[transcript]

50:09 This week we return to the question of the league militaires name, its meaning, and its inspiration. Last week I focused on the league militaire version of the name and looked at organizations with similar names around the start of the 20th century. While those military leagues varied in method and means, the anti masonic traditionalists in France, the modernizing progressives in Greece, and the reactionary warmongers in Bulgaria, they were alike in that all three were explicitly nationalist and composed principally of current and former army officers. None of them looked very much like the league militaire of UC 153, but perhaps the Miryteya used in the Japanese is more like militia than militaire. Thats certainly what the game developers at Namco were thinking when they made their 1993 giant robots fighting to liberate the earth game militia. Either way, lets put the words riga and mirithea behind us and focus on what theyre supposed to mean. According to Uso, league militaire actually means shinsei dome shinsei meaning holiness or sanctity, and dome as a general term for an alliance. An allied army is dome gun. A treaty of alliance is Dome Joyaku. Dome also can be used for coordinated action. In fact, there is a yoji jukugo, a four character compound for labor strikes that is composed of dome plus the characters for quitting and business Dome higy an alliance to stop working. The english subtitles render Shinsei Dome as Holy alliance, capital h, capital a, as though Uso were referring not to the general idea of a religiously motivated entente, but rather to a specific, historically identifiable holy alliance. And if you look up Shinsei dome in any given japanese dictionary, you will see the same thing, that in most cases, Shinsei dome means the Holy alliance of 1815. That in most cases is going to be real important later, because if I may tip my hand for a second here, I dont think that Uso is talking about the holy alliance of 1815. That holy alliance was a coalition of three absolutist european the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire and the Russian Empire, formed just after the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French. For more than 20 years, Europe had been wracked by near constant warfare, touched off initially by the French Revolution, then brought to bloody climax during Napoleon's reign. Each member of the holy alliance, the monarchs and the nations they ruled, had suffered grievously during that time. Prussia was crushed on the battlefield in 1806, lost half its territory in the ensuing treaty, with the remainder occupied by french troops at prussian expense. And for five years, her armies were forced to march and fight for Napoleon. Austria, too, had lost huge swathes of territory. In fact, the empire of Austria only existed as such because Napoleon had seized its predecessor, the Holy Roman Empire, and dashed it to pieces on the floor like an antique vase. By 1810, Francis, Emperor of Austria, even found himself obliged to marry his daughter, Marie Louise, to the hated Bonaparte. Russia, famously, was not conquered like its holy allies, but Napoleons ultimately disastrous 1812 invasion still inflicted terrible damage on the country, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the immolation of Moscow. But from the vantage point of 1815, the three monarchs and Emperor Alexander I of Russia in particular, saw Napoleon as merely a symptom of a deeper sickness. There were dangerous new ideas infecting liberalism, republicanism, secularism. In France, these ideas had been allowed to spread uninterrupted, and they had metastasized into that most dangerous of all ideas, revolutionary as they saw it, revolution had ended the monarchy and killed the king, displaced the Catholic Church from its central position in society, and killed, suborned or exiled tens of thousands of priests. Revolution had brought about the reign of terror, the rise of Napoleon, and all the ensuing chaos and suffering that had swept from one end of Europe to the other. It had taken them more than 20 years to suppress those dangerous new ideas, and the cost of doing it had been enormous. What damage might ideas like those cause if they were ever let loose on the world again? So these three emperors formed their holy alliance, a bulwark of reaction. Whatever enmity the great powers might feel for each other, they pledged to form a united front against revolution wherever in Europe it might next rear its head. In an interesting historical coincidence, this holy alliance was also an interdenominational alliance between Protestant Prussians, Catholic Austrians and Orthodox Russians. The Holy alliance per se did not last very long, no more than ten years. But the spirit of the alliance endured, and each of the participant nations remained staunchly committed to suppressing revolutionary ideas wherever they cropped up, as when Russia sent her armies to put down an anti austrian revolution in Hungary in 1848. And it was to this holy alliance that Karl Marx alluded in the now iconic opening sentences of the communist manifesto published during the wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this pope and tsar, Metternich and Guizot, french radicals and german police spies. It is a fascinating moment in history, but as a source for the name of the league militaire, I would call it a bad fit. But like I said, shinsei dome doesnt always mean the holy alliance. All of these terms originated in other languages, in German, French, Russian, Latin. The english and japanese translations are just approximations of their meanings. There is a whole series of early modern european alliances that we usually call in english holy leagues, but which are known in Japanese as either Katoriku dome, catholic alliances or Shinsei dome. To explain these, first quick question how much do you know about the Ottoman Empire? Dont worry, its a rhetorical question. The crucial thing you need to know for the purposes of this conversation is that by the late 14 hundreds, the Ottoman Empire was seen by christian monarchs in Europe, especially those in eastern and southern Europe, as the big existential threat to Christendom. The ottoman state first emerged out of a kind of warring states period in Anatolia, modern day Turkey. The orthodox christian byzantine empire had been in terminal decline ever since the battle of Manzikert in 1071. And Anatolia, the old heartland of the empire, fell under the control of the turkish and muslim sultanate of Rum. Rum from the turkish name for Rome for roughly 200 years. In the 1240s, this sultanate of Rum met and was conquered by the Mongol Empire. The Mongols left the sultan in place as a puppet. But with the prestige and power of the central authority so badly reduced, power increasingly devolved to local principalities or beyliks. The Ottoman Empire began as just another beylik. But around 1300, a man named Osman, the bey of a tiny fragment of land in northwestern Anatolia, launched on a campaign of conquest that would occupy the rest of his life and those of most of his descendants. It was continued by those descendants for two and a half centuries. It is from his name, Osman, that we get the word Ottoman for the empire. In the 1350s, Osmans son Orhan crossed into Europe and seized territory in Gallipoli, the empires first foothold outside of Anatolia. By 1388, Orhans son Murad had reduced Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria to vassalage. In 1389, he annihilated a joint serbian bosnian army at the battle of Kosovo, but did not survive the battle himself. An ottoman civil war and the appearance of the infamous warlord Timur, often called Tamerlane, on the Ottomans eastern flank, afforded the Europeans a small measure of peace. But by 1420, the Ottomans were unified again and back on the offensive in Europe. Then, in 1453, the sultan Mehmed II besieged Constantinople, penetrated the impenetrable theodosian land walls and conquered the unconquerable city. The Ottomans had just graduated from a purely local problem for the christian rulers in the Balkans to a serious threat to all christendom. In 1520, Suleiman, called the Magnificent, brought an army all the way to the walls of Vienna, but failed to take the city. He conquered most of Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia, pushed north into the Caucasus and east into Mesopotamia. In response to the rapid and seemingly inevitable ottoman expansion, the european powers formed a series of holy leagues, Shinsei dome or Katoriku dome, that were ad hoc alliances sponsored by one pope or another in order to assist those christian rulers actively engaged against the Ottomans. Lets go down the list. Holy League of 1535. Papal sponsor Paul III Main Charles V, Holy roman emperor and king of Spain, plus anyone that Charles could bully or cajole or pay to join him, including Genoa, Portugal and Naples, notably absent France, who were busy conspiring with the Ottomans for a coordinated attack against Charles. The seize the ottoman base at Tunis, european occupation of the city. Good start team. Try to keep it up. Next up, the Holy League of 1538. Papal sponsor Paul III again. Main participants Charles V again. Plus Venice, the Knights of Malta, Naples and Sicily. The defeat the ottoman fleet and retake the venetian controlled islands in the aegean and ionian seas. Outcome, catastrophic defeat, venetian capitulation and 30 years of ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean. Not great, not great, but theres always next time. The Holy League of 1571 papal sponsor, Pius V. Main, Philip II of Spain, Naples and Sicily, the republics of Venice and Genoa. The Knights of Malta, the italian duchies of Tuscany, Savoy, Urbino and Parma. The goal to put an end to those 30 years of effective ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean. And the outcome? Decisive victory. Ottoman control over the western part of the Mediterranean effectively broken. Holy League of 1595. Papal sponsor, clement VIII. The main participants, the Holy Roman Empire, Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia. With the Spanish kicking in some troops from their dominions in the Netherlands and fleets from Naples and Sicily, the reconquer Hungary and push the Ottomans back to the Danube. Outcome inconclusive, despite more than a decade of back and forth fighting. But now the big one, the Holy League of 1684. Generally speaking, if someone says the Holy League with no additional information, they mean this one. Papal sponsor Innocent XI main the Holy Roman Empire, the polish lithuanian commonwealth, the Venetian Republic, the tsardom of Russia. Notable absence, France once again allied with the Ottomans against the Holy Roman Empire. The resist ottoman expansion and recapture as much territory as possible. Outcome after more than 15 years victory over the course of those 15 years of war, this holy League demonstrated an almost unprecedented level of cooperation, which admittedly is not actually saying very much because the european powers were not good at cooperation. They were at each other's throats at the best of times. But their victory brought the ottoman empires era of westward expansion to a close. A renewed ottoman offensive in 1716 was decisively beaten by the Austrians at the cost of yet more ottoman territory. Instead, the Ottomans would turn their attention north to confront Russia in a rivalry that would define both empires for more than a century, until each fell prey to that most dangerous of ideas, revolution. The Holy League of 1684 is significant to us for a couple of reasons. First, because it started with ottoman attacks on weak, politically fractious Poland, Lithuania and the collective might of the great european powers did not commit themselves to the fight until after the badly outnumbered polish army had managed to pull off an inspiring victory or two. Second, because unlike the naval campaigns of the 1530s and 1570s, this war was fought in and for the balkan territories that would later become Yugoslavia. And we know from his comments during the production of victory that Tomina was deeply influenced by current events in that region, the beginning of what we now call the yugoslav wars. During the writing of victorys story, it seems entirely plausible that he was also inspired by the regions history. Third, because the professional soldiers of the Holy League were aided in significant numbers by irregular serbian militias, many of whom had fled their homes during the outbreak of the war, and fourth, because the Holy League of 1684 has one of those fancy latin names, the Sacra Ligua. So all things considered, I think that if the league militaire is in fact meant to be a reference to a specific historical predecessor, one with a name from old Roman that means something like holy alliance and translates to Shinsei Dome, one with significant militia involvement, great powers that only got involved reluctantly when the war arrived, right on their own doorsteps, and a connection to the Balkans, then I think this is our most likely candidate. But I would be remiss if I didnt point out that in the early nineties a worldly japanese person may well have read or heard Shinsei Dome in the news as the political situation in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, deteriorated by the late 1980s, President Mabutu Seisei Seko was starting to lose his grip on the country that he had ruled for more than 30 years. In 1990, Mobutu bowed to international pressure to make some token gestures toward democratization, and he allowed the formation of opposition political parties. By 1991, there were more than 200 such parties, including major ones like the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, the Democratic and Social Christian Party, and the Union of Federalists and Independent Republicans. To coordinate their efforts, they formed an opposition coalition, the sacred union of the opposition, usually shortened to the sacred Union in English, Union sacre in French and in Japanese, Shinsei Dome. We do love a contemporary reference, even if it doesnt seem like a very promising lead. After all, who knows? Perhaps news coverage of events in Zaire did play some small role in inspiring the league militaire. Stranger things have happened.