The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1111: The Spanish Empire 1492-1659 - Pt. 4 - The Focus of the Series w/ Paul Fahrenheidt

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

68 MinutesPG-13Paul Fahrenheidt is a husband, father, podcaster, writer, and founding member of the Old Glory Club.Paul joins Pete to continue a series on Spain's Golden Age. In this episode Paul gives an overview of the subject of each episode to be covered.A Country Squire's NotebookOld Glory Club YouTube ChannelOld Glory Club SubstackPaul's SubstackPaul on TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cupra plug-in hybrid range for mentor leon and terramar now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro search cupra and discover our latest offers cupra design that moves finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from vows wagon financial services arland limited subject to lending criteria, terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

And now this is over the nation at Amstere, is leargoal to goa and not great in Aundoon, and leant of gaol to give the father to Gaelta Deirin.

In Ergrid, we're dig tour in one-of-in-he, one-of-one-ha. There's ozchraught, a young lecturer, Gnall and Pobble cariffe at Waintheirte.

There's air of cooctuagin. Full of nismo at Airgrid, Pongahee. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and add free,

head on over to freemamandbeonthewall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. Two, there's subscribe star.

Three, there's Patreon. Four, there's substack. And now I've introduced Gumroad, because I know that a lot of our guys are on Gumroad, and they are against censorship. So if you head over to Gumroad and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad-free, and you'll get an invite into the Telegram group. So I really appreciate all the support everyone's giving me, and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has.

Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanuano show. It took a little break on this one, Paul. But yeah, we're going to do it. Paul Fahrenheit's back. How you doing, Paul? I'm very well, Mr. Pete. Thank you again for having me back on to discuss one of my favorite topics, Spain, Golden Era, Spain.

And this is episode three of the series itself, episode four, if you include the Disputation of Tortosa episode that we did. And what I have planned for this evening, I know it's not evening if you're listening to it on any other time, but what I have planned for for right now is we're kind of, so since the last two episodes, we've basically been sprinting through, you know, 1,500 years of history plus. Like, like we've been going through, we've been doing a massive survey of some of the broad strokes of what happened on the Iberian Peninsula and throughout the rest of Europe. That brought us up to the, this point where we are in the about the 1500s, right? We talked a little bit about the conquistadores

and the foundation of the Spanish Empire. We will talk about that a little bit more in depth later on, but I want to remind the listeners that this series had a sort of thesis statement and a primary example of analysis, which is world systems theory, particularly through what we're calling the Christendom world system. And we are going to be analyzing that world system, of which Spain and the Holy Roman Empire are kind of the center point at this era. And we are going to be analyzing this era in Spain

and the Holy Roman Empire and its various opponents through this world's lens at about this time, because this was the final crisis of legitimacy. Now there were various crises of legitimacy before it, this is the final crisis of legitimacy that finally brought it down. So what this episode is going to be is kind of a little bit of a table of contents as to what the remaining episodes of the series are going to be. I'm going to go into each episode that we're going to cover a little bit. Now, we're going to go into much, much more detail as we get to these individual episodes.

but if I'm counting correctly, we have not counting this one, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine episodes after this one. All right. So we have nine episodes that I have planned at least. All right. I have not, maybe we have a bonus episode thrown in. Maybe we'll compress it if the schedule demands it. But as of right now, we have nine episodes planned after this one. So I told you, we are going to be analyzing this system through a variety.

variety of angles and we will be getting into we will be getting into each angle so what i'm going to do first and foremost so that the listener isn't sitting with baited breath the whole time i'm going to read out at least the title of each episode we're going to do and then once i read out all of them all nine titles we're going to come back and i'm going to kind of start talking a little bit about what we're going to be touching on with each individual episode in the series does that sound good to you, Mr. Pete? Sounds great. Please proceed. All right. So the first episode after this one will be called the declining Christendom world system. The episode after that will be called the Italian Wars. The episode after that is the Protestant Reformation. The episode after that will be

the Spanish world economy. The episode after that will be the first modern state. The episode after that will be contemporary dissidents. The episode after that will be Christendom's crisis of legitimacy. The episode after that will be the 30 years war and the end of the system. And the final episode will be the aftermath and twilight of Spain. All right. So those are the nine, I believe that's nine episodes. If some listener was counting like, those's not nine, maybe, maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just stupid. But those are going to be the next nine episodes. All right. So now that I've kind of read all of those out, so the viewer has an idea as to where we're going to be going with this. It's a little bit of chronology, because whenever you're

doing history, you can't avoid the chronological analysis, even if you're trying to like dig deep, all right. But the whole point of this like multifaceted approach that we're going to be taking from a variety of different angles and slightly different time periods is we're trying to understand the whole picture, what all of the moving components of the system were that brought it to this point. as you heard we're going to be one episode we're going to be diving very heavily in on economics particularly the economic consequences of spain's colonies and what drove spain to look for colonies in the first place we're also going to be looking at the spanish governance and institutions as well as the governance and institutions of opposing regimes but one of note that i think is particularly

interesting is we're going to be looking at the behavior of dissidents of varying stripes in this era, because there were all kinds of dissidents in this era, just like there were in our era. And they had a brand new form of media to use to communicate with each other and with the general public, which was the Gutenberg Printing Press. The Gutenberg Printing Press operated in much the exact same way. It's analogous to Twitter today. or I suppose these YouTube streams today or substack articles today. All right.

And it is vital. You cannot understand this era without understanding the impacts of the Gutenberg printing press. So there will be some books we will be reading. There will be some points of some famous books that will go into some that maybe you haven't heard of, some angles that maybe you aren't familiar with. But overall, that's kind of the various angles we're going to be taking. So I'm going to go back and kind of go through each episode that we're going to be doing in a little, in a sort of, how should I say, in a sort of brief kind of overview.

I'm not going to talk about it for nothing. But by the way, Mr. Pete, if you have anything to add or any interruptions that you'd like to make at any point on this little survey of what we're going to be doing, just let me know and feel free to add anything. Yes, sir. You know I will. Yeah. So the first one, so the declining world, the declining Christendom World system,

that's going to be the episode immediately after this one, right? So in this episode, what we're going to do is we're going to hyper focus on what the Christendom world system was. And we are going to actually go back into some earlier medieval history in order to get a, get a, particularly with the church, particularly with the church. And this relates because the picture of the whole church needs to be understood. And the kind of why it got to this point. Because the empire, almost everyone kind of understands what it is. It's like, you know, competing dynasties and things like.

And the empire is sort of inseparable from the papacy and from the Catholic Church, just as theology is incess. separable from politics. Everyone has a political theology. The spiritual world and the political world are inseparable because the political world follows from the spiritual world. Whatever your contentions are as to what the spiritual world looks like and how the political world, the material world should emulate it, right? That shapes your politics. And it absolutely did shape the politics in the high and late medieval late middle ages. So what we're going to be talking about here is now obviously we're not going to be taking a whole walk through space and time, but it's important to understand specifically the issues that were arising within the Catholic Church that sort of sowed the seeds of these crises of authority that occurred within the, that kind of culminated, finally culminated in the 16th century and later. but the 16th century was by no means.

The Protestant Reformation did not come out of nowhere. The Protestant Reformation was the culmination of many, many hundreds of years of, of decay within the Catholic Church, critique from certain parts of the Catholic Church to other parts of the Catholic Church. The foundation of – there were various reformations prior to the Protestant Reformation. What comes to mind is the Franciscan Reformation, the Benedictine Reformation, which created these monastic orders that everyone knows about. These came from critiques within the Catholic Church from certain parties, which led to the establishment of these monastic orders. I think the Dominicans also came as a result of this.

But also, you have the investiture controversy, right? So what was the investiture controversy? We're going to be looking at that. The investiture controversy is basically a dispute as to who has the authority to appoint bishops. Who has the authority to appoint bishops, whether it lies with the emperor or whether it lies with the pope. And this, you know, you'd think it's a lot simpler of a question that it turned out being. There's also the issue, right, of the concept of anti-popes, which we're going to be talking about. Why did anti-Popes come about? Why did the Holy Roman Empire? Why did Frederick Barbarossa or Frederick the second think that they could just declare the Pope in Rome illegitimate, set up a Pope in their own realm, and then go down and depose the sitting Pope and replace him with their popes? What were the consequences of that? Why did that come about? Was that seen as illegitimate? It very much was, but sometimes that's just how it goes. who is it? And on that note, we're also going to be talking about the Western schism. What was the Western schism? Well, it was when at one point two, and then at one point, I think, like, four anti-Popes all existed at once.

There was the Pope in Rome, the Pope in Avignon, the Pope in, like, Aragon, and then the Pope in, I think, I think Savoy. There was a fourth one. And so, and this is a very serious thing. We're also going to talk about the conflict between the Gelfth and the Ghibolines. If you may or may not be familiar, the Gels and the Ghibolines were the competitors of two. Really, it was two separate dynasties within the Holy Roman Empire. It was most notable in the Italian city-states. We remember it from Dante's life.

But the Gelfs were supporters of the von Velfth dynasty, and the Gibilins were, I think, the supporters of the von Hoenstauphins. But what they kind of basically shook out to be was the von Velves built their dynastic authority on complete submission to the Pope and the emperor as like the servant of the Pope as opposed to the Ghibelines, the Holland Shalphans, you know, the emperor as sort of the this, what is it, this, the secular authority that that derives legitimacy from the Pope but doesn't necessarily, basically holds the Pope as the spiritual. leader who doesn't have, who should not, does not and should not have authority over secular issues. All right. And so that's kind of the earliest that this conflict appears. We're going to be talking about the Hussite movement, obviously, and some of the earlier pre-Protestant heresies. We're going to talk about the Valdensians, the Lollards, the, the, the Albigensians, the, was it, the Cathars, is the Albugencians. And we're also going to be talking about the shoot.

Who else is there? Am I forgetting one? But most notably the Hussites. The Hussites were the most successful Reformation before the Reformation. All right. We're going to be talking about what were these issues based on why do they happen, et cetera, et cetera. And did they come out of these crises within the church?

We're also going to be talking about the conciliar movement. All right, the conciliar movement was basically the reformation within the church that happened almost a century prior to the actual Protestant Reformation. This was a reform proposal within the Catholic Church that made serious traction and would have fundamentally reshaped how the Catholic Church would have worked, would have been, if it had gotten more successful, but, you know, it was not successful. We're going to talk about this. And then, of course, finally, it's going to culminate with the, we're not going to go so much into the Protestant Reformation itself because that will be its own episode. But we're going to explain how all of these issues of crises within, particularly the church part of the Christendom world system, led to this crisis of authority within the Christendom world system, which created its own, the crisis which ended it. All right. Anything on that, Mr. Pete, before I move on?

You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro.

Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Cooper. design that moves Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Subject to lending criteria Terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited

Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland Ready for huge savings Well mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items All reduced to clear From home essentials to seasonal must-habs,

when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa. Savour sumptuous farm-fresh dining.

Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. your five-star getaway where every detail is designed with you in mind give the gift of a unique experience this christmas with vouchers from trump dunbeg search trump ireland gift vouchers trump on dunbiog kush farraga no please proceed all right so next episode after that we're going to be focusing on the italian wars this is when we're going to return back to the secular part of the christendom world system all right the italian wars are extremely important because you're going to be focusing on the italian wars are extremely important because because the Italian Wars is basically the beginning of the competition between the two major secular pillars, or I guess three, but primarily it shakes out to two, the two major secular pillars of the Christendom World System, which is the Habsburg Domain versus France. All right, the Italian wars are the really the first, the first major confrontation between France and the Habsburgs, all right? And also it's an incident. interesting way to kind of dive into some of the military advances that because the Italian wars

were ostensibly between Spain and France over claims on the Italian peninsula. It's also it's also the end of the of the, what is it, of the Italian Renaissance. And it's also an interesting, an interesting display of some of the, of the cracks that had formed between the secular world and the ecclesiastical world. Because in 15, 27, Rome was sacked by Habsburg armies under Charles V. Right. So why does that happen? Why does a Catholic emperor sack Rome?

All right. We're going to get into that. We're going to show you how this all happened. All right. How this all happened? Why it all led to this? We're going to talk about a little bit about France's sort of nationalist antithic, because there's sort of a Hegelian dialectic going on here with this thesis in the Holy Roman Empire.

The Habsburg Empire is kind of the culmination of what Spangler calls in Prussianism and socialism, the Hohenzollern ideal of the universal Catholic state with both emperor as the Holy Rhone Empire is kind of the jurisdiction that's being expanded and the Kingdom of Spain is kind of the wealth and the military that's expanding it. Stop me if this sounds somewhat familiar, although I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not making any moral equivalencies here. Um, but then, um, but then, you know, there's a sort of nationalist kind of inward looking provincial almost reaction antithesis to that in the kingdom of France as this, you know, the, the Catholic Church of France being sort of the national church of France, the national Catholic Church of France and, you know, figures like, although he's not contemporary to this, but figures like Cardinal de Rishalou are great examples of this. So yeah, so yeah, I'm particularly looking forward to that one because the Italian Wars is very much understudied.

I'm trying to remember we're trying to remember if Kaiser Maximilian was involved in that one in the lands next. Yeah, some historian I am. I don't know this off the top of my head. Yes, I'm pretty sure, yeah, he fought in this one. And yeah, and we're also going to, you know, kind of talk about how, you know, the Burgundian succession has to do with this. And the beginning of the, the disputes of authority between France and the whole or an empire. But that's a lot, that's going to be a lot simpler of an episode. Excuse me.

So after that, anything on that, Mr. Pete? No, everything sounds good. All right. So after that, I'm going to stop after every episode just to make sure. Sure. As much as I like talking, after a while, I kind of feel, kind of get self-conscious about it. Well, you know, our friend Thomas comes on and, you know, it happens once, you know, he just starts going. And I let him because he's the one providing the information, just like you are.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. But regardless of it. So the next episode is going to be the. You know, I said, we're going to come back to the Protestant Reformation. I am, we're going to very specifically with the Protestant Reformation episode, we're going to dig down into the theological issues that the various reformers, you know, Luthers, Vingley, Calvin, John Knox, you know, all the other individuals.

we're also I'm also going to you know see if I because I know there were Spanish Protestants there were not very many but there were a few and there were Italian Protestants and there were a lot of French Protestants Calvin was French but but you know like we're going to we're going to basically go I want to kind of demonstrate that Protestantism was not this just this ethnic Nordic movement right it it there were others in other places It was much more now they were stamped out very quickly because frankly they just did not have the organization numbers or political power to resist But you know, I want to and and likewise vice versa within the Nordic countries there were quite a few people who had a problem with leaving the Catholic church You know so brazenly and abruptly

And so we're going to go into this this is not it's it's it's it's it's the whole point of this You know particularly and this is why I think is I said to you before the stream, I'm going to say this again, Mr. Pete. I think this is why it's important that we have a Protestant and a Catholic talking about this, because the whole point of this episode is going to be to deconstruct the polemic, right? I'm not here to play Ra Ra Protestant or Ra Catholic. All right, we are here to figure out the facts. What went wrong?

The whole fact that there was a Protestant Reformation in the first place means something was fundamentally wrong that was left to sit and rot and was not addressed until it was too late. And that, you know, I'm not saying one side is right or wrong. It's just breaks like that within any system whatsoever do not occur unless there was a massive underlying issue. And it may not even be necessarily with the church structure itself. It may have been other things. All right.

But this is why we need to, and this is what the Protestant Reformation episode is going to be. We're going to be focusing on the secular issues, the ecclesiastical issues, and, you know, and also we're going to get into a little bit of the Catholic Church's responses. We're going to talk about the Council of Trent. We're going to talk about the counter-reformation. We're going to talk about the Jesuits a little bit. We're going to talk about the Catholic Church seriously addressing and fundamentally agreeing, I think the Treaty of Augsbrose, some other places. We're going to, we're going to go into how the Catholic Church did very much seriously take a lot of the assertions that the Protestants were making about the state of the Catholic Church after the break had already done.

And that's what they went into the Council of Trent looking to do. Now, there are other councils we're going to talk about too. But obviously those are the main big points. If you are listening to this series attempting to get ammunition, for whatever particular ideological goal that you want to pursue, this is not the place for you. We are here to understand what happened better, not worse. And I don't mean to constantly emphasize this,

but I know that people will go in the comments or go on the timeline, whatever, and they will start, you know, causing problems over this. All right. So that's what I just wanted to re-emphasize that. All right. We are here as historians to attempt to get a better understanding of what happened historically so that we can avoid the same mistakes in the present.

All right. I'm going to leave it on that. Yeah. No, that's important. I mean, it's just too emotional of a subject. Best to just approach it clinically and just talk about what happened. Well, and I mean, and emotion isn't necessarily wrong because how did something like this happen? And obviously, yes, there was clear negligence.

And it very likely did exist, it does exist on both sides. You know? Yeah. And it happened for more than one reason too. So that's what's most, you know, that's important too. Yeah, absolutely. And the key thing is to take both sides seriously. It's like, you know, like if someone just, if, schism is, is never the first choice in anything.

And frankly, if the goal, as, and I'm, I don't want to say. the quiet part out loud but if the goal is to eventually you know you move past that if the goal if that's the goal you you know everyone needs to understand what caused the problem in the first place all right um but yes uh mr p that's kind of um that's what we're going to be talking about in this very specific protestant referendum we're going to talk about the diet of verms and um and uh charles the fifth um and and luther and other things like that and all in everything we're going to and particularly where the break in the world system occurred but that's that's what we're going to be addressing in that episode sounds good moving on

here the so the next episode after that we're going to take a step back from serious emotionally driven topics and talk about something i you know you can almost jokingly say more important but uh that'll also probably put a good chunk of the audience to sleep because what we're going to be talking about in the episode after that, Mr. Pete, is the Spanish world economy and the world economy generally in and around this time period, and specifically the massive shocks that came with the Spanish colonies, particularly with Spain trying for the first time in history to have a completely commodities-based currency. It's actually the first time anyone had tried that um at the at the extent at the extent spain did um because you know when you when you

find when you go into this foreign land and you find a literal mountain of silver like a a mountain with so much silver in it that the the the sunlight glints off of it because of how much silver is poking out of this mountain. All right. You know, it's like, it's like recently a lot of guys have been, you know, showing sympathy for the boomers. And I think it's the exact same way, right? Like if you're a country that finds a literal mountain of silver in a, you know, precious

metals based currency world, would you act any differently than the Spaniards did? It's like if you were born in the boomer generation, would you act any differently? than the boomers did you know it's like it's it's it's the resource curse right when you have a glut of something you kind of treat it as you kind of treat it for granted um so yeah that's and that's going to be a big chunk of what we're going to talk about we're going to talk a lot about uh spanish monetary policy um spanish coinage um you know particularly based around their treasure fleets and the golden silver that they extracted from the colonies but what we are also going to talk about i keep mentioning the grand duchy of burgundy and the low countries in

the netherlands it is extremely important to keep mentioning these places because um despite all of that currency all of that all those precious metals coming into the spanish economy the most productive and valuable and revenue creating provinces within the spanish empire were the low country provinces was flanders um holland zealand and the the other dutch provinces these were the the highest revenue creating provinces within the hapsburg spanish dominion um which is why you know a very large part of the reason why the 80 years war occurred is because uh all of the sudden all of these provinces which were the the largest revenue generating provinces within the Spanish Empire,

revolted, all of the sudden, you know, if you're, this is something I think, this is a master key that I think, I think your listeners, Mr. Pete, if they haven't already taken it to heart, I think they need to, I think a lot of our guys need to start taking it seriously too. Someone once said,

some dictator somewhere said that politics is the entertainment of the banking industry. And that doesn't mean politics doesn't exist or isn't important. You know, I'm not, I'm not like trying to be like some kind of Gnostic here and be like, oh, actually, the only thing you need to watch is financial markets. Politics has no influence on anything because obviously it does. But if you are not looking at the world situation and without, if you're looking at the world situation and you're not looking at the financial aspect of it, you are not getting the full picture. As a matter of fact, you know,

one of the reasons that the Dutch won against the Spaniards, or at least that they were able to hold out for so long, it's called the 80 years war for a reason, Amsterdam was under siege for so long that a whole economy developed in Amsterdam. Like that, it was like normal. Like, you know, like, like a whole siege economy developed, like to the point where like Dutch officials were purposely not prosecuting privateers, but they were raising prices to such a point that that like pirates and smugglers would start selling goods to their citizens at a lower price than the, than the Dutch government could sell to their citizens. You know, so that's like, that's like the kind of hard decisions that were being made. But one of the reasons that were, that the Dutch were able to hold out against this much larger opponent for so long, part of it is because of Maurice of Nassau's military reforms, but part of it is because the Dutch were superior accountants. The Dutch kept better track of their goods than the Spanish did.

Now, it's easier for the Dutch too because they had a much smaller area. But what was it? It was one missed payment to mercenaries changed the whole tide of the 80 years war. So that's what we're going to kind of go into. We're going to go into the sort of hyperinflation, which did occur with Spanish gold and silver. That's very similar to today. We're going to talk a lot about how the Spanish government declared bankruptcy like seven times over 50 years. I think they declare bankruptcy twice and one year once.

We're going to talk about the... Talking about banking, we're going to talk about the Fuggers, the F-U-G-G-E-R-S, the richest banking family in history, who were the sort of the financial backers of the Hapsburg dynasty and their various constituent parts. They're the reason why the Hapsburgs were able to remain Holy Roman Emperor for so long, because the, fugger finances were what bought the elections.

And we're going to talk about nascent banking systems and like the decline of the Italian banks and the rise of more Nordic banks. So we're also going to talk about how the Protestant Reformation allowed for sort of these nascent domestic credit markets within these Protestant countries to start developing with something resembling fiat currency, an early version of it. and as like a point of parallelism, all right? But yeah, what else? We're also, and we're also going to talk about how much like is the case in the United States today,

we're going to talk about how the Spanish Empire actually impoverished the Iberian Peninsula rather than enriched it. Because none of that wealth, all of the wealth that was extracted from the new world and that came from the Dutch provinces, none of it was reinvested in the Iberian peninsula. And that's a very significant part of the reason why Spain is so poor today, as compared to like Italy, right? Not because it's a Mediterranean country, because there's Italy right over there, which is much better developed, has a lot more wealth sitting in it. Spain was drained of wealth and manpower and all these other things for these constant Habsburg wars.

And a large reason for this was because the Hapsburgs were in many ways foreigners to the Iberian Peninsula. They were not Spaniards. They were Germans and, you know, actually to a certain extent, they came from the low countries as well. And a lot of, and their court kind of reflected that. You know, there's a reason why Spain and the Holy Roman Empire weren't really considered two separate entities. They were considered the one contiguous Habsburg entity. And we're going to talk about how there was kind of a, a, domestic Spanish, Castilian very specifically, but that's getting into another episode.

But yeah, we're going to talk about the economic strain and the economic cost that the Iberian Peninsula had to kind of shoulder for this. Because unlike Great Britain, Great Britain had a whole different model. Great Britain, all of the wealth that it extracted from its colonies, it reinvested in the British Isles themselves. That's why they were able to remain much more powerful for much longer. That money was reinvested in... This is why the Industrial Revolution was able to occur in England, in Great Britain, was because revenues from the colonies were reinvested in England itself, at least initially. And France's colonies were never serious enough to cause any sort of major reinvestment.

um but spain is an example of like it had these mass vast sprawling colonies to any of them and it never even really developed itself um and we're going to get into why that kind of occurred um so yeah i mean a lot of the more economically minded of your uh listenership your viewership might uh enjoy that episode in particular because it's a it's an angle on world history that not a lot of people take. Well, I think people are going to be fascinated by it because they're going to see a system that's way more advanced

than they would expect for the time. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, no, you all, we're not, if you should have learned one thing from the dissident, right, you should have learned this, is that you're not as clever as you think you are, and just because we got computers and smartphones that doesn't make us that much different at all

from our ancestors in terms of like the complexity of systems we can create. Shoot, like, I was listening on, I was on a Stone Choir episode. I heard this once. That in Mesopotamia, we found something resembling like a credit card. You know, it was a system of, like, exactly 18%, which is the typical market rate for a credit card today. So nothing, Solomon said it in, in, I think it's in Ecclesiastes, he said this. I could be misquoting, but I think this is an Ecclesiastes.

If it's not an Ecclesiastes, it's in Proverbs, but I think it's an Ecclesiastes. He says, nothing is new under the sun. And what do you, he also said, I know he says this in Proverbs. He also says in Proverbs to do not inquire why the, do not inquire, do not inquire why were the former days better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask this, all right? Look, the past is not like this grand cornucopia great place that you need to yearn for.

It's dead. It's gone. It's past. It's done. You need to understand it to understand how we got here. But, you know, the whole purpose of all historical study is to then come back to the present with a better understanding of how to manipulate things and how to change things. So yeah, like, yes, exactly on that point. These systems are very sophisticated, and the ones we have today are really just scaled-up versions. That's the only real difference.

And speaking of systems, all right, the episode after we do the economy episode, we're going to start going into Spain as the first modern state. We're also going to talk about, as always, the Grand Duchy of Burgundy and a lot of their systems that were borrowed by the Spanish and the Habsburgs and also by the Dutch. But particularly in the Spanish context, we're going to be talking about the Casa de Contraxion, which was kind of in one building. that was sort of this i don't want to say that it was like the administrative center of spanish government that decided coinage um contracts for uh colonial uh affairs uh it decided it decided all sorts of things and it really was it's like it's it's this first kind of modern even though it's in one building it's this first kind of modern bureaucratic center that was required for an empire as big

as the Spanish was. We're also going to talk about Eliscorial, which was the monastery palace that Philip II reigned from and did his work from. We're going to talk about how Philip the second's desk had something like 14,000 pieces of paper on it at any given time. And he was trying to basically deal with all of it at once.

We're going to talk about the foundation of the of Madrid itself because the city of Madrid, Mr. Pete, was actually an artificial city. It was artificially, it was a small little like river village. It was artificially created by the Habsburgs as kind of the center of governance in this, in the geographic center of Spain. Once they started adopting the title, Kings of Spain rather than Kings of Castile and Aragon. And also we're going to talk about the Council of the Indies, which was, um, this novel colonial institution that managed the rest of the empire.

But basically the whole point of this is, in the government of the Spanish Empire, you see the beginnings of what we would call a modern state. And what that really means is the changing nature of the bureaucracy. We're also going to talk about the decidedly foreign character of a lot of the Spanish bureaucracy, of how a lot of the Spanish bureaucrats came from the low countries or Germany or other places and the tensions that it caused with with the, what is it, with the native Iberians, with the Spaniards, which actually brings us anything on that, Mr. Pete? No, not on that part. So, yeah, and so this brings us into the next episode, which is about dissidents, contemporary dissidents, all right. This is where we are going to compare ourselves to the group of people we are the most analogous to at this time.

And it's not just the Protestants because lots of Catholics started using the printing press too, lots of particularly the Jesuits. The Jesuits were actually the ones who were intellectually engaging with many of the Protestant reformers, many of the Protestant thinkers, they were in correspondence, they were in dialogue, They were, the Jesuits were responding to many of their theological claims. Many, many interesting theological developments came out of this era, particularly, I'm thinking of a, I'm thinking of a particular school of eschatology, which actually a Jesuit was the first one to fully write a systemized treatment of called a preterism, which is the idea that a good chunk of

Revelation and the tribulation actually occurred in AD 70. And that the book of Revelation was it, that the book of Revelation was not written in AD 95, but that actually it was written in AD 65, five years prior to the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, which if, and that's just a minor archaeological quibble. But if it, but I don't mean to go into eschatology. some of you may be familiar with it but that was that was um what is it that was written by a jesuit priest which was then taken seriously by a group of dutch of dutch reformed protestants who kind of treated it in um i forget the name it was one guy it was um i forget his name he if if it comes

back but basically what i want to show is that like look this was an intellectual war as much as it was one of politics and economics right um and these people were in dialogue with each other um What was it? And we're going to talk about like the sort of the Gutenberg. You could call it Gutenberg Twitter. You know, you had these like hastily done woodcut memes that were rapidly printed and spread or at least in the whatever, the 17th century version of hyperfast, of rapid. Pantlets are being spread far and wide, miniature plays, essays, basically substacks.

what the Gutenberg printing press allowed for was just for people to basically publish there. If you got one, you could publish your own substack immediately. Yeah, and obviously we're going to talk about

some of the particularly the Protestant dissident behaviors. We're going to talk about a lot of the parallel economies that they tried to set up including, you know, you know,

I don't know, a nascent form of cameralism, but we're We're also going to talk about the English's maritime strategy to sort of like, you know, because here's the thing, right, none of these countries could confront the Habsburgs directly. All right. Once again, stop me if this sounds familiar, right? None of the Habsburg empire was the dominant power, the dominant force.

One on one, any one of these countries would have been swamped, would have been crushed. all right um but also the hapsburg system the spanish system was very much in decline was very much in sort of bureaucratic bloat and overextension and you know very very poor resource misallocation and so the the the protestants basically the the protest and france also i don't forget about France. The Protestants in France all kind of took this approach of, well, don't confront them directly if you can absolutely avoid it and just let them peter themselves out. Because everyone knew eventually this could not continue. But Spain in the Habsburg system and in the Christenum world system and built up so much momentum that you can't stop it. You just have to kind of sidestep

it, get out of its way, and then maybe like cut it the knees. like England did with its privateer strategy. And yes, and we're also going to, you know, we're also going to talk about the, what was it, the dissidents in the, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, Iberia, actually, who weren't at all Protestants, you know, hated Protestants, they were good Catholics, but they did have a, what I call them the, the Castile first party.

And they were not the only one. Matter of fact, there was a, there was a, Portugal was under the possession of Spain at this time, and there was a lot of Portuguese who didn't like the idea of being under Habsburg dominion, and they wanted, as the same with the Italians. The Italians had this long tradition of political republicanism and city states that were separate from the sort of Habsburg Empire. And so you have a lot of dissidents in these places that is not necessarily religious in nature, but is more so quasi, I don't want to say nationalist, but like, because, but more so like quasi like, hey, why are we being ruled by all of these German speakers who are sapping wealth from us? So, but particularly is the sort of, I call them the Casual first party. They did not like the direction that Spain was going in. And they were a very vocal, they were a group of very vocally critical nobles within the Catholic,

the Habsburg court. Um, so yeah, I mean, there's, whenever you have any sort of world system, there's all sorts of ways you can criticize it. There's all sorts of grievances with it, but the only thing that all the dissidents agree on is the current thing has to go. After that, though, you know. Anyway, that's, yeah, that's what we're going to be touching on with the, with the dissidents episode. Paul, just to, um, you were talking about the Dutch pastor. It was Hugo Grosius, who latched on to preterism from the Jesuits. And then what I think is the seminal work that I've read, I read three times in one year.

His book by J. Stewart Russell, he was an English Baptist called The Perseia. and he basically goes through it's a great book to how he takes all of the scripture and harmonizes them to show how much of how much of it had already come

to fruition in the first century so yeah and that's you might have to send me that after the show because I'm actually pretty interested because preterism is the small little aside here. Eschatology is one of those things I've been kind of, you know, thinking about a lot recently. And the one that I'm just, I just feel like would answer the most

questions, you know, without actually under, at all undermining the text of revelation, but would answer the most questions is preterism. Prederism feels like the viewpoint that answers the most questions without undermining the text itself. Maybe some people disagree. But yeah, Send me the, send me the, I might listen to this on the replay, too, but send me the title of that book. Sure. Yeah, so, but yes, yeah, and I mean, and that's exactly, yeah, Hugo Grotius, that's who it was. But yeah, there's also, there's also the other, now that we're on Dutch religious thinkers, I'm thinking of the one who highly critiqued the Catholic Church. Huitzenga wrote a book on him.

highly critiqued to the Catholic Church, but didn't become a Protestant. Matter of fact, he rejected, when the Protestants reached out to him, he kind of rejected. I'm trying to think he was another Dutch guy. Famous name, Erasmus, Erasmus. Yeah, Erasmus was another one of these, like, you know, another one of these sort of great intellectuals of the time. and yes, these people were all in dialogue. This is the thing I want to emphasize. These, all of the brightest minds of the Catholic Church and of the reformers were in some respects actually exchanging letters debating things.

You know, that's to say, you don't think of people in Rola and others, you know, anyway, so, yeah, this is like, yeah. Yeah, so anyway, without going into something I've already said, that's what we're going to be talking about with the, and we're also going to be talking about a lot of the responses that the authorities took to the, and frankly, the Protestant, just as how the Catholics had their dissidents that were not necessarily Protestants, the Protestant state authorities clamped down on their dissidents as hard, if not harder than a lot of what the Catholics did, right? this is not like people talk about a lot about the reformation but they forget a lot about like the magisterial versus the radical and even with not even necessarily just radical reformers but you know a lot of the dissidents who were orthodox protestant but critique to the secular authority of a lot of these protestant states yet there there was absolutely you know like i said this is all like yes we have these simplistic narratives in our head that kind of help with polemics, but the reality is a lot more messy and everyone is kind of doing the same thing. It's just, you know, for different stated intentions. But yeah, we're going to, that's what we're going to talk about. I've got to speed this up a little bit here. So the episode after that, after we talk about a lot about the dissidents, now we're going to get

into the sort of the end game, right? We're going to get the end game started. So the episode after that is going to be the, shoot, I lost my little table of contents I was reading through. Here it is. All right. It's going to be the Christendom's Crisis of Legitency. We're going to go into the Dutch Revolt here. We're going into like the lead up to the 30 years war, basically. It's like, you know, the French wars of religion. the, you know, we're going to go into the consequences of the Council of Trent. Philip the second's claim on Spain or, oh, Spain, that's not a state. Philip the second's claim on England through his marriage to Mary Queen of Scots. What is it?

He and the armadas and this kind of, this growing sort of like, what is it, this growing, these growing two camps of like sort of the Catholic League and the Protestant League. And what pushed each individual country into both sides? You know, one of the, I've just noticed this, Mr. Pete. I don't want a mission creep any further, but as I was describing this, right, one of the key factors that I haven't talked about at all, that I'm probably going to have to find places to insert, because we can't do a whole, this is not about them, but is the Turks. I've totally forgotten the impact that the Turks had on all of this, right? It's easy to get trapped in the Western Europe bubble, but no, the Turks had, the Turks were one of the biggest, like, you know, exterior forces of this whole thing.

So I might have to actually, I'll find places to insert the Turks. But, yeah, the Turks are very important here as well. but more so as like an outside kind of influence as to what's causing things to happen within Europe. But yes, as we kind of, we're going to talk about the sort of crisis. We're going to end right on the eve of what would then become the 30 years war. Then we're going to have a whole episode talking about the 30 years war. You could do a whole series, multiple series. On the 30 years war, there is so much to cover.

We've got only an episode. All right, so what we're going to focus on within the 30 years war, as much as I'd like to, I don't think we're going to focus on as much the, what is it, the military aspects of it, or things like, although, shoot, the 30 years war, I mean, I made a tweet about this once, but just the widespread quality of generalship that everyone had. in the 30 years war, you know, on both the Catholic and Protestant sides. You know, the most famously, Gustavus Adolphus, the Count of Bourbon, who was a Catholic on the Protestant side, because he was French. Christian the 4th of Denmark, Maurice of Nassau, in the Dutch sense.

but then on the on the on the on the on the Spanish side you have uh you have friggin Wallenstein who's one of my favorite commanders invented military logistics count Tilly um you know picolomini uh spinola ambrosio spinola uh the cardinal infante there's so many so many like just outstanding stellar generals. It was stacked. It was a stacked era. And everyone was like top quality.

That's to say nothing of what was going on in England with the English Civil War. We're actually, we're not going to touch on that. But yeah, and then of course we're going to talk about it. And sort of the whole point of the 30 Years War episode is to basically show like, yeah, this is the death knell of Christendom as a world system. with the Treaty of Vestphalia. The Treaty of Vestphalia is, you know, it's one of the few firm dates that everyone agrees on, and everyone points to as like one of the actual like watershed moments is like,

okay, you know, the Treaty of Vestphalia firmly ends Christendom as a world system and kind of begins this nascent idea of a sort of nations, a competing nation state. I don't think it's accurate to describe Vespalia as a world system because there was no real central authority. It was more of like an agreed upon set of rules for a certain period of time instead of a sort of internationally imposed set of rules. Although maybe some disagree with me on that. That's fine. But that's what we're going to primarily be focusing on. It's just the 30 years war, the end of the Christendom World system, and the Treaty of the Treaty

of Esphalia in that episode. Very simple. Particularly we're going to be looking at the power politics. And the point I want to take is that with the 30 years wars that a lot of people like, oh, it's just this secular war. It had nothing to do with religion. I kind of want to, like, at least initially, as wars drag on, they just kind of become their own reason for existence. You know, most people forget the reasons why they're fighting the war about a year in, especially if they drag out. That's why war is terrible. And it's to be. avoided at all costs. Guess where I got that.

But yeah, so that's what we're going to be talking. But what I want to get at here is that the 30 years war absolutely was a religious war. Being characterized as like a religious confrontations between Protestants and Catholics is probably one of the only accurate ways you can characterize that conflict. It's like, oh, but what about France? France had its, France is like a special, special case. France had it as we'll go into. But yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about for that episode.

And that's going to be our second to last episode. Anything on that real quick, Mr. Pete? Nope. Keep going. All right. So this brings us into our final episode of the series that we will end the series. All right. And we might have like a sort of an episode after this where we kind of review the series

and we kind of talk about the things that have been brought up and the, applications to modern day, but this is like the final episode of like content that I have planned itself. And we may have bonus episodes and we may have, we may compress some of these, but like I said, this is the last episode. There's going to be a sort of cleanup of everything. We're going to talk about the aftermath of everything that happened and the sort of the twilight of, because Spain as a world power actually did not end with the Treaty of Estfalia. Spain was still a world power after the Treaty of Vesphalia. But it did not end as a world power until the Treaty of the Pyrenees,

which was about, I think, 10 or so, 10, 15 years later, somewhere around that point. which basically Spain firmly was ended as the dominant world power of Europe to be replaced by France and that begins the the sort of the that begins the sort of the grand century of France or well the grand two centuries

of France really so yeah we're going to talk about how the nature of the papacy and modern politics changed with the end of the 30 years war. We're going to talk about how the Holy Roman Empire changed with the Treaty of Esphalia. Because all these things stuck around, but they were completely different in how everyone thought of them. We're going to talk about how the Habsburg dynasty themselves changed after the 30 years

war. We are going to be talking about, of course, the Treaty of the Pyrenees and like the sort of the decline and end of Spain as the primary European power. Now, Spain is still, Spain is still a serious European power until the war of Spanish succession, which we're actually going to touch on as well. Yeah, we're going to look at the post-treaty of the Pyrenees kind of decline and end of Habsburg, Spain with the death of Charles the second. And we're not going to really go into the war of Spanish succession. but the War of Spanus Succession is going to be the kind of the first salvo of the...

There's kind of a half-century breather after the 30 years' war, for a lot of reasons, but, you know, it kind of completely obliterated the continent. But in the War of Spanus Succession, which begins, and I'm pretty sure, 1701, and ends in 1712. The War of Spanish Succession is the beginning of the next kind of nascent great power competition in the sort of the era, what I call the Great Powers era. The War of Spanish Succession is really when this idea of nation states as competing entities really get started.

And the borders of these nation states start getting a lot more well-distance. defined and less complex. And that kind of has to go with the Enlightenment. But that's well outside the scope. But that's kind of, that's all the stuff we're going to touch on, on the final kind of content episode. And like I said,

we might have an episode after that where we all, where we, you know, you and I would just kind of talk for an hour about everything we discussed in that series. The takeaways that the, that the viewer can kind of take in the world system that we currently live in today.

and you know but like other than that that's that's just kind of that's that's whether it's at your leisure but for the most part that's the whole that's the table of contents ladies and gentlemen that's it that's everything that's all i've got planned for right now um i don't want a mission creep and i don't want to expand that and i already have fit a lot into those into those episodes um so um yeah i mean that's uh that's that's pretty much everything excellent yeah i like the idea of doing a wrap up at the end, maybe even a live stream

where we can take questions. No, I think that's a great idea. Yeah, because this is something I want, like, like your series with Thomas, this is a deep dive.

This is like, I want the viewership to, like, watch this as it comes out because the thing is, like, this is not like a series where you can just watch one episode.

Like, you know, I may contradict that later, but like this, this is something where you have to watch the whole thing. You have to, you have to get as complete of a picture. Because this analysis will not work if you aren't sort of following us down the rabbit holes to the different kind of ways that you can analyze this. Because, you know, if you want to operate, especially as a dissident in today's, or instead of saying a dissident, I guess you should say as a, as a, as a, external elite, all right? If you want to operate as that, you need to approach it from a multi-domain, a multifaceted lens.

And you need to have a lot of what's going on a lot of different levels in your head at once. So, yeah, that's what I have to say. Yeah, I mean, yeah, no, I like the idea of a live stream with people asking questions. So, yeah, I want your listeners to follow along with this, I hope they get something out of this. I'm certainly going to be putting quite a lot of work

into getting this done. Shoot, this may even turn into a book at some point if I really have that kind of time and energy, which I doubt I will. But yes, that's everything I got, Mr. Pete. Sounds good. Promote away. I think I know what you'll promote.

Yeah, just, you know, old glory club. I have to say it every single time. You all know it's coming. Oh, glory club. Get involved. Get involved. It's absolutely vital. You get involved.

And as I said last time that I did one of these episodes. The time for you to get in on the ground floor is very rapidly closing. At the rate we are growing, you will not be able to join at the same standing you can join at right now. right because we are we are still at a size where just about everyone can be known but just given the number of group chats that have spontaneously organized to start getting nascent chapters i don't know half the people in some in most of those group chats all right so if you were on the fence about joining the old glory club you've been listening to pete show you know maybe on and off maybe religiously and you have haven't pulled the trigger on the old glory club yet. It is now or never because I do not know if you can join as easily in the future as you can join right now. We are growing. We are getting very large.

And it's going to get to a point where we are going to have to start maybe even telling some people no because of because we might want to keep. We might want to keep what we're doing here with the system intact. So if you want to get involved, a lot of, I've seen a ton of you. Pete, when you do these shows, what is it? Like, what is it? When I go and check the email sometimes in the Old Glory Club Gmail account, a lot of the time, it's more than I think it's like, hey, I heard about this from listening to the Pete Cignonas show. Hey, I heard this listening to Pete Cignonas show.

Hey, Pete was talking about this. I want to see. So this is one of the most important platforms for getting this word out there. But if you were on the fence about joining the old glory club, do it now. Get involved now. I do not, we are wrapping up what we're calling the second founding that's going to be wrapped up by about years end. We have, what is it? There's only, I don't know, I mean, you could quibble about Alabama, but there's, there's, there's, there's, yeah, I guess you could, you could count Alabama.

You could count Florida too. So we have four first founding chapters. All right. We have four first founding chapters. Those are the only ones who are going to be the first founding. But if you want to be in the second founding, all right, you got to. to get involved by the end of this year because that's when we're going to be wrapping up this second founding um and i absolutely assure you there will be differences between chapters that are

first and second founding but that's how it always goes so if you want to get involved now it's better to get involved it was better for you to get involved a year ago but the second best time is right now and if you get involved right now it's better to be in the second founding than in the 46th or the or when we stop numbering it and it's just the OGC is set right so i know that i know pete that's a long friggin ramble but i really want to drive this home if you are on the fence about getting involved you need to get involved right now contact us i'm sure pete puts the email in the in the show description or the website or whatever contact us somehow and we can get you in contact with you know even if it's not a we can get you in contact with a pre-existing chapter

or an organizing chapter in your local area even if you're somewhat remote we've even thought about creating because chapters aren't necessarily geographically restricted we've thought about creating a floating free agent chapter of all the guys who are just in a in disparate areas and they can't there's no one around them so we've thought about throwing them and giving them a chapter just so they have other guys that they know so yeah i'm sorry mr pete i've been talking about this for like bringing three minutes at this point, but I do want to drive this home. Get involved. You do not want to be too late. Get involved. I have at least probably five people contact me daily. Is there a chapter in my area? Is there a chapter of my area? And yeah, but yeah, you're right. The earlier you get involved, the, you know, then you start to learn about what we're doing. And, um, Yeah, I'll leave it at that. You know, it's, I think one of the smart things is that you,

you don't go out there and you tell everybody your plans. It's for, you know, there's some things that we just, we want to talk about privately. And, yeah, that's it. That's it. Get involved. And, yeah, and you'll find out what, you'll find out where we're going. and what we plan on doing.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And frankly, if you want to find out about those plans, it's better to get involved sooner rather than later because as we get larger, those plans will not extend out as far as they have been. But yeah, that's all I really got. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I guess, Cap King Paul. That's it.

All right, Paul. Have a good evening. Thank you. Take care.