History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett Explaining East Europe's Age of Empires
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Feb 2, 2026 A lively tour of Eastern Europe from the late 1600s to World War I. They map imperial expansion, Austrian and Ottoman governance, and how multiethnic empires managed merchant minorities. Military revolutions, Prussian and Russian transformations, and the clash between imperial identities and rising nationalisms also feature prominently.
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Age Of Mythology Childhood Memory
- Rudyard Lynch recalls playing Age of Mythology at nine and preferring Norse units because of ancestral identity.
- He mass-produced Jarls as his winning strategy and linked gaming to historical curiosity.
Golden Age Of Multicultural Empires
- Eastern Europe’s 'Age of Empires' was its golden age of tolerance, multiethnicity, and elite-driven modernization.
- Imperial elites transplanted Western ideas and managed diverse societies more flexibly than later nationalists.
Three Wars That Reordered Europe
- Three late-17th-century conflicts set the stage for the next two centuries: Great Northern War, War of Spanish Succession, and Ottoman defeats.
- These wars reshaped power: Austria expanded east while the Ottoman frontier receded from Europe.
