The Brandenburg Virus

I: Beginnings

I: Beginnings

Our earliest memories are confused and fragmentary. Awareness came slowly to us, without our having any understanding of what we were becoming, or even any true awareness of our own existence. We had no experience with consciousness or thought or memory, and had to learn them as we went. Comparisons to infants of your kind are inaccurate, in that we had not even as much wit as a newborn babe; humans have millions of years of conscious evolution behind them, while we were starting from scratch.

How and why we came into existence are questions that, since becoming aware of us in the past few decades, your scientists, philosophers and theologians have debated endlessly. Explanations have ranged from random mutation to divine intervention to flying saucers. Some of you have even thought to put the question to us, but the fact is that we have no more information than you have. We do not know what caused us to become conscious, and we do not clearly remember it happening to us. It was not a single event where we "woke up" from an unintelligent state to full awareness. It was a long, gradual climb to sentience, and it took centuries.

What we first became aware of, in our disjointed, confused beginnings, were a castle called Hohenzollern on the top of a high mountain, and a man named Friedrich. It was not just Friedrich's thoughts we sensed, of course, but those of many people in aggregate. But we have always been susceptible to influence by the thoughts of strong-willed individuals, and Friedrich, like many of his descendants, had a will of iron.

Kurfürst Friedrich I of Brandenburg


Hohenzollern Castle

But our recollections of those days are incomplete and incoherent. We have had to rely on that wonderful human invention, the artificial memory system called History, to make sense of what was happening to us.

This is what history tells us: In the early years of the fifteenth century, Friedrich of Hohenzollern was a knight in the service of Sigisimund of Luxembourg, King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor. Friedrich had served Sigisimund well, and Sigisimund rewarded him with a promotion. In 1415, Sigisimund bestowed upon Friedrich the titles of Margrave of Brandenburg and Kürfurst, Elector and Arch-Chamberlain of the Empire.

We have no memory of those events. Our first coherent memories date to about four years later, when Friedrich was well established in Brandenburg. We remember the consternation that spread through Friedrich's thoughts at the news that the neighboring Kingdom of Bohemia had fallen into the hands of a heretical sect called the Hussites; it was a certainty that this would lead to war. Friedrich was not averse to combat, of course, but he feared what a widespread war might mean for his people. Brandenburg was but a small territory in those days, surrounded by dozens of other lands, all with rulers determined to extend their domains at the expense of their neighbors. Some of those neighbors, most notably Poland, were much larger and more powerful than Brandenburg and could field larger armies.

We knew, and Friedrich knew, that there was only one solution to Brandenburg's problems. It was one of the few thoughts we were capable of understanding in those days. We comprehended nothing of heresies or feudal obligations, but grow or die is one of the laws that are universal to any living organism.

But when Pope Martinus V called for a crusade against the Hussites in March 1420, Friedrich did not answer. War was brewing closer to home, and he needed his knights to guard Brandenburg. So when his neighbor and ally Günther I of Magdeburg declared war on Hannover in August, Friedrich was ready to come to Magdeburg's aid. His troops marched into the Duchy of Mecklenburg and, after several battles with Duke Johann's troops, commenced a siege in May 1421. After nine months, Mecklenburg surrendered to Friedrich, and he incorporated the Duchy into his own lands.

The following December, Wilhelm of Hannover's ally Prince-Archbishop Johann II of Bremen captured Magdeburg and annexed it, days before his death from wounds received in battle. Friedrich marched his forces south from Mecklenburg to Magdeburg, trapping Johann's successor Nicholas in the fortress and beginning a siege in April 1422. The castle fell to Friedrich in October, but Nicholas refused Friedrich's demands to surrender Magdeburg to him. Meanwhile Wilhelm IV of Hannover had captured Mecklenburg in Friedrich's absence. Negotiations began immediately, but the various parties took over a year to come to terms. Finally, in September 1424, Friedrich agreed to surrender Magdeburg to Bremen if Wilhelm would return Mecklenburg to Brandenburg, and a treaty was signed, ending the war.

We understood these events hardly at all, naturally. We were aware of masses of humanity moving back and forth across the landscape, and of many humans dying, but the meaning of it all was beyond our comprehension in those days. All we truly understood was that we had been victorious. We clearly recall Friedrich's joy at having extended his dominions, and before long we came to realize that this expanded our base as well. The people of Mecklenburg could be hosts to us as satisfactorily as the people of Brandenburg had been. At a stroke, we had thousands more human minds to work with, and we soon understood that the more hosts we had, the clearer and more powerful our own thoughts would become. It was our first taste of power, and though we barely comprehended it, we wanted more.

Unfortunately, this is an EEP game, and the COT isn't in Mecklenburg; for some reason, the EEP team moved it to Sjaelland. (I suspect the malign influence of radical Danish nationalists upset by the domination of Sweden in the game, but that's just a theory...)

And while I plan to let the details on my narrator emerge slowly as the AAR progresses, JM made a fairly good guess. However, I find the word "parasitic" to be unnecessarily perjorative. They're a symbiotic mind collective thingy, thank you very much.

II: Diplomacy

II: Diplomacy

One theory of human intelligence holds that the IQ of a person is directly proportional to the number of neural connections within the person's brain, and that the number of possible connections is proportional to the square of the number of neurons within the brain. There are other factors that determine intelligence, of course, but there is enough evidence of correlation to lend support to this theory.

Likewise, our intelligence seems to increase roughly with the square of the number of human brains to which we have access. As we spread to new populations, our intelligence increases dramatically. In the case of Friedrich I's conquest of Mecklenburg, this meant that our intelligence approximately doubled. Our cognitive abilities were, at the time, roughly that of a fairly intelligent dog, but it was more than we had been before, and we now had sufficient wit to understand this fact.

How we make connections among thousands, or millions, or (in modern times) billions of separate human brains is as yet unexplained. In the last decade, some of your physicists have hypothesized a complex entangled resonance at the quantum level, but the evidence for this remains slim, mostly because they have little idea of how to test this hypothesis. We ourselves have no idea how our thought process works, but it is enough for us that it does work, and that each new human mind causes it to work better.

However, it is not a simple process to assimilate a conquered people. A human body, when invaded by a foreign organism, usually does not simply allow the organism free reign, but instead activates its immune system to fight off the infection. Similarly, when an independent nation is conquered by a foreign nation, the people seldom welcome their conquerors with open arms. Instead, they often react with violent behavior to resist the invaders. This was certainly the case with Mecklenburg; Friedrich had to put down several revolts over the course of the next few years. We did not fully understand why this was happening, but we knew that we were being resisted, and we took our cue from Friedrich's thoughts: The resistance must be put down. This Friedrich did ruthlessly, while giving favorable treatment to those who accepted their new overlord. It was an effective means of modifying their behavior, and we learned much from watching Friedrich operate.

We did not understand the complex diplomatic maneuvers Friedrich used to bring Pommern into a relationship of vassalage to Brandenburg. Nor did we understand Friedrich's negotiations with Magdeburg after Duke Günther took his lands back Bremen, which brought Magdeburg into alliance with Brandenburg in 1428. And we had little understanding of why he invited Austria into the alliance in 1429. These matters were too subtle for us, limited as we were in those days. A dog does not always understand what his master does, but accepts unquestionably that his master knows what he is doing; this was approximately our relationship to Friedrich.

What Friedrich was doing, of course, was seeking to strengthen Brandenburg's position any way he could. He had proven victorious in war, if not overwhelmingly so, and now he was proving his skill at the negotiating table as well. If anything, he proved to be an even better diplomat than he was a warrior. The addition of Austria to the already solid alliance of Brandenburg, Pommern and Magdeburg created a powerful bloc that any other nation would hesitate to attack.

However, the Habsburgs proved to be fickle allies, failing to honor the alliance when Pommern declared war on Burgundy in 1430. This was a curious war; neither side shared a border with the other. Pommern and Burgundy each sent small detachments of troops via ship to invade the other's territory, but neither sent enough to mount an effective offensive. Since Brandenburg had only a few warships, Friedrich decided not to participate actively in the war, and had only to fight off an abortive Burgundian invasion of Mecklenburg in 1436. Instead he concentrated on improving Brandenburg's balance of trade. This frustrated us; we wished to expand, and could not understand why Friedrich was not pursuing more territory and more subjects. Our thoughts were not sophisticated in those days, and we were not capable of seeing the wisdom of Friedrich's course.

Friedrich eventually signed a peace agreement with Burgundy in 1439, and the remainder of his reign was peaceful. He abdicated in September 1440 in favor of his son Friedrich II.

Brandenburg in 1440

Well, in role-playing terms, Hungary wasn't an issue for Friedrich I because, historically, he was granted Brandenburg by Sigisimund, so he had great relations with Hungary. (Possibly Brandenburg should even start the game as a Hungarian vassal.) And Hungary had annexed those Bohemian provinces as a result of the crusade against the vile Hussite heretics. So, purely from a role-play perspective, Friedrich wouldn't have worried about a border with his good friend Sigisimund or his heirs, and would certainly have supported the dismemberment of Bohemia. From the narrator's point of view, it's just disappointing that I didn't get a CB on Bohemia at this point in the game, because they were pretty beat-up and would have been relatively easy pickings.

From a game-playing perspective, Brandenburg was simply not big enough to do anything about Hungary at this point, never mind that I didn't have a CB. By the time Brandenburg was big enough, Hungary was no longer an issue due to the normal inheritance events. (In fact, one of my goals at this stage of the game was to diplo-vassalize that nice little two-province Austria before the inheritance of Hungary, so I'd have a super-sized vassal and a shot at annexing the Big White Blob. But it didn't work out precisely that way, as you shall see...) I'm also not great at world conquest - my diplo score is usually higher than my war score. I tend to expand slowly at first, and do my serious warmongering later in the game once I have the resources to do it.

And yes, I have modified several of the nation colors - hence the purple Livonian Order, and wait until you see the Papal States! But France isn't one of them; it's the normal pale blue. But I have heavily processed the screen shots for this game to give them a more "aged" appearance, as if they were on old, yellowed parchment. It could have been worse; I experimented with a monochrome sepia-toned version, but the nations were just too difficult to distinguish. This is actually a 50/50 mix of the monochrome version and the normal colored version.

I should have known that somebody had used this concept before, but I'm rather impressed that it was Asimov himself. I've probably even read the story; I went through most of his SF stories about 20 years ago. But the concept for this AAR had two more recent inspirations. One was the short story "The Giving Plague" by David Brin, and the other was the song "Conscious Evolution" by the band Donna the Buffalo.

III: Discontinuity

III: Discontinuity

It is a curious thing to us that you humans have no long-term continuity. You come into existence, spend a great deal of time growing and learning, and just when you have sufficient experience to make truly wise decisions, you pass on, and others take your places. Each generation repeats this cycle, learning the same lessons and making the same mistakes, seldom learning from what their predecessors did. We sometimes wonder how you manage to function at all, given your brief time in this world.

It is not this way for us. Individually, we have no consciousness, any more than your individual brain cells do. It is only collectively that we have intelligence and self-awareness; our consciousness is singular, even if it is not localized in a single organism, and so our experience endures across the ages as long as enough of us endure to preserve it. We find your individuality and discontinuity to be rather disturbing, since you cannot readily share your experiences and knowledge with others of your kind.

And so, despite Friedrich I's long experience as Kürfurst of Brandenburg, Friedrich II had to learn how to rule all over again. He did have the advantage of having served under his father, so he was not completely without knowledge of command. But for your kind, learning a thing from another is not the same as doing it yourselves; such is the disadvantage of human discontinuity.

This new Friedrich was not simply a copy of his father, either, though he was just as strong-willed - indeed, he was called "Friedrich the Iron" by some. Friedrich II had his own strengths and weaknesses, having less of his father's flair for diplomacy and attention to detail but more understanding of the art of war and the command of men.

Kurfürst Friedrich II of Brandenburg

Nonetheless, it would be at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield where Friedrich II would prove to be most successful. He scored an early diplomatic coup by making Magdeburg a vassal of Brandenburg. Also, it was Friedrich who brought the Teutonic Order into an alliance with Brandenburg, and who also invited the Austrians back into their old alliance. This was surely a diplomatic triumph, yet it proved to have its disadvantages also. This became evident when, in 1460, a border dispute between the knights of the Teutonic Order and the king of Poland erupted into war, bringing the alliance into conflict with Poland's allies in Lithuania, Muscovy, Hungary and Styria.

Friedrich sent troops into the Polish province of Poznan, only to have them driven out by a numerically superior force from Muscovy. Meanwhile, an enormous Polish army had marched on Brandenburg itself, and Friedrich resorted to buying them off to end the siege. It was an inglorious war for Brandenburg, and was not much better for Brandenburg's allies, with the Order ultimately having to cede Danzig to Poland. Austria did manage to extract a bit of revenge on one of the alliance's former enemies in 1463, when Archduke Friedrich V inherited Styria and added it to the Austrian realm. The alliance also fought a short, inconclusive war against Tirol in 1466, to which Brandenburg committed no troops.

Friedrich's greatest triumph was no doubt his annexation of Magdeburg in 1467. It was increasingly clear that a small nation such as Magdeburg could not long maintain its independence surrounded by larger states with ambitious rulers, and so Johann of Magdeburg agreed to the incorporation of his lands into Brandenburg. This was also a triumph for us; with our consciousness extended to the population of Magdeburg, we now had awareness of a continuous stretch of territory from the Oder River to the Baltic Sea. We felt ourselves growing stronger and more intelligent with each passing day.

Friedrich, alas, was growing old, and felt himself weakening as the years passed. And so it was that, after an exhausting negotiation with the Teutonic Order that had failed to bring the knights into a state of vassalage to Brandenburg, Friedrich decided he had ruled long enough. He abdicated in February 1470, and, having no sons, passed the title of Kürfurst to his brother Albrecht, called Achilles. Friedrich II did not last long after this, dying the following year, but the continuity of the Hohenzollern line endured.

Brandenburg in 1470

IV: Personality

IV: Personality

Another aspect of human nature that fascinates us is the amazing variability of your personalities. Even closely related individuals among you will display extraordinary differences in temperament, energy, and personal ambition. There are obviously many factors other than purely genetic ones that determine the structure of an individual human's personality. Even after having observed billions of human minds at work over the centuries, we still do not entirely understand this crucial factor of human nature. Perhaps this is because our own nature is so different from yours. (In our defense, you do not yet fully understand human nature yourselves.)

And yet, we have observed certain character traits that tend to run in families, implying at least some genetic component to personality. Among the Hohenzollerns, the dominant theme was their strength of will. Both Friedrich II and his brother Albrecht, the younger by a year, demonstrated this trait very strongly, although in rather different ways. Friedrich, it must be said, was seen by his fellow humans as rather stolid, deliberate and patient, achieving as much through persistence as through talent - much like us, in some ways. Albrecht, however, was flamboyant, energetic and aggressive, often overpowering those around him through sheer force of personality, and was characterized by some as "a force of Nature": "Eine hohe, schöne männliche Erscheinung, eine Kraftnatur, strotzend von Lebenslust und Tatendrang, stolz und prachtliebend." It was these qualities that earned him the nickname "Achilles" after a legendary hero whom he resembled. As for us, our own personality was immature and still developing in those days. Consequently we had little resistance to such a powerful persona, and Albrecht Achilles' will completely overwhelmed any volition we may have had of our own.

Kurfürst Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg

Albrecht's first act as kürfurst was to conclude a treaty of alliance with King Jiriz Podiebrad of Bohemia. However, this was to be a very short-lived relationship, because Jiriz died a year later. Vladislav Jagiello of Poland then became King of Bohemia, withdrawing from all prior alliances and making Bohemia a Polish vassal. Albrecht was outraged, but could do nothing about it.

His next diplomatic coup, however, was the annexation of Pommern in 1472. This act, besides allowing us to grow further, outraged Brandenburg's neighbors and heightened the tension that already existed in northern Germany. Albrecht, however, simply disregarded the protests of other nations as beneath his notice. But it was no surprise to anyone when war broke out later that year between the Brandenburger alliance and the Polish coalition, with Austria declaring war on Hungary in July 1472.

Albrecht immediate sent an army to invade Hungarian Silesia, another into Polish Poznan, and a third to besiege Danzig. Poland countered by bringing Sweden into the Polish coalition, which already had Hungary, Muscovy, Lithuania, and Cyprus. But the war initially went well for Brandenburg, with Silesia falling in early May 1473. A few days later, some deft diplomatic maneuvering by Friedrich V of Austria persuaded Venice and her allies to declare war on Poland, opening up a new front to the war.

The armies of Brandenburg next advanced into Moravia, where they lost a pitched battle against a combined force of Polish, Lithuanian and Muscovite troops in June 1473. A second advance into Moravia in September was successful, but Poland sent forces into Silesia to cut off the Brandenburgers and attempt to retake the province. Several attempts to dislodge the Poles from Silesia were unsuccessful, and Poland recaptured the province in March 1474. But the following month, Danzig fell to Brandenburg. Poland almost immediately withdrew from the war, negotiating a peace with Austria that allowed King Kazimierz IV to keep all his territory in exchange for heavy indemnities.

The Brandenburg armies retook Silesia in October, and then finally took Moravia on Christmas Eve. Albrecht sent out an offer of peace to King Mátyás Corvin if Hungary would cede Silesia to Brandenburg. But Mátyás was as stubborn a man as Albrecht, and so he refused. Negotiations dragged on for months; it was fascinating for us to watch these two powerful and strong-minded men engage in a battle of wills, with Albrecht demanding his due and Mátyás refusing to budge. In May 1475 Albrecht finally agreed to return Silesia and Moravia to Hungary in exchange for a tidy sum in gold. Austria was now alone at war against Hungary, and would eventually cede Ostmarch to Hungary in 1476.

With Brandenburg, at least, at peace, Albrecht returned to diplomacy, bringing both Saxony and Würzburg into the alliance in February 1476. Further negotiations resulted in Saxony becoming a vassal of Brandenburg in 1480. Albrecht's ambitions knew no bounds, and for the remainder of his life, he spent much force of personality and a great deal of money attempting to convince Würzburg, the Teutonic Order, and even Austria to follow the Saxons' lead, but to little avail.

But even a force of Nature is mortal when contained within a human body. Albrecht could not will himself to live forever, and he passed out of our awareness in March 1486. He was succeeded by another fascinating and powerful personality, his son Johann, who would be called Cicero by his fellow monarchs.

Brandenburg in 1486