Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 264 - The Battle of Nicopolis

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

Crusaders attempt to drive the Ottomans out of the Balkans. It does not go well. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Aziz Antiya. Crusades in the Later Middle Ages http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_nicopolis.html https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/crusader-disaster-at-nicopolis/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/march-to-destruction-nicopolis-1396/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lions Ed by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me today is Francis. I've drug him out of the tombs of the bonus episodes and brought him back to the realm of the regular episodes. On this, the Memorial Day, when we're here to memorialize our fallen brethren, instead, I got a message that said, can you podcast? And I said, not this week, but yes, right now.

40 minutes later, here we are. And I wouldn't have it any other way. This is how I like to do podcasting. Frantically and on the fly and with no prior knowledge as to what the fuck's happening. I'm going to be completely honest with you. I forgot today is Memorial Day. It is no longer a holiday in which the country i live in

well uh i'm here to remind you of memorial day um it's not like 9-11 which we all promised we would never forget so the fact that if you're not if you're not on facebook having a bunch of like your shitty veteran friends talk about like this is about the day people are out barbecuing, having fun. It's about the day that our friends and our brethren died in this dumb fucking war that none of us should have gone to. It really kind of loses its luster after a while. Two things can be true at the same time. Have your moment of remembrance and also eat entirely too much barbecued meat and drink beer in somebody's backyard. There's really nothing more American than that.

Yeah. You know, most of those dead troops would have done a Memorial day is probably fucking exactly the same thing. We memorialize our fallen soldiers by getting drunk for them. If I had died in a battle of some kind, I encourage you all to get drunk in my honor. I always used to tell people that if they died in a battle,

they would name the port-a-potties after them. Yes. Because, you know, for people who are unaware, because this is not hell of a way to die where we don't expect to have a baseline knowledge of the American military, pretty much every building on every base, to include the forward operating bases that no longer exist or are now Taliban forward operated bases uh were all

named after someone who died uh and i always used to tell someone like if i died they're they've run out of buildings to name so they're gonna name the shitter after me i like i like that in bagram the main the main paved strip was called disney drive and people would uh think that that was like an answer to our consumerism like American consumerism is so bad they show up to war they show up with a Burger King and they name things after Disney like no a dude named Disney died like

we just it's not about the mouse man we just like a dude died not many people remember the time that Goofy got his fucking legs blown off by an IED I have nightmares when i sleep um now don't make popcorn or i'm gonna go crazy that's not a goofy thing i don't really think uh i think donald's really the only one with with true ptsd um that's why he's so angry constantly i remember was it isn't it like part of canon he fought World War Two. Did he wear pants then.

Yeah. But but Donald Duck who wears Navy garb is a honorary sergeant in the army. However Lieutenant General Lamb Chop of the Marine Corps does exist. So I'm not like Lamb Chop the puppet. Yeah. Yeah. Lamb Chop the puppet is a three-star in the Marines. So fucking enjoy that little tidbit of knowledge, you fucking crane eaters. You thought that the dog outranking you was bad.

Now a puppet outranks you. Francis, I think I speak for myself and all of my listeners when I say we're all worse off for knowing these things. That's the things that I bring to your podcast. Information that nobody wants and that honestly makes your day worse. Which is kind of, I mean like, look, I've listened to the Nanking

episodes. You can't really talk shit about making people's days worse. That's fair. I apologize to everybody for this Disney knowledge. I apologize to everybody for this Disney knowledge. I apologize to everybody for Japan's aggression to the Chinese country 50 years before any of us were born. Content warning, Donald Duck. Francis, before we started recording, we started talking about, you know, we love talking about dumb people from history kind of getting what's coming to them, whether it be Nazis or Confederates or Knights.

And you have no idea what this script is about today. But good news. We're talking about Knights and we're talking about the Crusades. I love the crusades um i love i love the crusades i'm very excited about running a crusades rpg one day with uh with all of us where we can all like roll for racism i assume or uh was it their children's crusade at one point where they're just like sent a bunch of kids off into the desert to die i'm confused as how a species how we have managed to fucking survive because we just kill the shit out of ourselves constantly throughout history because if there's one thing

that human beings like to do more than kill other human beings it's fuck we do we do enjoy we do enjoy fucking and uh the the women in our uh of our species are able to make a baby you know like i gestational periods and everything. Look, I don't know why I'm getting too deep into the weeds onto this, but we do love to fucking make babies and then send those babies to war or put them into, you know,

the looms in the 19th century, which would like rip off their arms. Yeah, their hands can get in. They can fit in there better. Everybody knows that. This message brought to you by the department of labor of the state of florida um we're bringing back powder monkeys yeah we have no need for them but we're bringing back children and gunpowder magazines and uh tall ships and there's not enough literal monkeys

anymore we have to use children yeah we have to it's by law, the monkeys are endangered, but the children are not. Not if I have my way. Now, Francis, if you thought the Crusades were dumb when they're busy marching to the other side of the world towards the Holy Land to die in the desert, wait until they go marching over to the Balkans in the 1300s. The Balkans, where famously nothing bad has ever happened. That's right. hundreds the balkans were famously nothing bad has ever that's right um today we're talking about the battle of decopolis or when the armies of europe teamed up with hungary to invade the ottoman balkans meaning that when you look at all the powers involved here this might be the most racist genocide denialist episode that we've ever done if there's one if there's one thing that can bring us all together it's racism

the as you say the unifying uh theory of fuck that guy yeah and also the balkans um truly the chaos ruin of the earth um now the balkans the balkans uh they uh bosnians came to st louis and they got a pass because they're all white so it it worked out. It's because they came in the 90s. If they would have come, for instance, when the Irish or the Italians or the Armenians or the Jews came to the U.S., it would have been a different story. The white people had already padded it out enough to just like, Ah, you're fine. You guys.

I mean, I have a Bosnian. He's no longer married into the family but you know he's a good guy um and he uh he loves to eat pork and smoke cigarettes and drink beer and be in the army so uh he's just like yeah we integrated pretty well because uh we're pretty much like shitty americans too in some ways i love that you start that sentence with i have a bosnian uh well i can't say cousin because we're not blood related but also he's not married to my cousin anymore but also i love him to death i've known him forever uh look i i don't live in the balkans but i i i from what i understand from balkans people you're

still pretty much his cousin that's how that works because it works that's how it works here he's cool dude i like him Shout out to you, Alam. Hope you listen, I guess. Probably not. But my knowledge of the Balkans really doesn't extend previous to the 1990s. So looking forward to a history lesson here. Well, it's still not great. Now, some people might not be aware of the latter very stupid crusades once people like richard the

lionhearted and saladine were out of the picture but there are quite a few minor ones going on during the 14th century specifically one going through northern europe and a failed one in tunisia and through the middle of all of this was the hundred years war tearing through france england and a few other places now we've talked about this before, but I do always have to say this whenever we talk about the Hundred Years' War before someone gets mad at me. It was not a hundred straight years of war. There were truces pretty frequently,

and they broke down just as frequently. During one of those times in the mid-1300s, the Ottoman Empire was steamrolling their way through the Balkans. The Pope desperately tried to get the French and the English steamrolling their way through the balkans the pope desperately tried to get the french and the english to cut their shit so he could proclaim a crusade against the ottomans and retake the balkans but uh he failed to do that for quite a little while oh yeah telling

the french and the english to cut their shit yeah that's that's a famously a thing they've ever done yeah yeah at least at least now they just argue about shitty football. They don't like those dudes. Talk about two countries that love to just fuck each other and everybody else up. Yeah. And then the Pope's just being like, could you guys cut it out? Can we all just get along Pope style?

Yeah. I do love that. Like when you look at history during this time that like the Pope also just had a standing army of his own because that's how territory worked back then is you had to hold it with a bunch of like malnourished peasants with pikes oh and there's more than one pope

at this point as well we got some anti-popes by the 1390s the almond conquest had all but finished at the Balkans after the Battle of Kosovo. No, not that one. The other one. No, not that one either.

The other one. Then the emperor of Bulgaria, a guy named Ivan Shishman, which his name sounds like every racist stereotype for an Eastern European ever. His name sounds like every racist stereotype for an Eastern European ever. That sounds like a dude that's coming out to wrestle in a high school gym somewhere. He is a Vince McMahon WWF heel. He comes out wearing some unknowable kind of vaguely Eastern European garb and wielding two sheeshs of meat. For people, a sheesh is like the kebab metal itself. It's not the meat tornado.

No, it's not meat tornado territory yet. Now, the Emperor of Bulgaria lost his temporary capital in Nicopolis to the Ottoman forces. Dozens of other Balkan princes had been reduced to vassals, including Shishman's brother. And soon the battlefield between Christianity and Islam inched closer and closer towards the Hungarian border, where today the president of Hungary would probably still say that happens.

Still, I mean, Hungary being racist throughout the years is uh as a constant you know just like the the tides come in and the tides go out hungary also will be concerned concerned about the the hordes at their gates look uh we're we're throwing a lot of a lot of shit at the balkans in hungary right now but ask any western Western European how they feel about Roma people, and they'll sound exactly the same way. Okay. You know, I, it is, it is very like when, when you think like, wow, America has a racism problem. And we absolutely do. We absolutely have problems with racism against, you know, black people, Hispanic people, and really anybody that's not, you know, straight white Christian male. And then you And then you like look into like we don't have like the centuries.

Like we only have like two centuries of real racism going on. We don't have like millennia of racism that Europe has. Like the racism there runs deep. It's impressive, honestly. And from my experience, it's actually much more open as well. Yeah. impressive honestly and and from my experience it's actually much more open as well yeah it's perfectly fine to be to be like no we hate we hate roma people uh and to use words that we won't uh repeat here because they're unkind because we're not those people we're not we're not uh europeans

yeah i live in the caucasus which is famously known for not being racist at all. Now, none of this was news to the king of Hungary and Croatia, Sigismund, who would eventually go on to tack on to the titles of the king of Germany and the Holy Roman Emperor a few years down the road. He was also nicknamed the Ginger Fox. So I don't know if that means he was clever or hot, but whatever. Could be both. Is that what we got to start calling Nate now? Yeah, we finally have some Nate representation on the podcast.

And Nate's not even here for it. Now, Sigismund had been in charge of Hungary for less than 10 years at this point. And the entire time he'd been begging the Pope and the rest of Europe for help countering the advancing of the Ottoman Empire. But because Europe was preoccupied with the Northern Crusade and the French and English were too busy with each other, pretty much everybody gave them the finger until after the Battle of Kosovo. There had been some contentious raids into Hungary where Ottoman forces, they did things that you would expect an expanding imperial force to do, especially for the time. Such as burning

villages to the ground, taking slaves, and rendering everyone they came across into a fine Christian-based mulch product. That's how you save souls, by pushing them through a fine sieve. Obviously, yeah. That's how I was saved. I just got better.

I built different. After one such raid in 1394, which left seven villages in ruins, King Sigismund finally understood that like Bulgaria and Serbia before it, Hungary was in the crosshairs of the Ottoman Empire. He began to beg the rest of Europe for help, suggesting a massive show of unity and force would be enough to scare off the Ottomans, at least for the time being. Now, I have a quick question. You mentioned that they're asking for help from all these others,

but obviously they can't just send an email or something. So what is the time frame of just like, oh, I need help. I'm going to send a runner through the fucking wilderness or through the desert or something to deliver a letter to say, hey, can you guys come help out and then i was like another month for it to come back and just say nah i mean weeks um months and you know so you they could get a letter out with like messengers in a couple weeks you know it's it's not as slow as people would think because europe is is not that large. But it's not...

I assume there's roads of some kind that have been built. Trade exists. I mean, it's certainly not instantaneous. Well, good news for Sigismund. This happened at one of the various points of the Hundred Years' War where there had been a truce.

Both England and France thought such a war against the Ottomans was a good idea. And wouldn't you know it, so did the Pope. The rest of Europe quickly joined in. The Republic of Venice was worried that the Ottoman power expansion would cripple them as their main trading power along the Adriatic, Ionian, and Aegean seas because they would cut into that. because they would cut into that. Genoa was worried Ottoman control of the Danube would give them control of everything in between the Black Sea and Europe,

and not to mention the Genoan territories that just come under Ottoman assault as they press towards Constantinople. However, I already kind of told you that there's two popes. That's going to be a problem. It's 1394, which means Catholicism and the papacy in general

had undergone the Western schism. So there was urban the fifth and Clement the seventh, one in France and one in Rome. So, yeah. And there's also like a third Pope there for a little while for the papal hat trick. There is another,

there is another Pope. There's like a Orthodox Christian hope as well. Well, so the ortho really talk about the orthodox and uh the apostolics for instance the armenian church we kind of have our own pope but we don't call it a pope we uh they never fell under rome um there was a point in history when uh the head of the armenian church called the all catholicos was like told by the pope that he needs to like join in communion with rome to save them from the mongols and the all catholicos, was told by the Pope that he needs to join in communion with Rome

to save them from the Mongols. And the Alcatholicos just kind of gave him the finger and decided with the Mongols instead. Turns out there's another option. Because the Mongols at the time, of course, this would change because eventually the Mongols convert to Islam as they break apart. There was a time where the Mongols were like,

we don't give a fuck what you do. Just pay your taxes. Yep. Um, that's if only all of society had been like that, uh, just pay your taxes on time. Uh,

and don't fuck with that. Don't fuck with the bag. If everybody just had the universal, don't fuck with the bag attitude, we would all be a lot happier. I think I don't know much about the eastern orthodox church but i believe the head is called the patriarch i could be wrong um yeah it's popish like we're the only one the we i'm not a catholic anymore but the

catholics are the only ones that use the word pope i suppose but uh yeah but but this is this is an actual anti-pope um which one is considered, I guess, the correct Pope in the Pope lineage? That depends on who you ask, because even the Crusaders can't completely agree on that. Now, this entire situation was dumber than hell. Eventually, Clement dies and Boniface IX was selected in Rome. Now, Boniface would have the most legitimacy because he was based in Rome. Now, Boniface would have the most legitimacy because he was based in Rome. And he's the one that called for a crusade, despite the era of

popes doing so being pretty much long gone. Obviously, the purpose of this crusade was political and not religious, and nobody gave a single solitary fuck about Sigismund, Hungary, or the Balkans. Boniface called the crusade to bring power

to his side of the schism and everybody who followed him, specifically Philip II, Duke of Burgundy was kind of in the same boat. They weren't in this for the papacy. They weren't in this for Christian Balkans or anything.

They wanted to put their houses in a more powerful position by gaining glory in a crusade. Uh, so that's, that, that was the, uh,

I guess the, you, you needed glory. You had to go out and it's very, I know you don't watch Star Trek, but it's very Klingon in its own, in its own kind of way. Uh,

by that, I mean, very stupid of, uh, we, you know what, at any point in time uh i could die by millions of different things i could drink water from the wrong thing i could get head butted

by a fucking goat and break my hip and die here in a field after exposure for three uh three days however i need to go pick up this metal pointy stick and go stab other dudes with it because i just i'm still alive and i just cannot abide that like nobody it feels like at this time and when i say nobody i don't mean like the peasants who are just trying to scrape by and they're just like fuck all these people it just really feels like there's a lot of um what do you mean i'm not dead yet god damn it we need to fix this yeah and you know this is the era before giant vanity projects while they did exist. Um, they,

it weren't so easy to pull off. It's a lot easier to gain glory through doing war. Um, right. Instead of, instead of grinding your peasants into a paste during a war, you can grind them into a, a paste,

like building a gigantic wall or something like that. Peasant pace. One way or another, one way or another, the blood gods must be, sated yeah corn the blood god cares not where the blood comes from just that it flows uh just that it's mixed into the mortar at a good uh 10 to 10 to 20 ratio lions led by donkeys is brought to you by peasant paste uh now outside of backdoor politicking and coming up with this entire thing, nobody gave much thought to the plan or the upcoming war at all. Though Philip II tends to catch most of the flack of this for being one

of its loudest champions, everyone's at fault here, though Philip is more of a colorful character. Or as Barbara Tuchman puts it, since he was the prince of self-magnification the result was that opulent display became the dominant thing plans logistics intelligence about the enemy came in second if at all just gotta make it look pretty we need uh we need those gold toilet seats yeah just need a whole bunch of dudes marching across Europe. What they're going to do when they get to wherever you sent them? Ah. But they look good doing it and that's what's important.

That's where the glory, that's what God shines his light upon is not the goodness or the wickedness of your deeds, but like how sharp. Your godly drip, as it were. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't buy

an insanely overpriced i don't know it's europe stupid pair of skinny jeans and a purse like you you had you had to go kill foreigners um then as count of flanders philip extracted huge amounts of wealth from the territory in order to pay for the upcoming adventure telling sigismund in 1395 that if he asked the king of France for help now, he would get it. Despite all of this starting in 1394, nobody really bothered to hammer out details for this entire operation until May of 1395.

And by August of that same year, Sigismund was pretty sure a full-scale Ottoman invasion was coming any day now. Where are they getting this information from? Like, why are they so worried about the... Are the Ottomans planning this? Like, do they? Or are they getting this information from like why are they so worried about the are the ottomans planning this like do they or are they just kind of chilling i mean they were slowly encroaching in in hungary um they were like raiding villages like their their war is definitely coming um like like any like any good empire of the uh the middle ages

they're expanding yeah uh the ottomans had checked their like horse-based satellite they launched into space you know uh and checked troop movements um now from the start of the crusade things did not go according to plan philip planned the entire war to be led by him louis of orlon and john of gaunt however they both pulled out when it became clear that oh this crusade's actually gonna happen i want nothing to do with this um this had to do with obviously they didn't want to march their happy asses all the way to the balkans but they also they also yeah i mean i still wouldn't want to do that i could drive a fucking car there um but you're leaving their territories was politically

sketchy for both of them and they were worried that they'd be ousted from power so there's like you guys you guys got this we're gonna stay here yeah this is the time i mean even today though like if if you if you're a leader of a of a of a country and you like fuck off for like maybe an eye exam to a different country, somebody could just come and be like, hey, I'm king now because I'm sitting in the throne. And that happens. Who did that happen to?

They went out for a dental procedure and they came back cooed. We just did a bonus episode on the US invasion of Granada. Eric Gehry, the first leader of independent Granada, got overthrown because he was speaking at the U.S. invasion of Granada, Eric Gary, the first leader of independent Granada, got overthrown because he was speaking at the U.N.

Yeah, yeah. Don't, you know, if you're going to, this is a time where if you're going to go, you might as well bring the magic chair with you. Otherwise, somebody else is going to sit in it. Yeah, if they don't have the chair, they can't be leader. Everybody knows that. It's like the Pope chair with the nutsack hole.

What? Okay, I'm going to need you to Google image search the Pope chair with the nutsack hole. Those specific words. You keep going. Look, you might want to turn on safe search for that one. I'm glad I'm not on my work laptop here. Oh, it's like a shitter. Yeah, it's a shitter, yeah it's a shitter but it's only for

nut sacks um now the the story goes um and this might be apocryphal that back in the day i and they might still do this the pope would have to sit out there like donald duck without pants on and they would have to check to make sure his balls hung through the hole to ensure that he was a man and he had an impressive sack um you could just i believe the exact term is like he's a man and it hangs well too um now that that might not actually be the true story but it is the popular story i look it's the catholic church it could truly go either way. The Catholics do have a weird thing about ball sacks and making sure a man is a quote man. Well, then there's also the apocryphal story

of a woman sneaking into being Pope for a couple years. We kind of touched on that with my thing because that was during the whole Iron Papacy thing. That was about 400 years before this. They've come a long way. By that, I mean they haven't come very far at all. Well, and there's also not a lot of evidence that that woman pope actually existed.

Right. There was a woman who begat like five different popes from her loins, though, because she just loved to fuck popes and make more popes. I mean, look, I'm not here to kink shame. Worried about command of this operation falling to someone not under his control or in good graces he nominated john the first to take command his oldest son john was only 24 and you know without

much experience in most things um though he would eventually go on to kill the king's brother and spark a french civil war in a couple of years so you know he was nothing on purpose or by by accident oh he did this on purpose uh so he was nothing if not a go-getter you know yeah that he had the the pick him up by the bootstraps and cause a french civil war uh kind of vibe you know we all start from we started from nothing and look at us now we're killing we're killing kings philip was smart enough to know his son was not experienced enough to handle this entire thing on his own so he summoned a man named angle ram dacucci nate is not here to correct my french and i refuse to believe that this man's name is not angle ram dacucci yeah and his buddy uh uh wolfram debussy now dacucci. Yeah, and his buddy Wolfram Debussy.

Now, Ducucci was to act as his advisor. However, John was given a ton of other counselors as well, all of whom had some vague form of command and title, though no formal command structure was ever actually ironed out. What you could consider the command staff soon became massively bloated with french nobles many of whom had no real jobs in the crusader army at all and damn that doesn't sound familiar these command elements would soon only grow and grow as they moved on towards hungary and more nobility joined such as sigismund the bulgarian czar various Polish nobles, sprinkling some Croats, and of course, the leader of the Knights Hospitaller, all piled in.

Is this all just like, oh, you guys are going to go get some glory? Hold up, let me get my sword. Oh yeah, it's of course what it is. And the Knights Hospitaller are there to run protection rackets for Christians. To make matters even dumber, the confused command group got together to come up with rules and discipline of the crusade. No, one of the things they figured out was not who was actually in command, but like the rules around the conduct of knights during war. One of those rules was knights were to prove their honor and glory in battle through chivalry and therefore by leading the charge from the front of the army.

and therefore by leading the charge from the front of the army. So, just to run this bias one more time for our dear listeners, no chain of command, but everybody that is in charge are knights, they're nobles, and they all must lead the army from the front. Now, who, and I imagine there's also just, are there just like a shitload of peasants being dragged along? There's a ton of local levies, minor knights, men at arms, things of that nature. But for knights, all of whom are nobles, there is no answer other than

charging and leading from the front, despite the fact that also counts in everybody who's in charge. So as one of the pike-wielding peasants, do you get any glory out of this or is it just like you either die or you get to go back to uh your sustenance farming i mean they got paid in their own way mostly through looting um like the the average person came back from crusades much better off when they left assuming they did make it back by just looting and pillaging everything

their paycheck was ripping up the copper wire from wherever the fuck it is that they went in, whether that be taking slaves, stealing riches, stealing property, things of that nature. So they were in it for their own reasons as well, all of which were bad. And of course, I'm not saying there wasn't true believers in this mix as well.

There absolutely was there's absolutely people who believe that their sins would be forgiven if they wouldn't stab the guy named Mohammed in the chest with a spear that is how the Pope sold it to people if you think that's silly QAnon

exists so these are the QAnoners of their time if we finally stop the... We're going to go fight a Hungarian comet pizza and stop the child cabal. Certainly, modern humans would never be this stupid. Anyway, let me log into literally any quarter of the internet. Now, with that, the various forces of the crusade from all over Western Europe agreed to meet in Buda, Hungary.

It might be Buda. I think it's Buda. Though that is, I'm basing that pronunciation off of a town that's spelled the same way as Texas. So I might be wrong. Anyway, they left from Dijon on April 1396. They would travel through Bavaria towards the Danube and cross into Hungary. Once there, Sigismund kind of realized that he may have fucked up by inviting everybody over to his house. Now, for starters...

But why? You got more people. Well, the problem is tens of thousands of assholes just showed up to his front door. For starters, Sigismund wanted to kick out the ottomans from the balkans this of course had nothing to do with religion but because he wanted to dominate the balkans for himself he didn't want to share with every asshole who came over from western europe however i get it the crusaders started talking about okay bro here's the plan first we're going to liberate the balkans and then we're going to go the aid of constance and opal we're going to march through turkey through syria and then of course we're going to liberate the Balkans. And then we're going to go the A to Constance and Opal. We're going to march through Turkey, through Syria. And then, of course, we're going to liberate the motherfucking Holy Land,

jump on our boats, and then return to Europe. Hey, Tom, put the Howard Dean yeah right in there. I was just about to say that, too. Yeah, that all ends with some drunken freshman going, Yeah! We're going to show our age really badly when some younger listeners, even Americans, have no fucking idea what we're talking about. Yeah, if you don't know the Howard Dean scream,

go look that up and then understand that there was a point in time when that completely tanked a political career. Making a funny noise was enough to end up a presidential primary. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, just like Jeb Bush's, please clap,

you know, but to be fair, poor Jeb, he never had it coming anyway. Look, I'm, I'm just, I refuse to have sympathy for anybody with the last name Bush.

And that includes the band Bush and Kate Bush, despite there being no relations. Oh, uh, or Gavin Rosdale. He knows he, and showing our no relations. Oh, poor Gavin Rossdale. He knows. Again, showing our fucking age. He knows what he fucking did.

Now. What? Was in Constantine? Was he in Constantine? Yeah. He was Balthazar in Constantine. Gavin Rossdale was in one movie. Look, Gavin Rossdale could rob me on the fucking street tomorrow, and I wouldn't be able to say Gavin Rossdale robbed in one movie. Look, Gavin Rossdale could rob me on the fucking street tomorrow,

and I wouldn't be able to say Gavin Rossdale robbed me, okay? I have no idea what this man looks like. It's fucking, well, watch Constantine. It's a really good Catholic movie with Keanu Reeves shooting people with a crucifix shotgun. Good stuff. And Gavin Rossdale. Now, this plane was kneecap when the Crusaders had to scrape

the bottom of the barrel just to find their army, which ended up being about 17,000 guys. And just because everybody on this crusade was on it together didn't mean they were not trying to royally fuck one another over. For example,

while everybody was marching off to war, France is attempting to seize Genoa, during which point the Duke of Milan's daughter was kicked out of Paris, which led the Duke to threaten to invade Paris with knights in order to defend his daughter's honor. All while all of them had soldiers marching off together to do a crusade. Yeah. Well, it's not like you're getting, you know the uh stars and stripes from home and figuring it out you know like these guys are united in racism they have their own thing going also the crusade armies marched through germany christian germany mind you and they stopped to pillage a few towns

and murder people also hundreds of soldiers randomly went missing um now chroniclers of the time have chalked this up with them getting absolutely wasted fucking a bunch of local hookers deciding this is a lot more fun than doing war and then just stayed there they were they would have been correct um surprised they didn't get executed though for just being like no we're not going to continue on with nobody nobody keeps track of anybody there's no there's like oh okay yeah like if you're a regular person, there's no roles for you. Nobody's taking like head count at formation in the morning. You're just like, it's got to show up and you drop out when, whenever. Deserting back then would have been incredibly easy.

Really like deserting becoming a problem that like a military based regulations around stopping didn't start until Frederick the Great, which is a long time from now. Desertion was just normal. Yeah, I mean, I guess you're there because either you're a true believer or you're looking to get some loot, and if you've decided both of those things are no longer affable for you,

it's not like the king knows what you look like. You're like a random peasant. It's just like, fuck off. king knows what you look like you're like a random peasant and nobody's like fuck off nobody knows what you look like nobody knows your name and nobody gives a fuck what happens to you so maybe right yeah maybe throwing it through shillings in the right direction getting a handy and then going home is a much better option and i would argue that's still a better option today than doing war russia i know you listen to my podcast yeah instead of invading ukraine why don't you just go get drunk and get jerked off and fuck off back well you probably can't fuck

off back home you will get shot um look get a handy then get shot um there is also mass scale catholic on catholic violence as like the army crossed into lands or under the control of what you could consider the wrong pope you you know, schism and all. And various bits and pieces of the army would break off and start murdering people, then rejoin the army. Then let's go do our own little side quest. Yeah. Yeah.

They're doing fetch quests, but they're fetching blood. And also humans. There's a lot of slavery going on here. Yeah. I can't imagine, imagine like if you're a person in a village and a military is coming oh it's always bad news for you is yeah it's never gonna be your own it could be the french army and you could be a french penzit like crusade aside and you'd be like oh dear god hide our daughters and everything that can be eaten yeah because

that's what they're coming for. Not like they had MREs and, uh, and nudie mags back then. So, you know, they didn't have the things that to keep our soldiers sated as we do today. Uh,

it just, just show up like, well, shit, we're, we're, we're fucked no matter what. Now,

uh, there, then John, the first finally showed up to the crusade in June, a full month after everybody else, because he had stopped along the way to party in Vienna with his brother-in-law Leopold IV, also known as Leopold the Fat.

But he had burned through all of his money, so he asked his brother-in-law for a loan of 100,000 ducats, which from what I can tell is roughly 15 million dollars. But, you know, ducats are gold, and that much gold weighs a lot so it took another month and you know not always gold they're metal it's precious metal

so it took another month for all that to be loaded into boats and sent to the gathering point to meet with everybody else so several years coming and a few months later on a boat with a bunch of copper wire uh sticking out out of the sides like no no we're good we're just gonna hit one more abandoned factory out on the outskirts here and we're good to go

I ran into a small problem where I got fucked up with Leopold and now I'm broke so here's my boat full of a loan who who's among us

hasn't you know woken up and taken a look at our credit card charges the next day and gone ah shit yeah so several years and a few months later the crusades were all in one place most of the heavy cavalry were burgundian and hungarian with the infantry being mostly german and various kinds of italian um philibert the leader of the knights hospitaler pretty much took the reins in leading

discussions and what they were going to do now that everybody was together. However, the war form he was trying to lead immediately turned into a giant bickering mess. Sigismund pointed out that they didn't have to really do anything. The Sultan of the Ottomans, Bayezid I, also awesomely known as Bayezid the Thunderbolt, had promised to attack Hungary. So hypothetically, they just had to sit there and wait for him to show up and fight a defensive war, rather than, you know, try to find enough food to keep 17,000 dudes alive and march out looking for him. The French rejected this immediately, as Baez had promised to attack in May, and it was now July, and he still hadn't come.

They also contended that fighting defensively was dishonorable and called Sigismund a coward. Sigismund tried to point out that they wasted nothing by waiting anyway, but was shouted down by virtually every single other person in the room. Mind you, remember, they came to help him. This is... You hate to see, like, in history, when there's the smatterings,

like there's no, there's no true like military, you know, what am I thinking? Like knowledge, people don't know what the fuck they're doing. Some people probably do. War back then is very individualistic.

Right. And it's hard. It's like, you see one person who's just like, no, actually it would be a lot smarter and we will win harder if we just kind of sit back in our defensive positions where we're safe, where we have everything that we need. Let them come to us, come across the open field. They're going to be tired.

They're going to be worn out. They're not going to have the food and things that they need. We're going to be easily able to defeat them. And somebody's just like, are you gay? What? No. Go. Let's go no yeah

i'm getting out of here like his argument they're all their arguments boil down to like you're being a pussy like we need to attack yeah what do you why are you being why are you being such a bitch dude what why don't you want to die out here in a field for no yeah don't you want to fucking go die trying to get glory um so soon the french were planning the invasion of the ottoman held balkans and sigismund just kind of threw his hands up and went along with it so with that trying to get glory. So soon the French were planning the invasion of the Ottoman held Balkans and Sigismund just kind of threw his hands up and went along with it. So with that, the crusader force marched on down the left side of the Danube,

having no idea where the Ottoman army was having no chain of command. And the King of Hungary just said, fuck all of this and put himself at the back of the army. Having been completely cut off from the decision-making process, the constable of Hungary, which is so the constable back then didn't mean a cop i mean it kind of did but police didn't really exist yet um but it was like the the commander of the military the constable of hungary nicholas dagara led the vanguard that meaning the front of it with the franco burgundian force in the middle. So they're just walking. Just like

40,000 dudes just walking. They have no idea where they're going. Nothing is planned. One guy in front is like, I don't know, fuck it, this way. As soon as the Crusaders entered Ottoman-controlled territory, they were on a murder spree, which shouldn't surprise anybody at this point.

Though, this will come back to bite them in the ass so you know this is one of the few times that like an army full of assholes does violent shit and actually like gets their comeuppance but you know doesn't happen enough in history unfortunately during the last week of august the crusaders reads or sava where the danube flows through the limestone gorge that is known as the Iron Gates. However, because nobody was really in charge of this gaggle of assholes, nobody was planning anything,

so nobody called ahead, sent a messenger ahead, whatever, to make sure there was enough boats to ferry them all across the gorge. So this process took a fucking week. Now, after taking a full week, now mind you, remember, they're in ottoman territory now

like there's scouts spies civilians everywhere so the longer they take the easier it is for word to get back to some ottoman commander but like there's a whole bunch of fucking assholes in town and you know this is giving them more time to prepare you know um so this brought the process to cross the gorge took a week they fell on to the town of vadine which is under the control of the bulgarian czar who at the time was a proxy vassal of the ottomans now when he saw the crusader army show up he immediately surrendered to join the crusaders and threw open the gates of the city what do you think happens next, Francis? They were welcome as liberators. Well, they were, depending on which part of the city you happen to be a part of.

Because there's a lot of Muslims, Turks living within the city walls. And of course, it became open season on them. They massacred everybody who looked even slightly from anatolia uh in in that city and then went buck wild across ottoman territory doing the kinds of things that crusaders do and remember at this point they had not found an ottoman army they had no idea where one was and they weren't even really scouting ahead this is this is the glory they're looking for just murdering the shit out of unarmed civilians that is certainly easier like it's very it's a lot easier for them to sack cities and steal shit from people who don't fight back right um then they moved on to the city of

nicopolis which was an important city in the lower danube and was a base of ottoman operations into hungary and wallachia the city was also well defended with a fortress and two walled towns nearby the citadel of the fortress easily saw everything to the east and west with supporting fortresses in the south in short it's not a great place to attack they're gonna see you coming yeah and be prepared for it in every way possible they're gonna be cowards and defend themselves look at those fine they've got the We've got the glory of God on our side Look at those giant babies hiding behind their thick stone walls Bayezad gave command

Of the defense of the area to Dogon Bay And they settled in for a siege Small problem for the crusaders though You know what's really important for a siege, Francis? Uh To have supplies? Yeah, and the means To do a siege namely siege engines ladders rams things of that nature they didn't bring any they're just running up and hitting the sides of the walls of

the castles with their their swords and shit well there was an immediate breakdown of any kind of central command that existed um which wasn't much with each country's crusaders just kind of central command that existed, which wasn't much, with each country's crusaders just kind of doing whatever the fuck it is that they wanted to do. And this was ramped up at the difficulty level because they couldn't talk to one another. Outside of the nobility who generally had a common language, which was French. But

immediately outside the nobility and even then the core highest levels of nobility, nobody could talk to one another so you had one half of the crusaders decide hey we need to build ladders while the other half decide to tunnel under the walls and blow them up without either side talking with or working with the other hell yeah and oh yeah i'm all about it let's's do it. I love both of these fucking wily coyote-ass ideas. And to be fair, a lot of them also spoke Latin.

But again, that was the nobility. Not everybody in this situation spoke Latin or French. Now, the crusaders who dug the tunnel immediately blew themselves up on accident. And the ones that were building ladders realized that, wow, there's no trees around here tall enough to make ladders out of that could reach the top of the walls so oh for two um so for the tunnel though like they built the tunnel and then blew it up by accident like i don't like i would think that as long as the explosion still happens, it would be successful, even if you paced a few of your knights.

They did build a tunnel, and they did build something you could consider a bomb. However, it was not in the right place when it exploded. Yeah, well, and were they just like, well, that's enough of that. We can't tunnel again and do it again. I feel like you shouldn't let one setback stop the whole idea it's a good plan you guys just need an eod guy um need somebody who knows what the fuck an eod guy back then is like pretty much a wizard um but like yeah again like you're you're talking from a place that like if they had someone controlling any of this chaos,

which they do not. Sure. This is basically one guy's is like, hey, I know how to make a bomb. Yeah. Everybody else is like, all right, cool. He read the 1300s equivalent of the anarchist cookbook and then promptly turned everybody into pasta sauce.

Yeah. Right after everybody got high smoking banana peels. Yeah. Once again, showing our age. Now, while the crusaders were busy trying to figure out how to do a siege, Bayezid was rapidly slapping together an army to come to the aid of the city. Ottoman forces assembled in Constantinople through August, and at points designated for assembly on Bayezid's expected route to the north of the Danube Valley, he gathered more and more forces as he went.

And because we haven't joked enough about how stereotypically racist European countries are and who was involved in this, this is when the Serbians showed up. Oh, boy. Bayezid traveled like a true Ottoman sultan in every way you can imagine. Since he was leading the army personally he brought with him hundreds of wagons um the reason for this was he of course took his absolutely massive harem with him but he was also the head of state so he took every administrative function of the empire with him in the backs of wagons because he had to run the entire country as he

left my god like you just like the guy who has to deal with the sewage is like hey buddy you're empire with him in the backs of wagons because he had to run the entire country as he left. My god, like, you're just like the guy who has to deal with the sewage. He's like, hey buddy, you're going to war now. You're going to have to deal with sewage on the road here. Like, oh, you need something notarized? You gotta mail it to the goddamn government wagon.

Which to me, I mean, so it's the precursor to the 42 alphas. You know, you gotta to bring your admin staff with you. Yeah, yeah. Everybody's wagon-based, though, which is significant. It's like if you were stuck on a government-based field training exercise. Like you had to bring the Department of Revenue. You had to bring the traffic police.

You had to bring, I don't know, the Department of revenue you had to bring the the the traffic police you had to bring uh i don't know the department of sanitation motor vehicles department like every terrible government worker is now a member of this army hell yeah by the end of september scouting parties the two sides finally ran into one another and at this point the crusaders had their lone victory in all of this assuming you don't count slaughtering innocent civilians as a victory which to be fair the crusaders absolutely did count those as victories it's hard man you get you get you get sword arm chopping you know putting putting all these peasants to the sword the first tommy john surgery in human history was from a knight who blew his elbow cutting off an innocent person's head. Now, managing to see the Ottoman scouts first

and luring them into an ambush, they managed to win. And this would be the high water point. Everything is downhill from here. That same day, after learning where the crusaders were, Bayezid positioned his army south of the city's citadel on the high ground, dug in behind ditches,

walls of sharp spikes, berms, and creating absolute hell for any attacker that was on horseback, which of course the crusader army was dominated by heavily armored cavalry. Behind each row of stakes and ditches were bowmen who could fire off at cavalry who then be forced to slow down when they ran across the obstacles. He also places reserves made up of the Janissaries on the back slope of the hill, concealing them from view. Then he waited. Coward.

Yeah, yeah. So much cowardice happening here with your preparing of defenses. Coward winning the war and killing all of us. Coward. You know, it's like World War I. Whole war of cowards hiding in their trenches they should just be running directly at one another um now it turned out a lot of that too yeah that's true um like if you dig so much as one inch into the ground while

you're at war immediate coward status you're you you will not go to the see the kingdom of heaven it turned out when your doctrine didn't boil down to the fake concept of honor that was chivalry, you could actually plan ahead. Bayaza knew the crusaders very well. After all, he assumed their hyper-aggressive, stupid nature would mean that they would assault him no matter where he was, even if terrain, time, and everything else wasn't on their side. For example, his flanks were secured by rough ground and thick woods, making it a pretty bad place to deploy cavalry, again, badly hampering the cavalry-dominated crusader army, and they would have to attack directly into the obstacles that he had laid out in front of him. And it turned out that Bayezid was right, and none of this would matter

to the crusaders. Now, Sigismund had been fighting the ottomans for a while and he recommended that someone go ahead and probe the enemy positions namely the wallachians and the transylvanians i assume because they're vampires um and they would be able to no daytime raids man yeah the the like the wallachians are the day walkers of of the transylvanian vampires everybody knows this uh it's just the whole army of blades not a single one paying their taxes on time there's a whole lot of dudes like now because like motherfuckers ice skating uphill like he wanted to find out where the ottomans were so he could then uh send in skirmishers namely in the form of like Bowman to soften them up before attacking. Cause he knew better.

Like he knew the Ottomans would have dug in. Um, so, and this had worked before in the past, like his tactic wasn't being pulled straight out of his ass. He knew how to do it. Uh, of course,

everybody thought this was a terrible idea. The French were insulted by the idea that their forces would follow people. They considered to be lesser peasants because he was going to send in the Wallachians and the Transylvanians. The constable of France, Philippe d'Artois, accused Sigismund of trying to steal his honor by sending his Hungarian subjects first. Once again, Sigismund threw his hands up and said, fine, you lead. So the attack would now be led by the Franco-Burgundian heavy cavalry. There'd be no scouting, nothing done at all before the attack, which was then launched on September 25th. As soon as the Crusaders began their advance, they started getting shot at by archers that had been concealed in the small clumps of trees that dotted the slopes of the hills.

Now, these weren't enough to penetrate the Crusaders' armor, unless they were lucky and slotted one through an eye hole or something um but like as the crusaders attacked the bowmen would withdraw meaning that as they got closer they would retreat further up the hill they the bows were strong enough to fuck up the horses that the crusaders were riding so you know um one chronicler wrote quote hail nor rain does not come down in a closer shower than did their shafts yeah I know I laughed at that too eventually the archers pulled back and for some reason this

made the crusaders believe that the entire Ottoman line was collapsing so the crusader vanguard rather than wait for the rest of the army, and remember, the Vanguard is full of all of the nobles who are supposed to be leading this army. They're all in there other than Sigismund and a few others.

So the Crusader Vanguard left everybody behind and rode full bore ahead, separating themselves from the main force who they left far, far behind them. And they rode directly into the defensive works. Some horses impaled themselves on the stakes, throwing their riders to the ground. Other knights jumped off their horses, ran forward,

and tried pulling the stakes out of the ground to make way for the men behind them. They did eventually open a path that was only big enough for about 15-ish people to go through at a time, which is known as, you know, the funnel of death. Right. Hey, what if we just created a bottleneck here? Yeah.

Tactical bottleneck, but we did it. Yeah. This made killing them as they came through incredibly easy for the Ottomans. Well, see, what you do is if you have a bunch of barbed wire, you just, like, throw a bunch of your dead comrades over the barbed wire and then you step over their bodies perfect perfect ideas corpse bridge yeah corpse look in in a war corpse infrastructure is uh is your saving grace always you gotta what do we got we got a lot of fucking dead bodies let's start coming up with some ideas how do we how do we counter build the ottomans what what resources

do we have i don't know i see a fuckload of dead transylvanians though let's let can we make a pot yeah dead transylvanian siege tower yeah uh now the the massive crush of bodies uh and the heavy armor that was worn by the crusaders meant that they were able to slowly crash through the center of the ottoman line through sheer dumb force of will they were able they were able to uh slowly just push their way through just because like unstoppable force versus a movable object kind of situation yeah i mean like they are wearing very heavy armor it is hard to kill a guy in full plate armor you have to like unless you have the ability to puncture their armor you kind of have to get them to the ground and then finish them off so

like they're not easy to kill even if they are doing dumb shit like sprinting directly into a wall of spikes once again the ottoman archers pulled away to the flanks raining arrows down on them as they plowed through the center at this point the vanguard had actually kind of done their job they had broken through the line to make way for everyone else so Ducucci and the admiral of France Jean de Vannes who I assume was lost because he's a fucking admiral attempting to order the men to halt the vanguard to hold their ground keep that gap open for the rest of the army to catch up to them and then they would push forward from there how do you think that went um well it's a navy guy given given directions on the land so uh i assume that like nobody heard and also the vanguard was just like you know this

glory that we have is good but i bet we can get some more if we just uh kept kept on going you're kind of right on both both regards thousands of men who had just been told that anything other than charging ahead was seen as god by as some like pussy shit immediately ignored their commanders and kept charging forward now this created a snowball effect it's you know thes. Not everybody hears this order. So when you don't know, follow everybody else, which is... To be fair, that rule still rules in war. You always don't know what's going on. When you see a mob of your own guys going one way, it's generally in your best interest to try to keep up.

So other knights who didn't hear the orders, maybe they didn't hear the orders, maybe they did, simply followed them, assuming they're doing the right thing by going with the pack of knights surging forward. Unfortunately for them, at this point, virtually all of the vanguard had lost their horses, and the rest of the army was still nowhere to be seen because they had charged so far ahead. nowhere to be seen because they had charged so far ahead. So, Bayezid sent in his reserves, which the crusaders didn't even know existed until this point because they had not scouted. Now, included in the reserves were the Janissaries, who were mostly

infantry, but were also heavily armored. Mounted mace-wielding force known as the Kapikulu, which, much like the Janissaries, so for people who aren't aware, Janissaries are press gang child slaves who've been raised for the purpose of soldiering.

The name Kapi Kulu directly translates to slaves of the sublime port, which is the Ottoman government. Most Janissaries and in turn Kapi Kulu slaves were generally slaves of the minorities from the ottoman empire like

kurds armenians assyrians and greeks because they would be forcefully converted and then turned into slave soldiers um so not not not the best way to uh fill out the ranks of your well they do have a great reputation for being fanatical soldiers for a very good reason. Well, there you go. You can brainwash them from a young age and get what you need. I get it. Yeah, pretty much. And they kind of turned into something of a Praetorian guard where they got enough influence where they could influence politics by murdering people.

The easiest way to influence politics is just to stab a guy yeah pretty much i will leave it at that and not say what i was thinking of um they slammed into the knights who are now badly outnumbered and getting their heads smashed in with maces wielded by slave soldiers once the knights hit the ground they were swarmed by later armored ottoman soldiers who frantically stabbed and slashed at them through gaps in their armor. Though it's always best to think about this as they're always getting stabbed in the fucking eyes. Just taking one into the face. I get it.

The eyes under the armpits, anywhere where there was gaps in the armor so the knights could move. They got swords and knives jammed all up in there, which normally only happens to you now after a long night out. Before long, the Ottoman cavalry wheeled around and surrounded the entire vanguard. Now, because their lead from the front god demands this of you beliefs, their entire chain of command was now surrounded. This included the key commanders like John I. Enemies on all sides of him, John I was fighting on, attempting to control the vanguard, and finally said fuck all this honor shit, and he threw down his sword and surrendered.

Which, to be fair, good choice. Seeing their nominal commander surrender, most of everybody else who was still alive inside that encirclement quickly followed suit. This is when the rest of the army finally showed up um at this point the battle is completely over but sigismund orders a charge racing up the hill

attempting to uh like save the the vanguard at which point he's promptly flanked by serbs sigismund looking around saying wow this has gone very badly abandoned everyone and ran for his life a lot of a lot of glory hounds uh suddenly not getting any glory like did they not realize what death meant or something or did they did they just like no god is going to uh shield me with the the veil of his holiness i will not die oh god where did all these serbs come from i mean i ask myself this every time i go to the club uh anyone who could ran for the danube river hoping to jump on one of the boats that were waiting for them there however there were only a few boats and not nearly enough for everybody to

cross as the boatman pulled, worried about being overloaded, Sigismund chased after them on horseback, riding his horse directly into the river, jumping aboard the last boat as it pulled away, leaving his horse to drown in the river behind him. Hell yeah. Just abandon everything, man. Just tuck tail and run.

Love it. Several men tried to swim across the river, but of course died because, you know, they're wearing armor and shit. They tried to swim across the fucking Danube river. Yeah. It's not, it's not a Creek, man. You can't, you can't just swim across a river. Yeah.

Um, and you know, the ability to swim is that very common as well. Right. Back then. And anybody left ashore were slaughtered by the Ottoman forces when they eventually found them. As for the men who were captured, Bayezid ordered the vast majority of them, around 3,000, to be executed because of all the horrible shit they'd been doing since they crossed into Ottoman territory. shit they'd been doing since they crossed into ottoman territory though he did show some kind of uh like sympathy to anyone under the age of 20 who he then forced into slavery instead of executing i mean compromise you show up for glory uh and somebody's just like look you're you're 16 i'm not gonna hold it against you But also put these chains on. I marched off for the glory of God.

And now all I do is make bread all day for a Turkish family who treats me like shit. I can't imagine that that's any worse than what that guy had going on before. That could be true. Yeah. Now, the most important people were kept to be ransomed off, which was normal for the time. people were kept to be ransomed off which was normal for the time if you're a noble of any stature you'd be ransomed off back to your family because they know you that you have money though a lot of them died in captivity um yeah i'm sure there's no need to look into what happened there i mean it's it's we're talking about the late 1300s it could be anything it could just be

the what the water here doesn't agree with me, so I died. Yeah, he died of shitting ass syndrome again. The few knights who survived all of this thought to be fewer than 10 were eventually returned home in 1398, two full years after the battle. Now, how do you rebuild your feudalism system after this

like your entire like upper echelon of nobility has just been wiped out you're just like well it's just time to get some new knights i guess we call this a uh a job that has promotion opportunity um yeah they all returned home about two years after the battle and after all of this sigismund did the thing that you know most people in Europe tend to do. Blame everything on the French, which we can all kind of support. The end. Yep.

Fucking French. Now, I just want to say, I appreciate that as we learn, as I have been learning more, you've been doing a lot of medieval stuff recently. it is very funny to learn just how stupid europeans are uh and and just how smart literally everybody else was by doing simple things like building defense systems which is you know even if it's something like just put some stakes in the ground over there their horses will get fucked up by it and it turns out that yes that would that would happen um well i i like to think of it as um the eras that uh that i mean nowadays

only certain kinds of of people uh attempt to romanticize and say it's like the era of champions and heroes and stuff like that era doesn't exist for anybody um your military heroes generally were all very stupid and they just got very lucky especially back in the day um and everyone's history is full of the dumbest shit possible like the the western civilization is like this concept that is built upon the dumbest dudes um that tend to be given a pass and i'm not saying that the ottomans were you know geniuses or good i'm fucking armenian you'll never hear me say that um but like in this situation like they didn't have to do much they didn't go fuck up other people. They were just doing commerce.

And then somebody, a bunch of knights showed up. And they were like, we don't like that. Well, the Ottomans didn't fuck up a lot. There is no march of empire that is not built upon the bones of whoever is going behind them. There's a lot of forced conversions. The Dimi system was eventually put into place. Like, the Ottomans are just fucking absolute ghouls. eventually put into place like the ottomans are just fucking absolute ghouls but you know in this situation they just had to be they had to have some minimum amount of competence which the crusaders didn't have and that's that's something that is incredibly common throughout the entire

crusader history like it's because while most of the you know the various uh uh muslim armies which were not you know there's there's no muslim empire during this point but they do tend to have some kind of continuity and centralization led by people that people rally around like saladin bayezid and others whereas and you know a common unifying language for the most part as well as for them they're always seen as defensive so it's much easier to rally people behind the cause and then there's of course backdoor politicking and backstabbing and everything else going on there on their side as well but the europeans almost always ran into the same fucking problems over and over again namely the fact is they were still Europeans

and they all fucking hated one another. I'm just imagining those stupid Deus Vult images, but instead of a heroic crusader, it's a guy just shitting himself constantly. My squire didn't open my butt flap for my liquid shitting. The whole squeaky thing because it's just covered in shit and rusty. They didn't have WD-40 back then.

It was probably some awful version of that that could only exist in the 1300s, like dog's blood or something. I mean, not that long ago, we did an episode where they literally didn't think about the fact that they needed to drink water in the desert. So this just keeps coming up. And we that they needed to drink water in the desert. So like,

you know, this just keeps coming up. Um, and you know, we'll do more crusade stuff in the future. It's always fun because it's always fun to laugh at these idiots. Um, cause like the crusaders can, in no stretch of the imagination ever be considered the good guys.

Uh, but they often are always portrayed that way for obvious reasons in Western media. And instead, there were just a whole bunch of backstabbing, two-faced assholes who all hated one another and never even planned the smallest amount of anything when it came to a military campaign. And they should be laughed at. And that's what we like to do here. Francis, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

And oftentimes I have Tom on now, who's a great co-host, but he was never in the military. So we can't do many military-centric questions. So today we have one tailor-made for the both of us. And it's going to require a bit of explanation. What is the weirdest thing you've ever encountered during a health and welfare inspection or heard of in the case of soldiers? Now, for people who are unaware, a health and welfare inspection is something that is done in the army where you have to go do room inspections to make sure. This, of course, is what they say to make sure soldiers are living in a hygienic and safe environment um which is very ironic considering all the stories about the black mold and shit that's yeah of course

like most soldiers things they mostly just care that like soldiers aren't wallowing in a pit of their own filth which you know they generally soldiers are gross like they're teenagers most of them have never lived on their own so like you know they probably they're like there's not a small number of number of people who learned how to wash their clothes in basic training um you know so like you find some wild shit uh during health and welfare and you were in reserve so maybe your experience is different did you guys ever do stuff like this uh thankfully no because uh otherwise they would have discovered that we were making wine under our bunks in uh iraq but considering we're giving some of the wine to our commanding officer uh well not not our not our major but a couple of our lieutenants would get a bottle when we were

when we were brew so um but i have officers only pruno yeah i've gone into other people's um rooms and just been like i never understood when we were in iraq we had these small rooms and there's two people per room and there were people who smoked in their rooms and that just never like yeah like i was a smoker at the time so like i can't talk too much shit but smoking in your room that is like really just a 12 by 12 box um was always disgusting uh i do know that there is a task and purpose had a story about somebody who found a bunch of ducks like when marine was keeping ducks hell yeah there's there's usually like a pet thing you'll find out uh at some point but uh no i never had to do personally i never had to do any uh

health and welfare checks uh and i didn't have too many disgusting soldiers because i was never really in combat arms um and i i feel like combat arms is where a lot of those kind of like dudes that didn't that nobody like helped teach them some domestic things didn't really exist there. Yeah, I have a few. So I'll tell a short one and a long one because I was an NCO and I frequently had to do health and welfare inspections. But one time I got a soldier, like I just showed up. It was, of course, Fort Hood, the nightmare of all, which has a new name now,

which I don't know what it is. Cavazos? Yeah, Fort Cavazos, whatever. Back then it was Fort Hood. We don't use the old names because we're racist. We use them because we're lazy. I legitimately didn't know

what it was called anymore. And also this was over 10 years ago so you know um but i got a new team so i had to go do a health and welfare inspection and hypothetically you're supposed to do an inspection every morning after pt uh physical training uh and i came into this team kind of under the assumption that had been happening for the last two years it had never an assumption to make it had not been um the first soldier's room that i walked in he just had a woman living in there um like not in the military even in the military that wouldn't have been okay but there was just someone from the out the local town uh she had fully moved in uh because he had a roommate which is not the person under my

charge who broke the rules and was just living off post without permission so like that room was empty effectively and everybody seemed okay with that or wasn't keeping track of it and this random woman had moved in they'd pushed the beds together they'd turn into the small studio apartment like they had settled like they had they they had that's nice actually i mean it's it's a shitty barracks room this is fort hood circa 2008 so the barracks rooms are really bad but i was like yo what in the fuck is going on in here he's like oh this is my fiance i'm like well it's nice to meet you please leave um because what is happening here is not only like against military like well it's nice to meet you please leave um because what is happening here is not only like against military regulation and it's going to get him in trouble you are breaking

the law this is illegal yeah like cannot do this look as a civilian i say i am fully on board with random people squatting in military barracks but as someone that this was going to hurt me professionally if this got out yeah that one was bad uh hurt me professionally if this got out? Yeah, that one was bad. The second one was straight up disgusting. This is a different time years later. Same kind of situation. I get a new team going there into the assumption that there have been room inspections going on. Once again, I am incorrect in this assumption. and it looks like the most nightmarish uh like 4chan ass redditor fucking barracks room you've ever seen and i'm not saying that like they had swastikas hanging up or anything but like

mountain dew bottles like ankle high cover the floor there's empty pizza boxes stacked like five six high and every flat surface and the only clean surface in the room is this small circle around where he sits at his computer desk and the whole place just smells like i don't know like a fucking like burning hair and bo and balls and i was like i've i had deployed a couple times by then i have smelled some awful aromas and i had to step the fuck out of that room to get fresh air um and you know i there's no way i could smooth this one over because he's living in a landfill uh so i had to tell my supervisor at which point the entire platoon had to clean his room so 30 ish dudes and it took hours to clean this room hours because this guy's just living in filth um but you know afterwards

i was like hey you know you you can't live like that it was it was like watching an episode of hoarders uh it was awful um i don't i was gone shortly thereafter uh i i would like to assume that he didn't he no longer lived in a sea of mountain dew bottles of pizza uh and what's really funny is i know we like where the show is listened to quite often by active duty soldiers uh and veterans and i'm willing to bet almost all of them have a story that's vaguely similar to that there's always there's always one dude yeah there's always the one stinky kid in class right and just you know you feel bad because like nobody's taught this person or maybe like they joined the army because they didn't really have any like people

come from like really bad backgrounds and join the army because it's an opportunity to get out of that bad background um but at the same time they don't really come with like things that just like you've gotta you've gotta stop like when you get off of work you should do something that isn't play world of warcraft and drink mountain dew and eat pizza until until one o'clock in the morning and then doing the whole thing over again like you you need to you need to become a better person in some way, shape or form. Yeah.

And I'm sure anybody who's okay living with that is going through other things that need to be handled. So I'm not, I'm not shaming them by any stretch of the imagination. I am saying, however, walking into that was, was an experience.

Francis, thank you so much for joining me here uh back on the regular feed of the show um use this area to pay for my voice yeah use this this this this area to plug your projects yes what a hell of a way to die it's a uh nominally military podcast uh though nate and i uh my co-host nate and i are moving more towards um dad ish stuff because uh we're all creeping up on middle ages i'm fully ensconced in middle age so you know having a conversation about what the fuck that means uh because our 40s are here or they're coming so uh we're we're discussing things like that. And Joe's on that show too.

Yeah. Um, sometimes you're going to have to change it to like, what have a hell, what a hell of a way to dad. So you can keep the same, uh, initials.

Okay. So I have actually bought, um, the, uh, Google came out with new, uh, dot domains.

And one of them is dot dad. And I have bought, what a hell of a way to dot dad that is the most francis thing you've ever done uh assuming assuming the home page is just a pair of cargo shorts as the navigator menu yes and uh and a um a link to get a costco card hell yeah uh and everybody thank you so much for listening if you like what we do here on the show and you want to support it you can support us on Patreon. You get episodes like this one a week, sometimes two weeks

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