Constantinople Fell in 1453, But These Men Refused to Bow

A city that called itself Rome is surrounded, outnumbered, and running out of time. We bring on Ryan Grant to walk us through the fall of Constantinople in 1453, from the long fuse of Byzantine decline to the moment Mehmed II finally gets his prize. You’ll hear why Constantinople mattered so much to the Ottoman Empire, why Europe can’t get its act together, and how the Council of Florence and the attempted union with Rome becomes a pressure point inside the city when every decision is political and personal.

Then we get into the siege warfare that makes this story feel modern: the Theodosian Walls under artillery fire, Orban’s massive cannon, trenching and mining, desperate sorties, and the naval chess match around the Golden Horn. We talk about the chain across the harbor, the relief ships that slip through when the wind shifts, and the move that still sounds unreal the Ottoman fleet getting hauled over land to bypass the blockade. At the center is Giovanni Giustiniani holding the defense together and Constantine XI choosing to die with his people instead of becoming a refugee emperor.

After the walls fall, the aftermath matters as much as the battle. We follow how Ottoman rule reshapes church politics, why “better the turban than the tiara” becomes a tragic slogan, and how the shockwaves roll straight into the Battle of Belgrade with John Hunyadi and St John Capistrano. We even detour into Vlad the Impaler, medieval weapons, Greek fire, and the uncomfortable reality that history is often held together by men willing to do hard things when institutions fail.

If you’re into Byzantine history, Ottoman military strategy, medieval warfare, and the religious politics that shaped Europe, this one is for you. Subscribe, share it with a friend who loves history, and leave us a review with your take: what actually doomed Constantinople, the cannons or the divisions?

Transcript

Surprise Opening And Setup

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Surprise.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Terrifying.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

Should have told me to bring that pipe to smoke.

Ryan Grant’s Background And Work

SPEAKER_01 0:49

That's awesome. Well, uh, welcome everyone. And as you can tell, uh Anthony is gone tonight. We are sede abate, as they like to say for tonight, which means other people will get a talk, but hopefully, hopefully not me. So uh to help with that, we have uh uh Ryan Grant on to walk us through the fall of Constantinople as well as some of the aftermath, and then we have Adrian here who does Guns and Rosaries with me to be uh Southern Anthony for the night. So um, for anyone who may or may not know uh Ryan, uh Ryan, why don't you uh give us a quick quick overview of yourself, sir?

SPEAKER_03 1:33

Okay, I am uh one of those guys that should be plumber and electrician or doing something you know natural, but every guidance counselor said, No, go to college, you need to go to college, and you you know that that you won't have a job if you don't go to college. And so I took their advice stupidly, went to college and uh went to Stubenville. I converted when I was 16, although it wasn't like any great massive conversion, it was um anyway, been like a Stubenville conference. Uh well we did that too, but no, I actually went to the university for four years, and I had been a Jew, and then we went back to the Episcopal Church when I was 13, and then my mother was watching Mother Angelica. She said, Oh, I got we, you know, I gotta go back to the Catholic Church because she had been, then she'd left. So we uh go to the Catholic Church. I'm like, didn't really know much about it, said okay, and then gradually, actually, I think it was that one of those Steubenville conferences. I just got I just wanted to learn more about the faith, didn't really know why. Didn't uh you know, just God was moving me, prodding me along a little bit here, a little bit there, and you know, there it was. And then uh Stevenville ended up becoming uh tread, became uh the insufferable young tread, which is gotta tell everyone about how great the traditional mass is, and finally everyone's just go away already. Fine, yeah, yeah, it's cool. Go go and that sort of thing. Um really got interested in in uh history, theology, uh, discerned a call of the priesthood for a while, so I was really bulking up in theology and philosophy. And but uh afterward, I just went to gravitated to history, art history, um, military history, especially is my kind of my nerddom, uh, along with dumb things that nobody cares about, like Star Trek and things like that. So um anyway, I I run a small publishing company and I translate books from Latin. Thank you. And um yeah, just try to try to do something that not everyone else is doing. I don't do books on Vatican II for or against, I don't do books on trad stuff specifically. I just try to get the tradition out. So here's the you know, Robert Bellerman. Alphonse is the word they wrote uh translating it so we can read it. Um, I you know, I get books on history on the Reformation, Reformation period, early modern history is kind of my historical wheelhouse, so to speak. And uh I also love guns and not a terrible expert, but um, you know, I enjoy uh shooting them and maintaining and learning more about what I got.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

I have a question, Ryan. Yeah, do you subscribe to the theory and the opinion that Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek series? That's hard.

SPEAKER_03 4:16

It's my favorite personally. I love it. I love the original series too, but it's it's really hard to quantify because their genre, their time period, and so different. Um, and I love next gen, but I really have to say deep space nine is hands down the best thing because they they take where the canon is in Star Trek with this semi like past the communist omega point and stuff like okay, well, we've eliminated money because we can replicate it, therefore it's not scarce, therefore nobody needs it. What does humanity look like? And so now federation is paradise, everyone's given a service, service on starships, and the stuff. What about when things go bad? What about things get difficult and the nitty-gritty? And of course, you couldn't make that show today because you have like the Ferengi teaching Jake Sisko about enlightened self-interest in capitalism, and you can brief. Um, you know, but it was great because it and it challenged notions all of Star Trek, like all good science fiction, is uh basically a morality play. So uh it's a morality play, basically, it's less to do with aliens and science. I mean, it has to do with sci-fi, obviously, and imagining what the future would look like, but it's also about us. You know, certain other like complicated topics, and they never really hit it on the nose. Instead, it's you hears this conflict, you see how they're dealing with it, and then it leaves you, the viewer, to kind of and you might not agree with the main characters and how they did something, and from the standpoint of the show, it's thinking about it. That's what made it all so interesting. But challenging your assumptions, challenging like what would you do? These trolley car experimented things where Cisco's gotta get the Romulans on board to fight these aliens from another quadrant of the galaxy if you haven't watched it, and so you've gotta deal with shady go-betweens for a whole bunch of different stuff, and they end up doing stuff, and and then which he doesn't sanction, but he has to live with the consequences of it. People die, and finally he says, You know what? I'm not even gonna know if it's right or wrong. I just know I'm glad we did it because because guess what? The Rod Mulans are on our alliance now, so it's a kind of moral reasoning you're left to grab, and they're not telling you this is good, and this goes not fine with it actually, but you have to engage with that, think about it. And you get another one where they're on a planet, they found out that this this weird temporal thing that 200 years in the past, and all the people they met are their children because when they try to leave that the ship you know crashed and they had to survive there. So if they go back to normal time and don't stay there, all these people are gonna die. And the episodes gradually everyone coming with the moral complications of that, and everyone agreeing, okay, we can't let make these people just disappear when the timeline corrects. We need to make sure their existence continues, it's the right thing to do. One of the characters, of course, you know, does I'm not gonna spoil it if you haven't seen it. What is it? Uh um, what's the title of the episode? It's not uh, I can't remember. I gotta let I'm not so much a Star Trek nerd, I know every episode by title and number and everything. But anyway, so one of the characters undoes all this because he's in love with one of the characters who dies there. You can't accept it. So they go back to normal time. All the people blip out of existence, and you feel the weight, what everyone else feels that all these people are lost. That's why I love Star Trek, you know, those kind of dilemmas that you have to deal with. So I and I think DS9 did it a lot better, they treated religion a lot better, religious issues, whereas functionally, everyone in the Federation is like an atheist. I guess we move past religion, and the Orville does a lot of that too. If you ever saw the Orville, oh yeah, that's just the state really demeaning to religion in the Orville. DS9 is actually really respectful of it because one of the main protagonists, the Pajorians, are an incredibly religious people.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Yeah. I I remember growing up watching Deep Space Nine with my dad, and we you know, he watched The Next Generation for you know first, and then Deep Space Nine came out. Um I just remember it being because I was in my teens, you know, I was like, you know, 12 or 18 or whatever when you know when I was watching it. I remember the subject matter being so much deeper than a lot of other shows that are at the time. And I so now I have this nostalgic remembrance of it. Um then I tried to watch like Voyager and like the other ones afterwards. I'm like yeah, Voyager. So Voyager seems like uh like a space uh Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, more than anything.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

It's got a brilliant concept behind its original thing, you know, that the perfect iteration of the original idea, strange man in a strange land. What's stranger than the complete opposite end of the galaxy, 15 years away from Federation Space at Max Warp? And but they don't deal with the consequences that then they turn in to make it in TNG, and it was just like yeah, uh I like Janeway's captain, I like the characters, but you have like these dissidents that now have to be become part of the crew, they never really deal with that. They just kind of I'm not sure what happened with the writers. We're like, Oh, let's just have everyone getting along. Oh, wait, let's bring up the monkey thing again. Okay, let's make a mad again, let's let's bring back together work together again. And it I don't know, there were good episodes in it, there were off episodes in it.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Is it it was what it was, so I may have made a mistake by having you two on the same show together. I'm starting to realize this.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

She just made it a guest stream, a start track stream. At least it's not about mash. We didn't have like a 20-minute diatron about mash.

Sponsor Reads And Rosary Talk

SPEAKER_01 9:43

That's a good point. Um, okay, before we get into the actual topic, since since you guys are having your nicotine, I should probably talk about our sponsored nicotine product here. Hold on, I gotta pull up the script from the FDA that we have to use. Um, but anyways, um I don't like doing this. Anthony usually does this. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

What? You'll do it. Go for it. I need the uh is there a script I have to read?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

I'll I'll say the part that we have to say. You just say whatever you want to about knick knack.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

Okay. So knick knack. I got onto somebody because they're uh enjoying something on their lousages, but um knicknack is a uh is a Catholic nicotine product. Uh and for such so I used to use I used to use out because I I didn't like Zen because I don't want a suppository, but um I used out for a while, and so then I I tried uh Dicknacks. Um I try the lemon is by far been my favorite. Uh I'm doing the peppermint right now, but they're phenomenal. Um, and I don't I I like that I don't have like a little spit line all over the place I have to worry about. Uh so I highly recommend them as well.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

So head over to nicknicknack.com, use code AB25% for 25% off your first order. And uh uh we are required to say that this product contains nicotine, and nicotine is an addictive chemical. So if you're gonna be addicted to it, you might as well be addicted to the Catholic version of nicotine. Um as well as cigars and pipes, too, obviously. But and then um our next and last monster for the night is one of it has been one of our favorites, and that's black monk rosaries. Um, I bought my first black monk rosary six years ago during the pandemic, ended up give giving that one away. We since bought four more in our household, and I got like this cool Memento Mori one, and then they have the new line of black metal rosaries too, but they are you could use it as a physical weapon if you wanted to. It weighs about three pounds, and they are indestructible. So head over to blackmithrosaries.com.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

I have the uh the rugged rosaries, you know, the paracord and everything. Yeah, my my issue with them. I love my rosary, like don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anything about rugged rosary, but the beads, I hate that they're plastic. I hate it. Yeah, the our father beads are metal, but the the the lava's are all plat, and I hate that. Because if I did need to beat somebody to death with it, like it's gonna break my rosary, and I don't want that to happen.

SPEAKER_03 12:32

Uh I just have a wooden one on rope made by nuns, but um, I'm really interested in those black monk rosaries. I think I'm gonna pick one up.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

I I do highly recommend it. My kids break rosaries all the time. Like even the the World War I replica ones that um what's his name? The what's the priest's name? Paul Heilman does. They're great, but man, yeah, they break super. In fact, I've got one for my boy. Um, it's a gold-plated one. He won it at a Troops of St. George thing we did. Um, and it and the the corpus from the crucifix broke off, and I had to gorilla glue the thing back on. But you know, those paracord rosaries, you really that's really what you to be honest with you. If you're gonna have rosy as a man, you need something that's not gonna break. So it either needs to be 550 cord or it needs to be like 12 gauge wire, right? Especially with boys around the house. I've got one boy and three girls, my girls still break them all the time, too. Um, but yeah, they're black months make some good rosaries. Maybe I'll get one one day. Like given to you. Give me like a 50% discount or something, man.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Okay, I'll see what I can do. I'll see what I can do. Okay, so I think we've taken care of all of our um, let's see, we've done ad reads, we've done introductions, we've done Star Trek. So uh, Ryan, are we ready to get into the subject?

SPEAKER_03 13:58

We are ready. Make it so.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

This is all you're the captain here now, bud.

SPEAKER_03 14:04

That's right. Uh, Anthony's uh being part of the proletariat. He's got his uh Mamdani bucks to take off and go for vacation.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Um he he's he's got a funny story uh for us Tuesday, everyone. Uh he he won't tell me the whole thing, so I don't spoil it, but he did tell me that somehow while he was at the airport, he set off the fire alarm for the whole airport. Yep. He won't say how he's gonna tell that on Tuesday.

Why Constantinople Mattered So Much

Council Of Florence And Union Politics

Mehmed II And The Ottoman War Machine

Walls Cannons And Orban’s Basilisk

SPEAKER_03 14:37

My goodness. All right, so on uh 6th April of uh 1453, the the Turks roll up into Constantinople, and uh and there's a young emperor, Mehmed II, he's only about 20, and he is ready to make his mark and and to show that he's fit to be the sultan by taking the one thing that that Islam has been coveting since its foundation practically, is the seizure of Constantinople. So there's a little bit of background. So Constantinople is part of what modern historians call the Byzantine Empire. They call themselves Romans because really they are Romans, they're the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages, throughout uh pretty much all that entire you know time. And so, with all the politics, the complications, the uh the history of of later Roman politics just plagued that the city throughout that thousand years. But the um they're in dire straits because starting in really, I mean, the Arab conquests originally in the seventh century, and then the the battle of Manzikert, where they they lose a good portion of their army, and the the emperor's betrayed by his by uh pretender. So he gets captured and ransomed, but uh then he's gotten rid disposed of when he tries to go back and get the ransom paid. They're in a bad spot, and the Turks have just encroached further and further. Well, that you know, the crusades holds them up for for a while, but then after the crusades, you have two things. One, you have the fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the Latin Crusade, and that was partly due to internal Byzantine politics. There's a pretender on the throne, there's Venetian politics. That'd be another episode to talk about 1204 because it's uh you know an endless subject to get into. But um eventually the Romans themselves they get control of the city again. The Paleologus family, my um, you know, the Emperor Michael Paleologus, they try, you know, to have union with the Pope. One of the sticking points is the people politics, because the you know, the French, the Angevins, they have control of various lands in Greece, they don't want to give them up, even though they belong properly to the emperor in Constantinople. So union kind of fails, and and there's like a policy, they end up getting, you know, hey, whenever you need something from the West, just profane union, and then you know, but now it's getting serious, you know, with the Turks. You have Murad II, father of Mechmed, and he it not only you know makes conquest over in Serbia and Bulgaria on the other side of Constantinople, on the European side, he's threatening the city directly. So they start asking all their allies, and and the Pope invites them to come to a council for reunion, because by effecting reunion, they'll have a crusade, they'll bring all kinds of you know forces in to defend Constantinople and whatnot. So the the East they get interested to say, okay, so they send theologians over, and and and the ground has been prepared over there too. You have a guy in the 1300s named Demetrius Kaidonis, and he founds a school of Byzantine Thomism, where he uh he was originally trained as a court uh court official, he was trained in Latin, but he really likes the Latin and he gets into reading Cicero and whatever, and so then he start tries to learn more about the West in order to deal with their ambassadors, and so he's reading St. Thomas Aquinas on the question of uh like the Filioque and other things. He's like, huh. Well, what do our theologians have to say to these arguments? So he starts kind of giving these arguments, he's getting like de asked kind of stuff. There's only like one or two people he will give real theological things, and he's sifting it over, he's thinking about it. He could get some people on his site, like Nilas Cabasius, one of the really great um theologians in the Orthodox Church of that time, 1300s. He tells Kaidonus, so this is Caidonius' testimony, Demetrius Caidonis. He says that Cabasias agreed with him that you know on a lot of these questions, but was afraid to say it for the opprobrium of the people. Right? There's natural national prejudice that comes in. The Greeks just think they're better than any of the Latins at this point, because of the history, the lineage, and so many things. And so, you know, but they don't really have a good knowledge about a lot of the West. And then, you know, it comes to what you know, he he doesn't really make the inroads that he thinks he does, but the next generation, they've got people like Cardinal Biss, future Cardinal Basarian, uh Gennadius Scalarius. You've got all these different figures that are Byzantine Thomas, they're interested in St. Thomas, and they're move. Hey, we need union with the Latins. And so the Emperor John VIII, he thinks that all right, now is the time. So he leaves one of his sons, Constantine, so who will later become Constantine XI, to kind of manage the city. He, you know, goes with his delegation of bishops and theologians, they go to Italy and they end up in uh Florence, where you have the Council of Florence, which is called specifically for that reunion. Now, what he wants, John VIII wants military aid, he wants it now. And you know, the Pope at the time something, well, Nicholas V, you've gotta, or is it the one before Nicholas V. Um, you've gotta work out the theological things first, then we'll give all the promised date. So they do, and it takes a painfully long time working out very complicated distinctions. You have some people like Mark of Ephesus totally against the whole thing. Um, it'd be great to, you know, there's another thing you could do a whole show on is the Council of Ephesus, right? But I'm sorry, the Council of Uh Florence. And so, but either way, eventually union is is struck, they they work out difficulties in a lot of these complicated questions. Some people completely stick with it, like Bessarian. He ends up uh becoming part of the papal court, he ends up becoming a cardinal, you know, he's 100% committed to to reunion. But then you have other people like Inadius Calarius, who switched a lot of them, they they kind of renege on their agreement to be in union. So this becomes a problem when the the Turks uh they set up a base in uh Romelli, which straddles you know some of the the Bosphorus coming out of Constantinople. And it's you know, they're able to basically blow up any ship that's going through there. So that that's the beginning warning uh of okay, this is this is coming down pretty soon. So Pope tells him you need to affect the union because he's been holding off, right? John VIII dies, his son Constantine becomes the emperor, and he's holding off on declaring union because there's a large anti-union party in Constantinople. They do not want union, and and that's where the the phrase, like I think it's Ganadius Calarius who declares, you know, better the the turban than the tiara, right? And it's a strong party, and he's and he's worried the emperor's worried about this, but he knows he's he's not going to get any help from the West unless he does. So finally he has um he invites the the Pope's legate Cardinal Isidore to come in, they declare union in Augia Sophia. They actually see a mass in Augia Sophia. So the anti-union party, they they avoid the church, they won't go into the church like it's been desecrated because uh the the Western mass has been set in there, they don't even want to go in. And it like it's amazing the the politics and how bad it is. And you got to realize too that there is you know a good period, 800 years or so, of anti Western feeling that that is kind of like a tradition now that the Greeks kind of rest upon. And you have irrespective of things they did, like when they you know they um facted the Venouese trade, uh the the Venetian and Genoese uh. Trading city of Para, completely sacked and uh blinded or murdered a lot of the Latin Christians there. Or you can look it up, the massacre of the Latins. The um they kind of forget about that and they just worry about 1204 when they get revenge for it, really. So that that's it's in their collective psyche, the Latin kingdom of uh Romania as it was called, not actual country of Romania, the Latin control of Constantinople and its environs. They remember that and they're not happy about that. And so all that plays in with the feeling that their leaders have betrayed the faith, that they they they've entered into uh you know heretical dealings with the the Pope of Rome, and that's why they they their chant comes better the turban than the tiara. But when when Isidore proclaims union, then you know help starts coming. And and we'll get Cardinal Isdor himself had brought in uh you know a few hundred men, munitions, money. The uh there's others coming, and we'll get to them in a minute. On the Turkish side, so the Ottoman Turks, um, you know, the Turks have been in the peninsula since you know um in Anatolia and all these places since about the year 1000 or so, and in increasing numbers, and they had overrun what we you know we think what used to be purely Roman territory, all of what's now Turkey, Nicaea, all these places, and and they were in their control. So they had a lot of campaigns under Murad II, who is the father of the current Sultan Mechmed, and those failed because of people like John Hinyadi, we'll talk about him, uh, other major figures that had defeated them in Serbia. So they kind of held to the territory they had, Bulgaria. And actually, I've got a map um in the picture there. Yep, that's it. So they um anyway, so the purple are are the Roman holdings at this point, so it's just Constantinople and a bit of its environs, and the lower Greek peninsula. The Ottomans have, of course, Anatolia and then the Bulgarian and Macedonian side on the European side. It's like pushing in. There's there's vassal states. They have uh they're trying to create vassal states in Romania, which at the time collectively a couple of countries now, but Wallachia, it's parts of Hungary, Romania, and and so on and so forth. They're just pushing themselves and getting, you know, and of course, most of Europe is totally oblivious to the threat of the Ottoman Empire. The the French and the English are fighting the 100 years' war. Italy, you know, there's constant warfare in Italy. The the Italian trading states have um, they're not terribly worried about Christian unity or repelling the Turk. They're more worried about what kind of trade contracts they can get with the Turks in order to increase their profits. Uh, you know, the Germans have their own problems. You have the Hussites, you have all these different uh, you know, problems at in flashpoints in Europe itself. So no one's really there, there's a lot of humanists like, hey, we got to defend Constantinople. You know, they they they reach back to antiquity, the city of Constantine. And then there's a lot of people like, uh, yeah, but you know, I got to go fight my neighbor over in the other village. There's just not, it's not a thing that's getting Europe together. The Pope had actually declared a crusade when uh after Florence, when you know the East had come back into Union, and it doesn't actually amount to very much. They end up fighting the Turks at Varna, and uh and there, which is a little bit north of where you see the Ottoman line at the top left. And uh, of course, the Turks end up defeating them very soundly. Nobody really musters up the forces. The Hungarians are, you know, Hignyadi is the um the prince, the protector of uh Hungary because the the actual king is um kind of a hostage in the house of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III. So Hynadi has got to manage the country, defend it against a potential Turkish assault. He's not really in a position to come now down to Constantinople. And uh, you know, none of the other powers are uh we'll mention some of them after, like Scannenberg and you know, how some of that you know develops. But in the meantime, you have Mechmet. Now he's trained since birth as you know, to be like classically translated. He just learns Latin, he learns Greek, uh as well as you know, classical Arabic, because the Turks don't speak Arabic. Prayers are done in Arabic, they don't really know it. He learns, you know, he's very well cultured, and he styles himself like a Caesar. That's how he thinks of himself. Because where is his capital? It well, it's in lands that they called Rome, Rome, right? Because it used to be part of the Roman Empire back then. The Turks see themselves increasingly, the Ottomans, I should say, have seen themselves as like heirs to the Roman Empire. And so the Sultan now wants to become true Caesar by occupying the very city of the Romans itself, Constantinople. And so this is why you know he's only 20, he needs to make his mark somewhere. Uh, already his father tried to retire and put him on the throne as a child, and the Janisseries didn't really like it. A lot of the court nobles uh were threatening uh rebellion. Hey, he doesn't know what he's doing, we can't do this. So he's got that in the background. Now he's solely in charge, and he needs to solidify his power because uh court intrigue in the Ottoman Empire is um endemic, and I mean a history of the Ottoman Empire, there's so much court intrigue, whether through the harem or through nobles, the Janissary rebellions, you get a couple of those, um, all kinds of crazy stuff. So he's got offend all this stuff off. But you know, so he can continue the wars of his father, but Constantinople is just sitting there, and as you saw on the map, it's like this little sea within this otherwise Ottoman, you know, control. Why not take it? And so that's what he plans to do. So him and Constantine, Aresen, he actually says to Constantine, you know, you can go down to Mystra, down in the Greek peninsula where it was still purple there in the map. You can get it had very nice villas, it had, you know, places where he could live in state as the Roman Emperor still, and Mechmed would have allowed it. At least he said he would. Um, all kinds of things. And Constantine is like, no, it is not. I have no authority to give up the city because it is Christ and the Thaetolkos who are in charge of the city, and the emperors are really just servants for it all. So that's why he can't he can't just give it up. So there's negotiating back and forth. He has a pretender to the Ottoman throne, uh, that that he's keeping safe in the city. He threatens to let him out. Mechmed responds by cutting off the heads of his emissaries and sending him back to um Constantine. So now it's like, okay, it's on. So he's so he gets starts begging for more help. Italian ships start showing up, Venetian ships, Genoese ships, and probably most importantly, the most uh important fellow in this whole story is a guy named uh Giovanni Justiniani Longo. So Justiniani, he's Genoese, he's a brilliant commander, um, you know, mercenary commander largely, but he has an you know, effective team of extremely well-armed mercenaries, you know, a few thousand, a lot of uh you know, experience with gunpowder, crossbows, cannons. They bring in a lot of cannon, they they help really help fortify the city. He's welcomed Constantine trusts him in implicitly and makes him the head of the the defense. So they they start you know immediately rebuilding the trenches and then re-fortifying the walls. Now, this is the most important thing. The walls are you know the they're called the Theodosian walls because they were built up by the Emperor Theodosius uh the second to deter Attila the hunt, right? Or originally they were built up and then refortified later, but that's what their the purpose was. And of course, throughout the Middle Ages, they're being strengthened and reworked, and it's a really impressive system. It's covering like five and a half miles on the land side, and then even more than that on the ocean side. They're they're just huge, almost impregnable. And that's the the question: can you beat the walls? So while Mechman's working on this problem, some a guy shows up who says, Oh, I can help you with this problem, and his name's Orban, and he's a Hungarian. Now, he had gone to Constantine and said, Hey, I'll build cannons for you to defend the city. And Constantine says, Great! But my I got spiders in my wallet, dude. I don't have any money. Orban says, Okay, thanks. Uh, I'll find someone else. So he goes over to Mechmed instead and says, Hey, I'll make you cannons to take down the city. You know, he's definitely working for whatever coin he can get. And he casts for Mechmed, if you want to put the cannon picture up, a massive cannon. So it's called the Bostilisk. So, gunpowder in this time, we talked about this, I think, the last time I was on, or a time before that, with what was Le Panta one with matchlocks and that sort of thing. You have the matchlock around at this time, um, or the Arcabus, but you don't have like really effective gunpowder yet, because there's a technique that they will learn in about 40 years, soaking gunpowder, and then and I there's a technical term for this, and I don't remember what it's called. Yes, soak it, and then you you you form it into like cakes and patties, and then you grind it back down into powder. And something about this increases the kinetic energy of gunpowder. I don't know what it is because I'm not a chemist, or uh, I can't remember the terms for that, but that hasn't been discovered yet. So the gunpowder in this time is a lot weaker than it will be in the 1500s. So your cannons to get more power, it's gonna be, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

They got to be bigger. We learned our we learned our lesson there.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

Yeah, that's right. So Orban, you know, he casts this thing for for Mehmed II, and this thing is massive. You see all the men that have to operate it. Um, I believe they're picturing Orban there in the green, you know, looking at it and making directions. Um, but either way, you know, it has to be lifted with a crane in order to be moved, and it only fires seven times a day, so it's not terribly efficient, except in one factor, it's really loud, and the psychological factor of it all is uh would prove to be very overwhelming.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

So was this cast in bronze still at this point? Um, this one was cast in iron.

Sea Blockade Chain And Ships Over Land

SPEAKER_03 31:55

Okay, which is part of the reason what will happen to it later is we'll get into it. It takes a long time to cool down. There's other canons cast like that that are not quite as large as this, but very big, and then he has regular ones. So on the 6th of April, um, there's a there's another picture in there, I think the third one in. So the 6th of April, Mechmed rolls up, and uh so you've got the city there as it would appear, and so you've got you've got the golden horn on the right, the channel that flows between Constantinople and then on the other bank is Para, the Genoese trading city. So formally they had preached uh a truce where they they told the Turks, hey, we're not gonna interfere. But there's one thing they did as a defensive thing. There's a chain that they would stretch across the strait and connect it to both cities to keep ships from getting through. And it's so that way that you know the Turks wouldn't be able to fully you know surround the city, but otherwise they they wouldn't give any material help because they they had to try to run with the foxes and the hounds uh on this one because their fate was uncertain if the Turks win and uncertain if they lose. And so they're kind of working both sides as best they can. You got the Ottoman ships that are in trying to form their blockade, and then you can see the seawalls very clearly. So Mechman tightens up, he has his fleet tighten up the seawalls to try to prevent you know any aid from going into the city. Then on the landward side, he sets up all of his troops in a circumvolation of the city with the cannons mostly concentrated on the center. I don't I should have had another graphic for the siege. Maybe I can find one. But in the meantime, he uh he sets up all his cannons you know facing the the landward side, and they start they start firing on 6th April. They start blasting off. So one of the things that Justiniani gets the men doing is they lower cushions onto the forward walls so that a lot of the cannonballs will bounce off, right? And so they create these cushions and then you know lower them down, catch a lot of a lot of that. Um, you know, and so so it starts off, but the the pressure from the guns is a lot. But the siege will end up going on for a month and a half, and it's gonna be you know a long time. But it you know, it continues. So in the city, you know, there's still problems like that. The Latin, the anti-Latin party is heckling the people that are defending the city. Uh that's one of the things they have to contend with. They have um you know food rationing, they had food stored up, but you know, as it would turn out, not nearly enough. And the Turks then, you know, on top of the guns, they send in sappers, they get you know miners going that are you know, and they're moving their trench. One of the things the Turks develop in this period is trench warfare. So long before you know you get to World War I, they actually created the notion of digging trenches for your men and hiding, you know, hiding your troops there. And so they're able to start advancing these a little bit more and a little bit more. And you know, as the kind of the weeks roll on, the um the defenders would make a sorte, right? And so uh if you're not hopefully everyone's that's a common enough term, everyone should know what that is. Sortie, yeah. Yeah, and so French word for exit, literally, or make our way out. Um, and so there were various gates all along even the landward side, and so at different times they would arrange a sorte and come out either with cavalry or on foot, and uh, you know, it attacked the Turks when they get too close to the walls, sometimes push some of their earthworks back and then get right back into the city. The you know, but it's still you know a devastating psychological impact as the you know the siege continues through April. So, but on the Turkish side, Mechmet's you know got problems too, because you know, as every reverse they get, the morale is you know kind of you know dropping, and you know, if he doesn't uh you know make good and get get the city, he he's pretty much not going to keep his throne, and he knows that. So the um he he moves the guns closer to the Romanus gate, which is more in the center of Constantinople, and he starts blasting in that area, and that's uh you know what he's working on. Meanwhile, while that happens, he hears about a relief force. There's uh Genoese fleet, about you know, not a huge one, about five or so ships, and they've got also a uh Byzantine cargo ship bringing food, military supplies, troops, and so the Ottomans remember they've got it blocked off, and so they but they have the wind, uh the weather gauge, so they're just flying right in, the the these Italian ships, and they're bigger than the Turkish vessel. So you have the similar thing we're talking about with Le Panto, right? And so they you know they move in and the Turks, you know, try to intercept them, they're able to blow past a good deal of the Turkish fleet, but then they get stuck. And so it well, so it's a massive battle. The wind dies, and it looks like the Turks are finally going to prevail. When the wind picks up again, fills their sails, and then they're they're able to push through the Turkish blockade. The chain opens up and they they enter the golden horn, and you know, and so then Medmet is pissed, so he gets his his um captain and instant death is the judgment for his admiral. And I can't remember the guy's name off the top of my head right now. Um, I believe like Balticlu or all the Turkish names are harder for him. I believe it's Baltic or Baltalu or something like that. He uh his men speak up for him and say, Hey, he fought bravely, look how wounded he is. Imagine his like, uh, all right, just beat him within an inch of his life and take all his treasure and send him out in exile. So almost as bad as killing him. He is just pissed. So he's got to figure out how to deal with this business of the chain, right? And so what he what he comes up with, uh he comes up with a really ingenious one, he waits a little bit to unfurl it, but what he'll do is from the landward side, he'll have his ships transported to you know, it sail around the eight um the other side of the landward side through the Black Sea, and then he would just transport his ships by land, drop them into the golden horde behind the chain, make the chain you know totally useless. So now his ships can have that full surrounding of every area of sea, which also blockades in the Venetian ships so they can't escape if they were gonna try to. They do try to tell Constantine at different points, hey, you know, your emperor, you need to leave. And I think it's very heroic in Constantine. And it's funny because he's actually he's a union, he's committed to the principle of union with Rome. So he's been getting you know nothing but hate from the anti-Latin Party for a long time. But you know, in the presence of the patriarch and everyone else, he declares that he will not even consider leaving the city because that you know it it is his fate to be the last emperor of the the Theatokus city, and he will die here with all of them. And he he does, he bravely he mans the walls, he gets into the thick of the fighting when at different times the Turks will breach and at uh you know in in May. And so it's uh you know, he does try to lift the morale quite a bit whenever he can. So he he's like one of the few really admirable people on the Greek side during all this. And he anyway, so the siege goes on. Uh do you have any questions here? Because I'm kind of moving on to like a loose reconstruction of it.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

Just some like things that not really questions, but I just kind of see the foreshadowing of some techniques we still use in war, right? Like the sorti has now become what's called the QRF, the quick reaction force. Right. Right. So when I was in Afghanistan, if somebody needs some help, we always had a guy on standby, uh, you know, whether it's the uh platoon size or whatever, that would go out and help real quick and be able to get right back. I'm also thinking about carrying those boats because I've carried a zodiac before, and that thing will you even if you got 20 other dudes carrying that thing, it will humble you. And that's a rubber boat, right? So I couldn't imagine carrying a wooden boat across land to land in behind lines, you know, in that in the horn there.

SPEAKER_03 40:02

But yeah, let me uh let me find a picture of it. But it was it was a huge process. Now the Vikings did stuff like that, but their boats were a lot smaller, and they were actually designed for them to be able to use that tactic whenever they could. Um I'm just trying to find uh let me just take rid of that that looks about right. There we go. That's 16th century. That's close enough. Uh let me see. Open image. There we go. I'll just share that. Working with the technology here. There we go. If you put that uh up, there we go. So that's that's about the size boat. So you you I mean, he's got a massive army at his disposal. So he can manage that. I should mention something too about the Turkish army. So he's got his navy and they they sail in DAOs like this, and a lot of men on the or is not too much dissimilar from an Italian-style galleon that had been used pretty much since Roman times. Uh, the the only difference being the addition of cannon. And uh they're a little lower, a lot lower than the Italian ships, which makes them a little bit faster, but also limits uh some of their their effectiveness at different stages. They have some bigger ones too when they need them, but that's what they they they bring over across into the golden horn. So uh the Turkish armies. I've got a picture uh of a Turkish Janissary if you want to bring that one. There we go. So the Janissaries, we mentioned them in the Lepanto episode that uh the Janisses are mostly taken from uh Christian parents, they're they're they're kids. They're taken when they're kids or ordered as tribute, and then they would be you know castrated, forcibly converted to Islam, and then raised as uh you know as Muslims. And they would be elite warriors, and they they would be trained in all manner. And the the Janissaries were with sword fighting, uh, spear, cannonade, cavalry, uh, you name it. They they've got all these different tactics that they're able to master. Uh they're they're they're really elite soldiers, the elite guard for the Sultan. Yet other the mainstay of his armies, though, at Constantinople was Anatolian infantry. So Anatolian infantry, these are people that once upon a time fought in Byzantine armies, and now they're attributed, you know, from Cappadocia, from uh uh Ankara, from all these different areas. I mean, men they'd fight with axes, they'd fight with spears, you know, they they largely brought their own uh you know weapons. So it's like you've got your professional army, and then you've got your wider conscripted army, yeah. You just can't afford that professional army, it's that big at this stage of the the world. So the uh so that's largely the the armies, I mean, massively outnumbered. You only have about 7,000 defenders really in Constantinople, so at the at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

But um how how would the defenders in Constantinople have been armed? What sort of troops were they largely?

Final Assault And Constantine’s Last Stand

SPEAKER_03 43:11

So they so a lot of them were Italian mercenaries. Uh they would have crossbows, uh Archibus, they had cannons. Uh they did have some Greek fire, but they saved that for very specific targeted operations. Like they would try to burn the boats one time that actually didn't work for them. Um, they another time they um they would burn, you know, siege equipment in earthworks, you know, sally out in a sorte and throw the Greek fire in and burn up some stuff and go back. The uh, but otherwise, mostly pike, uh pike and shot, axes, or swords, you know, the main uh weapons. But from the the chroniclers and what they write about the both on both sides of it, there don't seem to be a lot of uh like any specific order because you're working in a very narrow space. It's like the same principle like trying to get someone to fight into forward or River, you know, or somewhere you kill them in small numbers when they come across that bridge or over that ford, going through like a breach in the wall. That's where most of the fighting takes place, unless it was in a mine that they had discovered under underneath. Um, it's really just just just you know, the worst of hand-to-hand combat with whatever you got to do the most effective thing. You might start out with an efficient pike wall um as the the Turks are trying to enter, and they'll try to take it down with some shots on their way in with support as supporting fire for the the Anatolian infantry coming from the Janissaries in the back or something. But then, you know, once the melee happens, it's knives, it's axes, the bottom of your axe, halberds, swords, whatever it is that you've got at hand, that's the most effective. You might not be able to move your halberd just because your own people, so you've got a knife because it's actually more effective getting in and slicing. And any of these fights, like any almost any hand-to-hand combat, they're lasting two to six seconds, and you've killed the man, and eventually you've got to back out yourself to retire. And other people will come up and take your place because you're in such a tight-knit spot, uh, fighting at the breach. So the guns do breach the walls uh a couple times in May. And so, what Justiniani would have them do is uh after they'd repel the the the assault, is they'd build up a bunch of earthworks to try to patch up the the walls best they could. So then, you know, uh McMahon would redirect the guns as best he could. So then now that one uh remember that Hungarian who uh switched to help out the Turks, Medhead wants that basilisk going uh as he wants it like 20 times a day, not seven times a day. So Orban's trying to get it you know redirected, he's trying to get it loaded again, and uh it doesn't have enough time to cool down. So I believe it's like the fourth or the fifth of May, I might be wrong on the date. Um it blows up and also kill Orbin. So he he gets his reward for helping out the uh the Sultan who commanded him on pain of death. You keep this thing going, even though he knows it's probably gonna blow up. Not a good thing for him, but the uh they they they do the defenders that you know they they they're they got problems, they their defense is starting to break up. Um everyone's kind of you know getting mad at each other. And you still have you know the Greeks are accusing the Latins of not really fighting hard enough. You have uh quarrels over supplies, over stores, over food. Uh they want to get supplies from the Venetian ships, and which is agreed to, but then the Venetians are like, no, no, no, you're not taking our ships, and uh, as we want a way out of here if this all goes south. And eventually they're compelled to give up their arms and goods out of the ships and give it over to the defense. But there's there's a lot of grumbling, no, no one's really happy. There's bad omens. They do a procession with the Higerta, it's the icon of the Theotokos that they processing through the city, and then it's raining, and this happens in May. And while they're processing, the the icon falls from its and they they have a moment where they can't get it out of the mud. It was very heavy, it was encrusted with gold and other stones and whatnot, but even so, they can't get it out of the mud. Finally, they're able to get it up, but people kind of see this as the omen, you know, the city's gonna fall. And on top of that, on 13th May, there's a crescent moon, right? Which the Turks are very high, you know, excited by, but uh, everyone in the city is like, oh no, this is this is it. Um, so we just skip closer to the end. So about the uh the the 28th, Constantine pushes. I'm sorry, uh Mehmed pushes really hard for the final assault. And so he um they get the preparations ready. Agea Sophia, all the people flee there, so you have both Catholic and Orthodox together in in the church praying. And you know, it it most of the people hoping praying that an angel will come deliver them, you know, from the Turkish uh host. They actually they say uh Vespers there, it's the last service, you know, Christian service is done in Augia Sophia. And then 29th May, you know, the the the offensive begins and they send in the you know, they're they're kind of peasant armies, their conscripts, whatever, to be you know picked off by guns and killed by uh the troops. Uh then they send in the Anatolian infantry, and they're kind of the more hardened, battle-hardened troops in Med's army, and so but they get pushed back. Unfortunately, what happens is that Justiniani gets wounded, and he's the guy who's kept the morale up, who's kept the fighting up. You know, he is like a just uh absolute chad keeping this hopeless thing going, and he gets wounded, and so his men want to take him back to his ship, and which Constantine consents to, but without him, you're kind of leaderless. On top of that, there's a gate uh on the, if I'm not mistaken, the southwestern side is the the it's called the circus gate, the kerka. And what happens is that when the troops were set were making a sorte out of there, they didn't sufficiently lock it up, and so some you know, and there's because there's not enough defenders to cover even all the land walls, and so the Turks are prodding and poding in different places, so some Janissaries get in, and they even take part of the wall. So this creates more confusion as the Janissaries are making that final push through this breach in the wall, which almost gets repelled. But then, you know, the the defenders they see the the Turkish standards up on one of the towers and say what's going on, and the Janissaries are able to push their way through, and the defense just melts away. Constantine, you know, he gets all of any anything that might identify him as the emperor, he strips that off him, and then he draws his sword, he charges in, he's never seen again. And uh the Greeks actually have legends long after it, you know, 100-200 years after this, of Constantine coming again to free them up from Turkish slavery and whatnot. Um, which is funny because he dies fully in union with Rome. And that that part, all the legends, I kind of forget about that part, but uh but just his heroism, it it's so well remembered, it's part of it. But um, after that, you know, the defense just melts away, and uh's troops are able to overwhelm the city and so forth. But this is also the city he wants to make his capital, so he actually breaks the Islamic tradition on this thing and orders his troops to stop the plunder and stop the sack, which is done with uh you know a lot of consternation, but they eventually do it because he he doesn't want his new capital to be like burnt to the ground. So the uh Justiniani's troops actually take him by boat out of the city, they manage to break the Turkish blockade, but you know, he dies on en route, I think, on kiosks. Actually, he never really makes it back home to Genoa just from the the wound he got. And on top of that, you know, many others died there. The I didn't even mention the mines, it was probably just as well as I already got to the end. But there were their mining operations. There's actually a guy named Grant, who's a Scottish uh engineer, and I always wonder, you know, I wonder if there's a relation there. It probably is, but um, you know, anyway, so he's the one who like kind of discovered the mines throughout that you know, and of course, would lead to more horrific fighting once they discovered those and or used chemical warfare, burn some kind of gas, whatever, to smoke the Turks out and things like that. So, but you know, no one knows what happens to him in the whole business. Um, family members of the empire, they they had already actually made their way out, and you can actually look up uh what happened to the Paleologus after Constantinople fell. So one of them, of course, marries into the Russian royal family. It's how the Russia Russians styled themselves with the third Rome, right? Uh, some of them go to Italy. Thomas, who is uh Constantine's older brother, actually, or younger brother, I can't remember the order there. He ends up in Italy, and he ends up being styled as the by the Pope, the new Emperor of Constantinople, like just an empty title. Um, he doesn't have enough money, he's a spendthrift. He the guy ends up dying penniless, right? And there's a lot of other stories about the Paleologus who survived the fall. But anyway, the result is Constantinople falls, and now Mechmed's finally got his prize, which you know is almost mess in messianic terms for Muslims, because the Al-Hadith, all these Islamic texts talk about the importance of Constantinople. Um, the early uh successors of Muhammad tried it, you know, unsuccessfully to take it in the the 700s, and and uh there was another siege they had failed completely to take it. So now they finally have it. And this, of course, solidifies. Remember that map earlier, Constantinople is that one purple spot in the middle. Now it's all Ottoman. And now they've got a nice centralizing place that uh straddles most of the trade routes in the world to start looking to the west. And Hungary is kind of on the road to where they want to go, which is Venice and Rome, principally. Those are the principal targets that they're now aiming for. And but Hungary is in the crosshairs. I don't know if any more comments or the questions that people want to answer because then so yeah, we have a couple questions.

SPEAKER_01 53:03

So um it is for the most part assumed that that Constantine died in that battle.

SPEAKER_03 53:11

Yes, all sides agree, but his body was never found.

SPEAKER_01 53:14

Okay.

Aftermath Patriarchs And Broken Reunion

SPEAKER_03 53:14

But the thing is leads to the legends and that you said right, leads into the legends, but he almost certainly died there because if if they found him either alive or you know, he would have been a trophy piece in one way or the other for the the Sultan. His body was found, they would have hoisted it up, and um, you know, there's uh but they never found it, they couldn't identify it. And then um the question here wasn't there uh a vote to reunite with the at this time the the east had reunified with Rome, at least according to the vote of of like the the patriarchs and even the emperor and the patriarchs, but not the people, and so um yeah, the the people rioted over it, they ran that's what created the anti-Latin party, and uh headed by Gennadius Scolarius. So uh Mechmed brings him in, says, Hey, so I heard you were really against union with uh the Pope. Oh, absolutely, and I hear you know you you you are preferable to the reign of the Tiara. I said, Oh yes. I said, All right, how would you like to be the next patriarch of of uh the next ecumenical patriarch? He says, Well, that's wonderful, I love that. Just um kind of give over one of your sons for me to sodomize a little bit. He does it. That's on brand. So it uh scolarius, you know, he's such an interesting figure, otherwise, because you know, like I said, he was a Byzantine Thomas, and he even said that uh even even after all this, that he still revered St. Thomas, he said, yes, the only thing the Blessed Thomas got wrong was the uh the filioque and uh the energy's essence question, and that that was the only thing he could that he thought felt that Thomas was wrong about. Uh, you know, even as now the this vassal for this because the what happens is the ecumenical patriarch, the the Turks, that's what really finishes union between east and west, is that the Turks is now part of politics to keep the Eastern uh Patriarchate from ever being unified to the Pope, so that and and the Eastern Church in general, they want to see it completely severed in a creature of their own control, and so union with Rome would always be bad for that, so they don't want that to happen. And ecumenical patriarchs at different times, like during the Greek Revolution of the 1800s, they took the ecumenical patriarch and they told him to tell the people to stop, and he refused to do it, so they shot him and hung his corpse, you know, over the over the walls, and um, you know, it it was uh pretty dangerous being the ecumenical patriarch under the Turks, almost as much as being under the under the uh Byzantine emperors.

SPEAKER_01 56:04

But that that's uh another story if you want to dig into the history of Byzantium more, but um, so kind of that whole little question of union kind of leads to the questions like the at least a few of the guys we're probably going to talk about here now, like uh like Vlad, um Dracool and uh Skanderbeg, like are they more properly considered like Eastern Orthodox heroes or Skanderbegrun?

Belgrade Hunyadi And Capistrano’s Crusade

Vlad The Impaler And Terror As Strategy

SPEAKER_03 56:34

Skanderbeg was Catholic. Uh at first, I mean, at a certain point he was Muslim and it was a vassal for the the Turks, and then you know he completely switched and but he converted to Catholicism. And whether that was mere personal politics, because that would guarantee help from the West, or that was uh a serious movement of belief, you know, I can't tell, but he he certainly persevered in the Catholic faith. So um even you know, when he got in the war with Venice and things like that. So um Dracol's Vlad Tepas which probably mentioned Hunyadi a little bit. It's all throughout the siege of Constantinople, the Turks were nervous that Hunyadi was going to march against them. Now, Hunyadi had given massive defeats to the Emperor Murad, or the Sultan Murad, right? It was Mehmed's father. So, you know, and of course, now he's you know had to step down as protector of Hungary because Ladislaus the king has now come back and taken up his throne, but he's still the captain of uh formerly of all the military guards, got way too much power, too much nobility is just to be gotten rid of. And so he starts, he sees what happens in Constantinople's, he starts fortifying for more battle with the Turks. Punydi is such an interesting figure, very underrated general. He uh had actually been a knight in the train of the Emperor Sigismund III, and that's where he had gotten a lot of his battle experience, and he'd spent a lot of time like learning from you know Italian uh generals who had been fighting for a long time, learned a lot of different tactics and techniques. So, you know, he's just the church still feared his name. Uh, as he's preparing, there's he meets this Franciscan, and they had met before at different times. They've been working at like the Crusade in Varna and stuff like that. Saint Giovanni Capistrano. And Capistrano is he's a Franciscan, uh brilliant missionary preacher. He's preached all throughout Italy, big friend of St. Bernardino Siena. He um actually he's responsible for largely for St. Bernardine's canonization because for a lot of reasons there were people that didn't like this idea of this devotion to the holy name. That was too weird. And Pope Pius II, you know, it was it opened the cause and they got a lot of people in vain against canonizing Bernardino Siena. So Capistrano is it shows up and will start preaching for two hours on some miracle of a missing chicken having been found or some other thing. Like he's propounded, you know, uh 10,000 miracles attributed to St. Bernadette of Sienna. I would own probably only about a hundred of them were actually somewhat miraculous, but didn't matter. So eventually Pope Pius II, he'll have some jokes, you know, to troll John Capistrano a little bit. Capistrano will get mad, get really pissed off. He says, No, no, relax, relax. I'm listening. And then finally, just to get Capistrano to shut up, he says, All right, I'm gonna canonize him. Uh, we'll call these good no no more 10,000 lists of miracles, and let's just canonize them in so you can go on your way. He gets sent to Bohemia where he does a lot of preaching against the Hussites, especially against uh Utrequism. And that's uh since we mentioned the Orthodox, that's probably a you know the Utrequism is a big thing for the Hussites. The idea that you know denying the faithful the chalice at communion was denying them part of the body of Christ. That wasn't sufficient. So he he preaches a lot against that sort of thing. But I actually have a book on St. John Capistrano. If you want to get into it, it goes into a lot on the detail, very well-written history uh of him. But uh, otherwise, he uh he starts preaching the crusade and he goes into places in Hungary, Bohemia, he's just preaching in Latin because he doesn't know those languages now. In Bohemia, there are a lot of people that knew Latin just for trade and other things because there's a couple of different dialects you've got to deal with here, but Hungary, well, not so much. And people said, you know, uh, what's he saying? I don't know. I think it's something about uh fighting. Hey, I'm in, and you know, you hear something in Latin. You have my pitchfork, you have my axe. So he gets this army, largely of peasants, and whips them up into this halfway disciplined and decent army, nothing near like with Turkish regulars or anything like that. So Hanyadi desperately needs men. So you know they come and join this crusade, and the big thing that's happening now is Belgrade. So Belgrade sits on a little peninsula where the Danube uh meets the umara? No, no, no. It's uh I can't remember the river that it meets. Uh really important spot, and it will continue to be actually for a couple hundred years. And what Constantinople was to Europe generally holding back the the Turks, Belgrade is to Hungary specifically holding back the Turks. So in any in the so Mechmed decides to roll up a lot like he did with Constantinople, tries to um blockade uh the the river all around the Danube, and then he has a land walk of this circumvolation around the city, and so now you know so Hinyadi's you know what wasn't prepared for yeah, it's the salva river, his own ideas of how to raise him. So he gets going, and he actually gets uh ships, all these merchant ships that he's kind of refitted with cannon, and he goes to break the Turkish blockade of the Danube. The Turkish blockade of the Danube was set up by chaining a bunch of those galleys together so that you know nobody nobody could get through. So Hinyadi's men get in there and they have a hard-fought thing with their cannon, they're uh fighting, you know, but eventually they're able to uh you know sink, kill all the Turkish ships. They um you know, you kill the Turkish sailors, and he's able to get through and land uh right into Belgrade, you know, right in front of the Turkish lines. They can't do anything about it with troops, supplies that they desperately needed. So in Belgrade is set up. Um I wish I had a map of it. I should have thought about getting a map of Belgrade, but you know, it's got uh you know towers and walls, lowers. This is before Starforts and before they had really taken it account of gunpowder in the construction of forts, but just the same, cannons aren't really powerful to bring down the walls just like that. Takes a long time. So the uh there's lower uh fields of walls, and then there's upper ones, and then a main citadel, which is you know also part uh cathedral. And Hinyadi is you know now in the city waiting, you know, for the Turks. The Turks do manage to breach the walls, and he sets up a couple of death traps for them as they're going through the the cities. You know, they're marching up into Belgrade. Um there we go. Actually, you know what? That's from that's the thumbnail for a really good video on this whole subject by um I watched it a while ago. Um sand Roman history is the the channel, very underrated historical channel. So if you if you sand H Roman or Sand Roman with an H after the R, thing it's like that. He's not in native English speaker, so sometimes you know, he don't make fun of his messing up certain English words, but uh he does a great job with these animations and things. But yeah, you can see you know, Belgrade there. So Punyati, you know, lets the Turks breach the walls at certain points without trying to reinforce this. He wants them to come in, so he's set up a death trap for him. They're gonna march in and he's pulled the troops back, just like a token force to egg them on to go through the breach. Then, meanwhile, his men you know light some pitch and they set up fires to cut off part of the Turkish army from the other group that's come in, and then he hits them at two sides and he swings down with his cavalry from the citadel and just elderly smashes them and they they run a retreat from the city. And they try to breach a few more times, and again, he totally crushes them. And so now he's trying to prepare an even stronger assault, and then all of a sudden the Turks kind of their cavalry retreats and the men seem to disappear. So some of the people in the city say, Yay, and they start to go out to plunder, and Hinyati says, No, don't do it, because he's smart enough to know this is just a ruse. They want them out of the city to a pitched battle. Well, the men obey Hinyati, but then the peasant crusade under Capistrano that's hanging in reserve outside the city, they see it and they say, Hey, we should go plunder the Turkish camp. Look, there's even a few stragglers out there doing it. So they go to join that. When that happens, the Turkish infantry joins it. So, you know, Hinyadi is in like a difficult spot because they're all gonna get slaughtered by Turkish regulars. He doesn't want to see all that death happening. So even though it's not what he meant to do, is this is a lot like Helm's Deep, actually. He rides out, he makes a sorte from the city, rides out with the the full army to go fight the Turkish, uh the Ottoman infantry, and on top of that, the cavalry fails to show back up. So Mehmed's the Turkish cavalry does not reappear in the battlefield. So Hinyadi's men completely break the Turkish lines. Mehmed sees that and he tries to rally them to fight with them directly. The guy's got some you know, personal courage, and uh then he gets shot in the thigh with an arrow. So he's gotta withdraw. And you know, the sight of the Sultan coming away wounded, the morale drops, and Hinyadi utterly crushes and routes the rest of the Turks. They clean up the cavalry when they do finally materialize, and they save Belgrade. And it's not terribly long after that, though, that Hignati dies. The Turks actually have writings about a wizard amongst this group of uh peasants that were fighting with them. In other words, Capistrano, because he carried with the banner and with the name of Christ on it, and they were terrified, and they they thought it was like a wizard directing the people on. They're utterly terrified of him. So that was you know, Hinyati, and that you know, galvanizes you know, support. In Europe, people are hopeful that you know the Turk actually can be fought. He's not utterly invincible. And then we get to Dracula. So Dracula, he is his dad is um Dracul the Second. So he sends his son with the future of Lod III as a hostage down to the Turks. With his brother, right? With his brother. And he was treated fairly cruelly. And on top of that, he witnessed the Turks just doing horrible, horrible uh executions to people, traitors to criminals, and other things, uh, impaling being among them, you know, and beheadings, all choppings of hands, all these different things. And so he's he's kept a memory of that as well as the brutality. So um his uh his father and brother are killed, and so the Turks then install him in Wallachia as you know the client, they're they're kind of uh their king. And he's playing the part for the moment. And on top of that, you know, Wallachia and Hungary are not always allied, so Hinyati actually invades Wallachia. Vlad escapes to Morovia, uh, but then you know, some relatives kill, you know, attempt to kill him out there, so he ends up fleeing back to Hinyati. Hinyati, you know, receives him and he's really impressed with the guy's knowledge of the Turks and their tactics and so many things, and so they go to common accord. Uh Vlad goes back to Romania, and you know, this is kind of uh there's all kinds of stories about Vlad the impaler. I don't know how many of them are true, some of them or it should be, but one of the things he he wanted uh Romania to be less poor, more affluent. Notice there's all these beggars, and there's all these these lepers and diseased people, and what do we do about all that? So, according to this one story, he invites them all to a to a massive bar and that he's at a refit and gives them a tremendous banquet, and they're all eating, they're thankful. And then you know, he says, What else could you know could I do to and they said, Well, it'd be great if we we weren't poor and you weren't diseased, and and he says, Well, God will solve all of these problems. So he goes out the door, he locks it, and he has the thing burned down. Not poor anymore, they're not hungry anymore, they're not diseased anymore. Problem solved. And I don't know if that story is true or not, but it it is a it is a real, you know, good depiction of his character. And so he uh, you know, he refuses to pay the Sultan tribute. Sultan sends a small army, figures that's all he needs to deal with them, and Vlad, you know, kills them through guerrilla tactics, has all the survivors impale. Now impalement. You think, oh, yeah, it's just just run uh spike up somebody and they die, and that's it. No, no, no. He was very expert at this. So um, or uh, this is where he gets more PG 13 or R, I guess, but what you do well, you basically you sodomize this guy with this this uh stake that you're impaling him on, right? But you lay him over and and hit it in with a hammer, and somebody who's extremely well skilled with this will miss all the viscera, come up for the neck, and uh somewhere up here missing all your internal organs, and uh you know, and so you're sitting on this pole, which will be greased, and you could sit there for days, horrible, horrible pain. And the only thing that would kill you quicker is if it rained, and then you'd get gangrene if the wounds would be gangrenous and you'd die. That was, I mean, this is a pretty gruesome way. So he'd actually created a forest of around the capital of dead Turks, uh, from that. Yeah, that the up that's like and so and then he adds to it through various campaigns. Um, and so methm he he he sends his messengers again and says, please wouldn't you consider doing your your you know duty to the sultan? Because he's metmed dealing other stuff, he's dealing with uh another campaign for Hungary, and you know, this is where um uh you get either the Hungarians are marshaling, they have the creation of the Black Army, right? Which is another uh fabled military unit created by Matthew Corvinus. If you've seen a certain movie, The Father of Us All, right? But now he was neither a wolf nor a vampire, he was the way he fought.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:22

Talking about Underworld, love it.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:26

Well, yeah, Michael Corvinus. He he steps into the story, you know, around this time, right? But um, anyway, so so Mechmets had Vlad in Constantinople. He just wants to stop this guy and and and buy him off to me. Wouldn't you just pay a little tribute to the Sultan and you'll be rewarded in all these ways? And so he tells the emissaries, Yes, I will do service to the Sultan, I will come with my treasury and my men, and I will do service for him. And then uh it's a mess man like great. So he commands everyone when when Vlad's army comes through, you're just gonna let him in. And so he does. And so he moves into Turkish Bulgaria, it goes in, you know, past you know, quite a bit of uh Turkish territory, and he stops at a certain point and says, Right, all right, we've done some service, now we've got a little more to do. Turns around, raids everything in sight, sacks and destroys cities and towns, takes Turkish captives back, and um all the way back into Romania. So Mehmed here's this, he's just livid. So he assembles a massive army, marches up into Romania, and then he, according to a Greek chronicler, um Dekos of uh I'm trying to remember the names. I haven't looked in this history in a long time. He uh he describes Mehmed being there. I'm not sure the historians divided whether he was actually there or not, but um, either way, you know, the the Turks see this forest of all their impaled countrymen and and also criminals. Uh, Vlad did not like criminals, he didn't like thieves. Um, you know, so he had them impaled too. So wasn't tough on crime, but thousands of people impaled the rotting bodies up there. Birds have made nests in their entrails and all this type of thing. Uh, just horrid stuff. And Mechmet is is described as been so demoralized just by the sight of it. He just takes the army and goes back. Just utterly, you know, and so Vlad, uh, for all his cruelty, um, you know, kept the Turks out, kept Romania free for a while.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:31

What uh what's the most likely number for the number of people in the forest of the impaled?

SPEAKER_03 1:12:36

I don't know because it's I've heard upward of 20,000, but yeah, uh 20, 30,000 could have been a lot less than that. Could have looked. I mean, we if you're looking at thousands of people up on spikes, who knows? Yeah, um, it's uh it's hard to you know it's hard to quantify. I I don't know, there's no numbers from the time that uh that tell about it, but it was it was well known. And if you were in Romania, I mean you did not you you'd see gold and it you knew it was Dracula's gold, you didn't touch it. There's actually a story about a merchant that had uh left his gold in his cart, and the you know, somebody had stolen it, and so he reports this to Vlad, and Vlad says, uh it sends people out to look for you know whoever stole it, so they find the guy, finds gold. So Vlad does a little trick, right? He's got uh he adds three coins into the gold and he returns it to the merchants, the merchant's counting it, and he says, Well, your lord, my liege, you there's more gold here than I had. So he returns the gold that wasn't his. And Vlad, you know, claps his hand and says, I like you. If you had claimed all the gold, that spot that spike over there, I would have impaled you on it. The aid of thieves. Uh so basically, if you saw gold and it was Dracula's gold, you just didn't touch it.

Soft Lives And Returning Violence

SPEAKER_00 1:13:55

I mean, this whenever I read these histories, um it brings them out how violent the world has been and and what a time of just aversion to violence we're in now. Right. And we, you know, and maybe that's due to how soft we are, you know, people don't even know where their food comes from anymore. Like we've got people who think you know, food just shows up at the grocery store and that's it, right? Um and people are just not aware or even accustomed to just seeing blood. Right. I I can't tell you times when I was working on the fire department of a med unit that I have a trainee with me who the first time he sees a guy's tip fit broken and they, you know, it's an open fracture and there's blood everywhere, and they pass out. And they just they just can't stand the side of blood. But you know, the amount of violence that people were willing to do to protect their people, what what side you're on does it matter? Um, it just people are not prepared for that now, which means when we return to the old rules, it's going to be shocking for some people. We will not get ready.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:08

Yeah. Well, because I mean we live soft lives, happy lives, largely unmolested by by war. I mean, if you live in cities, you got a little bit closer with crime and judges letting these psychopaths back on the streets to do more crime and things like that. But like where I live, uh, you're not gonna come do crime where I live because every single house has man or teenager that's going to use his 2A to end you. Trying to think of a way I could put this on YouTube. Um it's that's just that's just it. So I know I'm even though I'm pseudo-academic, soft life. I mean, I I've had animals, I've butchered animals, and you know, the first time was actually hard for me because I was raised suburbanite kid in New England, you know. They were you know, slitting a uh a lamb's throat is not something that comes naturally, but you but you do it because it has to be done. And actually, interesting thing is so there was like uh 4-H group we were working with, so they came and they watched me butcher this lamb, and and they were like, and it was actually the cleanest one I ever did, too. I might add, but just aside one girl's like, she wouldn't eat meat for a week after that because yeah, she had never seen it done before, and and I said before, this is what we're gonna do, this is how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna shoot him, I'm gonna, you know, just slip right you know below the trachea, and then they're gonna bleed out, and this is how it's gonna happen. And then, oh, this is horrible. I mean, again, in another occasion where I had a dog that was suffering, I had to put the dog down. People were like, Oh, this is so evil. But it's like the dog is dying. I did not do this out of malice at another time where a dog gored up one of my sheep, just a stray dog somebody dumped in my area. I so I had to had to put it down, right? Because once it's done that, it's gonna do something to someone else's livestock or to another person. It's now a danger, we have to do that. And in and I put this on my Twitter for you, it's because I was mad. I was mad that somebody's dumping the dog because this should be a happy dog in somebody's living room. And people are like, You killed a dog, you're Hitler, you're literally Hitler. It's like grief. It he it killed two of my sheep.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:09

First off, anyone that actually knows anything about Hitler knows how he would kill dogs.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:13

He loved animals, he would not have killed a dog even if it had killed somebody's sheep.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:19

It's and we see it like yeah, like you brought up a minute ago, Ryan, where we're letting criminals back out, and that's on purpose, right? They're doing that as is a demoralization, increased chaos.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:31

Yeah, judges are not stupid. This is something that's being done by design.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:35

Exactly. And and what's eventually going to happen, because as we see now, people are losing trust in the institutions, whether it's academia or our uh police or or whoever, um and the uh the modern citizen now, their eventually is gonna come a point where people are gonna feel that it is their right to do something about it because the institutions aren't doing anything now. And that's gonna be the turning point, right? It's like what what I've especially during COVID, I expected more was, and we're seeing a little bit now, uh, in recent within the last year or two, for instance, um about two uh about 18 months ago, there was a judge who was presiding over a case uh where a young lady was raped and killed. And the um the perpetrator was let go because he was found not to be capable of, you know, he was not he was not saying basically what they said and they let him back out. And so the father of the daughter um took matters into his own hands and uh unalived the perpetrator, but he also killed the judge, right? Because he because it was he thought it was mostly the judge's fault for letting it happen. And I think we're gonna see more of that because people are they're at their wit's end. Order has to be maintained for us to have some type of semblance of life, but we're gonna have to go through a period, unfortunately, where there's a lot of violence to get there. Um and what and what these examples we're we're bringing up with Constantinople and Belgrade, Belgrade and everything, it shows us that we are going to need good men of virtue to be able to be capable of that. Which we're it's really on us to raise those men. Because I'm probably not I'm 45 years old. It's probably not gonna be me. Might be my son, right? Or it might be the younger men in my parish. They're going to have to be the men of virtue that are willing to to enact that violence to bring us back to some order. Yeah.

Islam Sharia And Civilizational Conflict

SPEAKER_03 1:19:50

And it's part of the paradox, too, because we have the this kind of overwhelming notion of humanitas, of human humaneness, right? It's coming around in the 19th and the 20th centuries. In that century, I might add, the 20th century especially, you have the most gruesome, barbaric, horrible violence, you know, right with this notion of humaneness. And then the idea is oh, we're so much better than they were. You look at them burning people at the stake and uh impaling people and hanging people, we're so much more enlightened, yeah, by dropping napalm on on non-combatant cities. Um we don't even deal with the H bomb, just napalm on cities of civilians and nobody else. I mean, we when we firebombed Tokyo, and how many innocent civilians died on account of that action? And yeah, and Dresden and all these places, and yeah, I mean, actually, doolittle to his credit, the um the commander in the air force, he was against it until he was ordered from the top and he reluctantly went along with it. But he was not pushing it with the British actually and Roosevelt who were pushing night bombings, indiscriminate civilian bombings. And and Doolittle felt this was against the Geneva Convention, even. But uh, it was like, well, whatever we had to do to win the war. It's like, well, interestingly, in these more barbaric times, there were rules, but now, granted, they violated these rules of war, you know, at different times. But the idea was you should not kill civilians. You have battle, now sacking cities, unfortunately, that you get all these bad things that happen. Not, but nobody says it's good. Nobody says, well, that's the unfortunate thing of war. No, everybody hates and condemns the other one for it for generations. I mean, you look, yeah, it's a hundred years uh that Germans were not well liked in Rome because of the Sacco di Roma, right, in 1527. And the horrors they did there, frankly, make the Soviets blush. Um, you've got, but then in general, what are the rules of war? Well, you kill combatants, you don't kill non-combatants. That's kind of a accepted thing, and they they adhered to it far better then than we do now. The idea, oh, yeah, well, war is hell, you just have to do whatever you want. Well, wait, that might be an unfortunate truth, and it's not something that anybody wants, though. We're treating it like it's good, it's not good, it may happen, but we don't want it to happen. That's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:13

I think another aspect we have to keep in mind is it is only the the Christian nations who have any semblance of this uh dignity of life as well and protecting us in life, because the Muslims do not at all. Right? For example, uh one of the issues that I had to deal with a lot in Afghanistan was we would have Afghans who had purposely put their family and their children in danger because they what would happen if we accidentally killed like a kid or something, we would offer condolence payments to the family. So in order to get ahead monetarily, they would let their family get killed so they could get those condolence payments. If y'all aren't aware, right now we're giving$47 million a month to Afghanistan as condolence payments for the war. We're basically we've basically capitulated to them at this point. Say, hey, sorry about that whole Afghan war thing for 20 years.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:10

We fought for 20 years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and uh millions upon millions of dollars of American armament. Oh, here you go. Off you go then. We won victory, yay! It's like when they could have just given it to us.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:26

Yeah, I know. Where's my Toiletta Hollux with a dish fill on the back? I mean, I'm just waiting for that. But the Muslims don't, they have no uh concept of the dignity of life at all. And even in here, even here in America, which I've continued to profess is look, uh, the only good Muslim is a non-practicing Muslim, and a non-practicing Muslim is only a non-practicing Muslim until Muslims reach 10% of the demographics, and then they all become practicing Muslims, and then we start seeing beheadings in the streets.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:03

And even if they're very westernized and very much inculcated in this notion of humanitas and in certain western values in this thing, and you decry the sight of blood, when it's their team, they're not gonna hesitate to support it. They won't. It's just knee-jerk reaction with a with only a handful of exceptions. That's what's gonna happen. And the idea that I mean because Islam is not just a religion, it's a socio-political movement akin to communism, really. And it it's it's both and it's not neither or. So this one thing I know, like uh, I guess we've all turned a team Holy Father with uh Trump in Iran stuff, but some of the things that he said with um you know Islam, you know, it's like now on the one hand, I try to give as much deference as I can to the Holy Father, but this whole attitude Christians and Muslims, we can have brotherhood, we can have all these things. I'm like, no, only when we're in power and they're visitors, and that's for a temporary period, you know. If you know, but the idea that we're gonna just gonna have like in the Middle East, you had Christian communities that lived there for centuries alongside Muslims. Now, it was in their own countries, and you know, generally the hostility was lax, but sometimes they flared up, sometimes they would just come in and kill Christians again, kidnap your daughters and kidnap your sons for the harem and for the military, or again, you gotta pay the jazah, the poll tax, you have to pay the jazah. And it's it's in the Quran, it's in the ahidith, it's in the Sunnah. Um, that that the Allah Kittab, the the non-believers, they have to pay the Jaza. And if and that's it just it's in the blood, it's in the very political notions of what Islam is. You just can't get around that. And wherever they once they declare um, and as far as Islamic thinking is concerned, that that is they declare the community that this is Islamic territory now, it will always be Islamic territory. So Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, that that's Islamic territory as far as they're concerned, because it was once ruled by Muslims and once a place where Ummah was established. India is still an Islamic country held by infidels, according to them.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:08

They can have that though, as far as we can trade them that one.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:14

That's right. You guys all go over here. We'll get Constantinople back, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:20

Yeah, I mean, you know, when you look at the time periods where there was the least persecution of Christians living in Muslim lands, it was under Muslim leaders that were considered to be very lax in their religious duties, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:34

And that could change, that could change very quickly, uh, depending on your your ruler. You know, when you get to uh the you know, the Armenian genocide, for example, and that's under the de-Islamicized secular Kamalist regime, yeah. That you have the slaughter of so many Armenians, and it's uh you know, it's it's a secular government. But we gotta we gotta you know wipe all these people out because they're by and large Christian, and any Muslim Armenians were not killed.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:12

Yeah, it reminds me of the there was that uh poll that was done amongst Muslims a few years ago. Then it was done again to it was done 10 years ago as well, but the most recent one was only a couple of years ago, asking them what what Muslims uh that favored Sharia law, even in Western countries. And 80%, like it's between 76 and 80 percent favored Sharia law in their in the Western countries. Right. And in this just speaks to the fact that they're they're unable to assimilate even in the Western countries because they create their little enclaves, as we're seeing in you know, Rob's backyard. Um caves and they never let go of it, right? Uh Raymond Ibrahim had a really good uh video about the umwas. Right. And and was speaking about specifically Spain and stuff because he was the head of video about the Reconquista. And they never, that's always will always, like you said, be declared a Muslim land, even if it's being taken over by the Kafir. So that that's a that's an ongoing issue that we're gonna have to deal with. And we have to understand that we cannot ally with these people at all. And we can't ally with the Middle Eastern New Jersey cult either. Right. Because we they are all they're both anti-Christ. And that is not anyone that we can have. Now we can we can you know ally with the Protestants and the Orthodox because we're pretty much playing with the same some of the same set of rules. True point, although the Protestants don't much want to be at least the ones on Twitter, they don't want to be much uh American Protestants are the worst. American Protestants are the absolute worst. But uh yeah, but they we cannot these are not people, it's not a it's not an either or it's not well because I'm against uh the nation state of Israel doesn't mean I'm for Islam. No, I'm against both.

Chesterton Elites And The Flying Inn

SPEAKER_03 1:29:11

There are no good guys. Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. That's what I support, but here we are. The um there's another thing in that with um, you know, it's there's so much. Oh, it's gotta be two sides. If you support Israel, you're against the Muslims. If you're you're if you support them, you know, if you're against Israel, you must support the Muslims. Like, what if I don't support either? It's like uh just because I I don't I have various opinions and on the administration's uh war in Iran, it doesn't mean I like the Iranian government, actually. Uh don't like anything, although they are trolling the heck out of it, and actually, I'm loving the Iranian troll videos. It it's like who would have known World War III would be mostly fought in memes, Lego memes. It's hilarious. Um, but it's like they got they got a moniker respect out of me for that. But um I don't like the Iranian regime, I don't want them to stay in power. But does that mean we need to come into whether oh yeah, they look our embassy back in the 80s? It's like there's more geopolitics that goes on in that, and honestly, what do I know about what's happening in Iran? Uh nothing. Do I know that these men, yeah, that the government's killing its people? Um, we've heard this playbook before. Gaddafi's giving his troops Viagra to rape people. It's like, have you guys stopped to think of the logistics of that? How that actually works? Uh, and of course, there was never any evidence ever provided for that. Um, so I've never been there, I haven't seen what's going on. Maybe they really did kill a lot of their people protesting, and maybe that's all made up, like mass graves in Serbia and um all these other things, but really ultimately, so I don't know what I do know is Western elites love Islam and have for like 150 years. You read the book, any you guys read the book The Flying In by GK Chesterton. No, you've got to go buy yourself a copy of that. It's a fantastic book. So um it's it's basically about how an Islamic invasion of England would come about. And who would have thought of that in 1920, imagining an Islamic takeover of England? Chesterton pretty much saw exactly how it is playing out now. And I don't think he himself meant it to be like an actual prediction, even though it's been almost 100% right in all of it. It was something that you know came about as mostly his thoughts on prohibition in America, and says, Well, how could that happen in England? Well, it wouldn't happen because they they would just legislate it out because nobody would support it, they would come through enculturation and supporting Islam, and then just like the elites want to support Islam in a force that they really can't control, but they think they can, and so that's more or less what happens in in the book. There's this one British politician, Lord Ivywood, and he's gradually, he's like in the thralls of this one Turk, and he's seeing this intellectual purism of certain ideas in Islamic theology and thinking, and so he's gradually working in more and more laws, changing the way that uh English live in order to accommodate Islam and bringing in Muslims into England, which will then serve as the enforcers for it. And the idea, their idea is like this Hegelian antithesis to the thesis, we're gonna have this new synthesis of a new man that comes out of this conflict of cross and crescent to get rid of the old world, and they'll be presiding over all of it at the end. I don't know about you. I'm looking around in most of Europe and and parts of the United States. I'm like, you know, that why does that sound so familiar? It's exactly what's happening. So buy the book, The Flying In. I don't publish it. It's also got some great poems. It's uh basically they're making all the ins illegal unless you have a pub sign. It's this big Irish captain Dalroy comes back to his old pub and it's being demolished, and uh, and so he takes stock of the situation, uh, you know, grabs his barkeeper friend, grabs the pub sign, smashes a policeman, grabs a cask of cheddar and a cask of rum, and runs off with the sign in the in the bartender. And they go setting up the sign, so now it's legal to drink, and they pour the rum for people, and you know, it's great. It even shows media. There's even a chapter on media manipulation. I'm just like, good grief. This thing is absolutely cold the modern world 100%.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:25

It just it makes me wonder what thing, you know, what the groundwork that was laid, especially, you know, like with Vatican II, and now we're at this point where well it's kind of it's it's not been prescribed, but it's more of implied that well, all religions kind of lead to the same place, right? And we see a lot of our prelates espousing the same things, right? And so the these little steps, these little cobblestones have been placed down for us to step on to eventually get to where we're at right now. Right. Um and it it and whether it's manufactured or maybe it's it's allowed to happen by God in order to get to where he wants us to go, um, you know, it I think the only outcome at this point is there has to be a a massive overturning of the world. Right. Either that means the antichrist is on stage and we're at the end of time, or this is like a a practice run for that time. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:35

Which could be uh maybe three days of darkness, right? I don't know. I'm actually not a big believer in that, although got my blessed candles just in case, but you know, but but something, you know, and there there is supposed to be like a period of peace, and it's not just a question of Fatima, it's also in in certain church fathers and coming of a great monarch. But I mean it would have to be such a massive change in the world. But I mean, you just think of little thing like uh disrupting your energy, disrupting your food supplies, and living through you know various riots that will ensue, especially in urban areas out of that. Uh military conscription, Islamic invasion, who knows how the world could be transformed even in 20 years, how absolutely different everything could be. You know, it's hard to you know to predict precisely how it's all going to come about. I don't know. I've been wrong before, but you know, that the prognosis for the future looks like a lot of pain and suffering. I don't think people are ready for it. And I guess if you return to Constantinople, what was the cry for the anti-Latin party? Better the the the turb than the tiara, right? Well, they found out 300 years of slavery to the Turk, and they found out how well that worked out for them. So it's uh you know, we're you know, the people today that that's to say, you know, Israel harder or whatever you know it is, they're gonna find out what exactly all that entails.

Prophecy Antichrist And The Ages Of The Church

SPEAKER_00 1:35:59

Right. What is your uh what is your opinion on Holzhauser and what is it, the seven ages of the church? I think six ages, seven ages.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:08

Um I I largely I largely agree with with with his position, you know, and the idea that what we're at the the end of the fifth age, which began with the reformation, um, and that there will be a um what you know, a chastisement, you know, maybe like the minor tribulation that's often talked about prior to leaving us into the sixth age, which you know could be called called the you know, the bringing of the Immaculate Heart, uh, you know, the age of the good the the great monarch and holy pope, angelic pope, um, as seen, you know, in other mystics before you know the final tribulation and you know the the seventh age, which is the end, the eschaton. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:52

Well, as I understand it, the sixth age is supposed to be the shortest age, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:36:58

From what I've read and learned, yes, this yeah, that that that that sixth age is probably you know it's literally like the reign of of the great monarch and the angelic pope, and probably not much longer than that.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:12

Yeah, all I can say is so far through the fifth age it tracks. It does, yeah, it really does. You can't really, you know, say it doesn't. And then the question is, what does the sixth and seventh age look like? And you know, are we in the sixth age now? Are we still in the fifth? Um, you know, and I I don't know. It's uh I we'll have to see really how it plays out. So I'd like to be kind of softer on the future prophecy. You know, there's some things you can see clearly just by their by their causes and their beginnings. There's other things like, well, we don't exactly know how that's gonna play out. Um, you know, it's like you know, the whoever the Antichrist is, he's going to be very intelligent and he's gonna be liked by everybody. That's how we know Donald Trump isn't it? Yeah, Donald Trump's not it. There's too many people I hate his guts. Um, I don't even think he's smart enough, actually, either. But besides that, it's like whoever this guy is, um, maybe like Elon Musk used to be before he went team Trump for a brief time, where uh yeah, he was the darling of every party, everyone loved him. He seemed fairly well spoken, and he would get on the Rogan podcast, and everyone loves these Rogan podcasts, left and right, center, you know, people are like digging the guy, even though they don't agree with everything, and just wow, he's such a great guy. Antichrist would be like that exponentially more. Everybody's gonna like how could you not think this guy is sent from God, right? And and that's why even the elect, if it were possible, would be you know, uh confused and and and uh tempted by it. That's how strong it's gonna be. So it's not gonna be like back when Obama, Obama's the Antichrist, like Obama's not smart enough to be the Antichrist, A, B, too many people hate him. Same thing with Trump on the other side, still too many people you know hate him. So it's um my Hollywood's all still like curled up in their bed, afraid of like thinking Trump's gonna send such Gestapo rays to Los Angeles to go get round him up and put him in camps or something because they really literally believe he's Hitler. Um, even though you might like him again then.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:14

I know if only he was as awesome as the left thinks he is.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:18

Right, I know.

Audience Questions And Orthodox Catholic Tensions

SPEAKER_03 1:39:22

Yeah, no kidding. I mean, I I I was never in the the Trump train, I was always like, Yeah, this guy's full of it, I don't believe it. And sure enough, he locked us down, he gave us the COVID job, set up the the program for the next guy to come run, and he's doing the same thing again. He's setting up the technocratic control grid. Next guy will come in and run it, and then there we'll say, Oh, it's all only we had Trump back, he wouldn't have done all this stuff. It's like every president going back a hundred years has set up the tools for the next guy to push down harder and taking away your rights and crush the really since Lincoln every single one, yeah. I mean, they they kind of put the genie back in the bottle just a little bit with Lincoln, but until Wilson, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, at least Wilson, you know, and so but you know, with uh yeah, we could go on about that for quite a while, but it's um that's just the way that the you know it goes, you know, noli te creditare and principibus, you know, don't put your trust in princes. You know, it's like if Trump does something good, hey, we'll come out and say he did something good. If it did something like uh I was supported his immigration policy until he backed off, you know, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:30

I um we had a question earlier for Ryan, didn't we?

SPEAKER_01 1:40:36

There was a couple. Um one is uh should we consider Vlad Vlad Orthodox or Catholic?

SPEAKER_03 1:40:46

Yeah, as far as I'm aware, he died Catholic. Um you know, there were certain points where you know he would work with one or the other, and but he he knew that he needed uh you know support from the West. And so he um as far as I'm aware he died as a Catholic, but I might have to look up just to make sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:11

Because he would have, I mean when did he die?

SPEAKER_03 1:41:17

Um uh 14 77 or 76? 76, he died.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:27

I'm gonna be real impressive, that's correct.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:35

I'm not sure which one.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:36

I could go look it up here, but if only we had these small little things in our hands that had the power right.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:42

I hate doing it though. I didn't know, I didn't know. I need to go back and read it. It's actually one thing with knowledge, it's um you know, the the Latin word for like to to to know, it's given in the in a past tense, only in the perfect tense, cognovi, right? To have literally to have learned, therefore, you know, because you learned it, right? And so that's what at least in classical Latin, cognovi. I learned it, therefore I know it. And so if I have to go pull up my fondle slab and go look it up and say, Oh, yeah, here I don't know it. I I I called a friend basically, like that is what it was the intro that was, you know. And um, you know, it's so, but I I didn't know it. So back to the drawing board, go look read all this stuff again, get into some more books, and and then I'll know it, drill it down again. So that's why I hate doing that.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:32

Um, someone wants to know if you can comment on Our Lady of Singe in Dalmatia.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:38

Um it's a shrine. I know it's a shrine that I think was built by an Italian, but I'm just not sure. Um was it Croatian?

SPEAKER_01 1:42:58

Yeah, yeah. It's a painting venerated as a as miraculous. Uh created potentially by a Venetian artist. Oh, there's the Italian, okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:13

Yeah, I remember something about that from the somebody's telling me from the area, but see if I can show a picture here. Oh, there we go. Yeah, I know that image. Yeah, so I don't know what what the miracles surrounding it uh are, but uh I'm gonna say it defeated a Muslim on a slight. Okay, I'm gonna take a note of that to do some research into that one.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:45

Well, that is a weak Wikipedia article.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:52

Generally is. I mean, the only thing I'll ever do with Wikipedia is like if I know absolutely nothing about something, go read it, kind of get my pointers down, certain terms, certain ideas. Now we go to the bottom. Now where's our sources? Click on one of those, nothing satisfactory, and then go find the real sources, then do the study. So because I just I mean anyone can put anything on a Wikipedia page, and so uh you never know when you'll be led astray.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:16

The assumption the Virgin Mary appeared and scared the extra eaters has that.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:28

Fish eaters has an article on it. Does it have to look at fish eaters? Yeah, I'll go bookmark that.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:35

Actually, there's one thing we should mention too, since we're talking about constant. One of the things, especially if you get what the orthobros online, but it's even a general thing in Orthodox pop you know publications. Oh, well, they went to Florence and promised union for help that never came. Well, one, it's not like Europe was some monolithic blocks sitting in the post control. Pope might have liked that, but it wasn't the case. The English or the French were fighting the Hundred Years' War. Uh, you had uh you know Spain, they were fighting their own battles in Naples and other places, you're distracted. Germany, the Empire was caught up with the Hussite Wars. Um Hungary was already fighting the the Ottomans. Yeah, you know, so the Hungarians are already in the thick of it, and it's uh what's the you know the possible so Father Philip Hughes, really good church historian, especially Reformation historian, but he also writes some other matters. He has a really great line that I wanted to read on that. So, okay. It is perhaps this last effect, you know, the destruction of you know Christian life you know life in the East and the dominance of the Turks, this last effect of the Turkish conquest, which was the most disastrous of all from the point of view of religion. Even had the popes been able to bring about the impossible, to put new life into the France of Charles VII, to unite in immediate harmony the England of the Wars of the Roses, to banish the Hussite feud, still eating away the vitality of Germany, and then uniting these mutually antagonistic national interests and combining these princes with those maritime states of Italy whose policy was, in its inspiration, the least Christian of all, to launch a well-planned, well-organized joint attack at a distance of months of marching from its bases. And even had the attack been successful and the Turks 500 years ago crippled forever, what could the papacy thereby have gained for religion? Territories where the victorious Latin princes would assuredly have been the rulers, and where populations violently attached to their anti-Latin prejudices would continue to prefer the temporal rule of Islam to the spiritual rule of the Pope? Nothing but a succession of miracles, suspensions of the laws of nature of things, in the fields of diplomacy and war could have now brought the Christian cause to triumph over the Turks. And nothing but a new series of miracles could have saved the land so liberated from the bloody anarchy which had been their fate already for generations, wherever Latins ruled Greeks and Hellenized Slavs. It is, however, rarely given to any man to see the problem of his own hour in all its dimensions. What is demanded of him by posterity is that he shall have faced the crisis generously with a total abandonment of self-interest. By this test, the popes of this generation might be judged to have succeeded. And in the continuous nine years effort of the two popes, Calixtus III and Pius II, the papacy now reaches to heights unskilled since Gregory X. So, you know, it's uh they really didn't have the power to bring that kind of aid. They already brought as much aid as they could get out against the greatest military force in the world at the time. But what if they had done it? We already see the anti-union party at Constantinople. Um, even as you've got 7,000 or so uh Latins here to defend the city at risk to their lives, and uh you know, money and and and things that has already come in from the papacy, they can't make the King of France and the King of England do their will, right? And even if they could, and even if they could have miraculously defeated the Turk and driven them even out of Anatolia, what would have been what would have happened? You know, I think the anti-Latin word is a sign of what would have happened and continued to do that. So it's uh I don't think that um you know it it's a part of the spirit of the age and the direction that you know the east had gone in. I think it's it is gonna take that succession of miracles that Father Hughes was talking about to bring about that breaking of the anti-Latin spirit, as well as a generous spirit on this side of it too.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:49

And if that had been God's act of will, it would have happened. Yeah.

1204 The Sack And Byzantine Decline

SPEAKER_03 1:48:53

That's the thing, you know, his permissive will allowed it, and he didn't create a brand new miracle to uh you know do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:06

So it's the Greeks' fault. Got it. That's what Bellerman thinks, actually.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:12

Um when Bellerman's addressing Greek Orthodox writers, principally Nelas Kabasias, in um his book on the papacy, I think it's where he says it. You know, he talks about the the the pride and arrogance of the Greeks being the cause of so much of their fault. Or it's in the book on the marks of the church, where he even says that you know that the pride and arrogance of the Greeks is the cause of their own fault. Now they don't like to hear that, but even in their own sources, it's it's it's fairly clear that that a lot of that's going on.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:41

So we we see that pride and arrogance even today with where we have the Russian Orthodox Church who's in with the the Greeks and Right. And it and they've never been able to get past it.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:53

You know, it's like Solovia said, you know, they're a bunch of largely a bunch of national churches. Now they they might have. Good arguments for patent things going on in the Catholic Church right now, they want to sling it us. All right, fair cop. But realistically, though, the the Orthodox churches have always been national churches. Ultimately, Cesaro Papism rule the day, you know, whereas the emperor is largely going to have control of the church and use it, you know, for his methods. And it's one of the reasons that it distinguishes the West, where the papacy was always independent, even if, especially in the you know, in the especially in this period when the state is encroaching upon the life of the church in so many different ways, controlling you know who's nominated bishop, putting a three-year-old nobility, you know, a three-year-old boy is like a sort of McGee or some other major household over an abbey with a lot of income, and all that income goes to that royal family now, not to the use of the monastery or the church or the people. All these kind of crazy things, the state encroaching on the church. But even that, you still have to reckon with the pope, somebody who is independent of them. And the the the way you break the spell is like you know, the German princes following Luther and Henry the Eighth, and just go off and become like the Orthodox, but no sacraments, you know. It's uh and that's that's what they do in Henry VIII. It's total Cesaropapism. It's a it's a true theocracy under Henry the Eighth. Uh they they modify it a bit under Elizabeth, but under Henry VIII, he is the Pope of the Church of England, as well as being the temporal lord as well. He wants to be in charge of people's bodies as well as their souls. So you know, it's uh you know, it leads down to that that rejection, you know, the first steps of trying to reject that independent authority create national churches in the West. So the uh and that's why you know so much revolves around the Pope. That's like the one issue that all Protestants, all Orthodox, you always be at loggerheads on until you once you accept that, everything else falls into place.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:57

Um by this point, by 1453, the I imagine the Varangian Guard was a relic of a history.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:06

Oh, yeah. Um, yeah, the entirety of the the Byzantine army is largely mercenaries at this point in 1453, uh, Western mercenaries or whatever few tributary areas they can you know afford to draw from their own population. Uh their arms and armament would have been similar to uh you know to Western troops, uh plate armor, brigandine, uh chainmail, and you know, you know, helmets like in that. I mean, they might have some relics left over. So the Varangian guard that that's back to Viking times. Yeah, that that lasted pretty much, I think, after 1204, it was not reconstituted, even before 1204, it was a relic. Um, most of them are fighting in southern Italy against the Normans and in the right before the first crusade. And it's actually funny when the the well, the supposed schism, because the 1054 dates was like this pop history date, right? But uh, I mean, because it only affected the patriarch, didn't excommunicate all of Constantinople, didn't excommunicate the other patriarchs, it only can't excommunicated Carulius. There is a sense in Constantinople of being out of communion on that account, but it wasn't the whole east was suddenly in schism, just boom, like that. So it was degrees and new problems that eventually drove that further away. But still, so in southern Italy, what's the Pope doing? He's fighting to maintain Byzantine lands against the Normans, and Leo IX ends up where in a Norman jail because his troops got defeated by the Normans, the Rangian Guard Guard got slaughtered, as the Greeks fighting against them, and the Greek fighting for them. But anyway.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:05

Um just to bring up some of the the tropes that come up on X, because we always see the uh the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders. And I think people always think that's in a in a in a vacuum, and that came out of nowhere, right? And people seem to gloss over the massacre of the Latins was 20, 30 years before that.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:28

Oh yeah. Yeah, and I mentioned that briefly. I decided to pass over it because who knows the what new dimensions that opens up. But yeah, the uh because so the the the Italians had a trading city in Para, we mentioned it, that's where they put the chain across the the the Golden Horn to uh you know to defend the the harbors and whatnot in Constantinople. So um that trading city, uh you know, there was a massacre of uh of the Latins, all the Latins who were there, which came about through you know a steady building of anti-Latin feeling, and that was before 1204 even happened. What the doge in Venice at the four who who does so much to manipulate and control the fourth crusade and direct it at Constantinople, he uh was blinded by during the sack of the Latins, and he never forgave the the Byzantines, and so he worked really hard to to get you know the support for this this pretender to the throne because he wanted to have like the coup de grosse of controlling Byzantium through that and making that part of his maritime empire, and it uh you know ultimately you know it went awry with the the whole sack, it wasn't anything that he directly intended, not not that way, although he certainly profited from it and Venice profited from it by getting a lot of treasures from Constantinople and bringing them to Rome. Not Rome, sorry, to Venice.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:54

How much effect or yeah, how much effect did the sack in 1204 have on the eventual you know defeat and fall of Constantinople 250 years later? Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:10

Uh it had a huge effect because the city never recovered. Now it's not true the city was an utter and absolute shambles, but it had been generally depopulated and it you know it because of the danger of the Turks and everything. And so the you know, the the they'd converted a lot of empty land into farmland within the city, which certainly helped their food problems. But it uh it definitely weakened their their administration, their treasury, their their hold on, especially in Greece and the Aegean and um other places, the the holdings they had in uh across in Anatolia were incredibly weakened, and the Turks definitely took advantage of that. So when the Palaeologists get in restore the empire um and drive out the last of the Latin kingdom, the uh you know the city's not the same, the you know, they don't have the same power or control that they used to have. You know, it's it's clearly a dying institution and might not have been if it wasn't for 1204. So and that's why too, Greeks remember 1204 and uh and their the great betrayal uh of the Latins, forget you know forget about all the other stuff. But you know, they'll they'll remember that hope that never came. I hope that did come, but just wasn't enough.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:40

Well, Adrian, anything else there?

Greek Fire Flamethrowers And War Reels

SPEAKER_00 1:57:44

I I need to decompress just not jest. There's a lot of things I just I just uh I just heard.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:51

I never even got to talk about Greek fire because that's one of those fun ones where they developed it in like the eighth century. It was basically similar to napalm. Nobody knows exactly what its chemical composition was, but um, but they could actually project it forward and then it would burn, and like napalm, it would continue burning and the water would just spread the fire around.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:11

Yeah, it is kind of cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:13

It's one of those historical mysteries where, like you said, we have we really don't know how they made it, where they gave you know we know from the Arab sources as well as their own that uh they did. There's a tradition that like an angel had received revealed the the recipe during a the second siege of Constantinople by the Arabs, uh, which could be. I like that story, but either way, you know, there's even in the sources reports about flamethrowers, about handheld flamethrowers to shoot Greek fire. We don't know. I mean, the the sources mention it, that's why it's plausible. And if they could do it out of a ship, they could probably you know do it in a handheld fashion, but it wasn't that widely developed and spread. That tells me that that wasn't an effective military like early canon, probably blows up more often than it you know holds together.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:05

So they tended to keep it really close to the chest, right? Like it was their greatest military secret.

SPEAKER_03 1:59:14

So very long time. And you know, other people had things they called Greek fire, but it wasn't the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:21

Well, we could also look at like World War II with flamethrowers, like the average life expectancy of a flamethrower is like 11 seconds, yeah. Once they hit the beach of Normandy. So it's probably to your point, right? It's probably a fact that it just tactically was not a great option.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:39

Did you get that Instagram reel I sent you the other day, Adrian? What was it?

SPEAKER_00 1:59:44

Was it better than the one I sent you of the marine emo?

SPEAKER_01 1:59:47

Way better. It was it was something about uh flamethrowers on Iwo Jima, and then it was a video of uh a kid with a leaf blower with the red blanket attached to the end using it as like a flamethrower against his brothers and sisters.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:05

Man, if y'all saw the reels that Rob and I send each other from Instagram, I've seen that you can legally purchase uh World War One era flamethrowers now. How old do those work?

SPEAKER_01 2:00:20

My local fleet supply fleet tractor supply store has them. I just haven't bought one yet.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:26

I want to get one that mounts to the bottom of my AR. AR, yeah, that'd be that'd be amazing.

SPEAKER_01 2:00:34

With enough redneck ingenuity, you can make any of them out of the yeah, yeah, I probably could.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:41

Make you think alien tying the pulse rifle and the flamethrower together, you know, so you got them both.

Medieval Weapons Grenades And Tactics

SPEAKER_00 2:00:45

Yeah, yeah. Because there there's there's one, you know, on the on the gun tube side of things, which is more where I'm at, uh, there's always the conversation of post-quarter battles with CQB or like going into a building, right, and having to take out like what we did in Fallujah, right? And I'm of the mindset, brother, I ain't doing that, I'm just gonna set the house on fire, right? And then your favorite saying is to come out.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:09

Yeah, your favorite saying is why do CQB when you can do arson instead. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:13

There's a there's a question here uh from White Knight. Uh, what are your favorite medieval weapons? And I figured I'll go first. My favorite medieval weapon is the pole axe, is it's one of the most versatile weapons generally, and your technique with this you know you've you've seen those probably pictures of them. You got an axe, uh some type of hammer development on one side, spike at the top, but then on the bottom, this is the part people miss. There's a spike at the bottom, too, or you know, a pointed you know, butt of it. So your tactic in hand-to-hand combat with that is actually this almost like a small spear. This is actually your first one, especially against an armored knight. You want to knock that stinker down and then wallop him with the hammer. That's what you want to do. And it's help his helm or something else, make his head ring. Because I've got that great helm up there. If you ever get hit with one of those, even with the padding, your head is ringing, right? You're you get tonight is something something awful, and you're you're gonna be a bit out of it uh for a while if you take a hit up there. It's just not, it might might save your life, but it's not gonna be fun going with that. So if you're a knight fully armored, full body armor, you get smacked with one of those uh by someone who's less armored, that's gonna affect you, and they can knock you down. And that's when they come in with a dagger, start getting in the joints, try to, you know, cut you, get some some badge or something to show whether you're a valuable nobility or you're a dangerous man at arms, right? But otherwise, anyway, with the pole axe, other than you know, knocking someone down, you lock in, you know, close quarters. Once you've got enough clearance, you know, you can swat this way if you're up on a horse, great for getting down at smacking the your peasant conscripts with either end of it as you're as you're going um, you know, you're going through. You know, a really handy weapon for a lot of different types of a thing, really effective against armor, especially if you're you're in like a hover, you know, like a gambasin and chainmail, or even a brigandine, which is gonna protect you against a lot of stuff, but you're not up to you know as heavily armored as that night, it can still run you through at close, close range. You need to something that can knock him over, get in the joints of his armor, and this is one of the best things you've got. You know, arrows, even at close range, even for brigandine, arrows don't actually go through the armor a lot of time. Now, with brigandine, you're not fully plate armor, so you might get the leg, you might get elbows, might take off a bit of the hand, which is in male for the most part, it's not always articulated plate armor for a lot of people. It depends what they can afford. But um, you know, but a direct arrow to the now, you can get like an ideal hit with a crossbow right up close, and the bolt will generally go through the armor, uh, 20 yards, 30 yards. Well, further out than that, a lot of times it's gonna bounce off, and especially with the the design of the armor, the bevels, and of course, you're uh out of uh ideal conditions where the guy's just sitting there and you shoot him. Uh, he's moving, right? That moving can deflect the bolt, could deflect the arrow. So, you know, a lot of times when knights are killed, it's actually close up by getting in the joints or uh lifting up the cod piece. And I don't want to say that uh that that's horrible for the point of the ephemeral artery. You know, just get in there and cut the throat, all kinds of horrible, gruesome stuff. That but you see the uh but have you seen the armed MMA?

SPEAKER_00 2:04:43

Yes, yeah, I've seen that already. It is good, it is done. I would say my favorite medieval weaponry is the uh the holy hand grenade of Antioch. You shall count to three, not four, not two, but three. Five is right out. That's gonna date us on that one. Everyone's like, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_01 2:05:08

I guess I I'm just I'm a simple man. I just like to play an old arming sword.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:17

I've got a uh we we've got a local uh HEMA chapter. Um and I keep like I keep about to go down there and just kind of check it out. I'm gonna take my son down, you know, I think it'd be fun just to kind of play around with. Uh but uh I watch some of them on you know like YouTube and stuff, and I'll watch them with with my son. And he's like, Dad, is that how they actually try? Because there's another channel where they tested uh plate armor and they they test modern weaponry against it. Plate armor will stop 556. Really? So all these theories that have like what would happen in the crusades if there was 50 Marines, like the 50 Marines would be slaughtered because that 5'5 is not going through the plate armor, especially in cavalry.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:59

Yeah, no, no doubt. Now, I mean, close up, probably, but again, it's the same thing with the arrows and the crossbows, you know, ideal conditions, the guy's moving around, and he got different things that have deflected. Yeah, I'm sure we got rounds that'll put them down, but even like the gunpowder's the archebus balls, right? In a little uh ball shot. Um that was hit or miss. That uh did not always penetrate a lot of the kills. I actually found the joints in armor, and of course, the the standard in armor was changing because um it's not even that it was considered less effective, it's just so expensive. And the economy that supported that landed aristocracy that had that chain mail, that plate mail, full plate armor. I was going away, and that became the plaything of kings for jousting throughout the 1500s, kind of showing off their uh their prowess by having the coolest armor. Some of them do have really cool armor, I might add. But you're equipping your troops, and or or you've got uh another nobleman's equipping troops. What do you go for? You go for a basic bit of plate, could be mass-produced, anyone can wear it, straps on the back, uh helmet, and you'd have some chain mill. Eventually, the chain mill starts going away altogether. Now you've got a gambison underneath uh, you know, uh plate, full chest plate, and that's what you go with, and makes it easier, especially as you go to the pike and cavalry tactic, and then pike shot and cavalry tactic for the Spanish tertio. And you know, they because you everyone's reading, you know, the Swiss had actually done it first, and it was really effective. So the the under uh the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I they developed the Lance Connects, literally in German land knights, because they're armored like knights somewhat, but that their armor goes in this fashion and they form the pike squares, like Alexander the Great. And it's mainly meant to be using you want to the same idea with Alexander the Great, hammer and anvil, right? And this is still studied in military academies today. You lock down the main force with the the pike squares so that they're kind of pinned in position. There they got to try to fight, hack their way through these things with their swords, they get stabbed by another one as they go through, it's slow going, trying to break that unit up. While you're all doing that, the cavalry comes from behind in the rear and causes a rout. And then that army, that that infantry just uh disappears. So the same type of tactic is start being employed, but you know, with but now it's you know you're against heavy cavalry that can outflank. So you need troops on the sides, you need swordsmen, you need lesser spearmen, you need archibissers, right? Gunmen, and they like in the Spanish, perfect this there with the Tercio. The uh archibissers move in, they plant their stake, they get you know their their weapons usually ready to fire, and then they step back, next one comes up, they're back, they're reloading. Okay, and they just like you do with flintlock, same thing with the match lock. You know, pretty much same for there's a few more steps because of the match and the the your primer pan and everything because your trigger, we we talked about this, it's just a mechanism of the burning match that goes into the pan, so the kinetic energy fires the ball. So that you know, it's a you need to take it cumbersome to reload, but if you got the and the Spanish had this down, they had the ranks, they would meander in and then they'd you know come back out, reload, come back in, right? And that's effective enough because even if you you know might not penetrate the the cavalrymen, kill the horse. Or horsies uh met their fate on battlefields from from that, from arrows or crossbows or uh shot.

SPEAKER_01 2:09:26

How reliable were early grenades and what were their kill range?

SPEAKER_03 2:09:32

Uh a lot of grenades would be like hollowed out cannonballs filled with gunpowder and have a bit of saltpeter rope. The knights of Malta used them and they would shoot out shrapnel. I mean, the range uh from the explosion would really it would be short range, whoever's standing around um a couple meters. At best, I'd have to go double check the the earliest ones because the first you know uh grenades, the um they were like hollowed-out cannonballs. Well, they were just too thick, they absorbed too much of the shock. So they started making those things thinner and more effective, uh, you know, that way. And they'd actually start casting the hollow uh you know ball and then fill it up with gunpowder. But then they'd what they would do is start filling up with shrapnel and other things to blow up with it. So when the salt peter came down, it hit its kinetic energy, it would just blast out all the shrapnel, and that would actually do far more damage than like the outer shell coming out or the explosion itself. And uh, especially for the Turks at Malta, uh, they've got a lot of flowing robes and other things in their uniforms, they catch fire. Um, and then the Knights of Malta had another thing almost as devastating for these early cannonballs. They would wrap uh so rope soaked in uh cloth soaked in saltpeter around these hoops, make it like a hula hoop, light the thing on fire and throw it on down. So you're charging up all of a sudden these fiery things come down at you. You either start moving the other way, try to get out of the way, catches on fire. Uh you catch on fire. Uh you know, a lot of burns, it's great for slowing down a charge, bringing down the morale, and then you stand up and you get shot, or you stand up and you get stabbed by uh even someone repelling the charge has come down, sorte, cavalry, whatever. Really great for breaking up infantry charges that way.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:16

Oh Adrian, what's the what's the range of mono grenades? Is it still five millimeter kill radius and fifteen casualties?

SPEAKER_00 2:11:26

Yeah, your your shrapnel really your fragmentation grenade, you're looking at you have five meters uh is the kill radius, 15 meters is casualty radius. Um because it's it's separated to like what once what radius is gonna kill, what radius is gonna injure.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:42

Um but uh when I deployed, uh we didn't get a lot of grenades out because we found out that a lot of guys don't play baseball anymore. Um so they don't know how to throw. And uh like when when I do when when I've got friends that Do uh like construction and stuff. Like one rule they have is it's always left-handed anger, right? So when they get mad, instead of destroying something with their right hand, which is they would always do like you know, left-handed anger, right? Type of thing, that's what everybody looked like throwing grenades. When we went to the grenade range and base and boot, you know, other people have basic, uh man, it just the people just cannot throw. So a lot of times we don't have it. Now, a lot of I my second or my first appointment, not my second appointment. Um, I had the grenade launcher on mine on my rifle, which was the horrible idea, by the way. It was way too heavy. I hated I hated having to go on patrol for that thing because it was like an extra 10 pounds I didn't need. Um, but that was that was the the really the development for people because they just can't throw. Yeah, and then but the like Fallujah, we saw it a lot. We saw a lot of flashbangs, a lot of fragmentation grains because you would just toss it in the doorway real quick and and then peel around the the doorway, but you didn't have to really throw it that far, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:13:00

Right. Uh Ryan, are are flares were flares actually medieval weapons?

Best Medieval Battle Scenes On Film

SPEAKER_03 2:13:07

They meant flails, they corrected in the subsequent comment. Flails were actually used, but they were not like your ball and spiky chain type of thing, those are all Victorian recreations. There's a lot of stuff about the Middle Ages. The Victorian is just basically made up, it comes through their fevered imagination, or they assume something must be so and they created it, and then those are where your examples come from, not from actual medieval combat. But people had flails, they were two-handed, like a log stick, and at the end of it would be you know, either either chains with pieces of uh you know sharp you know bits on them, or um, you know, or spiky things, and they were actually designed, they were yard tools for clearing weed whacking basically. Oh, okay. That's what they're for. And uh, but when you're conscripted to go fight in the count's army and you don't have a weapon, well, you grab your farm tools. So that's how the flail enter combat. And of course, the best you can do, I mean, it's terribly effective. You knock some guy in the head with that, you take his face off. It's also good to just use those quarter staff, and uh to the extent that someone can do that. And when you're thinking people they work at the fields all day, they're they're particularly built and not uh well fed and sitting at home at a computer like me, they could do a lot of damage with that, actually. But uh, but the the comical, you know, ball and chain, uh, as far as I'm aware, there's not a single battlefield example, there's not a few uh particular bit of art that depicts that. You did have um a mace, you had like a club, which is basically a metal club, sometimes the spikes on it, sometimes not, sometimes with a big hammer on it. Uh, those were actually favored by bishops when they would go into battle, prince bishops and whatnot, because they would um you know come and smack you down and uh not draw blood directly, might break your shoulder underneath, might crush your skull, but they didn't draw blood, so they don't incur irregularity. So you have that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 2:15:02

Okay, last question, guys. Last question, and then we I gotta go to bed.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:06

Yeah, I gotta go.

SPEAKER_01 2:15:07

What is the best medieval war scene in a movie in the last just ever, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_03 2:15:16

Medieval war scene.

SPEAKER_01 2:15:18

Because I know you have very strong opinions about medieval screen, yeah, terribly.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:26

I think um see as far as medieval war scenes, um the Bannock Burn scene and the Outlaw King, as far as medieval combat goes, was um was it was pretty is that the follow-up to Braveheart? Yes, except uh 10 times better film, and uh in a and it's far more accurate to the sources while still adapting and changing a few things. And the only thing you screw up is uh um Bruce fighting Edward II directly. That never happened, um, really. So that was uh that's a movie with Chris Pine, yeah. And it like he actually did really well in that, actually. I liked him in that. Um, and that was a that was a particularly well done movie. Um trying to think because I've seen a lot, I think the knight's tale for the silliness of the the the modern music in it. Um that actually worked really well. There were a lot of things you see there that are are true to battles because a lot a lot of the tension you get you in a Hollywood film, you gotta build the tension, you gotta you get dramatic scenes in an actual melee, especially with most people not being fully plate armored. Um you're gonna fight and you're gonna kill someone about two to four seconds, two to six seconds at the most, right? And so it in a good, well-disciplined battle order line, right, as you either you're advancing or you're receiving a charge, whatever, you're gonna get into a lot. Your first thing in most medieval battles is you're gonna use your shield. That is an offensive weapon, not a defensive weapon. If you just kind of sit there and cower under it, the guy's gonna take his axe and just trash your shield and carve your skull out. But what you do actually is is drive forward with your shield, push the guy over, and now you can stick him, you can crus uh crush his neck if you can get it with the the that's why the shields are pointed, because you smash down with it if you need to. Um, and then the sword is largely for parrying, shield knocks people off. You you strike with the sword, and then if you need to, you run it through. Uh broadswords that you're mostly that's mostly going to be once you've exposed the enemy. This is all happening in two to six seconds, maybe eight. Uh, some you know, a handful of battles take a little bit longer, but eventually you're gonna get killed by someone else, or you're gonna knock the guy down and kill him, or he'll be killed by someone else. And especially when you get in the scrum, which is where everyone's you know fighting in the the the the the mist of it all. Um, you get some battles that really get horrible and muddy, like at Agincourt, for example, in the midst of it. I mean, it's just mud all over. I don't know if you've ever been to Agincourt to that field. Um, even like a few days after it's rained, it's still kind of soft. Well, I mean, the the first the failed cavalry charge with the French, it turned up that field. So when the uh infantry comes down, apart from getting over all the dead horses and and whatnot, and they you know, they they're marching through mud, some of them because they're in full plate armor, they're like getting stuck as they're yeah. I mean, you've ever had that where you get your boot just in a real bad bog, and you lift up and your foot comes out right out, and the boot's still there in the mud. Well, that's what these guys are dealing with at Agin Cor with their uh their their boots, they're their their you know, metal plate and everything, even though it's not you know you know, not to coming off your foot, but still, and then you're getting you know hit by arrows as you're coming down, which is definitely going to be ringing and annoying, you know, annoying you. Some will die, hit the joints. Then you get into the knights, and of course, when you're in the the the melee with the knights, then what do the archers do? They drop their bows, pick up their bill hooks, their halberds, all these things. They come in, they're knives, they come in and they start attacking the the knights from the the flanks, start taking going into all the joints, all these horrible ways to to die, right? Um, that there is actually uh uh with uh what's his name, Timothy Chalamet. Um, some of the color wrong, the armor wasn't all done right, but the actual battle actually gets into some of this how nasty it was. A lot of times it wasn't really quite that that way, especially with the mud and everything, and it doesn't happen in every battle, but but it does get it got very brutal. And you know, especially if you're the unarmored peasant, or even if you're like in your male, male's good at turning, you know, you're getting hit overhead, side hits, whatever. It's gonna turn those now. Your bones underneath will be broken, but it will turn the blades, you won't die per se, unless you got internal bleeding. In that case, medieval medicine can't help you. Um, but you know, those guys are still dying faster. Arrows will penetrate male. The it just is the pressure, the force of the point will force the ring the male and it will penetrate that way. And if you're lucky and it hits you just right, you know, you're you got the quilt to jerk in underneath your mail, it might stop the arrow from going through sometimes, you know, based on the chroniclers, not not as often as people would like, but it's still better than nothing. So it's just uh I'm just thinking like again, so Outlaw King, uh, some of the battles in there. Um, yeah, this movie with Timothy Chalamet, uh we were also I was on with TLM Ryan and we were talking, we did a whole series in the Battle of Ajan Corps, and so we're talking about that.

SPEAKER_01 2:20:36

Uh so in terms of like medieval battles, um let's see, trying to think a few other uh yeah, the one with Timothy Chalamet is called the King. Yes, that's the one.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:49

Then there's the uh The Last Duel. I don't know if you've seen that one. It's got um I don't think so. Is that the one with the really accurate sort of Adam Driver and you're thinking uh the duelist that's from like the 70s? Uh the last duel's got um uh what's his name? Uh Ben Affleck, and it's not Ben Affleck, but what's the other guy that's always with Ben Affleck? Matt Damon.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:15

Matt Damon.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:16

He's got Matt Damon with him and like joined at the hip with Adam Driver.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:24

That uh everyone who saw that said it's really good. So I haven't watched it yet. I don't watch a lot of movies, so right.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:31

Yeah, it's an Anthony thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:33

He loves his movies because he's in the truck all day, it's all he can do. Right, an X.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:40

And actually, you know, and I come to think of it. Um, even though I I I don't like the Peter Jackson adaptation as a Lord of the Rings, as movies, they're good movies. As adaptions, I strongly dislike them, but um, the Helm's Deep scene actually is very much like the Battle of Delgri we're talking about, even down to well, like Hinyadi riding out is very much how Theodon rides out, and there's a lot of that Tolkien you know incorporates actually even like the the Pelinor Fields and the Siege of Gondor is a lot like his what should happen to Constantinople. And that looms very large because for a long time, like in English historiography, you taught that Constantinople that was the end of the medieval world, that was the the way they used to present it. I don't think that's true because unless unless you were in the city, life didn't change for you uh on May 30th, 15 uh 1453. So the world didn't suddenly change to be a new thing in anybody's imagination or the way anybody lived or the way anybody really thought, other than being afraid now of the danger of the Turk. So it's not really you know the end of the world, but that's what they used to be taught, right? I mean, really, if you want when when does the medieval world end? It's the reformation. That's the central notion of the Middle Ages, the unity of faith in Christendom that's utterly shattered at the Reformation. That's what changes the world, not Constantinople's fall. So, but that was loomed large in Tolkien's mind, and he he references it in different places. Even Father Christmas letters, he references the year Constantinople fell. You know, it's like it was one of those things in his head seeking to and and so uh Askilia, Gondor, you know, that's like that's like Constantinople.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:17

Yeah, okay. Well, I think we're gonna have to call it here, guys. Um, Ryan, thank you so much uh for coming on tonight. And you're welcome. Giving us all that all all your knowledge. It's amazing how much you're always glad to blame. Adrian, thank you for joining me and taking Anthony's spot.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:36

Um look, I don't want to leave you in here by yourself. I know you're you know, without Anthony here, you're you're kind of like a deer in headlights. So I want to come and see it.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:50

Four years and I'm still like that. I don't think I'm ever gonna get over that.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:53

Well, it's that it's that melancholic man is what it is. Yeah.

Plugs Next Shows And Signoff

SPEAKER_01 2:23:57

Um Anthony. Yeah. Anything you want to uh promote before we go, Ryan?

SPEAKER_03 2:24:06

Uh yeah, probably too many things. I think the book on St. John Capistrano does not get enough love. You know, people that you know see, like, who's John Capistran? It may or may not know who he is. Well, anyway, goes into uh the Battle of Belgrade and the Battle of the Crusades in Serbia, um, that we mentioned with Hignati, but also you know, his work in reforming the church and so many things that that he was uh worked with within the culture of Renaissance Italy at that time and and and things, it's just a fantastic book. So uh Mediatrix Press, John Capistran. I did that was the original title, and I decided not to change it, but you know, whereas most people they know him is Capistrano, but from the Italian, but anyway, and I I do have that uh a link to that book pinned in the live chat for everyone, just so you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:24:50

Adrian, uh Guns and Rosaries next week sometime. Yeah, hopefully Monday. Hopefully Monday.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:57

Hopefully the world doesn't end by Monday.

SPEAKER_01 2:24:59

It's it's it's funny because uh the um stuff between Leo and and Trump started to kick off late Sunday night. I sent it to I sent it to Anthony at like nine o'clock. He was, I think, already asleep. So he saw it when he woke up the next morning, texting me wanting to do a show right like Monday instead of Tuesday. And I go, I texted Adrian, I go, Adrian, any chance we can move it from Monday? And he goes, Anthony, just can't wait, Kenny. It's like Adrian knew exactly why I was asking that.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:33

I know, I know exactly what it was. Uh yeah, I mean, keep in mind that everything that happens since Iran War has always kicked off on a Friday. So be prepared for tomorrow. Let's see what happens. Uh so Monday might be a little epic.

SPEAKER_01 2:25:48

We could we could do we could Ryan, you could come on the other channel to do historical gun episodes sometime.

SPEAKER_03 2:25:54

Yeah, oh that would be fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:56

Yeah, just plan to do it all on X, though. Yeah, we have to do it. We won't build it on YouTube at all.

SPEAKER_03 2:26:03

Yeah, darn. Yeah, if I had uh stuff I used to have or had access to stuff I used to have access to, yeah, matchlocks, flintlocks, um shot those extensively. I would that would be a lot of fun to get into.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:18

I've been looking for the the people zoo's uh rolling block. They're not easy to find. No, they're not that expensive when you do find them, but they're just not easy to find.

SPEAKER_03 2:26:29

Yeah, another fun gun to look into during the English Civil War. They they try to develop these the wheel, the wheel block. You ever heard of the is a so basically, yeah, spring reloaded wheel, and it would spin to strike the flint and then ignite. And they they they were about 60 fire. They they would actually fire. A lot of times it wouldn't, and then you have to do it again, and then and then you get it and like I said, terribly effective.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:56

Well, they were they weren't shooting people in the legs randomly on the on their own.

SPEAKER_03 2:27:01

Give them a little bit of credit. Could not believe that.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:12

There was another 320 went off the last day or two. She went through a guy and went through his leg twice and then hit his foot. Good lord. Wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:27:22

I don't know. I've never had a misfire. I've always carried in the chamber, never had a misfire.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:28

Are you carrying the SIG 320? No, that's why that's probably why.

SPEAKER_03 2:27:31

That's why no, I got a C Z07s my daily carry, but ah, nice. We're we're big fans of CZs over here.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:41

Yeah, I carry she had a two. All right. Okay, well, stay at that YouTube will kill it, so yeah. Okay, thank you, everyone. Have a good night. All right.