0:02 Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode 0:04 of History 102, starring myself, Redard 0:07 Lynch, and our co-host Austin Padet. And 0:10 today's episode is on 16th century 0:12 Europe, or as I call it, the West's 0:14 rubo. 0:16 >> Great. I think this was one of the first 0:19 episodes we did when I joined the show. 0:21 Something around 16th century Western 0:23 Europe or uh maybe it was 17th century 0:26 Western Europe. 0:27 >> Right. Okay. Okay, so now we're on 16th 0:29 century 0:30 >> in the 1500s. 0:32 >> The way to compare the the 16th to the 0:35 17th centuries 0:37 >> is both of them are the transfer from 0:39 the medieval to the early to the modern 0:41 world and they carry elements of both. 0:45 And I don't even think the 17th century 0:47 was per se more quote advanced than the 0:50 16th. Um by some metrics the 16th would 0:53 be more advanced in the way that we 0:54 would understand that world. It's more 0:56 so that the 16th century was wellfed in 0:59 the 17th century was hungry where it's 1:02 the same underlying 1:04 people's social technologies, 1:06 environments, etc., but then you've 1:09 pressure tested them. And so you could 1:12 see all of the different things that 1:14 were there in the 16th century by the 1:17 time of the 17th become 1:21 which ones will survive to the 18th 1:24 century. And that's the way to see it 1:28 where in the 16th century much like the 1:31 20th century there was a lot of struggle 1:34 and hardship but none of it was as 1:36 desperate as the 17th century. I think 1:38 it's similar to the 20th and the 21st 1:40 centuries where the very worst parts of 1:44 the 20th century were still illnesses of 1:47 prosperity and I guess we are also an 1:50 illness of prosperity but in a very 1:51 different way where the world wars or 1:55 communism or the other totalitarian 1:57 ideologies 1:59 they got into power because there was so 2:01 much optimism that people got ridiculous 2:05 in the 21st century or the 17th 19th 2:08 century is all of these um wars based 2:13 around governments that can't pay their 2:15 budgets, 2:17 populations that were starving, high 2:20 income inequality, 2:22 um the mini ice age. And so 2:26 it's the same era of history under the 2:28 opposite selection pressures. And 2:33 Fernon Browell, potentially the greatest 2:35 historian of the 16th century, said the 2:37 core theme of it was 2:41 the uh the increasing population across 2:44 the Mediterranean and Europe where he 2:46 said in every single country over the 2:48 course of the 16th century, the 2:50 population went up and the entire 2:51 society got wealthier. 2:55 >> Right? the um 2:59 that I mean today you take that 3:01 correlary would you see the explosive 3:03 population growth all over the world and 3:05 you can imagine that Africa is going to 3:08 have for example or Asia going to have a 3:10 tough time managing those massive 3:14 populations within their existing social 3:17 systems in the coming century you have 3:19 like the water issues maybe maybe we'll 3:22 get our own mini ice age to match Um, 3:28 I forgot my other point I was going to 3:30 say with it, but 3:35 >> the term I used for this, the rubo, and 3:37 it's an alchemical term which fits 3:39 because this was the era of history 3:40 where alchemy was the most popular and 3:43 every major country in Europe, 3:46 >> every major church had funded 3:47 alchemists. Uh, I was I'm currently in 3:50 Vienna and I was just in Prague visiting 3:53 John D's house and he was one of the 3:55 great alchemists of the 16th century and 3:57 he served under Queen Elizabeth as her 3:59 top spy master. But um, a rubo is a 4:04 healthy explosion. And what I mean by 4:07 that is that in alchemy there's 4:10 explosions that are built around you 4:13 have spent your life charge and your 4:17 this is you're going out and this is not 4:19 sustainable and then there explosions 4:21 which are your society or your 4:24 environment has created a series of 4:25 incentives that will cause an explosion 4:29 that's the start of a new breakthrough 4:31 that lasts a long period of time. So the 4:34 rubo is 4:36 this is a rapid explosion in ability 4:40 that then creates the foundations for a 4:42 new age that allows even more growth. 4:46 And so in our current era of history and 4:48 this would be uh the the negrado or the 4:52 alchemical blackening which is struggle 4:54 and horror that for that forces people 4:57 to improve and to burn away their 5:00 weakness and then the putrification 5:02 which is sort of alchemical rot. So we 5:04 have a rot fire. But then what they had 5:07 was due to the earlier struggles of the 5:10 period of the black death or uh the 5:14 population going down by half over the 5:17 course of the 14th and the 15th 5:18 centuries is that by the year 1500 the 5:21 average European had a pretty good 5:23 quality of life. And there's a a really 5:26 interesting book called 5:28 um 5:30 The Verge by Patrick Wyman. And it's a 5:33 study of all of the shifts that occurred 5:35 in the 40-year period between 1490 and 5:39 1530. And it's really astonishing where 5:44 Europe started doing the voyage of we we 5:46 did the voyage of exploration where the 5:49 new world the Europeans reached the new 5:52 world. They sailed around the bottom of 5:54 Africa to Asia. They circumnavigated the 5:56 world. This was 5:59 a big breakthrough in banking. It was 6:02 the development and popularization of 6:04 the printing press, the rise of the 6:07 modern centralized state, the 6:11 Protestantism, 6:12 and the popularization of humanism, 6:14 which is the creation of the modern 6:16 intellectual tradition. And all of this 6:18 occurred in a 40-year period. And so 6:21 when we talk about how big a 6:23 breakthrough this was, this was the 6:26 tipping point where Europe surpassed 6:30 basically any previous earlier 6:32 civilization. Europe became 6:35 categorically different from the other 6:37 great civilizations of Asia such as the 6:39 Middle East or India or China that had 6:42 been Europe's peers for thousands of 6:44 years. 6:45 Europe even surpassed classical 6:47 civilization by doing the the global 6:50 breakthrough and the development of 6:52 science. And past this threshold, Europe 6:55 was really western Fouian civilization 6:58 was really in its own category that only 7:01 it could figure out. And at the time 7:07 we can see all of the growth, but it was 7:09 terrifying for them because it was 7:11 entirely new where this was at the 7:13 beginning a medieval society that was 7:14 put through all these changes. And 7:18 there's something very modern about the 7:20 16th century. And this is why I say you 7:22 don't I I'm careful about saying it's 7:25 less advanced than the 17th because 7:28 there were people who had very modern 7:30 thinking patterns and there were very 7:32 already very modern elements right out 7:35 the door when you leave the Middle Ages, 7:38 >> right? And this breakthrough shouldn't 7:41 be taken for granted because it's not 7:42 like the West hit some critical point 7:46 and leveled up like a Pokemon to the 7:49 next level before China did or something 7:51 like China had been in their developing 7:54 system for thousands of years. You can 7:57 hit like a Bronze Age collapse as the 7:59 maximum of civilization. There's nothing 8:01 inherent to say that you you're going to 8:04 break through to this kind of new level 8:08 of operating which we did in in the 8:11 west. And so you can tie that to unique 8:14 values or or various things but it's 8:17 it's not like China would have been 8:19 there later. It's we we completely 8:22 changed the game theory of how systems 8:25 operate. One of the top themes of the 8:28 book uh the Patrick Wyman book the Verge 8:30 is every single one of the breakthroughs 8:32 he talks about in that time period were 8:34 occurring due to capitalism. And the 8:38 reason that western civilization was 8:41 able to have this breakthrough was that 8:44 after the black death surfom ended in 8:47 Western Europe which created a free 8:49 labor market and things you wouldn't 8:52 think about between 8:54 the voyages of exploration were funded 8:56 by their era's equivalent of VC capital 9:01 >> right 9:01 >> where Italian 9:03 banks were were funding these ex voyages 9:06 of exploration by the Iberian courts. Um 9:10 the the Protestant Reformation was 9:12 funded by these princes who were getting 9:14 money from these banks where Charles V 9:17 was able to get the title of Holy Roman 9:19 Emperor because he was allies with the 9:21 Fuggers who were a big uh Europe's 9:24 biggest banking house based out of 9:26 Augsburg in South Germany. And there's 9:29 an interesting element he talks about in 9:31 that book where 9:33 you can see the professionalization of 9:35 military where he follows this uh German 9:37 knight in Sabia who starts out like any 9:40 good medieval knight. He goes to war 9:42 because he enjoys it where he and his 9:44 buddies go out and they raid local 9:46 merchants and towns and they do it for 9:48 the love of the game. And then over the 9:50 course of the decades it becomes a 9:51 professional operation where he has 9:53 investors, he has to get certain 9:55 returns, he has to hire men around him. 9:59 And so over the course of decades, you 10:02 can see this shift from the medieval 10:04 honor culture to the more 10:06 professionalized modern culture. And at 10:09 the time in the 16th century, you can 10:11 look at uh Don Kyote by Cervantes, which 10:14 besides Shakespeare is arguably the 16th 10:17 century's greatest author. He's already 10:20 talking about the death of this these 10:21 medieval concepts of honor. And honor, I 10:24 don't want to say honor died. It kept 10:26 going in Europe in different versions 10:27 until World War I and it survived in in 10:30 the rest of the Western world in other 10:32 versions. But the medieval concept of 10:34 feudal chivalrich honor that became a 10:37 lar that stopped being an actual 10:40 military force over the course of the 10:41 16th century and these very modern 10:45 professional 10:47 financial understandings of things like 10:49 war in every element of life that had 10:52 totally dominated by the 16th century 10:55 because e western Europe was still was 10:57 was already firmly a capitalist economy. 11:00 Do you think it became a LAR because of 11:02 the context in which honor was normally 11:06 carried out? And then people confused 11:07 the context with the actual system of 11:10 honor. So honor means being a knight 11:12 charging in real life. And then when 11:13 you're charging against a gunpowder 11:15 pistol, you just look like an idiot and 11:16 you become a parody. Like the black 11:18 knight from Monty Python where he gets 11:19 his arms cut off. The medieval chivalry 11:23 started out as an operational code for 11:25 people who were going to war where if 11:27 you were because war was these knights 11:30 job and if you're going to war every 11:32 year or a lot on a statistical basis 11:36 it's safer if you create a rule where 11:39 another nobleman will capture you and 11:41 then your family will ransom you back 11:43 because it just keeps you in the game 11:45 and everyone's part of this closed cast 11:47 where you don't all want to butcher each 11:49 other. And there were exceptions like 11:50 the hundred years war mass killed off 11:53 thousands of knights because there were 11:54 too many in France and England. And then 11:57 over the course of the 14th and the 15th 11:58 centuries and I believe Hisinga's book 12:01 the winning of the middle ages talks 12:02 about this. These shavalic ideas became 12:06 highly obsessive status games between 12:09 Europe's nobility where they would have 12:11 their own independent crests with 12:13 symbolism and they would have these 12:15 complex flirting systems for courtly 12:17 love. And I was reading through the 12:19 Vulgate Saga, which was this 13th 12:22 century Arthuran fanfic, and it was 12:25 absolutely insane where um Morgan Lefay 12:29 was uh ranting that Merlin had a crush 12:32 on her, but then she didn't appreciate 12:34 it, so she but Merlin was a sorcery. 12:37 Then Morgan Lefay killed him. And no guy 12:40 who pushed the original Arthuran myth in 12:42 Wales a thousand years ago would have 12:44 been okay with that. But they had 12:45 reached the fanfic stage of chivalry and 12:48 the courtly love culture. That's one 12:51 part of it. Um and the second part is 12:56 by the mid to late 15th century 13:01 gun especially pike warfare meant that 13:03 the knights weren't really a viable 13:06 option in warfare where from the 15th 13:09 century until the 17th you had uh pike 13:13 or spear armies dominate across Europe 13:15 and the first time the knights really 13:17 faced issues was with the English 13:18 longbow bowman but the long bowman were 13:20 a specific speifically English thing 13:22 that the English could produce with 13:23 their social structure. But crossbows 13:26 and pikes were bigger across Europe. And 13:28 so by the end of the hundred years war 13:30 in the 1450s, France was the first 13:32 country in Europe to make a professional 13:34 military. Um and these professional 13:36 militaries were mostly mercenaries and 13:40 that was so that the king wouldn't have 13:42 respond. If the king hired his own 13:44 subjects, he would be held accountable 13:46 to them. And so if he hired mercenaries, 13:48 they would just do whatever he said. But 13:50 the mercenaries were awful. Also 13:52 extremely brutal because they had no 13:54 loyalty. And certain areas of Europe 13:56 produced mercenaries such as Switzerland 13:58 or the south of Germany or Scotland uh 14:02 are often quite poor areas. And 14:05 once you get to pike warfare, being a 14:08 brave knight charging in battle doesn't 14:10 carry the same code as before because 14:14 you'll just die. And so chivalry became 14:18 this sort of party. It became this party 14:21 social status code for how to like how 14:24 to flex and look cool inside the royal 14:26 court and it became less an actual 14:28 military uh operational way of life. 14:32 >> You mentioned poor people and you 14:33 mentioned Switzerland, Scotland. It 14:35 sounds kind of like the mountain people 14:37 became the mercenaries. So in ancient 14:40 history, you have the mountain people 14:41 attacking the valley people and back and 14:43 forth. And now we've reached a stage of 14:46 like more sophistication of the process 14:48 where it's like it's managed. So the 14:50 mountain people are hired by the city 14:52 people to selectively go after this or 14:54 that. And then I guess it's also fitting 14:57 with the capitalist themes of the area 15:00 era, right? because you have these 15:01 private armies and then you have market 15:03 incentives within warfare which is 15:05 accelerating the development and the 15:07 improvement of these armies etc. 15:09 >> Right. And yeah, that's correct. And 15:12 Jeffrey Parker who wrote a book on this 15:14 time period called the military 15:16 revolution. 15:17 He talks about that and he says that the 15:20 two populations that were sampled for 15:22 these mercenary groups were mountain 15:24 people and border people 15:27 >> where it was a job that certain areas 15:30 did where the mountain people were poor 15:32 enough. And then the border people if 15:34 you're already in a frontier zone where 15:36 you have to fight because there's armies 15:38 going through it's a skill you pick up. 15:40 Um but a lot a lot of nobilities did 15:43 adjust and this is something that we 15:45 forget about where once the age of 15:49 knights charging on horseback was out 15:52 the nobility moved to having pikes and 15:54 and uh musketss and swords where mils 16:00 are the one of the easiest examples 16:02 where 16:04 they were German mercenary bands from 16:07 the small princlings of South Germany. 16:09 And they were especially known for 16:11 having uh pikes 16:14 and they were quite effective. They 16:15 would sell their services across Europe. 16:17 Um and the nobility were still in charge 16:21 of war. They just figured out how to 16:24 adjust the gunpowder revolution. 16:29 Yeah. And the the the German pikes and 16:34 gunpowder units and all that. Were they 16:38 were they advanced ahead of the curve, 16:39 Germany on gunpowder, or was it more 16:42 France or England or anyone stick out? 16:46 >> Once one of them got it, the rest of 16:48 them did. Although, so the first people 16:51 in Europe were the English, which is 16:55 funny because that's a technology coming 16:57 from Asia and the English picked it up 16:59 use against the French. 17:00 >> The French got it from the English and 17:02 then it went to the rest of Europe and 17:04 the Germans were good manufacturers even 17:06 then. so they could make really good 17:08 guns. 17:10 And when the Turks, who had um an 17:13 incredible cannons to knock down 17:14 Constantinople, they hired a Hungarian 17:17 to to do the cannon manufacturing for 17:19 them where Muslim governments did they 17:22 did have cannons, but the best guns were 17:24 made by Europeans. Isn't that funny that 17:27 the Ottomans specifically are notorious 17:28 for gunpowder and cannons, but even that 17:32 cannon technology, the massive cannons 17:34 came from European workers, 17:36 >> right? Where the Turks were a horse 17:39 people and they could conquer the older 17:41 civilizations, but much like the earlier 17:43 Arab conquerors of the Muslim world, 17:45 they were still fundamentally dependent 17:46 on them. So, their bureaucrats and their 17:49 merchants were Greeks. They had a lot of 17:51 Western artisans. they would hire 17:53 Italians for various tasks uh etc. 17:57 >> Hopefully it goes that way with uh China 18:00 where they're not known for mobile 18:02 phones or something even though we we 18:04 kind of kicked it off and then they were 18:06 famous more famous for it for a couple 18:08 decades maybe and then maybe we'll take 18:09 back over manufacturing of that. We'll 18:12 see. I wonder if it's similar. 18:15 >> The Don Kyote thing is interesting too 18:16 because it off often gets mocked 18:18 straight up as delusional. Um, but what 18:22 like there's also got to be a value that 18:26 was lost that they're getting romantic 18:28 about that was actually legitimate. That 18:30 doesn't mean you should charge at a gun, 18:32 but can still be a valuable mode of 18:34 behavior in another context. there is 18:37 and it's a concept of honor distinct 18:40 from the financial and um 18:45 >> and uh 18:49 there's there's another element I'm 18:51 trying to think and pull out of my mind. 18:52 Um but 18:57 with this turn there was this sense that 19:00 a lot of the older noble virtues were 19:02 lost. um where the monarchs were seen as 19:08 and they had their own golden age 19:10 propaganda of oh back in the middle ages 19:13 there was so much more nobility but the 19:14 middle ages were still a cutthroat 19:18 >> right 19:19 >> self-serving society and it's easy to 19:21 over dramatize this today where the 19:23 society of the 16th century still had a 19:25 very strong concept of honor and 19:26 nobility compared to the present um 19:30 where 19:32 if you were to go to any European 19:35 country and you were to try to touch 19:36 someone's sister, you would get into a 19:39 sword fight 19:40 >> um and the nobility would base their 19:43 right to rule where Europe was still 19:46 almost entirely run by the nobility off 19:49 their masculine prowess and honor. But 19:52 there was definitely a shift in that and 19:54 that was something that was bemoaned at 19:55 the time. 19:57 >> Right. And like anything, there's 20:00 there's the honor, there's a statement, 20:02 there's expectations, and then there's 20:03 the real behavior. Like there's 20:04 situations where if someone can get away 20:07 with something, they do it right. Those 20:08 dynamics were probably still the same 20:10 then. Maybe a bit buttressed by honor, 20:12 but we're still existing within the real 20:14 world, not like an Arthurian fantasy or 20:16 something. And even the Arththeran 20:18 fantasy is in the context of trying to 20:20 recover some challic code. I feel like 20:22 every story about chivalry is about like 20:24 how the code is failing and we need to 20:26 revive it. That's 20:28 >> yeah, 20:29 >> no one feels the need to write stories 20:30 or epics in the good times where 20:34 >> all of the scientists of history write 20:37 it down in a society's era of decline 20:41 because people that smart in the era of 20:43 the rise would be building the rise or 20:44 they wouldn't be sad about it. And so in 20:48 a society where that honor code is still 20:50 strong, there's less need to mythologize 20:53 it because it's just lived in the air. 20:57 And I feel like it's it's still lived in 20:59 the air today by a fewer number of 21:01 people, but there's a lot of people who 21:03 operate like that with actual honor who 21:06 kind of assume that other people think 21:08 the same way. And then you come into the 21:10 world and you're like, wait, who? Some 21:12 people don't think like that. And then 21:13 you're like, oh, a lot of people don't 21:14 think like that. And then you don't know 21:16 how to operate because you're you don't 21:17 know if someone would like strangle you, 21:21 you know, if they had the opportunity or 21:23 if they would do whatever to you or 21:25 cheat you. And like it kind of creates 21:28 this breakdown of trust 21:30 >> that's 21:31 >> which is difficult. That's very real and 21:33 we've talked about it and a huge 21:35 >> cost that the modern blank slate world 21:38 view imposes is it makes it impossible 21:40 to discuss what people are actually like 21:43 where what you're articulating it 21:46 happened to a lot of rural or red state 21:48 Americans once they leave their old high 21:51 trust society because if if you're from 21:53 an environment like that and I can 21:55 personally attest to that you grew up in 21:57 a town where there's all of these high 21:59 trust norms that were standard in 22:02 America over the 20th century and at no 22:04 point does the media say we're no longer 22:06 a high trust society and then you go out 22:08 into the world and you thought wait the 22:10 rest of the society doesn't even have a 22:11 concept of the high trust culture 22:14 >> or norms that we took for granted so I'm 22:17 going to have to reverse engineer what 22:19 how to deal with a low trust society 22:21 without any of the framework that you 22:23 would have from an actual low trust 22:26 society like Latin America where you 22:27 have you have strong family trust or you 22:31 can trust people from, I don't know, 22:32 your your hometown or your cartel. Uh, 22:36 and it's it's a it's really weird living 22:38 in a former high trust society. 22:40 >> Yeah. Because people don't really say it 22:42 out loud, but you like say you come from 22:45 a small town with higher trust norms and 22:47 then you go into the corporate workplace 22:48 and then you start to get little hints 22:50 like people are like, you know, about 22:52 office politics, right? or you know 22:54 people will try to screw you, people 22:56 will focus on screwing you rather than I 22:58 thought we were just like all trying to 23:01 do a better job. Um, no. It's like 23:05 there's this whole game behind that you 23:06 have to be careful for and then people 23:08 suggest you even participate in it to 23:09 get ahead of it and then there and then 23:12 even things like lying on your resume 23:13 where you're like why would anybody lie 23:16 on their resume is and then it turns out 23:18 like oh everybody lies on their resume. 23:20 Not everybody right there's a lot of 23:22 people not lying on their resumes that 23:24 get ignored. Um, and then and then yeah, 23:28 you see how it all starts to work and 23:30 it's kind of depressing 23:32 >> and I wish there was any chronicling 23:34 about that. The mainstream is not going 23:36 to touch anything related to 23:38 anthropology or actual culture or 23:40 people. And so you have to develop these 23:42 notions in private and it's taboo to 23:44 talk about them. Um, there's so many 23:46 half taboss in this society, things that 23:48 are impolite to say but not an actual 23:50 taboo. Um, 23:53 >> yeah. I wonder if the turning point is 23:55 when people start to talk about that out 23:56 loud 23:57 >> hopefully 23:59 >> or form new institutions, new companies 24:01 with different cultures that then 24:02 compete based on the advantages that 24:05 comes from a high trust group and then 24:07 that starts to to change the norms 24:09 balance something like that 24:11 >> hopefully. 24:13 >> All right. What were we talking about 24:14 the 16th century 24:15 >> right? Um, 24:19 as I try to divide the 15th from the 24:21 16th centuries, 24:23 the 15th centuries still had more 24:26 clearing out of the medieval order where 24:28 across Europe there was a lot there were 24:32 plenty of wars like the hundred years 24:34 war um 24:36 that [snorts] were trying to finish 24:38 these medieval dynastic disputes. But by 24:40 the year 1500, France is a unified 24:43 country. 24:44 England is 24:48 also a unified country under the tutors. 24:52 Germany is a federated mess 24:56 of a lot of independent countries that 25:02 fell apart in the 13th century where the 25:05 Habsburgs have technical control of 25:10 the Holy Roman Empire. They're based out 25:12 of Vienna. Their old capital was Prague, 25:14 but they were knocked out by the Husses, 25:16 who were protoprotestants who launched a 25:19 Czech nationalist revolt in the mid 15th 25:23 century where Czecha was a a basically 25:26 Protestant country for 80 years before 25:30 Protestantism spread around the rest of 25:32 Europe. 25:34 And 25:36 then Spain had recently unified under 25:38 Aragon and Castile. Italy was a series 25:42 of ind independent 25:45 sub subk kingdoms not kingdoms sub 25:49 potentates and principalities some of 25:51 which were republics others get governed 25:53 by the pope military dictatorships where 25:56 Italy was the wealthiest place in Europe 25:58 and the world and most technologically 26:00 and artistically advanced where Italy 26:02 was going through the Renaissance 26:04 and we're only going to look at that in 26:05 cursory detail because 26:08 the Renaissance deserves its own video. 26:10 It's one of the most difficult videos 26:12 I've ever researched if I'm honest. I've 26:14 read a bunch of books. I still don't get 26:16 a a handle on it. And then once you get 26:18 to Eastern Europe, you have 26:23 the growth of empires that haven't yet 26:25 solidified their power. The biggest is 26:28 the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, 26:29 which is largest nation in Europe. 26:32 Russia had only recently got 26:34 independence from the Mongols within the 26:36 last 20 years. You still have the 26:38 Tutonic Knights. Hungary was a great 26:41 power that was in a period of um loss of 26:46 internal cohesion due to the the 26:48 nobilities gaining power while the Turks 26:50 were growing in the Balkans 26:53 and 26:55 the great division that formed around 26:57 this time period as a consequence of the 26:59 Black Death which was the instigating 27:01 variable for a lot of the stuff in the 27:03 16th century where it killed half of 27:04 Europe's population. And you don't just 27:07 get past that where Europe's still at a 27:10 marketkedly lower population in the year 27:13 1500 than it did in the year 1300 27:16 where 27:18 Western Europe after the end of the 27:20 black death had all the peasants become 27:22 free 27:23 >> and so surfom died as an institution 27:25 which allowed the creation of 27:26 capitalism. The the opposite dynamic 27:29 occurred in Eastern Europe where the 27:32 nobility were able to use the new scarce 27:36 population to ensurf all of them under 27:39 very brutal conditions. And the line 27:41 went along the Elba River where the 27:43 Czech Republic and the area around 27:45 Berlin that was surf. Western Germany 27:49 was free, Italy was free. And so this 27:52 created a a new sort of iron curtain 27:55 that split the east and the west of 27:58 Europe on differing levels of 27:59 development 28:01 where East Europe created grain that fed 28:06 west Europe and so they were part of a 28:08 unified capitalist economy but due to 28:10 surfom east Europe was put in this 28:13 position of economic dependency to west 28:16 Europe where because they didn't have 28:18 the market institutions the population 28:20 couldn't grow was rapidly the cities 28:23 couldn't develop in the way they could 28:24 in Western Europe and so they stayed on 28:26 this level of just producing grain and 28:29 resources for Western Europe. Well, 28:31 Western Europe went steamrolling ahead. 28:34 >> It's kind of like the North and the 28:36 South and and but it's funny how it's 28:38 even more like the Iron Curtain, right? 28:40 >> And how it even splits down Western 28:42 Germany. Isn't just amazing how we kind 28:44 of like fit back into these historic 28:46 patterns and if you zoom out and look at 28:48 it on a map and it's like, oh, the water 28:51 went in the place where the earth was 28:54 dug out from the previous flood. What a 28:56 surprise. 28:58 >> That's a good point. 28:59 >> They perfectly match the boundaries. 29:01 >> I know I just said it, but I didn't 29:02 think it before I said it. Um, Peter 29:05 Zahan talks about how 29:08 he thinks this is caused by East Europe 29:11 having 29:12 slightly less rivers than West Europe, 29:15 where because West Europe has a higher 29:18 concentration of rivers, it's easy to 29:19 have cities and to have 29:22 >> um capitalism develop while in East 29:24 Europe there's because there's still a 29:27 lot of rivers that bisect East Europe, 29:29 but it's less. So, you have more open 29:30 grassland. And so Zahan said this caused 29:33 a different relationship to state 29:34 formation. And that's one of those 29:36 things that seems half true to me. It it 29:39 snacks of geographic determinism, which 29:41 Zahan likes to do. And it's a really 29:43 popular theory because geographic 29:45 determinism removes responsibility from 29:47 the human players, 29:49 >> right? And it's like rationalization. If 29:51 China had been ahead for whatever 29:53 reason, say they like Jesus showed up 29:55 there, 29:57 then there would be a way to explain it 30:00 according to geography, right? You could 30:02 you could play this game 30:04 >> and yeah, 30:05 >> I agree with that. And the country we'll 30:08 start in with in Europe is Spain where 30:13 Spain was the start of multiple 30:14 different trends where they were the 30:18 first modern bureaucratic country to 30:21 form in Europe 30:23 and they did so due to the alliance and 30:26 the unification of Aragon and Castile 30:29 which were independent countries for the 30:31 entire medieval period where there had 30:33 been no concept of Spanishness 30:35 until the the time of the Romans where 30:38 these independent countries had 30:40 developed as a side effect of the Muslim 30:43 conquest. And the original plan was that 30:47 Queen Isabella of Castile would marry 30:50 the king of Portugal, which would have 30:52 totally change the dynamics for the rest 30:54 of history. Where if you fused Portugal 30:57 and Spain together into a single 30:59 country, which they were for 80 years, 31:01 those were the two countries that 31:03 colonized Latin America together, they 31:06 had colonies on every continent. Um, but 31:09 instead Spain became the alliance of 31:12 Castile and Aragon where there's a story 31:15 that Isabella 31:17 was praying that her brother who was 31:19 going to set up this marriage would die. 31:22 He then died. She gained independent 31:25 custody from him and then chose to marry 31:28 Ferdinand of Aragon, thus fusing them 31:30 together. 31:32 >> Castile and Aragon are just classic 31:35 kingdom names. I mean, it's hard to beat 31:36 Castile for a kingdom name. 31:39 >> And that's one where Madrid is, right? 31:41 >> It's Yeah, it is. 31:43 >> Yeah. 31:43 >> Madrid, actually, they built it as a 31:46 specific capital with no rivers nearby 31:48 to show that they could. where Madrid in 31:52 the 16th century the Spanish government 31:54 thought we are going to build our our 31:56 new capital without any water source 31:59 nearby without any defining geographic 32:01 principles just as a power play 32:04 >> just to prove Peter Zahan wrong. 32:06 >> Yeah, basically 32:08 >> it was like their version of colonizing 32:10 Mars, 32:11 >> right? 32:12 >> Or or creating a city in Nevada. And the 32:15 the the name for Castile stems from 32:17 castle because when the Muslims were 32:18 conquering the region, they built a lot 32:19 of castles in the northern mountains 32:21 where Castile originated. 32:24 >> Oh, right. And it would is castile even 32:27 a word for like small castle or 32:29 something. It 32:29 >> it is for right. 32:31 >> And a castellane is an owner of a small 32:33 castle, 32:34 >> right? um 32:38 Aragon and Castile were fused together 32:41 under the unified Spanish monarchy 32:45 and they didn't get legal 32:48 legal mutual interdependence 32:51 until they didn't get fused until I 32:53 believe the time of the French 32:54 Revolution. So they had independent 32:56 constitutions. There were times when the 32:57 king of France, sorry, the king of Spain 32:59 tried to crush Aragon's constitution 33:03 >> because it had stronger rights than 33:05 Spain's, but he couldn't because or he 33:09 tried to when it caused a revolution in 33:10 the 70th century, which took a while to 33:13 put down. Um, but the average Spaniard 33:16 would probably not have considered 33:18 himself quote Spanish in this time 33:19 period. He would have seen himself as 33:21 belonging to one of those countries. 33:24 Although Spain did go through a big 33:26 project of nation building that was 33:28 intentional. Um, and 33:31 >> which is ironic because sorry to cut you 33:33 off there, but the because the people it 33:35 was people from Aragon and the people 33:37 from the north that kicked off the 33:38 reconista specifically because of their 33:41 fiercely independent country and their 33:44 reward was kind of getting stuck into 33:47 this centralized Spanish project where 33:50 they actually had less independence than 33:52 before even though it was a much better 33:53 situation. 33:54 >> Yeah. Um, and those areas always, even 33:57 to this day, have had had a very 34:00 specific tone around autonomy and 34:02 separation. And there's even like uh I 34:05 forget the the names of the provinces, 34:06 but those northern Spanish provinces are 34:09 legally described as autonomous 34:11 provinces. Even though they're mostly 34:13 legally integrated in the Spanish 34:15 system, they still try and maintain that 34:17 and there's still constant fight for 34:19 autonomy within the Spanish regions. 34:21 Both the Bas and the Catalans and and 34:24 the Galatians too, but especially the 34:25 Bas and the Catalanss are distinct 34:27 enough ethnic groups that they've gotten 34:29 the autonomy recently where Spain's gone 34:32 through periods of trying to force uh 34:34 centralization and then allowing 34:36 decentralization where Catalan is closer 34:38 in language to uh in the south of France 34:43 than it is to Castellian which is the 34:44 language of Spanish. Um, and then the 34:46 Basque speak their own language that is 34:50 pre-Indo-European. It's the only 34:52 language in Europe from before the Arian 34:53 conquest. Um, and they survived up in 34:57 the mountains where Navar was divided 34:59 between France and Spain at the end of 35:03 the 15th century, right before this 35:05 starts. 35:07 >> Yeah. And it's often surprising how 35:09 broken up Europe is like this. But it's 35:10 it's also not surprising when you 35:12 consider how long they've been behaving 35:15 that way in Basque that that attitude 35:18 has continued through to the modern day. 35:19 Like you just you don't just get rid of 35:21 thousands of years of a culture of 35:24 independence. 35:25 >> Um that that's true especially when the 35:28 the differences are that great. Um, 35:32 >> and with the unification of Spain, 35:37 there were several different things that 35:39 Ferdinand and Isabella 35:42 did in order to fuse their two countries 35:44 together where 35:47 one of which was drive out the final 35:49 Muslim kingdom in Granada, which 35:51 happened in 1492, the same year as the 35:53 discovery of the new world. 35:55 Granada was very wealthy and it was well 35:58 guarded and the Spanish had conquered 36:01 most of the rest of the south of Spain 36:02 or Anducia 36:04 in the early 13th century. So they left 36:07 Granada alone for nearly 300 years 36:09 because it was mountainous and difficult 36:11 to conquer 36:12 >> and the Gradins knew that the Christians 36:14 could take them but it was just sort of 36:17 easier for them to send tribute to the 36:19 the Spanish. Um, but 36:24 the the Christian monarchs in the north, 36:27 they wanted to take the final bit of 36:29 Muslim Spain to bring the country 36:30 together, clean up the map, and then 36:34 have uh a shared enemy to bring together 36:37 Christian Spain. And that was a brutal 36:39 war where they used cannons to finally 36:41 knock down the incredibly well-built 36:44 Granadan castle to finally end the 36:47 reconista there started 700 years 36:50 before. Um, 36:53 and as said before in the Spanish 36:55 America video, the same crusading spirit 36:59 that got the Reconista 37:02 was what also conquered and discovered 37:04 the new world at the same time or 37:06 immediately after. And the Spanish were 37:09 able to colonize the new world because 37:10 they already had this tradition of 37:13 forming these war bands to fight the 37:15 Muslims that they could place onto the 37:17 new world. And I read this interesting 37:19 history uh the shaping of America by 37:21 minig. And the argument it makes is that 37:24 the Spanish could colonize the new world 37:26 before the Northwest Europeans because 37:29 the Spanish already had this this naval 37:31 military uh s symbiosis developed from 37:37 their wars with the Muslims while the 37:39 northwest Europeans needed the wars of 37:40 religion from the reformation to build 37:42 that for themselves so that they could 37:44 have this military-industrial complex to 37:46 go after the new world. 37:48 >> Right. And then I guess what ended up 37:49 catching up to Spain was the more 37:52 advanced manufacturing development in 37:54 the north which erased their original 37:56 advantage. But do they ever talk about 37:58 how insane it is? Because we often talk 38:00 about how insane it is that they got 38:02 pushed all the way back up to the 38:04 Pyrenees mountains and then they 38:05 reconquered Spain. 38:08 But not only did they reconquer Spain, 38:10 they went from being pushed all the way 38:12 in the mountains to reconquering Spain 38:13 to conquering basically the whole world. 38:15 Does anybody talk about what that did to 38:19 the psychology of the Spanish at the 38:21 time? Were they confused? We're like, 38:24 >> I'm often accused of practicing the 38:26 black legend. And the black legend is 38:28 the the Spanish Empire was terrible and 38:31 it brutally oppressed the population. It 38:32 set up all these bad incentives. And I 38:35 of course I I I am my own defendant. But 38:38 I think I am good where 38:42 >> my attitude to the Spanish Empire was it 38:44 did have positives. They were nicer to 38:46 the natives than people give them 38:47 credit. They had more noble obligation 38:49 than a lot of later empires. But the 38:52 Spanish Empire really did bad things in 38:54 a few different categories. And I think 38:56 they should be held responsible for 38:57 that. And a lot of Spanish nationalists, 39:00 even on the left, hate the concept of 39:02 the black legend. and they use it for 39:04 anyone who criticizes Spain in its 39:06 imperial history. The other side of it 39:09 is the white legend which was the 39:11 Spanish nationalist telling of history 39:14 that Spain is a pure Catholic nation 39:16 that drove out the Muslims and was 39:18 incredible. And when Spain was pure and 39:20 Catholic, it conquered the world. And 39:22 then when they accepted these Protestant 39:25 and modernist and um the this blood from 39:28 elsewhere is when Spain decayed as a 39:30 great nation. And so this was the 39:32 dominant narrative under the Francoist 39:34 regime in parts of the 19th century. Um 39:37 and in modern Spain it's largely been 39:39 kicked out much like the other um 39:42 western dominant narratives in other 39:44 similar countries. But yes, they did 39:46 think about that and they attributed it 39:47 to the the courage of the Spanish people 39:50 and the the Catholic Church, 39:52 >> right? And then that's this um 39:56 that fits into the modern stereotypes of 39:59 like Catholics against reformation 40:01 Spain. Yeah. 40:02 >> Which you can you can see more clearly 40:05 how that's flawed by looking at Spain 40:08 >> in the 16th century rather than our 40:10 current context because we know that the 40:13 trends that screwed Spain over were 40:16 started well before Protestantism, 40:18 right? It was like their replication of 40:19 the Ottoman 40:21 >> uh system and then the the control of 40:24 the industry and all that stuff that put 40:27 them behind England and the Protestant 40:29 areas. Obviously, they converted to pro 40:31 or they didn't convert to Protestantism, 40:33 but maybe they felt they got more 40:34 corrupted by it and that correlates with 40:38 when they were less strong than the 40:40 English. But there that would be like 40:42 China saying that uh capitalism 40:45 corrupted them because they didn't have 40:48 as advanced of an economy as America 40:51 even though they switched to a 40:52 capitalist system. 40:53 >> There's also nationalist brain in the 40:55 same way that you'll have communist 40:57 brain where the communists just have 40:59 mental delusions that come with the sort 41:02 of psychic space of being communist. For 41:04 example, communists hate great men and 41:07 and that's not a logical idea. It's more 41:10 an outcome of the rest of their 41:12 worldview. But if you can find that bug, 41:13 you can figure out the rest of their 41:14 worldview. And nationalists have similar 41:17 bugs where it's useful to see 41:19 nationalists as their society's 41:21 immunological response that just 41:23 rationalizes whatever that immunology 41:26 is. And that's often why you need to 41:28 have a ruling class that's more 41:30 objective and actually comprehends other 41:32 cultures. Because if you let the ru the 41:35 nationalists without the objective 41:36 ruling class, the nationalists will 41:39 start attacking other countries and not 41:40 respecting there's a balance where you 41:42 do need to maintain the immunology, but 41:44 you also have to be aware of your 41:46 nation's failures. I consider myself a 41:48 patriotic American, but I can go to 41:50 Europe and admit that the Europeans, 41:52 especially in older eras, have a a 41:55 higher culture that's just vastly better 41:56 than ours or an intellectual tradition 41:58 that's vastly better. And the only way 42:00 your society will develop and grow is if 42:03 you're capable of integrating the 42:04 outside world like that. And so that's 42:06 how I see the white legend where it's 42:08 just this Spanish immunological response 42:10 of our way is good 42:13 and the things that are associated with 42:15 our way are good and then the outside 42:17 world is bad. It's it's a comparable 42:19 level of intellectual immunology as the 42:23 black legend. 42:25 >> Right. Interesting. Right. Like you 42:27 said, it's good to be a patriot, right? 42:29 But we can clearly see this pattern 42:31 where if you are if if you're just 42:34 taking where you are as a given and 42:36 defending that on its own terms without 42:40 context, then you're not really finding 42:42 out. You're not actually looking at what 42:44 made you successful, what's actually a 42:47 negative trend, what's a positive trend, 42:48 what's like a copying of the Ottoman 42:50 system and what's unique to Western 42:52 civilization. you're not sparsing that 42:54 out because you're kind of just 42:55 defending everything and throwing a kind 42:57 of term around it that's not consistent 43:00 that's more consistent with like a 43:01 psychological projection around an 43:04 immunological response than like 43:05 anything cons consistent 43:07 >> right um that that's that's a good point 43:10 and I agree with it um an important 43:13 point about this is that western Europe 43:17 sorry southern Europe and North Europe 43:18 hadn't diverged by this point where by 43:20 the end of the 17th century North Europe 43:22 had superseded South Europe, but in the 43:25 16th century 43:27 they were roughly equivalent with South 43:29 Europe having a slight advantage. Um, 43:33 >> and 43:34 there were two main sort of generative 43:38 cores in Europe, 43:41 one of which was in Italy, especially 43:43 the north of Italy, and the other one 43:45 was in Belgium. And the relationship to 43:47 these two cores determined your 43:49 position. Where as an example, 43:55 Spain was dependent on both Italy and on 43:59 the Netherlands where the funding that 44:03 let the Spanish colonize the new world 44:04 or have their empires that was of 44:06 Italian or German origin and then they 44:09 were already shipping in their 44:10 manufacturing from Flanders. 44:14 And so when you look at Europe at this 44:15 time, 44:17 >> everyone was growing, but it was in 44:19 different degrees. And it's not like the 44:21 current situation we have now was 44:23 predetermined where the average Spaniard 44:25 at the time of Columbus was equally free 44:28 to the average Englishman where Spain 44:31 had its own uh parliament called the 44:33 Cortez much like the Spanish guy who 44:35 conquered Mexico. 44:37 >> They had their own uh rights like their 44:39 own version of the Magna Carta. They 44:40 signed at a similar time and every major 44:43 country in Western Europe had a 44:44 parliament and they had their own set of 44:46 rights. Hungary had one, Poland, I said 44:49 Western Europe, but Hungary had one, 44:50 Poland had one, the Holy Roman Empire 44:52 had one, Spain did, uh, France, England, 44:56 the Italians were pretty free. And we 44:59 tend to perceive freedom in the 45:01 parliamentary tradition as modern 45:03 creations, but in actuality, they stem 45:06 from Europe's medieval tradition. So 45:09 everywhere in Western Europe would be 45:11 what we would consider to be free today. 45:14 And most places had functional freedom 45:16 of speech. They had freedom of action, 45:19 freedom of association. And then the 45:21 later encroachments by the absolutist 45:23 governments over the 17th century and 45:25 the 16th in some countries were what 45:27 killed that freedom. And so when you 45:29 look at the the Spain of the 15th 45:31 century or the 16th century that 45:33 colonized the new world and was this 45:35 great renaissance nation of culture and 45:37 art and philosophy, this was a free 45:40 society. And then the growth of their 45:42 absolutist state from money from the new 45:44 world is what strangled Spain's freedom. 45:47 And this is what also killed 45:48 Mediterranean Europe in general where 45:51 Italy was a wealthy free society in the 45:53 in the 16th century. But then that spa 45:56 same Spanish absolutist impulse is what 45:59 also strangled Italy. And you could say 46:02 the same thing for France which also had 46:04 absolutism and a more stringent version 46:06 of Catholicism. 46:09 But it's but Europe in the 16th century 46:11 was by and large a free open capitalist 46:15 society. 46:17 >> Right? If you think about it, they were 46:19 kind of more parliamentarian than we are 46:22 now. Because what is the parliament 46:24 other than a way of officially 46:26 organizing the mass of nobles who always 46:29 acted as a check on the king? Sometimes 46:32 much more powerful and relevant than the 46:34 king uh and the aggregate. But today the 46:37 parliament and the congress have been re 46:39 reduced to basically meaningless as like 46:43 the 46:44 >> the centralized nation states 46:46 bureaucracies to totally subsume their 46:48 role. So could you argue that like the 46:51 1600 hund00s were more parliamentarian 46:53 than now in a weird way? 46:56 >> There wasn't that much governance which 46:58 is a funny way to put it because the 46:59 governments were so weak they didn't 47:01 actually do that much. I was trying to 47:04 think was England governed by the 47:05 parliament more or the king in the 16th 47:07 century and the short answer was there 47:09 wasn't that much governance and because 47:10 it was a wealthy era much like 20th 47:13 century there was not the same fighting 47:16 over the purse book by them get to the 47:17 English civil war the parliament and the 47:19 king of England were at each other's 47:21 throats for who got to raise taxes 47:23 >> right and it was like 3% or whatever 47:25 >> yeah kill myself and in the 16th century 47:29 Queen Elizabeth could run the entire 47:31 English government with an exception for 47:33 the Spanish Armada just based off her 47:37 own personal estates. And in the 16th 47:39 century, you saw the unification and the 47:41 formation of these later absolutist 47:43 governments, but they were pretty weak 47:45 where the Spanish could form their great 47:47 state from the the money taken from the 47:50 Muslims and the Jews in the New World. 47:52 But in France, which was one of the most 47:54 centralized countries in Europe, which 47:56 was an outcome from the Hundred Years 47:58 War, 48:00 there's um there's a great movie called 48:02 Queen Marggo. It was one of my mom's 48:04 favorite movies in the 16th century, one 48:06 of my mother's favorite eras of history. 48:08 And it's about the the the French uh 48:10 wars of religion. And one of the 48:12 subplots is that the English sporsemen 48:16 to attack the king of France at his 48:18 estates outside Paris. And France had no 48:22 border controls or anyone to check. So 48:24 50 English guys could hop on boats, 48:26 cross the channel, land in France, buy 48:29 lunch, ride to Paris, attack the king at 48:31 his estate. 48:33 >> And right, they just buy lunch at the 48:35 local tavern. I guess nobody asks any 48:37 questions. A smooth in-n-out operation. 48:40 >> You you have crusade. You had crusades 48:42 that were crossing Europe earlier. You 48:44 would have people you would have people 48:46 going on pilgrimages, people traveling 48:48 where you you can't see the governments 48:50 of this era as powerful. And so when you 48:52 look at the rise of absolutist 48:54 philosophy, the thinkers like Hobbes who 48:57 said we want the total king who has 49:00 power over everything and all that 49:02 stuff, they were saying that because 49:04 they were from a society where the king 49:05 had basically no power. And so it was 49:07 this overcorrection, 49:09 >> right? And they were sick of that. Yeah. 49:13 not being able to get momentum. And it's 49:15 funny to think of these English knights 49:16 being like, you can just do things. What 49:18 do you mean you can't capture the king? 49:21 >> No, that was definitely the attitude 49:23 where uh the European age of 49:25 exploration, all of this stuff was 49:26 funded by their version of VC capital. 49:29 They would they would just go to India 49:32 or Africa or the new world or even there 49:34 was mass piracy inside Europe. The 49:37 Knights of St. John and Malta were 49:38 pirates. Uh the Barbarie Corsa were 49:41 pirates. The English were called a race 49:42 of pirates and shopkeepers because they 49:44 would raid across Europe. 49:46 >> They had famous privateeers were 49:48 English. I mean, it's like in history, 49:50 we take the English privateeers and we 49:52 don't really consider them private 49:55 pirates. They're more like privateeers 49:57 or noble or have some other 50:00 but then like you said that was the the 50:04 general reputation at the time. 50:07 My dad would say that if there was a way 50:09 for VC capital to fund privateeers 50:11 today, they would do it. He said that if 50:13 America 50:14 >> they're on it. Yeah. 50:15 >> If America had a war with China where we 50:18 had to take down Chinese shipping and 50:20 American capital was allowed to hire 50:22 pirates, they would to they would do it. 50:24 >> It would definitely happen. I think 50:25 where even in the war in Ukraine, 50:28 Ukraine has much more of a mercenary 50:31 capitalist reward system where it's 50:33 almost been gamified to point like Call 50:35 of Duty experience points where you like 50:38 get the more things you take out, the 50:40 more you rise up or whatever. 50:42 >> Let's created a a competition. 50:45 >> Let's take a break for a second and hop 50:47 right back. 50:47 >> Sounds good. 50:53 to return back to Spain. Besides driving 50:56 out the Muslims, 50:58 the Spaniards 51:01 also um created the Inquisition, which 51:04 was part of the same process where the 51:06 desire was to unify 51:09 the Christian Spaniards ran a shared 51:12 Catholic identity against the Jews and 51:16 the Muslims who first they created 51:19 discriminative laws against and then 51:22 they expelled out of Spain. 51:25 And this was a very messy process. 51:28 And it kept on getting stuck in these 51:30 cycles of virtue signaling that ended up 51:33 having toxic effects disproportionate 51:36 from the actual amount of people that 51:38 the Inquisition killed. And Protestants 51:41 did form a black legend around the 51:43 Inquisition, making them out to be some 51:45 horrifying Stalinist organization. But 51:47 they killed very few people in total. I 51:49 forget the exact number, but I it's it's 51:52 in the three digits or the very low four 51:54 digits. Um nothing comparable to the 51:58 20th century's regimes. Um and 52:02 the Jews settled around the Ottoman 52:05 Empire, especially so in Turkey, where 52:07 the site of modern Troy that I've been 52:09 to was an old uh sphartic Jewish site 52:13 where they spoke a language called 52:14 Ladino. 52:16 um while the the Moors or the Muslims 52:19 settled in North Africa 52:22 and these people were disproportionately 52:25 the merchant classes which is it's funny 52:27 because normally it's the Christians who 52:29 were the more advanced merchant classes 52:31 but in Spain the dynamic was inversed um 52:35 and so it and so it made Spain poorer 52:37 and the Ottoman sultan at the time 52:39 mocked the king of Spain saying why are 52:40 you sending me your your wealthiest 52:42 subjects I'm just going to use them now 52:45 Um, and there was resentment because the 52:47 the Jews had worked with the Muslims 52:50 during the this the colonization of 52:52 Christian Spain. Um, but it created this 52:55 very 52:57 um thought control environment where the 52:59 Inquisition shut off Protestant 53:02 thoughts, they shut off um 53:06 modern science, the enlightenment. So, 53:08 Spain was stuck in an artificial 53:11 medieval state until the era of the 53:14 French Revolution. Um, and they created 53:17 this environment of conformity and 53:21 destruction of free thought that didn't 53:25 have any parallel in the rest of Western 53:27 Europe because there was this idea that 53:29 if you were not following the Catholic 53:31 doctrine that you were not a good 53:34 Spaniard and there was an increasing 53:36 obsession over blood where 53:40 for example the Mus the Jews would often 53:42 convert to Catholicism 53:44 but then they'd grow wealthy ier than 53:46 the other uh than the than the 53:48 Castellians or the Christian Spaniards. 53:51 This would breed resentment and often 53:53 times the the the wealthiest of the best 53:55 families had mixed Jewish blood. So the 53:57 lower status Castellians would try to 54:02 make these racial purity spiraling of, 54:05 "Oh, I'm a pure-blooded uh Castilian, 54:08 thus I am superior to you. You do not 54:11 deserve to have these nice things." So 54:13 even for the ones that converted to 54:14 Christianity, they often ended up 54:16 migrating outwards to places like the 54:18 Netherlands or other countries that were 54:20 more tolerant because as this time went 54:23 on, Spain became a less free society. 54:26 And that was reflected in freedom of 54:28 thought. It was reflected in the king 54:30 shutting off the parliament. Um, and it 54:33 was reflected in the increasing power 54:35 over the economy where the entire 54:36 Spanish economy became dependent on 54:39 these monopolistic contracts where the 54:41 king gave them out to his buddies. And 54:43 this was an increasing issue over this 54:45 time period where Europe mostly had a 54:47 capitalist economy. But as time passed, 54:50 the kings would give these monopolies to 54:52 allies to control the the economy. And 54:55 this came to head in the 17th century 54:57 with the with the various wars of that 54:58 time period. But in the meanwhile, Spain 55:01 had a golden age we've forgotten about 55:03 where Spain was one of the great 55:05 capitals of culture in the 16th century 55:07 between authors like Cervantes. The 55:10 novel as an art form um some authors say 55:13 comes from Spain in this time period as 55:16 well as the concept of international law 55:18 was a creation of 16th century Spain. Um 55:21 and El Greco, an entire genre of 55:24 painting stem from Spain in this time 55:27 period. So they did use their uh they 55:30 did use their wealth for a a flash of 55:32 culture in the 16th century. 55:35 >> It it is weird how Spain kicked off a 55:37 lot of these trends but was the least to 55:40 see them through throughout Europe. I 55:42 suppose they you can see how they took 55:44 the mentality that worked during their 55:47 reconquista and weren't able to 55:50 basically 55:52 break out of that pattern for a changing 55:54 circumstance and and so it was easy to 55:57 fall into the Catholic solidarity 56:02 mentality 56:03 even in 56:05 conditions where it didn't work as well. 56:07 I don't know. 56:08 >> They were able to double down on 56:09 absolutism more than any other West 56:11 European country because the gold from 56:14 the new world went to the king, not the 56:15 parliament. If the parliament had gotten 56:18 the money from the new world, which 56:19 wouldn't have happened with Spanish law, 56:21 that would have completely changed the 56:22 dynamics. Um, but instead, the countries 56:26 in Europe that took on absolutism 56:28 suffered for it. Um, the worst traits of 56:31 current France stem from the the 56:33 absolutists winning. 56:35 same thing as Italy where 56:38 >> because the king got this huge cash 56:40 subsidy from outside 56:43 Europe, he could use this to subsidize 56:45 all of these bad behaviors that got 56:47 structured into the national system and 56:50 so you couldn't remove them, 56:52 >> right? And the absolutism actually leads 56:55 to atheism because you have a lot of 56:57 these debates occurring at the time 56:59 where you have this like for example 57:02 back to the show Sharp there's this 57:04 Spanish guy who's fighting with the 57:06 French side 57:07 >> and they ask him why he's like well what 57:10 what do you choose like superstition and 57:13 th this versus like 57:16 rationalism and scientific and discovery 57:18 right so it creates if if the religion 57:21 is considered absolutism Then it creates 57:23 this false binary that sends people 57:25 towards atheism, which is probably why 57:27 Spain and France are became so 57:30 atheistic. I don't know if they're more 57:32 atheistic than Northern Europe now or or 57:34 how that trended out, but I think they 57:37 that was a French and Spanish stereotype 57:40 for a while. 57:41 >> You're right. The Spaniards went for 57:43 atheism, 57:45 the second most rapid country on earth 57:47 after France. The French Enlightenment 57:49 popularized atheism and Spain was 57:51 immediately like a decade after. 57:53 Although Spain's a very diverse country 57:54 where there were other areas that were 57:56 very Catholic until quite recently. Um 57:59 >> well it's this dichconomy where you're 58:00 like how can the super Catholic place be 58:03 atheist? It's like well they're atheists 58:04 because they're super Catholic and have 58:06 right. It's like that's how it happened. 58:08 >> Whoa man what if you accepted genuine 58:10 mental diversity about the world rather 58:12 than fitting things into boxes. 58:14 Whoa man we don't need to put a label on 58:16 this. Um, 58:18 >> multi-dimensional thinking, 58:21 >> you in fact do need to put a label on 58:22 it. I just had I I had a PTSD trigger 58:25 from my time in LA. Um, and 58:28 >> your your verb linguistic map is not 58:30 reality, but you still need a linguistic 58:32 map. 58:33 >> Exactly. Um, 58:37 Spain was part of a larger empire 58:41 that they formed through marriages and 58:44 Isabella set this up where her children 58:47 married into the house of Habsburg and 58:50 indirectly through the house of Burgundy 58:53 where 58:55 Aragon already had the south of Italy as 58:58 a colony from the medieval period. 59:01 Then 59:03 they got Austria 59:07 and 59:10 the the Netherlands 59:12 in a corridor of territory through 59:14 Eastern France as part of the unified 59:17 Holy Roman Empire. And this passed on to 59:21 um to Charles V, who's known in European 59:24 history as that one guy who could have 59:26 unified Europe, although he likely could 59:29 not have. But Charles V in the early 59:31 16th century 59:33 he held 59:35 Spain 59:37 Italy indirectly because over the 59:40 Italian wars which we have to talk about 59:41 he took Milan and between Milan in the 59:44 south with the pope as an ally he 59:46 functionally had Italy and he had the 59:48 title of Holy Roman Emperor but most of 59:50 that was not actually usable because 59:52 Germany had split into a variety of 59:54 different states and the histories of 59:57 Europe I've read about this time period 59:59 and largely say Charles V was a decent 1:00:02 guy but not a genius. 1:00:06 But he did have the willpower and the 1:00:09 tenacity to hold this together because 1:00:11 if he was a genuinely bad king the his 1:00:14 shared empire would have just fallen 1:00:16 apart and he had to deal with a lot of 1:00:18 different crises over his reign. Uh and 1:00:21 he handled that with he handled them not 1:00:24 terribly. I mean, if he was a a true 1:00:26 genius, he would have crushed the 1:00:28 Protestant Reformation. Uh, but you 1:00:30 can't ask for true geniuses just at any 1:00:33 historic time period. Um, and he he was 1:00:37 a native French speaker. He was an 1:00:39 ethnic he was a mix of ethnicities, but 1:00:42 I think he was plurality Flemish 1:00:43 ancestry. Um, and so he would alternate 1:00:47 between his different courts in in Spain 1:00:49 where he where the Spanish were always 1:00:52 distrusted him up to a certain point 1:00:54 because he he was a foreigner. Um, and 1:00:58 then he would go out to Austria and then 1:01:00 the low countries and Italy. And 1:01:05 by the time he died in a little bit 1:01:08 after, they were able to maintain this 1:01:12 unified Habsburg 1:01:14 genetic connection and alliance across 1:01:16 the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. But 1:01:18 they became distinct poles. So by the 1:01:20 time of the 17th century with the 30 1:01:22 years war, the Spanish were fighting to 1:01:24 help the the Habsburgs. But it didn't 1:01:26 create the universal empire across 1:01:29 Europe that they wanted. They would have 1:01:30 needed a marriage with France uh to do 1:01:33 that. And I forget if there was an 1:01:34 opportunity to I think there was to mix 1:01:36 the Spanish and the French ruling 1:01:38 families, but it didn't happen because 1:01:40 France is too much of a a proud nation. 1:01:43 And France I think France might have had 1:01:45 more people. No, I France might have had 1:01:48 equivalent to a little bit less people 1:01:50 than the rest of Charles V's domains. 1:01:55 Sorry, I have to think about this. For 1:01:57 the territories Charles V actually held, 1:01:59 France would have more people. For the 1:02:01 territories he claimed to hold, France 1:02:03 would have less. Um, because France had 1:02:08 20 million, 15 million people. Uh, Spain 1:02:11 had I'm sorry, the these are pre-black 1:02:13 death numbers and 17th century numbers. 1:02:16 But excuse 17th century numbers, please 1:02:17 humor me. Spain had 11 million people. 1:02:20 France had 20 million people. Germany, 1:02:22 Germany/thehre 1:02:24 had like 15 11 million, Italy had like 1:02:28 10 million. Um, so you can add the 1:02:30 numbers together yourself. But Charles 1:02:32 V, he is the figure who actually said 1:02:35 the line that I've mis mis misattributed 1:02:38 to uh Frederick the Great of 1:02:41 I speak um German to my horse, Latin 1:02:46 intellectually 1:02:47 um French, French uh French uh to people 1:02:53 I know, Italian to lovers, etc. Um 1:02:57 because that was the nature of his 1:02:58 multi-thnic empire. But right he's an 1:03:01 interesting figure where he [snorts] was 1:03:04 there when Cortez conquered Mexico and 1:03:07 when Pizarro conquered Peru. He was also 1:03:10 there for the Protestant Reformation 1:03:12 where him and Arasmus who we need to get 1:03:15 to their attitude was that they didn't 1:03:17 want to have have the Protestant 1:03:19 Reformation where they wanted to 1:03:20 tolerate Martin Luther and bring him 1:03:23 back into the Catholic fold where this 1:03:25 wasn't a worthwhile conflict but after 1:03:27 it happened he was on the Catholic side 1:03:30 because the Holy Roman Emperor's title 1:03:32 was dependent on the papacy and then 1:03:35 Charles V also had to wage wars against 1:03:39 the Ottomans who are a threat on the 1:03:42 east. And when you get an empire that 1:03:45 big, your predominant concern just 1:03:48 becomes holding it together. And the 1:03:50 Spanish wasted their new world silver 1:03:53 and all that bounty on trying to conquer 1:03:55 Europe in these just constant wars 1:03:59 that rippled across the region, much 1:04:01 like how Louis the 14th wasted France's 1:04:04 wealth. And the Spanish could have built 1:04:06 out their new world colonies to be 1:04:09 something as incredible as America, but 1:04:10 they screwed up the incentives there. 1:04:12 Much as France could have Fran, they 1:04:15 could have sent um huge amounts of 1:04:18 settlers to the new world or taken India 1:04:20 where the core failing of these European 1:04:22 powers was they kept prioritizing the 1:04:24 current status conflicts inside Europe 1:04:26 rather than seeing these exponential 1:04:28 gains in things like the colonies or 1:04:30 science 1:04:31 >> like fighting over Alsas Lraine. 1:04:33 >> Exactly. while England was doing 1:04:35 everything else. 1:04:36 >> Yeah, I got I got the connection. And 1:04:38 then um it was like entropy or a growth, 1:04:40 right? Like was Spain didn't have the 1:04:42 dynamic to grow throughout grow their 1:04:45 empire. So it just became a a matter of 1:04:48 entropy. And I think people, this is 1:04:51 always a weird 1:04:53 empire or kingdom to people where you 1:04:55 have bits in Flanders and like around 1:04:57 the Netherlands and then bits in Italy 1:04:58 and some like connections to Germany and 1:05:00 it's like wait that's Spanish but the 1:05:02 king is it's a very strange thing and 1:05:06 this is kind of in the period where uh 1:05:08 you had the centers of wealth in Europe 1:05:10 like concentrated in Italy or uh pretty 1:05:13 much those places we described in the 1:05:15 Spanish Empire but then you had that 1:05:17 wealth spreading 1:05:19 more broadly out throughout Europe. So 1:05:21 just conquering those wealthy points 1:05:23 wasn't wasn't as big of a win as it 1:05:26 would have went been a hundred years ago 1:05:28 because the whole society is flattening 1:05:30 which kind of correlates to the current 1:05:32 dynamic where you had superpowers 1:05:34 competing over areas and now so much of 1:05:36 the world has developed that they're 1:05:37 more resistant to superpower 1:05:39 encroachment. So it's more about like 1:05:40 great nation jocking rather than someone 1:05:44 you know Roman Empire controlling it 1:05:47 all. That's a that's a very good point. 1:05:49 Yeah, bravo. Um, 1:05:52 it reminds you something my father told 1:05:54 me where he said the Italian Renaissance 1:05:56 is an outgrowth of the time period after 1:05:58 the fall of the Byzantine Empire and 1:06:00 before the rise of the West European 1:06:03 nation states because only in that time 1:06:06 window was the Eastern Mediterranean 1:06:08 open for the Italian citystates to 1:06:10 dominate the trade there. and Western 1:06:12 Europe hadn't developed the military 1:06:14 abilities to crush the Italian 1:06:16 citystates. And that was a transition 1:06:18 you saw over the course of the 16th 1:06:20 century because at the start of the 1:06:22 century, the Italian Renaissance was at 1:06:24 its peak flowering. And a lot of people 1:06:27 don't realize how late the late the 1:06:30 culmination of the Renaissance was. It 1:06:32 was much like European colonialism where 1:06:34 it went on for a few hundred years and 1:06:36 then it burned brightest towards the end 1:06:38 around the time of Christopher 1:06:39 Columbus's discovery of the new world. 1:06:41 That was when Da Vinci lived. That was 1:06:43 when Da Vinci was the same time as 1:06:45 Michelangelo. a lot of the best artists. 1:06:48 Um, and then it just got nuked by the 1:06:51 Italian Wars 1:06:53 >> where the Italian wars were the most 1:06:56 brutal conflict of their era of history 1:06:59 and they ended the Renaissance because 1:07:01 Italy just got devastated and ultimately 1:07:03 became a Spanish colony from them 1:07:05 directly or indirectly. 1:07:08 And the Italian wars 1:07:11 were a 1:07:15 they were a sandbox for modern techn for 1:07:17 modern war where over the course of them 1:07:20 the militaries involved where the two 1:07:22 predominant sides were the Spanish and 1:07:23 the French. 1:07:25 They moved to pike andshot militaries 1:07:27 from the earlier medieval ones and they 1:07:30 had to do that evolution over time and 1:07:32 the conflicts raged over the nearly the 1:07:35 entire breadth of Italy multiple times. 1:07:37 There was a there was a time when the 1:07:39 king of France who crossed the Alps was 1:07:43 able to get an army all the way down to 1:07:45 Naples. And then there were other times 1:07:47 where the Spanish could push the French 1:07:49 back up to the north of Italy where the 1:07:52 the most important battle was up by um 1:07:55 Pavia in the north of Italy um where the 1:07:59 Spanish were able to ultimately defeat 1:08:01 the French thus securing their control 1:08:03 over Italy where France wasted 20 years 1:08:06 of wars but in the process the major 1:08:08 cities of Italy were burned down. I 1:08:11 think millions of people may have died 1:08:12 in the Italian wars. it's either 1:08:14 hundreds of thousands or millions. Um, 1:08:17 and France got involved in those wars 1:08:21 because coming out of the hundred years 1:08:23 war, they had their own golden age. And 1:08:25 in France, this is a period when a lot 1:08:26 of the be the houses were built when 1:08:28 France had their own Renaissance 1:08:30 culture. 1:08:31 >> Um, and 1:08:33 >> they had much larger armies than Italy. 1:08:36 they just march in. 1:08:38 >> And so France France was doing really 1:08:40 well and they used this to conquer Italy 1:08:42 and the Spanish were able to ultimately 1:08:44 defeat them through pulling their much 1:08:47 larger Habsburg Empire together where 1:08:49 this was the war that really unified the 1:08:51 Habsburg coalition. Um, 1:08:54 and you had horrifying events where the 1:08:57 French, for example, sacked Rome and I 1:09:00 the Lenecks uh sacked Rome because they 1:09:03 were fighting through Italy and I 1:09:06 believe they hadn't been paid and this 1:09:08 was considered to be an atrocity that 1:09:10 they chose to attack the the holiest 1:09:12 city in Europe. Um, but the end the the 1:09:16 end outcome of the Italian wars 1:09:20 was that Italy was still wealthy, but 1:09:23 Milan was a Spanish colony. Sicily and 1:09:25 Naples were Spanish colonies. 1:09:28 the pope ran the middle of Italy 1:09:31 and he was an ally of the Spanish, 1:09:34 although he thought the Spanish were a 1:09:35 bit too hardcore where the the the the 1:09:38 papacy was in its Renaissance arc of um 1:09:42 moral degeneracy and great art while the 1:09:43 Spanish were in their crusading 1:09:46 uh crusading arc. Um and then the rest 1:09:49 of Italy were these declining city 1:09:51 states. So by the time of the 16th 1:09:53 century, Venice had their own fairly 1:09:56 small colonial empire, but Venice was 1:09:59 ultimately dun in by the Turks who 1:10:02 knocked out their colonies in the 1:10:04 Eastern Mediterranean. And so Venice was 1:10:06 able to survive by 1:10:09 basically turning itself into the 16th 1:10:12 centuries, a version of a tourist 1:10:13 tourist destination where they practiced 1:10:16 widescale prostitution where that was 1:10:18 what they were known for. They made um 1:10:22 they they did some advances to political 1:10:25 theory. Um but they Venice was known for 1:10:27 having 1:10:29 a small aristocratic elite who held all 1:10:33 of the economic and republican positions 1:10:36 where Venice was dominant and powerful 1:10:38 earlier on when they had a free market 1:10:40 economy. It's almost like there's these 1:10:41 themes. But then over time, the ruling 1:10:44 class had taken control of these of the 1:10:47 Venetian galleys and fused it with the 1:10:50 government, made sure that no one else 1:10:52 could have positions of power in Venice. 1:10:54 And so this ruling class could maintain 1:10:57 Venice's stability in a stable, wealthy 1:11:00 decline because they were 1:11:02 hyperconformists and held had very clear 1:11:05 moral standards. And it's interesting. I 1:11:06 was reading through the guide of the 1:11:07 Venetian social conform immoral 1:11:10 standards. 1:11:11 >> Oh yeah. No, I mean they would they'd 1:11:13 hire all the time where they'd 1:11:16 hire and they engaged in 1:11:17 degeneracy and all that stuff, but they 1:11:19 did invest in the Venetian Republic and 1:11:21 there was this sense of civic duty that 1:11:23 was very powerful. Um, and so Venice had 1:11:27 this closed elite that could maintain 1:11:29 power and the free the states in Italy 1:11:32 that weren't controlled by the Spanish. 1:11:34 That was largely what happened. And 1:11:36 Italy was wealthy through the 17th 1:11:38 century. And most of Shakespeare who was 1:11:41 writing at the end of this time period, 1:11:43 most in out of any other country in in 1:11:46 Europe besides England, 1:11:48 most of his plays are set in Italy. I 1:11:50 think maybe there might be more 1:11:51 Shakespeare plays set in Italy than 1:11:53 England because even in Protestant 1:11:55 Europe, they still looked to Italy as 1:11:58 the cultural head. Although Italy was in 1:12:00 a was in decline, 1:12:03 >> right? It just kind of makes me think 1:12:05 about how it's like there's church music 1:12:09 and then there's good music and church 1:12:11 music can be good, but like as long as 1:12:14 the good music is happening outside of 1:12:16 church, people are going to pay 1:12:17 attention to it. Yeah. And it's kind of 1:12:18 funny that um it Italy seems to have 1:12:22 almost taken the French World War II 1:12:24 strategy here because by all accounts 1:12:27 they should have been totally destroyed 1:12:28 by having their country be the ground 1:12:30 zero for war between France and Spain, 1:12:33 but they kind of just like 1:12:36 didn't bother to fight it and kind of 1:12:39 rode through as still a relatively 1:12:41 intact economic power. 1:12:43 >> It's all chill vibes, bro. Um 1:12:45 >> right. The thing with populations that 1:12:48 are skilled is they'll find ways to keep 1:12:51 making money and to keep supporting 1:12:53 themselves even and through hard 1:12:55 circumstance. You see that with the 1:12:56 Japanese and the Germans rebuilding very 1:12:59 quickly after the world wars. Um 1:13:02 >> or in this time period the Netherlands 1:13:05 was a constant battleground and it was 1:13:07 still an incredibly wealthy society. And 1:13:10 that's what I find so concerning about 1:13:12 the the the the the trends I talk about 1:13:15 today because we're not a war zone. 1:13:17 We're not a society that should be under 1:13:19 extreme external pressure. But we've 1:13:22 seen that a behavioral loss of just a 1:13:25 variety of skills. 1:13:27 And once a population loses skill, the 1:13:29 ability to produce things, 1:13:32 >> the ability to mate, the ability to have 1:13:33 social trust and national cohesion, it's 1:13:37 hard to get those skills back. But if 1:13:40 your society faces wars or external 1:13:42 threats, those skills will and can 1:13:45 survive. But it's harder to lose the 1:13:47 loss of skill. It's harder to deal with 1:13:50 the loss of skill. 1:13:51 >> It shows how valuable they are because 1:13:53 with the skills and with the culture, 1:13:55 even war isn't a big deal. And without 1:13:57 the skills and without the culture, it 1:13:59 it's it's a big deal even without war. 1:14:02 >> Yeah. and you'll eventually get yourself 1:14:04 in a situation where you're at risk of 1:14:07 more devastating wars or getting 1:14:08 conquered or whatever. 1:14:09 >> As a general rule, if there's an 1:14:11 environment and if you face a challenge 1:14:13 that's significantly above your skill 1:14:16 level, 1:14:17 >> you can resist heroically and just get 1:14:19 pummeled. That's admirable, 1:14:22 >> but it's very difficult. And in a lot of 1:14:24 people give up. Yeah. And 1:14:28 if you're if you're if you face a 1:14:30 challenge that's roughly equivalent to 1:14:31 your skill level, you can either take it 1:14:33 and increase your skill level or you can 1:14:35 lose and then get knocked back down. And 1:14:38 so this is an often and if you you don't 1:14:41 have any challenges to your skill level, 1:14:43 you'll bloat. And this is toinbee's core 1:14:45 theory of history. It was a big writer 1:14:47 about a century ago, 1:14:50 >> right? Well, which is the whole theme of 1:14:51 Europe partly got strong by fighting 1:14:53 each other so much, etc. And the fight 1:14:56 between the Netherlands and the Spain is 1:14:58 really indicative of this whole process 1:15:00 because the Netherlands, although we 1:15:02 consider it wealthy now, that area 1:15:04 should have should not have held a been 1:15:06 able to hold a candle to Italy or Spain 1:15:10 or or any of those other countries, but 1:15:12 somehow they resisted the Spanish 1:15:13 invasion with technology and different 1:15:16 armies. And then it was like, okay, now 1:15:18 we can't it's a different world now. We 1:15:20 can't just steamroll the less wealthy 1:15:23 parts of Europe. It's changing. 1:15:25 >> I'm glad you did that transition because 1:15:27 that was where I was going to go next. 1:15:29 >> Nice. 1:15:30 >> Where the Netherlands was originally a 1:15:32 Burgundian colony. 1:15:35 >> Um, and in the late 15th century, 1:15:37 Burgundy 1:15:39 had their own their phase where their 1:15:40 dukes tried to conquer Europe where they 1:15:42 had a military that was too advanced. 1:15:45 They they built Pike and Shot a century 1:15:48 before the technology was there and then 1:15:50 Charles the the Bold burnt out. Um, and 1:15:54 the Netherlands and Flanders, they had 1:15:57 an artistic and a cultural renaissance 1:15:59 that was nearly as impressive as Italy's 1:16:02 where a lot of modern painting is from 1:16:05 Flanders in this time period. Um, 1:16:10 and 1:16:11 so Flanders had this, it was an 1:16:14 incredibly wealthy society, and 1:16:18 this bred an external desire to control 1:16:20 it where 1:16:25 the Spanish inherited it and then when 1:16:28 the Protestant Reformation came, the the 1:16:30 Flem the Flem desired to they wanted to 1:16:33 convert to Protestantism, but that 1:16:35 wasn't okay with the Catholics. 1:16:37 uh the Catholic kings and they were one 1:16:39 of the few areas that really wanted to 1:16:41 be Protestant that was under Habsburg 1:16:44 governance. There were other areas 1:16:47 >> uh that had Protestant influence that 1:16:49 the Catholics could squash but they 1:16:53 weren't able to in the Netherlands and 1:16:56 >> the ultimate Protestant place like part 1:16:58 of that same German culture. 1:17:00 >> We can't help it, dude. We're going to 1:17:02 be Protestant. [laughter] 1:17:03 >> Yeah, ex exactly. Uh Austria was 1:17:05 originally Protestant and then the 1:17:07 Catholics crushed it down. So the 1:17:10 Germanic Protestant world holds fairly 1:17:12 strongly. Um and 1:17:17 the northern part of the Netherlands 1:17:18 broke up broke together broke off as the 1:17:21 United Provinces and they formed these a 1:17:25 pirate union where these were all 1:17:28 independent trading states and they had 1:17:31 these special types of ships I think 1:17:33 called beggar men and they would raid 1:17:37 the Spanish Empire 1:17:39 and the the Dutch were able to somehow 1:17:43 get wealthier 1:17:45 off their war 1:17:47 than they were during peace. So the 1:17:50 Dutch made a business out of this and 1:17:52 they would in fact lobby to have wars 1:17:54 with the rest of the world in Spain so 1:17:57 that they could make more money off it 1:17:58 because they had enough different 1:18:00 investments in the conflict. Um 1:18:02 >> how would they do that? Investments in 1:18:03 the conflict. So it's multiaceted. 1:18:07 >> It's multifaceted where they had 1:18:09 privateeers that would raid across it 1:18:11 and the Dutch's colonial strategy was 1:18:13 knocking out the old Habsburg bases in 1:18:16 the Indian Ocean in the New World. 1:18:18 >> Right? 1:18:18 >> So the Habsburgs would build these when 1:18:23 I say the Habsburgs, I really mean the 1:18:24 Iberians. The Iberians or the Portuguese 1:18:27 and the Spanish as they would like to be 1:18:28 called. They established these colonies 1:18:30 around the world. And what the Dutch 1:18:32 would do is they would laser strike 1:18:34 these Iberian colonies, take their 1:18:37 stuff, and then build a much more 1:18:40 efficient, better fortified Dutch 1:18:43 position on top of it. So the Dutch were 1:18:45 able to get quite wealthy off 1:18:47 parasetizing off the declining Habsburg 1:18:49 Empire. 1:18:51 >> And the Spanish and the Portuguese were 1:18:53 telling the people in their colonies, 1:18:54 "Hey, the Dutch are bad news. They're 1:18:56 pirates. They burned down our forts." 1:18:57 And then the Japanese are like, "And 1:19:00 [laughter] 1:19:01 >> yeah, 1:19:02 >> why are why are you not pirates?" 1:19:05 >> The Japanese understand these Dutch 1:19:06 people are so mean. 1:19:08 >> The Japanese preferred the Dutch because 1:19:10 they didn't evangelize in the same way. 1:19:12 Um and the the the the Spanish Empire or 1:19:15 the the the Habsburg Empire was just 1:19:17 legendarily corrupt in the colonies. in 1:19:19 in India for example or in son or Sri 1:19:22 Lanka they would have 1:19:25 a one-year 1:19:27 um 1:19:29 one-year lease as being governor of son 1:19:32 and that didn't really include include 1:19:34 the time to reach there. So it was 1:19:36 farcical that they'd basically reach son 1:19:41 govern it for however much time it took 1:19:43 for the next governor to show up or it 1:19:46 was so corrupt that they wouldn't feed 1:19:48 the men. The the the soldiers in the in 1:19:51 the ships they were often not being fed 1:19:53 or paid while the governor lived in 1:19:55 incredible ostentatious wealth. And so 1:19:58 compared to that, the Dutch had a huge 1:19:59 advantage where the Dutch were the most 1:20:01 efficient people in Europe because they 1:20:03 were the most capitalist and they had 1:20:06 the most advanced uh they in they they 1:20:09 um under Maurice of Nassau where they 1:20:12 had a prince and they were a republic 1:20:14 beneath him. 1:20:15 >> Mhm. 1:20:17 >> They reinstated drill warfare because 1:20:19 Maurice of Nassau was reading these 1:20:22 ancient Roman texts of how to teach 1:20:23 people how to have drill warfare. And so 1:20:25 he took these Roman ideas, started 1:20:28 drilling his men, and this gave them a 1:20:30 marketked military advantage over the 1:20:32 Spanish. And this this was a huge 1:20:35 variable in allowing the Dutch to fight 1:20:38 off the Spanish for 80 years while the 1:20:40 Spanish had such great a military 1:20:42 advantage over them, 1:20:44 >> right? They updated the pike and shot 1:20:47 tactics faster than the Spanish were. 1:20:48 And then they were using insane 1:20:50 engineering, etc. with the water and the 1:20:51 canals, which is very that would make a 1:20:54 great epic movie. Could you imagine 1:20:56 that? 1:20:57 >> They flooded with flooding. 1:20:59 >> They flooded the dikes and the canals 1:21:00 when the French army was coming in the 1:21:02 late 17th century and so they just 1:21:03 drowned it, 1:21:04 >> right? And then they would and then they 1:21:06 would cut it off and and dry and flood 1:21:08 another part and move the water around 1:21:10 and like edit it. It's crazy. I was in 1:21:12 the Netherlands recently in my trips 1:21:14 across Europe and it really so 1:21:18 >> as I go across as I go across Europe I 1:21:21 try to figure out what areas look like 1:21:23 Americans and in the north of France 1:21:26 about half of the people could pass as 1:21:27 American and then half of them look 1:21:29 distinctively French and in Bavaria and 1:21:31 Austria they look more American 1:21:35 but they have a distinctively German 1:21:37 look that we don't really have in 1:21:39 America to the same degree once you get 1:21:41 to the Netherlands and England, you're 1:21:42 like, I know that guy. He looks exactly 1:21:44 like someone I grew up with. And so, you 1:21:46 can see how the the populations that 1:21:48 made the Americans, they're very North 1:21:50 Sea concentrated, 1:21:52 >> right? Pirate kingdoms, Viking team. 1:21:56 >> Uh, and then even Nassau, right, the 1:21:58 pirate colony, Dutch name, 1:22:01 >> probably started by Maurice or whoever 1:22:03 you were mentioning. 1:22:04 >> There's a a Finnish epic music band 1:22:07 called Auntie Marquetine. I I I'm not 1:22:10 gonna pronounce his name correctly. He 1:22:12 has pirate music taking back Nassau. Um 1:22:15 it's it's very epic. Um 1:22:17 >> it's still the dream. Yeah. And then the 1:22:20 other thing with the Dutch um 1:22:24 >> was I forgot. Oh, whatever. 1:22:25 >> I was going to 1:22:27 >> Arasmus. 1:22:28 >> Oh, the independent rep the independent 1:22:31 states, right? which is kind of a 1:22:32 precursor to the US in a lot of ways 1:22:34 that doesn't get talked about literally 1:22:35 in in structure like a of different 1:22:39 groups together in a pirate colony is 1:22:41 how you could describe the states of the 1:22:43 US in a way 1:22:45 >> right and um we we helped form our 1:22:48 constitution off the Holy Roman Empire 1:22:50 >> federation was a bad word or like 1:22:52 non-monarchical federation 1:22:54 >> I know what you're saying it's called 1:22:56 >> it's called the United Provinces for a 1:22:58 reason where it's it's Holland and Zeon 1:23:00 and Freedom and um Frieia um no but 1:23:05 America's founded off a similar culture 1:23:07 with the United Federation 1:23:09 um and the Holy Roman Empire because the 1:23:12 the um the Netherlands was part of the 1:23:14 Holy Roman Empire until the 30 years war 1:23:16 when it broke off that was seen as a 1:23:18 model of freedom where it was almost 1:23:20 seen as sad when Germany unified for 1:23:22 some Germans because it destroyed the 1:23:24 freedom that came from these independent 1:23:25 statelets. Um, 1:23:27 >> yeah, I'm still sad about it. and Aras 1:23:31 Arasmus was Europe's first great public 1:23:34 intellectual 1:23:35 and he got a first mover advantage from 1:23:40 doing that where 1:23:44 he was the most important intellectual 1:23:46 in all of Western history for the 1:23:48 specific era he was in where he would 1:23:51 give kings he would he was friends with 1:23:52 multiple kings and he would give them 1:23:54 bad reviews and they'd be mortified that 1:23:56 oh my god Arasmus said this means said 1:23:59 I'm failing because he was that much of 1:24:01 a respected figure and he was a polymath 1:24:03 who studied a lot of different things. 1:24:05 He was known for introducing um the 1:24:07 humanist classical tri uh tradition to a 1:24:10 lot of North Europe because the Italians 1:24:12 were doing the Renaissance reading these 1:24:14 old authors from the Greeks, the Romans 1:24:16 and Arasmus helped translate that and 1:24:18 bring it to North Europe where he was 1:24:19 Flemish and 1:24:23 he he was a a rational moderate where 1:24:26 he's one of those conser he would be 1:24:28 like one of those conservatives today 1:24:29 who say we have to maintain the current 1:24:32 neoliberal order and then do 1:24:34 conservative 1:24:35 fixes inside the the current system. Um 1:24:38 where he thought that the Catholic 1:24:40 Church was corrupt and he would write 1:24:42 these very cutting satires of the 1:24:43 current Catholic Church, but he 1:24:45 ultimately disagreed with Martin Luther 1:24:47 because he thought he was just promoting 1:24:49 chaos and social collapse. Um and so he 1:24:52 and Martin Luther would send letters, 1:24:54 public letters at each other, 1:24:56 >> um criticizing one another. Um 1:24:59 >> it's like an accelerationist debate. 1:25:02 >> Exactly. Yeah. both um both Charles V 1:25:05 and Arasmus had the same position of 1:25:07 moderation where they thought that 1:25:09 Martin Luther or Arasmus thought that 1:25:11 Martin Luther was an outcome of the 1:25:13 Catholic Church's inability to reform in 1:25:15 itself. And something we forget is that 1:25:18 because this was a free society, 1:25:20 satire and social criticism 1:25:23 was quite normal across Europe. There 1:25:25 were popular public plays that would 1:25:29 make fun of the nobility and the power 1:25:31 structure where in most ways they had 1:25:33 more freedom of speech than we do today. 1:25:35 Um and the tradition in Europe of 1:25:37 mocking authority that goes back very 1:25:40 far. And you look at Ravel's who was 1:25:43 another author of that era and they had 1:25:45 an entire satirical um and literary 1:25:49 tradition in the 16th century of these 1:25:51 popular plays or novels that were social 1:25:53 satires that spread across Europe. 1:25:56 >> Why were the monarchs open to criticism? 1:25:59 Maybe they didn't have a choice. Why 1:26:00 were they self-conscious? Is it because 1:26:02 the the the kingdoms were changing so 1:26:04 fast? So there wasn't a real authentic 1:26:07 connection and so they constantly had to 1:26:09 justify the monarchy. There was an 1:26:11 insecurity around the arbitrary n nature 1:26:14 of it. 1:26:15 >> So directly criticizing the king could 1:26:18 get you in trouble in AC a lot of 1:26:20 Europe. But if you used allegorical 1:26:22 language you could get away with a lot. 1:26:24 So for Shakespeare as an example, a lot 1:26:27 of Shakespeare is allegorical political 1:26:29 positions of his era that are said 1:26:31 through these metaphors so an audience 1:26:32 can look at it and see what 1:26:34 Shakespeare's position is. Um but then 1:26:37 it's less it's less direct than um than 1:26:42 a a modern criticism. But these 1:26:44 societies allowed freedom and criticism 1:26:46 of authority 1:26:48 partly because there was a 1:26:49 decentralization of power between the 1:26:51 nobility and the king and the merchants. 1:26:53 and in some of Europe, the church. Um, 1:26:56 but there was also a pre-established 1:26:58 tradition from Christianity and 1:27:00 Aristotle about what tyranny looked 1:27:02 like. And there was this pre-established 1:27:05 training that all educated people had 1:27:07 for what tyranny what tyranny was. And 1:27:10 so if a king broke against the tyranny 1:27:12 that if a king broke against the rules 1:27:14 of what a free society looked like and 1:27:16 these were often constitutions or that 1:27:19 wouldn't be the word, some cases it was, 1:27:21 others it wasn't. Oh, this is what the 1:27:22 rights of being an Englishman is. This 1:27:24 is what the rights of being a Frenchman 1:27:25 or a Spaniard. And if a king violated 1:27:27 against that those rights, that was seen 1:27:29 as an abuse of his authority because it 1:27:31 was his duty to maintain his people's 1:27:33 freedom. 1:27:34 >> Right? It's like they put God before the 1:27:36 king uh rather than the opposite. And 1:27:38 does it kind of reminds me of Samuel and 1:27:42 Saul how Sam you had the prophets and 1:27:44 then you had the the kings who depended 1:27:48 on the approval of the prophet which is 1:27:51 kind of like this Arasmus guy judging 1:27:53 all the the kings and they're like oh 1:27:55 please Samuel say something nice about 1:27:56 me said tell me I have God's favor. They 1:28:00 almost certainly saw it in those terms 1:28:02 because early Protestantism was seen as 1:28:05 prophetic where that was the register 1:28:07 that these reformers like Luther and and 1:28:09 um and Calvin perceived themselves in 1:28:12 because they were reading the Bible and 1:28:14 trying to recreate it, 1:28:15 >> right? And they're like, I'm like Samuel 1:28:17 and you're like Saul and you have 1:28:19 strayed and I am declaring Martin 1:28:20 Luther's like I'm declaring you out of 1:28:22 God's favor. And Martin Luther's 1:28:25 defender was the Duke of Saxony 1:28:28 where um he did not like the monopoly on 1:28:32 power that the the the Catholic Church 1:28:33 and the Holy Roman Empire had. And so 1:28:35 when Martin Luther got controversial, he 1:28:37 could hide in the Duke of Saxony Castle 1:28:39 and keep printing. Um, and 1:28:41 interestingly, the 1:28:44 >> the issue with the 95 thesis at the door 1:28:47 in Wittenberg, that didn't have to 1:28:49 escalate, but it did because the local 1:28:53 Catholic prefect or the local guy who is 1:28:56 the bishop of that area. He was actually 1:28:58 the the ancestor 1:29:00 of the the royal line that would later 1:29:04 take over Prussia and unify Germany. and 1:29:06 he got into that position through 1:29:08 corruption and being the local nobleman. 1:29:10 So he wasn't a widely respected 1:29:12 spiritual figure and he chose to 1:29:15 escalate the crisis of the 95 thesis 1:29:17 because there were probably times where 1:29:19 you just ignore it and the Catholic 1:29:21 Church would think if we just let 1:29:23 sleeping dogs lie, we don't have to 1:29:25 escalate this to be a national crisis, 1:29:28 >> right? And maybe Martin Luther reformer 1:29:31 guy said was a bit I don't know uh you 1:29:36 could find all sorts of faults in him. 1:29:38 It's kind of like the blowup led to an 1:29:42 acceleration of this process that wasn't 1:29:45 really ultimately defined by Martin 1:29:46 Luther but was the more broad Protestant 1:29:50 replacement of the Catholic structure. 1:29:52 There's two. So there's two cultural 1:29:54 innovations that happened in 16th 1:29:56 century Europe that were mass actually 1:29:58 three. Three that were massive. Um and 1:30:02 then there were also three elite 1:30:04 cultures that span the 16th century. 1:30:07 Both of which I think are valuable to 1:30:08 understand it. I'm going to start with 1:30:10 the elite cultures. And this is 1:30:11 something McNeel talks about that being 1:30:13 the Gothic, the Turic, the the Gothic, 1:30:16 the ironic and the Henistic. 1:30:20 And for between these different high 1:30:23 cultures, the Gothic is the culture of 1:30:25 the cathedral. And inside Europe, 1:30:28 northwest Europe builds these Gothic 1:30:30 cathedrals. And there's a really 1:30:31 beautiful one in Vienna. It's one of the 1:30:33 most incredible I've seen that's 1:30:35 downtown here. It's huge. Um, and the 1:30:39 Gothic cathedral was symbolic of 1:30:43 Fouian Western European civilization. 1:30:46 And Gothic cathedrals weren't popular in 1:30:48 Italy because Italy had their own 1:30:50 tradition. Same thing as Spain kept the 1:30:52 romanesque in their own specific types 1:30:54 of cathedral design later. So you had 1:30:56 northwest Europe. The helenistic one was 1:30:59 the one that was built with the 1:31:00 Renaissance of the uh building the 1:31:02 Grecoman columns and studying the 1:31:05 classics and um this revitalization of 1:31:09 ancient philosophy. And McNeel thinks 1:31:11 that stems from Bzantium originally. The 1:31:14 third was the ironic where the elite 1:31:18 culture of the Ottoman Empire that 1:31:20 spread around the Muslim world that was 1:31:22 of Persian origin and it formed with the 1:31:25 Mongol conquest of that region and this 1:31:27 created its own distinct elite culture 1:31:29 that was popular in the Muslim world 1:31:32 that was sort of the mirror image of the 1:31:35 west and when you think of the a lot of 1:31:38 orientalist culture like the herums or 1:31:42 uh roomies poetry 1:31:44 etc. Um, that stems from that Persian 1:31:49 culture or the Tsh Mahal 1:31:53 >> and well that the Gothic architecture 1:31:55 and like the detail maxing, right? The 1:31:58 opposite of minimalism. It kind of 1:32:00 reminds me a lot of the Arabic 1:32:02 architecture at the time or what you see 1:32:04 in India where it's like every thing has 1:32:07 something carved out of it to you know 1:32:09 like a like an 18th century mansion. I 1:32:12 >> 1800's mansion. 1:32:13 >> You see it with the Baroque. And Baroque 1:32:16 became popular over the late 16th 1:32:17 century. Um, and that is as ostentatious 1:32:22 as possible. And I actually get tired of 1:32:24 it in the buildings in Vienna because 1:32:26 they're so ostentatious all the time. It 1:32:28 it's the same design on repeat. Um, 1:32:31 where it it's it's so it almost lacks a 1:32:35 degree of depth or gravitas, but I think 1:32:38 it's vastly better than what we're doing 1:32:40 now. And there is something that's very 1:32:41 compelling about Baroque artwork. Uh and 1:32:44 if you look at El Greco who was an 1:32:45 artist of that the end of the 16th 1:32:47 century and he was a cretton which why 1:32:49 is called Greco. He was making Baroque 1:32:51 psychedelic art where you you should 1:32:53 check out El Greco if you haven't 1:32:55 because it's a combination of of the the 1:32:58 the Baroque epicness and the the themes 1:33:01 of these was often mythological or 1:33:04 biblical. Um, 1:33:07 and an interesting fact was that 1:33:08 Shakespeare was a very popular 1:33:10 playwright of this era, but Shakespeare 1:33:12 wasn't popular from the 17th through the 1:33:17 uh through the 19th century because he 1:33:20 was not seen as having being as having 1:33:22 like a lordly enough bearing and he was 1:33:25 seen as vaguely degenerate. And Barzun 1:33:28 talks about this where Shakespeare was 1:33:32 sort of low class and he was funny and 1:33:34 the popular trend of the next few 1:33:36 centuries was making art that was as 1:33:38 epic and ostentatious and royal as 1:33:41 possible and so Shakespeare wasn't what 1:33:43 they wanted 1:33:45 >> because could you consider Shakespeare 1:33:47 cynical in some ways 1:33:49 >> maybe by their standards because he is 1:33:52 cynical but he also appreciates beauty. 1:33:54 Shakespeare is a complicated figure and 1:33:56 I think of Carile making him a a hero of 1:34:00 letters. And what Carile said at these 1:34:02 great men is they become these 1:34:05 very complicated forces that can radiate 1:34:08 a lot of different competing paradoxes 1:34:11 within them. And so for 1:34:13 >> almost accelerates the conversation. 1:34:15 >> Exactly. And so for Shakespeare, you do 1:34:17 have an element of cynicism, but there's 1:34:19 also a profound degree of hope about 1:34:21 humanity and sincerity. 1:34:23 And Shakespeare is a very good character 1:34:26 writer. He has a good comprehension of 1:34:29 how people work. And one of the best 1:34:31 elements is most of at least his 1:34:33 tragedies. And he did write comedies. He 1:34:36 does the tragic storytelling very well. 1:34:38 You can look at a person like McBth. and 1:34:40 McBth was partly a reference to uh James 1:34:43 of Scotland's getting the English throne 1:34:46 um or Hamlet and you can see the end 1:34:49 point of their characters being why they 1:34:53 fail and that was a literary tradition 1:34:55 they got from the Greeks 1:34:57 >> it reminds me of Don Kyote right where 1:34:59 he was like used as a prop to explain 1:35:02 the absurdity of honor culture as it was 1:35:05 being carried out and Shakespeare was 1:35:07 almost that in a more maybe subtly 1:35:10 broadly critical 1:35:13 way where although the characters are 1:35:15 taken down by their by their flaws. 1:35:18 >> Yes. And that was a convention of 1:35:21 storytelling that went back thousands of 1:35:23 years where the two and this is in 1:35:26 Aristotle's book on on on on um on 1:35:30 writing which I I read I forget its name 1:35:33 but he talks the comedic and the tragic 1:35:35 register where a tra tragedies are epic 1:35:37 stories and they show the life and the 1:35:40 culmination of a great man. It's meant 1:35:42 to be a character study of his core 1:35:44 strengths and weaknesses. And comedies 1:35:46 were stories that ended well. And their 1:35:48 goal was to have fun and to make people 1:35:51 laugh. 1:35:52 >> Uh yeah. Right. And it and um you have 1:35:56 the the character flaws, but also like 1:36:00 Dion Kote, they're like this, it's still 1:36:02 beautiful. What he's doing is beautiful, 1:36:04 but it's flawed. And Shakespeare is kind 1:36:06 of a more subtle version of that. That's 1:36:07 how I feel about the figures like 1:36:08 Napoleon or Caesar where if you were to 1:36:11 narrate their entire life, you would 1:36:13 need 20 different film sets because at 1:36:15 certain parts of his life, Napoleon's in 1:36:17 Corsica, he's outside Moscow, he's in 1:36:19 Paris, he's in Egypt. Um, and I think 1:36:23 there's something very beautiful about 1:36:24 that. Um, 1:36:27 and to get to the three breakthroughs 1:36:29 that Europe had in this time period, 1:36:33 that would be the scientific, the 1:36:36 reformation, and the Renaissance. And 1:36:38 these get have their own videos except 1:36:40 for the Renaissance, which we'll do 1:36:41 soon. Um but as a brief summary for each 1:36:46 um 1:36:48 the reformation emerged in Germany as a 1:36:52 rebellion against the stoaltification 1:36:54 and the degeneracy of the Renaissance 1:36:56 Catholic Church and it started with 1:36:58 Martin Luther outside Wittenberg and it 1:37:00 rapidly spread due to the due to um 1:37:03 print technology and over a handful of 1:37:06 decades Germanic Europe converted to 1:37:09 Protestantism thus splitting Christendom 1:37:11 in 1:37:12 where England was the most important 1:37:14 Protestant country but Scandinavia was 1:37:15 as well. Scandinavia had been under the 1:37:18 Calmar Union in the early 15th century 1:37:20 and then Spain got sorry Sweden got 1:37:23 independence in this through a 1:37:25 revolution and um and then Sweden went 1:37:29 through their own civil war where the 1:37:30 Protestants won. The north of Germany 1:37:33 and the Netherlands were Protestant. 1:37:36 the rest of Europe stayed Catholic and 1:37:38 this caused 1:37:41 a fossilization of moral values across 1:37:44 Europe where both Protestant and 1:37:47 Catholic Europe became more socially 1:37:49 conservative. And so the 16th century 1:37:52 was actually more socially conservative 1:37:54 than um than the Middle Ages was. And in 1:37:57 the counterreformation in Catholic 1:37:59 countries, you saw the rise of the 1:38:00 Jesuits and a lot of the art. And 1:38:05 >> the 16th century saw a tightening of 1:38:07 sexual norms, but it wasn't what we 1:38:10 really think of it where if you 1:38:12 Shakespeare would often make sex jokes. 1:38:14 We we know Luther was pretty sexual. 1:38:17 There was a lot of porn in the society. 1:38:19 So you hadn't yet seen the switch where 1:38:22 religion was seen predominantly as 1:38:25 related to sexual morality, 1:38:27 >> right? Well, you could see how it kind 1:38:28 of could derive off of a competition 1:38:31 because the Catholic Church is talking 1:38:33 about these traditional values. Yeah. 1:38:35 And they're pointing out how the 1:38:37 Protestant thing is going to lead to 1:38:38 more of this social degeneracy chaos. 1:38:42 And the Protestants are like, well, 1:38:44 actually the failure of your church is 1:38:46 leading to that and we can be even more 1:38:48 socially conservative than you. And 1:38:51 that's through the expression of the 1:38:53 Puritanism. 1:38:54 >> Yeah. 1:38:54 >> Uh which is kind of has a lot of funny 1:38:56 corlaries to to today. I wonder if we'll 1:38:59 see Protestants kind of go in more in 1:39:00 that direction as a counter to the 1:39:02 accusation that they're associated with 1:39:04 the cultural degeneracy. 1:39:06 >> I think I think that'll happen. And 1:39:10 that that's also what occurred between 1:39:11 the Protestants and the Catholics 1:39:12 pushing each other to be more socially 1:39:14 conservative. 1:39:15 >> A good example of is like okay marriage 1:39:18 great freaking out about like uh trying 1:39:21 to stamp out all prostitution or 1:39:23 something which they didn't even do in 1:39:24 the 1600s is like an example of how you 1:39:28 >> o overcorrect because you have to be 1:39:30 able to to advocate the idea without 1:39:33 getting obsessed about uh symptom 1:39:36 control from 1:39:37 >> right. you need to have the generation 1:39:39 generating engine to solve anything 1:39:41 >> and that was widely understood in the 1:39:43 16th century. Um 1:39:46 >> and syphilis became big in Europe in 1:39:48 this time period which came from the new 1:39:50 world. Um and that changed attitudes 1:39:53 towards sex because syphilis could 1:39:54 literally drive you crazy and so people 1:39:56 saw it as an indictment from God. Um, 1:40:02 and there's multiple characters in 1:40:04 Shakespeare's plays who get syphilis, 1:40:05 but it's told allegorically because it 1:40:07 was seen as sort of like a naughty word 1:40:09 or naughty concept. So Shakespeare will 1:40:11 drop a like a certain coded phrase that 1:40:13 this character is syphilis and an 1:40:15 audience to the time could could see 1:40:17 >> and then they know what his character 1:40:18 is. He could even introduce him that 1:40:20 way. It's like, oh, okay, he's a he's 1:40:22 one of those guys. Yeah. 1:40:23 >> And and they gradually go crazy, too. So 1:40:25 it was a certain character type in in 1:40:27 that era of the the nobleman who had 1:40:30 syphilis who was slightly 1:40:31 >> a fee a fee. 1:40:32 >> He's a womanizer. 1:40:33 >> Yeah, exactly. 1:40:34 >> Slightly effeminite you said too. 1:40:36 >> Yeah. There was this ideal of the the 1:40:38 noble the affeminite womanizing nobleman 1:40:40 who had syphilis in this time period. 1:40:41 That's it's super interesting because 1:40:44 players like uh playboys or whatever 1:40:47 like today we think of that as a Chadley 1:40:49 thing, but back in the day the playboy 1:40:51 guy in the royal court was the most 1:40:53 affeminite one, right? He like almost 1:40:55 dressed more like the women and hung out 1:40:57 with the women and did all of these 1:40:59 things and that Yeah, that's just kind 1:41:02 of an interesting reversal reverse 1:41:04 dynamic. Yeah, there was the ideal of 1:41:07 you you are the the nobleman and it's 1:41:10 assumed you'd sleep around more. Uh but 1:41:12 that's a different archetype because 1:41:14 you're in a position of authority, 1:41:15 >> right? And it fits with the this is what 1:41:17 I was going to say, the the hypersexual 1:41:20 behavior is more associated with doing 1:41:23 gay stuff because it's like 1:41:24 hypersexualized and that pattern is also 1:41:28 can apply to make this character within 1:41:30 a noble setting where he has 1:41:31 opportunity. 1:41:32 >> Good point. Um 1:41:36 and 1:41:38 after the besides the reformation you 1:41:40 had the Renaissance which spread across 1:41:42 Europe and a big part of the Renaissance 1:41:44 was humanism. Humanism is the ideal of 1:41:47 studying the human character rather than 1:41:48 religion. And our modern conventions of 1:41:51 education are of originally humanist 1:41:53 origin. Um the idea of having footnotes 1:41:57 or sources. 1:41:59 um and they studied the classics and 1:42:04 that was the foundation of the rest of 1:42:06 knowledge. But the first academic 1:42:08 histories were written in the 16th 1:42:10 century because this was the first era 1:42:12 of history that had a concept that 1:42:15 things could change over history. In the 1:42:17 middle ages they understood that the 1:42:19 Romans were a different era that had 1:42:20 their own architecture but they didn't 1:42:22 put the ser the sort of serious thought 1:42:24 into it that later eras did. But you had 1:42:27 histories of the entire world written in 1:42:29 the 16th century um that talked about 1:42:32 cultural or societal shifts over time. 1:42:36 So you you saw the development of a 1:42:38 greater intellectual tradition and the 1:42:40 Renaissance started in Italy but it was 1:42:42 popular elsewhere and there were 1:42:44 multiple Renaissances where there was a 1:42:45 Renaissance architecture, there was a 1:42:48 humanist Renaissance tradition of 1:42:49 studying intellectual topics. there was 1:42:53 um the incorporation of stuff like 1:42:55 rhetoric or military formations and um 1:43:00 and so there was a a very vibrant 1:43:02 renaissance or even art. there was a 1:43:04 huge breakthrough in in art where there 1:43:06 was a renaissance in Flanders, France 1:43:08 had a renaissance, 1:43:10 um Spain had a big one and it was more 1:43:13 concentrated in Latin Europe, but 1:43:15 practically every country in Europe 1:43:17 including Poland or Russia to a lesser 1:43:19 extent felt the Renaissance's influence 1:43:22 where the Kremlin, the builders of the 1:43:24 Kremlin uh in Russia, they hired out 1:43:27 Italian architects to do that. or Poland 1:43:29 would invite Renaissance Italian 1:43:32 thinkers out where they they tried to 1:43:34 fund uh a local Renaissance community 1:43:37 there, 1:43:38 >> right? And because that's it's a source 1:43:41 of insecurity for the culture. They're 1:43:43 like, "We need one of those. We need our 1:43:44 own megaplex. We need our own movie 1:43:46 theater, etc." 1:43:49 >> Um, 1:43:51 and the third one was the development of 1:43:53 science. and 1:43:57 they didn't have science 1:43:59 in the way they would in the 17th 1:44:01 century with the testing method and 1:44:05 Galileo 1:44:07 or Newton were still in the 17th century 1:44:10 but you did have polymaths and people 1:44:12 who studied science and rationality 1:44:15 where the 16th century has been called 1:44:17 the age of reason because a lot of that 1:44:19 philosophy developed where Francis Bacon 1:44:21 as an example uh he had a high position 1:44:24 in in in the English court. Um he 1:44:28 developed a lot of the rules of of 1:44:29 rationality and he developed a second 1:44:32 organome where Aristotle wrote the first 1:44:35 one that was the rules of rationality. 1:44:37 He had an updated version. Um 1:44:41 he also 1:44:42 created the philosophy of science with 1:44:45 the idea of a society that is constantly 1:44:49 innovating and 1:44:52 has integrated science into 1:44:55 into the entire society where his book 1:44:57 New Atlantis is set in this utopian 1:45:00 society in the South Pacific where the 1:45:03 government constantly invests in science 1:45:05 where it's a laboratory society and him 1:45:08 and Roger Bacon who was a monk in the 1:45:10 middle ages. Both of them talked about 1:45:13 the ability to have a new scientific 1:45:16 society. Um 1:45:19 then you have Thomas Moore who um was 1:45:24 I believe he was a minister in the 1:45:25 English court and he wrote his own book 1:45:28 Utopia. And utopia is interesting 1:45:31 because it shows how 1:45:33 once you get into the modern worlds, the 1:45:35 ideas that later became dominant 1:45:37 modernity just immediately showed up as 1:45:39 part of the package where his society 1:45:42 utopia is set in the new world that it's 1:45:44 a communist society that doesn't have 1:45:46 private property where the government 1:45:48 manages the society, homes and families 1:45:51 are interchangeable. Um, and 1:45:55 you see a shared culture without 1:45:58 religion that's entirely dependent on 1:46:00 helping the society. And so it's mass 1:46:02 conformity and communism and this 1:46:05 supposedly rational culture. This was a 1:46:07 writer in the 16th century, 1:46:10 >> right? The Thomas Moore idea of utopia 1:46:12 is great because like we did a project 1:46:14 in humanities class where we all had to 1:46:17 design our own utopia and it it's 1:46:20 immediately you're hit with the 1:46:22 impossible arbitrary and fragile nature 1:46:25 of this like thought experiment which 1:46:27 relates to like it's very similar to how 1:46:29 Plato made this like structure of 1:46:31 hierarchy according to like things that 1:46:32 he thought were valuable. It's just it's 1:46:35 just so 1:46:37 uh agonizingly simple compared to the 1:46:40 complexity of actual reality that it's 1:46:42 it's clearly a fool's errand born out of 1:46:45 a like a pretense of of knowledge and 1:46:48 even to do the experiment was hard but I 1:46:50 had to do it as like a joke. Uh and then 1:46:52 it became fun because I was like 1:46:54 designing a map perfect you know okay 1:46:56 this goes wrong here this will go into 1:46:58 there. It's kind of like the 1:46:59 constitution and the separation of 1:47:00 powers. can't design it perfectly enough 1:47:03 for the weather not to affect it. You 1:47:06 have to like make it weatherproof, 1:47:08 adaptable, like you're not going to just 1:47:11 solve things uh with a structure. 1:47:13 >> And it's funny that the first book of 1:47:15 utopia is him comparing it to England 1:47:17 negatively 1:47:19 >> where he says that compared to this 1:47:21 utopian society, England is so silly 1:47:22 because we have nobility, people fight 1:47:24 over religion, and there's constant 1:47:26 strife over property ownership. And the 1:47:29 irony is that 16th century England is 1:47:32 one of the most successful societies in 1:47:33 history. So he's trying to make this 1:47:36 comparison of this model society is 1:47:38 vastly superior to us. But in actuality 1:47:42 the it's proven the opposite point, 1:47:44 >> right? It's like did you ever think to 1:47:47 acknowledge how far uh England is 1:47:50 relative to the standard of history if 1:47:52 not your utopia? Maybe the fact that 1:47:54 England is advanced so far is the only 1:47:56 thing that got gave you the inspiration 1:47:59 idea that you could even imagine a 1:48:01 utopia. Um, so he's not giving his own 1:48:04 source of inspiration credit. And you 1:48:06 can see how it's like the beginning of 1:48:08 this 1:48:09 >> the rationalist 1:48:12 what people describe as the line go up. 1:48:14 Maybe the the wigish thing about 1:48:16 expectations of um prosperity, which 1:48:19 isn't wrong except for in the sense that 1:48:25 they're they're worshiping the the end 1:48:28 in itself rather than trying to like 1:48:30 take a serious attachment to the 1:48:33 generating core, which isn't like the 1:48:35 drawing of utopia they made in their 1:48:37 living room. It's really a 1:48:38 rationalization of the neurological left 1:48:41 hemisphere's biases, 1:48:43 >> right? Which uh Yeah. Yeah. Because the 1:48:47 things all the the generating core stuff 1:48:50 is too complex a lot of times to 1:48:51 rationalize. So it kind of gets ignored 1:48:53 into this. It's almost like modeling, 1:48:57 >> right? Where 1:48:58 >> separates from reality, 1:49:01 >> right? um once it once you you have to 1:49:06 model the unknown in chaos in order to 1:49:09 be able to accurately comprehend the 1:49:11 world and if your mental model doesn't 1:49:14 have an independent bracket for this is 1:49:15 how chaotic variables interface with the 1:49:17 thing I built it's going to fail 1:49:19 >> right yeah like which is like the boat 1:49:21 getting hit by weather 1:49:24 >> this was one of England's great golden 1:49:26 ages it was called Mary England and it 1:49:28 was under the reign of Elizabeth I um 1:49:32 where she came out of her father Henry 1:49:35 VIII's 1:49:38 uh chaos where he had a variety of 1:49:41 wives. He converted to he converted 1:49:43 England to Protestantism. 1:49:46 He gradually went mad from, I believe, 1:49:48 mercury poisoning. And 1:49:53 she did a pretty good job at governing 1:49:55 Brit England where she was able to keep 1:49:58 them as a stable local power and England 1:50:01 prospered under her, which is how you 1:50:03 could get the um how you could get to 1:50:07 the the later English Civil War because 1:50:10 she set up the golden age that let the 1:50:12 period of chaos occur. and 1:50:15 she fought off the Spanish Armada where 1:50:17 there aren't that many really big wars 1:50:20 in the 16th century. Um, you had the 1:50:23 peasants war in early 16th century 1:50:25 Germany that was part of the the chaos 1:50:28 with the rise of Protestantism that was 1:50:31 crushed and then you had the Turks 1:50:33 attack into Europe. And I've purposely 1:50:36 not covered the Turkish Empire in this 1:50:38 video because I think they're their own 1:50:39 civilization that deserves its own 1:50:41 topic. But the Turks were growing and 1:50:43 they conquered Hungary early in the 16th 1:50:45 century and they attacked uh west where 1:50:48 the Spanish failed to defeat them at 1:50:50 Leanto which was this naval battle 1:50:52 between Italy and Greece. Um, 1:50:56 but the Spanish Armada was one of the 1:50:59 few big setpiece wars of the 16th 1:51:02 century where the Spanish wanted to 1:51:04 knock out England because England was a 1:51:06 thorn in their side where otherwise they 1:51:09 had to send their men to Italy, march 1:51:12 over the Alps, go down the Rine to get 1:51:14 armies to Flanders to fight the Dutch. 1:51:16 And that was exceptionally expensive. 1:51:18 And because the reason was that the 1:51:20 English were blocking off the English 1:51:21 channel for them to sail directly to the 1:51:23 Netherlands and England was backing all 1:51:26 the other Protestants. And so the king 1:51:28 of Spain thought, if we can conquer 1:51:30 England, 1:51:32 we can just totally dominate this region 1:51:34 of the world and wipe out Protestantism. 1:51:37 Um, and the Spanish had a much better 1:51:39 military than the English. The English 1:51:41 didn't even have a standard military. 1:51:42 They were dependent on long bowmen. Um, 1:51:46 and 1:51:48 the Spanish Armada was one of history's 1:51:50 great military disasters. 1:51:53 >> The Spanish sailed over 1:51:56 the Atlantic till the English Channel. 1:51:58 And the Spanish had these really big 1:52:01 gallions that were topheavy and they 1:52:05 were uh they didn't they couldn't handle 1:52:07 the northern waters that well. And the 1:52:09 English were able to skirmish around the 1:52:11 Spanish 1:52:12 with their more agile, gunfocused 1:52:16 cannons to give the Spanish a a solid 1:52:20 amount of losses in multiple of the 1:52:22 battles. And the Spanish didn't 1:52:23 automatically attack England because 1:52:25 they were trying to meet up with their 1:52:27 navy and Flanders. 1:52:29 >> Um, and then what happened once they did 1:52:31 so was partly due to the English 1:52:34 fighting well, partly due to the 1:52:35 weather, they ended up getting blown 1:52:37 around the north of Scotland and almost 1:52:40 none of them made it back to Spain once 1:52:42 they sailed around long way around 1:52:44 across Ireland. 1:52:46 And did is it because a lot of them got 1:52:48 taken out by the sea up there or was it 1:52:51 just because they were stuck on this 1:52:52 long track moving slow and just like 1:52:54 constantly taking fire? 1:52:56 >> Uh once you get past England it was 1:52:58 largely the sea, 1:53:00 >> right? 1:53:01 >> So they had to they got carried out that 1:53:03 way. It's just so bizarre. Like naval 1:53:05 battles in history seem to go this way a 1:53:07 lot where either one side's dominant or 1:53:09 you get this weird thing happened where 1:53:11 like the Greek boats were more mobile 1:53:13 than the Persian boats and then they 1:53:14 destroy the entire Persian navy even 1:53:16 though they were smaller. It's like 1:53:17 there's a real fragility to naval 1:53:19 warfare. 1:53:19 >> There is the sea is the real enemy. 1:53:23 >> Um 1:53:23 >> and yeah and then changing techn 1:53:25 changing meta that you can't catch up to 1:53:28 like bigger boats. One of 1:53:31 >> one of the great naval historians, I 1:53:33 think Mayan, he said that you have to 1:53:35 see naval warfare as you're crossing a 1:53:38 giant desert where you have to carry all 1:53:40 your water and supplies to get across 1:53:42 the desert, 1:53:44 >> right? It's the big logistical 1:53:45 challenge. It almost makes me think I, 1:53:47 you know, why weren't why didn't the 1:53:50 changing technology enable them to 1:53:52 conquer the Alps in a totally different 1:53:54 way at this point? They were still kind 1:53:56 of relying on the ocean. Switzerland. It 1:53:58 was just the the Swiss were so ornery 1:54:01 they didn't want to bother where 1:54:03 >> we don't want to walk through. 1:54:04 >> They converted to Protestantism. They 1:54:05 supplied Europe's pikemen. And so the 1:54:07 Spanish thought we don't want to have to 1:54:09 drive you out of your dirt poor 1:54:11 mountains when you're all such good 1:54:12 fighters. You can just let us walk 1:54:14 through or we can are you can you please 1:54:16 just let us walk through? Um 1:54:19 >> and they sometimes said no. 1:54:22 um 1:54:25 with England 1:54:27 after Elizabeth I where she died a 1:54:30 virgin and never had children. They had 1:54:32 a fusion with Scotland that created the 1:54:35 unified Britain and that was right at 1:54:37 the start of the 17th century. France 1:54:39 had a series of really brutal civil wars 1:54:41 that killed millions of people between 1:54:43 the Protestants and the Catholics. And 1:54:45 this was over the course of the 16th 1:54:47 century where France had a dynastic 1:54:49 failure. And we've spoken about this in 1:54:51 other videos between the Fran the 1:54:53 creation of France video and the 1:54:55 Protestant Reformation or this actually 1:54:56 wasn't in the Protestant Reformation 1:54:57 video, but France had a they had a a 1:55:01 monarchical failure. And so it spiraled 1:55:04 in civil war between Protestants and 1:55:05 Catholic factions where there were 1:55:07 multiple eras of tolerance versus being 1:55:11 at each other's throats. And the 1:55:13 Protestants were about 10% of France's 1:55:15 population, but they could consistently 1:55:16 punch above their weight because they 1:55:19 were better organized and were a higher 1:55:21 social class and 1:55:24 >> merchants. 1:55:25 >> Yeah. And so you had multiple situations 1:55:28 where 1:55:30 the the the Protestants were able to get 1:55:33 the the throne, but then they would have 1:55:35 to agree to a mutual toleration with the 1:55:38 Catholics. And then over time, the 1:55:39 Catholics would get an advantage. And it 1:55:42 ended with the St. Bartholomew's Day 1:55:45 Massacre where the Catholics just killed 1:55:47 off the Protestants, 4,000 of them of 1:55:50 their top leadership when there was 1:55:52 supposed to be a marriage between the 1:55:53 the Protestant and the Catholic 1:55:55 factions. 1:55:55 >> Wow. 1:55:56 >> In order to unify the coalition and this 1:55:58 was precipitated by Katherine of Medici, 1:56:02 who was a descendant of the Italian 1:56:04 Medici, who were a big Renaissance 1:56:06 family. Um, and she she ruled France as 1:56:10 an iron fist. And then she forced Henry 1:56:13 of Navar, the Protestant, to marry into 1:56:18 her marry her daughter. And he was a he 1:56:21 he converted to Catholicism to lead 1:56:23 France. 1:56:25 Um, 1:56:26 but it was after his entire posi and his 1:56:30 family had been murdered. So, it's a 1:56:31 really twisted situation. 1:56:33 >> I mean, you can see how France ended up 1:56:35 paying for this, right? because this was 1:56:37 their chance to kind of fuse and get 1:56:40 past 1:56:41 their dynamics that led to their 1:56:43 revolution and everything and keep up 1:56:45 with England and the Netherlands. 1:56:47 >> Like maybe even a a more successful 1:56:49 fusion than anywhere else in Europe 1:56:51 where one or the other ended up winning 1:56:53 out. I mean, it could have just it could 1:56:55 have reversed their fortunes from zero 1:56:57 hero to zero. And then they chose to 1:56:59 double down once again in the 17th 1:57:01 century under the front where Louis the 1:57:03 14th got rid of the remaining 1:57:05 Protestants and then he crushed the 1:57:06 parliament and the the nobility and the 1:57:08 merchants once again, 1:57:10 >> right? And then people gave up on 1:57:11 Catholicism and there wasn't the energy 1:57:13 to like have a Protestant revival 1:57:15 because you killed all the people during 1:57:17 the time when it was growing. 1:57:20 So to summarize, in the year 1600, 1:57:25 the Spanish were under a joint monarchy 1:57:28 with the Habsburgs and Portugal um where 1:57:32 they had Iberia and Italy, 1:57:35 then Austria um and Belgium. By that 1:57:40 point, the Dutch had gained de facto 1:57:42 independence, but they were still at war 1:57:43 with Spain where the Spanish wouldn't 1:57:45 recognize it. Um, 1:57:48 >> England and Scotland had recently 1:57:51 unified. They technically controlled 1:57:53 Ireland, but the Irish were still 1:57:55 governed by their local nobility that 1:57:57 had to get that had to be wiped out 1:57:59 later. Um, France was a unified country. 1:58:03 They took Britany at the end of the 15th 1:58:06 century. Um, and the Holy Roman Empire 1:58:09 was still a mess of independent states. 1:58:12 Denmark held um Denmark held Norway. Um 1:58:16 Sweden had recently taken the area 1:58:19 around the Baltic coastline at the end 1:58:21 of that century. Um 1:58:23 >> and then you had Poland, Lithuania in 1:58:25 the east while the Turks held Hungary 1:58:28 and the bottom of Ukraine in the 1:58:30 Balkans, 1:58:31 >> right? And I like throughout all this 1:58:34 you can kind of forget about the uh 1:58:37 economic lens because you have the 1:58:39 oligarchy, right? which is the product 1:58:41 of the king providing favors to certain 1:58:43 industrial sectors to mutually assure 1:58:46 their power which then impacts your 1:58:48 economy negatively and what the the real 1:58:52 the underlying layer to all this 1:58:54 competition between different areas. We 1:58:56 talk about the weapons is their 1:58:57 industrial base because like the Dutch 1:59:00 out competing the French and the 1:59:01 textiles industries is a real source 1:59:04 >> of power. It's like that's what's going 1:59:07 to like it's like why are we worried 1:59:10 about whether we can produce phones or 1:59:12 not or whether if China's the only one 1:59:14 that can make stuff at the highest 1:59:15 standard that gives them a huge amount 1:59:17 of political power like that's the 1:59:18 underlying generating that's the 1:59:21 underlying like what do you have to even 1:59:23 fight with in the first place how able 1:59:25 are you to defend yourself what's your 1:59:26 technological capacity so it's uh it 1:59:31 would be interesting to also analyze 1:59:32 like what industries were really big in 1:59:36 the countries at the periods where they 1:59:38 were most powerful and what industries 1:59:40 were they losing when they were less 1:59:42 powerful and it it would be cool to 1:59:44 break that down. 1:59:45 >> Textiles were a big one much like the 1:59:47 early industrial revolution. Flanders 1:59:48 was the textile center. Um 1:59:52 England made wool. England was able to 1:59:55 move a lot of their Flanders' textile 1:59:57 production over to England. Mhm. 1:59:59 >> Um, and so they were less dependent on 2:00:03 uh Belgium than they were during the 2:00:05 Middle Ages. 2:00:07 A lot of artisal stuff like iron working 2:00:10 or craftsmanship was based out of 2:00:12 Germany. The Germans are very good at 2:00:14 that. Um, 2:00:16 and 2:00:18 agriculture was Eastern Europe. The 2:00:19 Italians were the best at a lot of 2:00:21 different things, but Europe had a less 2:00:23 of a centralized economy than it had in 2:00:25 other time periods where in any given 2:00:27 country in West Europe, you could 2:00:29 probably get an expert to produce that 2:00:31 given thing. 2:00:32 >> And yeah, and it's interesting to think 2:00:34 of like as Spain declined, what 2:00:36 industries were they no longer leading 2:00:38 in that they were leading in before? 2:00:41 >> I don't know. I I know the Spanish 2:00:43 hollowed out their economy where they 2:00:45 used to be fairly generative and then by 2:00:48 the time we get to the 18th century or 2:00:49 even through the 17th century huge parts 2:00:51 of Spain became wastelands that were 2:00:54 uninhabited and were filled with 2:00:55 vagrants and they did not have 2:00:57 productive economic work because the the 2:00:59 the the economy the the politics had 2:01:02 become so parasitic. 2:01:04 >> Interesting. Yeah. And something kind of 2:01:06 maybe unrelated about Spain, but it's a 2:01:08 really interesting geography because it 2:01:09 really is a desert. I mean, the whole 2:01:11 middle of Spain, it's almost like 2:01:13 Australia. Like, when you when you take 2:01:15 a train out to Madrid, you're literally 2:01:16 driving through cowboy land. There's no 2:01:19 there's almost no green at all. And all 2:01:21 the people are on the coasts or the 2:01:23 mountains or in like Madrid connected 2:01:25 only by trains. It's kind of a a weird 2:01:27 country. 2:01:28 >> It's the only real desert in Europe, 2:01:30 >> right? Yeah. It's a whole middle. 2:01:32 >> So, 2:01:33 >> interesting. 2:01:34 >> This is all I have to say at the 16th 2:01:35 century. Um, I would give you a happy 2:01:39 bow tie ending, but I don't think there 2:01:40 is one. All of the trends involved 2:01:42 continue through the 17th century, which 2:01:45 is the which is their culmination. So, 2:01:47 click that video next. 2:01:49 >> Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see 2:01:51 because there's the what do you say the 2:01:53 the growing period and or the prosperity 2:01:57 period and then the overcrowded period. 2:01:59 >> Yeah. Uh, and there's some reverse 2:02:02 parallels between that and now where we 2:02:06 don't have to break them down at the end 2:02:07 of the video, but um where it's like 2:02:11 there's bad and good, but it might be 2:02:12 flipped. So, be like in the the wigs in 2:02:15 the 1800s expected everything to go up 2:02:17 forever 2:02:18 uh and it it didn't. And now we kind of 2:02:22 expect everything to go down forever, 2:02:24 but we might have the seeds of 2:02:26 >> some of those reverse events just like 2:02:28 then. History is a double helix in which 2:02:30 all variables contain their opposite. If 2:02:33 you're in an era with decline, if you 2:02:34 can overcome the decline, you can have a 2:02:37 period of profound personal or national 2:02:39 growth. Um, eras of decline for one 2:02:42 thing are eros of growth for another. 2:02:44 You just have to to take responsibility 2:02:46 for figuring out your own personal life 2:02:48 where if your society sucks, you can 2:02:49 find a way to figure out yourself as an 2:02:51 individual, 2:02:52 >> right? Like you can just do things. Uh, 2:02:54 let's capture the king of France and 2:02:56 meet back here next week. Sounds good. 2:02:58 Next episode is on 20th Century Asia. 2:03:01 >> Oh, exciting. Cool. My expertise. 2:03:03 >> Exactly.