Ah, I just came home and checked my first post and the two "tables" that I made are a little messed up online, they made sence in word, I will fix them soon.
...but i wanna know , does Norway's historical statistics match the In game de jures it holds? the other thing is , could people freely and readily trade with Iceland. Seems like it was isolated , which might cause (in theory) said population to be less effective in joining wars throughout Europe. Like who will or could send 10 galley's all the way up there for a few levies?
Iceland's medieval population is much better documented then many other medieval population so I guess less is known about the size of Norway's medieval population. Maybe paradox assumes Norway's population was larger than what I have heard. The Norwegians did trade with Iceland, once a war was about to break out between Norway and Iceland over trade. Trade was an important issue to Icelanders and f.e. when most of Iceland accepted the Norwegian king as their king there was a chapter about trade in the oath. It can take a ship sailing from Bergen to maybe southern Iceland a week to sail to Iceland with a good wind and from there it only takes you about a day to ride to Alþingi.
One of Iceland's problems was probably the low number of ships. Wood that you could make ship from was very rare since you could use little or no wood that grew here to build ships. But wood drifted to Iceland and some men brought wood from f.e. Norway.
It was decentralized and isolated as an independent Republic, yes. The situation in which it would be dragged off to fight abroad would most likely be as a subject of the King of Norway, though, hence the comparisons to them. That's a more centralized model of governance. Also I provided a link to a battle between two clans of Iceland that showed they had over 2000 troops for the conflict. I would not be surprised if the other clans could raise an additional 1500. I'd be interested to see how these numbers change if as a vassal to the Norwegian King, though, since he'd probably raise less than 3500 from them. As you can see in the chart Norway's levies increased by about 10000 where as Iceland only went from 3520 to 3670 between the dates where they got vassalized.
Maybe Iceland never went to war with another country because Iceland never had the chance. For maybe 270 years Iceland was a decentrialised state ruled by 39 chieftains,
goðar, met and f.e. set laws and served as court. They had great difficulties gathering a large army and going to war with other chieftains because their "
þingmenn", the farmers, were not very keen on going to war. So if Iceland would have declared war on another country at that time I think the
goðar could not gather a large army. However when the 13th century began some goðar had become very powerful and Iceland was divided into a few but centrialised states who most of the time had natural rivals nerby or were in war with them. But in the 13th century Iceland was ruled by one chieftain one or two times but that lasted for a short time and war began again. Gissur was given a jarl title and ruled all or most of Iceland (not sure whether two chieftains were vassal to the jarl or the king) until he died with out an heir. The king took the jarl title back and the Icelanders would have had a hard time going to war with another since the king chose who would rule Iceland for him and that positions was not inherited by ones heirs.
In that battle 4 chieftens fought, two on each side. On one side was Sighvatur, brother to Snorri Sturluson and Sighvat's son, Sturla, who had taken recently taken over Snorri's realm. The other side had two chieftains from two clans, Kolbeinn ungi who ruled the land where the battle took place and the other was Gissur Þorvaldsson who later became jarl of Iceland. These 4 men ruled areas that had about 78 % of Iceland's population. But again, about 120 years before that a battle almost began between two sides and togather those armies had 2300 men. These men were commanded by goðar who ruled a area that had about 55 % of the population.
Iceland is not underpowered, when the game starts it has only been inhabited for a few hundred years. The population is still very low compared to the rest of Europe by that time, and Iceland has never been "strong" historically.
But it's population reached during the game's time frame. Iceland's population suffered from hunger in the 14th century and it seemed that the land could not feed more people and the population was stopped growing and later went down but at the same time the population of other countries was rising. As I have said, when Iceland was independent Iceland had less than 70 000 people, maybe 60 000 or 65 000 but in 1703 the population of Iceland was 50 358 (there was a full poll done).