Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 401 - The battle of Lake Peipus

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys We visit the 13th century Northern Crusades and examine what happens when Alexander Nevsky and the Livonian Order go head-to-head for a battle on the ice. No, not like that—no pucks, no skates, and way more bog mud than could possibly be healthy. WORKS CITED EBSCO. “Alexander Nevsky | History | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” Accessed February 9, 2026. https://www.ebsco.com. Fennell, John. "The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200-1304." Longman History of Russia. Taylor and Francis, 2014. Gore, Terry. “Lake Peipus: Battle on the Ice.” Military Heritage 7, no. 1 (2005). https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/lake-peipus-battle-on-the-ice/. Hellie, Richard. “Alexander Nevskii's April 5, 1242 Battle on the Ice.” Russian History 33, no. 2/4 (2006): 283–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24664445. Smith, Jerry C., and William L. Urban, eds. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle: Transl. with an Hist. Introd., Maps and App. Indiana University Publications. Uralic and Altaic Series 128. Indiana Univ, 1977.

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to Patreon.com slash Lions led by Donkeys and join

the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hey everybody and welcome back to the Lions at By Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, how are we doing?

I'm doing good. I've made friends with the Muslim bodybuilders in my gym. They're slowly trying to convince me to say the shahara, life is good. All right. I'm all right. I've been running a bit. I ride my bike a bit.

I put my headphones in when I ride my bike because I have a death wish. But also it's a lot safer here than it is in London or New York. The other cities I've ridden a bike in. And I, man, I had like every bike problem you could think of going to, for one, someone fucking disconnected my motor cable, which I realized after. It was fine, though. I mean, I put it back in. What is the concentration of Armenians in your,

area? I don't know, man. They don't want electrics. They only want catalytic converter. Yeah, exactly. There weren't any precious metals on the connector tips of that motor cable, so they didn't see any reason to. Honestly, it was probably because people were jostling it in the fucking, you know,

bike cavern and it got pulled out. Anyway, so like, then my tires had to be filled up and it was nightmare. And running errands before everything closes at like 5 p.m. on Saturday. It doesn't open until Monday because this is the Protestant country. And so I was kind of like, man, fuck this. But I was like, I need to get the ride. I need to get some exercise. I'll feel good.

And then Tom, you'll appreciate this. And maybe Joe, you will too. I was riding up there's a stretch of the road. Like, once you get on the protected path, it's chill as hell. It's wonderful. And it was going up on my way home. Headphones fucking randomly selected. It was Bulletproof by Leroux.

It was Call Your Girlfriend by Robin. And it was ride a white horse by Goldfrapp. And I was just like, your showful absolutely said, bitch you gay? Bitch you gay. And I was like, and I thought to myself for a second. I was like, oh, then it was man eater by Nelly Furtado. And then I was like, man, if you told me 20 years ago, like, yeah, in 2026, you'll live in Switzerland and you'll be whipping work on an electric bike for some reason, just breaking every Swiss traffic law, listening to Manningator. I'd be like, all right, doing pretty well for myself. There goes the bike sexual. I'm not, though. Those exist, man. Those exist. And like I said, they love electric bikes and like cargo electric bikes here to the point that once again, it's Portuguese Final Fantasy 8. So, I mean, I like it. I love it here. But boys, today we're talking about the crusades. One of the good ones or...

No such thing. But not any of the crusades we've talked about yet. We're talking about a crusade that involved an entire battle, allegedly, on a frozen lake. Lake Pepys. It might be Pipus. I think it's Pepys. If it's German, if you're dealing with German shit, it would probably be Pipus. Yeah.

However, I, too, understand that when it's the potential exists, we're calling it Lake Peepin. You gotta reach out, grab the peepus by the shafts sometimes. Yeah, in the club bathroom jorking my peepus. That's right. Much like your strange co-worker, you know the one who's always single, talks about how he wants her traditional woman because the Western women have been poisoned by feminism. We're also going east. See, those guys exist and reality what women want is a line cook that is severely underwerely

underweight that smoke cigarettes and probably can sell them cocaine. I mean, look, women want a lot of things. Some women, maybe they do want a guy who believes in traditional values. I doubt it. Well, absolutely, if you're nice, you smile, you shower every day and you either have or know someone who can get someone the key to take the shoplifting thing off of baby formula for Aldi, you will be in business. One time I was buying baby formula at Aldi and no one in the fucking store could figure out how to do it. And I remember having this moment, I'm like, we're so hung up on we got to prevent shoplifting in Britain, but also like we can't have actual

staff in a store. It's like, what's the solution? Put the formula in jail. I'm going on a first day and I'm winning the woman over when I produce my neodynium cube. To understand this episode, we have to talk about some guys that Pete Hegg Seth really thinks he enjoys,

but knows nothing about. The Teutonic Order. Sometimes known as the Teutonic Knights. Like previous orders, we've talked about. We've talked with the Knights Hospitaller before. The Teutonic order formed as a result of the Crusades, specifically in the case of these guys, as a result of the loss of Jerusalem in 1187. Per an order from the Pope, all of the hospitals in Jerusalem were under the command of the hospitalers, hence their name. But now with all of that out of the way and the siege of Acre and

1190 kicking off, a group of Germans took up the mission within that specific city's walls. The effort started in 1191, the order was efficiently recognized by the Pope. hope two years later with the original name, the Order of Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem, which I say, Issaquay-ass name. I was going to say that's a fucking fallout song, ass title. Mary, we're going down crusading. Leave the music jokes to the people who know music, Joe.

And who is that exactly? Are you going to pretend it's you two? Now, you know a lot about music about bands that nobody's ever heard of died way before I was born. But I mean, to be honest with you, I've never heard of a single one of the bands that you've mentioned. And they all have names like riffs on the formula of like, you know,

my cremical romance kind of shit, but also just like, but then you're like, you guys, you too, you know all these band names, you know all the lore behind them. And to me,

it all sounds like like mad libs for emo bands from the 2000s. And you're like, oh, that one, he was drunk driver. He's a white supremacist. He definitely is, uh,

definitely don't, don't leave him alone with underage fans. Nate, they're all the last guy you just named. Every single one of them. Nate, why do you think I'm on the show? It's because I'm the midpoint between the two of you, because I know about both of your sons. He is the demilitarized zone of shitty music taste.

Now, the original mission was obviously hospitals. That is what all of these guys originally got into. Hence, why their name is that. Hence why they were the Knights Hospitaller, and these guys were this other name. But in 1198, following the example of the hospitaler and the Knights Templar, they form themselves into a religious military order, largely under the guidance of their new titled Grand Master, Hermon von Salza. He's a German noble, I think he's from Tringia, but Herman is largely responsible for the rise of the order thanks to his personal friendship with Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire and Pope Oronius II. He had effectively taken command and rebuilt the entire thing after it had largely been destroyed fighting in the Armenian kingdom of Silesia.

Whoops. They pulled their horses into town. They had no horseshoes when they left. I said the joke because you guys can't. We've talked about this before back in the day in regards to the hospitalar specifically. But most of these religious military institutions were little more than protection rackets combined with. trafficking fake religious historical icons to raise funds. And that is absolutely my favorite thing about them.

If it wasn't for all of the war crimes and, you know, genocide, I would respect the hustle. Because if you think about it, this is hilarious. They would entice pilgrims of coming to the Holy Land and then effectively be like, hey, be ashamed if you got robbed on the roads going out this way. Oh, by the way, would you like a piece of the one true cross or else? Would you like to buy a metal iPhone case made out of a smelted horseshoes that an Armenian sold me? I'm trying to think of what the equivalent would be of a catalytic converter because obviously we're less concerned about horse, uh, horse CO2 emissions or fucking carbon monoxide, but

I want a greed horse. All right, Huey Lewis in the news, Jesus Christ. I would say, what if the horses had like precious metals on their horseshoes? That's sort of like the actual carbon converter. Yeah. You can, you can understand why, why people like stealing them so much. I guess the only other equivalent would be like if you had like a horse shit catcher, but it was like bedazzled with rubies and apples for some reason.

And every car had one, it had to have one legally. You can understand. It would be like if Rick Ross owned a horse and that the horse is also a cop. The timblowers rocking up would have just blinged out chain of horseshoes. And you have to try to convince them that is good thing that like you have to have all this bling for your shitty maceated horse, otherwise you cannot enter the Holy Land. And if you don't buy it for me, I am also going to jack your horse and sell it to the next guy. What you don't realize is this horseshoe was actually on the donkey that Jesus rode on Palm Sunday. Yep, that's right.

These forces were what Jesus wore to the one true cross, which I'm also selling you. And for you friend, I will give you a good price and only you. That's how you knew Barabbas was a thief. It's because he had black forces on the cross. I mean, I love the idea of it was like, oh, it's like, the shroud of turin kind of shit. Like this, this cloth was actually draping our Lord and Savior's body after the, after his crucifixion. And it's like,

it's just some guy's laundry. It's just some man's fucking dirty towel. You're like, yeah, but this, no, this is 2,000 years old. Well,

in this case, a thousand years old. And it was definitely steeped in history. And it was like, why does it, why does it smell like plum brandy and ass sweat? And it's like, they had that back then.

Jesus was into it. That's not a skid mark. That's blow. I think we're just inventing the world's first Casabian. Over time, the crusades States, began to decline. And like, say, the Knights Templar, the Teutonic Knights remained heavily influential, because famously, the Templars kind of got purged. There's a lot of rumors about them

doing some, like, occult shit. I'm really interested in the Templars, but this is not the time and place for their story. Most of it has to do with just the Templars falling out of favor. And then everybody coming up with the fact like, oh, they're, they're heretics. That's why we have to steal all their business holdings. Yeah, they're, they do gay initiation ceremonies. So we're going to like eviscerate all of them. Like that genuinely, this was the thing like there, there were a number of of them that were once the tide turned when they suddenly, like you said, they became too powerful and fell out of favor. That was another thing too of like, uh, actually the Templars are, uh, well, what do you think they get up to in their big castles? Like, I don't know,

counting money apparently, but no, they're like counting money in a gay way. They're doing Scrooge McDuck shit, but like, but if Scrooge McDuck was really into P&P. Yeah, Scrooge McDuck diving into his coins naked, but then he nuts as soon as he, enters, he breaks the surface tension of the points. In Scrooge McDuck's defense, we don't know that he didn't do that. I guess in a way I don't want to envision it because that would envision the Ducktail's opening sequence of

Scrooge McDuck diving in with a weird corkscrew dick that ducks out. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum, all right, keep going. And by the death throes of the kingdom of Acre in the early 1200s, the Teutonic Knights were in charge of collecting vast customs fees at the port.

They were legitimately one of the most powerful entities within the kingdom. Dudes were fantastically wealthy, but they knew as well as virtually everybody else did, that Ager's days were numbered, and they did exactly want to go down with the ship. A bunch of guys who were extremely German, checking your paperwork and taking bribes at the port of what's now Haifa.

That's never happened before. And, yeah, you could assume because it's a bunch of German dudes, they're near water, it's hot out, they're all naked. Every single one of them is naked. Yeah, FKK goes back, before even the establishment of the German consciousness. Basically, anytime the sun shines in the greater Germanic sphere, everyone takes their clothes off. It's like a pagan.

Exactly. Now you can see it near where I live. I would go into detail more about the fall of acre, but I'm really interested in it, which means you're all eventually going to have to suffer through a series about it at some point in the future. Like other knights, soldiers, and anyone else who made their living murdering people in the name of God, after the best show in town got shut down,

they went running around looking for new work. And for the Tetonic Knights, that came from Hungary. So King Andrew the 2nd of Hungary invited the order into what would be known as the Berzinland to deal with a little problem of the cumin raiders. The cumin, rather than being a tasty spice, were also known as the Kipchak. They're generally a pagan Turkic people that were starting to seriously run Hungary's pockets. And the kingdom wanted to stop their encroachment. There's too much human in this kingdom.

Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of. We haven't invented paprika yet. We don't know what coriander it is. This can't stand. How dare you come over here and spice my pockets full of goulash? They didn't have goulash yet because it's a new world spice. So can you imagine what fucked food they had in Hungary back then?

Just mayo and macaroni. I mean, honestly, it's just basically probably just German food. Hungary actually stands out because they're like, hey, they invented this thing on a different continent. It's hot as hell. and they love it, you know. Whereas the Germans are like, what if we put marasino cherries on toast? They do that.

The Dutch put sprinkles on toast. It's a horrible food. You shouldn't eat it. That's not disgusting. It's not good. Look, that's not a sandwich. All right? Your shitty white bread does not need to have sprinkles on top.

It's weird. It's fucking weird. Do you want another weird one? Because my wife's from New England. Do you know what they call sprinkles in New England? What? Jimmy's. Don't like that.

They call them Jimmy. Like you put Jimmy's on ice cream. I'm like, that sounds sexual. Why are you saying? And please get your dick off of my bread. There has been crossed wires somewhere in our communication. No, because it's plural. It's jimmies.

Everyone knows it's sprinkle wears. It's like, you put a Jimmy on ice cream. It's like, oh, you're slapping your dick on ice cream. It's like, that semantic difference of the plural, you know? And yet everyone from the greater Boston accent guy region understands that. Whereas for me, I'm like, can you guys talk normal actually? I don't like this. Maybe New England is actually Dutch.

Yeah, that's fair. I'll take that. Herman quickly took him up on the offer and moved his knights in to do some fighting. Though, Herman had other ideas as well. Remember, these guys weren't just mercenaries. They were also mercenaries, but they're more than that. Previous to rocking up in Hungary, they had one of the most powerful political bodies in the Holy Land, so to speak.

Herman was not going to be happy just fighting Hungary's enemies for them and then cashing a check. He wanted power and influence. King Andrew, a name that only gets more cursed the more I say it, allowed the order land, because, you know, this is the era which it is. A fighting force needed a place to live, a place for soldiers to live. They needed crops so they could build a logistical system.

It's not like they could slide in. The Kingdom of Hungary would give them a plastic bag full of goulash and they'd go and fight. They needed a place to grow crops, which in turn they would harvest, and that would be their fighting base. So they could better commit violence. They needed to build the same shitty military town that pops up wherever a military base is. they needed to build a crusader Hungarian Fort Bragg. I guess to me when you talk about this, it's like,

okay, this is medieval slash crusades early, I guess like 900s to 1,300's general span of medieval era, Hungary, Central Europe, South, Southern Central Europe. I keep thinking of like the kingdom of Tudor from Berserk. Like, I know that that's my go-to reference, but it's just sort of like vaguely European in a sort of unreconstructed way. And it's like, oh, you're taking this, you're basically taking.

crusader band of the hawk and giving them land and letting them establish their own sort of fiefdom. I don't think this is going to go very well. Are you telling me that there's a there's actually going to be a guy. They're like, oh yeah, by the way, the Hungarians are just aware of this man named Nosferatu Zod, who just periodically shows up. Okay, it's a dumb joke, but what I'm trying to say is it like, here's our new recruit weirdly his name is guts. We're fine with that. Yeah. Nospiratu Zad does have the build of the average Hungarian man. so. Hungarian men just do that.

They transform it to a giant one horn demon. I mean, that's what happens if you ask the average Romanian about Hungarians. That's what they'll tell you. We all have that Hungarian friend who's got Rams horns and it's 3,000 years old

and has slayed everywhere who's ever come across his back. There's always that one asshole at every party. Yeah, I would just say too that it's just interesting because, yeah, like the thing is with the Crusader kingdoms, like throughout this entire period is that, you know,

they obviously at one point, kind of like got a chance to do sort of proto new world shit of setting up new kingdoms and conquered territory, but that it didn't work out for them. Then they eventually got expelled. And so it's like, it is interesting to, uh, to be like, oh yeah, these guys, um, you know, their fortune is on the wayne, but whereas they can't have their, their beautiful coastal kingdom in, in the Levant, they can potentially have the sort of medieval Knights Templar Bundy ranch. Herman trying to sell us to German settlers, like, look, I know we're used to standing around naked on a beach somewhere, but what if we throw out naked in the forest and everybody's

like nodding sagely and taking notes? And that brings us to our next point because Herman had to bring in German settlers to work for them. There needs to be a population under the Teutonic Knights to keep the Teutonic Knights working. And this works. The order is successful fighting the Cubans. Herman secures more land and brings in more and more German settlers. And wouldn't you know it, this really pisses off local Hungarians and certainly would not be used for problems hundreds of years in the future. Local nobles complain that the order is becoming too powerful and influential. Once this becomes a political issue, the Pope points out that since their military order of the church, the order's land was not actually the orders, rather,

it was the churches. And they issued a papal bowl on the matter, which also meant that Hungarians were supposed to be cool with this. King Andrew, again, I'm going to say this as many times as I can because I hate it, finally got pissed and just kicked the order out of the country, which did cause some issues with the church, but weirdly the Pope kind of understood where he was coming from. After this, the order finds itself in the War of the Keys on the side of the Holy Roman Emperor,

who remember is Herman's friend. We're not going to go into it here because this is not what the episode is about, but the War of the Keys was against the Papal States, launched to get the emperor un-excommunicated after the emperor kicked him out of the church for promising to launch a crusade but then never would he even allegedly faked an illness

to get out of the crusade I'm just going to say the thing that's on everyone's mind which is that the war of the keys also does sound like it could be either a Jimmy Buffett album or a Rick Ross album That's true. That's true. Yeah, I could respect an emperor who malinger is to get out of emperor-related duty.

he just like me. I mean, it's very relatable. There are so many things you hear about various emperor business where like, I can't even conceive of that. Like, that requires like being raised in a mindset so radically different to the one that we know where that would seem normal to you. But I'd be like, actually, if they tell them my tummy hurts, they won't make me go on the crusade. I absolutely get that. But back then, having a tummy ache would kill a motherfucker. All these like grind set guys are like, oh, you need to be like Marcus Aurelius or like Alexander Gray. Why don't you just be like this guy? And do I, I'm not going to go to work.

My to tummy kind of hurts. Yeah, exactly. Much like me as a specialist, every time you sneeze is an excuse to get out of work. Anyway, the emperor and his boys win, and then in 1226, the order is freed up, and they are invited, once again, to go and kill pagans. This time under the pay of Conrad, the first of Mesovia, today, northeast Poland, to join in on the Prussian crusade. Previously, Conrad had attempted to conquer the area known as Klebnoland, but failed.

and the Prussian counterattacks had begun to threaten his kingdom. At the time, Prussia was pagan, and Conrad was one of several Christian leaders attempting to turn them to the light of Christ via mass murder and stealing their shit. For Herman, the Prussian crusade was a possible goldmine for several reasons. For starters, after years of fighting, the order had lost a lot of veterans, and they had lost their home turf twice. Getting some new land, especially that in Prussia and its population of pagans,

would be a perfect hold for his new knights to get training. And by training, I mean, experience killing people. I would be so pissed if I was a, you know, a Templar night and I was stationed in Hungary. I've been eating Kirtish Kolak for like the past while. And now I'm suddenly stuck in northern Poland. Setting you to northern Poland with a bunch of replacements who are just like, my drill sergeant told me that you could absolutely cleave a man in Twain if you wield a big enough sword. Imagine being in the Teutonic order long enough to be like,

remember when you could be sitting on a beach somewhere and really warm? To like, now I'm in a swamp and I'm cold. This fucking, like, God has forsaken us. I think I need to become Muslim. They were right. They were right. Being sent to the second country in Europe that has a propensity for potatoes and alcoholism that isn't Ireland. Furthermore, owing to a golden bowl issued that same year by the Holy Roman Emperor,

any lands the order conquered in Prussia would be theirs to administer. This was later supported by a papal bull offering indulgences for anyone who fought for the order or with the order as an ally over the course of the crusade. But Herman had other demands from Conrad before everything was agreed upon.

Namely, total freedom to war against anyone he wanted, parentheses in the name of Christ, or as Herman called them, the Northern Saracens. Yes. Yes, we're getting Muslims, but Polish. I mean, there have been so many instances of this where I've talked about this before,

where like the hardest diss you could drop on someone to be like, oh, he's basically the Grand Turk of the West or something like that. They don't know anything other than if anybody at the other end of my sword must be Muslim, even if it's a Prussian pagan. We have to go fight Saladin, but there's somehow loads of Ws and that L with the line through it in it. you wind up getting into like some kind of protracted border conflict with the

Finns every single one of them is albino and you're like turks Snow Saracens exactly that's the thing of the perfidy of the of the Saracen and the you know the heathen Muslim is such that he can actually drain the color from his skin and hair like a chameleon which I don't know about because they're I mean like literally this is the fucking weird thing that like all those like crusader guys go on about is like This is the Chad Templar versus the Chud pagan, because that's literally what the people in that region work all at the time. Yes, we will talk about the Chuds later.

All the rumors are true about the nice Templar and they're all jacked. They all look like the volleyball scene from Top Gun with all the implied homosexuality and they're just slaying Chuds and everyone's like, return with a V. Nice argument, but I have already depicted myself as the Chad. Templar and you was the Chud Eastern East Slavic pagan the Chud Saracen Oh my God

Conrad wasn't really worried about any of this and so he agreed to the deal to him it all worked out in his favor Conrad could focus

on consolidating his power in Poland and outsource his war against the Prussians in exchange for some swap plans that he saw is mostly worthless

it did not take long over the course of the Prussian crusade for the order to become more and more powerful. This should really come as no surprise. Coming from the battlefields of the Holy Lands and the Crusader states,

their weapons, armor, and tactics were pretty advanced for the arena of warfare that was common to the Baltics at the time. Heavy armored cavalry, heavy torsion-based artillery, crossbows. It's quite revolutionary for the time. And not to mention, they're very experienced in violence. Herman was also a shrewd political beast with more connections than just about anyone else. Not only did he begin to truck in German settlers once again, but he also purposely undermined other religious military orders

so he could then take them over. Operating in the same neighborhood, there was the sword brethren. Much cooler name, I have to point out. Yeah, for real. But they're more commonly known as Livonian Knights, a name that will be familiar for my fellow Michiganders owing to the town, Livonia. Our towns are weird.

Once again, my brain goes back to things kind of vaguely invoke this and all I can think is Livonian Knight sounds like some faction you deal with in Final Fantasy tactics. Like what I'm coming to realize is that like there's a lot of entertainment in Japanese, both animated entertainment and video games. It has a kind of like a vague concept of Europe, but it's just like all mishmash together. And it's like so in the same way that someone wants to describe the Swiss meal of the shredded potatoes and cheese and cocktail onions as like if a Japanese gas station sold European food in scare quotes, that's kind of like, Like, this is, it's so strange to hear all this stuff and be like, oh, yeah, that's what Livonian is.

Okay. Right. I've heard that before. And I've heard of Livonia, Michigan and Livonia in East New York. The town in Michigan is named after the town in New York. And that town is named after Baltic Livonia, because America reasons. Although Livonia is an avenue in East New York. And I'm only referenced because there's a FedEx pickup center there.

There is a Livonia, New York, which is where the original sellers of Livonia, Michigan came from. And the original. The original settlers of Livonia, New York came from Baltic Livonia. And to me, a Livonian knight is an out-of-work auto worker with a trash can lid and one hand and a wrench in the other. Because for me, having lived in Brooklyn for a while, it was a joke between friends because it was really, it was a pretty sketchy place to go pick up your stuff after work and like people got robbed all the time getting their FedEx packages.

Yeah, you should have paid your protection money to the Livonian nights. To get it. And so invariably, when someone's like, I have to go. pick up a FedEx thing, you just send them the lyrics from the gizzo song, I got you back about back up the Ave, up Livonia and Bristol with a pistol sticking up Pamela and Crystal. And it's just like, please don't joke about the fact that I'm probably going to get robbed.

See, the reason why that happened is you didn't pay your protection mite to the Livonia Knights and then an out of work, auto worker with a trash can lid and a monkey wrench would escort you back and forth. This is a really complex metaphor. You're welcome. Now, Herman would wait for these military orders. Oh, fuck you. You cannot segue that. Just cut.

just cut right the fuck back in. You know what? I feel like, I feel like we're a bit of a mess right now. I'm going to endeavor to only be on topic because otherwise, like, I feel as though we're all the kind of like dark brainwave energy right now. This is going to get so stupid and long. So I'm telling it to you, Joe, Tom and the listener. It's only going to be strictly business for now.

That's a strictly business. Herman would wait for these military orders like the Livonia Knights to get their teeth kicked in. Then he would use his connections with the Pope to get them effectively. signed over to him like a piece of property because he is the showrunner of the best religious military order in town. Hey, yo, boss, let me hold some nights. I feel like this must get very frustrating in the context even of this being the world

you grew up in, where like the Pope kind of lives in the godhouse and can just determine that you are property out of nowhere. Like, I feel as though, even as scratching out a living as a Livonian peasant, this must get, people might be like, you know, you're sitting around the campfire with a plum brandy or whatever, like, this Pope guy kind of fucking sucks. I actually really don't, we should invent a better system. This is why we worship like the trees as the son. Exactly. This is why we all go, it's like the underground cave and have the mud orgy

scene from Matrix 2. Like, we found a better religion. It involves healing crystals and drinking the pee of the shaman who ate that mushroom. And then you trip it, you see the future and you see Portuguese Final Fantasy A. All right. Like, it's possible to have a better way. Christianity is bullshit. I argue that if anybody is familiar with. having their jobs taken away

and offshoreed somewhere else. It's Livonian Knights. But also Livonia, New York and Livonia, Michigan in the sense that every single one of these. Like, I guess being Livonian brings an eternal core curse that you were going to get laid off. The Lord of Your Land only comes to build

already empty factories and that leaves. First, it was the Pope, and then it was Henry Ford. There's like a fucking painting in like the dining hall of like RV mechanic touching hands with Livonian night and he's like the tradition remains unbroken they're both holding pick slips

through backdoor politicking and bloody conquest the Teutonic State was eventually born though there was a time that the order simply purchased the entire Duchy of Estonia

from Denmark like a used car fueled by mayo based salads that happens about two decades after the story takes place I just really wanted

to bring it up because how ridiculous it is. The Mayo car. This was the thing, I mean, having researched a little bit about some of the, for the episode about Lescalade, like, you know, 16th century monarch who's like, you know, dot, dofan and then suddenly's like, oh, you're the king of Poland now. He's to go to Poland.

He's like, all right. What's up, Poland? Coming back, you're like, the Poles, they've invented toilets and utensils. It's like, wait, no. Is France ready for that? It's like semi-modern era where like a Habsburg monarch goes and becomes emperor of Mexico because like France really wants it to happen. Like, hello, ambray.

I am your king now. If you're in Britain and like you live in, I don't know, like the northeast or the northwest, and it's like you want to have representation in parliament, but you can't pick because anytime that you pick a candidate to be an MP who could actually represent you, like the Tony Blair Institute for like, you know, anti-kindergarten artillery strikes fucking puts in a guy. Just was like, nah, fuck a little. elections and just drops a person in. This happens all the time. The Tony Blair mayonnaise motoring institute. That's right.

Paste out of mince. Uh, Herman eventually finds himself in control of a pretty large state for how many knights are actually in the Teutonic order. He also is a growing military threat. Not from the Prussians, but from the Russians. Or at least the people who would become Russians. You might be saying, but the Russians are Christian, Joe. That is correct. But this is the crusader version of the Jesse Plymouth scene from Civil War asking, oh yeah, what kind of Christian are you? It goes without saying that the Catholics in the Orthodox Church have been going at one another since, well, forever. But things got a little weird when the Mongols arrived on

the scene, conquering massive swaths of Russia, and then pushed a lot of Russian nobles to slide up with the Western Catholic states looking for support. While other Russian leaders saw the Crusaders as more of a threat than the Mongols because to make a very long story short, the Mongols were generally fine with freedom of religion as long as you paid the protection money, i.e. taxes. Describing my faith the way

a weird niche leftists described their political ideology is like, yeah, you know, I'm Eastern Orthodox with, you know, Mongolian tendencies. Yeah, I'm kind of a step ecumenist. I see you guys are playing hearts of iron as well. It is very funny because it's like you can more or less be left alone

in your faith so long as you pay your ties. But if you don't pay your ties, it's not like you get like a complaint letter in the mail. It's like they basically just send like, what if we had human crickets on horseback with swords and they just destroy everything? They're like, you guys need to go back and do a better job.

There's exactly like one dandelion left alive on their land. Like, it's not really an easy balance to maintain. Yeah, normally they would. Not always, of course, but most of the time someone was made an example of. They were appointed to and be like, hey, pay the fuck up or this is going to happen to you. Generally, but not always, people were allowed to live as they always had afterwards, assuming they paid up.

That's why you get a lot of very weird things happening in churches in order to appease the Mongols famously in Armenia, which was dominated by the Mongols for a period of time and were allowed to remain Christian. They chose to side with the Mongols rather than joining the Catholic Church because the Mongols would allow them to keep the apostolic faith. some reliefs of Jesus look vaguely Mongol as like a nod to be like, see, we're cool together. deciding with the Mongols

become a different type of Trotskyist. Yeah, we have a perfect society, but every now and again, someone has to get made an example of in this story entitled the ones who get pulled apart by horses and omens. Yeah, exactly. So like some Russians were proto-Russians,

you know, Russia isn't a thing that exists yet, decided that it's better to pay our taxes to the Mongols. and keep our Orthodox faith, then side up with the Catholics who want to destroy it fully. And one of those nobles was Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Novgorod, and he's going to become the star of our show.

Nevsky was right not to trust the Crusaders because it's virtually as soon as the Mongols pulled away, thanks to Nevsky paying a large tribute to the Golden Horde to leave him alone, the Order and their allies invaded to pick apart at the bones. Order armies took the cities of Sykov and Bjork, committing the kinds of slaughter that Crusader armies tend to commit.

The order took both of these cities without much of a fight, you know, because the Mongols took care of that part already. And probably assuming those goddamn Eastern Orthodox simply couldn't put up a fight, Garrisoned Seikoff with only 52 men to defend it. Unlike with the Mongols, Nevsky saw

the Crusaders as an enemy that not only could he defeat, but he had a religious duty to do so, because they meant to destroy the Orthodox Church. And this is not taking one side or the other in this case, but the Teutonic Order would have absolutely destroyed the Orthodox Church if given the option.

So he would go on the offensive against the order. It also didn't help that, if you couldn't tell, both Nevsky and the Order were thirsting over the same lands for virtually the same reason. Outside of the practicalities of painting the map, both of them saw converting pagans to their specific brand of Christianity as their duty. And they saw everyone else outside of their...

their side of the cross as heretics. In the meantime, Herman was almost never on order lands. He stayed most of his time back in Germany or Rome, which in turn pissed off the knights that lived in the Teutonic state. They began to demand that he'd come to the fucking swamp. He forced them to live in and lead them. So Herman withdrew from political life, lost power, and eventually died. He was replaced by Popo von Austern, a man who never wanted to fight the Novgorodians

in the first place. That is a name. Popo. That's extremely name alert. It could also be, in my opinion, even funnier, Popo von Austern. I believe it is Popo. Hopefully he's not wearing a turban and covered in boo polish.

The first Dutch knight of the Teutonic Order. Mr. Popo von Austern. The pagans, you know, hardening their defenses because they've heard that Mr. Popo is inbound. And then they see him and they're just like, I feel a little bit uncomfortable about this representation. To be fair, that Mr. Popo Nights are easy to see because they're on that really tall tower that sticks out the center of the earth and never leave.

This is one of those things where like I have to kind of default to name alert jokes because it will become very, very clear that my knowledge of deep lore Dragon Ball Z trivia is basically zero. If it makes you feel any better, there's at least a percentage of people listening. They have no fucking idea that that has any connection to Dragon Ball Z whatsoever. and we're pissing in the wind. Well, definitely don't Google Mr. Popo if you're in public because it's just going to look uncomfortable.

As Nevsky swept through and took order in pagan lands east of the Neva River, mass murderer was obviously commonplace. This is also where he gets his name, Nevsky, is the Battle of the Neva River. There was mass enslavement, especially of the pagan people known as the Chud. Ah, the Chud.

This is a common term from the Roos. chronicles generally, but not always save for early Finnic people, the Chud. But this is not important, really. I just really wanted an excuse to say the Chud and Tom beat me to it. Early, early Finnic people are like, you may defeat us now, but revenge will be ours in about 700 years when we invent a phone with a game called Snake on it. The Swedes hate the Chords. Those goddamn Finnic Saracens. The Chiod IKEA. Yeah, it's just like a tree that has been broken down to 30 different pieces and you have to put it all back together using an Allen key. The order found itself pulled into a war it really couldn't get out of, but also not one.

It could really fight. The order was stretched terribly thin, thanks to previous defeats, both at the hand of Nevsky and the Mongols. Another war was generally unpopular, even amongst the bloodthirsty psychos that made up the core of the order, which is a problem. You know, it's like we talked about before, it's like occasionally there's a kind of that when they are against your idea, you know you've really fucked up. And one of the reasons for this was the makeup of the order itself.

For starters, the brothers of the order, as they were known, the actual knights of noble birth. That is the core leadership of the Teutonic Order and pretty much every other religious military order as well. They numbered maybe 100 people in the Teutonic State. Though some sources put this number higher and it did fluctuate. There was highs and lows. These guys were from noble blood. They're the ones living the good life, able to reap the benefits of the order's gain.

Then there's the retainers directly under the brothers. They would be thousands of these. These are generally considered the rank and file of the order. They lived in the area. They worked the land. At least some of them did. Some of them had a little bit more privilege than others. But specifically, they're not nobles.

We've been talking about the Tetonic order most of the time. and I'm kind of using that as a blanket term for all of the other orders in the region because the order tended to control most of them directly or indirectly. But just know I'm including the Tetonic Order, the Livonian Knights, and unless I say otherwise, they're always together. Along with them was the Bishopric of Dorpat. This is like a kind of state-lit controlled by a Catholic bishop. They generally only exist because the Knights are there.

And then there were the Summer Crusaders. These were noble knights and retainers from the rest of Europe. who traveled over to fight in the spring and summer, at least most of the time. Summer Crusader is kind of just a label given to them. They would travel while the getting was good. They go when to get money, loot occasionally lands, but they don't want to stay there. A crusade in Europe was just about the best thing that could have happened to them because they could get all of the indulgences, the riches, the loot, all of the awards of

fighting in the Holy Land, but not having to travel all the way to the Middle East. It's the guys who go to Ibiza to sell like 2CB during like Fat Boy Slim's residency. Like they don't want to commit full time to the lifestyle of selling drugs. But, you know, a little summer sojourn of like selling drugs to 19 year olds. It's kind of the same. Summer drug dealers are the modern summer crusaders, yeah. Drug dealers just hurt for summer. But with them.

for a lack of a better term, the summer randos. These weren't knights, these weren't fighting men, as much as being a soldier was a career for a common man in the Middle Ages. Rather,

they were just doing the same thing as the nobles, traveling to a religious war zone to secure as much bag as possible. These guys were a lot more common during the height of the crusade in the Holy Land. There was an entire crusade

of these people. We did an episode on that as well. it never ended well because these aren't trained fighting men. Some of them have weapons. Some of them don't. Some of them literally just wash into town. But namely the knights and the summer crusaders, they're trained and armed to a pretty good standard.

But things only get worse and worse from there. At the lowest level, arguably, were the local levees. Because remember, the knights in the Teutonic State have lands. Someone has to work those lands. and they run those lands just like they would have if they were from wherever the fuck they happen to be from. So they conscript people that are working their fields. And these guys were barely trained at all. Mostly they existed as a screening force to protect the night's flanks or simply to forge for food.

But they were no different than anyone else in their goals because it's, we've talked about this before. These guys aren't getting paid. If they do want to get paid, it's based on stealing shit. Yeah, you're getting paid and experience and exposure. Not that type of exposure, actual exposure. Yeah, exposure to crimes. Like, if they want to go back home

to their shitty swamp fields, growing swamp corner, whatever, and not be completely bankrupt because it's not like anybody's working their land while they're gone. They need to bring as much loot back as possible. So it's kind of like the trickle-down effect of loot, but it works as well as actual trickle-down,

anything. All the rich people take everything, and they're left with the scraps. So these levees fill their metaphorical bank account with enslavement, mostly. But it's also interesting because you think about coming back with loot, but what you actually need are like farm implements and like, I don't know, a supply of gravel so you can fucking dig out swamp pits and fill them with gravel so your house doesn't fall over. And you're like, well, I can't really help you,

but I've got a solid ivory chair and your neighbor can trade you for like a bejeweled sceptor. It's just sort of like, any of you have a scythe? No. Yeah, everyone's going on Crusade to get some hoes. Exactly. You would love to have a hoe made out of iron, but instead it's made out of, I don't know, fucking some kind of soft, really, really high purity gold. You're like, this doesn't cut knotweed for shit. And there's going to be one guy. I'm constantly breaking my golden side, like some kind of incompetent druid,

trying to harvest, I don't know, swamp barley. And instead it's like what I wouldn't give for, I don't know, 14th century John Deere. One guy is in a lot of. come back really pissed off that he was confused about the whole concept of looting. And he's just like, what am I going to do with this crate full of literal lutes? What am I going to do with all these string instruments? Fuck! You guys don't need bards? Nobody wants to work anymore. Nobody wants to go barting anymore. Nobody wants to teach in delight with the sound of music. No one wants to regale in the daring do of heroes set to, I don't know, plinky, plunky-ass weird medieval chords. Like,

They won't do it. All they want is golden scepter, ivory chair, not work, hang out in Rome, not actually go to the front, retire, die. They don't want to do anything. One guy with a whole bunch of looted lutes is going to start the Swamp Tang clan. Or he's going to open up the first like guitar center and Eastern Bohemia. I'm so fucking tired of these 14th century Gen Alpha swamp fluencers. Can anyone just use a farm implement? I'd like the guitar center in my hometown.

It's going to be shaped like a giant loot. Young hoes caught everything with a golden sign. All in all, by the time you worked away all the way through the different kinds of crusaders we've talked about, the Teutonic Order may have around 2,000 men available for war, which is not that many. Nevsky found himself in a situation

where he knew he wanted to bring the crusaders to battle, but he also knew they weren't going to invade him, owing to the fact that they didn't have enough men or political willpower, he had to come up with a way to goad the crusaders into a fight, and Nevsky didn't want to besiege their crusaders either and play to their strengths. When someone is armed with crossbows and advanced artillery, you don't want to exactly pin them into a corner and force them to fight you. But before we do that, we should talk about how the Novgorodian army would have looked like.

Where the crusaders were loosely allied from multiple different countries, we often think of them as being a multicultural and linguistically diverse cluster fuck. We have talked about this on countless crusader episodes. There's no unifying language. There's no unifying culture other than some vague understanding of the Catholic Church. Everybody's on their own shit, for a lack of a better term, Nevsky's force was pretty similar. Nevsky and his Novgorodian elite, the aristocrats, were a minority,

virtually the same as the brothers of the order. and under them were the Drusina, the closest advisors and retainers. Their service-bound Tenevsky rather than land-bound, though the Drusina could act as a kind of Praetorian Guard, fickle and a bit murdery if they're not treated well. As the size of the Prince's holdings would grow, so did the Drusina, and so did their responsibilities in a complex web of politics

and responsibilities in office. Under them were the rank and file, levied peasants, but most importantly, true believers in the Eastern Orthodox faith going to war against the heretics, just like the guys on the other side of the battlefield. And like those other guys, these levies and Eastern Crusaders, for lack of a better term, would have come from all walks of life, villages and regions. Old Novgorod was the general dialect that would have been spoken by the core, but there was also a broadly official language thanks to the Eastern Church. There would have been several different dialects and languages of Eastern Slavic at play throughout the various different ranks of this army. Few people would have spoken more than one of these outside of the educated,

meaning a lot of groups would not be able to talk to each other. And just like a Crusader army, your common everyday person would have been illiterate. So passing down orders would have been impossible. Joining Nevsky on his quest against the swamp Germans was Andre the second of Vladimir, Prince of Vladimir. Though there are some disagreements on if Andre was Prince or not yet. According to the book Medieval Russia, 980 to 1584, it wasn't until a few years after this battle that Andre was installed as Prince by the Mongols. but we at least know he was there,

Prince or not, with his men on his own or on behalf of his father. Yeah, we at least know he was really, really big and could drink 48 beers. It's a huge fucking guy. Oh, God. I'm now understanding that you mean Andre the Giant. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Which also means Andre the second is famous for filling a bathtub full of his diarrhea. This is some Andre the Giant lore I didn't know. Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of it is true. A lot of it is not true. He's famously a huge drinker. He would like, do the course of like a single night, he would drink like 50 goddamn beers,

which were very small for him because he was a large man. And one time he had some, let's say, tummy hurtitis. And the toilet was too small for his gigantic ass. So he just shit in the tub. A lot of this is up for debate, let's say. But the drinking has, There's multiple pictures and eyewitness testimony to that. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're that large, you know, someone handing you a beer is like

they handed you a little, a little Lego figure. You just got to like pinch it into your mouth. The thimble of beer. There's pictures of him holding cans of beer and it is very funny. Yeah. The Nove Grotian force relied heavily on archers, unlike the Crusaders, both on foot and on horseback. Fighting in a very similar way, kind of sort of that the Mongols did.

A kind of fighting that the Crusaders. were not very familiar with. They mostly use these archers on their flanks with the infantry in the center and their heavy horsemen held back in reserve. The reason why I bring all of this up both for the context of this battle and because a lot of history,

propaganda and nationalism has sprouted from this battle. Depending on who is telling the story, the German knights, the rigid professionals, drove forward an army of slaves against a stalwart common people. of Russia who were fighting off imperialism, who were, of course,

mostly peasants simply trying to protect the motherland. As I've already explained, both these armies were virtually identical in their makeup and political structure. Outside of regional flavor, there's very little difference. Both sides are fighting to expand their borders

for the name of personal glory and religion. None of that proto-modern political horseshit is going on here. Yes, if you know anything about a Russian nationalism, the name Alexander Nevsky is blinking at you like a red light right now. And that red light has come on

again very recently. And similarly to a lot of Germanic nationalism is based on the Teutonic state. The Battle of Tannenberg, for example. Not that Battle of Tannenberg. The one we didn't talk about.

But yeah, all of it's bullshit. None of it is true. Cut it out. So with the idea of dragging the Crusaders into a battle, Nevsky ordered his men to attack the Bishop Rick of Dorpat. Now, in reality, this was a raid, a small number of men only enough to draw their attention, with the main body of his force marching around a short ways away in order to make any scouts or anything like that, anybody who might be watching, think that something a little

bit more serious was going down. This raid went as far forward as it needed to, and by that I mean first contact. After running into some of the bishop's men, they broke conchievous. contact and ride off back towards the main force anchored into the bakes of Lake Peepus. I've had a lot of laughs this episode, but we finally got to the stupidest one. Got your back against the wall. Nowhere to go. We burn the boats on Lake Peepis. Either we get subsumed by Peepis or we fight and we stand.

We will be the heroes of Peepus. A lot of people are misunderstood about the importance of the girth of the peepis. Like Lake Peepis is quite wide. Yeah, it's kind of like a chode lake. I was looking at a... Google Earth. Didn't they say it was like the fifth, it's like one of the fifth largest lake in Eastern Europe?

Yeah, it's a large peepus. I've got the fifth largest peepis in Eastern Europe. You know, that actually means something. My peop is very large. My leg is a bit of a grower and less of shore. We take the water from Lake Peepas and grow gertie potato. Yeah, so everybody is Alexander Lucasenko now. Unfortunately, I can't do a finish accent.

Nobody can do it. a finish accent. I don't even know what a finish accent sounds like yet. All the listening fins are nodding sagely. Very, very thankful that we can't even attempt it. They're all nodding going, that's not really what they sound like. They sound more like it's just like the harsh concentration of like, uh,

I could be a Nokia engineer or I could be chopping firewood or I could be finding a really, really complex way to do a murder suicide. And you don't know which one is going to be. It was March of 1242. And since humans hadn't quite figured out how to melt the planet yet, Lake Peepus was still frozen over, albeit unevenly. It was thick enough. It was a thick peepus, not only for infantry to walk across, but lighter cavalry forces as well.

Can you imagine Finnish lines led by donkeys and they hear an English word that sounds like we, like weenus or something like that in Finnish? And so they entirely just derail this whole thing with like Finnish dick jokes about America, but they're talking about like Scranton, Pennsylvania or something. Someone out there has done it. We have a very stupid country with dumb names. and an unfortunate language. Now, the peepus wasn't quite thick enough

for the drugina to dare to cross because they're armored, they're heavy horse, right? Like, you don't want to walk your heavy horse to cross that peepus. Campanning during early spring in this region is not unheard of. Unlike a lot of other places,

campaigning what would still be considered winter would be off limits because there's snow, there's ice. But the early spring ice made things comparatively easier to move in the air. area because once it melted, everything would transform into a horrible, thick bog for a while. You don't want to find yourself bog campaigning. I mean, having been stationed in Alaska, which has a climate and landscape similar to this,

yeah, it is wet and slushy and bad, especially if you're breaking brush this time of year. Now, we were never riding on ultra horse. We were either walking or on track vehicles and trucks and stuff on roads. We have to enter Alaska into Horsipedia to see what it has the say about it. I simply would not want to ride my ultra horse over thin ice and start bog maxing on Lake Peepas. Dying in battle on Lake Peepis and becoming like Erzatz, a northern European altie the Iceman. Every single person has in the like the eternal human er memory of being like the horse that dies in the never-ending story. It's like Peepis.

A trayu. A trayu of Lake Peepus. No, Treyu's the boy. What's the horse's name? I thought the horse is a Treyu. No, Atreu's the kid. Who names your kid Atreu? It's a fucking fantasy novel by a German guy.

What do you think? Everybody knows you name your metal core band Atreu, not your son. R-Tax. R-Tax is the fucking horse's name. But Trey used the boy's name. I have been fucked up for so long. I literally always thought Atreu was the horse. No.

Bastian Balthasar, but is the name of the boy in Mottis. in modern Germany. Betray you is the hero boy and fuck, whatever the goddamn stupid world is called. And our tax is the horse who gives up hope. So many people are mad at us right now. The mud that makes you sad makes the horse give up.

For anyone listening, 45 minutes ago, Nate said, I'm going to stay on topic. I am staying on topic. We're talking about heavy horses and bogs. That's the fucking, that's the relevant thing.

You can't conceive of this. If you just start throw it out weird, like, you know, weird to us, Eastern European names and, you know, geographical locations. But you bring up the goddamn horse and mud in the never-erning story.

And basically everyone under the age of 25 has a traumatic memory associated with us. You know what? I have now made this comprehensible. This is how we make history real. That's the number one reason why the never-ending story is not historically accurate. Is that the horse to not grab that kid and drowned it in the mud with it? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. They need to make a realistic version where that happens. There's actually about this battle. This theme song will go, you're drowning in Lake Peepas. Na, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's kind of a bang. But because, you know, it's the early season in this particular region, everything is still frozen.

You have not yet entered into the mud that kills you zone. And despite the ice still being crossable, it's still ice. It's not great terrain to fight on unless you happen to be in the NHL. So Nevsky made sure to align his men on the shore with the only realistic approach being to advance over the ice. Now, this seems like an obvious trap to us, and I assume virtually anybody else. But the entire point of the raid on the bishopric was to make it look like the Novgorodians had been beaten back by the Crusaders to make them look like they were a defeated enemy on the run. Therefore, anybody chasing after them isn't going to really worry too much about terrain because they're stupid. They're like, no, we're running these people down.

They're running for their lives because we have them defeated. According to some tellings of the story, Crusader forces appear like they always do on April 5th. the heavy armored brothers of the order, therefore their entire leadership making up the center of the massive armored horse formation. Generally, let's consider it the spearhead, a wedge shape,

driving straight for the enemy's center. On the right flank were their auxiliaries and on their left flank were their Danish and Estonian allies. And I do believe we've just invented the world's most fucked up barbecue. Jesus Christ. How the charge goes depends on who's

telling the story. In some tellings, Crusaders charge right up the gut across the Frozen Lake and directly into Novgorodian lines. But in others, the Crusaders do something that makes, to be honest, a lot more sense. They simply go around the Frozen Lake and attack up the shore and a smaller front. But either way, do Crusaders charge hard for Nevsky? Hermann of Dorpot, the commander of the Allied Crusader Army, only had that in mind with the idea of busting through and managing to kill or capture Nevsky, and then his army would simply collapse without his unifying presence.

And there's a good chance that this is true, and Nevsky knew it, which is why he stood there at the center with his personal standard flying in order to draw them in. Once the Crusaders bit, bowled straight into Novgorodian lines, Nebsky's center, with him amongst them, fell back, but did not

break. Then something happened that might sound very familiar to anybody who's listened to more than one of our Crusader episodes in the past. The Novgorodian light horse archers looped around, firing arrows into the Danes, who, of course, start chasing them. The entire point of light horse archers is to be able to run away and continue flinging arrows into your enemy.

They retreat, fire, retreat, fire. They're lighter and they're faster. Danish heavy horsemen cannot possibly hope to catch them. And as they fall back and continuously do this, they shred the Danes. And when you're taking all of this in, all these men murdering each other over a frozen swamp, I need to add for the general ambiance for you and the listeners at home.

That is the dulcet tones of someone playing a church organ. That's because according to some of the earliest histories of the battle, the Crusaders dragged a fucking church organ all the way with them to the battlefield. All you here is, dun, dun, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Just like the drowning horse who drowns in the swamp of sadness is an eternal occurring human memory.

The duff warrior from Thir, Fury Road is also real. Yes. They brought a church organ out to, like, get everybody hyped up and play fucking proto-Black Sabbath out there. And you know it's shooting fire. Like, this is straight 40-K trench crusade shit. 100%. 100%.

No, well, if the organ players like playing, you know, like the interstitial music from like hockey, didla-da-da-da-da-da-da. And all the crusaders have to go, charge. Maybe that's how the bishop ordered the charge. Danish guy takes fires at you and misses, and then you play, just owning them with goofy organ sounds. Playing the church organ version of Freebird

while they charge into battle and just get destroyed by arrows. You know, you're really speaking to me right now, but I don't know if there's, when you're bogged down in a frozen swamp, I don't necessarily know if there's enough latent movement for Freebird to fucking. kind of work.

Because you have to be whipping ass somewhere. It doesn't matter the historical period. It doesn't matter the setting. It doesn't matter the context. You got to be whipping ass somewhere. And you play Freebird. Everyone's like, Americans least, we're like, we're locked in. We're like, America might be a fake country, but we have a real culture in it to this.

It's tearing ass through something. Tie Fighter, fucking X-Wing, World War II dive bombers. I don't know, like fucking riding the motorcycles and chrono trigger, whatever it is. You're going somewhere. You're whipping ass. you play Freebird, it's cooler. They're just like getting really hyped up. There's like Templars like headbutting each other's helmets and just green sleeves is playing in the background.

So while listening to their favorite music, the Danish flank crumbles. The Novgorodians continue to hold at the center for what could be ours. And like we've talked about before, that initial heavy charge of cavalry is its advantage. If the unit getting charged holds, things tend to swing in the other direction. as the defender slow the horses down with spears, axes, swords, their own bodies, whatever, they begin to drag the knights down to the ground, they jam knives into the slits of their armor, they cave their helms in with hammers. Not to mention things aren't any better for the knights who realize that the charge was grounding to a halt,

and they jumped down to fight because their armor isn't exactly made to fight on the snow and ice. It was there after hours of fighting, the crusade. center completely exhausted, that Nevsky finally ordered his own heavy cavalry into battle. The entrance of the Drogena into the fight could be felt immediately. They blasted through the Crusaders and advanced up their now almost completely unprotected flanks, thanks to the Danes getting a face full of arrow. It didn't take the Crusaders still slogging it out in the center, long to realize that they needed to get the fuck out of there or they were all going to die.

So they ran. The Novgorodians gave chase slaughtering crusaders as they attempted to flee across the frozen lake. And what happens next depends entirely on which telling of the story you listen to. You just have the organ player in the background going,

Dying on Lake Peepus, honey. You know, I just obviously smoke on the water as the one who'd want instead. But you know what? Let's just leave it. Just leave it. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, catch a narrow in, like, the back of your shoulder.

Like, fuck, bum, bum, bum, bum. Nobody told me that carrying the organ would be so painful. I mean, maybe this is why they had to put, We Will Rock You in a Knight's Tale. Because if you actually played music, first of all, we don't have a record of what music was like back then. But if you did, it would be, like, really basic. And it would just be, like, one piano refrain, like,

do, do, do, do do. And then he closed him in Twain. Twain. And then he fucked his mom. And it's like, that gets boring. For them, like, the concept of music was so novel that you could do like a hundred stanzas and they'd be like, I am so locked into this. My personal favorite stanza of the two hour lock baseball music concert is the 300th time

we've had to say the word charge. Yeah. Like I said, what happens next depends entirely on who's telling the story. In some, the Nove Grotian just break off the chase because they start to hear the the ice under them crack. Like, because if you've ever walked across the frozen body of water, you can hear it break under your feet. I fell into a frozen lake when I was 10 and it sucks.

I'm just saying it fucking sucks. Definite Midwest experience there. And if, like, for example, back when I was a kid, the Great Lakes used to freeze and you could walk on them. But you could hear the water under you and it was terrifying. In some tellings, that's why they stop. and others, the lake itself breaks under the Crusader's feet and they fall into a watery grave. So that is heavily disputed.

Either way, pick whichever one you think is more fun. Presumably, there would be a lot of bedazzled horse quiruses and huge fucking horse helmets at the bottom of Lake Peebus. If you, if this were the telling, if all of them, if the lake just gave all of a sudden. Yeah, it just turns into the greatest loop drop in like recent memory. Well, yeah, it's deep enough that like, wouldn't have been a thing that people would have scavenged or scoured out in time. And you could just go, you know, destination, archaeology dive on Lake Pibis and you could find thousands of go diving on that Pizis. Look, stop talking about my vacation plans. Imagine how bummed out,

like the Novgorodian forces would be chasing these guys down, loaded down with armor and weapons and jewelry. And they just go crashing into the frozen leg. Like, fuck. Can you imagine how many pairs of scissors we could have made out of that horse armor? Now we have to, make it out of a fucking ivory chair again. Whatever happened, the fighting is horrifically violent even for the Crusades. And one of the ways that we can tell is how few knights were taken alive. We've talked about this before on the show, but this was an era of ransoming prisoners for cash. Knights were nobles.

Or failing that, people whose families had connections and therefore a ton of money and privilege. Taking a night alive was better than killing them. taking a hostage and then ransoming back to the family was a literal specific part of any battle plan. But in this case, only six knights were taken prisoner because all of the other ones got killed. Geez. I mean, I am kind of now coming to the conclusion

that maybe the swamps of sadness was the real thing that happened. But I don't know. It's also possible that they were just really, really sick of these guys. Hey, any swamp can be a swamp of sadness if you happen to be getting stabbed in the face in it. Well, yeah, and also it's like, they know these guys are just going to keep bothering them. They keep fucking with them.

And so at the point it's like, all right, look, you got them in a bad spot. Yeah, you could loot Max by ransoming them, but you could also just like solve the problem. You know, sort of like, I don't necessarily want to enter into dialogue with the bedbugs. I kind of want them gone for good. There was also some of the exiliaries that were taken as well. There's some argument if they were of a ransom because these guys weren't nobles. Hard to say if they'd be worth it. Some accounts say they were putting a slavery.

Other accounts just have their fate left unknown, which I think we could all fill in the blanks there. And as for casualties, this happens to be just one of those battles that we legitimately don't know. There's no good account of how many people were killed or wounded. According to the earliest tellings, 20 brothers of the order were killed, which is a large number when you think of how few of them there actually were in the grand scheme of things. Another six, as I said, for ransom. Possibly thousands of others connected to their crew. Crusade also died.

We have no idea how many Novgorodians were killed, but it's fair to say less than that. So that certainly put a stop to the old Prussian crusade, right? Not even remotely. The Crusades would continue on and so with the Teutonic Order and the Teutonic State for hundreds of years until they were terminally checked and 1410 at a little something called the Battle of Tannenberg. Listeners of the show will remember that we talked about World War I's Battle of Tannenberg, a battle given that name because of the battle where the Teutonic Knights lost

for a very specific purpose. To where we invented the concept of German swampas or Sumfarch. That's right. The order would go on to form the bedrock of early Prussian military tradition and arguably military fascism in a lot of different ways and other horrible shit would come out of that. As for Nevsky, thanks to his victory over the Crusaders and his dealings with the Golden Horde, managed to preserve the Eastern Orthodox Church. I'll leave that up to you if that's a good thing or not.

He was venerated as a saint virtually as soon as he dropped dead, and he was canonized, something that sounds a lot cooler when it involves an actual canon. Tons of valuables are packed inside of his tomb, only to be taken up by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Over the years, Nevsky has been turned into a hero of Russian nationalism, and then a champion of the working class, and then Russian nationalism once again,

as all of his valuables replaced in 2023 by Russian patriot Kareel for reasons I think we don't need to go into. I guess in closing, both Nevsky and the Teutonic Order were lionized by the worst people you know. Rest and piss, you won't be missed. The end. Fellas, that is

the Battle of Lake Pepys, also known as the Battle on the Ice, which may or may not have taken place on ice. Yeah, there is an extent to which like these kinds of battles, even though they are, you know, within the realm of some degree of historiography are like so many apocryphal details. Yeah, because records weren't kept and they certainly weren't preserved. And so, yeah, like there's the living men, there's the kind of oral tradition. There's a storytelling of the sort of passed down memory. But then if you want to be like, what was the, you know, what was the modified table of organization and equipment or whatever? It's like, good luck. Yeah. There's really a lot missing. Like the day. is generally agreed upon, and that's about it. The result of the battle. Like, we know what leads to it, what comes after it.

But, and like, for example, the church organ thing is also debated, because why wouldn't it be it's a ridiculous detail? But the Novgorodians write that they destroyed a church organ on the battlefield. Like, I had to get there somehow. It is very funny because we always envisioned the Duf Warrior from Fury Road, but imagine the Dufori with all his amps and guitars fucked up with his legs just sticking comically up in the air and that is what happened. He fight on my peepers till he dies in the ice.

I hate when that happens. But fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. This is a regular episode. So it's free. Thank you for listening to the show. If you'd like to support us, give money to us on Patreon. $5 a month gets you absolutely everything. Years and years and years of content, Discord access, a whole bunch of other stuff.

But also the ability to ask us a question which we answer on the show. You can ask us on Patreon or in our Discord where there's, a dedicated channel to that thing. And today's question is military related. For people who are new to the show, maybe you don't know, Tom is the only one of us who was smart enough to not ever join the military. So this question is more of a question for him to answer on what he's learned accidentally from being surrounded by us for years now.

You're on a field training exercise. You have to pick one. You have lost your weapon or you have lost your night vision. Either way you are fucked. What do you do? Look at the moon and then try and dead wrecking my way away from wherever battle is happening. Like climb through trees, bushes. I don't know.

If I had to choose which one to lose, I would lose my weapon because it's probably much more useful to be able to see in the dark. So I'll explain further for our fellow Tom heads out there who have no idea of the unfortunate fate of being a dude in the military. these are called sensitive items. Everything is a serial number on it. And if you're non-commissioned officer, one of the most important jobs you have during a field training exercise is making sure your soldiers have not lost their sensitive items

because soldiers lose everything. Everything. I cannot count how many times I was in a field training exercise in the States or deployed to a war zone and I'd open up a porter pot and there'd just be a gun in there. Yes. Like these things fucking happen because soldiers are dumb.

But from my personal experience, experience. I've never lost anything, but I have seen soldiers who have lost things. And I've noticed that people who lose their night vision on field training exercise get in less trouble. So I will go with the night vision. I never lost either. I did lose my dummy weapon during a land of course in Special Forces training. And I retraced my steps to every point and found it leaning against a tree. So I know the utter terror of you have lost your weapon, even if it's not real. I would say that because I was a platoon leader and then also I was a headquarters company XO, absolutely, you'd rather lose your night vision goggles than a weapon.

Number one, because it's, okay, with weapons, like that's like a full on CID thing, like, because it's a weapon. If it's a missing, like, it's a problem. It's a gun. It's a gun that you're not, that's not allowed, that your civilians are allowed to own because of the way that it's, so it's a huge, huge problem. And that will be a much longer and more drawn out process. Because obviously, while it is bad if somebody loses their night vision goggles and there worth thousands of dollars and obviously they are not things that are legal to be owned by civilians either, that is a thing where it's less conceived of less as a risk than someone happening upon or stealing or squirreling away an assault rifle or a pistol or God knows like a fucking machine gun, a mortar tube,

you know, that kind of grenade launcher, that kind of a thing. I do think the crowning achievement that I've ever seen lost, and I know this has nothing to do with questions from the Legion, but since we're talking about it. lost things, I do have to tell this story. And forgive me, I've had a couple of concussions in my life. So if I've told the story of this show before, I apologize. Again, we've been doing this for almost eight years, but I'm going to repeat myself at some point. But I was stationed at Fort Knox, unfortunate place to get stationed back when I was there. I mean, it's always an unfortunate place to get stationed because it's in Kentucky. But back when I was there, it was the home of the U.S.

Army's armor program for tanks and Bradley's and whatnot. It's not anymore. They moved at the Fort Stewart, I believe. But when I was there, I got put into a unit whose entire job was to do field training lanes for officers going through basic armored leadership courses. We would drive them around. We would teach them how to use our vehicles. I was a tanker. So we would teach them how to use tanks, which also meant our motor pool, the place where all of our vehicles are stored, has, you know, 100 tanks in it. It has a lot of fucking tanks for any armored motor pool because we're going through so many training iterations. These are not tanks meant to be deployed.

They're trash effectively. They're still M1A1 Abrams, but like, it's like nobody's taking care of them. Like no, nobody's assigned to the tanks. Nobody's taking care of them. And everything, if you took the combined total like hand receipt value of all of those tanks, every single person in America could get a graduate degree for free. Yeah. But they are also pieces of shit in a big ass motor pool.

And it would be like the second largest tank. course in the world just laying around. Like, yes. If in a normal line unit as a tanker, you have four guys assigned to a tank, that is your responsibility. You take care of it like it's your baby. But these are literally just like trash left around. Nobody takes care of them.

Like my platoon would get assigned like eight tanks to go get ready for the next cycle of lieutenants coming into train. We get keys to them because they're just padlocked clothes on the hatches. We go down there. We open them up. We make sure they're still running. or if they're not running, how, what little amount of work

we can do to get it to work because they're always kind of broken. People may not realize this, but military vehicles don't have key ignition. No, they just have start buttons or switches. Yeah, because there's one more thing

that would lose or get lost or broken. So, you know, like you literally have to put padlocks to keep the doors closed because otherwise someone can just hop in in Grand Theft Auto, your Susfi or, you know, 1-13 or whatever.

And, you know, we are going down there. They give me these fucking five tanks to go unlock and look inside and do a general, eyeing that it's okay to bring up for training. And I can't find one of them. Dunday's style, El Tank. Yeah, like, tanks have bumper numbers.

Think of it like a license plate, but it's painted on the back. And I'm going through it. I'm looking on this paperwork. I'm like, it's not there. Which happens sometimes. People park them in the wrong spot. I go to the warrant officer who's in charge of the motor pool. And I'm like, can't find this one.

I need a different one. He's like, well, we don't have a different one. You need to find that one. So he starts looking up where it would have been parked, the last squadron to use it for their other training mission. we call them like, oh yeah, we'll go down our line and look out for it. It's not there either. We eventually go through the entirety of 16th cavalry. Nobody can find this tank. Nobody.

Is a bumper number kind of like a tank's tramp stamp? Actually, yeah, it is on the back. It is on the back. I would say the tramp stamp for tanks is more like when the crews give it names and they write the name on the barrel. So you get like, you know, because the bumper number is slightly off to the left or right. So it's more like a butt cheek tattoo. Exactly. And so everybody's looking around trying to find this. tank. It is nowhere to be found. And because I was given the keys, suddenly it's

specialist Casabian's problem, but I never signed any paperwork for this tank yet. So I, like, it's not my problem. It ends up becoming the warrant officer's problem who's in charge of the motor pool. And then it kind of like goes above my head. But long story short, someone lost a whole main battle tank. And as far as I know, no one ever found it. Someone somewhere got a massive amount of problems. That is insane, but yeah, I know that when I was deployed, a friend of mine was handed over during the transfer of what's called theater purchased equipment because you couldn't have units bringing all of their stuff to combat and back. It was just the logistics, especially

in a country like Afghanistan that is landlocked, would be massive. And he was told by a platoon leader that he was trading out with that he had 420 millimeter mortar tubes that weren't on anyone's books. And he was like, now that's not unreasonable to be in the sense that you've been at that point, we'd been in Afghanistan for eight years and, you know, stuff gets, like, written off his battlefield loss and, like, it's still there. They find it, you know, that kind of thing. And he was like, how did you get them? He's like, oh, I traded him an ASV for it. And I'm like, you traded him a military vehicle? He's like, yeah, it was scraps of combat loss. It's on blocks. In his defense, it's an ASV. It's hardly a military vehicle.

It was it looked like a BRDM. Yeah, it's a real piece of shit. It's extremely like you get killed in this vehicle. Yeah. I will say that, uh, I'll give you my own quickly because, because I don't want to drag up too long. When I was deployed, we had amongst the kit that was going to come back because all the personal weapons are going to come back with you. Like three or four M16 A2s that no one had assigned and we had to inventory them. And I was like, who's are these? Are these just in reserve? And they're like, no, these were the rifles that were given to replacements when we deployed to Iraq from the Kona's replacement center to sent them over to theater with these and they trans them to our hand receipts. But like, they aren't actually ours.

They belong to a state side unit. But like, no one has been able to. to figure out what to do with them. So we just have to make sure we've got them. And I was like, that sounds really fucking shady. And I'm going to tell the battalion XO about it. But like, let's just keep this one, you know, as a note. About a year after, I got home from Afghanistan. I was, I was in the S3 shop.

And they called me and they're like, hey, you know, Captain Bethay, you were the XO. There's a guy from, so CW4 from Fort Hood CID calling, some missing M16s. And I was like, I bet you I know the answer. And I was like, and I talked to this guy. I was like, yeah, we've had these and we've got them literally in our arms room and we inventory them on our hammer seat every month. But yes, they were sent over with guys who got sent his replacements to Iraq in 2007, I think, 2006, 2007. And for some reason, we still fucking got them. He's like, well, sir, I'm really glad to hear you say that because we were about

to lock down the entirety of Fort Hood and find these. That wouldn't even be the first time. They're in Alaska in someone's arms room. I'm like, yeah, Roger, we've got them. So I would say, If you were missing nods, you'd get Article 15, you'd get a statement of charges, there would be a financial liability investigation of property loss, all that stuff. But that, what I just described, like fucking special agent bond from Fort Hood CID, that shit wouldn't happen. When it's firearms, especially, yeah, assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, that kind of shit, one trillion percent.

So to answer the question and bring it back to the beginning, you would get the dog shit smoked out of you. You would get smoked through time for losing either, but it's way worth to lose a weapon. Yeah, you definitely get demoted, but like, it wouldn't be a criminal issue. Exactly. Whereas where, and also the thing I'd say, too, is that everyone else's problem in the sense of the hands across America, even when it's obviously not going to be found to just mass punish and torment you because someone lost something, would stop sooner for nods than for a rifle or any kind of weapon. I should point out that both of us have been on the military

very long time and you'd probably be kicked out for either of those today. But who knows? Yeah. Back in order, they needed bodies to put in places to get blown up and put full of holes. so yeah, we'd still deploy you. We just kick you out after and then you don't get VA benefits. That's a podcast, but you guys host other podcasts. Plug does other podcasts. Trash future. What a hell of way to dad. Kill James Bond. No guys, no mayors. I'm involved in some capacity. I'm also in a band called Second Homes. We have an album called Find a Way to Hate It that's coming out in the spring. That's my bit. Bloodwork. Show about the economy of violence. Listen to Bloodwork on whatever platform you like with your favorite picture of someone holding a gun or a gun or like someone last night did with actual bullets. and beneath skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattoos. This is the only show that I host. You've already heard my pitch. So give us money on Patreon.

Until next time, ride your horse across like peepas.