Top Medieval Historian on Demons & Angels, Rome’s Slow Fall & Catholicism’s “Truman Show”

This holiday, all plans, even unlimited, are just $15 a month. A holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song, like All I Want. Right. Okay, we can't afford that. You know what? Forget the music budget. We're going to stick with whatever's in the public domain. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. See terms. 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. My buddy Nico and I, our favorite movie was A Knight'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 wonder why they didn't make a ton more content on this because it's so fascinating. But it's kind of like an ignored part of history in a lot of ways. This thousand, 1100 year stretch, no? Yeah. I mean. You got like Kingdom of Heaven. There was like kind of a revival in the early 2000s. Knight's Tale, Prime, Prime Heath Ledger. I like to use some. Yeah. I like to use clips from that in my videos because the ladies love it. But it seems like now there's a little bit of a comeback. Like there's the werewolf movie, the Robert Eggers movie. And then there's the one with Andrew Garfield. There's one with Andrew Garfield? Yeah. It's coming out like next month. Let's pull it out. 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 because nobody was watching that. Oh, very cool. But yeah. It's a good movie. It's a good movie. 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, you know, talk about how – it's the same thing with the Robert Eggers movie. It's like Willem Dafoe and it's set in the Middle Ages. It's about like 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. Yeah. Why did – this is what I'm confused about. Why it's been marketed this way for so long because the way I understand it, first of all, like I said, you got an over thousand year period right here. That's a long fucking time to call one era. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of generations in that. We can do some math. Yeah. But also, you have the different periods within it all across the world as well where there'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 thousand years since the fall of Rome was the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. Like everything was bad, gray drab. And everything now, Renaissance forward, we're like we're really making art in God's image and 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 is not linear. You know, so. Hey, guys, three quick things. Number one, if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. It's a huge, huge help. Number two, if you'd like to join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes, you can join via the link in my description or in the pinned comment below. And number three, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make content from the show and make money, you can join via the Discord link in my description below. 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 what I'm going to do. This is why a medieval – you wouldn't survive 24 hours in a medieval castle or like why a medieval winter was the worst thing you could possibly imagine. I'm like, it was a thousand years – like people are people. People come up with innovative solutions. And a lot of ways, they were 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. Well, you have struck a vein. Shout out to my boy, Mark Gagnani. He called me up. Yeah, yeah. He's like, yo, you got to talk to fucking John. He's killing it. Channel Medieval Mindset. That's right. Yeah. On YouTube. Yeah. 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? Oh, 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 knights 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 or something. It's like nothing happened in between. Yeah. 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. Do you feel a fan? 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 – It's 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, fuck it. I'm starting a YouTube channel. Yeah. So I was like I'll film it on my phone and see what happens. What were you doing before this? I was working in marketing for years like small – You went from marketing to medieval history. Yeah. Small marketing agencies. 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 then – Here you are. Yeah, here I am. You go from marketing to like I said, history. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's quite a different content. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 you just alluded to when you go through YouTube, everything is like back to the ancient southern Mediterranean type stuff. Mm-hmm. Whether it be – Whether 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, yeah, exactly. But 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 of 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 were like, you know, knocking over all these statues. That's how it was always taught to me. That it 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 in the empire, the movement towards the Eastern Roman Empire is like the real capital and the Western Roman Empire. Yeah. So that's Constantine. He moves everything over to Byzantium in the East in modern day Turkey. And that was kind of the beginning of splitting power between the East and West, which weakened 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. Cause it's, 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, that's what draws a lot of those comparisons, but basically the fall of Rome is like a slow process of decentralization. Um, a lot of 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. Um, 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? Yeah, there were two. There was an initial sacrifice. of Rome in 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 I was uh 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 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 uh savage tribesmen but a lot of these guys had been living within the borders of the Roman Empire for for decades like these groups a lot of them spoke Latin were they considered a part of the Roman Empire yeah by by the time like this first sack of Rome like a lot of the Roman army was made up of these like Germanic mercenaries to like supplement the loss of population and the loss of the army so that was that was also also highly controversial it's kind of the same thing as like an immigration debate we might have today where people are like well what does it mean to be Roman if we're bringing all these guys in and are you know 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 you know mayor or Consul of that area but really the guys running it were the Germanic warlords and so the writing was kind of on the wall by the fifth century and that's 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 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 pull in outsiders to come within and call it Roman there's there's this guy on Twitter who I'm friends with on online there this this dude James Lucas you ever seen his account I don't think so he's great he does 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 thief 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 it should 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 at the leaders actually yeah this is crazy I taught 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 because of our population decline and we're you know the collapse of the uh like what is it called when you have to have a certain amount of kids to like maintain the population and he says it in here yeah I I forget what it is but let me read this real quick and then have you react to it because I think that would be like a good jumping 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 one of if not the most common DMS I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are well today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now also if you'd like to join my Clipping Community for a chance to make money producing content from the show you can do so via the Discord link in my description below and finally you can join my patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the patreon link in my description below as always please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already I really appreciate that also the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below James Lucas said we think the 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 Rome 2 000 years ago the emperor was Augustus this is years before this goes into your theory about it taking hundreds of years as well the emperor was Augustus and by his reign the Roman elite had grown wealthy comfortable and reluctant to marry or raise families men preferred bachelor Hood and affairs to the burden of a wife and children Augustus found it alarming enough to legislate around 18 B.C and again in AD 9 he pushed through the lex julia and the lex papia papaya a sweeping set of laws designed to engineer a baby boom by by decree the measures were direct unmarried and childless couples face 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 liberarum 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 went on having small families anyway the historian Cassius Dio records Augustus 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 its people quote for it is human beings that 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 the pattern is old and eerily familiar a society climbs to the height of its wealth and comfort and at that very peak its people stop having children and no law 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 30 years until London in the 1800s the Roman historian Livy writing as the Republic gave way to the Empire said this was an age the 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 has died from suicide not by murder yeah I mean uh that's usually when especially like a lot of medieval historians usually start like a few hundred years before the beginning of the Middle Ages because it's like you have to kind of understand those waning centuries of of Rome to really understand like the mindset of the Middle Ages and it's that that last quote civilizations die from suicide not by murder yeah it's it's interesting too um there had been a Greek philosopher probably 500 years before this who had you know 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 or something along those lines of uh 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 um I yeah I think it it comes down to because I know Xi Jinping and his 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 right the population is going to keep going and the world will you know yeah explode or something yeah it's crazy now that I mean they're saying the decline started in the early 2000s so I'm like what were we learning feels like a sign yeah it's probably a sigh honestly that's usually the explanation yeah but um from what I understand even Trump when he was running in 2024 was like I'm gonna be the baby boom president like that was one of the things he was like I'm gonna be the fertility president or something like that because 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 here whatever it is where there's too many old people and not enough young people working to support them but uh yeah it turns out it's been a problem throughout history it always does though because the same thing happened in Europe in the wake of the Black Plague like in the in the late Middle Ages tons of people died and then also like people were like shell shocked by what had happened because 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 uh in the end it led to increased bargaining power by the peasantry because there's the crops still need to be harvested and now there's like way fewer of us so of course the nobility the uh the uber rich of the late Middle Ages tried to force all these laws right but it was the same thing where it's 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 yeah whether or not people can have a kid yeah the average American because of how crazy expenses have gotten and you wonder how much of that is baked in as well because you know the people who make the decisions in society that lead to policies that lead to socioeconomic downstream effects are the elites yeah 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 population through other means and I think it's just human nature and I this is just a hot take on 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 his peak the guy just this amazing story came from behind was an underdog 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 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 remember that 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 it'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 suspiciously that suspiciously but that hunger yeah this holiday all plans even unlimited are just 15 a month a holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song like all i want right okay we can afford that you don't forget the music budget we're gonna stick with whatever's in the public domain give it a try at mint mobile.com slash switch upfront payment of 45 for three months 90 for six months or 180 for 12 month plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra new customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy see terms from the studio that brought you wandavision i was an avenger but i'm not a hero anymore the vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy that family wasn't real you sure about that i had a father called vision how is this possible don't miss the two episode premiere of marvel television's vision quest nothing bonds a family together quite like mortal jeopardy now streaming only on disney plus switches and someone else out there someone else is a hungry dog and wants to eat and that's what the visigoths 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 haigler one of the older boxing greats but connor the silk pajamas it's hard to get up at 5 a.m to jog when you're in pajamas and it's still true um god i wish he hadn't taken that floyd fight what could have been with his ufc career if he had kept going defended the belt anyway not not the not the topic but um yeah it's interesting too 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 um and it's it's interesting too i was just re-watching mad men it's you know obviously depicting the optimism of like post-world war ii 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 um 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 um 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 early 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 uh 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 a 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 uh like in in elementary middle school it was like the founding fathers were unassailable 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 manic holiday uh not you know columbus day was columbus day i'm not saying that's right or wrong but that one yeah that one yeah yeah yeah that one we might have to look at yeah yeah yeah but um 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 just a cartoon pilgrims and cartoon native americans shaking your hands yeah yeah that one i stepped up yeah it's a great holiday listen don't let the truth get in the way of a good story yeah yeah yeah but i've uh i read um i mean a lot of like social history has been based on a civilization founding its myth on tragedy or triumph tragedy or trying so was our original founding a great flood was it's 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 they're it shapes your whole culture how you think of yourself do we come from tragedy or triumph um 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 uh but i think we're kind of in the midst of a reframing i think i i had hw brands in here who's one of the greatest american historians to ever live he's written 42 books in 39 years on american history just one of the goats and i loved how he read it and i loved it and i think he's a great historian and i think he's one of the greatest historians in the world and i think he's a great historian in the world and i think he's a great yeah so like right now 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 we 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 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. 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. It doesn't 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 its future. 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 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 we're like they were complete villains oh that's interesting yeah it's it's interesting too i so i live in atlanta and there's a lot of civil war battlefields and i was i just took my little brother to visit the the battlefield at kennesaw mountain and uh we were in the gift shop and there was like an older southern couple discussing you know well these guys in the context of the time you know slavery back then they 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 comment section a lot I think this is something that is generally hurtful to our perception of history and being being able to understand the past they're like how were medieval people able to burn people at the stake for heresy like 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 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, without understanding the social context, like who these people really were and what world they were raised in. So when Rome officially like fell after the hundreds of years, and like now, obviously it was backdated 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 that would be this first hundred years would be the early middle ages which is also what's called the dark ages just a hundred years no the hundreds of years. 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 length of 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 de france in germany by 800 you have the carolingians 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 uh a lot of just advancements in in music like uh 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 mess and you know there's a few hundred more years of darkness but um it depends on which part of europe i mean the one that a lot of like anti-medieval people will point to is anglo-saxon england after the withdraw the Romans, because it was a Roman colony. - Yes. - And then the Romans withdraw, and over the next few decades, century, the angles, the Saxons and the Jutes from 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 german roots in there yeah yeah yeah so yeah shout out germany yeah yeah they uh they love starting massive conflicts they do yeah they never stop yeah we gotta keep an eye on those guys now i feel like we've we've let our foot off the gas yeah a little bit um 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 bath houses you know all these things the bath houses which people sleep on the the city of bath in uh in england still has those old roman bath houses they're beautiful um but basically that was like a hooker den yeah 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 dude 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 39th street no no i mean i'm not that familiar with hoboken but probably not yeah yeah we're at same thing yeah um but yeah so basically and especially the roman education system all that kind of starts to withdraw 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 canter who argues that one of the reasons for the downfall of the roman empire and the transition into 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 because it was like after nicaea basically yeah 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 so they were getting 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 into politics sent them into the church and the church became the politics they even took over the organization like the way 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 like a position of leadership like an archbishop or something like that so you could 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 12 15 that we would think of as the sacrament of marriage was like established in the catholic church and that's kind of like an aside but for like the first thousand years of christianity especially in europe like peasant you didn't get married in like a church it was like a common law what would we call common law marriage if you lived with a woman and had children with her you were married in the eyes of the church because there wasn't like enough priests to go around to every small village so you didn't even have to go to city hall or something no no no no it was like everybody knows yeah we live together like we've known each other since we were five like everybody knows we're a couple oh that's yeah 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 confession once a year and you have to you know that's how you start you start to pull in natural human mammalian type relationships towards some sort of control at a state level in this case the church yeah yeah and then it i mean this is yeah this is this is the early 13th century and this is like the medieval church as it's become known in the popular imagination because 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 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 um so it took quite a while of like political maneuvering for that to sort of become a reality it isn't until you know like the mid like 11th century that really starts to come around but wow so all those years because that's a lot of years too yeah i think about this with history all the time i've said this to so many guys like you who just cover like really cool far away time periods of history it's like when we think of the past decade decade we think of every single detail because we're living in it yeah but then think about the years where like 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 yeah then the farther 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 yeah through two or three years you're moving like this yeah through 200 years like it's like it's five seconds yeah it's it's interesting too because we think i mean at least the way we conceptualize like decades in popular culture is like the 70s disco 80s big hair and cocaine 90s i don't know what he looks like limp biscuit i don't know whatever it is but um uh it's it's interesting to think like did people a thousand years ago where like the 10 60s and the 10 70s and the 1080s did they have their own cultural identity and so that's always been something i've been interested in like were the lives of your parents distinctively different from your lives from a cultural point of view or a cultural point of view or a cultural point of view 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 as 1400 but there are changes in style and fashion that are really interesting pointy shoes are really popular for a while bright colors um you know changes in uh 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 yeah affected the volume of information we can even get yeah from those time periods to say what might have differentiated say the year 1000 from even the year 1100 yeah whereas the other part of it is think about how fast how the internet and social media has changed cultural trends now you know some girl in france can get on the latest fashion trend that you know 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 a town over that took 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 uh 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 um i i did a video on this that that's basically going back to like the medieval village way of like your algorithm is your village people outside your village wouldn't know your local town drunk they wouldn't know your your local songs that they play the tavern like you 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 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 hey guys if you haven't already subscribed please hit that subscribe button it's a huge huge help thank you so that's kind of how some of these ideas start to spread and then it's interesting too um a lot of what we know culturally because again something else i see in my own comment section is like well isn't this just what rich people wrote down because we don't have what a peasant wrote because he couldn't write 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 because 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 and write down and how pissed they were at the pants guys 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 and see what's going on in the town backtrack from that what's like how mad are the monks right now that's where society is going aesthetically and the same it's 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 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 no that's uh that's that's the end of the byzantines yeah in 1453 they sack uh yeah so you have the byzantines you have the eastern holy roman empire i'm probably butchering some right now what basically what does 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 astrogoths the visigoths you have the franks that's where charlemagne comes from you have the anglo-saxons but you also still have the native brightons 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 um they're like the the major kind of power in western europe they they control a lot of modern-day france and germany and uh 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 why what was the deal with this alliance and really at least in my opinion the the the 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 enemies who are always bothering him, the Lombards. So 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. But the state gave them that, like the ability for him to claim Charlemagne as the leader, you're giving a sense of power publicly to the church. Well, so 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? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And he had approved of 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 a historical debate of whether or not Charlemagne was surprised. That's the meme. How surprised was Charlemagne when he got that crown on his head? But I mean, 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. Right. You know what? The music is busy. See terms. From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming only on Disney+. No, 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 adopting 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. 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. These things that seem, in retrospect, how big of a deal is that? Where people were willing to fight to the death for these issues. So a lot of them had converted to Aryan Christianity, mostly because the Aryan missionaries had been more successful, the Catholic missionaries in the outer outskirts of the Roman world. And then over time, the writing became on the wall, basically, that the Catholic church in Rome was going to be the dominant. Christian force. So over time, all those Aryans converted to Catholicism. But it was a slow process. But in Western Europe, by the year approximately 1,000 is usually what's given, fully Christianized. It would take a lot longer in Eastern Europe, in Poland, in Lithuania. The Teutonic Knights had to go on crusade there and basically slaughter people for a few hundred years to get them to convert. And even now, in places like Romania, it's still gypsy. It's not fully what we'd recognize as Christianity. It's gypsy, pagan blend Christianity. A couple hundred years they're there. Yeah. And it's seen as a holy, Christianizing mission. And they kind of set up their own state there. It kind of becomes a whole satellite of the Holy Roman Empire. What do you think drove things like that? Is it just power? It's interesting. And I feel like the Crusades are easily the most controversial. Because it was the Northern Crusade. It was one of the Crusades that was. We think of the Crusades to Jerusalem when we think of the word Crusades, but there were Crusades happening everywhere. All over. There was Reconquista in Spain. It became a cultural movement. When did they start? 1095 is when the first is launched. And then over the next few hundred years, 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. Later on in France, it's used to attack heretics, the Albigensians 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. I thought we were doing this against Muslims. Now we've. Christians have attacked a Christian city in the Fourth Crusade, Constantinople, and sacked it horribly. It was one of the most horrific events of the Middle Ages. What year was that again? That was 1204. So this is, what, 110 years after the First Crusade, which started very nobly. And then by then, it's like. It's only been 100 years, which now seems like a lot of time, but 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 a power structure to have their own, I guess, military abilities. A lot of this is where the lore of the Knights Templar comes in. But how did it work? Who were all the troops involved being sent to all these places? And were they on contract as 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 a speaking tour of all the courts of Western Europe and being like, you guys need to send your military. The French need to send, yeah. 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 II. 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 they're all like, Jerusalem's a thousand miles away. This poses no financial interest for us. But all these unlanded. Maybe you're the second or third son of a king, and 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 these are earthly powers that are sending their armies across. And it's interesting too, regular people are getting swept up in this. 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 this guy, Peter the Hermit. And so there's also a people's crusade led by this guy, 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 is immediately butchered. They're all butchered by the Saracens immediately. And then they return home. Like, who's left returns home? Peter, of course, survives. All 10 of them. Yeah, yeah. So that was. He was like, no, not like that, fam. Hold the line. But they got there first. They got there before any of the actual Christian armies got there, these like 10,000. And they thought we're protected by God. So it's. It's interesting. God, they were able to sell that? Yeah. But the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller 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 rout all the way to Jerusalem and everybody'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 was 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 the Holy Land. This is where Jesus died. So it's like a huge 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 through Byzantium, through Turkey and into the Middle East. There's robbers, there's 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 going to do. And then they're going to try and kill them. And they're doing so much because the church is getting money from these pilgrimages that they give them special powers basically. And they're like, you're exempt from local laws. And that leads to a lot of problems that eventually causes the downfall of 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 pre-printing press, I would imagine that there's a lot of people who 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 of 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, pal. That's so interesting, the power of that. Yeah. That's a question I've asked myself a lot, specifically about the people's crusade. Because for the knights, the barons, the princes, there was like financial incentive for them. They could carve up the holy land amongst themselves and it was 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. Well, I guess now that I say that out loud, maybe there's reason for that. Maybe they're like perfect excuse to ditch the wife and kids. Yeah, yeah. But no, it's interesting. Yeah, the power of the spoken word in in the middle ages, especially like, uh, 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 weeping and like ripping their clothes people were very emotional in the middle ages i i wonder if it's like um you know exposure to popular culture or something that's like numbed us a little bit in the way that we don't have the same emotional reaction but one of the things like key medievalists will 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 in 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 would have been familiar with like the biblical stories of jesus in 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 with like the significance of jerusalem and why we need to take it back from the sarasota person 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 he 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 maybe shares things in common with the one of the main theses is that it has an appeal to like the average person it's saying like in jesus's kingdom upside down kingdom there's no rich there's no poor it's you know about your morality and the like the bible it speaks to the lowest classes of 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 fucking great i know yeah it's like this is this is awesome for us the regular people love it um and then from 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 wouldn't like you'd go to a catholic festival and it would feel like some ancient pagan ritual i remember i did a summer in the in the small village in spain and it was like they had like uh they were like burning things and like uh 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 yeah this is better 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 italian food right yeah greek food 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 your you know viking warlord will be baptized in the river and everybody can see it then we don't care like if you want to why did so many kings i mean we touched on it with charlemagne and like the pope kind of taking 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 want to get it like if you're the saxons and you want to get in good with the franks who are all christian it's probably going to behoove you to to convert to christianity or you know uh 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 trees 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 because 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 two thousand years ago like well two thousand years now a thousand years ago then you know this really happened moses was a real guy this 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 might 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 and 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 of christianity jesus christ carpenter hung out with poor people wore regular clothes you know in a time where you would have ridden around on a white horse in golden armor to show your significance he didn't do any of that 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 in particularly in hearing how it's like oh that's speaking to us no matter what level of 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 it's interesting too the only physical description given of jesus in the new testament is that you wouldn't pick him 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 the guy begging on the 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 by the royalty was was charity charity was a big deal right because this is still kind of wrapped up in the theology of like there's a checkbox of things you do to enter heaven people will get mad maybe 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 your guys yeah exactly exactly yeah it's wild now what is this is pre-obviously the rise of like the british monarchy when we're talking in 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 starting 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 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 alfred the great in the 800s is thought of as like the guy who kind of came out with this vision of like england is a unified place um but basically before that it's a couple different like warring sections uh owned by different sort of anglo-saxon warlords um but they've they've they adopt christianity over time um 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 um i mean anglo-saxon england is always depicted as like these evil tribesmen but um by the end of the anglo-saxon period in 1066 they're actually fairly advanced and he's kind of alfred the great's kind of a national hero isn't that when the uh 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 ends 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's a lot of that yeah yeah so they were the northmen the normans that got like bastardized and then they crossed 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 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 loved to go to confession um and so apparently william the conqueror says that edward promised it to me on his deathbed he told me that the country yeah yeah nobody was there but then there's other guys that are saying like harold godwinson is like the next descendant who was supposed to get it he promised me he's got the pillow yeah yeah yeah he told me yeah i gotta go take that all right gotcha so he successfully took it in 1066 and uh that was i mean you could all 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 that it's on the right side too right next one yeah i feel yeah the actual page though 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 other one i've heard that's great yeah he's the king it's like centered around the waning years of his rule and his kind of uniting of oh that's interesting yeah cia pedia 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 8 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 in turn before him so he was the fourth brother and wow under alfred's rule considerable administrative and military responsibility to the king of england and the king of england and the king of england and the reforms were introduced prompting lasting change in england after ascending the throne alfred spent several years fighting viking invasions he won a decisive victory at the battle of eddington in 878 and made an agreement with the vikings dividing england between anglo-saxon territory and the viking ruled donalol which consisted of scandinavian york the northeast midlands and east anglia do we know like if you did a dna test on like i don't know the high classes of london society how much is going to show viking and how much 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 like english like that was part of like the data set and it was found that a lot of uh there was a lot of viking intermixing and there's also constantly like metal detectorists 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's that was the beginning of anglo-saxon culture and like kind of unified culture but then the vikings intermixed intermarried ruled england for stretches of time so it was kind of a melting pot but yeah a lot of viking dna scandinavian dna in the modern english makeup thank you guys for checking out this clip if you haven't already subscribed please subscribe and hit the like button on this video it is a huge huge help and if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode that link is in the description below or right here and finally you can follow me on instagram and x by using the links in my description below