Sidequests is a podcast about the history you didn’t know you needed... and sometimes, the history that explains the week you just had.

We go down a rabbit hole. Sometimes it’s obscure. Sometimes it’s weird. Sometimes it’s both, and somewhere in the middle of it you realize the fourteenth century is suddenly more relevant than it has any right to be.

In 1309, the entire papal court packed up and moved to France. Not because the pope wanted to. Not exactly. It’s a story about a king who wasn’t afraid of excommunication, a conclave that lasted eleven months, a wall that collapsed at the worst possible moment, and a mystic from Siena who eventually got tired of writing polite letters.

The Avignon Papacy lasted sixty-seven years, produced seven popes, all French, and ended with a schism that cracked open questions the Church wouldn’t fully answer for another century. You may have seen a reference to it floating around in the news last week.

Coming this Friday: The first episode of Sidequests: Titanic — a ten-part extended series on the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the age of technological optimism it brought crashing down with it.

Free subscribers get the first episode in full. Paid subscribers get the complete 60-minute experience, with deeper dives into the people, the engineering, and the decisions that made April 14, 1912 inevitable long before the iceberg showed up.

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