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What do pocket watches, Korean prisoners, and samurai armor have in common? All of them help explain the close relationship between Portuguese merchants and Japanese warlords in the late 1500s. In this episode of Gladio Free Europe, we see how Portuguese Catholics entered the inner circles of Japan's most powerful men before a sudden change of heart turned this glamorous foreign religion into an underground cult.

This episode focuses on the ways different feudal daimyo responded to the sudden arrival of Christianity. A few noblemen converted outright. Some welcomed the missionaries just to get access to their foreign guns. One very important warlord distrusted the Jesuits, would set Japan on a course to ultimately eradicate Christianity in the islands.

While accounts of early East-West contact typically focus on European merchants and missionaries visiting Asia, this period saw people and goods and ideas move in both directions. We'll We go over the career of early Japanese Christians in Europe, such as a mysterious figure named Bernardo as well as an official diplomatic mission sent by three Christian warlords to the Papal States. And we can't forget the famous African samurai Yasuke, who arrived with the Jesuits only to become a close ally of the great unifier Oda Nobunaga. He and another Catholic would be a witness to Nobunaga's shocking betrayal, which would ultimately spell the doom of the Japanese Catholics.

Stay tuned for our upcoming final episode of this series, chronicling the long period of Christian persecutions that ended with a brutal last stand in the city of Shimabara.

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In 1549, a Portuguese priest and a Japanese pirate disembarked on the port of Kagoshima with one purpose: to bring Christianity to the islands of Japan. They would be remarkably successful. Within 50 years, hundreds of thousands of Japanese people had been baptized, from lowly fishermen and merchants to powerful noblemen at the center of the shogun's circle. Yet after 100 years, almost all trace of this foreign religion had vanished.

This episode is this first of a series covering the history of Christianity in Japan, which is going to explore how this faith, once praised by no less than the great warlord Oda Nobunaga, came to be persecuted with a fervor rivaling the Spanish Inquisition being carried thousands of miles away in Europe. Liam and Russian Sam explore how the 16th century brought political and religious upheavals to both Japan and Europe. In the east, this came in the form of the Warring States Period, or Sengoku Jidai, when samurai, shoguns, and Buddhist warrior-monks fought for control of Japan. In the west, the Protestant Reformation split Europe apart and led to the formation of the Jesuits, a well-connected order of priests commanded to spread the power of the Catholic Church by any means necessary.

What caused the civil war that tore Japan into pieces? Why were many Japanese people so accepting of a foreign religion? And where do the pirates come in? All this and more in this week's episode of Gladio Free Europe.

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England has a new king, and the realm has come down with a terrible case of coronation fever. You may have seen the ridiculous merchandise, the extravagant robes, or the swords and other odd utensils used in the ceremony, but you asking yourself — what does this all mean?

Well, Liam and Russian Sam sat through the coronation of Charles III so you don't have to. This week's episode of Gladio Free Europe is a run-down of the various aspects of this solemn ritual, which as it turns out is much less ancient than you might expect. Listen to find out what Penny Mordaunt's Sword of Mercy has to do with the Halo games, why Charles chose to be crowned in his mother's clothes, and how a rickety graffiti-covered chair became Britain's most sacred throne. We end the episode with a brief history of the Stone of Scone, sometimes known as the Stone of Destiny. Stolen from Scotland in the 13th century by Edward I, this rock seemed doomed to remain in England forever before a plucky group of young Scottish patriots busted it out of Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1950.

Apologies for the audio trouble on this one. We can only assume this is our punishment for besmirching the divine right of kings.

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After a couple weeks of adventuring across Japan and the Caucasus, the hosts of Gladio Free Europe are back in the States. Liam shares his experiences seeing the traces of the violent Sengoku period all across Japan's main island Honshu, and explains how this trip finally brought him to his "white guy into Buddhism" phase. Thousands of miles away, Russian Sam visited the ancient nations of Armenia and Georgia and got a front-seat view of how influences from east and west continue to vie over these countries today.

We'll be back very soon with full episodes on the history of Japan, Armenia, and Georgia, beginning this month we dive into the chaotic finale of Japan's Warring States Period, when a period of intense international ambition gave way to the famous centuries of isolation.

In 2011, the US National Archives released 12,000 pages of documents relating to the activities of the Public Health Service in 1940s Guatemala. This report conclusively proved that a team of doctors led by John Charles Cutler, previously involved in the notorious Tuskegee Experiment, knowingly infected patients in Guatemala with syphilis and other venereal diseases.

Our friend Krebbs joins Russian Sam for a discussion about this deeply shocking episode in the history of US-Latin American relations. Under the pretext of a program to study prophylactic methods for STDs, thousands of Guatemalans were infected without their consent. The victims included some of the vulnerable members of Guatemalan society, including psychiatric patients, prisoners, prostitutes, and orphans. The methods by which these patients were infected exhibited a sadism that rivals the medical atrocities of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

The US formally apologized for these horrific crimes in the Obama administration, but the grievances of the victims remain without redress. Join us as we explore the history of syphilis treatment and other brutally unethical medical experiments to understand why this official apology remains unsatisfying. As we explore how white supremacy and imperial violence underscore human medical experimentation, we have to ask if this atrocity in Guatemala was really about preventing disease at all.

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This week, we talk about centaurs, demons, and self-filling pots of food. That's right, we're talking about saints and their hagiographies! This unusual genre stands at the crossroads between the Late Antique and Medieval worlds, and despite their often strange contents, they have a lot to tell us about the world in which they were written. Finally, we look at a firmly modern saint, a martyr who perished in the 1940s, and consider the ways in which the passage of time has likely sanitized many of the saints, many of whom were probably far from saintly by contemporary standards.

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With Argentina, 1985 having been in the running for Best Foreign Language Film, we are joined by our good friend Kevin as we delve into the history of the Argentinian Junta and its genocidal campaign of disappearances, extrajudicial murder, torture, and the kidnapping of children. The latter crime is the subject of The Official Story, another Argentinian movie which actually was made in 1985 and approaches the crimes of the period from a more personal angle.

Using these two films as a jumping off point, we tell the harrowing story of this dictatorship and the long struggle to bring the participants to justice. Who were the junteros and how did they seize power? What was the P2 connection? How were they ousted and why was the legal battle against them such an uphill battle? Finally, what do these movies get right (and wrong) about the events depicted, and what do they have to say about the state of Argentinian society at the times of their making? All this and more on this episode of Gladio Free Europe.

Gladio Free Europe received a frosty transmission this week from the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Writer, prophet, and friend of the pod Jon called in to talk about life in Alaska. We run through the past 300 years of the 49th state, beginning with initial bloody encounters between indigenous Yupik and Inuit peoples and the Russian Empire and the ensuing colonial contest with Britain, the United States, and even Spain. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly what makes Alaska so different from the Lower 48, the reason American merchants were so set on acquiring the territory, and why famous sled-dog Balto is a damned fraud.

Check out Jon's Substack

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More and more people are talking about bog bodies! Due to great feedback on our most recent episode we're following up our bog talk with an overview of recent developments in wetland archaeology and an overview of some of the most interesting bog sites in Europe. We dive into our favorite finds that we didn't have time to cover in our last episode, like the morbid battlefield of Alken Enge and the beautiful bog dog of Saxony. We expand our scope to bog bodies outside the Iron Age, exploring corpses deposited in bogs from 9,000 BC up to a late medieval murder mystery. Linked below is the new meta-analysis of hundreds of bog remains we draw from in this episode.

Tune into Gladio Free Europe this week for one more dip into the murky mire.

Bogs, bones and bodies: the deposition of human remains in northern European mires (9000 BC–AD 1900)

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We get knee-deep in the peat this week to examine the bog body phenomenon. Due to their unusually anaerobic nature, bogs across the world have a remarkable ability to preserve any animal matter that falls into them. The cold and wet climate of Northern Europe has proven especially fruitful for the preservation of human corpses, many of which date back to the iron age and beyond. Generations of scholars have been enchanted by these enigmatic and unnerving corpses, whose flesh and faces are so well-preserved that they look like they could have died next week. Moreover, individual bog burials like the Egtved Girl and the Tollund Man offer unparalleled insights into the lives and typically violent deaths of individual people from the deep past. 

The existence of these bodies gives a voice to a people who could not read or write, and whose culture is only known from potsherds and petroglyphs and the occasional footnote of a Roman text. At the same time, any true understanding of their lives will always remain beyond our grasp. On this episode of Gladio Free Europe, we show this paradox has tantalized artists, archaeologists, and propagandists for hundreds of years. Join us to see what happens when the dead live again.