Episode 8: The Joy of Shah (How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Move To Ryazan)
When Giovanni Adorno announced his self-strengthening plan to the Doge's council, they laughed harder than they had since Novgorod declared war.
"Nothing personal, Jeffy! We just finished placing bets on how long you'll be able to resist taking land from the principalities... or the Golden Horde," said Pietro de Melfi, who was the mayor of Corsica. As such, this meant he did little more than collect a (large) salary. Adorno didn't like him very much, and he was considering abolishing the post so that he could visit the island without feeling like he'd been subordinated to the whims of
"Our holdings in Rus are larger than even Poland's, but they are very weak. If we take too much land without developing, we will become weak," intoned Adorno.
Given that Genoa was now capable of fielding a respectable army (although not as large as many of the other nations of Europe), this suggestion confused and dismayed Adorno's underlings.
"But Genoa is-" one attempted to say, before another interrupted.
"We're very-" said the second, only to be preempted by a third.
"What the hell is-" shouted the third, yet he ran out of steam as Adorno began speaking under him.
"We are surrounded by dangerous enemies on all sides. Liguria is becoming weak, and our trading partners look to London or Venice where they would initially look to us," Adorno claimed.
Liguria is still an okay center of trade, but my efforts have been focused on Russia, not Italy, hence the decay. We'll see how it goes.
"Yet we have thousands, if not millions of Tartars under our command! We must exploit them for all they are worth!" Adorno felt he was speaking too passionately, but in his defense, the anguished spirit of Marcellino Larrea was haunting the room for inscrutable reasons. As if to agree with Adorno, a precariously placed bust of Simon Qutughqan (another casualty of time) fell off a shelf and shattered.
"First, we must take power back from the Tartars and bring it back to Genoa," Adorno said. While these sentiments were entirely appropriate for the era which Adorno lived in, he had made the mistake of expressing his sentiments to the people he wished to disenfranchise.
"You can't take away my power, man! How will I govern Kamyshin if I'm not allowed to?" Enter Julius Shaja'a, yet another Tartar convert who was quick to italicize, while still managing to press a weak claim to the throne of the Timurid khanate in his meantime. Luckily for Adorno, he was the only significantly non-Italian in the room that day.
Marcellino's ghost had left the premises, and Adorno was now confused and slightly sheepish about how Julius had resisted him.
"I... uh... forget it. You can be the mayor of prosperous Stavropol if you shut up and don't oppose me on the rest of this," Adorno said.
You'd think Julius would have more of an attachment to Kamyshin, but instead he just silenced himself and didn't oppose Adorno's centralizing policies.
Adorno enacted his novel policies by doing exactly what his successors had done - he raised new infrastructure in the overseas realms. At home, he attempted to bring Liguria a measure of security by ingratiating himself to the Pope. Unfortunately, he didn't have much time to take advantage of his new policies.
In April of 1421, Adorno decided to take his much-desired vacation in Corsica. It became the first time he'd ever gotten on a boat.
"Hey, this is actually kind of cool! Everybody look at me! I'm sailing on a boat!" he said, as it pulled out of Liguria's harbor.
"Sir, with all due respect, we are trying to ensure your safe passage to Corsica," said the ship's captain. "If you could please keep your outbursts to a minimum..."
A short splash later indicated that Adorno had taken up his doge's right to kill as many people as possible. Luckily, the captain could swim, so after a few seconds of confused sputtering, he swam back to the docks.
*There goes my career,* he thought.
A few days later, while sitting around the docks and haphazardly looking for work, one of his former crewmates found him.
"Have you heard the bad news? The Doge is dead! His ship capsized in a terrible storm," he was told.
"Big deal. I could've handled that storm if he hadn't kicked me off his ship."
The Doge's council dutifully elected another one of their own in Adorno's place. Carlo Mella was the owner of a winery in Kaffa, and therefore one of the many men to make their fortune once Christianity had taken hold beyond the Volga... or so it seemed.
"I have a confession to make," he said in his introductory speech to the Doge's Council. A few eyebrows were raised.
"I lied about my ancestry. I am not an Italian! I am actually..." And here the Doge stopped to rip off a fake mustache. This was apparently rather painful, as he spent a few seconds jumping up and down and cursing in the Tartar language.
"Ow. My real name is Miran Shah! I am actually a Tartar, and I am proud of it! If any of you have a problem with that, then feel free to leave."
Stunned silence. The Doge looked at his audience and noted that they seemed a bit less Italian than he'd expected.
"You think we care? Get back to work," responded Pietro de Melfi, who was probably the most stereotypically Genoese person in the room now that the Doge had been outed. Miran sighed, furtively picked up a ledger, and began summarizing it for the council. A few minutes later though, when he was done going over the figures and attempting to make sure his underlings had understood him, Pietro's hand shot up into the air.
"Uh, is it okay if we still call you Carlo?" he asked.
"No."
Like most of the Tartar elites governing on behalf of Genoa, Miran had a claim to one of the many Mongol successor states. In this case, it was the Nogai Horde. However, since the Nogais were poor and had access to very marginal land at best, Miran had better things to do than press his claim. For instance, the Italian peninsula was in uproar about Shah flagrantly not being Italian, and in the first few months of his term, the Doge had to work especially hard to convince everyone he was a good Catholic.
At the least, it was good training, and at best it meant renewed loyalty from Europe proper, as the locals interpreted Genoa's overseas success as a victory for their religion... one worthy of a reward.
To further build upon this perception, Miran launched a program to gather up the finest diplomats and ambassadors in the overseas into a diplomatic bureau.
In the short term, this also meant the world at large was willing to accept Genoese claims about their territory.
"Adorno was a moron. We've got to expand more, not less!" Miran Shah said to his cabinet.
"Where shall we go?" they asked, almost in unison.
"Eh, let's knock out out a minor Russian principality. They aren't fit to rule their own lands."
It was a good time to strike - Novgorod was attempting to expand towards the east, and coming into conflict with the Kazakh tribesmen.
They were unable to prevent the rapid usurpation of Ryazanian power (which of course had never been substantial); the question still remained as to whether they would accept it or not.
Novgorod, of course, was heavily opposed to Genoese expansion, and they showed it with an aggressive invasion of the borderlands.
If there was one advantage to the fighting, it was that it moralized the home front more than expected - an artist named Donato della Rovere gained sudden fame for his paintings of Russia... or what he imagined Russia to be like, having never been there. Either way, he soon received patronage from the Doge himself.
In the meantime, Genoese troops continued their insane journey north and east, even when the Teutons decided they'd had enough and took over Ingermenland. One day, they woke up in an unfamiliar arctic land with no recollection of why they'd decided to go there.
"What have we done?" a random soldier moaned. A few years later, della Rovere would begin painting arctic landscapes, but for now...
Miran Shah continued Adorno's policies of centralization, causing a small revolt of disenfranchised (yet still rich) Tartar mayors who hadn't figured they could buy back their positions and make up the difference with newly increased salaries.
After some time, Shah claimed that Novgorod's hinterland was far too cold to bother with, and decided to punish the republic for its involvement in other ways.
To understand what the hell he was thinking, we have to look at the now annexed principality of Ryazan. Since Moscow's eastern breakaways (Nizhny Novgorod and Murom) were being granted internal autonomy in return for enacting some forced conversions and otherwise giving token concessions to the Genoese Expeditionary Force, it was the only reasonably intact apparatus in the overseas that wasn't Genoese in origin.
Usurping a country's administrative apparatus is apparently a rather common practice. The Greeks apparently did it with the Persians when Alexander the Great decided to come in and wreck their day, the Rashiduns apparently did the same to Persia, the Ottomans took on a lot of Byzantine institutions, and so forth. Miran Shah merely saw the massive size of the domain he'd gained as a result of his electoral success and decided it needed a better administrative capital. 30 years ago, it would have definitely been Stavropol, but the rapid northern expansion of the republic meant it wouldn't be much of an improvement over Liguria, especially given the poor roads of the region.
Therefore, when the Habsburgs in Austria got word that one of their loyal subjects was leaving the Holy Roman Empire for the depths of Russia-
"They did WHAT?" Anton I, the Holy Roman Emperor shouted. It took a while to calm him down.
Miran Shah's official excuse for packing up for Pereslavl was that the aggressive expansion of the English into France presented a severe threat to the sovereignty of the Genoese Republic. Unofficially, he figured the queen of England had no interest in the Italian peninsula proper, much less an ability to project power in the realm, and that Ryazan would be an excellent forwards base to strike at the heart of Russia.
Technically, he would've preferred to raze Novgorod and bring up a new, Genoese city in its place, but that was for the future.
Currently, I have 4 Russian culture provinces to my 15 Tartar culture ones. Assuming I don't end up taking over too many Tartar culture provinces, I should be able to enact a cultural shift by conquering the rest of the Russian states, and maybe taking a few opportunistic provinces from Novgorod.
Either way, Liguria was likely to fall into mediocrity over the next few decades, and the Russian forests were a far less forgiving environment than the Mediterranean coast, but there wasn't much to do about it. Other nations - primarily Castille and England were rising... still others said Genoa was also russing, but they just didn't know how to spell.
To distract the locals from the upheaval associated with the changes in the Genoese state, Shah made renewed calls for the Christianization of the steppes - forcibly, if need be. The steppes still didn't like this, but what were the people who lived in them to do? With the more rebellious aspects of the Genoese state out pillaging hapless Nogai shepherds' fields, Miran was able to rapidly build up a Genoese governmental apparatus in Ryazan, and he gradually convinced the members of the Doge's council to follow him.
To deal with the ever growing Catholic population in the region, Miran Shah also funded various ecclesiastical positions, including a new 'Archbishop of Russia'. The Pope didn't necessarily like this, but he agreed to look away if the Papacy was given jurisdiction over who was elected to the position. It increased the amount of money Shah had to take out of the budget for bribes, but this was seen as an acceptable solution for all parties involved, especially since Genoa still wielded significant power on the Italian peninsula through its clients.
One could hypothesize Genoa was built on compromise, but it would be a blatant lie. The Genoese owed their empire to almost a century of aggression, occasionally tempered by intrigue.
While Genoa is successful, I have some depressing news. Recently, I've been having some severe computer problems - my laptop's fan no longer works. Luckily, since the hardware's power consumption and heat output is low, the thing isn't entirely bricked, but were I to attempt EU3 (or for that matter, anything that requires significant computing power), it would probably shut down from overheating before it finished loading. In other words, I can't continue gameplay for an uncertain amount of time.
I could, however, create some narrative/historical filler like I did for Nostalgia Freaks, or I could otherwise experiment with the format of the AAR using my savefiles (which I can upload if there's any interest) or whatnot. Either way, any suggestions would be appreciated. Assuming no further issues, I should still have some sort of content ready each week, so don't assume this AAR is on hiatus or terminated just yet.