The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1183: The Spanish Empire 1492-1659 - Pt. 7 -The Reformation - w/ Paul Fahrenheidt

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

63 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 Protestant Reformation.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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Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekiniano show. Paul Fahrenheit's back and we're going to continue the Spain series. How are you doing, Paul? I'm doing very well, Pete, the Spain series where we, rarely and occasionally talk about Spain. Well, yeah, you know, it's when you're, when you have a world empire, it's, you know, there's other places you may want to talk about. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, so today, as I made the joke

about, we're going to be talking about the extremely unifying and non-controversial topic of the Protestant Reformation. That is, that is what we are going to be talking about today. And I am not so much interested in, what is it, I'm not so much interested in, number one, I'm not interested in giving you guys a play by play. This is not, this is, this is not really a historical series in the sense that we're going over the history. They're people who do that better. Rather, we are using world systems theory to try to analyze the decline and collapse of a world system using the Christendom world system and particularly the Spanish Empire as a vector of analysis.

And the Protestant Reformation was broadly, right, and we're going to get into, it was, it was, it was by no means a monolithic movement. But the Protestant Reformation broadly, right, is the terminal crisis, or it began the terminal crisis, or it was the reason of the terminal crisis that ended the Christendom world system. Because, so one of the things that we've kind of realized as we've gone through this series, and we've, you know, discussed these certain things, Mr. Pete, is that the Christendom world system could only exist insofar as the Roman church was the universal church in name or in fact. And the empire was the strongest entity, and it was at the center of Europe, right? was built on those two things.

And those two things did not fail simultaneously. As a matter of fact, the power of one outlived, the power of the other, which is the empire lasted, or a politically relevant empire lasted longer than a, I don't want to say a politically relevant papacy, but a politically powerful papacy. in the sense that the Pope had the political authority that he previously did, but we've already talked about that. And this, you know, the Italian Wars really was kind of the last gasp of a politically strong papacy in the sense of it having a realm that it had influence over and using that as a vector of influencing wider European politics. We've already talked about that. and we've also already talked about the various crises in church history that began, you know, some as early as Gregory the Great, you know, and then going into the later Gregorian reforms and then going all the way to the eve of the Reformation, right?

So one of the things, before we even get started on this, one of the things that I want to emphasize, one of the themes I want to emphasize of today's episodes, and I hope that the listener has been taking with them throughout the series, world systems do not break apart on a whim. They do not break apart on a whim. they are what are called complex adaptive systems. What's a complex adaptive system? A complex adaptive system is like a human body, right?

Where it is an entity, it is an organic whole, it is an entity in and of itself. However, that entity has a very large number of constituent parts. And those constituent parts all perform a certain task or certain tasks. And there are a variety of redundancies within that. complex adaptive system. You know, for example, Mr. Pete, you know, your body can take a certain amount of any kind of poison, any kind of a disease, any kind of virus, right? Because there's redundancies. You won't instantly die. You know, now obviously too much of anything will kill you, but there is a sort of a realm of tolerance, a certain amount, you know, as Nassim Taleb always says,

damage is non-linear. All right. So that's the thing. So a complex adaptive system in a civilizational sense or in a world system sense is a system that can deal with not only singular crises, but multiple crises at once across a large area. You know, I think one of the first examples we have of a complex adaptive world system was that of the, the bronze age the pre-bronage collapse bronze age the Bronze Age Mediterranean which was centered

around Egypt which played a similar role as the United States does now as the primary food exporter you know the world is centered around the primary food exporter that wasn't so much the case I haven't deep dived into the economics we're going to do a

whole episode on the economics of this era too particularly we're not there yet but a complex adaptive system and like the one ancient Egypt I'm not going to go too much into detail but ancient Egypt was able to deal with a variety

of crises at once the problem was and why the Bronze Age collapse occurred was because too many crises hit Egypt at once the way you overwhelm a complex adaptive system is to throw everything in the kitchen sink at it fast

too fast too fast for it to react everything at once. Similar to what... Are we sort of seeing that right now? Yeah, I was about to say similar to what our current executive is doing, right? You know, because in many ways, the quote-unquote deep state or the, you know, government bureaucracy, whatever name you want to give it is a complex adaptive system.

And in a lot of instances, it isn't even conscious. That's the thing. Like a body, an organism, some parts of it can be more conscious of the whole than others. I remember back to the to the Yaki series we did Pete, which really is an inspiration for this series. Yaki talks a lot about what I'm talking about with Spain and ultramontanism and things like that in Imperium. And, you know, Yaki understands this. The culture-bearing stratum of any high culture is more conscious of the hole than, say, you know, a drywall and paint installer. you know, and in any normally functioning society,

there would be more drywall installers and painters than members of the culture bearing stratum. Unfortunately, because we live in the age of total politics, everyone is kind of sort of partially, at least involved in culture. And that's good in some ways and it's bad in other ways. That's why culture is so cancerous right now is because everyone's involved in it.

Culture, in a coherent functioning society, culture is the output of a very small group. But, you know, you know all of this. We all know all of this. So to kind of bring this back, world systems do not collapse on a dime. Do not collapse on a whim. We've already talked about, we've already done an episode, Mr. Pete, talking about the very various crises of authority within the church. I think we've talked about the various crisis of authority within the empire. And as Yaqui says, Christendom, medieval Christendom or this

Christendom world system, and I'm not quite using the Yaki Spanglerian model here, but it's helpful, was based around the two poles of the Pope and the emperor. That is medieval Christianity, pretty much is summed up in the Pope as the spiritual center and the emperor as the political center that enforces his will. And as we've already demonstrated, as those two entities come into conflict and one tries to absorb the other, and talked about the Gelsso and the Givolines and all that, this starts causing cracks in the legitimacy of the system. Legitimacy is one of those concepts that academics like to talk about. about a lot today. It's one of those things where like just about everyone kind of knows it when

they see it. You know, legitimacy has a variety of sources, but the legitimacy of a system is the buy-in that any given component of that system has in the raison d'etra of that system. and as we all know, the purpose of a system is what it does. So that said, the Protestant Reformation did not come out of nowhere. We talked about earlier heresies. We've talked about earlier movements, earlier attempts to reform that not all of them came from outside of the church. A great many throughout history, a great many theologians, priests, cardinals, bishops of all sorts,

have critiqued the Catholic Church, the Roman Church, from within it, from a desire to reform it, from a desire to bring it closer to the image of Jesus Christ. That is, and that's, you know, undeniable. And this continued, even during the Protestant Reformation. So that's something I want everyone to keep in mind as we're going into this. And we're not, I'm not going to talk about theology. This is not a theology episode. I'm not here to let, you know, you all know, I'm a Protestant pizza Catholic.

This is how this goes. I'm not here to relitigate the Protestant Reformation. I'm not here to say who's right and who's wrong. I'm not here to debate soteriology or Christology or whatever other stuff. You can go to Stone Choir if you want to hear stuff like that, all right? or equivalent Catholic podcast. Pines with Aquinas, I guess. No, I'm not going to insult Catholics. But that's something I want everyone to keep in mind. So now that we're on that, I just want to remind the listeners,

there were prior to the Protestant Reformation, right, which the Protestant Reformation, I think just about everyone agrees. It started in about 1517, when Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the door, of the church in Vittenberg. Okay, that's kind of what began it. You know, the Protestant Reformation cannot be separated from the figure of Martin Luther.

Right. Now, Martin Luther was far from the only reformer, far from the only the only theologian of his time talking about these ideas. But he was the one who took the step. So, before him, before Luther,

there were other attempts at either separatism from, and here's the other thing too. Like I think when you say the reformation, that kind of, that doesn't, it's too simple of a word because the Lutherans were separated from the fact that they were sort of separatists from the Roman church. They wanted to split off.

They wanted to create a new church. And then later movements like Calvin in Geneva and the Calvinists wanted to do something similar in the radical Reformation, the Mennonites, the Anabaptists, et cetera, wanted to go even further. Right. But they all, all of the Protestants, what makes a Protestant, right, broadly? Let's define that first. What makes a Protestant, as we define the term? A Protestant is someone who desired to separate from the Church of Rome. for any for for whatever reason for theological reasons for for for personal reasons for you know that is that is

what makes a protestant now i mean if if you go with that definition then you're like oh well the eastern orthodox are protestant okay well that's different you catch them in the corner of your eye distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cooper plug-in hybrid range for Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services

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Liddle more to value Different story All right So proto-Protestant movements, earlier Protestant movements include John Wycliffe and the Baldensians. Those did not go very far because, you know, Wycliffe translation was, you know, easily stamped out because of one big old gorilla in the room thing I haven't talked about yet, which I'm going to get to. Wickliff inspired Jan Hus, who was able to inspire a much larger local reformation with the Hussites and Bohemia. That would continue until the Battle of White Mountain, where the Bohemians were more or less brought back into the fold of the Catholic Church. there you know and you know you can go even further back to the cathars and to the

the the law lords and and and other various pissant reform movements that didn't really go anywhere uh Wycliffe and Husser are important though because they're the ones who are too early and um as a mutual friend of ours says Pete being too early is the same as being wrong um So why was Luther different? Why was Luther different? You know, I'm not going to go. Everyone knows, you know, oh, Luther, he was the, you know, Dominican prior. He was trained to be a lawyer.

He flipped over to the church out of genuine religious faith. By all appearance, genuine religious faith, didn't want to be a lawyer. Wanted to enter the church. entered the church. I think he was like the vicar of Saxony or something like that. He was relatively high up, or at least he was getting relatively high up. He had a pretty good church career. And he was going places.

And then everyone knows his famous trip to Rome and the one moment. And I'm more than willing to admit, I'm not sure if this was a real thing. In history, you find a lot of these stories are very a pop. kind of made up after the fact. It's like, you know, the one quote you associate with that historical figure, well, he never actually said that quote. But, you know, Luther goes to Rome and, you know, sees the Italian priests kind of making a mockery of the Lord's supper, you know, from bread you were and to bread you will return or something like that. And that may have been apocryphal, but, you know, almost certainly Luther was moved to do what he did by some reason. And I can't.

discount genuine belief rightly or wrongly on his part. Now, there were a variety of things that were happening in Europe. So, so kind of stepping away from Luther, not so much the man. Why was his movement different? Well, as they say, it takes a perfect storm. Europe at the time was changing. If there's one word you can use to describe it, it was changing. One of the big grillas in the room that we haven't so much gone into was the black death's effect on Europe was revolutionary. Because what the black death did was it functionally reduced the population density by orders of magnitude. that hasn't been seen since.

And because it reduced the population density, right? Much like we have now, there was a sort of competency crisis in Europe. There weren't enough bodies to do the work that needed to be done. And so systems started getting implemented. People started, you know,

this is something people talk about, a history class, people started being afforded a little bit more liberty. because more work needed to be done. And some of this is practical. You can't exactly tie peasants down to the land when there's only three peasants on your land

and there's more farming that needs to be done. This is obviously a freaking weird example, blown out of proportion example, but there's more farming that needs to be done than peasants to do the farming in some places. So this also started, you know, the collapse of scholasticism, as an intellectual movement, you know, William of Avaugham's skepticism, the beginnings of,

you could even say proto-rationalist thought goes all the way back to this period. But besides all that, that's happening in Europe, you have the aforementioned crises within the papacy we've talked about. You have the Western schism, the Babylonian captivity in France of the Avignon papacy. You have, you know, jumping forward a little bit, the Italian wars, jumping back a little bit, you have the rise of the Ottoman Turks and the seeming inability for West. That's a big thing. We haven't talked about the Turks a lot, but the Turks are kind of the, you know, one of the looming swords of Damocles over Europe at this time, particularly over the emperor at this time,

because the emperor is the gateway between the Balkans and the rest of Europe and the Turks were making their way through the Balkans relatively quickly. But the Western Christian military forces proved unable to keep the Turks out of Europe for a extended period of time. moments, you know, Scanderbeg, Matias Corvinas in Hungary, you had other, you know, the most famous Vlad Teppes in Transylvania, you had little moments where the Turks were checked, but overall their advance was contiguous. And this caused a lot of, you know, many people to think, oh, well, God isn't with us? Why isn't God giving us victory over the heathens? Why isn't God giving us victory over the Muslims? You know, he gave us victory over the

Muslims 500 years ago during the Crusades, why not now? In addition, you had contact with foreigners. The Portuguese and the Spanish were in the Italians before them, were making all of these expeditions throughout the world. They were coming into contact with lots of, you know, a lot of pissant primitive tribes, but, you know, for the Portuguese, the Chinese. and the Indians, which started bringing knowledge of Eastern traditions, faith traditions, into the West. Hinduism and Buddhism or whatever, you know, Hinduism was invented by the British in the 19th century,

whatever Indian glop that they found in the subcontinent, Taoism, various Chinese schools, knowledge of those started entering into Europe and the, you know, contact with the Muslims, the aforementioned Turks. There were also economic concerns. The Turks had shut off spices from the rest of Europe. Europe was undergoing a gold shortage. Europe was, you know, finding that its mass peasant-based agrarian economy wasn't meeting the challenges of the 15th and 16th centuries.

And all of, you know, all of that. but there's you know I'm kind of been dancing around it there's one big thing I haven't mentioned and I haven't talked about that you know you can't really talk about the Protestant Reformation

without talking about this thing you probably know what that one big thing is what have I not mentioned it's a technological advancement oh yeah oh the the printing press there you go the printing press

the printing press yeah you know if if I had a $100 bet to place and I could place it on a man. And I firmly believe that, you know, humans are the center of all history. Machines just kind of follow from it. But machines make possible things that are not possible prior to their invention. That's why they're so important. It's why technology is so important.

It makes possible things that are not possible, or were not possible before. So why did Luther and his movement succeed? Well, if I had to place $100 on any one thing, I'd probably place it on the printing press because printing press for anyone who knows what it was and we're going to do a whole episode on that um you know talking about that and dissidence in this era generally the printing press made it possible for the mass proliferation of whatever you can think of the people of that time largely used it for the one thing that they saw is more important than anything else, which was the faith of Christ and how the faith of Christ was manifested on earth ecclesiastically.

This was a very religious age. Because people took this technology and they immediately used it to have these various theological disputes. But there were also pamphlets, woodcut means. You know, pamphlet substacks. There were, there was a sort of proto-republic of letters that was happening amongst the clergy, amongst relatively intellectual aristocrats, amongst burgers, you know, the rising, the rising of the merchant class, the middle class in this time, also coincides with this. You know, all of this, everything that I've just outlined, you know,

the weakened legitimacy, the military defeat against the Turks, contact with four. foreigners and, you know, changing economic colonization is bringing in all kinds of commodities to Europe, too. There's a shake-up in political systems. There's, there's, and then you, all of these people are having all these ideas. And then all of a sudden you drop this bomb on them that now allows them to spread these ideas faster than historically authorities have been able to keep up with it. All right. So, that is the

that's the big thing. That's the $100 bet, the 800 pound gorilla in the room. It's the printing press. Now, that said, I was doing some reading before this episode, and I read something that a recent theory has been posited given how Protestantism was spread the fastest and remains the strongest in Germany in the places that Luther had social contacts

and visited that it was the social network Luther had that spread Protestantism faster than the printing press did, which I think is an interesting theory, but that's all I'm going to leave it at. I'm going to put it out there because, you know, Mr. Pete, we talk a lot about the importance of social networks and of network theory and how groups of organized minorities shape history. And I think the same could be said to be true of the Protestant Reformation, because numerically, Catholics always, I think they still, they've always outnumbered Protestants.

There have always been more Catholics on earth than Protestants since the Protestant Reformation. Especially in the beginning. And yet, remembering our elite theory, this group of organized elites was able to not only have and create ecclesiastical change

and theological change, but to later affect political change. for good or for ill. So in a large part, that's why Luther's Reformation succeeded where everyone before him did not catch on to the same level. Yeah, you know, Huss, it caught on to the borders of Bohemia, but, you know, it was kind of a weird quirk of the Bohemians and not every Bohemian was a Hussite.

Many of them remained Catholic. And the Hussites also later largely converted to Lutheranism and some of them to Calvinism. So all that said, all that said, complex adaptive systems. The Christendom World system, I don't want to, it didn't, it didn't have more than it could take because it didn't immediately fail. Here's the thing, right? You know how we talk a lot about in public school education? People are given lots of gaps in their historical education.

You know, and part of that is just, you know, in any time constraint standardized education, you can't teach people in continuity. You know, there are certain high level moments and moments that you don't really have to cover because they're not as important. Now, all those moments are picks serve an ideological agenda, but regardless, you know, like, you know, Mr. Pete in American history, you have, you know, the civil war and then industrial revolution and then all of a sudden World War I, right? and then oh but that's not important and great depression in world war two and very little like reconstruction is mentioned but how it's ended is not mentioned and then the period between reconstruction and world war one is not really talked about all that much and then the night the the inner war years prior to fDR really talked about all that much and you know it's the same thing with the Protestant Reformation.

Right. In most people's mind, it's like, oh, you know, Martin Luther has his 95 thesis, and then five minutes later, the 30 years war happens. It's not, this is not quite it. There was about a hundred,

and, you know, there was about 100 years. Yeah, because the 30 years war began in 1618. there was about 100 years between Luther nailing his thesis and the 30 years war starting. To give you an idea, a hundred years ago today, the president was, I think Calvin Coolidge? Yeah, I think it was Calvin Coolidge, who was president.

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sale 28th to 30th of November Lidl, more to value and you know we had just gotten over World War I a lot has happened since then right so the Protestant Reformation was a let's just say

war between Protestants and Catholics was not inevitable it was certainly chosen but it was not inevitable and various things happened in between and I'm not going to give everyone a whole retrospective, and we're not even going to talk about the 30 years war on this episode. That's going to be its own episode.

This is more so an episode on the 100 years between Luther Nailing Esteses and, I guess, the beginning of the third, but we're probably not even going to get that far. So let me get into the next thing. And what was the next thing? Shoot. I'm looking at my notes here. I'm trying to, I'm trying to be organized. you got to have notes for an episode like this

for a series like this yeah that's the thing right is it's like you know I hope the listeners are aware as I am that this is a absolute minefield yeah so what is it where am I trying to pick I guess I'll I guess I'll go into the second phase of the reformation right

and talk about the sort of the splits that occurred within the Reformation. Because I understand, Mr. Pete, a lot of your listeners are Catholics, and a lot of ignorance exists, and rightfully so, about Protestants and Protestant movements, mostly because, you know, the mean, oh, there's 10,000 little microdenominations of Protestants. Why do I even care? And, you know, to a certain respect, it is true. Protestants do have a tendency to schism more than, more than other, let's just say, Nicene Christian sex. But there's reasons for it.

So there were two broad strains of Protestant Christianity. You started with the Lutherans. You initially had the Lutherans, right? But they didn't even call themselves Lutherans at first. They called themselves evangelicals. They were largely followers of Luther, but they weren't only followers of Luther. And Luther wasn't even the only reformer among them. A lot of people know of Malankhan, who was his kind of secondhand man.

And there were other, largely, you know, there were other thinkers with him. And then later on, and this was like almost a generation of difference because Calvin was was almost a whole, I think like 30 years after Luther, maybe a little bit more. That began the Calvinist or the reformed tradition. and they were, and then obviously, you know, you have the radical Reformation, the Anabaptists, the Baptists kind of come out of this area, and then you have the Anglican Reformation in England, which, you know, people, you know, Henry VIII is one of the most misunderstood historical figures of all time, but that's kind of beyond the scope, but the Anglican Reformation was not, you know, not in time. A lot of people say it's like, oh, it's the church, Henry the Eight started winning.

wanted a divorce. No, there was, there was theological thinking behind it, you know, amongst the English. And the English were unique in Catholic Europe and that the Bible had existed in some, you know, what they call the Vulgate, in some form of English since, really since Augustine of Canterbury was sent there in the fifth century. So the English are special as they always are. They're different. But the Protestants were not a monolith. Even in the beginning, you had Luther and one of the forgotten major reformers, Holdrick Zwingli, who was in Zurich, Zurich, which is also in Switzerland, alongside Geneva.

It's funny how these things kind of break down on ethnic lines, because Calvin in Geneva was in the French part of Switzerland, and they were mostly reformed. And Zwingli was in Zurich, which is in the mostly German part of Switzerland, and they were mostly Lutheran. And it doesn't entirely break down on ethnic lines. A lot of Germans later on convert to Calvinism,

the platinate most notably, and also interestingly, Prussia. But basically, I don't want to say it entirely, breaks down on ethnic lines, but in a lot of respects, it does. Even in Italy and in... Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back.

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Search Coopera and discover our latest offers Coopera 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 Spain you know there were there weren't a lot of Protestants in Italy and Spain and the Inquisition was well enough established and experienced enough at what it did

that it was able to pretty effectively stamp out any because there were attempts in Spain. You know, there were Spanish translations of the Bible made, and that mostly became popular in the Basque country, you know, through the Huguenot influence in France. And the Huguenots were all Calvinists. They were not Lutherans. And that's another thing, you know, France. France had its whole own internal struggle over this, you know, a very large minority of the population converted to you know Calvinism is

they don't really they don't like that word anymore they prefer the word reformed now but the Huguenots were largely Calvinistic and they were in the south of France and in other places and that mostly entered into Spain through the Basque country but it was mostly minor

and you know most of the Spanish Protestants were intellectuals who were either either killed or deported. Same thing in Italy. Italy, even fewer people caught on. But, and that's not, I mean, the Protestants killed all kinds of Catholics. I'm not saying, you know, the Catholics were unique in killing Protestants.

No, they were both executing each other. And this is the thing. This is the seriousness of it, right? You know, these people legitimately believed that if you were in a state of mortal sin, And it was better to kill you because it would have kept you from sinning even further. It would have kept you from getting from even worsening your situation. And both sides believed this about the others, at least initially. But that's the most I'll get into that.

The point is this was a multi-generational thing. And this was a certainly not a monolithic thing. And I'll tell you why. This can kind of, Zvingli was sort of a proto-reformer. He was or proto-Calvinist, rather. He was closer. He agreed with Luther on, you know,

they had this, you know, all these articles of faith that they established. And Zwingli agreed with Luther on everything except for the place of the Lord's Supper. Luther retained the belief of the Catholic Church that transubstantiation occurred. when the Lord's Supper was done. Zvingley did not.

Zvingley was, you know, that's what made him closer to a Calvinist. Vingley believed that the Lord's Supper wasn't, I don't even necessarily that it wasn't a sacrament, but that transubstantiation didn't occur. And this leads into this very famous discussion conference and falling out between the two where Luther carves on a table with a knife in the middle of the debate,

is means is, referring to when Christ says, this is my body, which is given to you, in defense of transubstantiation. And every time Zwingli or someone else would make a point, would just point to what he carved on the table.

And this, of course, caused this huge breakdown between the Zvinglian reformers and Luther. And what would later start to be called the Lutheran reformers. So, in addition, Zwingli was a sort of proto-Swiss nationalist.

This is something that we've talked about a little bit, but I've, and I've kind of purported this line before, at least I've played with it, how nations were fictions of the 19th century, but I don't, I'm not so sure about that anymore. I'm not so sure that's the case,

because you see precedent earlier, in this period particularly. And you actually, I think you start to see the sort of, birth, the beginnings of a national self-conception that goes beyond just a, you know, your county, your town that's around you. I believe, you know, I believe in, I don't so much believe in cyclical history anymore. I believe in, you know, I guess the best shape is like sort of spiral history. You know, there is a beginning and an end of history. There is a line,

but it's, it goes and increases, it grows in in complexity with each, uh, turn of the wheel as it were. And I believe that a nation is a, you know, a 19th century nation state is a more sophisticated, in some ways simpler, but in some ways a more sophisticated entity than a confederation of feudal fiefdoms associated by, you know, all different kinds of law. But Zwingli was a proto-Swist nationalist, and he believed in the concept of a Switzerland separate from the empire. But the problem is, is that within Switzerland, Switzerland was also a sort of microcosm of the Reformation,

because you had three big parts of Switzerland. You know, a matter of fact, all three major parties of the era were represented in Switzerland. The Lutherans were largely out of Zurich, or the Lutheran aligned, or the Lutheran-friendly, Zwingli. The Reformed were in Geneva, and the Catholics were largely in the south. of Switzerland, you know, the Swiss Guard, the very famous Swiss guard, which to this day are drawn

from Swiss Catholic men. The Swiss had a long Catholic tradition alongside these other things. And so there were wars between the cantons. The cantons went to war with each other. And Zvingli himself would die in battle against the canton, or in the war against the cantons. You know, he was a chaplain with his, you know, he believed, you know, with his, I forget, with the forces from Zurich, he was a chaplain and he died in battle. And after he died, and Luther heard of it. Luther hated Zwingli after this, that falling out. Luther very snidly wrote, you know, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. So there was very little love lost between some of these parties of reformers. and this is exacerbated by Pete question for you and question for the audience what created peace in the empire and acceptance within the empire of a non-catholic faith what did it

what created peace in a non-catholic what what what treaty what agreement allowed for members of the empire to not be capital to be to something else. Remember. I'm sorry. A lot of people think it's the Treaty of, it was kind of a trick question. A lot of people think it's the Treaty of Vestphalia that created it. Not true. Not true. The Treaty of Vestphalia at the end of the, and this is the thing, Pete, you know, people

like, oh, Luther, Luther starts his, I'm not trying to catch you on the spot. It's just, I'm trying to challenge people's thinking. Luther hammers his thesis on the door and then five minutes later the 30 years war starts. That's not how it works, right? the piece of Augsburg in 1555 and the Augsburg confession in 1555 established the principle of, I'm not going to say the Latin, but his realm, his religion, right? And this was in large part, and it was Charles V who negotiated this. Charles the 5th was emperor at the time, also king of Spain.

Charles the 5th negotiated this with the like Schmali Kot League, I think, is what it was called, some stupid German name. It was this military alliance of all of the Lutheran, principalities because one of the one of the reasons why luther succeeded is he got a lot of rogue counter elites particularly in the realms of saxony and in hessa in northern germany to uh to convert to become lutheran a lot of free cities did as well and these people you know this and they formed a military alliance with each other and they were powerful enough that they were willing they were able to hold leverage over Charles the 5th because at the time in the 1530s,

the Turks were marching against the Austrians. The Turks were marching north from the Balkans. And so temporary peace over and over and over again was granted with the Lutherans because the empire couldn't afford to be in a state of civil war while the Turks were marching northward. But the peace of Augsburg was the sort of the legal conclusion. of this long series of, you know, Luther being on the run, being protected by the Duke of Saxony, who was one of the first to convert, writing his pamphlets, things like that. And the piece of Augsburg in 1555 is what allowed for this principle, you know, his realm,

his religion, his realm, peace, etc. For Lutherans only. For Lutherans only. A lot of people today will tell you that there is animosity between the Lutherans and, you know, the largest remaining Calvinist denomination is the Presbyterians, which are the Scottish Calvinists who are an offshoot outside the scope of this. The Calvinists were not accepted in the empire, the reformed. They were still considered heretics and will be put to death whether you were in a Lutheran realm or a Catholic realm. And this was in 1555. In part, the exclusion of the, because the reformed were seen. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back.

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At the time as, you know, the Calvinist inhabited this weird niche. The Lutherans were the moderate reformers. They were the most close to Rome. They were even overtures. You know, Melanthin even talked about, you know, going back into Rome if certain concessions were given. Now, it didn't happen, of course, but it was the fact that the conversations were happening kind of tells you something, right? And the Lutherans were a lot, let's just say, more skittish

about the split from Rome than the reformed or the radical reformers who were a lot more sanguine about the prospect. The Calvinists inhabited this weird niche and that they were either the most moderate radicals or they were the most radical moderates. And that's not a good place to be because they were not immediately included with the peace of Augsburg. Now, the piece of Augsburg did not create religious tolerance in the lay people. The lay people, if they were not, they were forcibly converted to whoever their sovereign's faith were, but they were given permission to leave, they were given a grace period to leave and go to another province if they didn't want to convert to their religious faith, to their

sovereign's faith. but the piece of Augsburg was a very very, very brittle thing. It was a very delicate thing, right? Because especially when the Council of Trent was established and the counter-reformation begins, you know, the counter-reformation, the Catholic Church takes a good hard look at itself, right? The Catholic Church sees that a not insignificant portion of its constituents have split off and are no longer in communion with the Church of Rome. And the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation generally began with kind of this ethos

that Luther has gone too far. Luther has taken a step too far in separating from the church. However, a great many things that he points out about the church are valid. You know, and these are things like, you know, the selling of indulgence. and other low-hanging fruit. And the Catholic Church starts addressing this. It starts reforming itself. Now, the Jesuit order is established around this time,

and the primary purpose of the Jesuit order is in reaction to this, partially also to spread the word to the natives, but also in reaction. to the Protestants. And you have a great many Jesuit scholars engaging in debate with Protestants, most notably about, most notably, you know, I think we talked about preterism earlier. That was a really good example of when a Dutch Protestant and a Jesuit Catholic, I believe from Spain, engaged in a theological intellectual debate over the concept of preterism.

And this happened all throughout Europe. Like I said, this printing press created this. Republic of Letters. But the piece of Augsburg created, it was very much a sort of compromise piece. It didn't make anyone happy, especially the Catholic Church after the counter-reformation occurred. The Pope hated it. The Pope hated the peace of Augsburg. I think it was condemned.

It was not, you know, by the papacy. But once again, crises in the world system, the emperors do. doing one thing and he claims to be the, you know, first servant of the Pope, the greatest servant of the Pope, but he's going off and completely ignoring anything that the Pope says about political affairs. And so whatever your opinion of it is, this world system is breaking. And I mean, we talked about national conceptions, right? That, you know, the nation states that would come out of this or the proto-nation states that

would come out of this, although they were being formed now. Charles V was the first one to style himself king of Spain that didn't exist prior to him. You know, the kings of France, especially through the wars of religion with the centralization occurring under the Valois kings, France was becoming much more of a solidified, centralized concept. And the nature of that, and particularly the nature of that concept in relation to its confessional heritage. You know, French Catholicism and Spanish Catholicism, as we've outlined before, are two very different things, particularly specifically in their relation to the Pope. And in their relation to the Pope is how they treat their own Catholicism.

You know, the more I read this, or rather, the more I research this period, Mr. Pete, the more I find myself hating the French more than anyone else. The French are like the most cynical and like self-interested and just blatantly. I've already said cynical, but that's the best word for them. You know, they made an alliance with the Turks against the emperor. And it lasted until like 1798. You know, the French, you know, and we've talked about about Galilee. and the French self-conception of how they believe that the Catholic Church, at least the

Catholic Church in France, but then, you know, you look at the Avignon Papacy, the Catholic Church broadly should serve the interests of France above everything else. And, you know, during the French wars of religion, you know, which I briefly mentioned earlier, where the, the, the, the, the, the, the French were persecuting the Huguenots in their own country. The French were supporting that same Protestant League against the empire. So the hypocrisy, and then later on in the 30 years, were the French joined on the side of the Protestant? This is, look, like, this is the thing.

Like, that, now I was just a personal aside, Mr. Pete, you know, the French are treacherous. That's, that's sort of behavior that we attribute to another group. Yeah, well, you know, I don't know. I don't know what I have to say on that. The French are treacherous and are not to be trusted. But besides that, you know, so this is the truth. The peace of Augsburg pleases no one.

Please doesn't please the Pope. Doesn't please the radical reform. And the Lutherans who kind of benefit from this, like kind of really start hating the radical reform because the radical reform, or not the radical reform, they get genocided. The Calvinists, rather. they really start hating the Calvinists because the Calvinists start making theological and political claims that go against the precepts of the peace of Augsburg, which also includes the Augsburg, the Augsburg Confession,

which each realm is to hold by. And so this begins, this animosity, which it continues to this day within reformed tradition. So, I mean I went to you know I went to a reform seminary

the year and all it is is it is just arguing yeah it's just if any if there was a non-prospetarian there it was just arguments God forbid a Baptist come in or you know anyone even even high church

some kind of high church Protestant it's as all it was. It was just a debate society. Well, and that's, and that's kind of how, how it's always been. But, you know, but these animosities have historical origin, and they didn't come out of nowhere. They didn't come out of nowhere. And I mean, like, to bring this back, this complex adaptive system, it was dealing with a lot of things at once. This world's, the, the, the Christendom world system was dealing with a lot of things at once.

It was dealing with its emperor, basically having completely rolled over the Pope. It's Pope, you know, it's Pope's, let's just say, I don't think I'm going to say anything controversial here. Alexander the 6th wasn't exactly the highest example of moral character. All right. I'm not going to pick on that low-hanging fruit too much, but it had a string of not very good popes that did not reflect very well on the church they were a part of. It had, you know, the Italian wars. It had the intercom, the conflict of the French Gallicans with the Spanish and imperial, you could say papal loyalists, or at least loyal to the idea of the papacy.

You know, you had the printing press. You had the Turks encroaching and military defeat against the Turks. You had these economic issues and this contact with the Turks. with foreign groups of people. You had, what else, resentful counter elites in the north of Germany who didn't like how the emperor was treating them.

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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 Doonbiog, Kush Farage. Movement of a religious movement that was catching fire. You know, there were all of... of these things that went into this, it wasn't a single thing. If Luther's reformate, even if if he had, even if he had the printing press, right, even if he had the printing press, if it had

the printing press, if it had happened at any other period, it's possible the Lutherans would have gone and found, you know, founded another monastic order, like what happened with the Dominicans and the Benedictines earlier in church history, or like would have happened with the conciliar movement, even a hundred years before, you know. But unfortunately, the anomalies of history happen when you have a perfect storm of circumstances, all uniquely conspiring to result in one single moment where a massive break is made. And once the break is made, it is almost impossible to put that genie back into the bottle. the reformation, the printing press, it was like opening Pandora's box.

All of the sudden, everyone across Europe, much like today, much like today, everyone had an anon account. Anyone could say anything and have people read it, right? Or at least if you were literate, because that actually wasn't as guaranteed of a thing at this time. Literacy was growing, especially amongst the merchant classes, but you still have mass of literacy amongst the peasant. made it even worse.

You know, the peasants' wars, Luther famously, like, you know, tells the nobles, kill them all, killed them all, you know, and they deserve it. But, like, you know, the peasants started getting these retardo ideas, and the radical reformers were a, I think a great example of the excesses of the Reformation. I've almost anyone will agree with that. Things like free love cults, things like radical apocalyptic, things like proto-communism,

peasants taking out resentment. All of this followed once you opened up that box. And actually, you know, the Protestant movements that survived, what we think of, you know, the Magisterial Reformation, you know, they very much cracked down

on that sort of thing. They were state churches. They were state and, forced, you know, similar to how the Catholic Church is just on a smaller scale. They would burn people at the stake. They would kill people for having radical ideas. But regardless, this whole mess with the Protestant Reformation, it did not come out of a healthy system. That's the main point. It did not come out of a healthy system. It came out of a system that was very much. much in crisis, a system that was very much not capable of meeting the threats of its day,

both internal and external. And because it was incapable, the reformation happened and what came after it was a result of the choices that those people who were incapable of meeting those circumstances made. So that's kind of how I'm going to leave it more or less. I think that's a good little summary of the whole thing. It's a minefield. Yeah, I mean, you could go, you know, people talk about the World War II series I did with Thomas 23, 24 episodes.

You could go forever with this. Yeah. I mean, once you start getting into the Reformation and everything that, um, all the implications of it, all the players, the different countries. I mean, it's insane. But, you know, one thing it did do was it began to bring down that centralizing power that so many countries in Europe basically relied upon.

It is true. It is true. And, I mean, and it wasn't apocalyptic in the sense. that it brought about the end of days, but it certainly did bring the ending of a world. You know, modernity began, not necessarily with the Protestant Reformation.

You could say with the, I think, you know, a good point to say it began was with, it had predecessors, but modernity began with the shattering of the previous world paradigm, which was christened them. You could argue that.

You know, modernity began with Europe no longer, when the idea of Europe replaced the idea of christened them. That's, I think, that's I think what began it. Eventually, you're going to get to the Enlightenment, and that's when, that's a whole other candleworms. Yeah, not to be overly hyperbolic Catholic, but, you know, basically every man, every man of Pope.

Yeah. Then, you know, with the Enlightenment, every man of God. Yeah, I mean, there are certainly connections you can draw, but I think that's a good time to end it. Yep. And, well, I will say that that's one good thing about the Old Glory Club is we understand what the stakes are and we put those differences aside. Absolutely. It is certainly an ecumenical moment. That's for sure.

There are much bigger, you know, much like there are Turks outside the gates of Vienna. there are much bigger threats. Yep. So I plug the old glory club. Anything else? Nope. Old Glory Club. All right.

Paul, thank you. Until the next time. And yeah, I can't wait to see. What is next? Oh, shoot. I don't know. I could pull it up. I think it's either economics or it's the Gutenberg printing press.

It's one of the two. Okay. Economics is going to be interesting. I've already started doing a bunch of background on that. All right. Thank you, Paul. Appreciate it. Take care, Mr. Pete.