The Holy Grail, Dark Age PSYCHOPATHS & Knights Templar Mystery | Medieval Mindset

(upbeat music) - You know, when I was a little kid, my buddy Niko and I, our favorite movie, was a night's tale. - Oh yeah. - And it was like, obviously a bunch of medieval themes took place in somewhere around like 1100 or something like that. And I always wondered why they didn't make a ton more content on this shit, 'cause it's so fascinating. - Yeah. - It's kind of like an ignored part of history in a lot of ways, this 1100 year stretch, no? - Yeah, I mean, you got like Kingdom of Heaven. There was that kind of a revival in the early 2000s, night's tale, prime Heath Ledger. I like to use clips from that in my videos, 'cause the ladies love it. But it seems like now, there's a little bit of a comeback. Like there's the The Werewolf movie, The Robert Eiger's movie, and then there's the one with Andrew Garfield. - There's an Andrew Garfield. - Yeah, it's coming out like next month. - Let's pull it home. - It's called The Uprising. And they actually just added like a little subtitle to it, like the story of Robin Hood. They had to rebrand it, 'cause nobody was watching that. But yeah, this has been very controversial on the medieval social media sphere, because it's the big problem with a lot of these medieval movies is that they leave all the color out. Like in the middle ages, clothes are very colorful. Like it's always depicted as very gray and drab. And just watching the trailer, it looks like they reused a bunch of stuff from some other movie. So a lot of people were asking me, like react to the trailer, like it's talk about how it's the same thing with the Robert Eiger's movie. It's like Willem DeFoe, and it's set in the middle ages. It's about the legend of the werewolf. And it's the same thing, it's like super gray, and but that's kind of like more his style, I don't know. - Why did, this is what I'm confused about. Why it's been marketed this way for so long, 'cause the way I understand it, first of all, like I said, you got an over 1000 year period right here. That's a long fucking call one era. You know, there's a lot of generations in that. We could do some math. But also, you have the different periods within it all across the world as well, where it's like the high middle ages at some point, the dark ages that actually do occur, but you have the renaissance going on. And like you said, it's a very colorful time. Why did we lose in translation so much of just assume the entire middle ages was the same, and it looks black and white? - Yeah, it's actually interesting. It kind of started in the Renaissance. A lot of these guys, I think when people think of the Renaissance, they think it was like, everybody was kind of looking around, and they're like, all right, the middle ages are over. And we're in the Renaissance now, but it was really more so like small groups of guys in different parts of Europe that were having this like intellectual awakening. But if you were just a regular peasant life was pretty much the same for hundreds of years. But basically, they started to want to separate their intellectual movement from what had come before. So they're like everything for the last 1000 years since the fall of Rome was the middle ages, the dark ages, like everything was bad, great drab. And everything now, Renaissance forward, we're like, we're really making art and God's image, we're really doing something cool and serious. So basically, it started as a way to distinguish themselves and then with the enlightenment and the Victorians, again, like they had to have this. Our ancestors were, you know, really backwards and history's not linear, you know, so. - Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. - That's kind of like a big thing that motivated me to make my videos because I was going on YouTube or going anywhere on the internet and every video was like, this is why a medieval, you wouldn't survive 24 hours and a medieval castle or like, why a medieval winter was the worst thing you could possibly imagine. I'm like, it was a thousand year, like people are people, like people come with innovative solutions. And a lot of ways they're probably smarter and more like tapped in with the world around them than we are. So I was like, there's got to be more to this to correct the narrative. So. - Well, you, you have struck a vein. I mean, shout out to my boy Mark Gagnani. - Yeah, yeah. - He's like, you got to talk to fucking John. He's killing it. He channeled medieval mindset. - That's right. You too, with some great content. And also like, I'm sure we'll get into it today, but you relate a lot of things to present day as well. So obviously like you're an expert on this kind of history, but how far back does your fascination with the middle ages go? - Since I was a kid, I feel like it's just a really, I mean, maybe kind of what we were talking about earlier that it's sort of this like historically maligned period that you don't have a clear mental image of beyond like nights and princesses and like plague maybe and that's kind of it. But it's like a thousand years of history and it feels like it goes like ancient Rome or ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Egypt before Greece and then there's like nothing and then I don't know, in school, we learn about like the American revolution. It's like nothing happened in between. So I think I've always kind of been interested in it and then like in 2018, this game came out, this video game called Kingdom Come Deliverance where you like play, it's like a cyberpunk or Skyrim type game where you're walking around in an open world. - But it's a sick game, right? Yeah, but you're like in 15th century Bohemia, like in the Holy Roman Empire and it's like a super accurate like medieval simulator basically and it just totally like changed my life that game. I just got like totally hooked on it and then it was like every book I read, everything I talk about and eventually my family and friends were like, please stop talking to us about this. - You're like, it's fucking, I'm starting to use that. - Yeah, so I was like, I'll film it on my phone see what happens, yeah. - What were you doing before this? - I was working in marketing for years, like small. - You went from marketing to medieval history. - Small marketing, I like that move. - Yeah, so I was doing some social media marketing here and there too and I had a couple posts that I did from like the company I was working for pop off on Instagram and it gave me such a buzz and I was like, oh, like I can do social media. So done. - Here you are. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - You know from marketing to like I said in history. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So it's quite a different content. - So you go into that and you start the channel because there's also like kind of an underserved market with this, like I'll see some documentaries on this but it does feel like like you just alluded to when you go through YouTube, everything is like back to the ancient Southern Mediterranean type stuff, wouldn't it be Rome or Greece or then obviously going to Africa with Egypt and that whole time period and then it skips forward to literally like the British Empire. - Yeah, exactly. - The British Empire also basically forms smack dab in the middle of the Middle Ages because there had been the fall of the actual Roman Empire that existed, which that kind of began. It's fair to say like around year 500, it starts the Middle Ages because Roman Empire falls. Can you explain what happened there? - Yeah, so basically there had been like this period of decline in the empire for a few hundred years, just kind of like bureaucratic issues, population decline. There's been like a lot of argument on what caused that. Some people say mass outbreaks of like venereal disease or like climate change had caused it and people weren't having as many kids or living as long and they couldn't really defend the borders anymore. The armies were getting smaller and these Germanic peoples were kind of pushing in. There were a lot of issues with like later on in the Middle Ages, basically the way society was run was like rich people would hand out land to other rich people, but the Roman Empire was kind of based more on a taxation system that we would recognize and that's how the state got its money to fund the armies and whatever. All that kind of started falling apart and then it made Rome super vulnerable to like outside invaders. That's basically what happened. But I think the way that it kind of gets imagined in our Western imaginations and how it gets taught in like public school is that like everything was kosher pretty much and then one day a bunch of like German tribesmen busted in and like tore down the Colosseum and we're like, you know, knocking over all these statues. That's how it was always taught to me that I was like from one day to the next this whole thing collapsed and that could happen to America if we're not careful, like we're living in the fall of Rome. And of course it was like a hundreds of years process. - Hundreds of years. - Yeah, it started like probably like mid, like 350s somewhere around there. A lot of historians will disagree but like the spread of Christianity and the Empire, the movement towards the Eastern Roman Empire was like the real capital and the Western Roman Empire. Yeah, the West, so that's that's Constantine. He moves everything over to Byzantium in the Eastern Monodic Turkey. And that was kind of the beginning of splitting power between the Eastern West which week and the Empire. And there were a lot of contributing factors but it's also like important to remember that this is obviously like an age before like nobody's like calling some, they're not calling like their friend in France being like Rome fell. So it's like a lot of people, it takes like decades. Like they'll notice like, hey, nobody's come around to fix the roads in like 10 years. And it's like, oh, it's because yeah, there's no Roman Empire anymore as we know it. But it's interesting because it was this like monolithic empire that was thought of for centuries as something that could never fall. It had always been here, it would always be here. And so I think that's why it kind of has the parallels to like American history and people want to point so much to like this massive empire that's, you know, can never fall and it like decides the world order. That's how we feel as Americans. Like we're kind of the center of everything. And this is how it's always going to be. So I think that's what draws a lot of this comparisons. But basically the fall of Rome is like a slow process of decentralization. A lot like the Roman laws and I do yeah. So people act like it was the worst thing ever but really it like brought things back to smaller local communities. People kind of learning and teaching in their own common tongues and like adopting their own traditions. And then also taking aspects of like Roman justice, Roman law, Roman economics and kind of adapting them. Took a few hundred years but was there a day where like a leader of an invading tribe came in and like actually entered Rome after these years? Yeah, there were two. There is an initial sacking of Roman 410 and then another in 476. Okay, so people didn't view that as like a hard switch though in 410? Well, yeah, so so Rome hadn't hadn't been sacked in like hundreds of years. So it was a very shocking event definitely. Yeah, but it wasn't seen as like this is the end of everything. I don't know how like I was doing a video on this and I was trying to think like what would be a parallel? Like I don't know 9/11, maybe something like that or like this disastrous event where thousands of people died but it happened over the course of like a couple days. Like it wasn't they weren't like in Rome for yeah. Yeah, let's pull that up. Yeah, this is always how it's depicted kind of in the like this, these savage tribesmen but a lot of these guys had been living within the borders of the Roman Empire for decades, like these groups, a lot of them spoke Latin. - Were they considered a part of the Roman Empire effectively? - By the time this first sack of Rome, like a lot of the Roman army was made up of these Germanic mercenaries to supplement the loss of population and the loss of the army. So that was also highly controversial. It was kind of the same thing as an immigration debate we might have today where people were like, well, what does it mean to be Roman? If we're bringing all these guys in and a lot of them would just kind of like adapt and get these jobs within the government, or another thing that became really commonplace was that they would rule certain areas. And then the Roman-born guy would be kind of the puppet, mayor or console of that area, but really the guy's running it with the Germanic warlords. And so the writing was kind of on the wall by the fifth century, and that's really when what we would call the Middle Ages starts. - That's wild that you would have an initial sack though, and like the main city, the heartbeat of the whole place. It falls. And then I imagine it's occupied by these invading forces. And that's not considered like a hard stop. But your point on the population decline and having to pull in outsiders to come within and call it Roman, there's this guy on Twitter, home friends with online, this dude James Lucas, you ever seen his account? - I don't think so. - He's great. A lot of like cultural architecture or cultural history kind of stuff. He's out of Europe. And so he really has a immense appreciation for it. But Dave, can we actually pull up that tweet that we read on Danny Jones the other day, which was about the population decline. So if you type in James Lucas population, as you'll probably be there. So he put together this tweet describing what went on with the fall of Rome, where essentially the elites of Rome, the higher classes ended up not reproducing. - Yeah. - And how the leaders, yeah, this is actually it. The leaders actually. - Yeah, this is crazy. I just did a collab with this YouTube channel after school, the guy who does the whiteboard animations. And it was talking about how this is one of the things people say we're living in the end times 'cause of our population decline. And we're, you know, the collapse of the like, what is it called when you have to have a certain amount of kids to like maintain the population? He says it in here. - Yeah. - I forget what it is. But let me read this real quick and then have you react to it 'cause I think that would be like a good jump and off point here. But James Lucas, sorry to the people that heard this on Danny Jones's podcast with me already, but I'm just gonna read it again. 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Behind the scenes, they're orchestrating all the AI models and automatically choosing the right one for each step. I just tell it what needs to be done and then get the (beep) out the way. Instead of questions to ask, you just dictate the entire project to the computer. Research the market, compare the competition, analyze your finances and build projections, build entire pitches or presentations. And you can also connect your Gmail, Slack, all the work tools you already use. So for a limited time only, our listeners can try perplexity computer for free. You heard that right, for free. You just have to head to pplx.ai/julian. That link is in my description below. That's pplx.ai/julian link my description below to try perplexity computer today. Most AI tools are still answering questions. Perplexity computer is completing full projects. James Lucas said, "We think that collapse in birth rates is a modern problem, it is not." The most powerful man in the world once faced the exact same thing and he was so alarmed he passed laws to force the people to have children. This was not a modern government. It was roamed 2,000 years ago. The emperor was a gustus. This is years before this goes into your theory about it taking hundreds of years as well. The emperor was a gustus and by his reign, the Roman elite had grown wealthy, comfortable and reluctant to marry or raise families. Men preferred bachelorhood and affairs to the burden of a wife and children. The gustus founded alarming enough to legislate around 18 B.C. and again in A.D. 9. He pushed through the Lex Julia and the Lex Papia Popeye, a sweeping set of laws designed to engineer a baby boom by decree. The measures were direct. Unmarried and childless couples faced penalties on what they could inherit. Those who married and had children were rewarded with faster careers in public honors. Women who bore three or more children were granted a special legal freedom and ES Tribium Liberarium, the right of three children, releasing them from male guardianship. The state was quite literally paying its citizens to reproduce and finding them when they did not. It didn't work though. The laws were resented evaded and endlessly tinkered with and Rome's elite when not having small families anyway. The historian Cassius Dio records a gustus standing before the childless men of Rome and shaming them to their faces, quote, "You're a committed, committing murder and not be getting in the first place those who ought to be your descendants," unquote. A city he warned them is not the buildings, but it's people, quote, "For it is human beings to constitute a city, not houses or porticos or marketplaces empty of men." Now look at the numbers today. For a population simply to hold steady, women need to average about 2.1 children each. South Korea recently hit 0.72, the lowest rate ever recorded for any country on Earth. And even after a small rebound to 0.8 in 2025, it remains less than half of what a country needs to sustain itself. Italy and Japan sit near 1.2, China around 1.0, Spain near 1.1, the United States is about 1.6, the UK 1.5, according to the UN, more than half the world's countries are now below that line. History doesn't repeat itself, the saying goes, "But it often rhymes, and pattern is old and early familiar." A society climbs to the height of its wealth and comfort, and at that very peak, it's people stop having children and no law and no incentive, no sum of money seems to take them back into it. Rome tried with the full power of an empire behind it and failed. At its height, the city held more than a million people. A size no European city would reach again for 1,700 years until London in the 1800s. The Roman historian Livy writing as the republic gave way to the empire said, "This was an age that, quote, can endure neither its vices nor its cure," unquote. 2,000 years later, staring at the same problem and just as unable to solve it, we may be watching the beginning of the same story. Civilization does not always fall to the enemy at the gates as the historian Arnold Toynbee once said, quote, "Civilization is die from suicide, not by murder." Yeah, I mean, that's usually when, especially like a lot of medieval historians usually start a few hundred years before the beginning of the Middle Ages, 'cause it's like you have to kind of understand those waning centuries of Rome to really understand like the mindset of the Middle Ages. And that last quote, "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." Yeah, it's interesting too. There had been a Greek philosopher probably 500 years before this who had kind of documented the same problem happening in his society. I think it was Athens where he was saying like, "Young men aren't having children. They're chasing vice. People have too much money and comfort." And it's the same thing. I think I just saw an article come out last week in time. Maybe there's something along those lines of why smartphones are the reason why people somehow there's a direct link between smartphones and people not wanting to have children. I think there's like a lot of steps in between. Yeah, but yeah, I think it comes down to, 'cause I know Xi Jinping and his government in China is trying to push these like child rearing initiatives and the same thing in South Korea and Japan, which is having a huge problem with it. Remember China had the opposite? I know, yeah, that's how I always, I don't know if you had the same thing, but when I grew up in school, it was always like, we're overpopulated. The population's going to keep going in the world will explode or something. It's crazy now that, I mean, they're saying the decline started in the early 2000s. I'm like, what were we learning? Feels like a sign off. Yeah, it's probably a sign off, honestly. That's usually the explanation. But from what I understand, even Trump, when he was running in 2024, was like, I'm going to be the baby boom president. That was one of the things he was like, I'm going to be the fertility president or something. That 'cause this was already something that Elon Musk was talking about on Joe Rogan and all these issues that are going to face society if we have the upside down pyramid or the right side up pyramid, whatever it is, where there's too many old people, not enough young people working to support them. But yeah, it turns out it's been a problem throughout history. It always does though, 'cause the same thing happened in Europe and the wake of the black plague like in the late middle ages, tons of people died. And then also people are like shell shocked by what had happened, 'cause it happened like in the course of a year, like a third of the population was wiped out. So people were really freaked out. So for a while, like people weren't going to church, like they used to, people weren't having kids like they used to. So not only did a bunch of people that were alive died, like kids that would have been born, weren't born. And in the end, it led to increased bargaining power by the peasantry 'cause the crops still need to be harvested and now there's like way fewer of us. So of course the nobility, the uber rich of the late middle ages try to force all these laws. But it was the same thing where it was like, you can't legislate people's freedom in that way, they'll fight back. If they know they have leverage. - Absolutely, yeah. - And you think about today where I've talked about this a ton, but it is quite literally like a financial decision. Whether or not people can have a fucking kid. The average American because of how crazy expenses have gotten. And you wonder how much of that is baked in as well. Because the people who make the decisions in society that lead to policies, that lead to socio-economic downstream effects are the elites. And that's what we were talking about right here. Where the elites of society decided they weren't going to reproduce and then it worked its way down to the regular populations or other means. And I think it's just human nature. And this is just a hot take on that. my part, but like the way I look at it is, there's a really ironic quote that Conor McGregor said back in like maybe 2016, 2017, when he was coming to what was going to end up being as peak. The guy just had this amazing story, came from behind, was an unregulant. I remember this. Yeah. I'm a big UFC fan, yeah. Right. So you know, and he finds his way up. And then one day he's fighting Floyd Mayweather in the highest paid fight like ever or whatever at the time. And it's just incredible, an incredible achievement to cross sports and actually last with one of the greats to ever do it. And then since then, but before the, all the vices knocked in and all the things like kind of took him down, he actually warned and alluded to his own downfall, which he said, people get comfortable with a win. People get real comfortable with a win and that's how you wake up with a loss. Yeah. I know that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that a lot of that, if you want to oversimplify any empire or great economic zone, whatever you want to say, faltering over time. That's because the very hunger that got them there that's, you know, Alexander, I want to conquer everything when he's got nothing left to conquer. He cries and he does nothing and then dies. Yeah. You know, it's like that. Suspiciously. Suspiciously. But that hunger switches and someone else out there, someone else is a hungry dog and wants to eat. And that's what the visitors were. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's interesting. I mean, there's also, I know he quoted it, but I think it was from like Marvin Hagler, one of the older boxing greats. Conor, the soaked pajamas, it's hard to get up a 5 a.m. to jog when you're soaked pajamas. And it's still true. God, I wish he hadn't taken that Floyd fight. What could have been with his UFC career if he kept going to defend it the belt anyway? Not the, not the topic, but yeah, it's interesting to, I mean, I think there's a tendency to address it as like a moral failing. And I've seen there's the smartphones argument, but it's also like only fans, hinge dating, you know, Tinder was the beginning of the end of all this or any of that. And it's, it's interesting too. There's just rewatching Mad Men, it's, you know, obviously depicting the optimism of like post world or to America. And even though it's from the early 2000s, it has this, you, it really captures the feeling of the time, at least if you talk to anybody that's older. And it feels like it almost captures that lightning in a bottle, that hunger of like American uniqueness, American industry. Like we're going to push into these new industries aviation, like we're going to be the greatest in the world. We're going to be the greatest in the world at this. We have Coca-Cola. We have all these things. And also one thing you'll never see in that show again, it's made in the 2000s, but it's from supposed to be set in the late 50s or the 60s is that nobody's ever saying like anything negative. Even in the midst of the civil rights movement, all these kind of things that are happening is the undercurrent. Nobody's like America's a failed experiment. America. I'm ashamed to be from America, which look, I'm not, you know, saying one thing or another, but I kind of feel like it's something that I see when I study the history of civilization is that when people start to kind of shrink away or like start to disassemble the myth of their own founding story, that's when the structure kind of starts to crumble a little bit. So I mean, even as recently as the early 2000s, like coming, coming up like in elementary middle school, it was like the founding fathers were on a sellable, like there was no conversation about whether or not George Washington was a great man, like nobody was ever debating this. Fourth of July was like a man at holiday, not, you know, Columbus Day was Columbus Day. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That one knew that. Yeah, that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That one we might have to look at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there was just no question of these founding myths and like obviously some of these things need to be brought to light and discussed, you know, what really happened at the Thanksgiving story. It wasn't cartoon programs and Cartoon Native American shaking hands. Yeah. That's what I said. Yeah. It's a great holiday. I'm not that true. It's getting the way of a good story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I read, I mean, a lot of like social history has been based on a civilization founding its myth on tragedy or triumph. Tragedy or triumph? So it was our original founding a great flood. Was it a wiping out of civilization or was it like us standing up to the British? Like is it tragedy or triumph? So it's these, all these different civilizations throughout history and you can kind of trace how there it shapes your whole culture, how you think of yourself. Do we come from tragedy or triumph? And so I think now we've kind of, we're in this weird middle ground where we're trying to like figure out, well, we don't think of it as triumph anymore. Like these guys were slave owners and, you know, but I think we're kind of in the midst of a reframing. I think I had HW brands in here who's one of the greatest American historians ever lived. He's written 42 books in 39 years on American history, just one of the goats. And I loved how he talked about all this because he said when you look at any point in history, you have to judge people in the context of their time. Yeah. And for a while, obviously, we've been at a point as a country where we're like, obviously, something like slavery was like the worst thing I ever did. It's this horrible history and all that and that's, and that's all true. But then you also have to look at the guys who were brought up in a world where that was just normalized and that's what it was and maybe didn't think of it the way that a human being normally today at all would think about it. And I do worry sometimes it's so interesting that you say all empires are found on tragedy or triumph. And as you were saying that, I'm thinking of different big ones over time. And I think that's 100% right. But like we live in this world where it has to be everything or nothing. And so it's not enough for people when they may look back at the revolution, which I've studied that extensively and I'm really glad those guys did what they did. You know, they look at it and it was always this 100% story. They were 100% the good guys. What I always say to people is I'm like, it's okay if like 10% of what they did wasn't the greatest. I mean, you have to then be like, fuck it. We got to take it down to zero. Yeah. Because that changes the whole vibe and perception of society and that I worry about a lot. Well, yeah. And I think it also points to how you feel about your civilization's past is how you think of it's future. Yeah. So a lot of these times, these conversations, I mean, you see it happening over and over again about the end times we're living in the end times. This is over. Comes from a perception of like a reappraisal of the founding myth. So it's like when people are thinking, yeah, America can't possibly survive. It's like, well, yeah, we've done a reappraisal. We've done the black and white thinking of these guys were either complete heroes or now where like they were complete villains. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. It's interesting too. So I live in Atlanta. There's a lot of civil war battlefields. And I just took my little brother to visit the battlefield at Kennesaw Mountain. And we were in the gift shop and there was like an older southern couple discussing, you know, well, these guys in the context at the time, you know, slavery back then they thought they were fighting for something good. And it's kind of like, well, people even then knew it was kind of bad. But I see people in my comments section a lot. I think this is something that is generally hurtful to our perception of history and being able to understand the past. They're like, how were medieval people able to burn people at the stake for Harris? You know, how could they possibly ever think that that was okay? And it's like, I mean, there's a million different explanations for like why violence is more accepted in certain societies than others and whatever and where we can talk about social relativism. But it's like, I don't think you can have any understanding of history, obviously like you said with that understanding, the social context, like who these people really were and what what world they were raised in. So when when Rome officially like fell after the hundreds of years and like now, obviously was back dated because it's later writers and historians looking at this in the 17th century and being like middle ages, but like the beginning of what we now know as the middle ages because it was three different time periods. What was that first time period called again and what was maybe we could start here? What was life like in let's just say Europe at that time? Yeah. So usually it gets segmented into the early middle ages, the high middle ages and the late middle ages. So that would be this first 100 years would be the early middle ages, which is also what's called the dark ages. Just 100 years. No, the hundreds of years. So first. So yeah, usually till about from about 500 to 800 and then well, no, 500 to about a thousand then a thousand to like 1200 is usually about high middle ages and then 1200 to the Renaissance like 1500s is usually the high middle ages. So the early middle ages are double the, yeah, they leveled a lot into this country's history right. But it's it's kind of up for interpretation and it's in moving in different ways throughout Europe. So like in kind of what would be modern day France in Germany by 800, you have the Carol Engian's Charlemagne. He's kind of engineering his own like Renaissance, a thousand years before the Renaissance. He's having like a reappraisal, another great word of like the Latin alphabet and the teachings and writings of the Greeks and Romans, he's bringing those back. They actually invented all Latin writing up to that point had been all uppercase. That's why when you see like the tablets, it's carved all the letters are uppercase. So his he has his monks invent lowercase writing and a lot of just advancements in music like like what we would think of as Gregorian chant kind of starts to be like what we would think of as the medieval identity starts to be formed. And then Charlemagne dies. It's kind of the same thing like as Alexander where this really ambitious guy dies and nobody can pick up the mantle of what he was doing. It gets split between his sons and that's a total mass and you know there's a few hundred more years of darkness. But it depends on which part of Europe. I mean the one that a lot of like anti medieval people were point will point to is Anglo-Saxon England after the withdrawal of the Romans because there's a Roman colony. Yes. And then the Romans withdraw and over the next few decades century the angles, the Saxons and the Juts from like what would be modern day Germany and the Netherlands cross over and start like invading and kind of mixing with the people there. Roman roots in there. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Shout out Germany. Yeah. They love starting massive conflicts. They do. They never saw it. They do. Yeah. We've got to keep an eye on those guys now. I feel like we've we've left a lot of the gas. Yeah. A little bit. But yeah. So then that starts to be there's this like sort of transition period between the withdrawal of like every benefit you got from Roman administration, the roads, the justice, the bathhouses. You know all these things. The bathhouses. If people sleep on the city of bath in England still has those old Roman bathhouses. They're beautiful. But basically that was like a hooker down. Yeah. So I mean we can assume I wasn't there, but I feel like I walked around. They still have it like a reconstruction of it and it's like there's no way. Everybody's naked in this big pool of water. I mean, it was pretty high-end. - It was high-end. It definitely looked like it was high-end for the time. - This wasn't like, you know, going out on like 39 streets. - No, no. - Too late. - I mean, I'm not that familiar with Hoboken, but probably not. - That's not Hoboken. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, where it's a thing, yeah. But yeah, so basically, and especially the Roman education system, all of that kind of starts with the draw. You see like bits and pieces of it still surviving, you know, certain tutors. A lot of what survived from Rome survived within the church. And there's actually this historian, Norman Cantor, who argues that one of the reasons for the downfall of the Roman Empire and the transition to the Middle Ages was that a lot of the men who would have been great selections for generals or senators or leaders of Rome went to the church instead. Once Christianity became the state religion. 'Cause it was like, you don't have to fight anybody, you get paid, you have a ton of power locally. Everybody respects you. You're like tapped in with God. - Oh, they were getting tapped in. - Yeah, yeah. - They were getting paid heavy? - Oh, yeah, it was the place to be. I mean, a lot of noble families that would have sent their children to politics, sent them into the church. And the church became the politics. They even took over the organization. Like the way that the Roman state administered itself was absorbed by the Catholic church. - And was this, so when you say sending people, sending family members into the church, all in the context of like being a priest? - No, let's just say I was like, like an archbishop or something. - Yeah, so you can like still get married. - Right, right, right, yeah. So that was actually, it wasn't until hundreds of years later and it kind of changed throughout Europe. It really wasn't until like 1215 that we would think of as the sacrament of marriage was like established in the Catholic church. I know that's kind of like an aside, but for like the first thousand years of Christianity, especially in like rural areas, which is most of Europe, like peasant, you didn't get married in like a church. It was like a common law. What would we call a common law marriage? If you lived with a woman and had children with her, you were married in the eyes of the church. 'Cause there wasn't like enough priests to go around to every small village. - Wait, yes, so you didn't even have to go to city hall or something like that? - No, no, no, no. It was like, this is my life. - Yeah, we lived together, like we've known each other since we were five. Everybody knows we're a couple. - Oh, that's just wow. - It's really interesting. And then after that, they're like, no, you have to get married in a church and you have to go to a confession once a year and you have to, you know, start out. - Isn't that interesting? That's how you start. You start to pull in natural human mammalian type relationships towards some sort of control at a state level and you start to change the church. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And then it, I mean, this is, yeah, this is the early 13th century. And this is like the medieval church as it's become known in the popular imagination. 'Cause for the first, like throughout those dark ages, even into like the high middle ages, we think of like the, what, draconian medieval church and the evil pope who's like burning people at the stake and controls everything. That's how it's always depicted in movies. But the pope didn't really have the power, like he did not have as much power as a king. A king had an army, the pope had nothing. - One of the most frustrating pieces of clothing, I don't know about you, but I can definitely speak for me are jeans. No matter what my size is, all the brands seem to run in a different type of fit and it's one type of clothing. 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And even with their nice fit, they got deep pockets that are actually gonna fit your phone, your keys and your wallet without that weird bulge that ruins your whole silhouette. And best of all, they got six fits from Skinny to deep favorite, thick, thick. So if you're looking for comfortable jeans that are actually gonna fit and look great, head on over to the perfect gene.nyc, that link is in my description below. And as a listener of our show, you're gonna get 15% off your first order and free shipping. All you gotta do is use code Julian15 for 15% off that checkout. You can also Google the perfect gene and head to their site, but literally the link is right down in my description below. So head to the perfect gene.nyc and use code Julian15. - So it took quite a while of political maneuvering for that to sort of become a reality. It isn't until the mid, like 11th century that really starts to come around. But that's a lot of years too. I think about this with history all the time. I've said this to so many guys like you who just cover really cool, far away time period's history. It's like when we think of the past decade, we think of every single detail 'cause we're living in it. But then think about the years where you and I weren't alive. The '80s, the '70s, the '60s, there's so many details. But it's a little faster when we go through a decade because you're looking at the higher level things. Then the far that you go back, you're even higher and higher level. And suddenly like it's exponential in the speed of you going through history. It's almost like recent history you're moving like this. Then it gets faster and faster and faster. And by the time you're at like year zero, you're moving like this through 200 years. - It's crazy. - Like it's five seconds. - Yeah. It's interesting too 'cause we think, I mean, at least the way we conceptualize like decades and popular cultures like the '70s, disco, '80s, big hair and cocaine, '90s. I don't know, what do you listen like limb biscuit? I don't know, whatever it is. But it's interesting to think like, did people a thousand years ago, were like the 1060s and the 1070s and the 1080s, did they have their own cultural identity? And so that's always been something I've been interested in. Like where the lives of your parents distinctively different than your lives from a cultural educational perspective. And the answer at least according to like most evidence that any social historian would give for most of the Middle Ages, unless you were like a monarch or you were like a very rich member of the nobility, like functionally, 1200 is the same as 1300 is 1400. But there are changes in style and fashion that are really interesting pointy shoes are really popular for a while, bright colors. Changes in people's kind of adherence to Christianity, like influences culture as well, like how strict people are. So yeah, it is kind of interesting. That's so on the one hand, I think you're, I mean, historically from what we can see, you're definitely right. On the other hand, I wonder how much the printing press not happening until the 15th century affected the volume of information we can even get from those time periods to say what might have differentiated, say the year 1000 from even the year 1100, whereas the other part of it is, think about how fast, how the internet and social media has changed cultural trends. Now, some girl in France can get on the latest fashion trend that a girl in California is doing overnight. And suddenly it spreads like wildfire because we have access to so much information, whereas these societies, just to get a letter to someone to town over that took fucking four days back then. So you don't have the same like mass, I don't want to say psychosis, but like the mass ability to spread cultural ideas at any kind of fast rate. So it does make sense that maybe the life of a grandparent you study in a grand kid in the 12th century might have been fairly similar. - Yeah, it's also, I mean, now there's obviously the birth rate thing that we're all decrying. And then another thing has been like the death of monoculture. We don't all watch the same things on TV anymore. We don't have the same pop stars. You might have somebody on your algorithm that's super famous to you and I've never heard of them and that's like new. I did a video on this that that's basically going back to like the medieval village way of like your algorithm as your village, people outside of your village wouldn't know your local town drunk. They wouldn't know your local songs that they play the tavern. And like you were kind of existing within an ecosystem. I do think there's a little bit of a misconception in terms of I've heard a lot of people say, oh, medieval people never traveled beyond like the horizon of their town. They never really left their town. It's not true. We have a lot of evidence that medieval people traveled quite a lot. They would have traveling merchants come through town with stories of what was happening elsewhere in Europe. And then especially in the later middle ages, you would know at least a couple guys in your town who were veterans of foreign conflicts who had fought. If you were English, you would know guys who were coming back from war with the French or guys who had been mercenaries in the Holy Roman Empire and were coming back and they have a limp and a story to tell you at the tavern about what's going on in Bohemia. So that's kind of how some of these ideas start to spread. And then it's interesting to a lot of what we know culturally 'cause again, something else I see in my own comment section is like, well, isn't this just what rich people wrote down? 'Cause we don't have what a peasant wrote 'cause he couldn't write it. So it's like we don't know what the experience of the everyday person was like. And what you kind of have to do, at least to the best of your ability, is backtrack from what the monks were writing. 'Cause basically the monks were the cultural commentators at the time and a lot of times they were like in these monasteries, but they'd go into town and see what was going on and then come back and write down and how pissed they were at the pan skies are wearing or women's dresses are too short or the songs they're playing at the tavern have too many vulgar lyrics or whatever. So you can kind of like backtrack from that. What's, like how mad are the monks right now? That's where society's going aesthetically. And the same way it's been kind of, in the last couple hundred years of American history, there's like religious revivals where it gets super puritanical and then it kind of gets looser with the morals, depending on a variety of different, you know, contributing factors. So it's interesting. Yeah, I've heard the term medieval culture but you can't really boil down like a thousand years ago. Yeah. - So back to the dark ages though, that five or six hundred year period, you have the Byzantine Empire. I think, do you have the Ottoman Empire in there? - No, no, that's the end of the Byzantines. Yeah, in 1455 the Asak concept. - Yeah, so you have the Byzantines, you have the Eastern Holy Roman Empire and probably butchering some shit right now. What is the power structures look like at that time? - Yeah, so like loose, especially in Europe like very loosely, it's like a lot of trot. You have like the Ashrugoths, the Visigoths, you have the Franks, that's where Charlemagne comes from. You have it. Anglo-Saxons, but you also still have the Native Britons who are like the people that are originally from England, even before the Romans. You still have some remaining like descendants of the Romans in England. You have the the forming of the Holy Roman Empire was kind of with Charlemagne. This is an interesting question about like the power of the Church because basically what happens is the Franks become by the year 800 by the year Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope. He's the first one. They're like the the major kind of power in Western Europe. They they control a lot of modern day France and Germany. And basically the question the big historical question has always been who needed who? Did Charlemagne need the Church or did the Church need Charlemagne? Like what what was the deal with this alliance? And really at least in my opinion the Church needed Charlemagne way more than he needed the Church. The argument is he needed religious legitimacy for his rule because he's just the ruler of the Franks who have been Christianized at this point. But he has no God given like this idea of like God appointing the monarch is not really a thing yet. So it's like he needs God given legitimacy. And the Pope needs like this Frankish army that'll cross the Alps and like defend him from his from his enemies who are always bothering him the Lombards. So that's it's a question of who needed who I would say that for most of the Middle Ages the Church needed the state and not the other way around. And then also gave them that like the ability for him to claim. Yeah Charlemagne is the leader you're giving a sense of power publicly to make sure that was the controversy and this is something that historians argue about a lot. So Charlemagne is in Rome and it's Christmas day and he's kneeling at Mass and the Pope walks up to him and places the crown on his head and says I crown you emperor. And the question is did Charlemagne know this was going to happen and he had approved it beforehand or was the Pope taking that moment to say I'm the only one who can give out this crown. I'm the power of God to give out this crown. So it's it's a historical debate of whether or not Charlemagne was surprised. That's the meme. How how how surprised are Charlemagne when he when he got that crown on his head. But I mean that's that moment right there in the year 800 is like the defining moment of the rest of the Middle Ages basically the struggle between church and state and it's something that will kind of go back and forth really blending in a way that we couldn't really wrap our heads around. What did I I don't know if you would know specific percentages or anything like that. That's kind of an exact question. But like what did the adoption of Christianity look like at the beginning of the dark ages and how did it progress throughout the rest of them. Yeah. So it was already a popular obviously it had become the state religion of Rome at that point and a lot of the Germanic tribes were adopted Christianity as well but they were adopting what's called Aryan Christianity which isn't yeah it's not Catholic Christianity it's believing that I believe unless I'm mixing it up it's believing that Jesus was fully human and not fully divine or maybe the other way around. So he doesn't have the dual nature he's one or the other and that was very like these things that seem in retrospect like how big of a deal is that were like people were willing to fight to death for these issues. So a lot of them had converted to Aryan Christianity mostly because like the Aryan missionaries have been more successful with the Catholic missionaries and like the outer outskirts of the Roman world and then over time it was the writing became on the wall basically that like the Catholic church in Rome was going to be the dominant Christian force. So over time like all those Aryans converted to Catholicism but it was a slow process but in Western Europe by the year approximately 1000 is usually what's given like fully Christianized. It would take a lot longer in Eastern Europe in Poland and Lithuania the two tonic nights had to go on crusade there and basically like slaughter people for a few hundred years to get them to convert and even now like in places like Romania it's still like gypsy like Christian it's like not fully what we'd recognize as Christianity it's like gypsy pagan blend Christianity. A couple hundred years there they're just slaughtered. Yeah and it's yeah it's seen as like a holy Christianizing mission and they kind of like set up their own state there like it kind of becomes a whole like satellite of the Holy Roman Empire. What do you think drove things like that as it just power? It's interesting and I feel like the crusades are easily the most controversial because that was the it was the northern crusade it was one of the crusades that was we we think of the crusades the Jerusalem when we think of the word crusades but there were crusades happening everywhere there's a lot of reconquista in Spain it became like a cultural movement. When did they start? 1095 is when the first is launched and then over the next few hundred years there's like there's a bunch that are launched and at a certain point it became less about the religious nature of what was being done and more so about how can I add a religious twist to what's essentially like a political maneuver. So by the fourth crusade they're attacking it's Christians attacking Christians. Same thing in in like later on in France it's used to attack heretics the albagensians or the Cathars they're like a southern French heretic group and the pope declares a crusade on them and it's like I thought we were doing this against Muslims like now we've Christians have attacked a Christian city in the fourth crusade constant to noble and sacked it horribly. It was like one of the most horrific events of the Middle Ages. What year was that again? That was 12 or four. So this is what a hundred and ten years after the first crusade which started very nobly and then by then it's like we've it's only been a hundred years which I mean now seems like a lot of time but you know in the grand scope of history not that long and we've totally muddied what it means to go on crusade. And the crusades obviously because they're religion based involved the church. Yeah. And obviously that means at this point they had developed enough of power structure to have their own I guess military abilities. A lot of this is where the lore of like the Knights Templar comes in. Yeah. But who were like how did it work? Who were all the troops involved being sent to all these places and what were they on? Contract there's mercenaries. What was the setup? Yeah. So basically it's actually kind of I think lending more evidence to the idea that the church didn't have as much power as it would later have because the Pope isn't sending his own military. He's going on like a speaking tour of all the courts of Western Europe and being like you guys need to send your meal at like the French need to send. Yeah. They're the Burgundians need to send the English need to send. You guys all send. And for that first crusade he's this is Pope urban the second. He's a very charismatic speaker and he gets everybody fired up about it. All these young princes and barons and dukes no kings partake because there are like drizzles of a thousand miles away like this poses no like financial interest for us. But all these like unlanded you know maybe like you're the second or third son of a king and you don't you didn't inherit anything. You're going to want to go to Jerusalem and carve out a piece of land for yourself. So there's real motivation there. So he goes on this barnstorming tour speaking tour all across Europe and he rouses up support but it's these are like earthly powers that are sending their armies across and it's interesting to like regular people are getting swept up in this like peasants are overhearing the speeches that are being given in the town square or whatever. And so there's also at the same time a people's crusade led by the sky Peter the hermit who's like this local firebrand in France and he gets like 10,000 peasants to walk with him across Europe like across like through Constantinople and it's immediately butchered they're all butchered by by the by the serisans immediately and then they return like who's left return so Peter of course yeah so not like that fan yeah yeah but they got there first they got there before any of the actual Christian armies got there these like 10,000 and they thought like we're protected by God. So it's it's interesting yeah but the Knights Templar and the Knights has Spitaler and all these kind of military orders that become like auxiliaries of the church spring up in the wake of that successful first crusade because it's like a smashing success nobody actually expected like we're going to retake Jerusalem it's like they win every battle and it's like a total route all the way to Jerusalem and everything's like holy shit we did it. Mostly it's because all the Muslim powers were fighting amongst themselves and couldn't unite against the invading Christians and then so it's like they took advantage of that not knowing that that's what was going on but anyway so they take Jerusalem and they start dividing it up into these crusader states and now the portal is opened between Europe and and the Holy Land like gee this is where Jesus died so it's like a huge like cottage industry of pilgrimage across from every area of Europe you can think of springs up and now you need somebody to protect these pilgrims along the road especially once they get past like through Byzantium through Turkey and like into the Middle East like there's robbers there's you know local tribesmen that are going to try and kill them so that's where the Knights Templar come and then the church is digging what they're doing so much because the church is getting money from these pilgrimages that they give them special powers basically and are like your exempt from local laws and that leads to a lot of problems that eventually causes the downfall the Templars they get too powerful too rich yeah we'll come to that in a second it's just so fascinating to me that the power of like the spoken word of the traveling man is strong enough to unite so many places behind a cause because like we were saying earlier this is pre printing press I would imagine most people would therefore don't own a Bible or something like that they were born somewhere they pretty much stay in that area and whatever and they work the land and people come through and they say there's this powerful guy maybe hundreds thousands miles away called the Pope and he represents this guy called Jesus because this is the church he set up and by the way there's a really important land where Jesus was killed and we all got to go there and people are just like sign me up yeah that's so interesting that power they yeah that that's a question I've asked myself a lot specifically about the people's crusade because for the for the Knights the barons the princes there was like financial incentive right they could carve up the holy land amongst themselves in like a valuable trading port and whatever but for a random guy with a sickle in France like rural France like why is he leaving his wife and children sometimes they brought them with on this crusade but a lot of them just like bounced it's well I guess now that I say that I love maybe there's reason for that maybe they're like perfect excuse to ditch the wife okay yeah yeah but uh no it's it's interesting yeah the power of the spoken word in the middle ages especially like a local town performances it's crazy to read contemporary descriptions like a traveling group of actors would come and perform a biblical scene in the town play and people are like cropping and like ripping their clothes people were very emotional in the middle ages I I wonder if it's like um you know exposure popular culture or something like that. that's like numb to us a little bit in the way that we don't have the same emotional reaction. But one of the things like key medievalists we'll always talk about is like the emotional tenor of medieval culture. Like people would go on a pilgrimage barefoot and like be crying and weeping and sackcloth and ashes and like everything was very intense and over the top. So in that kind of cultural milieu, it's like, you know, a guy comes around and sparks the powder keg. It's also worth mentioning too that even a peasant would have been familiar with like the biblical stories of Jesus and Jerusalem, Jesus coming into Jerusalem on the donkey being crucified. They couldn't read, but this is like their whole cultural. Like every story is told through a biblical lens. The walls in the church are painted with biblical murals they're hearing it every Sunday. So they would be familiar with like the significance of Jerusalem and why we need to take it back from the serison. - That's so interesting that it went from for roughly 300 years Christians had to do it in silence persecuted as this small minority. And then you have one emperor just like, all right, we're gonna switch that around fam and then suddenly it goes hard the opposite way and they're like we need to spread this everywhere, stick the visual imagery around people in places that would never have thought about this and make this this giant religion. I, what do you think that was that made them want to make a switch that dramatic? - Well, there have been a ton of theories on this and it's always been something that's interested me. I mean, there have been how many books like written on why was Christianity more successful than any of these other ancient religions that it may be shares things in common with. The one of the main thesis is that it has an appeal to like the average person. It's saying like in Jesus' kingdom, upside down kingdom, there's no rich, there's no poor. It's about your morality and like the Bible, it speaks to the lowest class as a society, the New Testament, it speaks to the slave, it speaks to the wage worker, it speaks to whoever. So I think there was an appeal there. And then, I mean, it's the question of also as soon as kind of church and state, like the Roman bureaucracy started to be involved in the church, there's like an appeal to the rich there as well. It's like, oh, we can actually have power and claim God's like descent from God. - This is looking great. - I know, yeah, it's like this is awesome for us. The regular people love it. And then from the, I mean, people had always been religious. Like in as Christianity spreads throughout Europe, it's replacing pagan religions. And in a lot of cases, it took centuries and even now into the modern day, there are places in Europe where you would, like you would go to a Catholic festival and it would feel like some ancient pagan ritual. I remember I did a summer in the small village in Spain and it was like they had like, they were like burning things and like, what's it called like an effigy of somebody and whatever. And it didn't feel like anything you would see in a Catholic church here. But it's because as Christianity expanded, of course, this is a world without the internet, without telephones, anything like that. Like it blends with local traditions, local pagan traditions, and then the church is like, at a certain point, like we've done all week, we can't stand about all these. Yeah, exactly. So it allowed a lot of that. Right, it's like making a melting pot. Yeah, it's like, yeah, this is like, yeah. We have Chinese food, we have a Thai food. Right, yeah. And it's like as long as your rulers will like publicly declare their allegiance to the church and that they believe in Jesus Christ and you're, you know, Viking or Lord will be baptized in the river and everybody can see it, then we don't care. Like if you wanna. Why did so many kings, I mean, we touched on it with Charlemagne and like the Pope kind of taken his moment to have that kind of clout. But why did so many kings go along with this over the years? Like, yeah, this is it. Yeah, it's interesting. There, again, it's one of those things where there's like a couple historical explanations based on like time and place. But one argument is that they legitimately believed that that's that's always the most interesting. A lot of times too, there would be alliances made. So for example, there might be an Anglo-Saxon ruler who's pagan, right? And he marries a French princess and she's super Christian and she's like, you have to convert for me. And then he converts and that changes the whole course of the empire and things like that. There's also, you know, the writing on the wall, if you wanna get it, like if you're the Saxons and you wanna get in good with the Franks who are all Christian, it's probably gonna behoove you to convert to Christianity or, you know, in the later Middle Ages, it's like, this is being forced on you by the sword or there's legitimacy coming from Rome. Like you can claim part of this divine lineage if you convert. And also, a lot of medieval rulers, one of their favorite things to do was to declare speaking of lineage that they were descended from Adam or directly descended from. So they would draw up family treaties like showing, like we came from Noah and like then it went here. So it was also a way to, like if you adopted Christianity, you were adopting the story of the Bible and you can insert yourself into that. It's a salvation story that's linear in a way that like most religious stories aren't. That's historical also. 'Cause it's like most religions, especially pagan religions, it's like in the early dark times, there was this and then this happened and now that. But this, it's like, there was a guy 2000 years ago, like we'll tell us in years now, 1000 years ago then. You know, this really happened. Moses was a real guy, this exile out of Egypt. Like these are historical events and we are placing ourselves in the context of that of this like holy book. - Yeah, I've talked about it so many times on my show, but my friend Charlie Rocket came up with this unbelievable theory seven years ago, eight years ago called the IMU theory. And the concept was that the most relatable people by mass following across culture from comic books to sports, to corporations, to religion are those who are most like the common man. So the example that he used with religion is he had Googled the most followed religion in the world and it was Christianity. And so he thought, okay, who's the hero Christianity? Jesus Christ. Carpenter hung out with poor people or regular clothes, you know, in a time where you would have ridden around on a white horse and golden armor to show your significance. He didn't do any of that shit. And people could identify with it. And so when you explain even all the peasant class here in the story and here in the New Testament and particularly in hearing how it's like, oh, that's speaking to us, no matter what level the quote unquote caste system they were. It's further, it is further affirmation that from a religious standpoint, regardless of whether you think it's truth or not, it is the best story. Yeah, ever told. It is the most sellable story ever told in my opinion. Yeah, and it's interesting to the only physical description given of Jesus in the New Testament is that you wouldn't pick them out of a crowd. He was totally average looking. And so something that a lot of medieval preachers tell in the story of Jesus is that Jesus is in the face of the guy begging on a street corner. Jesus is in the face of the traveler who's knocking on your door at midnight and asking for a room. Jesus is, so like a big social idea that was financed by the church and financed by the royalty was charity, charity was a big deal. Because this is still kind of wrapped up in the theology of like there's a check box of things you do to enter heaven. People will get mad, have you talking about that in that way about medieval Catholicism, but it is kind of true that there's, there's a clear now Catholic theology has changed from that, but there is a clear in the medieval mind. Like you do this, you get this eternal result and charity is one of those things. So it's like Jesus is one of us, he's a villager, he's a peasant, he's your brother. Give you a test. Yeah, exactly, yeah, it's wild. Now what is, this is pre obviously the rise of like the British monarchy when we're talking in the dark ages, but like you had said during the Roman Empire, Britain was a part of the Roman Empire. And so now you have these middle years here, the dark ages where they're now not like owned by the Roman Empire and they're started to become their own thing. And you said like Germans were coming across and coming in there, but like what is, what is the, as we know at the UK today look like during this time period? Yeah, it's a, it's fragmented. Like it's not, there's no idea of a unified England that won't happen until later. It's, there's some debate as to how, like how English rulers thought of themselves as English, usually offered the grade in the 800s, as thought of as like the guy who kind of came out with this vision of like England as a unified place. But basically before that, it's a couple different, like warring sections owned by different sort of Anglo-Saxon warlords. But they've, they've adopt, they adopt Christianity over time. They adopt like written learning. They adopt like monastic culture, which is like a big part of like diffusing education and things like that. So, I mean, Anglo-Saxon England is always depicted as like these evil tribesmen, but by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period in 1066, they're actually fairly advanced. And he's kind of a, Alfred the Great is kind of a national hero. Isn't that when the roughly when the royal family began? Like was it 1066 or 1088 or something like that? Yeah, 1066 is when William the Conqueror crosses from Normandy, crosses the English Channel and he becomes King and the Anglo-Saxon. So, he was a Frenchman? Yes, he was Norman. So, the Normans were descended from the Vikings who had intermixed with the the native French. There was a lot of men. Yeah, yeah, so they were the Northmen, the Normans that it got like bastardized in Norman. And then they cross, he had a claim to the throne. And so he crosses. So, it had apparently been promised to him by Edward the Confessor, who was one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings. And he was known for probably being more cut out for the church than for ruling. There's a lot of medieval kings like that, where it's like they just love Jesus and they don't really want to do any of the King's stuff. They're just, they really like the Catholic thing and they like like going to mass and stuff, but they don't want to like lead an army. And he was one of those guys, he's named Edward the Confessor because he was so religious, he left to go to confession. And so apparently, William the Conqueror says that Edward promised it to me on his deathbed. He told me that they couldn't be mindful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody was there. But then there's other guys that are saying, like Harold Godwin's in is like the next descendant who was supposed to do it. He promised me he's got the pillow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He told me, yeah, I gotta go take that. All right, gotcha. So he successfully took it in 1066. And that was, I mean, you could also say that's the jumping off point for like modern England, as we know it, or medieval England, as we think of it. Yeah, let's pull up the Alfred the Great Wiki right there. I was, I feel like I've heard it. It's on the right side too, right, bit next one. Yeah, I feel, yeah, the actual page. So I've heard this name, but I can't. So this was the guy in the 800s you were saying. - Yeah, have you ever seen that Netflix show the last kingdom, the only one? - I've heard that's great. - Okay, yeah, he's the king. It's like center around the waiting years of his rule on his kind of uniting of things. - Oh, that's interesting. - So C.I.A.A.P.D.A says Alfred the Great was king of the West Saxons from 871 to 886 and king of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 until his death in 899. - So that's kind of, yeah. - He was the youngest son of king. I'm not even gonna try to say that. And his first wife, Osper, who both died when Alfred was young, three of his brothers reigned and turned before him. So he was the fourth brother, and wow. Under Alfred's rule, considerable administrative military reforms were introduced, prompting lasting change in England after sending the throne. Alfred spent several years fighting Viking invasions. He wanted decisive victory at the battle of adding 10 and 878 and made an agreement with the Vikings to body England between Anglo-Saxon territory and the Viking ruled Donnellal, which consisted of Scandinavian New York, the Northeast Midlands and East Anglia. Do we know if you did a DNA test on the high classes of London society? How much is going to show Viking and how much is going to show? - That's such an interesting question. Yeah, they actually did. Well, I believe the context of it was trying to track the migrations into Iceland, that happened in the Middle Ages from Viking invaders, but they used English, that was part of the data set. And it was found that a lot of, there was a lot of Viking intermixing. And there's also constantly like metal detectors who are unearthing Viking treasures in England. And a lot of like place names in England that come from Scandinavian. Like Anglo-Saxon culture in a weird way, sort of, first of all, defined itself in contrast to the Vikings. Because a society starts to define itself when it's being invaded from outside. It's like, we are not those. Those guys are evil and we are we. So that was the beginning of Anglo-Saxon culture and like kind of unified culture. But then the Vikings intermix, intermarried, ruled England for stretches of time. So it was kind of a melting pop. But yeah, a lot of Viking DNA, Scandinavian DNA in the modern English makeup. Yeah, what were the Vikings like? Minus what we know is like the stereotypes. Well, yeah, weirdly. So I mean, their greatest legacy, at least in terms of their power in the Middle Ages was the Norman people who that they intermixed with. Who would we would think of now as the French? And the Normans were like the dominant peoples of the high and late Middle Ages. I mean, obviously they conquered England. Actually, there's an interesting etymological distinction between Anglo-Saxon last names and Norman derived last names between the English, who would be the upper cross now, like these families that have been around for hundreds of years and your average person. What does that look like? Smith or Johnson would be more descended from the lower classes, more coming from an Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian background. And then I'm trying to think, I had some examples. But it almost, some of these names sound more thorough. It's like more French sounding names. You'll see that more so in the upper classes. But yeah, it's kind of an interesting distinction because the French pull one over the bridge. Well, yeah, yeah. They led to a lot of back and forth over the years. But yeah, so the Normans coming kind of established themselves as the nobility in France and the royalty William the Conqueror takes the throne, and all of his boys kind of take over all the lands of the Anglo-Saxons. Is it fair to say that's when the rivalry of Britain and France kind of dates back to earths? Was it even before that? Well, it's interesting because Charlemagne worked with the Anglo-Saxons. There was kind of more of a friendly relationship there, and they would exchange knowledge. Up until that point, it's kind of difficult to say, oh, well, also because the French were, I mean, what we would call the modern French, they were more divided then. But we're also kind of defining themselves. They were being invaded by the Vikings too, coming up through River San and like pillaging Paris and whatever. So there was a common thread there. Like we are both being invaded by these psychos from the north, like I'll send some guys to you. You help me out. So there was a little bit more of like we're sharing together in this external conflict. And then once the Viking conflict kind of seized and they became integrated, then it's like wait a second. I'm a power and you're a power right across the channel. And also there was a lot of intermarrying between the French and English. So then when somebody dies in France, an English guy now has a claim to that land, he's going to send an order to take it. So there's a lot of that going back and forth. Yeah, I always wondered obviously like they have the rivalry, but they're so close to each other and the language is at least to me or so different. You know what I mean? Like why that is? Because the origin story, bigger quotes there, of like the two of them has a roughly similar timeline. It's not like France was ever in charge of the Roman Empire or something like that. Obviously neither was what we now know as the UK. And so they start to come of age and start to get their power in the world. I'd say probably during the dark ages and then throughout the mid period and they're so close to each other, but the cultures are so at least to me, my American ass, so distinctively different, you know? It's kind of fascinating. Yeah, it's the French and the Italians and the Spanish, what we would call like those modern areas and those peoples were more they didn't experience the separation from the Roman world. Like after the fall of Rome, anything that was kind of like on the outskirts of the Roman world, like was on its own for a while. So England was on its own and dominated by like Germanic cultures, the Anglo-Saxons or Scandinavian cultures. So the whole legal system, the English language, everything came from a Germanic base, whereas France, even their like legal system, the way their monasteries were set up, their language was more so influenced by the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans and then Latin. So it was kind of like a separation between, but it's yeah, it's interesting too, like the different trajectories they took. And that's why French food's good and British food isn't. Yeah, yeah, there's that clip of like a, I forget some English chef being like, all the 10 best restaurants in the world are in London and the other guy's like, what kind of cuisine is he's like, well, France. Yeah, that's nuts, man. Yeah, it's just like, I so wish that you could just like spawn back into one of these centuries and just kind of like watch it from the crystal ball right there. And just like imagine you're 100,000 feet in the air and you could microscopically see and you're like looking at the people working their way across the you. Oh, now they're fucking him. Okay, there with them and he looked down at France. This was happening. I look over in Eastern Europe and there's so many like little moving ant nodes that the world is changing and separating out all these cultures to what we know today. It kind of, it's probably fair to say, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that you can date back the cultures that we know today across Europe, the formation of them, pretty much all happened in the Middle Ages. Yeah, I think that's, yeah, that's also why I feel like medieval history is so important and why I have to talk about it so much because I feel like it still has so much of an influence. Even on like, 'cause that's when all of these like alliances and cultural makeups and everything is all kind of forming in Europe that still influences everything. It's also just as you were saying like the crystal ball like looking down at everything. It's this has always blown my mind to think about, but you and I can imagine looking down on Europe and seeing like a map like you see on the history channel like Charlemagne entering this area and his army or whatever. And it's interesting 'cause like obviously this is a time before planes or satellites or anything. So like a medieval person would not have had any concept of, there's some medieval story of a guy falling from the sky and the author can't even like describe what he's seeing 'cause nobody's ever been. - He fell from the sky? - I mean, it's like a myth, like it's like a story written, but it's like a guy's falling to earth from heaven and it's like the author's trying to describe what the guy's seeing as he falls and he can't really do it because you can't imagine something, we've seen images of earth, but you can't, if you've never seen Europe from above, you kind of have to like imagine. - Yeah. - It's sort of weird. Of course, you say Europe and I imagine something in my head, I see what it would be like. - Yeah, how many of these people ever even saw a map and they're like very few of them? - Yeah, by the late middle ages, like maps are just starting to get like decent. Up until that point, they're like pretty bad, yeah. - You just live on this blot and you look up at the sky and you're like, well, it's blue. - It's crazy, it's somewhere on earth, yeah. If somebody's like I was fighting for Emperor Henry IV in the Holy Roman Empire, you're like, who the fuck is that? - Yeah, and you're like, what is, like the Holy, like Germany? Like what is, I don't know, how you conceptualize of that. - Oh, it's so crazy. - Yeah, it is kind of mind-blowing. - Did they have any concept or I shouldn't say concept even? Did they have any fascination with life beyond earth at that point? Like do we have records of them wondering about aliens? - Yeah, so the way that they thought of it, I've never heard of them thinking of anything in terms of aliens, the way they thought that outer space was occupied by angels. So they had this view, it was sort of a bastardized version of what like Greek and Roman thinkers had imagined that the universe was like, and then they took it and like super-Christianized it in the Middle Ages and all these like Catholic thinkers. But basically it was like, I just did a video on this recently, but you know how in the Truman show that movie he lives in the dome? - Yes. - So it's like they imagined like a dome and then other domes that we are within, like a Russian doll. And so then there's like the heavenly dome and then there's God outside of all of that. So almost like a Christ off the director from the movie, like there's a divine control room basically. And all of the saints and angels are watching you. They're watching everything you do. So it was kind of like a, this is an aspect of medieval Catholicism that I feel like we don't think about when we imagine the medieval mindset, but they really imagined and believed that everything they were saying and doing was watched, like even when you're alone, you're being watched because they believed that God, the saints and the angels, that's like Catholic theology in the Middle Ages. - I've just never heard of it put that way. - Yeah, so it's, I mean the like a quippy conclusion in the video was like that. Now we're like terrified of master valence, right? Like the flock cameras and these like tech lizards that are like obsessed with, but back then it was like, they lived in what they truly imagined was like every single thing they said or did. There was like this late medieval legend of this demon called Tidavillus that would pick up on God. He would take your gossip and write it down to show you died. Like, look at all this. things he said. But here's the different and I agree it's no way to live. But they're thinking about something in the context of when they're not here and something that's above them. And it's good. It's a good loving God. Yeah. Who has their best interests at heart? It's not human. Well, we deal with today is we know these are evil fallen humans who want to do these things. Yeah. Yeah. That's a different side. I'm not saying they should have thought that way with that. I disagree with that to be clear. But like it's a different life philosophy, if you will. It's like, all right, let me try to do more good than bad. And they're just very, very compulsively keeping score of it. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's definitely kind of infused with this idea of like almost like reading some of these, especially like high and late medieval Catholic like mystics and thinkers. It reads is like very hippie-ish. Like the world is confused with love and God's love is in all things. And it's kind of towards the late middle ages and the Renaissance. They really start to bore in on this idea of like the human being I mean, obviously that's biblical made in God's image. But like you as an individual person have an individual personality and you are loved by God and you are worthy of having. So like, for example, medieval artists wouldn't sign their name on a painting or on a mural. That was like made by a guild. It would be like a group of guys make it. There was no like Michelangelo made this. And it isn't until the late middle ages and the early Renaissance that you have individual artists. This idea that like a human being could be important enough to be the sole creator of an artwork or to be paid by the church to create an altarpiece like wasn't thought of your thought of in context of like the brotherhood of parents basically. So they had a more of like a corporate Christianity like a group. That's what it's called the other corporate Christianity. And then in the late middle ages, it becomes more individual piety identifying yourself with the suffering of Christ. He's an individual. You're an individual. What caused that change? It was sort of the rise in there was a 12th century Renaissance. I mean, that's like its its own thing. There are like many Renaissance's throughout the middle ages when like learning what start to come up like this is like when university culture is becoming a thing. Young people are are going to school in London or Paris and they're learning new ideas and they're getting kind of tapped in with you know what the monks are saying and you know new writings are being rediscovered especially after the Crusades. Now you've had a Christian power establish itself in the Middle East. So all those Muslim writings are coming back to like all those Muslim writings that had like survived from the Greek and Roman philosophers now are coming back to Europe well before the actual Renaissance. So there's kind of like this rediscovery of knowledge also the rise of like proto-capitalism in the merchant class. Now this is people who can afford to like build a prayer room just for them in their house or people people like pay extra to have their own puet mass where they could pray by themselves which was not a thing before everybody kind of stood together. And then now it's like well he's the town's like the court side seats right exactly. You know what I was god yeah they get to sit and everybody else stands by them yeah exactly. So it becomes and these these individual objects of devotion the rosary kind of like having a crucifix in your house these sorts of things become like this is an important sign of your individual devotion to god whereas before it was like our whole village has to believe otherwise there's going to be a famine or something like that yeah. Now I think one of the trends like you were talking about this towards the beginning of the podcast we talk about the end of the Roman Empire and different things that caused it and how it happens over 100 hundreds of years but another one of the trends if I understand correctly is that there was also like a spreading out of people meaning like maybe at the height of the Roman Empire you had a little bit more of emphasis on urban major urban centers not to say that stopped but as it wore on people went out and got into land and you know they're more rural and more disconnected from the node more decentralized so it becomes harder to control throughout the middle ages though does that pendulum kind of swing back to like when you get towards the end you're back to having a lot of city centers yeah so back towards again with the rise of that like proto capitalism in the merchant class also the rise of university culture a lot of these kids will like go to university in Paris or London and then they'll stay to work there as a clerk you know for a local politician or whoever and so it kind of yeah leads to cities expanding population expanding there's advancements in like like the engineering of water running water like sanitation things that make cities more livable so I mean something that's kind of an interesting contrast and I don't think a lot of people think of this when comparing Rome to the Middle Ages because the historical imagination is like Rome was like dope guys in togas cool statues everything was dope and then the Middle Ages were like a thousand years of like mud and and horror it was a terrible time which is bullshit yeah which is bullshit but also one of the things the Romans for everything because they were a civilization of conquest relied on slave labor and a constantly refreshing population of slaves so they never had a motivation to come up with complex engineering like solutions because they always why would you need to come up with a new way to have a crane lift something up a building when you could just have a thousand slaves lift up a building so one the influence more efficient yeah more efficiently but you know with the rise of Christianity in the Middle Ages that becomes obviously like we can't really be doing this by like a thousand a.d like me you look at like records from medieval England there's like no slaves I mean it's become the peasantry it's really yeah by the time the doomsday book is published which is William the Conqueror's this is like 1080 survey and he's been good that's what it's called yeah that's hard yeah it is it is dope yeah I was surprised no rappers uh he's like uh he basically it's the most comprehensive survey he's conquered England at this point he's the Norman guy who crossed the channel in conquered England and he's basically like I want a written administrative document of like everything I now own so he sends all his guys out to the countryside like do a census like map out of the land like get an idea of like what the religious spread is like who's who who who's working where and basically we can see from those first of all that like British people I mean historically I've always been super obsessed with record keeping that's why like medieval English history is always the one that's most steady because they like wrote down everything but that also um like the the slave populations like pretty much nothing about that point so this is you know a five centuries after the fall of Rome so that's really fascinating yeah because you look throughout world history and not necessarily in every place at all times clearly a common trend is they I mean we still have it today in the world where where people are literal slaves but an entire central cultural iconic place like Europe had effectively drowned that out yeah by like roughly year one thousand or something like that I didn't know that yeah it's um I mean in a way you could argue that the like peasant class kind of replaced the slaves a lot of times they're tied to the land sort of against their will they're born into it feudalism yeah feudalism yeah so they're they're born into Serfdom it's not exactly slavery like technically you're free you're not owned by anybody but you're you're like crushed under a rent to your lord and you're never gonna escape it probably that said you weren't like the peasantry wasn't forced to build like gothic cathedrals are built by like professional mason's and volunteers from the local countryside and they have to use like medieval engineering techniques that they come up with like using like geometry that they learned from the romans and then applying it to create because we just like do not have enough guys to to build this sure so we have to come up with new ways to move these massive stones and it's been said that even with modern technology it would be difficult to build a gothic cathedral the way they built it then yeah it's crazy all right I want to come to that but on on the slavery point I think about this a lot and I want to be really careful I say this because I don't want to be misheard when you look at the the most common culturally understood forms of slavery which is another human being is owned by another human being their treated is not a human being they're running into the nub they're killed if they do one thing wrong and stuff like that obviously that's full slavery that's the worst kind of slavery but when I come up and I look at throughout history the way that like elite communities will maintain power is they just change the semantics of slavery over time and then we'll come to that in feudalism but like you look today if I wanted to create say a big air quotes here a slave class of people that was large to do my bidding I might make sure that I bring in all kinds of immigrant labor and basically pay them below minimum wage which is a former slavery by the way to replace a lot of jobs as well that Americans could get while at the same time moving us off the gold standard and inflating away our whole fucking currency while selling a bunch of people on a university system to get a gender studies degree for $60,000 a year that they finance at a seven percent rate that they're never going to be able to pay off making $50,000 a year in New York City with a shit job after college and I would make sure that they just are tricked into not thinking their slaves at night by making sure they can at least go home to a shitty rent apartment of their own and watch a little Netflix so they feel like they have some free will but in reality I have just taken forms of history's most brutal slavery which is way worse to be clear and I've just kind of like dumbed it down to make them feel like they're important while actually enslaving them to a system that I sell them that it's going to work but it doesn't at all hypothetically. Hypothetically. Yeah if I were to give her something like that up yeah right but yeah no it's it's I think also like kind of in the world history of slavery you're even in the world history of like an oppressive system like you could argue feudalism there's like a visible violence to it like medieval Europe it's been said many times was like a a place where not only is day-to-day violence kind of like accepted but whereas like violence is seen as just like a part of life that's how the feudal system works like if a lord rises up against his king the king sends an army and slaughters the lord and that's understood that this is how this works and I think now we have this idea that we've moved past that and that morally we don't need any threat of like violence or violent oppression and then when you remove that then slavery isn't so visible because slavery's visible when the when the king comes with a bunch of like guys on horses to kill your village it's visible what's happening and now it's like happening quietly in behind the scenes so yeah - Yeah, it's interesting. - So where did this, what was the birth of the feudalism system? How far back does it date? 'Cause it's a different system than they had in the Roman Empire where they had literal slaves and stuff like that. Now they're creating like some, I almost liken it to like a caste system in ways, is that fair? - Yeah, yeah, basically there's not a whole lot of social mobility as the Middle Ages advance that kind of starts to change. Like you'll see examples of like a bright peasant boy that's picked up and gets a career in the clergy and he's able to enrich himself that way 'cause getting involved in the church was a way to fortune and fame, basically. - Or he's good at jousting. - Yeah, he's good at jousting. Although usually if you were good at jousting, it was because you were born into a noble family and you were raised. - He thought you're not born into a noble family. - That's right, that's right. Neither is Henry from Kingdom of the world. - He followed the stash. - Yeah, exactly. - That's right. - But yeah, basically it actually kind of evolves out of like a late Roman system of landholding and then sort of becomes more practical in like the decentralized early Middle Ages. So basically with these Germanic tribes, like the Franks, for example, there's a system that was called by Roman historians, namely Tacitus, it's called Comatatus. - Comatatus. - Yeah, and basically it means like a brotherhood of guys around one central leader. So if you imagine like a medieval war band, there's one like charismatic central leader and then there's like a group of guys that have sworn allegiance to him and that's the war band. So he's offering something to them, which is protection and they're offering, no, they're offering him protection. He's offering them war booty. - Right. - So it's like, I'll, yeah, yeah, boss. Yeah, so you guys help me. We'll go take over this village and you'll get everything, you know, all the spoils. And then in return, I'll give you land. The village, I'll divide it up between you guys. And so that's sort of the beginning of the basis of the feudal system. It's not based on paper currency anymore. It's based on landholding. And that's kind of, throughout most of the Middle Ages, it's like a handshake deal. It's like handshake. - Yeah, like I am, my family has been telling this land for years. Your family has been the lords over this land for years and there's just sort of this agreement, but it's never written down in a contract until later in the Middle Ages. - So there's a really good enforced. - That's the thing. And there's examples, even as late as like the 1400s, where you can just, there's actually one I'm planning to talk about in an upcoming video where there was a lord who wanted the land of another lord. So he forged a document, this is the late Middle Ages and like written documents are kind of more of a thing in the legal system saying that that guy was actually descended from peasants and he had no claim over his land. And the land actually belonged to. Again, like, so I had this video about like why it would be great to be a psychopath in the Middle Ages and one of the reasons behind it is if you believe God is seeing everything, then a handshake deal can work 'cause you're like, you wouldn't break a handshake deal 'cause you'll go to hell. God is seeing this. We don't need a written document. - Not a fearsome. - Yeah, not if you don't care or don't believe in God, which you know, you would kind of have like a superhuman ability to do whatever you want. It would be difficult to catch you 'cause this is a time when, I mean, basically between the fall of the Roman Empire and like the 1700s, nobody in Europe knows how to build a good road. So it's really hard to get from point A to point B also Europe's cover about like dense forests at this point. So news travels very slowly in the Middle Ages. Like the Roman roads kind of fall into disrepair and it's difficult to get from point A to point B. So it's like, I could be a local lord torturing my peasants for like 20 years before the king sends a forest to do something about it. There's examples of this, but yeah, there are some guys that get up to some really suspect stuff. - Honestly, if you get caught after 20 years, you had 20 years to plan getting yourself out of this fucking bind. - And they do. So you just don't show up to the trial and you keep doing what you're doing. - Or this is what this guy. - To Maddemarro shows up and like, renounces his, he shows up in church in front of everybody and renounces his old ways. And if you're in the audience, you're like, oh, he just made a promise to God that he's not gonna do this anymore. So he can't do it. And then he just goes and does it more subtly. - Good enough for me. - Yeah, we'll build the dungeon deeper this time. - Oh my God, yeah. Now what, when did the architecture start to change over? Like, is there a time where we kind of see a magic wand happen and suddenly it's like castles? - Yeah, it's, I would say the high middle ages are when, 'cause like in the early middle ages, when things are kind of like I said decentralized, you see like, like basically like earth forts being built, like basically forts being, like Waddle and Dob, like mud, forts being built in the countryside. There's a ton of them in England. I think there are some that still survive. But basically it's because like things aren't centered around big urban centers anymore. So if you own a big plot of land, you have to be able to defend it from a central point. So you build a big earth, earth, earth, what would you call it, like earthwork dome or whatever on a hill. So you can shoot arrows down the hill or send your men down and see what's going on. Yeah, exactly. So it kind of develops from there. Over time, like France is kind of, as much as I hate to say it, they are kind of like the vanguard of like architecture. - Why do you hate to say that? - Well, 'cause they're French. - I mean, you don't like the French. - No, terrible. - You're not a fan? - No, actually, I think it's a mystery. - You're a beautiful woman in France. - Yeah, I'm a French, I'm actually a French. I mean, I have a tattoo of Napoleon. He was Italian. - And you don't like France? - I do, but I always have to shit talk France. It's, I don't know why. It's a part of my American blood. - To shit talk France? - I feel like we really don't know. - I mean, they kind of helped us out in revolution. - What have you done for me lately? Remember Freedom Fries? - No, I don't. - When they renamed French Fries during their record. I think what, like France wouldn't come to our aid in the war on terror, so they were calling them. It was Freedom Fries on the menu of fast food restaurants right over my age. - Yeah, yeah, but anyway, so. But France, they're legit in my book, I think. - But anyway, a lot of it came from like monastic culture. These are the most well-read guys in Europe. And they're reading like these French. - French and monks generally. - But French monks specifically. A French abbot named Sougare, which is not the French way to pronounce it, but I always say it that way. I don't know how to pronounce it in French. - Sougare. - Yeah, Sougare, SUGR. He's kind of like the progenitor of Gothic architecture, and he gets it from all these books that he reads. These scrolls from ancient Roman designs, and then is able to figure out how to do it kind of-- - That's a good word for us. - Yeah, that's right. I refuse to learn how to actually pronounce it. Sougare, is that so? - Whatever. - Close enough for their made up language. - Sougare was a French abbot. Can we just go back with this, sir. He was a French abbot and statesman. He was a key advisor to King Louis VI, and his son Louis VII acting as the latter's Regent during the Second Crusade. His writings are seminal texts for early 12th century Capitian history and his reconstruction of the Basilica of Sundani, where he was abbot, was instrumental in creating the Gothic architecture style. Could we hit Gothic architecture? By the way, just so people can get a visual. So obviously-- - I'm even saying. - Yeah, you know-- - No AI. - No AI, and we don't build shit like this anymore, and you call this the dark ages, this shit is fire. - It's incredible. And some of these took over a century to build, so you're building something that you know you're not going to-- your children might not even live to see completed, but it's seen as an act of building towards eternity. I think that's kind of what's been lost. Like we don't build towards eternity. - Yeah, so it's like this will stand forever, and this will be a testament to our faith in God forever. - Yeah, I was just, maybe we can pull it up, to make sure I'm right about this, but I was just in Florence and the Diwomo there. - Oh, incredible. - That's Gothic as hell, right? Yeah, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Can we pull that up like the front? Have you ever been there? - Yeah. - John? - Yeah, so cool. - So yeah, like this is, you see stuff like this, and I think that's from the same time period. Don't quote me on that, but we can default. - Yeah, yeah. The construction starts in the high middle ages. - Yeah, and it's the same thing, it's just like remarkable. And that image on the far left, if you go back there, just up top, far left, yeah, yeah. So my friend Lorenzo, the last day in Florence, took me up to like one of the rooftops up there, restaurants, and you could see all this. Then you look out and you actually appreciate how fucking bacon is related to the skyline. And this is the year 2026, they did this shit. - Yeah. - Over a thousand years. - Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, and if you look at it, I don't know specifically the Florence Cathedral, but most medieval cathedrals, if you look at it from above, it's shaped like a cross. - Yeah. - And each section of the cathedral has a specific, like there's four sides to it to represent the four evangelists from the Testament. And like every part of it has some-- - That's the churches are still-- - Yeah, still in the cross, but there's like a whole mountain. - Yeah, there it is. - A whole medieval theology to it. - Yeah. Look at that from above, that's insane. - Incredible. - That looks like a, from above, looks like a perfect geometrical work of art. - And the original builders, even when this was completed, would never have been able to see it in this management. - No, they didn't have, I mean, maybe they had drones. - They probably had drones. - No, no, they didn't have drones. - We just forgot, yeah. - Yeah, they had the Egyptian all-seeing eye. - Yeah. - It's a shit like that. That's crazy. So this guy, what was his name again, Capernicus? - Burleschi, that thought they don't? - No, no, no, no, no. The fucking, the guy who invented Gothic architecture, - Oh, soogair. - Yeah, soogair, soogair. - What did I say, Capernicus? - Capernicus. - Oh, I don't know where they all blend together. - So he's the guy that conceived of this idea. - Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of influence that goes into it, especially, there's influence from like architectural styles coming back from the Holy Land, like Islamic architectural styles that travel back, like these manuals kind of come back to your-- - So pieces of it. - Yeah, pieces of it. And then it kind of is all, but even up to this, there are, it's not like he invents the cathedral, he just is kind of one of the early influencers of the Gothic style, but before this, there were like Roman-esque cathedrals that are based more on like the Roman arch-style architecture. And there's different emphasis, like the early cathedrals that you'll see, like early medieval cathedrals are meant to like give a sense of like gloom, like a sacred gloom. It's very dark, there's no stained glass, like there's not a lot of natural light, and it's supposed to be this place of like quiet reflection. And then by the time of Soogair's, you know, his Gothic cathedrals is all about holy, heavenly light coming in, especially during mass. - But he called it Gothic. Yeah, that wasn't he didn't I believe he didn't call it that I think it was retroactive whoever did that poor branding yeah because it's not I don't think that's just like you think like an emo person yeah yeah because they're upset you know like they could have branded no definitely yeah should have called it the big beautiful cathedral yes but you know so they're coming up with architecture like this how does when let's say I'm in Paris right now have you ever been there before no I gotta go we just went there last December it's a beautiful place beautiful place and like I I'll bet maybe it's more like this at Taurus season because there's too many motherfuckers coming through there but they you always heard like the bad rap of like people in Paris are like dicks to Taurus coming in could not have been nicer really they're every fucking person we came across wow the coolest person ever I'll bet like in June or July they're like we're so yeah I mean but like at the same time great place when I'm looking at architecture though I don't know how much you know if you haven't been there and looked at it but you do study this stuff like if I'm looking at Parisian architecture which they obviously preserve and they don't let you just build skyscrapers anywhere what errors is that is that attributable to middle ages pretty much like the the the Notre Dame basically is but like some of the other buildings in city blocks I look at is that one we can date it to I mean there's a it's either medieval or built on top of medieval I mean obviously now like you can't build a skyscraper on top of it but historically even in London too it's like a lot of the most famous buildings were built on top of earlier medieval right like that site has been a place where there's been a church right some kind of church for over a thousand years I would say probably a lot more of it I know Paris has burned significantly a couple times so a lot of it is probably like reconstructions or like but every era of architecture after is influenced by the Gothic architectures like a turning point European architecture you know what I just thought of there's a video deep I think we pulled it up a long time ago on a podcast but the imagining London throughout the years it's like an AI video that takes you from London in like year 400 and it shows you it getting built yeah let's pull it out because but just don't make it full screen or with volume but yeah it's what it's not that one that I want like London over evolving over time so I'm trying to think I think at this video just popped on my feet the entire history London do that yeah hit that experience the full history alone no I think you hit the other one the one right below yeah yeah hit that so this is like 25 minutes I obviously we're not gonna play that whole thing but yes sticking on two and then does it start with like the fish grow forward deep and that's okay so yeah like early Roman and yeah if you go way forward now there's yeah yeah yeah so it starts to walk you through the streets and you see it from like firsthand and you start to see like how it forms and all that so it's too long to watch but like what was really fascinating to me is you literally see and I am thinking of a different video it's one that shows it all firsthand like like a time lapse you know what one I'm talking about yeah yeah but like maybe deep can find that but there's so many videos like this but you know when you see the buildings you know you'll see like it's all the same it's all the same it's all the same and then I'm making up years here but like 1100 to 1150 full like suddenly like a lot of shit happens yeah and stuff so what you know what would inspire during these time periods brand new ideas to take hold for architecture to wear these places that are not connected by the internet can all communicate with each other but suddenly like city centers go you know what we were doing it this way for a thousand years now we're gonna do it this way yeah I mean I mean one of the things would be like Muslim teachings or architectiles coming back from the Holy Land that was a big one another would be there is a period of time in Europe from about 900 to 1300 that's called the great warming period yeah we're so it's a period of climate change where it's like it gets warm enough that there are like vineyards in England which now is like crazy to think about but some of the best wine is being manufactured in England and it's a time of like economic prosperity and agricultural prosperity the two are obviously like tied together in an agrarian society so things like that we'll start to have downstream effects like now there's a larger elite class of kids being educated in the clergy to sit around and be able to like debate each other and Latin and come up with new ideas and then somebody comes in with a scroll from the holy land describing how to do a pointed arch and then that you know gets in the hands of a French mason who then so it's like all these things kind of have like what there will be a singular event or like an environmental or like an invading force comes in and brings new ideas I mean there's like the the Arab conquest of Spain in the early Middle Ages like approximately the 700s and then there's the reconquest by the native Spanish kind of taking things back and then there's a mixing between the two where it's like architectural styles are mixed you have like Christian and Muslim styles meeting and ideas are being kind of transferred even while there's like warfare and conflict happening so that's always there's there's a lot of different contributing factors but it's always kind of like a river splitting into a million different streams and then some kid grows up you know in the right place in time around the right people and he gets this idea this vision and this had his cathedral he wants to build and you know you have this like individuals in history can we point to things like patterns that develop not necessarily in the same way but similarly to like the fourth turning are you familiar with that it sounds familiar so these guys I'm gonna give the very abbreviated version these guys in the mid-90s they figured out that cycles dating back to the revolutionary war but really before that but they just kept it simple with the history of America operate in 80 to 85 year cycles four different generations at a time on a repeating loop 21 and a half years on average each generation they always exist in the same type of time period so one generation if it's called the profit generation will be born as kids into like the boom they'll come of age 21 to 42 during the awakening they'll be in power 42 to 63 during the brewing crisis and then they'll be on their way out when the crisis is happening that kind of thing yeah so do we have things that we can look at the thousand roughly thousand year period of middle ages to where we can find patterns that are similar in society yeah I mean I would say so I think I mean of course like now we would look at something like the baby boomers all the way to the modern day would be like probably that 80 year period right like the people who were there for the movement and now we're in the decline and so something like that I would say like the generations the 80 years or so before the coming of the black plague in Europe is like a time of great prosperity and overpopulation and then this is a time overpopulation that's like causing like overeating of crop like the crop the crop system has not advanced enough to feed as many people there's a mass famine like about two or three decades before the black plague that's kind of like a harbinger in retrospect all of like the religious figures are like that was the sign that things were gonna go badly but it's basically yeah there's a there's a period of prosperity and things kind of reach a certain point and then there's a it starts to downturn but nobody knows that that's the beginning of the end and then finally there's almost like this cataclysmic event the same thing could be said like the hundred or years or so before the norm in invasion that ended Anglo-Saxon England in 1066 like things are going decently well if you're like an Anglo-Saxon nobleman or you know you're a farmer you're decently well protected especially you know if if you've they've kind of fought off a lot of the Viking invasions at this point the administrations become more centralized like education is kind of coming back online like everything's going pretty well and then it leads to a period of like what would you like weak rulers weak upper class people who aren't defending properly and it leaves you ripe and open for an invading force to come and and trounce everything so I think there's yeah there's like a ton of different I mean you see it in the Byzantine Empire too like waves and waves of like what is that I think Joe we're gonna talk about this mean but like good times create what you know I'm talking about but it's like this cycle that hard men good times get that might go over here he's always got this because I get this like see on my head yeah good times create soft men and soft men create hard times hard times create I think you budget it like I butcher yeah I fucked it up rubbing off on you but we all get the picture of the meme like the picture of it but it's history doesn't repeat but it rhymes yeah exactly yeah so it's kind of no different with this yeah so it'll be like some great a great king or a great emperor in the Byzantine tradition who will you know bring about a period of prosperity and new expansion and you know new economic rulings that open things up for the merchant class and then his like his son is it really like living he's still not destructive like he's not tearing everything that but he's not as good things kind of start to get relaxed right I mean it is interesting looking at especially in the high and late middle ages like how much the individual character of the monarch affects the history of the civilization and a way that's like I don't maybe I'm simplifying this but like you can have a bad president for four or even eight years and it's not gonna like lead to the collapse of America I mean there's gonna be a lot of debate but but basically it's like like the entire first of all a king like rules for life and second of all it's like you see the historical trends of like the rise and fall of of societies and cultures and groups on the individual like a guy like Charlemagne is like he defines the Franks on the world stage it absolute power yeah well actually no this is yeah so that's a that's a common misconception with medieval monarchy it isn't until well into the late middle ages that medieval kings have this level of power that we think because there's no centralization like there is no so what did it look like before it was basically so France is a great example like the king had Paris and that was kind of it like everything else is ruled by dukes who are always fighting with each other and the king is always kind of trying to exercise power and bring them back in but it's basically like a decentralized rule it's like that in England too actually England is the one who sets the prototype for the rest of the rest of Europe, because basically through their ingenious record keeping and administrative capabilities that were brought in by William the Conqueror of the Norman invasion, they kind of invent the centralized monarch, the state where the king has power or some guy, you know, who's in the north of England, hundreds of miles away, like he can call him to London. And I'll have your answer for his crimes. Yeah, exactly. So that's something that you don't really see in a lot of the rest of Europe, especially France. France isn't until, like after the Alba Genzy and Crusade, that like France is actually like united and there's a king who rules over. Yeah, it's so crazy. Also, like it just blows my mind listening to talk about all these different places today. When I think of like the Middle Ages, there's like these images that come in your head, like night, sword, armor, people working on, you know, an open field for a bunch of people who are landlords, you know, but there were so many different cultures and so many different places with different priorities and different climates and different economies all at the same time and so many more religion versus like business versus where religion and business meet, monarchs trying to get power, church taking power, Muslim culture working its way in. Like the number of things being juggled in the air during that whole time period is crazy. Yeah, a lot of change happening over a long period of time. And again, it's this weird, I don't really know if I see it happening with any other period of history. And I think that's it's it's normal because obviously the more recent you get the more like surviving evidence, we have much more surviving evidence of the industrial revolution than the crusades of the ancient century Renaissance. So it makes sense, but just to it's even called the Middle Ages. It's plural. Like there's it's a collection of like epochs or whatever epochs. So everyone else that like it's a collection of time periods. It's not 1000 year. So I don't know, I don't like the flattening of the Middle Ages. I like to, you know, get into the nitty gritty and try to reconstruct the average person's experience, although it's difficult. I was watching because I wonder like what's the closest in the modern day? Could you get to somebody who's still living in the medieval mindset? And I was watching this Netflix documentary about Mormon fundamentalists. And if you think about it, it's like this, these are people who like believe in religion. Like we believe the skies, but you're like if I was like I believe in the ocean, you're like what you don't believe in the ocean, the ocean is. And that's kind of like how medieval Catholics believed in God and the church. And so and like limited education, limited opportunities, limited travel beyond. So I'm like watching this documentary about these Mormon fundamentalists in Utah, like in rural Utah. I'm like, hmm, like information is not totally accessible. Still that flow. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot, I mean, there's a lot of differences. I think just from watching the documentary, it's like the guys know what they're doing. They're keeping the women in the dark purposely. Sure. So I mean, I was kind of like is there a video idea there? Like why have medieval people were spiritually Mormon or something? I'm like always thinking like what's the I think there's something there. But I was just like, yeah, what's that? Are Amish people like the closest you could get to to a medieval, like somebody who's born into like a because really if you think about it like medieval Catholicism at a certain level is like a fundamental, it's fundamentalism basically the way it's thought of. And it's like, yeah, what would be a modern. I mean, coming from I live in Georgia now and like I live there cumulatively for quite a while. And I know like a lot of people who grew up even in like the Baptist church or something. It's like it's a little bit culty. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a form of with almost anything. There's just varying degrees of of cultiness throughout everything we do. And as you get up the scale, you tend to run into things like religion, like you know, treating politics as God and stuff like that or a leader as your great leader and things like that. And that's why we see people fall victim to that type of thinking over time. And it leads to wars. Like you were talking about it earlier. I didn't want to cut you off, but like you're looking at every words ever been fought. There's some of course, they're all about power. But there's some aspect of like a religious undertone or straight up the religion is causing it right there, which there's something to be said for the fact that a bunch of men on earth are fighting over what we all have in common, which is that we don't know what the fuck happens when it all ends. But that's enough to be like off with your head. Yeah. And it's also, I mean, how many of these wars are the guys who are actually in the front lines think it's a religious war. And a lot of these later crusade is where it's like really, it's about political expansion, like economic opportunity or beef between two rival lords and they're phrasing it as this is a holy war and the Pope sanctioned this. So and the Pope is with us French Catholics, not you English Catholics. That's right. And there's two popes now. That's a lot of crazy. Yeah, we got to talk about that. I got to go to the bathroom real quick, pick up with the two popes. Sounds good. All right, the two popes. Yeah. What happened there? Yeah. So I think kind of one of the, there are some like storylines in medieval history that I feel like if you're just getting into medieval history, it's like important to kind of follow these threads to understand the whole period. And one of them is what we were talking about earlier, which is like the development of papal power apart from an interrelation to the power of like the kings and emperors, like how did the pope become this super powerful kind of like guy who reigns over all of Europe and everybody answers to him, which is sort of what was happening by the late Middle Ages. And you have this pope in the 11th century named Gregory. And he's kind of like one of those guys in history that's just like the right personality at the right place at the right time. And he's kind of the first pope to be like, this should be way bigger of a deal than it is. Like the pope should be way more powerful than he currently is. And I might be butchering the quote here, but he says something along the lines of an official edict. He's like the entire God's entire world should be under the edict of the pope should be under the edict of the Catholic church. Yeah. So that's like that's like nobody has ever really like put that in writing before. And he's sort of the first one to say the pope should be having all this power. And he's sort of able to use all this like maneuvering to get if a king or an emperor disobeys him. He gets the subjects to turn against the emperor until the emperor has to come beg his forgiveness. So this famously happened to the Holy Roman emperor Henry the fourth. He gets like a basically because this guy's the Catholic mouthpiece of Europe, the pope. He gets all of Henry's like no nobility around him, all the dukes and barons and whatever to turn on him because the pope is like he's not a Catholic ruler. Like you can't have God will cause problems for you if you have this guy in the throne. So then Henry has to walk barefoot in the snow to Italy across the Alps to beg forgiveness. This is like one of the central foot across the Alps. Yeah. He survived. Well, I think he only walked barefoot the last three days. There's like some debate over this. I know that there were an additional three days where he waited outside the pope's estate and the pope wouldn't let him in. And they're like he was kneeling in like a shawl. I don't like did he what it died. But this is what's written. It's a Henry and the snow at canosa. Of course, like a lot of medieval history written in the time period is written not factually, but to tell us like to tell a moral story. So it's like very likely. No, he had shoes on or you know, whatever. But it's like you're supposed to be reading it and thinking like, wow, he was really asking for forgiveness. He had to shoes off and everything. Like the facts don't really matter to medieval contemporary historians. But anyway, I don't think they matter to contemporary history. No, no, it's more so. Yeah, what story you're trying to tell? Yeah, I see that a lot with especially like 20th century medieval scholarship. It's like whatever your political alliances or whatever historical spend you're trying to put on it totally changes the story telling other Middle Ages. But basically, this is kind of the beginning of people authority. But if the pope is based in Rome, that means all these Italian guys around him have the power like all of his. So there's the pope and then there's the papal states. There's the lands and central Italy that he owns basically and that are administered by by his guys. Was the Vatican around at this point? Yeah, yeah. So he has the Vatican and he has the papal states basically. And so all of these Italian nobles hold all the power and basically like to simplify the French are like, well, we want some of this. There had been like kind of an incestuous relationship between France and Italy for centuries at this point. Like French nobleman that had settled in Italy and so on and so forth. And so basically through a series of like power struggles, the pope is ousted from Rome. And there's an alternate pope that's installed in France and Avignon. And now it's like the French king has way more power because the pope is French and he's in France. And like the papacy has moved, but there's still an original pope in Rome. It's what he was ousted from power. Well, that's so it's like, who has the power to oust the pope? Right. So he's he's out basically like the west side was like, you know, we don't fuck with these. Yeah. So like he we're like, he's still in the Vatican, but they're like, he's not the pope. So this is this is Pock and Biggie before. Right. Exactly. It was like hit him up. Yeah, exactly. Across the Alps. Yes. So then yeah, exactly. So then they installed this second pope and this is kind of the beginning. I mean, this is like a few hundred years before. Well, like a hundred years before the like the beginning of the Reformation, but this is in the eyes of like the public, the first like major split, like the church is not this unified. Like this is not God's kingdom on earth. The church isn't infallible. How can you have two popes? Because up to this point for like a thousand years, the Catholic church has been like unassailable. Like what we say goes, we are the ultimate power in Western Europe. And then now it's like there are two popes. How can there be two popes? And then who has the real power? And then there are rulers who ally with the Avignon Pope and rulers who ally with the Roman Pope. And that leads to a lot of like blood feuds and things like that. Why did they why'd they pick Avignon? I believe there was a there was already a large contingent of like clergy who lived there. It was like one of the hot spots of like French Catholicism. And so there were closest at the Paris. Can we close up on a map? I'd have to yeah, let's pull it up. So a lot of clergy lived there. Yeah, it was like already set up as like a very like a hot spot for the Catholic church in France. I'm sorry. What year again was this? This was the early 1300 now. This is sorry. That was a I like went way back in history. That was the Henry IV crawling through the snow to apologize. That's like the beginning of like the Pope becoming super super powerful. And then this is like a few hundred years later. Okay. Avignon A B I G N O N. That was a good pull. Did I pull it? That's right. I don't even know what I said. Okay. So roughly seven hundred four and a 35 miles nowhere near Paris. Well yeah, this is kind of yeah, again like as the so this is like late middle ages of 1300s like the the king now has Basically more like if this had been a few hundred years before like Avignon would have been out of the French kings Like he would have had a difficult time controlling it, but here. It's like a political play for him to have the Pope there and this is so this happens after Friday the 13th with the night's template, right? It's around yeah, yeah similar times. Yeah, yeah, so much time Yeah, okay, so we kind of put a pin in that earlier But now's a good time to come back to it because you started to talk about the crusades and how they were actually everywhere Well, just the holy land and everything, but there's also in the mid I guess 11th century this band of glorified I don't know religious mercenaries that forms called the night's Templar that are a huge part of lore that then existed for the next 250 years or so where they were leading a lot of these crusades and they were doing it not as the official military the church But like on their behalf as I don't know the mercenary group is that yeah, I've heard them referred to as like the shock troops of the church The shock troops. Yeah, it's kind of hard. Yeah, it is But they were they were never like an army of guys. It would be like, you know at the head like there's like a few hundred Templars that are within our larger army that are attacking this like Seljuk Turk fortress or whatever, but yeah, so they were kind of I Wouldn't necessarily say that the representatives of the church, but they were like the special anointed ones of the church So basically what happens is in the wake of the first crusade like I said this kind of like portal opens up between now It's like the roads are open between Europe and the holy land and people are coming for pilgrimage to to be where Jesus was like This is the most powerful place in the world for for a Christian and are they traveling through like Turkey to do this? So yeah, so there was like a big a trade basically that was happening because you had to go through Constantinople to cross the street and then get in So of course like you know, you're paying fees to get through, but then also if you had a little bit of money You would travel across the Mediterranean by boat. So there's like examples of like guys from scale like rich Scandinavian warlords That would like go around Spain and like come through the Mediterranean, but most people will be going by Foot across Europe be not because they didn't have the money for it But because the harder the pilgrimage was the more spiritual word you got for it So even if you were a rich guy in England and you could like write a horse to the homeland if you walked that was worth more It's worth more. Yeah worth more spiritually. There's like coins to demonstrate my spiritual It's it's really more so like public perception Especially like if you're let's say a local A local lord and you've done something maybe you got caught with your sister or something like that Who knows? No, I'm not pulling any specific real game of thrones. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get Terrence Howard in here You might say to kind of calm down your angry subjects who you've broken God's law and it's like wow you're you know You're gonna bring ruin on all of us, but she was hot. She was yeah, exactly. Yeah unmarried Yeah, and we you'd have to unearth a lot of church documents even proof she was technically That's right. You don't even know. Yeah, but anyone's there for the birth. Yeah, exactly So you could then you would say I'm gonna walk to Jerusalem and people be like and back and people be like oh holy shit He's like serious about his faith and this this is like wiped the spiritual record There's like thousands of examples of this pilgrimage culture becomes huge even among like regular people So that's the price. Yeah, fuck your sister Something like that. Yeah, or you get caught you murder somebody and it's like you not necessarily to the Holy Lamb You might go to like Santiago de Compostela in Spain or you might go to Sandini Basilica in like there are different holy sites throughout Europe you can go to but the further you go the more It's the same thing is like the the Extremity of the like are you going on foot and how far are you going couldn't you just lie when you got that? Yeah, I came from 2000 miles away It's like yeah, yeah, and then you know you show up with like a splinter of wood and you're like this is the true cross I got it from Jerusalem. Yeah, people are like fuck it is. Yeah, it's like yeah, I guess you could just do that But yeah, so anyway, that's kind of where the Templars rise up to like protect people that are going on these pilgrimages But they created their own system. They had their own bank. Yeah, they became this huge powerful organization with their own Is it fair to say what developed into their own set of religious beliefs so that was the accusation that was levied against them It's unclear well to backtrack a little bit basically They kind of develop in Jerusalem in the wake of the first crusade now Jerusalem is in Christian hands And it needs these nights to defend pilgrims and so Huda Payne who's a kind of the founder of this like rag tag group of what are called the Templars because they set up on the side of the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem He travels back to Europe to like drum up money and support He's like I just started this thing we're called the Templars We're going to protect pilgrims is going to be sick like give us some money and kind of the foremost monk in France is this guy Bernard of Clarevo very likely Autistic Very likely Autistic. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he had like hypersensory he had sensory issues He was like he had bad issues with hyper fixation. I talked about this in one of my videos. Of course you can't diagnose somebody from the past But it's like I mean if there was anybody and he sees these guys. Yeah, he got next. Yeah, he barely avoided Yeah, he got next. Yeah, a little bit, but he sees these guys and he's like wait wait, so your priests kind of like your monk you live a monastic lifestyle But you're also knights with swords and Huda Payne's like yeah, we're doing both and Bernard's like this is the coolest shit I've ever like nobody's ever done this is a sick So then Bernard who's like a super influential Catholic thinker drums up a ton of support from all the kings and all the local clergy to support the Templars And this is the beginning of their kind of rise to power. It's like that Don Draper meme where he's drunk in front of the boys like God But we kill people. Yeah, yeah exactly So I mean like it was like dude We're killing the infidel in in the Holy Land and we're doing it in God's name and these are like God's special shock troops Wait, they use that term infidel. They use Saracens That was kind of the go-to term for infidel. I believe it was a Muslim term for Christians. Yeah, yeah for anyone that's not Muslim Yeah, so they the term the catch all term for all Muslims with Saracens and then the catch all term for the Muslims for all Christians was Frank's Where did the Saracen term come from? Do you know? Oh, yeah, it's from the original I believe the original conquest through Spain of like when the Muslims first kind of like had their Inclusion into Western Europe. I believe it's source from then because they were repelled by the Franks at the time So they called us all Franks. Yeah What is it Saracen the term Saracen was commonly used in medieval Europe to refer to a person who lived or near what the ancient Roman is new as Arabia, Petria and Arabia deserta It's original meaning a Greek and Latin is not known was certainly by the early medieval period It had come to be associated with Arabian tribes following the rise of Islam which occurred in Arabia the words Definition evolved to refer not only to ours, but to Muslims taken generally as well It eventually became the standard adjective among European Christians for all people and things in from the Muslim world regardless of whether or not They were Arab and origin the oldest known source mentoring Saracens in association with Muslims is the Greek language Christian track Drina Jacoby which was compiled in the Byzantine Empire amidst the Muslim conquest of the Levant The word became particularly widespread in European societies during the Crusades when it was used by the Catholic Church and By several European Christian political and military figures. Yeah, so it's kind of like a flattening in the same way that the Muslims Referred to like all European powers as the Franks like this kind of conglomerate It was the same like there's obviously all these different tribes and like Islamic powers, but they're just kind of Right like they are the Saracens they are the other that we need to defend ourselves again the the the non-believer and at the time during the Crusades Islam is like three four five hundred six hundred years old something like that. Yeah About four hundred years old there. Okay. So their claim was that Maybe I'm gonna get this wrong, but like the prophet Muhammad had said the land was theirs. Yeah, well that he had had Yeah, he had had this revelation that he was the last prophet after Jesus and That Jesus was a divine prophet but Muhammad was the final divine prophet and that yeah, he had had this revelation and then now It was the job of anybody who was under the Muslim banner to spread the faith by sword by jihad Now you had said you've obviously seen the movie Kingdom of heaven. Yeah, right. Yeah, now have you seen the regular movie or have you seen the directors? I've heard a lot of good things about the directors kind of only seen the regular movie It's like an only operate off of with the knowledge they fucked up Ridley so hard. Yeah Yeah, I feel like he had a two hundred ten minute cut or something So the studio is like nope needed a hundred forty five ruin the movie. Yeah, then like a year or two later He puts out the hundred seventy five minute version or something like that and people are like whoa, it's actually pretty good Then I believe I hope I'm getting this right. It's been a while But then like a year or two after that he put out the full thing and people were like Cinema yeah, yeah, I've heard really good things about the directors cut. I gotta watch it. I mean, that's a long now What do you think of the historic at least from the one you've seen the the original theatrical one what? historically speaking How over the target is that? I mean like a lot of Ridley Scott movies. I also hated his Napoleon movie, but the it was it was brutal. Yeah, but Like in terms of set about this one It was so obviously like any Historical retelling of the past is colored by the events of the president the same thing I was saying with like a lot of 20th century scholars writing in the aftermath of like the atrocities of World War two like kind of looked back through the middle ages and yeah So that that it's always like color, but what's going on? So that was apparently from from what I know colored by Like the beginning of the war on terror and like what we were doing at like Abu Ghraib and like how we were kind of like perpetrating these These like atrocities on Islamic people's like white invader perpetrating atrocity on Muslim person so that was kind of like part of like Ridley Scott's he was trying to show like The movie is just a little bit too cut and dry and I think maybe this is like fixed in the the long term that like Obviously history like there's good guys and bad guys on both sides. There's no like clear narrative, but in the in the movie There's a quote where it's like Muslim like Islam Christianity asked you to make a decision Like you have to decide that like Jesus Christ is Lord whereas like the Muslim is just like you live and not live and I'm like That's not historical or theological at all. I think it's Ava Green's character who says that to uh to What's his name Orlando Bloom? I was watching the movie. I'm like what are you? First of all, nobody was thinking this way a thousand years ago It does look good and she looks great in the movie She does great in that movie and uh also the Knights Templar are all like depicted as like villains like arrogant like Looting villains. It's them who like caused the whole thing where was it Baldwin and Saladin have to have that standoff Because it was like the evil Templars who had like yeah, exactly. I love that scene dude. Oh, it's crazy. Oh Yeah, that was sick. Yeah, do greatest performance behind a mask. I didn't know that was every one until he didn't get nominated for that Diddy He but he didn't put himself in the credits So does that discount him from being able to be nominated if he didn't put himself in the credits Is that like the rule of the Academy because that's a huge oversight He was sick and that yeah in that movie. Yeah, he's playing a leper. Yeah, King leper. Yeah, Baldwin the fourth Yeah, what was Baldwin the forceful story um, so he was descended from Basically like after the first crusade now you have like European power like European nobility are ruling over the Holy Land He's like formerly Muslim places So they kind of carve it up into the Crusader states and they decide like okay, you're gonna rule this part. You're gonna get that and Like the French nobility controlled a lot of it and he was descended. So Baldwin's a French name He's descended from a lion of French nobility who had ruled over Jerusalem King there. Yes. Yeah, and so he had and he had leprosy he had leprosy and he died young What does he say in the movie? I won a great victory at when I was 20 and I thought I would live forever and now I know I won't see 30 I'm like, oh, that's fucking hard. That's crazy. Yeah, I wish I could have a lion like that. Oh, I'm good But uh, yeah, he was he was a real person in terms of like his military efficacy against Cassaladine is kind of the one who unites all the Arab tribes against the Christians and finally like Starts to make some progress towards getting them out of there. That's the beginning of the end really For like Christian power in the Middle East It's kind of overstated in the movie like Baldwin's like military success against Saladine It was like a losing battle the third crusade is is what's being depicted and it was like a couple cool Christian victories One was that this would have been the what mid to late 1100s. Okay So about a hundred years after the first crusade and the first crusade was 1095 Is when it's first launched. Yeah, so um Yeah, but it's it's it's yeah It's like flattens of course like I think for any historical movie. You have to like flatten history a little bit to tell the narrative And that's that's like acceptable But I think it's kind of weird when you're putting like a modern political spin on it or like trying to like force feed the audience some idea about You know, whatever your political opinions are that's when I'm like when you're using history to agendas Which is of course what history is always of course like it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth like I want to see cool battles Obviously guys with swords. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah, it's also difficult. Those any historian of any time period To study it and look at all the sources and then try to come to the best conclusion of the some of the average Maybe the some of the average is also completely off and we'll never know. Yeah, because it was all kind of rigged But like that's what's so difficult because then so many things that happen whether it's passively or actively through people in power Are designed after influences of history. Yeah, so it literally affects how we rhyme the pattern Today, it's that's a stressful thing for me to think about because it's like how much You know how much is not what we were told or how much is do we look at now and say shit that's not what we were told But it actually is kind of close and it's any man's best guess like you ever like have the stress of that hanging over you when you're looking through this shit Yeah, it's like how much of this is just completely made up or how much of this is I mean, it's interesting You're you mentioned like different rulers kind of using history for different reasons and it's kind of like It's really Charlemagne is one of the first who realizes like oh like I can bring Monk historians into my court and I can have them kind of spin Roman and Greek history nobody's given up the difference And they I can make certain political decisions and they can point to this old scroll that like most people can't read and say This is what Caesar did 400 years ago. So now Charlemagne's doing it and he's in the same you know or 800 years ago He's in the same footsteps of Caesar So it's like a lot of massaging the church does this too There's this the most famous forgery in medieval history is the donation of Constantine Which is shown to Charlemagne's father pep in the short, but basically it's how the Pope gets um Like the papal states how he's able to get like geographic land around him Which is that he shows this forged document that nobody could tell was forged because this is the middle ages like you know People aren't really up on the whole first world gods watching second of all you know It's written in Latin, you know looks cool like it's it's official But the Pope basically shows this Frankish king this document that was supposed to be written hundreds of years before by the Roman emperor Constantine on his deathbed granting the Pope Like all earthly power over Western Europe. So this is actually fascinating Basically what he's saying is that Constantine on his deathbed The Pope like helps him like heal from his sickness. He ends up dying anyway But the Pope like helps him in his end of life in some ways hospice care And he awards the Pope as he dies because Constantine was the one who started to shift the empire towards the east Awards the Pope Like a kingship over all of the Western Roman Empire And so here's this forged document that gets unearthed in the Vatican library hundreds of years later And the Pope shows it to the king the Frankish king and is like look we this is why the Pope should have more power Look at this document and it it wasn't until the Renaissance that they were like wait these words are anachronisms like this doesn't even make any sense This is a forgery and that was I mean this is also like we've Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a tough one. That's like that's like hundreds of years of like people historical power That's now like completely undermined when they realize that this This document is forged yeah Yeah, and that's and that's the type of thing that leads to civilizational collapse because it's such a seminal power structure That was agreed and accepted upon for so long that it built the society we know and now we realize that was built on a house of course It is kind of like in a way its own like handshake deal I mean, so you have because it's like this agreed upon power structure that generation after generation Respects and doesn't rise up against and it isn't until you start to see this rod at the core the donation of Constantine being proven false The schism between the two popes like all these things that start to cause these these Kind of splits between what we would think of as like Catholic sovereignty over Europe It's like oh shit. What if none of this is true? And then you have random German preachers being like actually the bible has too many books All right, you know, and then people start asking questions. Why why do priests have so much power? Why can't I just pray that was original? I have a dream. Yeah exactly. Yeah, that's exactly So how did the two popes thing by the way like get Worked out eventually and how long did that take um? I mean, it's like within the context of the hundred years war It lasted about 70 years the papacy in Avignon There were like seven popes that ruled in Avignon and then eventually Like the French well, okay, so the English one the hundred years war It's like it's like its own thing But it's a war fought over the course of about a hundred years between the English and the France and France Basically over English royal claims and France that then gets ballooned into this whole propaganda thing that lasts for generations And basically at a certain point the English were allied with Rome and the French were obviously allied with Avignon and the English had like Racked the French enough that they could impose their will and be like the whole Avignon papacy French papacy thing is over We're going back Rooms the only one and that's kind of like how it And this yeah, there's a lot going on during that too. Yeah, but like with with the crusades So you mentioned the third crusade is where it started to go wrong for them after they roughly rule over the land for like a hundred years But again during this time period you have operating between Europe and the Holy Land the Knights Templar and they are Is it fair to say that prior to thirteen oh seven? They are fully accepted by the Vatican and the church and Basically promoted Yeah, they're given special so they're given special exemptions This is one of the thing that starts to cause problems with like earthly rulers political political powers is that they're Exempted from any local laws So you start to have kind of bad actors. Yeah, the the church exempted them from any they only have to follow canon law They had to follow church law, but they don't have to follow any of the local political laws They answer only to the Pope. So it's like if you're operating in one of the Crusader states and there's the king of Jerusalem You don't answer to the king of Jerusalem as a template you answer the Pope that's it. Yeah, what about the Ten Commandments though And it includes like thou shalt not kill and they're like, you know, yeah, I mean that's that that's something that the But you shalt not kill who you can kill Sarasin. I mean who are you? I don't know Yeah, there's only worse some fine print. Yeah, it's actually kind of interesting that I mean as the definition of the crusade starts to expand because eventually You start to get crusades of Christians against Christians. It's like what does it mean to go on crusade and also like what is murder and what is holy war and like what is Allowed by the church it starts to become this like interesting moral laundry that more and more people You start to see like more tracks being written about it in the late middle ages And people criticizing the church more openly But basically the Templars are kind of they they they become They don't have to answer to anybody and they have these like initiation rituals They're kind of like a fraternity almost and that starts to rub people the wrong way How big do they get my character? Honestly, I mean spread across Europe. There are guys who are like living They're like post-templar. It's kind of like a Freemason type thing where it's like you were maybe involved in it from a military Perspective when you were young and then now you don't fight anymore But you're like a banker in Germany and you're still like part of the organization, but you're not active, you know You're not like one of the guys. Yeah, yeah, so I mean thousands probably tens of thousands Yeah, so they have and they create their own economic system as well where people they basically set up like a Like a loan system, right? It's a credit system So it's basically what I was talking about earlier like the popularity of pilgrimages So let's say you're starting out from London and you're walking to Jerusalem There's a lot of potential people that could rob you along the way. So you don't want to be carrying a big thing of all your gold with you because you could just take it. So you would go to a Templar banker in London and he would write you a special cipher in London and he would write you a special cipher on a scroll and you would take it to the Templar banker in Jerusalem and the cipher would say how much money you were allowed to withdraw but only he could decipher it. And so this is like the world's first credit system and of course this allows them to amass enormous wealth and that's kind of actually fill up the fourth who's the French king who eventually persecutes them is in debt to them, like a shitload of money. Oh, that was why. Yeah. So he's like, well, first he want, he was like, let me join you guys. Let me be a Templar and then we'll wipe the debt and they're like, no way. You suck. And then he's like, I'm going to kill all of you. Yeah. I can't. I'm going to get the university guys. The egg heads at the university to back me up with like theology about why I should kill you. So they spread all these rumors that they're like having gay sacks behind closed doors and they're worshiping Muhammad and that wasn't real, right? Well, I mean, I wasn't there. You weren't there. But they were giving each other the special kiss of peace below the belly. I don't know what that means. That wasn't there. The Templar's work. Yeah, below the belly. That's how hard it was. Yeah. Wait, can we go along? Templar's special kiss below the belly. Don't put the template. The Templar kiss. Yeah. It's like four nubs. Yeah, exactly. The template. The Templar kiss reversed it. First, the controversial alleged obscure greeting ritual that new members were forced to perform, forced to perform. Look at the first during night's Templar initiation, the ritual, according to 1307 Heresy Trials, which were a sham orchestrated by King Philip IV, who was in debt of France. Initiates were forced to bestow kiss on the senior member receiving them. The confessions in charges claim the kisses were applied to the mouth, the navel, the base of the spine, or the buttocks, and the end of the spine. This is very skull and bonesy. It's like you got to do like gay shit. Now we have that on you. Now you're going to do whatever we want, including start the Iraq war if we want you to do that. Exactly. That's interesting. Well, it comes from a, the kiss of peace is like a Christian concept. That's like a hell of a way to show peace. Yeah. So it's like supposed to be everything that they're accused of is a bastardization of like a good Christian. So yeah, the mouth of mouth when it goes down. Exactly. Yeah. That's a close fraternal order right there. Yeah. If that's the case. So he comes up, King Philip concocts this whole story. None of this is true. The allegations are false. He's telling everyone like they're gay. They have a separate religion and he was like they don't believe in Jesus, right? Yeah. He's like the worst thing is that they're a sacriot. They have all this power and their answer. They answer only to the Pope, but they're like a sacrilegious. Right. And he gets the Pope to like denounce them too because he has dirt on the Pope. So he had dirt on the Pope. He had the Pope is in his pocket. So he's like, what's the Pope like messing around with a little boys? I can't remember the exact circumstances, but he had he was basically like he had his talents in the Pope and the Pope would do whatever he said. And so he was able to get the Pope was like the big defender of the Templars. So if he turns on the Templars, it's like there's nobody left. And then also at this point, like university culture was like very popular and the University of Paris is kind of like the center of the academic and religious world. I know. I know. So he gets like a council of the University of Paris to like piece together a bunch of evidence that the Templars are dumb. And these are the smartest guys in Europe. So it's like dude, the Paris guys. They can't be wrong. Exactly. So it's like and so like in the space of like 10 years, they're wiped out. First, they're imprisoned in torture. And a lot of them say, yeah, we did do these things to each other while under torture. Yeah. But then yeah, almost all of them like were announced later. Can we Google that? What dirt did King Philip the fourth claim to have on the Pope? I wanted to know what could get him to pull one over the Pope. The relationship he had with the Pope, yeah. All right. So King Philip the fourth of France compiled a sweeping list of extreme and largely fabricated charges against Pope Boniface the eighth, including heresy sorcery, saturday. There it is. And keep it a pet demon to brand him an illegitimate ruler and depose him. The feud began when Philip the fourth needed money for wars. Can't feed the poor. Got money for wars. Shut up. And started taxing the French clergy. Pope Boniface the eighth strongly objected stating that the church answered only to him and threatened the king with excommunication. In response, Philip and his chief minister, Guillaume de Nakare launched a massive propaganda campaign to ruin the Pope's reputation. Heresy and blasphemy. Yeah. They just list out all the things. So what did they say, accusing the Pope of severe sexual immorality and unnatural acts, claiming Boniface illegally bought his way into the papacy called simony and murdered his predecessor. Oh, shit. Yeah. Pope Celestine the fifth claim the Pope denied the immortality of the soul and mocked Christ. That's a worse charge than Sodom in the medieval mind. Whoa. Sodom is like that can happen any good Christian man. It's actually there's like a whole interesting side of that. That can happen any good Christian. Well, that homosexuality isn't thought of as like an idea. You're not a gay man. Really? It's like something it's a temptation that you can fall to. But there's no such thing as like you are born a home. You are a gay man. It's like everybody like every guy likes women, but you just happen to just say boy. Yeah, you were into some stuff, but you were tempted by demonic forces. And that's why you did it. So it's like something like Sodomy. Something like Sodomy. It's like, well, there's we could we could explain that. It's something like Heresy. It's like, oh, he mocked Christ and worshiped the severed head of Muhammad. I can't say it because it's got a word that's banned by YouTube in it, but Ari Spears. I think it was used to have this like bit about Italian guys who say half a. Oh, yeah. And then he'd be like, what does that even look like? Yeah. You go into a stall. You're like, up, up, mouse around the neck. Yeah. All right. Stop. Relax. Well, in the soprano's, Vito was okay until they realized he was catching up. That's what's the problem. Yeah. That's what we doing prison the past the time. You get you get a pass on. Yeah. Then like he was catching. So they're like, they're giving the Pope a pass, but then they're like the Heresy and the Pope's like Jesus ain't real and they're like, not that's the story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, he's the Pope. Yeah. That's the real. But that it's fair to say those are probably some trumped up charges. For sure. Yeah. And then also like Heresy's a great one because you don't really, what's the evidence for that? It's something that's happening in your mind. So the Pope then sells out the Knights Templar, which is where the whole thing derives from because the king was in debt and then bows to the king on that. Does this affect the power structure then moving forward of like now the scales are tipped again to where kings have more power than the Pope? Like what does that look like? It's kind of it's by this point in the Middle Ages, it's definitely more so in favor of the kings. I think the kings head at this point. I mean, you could see with Philip, like I had figured out how to weaponize the Pope's own like holiness against him. If you invert that, then he's lost all of his power. And I think also there's like a sort of like a ruthless pragmatism that you start to see in like even the most pious like late medieval rulers where it's like these are guys who are like super godfiring. But when it comes to the actual structure of the church, they're willing to say fuck you to the Pope in a way that like people previously would never have done. So it's kind of I think more of an affirmation of I'm the king and I've been divinely appointed like you have your role as a religious figure head, but like this is almost now like it's going to take hundreds of years, but the beginning of like the separation of the church and the state and the way that like the medieval mind wouldn't have been able to comprehend. But I mean, it's it starts years before when the Pope is trying to one of the things he loved to do in all of these major kingdoms was like I will choose who's going to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. I'm going to choose all the major clerical positions for you. You're the king. I'm the Pope, but I get the final say and the king's like, no, it's not I'm the king of England. You don't get to choose who my Archbishop is and that's like there's a lot of beef over that. Yeah, a lot of the period of time. I had eventually in Lisa a lot of things going on. Yeah, but like the with the end in 1307 with the Templars, it's like this entire organization now gets buried to history and then there's the conspiracy theories that they continued underground and they form into other things. This is where Freemasonry comes from. A lot of different things that it's like we could sit here and just play Tim Foyle hat and maybe some of it's true. Maybe it's not. But famously, Dan Brown created the Robert Langdon series, which includes the Da Vinci code, where he fictionalized a lot of things to tell like a great story. Yeah, which were, you know, for people who haven't seen the movie or read the book. Great book. You know, he basically was saying the Templars continued underground and that it was because they had come to worship the sacred feminine because they had discovered the Holy Grail, which is actually Mary Magdalene's body, which proved that Jesus had been married and he had a he had a kid and it created this bloodline and everything. But the thing about that is he did base in creating the story. He based some of the research off a book called Holy Blood Holy Grail, which I read. I forget. Can we pull it up deep? I forget the names of the guys who wrote that, which is a very controversial book that people say is like pseudo history in some ways, but it's also attacking very controversial topic and everything. Is there anything to suggest from historical record that the Templars may have discovered some sort of Holy Grail or something, whether or not it's related to Mary Magdalene or not? Yeah, there was, I mean, it became, I mean, sort of what we were talking about earlier with like foundational myths. I mean, in those years after the taking of the Holy Land by Christian forces, there's a lot of like, I found a piece of the true cross. Like IFA, because now you have like Christians in Jerusalem ruling over, I found, you know, a nail, but they nailed Jesus with I found this. So there was a rumor that they found the Holy Grail, they found part of or all of the Ark of the Covenant and that the Templars because they built their like first camp when they were like still kind of like amateurs off of the temple, like off the side of the temple of Solomon and Jerusalem that in that temple, they like conducted some sort of ritual to have like direct access to the divine through the temple because the way that medieval people, obviously, they're like super, super steep in Christianity, Jerusalem is seen as the center of the world, right? The rest of the world, even on maps, it's like Jerusalem in the middle, everything else around it. So it's like the temple of Solomon and Jerusalem, it becomes like this kind of urban legend that the Templars, the reason they were able to become so powerful so quickly is because they did some kind of deal with God in the temple of Solomon. And then I think what adds to it too is these accusations against them of, you know, all these things that were happening behind closed doors because the reason why the Philip and the Pope were able to make these accusations against them and have these accusations stick is that the Templars were very defensive about like their initiation rituals, what they were really doing, their administrative techniques. So it's like you could kind of like impose anything you want on that. And then historically, they're kind of the first example of such a major organization in a shadowy way, being taken down almost overnight, and then you can impose anything on that. Like they actually found the Holy Grail, and that's why that's why the Pope had to take them out. Or they actually, you know, they had the special power and then they went underground. And so it became, it's kind of like one of the earliest, like major, like late medieval, like conspiracy theories. It begins immediately in the wake of the Templars kind of disappearing. There's a lot of secret society lore that dates in the Middle Ages and I'm always curious what about that. And it's not all of it, but you know, just a lot of different ones. I'm curious about what about that time period had such the allure to certain people to hold power below ground that other people didn't know about. It's a really interesting psychological. Yeah. I love this question. I feel like it actually gets at like the core of the medieval mindset. First of all, one thing you see, and I feel like this is the biggest lesson we need to learn in the modern days, that if there was any activity that could be done, medieval people formed a fraternity around it, or they filmed for form like a sisterhood or a co-ed like kind of fraternity or something like that. So it's like the people who light the candles at mass, that's like a club. Like they hang out, they go to the tavern together. Like the guys who, you know, sweep up around the pew, like a lot of it was religious in nature. The guys who, you know, stand watch over this rich person's like grave at night. Like those are the grave watcher guild and they all hang out and they do lace things. So there's like a ton of societies and some of them get bigger, some of them get sponsored by local rich guys who really like what they're doing or if one of them's like a Catholic kind of fraternity at the local church, and I want my soul to be cleansed, maybe I'm a local rich guy who's done some suspect things. I'll give money to the candlelighters guild and they'll light candles in my name even after I die. Things like that. So then the candlelighters guild has money. They get bigger. This is just like a hypothetical, but like everything was communal and corporate and group oriented. So there's like tons of, you know, in a way that really like after the middle ages kind of goes away. So there's just tons of like things that you could kind of impose a narrative on. And then also in a pre and lightenment, I think sometimes this gets stretched a little bit, but CS Lewis has written a lot of really interesting stuff on the medieval, yeah, yeah. He was, he was a medievalist first, medievalist, him and JR are talking both and he wrote this incredible book about the medieval mine called the discarded image anybody that's interested in medieval history should read it. It's not that long, but it's basically about like how medieval people saw the world around them. And in a world before you have any scientific explanation for anything, like if you were to tell me that one time you floated through your kitchen, I would be like, there's a law of gravity. You can't do that. But in a world where there's no established law of gravity. If you tell me there's a guy in two villages over that can fly, there's or that was attacked by demons in the middle of the night, like Tucker Carlson, I like that I would have no way to tell you that that didn't happen. Well, maybe gravity is conspiracy to take us away from thinking the possible possible. Exactly. I mean, this is the whole, this is the whole like view, the medieval view of the cosmos. Like this whole idea that we live in an ordered universe with a benevolent God, but that there's there's angel, there's different classes of beings. There's angels and then there's arch angels and then there's actually medieval people believed in fairies, like quite literally that they were like sub angels, like they were kind of like the lesser angels who like watched over the forest. I mean, it depends on this was a big thing in the Slavic tradition. Yeah. But like basically it's, it's to sum it all up, it's an incredibly mystical world view that the average medieval person like really did have mystical in the sense that like things weren't so clearly defined. What's going on in the forest? I don't know. There's weird noises. I don't know what's going on in there. I've never read like a handbook to forests, you know, what every animal is in the forest. So yeah, it's that combined with all of these groups. So mysticism, that's just inherent in the medieval Catholic mind and then everything's communal. So it's like secret societies. Yeah, it's, that's just like, it's one of those that will never get old for me exploring that because you wonder how much of it is urban folklore and whatever and they exist, so maybe they just don't have the cloud, like we think, versus like how much of it is, look at the back of that dollar bill and that motherfucking, that thing's got an eye on it. That's an all seen eye. Yeah. I don't know what's going on here. 13 of those 37 signed that constitution were a little group, so maybe that trickled down, right? Yeah, that's crazy. And then I feel like also there's like a natural inclination, like we don't want to believe that the simple explanation could possibly that it's really like somebody like JD Vance is really calling any kind of shots. Like of course, it's got to be, there's got to be a secret society that's running all this. It can't be that guy. So I don't know. Maybe that transcends that. Yeah, we were looking at that deep. Do you still have that clip, JD Vance sitting vice president on a book tour with the book product place behind them called communion, saying like, yeah, you know, I believe religion, if it comes to the end times, well, okay, yeah, just play, it's out of context, but it's still fucking hilarious, like just the visual here is great. What I'm trying to focus on is doing as much of God's work as possible right now. And if at least the end times, okay, okay, okay, yeah, it's not like you're not in the second most important position, the government of the largest GDP in the world, but that's neither here. It leads the end times. Oh my God. Now, in many evil times, they were obsessed with the end times as well, they thought it was going to be coming upon. Well, the thing is like in Christian thought generally, I mean, this is like what JD Vance is a Catholic conber. Like this is what he's talking about. It's like the, the end times are a good thing. It's the second coming of Christ. It's like heaven and earth convening back into one. We've been, so heaven and earth, two separate things with the coming, the first coming of Christ, the, the birth and death and resurrection of Christ, heaven and earth, they have a little bit of crossover, this kingdom of heaven that's come into earth. That's right. And then with the second coming, they'll become one. And you know, people have argued for centuries what that really like is would look like. Do you have a physical body? Is it just a spiritual thing? Is it literal? Does Jesus really have a sword coming out of his mouth and he's on a cloud? You know, it's these things in the book of Revelation, like how literal is it? But yeah, in the year 1000, there was a big apocalypse. I mean, there were a ton of them throughout the Middle Ages and tons of apocalyptic sacks, S E C T S because it was like, we saw with Peter the Hermann, it was pretty easy to like get people whipped up. If you were pretty smart and well spoken, you could like get people to, I mean, even now, how many call documentaries and Netflix. But there was a big like terror that in the year 1000, a thousand years after the birth of Christ that the world wouldn't, that's when the second coming would happen. There were, there are biblical passages about like the millennial reign of Christ and that's what had kind of gotten people scared. And then the year 1000 like came in when and like nothing happened and people were like fuck and then they're like, wait, it should be a thousand and thirty three because he died when he was thirty three. Right. So it's like we got thirty three years. And so then that came and when people were like, well, we got this wrong, but you know, we got to come down from the mountain and go back to work now, but you know, so they accepted it. Yeah. I mean, the thing is most people just went to work every day. Like most people were not like, the world's going to end. It's the same thing now where it's like just a vocal minority online who are saying like crazy shit. But most people are just going about, they're going to work, going to Dunkin' Donuts like for their lives. So like most people were just like working their land and had no idea there was a prophecy that the world was going to end in the year 1000. It was like some monks that were, it gets a lot of likes on X now. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It was popular around the monastery. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of Saudi Arabian bot part in March. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of that Saudi Arabian money coming in lately. It's coming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe I'm too much of a literalist, but I'm like, let's live here on Earth, especially in America. We have so many different perspectives and types of people and stuff. It's like everyone goes through cycles of hard times and everything. It doesn't always mean there's like some fucking biblical you all are going to get flooded because you're all Saddamites and Saddam Kamora, you know, that whole thing. It's like, it gets a little old for me. Yeah. I think there's also, and I've said this before, but I think there's an element of like almost like arrogance or egocentrism to it that we're the generation that has been deemed worthy to witness the end of the world. That's right. I mean, you see that even like we have, like even in these prophecies from the year 1000 or any of these religious sects, it's like we have reached the end of human civilization. Like we are the last ones. Yeah. And I think now it's like in the information ages, like where can we possibly go from here? There's only one way out. And that's the other thing too. We're in the information age. We have access to things and the spread of information at a rate so exponential from any point in human history that unfortunately a bad thing that comes with that is all the things that previously would have been, not all of them, but some of the things that previously would have been behind closed doors, we now see it. And you'll see something that's objectively a horrible story like the Epstein thing where then it affects also plenty of people who are in ruling positions and people righteously so get extremely angry about this. But like stuff like that unfortunately, as existed throughout human history, you just didn't know about it. Yeah. Because they could be like run along. But now with the internet, it's harder too. So I think the amplification of not to overstate it here, but like everything that's anecdotal creates it all is the definition. And you can be like, you know what? That means it's all like that. And I try to be really careful with that, especially during a time where we are right now where there is some really fucked up shit to not be like, well, that means it's everything. You try to just stay with where the evidence is on it, you know? Yeah. I do think I mean the whole access to information thing is really interesting because obviously like from a medieval history perspective That's much more limited and I think it's maybe a little bit easier to start an apocalyptic cult in a medieval village Because nobody's going to remember the fact that a hundred years ago another guy started this exact same cult Like there's no whereas we can look we can go on Netflix and watch a cult documentary We can we can go on Twitter and see crazy people talking about the end times and look at the historical timeline of all the people that have predicted The end of the world and yet it still persists. I don't know what that says about the human psyche That's always what's most interesting to me like how little we've really changed We've become so much more invested in this idea of individual human rights and that I shouldn't be able to cut off your head if you you know You if you kill a member of my family. I can't legally start a blood issue all these things like we've advanced so much from our medieval ancestors And it's like we're susceptible to the same propaganda that they were and it's it's just as I mean look at the template propaganda If you look before it that's exactly what you do to your political opponent now Maybe yeah, yeah, you tear down and that's it. That's the unfortunate law of like public PR campaigns you better punch first. Yeah, that's what Trump always says. He's like deny everything and hit back harder or whatever You know, which it's like It sucks that as a society no matter who it is that is historically what we've always responded to Once the accusation is made the burden proof is now on the person that was accused even if it was total bullshit Yeah, you know like they're I think about that a lot because it ruins a lot of things and it also creates is the opposite of what America's founded on Which is innocent before proving guilty. We now have guilty before proven innocent What's my public opinion? Yeah, it's really bad. And that's I mean obviously this is like my whole thing to like harp on this That's like a very medieval concept that the mob decides the innocence or guilt of somebody I mean, you see it in some of like the medieval justice systems where like trial by combat So it's like I saw that in Game of Thrones. Yeah, yeah, so that was like a real thing I was it was mostly in like a Germanic influence law system So like England and parts of the Holy Roman Empire for a portion of the Middle Ages But basically like God will this these two guys will fight and whoever wins is is innocent because God will ordain it But then also, I mean especially in Italy, there's this concept called Charavari or Caravari Where if somebody has committed some like social ill maybe they cheated on their spouse with a bunch of other women in the village They got another man's wife pregnant or a woman who's been accused of sleeping around whatever like some kind of like social evil That's like lesser than murder but like still kind of disrupts the village They're paraded through the village and people like cheer at them and throw a rotten fruit. It's called Caravari Yeah, yeah, and it's like a public shaming, but it's like a cleansing then after that you go to confession and it's like you've you've done your penance I mean, it's kind of like also game of thrones. Yeah, yeah, like when they shave her head and a Cersei and they walk in the streets Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a public shaming, but then after that your you return to status your back to society And I think we like how many people actually get canceled I feel like you have to take your apology tour and then like Lucy Kay just had an efflux special Yeah, you know what I mean? I didn't have like behind him when he first came back like I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Yeah, his first one was called sorry Yeah, that's I mean that's it's just it's another example of history rhymes Yeah, but we love that we want to pass and it's also like there are certain things that I don't know what the whole thing and like the late 2010s and even like Covid time of like unearthing old tweets and then just getting like Furious about it even if you were like 12 when you tweeted it and it wasn't even offensive It was like there are certain things and I think it changes with different cultures like in Europe If you use somebody of heresy that would get people fired up saw to me a heresy real bad Whereas now it's like something like that like you said something that was vague you made a racial joke on Twitter 15 years ago It's like yeah, now that's getting old. Yeah, now we don't know people are just like whatever but at that time It like struck that perfect court where people are certain contingent of people would get like perfect sort about it Yeah, there were years where it's like come on. Yeah Like I you can go look at like when it says like you have a Facebook memory Yeah, and even if it's not something like bad. It's always something cringe. Yeah, like I I thought that was cool when I was Like no, it's very very stupid. Yeah, it's something about that with society that it's just like it comes in cycles Yeah, it kind of depends what the power structure looks like what the cultural pendulum swinging at and then it goes hard Yeah, now you got like someone like Nick Fuente is who's like famous as hell saying every other line something that would have gotten you canceled Yeah, you know like eight years ago, which I you know, I don't like any extremes. I like equilibrium Yeah, I mean, but there's this happy medium with things. What was the same thing? I think at least to my memory like the rise of Trump in 2015 That was like right when SJW campus woke social as culture was starting to get and like everybody was like what the hell is this? It all happened so fast it came out of so it came out of Tumblr and then now all of a sudden like everything super woke movies Our woke everything's woke and then it's like you can come out and and to cry that as the thing that this is what's going to get Everybody fired up. Yeah, Jonathan Hayden Craig looking off wrote a great book about that in I want to say 2018 Where they broke down psychologically exactly where that came from and it from 2014 to 2017 this steep descent and when I thought about my years in college at that time I was like oh wow This is after the fact. I'm like Yeah, that's exactly how I've done it like down to the day and the timeline and it just had you know They're better explain. I recommend that book, but like there's there's just something The there's like I this fit it was like a slippery slope and then a cliff dive I remember the year after I left a friend of mine Alex Horowitz who was later on my show shout out hurrah. He called me up Like the beginning of the next year. So I had graduated and he was there and he was a senior and he's like Dude, I just had to call someone right now and I thought of you first. I'm like what's going on? And he's like I'm standing in the middle of our campus and there's caution tape everywhere And I'm like oh my god like is someone get murdered and he's like no They made a safe space And I just remember like sitting on the phone and I'm like What the fuck is this safe space? And he's like it's with somewhere where you can go express all your feelings and not have anyone judge You were I'm like this is the guy saying like what are we doing right here? And that just was that wouldn't even happen like a year before But then something occurred where they're like yeah, no, this is what we're doing, you know, yeah I mean, it's yeah, it's interesting I'd actually never thought of it that way But I was I was in college from 2014 to 2018 and in those four years there was like a market shift I mean, I went to like emery. It's it wasn't like a I wouldn't go to like Bama or something Right crazy party school But when I got there it was like frat row every night parties It was still had like that American pie type vibe to it And then by my senior year all the fratts and sororities have been cleared out and those were like buildings for like the creative students Union and like the LGBT not and nothing wrong with that But it's like that's who I'd moved into those frat houses and sororities. Yeah, and it was like no I mean part of that was like pure liability like if you're having kids like fall down the stairs hammered at a frat house It's like bad for the happy I know yeah, so it's like part of it was understandable and then part of it was definitely a big cultural shift I remember like in 2016 Milo you know bliss came to speak at emery and it was like I was just right. It was a huge problem. Yeah, it was like warring factions because there were the emery young Republicans And then there was everybody else. It was crazy What a time there was a lot of chalk chalk wars like people were like writing writing like a like magga And then someone across it out and be like fuck Trump or something and then I was like about it. They were the chalk wars It was that accomplished so much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You all did so much amazing. Yeah When you when you look at all the context of like the Religious history during this time period as well Obviously that's so much of the story whether not just a crusade But just like the time period that the development of the spread of Christianity and how they're all working You talk about even some of the mysticism and how people slaughter the world like has it Informed your religious beliefs at all looking through this or what what do you like do you have religious beliefs? Yeah, I'm Catholic I actually converted to Catholicism as an adult through my video history studies Yeah, it's interesting. I think I mean The history I think kind of brings me to like a certain closeness with people like who lived this lifestyle It feels like I'm spending all my time like reading the inner thoughts or the closest we can get the inner thoughts of like people who like lived and breathed this and I don't know. It was just always fascinating to me and I kind of fell down that rabbit hole personally I think it also There's like a romantic romanticization of medieval Catholicism among like trad cats online like traditional Catholics hardcore right wing like traditional Catholics They don't believe in like a Pope like Leo or a Pope like Francis who's a little bit more like They want Latin masses. They want everything to go back to the way it was before Vatican too So they're like extremely fundamentalists and they glorify the Templars. They glorify the Crusades They glorify medieval Catholicism and like heretics. They glorify the Templars. Yeah The who was it? I think it was Louis the pious Louis the ninth who said the only answer to a hair or the only way to debate a heretic is at the end of a sword or something like that You see that all the time Like posting on these Catholic forms. Jesus say that. Yeah, I know Well, Jesus said I came not to bring peace but a sword which is often miss quotes from its context He was basically saying like I'm here to shake things up. Yeah, he was using a switch. Yeah, that one place He was yeah in money changers. Yeah, he flipped it over. We didn't kill him. Yeah, right Yeah, so it was nice would it though. Yeah, he was yeah, he's a stunned couple of them for sure turned over some tables people were scared but Yeah, so I see I used to see more of that in my comments section when I first started posting I think it was like reaching that side of YouTube And so that that was something that was a little bit of like a turn off for me because to answer your question How it's informed my own religious beliefs is like I think there's partially a cautionary tale in medieval Catholicism about like extremism and fundamentalism. Yeah, and like becoming so fiercely territorial with your religion that it can turn like an entire civilization of people into like an other that it's okay to murder And like some of the atrocities committed on both sides in the crusades are not something that should ever be glorified I see these like crusades or bros on YouTube or whatever being like we need another crusade we need to we need to what Trump's doing in Iran is actually great because it's it's like the 10th crusade he's like doing a crusade in Iran right now it's like geez dude this is brutal so in that way it's been like I'm all for modern progressive Catholicism I'm with it I like Leo he's a Chicago guy I'm from the Chicago land area so I relate to him yeah it sounds like you have a real common sense view on it yeah yeah it's kind of yeah and I mean I kind of rub shoulders with people from all walks of life and it's like I mean I've personally seen there I know this is like a cliche as old as time but like some of the people I see living the most like Christian values have never even walked that's right it never been to mass so it's like for you yeah so it's like how can I how can I now I still have the medieval crucifix in my studio apartment oh you're sure medieval yeah medieval style I got it from a monster let me pull that medieval crusade it's sick dude that's a whole other topic about how depictions of Jesus changed throughout the Middle Ages so in the early Middle Ages he's we think of him on a cross right suffering yeah yeah so in the early Middle Ages these are like high and late medieval depictions like in Byzantine and which one do you want a resticle honestly yeah if you do like early Byzantine style like Byzantine Jesus he's depicted Byzantine Jesus was he white then or was he still scroll down because these are some of these are like there's also an art style called Byzantine that people still make if you look up like Jesus Ravenna Mosaic that should be a good one like Ravenna Italy yeah there's a mosaic in the Byzantine style where he's he has no beard and he's dressed as like a no no it's not oh sorry not a crucifix on mosaic mosaic yeah the crucifix kind of comes yeah so here you see him totally depicted he's for hundreds of years oh shit that has no on the right to the right right there left wait go down yeah that's him as a shepherd yeah so that's no beard no beard and he's dressed as a Roman soldier yeah so this is how he's so first he's the sovereign Christ for hundreds of years and this is coming from like the martial traditions of Greek and Roman society that Jesus has seen as like a conqueror one of the popular scenes from the New Testament that's actually really only alluded to and the New Testament is Jesus's harrowing of hell so those three days when he was dead he went to hell and like fucked everyone up down there it was like I'm the new king so it's like that's one of the popular things like Jesus in armor like messing people up in hell and Lindsey Graham yeah he's got Lindsey for sure but he's he's depicted here as like the ruler of the universe he's sitting on a throne he's clothed he's not suffering he's like a piece and he's a ruler I was all the same and then they're like he needs a beard yeah so the beard comes and then throughout the the late middle ages when that whole movement of like personal piety and people identifying with the humanity of Christ becomes a thing people start to get more invested in the identifying with the suffering of Christ and that's when you start to see like crazy gruesome there's a whole cult in the late middle ages that rises up around his side wound that the Roman soldier yeah but there because the idea is that the way to Christ is through his wounds the way to understand Jesus's suffering is to suffer with him so then that's what you get like in my team I done the people that whip themselves and all that stuff there's a lot of like bodily mortification and late medieval Catholicism as well. What the hell's that group called again? The flagellants? Yeah no no no within within the church opus day oh yeah and the hard yeah they're hard core they fucking do that yeah I mean there was also like extreme piety as a late medieval like a European ruler was a way to show like not only like your devotion to God but in a way it was kind of your devotion to the community like I am the figurehead of our community and by me being super Catholic the fact that I go to mass every day I go to confession every day all this is public but you have like tons of late medieval monarchs who would like wear like an iron band that would like cut off the circulation on their leg all day for discomfort or wear like a wool shirt that would scratch them up so they could remember their humanness and remember their the suffering of Christ and some of it sounds crazy it sounds crazy whatever gets you through the day I know yeah that's like dude I also wonder if a lot of the extreme religiosity has to do with like the closeness of life and death closeness of life and death yeah that like now death is like some mostly obviously something that like happens in a hospital like you you're not like seeing people die all the time but like death happened in your living room that's really your parents got the plague like they died and you're this was a thing all the way up until like the American Civil War like the industrialization of death happened during the Civil War because there was such death this is now going off in another tangent but like it's a good the funeral industry rose up around it because it's like now we have to ship these bodies home from Antietam and like Fredericksburg or whatever and then we have to like preserve them and refrigerate them and figure out how to do all this and like people aren't dying of like typhus in their living rooms surrounded by their family which is what how it had been for thousands of years so in the middle ages like you see you grew up around death your grandpa dies like in in beds surrounded by the family like you've witnessed siblings die like your your kid siblings passed away so yeah I think some of our alienation from death or closeness to death I don't know influences things culturally for sure now what when did the when officially did the Renaissance period start yeah there's a so there's I mean it depends on who you ask some would say it's really more so a question of like when did the middle ages end but some would say there was a competition in Florence in 1408 I believe it was to see who could design the most beautiful doors for the baptister and Brunelleski of Brunelleski's dome fame was one of the designers I think I believe he won but that was like the first like civic display of artistry and like a competition in a way that became like like what's the embodiment of the Renaissance mind like that your individual talent is worth something and you can be better than another guy it's not all of us working together towards God so that's been seen as one of the the beginnings of the Renaissance the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 the discovery of the new world 1492 has been it kind of depends like time and place Martin Luther now in the 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 some people would say the reformations kind of the beginning of or the end of the Middle Ages because the Middle Ages were Catholic and then you have Protestantism come along and dismantle that and it's like that's the end of the so it's kind of a time and place in the language looking at it I still always thought of and maybe this is just my amateur ass at home looking at this way oh we start of like the 15th century would like to Vinci and Michael Angelo and stuff like that to where obviously they're a part of the burgeoning of artistry in Italy and obviously cross with the church and you're starting to get some of the science and church religion stuff going going at each other it's like I always thought of that is still part of the Middle Ages it was like the way that we were coming out of it but you're still on the runway the wheels are down yeah no I would totally agree with that and that's something that I I first of all I feel like any medievalists or like Renaissance historian kind of worth their salt would recognize that for at least a hundred years there was quite a bit of crossover between like even like a divinity or Michael Angelo was deeply influenced by medieval Catholic thought like these were medieval guys kind of taking medieval ideas like one foot in the past one foot in the future type of thing you can see it like an all like the early Renaissance Italian artworks it's still like kind of in a medieval style but they're moving more humanly like it's small changes and then also something that I think is always worth recognizing is that like the Renaissance was like a smaller social movement like if you lived in Florence you would see the results of it around like if you were just like a merchant or whatever but you wouldn't be like I'm in the Renaissance like this is a right you don't know it at the time yeah it's like it's like groups of artists throughout Europe groups of like sculptors and painters and engineers like kind of coming together in different organizations and groups but like you can feel it when you're in Florence we're talking about it's crazy yeah you feel like you are well there was a big concept in these medieval Italians or Renaissance Italian city states of civic pride how beautiful can we make the city and we're going to we're going to pay collectively like all of our greatest artists to create the most because our city is more beautiful than Venice or whatever so I don't know we've kind of although I don't know there's still city rivalry not like football or something like how much better is I think there's still city rivalry yeah sure I know what you're saying that we find other ways to make rivalries yeah I still think you know we got some interesting ways of expressing it that's the thing they're hearing over there but like there's definitely still the now we got more beauty but it may also exist the more in Europe because they preserve so much of like their classical architecture regarding depending on what era it was as opposed to here where we just you know build right that we don't we don't even preserve the first president's houses are all gone in New York and Philly yeah like we don't preserve shit here which is crazy yeah that's why I love when you get off the Christopher Street stop in New York City which is down if you're looking to freedom tower there on our wallpaper it's down to the right of it in those lower buildings basically and you walk up a half a block and turn down I think it's bleaker street you can they have a lot of the old old for here it's old you know late 18th century early 19th century struck like houses that are built and it's like stepping into a little time capsule and it's only five blocks and then suddenly up yeah back to modern architecture yeah what do you think that says about your connection to your your ancestry and your like foundational myth or because I always thought it was interesting that I was thinking about this the other day and I know people disagree but it's like I'm the thing that brought this about was that one of the sponsors for my video was like one of those DNA things where they tell you your breakdown of like your ancestry no it was called my heritage this one promises not to sell your data anyway yeah I think they're Canadian but anyway they I was like looking at my results and it's like you know 60 percent Dutch 10 percent Polish what I'm like but I'm really I'm from here my parents are from here my grandparents are from here I have no cultural tie to Europe in any way shape or form but still when you ask somebody like where are you from like a white person where are you from from they're like a one half Italian half English whatever And I think it's weird. I don't know if that has some aspect to it. Whereas if you ask somebody in like, Naples, where are you from? They're like, I'm full blooded. I'm Italian. And like my ancestors built, you know, I don't know. - Right, it's kind of, it's more trackable. - Yeah. - Because you even talked about it earlier. Look at the UK. It was built by Viking tribes. And the Germans came over at one point. And, you know, they came over from the Netherlands and then all kind of mixed together. But if you talk to someone whose family has been from the UK now, they're British, right? The Roman Empire, Rome was obviously the center of a lot of different cultures and a lot of different people. And you can trace some of the DNA when they do these tests as far as I know to like Africa and Asia and all these different places, but they're Roman because what I'm getting at is it's almost like once the European order was defined, that was the line in the sentence. Like that's what we draw it to, where you're from and what you're about. So in America, we very quickly, not right away necessarily, but in some ways right away, but as far as like mass appeal of many different countries coming in, we very quickly turn into a melting pot such that we have a mix of so many cultures here that we have this overall kind of American construct, but it's now been influenced by so many different places that it's a smorgasbord in a way. So it's like when you go to France, you feel the French identity. Yeah, it's over 1,000 years old. You can feel it. They're feel super techive of it from what I understand. They are. When you go to Italy, they're really protective of it. You can feel that Italian identity. When you come to America, you feel this is a new world. You know, like I, and I've never had to come to America. I was born here. I lived in it, molded by it, right? But you know, you, it's, it's a different feeling than you get in other places because it's still so new. Yeah, no, yeah. I think we're still kind of figuring out what our American identity is. It's even like the different regional identities. I noticed at least, and I don't know what this tracks to. I lived in New England for five years, and there's like a new, you know, no con. Yes. There's like a New England idea, but the average person, I didn't, like the Boston accent is kind of waning. That's not really a thing anymore. Whereas like moving back to Georgia, it's like, oh, Southern culture is very real. Like the accent, like everybody still has the accent. The, there's a very clear cultural identity to Atlanta that there was not in Boston. And it's very much tied to the regionality of the place. And like it's history. So I don't know. I thought that was kind of a fascinating difference for me. It almost feels like more, like when I traveled to Europe and there's like an identity to the place, yeah. Same in New York City, there's a New York City identity. There's an accent, there's an attitude. Yeah, I don't want to say there's nothing to, I don't want to miss heard on that. But it's just like, it's different. It's at a higher level. Whereas it's a more intricate level when you go to various places in Europe, at least from my perspective. But you had said something like you think or entering some sort of a new Renaissance period now? Oh, yeah. What, why do you think that? Well, I think, I mean, one of the things that, so all the great Renaissance thinkers defined themselves against like the rigid, so medieval people love to like classify very rigidly. I, part of that has been explained as they lived in like a chaotic world of plague and war and death. And so the medieval mind, you can see it in the architecture of a Gothic cathedral, like how every minute detail is very paid attention to. Like had this obsessive need to design and classify and put everything in its category. And it led to a style of thinking called scholasticism, which was very rigid. It rose up in the monasteries and universities. And it's basically like, there is this system of logic that is ordained by God. And like, this is how you arrive at different ideas and points and it all has to exist within this ecosystem. And so the Renaissance thinkers are identifying themselves in contrast to that. We're free thinkers. We've broken from this old mold of our ancestors. And I think in some way, you see that a lot with Gen Z. It almost feels like even more so than when I was a kid. Like this identification of like, we are breaking with the older generations and we are creating something new. And then I think in a way, like the rigid mathematical nature of AI, even the way it writes, is creating something that Gen Z can like, Renaissance board off of. Because it's like, now like, you know, a certain art style isn't really feasible online anymore because it looks to AI. Like you have to get weird with your art for people to know it's human. You have to, you know, if you, if you want to do something in your neighborhood, it has to be in person because why would I want to just sit through a live stream that could be AI or something like that? So I would want, I want to go maybe hopefully see a play or see a live performance. I've seen like some stats saying the last couple years that like ticket sales have gone out for concerts and outdoor things and that Gen Z is going back to the movies and doing all these things that require like, actually rubbing shoulders with people in real life. I think part of it also is like coming out of COVID, we realize like how scary this thing can get and how real isolation is that was actually kind of part of like the early motivation for the channel is, I just saw so much of the communal nature of medieval living and the fact that just like in modern post enlightenment, post industrial revolution society, like we've never, the concept of living by yourself in a studio apartment as an adult is like mind boggling to a medieval peasant. You lived with your entire like 12 person family in a one room, you slept in the same bed a huge bed. Even when you traveled like an inn, you would sleep with strangers in a big bed. And Barbara Tuckman, this medieval historian famously said that the medieval man never knew loneliness, like the concept of loneliness as we understand it would not have been, you were always around people. So the meant, the meant, look at the biggest shows too. I'm sorry to cut you out. - Oh no, you're gonna. - You're cooking right here. You look at the sopranos, it's about an illegal thing but it's about a family, right, they're all together. You look at breaking bad. He, Walt was a tragic figure because he increasingly went away from society and away from everyone that loved him. You look at Game of Thrones. Like they're all killing each other and shit but they're all clans, they're all together. They all go to war together. They stand under banners. It's like those are the things people, entourage which is a comedy. People love the buddy buddy bro kind of. - Yeah, sign phone. - We are, you sign, imagine having a group of friends like that as an adult. It's crazy. - Friend of Joe Friends. We are attracted to that but society's going opposite. That's a great point. - Yeah, I mean, I see it, I just, I live like in Midtown Atlanta and I've noticed, I used to live there for like most from 2014 to 2019 and then I was in Boston for a few years and I just moved back and it's crazy seeing how purposeful there's now an initiative for community organizing that wasn't there before. So it's like, dude, run clubs. Like there's a run club every day at every quarter. There's groups of people running around. There's like a, there's a yoga club that meets in this courtyard and everybody's doing it together. And so part of that is I think kind of what, to me, a Renaissance is a natural part of the human cultural psyche. Like after a low point, we naturally have a human desire and it might just be a couple people and might be a culture as a whole, need to spring off of that cultural low point and kind of separate themselves from it. And I just see it so much. I mean, I did a video about why the 2030s will be the new Renaissance. I think in response to AI largely was kind of my point. And it seemed to resonate with a lot of young people. They're like, I've kind of been seeing the same thing because all you see online is like doom and gloom, which is actually sort of a medieval, it's a kind of a perfect comparison because medieval people are always like, like death is right around the corner. Memento Mori, the end of the world could happen at any time. And then Renaissance people were like, no, the human soul is immortal and like we should make beautiful cities and we should do all these things. And so it's like, yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, I think I just see it happening and the way I see young people kind of interfacing with AI have two younger brothers or twins, they're 22. So like very Gen Z, they keep me tapped in with everything going on. - You're 29? - I'm 30. So they're 86. - So you're born in 96? - 96, yeah. - You're right at the front in Gen Z. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm in the crossover year. But yeah, so they, it's just interesting 'cause they, I still remember when like the internet was on like a computer in my dad's office and like it wasn't really part of the world. Like you would, that's where it stayed. Like at school people were like texting but nobody was talking about like. - Right. - And then now it sometimes feels like online is more real than reality. And I think people are just realizing there's diminishing returns to that. - But this is where you point on Gen Z's also really well taken because they're changing that paradigm too, I think. So the peak of like pre-Renazza's time if we're talking about this now, was the millennials coming of age in the social media era to where it build up to the, I have to show you a perfect life that doesn't exist and everything's filtered and we're gonna use every tool to show you why I'm great and your life sucks. You know, behind the scenes that's not really what it was while at the same time art continued to diminish to the most basic like not even art sometimes. It's like how can we make something that's the most boring thing ever and call it beautiful. - Yeah. - And now, and I hope some of this isn't wishful thinking. With Gen Z, you see a lot more of an emphasis on content that's real, blurry pictures taken in motion just on a random trip, just like random shots of things around you. Some a picture that's not filtered. It's just actually captures the moment. Pictures with friends. And also like not to bring it to the foreturning, but Gen Z is considered the artist generation, which isn't supposed to be taken totally literally, but like in the generation that grows up in the period of great crisis learns to express themselves over time in creative ways. The last one was the silent generation. Now we're in this generation Gen Z, and I wonder I'm seeing some early signs of it. I hope I'm right and I hope you're right with this being a new renaissance. I'm seeing a lot more creative, almost colorful expression for lack of a way of putting it of art than I saw say 10 years ago. And I hope that trend is actually real and kind of continues. I don't know if you've seen that. - Yeah, no, definitely. And I feel like also now with the ability to express yourself and spread your content online, you have to be more unique. I look at streamers, which is not a world that I'm super into, but I'll keep my finger on the pulse like, you know. whom my little brothers know of or whatever. And it feels like there's so many, like everybody now is trying to get a bag, it's like a gold rush of streaming. And so like to really make it, you have to stand out and be super unique and be doing something totally new to like rise to the top of streaming in 2026. And it's almost like these artistic competitions they had in Renaissance Florence, where it's like who's doing the most cutting edge, who's the Da Vinci, who's the Michelangelo, who's like really reinventing this whole thing. And there was also, I think this kind of like ties into social media, maybe this is like a clunky analogy, but going back to the idea of like surveillance that the medieval people thought watched at all times. Obviously that was under the auspices of like divine love, but there's this idea that we are watched, we exist within a rigid order and like we should behave in a certain way. And I think there's actually like a comparison to be made there just with what I've heard from my brothers and about like think pieces on Gen Z, drinking culture and all this stuff. Where it's like kids don't want to drink in party anymore 'cause everything ends up on TikTok. Like in 2014, the worst thing that could happen to me if I blacked out at a house party was maybe getting on somebody's private Snapchat story. Like it wasn't gonna have millions of views on bar stool tomorrow morning, if I did like a backflip and like broke a table or something. So now it's like my little brothers are like yeah, I'm like afraid to get, they're friends, they're friends. Well, like film each other drunk and post it on, it's crazy. I'm like, what kind of homies are that? Yeah, so I'm like. - You gotta keep that on Snapchat. - Yeah, so it's almost this like medieval idea of like we're being watched and you know that scares us. And then now I see Gen Z kind of being like, everybody's filming everything all the time. Fuck it, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna film myself 24/7 and put it on Twitch and stream. I'll do lifestyle streaming. Like I'm gonna take control of the surveillance and like live free in it. And it's kind of like the sort of renaissance reappraisal of like the Catholic universal model and like God himself and who we are as humans. Like yes, you're being watched, but you're also your own individual person. It's kind of, yeah, so I don't know. That's what I, that's my prediction for the 2030s. I think it's already starting now, I think 2026. - I really hope you're right. - Yeah. What do you think, besides that, what do you think the main parallel right now between say the height of medieval times to now is? - Oh man, dude, there's a lot. Well, yeah, one would be the use of private militaries. I think for a long time there's like a statement uply on violence where like France goes to war with England or like Nazi Germany goes to war with like the Allied powers or whatever, where it's like the state controls that their army, their own army against each other. And then now it's like, you got like, I mean, Blackwater's kind of a dated example where there's a ton of examples in like the conflict in Ukraine right now or like what's going on in the Middle East. And it's like, there are these private mercenary companies being paid under the table, which is exactly how medieval war was fought in the late Middle Ages. Like in the 100 years war, in a lot of cases, it wasn't English guys fighting French guys. It was like German mercenaries fighting Dutch mercenaries and each had been paid off by their side. Yeah. So like that, that's a concept. Another would be like the decline in literacy and like a purely visual culture. Medieval people for much of the Middle Ages like only were able to absorb ideas through like murals on the wall or walking into a cathedral stained glass. Like ideas were explained visually or acted out to you in the village square. Is that fair to say that already existed before them though 'cause we still didn't have the printing press? Still didn't have the printing press, but it's been said that there was a, like I was, I believe it was also Norman Cantor who I mentioned earlier, but he was trying to like break down the statistics of like literacy in the late Roman Empire versus the dark ages. And just that education and general literacy, I think through some of the archaeology that's survived of like public notices. And it's like, okay, this suggests that at least a decent amount of people walking through the town square in Rome would be able to read this whereas in the Middle Ages it takes a while to get there. But for sure, definitely still a very visual culture. But the Middle Ages takes it to a new extreme and I think the way that it is now like we're purely a visual culture, everythings. And I do actually kind of wonder with the, with like AI generated images if we'll turn away from that or if that'll be something that, you know, it has to get worse before it gets better. But it's like if you, if you're only relying on what you see then it kind of becomes, if you're not engaging with the deeper ideas behind it, it becomes a little bit difficult. - Or some effort. - Yeah. But I do, you know, I don't know if this is like the happy Ludite that should exist in all of us talking or if this is actually how it is. I hope it's how it actually is. I think there's something really inherently known in the human soul about something created by a human. And maybe that'll change and I hope it doesn't. But like you saw when AI made that Drake in the weekend song like a year and a half ago or something and objectively, it's fucking good. And they nailed the style of those guys. But it didn't take off because people knew it was AI. And they're like, nah, but this didn't happen in a studio. This wasn't a human, you know, putting their pitch touch on it. This was a machine making this. And I think it's gonna be really important that all generations, not just the youngest ones, as we get access to these tools and stuff, we still appreciate the beauty and spirit of what humans are capable of. And don't fall trapped to, you know, creating, you know, some bootloader generation of X Machina. - Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there was that example of the song from the last couple of months, the Phoenix Flex and song, "Rubbers." Yeah. The fully, it's fully AI generated. It's this guy who was like a West Coast rapper and then he released this like 80s style like synth pop song, not a nowhere. Totally not his style, didn't sound like his voice, but he released it and from the moment it came out, people are like, this has to be AI and he's like, no, it isn't. And then the big debate in the public sphere, it became like a billboard hit, but the big debate was, did he use AI or not? And then recently it was like conclusively proven that he used to know, I think it was to make it and the song's like fizzled out. So I think it actually kind of speaks to your point that people really aren't interested in. The only way it was able to maintain popularity was when there was still a question of, it might be human made. And then when it was conclusively proven that it is AI, people were like, I'm not gonna fucking lose it on that. Especially younger people. Yeah. Like boomers might, I feel like boomers are more comfortable with AI generated content. Boomers can't really, you know, they don't differentiate between a lot of shit. No disrespect. Shout out my parents. I'm sure they'll watch this, but I was living at home for a couple months earlier this year and like it's shocking. It was especially during the Super Bowl, there was a lot of discussion around this, but like even generally so much AI generated imagery and commercials. Now like car commercials have AI, there's one with Dana White and it's depicting scenes from American history of like Washington crossing the Delaware and all these things and they're all very visibly AI. And I remember I was watching one of those ads and my parents were like, you can, you recognize it. This is AI right? And they're like, no. I was like, but I think the broader question was like, and even if it is so what? Whereas like my 22 year old brothers would be like, I'm not watching fucking. Like that movie young Washington came out like a month ago and it had a bunch of AI generated scenes. That was the, oh wait, that movie did too. Yeah, I had a bunch of AI generated stuff. And so like, I'm a history guy. I like history so I was thinking about going to see it and then when I read that, I'm like, no fuck. Yeah, look, if you want to make it like, my friend Will Brown does a lot of ancient history stuff and will make in his voice over documentaries on YouTube, the scenes come alive with AI, that's where it's a good tool to do that. But if you're making actual storytelling features that are supposed to be billed as art, which is not what he's doing. He's doing, I'm documenting history and explaining it to you. Like you have to have some level of, I don't know, a conscience there and be like, and also like the market's gonna speak. People are gonna be like, fuck this. I really believe that. Like the boomers, maybe eventually they'll figure it out but like they're also on their way out. The younger generations and the ones who are adopting this are gonna be the ones that set the standard for the next generations. Well, a question I had because obviously like, I'm in the history content creation space and we were watching with the evolution of one in AI reconstruction. Yeah, deep finally found that video too. I should have had that before 'cause I knew this would come up, but this was the one. Well, this is like, yeah, this is obviously like machine generated footage from certain sources, but how much over the next few years it's this gonna like color our visualization of history and our understanding of history, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. 'Cause it's like, okay, now this is what it looked like. But this is just-- Like these people a quick little image of this, Steve. We don't need volume on it. But yeah, this kind of thing is cool, but it's also like, I don't know who made this and you wanna make sure it's kinda right. Like you're saying. It would be a good game honestly. Yeah, it does look like a really cool video game. It's basically shot in like first person call of duty, maybe turn it on 2.0 so we can see a little faster. But this is what I was talking about. You see this is like the year 44. He's got a spear and he's running into these, these huts, if you're listening, not watching. And suddenly then the year's 46 and now they're tense. And you start to see what it would look like inside there and then he comes out and now you see Roman London because this is after they conquered it and now they're constructing actual like barn type buildings and stuff. I don't know, stuff like this is pretty cool. This is a good use case. But if Hollywood started using this to make content without people and I'd be like, fuck that, you know? Yeah, I think it's, well, 'cause obviously like AI, it can't at least as far as I understand, create something totally new and has to draw on certain existing sources. I don't know what like the biases are and what sources that it draws from. But I just wonder how that influences like the way it's portraying. You know what I mean, like what we were talking about earlier, like people being like, oh, the middle ages are always depicted as drab and gray. Like if it's pulling from existing medieval movies, it would depict them that way. Or something, I don't know. I just wonder like how it affects like especially younger people's vision of history. But it is sick. It is pretty sick. And you can also see like rises and falls where things went backwards for a time 'cause nothing ever happens on a straight line. You have down moments, but overall, things rise. And like something like we think of now is like the British Empire was like the largest empire in modern history and everything, I guess maybe until America. But actually no, they were larger 'cause they owned a lot of countries and stuff. It's like it started as a hut somewhere. Yeah. And you're just kind of seeing that develop. It's pretty fucking cool. I like that there's some storytelling here too. Yes. Yeah. like little characters that will run through. These videos are cool, like I'm alright with this. But man, we could talk for a lot longer. There's a lot of shit we didn't get to today. So we're going to have to do a podcast again in the future because we've got like three hours, five minutes, three hours, ten minutes. But dude, your knowledge of this is amazing. Oh yeah, thank you. I had a great time talking about it. And by the way, people can also subscribe to your channel. If we collab this as well, people can write down below. If you just click right there, you'll be able to describe the John's channel. And you do a lot of stuff that we'd have to get into on a future podcast. Like there's a little bit of it today where you're constantly relating the patterns back and forth between the errors like today and back then. Like I saw a video I did recently on like the nights having PTSD, you know, because we talk about that a lot with veterans today. But you just think these guys throw on armor back then and just went into battle, slashed lots of heads and came home and said, "Fuck it, I'm good." Yeah. But like of course they were human too. Right. Back then and that gets ignored. So I love shit like that. But you're doing an amazing job and keep it rolling. Thank you. I appreciate it. All right, everybody else you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. Thank you.