The Great Game : Part II, Europe's Revenge

I'd like to point out that Spain has 6 serfdom, while Norway has 2.

I admit this is a little at odds with the kind of society I'm creating, but I excuse it by saying that the DP sliders only apply to Ynglings. Who cares how free or unfree a stril is?

Endre Fodstad said:

I really don't think that's how it works. With serfdom 2, you're probably looking a bit like 18th century England or Norway during one of the periods of weak danish control.

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Well, basically, the problem is that the kind of state I'm creating in my backstory doesn't really exist in the EU2 timeframe, so the DP sliders (which I set for game advantage, rather than matching the AAR - I'm not fighting the AI here, after all!) can't really reflect it properly. The thing is, I don't think there ever has been this kind of state, with a really vast ruling class of a few million people, and the underclass being only a factor three or four larger.

I admit to a certain amount of inspiration from Stirling's Domination of the Draka series, but the Draka had the advantage that the author was on their side, so they could conquer all of Africa and have a good hundred serfs for every free Citizen. Norway, even with the American colonies, just doesn't have that kind of population imbalance.

So, has Ear given up? It's pretty brutal to see a player country mercilessly ground into the dust by other players, but if the other great powers really wanted to hand all that land to Spain, my guess is they got something in return for it?

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Yes, well, Burgundy threatened war if I interfered. Which was probably a mistake by Abs, considering how powerful Spain is now, but there you go. I'm sorry to see Ear go; I hope we can get another player to restore Persia's greatness. They're not that far down, after all; they could easily expand into Mughal and Bengalese lands, and be fantastically wealthy in Vicky.

das said:

How many Ynglings should you have now anyway KoM?

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Well, that's an interesting question. Consider : At the end of CK, in 1419, I had about 700 living, male Ynglings. I estimated the doubling time as 25 years, since this is a well-fed upper class which accepts bastards - male ones, anyway - and marries for fertility. So by 1600, there is something in excess of 100k male Ynglings. I don't recall exactly when I introduced my safety valve of letting soldiers marry into the family, but let's say it was 1600; then the population doubles at a stroke, since we can now consider the females also. Further, the doubling time would go down a bit, since female Ynglings are no longer lost - obviously, their husbands take the family name. (This gives the effect of 'immigration' into the Yngling family, so we're no longer limited to the biological means of increasing the numbers.) So with all that, we can probably take the doubling time down as far as fifteen (!) years, which means we've had seven doublings since 1600, in addition to the doubling from adding females. Total, 2.7 million. Something should be chopped off that for military casualties, though, since there have been some very bloody wars lately, and the Ynglings are increasingly fighting as regular infantry and not just officers, so the casualties are getting to them. And with the losses of 3 to 5% from military training, doubling time is going to increase a bit again. So I'm going to say 2 million Ynglings (male and female), with a doubling time of twenty years.

Well, that's a really large ruling class! However, there are some natural brakes here. First, the number of stril soldiers is going to be decreasing, since there are more Ynglings who can fight, so the need for auxiliaries decreases. Second, the ruling class is now so large that we can no longer consider all of it 'well-fed', so that increases the doubling time quite a bit. Third, as the polarisation between rulers and ruled increases, there's going to be more uprisings - killing off some Ynglings - and perhaps fewer marriages also. (After all, the soldiers only have permission to marry into the ruling class; nobody is going to be forcing the women to marry a smelly stril, if they don't want to!) And, as long as I keep losing wars, the Yngling population will decrease a bit every time; not just from casualties, but also because the Ynglings living in lands lost to other countries will pretty soon cease to be Ynglings. First, it's going to be an extremely unpopular name, and second, the class is by now defined basically by being rulers with an extremely militaristic sort of upbringing - children living in barracks from age 5, hours of drill every day, and so on. That kind of thing takes a lot of effort and surplus to sustain; it just can't be done without a fairly major state pushing it. Just for one thing, a landowner who no longer has State resources keeping his tenants down simply can't treat them as the Ynglings are used to doing, and hat means he has to put considerable effort into managing his own lands - which takes time away from drill and exercise. And he certainly can't afford to keep up barracks for his children, at his own expense! So even if the lands are reconquered, the Ynglings that still live there will have degenerated (as my Norwegian ones would see it) and be soft strils, suitable only for subjugation.

So basically, the answer is, I have however many I need for story purposes, subject to the restriction that it is somewhere in the range of 'a few million'.

Endre Fodstad said:

Yes, the Dominion had the most absurd social set-up I ever saw in a alternate history novel. It could probably only exist because God (Stirling) was actively cheering them on. I've always found it odd that the man who wrote the enjoyable Island in the Sea of Time series could create such oddities as the Draka and Dies the Fire books...

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Indeed, "Dies the Fire" seemed rather strange to me. Granted. a 99% die-off would produce some very weird psychological effects, but come on, people are going to forget they are Americans and just accept serfdom and, fer god's sake, a ruler with an outright torture fetish? Chain mail is a fine thing, but there's much to be said for a howling mob too, especially when the 'knights' haven't had a lifetime of practice with their weapons.

Probably because, as you say, it's not a very likely, or even possible, social system. You could of course argue that the historian writing your story has such a heavy aristocratic prejudice he's distorting the facts. It wouldn't be unusual.

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Well, I've tried to keep things plausible as a step-by-step evolution, and not go too far too fast. Of course, when you have a goal in mind, it's easy to do that! But here's the way I think things have gone :

• We begin in 1066 with Norway as an 'elective'-within-the-Yngling-family monarchy. I put elective in quotes because, if you read between the lines of the sagas, people get proclaimed King when they show up at local Tings with a large warband of heavily armed hirdsmen.
• Unlike the real history, Norway expands quite considerably; there's enough new land gained that male Ynglings have at least a reasonable chance of getting some. Meanwhile, all the OTL change from biggest-robber-baron kingdom to a real dynastic state is taking place, with Norway instead of Denmark as the dominant player in Scandinavia. At this point the Ynglings are just a large aristocratic family.
• During the Great Rising, in which Yngling unity collapses in (basically) a dispute over the kingship, Norway's power also disappears - at one point, I was one province away from being annexed to Germany. The recovery leads to the Ynglings becoming more self-aware - in Vicky terms, their Consciousness increases - and recognising themselves as a class. Yngling unity becomes an important value for them; at this time it's directed more against external threats and other noble families - particularly the Swedish ones, newly conquered and still sore about it - than against the commoners. I've used the phrase "Yngling thinks like Yngling" a couple of times; it's not just an observation, it's intended (by the guy who coined it) to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Now, I've made a lot of noise about the Tings, but as you know, they weren't so democratic as all that. Sure, everyone could speak, in principle. But if one party was a major landowner with a bunch of retainers, and the other owned one small farm, well. So I'm thinking my Tings are a slightly exaggerated version of this, where commoners only have a real voice insofar as they're part of an Yngling's retinue; something like the patron-client relationship in Rome. For practical purposes, the Yngling (and to a lesser extent, other noble) electorate is what matters. This could get enshrined into actual law at some point, or it could remain an oligarchic 'democracy'; it doesn't really matter for story purposes.
• As time goes on, the kings become increasingly 'first among equals'; the Yngling landowners is where most of the power lies, since they elect the kings and have most of the actual troops.
• At some point, the slaves are freed if they are willing to serve in the army, due to the crushing need for manpower to fight the Poles. This essentially destroys slavery as an institution in Norway - and by this time, that means over all of Scandinavia and large tracts of Germany and Russia. (It also sets a precedent for soldiers being treated differently.) Now, I expect people to be rather proud of this, much as the English were a few centuries later in our own history; "Norway where no man is a slave" and such. However, that also creates a bit of a contradiction : The people are proud to be the freest men in the world (whether they objectively are, is irrelevant - it's all about perception) but at the same time the more perceptive can see that their democracy is not actually that democratic. So from here on out, the Ynglings have to worry a bit about the lower classes, because they can see the contradiction too. So instead of the historical situation where the nobles were afraid of bread riots (bad enough!), you get a situation where the nobles are afraid that the peasants are going to demand a real democracy, not a sham one. In other words, you've got the stirrings of political awareness much earlier than in our history, and hence you can get real class struggle much earlier.
• At this point two things happen : First, the Yngling population expands dramatically, and second (rather later) the Americas are discovered. And in this history, the Baltic states are not busy fighting each other and can grab a share, especially since Poland was rather decisively defeated shortly after we entered the EU2 period. So the Ynglings begin carving up the Americas into estates; having already got most of the economic and political power in Norway, they naturally get the lion's share of the new lands for themselves. Of course, there's a need for labour, so you get a tenant farmer system that's not so far removed from slavery. Even so, farming isn't for everyone, and the increase in Yngling population pressures some of them to go into shipowning and other business. Again, with the resources of the ruling class behind them, they are very strong competition. So the non-Ynglings are getting pushed further and further down the economic ladder.
• Of course, the worse off the non-Ynglings are, the less power they have at Ting, so the Ynglings get more money and power! None of this is planned, by any means; it's just what happens when individual Ynglings take advantage of their connections and capital because they see that they won't be inheriting any land, and don't feel like whipping three hundred acres of America into productive shape.
• So now you have the situation where the underclass is kind of restive, what's left of the middle class is being ground into tenant farming or guild work with every generation, and the Ynglings are getting a bit worried about the servant problem, as it were. Then comes a defeat or two in war, and the 'safety valve' that I've already spoken of. This increases the Yngling class-consciousness still further, because some percentage of them now know what it's like not to be an Yngling, and are grimly determined to preserve their privileges as a class.

Ok, so I hope I've made a case that by 1550-1650, you have got something that our Europe just didn't have : A large ruling class that is conscious of itself as a ruling class, and thinks in terms of its class interest, rather than individual interest. Marx might say that the Ynglings were a political class before the bourgeoisie (to the extent they exist), the farmers, or the (just beginning to develop) proletariat. However, the Ynglings are not likely to be very revolutionary!

So that's all or mostly internal to Norway. Then comes an ingame development : People ran out of places to colonise, and began fighting each other. Norway lost out in these struggles. Here's where I depart a bit from developing things purely as rational class interests : With a fairly heavy defeat in war (in fact, two in a row) I don't think it's too unlikely that a rather radical party might come into power. And they do things that are not very rational, like the heavy restrictions I've been laying on the strils, because they are running scared and not thinking too clearly. The thing is, though, that once you have the wolf by the ears, it's not so easy to let go. By 1720 or 1730, more cool-headed people are coming to power, and they might quite like to let up a bit on the strils, but how can they? Show any sign of weakness, and the revolution explodes! So now the Ynglings are in a trap, and like most humans they will try to make a virtue of necessity, by claiming that strils are naturally inferior, that Yngling Spirit and Will make them suited to rule (and with the heavy eugenics, and grabbing up the more talented individuals from the lower classes, they might have a point at that) and so on. And so there you are, barracks for children and all. (Well, actually I guess I didn't make a case for that, but after all, noble children in historical Norway were all given training at arms; since there's no break in the continuity of the Viking tradition, that should continue and develop into something more modern that the radicals can shape to their own ends.)

Whew, I may let this count as my AAR for the week! But anyway, while I agree that this Norway is not very likely (after all, the point of departure for the timeline is that I come in as the guiding spirit, so every king for 400 years is much smarter than his internal opposition!), I hope I've convinced you that it's at least plausible.

I'd guess the Yngling aristocracy has been influenced heavily by german culture, given that the use terms such as the stril are likely german in origin, as are a great deal of the bergensian particular grammar?

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Well, that's more me growing up in Bergen, actually. Really, you'd think Finnish and Russian influence was more important; I never owned that big a portion of Germany, so you'd expect the influence to go the other way. (Indeed, Holstein converted to norwegian culture at some point, I think it was the patch with the very quick culture spread.) But I'm not a linguist and won't be throwing Finnish and Russian about.

das said:

Not sure if its that improbable. Its merely dynastical, familial control taken to an extreme.

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Thank you! I'd also note that there are historical precedents for quite a bit of it : Junker Prussia has the landowner/military class, for example, as does Sparta, which also has the training-from-age-five bit. Rome did the bit with arming slaves when they got desperate enough, though with them it didn't destroy the institution. (Mainly because when they won, the losers would become more slaves, which just isn't practical in Norway - the land doesn't really lend itself to huge plantations. Besides, the OTL development where it's seen as immoral to take other Christians as slaves would go on here too.) And Rome had the class struggle, too, 2000 years before Marx. Athens and Venice for the aggressively expansionist 'democracies' dominated by an oligarchic class; Russia under the Rurikoviches for the single inter-related family in most noble titles.

das said:

Can't you move Ynglings from the conquered lands to, say, America? Or are they left for the sake of building up a fifth column?

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Well, in principle, yes. But are they going to want to move? By the treaties, they are allowed to keep a considerable portion of their lands - about as much as you can productively farm, really, without the repressive mechanisms keeping your peasants down. Besides, they have all the capital and farming equipment; they'll still be pretty dominant, wealthy people, they just won't be the only ones with political power. It takes a considerable amount of fanaticism to abandon all that for the life of a refugee in America, where all the good land is taken; and I don't think the Ynglings have reached the modern level of ideology yet. Not enough propaganda apparatus for it, for one thing.

das said:

Nice description of social history; its something that pretty rarely appears even in the textbook variety AARs.

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Thank you!

One point of interest - what exactly is the status of other nobles? One'd think they're overwhelmed by the Ynglings by now, especially as I suspect many of them would have married into Ynglingdom now that you, in your own words, "opened the safety valve".

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Well, I suppose they must basically have been assimilated. The Ynglings have a long tradition of marrying into families with only daughters, after all, and even of, um, adjusting the odds that only daughters is what there'll be. As you say, then, the few other noble lines that managed to maintain at least one non-incompetent son in every generation would eventually be assimilated through marriage to an Yngling daughter - the pressure to keep the Yngling name would be pretty overwhelming.

Indeed, the future seems pretty dark. Eitehr we get a perpetuation of an aristocratic dynastical dictatorship, or we get an uberviolent revolution from below. Might Norway take the place of revolutionary France or Russia (and if so, which? Will it simply sit around scaring people or will it export the revolution to wherever there isn't one?)?

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Well, unlike France, Norway doesn't really have the resources to be a threat to all of Europe, short of a big victory against Poland, or some such. But yes, it'll be interesting to see which way I go when I get to Vicky, which has better modelling of that kind of thing.

As you yourself have said, they have a very high consciousness. From their birth they are raised to rule, so how many will accept the sheer humiliation, not to mention the inconvenience, of being ruled themselves by foreigners, especially by the more democratic ones? Okay, many would. But I could imagine a large percentage moving elsewhere.

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Well, these are good points. Perhaps we could say that the younger sons and suchlike, who aren't in a position to inherit any land, and the people whose capital is not tied up in land, move? They could form a new and extra-nasty party, demanding wars of revenge whether or not there is any chance of winning, and enforcing the strictest parts of the eugenics, barracks and segregation. Sort of like the bitterenders in Kenya and South Africa, except they've got some kind of chance at winning.

Hmm, it's a good point. I guess we won't be seeing the Democratic People's Republic of Non-Yngling (Death to the Exploiters!) Norwegians, then, unless I deliberately play for it. The low aristocracy, you should note, is because with 2 million Ynglings, they just can't function as a traditional land-based aristocracy, even though that's the prestige occupation among them. By the numbers, they are far more likely to be merchants or administrators of some description.

I don't think there's anyone who actually likes the Spanish, although since I still need help against Burgundy, I suppose I'll have to put up with their arrogant ways for a while.