Episode 101 – Gottschalk & Adalbert
This week we will follow the history of two men who could not be more different. On one side is Gottschalk, leader of the pagan Abodrites, who first comes to prominence as a brutal raider killing Saxons all across Holstein in revenge for his father’s killing. The other is Adalbert, son of a count, brother of the count palatinate of Saxony, friend and confidant of Henry III, a man who refused the offer of becoming pope for his ambition to convert all of Scandinavia and the Baltic.
Episode 200 – Divide and Lose
In 1485 two brothers split the electorate of Saxony in two, creating the distinctly different Länder of Thuringia and Saxony in the process. All that after 20 years of successful joint rule and at the risk of materially reducing their family’s power. Why did they do it?
Episode 192 – Duchy of Württemberg, or Turning Wine into Winning
The region around Stuttgart has become one of Europe’s richest and most active technological hub. How did that trace back to the 15th century?
Episode 191 – The Margraviate of Baden
The story of how the small state of Baden became a dominant force in the South West of germany is one of friendship and loyalty to the death, piratical princesses, alchemy, someone called the Türkenlouis, a sun-shaped city and some skilled diplomacy.
Episode 189 – The Count Palatine on the Rhine
A journey upriver from Mainz to Heidelberg in 1454 – with a brief history of the Counts Palatinate on the Rhine
Episode 186 – Origin Stories
The archbishops of Mainz and the Ladgrave of Hessen fought each other incessantly for 200 years. Why and how we look at in this episode
Episode 108– from Saxony to Saxonies
How first Henry the Lion, greatest of medieval dukes, and then the great stem duchy of Saxony came to fall apart
Episode 106 – Making a Mark in Brandenburg
The story of how the state that would later became Prussia came about – featuring Albrecht, called the Bear, and not for nothing.
EPISODE 104 – The Making of Holstein
After 200 years of raiding and plundering the Slavic lands north and east of the Elbe River the Saxon magnates have a change of heart with consequences that impacted Eastern European history for centuries to come
Episode 103 – All the Duke’s Men
Precious freedoms gained in bloody struggles can be lost easily in the subsequent peace, not to the old adversary, but to new, homegrown usurpers. That is at least one way of telling the story, the other being, that every major political upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation that embeds the gains made and truncates the excesses that appeared during the revolutionary period.