I Take History With My Coffee

It's June 1513. A plain outside Novara, northern Italy. Thousands of Swiss infantry are moving — fast, nearly silent — in a dense pike square that no army in Europe has found a reliable way to stop. For forty years, they have been unstoppable. So what finally breaks them?
This episode tells the story of how European warfare was remade between roughly 1420 and 1600 — not through a single invention or battle, but through a continuous, deadly conversation among weapon and counter-weapon, formation and counter-formation, and wall and gun. Four interlocking stories drive the episode: the rise and fall of the Swiss pike, the long and messy gunpowder revolution, the radical new science of fortification, and the historians' argument about what it all actually means.
We follow the Spanish tercio from Cerignola to Pavia, trace the logic of the trace italienne from Leon Battista Alberti's theory to the bastioned fortresses that would freeze campaigns for months and drain state treasuries, and watch Maurice of Nassau work out the mathematics of volley fire in a letter to his cousin. Along the way, we meet Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba — El Gran Capitán — the engineer Francesco Laparelli, and the scholars who have spent seventy years arguing over whether any of this constitutes a genuine "Military Revolution."
Michael Roberts said it did. Geoffrey Parker expanded and complicated the case. Jeremy Black called it dubious at best. David Parrott showed that the armies that grew weren't building states — they were feeding warlords. The debate remains open, and that's precisely what makes it worth your time.
What changed in early modern Europe wasn't just how soldiers fought. It was those who could afford to fight, who could survive the cost, and which polities those pressures would eventually forge into something resembling a modern state. The Swiss won the battle at Novara. Within two years, at Marignano, the reality of combined arms caught up with them.
No single factor. Never a single factor. That's the whole story.
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I Take History With My Coffee is writing a history blog and doing a history podcast. (buymeacoffee.com)

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Intro Music: Hayden Symphony #39
Outro Music: Vivaldi Concerto for Mandolin and Strings in D

Charles V ruled the biggest empire the Western world had seen since Rome — and he was almost never in the Netherlands.
He governed his wealthiest, most fractious territory through regents: first his aunt Margaret of Austria, then his sister Mary of Hungary. Two exceptional women. One impossible job. Between them, they kept the Low Countries together for the better part of three decades — through financial crises, military invasions, a Protestant frontier that constantly threatened to open in the northeast, and the most tumultuous urban rebellion of the period.
This episode covers the years 1531 to 1549: Mary's arrival in Brussels on horseback, turning a political obligation into a hunting expedition; the long struggle to incorporate the duchy of Guelders, which had resisted Habsburg control since the 1490s; and the revolt of Ghent in 1539 — a city that had once imprisoned an emperor and would do something close to it again. We follow the coordinated four-direction assault on the Netherlands in 1542, Mary's improvised command in Charles's absence, and the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, which declared seventeen provinces united forever.
But the deeper question running through all of it is the one historians still debate: were the seeds of the Dutch Revolt — which would occur thirty years later — already planted in these years? Was what followed inevitable, or did everything still depend on choices not yet made?
Historians referenced in this episode: Karl Brandi, Wim Blockmans, Jonathan Israel, Geoffrey Parker, and Jane de Longh.

Map of the Habsburg Netherlands in 1543
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Find us on Substack. Both Free and Premium content is available:
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Podcast website: https://www.podpage.com/i-take-history-with-my-coffee/
Visit my blog at itakehistory.com and also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

Comments and feedback can be sent to [email protected].
 You can also leave a review on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Refer to the episode number in the subject line.

If you enjoy this podcast, you can help support my work to deliver great historical content.  Consider buying me a coffee:
I Take History With My Coffee is writing a history blog and doing a history podcast. (buymeacoffee.com)

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Intro Music: Hayden Symphony #39
Outro Music: Vivaldi Concerto for Mandolin and Strings in D

In the summer of 1509, Erasmus crossed the Alps on horseback with an idea taking shape in his mind—a satirical masterpiece that would make him the most renowned writer in Europe. But fame, for Erasmus, was never the goal. It was a tool, and he had a purpose: to reform the Church from within through education, persuasion, and the slow transformation of minds. He believed it was working. Then, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his theses to a church door in Wittenberg, and the world Erasmus had been carefully building began to come apart.
 
What followed was one of the most challenging positions in intellectual history. The Catholic Church wanted Erasmus to condemn Luther. Luther's allies considered him theirs. He refused both — not out of cowardice but out of genuine conviction that maintaining the middle ground was vital. He believed change should come through persuasion, not confrontation. He thought that a truth kept private, awaiting God's approval, was still a truth. Almost no one around him agreed.
 
This episode traces Erasmus from the Praise of Folly to the great debate over free will, from the humanist optimism of 1516 to the grief of his final years — and explores what it means to be correct in a way your era cannot accept. Guided by Johan Huizinga, Margaret Mann Phillips, and Roland Bainton, we examine a man who was, in Huizinga's words, "not strong enough for his age" — and why that might be the most complex compliment in the history of ideas.

Resources:
Erasmus and the Age of Reformation by Johan Huizinga
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Podcast website: https://www.podpage.com/i-take-history-with-my-coffee/
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I Take History With My Coffee is writing a history blog and doing a history podcast. (buymeacoffee.com)

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Intro Music: Hayden Symphony #39
Outro Music: Vivaldi Concerto for Mandolin and Strings in D

He was born illegitimate in a provincial Dutch backwater, a region that produced herring fishermen and transit traders — not intellectuals. He entered a monastery he had not chosen. He served a bishop who never fulfilled his promises. And yet, from these unpromising circumstances, Erasmus of Rotterdam would become Europe's most celebrated scholar, the conscience of a continent on the brink of fracture.
 
This episode traces the formation of that mind. Beginning in the Burgundian Low Countries in the late fifteenth century — a world shaped by the Devotio Moderna, the spread of humanist learning from Italy, and the institutional pressures closing in on a gifted and vulnerable young man — we follow Erasmus from his earliest schooling in Deventer, through the Steyn monastery, and into the patronage networks and intellectual circles that gradually opened a larger world to him. We examine how illegitimacy, loss, confinement, and a single electrifying encounter with a scholar named Rudolf Agricola combined to produce not just a thinker, but a particular kind of thinker: ironic, restless, independent, and European before Europe had a name for what he was.
 
The Low Countries made Erasmus. This episode begins to answer the question: how, exactly — and at what cost.
Support the show
Find us on Substack. Both Free and Premium content is available:
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Podcast website: https://www.podpage.com/i-take-history-with-my-coffee/
Visit my blog at itakehistory.com and also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

Comments and feedback can be sent to [email protected].
 You can also leave a review on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Refer to the episode number in the subject line.

If you enjoy this podcast, you can help support my work to deliver great historical content.  Consider buying me a coffee:
I Take History With My Coffee is writing a history blog and doing a history podcast. (buymeacoffee.com)

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Intro Music: Hayden Symphony #39
Outro Music: Vivaldi Concerto for Mandolin and Strings in D

In the fifteenth century, the Burgundian Low Countries became Europe's premier musical center, and no composer embodied this achievement more fully than Guillaume du Fay. From the soaring polyphony of Cambrai Cathedral to the ceremonial grandeur of papal Rome, du Fay's music captured the cultural power that made Burgundy the envy of Europe.
 
This episode examines how du Fay transformed European music by balancing medieval structural sophistication with a new harmonic language that emphasized beauty, clarity, and expressive power. Through masterworks such as the Nuper rosarum flores motet—commissioned for the consecration of Florence Cathedral in 1436—and the innovative Missa Se la face ay pale, du Fay showed how music served as cultural statecraft, projecting Burgundian prestige across the continent.
 
Du Fay's career exemplifies the institutional infrastructure that enabled this: cathedral schools that cultivated Europe's leading musicians, patronage networks extending from ducal courts to the papal chapel, and a cultural scene in which wealth, ambition, and artistic innovation combined. His creation of the cyclic mass and integration of French, Italian, and English musical styles laid the groundwork for European composition, influencing future generations.
 
This is the second installment in a cultural triptych that examines the accumulated sophistication that made the Burgundian inheritance so valuable to the Habsburgs, following Jan van Eyck's visual achievements and preceding Erasmus's humanist revolution. Together, they reveal a culture at the height of its creative power.

Music:
Opening and closing: Ave Regina Caelorum
Performed by the Binchois Consort. ℗ 2003 Hyperion Records Limited

Listen on YouTube

Se la face ay pale
Performed by the Binchois Consort. ℗ 2009 Hyperion Records Limited
Listen on YouTube

Nuper Rosarum Flores
Performed by students of the Florence Choral Course 2024 at the Dome of the Florence Cathedral
Listen on YouTube

Music is for educational purposes only.

Support the show
Find us on Substack. Both Free and Premium content is available:
https://substack.com/@itakehistorywithmycoffee

Podcast website: https://www.podpage.com/i-take-history-with-my-coffee/
Visit my blog at itakehistory.com and also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

Comments and feedback can be sent to [email protected].
 You can also leave a review on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Refer to the episode number in the subject line.

If you enjoy this podcast, you can help support my work to deliver great historical content.  Consider buying me a coffee:
I Take History With My Coffee is writing a history blog and doing a history podcast. (buymeacoffee.com)

Visit audibletrial.com/itakehistory to sign up for your free trial of Audible, the leading destination for audiobooks.

Intro Music: Hayden Symphony #39
Outro Music: Vivaldi Concerto for Mandolin and Strings in D