
the financial aspect and the economic aspect of this world system.
But suffice it to say, right to kind of start
bringing us to our conclusions, the Italian Wars can conclude
right in fifteen fifty nine with I'm trying to remember
what the what the treaty was called? What was the treaty?
We'll look it up. The piece of catou cambresis all right,
that's what it was. Called and it caused a whole
bunch of seating of territory. But basically the the the
end of the Italian Wars, Spain is dominant. Spain becomes
sovereign over the kingdoms of Sicily, of Naples, Sardinia, and
which was basically so Spain inherits all of the old
Aragonese dominions under the Habsburgs. Because remember, part way through
the Italian Wars, the Habsburgs come in control of Spain
and start shifting the policy. So but Spain, Spain's national
interests are more or less secured. And in addition, the
Spaniards are given control over the Duchy of Milan, which
is the richest part of Italy. France, you know, England
got involved at one point. France gets some minor cessation,
secession or cessations from England and from parts of the
Holy Roman Empire. You know, there's some minor territorial changes
on the Italian peninsula. But what the end of the
Italian Wars functionally does is establishes Spanish and rather re
establishes Spanish and habsburg dominance over it at the expense
of France. And this does not do a lot for
the legitimacy of the world system. In a large part,
this conflict was between two differing visions within Christendom. You
have the the Christendom thesis, which is pope and emperor,
you know, God and man, Church and state all made one.
That is the Holy Roman Empire, Habsburg claim, Habsburg dominion,
Habsburg ideological push as to what Christendom is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be a re established Christian Roman Empire functionally.
The French, on the other hand, have a lot more
of an antithesis to that. They see the what is
it they see? They see basically Christendom as supposed to
be France and everyone else the Catholic Church is the
French Church, and all of the other peoples of Europe
are you know, ethnically influenced. This is a lot more,
you know, and you could say it's a lot more
of an ethnic empire. And I mean and later on
France did get something, you know, did have the most
the highest cultural influence in Europe. But these Italian wars,
these on and off conflicts utilizing these you know, a
lot of proxy states were used. You had a lot
of devastation that it ended the Italian Renaissance, and it
ended Italy as the most well developed, richest place on
the on the European continent and kind of started pushing
it more towards the backwater status, which it unfortunately kind
of holds until the present day as compared to its neighbors.
You can only have so many armies march through you
and sack your city so many times before you kind
of go back a couple of levels of development, and
it starts to show the cracks of this system. Right,
Why are the quote unquote leaders of this add to
this the fact that you have religious dissidents within the
armies of the primary world power upholding this Christendom world system.
You know, why why are you having military force being
utilized between so called constituent members of Catholic Europe who
are all theoretically under the pope and the Pope himself
his own opinions and his own assertions. You know, with
Spain is only back or being taken over by the
Habsburgs are kind of swept under the rug and he's
kind of turned into this, you know, into this little
rump figure which he you know, more or less still
inhabits today. Politically, if the Italian Wars were anything. It
was a final end of the pope having any say
into how his legitimacy was utilized by his by the
states that let's just say that he backs so. Added
this the Protestant Reformation. Add to this, you know, resentment
against the Habsburg Dominion in Austria, in the Holy Run Empire,
in Spain and Italy. Add this the fact that the
French feel humiliated and start building further resentment towards this
Habsburg world order, and you know, you have a system
and crisis. And that's what the Italian Wars more or
less brought about. A bunch of powers with different dreams,
you know, more or less independent entities coming out of
a feudal world stepped into these Italian Wars, and what
came out was more or less two broad sides of
a conflict that would later rend Christendom in half. But
we're a bit further away from that historically. Yeah, I mean,
I know we're I know, we're a few minutes short
of how long you usually go. But I think that's
a good place to leave it. Did you have any
any thoughts or anything you wanted to add to this, mister.
Speaker 1: Pete No, no, But I think you're right. I think
when you when you start looking beyond beyond this, that
the kind of say the Pope has over the Catholic
the Catholic world. You see it start to it doesn't
just go away, but it dwindles and dwindles and windles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Pope kind of starts becoming a sock puppet
for imperial interests the more things happen. Not to say
that he has no say not to say that he
has no power, because the empire is It's whole legitimacy
is based off of the fact that it was the
it was the Empire of Charlemagne, it was the new
Roman Empire, the better Christian Roman empire that the Pope created,
that is backed by the Pope, That is the hand
of the Pope in on Earth. That is their whole
basis of legitimacy. But unfortunately, if the Pope himself disagrees
with that, then you know, something's got to give there.
And I'm not here to say say that the you know,
the French were any better. The French were just unabashedly
selfish and self centered, as they always are in terms
of how they wanted the system to work. They wanted
to systems the same thing that they have never stopped.
You know, you look at how France acts in the
EU today, it's the same thing. You know. They want
it to be the France and everyone else show. You know,
they want it to be France and all of her friends,
and all of her subjects and all of her her lackeys.
You know. So I'm not here to say that there's
any moral superiority in the French position. But you know,
what the French do have is a nascent version of
what you could later call nationalism, of their conception of
themselves as an entity separate from and yet still a
part of the rest of Europe. And that is the
idea that you know, the Spanish would have a little bit,
but you know they were more or less under habsburg
dominion that the English would absolutely have. And later on
the biggest thorn in the side of the Habsburg's in
the Spanish the Netherlands. But that's a later episode. So
we've talked about the Italian Wars. Now what is the next?
Oh boy, well, Pete, when we come back, that's when
we're gonna That's when, that's when we're gonna have the
fireworks fly because next episode we will be discussing the
Protestant Reformation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here we go. But the one thing I guess
you can see from this is, yeah, one man basically,
one man rule over Europe whittles down to one man
rule over countries, and then eventually you get you know,
like in Spain, the courts has their power grows more
and more, so you go away from one man and
then you know, eventually that just starts breaking down, breaking down,
breaking down, and so you get the managerial managerialism we've
had for the last eighty ninety years.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Managerialism didn't come from nowhere. This idea of a
self regulating rules based order. You know, people don't understand this,
but AGI was invented in the in the seventeenth century.
AGI is the is the rules based order. That's all
it is. It's a it's a complex adaptive system that
has no sovereign over it, that is its own source
of authority, that edits itself based on internal polling. And
you know, is what has resulted in managerialism today. And
I don't want to say it's an entirely evil thing,
because it's how we have modern day instant availability internet,
twenty first century civilization, but there were certainly costs that
came with it, and I'm not sure how sustainable it
will be in the future. So the past isn't even past.
Everyone All of the ideas that we discussed today have
historical precedents. They all came from somewhere in the past,
and they're a lot older than you may think they are.
Speaker 1: And I think everyone believes that the system that they're
living under is the one that's going, Oh, this is
the way it's going to be forever. And I mean
it really just goes to show how people just don't
understand history.
Speaker 2: Maybe later on you could have me to come on
and discuss Young Earth creationism, which will probably infuriate a
large amount of your audience, but I think that's part
of the appeal. But the idea that you just you
can't have have a rapid, radically changing event that happens
in a very short period of time that completely transforms
everything is foolishness. That's how history works. There's no such
thing as a long gradual processes. The way things are,
you know, they normalcy bias, you know they are how
they are, And then one day everything changes, and some
people could predict it and some people can't. But one day,
the whole paradigm breaks and shifts and completely re orients itself,
and it's a completely unrecognizable world to the one that
pre existed it. And that is how history works, you know.
Spangler once said history is just the movement from catastrophe
to catastrophe. And I don't know about you, Pete, but
I feel like we're moving towards a catastrophe right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the conversation that we had before we
started recording, yeah, is one that most people don't really
want to have at this point. It's a little more
of the the conversation I had with Clay Martin than
the conversations that we have on our on our live streams.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, promote what you want, support the old
Glory Club.
Speaker 2: I don't really care about anything else.
Speaker 1: I hear you, man, I'm at that point too. It's like,
I care about my people. And somebody asked today He's like, well,
what someone was listening some getting caught up on some
of my episodes and he's like, well, what what what
is it?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: What what is it? I'm like, I just support my
people and in real life. That's the whole point of
the Old Glory Club is you have people in real
life to rely upon and build with. That's it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's I mean. And even if you aren't a
part of the Old Glory Club and have no interest
in in in being a part of the Old Glory Club,
start something with someone near you because you're gonna need it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Paul, I will talk to you the
next time. We're gonna do that. We're gonna do this
next one quicker, people, Well we'll follow up on this
a lot quicker than we did the last one.
Speaker 2: Oh man, the next one is gonna burn down your channel.
Speaker 1: Oh that's that's what I loved for. Thanks Paul, all.
Speaker 2: Right, take care of Pete. M hm hm