Machiavelli wrote that anyone who sets out to deceive will always find someone willing to be deceived. Read it again and it is not contempt for the victim. It is a statement about supply and demand.Four stories in which somebody was comprehensively fooled — and in which, if you examine the documents afterwards, it is remarkably hard to find the lie.A slave rowing a true report across the water to an enemy who acted on it exactly as he was meant to. A charter that reordered Europe for seven hundred years, undone by a man who noticed the wrong vocabulary. A telegram that lost a handful of words on its way to the printers. A dead man with a fiancée who never existed and an overdraft that did.A forgery can be exposed. A lie can be contradicted. A carefully chosen truth has no weak point to attack.An episode of Risto's History Rhymes.#Deception #Propaganda #HistoryPodcast

Written laws, a Scythian once told Solon, are like spiderwebs. They hold the small and the weak. The powerful tear straight through.Four stories about what people do when the law is too slow, too expensive, too distant — or when it simply refuses.A city that could exile a man without accusing him of anything. A village that owned no law books and enforced its rules with cooking pots. A country that priced divorce out of reach, and got a rope in the marketplace instead. And a plain outside Valencia where eight farmers still settle the water every Thursday at noon, and write nothing down.Four courts that were not courts.An episode of Risto's History Rhymes.#Justice #Custom #HistoryPodcast

There is an old saying, often attributed to Talleyrand: treason is a matter of dates. The traitor of one year is the founder of the next.Four stories across twenty-five centuries. An Athenian general who served three enemies in a single lifetime. A holy crusade that ended by sacking the city it was meant to save. A diplomatic revolution that traded partners across Europe in a single winter, negotiated between an empress and a king's mistress. And an empire in the East that broke its most solemn promise on the last day of a war.None of them, at the time, were called treason. All of them, later, were.An episode of Risto's History Rhymes.#Alliances #Diplomacy #HistoryPodcast

Every civilisation that invented competition gave it a purpose larger than victory. A ritual. A war. A prayer. A judgment.Four stories from four continents. A rubber ball in a Yucatán stone court where somebody died at the end of the game — we do not know who. Two men in a Japanese ring, throwing salt for a harvest they no longer remember. An English peasant with a longbow, on a Sunday afternoon, being trained to kill a Frenchman he will never meet. A young man on a rock in the Pacific, waiting for a bird to lay an egg, so that his chief can become sacred for a year.Each one looks like a sport. None of them is what you think.An episode of Risto's History Rhymes.#Sport #Ritual #HistoryPodcast

We don't get fooled because the lie is good. We get fooled because the truth is worse.Four stories of people who wanted to believe — and paid for it. A Greek traitor whose name became the modern Greek word for "nightmare." A queen mother who thought she had beaten Richelieu. A cardinal in love who signed for a necklace he never saw. A British prime minister who came home from Munich waving a piece of paper.Four centuries, one mechanism: a lie that flatters lasts longer than the truth that corrects it.

An episode of Risto's History Rhymes.

#HistoryPodcast #WhoIsTheFool #History

Scotland, June 1879. Queen Victoria crosses the newly opened Tay Bridge — two miles of iron, the longest bridge in the world. Six days later, she knights its designer. Six months after that, the bridge collapses in a storm and takes fifty-nine people with it.A bonus story not in the episode.🎧 Full episode: Look What I Built — four other feats of engineering that turned against their builders.

#TayBridge #HistoryPodcast #HistoryShort

Switzerland, 1941. A Swiss engineer comes back from an Alpine walk with his Irish Pointer. Both of them are covered in burrs. Instead of brushing them off, he puts one under a microscope. Ten years later, he has reinvented the fastener.A bonus story not in the episode.🎧 Full episode: The Better Mistake — four other people who set out for one thing and found something else entirely.

Algiers, 1577. A thirty-year-old Spaniard is enslaved in the bagnios. Five years, four failed escapes, one act of brotherly sacrifice. He will spend the rest of his life writing about it. His name was Miguel de Cervantes.

🎧 Full episode: What Confinement Made

A short bonus story related to the episode 2 "When the Cage Feels Like Home". In 1974, when Patty Hearst walked into a San Francisco branch of the Hibernia Bank with a carbine in her hands, she was robbing the family business of one of her closest childhood friends.

Il y a des choses pour lesquelles les hommes ont tué, à travers l'histoire, que nous trouvons aujourd'hui difficiles à défendre. La mauvaise famille. Le mauvais rang. La mauvaise couleur de peau.

Dans Les amours interdites, Risto suit quatre couples, à travers neuf siècles, qui ont refusé.

Un philosophe français atrocement mutilé pour avoir épousé son élève. Une concubine chinoise étranglée d'un cordon de soie parce que la propre armée de son empereur l'avait exigée. Une noble galicienne assassinée par le roi qui était son beau-père. Et un couple américain arrêté à deux heures du matin, cinq semaines après leur mariage, pour le crime d'être mariés l'un à l'autre.

Chacun a payé, de façon différente. Ils l'ont fait quand même.

Version française de l'épisode anglais In the Name of Loving.