August 14, 2017 • 30 mins
France’s mad king Charles VI reigned in the middle of the Hundred Years War between England and France. While his early reign hinted at greatness, things soon spiraled downward.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we
have not had a Mad Royal episode in a little bit.
We have not, so we're kind of do It's kind
(00:23):
of a theme though. Yeah, we have a lot of
them and people love them, but we haven't done one
in a bit, so it seemed like time to circle
back on the mad Royals. This one, like all of
those stories, is really sad and that it features a
person who has never really properly treated for their illness,
although there was a lot of theorizing and attempts at
treating it. But it's also smack dab in the middle
(00:45):
of the Hundred Years War between England and France, which
ran from thirty seven to fourteen fifty three. You'll find
some accounts that want to shift those numbers a little bit,
but that's sort of the agreed upon general range, which yes,
is more than a hundred years. Uh. And we're talking
today about Charles the sixth of France and his reign
because of its position on the timeline of Europe had
(01:06):
ripple effects throughout the histories of both those countries, and uh,
this stuff is really convoluted. There is so much intrigue
and loyalty gaming and power grabbing, and to make matters worse,
there are a lot of repeating names. So hopefully I
have managed to pare it down in a way that
makes sense. But yeah, we're going to talk about Charles
(01:28):
the sixth of France, who was also known as the
Mad King. Yeah, if you looked at your at the
title of this and your podcast player and said, didn't
they do this when already uh I was Charles the ninth. Yeah,
a lot of Charles's obviously nine iyabokuda Charles. So this
(01:51):
particular Charles was born on December three, thirty eight in Paris.
His parents were King Charles five and John du Bourbon,
and he was only eleven. Charles became king. He was
crowned on October and initially it really seemed like Charles
was a golden child. He was very bright, he was charming,
(02:12):
he was handsome, and he was athletically skilled. So the
country and the court of France really believed that he
was going to grow into a fine king because he
was so young when he inherited the throne though his
uncle's surface his aids and advisors, and he's included the
Dukes of Burgundy, Bourbon and jow and Barry. They also
created an advisory council to guide the young Charles, called
(02:35):
the Council of twelve. Philip the Bold of Burgundy was
selected to lead this cabinet. This was not to be
confused with the King of France also called Philip the Bold,
and that was Philip the Third and he had reigned
from twelve seventy to twelve eighty five, so this is
roughly a century later. Yes, again, so many and they
(02:56):
were used not only names like Philip and Charles, but
nickname which makes it really confusing. But while France was
in effect being ruled by Charles's duke uncles, a number
of actions were taken that were not so much in
the interests of the people as they were to benefit
those royals. England and France, as we mentioned, were deep
into the Hundred Years War at this point, it had
(03:18):
been going on since thirty seven and it had really
been a very expensive effort for France. So the dukes
raised taxes, but a lot of what they were trying
to do was replace reallocated treasury funds that they had
actually spent to benefit themselves. So just two years after
Charles the sixth was named king, revolts started breaking out
(03:40):
throughout the country as France's people grew very frustrated with
things that were being done in the young king's name.
You know, one account I read suggested that all of
those dukes kind of each had their own agenda, and
so they were spending money, not as a unified force,
but they were each just going, well, I'm gonna take
some money to go do my thing over here. I'm
gonna take money to go do my thing over year,
and so they were really just part of the problem
(04:02):
was not only that they were benefiting themselves, but they
were doing their own projects and kind of funding them
willing really. In thirteen eighty five, at the age of seventeen,
Charles was married to Isabeau of Bavaria, and that was
a union which had been brokered by Philip the Bold.
This was a move that benefited Philip, who had inherited
the Countship of Flanders in thirteen eighty four, and at
(04:24):
the time England was exerting its power in Flanders, so
Philip arranged the marriage in part to ensure that he
had German support there. Even though it was arranged, this
marriage was definitely not something Charles had been forced into.
Despite the fact that he didn't speak German and Isabeau
didn't speak French, the young king was instantly smitten when
(04:44):
he saw his Bavarian princess, so much so that the
young man insisted that the wedding happened as quickly as possible.
Three days after they met, the young couple were already
husband and wife, and the marriage, initially in a way,
went well. Uh The young couple became known for their
entertaining They were both very attractive and charming, so even
(05:06):
if they had not been royalty in those first years,
at least, they probably would have been fourteenth century Europe's
version of an IT couple. In August eight, at Phillip's urging,
Charles back to Jean of Brabant in a disagreement with
Duke William of Gelderland. Jean of Brabant was related to
phill Up the Bowl by marriage. She was his wife's aunt,
(05:28):
so he was using his position and his influence over
the king to try to smooth things out for his family.
But once Charles arrived on the scene, what he actually
did was to make peace with Duke William and that
was the end of things. It was not the show
of force that Philip and John had been hoping for. Yeah,
I don't think they wanted negotiations at all. They wanted
(05:49):
somebody to come in, crack some skulls and show who
was who. And instead it was like, hey, we can
work this out, you guys. Uh. Just a few months
after this, Charles, who was twenty and at that point,
decided that he was ready to govern on his own, so,
with the help of Louis, the Duke of Orleon, who
was his brother, he made the move to dissolve the
Council of Twelve, and so his uncles were also removed
(06:11):
from their advisory positions. Charles's father, Charles the Fifth, had
had an advisory cabinet called the Marmosets, and when Charles
took over his reign, he reinstated the Marmosets, which included
non Aristocrats as his advisors. Charles sought reform once he
started ruling on his own with the Marmosets and placed
to advise, Charles began repairing the damage that his uncle's
(06:35):
had been doing slowly. The French economy improved and the
corruption of the royals and their government was reduced, and
this is when the nickname Charles the Beloved came to
be associated with the king. Yeah, initially it looked like
everything was going so great. Uh. In nine Charles made
a move that was intended to bring greater power to
(06:55):
France by placing an ally on the papal throne. And
this is one of those points in history where there
were several contenders for pope, and Charles aligned with Antipope
Clement the seventh. Charles knew that if he could convince
Clement the seventh that he should make a strong move
to take the role of pope, and if he assisted,
then France would have this really strong ally in Rome.
(07:18):
But not everyone wanted the same pope. King Richard the
second of England wished for Boniface the ninth to become
the pope win word of Charles's plans to installed Clement
the seventh. As pope reached England, it led to the
two monarchs and meeting to discuss this issue as well
as their country's ongoing antagonism, and Charles managed with Richard
(07:42):
the Second to come to a temporary peaceful agreement, and
that was the Truth of Lullingham, which put an end
to the second segment of fighting between the two countries
in the course of the Hundred Years War, and it
actually also led to the longest period of peace within
the Hundred Years War. The treaty also included an arrangement
made several years later for Richard the Second to marry
(08:02):
Charles and Isabella's daughter, Isabella. Isabella was six when the
treaty was signed, and that marriage did happen then. UM,
So we're going to do a really brief sidebar here
on gross child marriages. UM. Richard the Second and Isabella
were marrying before the girl's seventh birthday. Although according to
the custom of the time and canon law, marriage to
(08:23):
a child in such an instance was seen as political.
Such marriages were not consummated until the child involved was
a more appropriate age. Um. But in terms of what
that means for girls, that was commonly twelve years old,
which is still troubling but at that time was pretty standard.
But in Isabella's case, her husband, Richard the Second, died
(08:44):
when she was only ten, so the marriage was never consummated,
and most accounts suggest that he really did treat her kindly.
He wanted to protect her, and he felt like, that's fine,
we can make this political alliance and I will wait
to make her my wife in actuality. Um. But he
died before any of that came to fruition. So because
they had not consummated the marriage, she was not considered
(09:05):
a queen dowager, And initially it was a little bit
tricky to get her moved back to France. Uh. There
was a lot of political maneuvering going on in an
attempt to remarry her to the young Henry the fifth,
but she was eventually returned to her parents in France.
So we're about to get into the first time that
Charles exhibited some truly bizarre and upsetting behavior. But before
(09:29):
we do that, we'll get to a word from one
of our sponsors. The first instance of Charles having medical
issues which would be associated with his madness was in
thirteen nine, and he had in April of that year
been quite ill and had lost most of his hair
and his fingernails to that illness, which remains unidentified. While
(09:51):
he was recovering from that illness, Charles learned that one
of his friends had been the target of a failed
murder attempt, so in August, Charles began a jar need
to try to seek a vengeance on this attempted murderer,
who had fled to Brittany. While he was riding to
his destination, Charles developed a high fever and also out
of nowhere, stabbed four of his men with a sword.
(10:14):
He was overpowered and laid out on the ground and
he started having some kind of convulsions and then fell
into a coma like state. Yeah, he actually may have
stabbed more than that, but he definitely killed four of
his men. Um. There's also a weird little part of
that story where a stranger, a seemingly very distraught possibly
(10:36):
wild man runs up and and yells some things right
before this all happens. It's a very weird scene that happened,
and apparently like a lance was dropped and that may
have triggered it. We basically do not know why he
went on this bizarre killing spree. But after several days
of being unconscious, the young king awoke and he was
treated by a doctor, and he was completely heartbroken when
(10:59):
he learned that he had killed four members of his party.
He had also injured his brother Louis in the process,
and this was unfortunately the start of a cycle that
would play out over and over throughout the King's life,
where he would have these bouts of madness followed by
a period of apparent normalcy. About five months later, on January,
(11:20):
the king was in a serious accident at a masked
ball that was thrown by Queen Isebeu. He and several
other men had been dressed as so called wild men,
and their linen costumes caught fire when they came in
contact with a torch that was being carried by the
King's brother Louis, who got too close while trying to
(11:41):
identify who the masqueraders were. Thinking very quickly, the Duchess
of Berry used her skirts to smother the flames that
were engulfing the king, but four of his courtiers burned
to death in the incident. This incident came to be
known by the grizzly name bal Dessardaunt, or the Ball
of the Burning Men. I had thought about doing a
(12:02):
whole episode on this at some point, but like what
we just said, is most of the information about it.
It was a grizzly and horrifying spectacle. Yeah, there are
some pieces that have a hair more detail that as
part of their costumes that were linen, they had soaked
them in some sort of um formula that allowed them
(12:23):
to like stick hair to them so that they would
look more wild, and that that was super flammable. But
most of them really all kind of center around really
making it clear that this was not anything but an accident.
Louis really was just trying to figure out who these
people were. He was not trying to attack them with
this this torch. And at this point Charles was still
(12:45):
grappling with his guilt over the August incident in the forest,
and this accident only made him more deeply upset, and
several months later he experienced another attack that was very
similar to the first one, and this time a surgeon
intervened and trepan the King's skull to relieve pressure on
Charles's brain, and that procedure actually seemed, at least according
(13:06):
to record, to work for a while. He felt better
and he did not have another episode until But as
time progressed, this cycle between periods of lucidity and periods
of psychosis became shorter and shorter to the point that
he would experience about of madness, lasting anywhere from three
(13:27):
to nine months, followed by a lucid period that would
last three to five months. And there were many theories
as to what was going on with the king, and
one of them started circulating that he might be possessed
or cursed in some way. So church officials attempted exorcism
on several occasions, and during one such attempt, Charles called out,
(13:47):
begging that if someone present had been part of the curse,
that they should just let him die rather than let
him continue to suffer. These episodes began to manifest with
serious breaks from reality, and his delusions weren't really consistent
from one episode to another. He claimed at various points
that he was not the king, that he was being
chased through the palace, and that his wife and children
(14:10):
were not in fact his family. He attacked physicians and
servants and destroyed his apartment, and at one point he
also exhibited a version of the glass delusion that we
spoke about in our podcast episode covering Alexandra of Bavaria.
Unlike Alexandra, who thought she had swallowed a glass piano,
Charles believed that he was made of glass, and so
(14:31):
he demanded that iron rods and sometimes wooden planks be
placed in his clothing to protect him from shattering, and
he became really fearful of physical contact. Charles was horrified
when he would return to a state of relative lucidity
and discover what he had done in the previous episode,
and it particularly upset him on one occasion when he
(14:54):
realized his children had heard him ranting beginning as earliest tee.
So really, when this all really started to get serious,
Isabeau basically started acting as regent whenever Charles was in
one of his psychotic states and leading a regent's council.
And Isabelle really has been characterized in a number of
(15:14):
ways throughout the years, many of them not flattering. Uh.
She has been described as power hungry, as an adulteress,
as self indulgent, as a shallow woman who only wanted
to enjoy the luxuries of royal life. But she really
was in a unique position of power, and more modern historians,
as they've analyzed more of the actual documents of the
(15:34):
time and not just things that were written kind of
in the interim that maybe embellished the story, realized that
she was really quite adept at managing diplomacy in the
very stressful situation of having a husband who was not
only experiencing psychosis but was very dangerous as a consequence.
I do want to take a moment to just clarify
that the vast majority of people who have some kind
(15:56):
of mental illness are not dangerous. Correct. Yeah, we we
have a couple of stories about royalty who were both
mentally ill and dangerous, but like, those things don't live together,
and they're probably yeah, they're not necessarily hand in hand.
These manifested that way. Uh, probably due to a number
of factors. But yeah, that's never make that assumption. Yeah,
(16:19):
So Charles, the sixth rain stretched on and it became
more and more apparent that there was something really wrong.
Other members of the French court began to scheme about
how they could take advantage of this situation and seize
power for themselves. Even when the king seemed to be lucid,
he couldn't really think clearly, and he relied on advice
(16:40):
of those around him more and more, to the point
that he just started doing what other people told him
to do. This led to a series of events that
are just a complicated mess of drama right. So John
the Fearless, who had become the Duke of Burgundy after
Philip the Bold had died, had been at odds with
Louis Valois, the Duke of Orleans, who was of course
(17:01):
Charles the Sixes brother, and Louis was also rumored to
be having an affair with Queen Isabeau. So John the
Fearless felt that if he didn't do something about Louis,
who was close to both the king and Isabeau, that
he John would have virtually no power. The two dukes
were openly hostile to one another, and in what John
(17:22):
perceived as a power gap created by the King's instability,
he plotted to have Louis assassinated. In fourteen oh seven,
after a false note claiming that the King wanted to
see him was sent to Louis. A crowd of more
than a dozen attackers set upon the Duke of Orleans
as he went to answer the request, and he was
(17:42):
stabbed to death. But then, in a really surprising move, Isabeau,
who had been close with Louis, joined up with the
Burgundians Louise attackers, and she and John the Fearless actually
became close friends. In the meantime, Louise followers continued to
oppose the Burgundy power grab, and those uh those resistors
were led by Bernard the seventh, the Count of Armagnac.
(18:05):
Over the next several years, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs
remained at odds, and the Armagnacs gradually pushed their rivals
out of Paris and what's fittingly called the Armagnac Burgundian
Civil War. But in fourteen fifteen, a new development, which
was the invasion of France by Henry the Fifth, added
yet another layer of stress and intrigue to the whole situation.
(18:29):
Henry and his army of eleven thousand men had arrived
in France in late summer fourteen fifteen. After a five
week siege at our Fleur. Henry was victorious, but it
was a costly win. They really did not expect Our
Fleur to be able to resist that long, and so
his army was depleted by half. He had at that
point intended to move north to Calais and then head
(18:52):
back to England from there, but he was confronted at
Agincourt by the French army, which was twenty thousand men strong,
and in one of history's most famous upsets. Henry's more
agile troops were able to defeat the armor encumbered French
forces despite that massive deficit in head count. Coming up,
we will talk about how John the Fearless had been
(19:12):
hoping to manipulate the situation to his advantage. But before
we do, we'll have one more quick sponsor break. So
when we left off, we had been talking about how
Henry the Fifth had entered France, and initially John the
Fearless had hoped to curry favor with Henry the Fifth
by backing him, at least in a sneaky way. But
(19:33):
his efforts fell apart and the alliance that he hoped
for never materialized, and after that he turned to his enemies,
the Armagnacs for help. He wanted the Armagnacs and Burgundians
to forge a truce and joined forces to fight England.
He hoped in this move to also get in the
good graces of Charles the Sixes air that was the
Dauphin Charles the seventh. But during the discussions, which took
(19:56):
place on the Montereu Bridge, John the Fearless was killed
in what was likely a planned attack, although at the
time it was carefully staged to look like a spontaneous
disagreement that escalated and got out of hand. As a
quick aside, Charles the Seventh was something of an unlikely dauphin.
Charles the sixth and Isabeau had a lot of kids.
(20:16):
From six to fourteen oh seven, there had been twelve children,
and four of them were boys. Their first child and
first son, also named Charles, died at just three days old.
Their second son, another Charles, died when he was nine.
The two other sons, Louis and John, each died when
they were eighteen, so Charles the seventh didn't become next
(20:38):
in line to the throne until he was fourteen, when
John died, and the death of Burgundy in a meeting
with Charles the seventh soured Isabel's relationship with the crown prince.
Up to that point, she had really favored the young
man over her other children, and there were a lot
of suspicions and rumors going around that Charles the Seventh
(20:59):
was actually the child eild of her deceased close friend Louis,
the Duke of Orleon. But after John the Fearless was killed,
Isabeau disowned Charles the seventh and forged ahead with her
own plan to make peace with England. In May of
fourteen twenty, the Treaty of Tis was signed, and it
was really Isabeau and the Duke of Burgundy who was
fill up the third and fill up the good at
(21:20):
that point, who orchestrated the terms of this deal. In it,
Charles and Isabel's youngest daughter, Catherine of Valwas was promised
as wife to Henry the Fifth of England. As part
of the agreement, Henry the five would become king of
France as well as England when Charles the sixth that died.
This meant that Charles the seventh would be completely bypassed
(21:42):
as the monarch and his sister Catherine would instead be queen.
The treaty further provided that the descendants of Henry, King
of England should rule France going forward. Yeah, this was
sort of a weird thing where it's like, well, we're
never going to win against them, but maybe we can
work some thing out. And Charles the seventh really stinks,
(22:02):
so let's do whatever we can to make this rough
for him. Um, And that way, in making Catherine Henry
the fifth wife, they were at least ensuring that their
bloodline was still part of the ruling um effort in
France and beyond being bypassed, all parties involved in this
treaty denounced Charles the seventh and agreed that he and
(22:23):
his followers should not be bargained with in any way,
and that opposition to the terms of the treaty, which
would undoubtedly come from Charles the Seventh, should be eliminated.
But Henry the Fifth, who had been working his way
through France claiming territory, continued to do just that. After
the treaty was signed, and throughout all this Charles the
sixth was basically out of the game. The people of
(22:45):
France were not pleased, and the Treaty of Tis really
set off a couple of decades worth of unrest. Yeah,
they weren't really thrilled with this whole Oh we're giving
the country's rule away to England. Uh. They didn't care
that it was a French a French wife that was
involved in that. They just felt like they have been
completely betrayed. And on October one, just shy of the
(23:09):
forty two anniversary of his crowning is King of France,
Charles the six died Henry the fifth of England had
actually already died just two months prior, so that meant
that Henry the fifth could not reign, but Henry's infant
son that he had had with Catherine was proclaimed king
of England and France. Charles the sixth son Charles the seventh,
(23:30):
was declared King of France by his supporters, though, and
for a time everything north of the Loire was under
English rule, while the portions of France south of there
were back in Charles the seventh as their king. It's
a little more complex than that, but that becomes a
whole podcast episode in and of itself. Um. But I
(23:51):
want to talk a little bit because, particularly in those
later years, Charles the six is madness doesn't get talked
about a lot um because the kind of just started
to ignore him in some ways. In total, Charles the
sixth had forty four documented episodes of madness through his life.
So those those instances where he had a psychotic break
(24:12):
of some sort. Uh. Initially, they were really well documented
when this happened, but as his episodes of psychosis became
more frequent and longer, there were fewer and fewer records
kept about them. As is so often the case. There's
a lot of modern speculation about his diagnosis, and that
speculation has included porphyria and in sephalitis as well as schizophrenia.
(24:36):
Charles the sixth was certainly not the first in his
family to exhibit some kind of mental illness. His mother,
John of Bourbon, had also exhibited some instability, as had
her brother and father. It's also possible that porphyria from
Charles the sixth is French bloodline was introduced into the
English royal lineage with his daughter Catherine. That's one of
(25:00):
the theorized diagnoses attributed to King George the Third's madness. Yeah,
which we uh, some listeners may know about if they
ever saw the film In the Madness of King George,
which was again an episodic instance where he had this
psychotic break and some really weird things were going on
in him and then he recovered and was fine again. Uh.
(25:23):
Which it's uh that that brings up some interesting stuff
that goes on later with Victoria and Albert's bloodline, but
we won't get into that now. Yeah, it gets so
convoluted and it's one of those things working on this
It's like tricky where you're like, I don't how far
do we go in on either end of this of
Charles the sixth reign, because it all affects. It's all
(25:46):
like this big moving morass, and every gear that turns
affects things down the road and is related to things
that happened way before, and it's tricky. The Hundred Years
War is a very complicated thing because there were so
many schemes playing out by so many different people that
intersected in interesting ways. But it's not always easy to
tease them apart because there was also a lot of
(26:08):
fakery going on of like, oh, that's an assassination, but
really we made it look like we just had a
disagreement that went bad. Things like that were happening all
the time, and a lot of the history that was written,
for example, in like the eighteen hundreds about all of
this when it was had a surge in popularity is
(26:29):
really embellished. And it's one of those things we've seen
happen many, many times where someone will say something like,
you know, that's where sort of Isabea's um characterization as
being this you know, licentious woman who took a lot
of lovers, which she allegedly did, but we have no
real evidence. Um. But that's really where that sort of
(26:49):
story picks up steam and gets repeated over and over
and if you look back at the actual records of
the time, there isn't really much. There are hints that
she may have had paramours outside of her marriage, but
we don't. There's no no solid evidence when we or
the other, so it's tricky. I have completely uh non
(27:12):
drama listener mail. It's about space. Uh. It is from
our listener Roger, and he writes, Dear Tracy and Holly,
thank you for your recent podcast. I'm Dr Hugh Dryden.
I have worked for the past twenty five years at
n I s T. That's the National Institute of Standards
in Technology uh AS. NBS, which was the National Bureau
(27:33):
of Standards where Hugh Dryden worked, was renamed in the
mid nineteen eighties. This institution has over a century of
scientific and engineering excellence which is widely celebrated here. So
I was surprised not to have heard of Dryden, though
I knew of the NBS wind tunnels, the Bat Project,
and other achievements related to aeronautics. There is an encyclopedics
three volume History of NBS N I S T. Covering
(27:55):
the first one hundred years of its existence. But even
this exhaustive reference contain it's only a few incidental references
to this extraordinary man. I cannot offer an explanation for
this oversight, the reading between the lines. One might conjecture
as to the reasons, But no matter the cause, I
hope we might celebrate Dr Dryden's accomplishments more fully. I
have nominated Dr bill Berry, who was our guest on
the show where we talked about him, as a speaker
(28:18):
for the and I S T. Colloquium series, which is
so cool. I love that idea, and Um Bill Berry
is such a fond of knowledge. Even as much as
we talked on the show, he has so much more
knowledge in his head and passion for the subject that
he would be a phenomenal speaker. And also, Roger enclosed
(28:38):
an assortment of postcards and pictures and pages from an
account of early NBS history for our amusement, which is lovely.
It's such a cool packet. Uh. It came in a
very official looking envelope and I felt very fancy. Uh,
but it's really really great pictures about this pictures and
and documents about this early stage of of an a
(28:59):
branch of the United States government that maybe isn't always
lauded in no wise it should be in terms of
what it helped us achieve scientifically. So thank you, thank you,
thank you, Roger. That was super fantastic to open this morning.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast. At how stuff works dot com,
you can find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History. That means on Twitter and Instagram
(29:22):
and Pinterest and Tumbler and Facebook everywhere there we are
missed in History. We also have a website, which is
Missed in History dot com, which covers all of the
episodes of the show ever in archive form, and for
any of the episodes that Tracy and I have worked
on together, there are show notes. Prior to a couple
of months ago, those were their own separate pages for
each episode, and now they're integrated, so all of the
(29:44):
sources are right there with the podcast itself. If you
would like to visit our parents site, that is how
stuff Works dot com. You can type in almost anything
you're curious about in the search bar. You will come
up with a plethora of content and information to explore
and learn from, so please come and visit us at
mist in history dot com and how stuff works dot com.
(30:08):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we
have not had a Mad Royal episode in a little bit.
We have not, so we're kind of do It's kind
(00:23):
of a theme though. Yeah, we have a lot of
them and people love them, but we haven't done one
in a bit, so it seemed like time to circle
back on the mad Royals. This one, like all of
those stories, is really sad and that it features a
person who has never really properly treated for their illness,
although there was a lot of theorizing and attempts at
treating it. But it's also smack dab in the middle
(00:45):
of the Hundred Years War between England and France, which
ran from thirty seven to fourteen fifty three. You'll find
some accounts that want to shift those numbers a little bit,
but that's sort of the agreed upon general range, which yes,
is more than a hundred years. Uh. And we're talking
today about Charles the sixth of France and his reign
because of its position on the timeline of Europe had
(01:06):
ripple effects throughout the histories of both those countries, and uh,
this stuff is really convoluted. There is so much intrigue
and loyalty gaming and power grabbing, and to make matters worse,
there are a lot of repeating names. So hopefully I
have managed to pare it down in a way that
makes sense. But yeah, we're going to talk about Charles
(01:28):
the sixth of France, who was also known as the
Mad King. Yeah, if you looked at your at the
title of this and your podcast player and said, didn't
they do this when already uh I was Charles the ninth. Yeah,
a lot of Charles's obviously nine iyabokuda Charles. So this
(01:51):
particular Charles was born on December three, thirty eight in Paris.
His parents were King Charles five and John du Bourbon,
and he was only eleven. Charles became king. He was
crowned on October and initially it really seemed like Charles
was a golden child. He was very bright, he was charming,
(02:12):
he was handsome, and he was athletically skilled. So the
country and the court of France really believed that he
was going to grow into a fine king because he
was so young when he inherited the throne though his
uncle's surface his aids and advisors, and he's included the
Dukes of Burgundy, Bourbon and jow and Barry. They also
created an advisory council to guide the young Charles, called
(02:35):
the Council of twelve. Philip the Bold of Burgundy was
selected to lead this cabinet. This was not to be
confused with the King of France also called Philip the Bold,
and that was Philip the Third and he had reigned
from twelve seventy to twelve eighty five, so this is
roughly a century later. Yes, again, so many and they
(02:56):
were used not only names like Philip and Charles, but
nickname which makes it really confusing. But while France was
in effect being ruled by Charles's duke uncles, a number
of actions were taken that were not so much in
the interests of the people as they were to benefit
those royals. England and France, as we mentioned, were deep
into the Hundred Years War at this point, it had
(03:18):
been going on since thirty seven and it had really
been a very expensive effort for France. So the dukes
raised taxes, but a lot of what they were trying
to do was replace reallocated treasury funds that they had
actually spent to benefit themselves. So just two years after
Charles the sixth was named king, revolts started breaking out
(03:40):
throughout the country as France's people grew very frustrated with
things that were being done in the young king's name.
You know, one account I read suggested that all of
those dukes kind of each had their own agenda, and
so they were spending money, not as a unified force,
but they were each just going, well, I'm gonna take
some money to go do my thing over here. I'm
gonna take money to go do my thing over year,
and so they were really just part of the problem
(04:02):
was not only that they were benefiting themselves, but they
were doing their own projects and kind of funding them
willing really. In thirteen eighty five, at the age of seventeen,
Charles was married to Isabeau of Bavaria, and that was
a union which had been brokered by Philip the Bold.
This was a move that benefited Philip, who had inherited
the Countship of Flanders in thirteen eighty four, and at
(04:24):
the time England was exerting its power in Flanders, so
Philip arranged the marriage in part to ensure that he
had German support there. Even though it was arranged, this
marriage was definitely not something Charles had been forced into.
Despite the fact that he didn't speak German and Isabeau
didn't speak French, the young king was instantly smitten when
(04:44):
he saw his Bavarian princess, so much so that the
young man insisted that the wedding happened as quickly as possible.
Three days after they met, the young couple were already
husband and wife, and the marriage, initially in a way,
went well. Uh The young couple became known for their
entertaining They were both very attractive and charming, so even
(05:06):
if they had not been royalty in those first years,
at least, they probably would have been fourteenth century Europe's
version of an IT couple. In August eight, at Phillip's urging,
Charles back to Jean of Brabant in a disagreement with
Duke William of Gelderland. Jean of Brabant was related to
phill Up the Bowl by marriage. She was his wife's aunt,
(05:28):
so he was using his position and his influence over
the king to try to smooth things out for his family.
But once Charles arrived on the scene, what he actually
did was to make peace with Duke William and that
was the end of things. It was not the show
of force that Philip and John had been hoping for. Yeah,
I don't think they wanted negotiations at all. They wanted
(05:49):
somebody to come in, crack some skulls and show who
was who. And instead it was like, hey, we can
work this out, you guys. Uh. Just a few months
after this, Charles, who was twenty and at that point,
decided that he was ready to govern on his own, so,
with the help of Louis, the Duke of Orleon, who
was his brother, he made the move to dissolve the
Council of Twelve, and so his uncles were also removed
(06:11):
from their advisory positions. Charles's father, Charles the Fifth, had
had an advisory cabinet called the Marmosets, and when Charles
took over his reign, he reinstated the Marmosets, which included
non Aristocrats as his advisors. Charles sought reform once he
started ruling on his own with the Marmosets and placed
to advise, Charles began repairing the damage that his uncle's
(06:35):
had been doing slowly. The French economy improved and the
corruption of the royals and their government was reduced, and
this is when the nickname Charles the Beloved came to
be associated with the king. Yeah, initially it looked like
everything was going so great. Uh. In nine Charles made
a move that was intended to bring greater power to
(06:55):
France by placing an ally on the papal throne. And
this is one of those points in history where there
were several contenders for pope, and Charles aligned with Antipope
Clement the seventh. Charles knew that if he could convince
Clement the seventh that he should make a strong move
to take the role of pope, and if he assisted,
then France would have this really strong ally in Rome.
(07:18):
But not everyone wanted the same pope. King Richard the
second of England wished for Boniface the ninth to become
the pope win word of Charles's plans to installed Clement
the seventh. As pope reached England, it led to the
two monarchs and meeting to discuss this issue as well
as their country's ongoing antagonism, and Charles managed with Richard
(07:42):
the Second to come to a temporary peaceful agreement, and
that was the Truth of Lullingham, which put an end
to the second segment of fighting between the two countries
in the course of the Hundred Years War, and it
actually also led to the longest period of peace within
the Hundred Years War. The treaty also included an arrangement
made several years later for Richard the Second to marry
(08:02):
Charles and Isabella's daughter, Isabella. Isabella was six when the
treaty was signed, and that marriage did happen then. UM,
So we're going to do a really brief sidebar here
on gross child marriages. UM. Richard the Second and Isabella
were marrying before the girl's seventh birthday. Although according to
the custom of the time and canon law, marriage to
(08:23):
a child in such an instance was seen as political.
Such marriages were not consummated until the child involved was
a more appropriate age. Um. But in terms of what
that means for girls, that was commonly twelve years old,
which is still troubling but at that time was pretty standard.
But in Isabella's case, her husband, Richard the Second, died
(08:44):
when she was only ten, so the marriage was never consummated,
and most accounts suggest that he really did treat her kindly.
He wanted to protect her, and he felt like, that's fine,
we can make this political alliance and I will wait
to make her my wife in actuality. Um. But he
died before any of that came to fruition. So because
they had not consummated the marriage, she was not considered
(09:05):
a queen dowager, And initially it was a little bit
tricky to get her moved back to France. Uh. There
was a lot of political maneuvering going on in an
attempt to remarry her to the young Henry the fifth,
but she was eventually returned to her parents in France.
So we're about to get into the first time that
Charles exhibited some truly bizarre and upsetting behavior. But before
(09:29):
we do that, we'll get to a word from one
of our sponsors. The first instance of Charles having medical
issues which would be associated with his madness was in
thirteen nine, and he had in April of that year
been quite ill and had lost most of his hair
and his fingernails to that illness, which remains unidentified. While
(09:51):
he was recovering from that illness, Charles learned that one
of his friends had been the target of a failed
murder attempt, so in August, Charles began a jar need
to try to seek a vengeance on this attempted murderer,
who had fled to Brittany. While he was riding to
his destination, Charles developed a high fever and also out
of nowhere, stabbed four of his men with a sword.
(10:14):
He was overpowered and laid out on the ground and
he started having some kind of convulsions and then fell
into a coma like state. Yeah, he actually may have
stabbed more than that, but he definitely killed four of
his men. Um. There's also a weird little part of
that story where a stranger, a seemingly very distraught possibly
(10:36):
wild man runs up and and yells some things right
before this all happens. It's a very weird scene that happened,
and apparently like a lance was dropped and that may
have triggered it. We basically do not know why he
went on this bizarre killing spree. But after several days
of being unconscious, the young king awoke and he was
treated by a doctor, and he was completely heartbroken when
(10:59):
he learned that he had killed four members of his party.
He had also injured his brother Louis in the process,
and this was unfortunately the start of a cycle that
would play out over and over throughout the King's life,
where he would have these bouts of madness followed by
a period of apparent normalcy. About five months later, on January,
(11:20):
the king was in a serious accident at a masked
ball that was thrown by Queen Isebeu. He and several
other men had been dressed as so called wild men,
and their linen costumes caught fire when they came in
contact with a torch that was being carried by the
King's brother Louis, who got too close while trying to
(11:41):
identify who the masqueraders were. Thinking very quickly, the Duchess
of Berry used her skirts to smother the flames that
were engulfing the king, but four of his courtiers burned
to death in the incident. This incident came to be
known by the grizzly name bal Dessardaunt, or the Ball
of the Burning Men. I had thought about doing a
(12:02):
whole episode on this at some point, but like what
we just said, is most of the information about it.
It was a grizzly and horrifying spectacle. Yeah, there are
some pieces that have a hair more detail that as
part of their costumes that were linen, they had soaked
them in some sort of um formula that allowed them
(12:23):
to like stick hair to them so that they would
look more wild, and that that was super flammable. But
most of them really all kind of center around really
making it clear that this was not anything but an accident.
Louis really was just trying to figure out who these
people were. He was not trying to attack them with
this this torch. And at this point Charles was still
(12:45):
grappling with his guilt over the August incident in the forest,
and this accident only made him more deeply upset, and
several months later he experienced another attack that was very
similar to the first one, and this time a surgeon
intervened and trepan the King's skull to relieve pressure on
Charles's brain, and that procedure actually seemed, at least according
(13:06):
to record, to work for a while. He felt better
and he did not have another episode until But as
time progressed, this cycle between periods of lucidity and periods
of psychosis became shorter and shorter to the point that
he would experience about of madness, lasting anywhere from three
(13:27):
to nine months, followed by a lucid period that would
last three to five months. And there were many theories
as to what was going on with the king, and
one of them started circulating that he might be possessed
or cursed in some way. So church officials attempted exorcism
on several occasions, and during one such attempt, Charles called out,
(13:47):
begging that if someone present had been part of the curse,
that they should just let him die rather than let
him continue to suffer. These episodes began to manifest with
serious breaks from reality, and his delusions weren't really consistent
from one episode to another. He claimed at various points
that he was not the king, that he was being
chased through the palace, and that his wife and children
(14:10):
were not in fact his family. He attacked physicians and
servants and destroyed his apartment, and at one point he
also exhibited a version of the glass delusion that we
spoke about in our podcast episode covering Alexandra of Bavaria.
Unlike Alexandra, who thought she had swallowed a glass piano,
Charles believed that he was made of glass, and so
(14:31):
he demanded that iron rods and sometimes wooden planks be
placed in his clothing to protect him from shattering, and
he became really fearful of physical contact. Charles was horrified
when he would return to a state of relative lucidity
and discover what he had done in the previous episode,
and it particularly upset him on one occasion when he
(14:54):
realized his children had heard him ranting beginning as earliest tee.
So really, when this all really started to get serious,
Isabeau basically started acting as regent whenever Charles was in
one of his psychotic states and leading a regent's council.
And Isabelle really has been characterized in a number of
(15:14):
ways throughout the years, many of them not flattering. Uh.
She has been described as power hungry, as an adulteress,
as self indulgent, as a shallow woman who only wanted
to enjoy the luxuries of royal life. But she really
was in a unique position of power, and more modern historians,
as they've analyzed more of the actual documents of the
(15:34):
time and not just things that were written kind of
in the interim that maybe embellished the story, realized that
she was really quite adept at managing diplomacy in the
very stressful situation of having a husband who was not
only experiencing psychosis but was very dangerous as a consequence.
I do want to take a moment to just clarify
that the vast majority of people who have some kind
(15:56):
of mental illness are not dangerous. Correct. Yeah, we we
have a couple of stories about royalty who were both
mentally ill and dangerous, but like, those things don't live together,
and they're probably yeah, they're not necessarily hand in hand.
These manifested that way. Uh, probably due to a number
of factors. But yeah, that's never make that assumption. Yeah,
(16:19):
So Charles, the sixth rain stretched on and it became
more and more apparent that there was something really wrong.
Other members of the French court began to scheme about
how they could take advantage of this situation and seize
power for themselves. Even when the king seemed to be lucid,
he couldn't really think clearly, and he relied on advice
(16:40):
of those around him more and more, to the point
that he just started doing what other people told him
to do. This led to a series of events that
are just a complicated mess of drama right. So John
the Fearless, who had become the Duke of Burgundy after
Philip the Bold had died, had been at odds with
Louis Valois, the Duke of Orleans, who was of course
(17:01):
Charles the Sixes brother, and Louis was also rumored to
be having an affair with Queen Isabeau. So John the
Fearless felt that if he didn't do something about Louis,
who was close to both the king and Isabeau, that
he John would have virtually no power. The two dukes
were openly hostile to one another, and in what John
(17:22):
perceived as a power gap created by the King's instability,
he plotted to have Louis assassinated. In fourteen oh seven,
after a false note claiming that the King wanted to
see him was sent to Louis. A crowd of more
than a dozen attackers set upon the Duke of Orleans
as he went to answer the request, and he was
(17:42):
stabbed to death. But then, in a really surprising move, Isabeau,
who had been close with Louis, joined up with the
Burgundians Louise attackers, and she and John the Fearless actually
became close friends. In the meantime, Louise followers continued to
oppose the Burgundy power grab, and those uh those resistors
were led by Bernard the seventh, the Count of Armagnac.
(18:05):
Over the next several years, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs
remained at odds, and the Armagnacs gradually pushed their rivals
out of Paris and what's fittingly called the Armagnac Burgundian
Civil War. But in fourteen fifteen, a new development, which
was the invasion of France by Henry the Fifth, added
yet another layer of stress and intrigue to the whole situation.
(18:29):
Henry and his army of eleven thousand men had arrived
in France in late summer fourteen fifteen. After a five
week siege at our Fleur. Henry was victorious, but it
was a costly win. They really did not expect Our
Fleur to be able to resist that long, and so
his army was depleted by half. He had at that
point intended to move north to Calais and then head
(18:52):
back to England from there, but he was confronted at
Agincourt by the French army, which was twenty thousand men strong,
and in one of history's most famous upsets. Henry's more
agile troops were able to defeat the armor encumbered French
forces despite that massive deficit in head count. Coming up,
we will talk about how John the Fearless had been
(19:12):
hoping to manipulate the situation to his advantage. But before
we do, we'll have one more quick sponsor break. So
when we left off, we had been talking about how
Henry the Fifth had entered France, and initially John the
Fearless had hoped to curry favor with Henry the Fifth
by backing him, at least in a sneaky way. But
(19:33):
his efforts fell apart and the alliance that he hoped
for never materialized, and after that he turned to his enemies,
the Armagnacs for help. He wanted the Armagnacs and Burgundians
to forge a truce and joined forces to fight England.
He hoped in this move to also get in the
good graces of Charles the Sixes air that was the
Dauphin Charles the seventh. But during the discussions, which took
(19:56):
place on the Montereu Bridge, John the Fearless was killed
in what was likely a planned attack, although at the
time it was carefully staged to look like a spontaneous
disagreement that escalated and got out of hand. As a
quick aside, Charles the Seventh was something of an unlikely dauphin.
Charles the sixth and Isabeau had a lot of kids.
(20:16):
From six to fourteen oh seven, there had been twelve children,
and four of them were boys. Their first child and
first son, also named Charles, died at just three days old.
Their second son, another Charles, died when he was nine.
The two other sons, Louis and John, each died when
they were eighteen, so Charles the seventh didn't become next
(20:38):
in line to the throne until he was fourteen, when
John died, and the death of Burgundy in a meeting
with Charles the seventh soured Isabel's relationship with the crown prince.
Up to that point, she had really favored the young
man over her other children, and there were a lot
of suspicions and rumors going around that Charles the Seventh
(20:59):
was actually the child eild of her deceased close friend Louis,
the Duke of Orleon. But after John the Fearless was killed,
Isabeau disowned Charles the seventh and forged ahead with her
own plan to make peace with England. In May of
fourteen twenty, the Treaty of Tis was signed, and it
was really Isabeau and the Duke of Burgundy who was
fill up the third and fill up the good at
(21:20):
that point, who orchestrated the terms of this deal. In it,
Charles and Isabel's youngest daughter, Catherine of Valwas was promised
as wife to Henry the Fifth of England. As part
of the agreement, Henry the five would become king of
France as well as England when Charles the sixth that died.
This meant that Charles the seventh would be completely bypassed
(21:42):
as the monarch and his sister Catherine would instead be queen.
The treaty further provided that the descendants of Henry, King
of England should rule France going forward. Yeah, this was
sort of a weird thing where it's like, well, we're
never going to win against them, but maybe we can
work some thing out. And Charles the seventh really stinks,
(22:02):
so let's do whatever we can to make this rough
for him. Um, And that way, in making Catherine Henry
the fifth wife, they were at least ensuring that their
bloodline was still part of the ruling um effort in
France and beyond being bypassed, all parties involved in this
treaty denounced Charles the seventh and agreed that he and
(22:23):
his followers should not be bargained with in any way,
and that opposition to the terms of the treaty, which
would undoubtedly come from Charles the Seventh, should be eliminated.
But Henry the Fifth, who had been working his way
through France claiming territory, continued to do just that. After
the treaty was signed, and throughout all this Charles the
sixth was basically out of the game. The people of
(22:45):
France were not pleased, and the Treaty of Tis really
set off a couple of decades worth of unrest. Yeah,
they weren't really thrilled with this whole Oh we're giving
the country's rule away to England. Uh. They didn't care
that it was a French a French wife that was
involved in that. They just felt like they have been
completely betrayed. And on October one, just shy of the
(23:09):
forty two anniversary of his crowning is King of France,
Charles the six died Henry the fifth of England had
actually already died just two months prior, so that meant
that Henry the fifth could not reign, but Henry's infant
son that he had had with Catherine was proclaimed king
of England and France. Charles the sixth son Charles the seventh,
(23:30):
was declared King of France by his supporters, though, and
for a time everything north of the Loire was under
English rule, while the portions of France south of there
were back in Charles the seventh as their king. It's
a little more complex than that, but that becomes a
whole podcast episode in and of itself. Um. But I
(23:51):
want to talk a little bit because, particularly in those
later years, Charles the six is madness doesn't get talked
about a lot um because the kind of just started
to ignore him in some ways. In total, Charles the
sixth had forty four documented episodes of madness through his life.
So those those instances where he had a psychotic break
(24:12):
of some sort. Uh. Initially, they were really well documented
when this happened, but as his episodes of psychosis became
more frequent and longer, there were fewer and fewer records
kept about them. As is so often the case. There's
a lot of modern speculation about his diagnosis, and that
speculation has included porphyria and in sephalitis as well as schizophrenia.
(24:36):
Charles the sixth was certainly not the first in his
family to exhibit some kind of mental illness. His mother,
John of Bourbon, had also exhibited some instability, as had
her brother and father. It's also possible that porphyria from
Charles the sixth is French bloodline was introduced into the
English royal lineage with his daughter Catherine. That's one of
(25:00):
the theorized diagnoses attributed to King George the Third's madness. Yeah,
which we uh, some listeners may know about if they
ever saw the film In the Madness of King George,
which was again an episodic instance where he had this
psychotic break and some really weird things were going on
in him and then he recovered and was fine again. Uh.
(25:23):
Which it's uh that that brings up some interesting stuff
that goes on later with Victoria and Albert's bloodline, but
we won't get into that now. Yeah, it gets so
convoluted and it's one of those things working on this
It's like tricky where you're like, I don't how far
do we go in on either end of this of
Charles the sixth reign, because it all affects. It's all
(25:46):
like this big moving morass, and every gear that turns
affects things down the road and is related to things
that happened way before, and it's tricky. The Hundred Years
War is a very complicated thing because there were so
many schemes playing out by so many different people that
intersected in interesting ways. But it's not always easy to
tease them apart because there was also a lot of
(26:08):
fakery going on of like, oh, that's an assassination, but
really we made it look like we just had a
disagreement that went bad. Things like that were happening all
the time, and a lot of the history that was written,
for example, in like the eighteen hundreds about all of
this when it was had a surge in popularity is
(26:29):
really embellished. And it's one of those things we've seen
happen many, many times where someone will say something like,
you know, that's where sort of Isabea's um characterization as
being this you know, licentious woman who took a lot
of lovers, which she allegedly did, but we have no
real evidence. Um. But that's really where that sort of
(26:49):
story picks up steam and gets repeated over and over
and if you look back at the actual records of
the time, there isn't really much. There are hints that
she may have had paramours outside of her marriage, but
we don't. There's no no solid evidence when we or
the other, so it's tricky. I have completely uh non
(27:12):
drama listener mail. It's about space. Uh. It is from
our listener Roger, and he writes, Dear Tracy and Holly,
thank you for your recent podcast. I'm Dr Hugh Dryden.
I have worked for the past twenty five years at
n I s T. That's the National Institute of Standards
in Technology uh AS. NBS, which was the National Bureau
(27:33):
of Standards where Hugh Dryden worked, was renamed in the
mid nineteen eighties. This institution has over a century of
scientific and engineering excellence which is widely celebrated here. So
I was surprised not to have heard of Dryden, though
I knew of the NBS wind tunnels, the Bat Project,
and other achievements related to aeronautics. There is an encyclopedics
three volume History of NBS N I S T. Covering
(27:55):
the first one hundred years of its existence. But even
this exhaustive reference contain it's only a few incidental references
to this extraordinary man. I cannot offer an explanation for
this oversight, the reading between the lines. One might conjecture
as to the reasons, But no matter the cause, I
hope we might celebrate Dr Dryden's accomplishments more fully. I
have nominated Dr bill Berry, who was our guest on
the show where we talked about him, as a speaker
(28:18):
for the and I S T. Colloquium series, which is
so cool. I love that idea, and Um Bill Berry
is such a fond of knowledge. Even as much as
we talked on the show, he has so much more
knowledge in his head and passion for the subject that
he would be a phenomenal speaker. And also, Roger enclosed
(28:38):
an assortment of postcards and pictures and pages from an
account of early NBS history for our amusement, which is lovely.
It's such a cool packet. Uh. It came in a
very official looking envelope and I felt very fancy. Uh,
but it's really really great pictures about this pictures and
and documents about this early stage of of an a
(28:59):
branch of the United States government that maybe isn't always
lauded in no wise it should be in terms of
what it helped us achieve scientifically. So thank you, thank you,
thank you, Roger. That was super fantastic to open this morning.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast. At how stuff works dot com,
you can find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History. That means on Twitter and Instagram
(29:22):
and Pinterest and Tumbler and Facebook everywhere there we are
missed in History. We also have a website, which is
Missed in History dot com, which covers all of the
episodes of the show ever in archive form, and for
any of the episodes that Tracy and I have worked
on together, there are show notes. Prior to a couple
of months ago, those were their own separate pages for
each episode, and now they're integrated, so all of the
(29:44):
sources are right there with the podcast itself. If you
would like to visit our parents site, that is how
stuff Works dot com. You can type in almost anything
you're curious about in the search bar. You will come
up with a plethora of content and information to explore
and learn from, so please come and visit us at
mist in history dot com and how stuff works dot com.
(30:08):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com. M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.