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Really accumulating vassals now! Im excited to behold france in all its future glory! But how far away are you from QFTNW?
 
Whatever size works for you, still folowing. :happy:
Good luck with the work.

Thank you! It's my last year at this summer camp I've been working in since my senior year of high school. If there is such a thing as menial social work, this would be it (along with answering phone lines). One of those jobs where you say "this summer is the last time I'm doing this job!" and yet next summer there you are, slaving away. On the plus side, next year I'll be in Virginia, staying for the summer in an attempt at getting domicile citizenship for the in state tuition, so this is most definitely a 'last time'.

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The Dauphin from Dauphine, pt1

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Louis XI, the Monk King

Louis d'Avignon Valois, known to history as Louis XI, was one of France's most unique kings. If Francois I was a capable King because of his ambition and his want to be King, then his nephew was a capable king because he most emphatically did not want to be King but saw it as his solemn duty. Unlike Francois I, who dressed in expensive, almost militaristic attire, Louis XI dressed as conservatively as he could, wearing a crown made more out of wood than gold and wool garments. And yet, France enjoyed unheard of prestige during the administration of Louis XI, and the court at Ile de France was soon dominated by the foremost philosophers of the time. Precisely how a Humanist priest became King of France in 1479 is a long tale, touching on Papal politics, the growth of Humanism in France, the Inquisition, and Francois I's untimely death.

The Pope's Men

Pious VI's reign over the Papal State was fraught with difficulties and failures. He sought to follow a similar policy he had committed to in Granada, setting up a Papal Inquisition and looking everywhere for opportunities to expand his territory. The First and Second Wars of Papal Aggression, against Urbino and Modena respectively, led to the destruction of the Papal army by the Holy Roman Emperor and the loss of the province of Romagne to the Duchy of Modena. It was only with French intervention that the province of Avignon wasn't lost. Worse, Pious VI's tendency to staff the Inquisition with ex-Jews, a policy he continued from the Granadan Inquisition, was immensely unpopular within Rome. Pious used his inquisition not only to attack Muslims and Jews within his borders, but he also attempted to roll back Humanist thought by oppression. This led to a massive revolt by Roman burghers in the early 1470s, just when the Papacy had no army to defend itself.

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Italy in 1476. The Sectarian Heresy would have been successful if it weren't for an intervention by Castille

This left the Papacy in a state of disarray, and soon after the heretics were put down, Pious VI fell into a state of poor health, and though he lived for 2 more years, he stopped being an active force in Papal politics, leaving a huge power vacuum. This was filled by the Humanists, most particularly by the Frenchman Georges Duqesne.

It is said that sometimes problems look for solutions, and sometimes solutions look for problems. Both of these dynamics influenced the relationship between Cardinal Duqesne and his pupil, the Dauphin* Louis d'Avignon.

Southern Heirs

Louis Valois had never been bred for greatness. Born in 1450, his father was the younger brother of the king Charles VII, but his family was incredibly minor in the scheme of things. Louis' father, Benjamin, was a diminutive man who rarely left his castle, and Louis, raised as the second son of the youngest son, never assumed that he would be forced into greatness. Due to financial problems and several incidents between father and son, Louis was sent to a priory at a young age--he likely started his learning at 10. As he studied more and more, he obtained permission to travel across Spain and France, moving to monasteries of different religious orders, studying and praying with them as they would.

When he was 16 and ready for his studies, he made a decision which shocked his family--he became a Carmelite monk, and moved to Avignon, the largest Carmelite monastery in France at the time, to begin his life of celibacy and poverty. Carmelite Catholicism was a sect devoted to contemplative and methodological prayer, and its monks took vows of poverty, toil, celibacy and, most of all, thought. It was the Carmelites which led Louis to Humanist thought--he found that the reflections of the Greeks and the Roman pagans could lead to fantastical philosophical contemplations, and much of Louis' early 20s was spent trying to reconcile pre-Christian philosophy with modern Christian thought. It was this search which brought him to the Cardinal Duquesne of Avignon.

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Cardinal Duquesne, later Pope Francis I, was one of the greatest figures in the early Renaissance, especially the French Renaissance

Cardinal Duquesne had a massive influence over the introduction of Renaissance thinking into France. As the Bishop of Avignon, he was in control of the local Inquisition, which meant that Avignon was the only province in nearly all of France and Italy during the 1460s and 70s which accepted Humanism. Duquesne, who knew Arabic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French and Italian, soon became an expert translator of the new documents coming from the Byzantine refugee communities. By 1475 Duquesne was a sought after expert in humanist philosophy. It was in this context that Louis met him and asked him to be his teacher.

Louis was in a tough situation in 1475. Although it soon became clear that Francois' wife Helene Hapsburg wasn't going to be with child (modern historians have ventured that Francois may have been homosexual--or even asexual), it was assumed that Louis' older brother Regis would ascend to the throne. But Regis died in a hunting incident in 1464, which left Louis as the Dauphin. This put him in a tough position--to become King, he would have to give up his vows and the only world he'd ever known. But Duquesne saw an opportunity: this man whom he had influence over would soon be King of the greatest country in Christendom. He could use his influence over the prince to create a massive intellectual explosion in Europe. He told Louis that he would teach him, but not as a monk--he would teach him as Aristotle taught Alexander.
 
Really accumulating vassals now! Im excited to behold france in all its future glory! But how far away are you from QFTNW?

I'm not going for QFTNW, for the following reason:

BEGINNERS CORNER!

Advanced Ideas

Advanced Ideas in Magna Mundi are the most powerful ideas in the game--the give large tax bonuses, massive colonial range, higher army tradition and far lower technology costs. But they require specialization--each advanced idea requires 4 other ideas. For instance, Glorious Arms is a great NI in Vanilla EU, but in MM here it is:

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It gives huge bonuses, but also requires a ton of exploration oriented ideas. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite is the same, as is Glorious Arms, Naval Glory, and Scientific Revolution. This is one of my favorite parts about MM, in that even though it's a 'harder' game than Vanilla, it has stronger helpful elements which promotes strategic choice.

As I said early on, I'm trying to get Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, Scientific Revolution, and Glorious Arms, though I'm probably going to end up settling for Glorious Arms and LEF (what's France without LEF). However, I'm likely going to take Colonial Ventures and I am going to participate in colonization (which is a space for another Beginners Corner--the Western European nations get decisions which allow for early exploration)
 
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The Dauphin from Dauphine, part 2


Church and State: The Dauphin-Papal Alliance

As I said in the last section, the friendship between the Dauphin Louis and the nascent pope Georges was based on mutual advantage--Georges saw a man who could spread the ideals of the Renaissance , while Louis saw a mentor who would give him legitimacy in the clergy, a Cardinal who would protect France's interests. As such, the striking up of a friendship between Georges and Louis led to a transformation in the two, from secluded intellectuals to ambitious political players in their own states. Acting from Avignon, Louis and Georges started to influence French and Papal policy towards each other.

But the two became closer in personality

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The Palace of the Popes, where Louis and Georges built the foundations of the French Renaissance

The first issue for the French and Italian humanists was that they couldn't even practice their beliefs in France and the Papal states. The Cosmopolitaine and Urbian Inquisitions were dominated by conservative elements in the Catholic Church, and they had been used for a decade to suppress Humanist thinkers, which left Avignon and Tuscany as the only areas with thriving humanist communities.

And so Louis' first trip to Paris since he'd taken his vows was to in his capacity as Dauphin in the Cabinet. This was the first time that this had occurred since the creation of the Cabinet--although the Dauphin was nominally a voting member in it, Francois' heirs had very little interest in political matters and remained in their castles throughout their lives. But Louis had a specific reason for going to Ile de France--he wanted to limit the ability of the Inquisition to oppress non-heretical groups such as tax evaders, monks, and humanists. He clashed with Mancini over this, but the truth is that most of the cabinet and most of Francois' subjects were sick of the excesses of the Inquisition, and though they were seen as important for rooting out witchcraft and heresy, actions against tax evaders had led to multiple revolts. Louis gained support for this proposition when he noted that France's historic role as Papal Sponsor had been weakened in the past century by the financial rise of the Spaniards and Italians, but by taking an ideological initiative and courting the Humanist faction within the Church, France could retake her position as the leader in theological thought and reap the gains of Papal influence.

This argument didn't fully fly with Francois, who had spent his whole life following what we would now call 'hard' security goals. But the proposition of placing France back into her traditional perennial papal sponsor position was pleasing, and so the proposition passed with the support of the King, de Villenueve and the Duke of Provence, and this was the last vote before Francois moved out with his army to fight the Ten Thousand.

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The limitation of the Inquisitions' power is generally considered the point where Francois' style of governance started to transition to Louis' style. Also I moved 1 towards innovative in this situation, and I got Papabile out of nowhere--I'd decided that Francois wasn't the type to spend money on something as 'soft' as Papal influence

The last revolt of Francois' reign

The Othe Revolt of 1482 was a third in a series of revolts caused by the Cosmopolitaine Inquisition, but it was different than the revolts of the past. Unlike the Parisian tax revolt in the 60s and the Othe tax revolt of the 70s, this revolt was the signalling of the new major issue in France, one which much blood was spilled through to 1500. This issue was a battle between an ultra-orthodox Catholic sect promoted by the Inquisition, and the new Humanist faction who followed the philosophical trends of Italy.

Even though Louis had managed to create laws which forbade the use of the Inquisition against Humanists, Mancini continued his policy of arresting and torturing the members of what he viewed as a heretical sect well into the 1480s. This meant that the law which formally protected humanists became nothing more than a sad joke to the men and women languishing in the Inquisition's cells. When news came to Ile de France of a major urban revolt, records show that Louis seriously considered retaking his vows and leaving politics forever, especially with the news that his uncle was moving to put down the revolt.

The 80 year old king, wearing golden armor and on the strongest horse in the Parisian stables, marched with his pikemen into the city of Othe. Riding as he did before at the front of the army, and at the head of an elite group of knights, he intended to strike fear into the hearts of the rebels, the better to finish the battle quickly. He entered the city with the air of arrogance he'd worn his whole life. But then something happened, something unexpected.

A series of cobblestones were thrown at him from the houses of Othe. He was hit in the head by one and died on the spot. The ensuing battle was a victory for the Royal Army, but it required support from the security force of the Armee du Flandres. The news reached Louis just as he was leaving for Avignon to go retake his vows. It was said that when he was given the ornate golden crown of his uncle, signifying that he was now king, he ordered for it to be melted down to make a cross and a more austere crown. The oversized cross became a symbol for his administration, which was marked by similar massive failures and successes. But that is for the next section.

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The coronation of Louis XI
 
A question: I'm planning on changing the background of my title picture with each king to a different version of the French coat of arms. This would eventually move to me using the tricolor when (if) I get up to the Revolution (which I'm planning on moving towards in the 1700s, maybe having the Revolution be my last post?). I have 2 different possible coats of arms for Louis, both showing his origins in Avignon as well as his connection to the clergy and the Papacy:

Here's one (that's pretty rough) of the Papal keys in the French colors:

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And here's a split of the French fleur de lis and the Papal coat of arms:

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And here's a split of the French fleur de lis and the coat of arms of Avignon:

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Which one should I use? (and I'll fix the line in the Avignon one)
 
I think: French fleur de lis and coat of arms of Avignon.

I agree.

With Louis being Mil 3, does that indicate you will heavily focus on development and infrastructure rather than conquest, which is also more in line with Louis' humanist views?

Also enjoyed the beginners corner thank you.
 
I agree.

With Louis being Mil 3, does that indicate you will heavily focus on development and infrastructure rather than conquest, which is also more in line with Louis' humanist views?

Also enjoyed the beginners corner thank you.

It indicates that I tried to focus on development and infrastructure rather than conquest

In reality I got a decade long war
 
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Macro trend in Louis' early reign

Francois I's reign was generally seen as having a long 'transitional period', because Francois' personality and lack of diplomatic acumen led to a reliance on the same advisers as his father. Louis took an utterly different tack at the beginning of his reign--he immediately fired Mancini, and replaced him with the governor of Gascony, Philip de Rochecourt, and told him that the elimination of traditionalists in the Inquisition was his top priority. After this he offered d'Ursine a large pension and told him that if d'Ursine retired, Louis would suggest him as the new Minister of the Estates, which he would likely be welcomed in. D'Ursine was replaced by the relatively minor ambassador to Navarre, Eugene de la Porte.

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The Court of Louis XI, in 1483.

This all meant that the transition from Francois' style of rule to Louis' was a quick one, and in the case of the diplomatic corps, Louis' appointment of the weak willed de la Porte to the head of the diplomatic service sent the message that he was in charge. But in the case of the Inquisition and the tax collecting services, the abrupt transfer of power and governing philosophy left several key Inquisitors enraged, which led to several major ultra-conservative revolts during Louis' reign.

But de Rochecourt was more than simply an alternative to Mancini. De Rochecourt, during his time in Gascony, had transformed the Gascognard civil/tax collecting service into a massive organization, greatly simplifying provincial governance and turning the province into the second largest tax base in the French kingdom. He'd organized urban militias into a regional police force under his command, privatized several major pastures, and--in conjunction with the local Inquisition--had set up a small religious school system which taught low Latin (more on that later) to the local population.

These reforms would have been impossible or insignificant if it weren't for the huge province which de Rochecourt lorded over. The only administrative level in France at the time was the County (or the Barony in Auvergne). Counties within Valois France were governed either by the crown or by a pseudofeudal compact between the Count and the king-appointed governor. Whether or not 'centrally governed provinces' were actually governed by the center had much to do with how active the Count of each county felt like being, but regardless there were so many provinces by 1480 that it was near impossible for Ile de France to govern them all. This was compounded by the laziness of the governors, who often had hereditary positions and were just as content to sit back and reap the kickbacks of running a province. The worst region in this respect was the ex-county of Auvergne, which had been annexed as a group of hundreds of baronies and had remained such as a part of her annexation. The administrative costs to actually govern Auvergne would have taken up all of the bureaucrats in the rest of France. Worse, those bureaucrats who ended up administering provinces were generally incompetent, occasionally illiterate, and (when lowborn) were seen as illegitimate.

Philip de Rochecourt started his career as the governor of the military district of Gascogne. Unlike the governors in the provinces, de Rochecourt wasn't constrained by a system of parallel governance. His province was his and his alone. However, he soon found that the problems which effected Gascogne were larger than he could surpass in his own district--piracy and food storage being his biggest problems. He simply couldn't collect enough food within his own province to feed his own people. After the famine of 1470, de Rochecourt started a concerted campaign to buy the governorships of nearby counties, until the 'province of Gascogne' spanned much of the former Duchy of Aquitaine.

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Administrative areas of France by 1485. Non-French areas are in black, areas de facto controlled by the King are in yellow, the baronies of Auvergne are in white, and areas under the newly created 'province of Gascogne' are in red

De Rochecourt was made Minister of the Interior to simplify all of France in such a fashion. Over the next several years he developed a new system of provincial rule: the governors, and the governors alone, governed their provinces, and they be assigned a personal staff which would follow them. Rather than governorships being hereditary and permanent, they were appointed for 5 year periods, and governors were not allowed to govern their own homelands or participate in local politics.

It would seem, at first, that this reform would have broken the strength of France's nobility. But what it did end up doing was transferring it, via two final provisions added by the King and his Minister: each governor had to be of noble blood, and the Governors staffs were to be venal (ie, sellable) positions. This meant that though the French bureaucratic faction had separate goals from the High Lords, the French government remained dominated by the nobility.

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The new administrative area of France, starting 1486, and me embracing the bureaucracy national idea
 
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Macro-trends in Louis' early reign pt2

Low Latin, the Monastic revolution, and the rise of printing

Starting my section on Louis with a discussion of the largest reform in French governance in a century was perhaps a mistep. Yes, the creation of a more centralized, bureaucratic France was Louis' greatest achievement, but to start with it gives the wrong image of Louis. Louis was most emphatically not another Francois I, and it is clear now that it was precisely Louis' personality and his focus on 'soft' issues like prestige and perception that led to his massive domestic successes. This is because, while Francois was an ideological void, acting as a Machiavellian Principe (although the book was written half a century later), Louis most definitively an ideological creature, and his ideology was the age old French phenomena of academic Christianity, or scholasticism. We can see marks of scholasticism throughout Louis' policy--to remark on something outside of the purview of this article, Louis' preference for defensive styles of war was clearly driven as much by de Villenueve as it was driven by Thomas Aquinas' concept of Just War. But this ideology went further than international relations: we can see a promotion of scholasticism in all of Louis' policies.

But the scholastic tradition had was a completely different beast in the late 15th century. Two major factors had come to change the face of European academia:
  • The burgeoning Renaissance
  • The Printing Press
Both of these advances left Louis feeling bittersweet. On the one hand, the Humanist revolution and the explosion of print meant that far more people were accessing intellectual thinking than ever before. On the other hand, this explosion of thought had started to marginalize the monastic world that Louis had been a part of, the monastic world which had served as a filter which kept new intellectual trends 'safe' for centuries. Louis attributed part of the sectarian violence in France to the decline of monasticism, and saw an intelligencia contained within the universities and monasteries as ideal, but he also was very much a man of the Renaissance who wanted to accelerate its spread. Thus, he was presented with a paradox: he wanted to increase intellectual freedom while limiting that freedom to a very narrow space.

He addressed this two-fold problem with a two-fold solution--a massive state sponsored expansion of the monasteries combined with a limitation on printing--from now on, only monasteries would be allowed to use printing presses.

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By 1500, nearly every region had its own monastic network

The huge increase in new monasteries was supported by a widespread diffusion of the clergy in France. No longer were Paris, Toulouse and Avignon the only seats of ecclesiastical learning: now each town had its own small group of monks. The clergy became more diverse as well: highborns and lowborns alike were attracted to the monk's robe, creating a clerical class which was able to connect to both the aristocratic government as well as the poverty stricken peasants. Over the years, the clergy began to become the glue which held French society together.

Part of the historiography of the early modern period is that it was during this time that the concept of Separation of Church and State came about, coming to a head in the treaty of Westphalia which created a formal distinction between the two. The case of Louis vs Francois shows us that a simple Church vs State dichotomy is too simplistic to be helpful (especially in the early modern period)--there were different kinds of 'Churches' and different kinds of states throughout the period. For instance, while Louis XI's enthusiastic support for monasticism may seem like a reactionary movement aimed at stifling creativity, the truth is that under the protection of the state the French printing press industry boomed far more quickly than in any other region. To illustrate, by 1498, when the first English printing press opened in London, the order of St.Augustine had 20 presses in the Ile de France province alone. As the Inquisition shut down and censored presses throughout the rest of Europe, France remained a relative beacon for freedom of speech and expression.

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The printer, a priest generally of burgher backgrounds, helped foster urban connections to the Catholic Church which proved key during the Reformation

Monastic domination of literature had another effect, unforeseen but not unwanted. Latin saw a massive resurgence in the period, coming out of the renewed interest in spoken Latin from the unearthing of Roman texts and the huge increase in Latin writing. A new form of Latin called Low Latin, which was a simplified and spoken form of Roman Latin, became widespread throughout France's upper classes. Even the burghers took up the study of literacy in Latin, and new monks soon found that much of their charitable work was giving language lessons to the children of town elders.

Louis even went so far as to levy large taxes on liquors, but the way that he did this helps us understand the method he took in governance in general. While Francois was upfront about a need for power, Louis rarely if ever attacked an issue head on, rather he would find some innovative method of fixing a problem he had. The Liquor tax was a perfect example, because it was accompanied by a huge attempt to charter new marketplaces, workshops, and Carmelite monasteries, all of which were involved in the making of and selling of wine and liquor. By opening up France's market system as he closed off certain kinds of liquors for sale, Louis managed to get to his preferred result (less drinking, more money for monasteries) without the rage which a straightforward policy would entail.

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The Liquor act funded several expansions in France's market infrastructure. Also I'll write a short beginners corner about this tomorrow

There were two other major institutional reforms related to Louis XI's religious beliefs during the period, both implemented in the year 1488. Before I get to these reforms, I want to note the importance of the date. 1488 was the low point of the Franco-Burgundian War, and from journal entries one can believe that Louis was creating these institutions while Paris was under siege. This shows us how different Louis' personality was from Francois--while Francois was a controlling man who would have been personally leading one of the armies or the garrison, Louis accepted that he simply wasn't good at military matters, and thus stuck to his proficiency.

Back to the reforms. Both were related to vestiges of the old bureaucratic system which Louis was methodically and patiently stripping away, now aimed mainly at the tax collectors and their incestuous relationship with the Inquisition. There was a massive problem though--Mancini had created a massive system of tenure in order to maintain the loyalty of his operators, and given the decentralized nature of France's bureaucratic system, Louis and his Minister of the Interior de Rochecourt couldn't directly fire the problematic collectors. So Louis attacked from a different path--he abolished all tenures within the French bureaucracy before attacking the Inquisitorial tax agency. But his attack on the tax agency was just as subtle: de Rochecourt didn't even fire any of the Inquisitors. What de Rochecourt/Louis did do was create a new court: a court of wards and liveries--to deal with tax matters. The Inquisitorial Tax Agency was allowed to continue collecting taxes, but the law enforcement side of it was taken away from the inquisition and given to the court of wards and liveries. Over the next several years, court houses sprung up all around France, especially in the previously perennially unstable north east. The new King was slowly remaking all of France in his image, in a more encompassing way than his uncle could have ever dreamed of.

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The two institutional reforms of the later 1480s
 
Excellent post!! Learn something new with every post. Keep it coming.
 
Beginners Corner: Advanced Buildings and Monasteries

In my last section I talked about how Louis built a lot of monasteries. What the hells going on with that, Merrick? Monasteries aren't in EU3! What are you crazy?

I am. But Magna Mundi simulates levels of economic progress via an advanced buildings system, which comes up as a series of provincial decisions. They are similar to the advanced buildings system in Divine Wind, but there are more limitations to who can build them. For instance, not only do you need a certain level of naval/trade tech to build a larger port, you also need a naval adviser. You can't build advanced military buildings without military advisers, or economic buildings without economic advisers. I built a lot of markets and workshops during Louis' career, because de Rochecourt is an alderman and aldermen are the only advisers who let you build both markets and workshops. Religious buildings are even more limited--you can only build one per province and they require a religious idea (which is lame because they're awesome, especially religious university which gives -3% tech costs).

Monasteries are a specific type of religious building limited to Catholics. To build one of them, you need 2 missionaries, 5 ducats, and you need to have either high religious fervor (simply put, ou need to be a theocracy or have religious ideas), be Papal Controller, or have a Theologian. There are 4 types of monasteries--Franciscan, Dominican, Augustan, and Carmelite, and you can only have 1 type of monastery in each province. Each monastery gives minor advantages (+.01 or +.05 missionaries, less stability costs, etc), gives a small chance to get a unique monk adviser. I've been building mostly Carmelite monasteries (+.01 missionaries, +5% trade good cost), but in some provinces which I'm pretty sure are going to go protestant I've been building Franciscan and Dominican monastaries (+.05 missionaries, -20% missionary cost/+3% missionary chance respectively). You start getting events around the start of the Enlightenment to disband your monasteries, but this is made up for via the creation of the Jesuits (which I'm going to push for in this game).

I'd post images but photobucket's being dumb.

Big Question: Do you guys want my next update to be on exploration/colonialization, or on the Franco-Burgundian war? Either way I'll probably write the next entry sometime this weekend.
 
I've just read several updates ina row, I really do love your writing style. Looking forward to how France deals with the reformation especially.

I'd prefer the next udpate to be exploration/colonisation. I wonder, how much to you intend to be involved in the colonial race? From earlier posts it seems your not that kean on it.
 
I've just read several updates ina row, I really do love your writing style. Looking forward to how France deals with the reformation especially.

I'd prefer the next udpate to be exploration/colonisation. I wonder, how much to you intend to be involved in the colonial race? From earlier posts it seems your not that kean on it.

Buying Wars in America/reading a history of New France can change a man, what can I say? Also I've found that it becomes impossible to fight England if you don't have some north american territories

Now that I think about that, I'll probably do the next section on the Franco-Burgundian Wars because they flow nicely and provide a motivation for exploration/colonization
 
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The Burgundian Wars

The Franco-Aragon War

The Burgundian Wars were a long time incoming. The Duchy of Burgundy had been aggressively expanding since the beginning of the 14th century when she broke off from France. Since then she had been steadily gaining land in the Lowlands, in French Burgundy, and most recently in Italy. Through her swift success, she had formed a bloc of anti-status quo powers which included Brittany, Aragon, and several Italian states. Involving most of the major powers of Western Europe, the Wars were fought over Spain, France, and Italy and taking the lives of several ten thousand men, the Burgundian Wars were the largest conflict of their time. But what is generally forgotten about the Wars was that they were started over France's ambition to weaken Berber piracy and her want for security in the Papal State; but what started out as a simple security issue turned into an existential struggle which vanquished several Western duchies and kingdoms.

The first conflict in the Burgundian Wars can be traced directly to the Turkish pirate Barbarossa. Hayreddin Barbarossa, born into slavery in the Genoese colony of Lesbos, escaped at the age of 16 to the Ottoman Empire via a sailboat. After that, he became the greatest naval mind of his time, orchestrating raids against Aragon, Castille, France, the Italian states, and even going to far as to sack the port of Sagres, in Portugal, in 1480. But it was his attack on the Duchy of Provence which drove France to action.

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An artist's rendering of the attack on Ile d'Hyeres, which historically guarded Marseille and Toulon from pirates

By 1482 the headquarters of France's Anti-Piracy Force had been moved to Provence. This headquarters, guarded by a massive fortress on the Island of Hyeres, coordinated similar fortresses as well as mobile anti-piracy fleets which spanned through the whole Kingdom. Although France did not have an admiralty or even a naval academy until the 19th century, the L'Ordonne D'Hyeres was the closest thing to it. An attack on the fortress on the 8th of May, 1484 took the French by surprise--not the fact that it happened but the size of it. A full flotilla of galleys, barques, and a carrack attacked the fortress, and nearly 500 men landed on the Island and did battle with the guards stationed there. The battle lasted for a week and at times it seemed that the fortress was going to fall. Eventually the French, Genoese, and Templar navies were called to action, and Barbarossa's fleet disengaged. But the cost was great--nearly all of the French anti-piracy officer staff had been killed in the fighting, and the attack led to a massive outpouring of capital from France, which would have led to a huge scaling back of the French economy if it weren't for colossal government spending.

The French military, now the most powerful force in French foreign policy, came up with several actions to ameliorate the problem of Berber piracy--they signed pacts of non-aggression with the Tripolantian and Tunisian pirates, bulked up the French navy, and created more cooperation efforts with the French vassals. But lastly, they began asking Aragon for military access to their ports. Aragon, at this point, controlled the Strait of Messina (between Sicily and Naples), the Sea of Sicily (between Sicily and Africa), and all of the access-points to the Mediterranean via their control of Sardinia.

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In 1482, Aragon controlled all of the waterways by which one could move from the Eastern to the Western Mediterranean

But this request came too late. The King of Aragon was already deeply concerned about the French army stationed in Roma (which was in fact there to protect the Pope against the anti-semitic mobs left over from the revolts of the 1470s), and the request for naval access came at the worst possible time. The King of Aragon, like the Duke of Burgundy at the time, had no heir. He has asked the Pope for a missive allowing his stepson to inherit his realm, but the Pope refused the missive. This left war as his last option. This played directly into French hands--the Royal Army and the Armee d'Est marched into Italy with the aim of conquering all of the Kingdom of Naples.

Furthermore, the Aragon War killed two birds with one stone for France--The Duchy of Brittany (which, by this point, was called "The County of Nantes" by the French court because the province of Brittany was officially the 'Duchy of Brittany') was allied with the Kingdom of Aragon, and the Duchy's small police force was swiftly done away with by the numerically superior Armee du Nord. The Duchy of Brittany was annexed shortly after, and though the province remained a thorn in France's side for years to come, the country was no longer actively promoting dissent.

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The last gasp of the Bretons

This was the last good news in a while. The French armies soon met resistance in Naples and the Pyrenees. The mountains which separated the French Kingdom from the Iberian ones were difficult to surpass for the French army, which relied so heavily on heavy infantry. The French army took heavy casualties in the mountains, losing ~6,000 men within the first month of the campaign into Aragon. This led to a reliance on the soldiers of Foix and Armagnac, which fielded large groups of highly trained light infantry. The success of the soldiers of Foix is what led to a 'federalization' of the French army, wherein the armies of the French vassals were allowed to follow their own doctrinal paths (it would be decades before focused light infantry/skirmisher elements would be introduced to the French army).

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Although the French Armee du Sud performed horribly in the Aragonese Theatre, the Army of Foix under Count Gascard VI's ability to destroy armies far larger than they tipped the scale in French favor

French problems got far worse with the death of de Crevecoeur, the most senior and experienced of the French generals and the Commander in Chief of the Aragonese theater. With a King insistent on remaining uninvolved in military manners, and with Armand de Villenueve fully involved with the increasingly destabilizing Neapolitan theatre, the position of Commander in chief fell to the new general Simon de Maurepas. Simon de Maurepas was an interesting creature within the French military--he had started as a diplomat, and in fact was the newphew of d'Ursine. But the demotion of the French diplomatic corps and the promotion of the French army as the foreign policy-making body in France had led him to move to the Army Academy of France, where he specialized in anti-partisan warfare. De Maurepas' belief that the high command of an army should include diplomats as well as the police of the local area was not relevant to his skill as commander in chief of the Aragonese front, but becomes relevant soon after.

De Maurepas was not as aggressive a commander as his predecessor, and this swiftly proved problematic. 15,000 French soldiers stayed in the province of Barcelona, fighting the local garrisons rather than engaging the weakened Army of Aragon. This prolonged the campaign, which brings me back to the Duchy of Burgundy.

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The end of positive Franco-Burgundian relations.

French-Burgundy relations had been sliding downward ever since the War of the League of Vendee. Duke Philip worried about the massive lost opportunity within that war--the chance for a backstab given up, and a major French enemy destroyed while France became ever stronger. Philip decided, after 1470, that he would not allow another opportunity like the League of Vendee to sip past his grip. This problem was exacerbated by the same problem that King Miquel had--Philip had no heir, and the French controlled Papacy wasn't likely to give him a missive. So he acted for the next decade to weaken France--first putting pressure on Savoy to break her bonds of vassalage, which Savoy did in 1484 (didn't screencap this, but there's an event by which a vassal in the HRE who doesn't like you can ask for freedom, and if you deny it the Holy Roman Emperor [Austria] gets pissed at you. I didn't want to lose my alliance with Austria because I'd like as long a time of calm before the Reformation starts, so I let Savoy go). At the beginning of the War with Aragon, Philip cancelled France's military access to the Milanese area. And, at the news of yet another French army leaving to fight in Italy, leaving only 25,000 soldiers still in France, Philip declared war on France.

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The First Burgundian War
 
Beginner's Corner: Piracy

Piracy is generally one of the most complained about mechanics in Magna Mundi. It's also been attacked for being unintuitive. But, when you think of the variables that effect it, it makes total sense. Pirate attacks occur to any coastal country, and have a higher chance when you have a large coast or lower stability, or if you're bordering a country with low stability. Provincial or Country-wide defenses lower the chance of a pirate attack, and naval NI's and naval advisers also lower it. The Mediterranean has a parallel system to simulate Berber piracy, and I got a bad Mediterranean piracy event because I didn't have any anti-piracy defenses other than my limited anti-piracy policy. The attack (which occurred in Languedoc actually) led to me setting up anti-pirate defenses in poorer provinces.
 
Berber piracy was a huge issue. Most countries paid tribute.

Or sent the pirates off on someone else. Having played as Algeria I actually really like the piracy mechanics--they give the North African nations a huge leg up (along with Berber revolts if you attack them as a Western nation).

Sorry for not getting the newest section done, work has been mind boggling.