In around 1320 near the lake Issy-Kul in Kyrgysistan the rats started dying. Shortly after the inhabitants became affected with terrible diseases. Some started coughing up blood and all who did, died within 3 days. Others developed swellings of the lymph nodes, particularly in the groins and armpits. Roughly half of them died within five days. A small number saw their feet and fingertips turn black. All of those died.

Everyone who could still leave sought refuge in towns and villages that had not been affected. The disease travelled with them. By 1330 Chinese chroniclers recorded a plague affecting the Mongol hordes. In 1346 a Mongol army besieging the Genoese trading city of Caffa on Crimea succumbed to the disease. In their final push to cow the defenders they catapulted the diseased corpses of their comrades into the city. The siege lifted grain transports from Caffa to Italy resumed. The disease reached Messina in Sicily in 1347. In 1348 it had enveloped most of Italy. 1349 it crossed the alps, by 1350 people died in their thousands in Northern Germany and Scandinavia. It took until 1353 before this wave of the plague petered out, leaving between 20 and 60% of the population of Europe dead. The disease returned in 1361-1363, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390 and 1400. After that intervals became longer but the plague never went away completely and still today a couple of 100 people die worldwide of Plague every year.

Despite having lived through a pandemic only recently, we have all realised that the impact of such an event goes far beyond the gruesome statistics. It is much too recent an event to get a grasp of the impact COVID 19 had on the economy, political system and society in general, but clearly something has changed. Now imagine the plague, which in terms of death toll was between 10 and 30 times worse and crucially affected young and old equally. The fallout was exponentially greater not least because it came on the back of several other calamities. It is these impacts we will mainly focus on in this episode. So let’s dive in..

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 157 – The Black Death and other Calamities, also episode 19 of Season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull”

In around 1320 near the lake Issy-Kul in Kyrgysistan the rats started dying. Shortly after the inhabitants became affected with terrible diseases. Some started coughing up blood and all who did, died within 3 days. Others developed swellings of the lymph nodes, particularly in the groins and armpits. Roughly half of them died within five days. A small number saw their feet and fingertips turn black. All of those died.

Everyone who could still leave sought refuge in towns and villages that had not been affected. The disease travelled with them. By 1330 Chinese chroniclers recorded a plague affecting the Mongol hordes. In 1346 a Mongol army besieging the Genoese trading city of Caffa on Crimea succumbed to the disease. In their final push to cow the defenders they catapulted the diseased corpses of their comrades into the city. The siege lifted grain transports from Caffa to Italy resumed. The disease reached Messina in Sicily in 1347. In 1348 it had enveloped most of Italy. 1349 it crossed the alps, by 1350 people died in their thousands in Northern Germany and Scandinavia. It took until 1353 before this wave of the plague petered out, leaving between 20 and 60% of the population of Europe dead. The disease returned in 1361-1363, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390 and 1400. After that intervals became longer but the plague never went away completely and still today a couple of 100 people die worldwide of Plague every year.

Despite having lived through a pandemic only recently, we have all realised that the impact of such an event goes far beyond the gruesome statistics. It is much too recent an event to get a grasp of the impact COVID 19 had on the economy, political system and society in general, but clearly something has changed. Now imagine the plague, which in terms of death toll was between 10 and 30 times worse and crucially affected young and old equally. The fallout was exponentially greater not least because it came on the back of several other calamities. It is these impacts we will mainly focus on in this episode. So let’s dive in..

But before we start the usual reminder that this show is advertising free and that I also have shortened this section to the absolute minimum. So, please give generously on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks so much to Jan M., Isaac B., Robin G. George b., Clive S. and Ben E. who have already signed up

Now back to the show.

The 14^th century wasn’t off to a good start. In 1309 weather patterns changed and for 8 years Europe experienced a sequence of wet summers and extremely hard winters. Crop failures weren’t uncommon in the Middle Ages, but they tended to be short lived. This sequence of 8 bad years was exceptional and it had a compounding effect. Yields in 14^th century were quite low. I saw numbers of just 3 to 4 grains per seed. That was above the levels of the 10^th century but not much. Improved agricultural technology such as the horse-driven plough and crop rotation were offset by 200 years of expansion of agricultural land into less and less productive parcels.

The problem was that if one seed produced just 4 grains, a quarter of the harvest had to be set aside as seed for next year. In normal years about 10-30% of the produce was sold at market, depending on proximity of urban centres. The rest aka 2 grains per one seed was needed to feed the peasant and his family. In a crop failure the harvest dropped to half of the normal yield or less. Now we have just 2 grains per seed, 1 of those is needed to seed the next harvest and only 1 grains is available to feed the farmer and for sale. Given the producers used to have 2 grains just for themselves, they are now starving even if they do not sell anything. But not selling anything would be difficult since the peasant owed rent to the local lord in cash or had to deliver a fixed amount of produce in lieu of payment. Having given away some of their scarce grain, farmers had to dip into the grain reserved for seeding next year’s crop. Which means that even if the following year is a good year, not all fields will have been seeded and the total harvest is lower than normal.

If you have several years of crop failure in a row, the seed reserve shrinks and shrinks so that even in years with decent yields the absolute amount of harvest is down dramatically. That is what happened in 1309 to 1317. The series of crop failures exhausted the system. Even though the Hanse merchants were now busy bringing grain from the Prussia, Lithuania and even Ukraine into the empire, famine gripped almost all of Europe.

As always children were the worst affected. Childhood malnutrition has long-term outcomes for its survivors, including impaired growth, altered body composition, greater cardiometabolic disease risk, cognitive impairment, and behavioural problems. Not an ideal starting point for these children who are in the 30s and 40s when we get to the Black Death.

But before that we have a plague of locusts in 1338 and 1346 and a massive earthquake in 1348.

And then comes the big one:

Quote: “The mortality began in Siena in May 1348. It was a cruel and horrible thing and I do not know where to begin to tell of the cruelty and the pitiless ways. It seemed to almost everyone that one became stupified by seeing the pain. And it was impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful thing. Indeed, one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed. And the victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath their armpits and in their groins, and all over dead while talking. Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother a brother; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices. Nor did the death bell sound. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered over with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug.”

This how Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, a citizen of Siena who had buried his five children with his own hands described the seminal event of the 14^th century, the Black death that lasted from 1346 to 1353 in Europe.

As a listener to the History of the Germans you have already heard me giving a number of accounts of the Black Death so I will not repeat all the well known details. But there is something I came across recently that I hope you will find interesting.

For a long time it was believed that the Black Death had been a unique event resulting from a specific mutation sometime in the 14^th century. But it is now firmly established that the plague had been around for thousands of years earlier. Researchers have found DNA of Yarsinia Pestis the bacteria that caused the disease in human remains from 3600BC. And there had been several other outbreaks, the best known of which was the Justinian Plague in the 6^th century that petered out in the 8^th and killed about a third of the population around the mediterranean rim.

The Black Death of 1346-1353 in Europe was followed by a number of regular outbreaks until it disappeared in the 18^th century. A hundred years later we had several large outbreaks in Asia and even today people die of the plague, mainly in the democratic Republic of Kongo, Madagascar and Peru.

Which leaves us with the question, why can such a devastating disease appear seemingly out of nowhere then reappear in 10 to 15 year intervals before seemingly vanishing for centuries? Most other communicable diseases, Cholera, Malaria, Smallpox and COVID 19 etc. circulate in the human population until defeated by vaccination or changes in sanitation. The Plague mysteriously disappears leaving not even immune carriers amongst the human population behind.

Two zoologists, Keeling and Gilligan published an article in Nature in 2000 that provides a hypothesis that at least I find very convincing.

Their starting point is a fairly obvious observation, the plague isn’t a predominantly human disease, but first and foremost a disease of rodents, namely rats. The fleas that transmit the disease only attack humans if they cannot find a rat nearby. Basically, they prefer rat blood to human blood. So as long as there are enough rats for the fleas to feed on, the plague does not get transmitted to humans.

There are separate populations of rats where the plague is endemic but thanks to widespread immunity in this population, the bacterium remains contained. And these populations might have existed all over the world, and – spoiler alert – they still do.

Looking at it that way, it becomes clear how these spontaneous outbreaks happen. One scenario is that a population of mostly immune rats comes into contact with another population that is not immune, the bacterium kills them very much the same way it kills humans. As the fleas run out of rats they attack humans. Or alternatively, the rats die for another reason, for instance the lack of food due to widespread crop failure, the same things happens. Fleas run out of rats to feed of and move on to humans.

So, what likely happened is that somewhere in the Mongol empire, most probably near lake Issy-Kul in Kyrgysistan for some reason the rats died and the disease then spread to humans. Once it hits humans, it can be conveyed not just by fleas, but also by coughing, which may account for the rapid dissemination across Asia and Europe.

And that also explains why the disease reappeared randomly over the following centuries all across Europe. After the first outbreak the bacteria was still circulating in rats that were largely immune but not in humans. When those rats died for whatever reason, for instance because the humans killed the rats as a way to protect themselves from diseases, the hungry fleas spread the disease to humans again. The disease then peters out once the rat population recovers and the flea no longer jump on the humans.

Now here is the worrying bit. There are still populations of rats and other mammals in North America that carry the plague bacteria. These are mostly wild rats living outside the major cities and so far no outbreak has occurred. But as the plague has had extended periods of being dormant, it could show up any moment. And once it does, the last thing we want to do is eradicate the rats. If we did that, the hungry fleas would overcome their disgust for human blood, and the impact would be even more catastrophic. Ah, and some of these strains have become resistant to antibiotics…. Top tip from the History of the Germans podcast: Don’t kill rats, we may need them.

Now let’s get back to the 14^th century and look at the impact.

The first wave of the plague took 3 years from the first reported cases in Messina in Sicily in 1347 until the disease took hold in Scandinavia and another year to make it to Poland. But when it came, it came with force. In 1350 the city Council of Bremen ordered to list the names of everyone who had died from the Plague and collected 6,966 names. Add to that an estimated 1,000 unknown corpses and assuming the city had about 12,000-15,000 inhabitants at the time, more than half fell victim to the disease.

Hamburg reported the death of 12 out of its 34 bakers, 18 of its 40 butchers, 27 out of its 50 civil servants and a staggering 16 out of 21 members of its council. Similarly, Lübeck, Wismar, Reval and Lüneburg reported death rates of 30% and more amongst the members of their city councils.

We have less detailed numbers for the south of Germany and Bohemia, but the estimates range from 20 to 60% of the population dying from the Plague. We than have another series of pan-European outbreaks in 1361-1363, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390 and 1400, each taking another material percentage of the population.

The Historian Joerg Hoenisch expects the population in what is today Germany to have fallen from 6-7 million to 4-4.5 million and in the empire overall from 12-13 million to 8-9 million. We also notice that the reproduction rate during the period declined and given the high mortality, population numbers kept declining consistently until 1420.

Unsurprisingly such a massive cull did have huge implications for the economy, society and politics.

Let’s start with economics. And spoiler alert, as horrible as that sounds, it wasn’t all bad.

Imagine a world where practically overnight 30% of the population disappears, more in the densely populated cities and maybe somewhat less in the countryside.

The first thing is that there are simply less mouths to feed – demand for foodstuff drops dramatically. When demand drops prices drop. Prices for foodstuff were determined in the cities, With urban populations contracting even faster, grain prices in particular declined rapidly in nominal terms. In real terms the decline was even more significant because the gold and silver coins did not vanish with its previous owners, causing material inflation in other goods.

This fall in grain prices had a major impact on the economics in the countryside. By the 14^th century the legal situation for most peasants in the empire had improved significantly. Serfdom had largely vanished and had been replaced by rents, most often paid in cash rather than produce. As the farmers received less and less coins for their hard labour, they found themselves unable to pay the rents. The landowners, the knights, lords, abbots and bishops saw their income drop and put pressure on the peasants to pay them in full. In this situation of falling income and rising rents, lots of peasants left for the cities, where the decline in population had created new opportunities.

At which point the landowners had an even bigger problem. A significant percentage of their peasants had died in the plague. Of those that survived, a lot have run away to the cities. To keep the remainder to toil on the land, there were two options. Carrot or stick. The carrot was to pay agricultural labourers a fair wage and or reduce rents. The other was to exert force, turning them back into serfs. Depending on political conditions and geography, in some regions we have a return to serfdom, but the more common outcome was that the remaining rural population resisted, sometimes in the form of peasant revolts until they saw their incomes improve.

At the same time the rural landscape changed. With fewer people available to work on the land, the marginally productive parcels were abandoned. To improve security and efficiency small villages and outlying farms were abandoned in favour of larger villages. About 40,000 settlements, roughly a quarter of the total disappeared during the 14^th century.

The shortage of labour and the concentration in the larger villages further improved the bargaining power of the peasants. Many villages were able to establish their own administration led by a Vorsteher or Schöffe who would also assume the role of judge for minor crimes and civil disputes.

Having got rid of the marginal fields, yields improved to five grains per seed and by concentrating in the larger villages, production could be diversified. These higher value products found markets in the cities at better prices, leading to a further improvement of the material situation for the rural population. According to an analysis by the Bank of England, this period was the one and only time between the 10^th and 18^th century that real incomes of the working population material improved, the one and only time.

The big losers in this game were the landowners, in particular the Reichsritter, the knights or what we used to call the Ministeriales. So far, they had maintained a fairly comfortable existence as the lion’s share of the monetary proceeds of agricultural activity ended up in their pockets. But this had now shifted. The knights saw both the total and their share of the agricultural income decline. As the value of labour rose, the value of land shrunk. At the same time their relevance as a military force was also rapidly eroding as commoners with longbows, halberds and crossbows were mowing down the lower of French, Habsburg and any other chivalry. Shut out from their main sources of income, they were left with two options, brigandry or submission under a more powerful player. A lot chose brigandry, but that turned out to be no more than a stepping stone to submission.

The territorial princes, a growing force since the days of the early Hohenstaufen got a major boost from the Black Death. Not that their resources weren’t affected but they were less impacted than the knights. They had already built a rudimentary administration and had sources of income not associated with land ownership such as taxes, tolls and the ability to reduce the content of precious metal in their coins.

As a consequence, the princes were able to incorporate many knightly holdings into their territories. Either by convincing them that this was their only option, or if the knight had turned brigand, by defeating and expropriating them.

But not all knights submitted to territorial lords. Many preferred to align themselves with the big cities that recovered surprisingly quickly.

The cities had suffered the brunt of the mortality of the Black death. Many had vanished, but those that survived were able to replenish their populations with peasants fleeing the oppression of their local lords and the lawlessness caused by the brigands.

What happened in the cities with these peoples is still subject to debate. On the one hand the plague and the regular outbreaks that followed created a shortage of labour, not just simple manual labour but also artisans and merchants. Hence ambitious men willing to build up their skills found ample opportunities to step into the shoes of their deceased predecessors. On the other hand, the richest families, the patricians found themselves even richer than before, provided they survived. The patrician families were an intermarried oligarchy so that the inheritance of the plague victims was distributed within a small pool of survivors. These survivors held all the levers of power. In most cities the council was refilled by appointment from within a small number of patrician families, not by election.

Into this situation stumbled the impoverished knights asking for help in fending off the greedy princes on their doorstop. The cities were happy to take them in as so-called Pfahlbürger, citizens but – despite their aristocratic background – not patricians. They could stay on their castles and would form part of the city’s military force. As a consequence we find now cities in the German speaking part of the empire like Nürnberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber or Zurich with large territories around their cities, a bit like the Contados of the Italian communes.

This structural change in the cities caused serious frictions. On the one hand the patricians flouted their inherited wealth and were less and less interested in economic activity, whilst the artisans, some of whom had become successful entrepreneurs found themselves shut out of political power. And the social underclass of labourers, apprentices, maids and servants found themselves often in circumstances not better and sometimes even worse than the villages they had left.

Insurrections against the patricians and the city councils they controlled happened in regular intervals all across the empire. They were often triggered when the inept patrician administration had borrowed excessive amounts for prestige projects leaving the community overindebted which subsequently required tax increases. These insurrections were most often suppressed, usually with the help of patricians from neighbouring cities and the Pfahlbuerger, the knights who had joined the cities. But over time in particular the Southern and Western German cities allowed the artisans representation on the city council. The Hanse was an exception since the patricians were closely linked across the core cities and suppressed these attempts to overthrow their regime, something we discussed in the series on the Hanseatic League.

All these economic and political changes leave behind a quite fundamentally different empire. An empire where the population shrinks, economic activity shifted towards the big cities, the knights see their role eroding and turn to brigandry, peasants gain more freedom and self-determination.

But beyond these material changes, something also changed in the minds of people.

The initial reaction is best described by Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, our friend from Siena: quote  “And then, when the pestilence abated, all who survived gave themselves over to pleasures: monks, priests, nuns, and lay men and women all enjoyed themselves, and none worried about spending and gambling. And everyone thought himself rich because he had escaped and regained the world, and no one knew how to allow himself to do nothing. Each person lived according to his own caprice, and everyone tended to seek pleasure in eating and drinking, hunting, catching birds, and gaming. “ End Quote. He clearly leaves out the bits not suitable for a family show.

Emerging from the trauma, suddenly rich beyond their expectations and having realised how short life could be, people went all out for hedonism. This is the time when fashion went from shapeless tunics into tight fitting leggings and shirt jackets for men and body-hugging dresses for women. Bocaccio published his Decameron which is full of stories about practical jokes and erotic adventures, Chaucer, who writes not much later too has his fair share of saucy stories.

But beyond this outbreak of fun or debauchery, depending on your viewpoint, the society of the 14^th century was asking the obvious question: Why? Why did they have to live through a century of plague, famine, war and death? Why did God release the four riders of the apocalypse on us.

The reaction to this question varied. The Avignon church, its corruption, wealth and ostentation made a great scapegoat, in particular in the empire where anticlerical sentiment was already deeply ingrained. But also in the Decameron or in Chaucer, the dissolute cleric is a classic trope.

Others saw the failure in themselves, their sinfulness and lack of repentance. The flagellants appeared across all of europe, groups of initially only men who would whip themselves three times a day, twice publicly and once in private in the knight. The reason for that was from a letter, allegedly written by Jesus where he promised not to destroy the world as long as there would be regular lashings and people would honour the Sunday rest.

Contrary to the usual perception, few flagellants joined these groups permanently. The idea was to do penance for 33 1/3 days, one day for each of Jesus life on earth. People from all walks of life took part, from the desperately poor to rich merchants and even nobles. Women were admitted only fairly late in the movement’s short history

The flagellants as a concept had been around since 1261. But they only turned into a mass movement when the plague hit, and probably helped a lot in spreading the disease. The official church opposed the movement as it further exposed their worldliness and they succeeded in suppressing it by the 1350s.

The Flagellants were a  pretty gruesome spectacle, but largely harmless. Then there was another, a horrific way, how people tried to make sense what happened. As so many societies before, they laid the blame on the Other, and the most other group in the world of the 14^th century were the Jews. They had their own language, laws, communities and above all, they were the only non-Christian religion tolerated in Europe.

By 1348 there were 350 Jewish communities in most towns and sometimes villages along the Rhine river and its tributaries. Most of these communities were small. The larger ones in Mainz and Trier counted about 250-300 people, Cologne was significantly larger and Nurnberg might have had as much as 1,500 Jewish inhabitants out of maybe 25,000 citizens overall.

Jews had been living in this area since the time of the Romans. The Jewish community in Cologne is recorded from the 4^th century onwards. In the 11^th century Worms and Mainz had been centres of Jewish learning, law and culture of international significance.

Life for the Jewish communities became more and more constrained since the time of the crusades. We have talked about the massacres of the Jewish communities in the build-up of the First Crusade in episode 53, still the only episode of this show with an NSFW rating.

Ever since the 11^th century Jews in the empire enjoyed the protection of the emperor, not because he recognised them as fellow monotheists, but because that was how he justified taxing them especially hard. Frederick II being the notable exception, not for the taxation but for the respect he paid them. This protection was not always effective as central authority declined so that the obligation to keep them safe and the associated taxes were increasingly assumed by the territorial princes, often the bishops.

Despite the promise of safekeeping there were persecutions and pogroms in 1298 that killed about 3,000 people, and another one in 1336 and 1338 in Bavaria. The leader of one of these attacks, a knight Uissingheim was finally apprehended by the bishop of Wuerzburg and executed, though by that time 900 jews of Wuerzburg lay dead already.

Persecution of the Jews wasn’t specific to the empire. King Edward I had expelled the Jews from England in 1290, following a long tradition, whilst in France expulsions were ordered in 1254, 1306 and 1322. This may explain the relative density of Jewish populations in the empire where they enjoyed a still precarious but somewhat safer existence.

All that came to a dramatic end when the plague hit in 1348. Rumours had spread from the South of France that the Jews had poisoned the wells in order to wipe out the Christians, adding to previous notions that Jews had murdered Christian children in satanic rituals and desecrated the host, all baseless – just in case I need to say that.

These rumours were taken up with great enthusiasm across the empire and a terrifying mass murdering and killing began. Some of these pogroms were driven by a mop that had formed spontaneously. But more often than not the persecution of the jews was tied in with local politics if not authorised by the authorities.

One example happened in Strasburg. The city had been in the midst of one of these constitutional crises that I have described before. The artisan guilds and lower classes demanded participation in city politics from the patrician rulers of the city. The leaders of the revolt took advantage of the febrile atmosphere and blamed the Jews for the plague and demanded the council should therefore  kill them all. The Ammeister, the senior city magistrate refused and the city guard protected the Jewish community. But public pressure was such that the Ammeister was forced to step down and as the chronicler recorded: quote “On Friday they caught the Jews. On Saturday they burned them. There were about 2,000 of them. Those who converted were spared. And children were taken out of the fire against their parents wishes, baptised and brought up by Christian families. All the debts owed to the Jews were cancelled, their pawns and letters of credit returned. The cash was distributed amongst the guilds.” End quote. Just to complete the story, the Ammeister who had tried to protect the Jews was exiled and his fortune split amongst the patricians

It was often the debt, including the debt of the city itself that enticed the authorities to join and sometimes even organise the persecution. Nurnberg owed 70,000 gold guilders, roughly the cities annual budget. Their Jewish community perished…

Some cities tried to protect their Jewish neighbours, like Frankfurt and Ulm, though the mob in Frankfurt did get its way in an orgy of bloodshed in the end.

Which leaves the question, where was the emperor, the official protector of the Jews. That emperor was Karl IV, king of Bohemia. He did well in his own homelands, in Luxemburg, Bohemia and Moravia where the Jewish communities remained largely unmolested. As for the rest, not so much. Some have argued that given he had only just gained full recognition as king of the Romans in 1349 and was heavily indebted, his ability to provide any material protection was limited. But that is only part of the story. In his negotiations with the cities and with Ludwig of Brandenburg he disposed of Jewish property even before the owners had been killed. In Nurnberg he approved the destruction of the Synagogue and its replacement with a church, which made clear that Karl would not raise a finger to protect the largest Jewish community in his realm. Two days later the burning began.

With that – at least in my eyes – he had moved from heartless passivity to collaboration. A stain on his character he never recognised or even mentioned.

As for Jewish life after the Black Death, some communities recovered, often those where the territorial lord had kept them safe, but Jewish life remained a shadow of its form vibrancy. Many jurisdictions imported the Venetian concept of a separate quarter for Jews, the Ghetto. Their former role in high finance was assumed by the banking families of Augsburg and Nurnberg, forcing them down to being small time traders and moneylenders to the poor. They were made to wear a special headgear, the Judenhut and a yellow marker on their clothes. As time went on they were formally expelled from various cities and territories, namely Strasburg in 1389, Prague in 1400, Vienna in 1421, Augsburg 1440, Breslau 1453 and Carinthia in 1496. Many jews left for Poland where King Kasimir the Great welcomed them with open arms and where they helped the cities and the country to prosper.

Was this all that followed from the Black Death? Probably not. But this is all I have time for today. I have not yet decided what we will look at next week, but probably the much more cheerful topic of Karl IV’s expansion of the city of Prague, turning it into the largest city in the empire leaving behind monuments that still take your breath away today. I hope you will join us again.

Before we go, just the usual reminder that all this is only possible because some of you are generous enough to support the show either by becoming a patron by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or by making a one-time donation on historyofthegermans.com/support