In this podcast, I explore the history of Europe from the Renaissance to the present. In each episode, we talk about the social, political, cultural, and economic changes that Europe went through, and how they brought us the Europe that we know today.
On the horrific night of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, thousands of French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were slaughtered in the streets of Paris. Up to that moment, the Huguenot movement had been steadily gaining momentum and civil rights. But overnight, that mob violence plunged France into decades of brutal religious warfare. Young Sully was a close companion to Henry of Navarre, the sovereign of a small realm tucked into the Pyrenees along France’s southwestern border. Raised a strict Calvinist by his mother, Henry would grow up to become the undisputed political and military commander of the Protestant cause. At the start of the 1500s, French Protestantism was a fringe movement. Yet within a century, a nation fractured by holy war would ultimately surrender its crown to a Huguenot king. In today’s episode, we trace the story of Protestantism in France — from its quiet origins through nearly a century of sectarian violence, to the moment Henry of Navarre enters Paris to claim the throne of France.
26 Sept 2026
Protestant Reformation
Standing before the most powerful man in Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor, Martin Luther refused to recant his criticisms of church practice. He knew full well that this moment of defiance could end with his execution. Some years earlier, Luther had sparked a firestorm by nailing his 95 Theses to a church door, exposing the deep corruption of the Catholic Church. He wasn’t the first to do this. A century prior, the Czech reformer Jan Hus spoke out against some of the very same failings — and the Church burned him alive for it. Even in Luther's own time, scholars like Desiderius Erasmus were quietly dismantling church teachings with new, radical translations of the Bible. What sets Luther apart from the others is the extent to which his calls for reform really resonated with the public. Today, we would say that he “went viral.” His criticisms hit exactly the right notes, at exactly the right moment, for a continent that was ready to burn the old world down.
18 Sept 2026
The Christian Church in Europe
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Church transcended its role as a spiritual sanctuary to become the administrative, moral, and cultural backbone of medieval Europe. In this second season of my podcast, we are going to talk about the Protestant Reformation, which began in earnest in 1517 with Martin Luther’s 95 theses. In this episode, I am going to do something a little bit different. I want to take a step back and take a broad look at the history of the Christian Church from its very beginnings up until the Protestant Reformation. That means we are going to sweep across one thousand five hundred years of European History. Only by understanding how the Church became the supreme ruler of Europe can we understand the men who set out to dismantle it — and the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation.
9 Jul 2026
Commercial Revolution
In the beginning of the 1500s, hundreds of thousands of regular people rose up in an armed, bloody revolt that shook central Europe to its foundations. Why were they so furious? Because the very ground beneath their feet was shifting. For generations, European life was simple: you farmed the land, and you gave your loyalty to a local lord. But by the 1500s, a massive wave of global trade, skyrocketing inflation, and early capitalism was tearing that old world apart. Wealth was no longer just about who owned the land — it was about who controlled the markets. In this episode, we are exploring the Commercial Revolution: the chaotic, transformative era that destroyed the Middle Ages and birthed the modern economic world.
15 Jun 2026
Columbian Exchange
It boggles the mind to think that when the Taino people walked out onto the beaches of San Salvador and looked at Christopher Columbus, they weren’t just looking at men from another country; they were looking across a 15,000-year-old canyon of human separation. Columbus’s men brought weapons, clothes, and concepts forged by thousands of years of European, Asian, and African collision. But they also brought diseases that had never existed in the New World. In this episode, were going to talk about how the geographic isolation that had allowed these two worlds to grow into distinct, beautiful masterpieces was about to become the New World’s undoing.
29 May 2026
Rivals on the World Stage
When the news reached Venice that Vasco da Gama had made it all the way to India and back by ship, the Venetians knew that their monopoly on selling luxury goods from Asia was over. The task of breaking the news to the Doge of Venice fell to Piero Pasqualigo, the Venetian diplomat stationed in Lisbon. Throughout the 1400s, European states like Portugal, Castile, and Venice were locked in a battle for trade dominance. Venice guarded its Mediterranean strongholds (meaning), Castile and Portugal looked outward to the uncharted Atlantic. With every new island that Portugal claimed, its neighbor Castile looked for ways to increase its own regional and global influence. This decades-long competition for trade ignited an age of discovery that permanently shifted the global balance of power from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. In this episode, we look at how these power struggles played out.
15 May 2026
Exploration
This was a century when European explorers were traveling farther than they had ever gone before from their own shores. Ferdinand and Isabella were competing with the Portuguese to find routes to travel to Southern Asia. These routes were incredibly valuable, as merchants could buy large quantities of luxury goods such as spices like pepper and cinnamon, porcelain, ivory, cotton, or even silk, then bring them back to Europe and sell them at a huge profit. But these voyages were also very risky. Signing on to a voyage of exploration was a bit like buying a lottery ticket, where you had just as good a chance of earning a fortune as you did of never returning. It is astonishing to imagine just how many sailors were willing to accept this risk and set sail for unknown shores, often without having any idea precisely where their destination was. Until 1434, European sailors would sail no further than Cape Bojador on the coast of Morocco. They were afraid that the currents and winds would never allow them to sail back northwards. But within less than a hundred years, an expedition sponsored by the Spanish crown would manage to sail all the way around the world.
6 May 2026
New Monarchs
By the end of the sixteenth century, the New Monarchs had left the European continent transformed. New monarchs found ways to raise taxes and fill their states’ treasuries. New monarchs also sought to create a more unified national identity in their kingdoms. By centralizing power, professionalizing war, and tethering the Church to the crown, they did more than just expand their borders—they invented the concept of the nation-state. They found Europe a collection of private estates and left it a map of sovereign powers, proving that the pen of a letrado and the ledger of a Fugger were often mightier than any noble’s sword.
29 Apr 2026
Printing Press
Printing had been invented in the city of Mainz by the craftsman Johannes Gutenberg. In a few short decades, its invention nearly brought down the institutional Christian church, allowed for the foundations of modern science and medicine, and led to the discovery of about half of the planet. In this episode, we will look at the history of how Europeans recorded human knowledge, and how an inventor in Mainz accidentally altered the future of humanity forever.
20 Apr 2026
Northern Renaissance
Last week, we learned about the rekindling of classical learning, science, and the arts that was fueled by tremendous economic growth and trade that historians call the “Renaissance.” Today, we head to Northern Europe, where a similar Renaissance was taking place. Like the artists, architects, and scientists of the Italian Renaissance that we talked about in our last episode, the Renaissance in Northern Europe focused on the potential of individuals. That is what Dürer represents: an artist whose love for learning and desire to express his ideas through his works had such a profound impact on their age, that they still resonate with us today.
15 Apr 2026
Italian Renaissance
In this episode, we explore the Italian Renaissance. We’ll look at the economic factors that made the Renaissance possible, the patrons who became sponsors of art and scientific breakthroughs, and the accomplishments that visitors from all around the world travel to Italy and marvel at.
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