Napoleon had used Italy's disunity to his advantage, allowing him to control most of Italy, either directly or indirectly, for a comparatively small cost in men and resources. However, Napoleon was about to double down on his rise to power, and he'd need to tighten his grip on Italy to help finance his bet. In 1806, Napoleon told a Prussian minister "Italy is my mistress whose favors I want no one to share."

By 1810 the map of Italy will be greatly simplified, and Italy will be divided into three pieces, all under Napoleon’s control. First we'll Napoleon replace the Italian Republic, in the northeast of Italy, with the Kingdom of Italy, making himself its new king. Then he'll dissolve the Papal states, which, with the rest of northwest of Italy, will be annexed to France. Finally, he'll put first his brother and then his brother-in-law on the throne of the nominally independent Kingdom of Naples. Download Episode 12

Hello everyone, it’s Benjamin here with two special announcements. First, for two months I’ve been working with other history podcasters to create a new series called the History Podcasters Collage. The idea is to give you, the listener, a quick and fun sampling of a range of different podcasters as they each give you their take on a certain topic. Each podcaster is kept to a 9 minute maximum, to keep the episode moving along. 

The first topic is “Unsung Heroes”, and we’ve managed to assemble an all-star cast of podcasters, which we’ve split into two episodes. The first is ready for download now, and the second should be up any day now. Just search for History Podcasters on iTunes, or go to historypodcasters.com. I’m hosting this series, and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, and I encourage you to give it a try.

Second, I was recently interviewed by Roifield Brown, who you may know from his excellent and unique podcast How Jamaica Conuqered the World. What you may not know is that he does a second podcast, called Audio Lounge, where he interviews musicians, storytellers, and other podcasters. This particular interview is about how Adam and I go about researching and writing this podcast, so if you’re curious about how we put these together, head on over and give it a listen. You can find it in Episode 5 of the podcast Audio Lounge, which you can find on the iTunes store or on their website, audiolounge.co.uk. 

It’s 1799, and Italy is fractured, politically, socially, and economically. This isn’t new - it’s been fractured for over a thousand years at this point. This made it easy for Napoleon to invade in the first place, and now he is going to exploit this to keep Italy under his thumb. In this episode we’re going to see how Napoleon manages to juggle the various forces in Italy - he needs to keep things united enough to be stable, but fractured enough to be pliable. Download Episode 11