Wayback Wednesdays: Richelieu
On this day in 1624, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu (known simply as "Richelieu" ) was made president of the council of ministers of France
When I say "France", I mean something as we know it today, but back then it was anything but a country. There were severe internal differences, each little fiefdom had it's own lord, and national control was a rare if non-existent thing. The old joke is that the phrase "Holy Roman Empire" was wrong on all counts: It wasn't holy, it wasn't Roman, and it wasn't an Empire.
After the Western Roman Empire slowly disintegrated into little kingdoms, the people in the west still thought of themselves as Romans. Why wouldn't they? In fact, if you look at some very modern terms for leader, like "Tsar" and "Keiser", they're just different ways of saying Caesar.
But a disintegrated Western Europe was inherently unstable, no matter what they though they were. Add in the printing press and the Protestant Reformation, and you've got hundreds of little principalities all hating the folks living in the village next door. Add in a bunch of outside armies vying for power? Fun times.
Richelieu is the guy who kept France together, made it into more of a whole country than it ever was before, and managed to keep it functioning throughout the Thirty-Year's War. He did this by all sorts of techniques. He was not afraid to make alliances with Protestants when it suited him. He fought off internal rumors and external plots. He did this all while working under a king and his ministers that had their own ideas of how things should go.
If you'd like to study a master class in how diplomacy and statesmanship work, you should take a look at the life of Richelieu. He was an amazing guy.
From Space-X to a new inside-out Wenkel engine for DoD, it's been an amazing week for inventors.
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The new site is just like this one, only no "locals" in the name. It's https://danielbmarkham.com
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Hey @markthien , @vikdutt , @mavenllc , @Dauugavpiils , @rmonaghan , @Vic8888 , @GeorgiaLogCabin , @godfrey , @yumaikas
I've moved!
Locals is turning off their free accounts and I've decided that I'd rather go back to maintaining my own site than sign up for any more "free" services that end up changing the conditions of service later.
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