Radio War Nerd #331 — The Italian Wars, Part I: Introduction (with Annibale)

What’s the political memoir that Annibale references??

There was a prestige TV series called 'the Borgias' from a couple years back that explores these events from a Papal point of view. Interested to get a sense of what they got right and wrong.

Great listen, as always.

I mean, Swiss mercenaries must have been pretty fucking bad if the peace of Westphalia bans them.

Could you discuss why, in all that turmoil, Protestantism never made any inroads in Italy?

As an American abroad I can confirm that people do react better when they believe you are from California. And when I, a wretched Floridian, tell people I am from Florida and they mistakenly believe or hear that that is California I let the charade continue.

Thank you so much Annibale! I was starting to get worried something had happened to you. I just wanted to mention that there is a new way in the Anglophone world that people know of the Pazzi and their conspiracy. The video game Assassins Creed 2 has them featured as an early antagonist to your character. You came from a major Tuscan banking family who get executed after being framed by the Pazzi and you have to take revenge upon them. The game sets itself in late 15th century Italy with Florence and Venice being the two main settings, with also the towns of Monetriggoni, San Gimignano, and Flori. After you defeat the Pazzi, Rodrigo Borgia becomes your main antagonist. There is also a sequel that features Rome and your antogonist is now Cesare Borgia. Oh, one last piece of the lore is that your father who comes from a line of Assassin's (and you are one as well) and tries to save his friend Galeazzo Maria Sforza from being murdered. The whole arc of Ezio Auditore da Firenze (your characters name) is the best part about the whole series. They did do Venice dirty though by showing the city administration to be slightly incompetent at rooting out conspiracies and secret societies which is the exact opposite of reality. Either way I love that you are back and hope you can do more episodes in the future (I am dying for not just something on Garibaldi but the entire Risorgimento and the following years politically up to about Adwa). Thanks

This is like Christmas morning. Grazie Annibale!

I would love you guys to do an episode about the welsh revolt of 1400-1415. I studied history and did my dissertation on Medieval Wales, an earlier period than this, but if you guys thought it would be a cool episode I would love to talk to you! Trust me it has everything. And your audience would definitely be less aware of it than say the Scottish Wars of Independence or Early Irish revolts

Thanks for this Episode Annibale! Do you have book suggestions for a deeper dive?

when the first aside starts after 2 minutes in [vince_mcmahon_freaking_out.jpg]

Agreed

In response to Travis Eller, I think I discovered the word “racist” has different connotations in French and Italian than in English, where it is extremely pejorative, and brings up connotations of segregation, scientific racism and the like. I think in the Latin languages its meaning is more like the English “prejudiced.” Just my two cents. As far as the present series I am delighted with this choice of topic and can’t wait to hear more. My background in more in literature and I have always wanted to know more about the history of this exceedingly complex period. I hope Annibale will discuss the sack of Rome.

Just listened to the Venice series and I’m ready for more…. Thanks guys!

I love his episodes because like a entertaining dense book you need to read (listen) multiple times to get the details.

Hell yeah, those countless hours in EU4 are paying off

A note regarding Annibale: He makes the claim in the episodes on Italy's participation on the Eastern Front that Italy, in contrast to Germany, did not endorse the racial ideology which is undergirded the holocaust. This is utterly ridiculous. The Italian Fascists were just as racist toward 'dark' Southern Italians as the Germans were towards the Jews. Gramsci makes this point in his "On The Southern Question" and Giuseppe Fiori demonstrates how this type of racialization was used to suppress wage levels amongst Sardinian miners in his biography of Gramsci. The main difference between Germany and Italy was that Italian nationalist-fascists were more culturally cosmopolitan compared to the culturally provincial Germans; both of which were the ideological veil used to cover their otherwise indistinguishable nationalist-liberal movements. The Germans thought 'if only the Jews were gone we could develop more quickly' and the Italians thought 'if only those barbarous peasants had a work ethic we could develop more quickly'. For all his voluminous empirical knowledge Annibale is through and through a liberal-bourgeois who is as theoretically impoverished as Hayek; he just playfully subverts liberal-bourgeois ideology to feign criticality. His theoretical understanding of Venice demonstrates this as well, taking capitalism to simply be the expansion of commerce rather than a socially organized mode of production distinguishable from the socially organized modes of production which preceded it. Ellen Meiksins Wood is leagues ahead of him in understanding that. See the reader of her work compiled by Historical Materialism. Just ask him what he thinks of Bennedetto Croce; he'll characterize him as the Italian inheritor and supersession of Marx following Labriola. In reality, It goes Marx -> Labriola -> Gramsci with Croce playing the role of liberal apologist who work emphatically to distance Italy from its fascist past.

Great episode. I think we're gonna need family trees and flow charts. Lots of people with one name.

Yeeeeeees

*The Alan Parsons Project’s “Sirius” starts playing*

The return of the king

Lets goooooooo

oh man I saw Annibale in the patreon notif and thought, whew, this is gonna be a complicated one, but I wasn't anywhere remotely ready, mentally and emotionally, to see this map