 Real socialism has never been tried, you say. You weak and pathetic creature, cowering away behind word games and suckling at the capitalist teet with an unquenching thirst for Marvel movies, and yet all the while with crocodile tears streaming down your face, I don't have to lower myself to such a lowly existence. Real anarcho-capitalism has been tried, and it was awesome. Even when anarchist socialist polities have been attempted, such as the Paris Commune, the War Catalonia and the hilariously closed borders, Seattle Autonomous Zone from 2020, they were all born out of violence, died in violence, and during their times were all godless places of disease, disorder and despotism. Not to the case for the glorious 400-year-long stateless capitalist Italian polity known as the Republic of Cospire. Hundreds of years before Parisian socialists led their two-month occupation of decadence and destruction on a slither of their city, the Republic of Cospire was peacefully established as the result of administrative oversight. For much of the medieval age, the Catholic Church owned and governed parts of Italy which had been donated to it by kingly states over the years which were known as the Papal States, and the Church would buy and sell these pieces of land as their treasury acquired. During the 17th Ecumenical Council, Pope Eugene IV was providing some territory in the province of Perugia to the Medici-led Republic of Florence. As this was the collateral on a loan the Pope had taken out from the Medici but could not pay, and due to a misunderstanding between the two parties, a small piece of land between a river and a stream was not technically officially included in the transaction. The families who lived in the small hamlet located within this land with its population of around 300 wasted no time at all in declaring themselves independent and giving themselves a dope coat of arms, reading perpetual and firm liberty and a fittingly anarchist flag. Just over 40 years later this territory's independence was officially recognized by both Florence and the Papal States as it was simply not worth trying to invade it or ratify the treaty. As this was the good old days when treaties were those long ass pieces of paper that took ages to write with a quill, not like now when you can just redo it on Microsoft Word exactly like how I'm doing this video, you just can't have fun things anymore. And so the Stateless Republic of Cospia was born and would live happily ever after or at least for 386 years. And to put that into perspective, the United States of America is only 246 years old and already falling apart and going out with a whimper rather than a bang. And you might be wondering if this place was called the Republic of Cospia, how could it be anarchist? America is a republic, France is a republic, even Rome was a republic for most of its growth and none of them can be called anarchist at all. While that is because the word republic finds its etymological root in the Latin phrase res publica, which literally translates to public affair, but has generally been used to describe any sort of nation without a monarch. The ancient Romans used it in this specific manner as they looked back in hatred at their time of being ruled by kings and took pride in being a kingless republic. So much so that Roman emperors never called themselves emperor, they used the term princeps, meaning first citizen. And this is how the term republic is now generally used. So given that an anarchist nation certainly does not have a monarch, Cospia was indeed a republic. And it's also key to remember here that nation does not mean an area denominated by a government either, a nation is an organised group of people united under a shared identity through location, language and culture. So given that I've only scratched the surface of Cospia's history, we can already see something extremely important. The Republic of Florence, led by the Medici, those most grotesque examples of unending capitalist greed and conquest which steamrolls all their opponents in pursuit of profit above people, did not deem it worthy to take any action whatsoever against the cost by easy. And they were far from a destitute people living in mud huts as I'll show when I document their economy. They were a close knit and organically arisen covenant community situated on the border of a republic which is often used as the caricature of early capitalist greed and they were completely left alone. For the longest time when I've been continuously asked won't Ancap communities be invaded by states, I've told people to read the short book Chaos Theory by Bob Murphy to understand how markets can provide defensive services. But now I can just say the Republic of Cospia lasted nearly 400 years and refused to elaborate. You should still read Chaos Theory though. The Republic's end sadly came in the mid 19th century as nationalism changed in the wake of Napoleon's aggressive conquest of central Europe when nationalism came to be a movement obsessed with consolidating and ruling land based on language, caring little for the many cultures within and a new fictional Italian nationalism was fabricated to break up and rebuild the peninsula into a new and all encompassing state with a made up unified identity. At this time even the Papal states were trying to retain their power and offered in quotes compensation to the cost by easy to relinquish their independence to them. A fruitless attempt to retain power as the Papal states themselves would be dissolved into a unified Italy less than 50 years afterward and relegated to just the Vatican city. Cospia was sadly an early casualty of this new ideology of industrialized nationalism which took over all of Europe and showed that the so called imperialist tendencies of capitalism were no threat to covenant communities at all but that the panic induced by the growth of statist ideology will crush no enemy too small that men of money would simply leave in peace. But let's go back to the good times and see what put both the an and cap in cospias deserved and cap title. Cospia was anarchist by virtue of there simply being no government or any organization through coercive means and without any army or police force no monopoly on violence. Almost everything was left up to market decision but matters of organization were decided by the heads of the resident families who met in the local church with disassociation and exile being the means of retaliation against those who defied the decisions of these property owners whose decisions were few and light and an exiled person had unrestricted choice on where to go among any of the other republics in the Italian peninsula. Love it or leave it. There was potentially an unverified and disputed fee for membership into the council but it hasn't been proven to have existed and would not have constituted a tax as it would have been completely voluntary. There was indeed no sort of tax or economic regulation whatsoever in Cospia and this brought it peace and prosperity. Never the theoretical chaos and poverty we hear would come from our ideals spouted from terminally online political pundits with a cartoonish view of history and trade. With the discovery of tobacco in the new world around this time the Catholic Church and by extension the people of Italy were very wary of it as its recreational use exploded in popularity to the point where the pope threatened to excommunicate any tobacco smokers and in turn the republics of Italy banned its growth and use. But Cospia did what we love to see and undermined this completely by taking no such stance and took the opportunity to grab a monopoly that was left wide open by the restrictive policies of surrounding states giving it huge demand due to small supply. From 1574 to the early 8th century they were the tobacco capital of Italy but as the surrounding states expanded both in their territories and their taxes Cospia had doubled to still a small population of 600 but was now being used as a sovereign warehouse of sorts for traders to store and ship out their goods to and from central Italy and beyond without any taxes or other red tape obstacles. This was of course branded as smuggling by the states who were losing revenue from the theft of customs taxes who then sought to smear Cospia as a lawless den of smugglers technically true but there was nothing wrong with that at all. They still had no need for a police force or jails of any kind and operated entirely as a militia hamlet which chose their associations by their moral standing and trustworthiness of their clients. We have no records of any sort which indicates that Cospia was a violent place at all. It always remained a close knit village of families living together in community centred around a church and the inscription above the doorway of that church said all that needed to be said. Perpetua ed firma liberitas Yes I am currently learning Latin, how could you tell? That's probably shit but never mind. So what lessons can Cospia's long peaceful and prosperous time in the sun give us? For me it is the emergence that is of most interest because it shouldn't be surprising to a good thinker that it lasted so long and was so secure. Libertarians both current and former are ripping themselves apart trying to figure out a strategy that can actually get us to the place we want to go. A place of perpetual and firm liberty. Do we back the side of the establishment that is more aligned to us than the other side as the post-libertarians do? Do we try to overthrow the establishment at their own game by holding steadfast to proselytising principle as the LP Mises Corkers do? Or do we try to organise locally to secede from the establishment entirely like the New Hampshire Free State Project Rise? While I have always been most partial to the FSP approach, I don't think it can be denied that Cospia's example greatly edifies their efforts. We hear from the first category mentioned of post-libertarians that New Hampshire is a useless place to focus any efforts and would just be railroaded by the surrounding state. The classic yet well-answered retort which in all honesty they should know better than to seriously hold. But I did highlight something crucial when talking about the Republic's downfall, that post-enlightenment status nationalism became the status quo for Europe and has been the status quo for North America for exactly the same amount of time. This is the ideology which snuffed the halcyon light of Cospia and it has not gone anywhere, but I'm not convinced it will stay forever. The global liberal status quo is in the greatest danger of collapse that it's ever been in and when a status quo falls from grace it does not do so slowly, it wobbles and lists showing the first cracks in the foundation until all of a sudden it crashes down in one swift collapse, only surprising those that didn't realise the first signs. If or when this happens, how do we recover with the kind of society that we want? The answer is to have the foundations for that society already there waiting to be built on. So if by a twist of fate a small portion of New Hampshire got the opportunity to become independent just like Cospia did purely by chance, it would fare so much better off at recreating the greatness of Cospia than most of Texas, probably all of Florida and with practically no hope for anywhere else in the US, let alone the world. The people make the place and thanks to the Free State Project's work over decades, New Hampshire has a mass of people with good ideals that yes probably need cleaning around the edges and more of a consideration of morality than just politics, but no people are perfect and none are better situated in perhaps the world to reignite the fire that Cospia once held. What could have been called nationalism in the 15th century is not what nationalism can be called now, an ideology focused on the power of the state rather than the actual features of a nation. The era of tiny kingdoms, principalities and republics dotted all over Europe can these days be called localism. And as the 400 year long track record shows us, this is a fantastically well proven method of creating a moral, western, stateless and free market covenant community that can exist freely and securely for much longer than the countries which head our current global hegemony have lasted before becoming rotten to the core and dying from the inside out. And while I said before that I'd only scratched the surface of Cospia's history, I still haven't dented it. Getting quite specific details of this tiny, decentralised nation, especially economic data is sadly practically impossible, but we do know that Cospia grew at at least the same rate of all the other republics in Italy at the time. But I'll leave my three primary sources in the description and do encourage all of you to do further reading beyond those so you can fall in love with this bygone republic and hopefully create enough interest that its flag starts getting mass reproduced with the cuts in it and everything, much better than having one of the fucking Soviet Union. Take it easy.