Renaissance to World Wars: A High-Speed History of Europe

Lachlan Reed

[excited] Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Lachlan Reed, here with Simon Carver. And Simon, picture this -- [pauses] it's October 31, 1517. A thirty-four-year-old monk named Martin Luther walks up to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, and he nails a document to the wood. Ninety-five SPECIFIC complaints about how the Catholic Church is running things.

Simon Carver

[surprised] Ninety-five complaints! [laughs] That is... that's not just a disagreement, Lachlan. That is the sixteenth-century equivalent of a massive, VIRAL call-out post.

Lachlan Reed

Exactly! [chuckles] It's the ultimate reply-guy thread, but it actually breaks the Church's monopoly on religion in Europe. But to understand how a bloke with a hammer and a piece of paper changed the world, [matter-of-fact] we actually have to wind the clock back about two hundred years to fourteenth-century northern Italy. Because before you get the Reformation, you gotta have the Renaissance.

Simon Carver

Right, the Renaissance. Which literally just means "rebirth." And I always love how historians frame this -- [mischievously] it's basically Europe having a massive cultural glow-up because they suddenly remembered that ancient Greece and Rome existed. [reflective] You've got this shift away from the medieval obsession with the afterlife, and suddenly everyone is focused on humanism. The idea that human beings have potential right here, right now.

Lachlan Reed

Human potential, yeah. But let's be real, Simon, it was also about money. [chuckles] You don't get guys like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo painting ceilings and carving marble without SERIOUS cash. [deadpan] And that brings us to the Medici family in Florence. Specifically Cosimo de Medici.

Simon Carver

Cosimo de Medici. [thoughtfully] He's fascinating because he's essentially using a massive banking fortune to bankroll this entire cultural revolution, isn't he? They were like the Silicon Valley tech bros of the Renaissance, [scoffs] but instead of funding apps, they were funding statues and frescoes.

Lachlan Reed

[warmly] Spot on. It's patronage. Wealthy families paying for art and architecture to show off how important they are. But that new way of thinking -- that individualism, [deliberate] questioning the old medieval ways -- that leaks out of art and into everything else. Including religion. Which brings us right back to our mate Martin Luther in 1517.

Simon Carver

Back to the Wittenberg church door. And what Luther was specifically angry about was this thing called "indulgences." [skeptical] The Church was literally selling pieces of paper that supposedly reduced your punishment for sins. You pay cash, you get a FAST-PASS through purgatory.

Lachlan Reed

A fast-pass through purgatory! [laughs] But Luther says, "No, salvation comes through faith ALONE." And because someone had just invented the printing press, his ninety-five complaints don't just stay on that door. [urgently] They go viral. They get printed and copied all over Europe.

Simon Carver

And that fractures Europe entirely. You suddenly have Protestantism. You have John Calvin in Switzerland pushing predestination, you have the English Reformation -- which, [sarcastic] let's be honest, started mostly because King Henry VIII wanted an annulment in the 1530s and the Pope said no. [resigned] It kicks off more than a century of brutal religious wars, ending only when the Peace of Westphalia is signed in 1648.

Lachlan Reed

1648. That date is the HINGE, mate. [deliberate] Because after Westphalia, the religious dust sort of settles, and Europe's leaders realize they need a new way to keep control. Which is exactly where things get really intense.

Simon Carver

[matter-of-fact] Intense is the right word. Because post-1648, you see two completely opposite ways of running a country emerge. In France, you get absolutism. [dramatically] And the poster child for this is King Louis XIV.

Lachlan Reed

Louis XIV. The bloke who famously said, "L'état, c'est moi" -- I am the state. [mock-serious] Talk about MAIN CHARACTER ENERGY. [laughs] He literally builds the Palace of Versailles just to keep all his nobles in one house so he can watch them. He's centralizing ALL the power.

Simon Carver

Right, Louis is pulling all the strings. But across the channel in England, they try something completely different: constitutionalism. [clears throat] They actually EXECUTE their absolute monarch, Charles I, in 1649. And by 1688, during the Glorious Revolution, Parliament officially limits the king's power with the English Bill of Rights.

Lachlan Reed

So England says "we love rules," and France says "we love the King." But that French model? [short pause] It ends spectacularly BADLY about a century later. By 1789, the French government is broke, the tax system is a joke where the rich pay nothing, and a bad harvest makes the price of bread skyrocket.

Simon Carver

And when people can't afford bread, Lachlan, things get violent very quickly. [urgently] King Louis XVI calls the Estates-General in 1789 to fix the money problem, but the commoners -- the Third Estate -- realize they're just getting outvoted by the clergy and nobility. [gasps] So they declare themselves the National Assembly. And that's the spark of the French Revolution.

Lachlan Reed

A spark that turns into the Reign of Terror. [grimly] Thousands of people going to the guillotine. It's absolute chaos until this one military genius steps in to fill the power vacuum. [impressed] Napoleon Bonaparte. He crowns himself emperor, conquers most of Europe, and spreads all these revolutionary ideas before finally getting defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

Simon Carver

Waterloo. [sighs] And after Napoleon, the nineteenth century is just this messy tug-of-war. [intrigued] You've got the Industrial Revolution building massive factories and a new working class. You've got Karl Marx watching that exploitation and writing about class struggle. And you've got nationalism suddenly uniting places like Italy and Germany. Otto von Bismarck literally uses "blood and iron" policies to forge the German empire.

Lachlan Reed

[urgently] Which sets the stage for the absolute speedrun of disaster that is the twentieth century. Because all that nationalism, plus these massive industrial militaries, plus a bunch of tangled alliances? [short pause] EVERYTHING blows up in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated. World War I.

Simon Carver

[somberly] And World War I is devastating. Millions die in the trenches. And the peace treaty that ends it -- the Treaty of Versailles -- places ALL the blame, and massive financial reparations, squarely on Germany. [heavy sigh] It's a humiliation that practically guarantees another conflict.

Lachlan Reed

Exactly. [stressed] The Weimar Republic in Germany gets crushed by hyperinflation in the 1920s. People lose their life savings. And in that desperation, [darkly] Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power, promising to fix everything by blaming Jewish people and tearing up the Versailles treaty. By 1939, Hitler invades Poland, and we're into World War II.

Simon Carver

The deadliest conflict in human history. [hushed tone] You have Blitzkrieg tactics tearing through Europe, the horrors of the Holocaust where six million Jewish people are systematically murdered, and massive global battles from Stalingrad to D-Day. [resigned] It only ends in 1945 after the complete collapse of Germany and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan.

Lachlan Reed

But 1945 doesn't bring peace, does it? It just shifts the tension. [exhales sharply] The minute World War II ends, the Cold War starts. The United States backing capitalism, the Soviet Union backing communism. Europe literally gets split in half by the Iron Curtain.

Simon Carver

The Iron Curtain. [sighs] It's essentially the world's longest, [softly] most dangerous staring contest. Both sides have nuclear weapons, so they can't fight each other directly. Instead, they fight proxy wars, they race to space, and they try to out-spend each other.

Lachlan Reed

[dramatically] Until the Soviet Union finally BLINKS. By the 1980s, their economy is stalling. Mikhail Gorbachev tries to fix it with reforms like Glasnost and Perestroika, [hesitates] but it's too little too late. The whole system unravels, and in 1991, [relieved] the Soviet Union just... dissolves. The Cold War ends.

Simon Carver

[genuinely surprised] It's staggering when you look at it all laid out like that. From Petrarch reading old Roman books in fourteenth-century Italy, to the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989. [nostalgic] It's just one unbroken chain of people challenging the rules of the people who came before them.

Lachlan Reed

[warmly] That's history, mate. [chuckles] It's just humanity arguing with itself, trying to find a better way forward. Good luck on the exam, everyone! Catch you next time.