Well hi, everybody!
I feel like it’s been forever even though it took me like a week to mentally recover
from Elizabeth Bathory.
Anyway, anybody remember this?
They jousted with blunted lances but Montgomery’s broke and the pointed end went straight into
Henry’s eye slit.
He died ten days later.
Tell me audience, which is more likely?
One of Nostradamus’s prophecies coincidentally reflected one event in the future history
of the world?
Or there are much darker forces in this world than we realize…?
You tell me.
You.
Tell.
Me.
Well here we are, five years later in glorious HD!
The king dead, a family shattered like the lance that stabbed him in the eyeball, what
will happen next?
Was Nostradamus right all along?
Did the illuminati with Naruto eyes orchestrate the entire thing?
Ooh, I bet you can’t wait to find out the answer!
Okay, so, early 1500’s Italy.
Catherine de Medici is the only daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, the guy for whom Machiavelli
wrote that book that made him really famous and controversial and stuff.
And then pttt! her parents both died.
So the Pope gives her a duchy, takes 99% of it for himself so she was just the duchess
of like one fort but hey fair enough she’s a literal infant.
He dies, Catherine bounces around a lot, almost spends the rest of her life in a convent until
the Medici get thrown out of town and hey she’s married to a French Prince named Henry!
And his dad watches the consummation.
They are 14.
They are 14!
Three years later Henry’s older brother gets chilly playing tennis and falls over
dead, Henry and Cat are the new heirs, and now all of Europe is watching them!
But not in the bedroom because that’s - that is a word I cannot say on YouTube but it is
very illegal.
[intro]
“Say Catherine, why do you always wear that thing on your head?”
“My… crown?”
“Yeah!”
“Oh!
Well I use it to cover up my bald spot, but it just keeps getting bigger!”
“Oh my God, is that true, like historically?”
“No, it’s an ad for Keeps, but what is true is that two out of three men are at risk
of that very fate!
Even you!”
“Oh no, whatever can I do!”
“Well you’re in luck - Keeps is a hair-loss prevention service used by hundreds of thousands
of men, and as long as you’ve still got hair, Keeps will keeps it on your head!”
“By the Lord, it’s a miracle!”
“Best of all they deliver straight to your door, and bester of all their FDA-approved
medication doesn’t come with a brand-name tax, so you get to keeps more money in your
wallet too!
Head to keeps.com/jackrackam to get 50% off your first order of hair loss treatment!”
“Thank you Catherine de Medici, one of the most influential women of the 16th century
and suspected architect of the century’s most violent religious massacres!
I look forward to resisting your religious oppression with a healthy head
of hair!”
“Burn in hell, heretic!”
So, problem: The Valois dynasty, the people who’ve been doing all the France-ing for
the last 200 years, they’re kinda running short on kids.
It’s ten years since the wedding and Catherine is coming up with bupkus.
Dr: “Well my dear lady it’s clear you’re not up to the task.
I fear divorce may be on the horizon, but never fear!
We’re on your side here, and we’ve got just the remedies to repair your middling
matrimony!”
Cat: “Oh, no, I think you’re looking for my husband, his ‘marital apparatus’ is
a bit --”
Henry: “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, I got that courtesan pregnant after
all-”
Cat: “Yes, but it’s crooked-”
Henry: “And named my daughter whom I fathered after my other mistress-”
Cat: “Point taken.”
Dr: “Now, your highness, you’re going to want to apply this to your, ehm, source
of life”
Cat: “Is this… cow dung?”
Dr: “Your highness, I am the foremost expert in women’s health!
It’s called manure”
To be fair that particular anecdote I traced back to a book that itself points to another
book where I can’t seem to find it, it might be in this paper, but guess who doesn’t
have a subscription to the Canadian Journal of Urology, this guy!
Thankfully they got a real doctor in the form of the guy who invented physiology and Henry
and Catherine had 8 children together, meaning the future of the dynasty was secured for
generations to come… and then everyone in her family started dying.
June 30, 1559, Henry the Two holds a celebration following peace with his neighbors, so all
his vassals return from their bloody campaigns to have a party where they all get on horses
and try to stab each other.
Henry gets in on the fun, he’s having a great day decking dukes and trouncing counts,
and he says
“Give me a real challenge!
You, bodyguard!
Let’s go, let’s do this thing!”
“Sir, I’ve got to warn you, you might get hurt”
“That’s the fun part!
Come on you pansy!”
So the two men take to the field…
“Agh!
...Do-over!”
And he died in a tragic accident.
OR WAS IT AN ACCIDENT?
Nostradamus wrote a thing about - about lions and shields and, and, and fighting, and Henry’s
shield had a lion and then he died woah!
Just like when he said “The third toe will seem first” and then, and then, uh… prophecy
happened!
There was a thing about Henry’s kids too, yeah, it said, uh, here we go:
“Three beautiful children are born.
Ruin to the people when they are of age”
What does that mean, well I’m glad you asked!
Catherine had three sons who all became king, which is to say they all let her run the kingdom.
Or at least, they let her run the capital, because France was on the brink of civil war.
There were these folks called the Huguenots in France and the old regime was not a fan,
in fact one could go as far as to say they were real haters.
The law was pretty much “don’t talk about protestant ideas or we will massacre your
city.
I - we’ve done it before, Francis I 1545, I’m serious, don’t push me”.
But over a couple decades like half the nobility had become protestant, so yeah now the monarchy
was threatening people who actually had the power to fight back.
Catherine realized this was a problem, oh by the way Francis got sick and died so his
little brother Charlie is king now, so what Catherine decided to do, bless her heart,
she put out an edict of tolerance and got everybody in a room and hash things out.
Unfortunately, the plan was for the most fervent Catholic and Protestant leaders to find a
halfway point between their ideologies and hodge-podge a new state religion, which failed
in spectacular fashion.
And then oopsie-woopsie, one of her Dukes accidentally did a massacre.
So began the French Wars of Religion, but Catherine didn’t give up!
The guy who sparked it got his comeuppance and she managed to pull together a truce and
send Protestants and Catholics against their common enemy: The English.
She put the king on a goodwill tour around the kingdom, she married her daughter to a
Huguenot, she even asked the Ottomans:
“Hey, what if we took all of our protestants… and gave them to you?”
“Cat -” “It’ll be great, they can live on your
border and defend against the Habsburgs, the- hello?
Hello?
Damn 1500s cell service”
Well, with nothing seeming to work, and with tensions rising again, she started restricting
the rights of Huguenots near the capital, and then she discovers there’s a group of
them plotting to kidnap her son while he’s on tour.
And uh, yeah, she suddenly got a whole lot less understanding.
A Huguenot leader is shot in 1572 but narrowly survives.
Some in town say Catherine might have done it herself.
There’s another war coming any day now.
So on orders coming in some combination from the king and the queen mother, the royal army
strikes first: they lock down the city and massacre as many Huguenot leaders as they
can find.
So Charlie dies, somehow of natural causes, the next guy in line is his brother Henry
who’s actually the king of Poland-Lithuania!
Crazy, right, imagine the world where those two countries stay connected.
But as it happened, Henry jets off back to France and never comes back so the Poles go
“Allll right guess we need to find a new king”
But hey, Poland had a pretty sizable Protestant minority and they’re not on the brink of
civil war, maybe Henry learned a thing or two that can - oh except now the Catholics
are also rebelling.
Yeah they thought the Huguenots had too many rights so now the other half of France is
at war with the monarchy.
The tensions in France are made worse with the conflict between Protestant England and
Catholic Scotland boiling over with the death of Mary Queen of Scots, the people of Paris
are throwing up barricades in the streets, do you hear the people sing?!
Catherine obliges Henry, capitulate to the Catholic League’s demands and live to fight
another day, for if he dies she’ll bury herself with him.
But Henry sees a path forward, a light that will take him to salvation or ruin.
He invited over one of the Catholic leaders and stabbed him to death at the foot of his
bed.
He was assassinated eight months later, but Catherine was already dead.
The dynasty of Valois was finished, and the next man in line for the throne… was a Huguenot,
oh-ho boy you better believe that’s gonna be good.
Welp, see you in five years!