Season 10, Episode 13: Flesh and Blood in a War of Machines (Patreon)

This week on Mobile Suit Breakdown, Victory juggles a lot of balls, Uso playing a lot of roles, Mandella gives out a lot of tickets, and Thom identifies a lot of possible inspirations for the League Militaire. Please listen to it!

Plus, you get to enjoy a Patreon-exclusive addendum to the research!

Show Notes

• The Jisho.org page for 神聖同盟 (shinseidoumei) or 'Holy Alliance' refers to the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1815 and links to its Wikipedia page. 

• Japanese online-dictionary Kotobank also says that 神聖同盟 (shinseidoumei) means the Holy Alliance of 1815. 

• Japanese Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for 神聖同盟 (shinseidoumei) that lists the 1815 Holy Alliance alongside other similarly-named institutions, like the 20th century French Union sacrée, and the Holy League of 1684. 

• The Holy Alliance of 1815:

  • Basic info about the Holy Alliance is available on Wikipedia and Britannica.

  • Karl Marx used this Holy Alliance as an example of an alliance between reactionary political institutions in the preamble to the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

    • Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing together for Neue Rheinische Zeitung, accused the Prussians, Austrians, and Russians of forming a new Holy Alliance to crush the revolutions of 1848.

    • In 1849 they described a political alliance within France of "legitimists, Philippists, Bonapartists and “respectable” republicans" as a new Holy Alliance.

    • Marx also used the term 'Holy Alliance' for other interventionist alliances, as when he accused England, France, and Spain of planning a new Holy Alliance to intervene in Mexico in 1861. 

    • Engels contrasted the counter-revolutionary powers of 1848-51 with the original Holy Alliance in his "Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance Against France in 1852," written in 1851.

  • For a very different perspective, the Quaker writer Augustine Jones described the Holy Alliance in rapturous terms in an 1894 article for The Advocate of Peace:
    
    JONES, AUGUSTINE. “THE HOLY ALLIANCE.” The Advocate of Peace (1894-1920), vol. 56, no. 1, 1894, pp. 5–7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20665051. Accessed 21 May 2024. 

• A brief and inadequate history of the Ottoman Empire:

  • Fleet K, ed. The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 1. Cambridge University Press; 2009.

  • Relevant Wikipedia pages: the Sultanate of Rum, the Ottoman Empire, the Rise of the Ottoman Empire, the warlord Timur, and Mehmed II, the Conqueror.

• The Holy Leagues of the 1500s mostly focused on countering Ottoman expansion around the Mediterranean Sea: 

  • Abulafia, David, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York, 2011)

  • Wikipedia pages on the Conquest of Tunis (1535), the Holy League of 1538, and the Holy League of 1571.

• The Holy Leagues of 1594 and 1684 were directed against Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, Austria, and Poland. 

  • The failed League of 1594.

  • And the famous Holy League of 1684, aka the Sacra Ligua: 

    • The Holy League formed in the aftermath of a failed Ottoman attack on Vienna which was driven off with the help of an army from Poland-Lithuana in 1863. That expedition and the circumstances that led to it are described in great detail in the 2021 doctoral thesis of Philip James at Royal Holloway, University of London.

    • In Japanese, it's the 神聖同盟 (Shinseidoumei) of 1684.

    • It's also known as the 'Great Turkish War' or the 'Wars of the Holy League.'

    • During the war, the Holy League was aided by local Serbian militias.

    • The war ended with the Peace of Karlowitz and the subsequent Treaty of Constantinople, analyzed here by Randall Lesaffer for the Oxford Public International Law blog.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

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