The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1159: The Spanish Empire 1492-1659 - Pt. 6 -The Italian Wars - w/ Paul Fahrenheidt

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

64 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 Italian Wars.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.

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Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Great to see you back at Speck Savers. Okay. Could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right. Yes, our Black Friday deals are eye-catching. But the letter chart's over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals. Like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply.

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Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingeno show. Paul Fahrenheit's back, and we are going to continue the Spain series. How are you doing, Paul? I'm doing very well, Mr. Pete. Thank you again for having me back. I know it's been a while since we have done an episode of the Spain series, but I've been busy.

You've been busy. It's been the holiday season, and it's been a very interesting couple of months. So, yeah. A very interesting and strangely calm couple of months. Yeah, that's true. So let's talk about them Italians. Yeah, the Italian wars. So the next episode of the Spanish series, we're going to be talking about the Italian Wars, which is...

So first and foremost, I'm going to let all of your readers... Readership know that this is not going to be a history of the Italian Wars. That's not what this series is. It's a history of the Spanish Empire, but it's from a certain perspective. I am not here to give you a play-by-play of the Italian Wars. Rather, I would recommend you all go watch Apostolic Majesties, eight hour plus, I may be exaggerating a little bit, but very long coverage of the Italian wars of the surrounding Habsburgs of their policy objectives, of the Kingdom of France, of all this other stuff. This, rather, remember, the point of this series is world systems theory. All right, that is the point of this.

and we're looking at the Christendom world system, and specifically, Mr. Pete, the series through the, you know, Spain is the key to the latter part of the Christendom world system. And what we're looking at is the decline and breakdown of the Christendom world system, which coincides with the rise of the Spanish Empire. And one of those things that we're going to be looking at today

is the Italian wars. Now, what were the Italian wars? Well, they were called the Italian wars because there was like eight of them, you know, eight different ones and they all happen like two years, four years apart, stretching between 1494 and 1559. Some people even argue that, you know, some people would even include a lot of the smaller wars on the Italian peninsula previous to 1494 as a part of the Italian wars. And some people argue that the Italian wars never really, ended after the end of them in 1559. But I will give the viewership, the listenership, the broadstrokes. So the Italian wars are called such because they largely took place in Italy. They didn't only take place in Italy. They kind of spilled out into wider Europe.

But primarily they took place in Italy. And primarily in Italy, it took place. place in northern Italy. All right. And there were two-ish, three broadsides depending on, yeah, there were about three sides. All right. And what this demonstrates, what these three sides kind of represent are the differing ideas that are starting to come into place in the Christendom world system, especially towards its end. We've talked before Mr. Pete about the rival between France and the Habsburgs, which Spain kind of gets subsumed into. And this is the unfortunate thing about doing a history of the Spanish Empire, because the longer you analyze it,

Spain was, in fact, the foremost power in Europe at the time. It was the strongest by far in both economy and military. And it was infiltrated and occupied by a foreign cosmopolitan elite and utilized to further that cosmopolitan elite's political agenda rather than a Spanish national political agenda. Please stop me if this sounds familiar. Now, it wasn't entirely that. You know, there was, you know, the Spaniards weren't entirely powerless, but, and I may be exaggerating a little bit, but the kingdom of Spain, especially once the Habsburgs come into power, really does walk the line of a independent sovereign nation with a Habsburg king

and a Habsburg fiefdom subordinate to continental Habsburg policy. And the Italian wars actually kind of exemplify that, that sort of transition because the Italian wars, Spanish involvement in the Italian wars actually predates Habsburg rule because Spain, before it was even Spain, the unified kingdoms of Aragon and Castile had Italian provinces. Aragon was an outside participant.

So let me, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. So first, let me, and by the way, Pete, stop me at any time if you have any questions or you want to add something. I will. So in order for me to explain why the Italian wars occurred, I must first explain what Italy is at this time. Italy, the Italian Peninsula, is at this time, the richest part of Europe.

It is the most well-developed. It is the cleanest. It is the most modern. The Italian peninsula has been the beneficiary of Mediterranean trade for the past several hundred years. This trade largely flows into, you know, in addition. the Italian Peninsula is not a unified country. It's not even a sort of federation of feudal provinces like the Holy Roman Empire is or England is or France at this time, because France is a national concept isn't as solidified yet, or Spain is. Italy is just a whole bunch of

different principalities that don't even pretend to have unity with each other. Now, nominally, northern Italy, what we called it, you know, going down to, not Rome, but Northern Italy, nominally, is a part of the Holy Roman Empire. And the Holy Roman Empire even claims Rome. It does not claim Naples. It does not claim Southern Italy. That has always been, and everyone knows this, has always been a historically distinct part of Italy, Naples and Southern Italy. Northern Italy has, in the past, the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg's hold on Italy was a lot more decisive and strong. But now, especially with all this wealth that's flowing into Italy, and I'll tell your listeners why in a minute, that is no longer the case. So Italy is kind of an Ancaps paradise at this time. It is a smattering of 10,000 city-states. Some of them are duchies, some of them are republics, some of them are somewhere in between. In the middle of them, you have the papal states, which is a geopolitical entity that is under the authority of the Pope, who also, we've talked about that before, who also claim spiritual authority over all Christendom.

And the temporal role of the Pope is something that's actually going to play into the Italian Wars, because there's a disagreement as to what role the Pope has to play. and the Pope himself has an opinion that is actually at odds with the two major players here, which are the Habsburgs and the French. 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.

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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. Great to see you back at Spegg Savers. Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S?

Yeah, D-E-A-L-L-S. Deals. Oh, right. Yes. Our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter charts over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals, like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. So, anyway, besides that, the reason that Italy is so wealthy, or at least one of the many reasons, or at least one of the many reasons, reasons. Like I said, they were sort of the gateway of, you know, prior to the Ottomans conquering Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantine Empire was the terminus of the Silk Road, which brought

all kinds of commodities from Asia that Europe could not produce. And not just Asia. I mean, I say Asia, you know, people think of China, but really Central Asia, India, Iran, Anatolia, the Slavic countries, all of them flow into Europe largely through the Mediterranean Sea. And Italy and the Italian city-states, particularly the merchant republics of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and there was a fourth one. It's not Naples. It was in southern Italy, though, and it's like a blue background with a white cross. I forget the name of it.

but there were a variety, I might remember it at some point, but there were a variety of Italian merchant republics, and there were some more minor ones too. There was Sienna, a lot of, and a bunch of other minor cities. And these all have basically their own privately funded trade fleets. They have kind of trade outposts, or an early nascent version of colonialism, the Mediterranean has all of these like little islands scattered throughout them.

So it, that's part of the reason why trade. Not only is the Mediterranean sort of self-contained sea that isn't very far to go anywhere, it also has all of these very convenient rest stops in it with these little islands. So this is what makes the Mediterranean such a trade center, not only because of the inertia that's behind it, but because it's geographically very easy to trade in the Mediterranean.

You can take a ship from Venice and you have 15 possible stops. It's very unlikely you're going to lose that ship. The seas are very calm, generally, and everything is close enough to each other that trade is very salubrious. But an early nascent version of colonialism is some of these Italian states, gobbling up these little islands and little pieces of coastline throughout the Mediterranean to make its trading easier, basically giving them a whole bunch of rest stops so they can have really reliable trade routes. Portugal would later replicate this, and this is how Portugal

was able to get around Africa so quickly was it kind of took from the Italians' playbook in establishing their fait torres along the African coast. But when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, what they did was they banned, you know, this was partially a religious move, partially a cynical economic one, they banned all export of Asian commodities into Western Europe

as a part of their jihad against Western Europe. And so, who was the only one who could secure alternate routes? the Italian cities. This is why Spain and Portugal started going exploring in the first place, was they wanted to find a different source of those East Asian and Indian commodities that the Ottomans had blocked off. But the Italians had to help fill in the gap. And they did so by sailing all around the Mediterranean, sailing all around the Black Sea, going to Georgia, going to the southern Levant,

going to other places where the Ottomans didn't have dominion over yet, and attempting to do business there. In addition, the Italian Renaissance, which had been going on, led to advances in lots of domestic economic technology. Most notably, the Florentines figuring out double-entry bookkeeping, which I'm going to be honest with you, Mr. Pete, is probably one of the best inventions for white guys ever. I don't know if you've ever had to balance a balance sheet in your life,

but the first time that you see that total assets and total liabilities plus equity number and the whole spreadsheet just balances, it's like you're chasing that high for the rest of your life, if it makes sense. Yeah, being old enough to have done it on paper, yes. It's frigging great. And I can understand why the Italians liked it so much. But this causes lots of innovation in banking. And it, you know, there's also different economic theories.

You know, the wealth is starting to be seen less as a horder mindset in the Italian peninsula. And this is why the Italians were able to develop earlier than a lot of other places. was that the psychic concept of wealth in the mind of Europeans changed. Right. Wealth was no longer seen as a sort of fixed horde that everyone is kind of competing for. Rather, wealth started to be seen as something that you could invest and turn into capital, that you could put into productive enterprises, that you could use to, you know, beyond financing trade missions,

beyond, you know, buying gold coins, beyond building up an army to take more land. And part of this, too, was the decline of feudalism. Because the reason that in the Middle Ages, a lot of Europeans didn't fight over money, they fought over land is that in a society where, you know, agricultural production is basically money, which is what a feudal society was closer to, money is coming. money is kind of secondary. It's the land and the land production value that is what's important that people are fighting over. But now, as the Italians are demonstrating, particularly with very small geographic areas comparatively, a lot of these cities did not have a lot of territory

around them. They're demonstrating the power of basically taking in the capital from the rest of Europe and reinvesting them into their own cities. right so this is why italy is important italy is important to a lot of the larger european powers because of historical claims desire for expansion personal grudges all of these lovely things that cause wars and strife of various sorts um first i will be talking about france

So France at this time is under the Capitian House of Valois. All right, I'm not going to get into French dynastic politics, but suffice it to say the House of Capet is the grand house, and there's various sub-cadet branches of it, the House of Anjou, the House of Valois, the House of Burgundy was one, the House of Frigan, the later House of Bourbon,

the later House of Bourbon, which was the last royal dynasty of France, was a Copecian dynasty, a Capitian cadet branch, that is, and it's split out in various places. But the House of Anjou is no longer in, does no longer rules the kingdom of France, but it does rule a minor county in the south of France on the border of Italy called Provence. Why is Provence interesting? Well, if you'll remember our Western Schism episode that we did, was that the last one? I think that was the last one, the previous one. Provence is where Avignon is.

Avignon is where the... I don't want to say the French papacy, but the Avignon papacy sat during the Western schism. And so, when the Valois king of France inherits Provence from I think it was Charles of Anjou, I think that was his name. The people aren't so much important in this.

The individual rulers aren't so much important here. This places the kingdom of France in a very salubrious, good position to start looking at getting some Italian provinces, getting some of that Italian wealth to enter into the kingdom of France. In addition, there were historic French claims to the Kingdom of Naples, because the Kingdom of Naples, part of their symbol is the French Fleur de Lee, because the House of Anjou ruled the Kingdom of Naples for a very long time. And even all the way back to the Norman conquest, Naples as a concept was founded by Norman knights from France. On the other side, all right, on the other side.

all right on the other side of this you have the hapsburg interests in Spain and this is not not in Spain in Italy sorry I'll talk about Spain in a minute because Spain actually has separate interests in Italy from the hapsburgs because at this time Spain is not under hapsburg

dominion it is still under the control of Isabella and ferdinand the hapsburgs are the new imperial dynasty they are in charge of the holy Roman Empire and northern Italy these were the pretty much the entirety of these

very rich city states these rich duchies um you know very whatever the specific political name they give themselves are nominally a part of the Holy Roman Empire you catch them in the corner of your eye Distinctive, by design, they move you even before you drive.

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D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right, yes. Our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter chart's over here. Oh, sorry. At Speck Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals,

like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. And now I say nominally because, like I said earlier, the Habsburg grip on these territories is very much slipping because these Italian states are, you know, they're the richest place in Europe. They're the best developed,

and they've got some of the best economic technology anywhere to be found. The problem is that they do not have the land an agricultural basis to support large standing or not standing army. That's a little bit further in the future, although that develops because of the Italian Wars. Rather, they can't muster large feudal levies, peasant levies, which is what the basis of military power in Western Europe at the time is built on the back of. This is why agriculture is one of the big reasons why agriculture kind of was the cornerstone of feudal Europe because it dictated how many, men at arms you could put into the field

and the Italians though they're extremely cash rich are extremely asset poor in the sense of assets being land on the other hand the French the Habsburgs the Spanish are very asset rich but they're very cash poor

they don't have the money the gold and at this time money and gold was still more or less synonymous the Spanish hadn't yet tested that theory of how far you can push that. There was actually a gold shortage in Europe at the time. So gold and silver were very much still considered a rare enough commodity that people could more or less universally accept it as money. So in a battle between cash, in a military battle between cash and assets,

rather, the assets usually went in the long run because the Italian city states, in terms of military strength, could not rely on their own domestic populaces. They had to rely on a very particular type of mercenaries called Kundatieri. I don't speak Italian, but basically, it literally means, I think, contractor is what it means. And, you know, there's lots of stories about kondottieri's you know they were the you know machiavelli was one um there were these roving bands of professional soldiers from a lot of them were from italy a lot of them were for all over europe and they would just go around make deals with the city state to go bully another city state but a lot of the time they would go to the other city state and say hey this city state said they'd pay us

this much to bully you how much will you pay us and then back and forth and you know sometimes cities would hire kondottieri to fight each other but the kondatieri would make in the middle of the battle make a deal and go sack one city and sometimes go sack the other. And this is the thing. This is, you know, this is the background where Machiavelli makes the assertion in his book, The Prince, that, you know, you can't rely on mercenaries. And this was in a very specific environment in Italy where these Italian states could not furnish their own armies except for Naples, except for Naples. except for Naples. Naples is the exception

because they had, and Venice to a certain extent, and Milan, some of the bigger states could furnish some standing armies, the smaller ones couldn't, but Naples very much could. Anyway, besides that,

Spain, moving over to Spain, Spain has interests in the Italian peninsula, mostly through its constituent kingdom of Aragon. The Kingdom of Aragon was an outside player in this Mediterranean trade game, because Aragon is the part of Spain that faces inward of the Mediterranean. It's where Barcelona and Valencia and some other cities are. And these also got very rich off of Mediterranean trade, not the least of which because the Kingdom of Aragon possessed the overseas territories of the Bleric Islands,

Sardinia and Sicily itself, as well as the Kingdom of Naples for a time. under the House of Trasamara, which we talked about, I think, in the first couple of episodes. And so, Aragon was a huge, outsized, influential player in Italian politics. Alexander the 6th, that one Pope everyone talks about, the one that was heinously evil and has all those things of accusations of incest and stuff like that about him. Um, well, his family, the Borgias, were from Aragon. They were not Italian. They were Spanish. And this is one of the, actually, the, the polemic lines that people took against him.

So the Spanish are interested in the Italian peninsula, mostly the union of, the Iberian union between Castile and Aragon, um, inherits Aragon's pride. And Aragon actually tried to, was in a lot of, for a certain time, Aragon was the strongest naval power, other than, other than Venice. It was the strongest naval power in the Mediterranean. It tried to implement a, one of the first instances of international law, a, it tried to implement a sort of, how should I say, international maritime law. I think it was the codex, the codex, the code,

Potex Marinus or something like that. I don't remember the exact name, but it was specifically they tried to implement an international maritime law that all powers of the Mediterranean were a party to. And they didn't have enough strength to pull that off. But, you know, this kind of tells you that the idea of universalism is not new at all. I digress. So this is I'd be loathe to mention the Ottomans, this huge Islamic threat from the East who have all of these Asian commodities backing them, they have this brand new technology, they've got this

great leadership, the Ottomans are starting to knock at the door. And these European polities Hapsburg, Austria very specifically, feels very, very anxious about this Ottoman neighbor, and they want to secure enough of a power base, enough of a money base, that they can fund these wars against the Ottomans. Because wars, especially at this time, one of the, I mean, Mr. Pete, I know you did an episode recently talking about how Spadley Butler's war as a racket is the stupidest thing ever written and war makes very few people money.

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Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep, D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-L-S, deals. Oh, right. Yes. Our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter charts over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals, like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. Yeah, I mean, there are people who are going to benefit from it, but, you know, that was me, that was Stormy and I. And even Thomas says nobody wants, nobody wants war. He goes, yeah, sure.

some people are going to benefit from it. But to think that people are just going to war to make money, that's retarded. It's normally people decide to go to war and then the people who are going to come in and profiteer off of it. That's a secondary action. And for a war of like territorial expansion, there may be this idea that the long-term benefit of the gained territory will outweigh the short-term expense of the war. there may be some of that. I'm not going to say there's zero of that. But war is expensive,

especially at this time. War is extremely expensive. You know, the amount of money you need to levy in loans, the amount of, a lot of instances you have to divest capital, you have to divest your assets. And a lot of times you have to divest assets that you've taken loans against. And this was true for European monarchs and principalities in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries as true as it is today. This is one of the things why I'm a short break here. This is why I'm so glad we're doing this series is because I hope it's apparent to your readers, but this the current era that we live in is closer to the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries than it is to the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

And that is what's throwing so many people for the loop because we have the 20th century right before us and we think that oh, because it's chronologically closer, it has more to do with our lives. No, the 20th century has more in common with the 18th with the Baroque period than it does with the 17th, the 16th, right? Why? Why? Because we are in a period of transition, just as those were periods of transitions. The 17th, 18th, or the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were marked by a remarkable cultural coherency, technological coherency, homogeneity almost, almost everywhere.

You know, even colonialism remained somewhat homogenous, if that makes sense. to you, Mr. Pete. Borders were not broken down the same way. It was a very rigid. It was a very well-defined period of history. We do not have that. But our forefathers in the 16th, 17th century, also did not have that.

Because Europe was coming out of this thousand-plus-year long world of proto-futalism of feudalism. And you had these very old legacy systems that were so big that they couldn't really be innovated in a convenient way. And you had these brand new systems that were untested that could work on very small scales, but people hadn't figured out how to scale them up yet without utter failure. And so you have this huge disconnect. this uneven development throughout Europe,

you know, exemplified by the Renaissance. You also had, like similar to today, you also had, and we'll talk, I don't want to get too far afield, but regardless, basically, the Italian wars are one of the first examples of that, because the reasons for fighting the war are extremely medieval, right? It's dynastic intrigues and disputes between wives of various duchies and, you know, inviting in your cousin who's the king of France and pressing old dynastic claims.

That is what starts the Italian wars, you know. But the wars themselves were fought with, you know, imagine like eight-year-olds holding. AR-15s. That's the wars themselves. Because military technology had started advancing to such a point you had arquebuses, you had mass firearms, you had mass artillery. The Italian wars were actually the first instance of mass artillery being ubiquitous in warfare. And it made a thousand years of European siege warfare functionally obsolete.

which a lot of the Italian city-states had to learn the hard way. But the Italian wars begin when one of these Condottieri families, the Sforza's, basically coup the Duchy of Milan and set themselves up as the Dukes of Milan's, and wanted the French to back them. And so they encouraged the French to come. come and make good on their claim on the Crown of Naples in the south south of Italy. Now the Crown of Naples, I think at this time, was independent, but the monarch was related to the House of Spain. And so this did not go very well.

And once again, like I said, I'm not going to go into the wars too much. this kicks off about 60 or so years of fighting. But I will go over the high points. The high points are you have the War of the League of Cambrai, which lasts from trying to remember how long it was. Sorry, I've decided to start fact-checking myself mid-episode, so instead of giving out a bunch of bunk information, I have the dates in front of me.

it went from 1508 to 1516 and what it was was it was a bunch of Italian states getting really scared at Venice having a lot of influence in the north of Italy and then inviting in the French and the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope. Matter of fact, it was the Pope who was the center of all this. So actually that actually gives me a nice little off ramp. So I haven't talked. about the Pope and all of this. These three different polities, these three sort of big powers in Italy, the whole the Habsburgs and the Holy Rowan Empire, the French and the Spanish all have differing ideas as to what role the Pope is supposed to play. The French very much like this sort of the the French conception of Catholicism is like a Protestant conception of Catholicism. They conceive of Catholicism as the French state church. And this is, you know, Gallicanism is a later development of this. That's the actual official name for it.

But this goes back all the way to the Western schism when you had a French papacy and an Italian papacy. The French wanted the papacy, or at least their own papacy, to be within the borders of France, inhabited at all times by a Frenchman and friendly to the interests of France. This is opposed to the imperial view of the papacy that the Habsburgs have, that the papacy is the legitimizing force for his left hand, which is the Holy Roman Empire, which is the continuation of the Roman Empire, which the pope is the spiritual head of, right? The Spanish, on the other hand,

have a third view of the pope. And this is actually, you could say, this is sort of a continuation of the von Velfth view or a reinvention of it, of what would later be called ultramontanism. The idea that the pope has complete and total dominion over all things. And you could argue that it's very similar

to the Habsburg view, but it's a lot more servile to the Pope rather than, how should I say, I don't know what the right word is, rather, I don't want to say that the Habsburgs didn't see themselves as subordinate, but they saw his role as, excuse me, mostly spiritual legitimization. Does that make sense? Yes. So, the Pope's, the Pope's. Pope has his own view. And this is largely due to the fact that the papal state has a geopolitical entity, has a civil government

that has subjects, collects taxes, etc., which is, functions more or less outside of the Catholic church hierarchy and how the churches across Europe function. and so this as we've talked about in the past raises interesting questions as to as to what the pope what role the pope should play and the pope as kind of a part of this and i forgot to mention the italian city states particularly under one lorenzo di medici that some of you might know um created this italian league which was sort of this this league of nations for the for the for italy and it was meant to be this rules-based order between all these different republics and duchies and all of that that kept peace and kept the French and kept the Habsburgs out of Italy. And you could argue that a lot of people make a lot of hay about the 19th century and how nationalism was like this entirely invented fabricated concept.

But I'm not so sure it was as fabricated as people think it was. now it's one thing to read the past, to read the present onto the past. That's a big mistake. You can't do that. That's how people still believe that the earth is millions of years old. But you have to read from the past forward. And I think the Italian League's existence exemplifies that there was a sort of a nascent idea of a unified Italy separate from France and the Holy Roman Empire in Spain without foreign influence, it's just it was kind of strangled in the crib as were a lot of national ideas.

But I digress. So the War of League of Camp Rae, you have a whole lot of side switching going on. First, the French and the Spanish and the Holy Royal Empire coming on on the one side, but then the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire switched the other side, and France stays on the first side, and then Scotland gets involved at some point, and it's a big mess, and this is why I'm not going into the history of it, because it's the Italians. Do you know how much side switching there is? You know, it's, it's, it's

exceptionally complicated. But, you know, it's, and it's, it's a lot like the Wars of the Roses, too, because the French gained dominion over Naples at one point, and they also, I think, gained dominion over Milan at one point, but it doesn't stick because the Spanish come back. And the Spanish start wars against the French. And second high point, war of the League of Cognac. Why am I mentioning this? I'm mentioning this because this is when the one thing

that you might have heard of of the Italian wars occurred, which was the sack of Rome in 1527. Mr. Pete, do you know anything about the sack of Rome in 1527? Not as much as I should. So, I mean, it's not that, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that they, another interesting thing about the Italian wars, they take place before and during the Protestant Reformation. They started before the Protestant Reformation. But once the Protestant Reformation occurred in 1517, I want to say, this spread like wildfire, even throughout the armies of the Empire, particularly amongst German soldiers. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from

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against the Catholic Church as an institution, has hundreds of years of precedent at this point. We did a whole episode on that. But it really starts to spill over when a lot of these soldiers with a lot of this animosity towards the papacy are fighting a war in his general vicinity. and he is on the enemy side. All right. So what was the sack of Roman 1527? Well, basically in the War of the League of Cognac,

the Pope and the Habsburgs were at one point on one side, later on one side. But in this instance, they were opposed to each other because the papal states were backing France at the time. A lot of this was over the Duchies of Maloney. in the kingdom of Naples. Milan was the richest part of Italy. I think it still is, or the Piedmont is, and the kingdom of Naples was extremely well developed at the time. But basically, the emperor,

Charles V, and Charles V was emperor at the time, surrounded the city of Rome with his forces in order to get the Pope to come to terms. Unfortunately, and this is something we'll talk about later, this is another thing that started undoing the Christendom world system, I think largely because it just frankly got too big and they didn't adopt the technologies to manage it, or the technologies couldn't be adopted at scale to manage it. One of the two. An army of a couple, I think like 20, 30,000 Holy Roman and soldiers went without pay. And that is the primary primary. reason why they mutinied against Charles V, broke into the city of Rome, and just started raping and pillaging and holding people hostage and killing and all this and looting and everything

else. Now, a lot of Lutherans were in that army, or at least they weren't loot. They didn't even call themselves Lutherans yet. A lot of followers of Martin Luther were in that army and I am not going to sit here and say that that played zero role in it. But soldiering in these days, was awful. It was a horrible thing to do. Because you had a combination of all of the medieval plagues, all of the medieval difficulties of heavy plate armor, of melee combat, of all this other stuff,

combined with the modern threats of getting shot, getting exploded by a cannon pole. It was not a, fun time to be a warrior. For those of you who are more interested in military history, this is sort of the beginning of the pike and shot era where infantry for the first time in a very long time becomes the centerpiece of armies as opposed to heavy cavalry, which marked the sort of end of the feudal world because the feudal world was largely based around heavy cavalry.

and largely because the Spanish developed something towards the end of the Italian wars called Terthio, which was the first proper implementation, the first proper mix of pikes and arquebusks in warfare. You know, it's well known that the pikes were in front and the arquebugs were behind firing over their shoulders. I digress. That was a couple of lines of thought. I'm trying to pick up one. But basically, yeah, yeah, the saccharacterone. Basically, the Holy Roman Empire and particularly both the HRA,

the Habsburg's domains generally were terrible at accounting, horrible at accounting, could not, they had a lot of money. A lot of gold and a lot of silver was coming in from the colonies into Spain. and the fuggers who were the personal bankers of the Hapsburgs were able to come up with a lot of money to loan to them. But their accounting was just abysmal. And so whole armies of tens of thousands would go unpaid. The soldiers who were suffering from plagues, gangrene, confronting almost certain death, The problem with these pike and shop formations, if you tripped, you would get trampled to death by your fellow soldiers because they just couldn't stop moving because of the structure of the formation.

You know, just to say nothing of the mud of the of the, of the, you know, physical fatigue. Siphilis, by the way, had started becoming a thing. And so that was wreaking havoc amongst the ranks. So have I painted a good enough picture as to how much it sucked to be a soldier during these times? Oh, yeah. You know, and those formations were not new. I mean, you can go back to Alexander and some of his formations where, yeah, you were going to get trampled just as easily. Yeah, precisely.

The novelty was in adding, in finding a way to make mass firearms useful at scale. That was the innovation that the Spanish were able to do. But yes, as a matter of fact, they took a lot of inspiration and the foundation of these units were taken from the Macedonian phalanxes, who used similar-sized pikes. Imagine a whole army of this who don't get paid. They don't get that little bit of money that they can have their fun gambling or, you know, I don't condone sin,

but visiting ladies of the night. Basically, they can't buy those little creature comforts that, you know, because these soldiers just, I don't even, a lot of them were press ganged. A lot of them were there not by choice. Some of them were mercenaries who did make a lot of money and some of them weren't. And so they weren't really even profiting off of this, but that was how they were able to get their creature comforts that made life even somewhat bearable. Imagine not paying them.

in the middle of a siege. And what do you think they're going to do? At this time, armies mutineing and sacking cities, whether it be friendly or not friendly, it became a common thing. And we're going to talk about this very specifically later on, Mr. Pete, when we get into the financial aspect and the economic aspect, of this world system.

But suffice it to say, right, to kind of start bringing us to our conclusions, the Italian wars conclude, right, in 1559 with, I'm trying to remember what the treaty was called. What was the treaty? I'll look it up. The piece of cateau cambricis. All right, that's what it was called. and it caused a whole bunch of seeding of territory, but basically the end of the Italian wars, Spain is dominant.

Spain becomes sovereign over the kingdoms of Sicily, of Naples, Sardinia, which is basically, so Spain inherits all of the old Aragonese dominions under the Habsburgs. Because remember, partway through the Italian wars, the Habsburgs come in control of Spain and start shifting the policy. But Spain's national interests are more or less secured, and in addition, the Spaniards are given control of the Duchy of Milan, which is the richest part of Italy. France, England got involved at one point.

France gets some minor cessations from England and from parts of the Holy Roman Empire. you know, there's some minor territorial changes on the Italian peninsula, but what the end of the Italian Wars functionally does is establishes Spanish and rather reestablishes Spanish and Habsburg dominance over Italy at the expense of France. And this does not do a lot for the legitimacy of the world system. In a large part, this conflict was between two differing visions within Christendom. You have the Christendom thesis, which is Pope and Emperor, God and man, church and state, all made one. That is the Holy Roman Empire Hapsburg claim, Habsburg dominion, Habsburg ideological push as to what Christendom is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a reestablishment. It's supposed to be a

re-established Christian Roman Empire functionally. The French, on the other hand, have a lot more of an antithesis to that. They see the, what is it? They see basically Christendom as supposed to be France and everyone else. The Catholic Church is the French Church, and all of the other peoples of Europe are, you know,

ethnically influenced. This is a lot more, you know, And you could say it's a lot more of an ethnic empire. And I mean, later on, France did get some, you know, did have the most, the highest cultural influence in Europe. But these Italian wars, these on and off conflicts utilizing these, you know, a lot of proxy states were used. You had a lot of devastation. It ended the Italian Renaissance. And it ended Italy as the most well-developed, richest place on the, on the, on the,

the European continent and kind of started pushing it more towards the backwater status, which it unfortunately kind of holds until the present day as compared to its neighbors. You can only have so many armies marched through you and sack your city so many times before you kind of go back a couple of levels of development. And it starts to show the cracks of this system. Why are the quote-unquote leaders of this, add to this the fact that you have religious dissidents within the armies of the primary world power upholding this Christendom world system? You know, why are you having military force being utilized between so-called constituent members of Catholic Europe who are all theoretically under the point? Pope and the Pope himself, his own opinions and his own assertions, you know, with Spain

his only backer being taken over by the Habsburgs, are kind of swept under the rug and he's kind of turned into this, you know, into this little rump figure, which he, you know, more or less still inhabits today politically. If the Italian Wars were anything, it was a final end of the Pope having any say into how his legitimacy was utilized by his, by the states that's, let's just say, that he backs. So add to this the Protestant Reformation, add to this, you know, resentment against the Habsburg dominion in Austria, in the Holy Royal Empire in Spain, in Italy. add this, the fact that the French feel humiliated and start building further resentment towards

this Habsburg world order. And, you know, you have a system in crisis. And that's what the Italian wars more or less brought about. A bunch of powers with different dreams, you know, more or less independent entities coming out of a feudal world stepped into these Italian wars. and what came out was more or less two broad sides of a conflict that would later rend christened them in half. But we're a bit further away from that historically. Yeah, I mean, I know we're a few minutes short of how long you usually go, but I think that's a good place to leave it. Did you have any thoughts or anything you wanted to add to this, Mr. Pete? No, no, but I think you're right.

I think when you start looking beyond this, that, um, the kind of, say the Pope has over the Catholic, uh, you know, the Catholic world, you see it start to, it doesn't just go away, but it dwindles and dwindles and windles. Yeah, the Pope kind of starts becoming a sock puppet for, uh, imperial interests. The, the more things happen. Not to say that he has no say, not to say that he has no power, because the empire is, its whole legitimacy is based off of the fact that it was the empire of Charlemagne. It was the new Roman empire, the better Christian Roman empire that the pope created, that is backed by the Pope, that is the hand of the Pope on earth.

That is their whole basis of legitimacy. but unfortunately if the Pope himself disagrees with that, then, you know, something's got to give there. And I'm not here to say that the, you know, the French were any better. The French were just unabashedly selfish and self-centered, as they always are, in terms of how they wanted the system to work. They wanted a system, it's the same thing. They have never stopped. You know, you look at how France acts in the EU today. It's the same thing.

You know, they want it to be the France and everyone else show. you know, they want it to be France and all of her friends and all of her subjects and all of her lackeys. You know, so I'm not here to say that there's any moral superiority in the French position, but, you know, what the French do have is a nascent version of what you could later call nationalism, of their conception of themselves as an entity separate from and yet still a part of the rest of Europe. And that is the idea that, you know, the Spanish would have a little bit, but that, you know, they were more or less under Hapsburg dominion, that the English would absolutely have. And later on, the biggest thorn in the side of the Hapsburgs and the Spanish, the Netherlands. but that's a later episode.

So we've talked about the Italian wars now. What is the next? Oh, boy. Well, Pete, when we come back, that's when we're going to, that's when we're going to have the fireworks fly because next episode we will be discussing the Protestant Yeah, here we go. But the, one thing I guess you can see from this is you have one man, basically one man rule over Europe, whittles down to one man rule over countries. And then eventually you get, you know, like in Spain, the Cortez, their power grows more

and more. So you go away from one man. And then, you know, eventually that just starts breaking down, breaking down, breaking down. until you get the managerialism we've had for the last 80, 90 years. Exactly. Managerialism didn't come from nowhere. This idea of a self-regulating rules-based order, you know, people don't understand this,

but AGI was invented in the 17th century. AGI is the rules-based order. That's all it is. It's a complex adaptive system that has no sovereign over it, that is its own source of authority. that edits itself based on internal polling and, you know, is what has resulted in managerialism today. And I don't want to say it's an entirely evil thing because it's how we have modern day instant availability, internet 21st century civilization, but there were certainly costs that came with it. And I'm not sure how sustainable it will be in the future.

So the past isn't even past, everyone. all of the ideas that we discussed today have historical precedents. They all came from somewhere in the past, and they're a lot older than you may think they are. And I think everyone believes that the system that they're living under is the one that's going, oh, this is a way it's going to be forever. And, I mean, it really just goes to show how people just don't understand history. Maybe later on you could have me to come on and discuss Young Earth Creationism,

which will probably infuriate a large amount of your audience, but I think that's part of the appeal. But the idea that you just, you can't have a rapid, radically changing event that happens in a very short period of time that completely transforms everything is foolishness. That's how history works. There's no such thing as long gradual processes.

the way things are, you know, normalcy bias. You know, they are how they are, and then one day everything changes, and some people can't. But one day the whole paradigm breaks and shifts and completely reorient itself, and it's a completely unrecognizable world to the one that pre-existed it. And that is how history works. You know, Spangler once said history is just the movement from catastrophe to catastrophe. And I don't know about you.

you, Pete, but I feel like we're moving towards a catastrophe right now. Yeah, I think the conversation that we had before we started a recording would, yeah, is one that most people don't really want to have at this point. Yeah, it's a little more of the, you know, the conversation I had with Clay Martin than the conversations that we have on our, on our live streams. Yeah. All right. promote what you want.

Support the old glory club. I don't really care about anything else. I hear you, man. I'm at that point, too. It's like I care about my people. And somebody asked today, he's like, well, someone was listening, getting caught up on some of my episodes,

and he's like, well, what, what is it now? What, what is it? I'm like, I just support my people. And in real life, that's the, The whole point of the old glory club is you have people in real life to rely upon and build with. That's it. Yeah. That's, I mean, and even if you aren't a part of the old glory club and have no interest in being a part of the old glory club,

start something with someone near you because you're going to need it. All right, Paul. I will talk to you the next time. We're going to do this next one quicker, people. We'll follow up on this a lot quicker than we did the last one. No, man, the next one's going to burn down your channel. Oh, that's what I live for. Thanks, Paul.

All right, take care of Pete.