Cards of History

Six months in the making and today, it's yours. The French Legacy A nation that forged history, ignited wars, defined culture and shaped the politics of the world. This collection has been calling to me for years, and now the trailer is here. Volume all the way up! Let's go!

@LoukusChar95372 Love that idea. I'll dive into it!

@GodPlaysCards Compare to the Hanseatic League, pretty please.

Every other colonial power (🇬🇧🇪🇸🇵🇹) had a king behind it. The VOC 🇳🇱 had a republic of merchants, windmills, ships, and a monopoly they seized from the world. It became on of the most powerful companies in history. And it didn't start in a garage, but in a swamp. Here's how. 👇 🔸The year is 1600. The Dutch Republic is a nation that shouldn't exist. Built on reclaimed swampland, constantly threatened by Spain, it has no king, no empire, just canals, windmills grinding grain, and merchants who refuse to accept the world as they found it. 🔸The spice trade is the oil industry of the 17th century. Nutmeg, cloves, pepper, cinnamon. Whoever controls them controls the wealth of the world. Portugal and Spain have carved it up between themselves. The Dutch want in. 🔸Dutch merchants are already sending ships to Asia. But competing companies are undercutting each other, driving up costs and driving down profits. The windmill builders have a problem: they are too good at competition, even against themselves. 🔸In 1602, the States-General makes a decision that changes history. They force the competing merchant companies to merge into one. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the VOC, is born. The most powerful corporation in history starts as a forced marriage. 🔸The charter they issue is unlike anything before it. The VOC is not just allowed to trade. It is allowed to build forts, raise armies, wage war, and sign treaties. A private company is handed the powers of a sovereign state. The merchants of the swamp now have teeth. 🔸They invent something else in 1602 that reshapes civilization. To fund the VOC, Amsterdam opens the world's first stock exchange. Ordinary citizens can buy shares. The Dutch built the architecture of modern capitalism. 🔸The ships leave Amsterdam in fleets. Built in the shipyards powered by those iconic windmills (the same we used to pump water out and create land). They sawed timber and ground materials for the Dutch war machine of commerce. The wind that drained the bogs now built the vessels that ruled the oceans. The difference is that the Dutch built one of the best and first assembly lines in the world. Quality and speed of production increases rapidly. 🔸The VOC's first major target is the Banda Islands. A tiny volcanic archipelago in Indonesia, the only place on earth where nutmeg grows. The Portuguese are there. The VOC arrives with cannons. The spice monopoly stays Dutch. 🔸Jan Pieterszoon Coen (I'm working on a Card on him) becomes the VOC's enforcer in Asia. Brilliant, ruthless, and completely without mercy. When the Bandanese resist the monopoly, he orders a massacre. Of the 15,000 inhabitants, only about a thousand survive. The spice monopoly is secured in blood. 🔸At its peak the VOC operates over 150 merchant ships and 40 warships, and employs 57,000 people directly. It governs millions. No king commands more tonnage on the world's oceans than this company of Dutch merchants born in a bog. 🔸From Cape Town to Nagasaki, the VOC flag flies. Trading posts, forts, and colonies stretch across two oceans. Japan closes itself to all Western nations and makes one exception: the Dutch. The VOC is the only Western entity permitted to trade with Japan for over 200 years (Shogun anyone?) 🔸Back in Amsterdam, the windmills keep turning. The wealth flowing in from Asia transforms the city. The canal houses go up. Rembrandt paints. Spinoza thinks. The Dutch Golden Age, one of the greatest flowerings of art, science, and philosophy in history, is funded by pepper and nutmeg. 🔸But power at that scale corrupts at that scale. VOC officials in Asia grow rich through private trading, bribery, and theft. The company that invented the shareholder dividend begins quietly bleeding out. Corruption eats the hull from the inside while the ships still look magnificent from shore. 🔸VOC's decline was slow and multi-causal. Corruption was real and significant, but so were external factors: the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in the 1780s badly damaged Dutch trade power, competition from the British East India Company intensified, and demand for spices in Europe had been declining. The corruption accelerated a decline that had structural causes too. 🔸By the late 1700s the VOC is effectively bankrupt. Two centuries of dominance, undone by mismanagement, war with Britain, and an empire too vast to control. On December 31, 1799, the charter expires and the Dutch government formally dissolves the company. The most powerful company in history simply closes. 🔸The VOC is gone but its fingerprints are everywhere. The stock exchange it invented still exists. The legal framework of the corporation it pioneered still governs modern business. Cape Town, Jakarta, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, all shaped by its presence. It started in a swamp. It ended having remade the world. History remembers the VOC as the greatest (or one of the greatest) commercial enterprise ever built. Every dominant power in history built its position through force. The Romans. The British. The Ottomans. The Spanish. The VOC was not an exception to that rule. Commerce has always required violence to protect it. True in the Golden Age and also true now. I'll spare you a paragraph on the Strait of Hormuz. With that final note, I want to thank you for sticking with me. Tomorrow I've got another fantastic story lined up for you. Honored to have you on board.

@AustinTunnell Looks great! Is if it is also visible in the interior how are you addressing the thermal bridge it creates, or is that less of a concern in the climate you are building.

Me and BC team are working on laying these big stone lintels this morning that look into our dedicated desk area at Apollo. Looks small in pics…but it’s substantial! That’s a ~1500 pound stone, and center window is 5’x7’. Going to look so good, both inside and out! Imagine working here instead of in a beige carpeted, beige walled, fluorescent lighted stale space (aka most “offices”).

@Shirley90129617 I'll gladly take requests, any specific topics / figures in mind?

@GodPlaysCards Do Middle East plz

@AchimBetke12460 Correct. I’ve read a lot about it. Very possible the mayas found it in place.

@GodPlaysCards It may be that post glacial civilizations reused materials left over from a pre-glacial civilization that experienced a catastrophic civilization annihilating event. It’s possible that 12+K years ago there were advanced civilizations with advanced technologies that were lost.

When the Spanish landed at Sacsayhuamán they were astonished by what they found. The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León wrote that the walls seemed impossible for human hands to have built, some Spaniards suggested giants or demons must have been responsible. The largest stone is estimated to weigh around 130 tonnes, and they are polygonal in shape, fitted together without mortar with such precision that not even a sheet of paper can slide between them. Some blocks have up to 12 angles, each face cut to match a different neighboring stone perfectly. The entire complex stretches over 300 meters in length and the main walls rise to nearly 6 meters high, yet what stands today is only an estimated 20% of the original structure. Many of the stones were used by the Spanish to build colonial Cusco. Churches, palaces, and foundations across the city were constructed with Inca stone. The Cathedral of Cusco, the Church of Santo Domingo, and countless mansions along the city's main streets all rest on foundations of Sacsayhuamán granite. People are still debating how this was made.

@matkinsj @BookwormBean 😅

@GodPlaysCards @BookwormBean

@SirEvanAmato I knew a guy in Austria who did the same.

One of the best periods in my life was when I lived in London and spent my entire paycheck attending the opera. I went to plays, ballets, and concerts while subsisting on canned beans and Tesco ready to eat sandwiches. It was a horrendous financial decision, yet one of the best things I’ve ever done. Those months in London shaped me like no other, and my soul was transformed by the music I encountered. “Man does not live by bread alone", indeed.

@real_mpwilcox You are too kind. 🫡 Much obliged brother!

Doing a great service. Support this account and their work.

@MadBulgarian1 True, what a scene that was 🔥

@GodPlaysCards Tolkien tapped into that cultural memory big time with Lord of the Rings.

For two centuries, the Ottoman Empire had pushed westward, swallowing kingdoms whole. Vienna was on the brink of collapse, the gate to all of Europe was about to fall open. Then, over the ridge of the Kahlenberg hill, came the largest cavalry charge in recorded history. 🔸By 1683, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful military force on earth. Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa marched with more than 150,000 soldiers toward Vienna, pulling with him over 300 cannons and a supply chain that stretched back to Constantinople. 🔸On July 14th, the Ottomans surrounded Vienna and began digging. They ran tunnels beneath the city walls, packed them with gunpowder, and detonated them one by one. The city's 12,000 - 15,000 defenders watched their walls crumble from the inside out. 🔸After two months under siege, Vienna was dying. Food had run out, disease was spreading through the streets, and the garrison had lost a third of its men. The city's commander, Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, sent desperate messengers through enemy lines begging for relief. 🔸Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I had spent weeks negotiating one of the most unlikely alliances in European history. Catholic Austria, Protestant German princes, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth agreed to set aside their rivalries and march together. King Jan III Sobieski of Poland would lead them. 🔸Jan Sobieski was already a legend before Vienna. He had spent his career fighting the Ottomans on Poland's eastern frontier, and the Turks called him the "Lion of Lechistan." When the Pope personally wrote to him asking for help, Sobieski mobilized 74,000 men and began the march south. 🔸On the evening of September 11th, the allied commanders gathered on the Kahlenberg hill overlooking Vienna. Below them, the Ottoman camp stretched across the plain like a city of its own, with silk tents, horse herds, and cooking fires as far as the eye could see. Sobieski turned to his son and said: "Tomorrow we fight." 🔸The battle opened at dawn on September 12th with infantry clashing in the woods and ravines below the hill. For eight hours the fighting ground on, neither side breaking. Then, at around four in the afternoon, Sobieski ordered his cavalry to the ridge. 🔸The Polish Winged Hussars were the most feared heavy cavalry in the world. They rode massive warhorses, carried 16-foot lances, and wore wooden frames on their backs that held enormous eagle and ostrich feathers. At full gallop, the wings created a roaring sound that witnesses said was unlike anything they had ever heard. 🔸18,000 horsemen crested the hill and began riding downhill toward the Ottoman camp. Sobieski led from the front with 3,000 of his Polish Winged Hussars. The ground shook. The Ottoman lines, which had held all day, looked up to see a wall of horses, lances, and screaming wings descending on them at full speed. The formation collapsed almost immediately. 🔸The battle raged for 15 hours after which the Ottoman army was in full retreat. Kara Mustafa abandoned his command tent, his treasury, his artillery, and the green banner of the Prophet Muhammad. The Poles captured so much coffee from the Ottoman camp that it is credited with introducing the coffeehouse culture to Vienna. 🔸Kara Mustafa fled to Belgrade, where he was executed by order of the Sultan three months later. The Ottoman Empire never again threatened central Europe with the same force. The siege of Vienna is now considered the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion into the West. 🔸On the evening of the victory, Sobieski wrote a letter to the Pope. In it, he borrowed the words of Julius Caesar and wrote: "I came, I saw, God conquered." He had just saved Western Europe. He sent the letter before the bodies were even cleared from the field. 🔸The Winged Hussars charged for the last time at Vienna, and they won the most consequential cavalry battle in modern history. Within a generation, the age of mounted shock warfare would be over forever. Most people have never heard of the Battle of Vienna or of Jan Sobieski (he will receive his own card in due time). I believe it is vital you are now part of the group that does. History has a way of burying the moments that changed everything. Europe was about to fall. These men ensured it didn't. Thanks for sticking with me. Tomorrow I've got another fantastic story lined up for you.

This is exactly the reason I'm on X, the most wonderful people, the most educated audience.

@brubarian Thanks Michael, means a lot to me.

I just found this account. I immediately followed. And I’m going to buy everything they offer. Amazing.

@joe59017 @grok My pleasure, thanks you are here for the ride. Yes indeed, we have to be very careful. Some battles are not over.

@GodPlaysCards @grok Thanks Doing God's work man. Some would say teaching this is divisive but if you value European history it should be mandatory in every country. Europe was very close to being conquered. Very close.

Not on my watch.

@joe59017 @grok Hi Jim. Honest answer from me. It depends on the region. I heard central Europe uses this in their curriculum. I'm Dutch myself, and never heard of it until I started this project. It is also one of the reasons I post about it, some stories are simply vital to understand.

@GodPlaysCards Honest question but do schools in Eu teach about this battle in many levels of history. @grok you have any info about teaching of this battle in eu.

@AustinTunnell 🔥🔥🔥

@GodPlaysCards Appreciate it! Can't wait til we get to the second story :)

This arch is 10' wide. We already have 3 courses of voussoirs (the layers of the arch), and have a final course that you can see started at the bottom. The thickness (proportionate to size of arch) and dimensionality (reveals created from stepping brick in/out) are part of what make this beautiful. But one more tip to make your brick arches look great: as the radius expands outward with multiple voussoirs, don't line up the mortar joints. If you look closely, you can see the mortar joints are not aligned on the arch. If we DID line them up, which masons often do by default, the mortar joints start getting really thick, and it looks bad. We are laying what's called a "rough arch", where the mortar joint creates the wedge from the radius, rather than cutting each brick into the wedge shape. Rough arches can look amazing, and work just as well as "gauged" arches (when you cut the brick), but are 10x faster - and much cheaper. But the mistake I often see made when laying a rough arch is 1) lining up the mortar joints or 2) laying the brick vertically on edge, as a soldier course, which has the same effect as lining up mortar joints when laying "rowlocks" (what we've done here). You end up seeing the mortar joint for a continuous 8" rather than 4", and so the mortar joint gets beefy towards the top and does not look good. So: 1. Lay rough arches 2. Use rowlocks (we often cap with a header) 3. Don't line up mortar joints 4. Create reveals by corbelling out layers of voussoirs The same rules apply to veneer. You can communicate this to your architect/GC/mason, but I'd include pictures to show them. **each way you lay a brick has a name. What you typically see in a wall is a "stretcher", where the long face lays horizontally. Header is where you turn a stretcher 90 degrees so you see the short face. Rowlock is when you turn that header on edge, as you see in this arch**

@AfifahHamilton That is very kind of you.

@GodPlaysCards When I have deliveries from Poles or Lithuanians I always, literally, thank them for their ancestors' dedication, for the Winged Hussars, for deciding they would prevail. They are surprised at the acknowledgement.

@TheKingDude Thanks for the QT Mike! I've completed my masters in Vienna, still one of the most gorgeous cities in the world.

To all my Polish brethren, this one is for you! Very good history lesson! Never forget the Ottomans are today's Turks and 150,000 of them now LIVE IN Vienna!

Preparing shipments for Monday morning. Your time to order is now. God wills it!