great, thanks. looking forwards to them.
Btw fyi, the screens are WIP. I chceked the things we discussed and will rename some counties (Kwararafa and West Igbo)... just to save you time writing it.
[Map] Ibn Battuta's Legacy 2 - An alternative vanilla map WIP
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Btw fyi, the screens are WIP. I chceked the things we discussed and will rename some counties (Kwararafa and West Igbo)... just to save you time writing it.
Just to nitpick, arabization of population wasn't so prominent until the middle of 11th century (Der Nahe und Mittlere Osten - Heinz Halm), so if one village spoke african romance until 18th century and arguably latin speaking christians had significant enough numbers during the 12th century to aid the norman sicillian conquest, then them having counties in the earliest startdate would make sense. After the arab reconquest though, both the remaining christians and latin speaking population went poof (aside from small pockets) and by 14th century were practically nonexistent.
...
P.S. I also saw your comment about your irl situation, take it easy XD
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Hi,
yes, the fact that the Maghreb wasn't arabized until the Hilalian migration is very well known. It is also known that this describes arabization of Maghrebi Berbers and rising influence of Arab tribes against Berber tribes who were the major force beffore that. Not Latin speaking Christians. Understanding it this way is misunderstanding the history of Maghreb caused by seing it in deformed context.
Majority of population of the region were Berbers, mainly inrural areas, who were firmly islamized very soon during already the 8th-9th century. They struggled with Arab speaking elite in the capitals and started losing ground against Arab tribes only in 11th century. That's what Arabization of Maghreb means.
Then there were the towns and cities, which had larger share of latin speaking population, than the rural predominantly Berber communities. And here the accademia distinguishes between major urban centers and political capitals on the one hand, and small provincial towns on the other. Taking aside Kairouan as a unique case - a city founded by Arabs as garrison city, with large portion of original Arab population and local population which was more arabized than inhabitatns of all the other 3 groups.
The principal towns were being arabized already before 11th century, with Arab immigrants and settlers from the east, while the small ones, or those whose importance declined (like Gafsa in particular), remained largely as they were with their latin speaking population and christians remaining a majority.
I have noted several studies concentrating on these marginalized and declining towns and about a dozen of isolated rural communitues and I saw number of people generalizing these case studies to the whole of Maghreb.
I think I don't need to explain why such approach is as wrong as the old approach of generalizing the level of arabization after Kairouan and the ruling elite which wrote in Arabic.
The fact is that before this Arabization of the mid 11th century the political matters in Maghreb were firmly in hands of local Berber tribes and dynasties, the Arab governors of Kairouan and their garrisons and Arab speaking immigrant dynasties such as Rustamids and Idrisids.
The townspeople of marginal provincial cities would - in terms of CK3 world - surely deserve to have the latin speaking Christian population to be represented on barony level in 5-12 baronies across Maghreb in 867 and 1-2 baronies in 1066, if religion and culture were defined by barony instead of county level.
But since all of those towns are surrounded by rural areas with their Berber tribal populations, it would be misleading to have those entire counties other than Berber majority. Among other reasons also because the Berber tribes were the ones holding political influence and power in those provinces.
That's why almost all provinces have Berber cultures and only the exceptional Kairouan is made Maghrebi... among other reasons to prevent the Arab governors from converting to Berber culture.
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this is, again misunderstanding of the events in Ifrikiya.
First, there was no such thing as Arab reconquest. And the closest thing to being called reconquest (the Hilalian migration/invasion which led to Arabization of the region) happened before Sicilian incursions (which I'd avoid calling a conquest) and was actually a direct cause it it.
After the Arab tribes of Banu Hilal and Sulaym seized the inland of Ifrikiya, the power of previous rulers - Berber Zirid and Hammadid dynasties became limited to few coastal cities.
What followed was a 100 years of chaos of various Arab tribes warring each other, often in coalitions with or against Berber tribes, who tried to recover from their losses, often hiring Sicilian mercenaries to fight for them.
In the chaos that followed, some of the minor rulers of some cities asked for Sicilian garrisons to stay and pledged alleigance to their master, the king of Sicily, to proteft them. Then the Sicilians themselves used the chaos, sometimes for raids, sometimes they turned them into temporary occupation of several coastal towns, sometimes the Sicilian mercenaries seized the power for themselves. Whatever the form, it usually lasted very few years.
Only in one single instance this occupation lasted slightly more than a decade and the few towns which didn't expell the Sicilian garrisons by themselves soon turned for help of the rising power of the Almohads (Berbers), and were conquered by them by 1160. (is this by any chance what you considered the Arab reconquest?)
It isn't impossible that remnants of Christian populations of some of those cities worked as mediators between their Berber or Arab rulers and the Sicilians, especially when in Gafsa they probably still were s majority) but I haven't yet read a word about Maghrebi Christians actively aiding 'Sicilian conquest'. I have to admit, though, that my knowledge is limited as I take my information from studies about history of the Maghreb and I haven't studied Sicilian sources which might interpret the events otherwise. If you know about some such case, I'll be happy to learn about it.
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I mean you are probably more informed about this than I am, since, unlike me, you actually do have more knowledge about said part of the world. I just picked some things from memory and mashed them together with some quick google search enhancement. Reading your points, it looks like I was wrong, and especially wrong concerning "reconquest" where I just wrongly assumed that since today Tunis is arab speaking country and sicillians were pushed away by muslims, I mistakenly though they were arabs. (mission google search enhancement failed misserably)
This is a relatively minor thing, but could you also fix the ruler titles for Arabs? It baffles me how they gave Iranians and Maghrebis the quite reasonable "Amir e-Amiran" and "Amir al-Umara" yet the Umayyads in 867 are still called "Sultan".
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Good idea. it seems like the Andalusian culture was forgotten, writing it to my to-do-list for the time I'll be able to do more modding. Hopefully after the Christmas.
no problem. I wasn't sure, to be honest. You mentioned a German source and since I don't read German, I couldn't guess what the source wrote or not.
It's funny how our age of easy Googling works. To get great load of information about anything there's no longer any need to know the general context of those things. And that's why so many people today misjudge or misunderstand so many things and refuse to accept that they might be wrong. Knowing facts B+C+F+J makes us think that we know a lot, but knowing nothing about the whole alphabet can only shade the fact that we actually know only a fragment and the true nature of alphabet remains unknown and our conclusions can thus be entirely wrong. And nobody teaches that - our school system still concentrates more about particular facts, rather than teaching how to put them together in order to understand the whole.
I hope I wasn't too rough or patronizing. Sorry if I was. You did great job reading about very interesting stuff and trying to correct a possible error and thanks for that!
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Not at all, people get mistaken all the time, even consensus amongst the historians (or any other elite at the top of their subject for that matter) can be mistaken at some times, the most important bit is to be able to say "I was wrong" in any case though, that goes twice as true for history enthusiasts/geeks like me XD.
(A personal complaint towards myself in one aspect is that I remember considerable amounts of trivia but for whatever reason I cannot remember numbers like dates which includes even those like important battles in "czech" history that teachers so love to hammer down into kids like Wogastisburg or Sudoměř etc)
As for my "german" citation, it's from a german historian Heinz Halm who (citing wiki) is a German scholar of Islamic Studies. And his book was translated to english (not the title name for some reason). When it comes to german I can at most show a way to a pedestrian.
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I couldn't agree more! Everytime a parent utters the infamous line "makes no sense to teach knowledge to the kids, they have it at their fingertips!", my skin crawls. Context is what schools are teaching, not trivia!
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Oh yes, I also find Nubia very fascinating. After the first 3 weeks of my own reading about Nubian history I would probably agree with most your points. But since my original reading/research of the area any my firs modding overhaul of the area for CK2, I have myself invested far more time than that on the region and re-evaluated many if not most of my original assessments. And from that perspective I find the actual vanilla setup far less wrong than you seem to do.Just to back track on this for a bit, I know you guys were discussing egypt - but maybe you also have thoughts or had input into this too... I've been reading about medieval Nubia for the past 3 weeks almost non-stop - the k_nubia seems like it could use a lot of work?
-There's modern place names all over the place, arabic names for places over greek or nubian ones (which predominated at this time) - the barony selection in particular is frustrating.
-Meroe county in in Napata region instead of in the area where Meroe was located (opposite sites of the nile).
-Makuria itself is a duchy not a kingdom, same for Alodia.
-Makuria occupys the middle nile area exclusively - whilst we don't really know the borders of Makuria/Alodia, having Alodia basically sitting on the city of Soba south is a configuration i've never seen on any map of the area before - usually the border is just split from area of c_karghas or c_atabara.
-There could be more counties between Aswan and 'old Dongola' the Makurian capital, there were settlements, forts, churches, monasteries all over of Makuria - we know of over of 60 churches from records in lower nubia, and more than half a dozen bishoprics.
-K_nubia should probably also be called Dotawo and not Nubia.
And as someone slightly obssessed with Kushitic history at the moment, having k_nubia as de jure e_abyssinia gives me stomach pains lol. Not only is that empire a made up fantasy empire (acceptable in game terms, there's heaps of these due to pdx's design of having an empire for every de jure kingdom), but it's premised on 'ethiopian' hegemony, which is an insult to Kush/Nubia, which was the premier state of this region. Axum was a comparatively small trading kingdom compared to Kush, and even it's successor states. I'd like to see a e_nubia consisting of k_nubia, k_beja, and k_darfur, and leave Abyssinia for the horn.
/rant over
I will answer in more detail later when I'll have more time to check it with my sources, but from the top of my head:
- Meroe is located correctly. The Meroe you seem to be speaking about is the ancient Meroe. There was, however also a post-Meroitic Meroe, which was "in the Napata area".
- as for naming - yes, there are many Arabic names used. As far as my knowledge of the region goes, it does show the names you can usually find on the maps depicting known settlements of medieval Nubia. I need to admit, though, that the most essential book I ordered for Nubian history got lost on the way and I received it months after I had time to update my map of medieval Nubia which I passed to Paradox.
- Dotawo vs. Nubia - we are at the naming conventions such as Ghana vs. Wagadu, Bohemia vs. Čechy, Germany vs. Deutschland etc. I guess we discussed this matter. Nubia is how you find the medieval region described in 99% of both popular and academic sources, hence the name I consider correct. Also Dotawo was a name of Nobatia rather than the entire Nubia.
- more counties and baronies - sure, there certainly could be more. Especially in some parts of Nubia. OTOH from a gameplay and other perspectives, Nubia already is more powerfull than it should be compared to its neighbours.
I did spend some time considering placement of the baronies and frankly I found it difficult to increase their number significantly. I could, but increasing barony density in some areas would mean either misplacing some important settlements or gaving some of the added baronies way too small.
- As for the Alodia/Makuria border - you are right that the real border was slightly more downstream than it actually is. It was neither stable nor clear (to our knowledge), but it seems that it passed somewhere between the 6th cataract and Nile-Atbara confluence (although some maps do place it as far as 5th cataract), which means the Nile-valley area of c_abwab was in Alodia and so probably was the most upstream part of c_atbara. However - quick checking my maps tells me that there aren't any known settlements on the left bank of the Nile (upstream from the confluence) to place a barony and create another county there. And without a county there it would be hard to reshuffle the duchy setup in the area
- reshufling the de jure setup, moving some counties to different duchies, making some duchies larger, or splitting them and creating slightly different kingdoms setups is something I could imagine as possible.
I know I had some other setups in my mind already but none of them I found significantly better. But I do admit that mostly I didn't want to have Makuria, Nobatia and Alodia as separate kingdoms as I sort of never minded the idea of them being in game petty kingdoms.
From another perspective, having them as actual kingdom tier titles would make the kingdoms smaller and less powerfull and hence it could bring better ballance to the area, especially in regards to Egypt and the Beja tribes to the east of Nubia.
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I'm sorry mate,
I wanted to give you a more detailed answer, but as I was going through my sources I collected over the years, I realized that getting halfway to the reply took me most of my time I saved for modding in the only day I am free for modding in the first half of january. So scrap it...
In the end I can say:
1) vast majority of your requests go beyond the goals and objectives of this mod. What's sad is that nobody knows that better than you, because with nobody have I discussed those thigs more..
2) Nubia does deserve some minor changes, but nothing anywhere near the scope nor reasoning you ask for. Not for this mod with its goals. There are other mods for the things you are asking. We can talk the details when time comes. Or maybe we can talk after you give Nubia few more months which is what I gave it before I passed my sources to Paradox, which did its own research above that.
Sadly, as most my time for modding I spent dealing and researching region which doesn't need anything but minor updates, I'm nothing but angry about myself for yet again getting carried away.
So my apologies to everyone expecting an update any time soon.
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@elvain What do you think about e_maghreb? Isn't it too expansive? Do you have any proposition for an alternative Empire setup?
If you ask just about the empire itself, the answer would be yes.
The question is, how else should the Sahara be designed in terms of empires, and it isn't as easy as to say Maghreb is excessive. I was thinking about the potential designs few times already and yes I did have several alternative setups in mind.. each of them better from one perspective and worse from another.
Since you are asking, I guess you yourself do have an alternative setup, don't you?
Uh I thought about the question but I didn't come up with anything really. I don't know a whole lot about the region. I kinda told myself it would be neat if the Empire was the same but minus Anbiya and Sahara but that's awkward. You can't really win with de jure setup.
Also don't know if the region is dense as it should be. Heard the Hilalians did a number on Ifriqiya
Also don't know if the region is dense as it should be. Heard the Hilalians did a number on Ifriqiya
As for the potential alternative designs I can see. There actually is relatively wide array of possibilities, some of them relatively simple, some more complex.
If I stick to the simple ones, here's a sketch:
There you can see that instead of one large kingdom of Sahara, there can be 2 kingdoms.
Major flaw of both these setups is that I sort of like that the kingdom of Sahara is spread across large and not very territory, which makes it hard to create. I very much like this design, because, frankly, there never was a kingdom of Sahara, except for the Garamantian kingdom in the early first millenium C.E.
In regards to Maghreb and the Saharan Berbers, the blue borders would make more sense.
Fezzan and Ghat would be their own kingdom (not sure about the name, though, perhaps Sahara), and this kingdom would remain in Maghreb empire. Note that I think it is good to have 5 kingdoms in this empire to avoid easy creation of the empire.
The second kingdom of Air, Kawar and Tibesti could be called Kawar or Tenere kingdom after the central duchy or the desert covering its vast western half. This kingdom could be part of Kanem-Bornu emire which would make good historical sense, because this area leaned towards the Sahel more than towards the north. The diwnside of this is Fezzan - if there is a kingdom stretching across this part of Sahara, it would sort of require having Fezzan part of it. Which leads us to the yellow borders
With Fezzan, the eastern Saharan kingdom would make much more sense. But! Fezzan was the essential part of the Trans-Saharan route in this area and it was conquered by Bornu in the 13th century. OTOH, it was still far more tied to the history of Maghreb and North Africa in general. Naturally. Hence, making it part of Kanem-Bornu empire instead of Maghreb empire would be very weird.
The other downside of this setup is the western kingdom. It would either have only 2 duchies (Ghat and Tadmekka) or would need at least one additional duchy. Seemingly natural choice could be Touat, which is also drawn here. But Touat was throughout this period inhabited by the desert Sanhaja, the tribes which formed the kingdom of Anbiya, the predecessor of Almoravid empire. Honestly, I don't like Touat being disconnected from Anbiya. The other choice is the duchy of Air. This would be quite natural thing to do. The tiny problem is that it is disconnected from the other 2 duchies. It has a solution, but that would bring more problems again... so let's stop here for now.
anyway - the possible alternatives all have some positives, but considering the negatives they bring, I don't think any of them is a clear better solution.
If I stick to the simple ones, here's a sketch:
There you can see that instead of one large kingdom of Sahara, there can be 2 kingdoms.
Major flaw of both these setups is that I sort of like that the kingdom of Sahara is spread across large and not very territory, which makes it hard to create. I very much like this design, because, frankly, there never was a kingdom of Sahara, except for the Garamantian kingdom in the early first millenium C.E.
In regards to Maghreb and the Saharan Berbers, the blue borders would make more sense.
Fezzan and Ghat would be their own kingdom (not sure about the name, though, perhaps Sahara), and this kingdom would remain in Maghreb empire. Note that I think it is good to have 5 kingdoms in this empire to avoid easy creation of the empire.
The second kingdom of Air, Kawar and Tibesti could be called Kawar or Tenere kingdom after the central duchy or the desert covering its vast western half. This kingdom could be part of Kanem-Bornu emire which would make good historical sense, because this area leaned towards the Sahel more than towards the north. The diwnside of this is Fezzan - if there is a kingdom stretching across this part of Sahara, it would sort of require having Fezzan part of it. Which leads us to the yellow borders
With Fezzan, the eastern Saharan kingdom would make much more sense. But! Fezzan was the essential part of the Trans-Saharan route in this area and it was conquered by Bornu in the 13th century. OTOH, it was still far more tied to the history of Maghreb and North Africa in general. Naturally. Hence, making it part of Kanem-Bornu empire instead of Maghreb empire would be very weird.
The other downside of this setup is the western kingdom. It would either have only 2 duchies (Ghat and Tadmekka) or would need at least one additional duchy. Seemingly natural choice could be Touat, which is also drawn here. But Touat was throughout this period inhabited by the desert Sanhaja, the tribes which formed the kingdom of Anbiya, the predecessor of Almoravid empire. Honestly, I don't like Touat being disconnected from Anbiya. The other choice is the duchy of Air. This would be quite natural thing to do. The tiny problem is that it is disconnected from the other 2 duchies. It has a solution, but that would bring more problems again... so let's stop here for now.
anyway - the possible alternatives all have some positives, but considering the negatives they bring, I don't think any of them is a clear better solution.
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Sahara and the Maghreb are among my most favourite areas of interest and I have been researching it for rougly a decade... and since I started modding CK2 8 years ago I have been thinking about an ideal setup. The one you see in vanilla is very, very close to what I have been suggesting to the devs for years (it is an improved version of what I designed for them for CK2 Holy Fury - something I didn't dare suggesting myself back then).
There are possible alternatives. For instance, if it was just me, I'd prefer to have only 2 kingdoms in the Maghreb proper, instead of 3. As for this design, Anbiya is very reasonable part of Maghreb - it was the base of the Almoravids for instance. The inner Sahara still needs to be part of some empire and Maghreb is the least bad choice. The good choice would be no empire at all, if you ask me.
As for density - I can imagine Sahara being a lot more dense as well as a lot less dense with provinces, depending design choices. This design is very sober and reasonable compromise of having the Sahara primarily as a barrier, yet having all the main necessary corridors present. If the game ever gets mechanics to better deal with desert people, I can imagine changing the map design. As for now, I already changed what I would want changed. (I might add one or two baronies to Fezzan and a corridor connecting Siwa to Awjila and Bahiriya respectively, but that's about it.
As for Ifrikiya - considering the sources I have amassed and read over the last decade or something, I am pretty sure it is as dense as it should be with the game's level of detail. Like in the case of Egypt, few more baronies could be added, but not many and the areas where they could be added are already on the edge of maximum density, if the game is to be playable. For a minimalistic mod this still aims to be, I don't see a reason to change it. Especially since this design pretty much fits my own research.
If you do have some particular suggestions about things missing or anything, we can talk about it.
I hope it won't sound rude or anything like that, but please, I don't have much time to spare. I still haven't managed to properly update the mod (although it is working) and am sorry for that. Thanks for keeping it alive by being interested. Usually giving an outline of some alternative design takes an hour or three, roughly the same time it took me to fully code all the files for the Nubia update (just coding, not counting the research. However, spending the little time I have on requests based on "I don't know a whole lot... I kinda told myself it would be neat ..." is something I can't afford. So please try to avoid it, if possible. I'm very sorry.
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Uh do you think it ne
No problem I understand. Hope you have a lot of success.
Nubia update sketch
After a long while I finally have something I can share with you, guys,
Thanks to @Black7Emperor7 I realized that Nubia now is worth an empire, so I reconstructed the area a little.
Now when Blemmyia was already strenghtened a little I even agreed to slightly adjust not just the big dejure entities of empires, kingdoms and duchies, but also added very few counties and baronies to areas, where I got some additional sources...
All in all, here I present the empire of Nubia with its 4 kingdoms:
Nubia/Makuria, Alodia and Blemmyia and Darfur as kingdoms within Nubian sphere of influence.
You can also see that the border between Makuria and Alodia - which should be between the 5th and 6th cataracts - has moved slightly downstream.
This change was allowed by addition of 3 new baronies in the area and 2 new counties - Keraba and Bayuda, which allowed me to create a new duchy of Abwab in Lower Alodia.
and in order to make the borders smooth, I had to move the county of Atbara to the Shamir duchy:
On the last screenshot you can also see that I renamed the county of Meroë to Makuria, so it won't cause confusion with ancient Meroë, which is upstream the Nile in the area on the border of Keraba and Abwab counties.
I decided not to make Nobatia a separate kingdom, though. Although I believe that many would think it better, I think that this kingdom would be way too small. Its 12 baronies are already on the edge of possible/playable density and adding more would make it hard to click on those provinces. It would be possible to move the border-county of Sai from Makuria to Nobatia, but still I think that even 15 baronies in 6 counties is little too few for a kingdom.
I made the exception in case of Benin, but that was an essential state and center of power and civilization. Nobatia was influential, yet I don't think it was exceptional enough for a de jure kingdom.
Question:
Lastly - I am considering to split Wadi el-Milk in 2 tiny counties so it could become a duchy, but mainly for just cosmetics - with it being a separate duchy, rather than a county under Makuria, it will make Makuria look less awfull in the duchy map view. OTOH I don't think it's enough to make it a separate duchy. What do you think?
Thanks to @Black7Emperor7 I realized that Nubia now is worth an empire, so I reconstructed the area a little.
Now when Blemmyia was already strenghtened a little I even agreed to slightly adjust not just the big dejure entities of empires, kingdoms and duchies, but also added very few counties and baronies to areas, where I got some additional sources...
All in all, here I present the empire of Nubia with its 4 kingdoms:
Nubia/Makuria, Alodia and Blemmyia and Darfur as kingdoms within Nubian sphere of influence.
You can also see that the border between Makuria and Alodia - which should be between the 5th and 6th cataracts - has moved slightly downstream.
This change was allowed by addition of 3 new baronies in the area and 2 new counties - Keraba and Bayuda, which allowed me to create a new duchy of Abwab in Lower Alodia.
and in order to make the borders smooth, I had to move the county of Atbara to the Shamir duchy:
On the last screenshot you can also see that I renamed the county of Meroë to Makuria, so it won't cause confusion with ancient Meroë, which is upstream the Nile in the area on the border of Keraba and Abwab counties.
I decided not to make Nobatia a separate kingdom, though. Although I believe that many would think it better, I think that this kingdom would be way too small. Its 12 baronies are already on the edge of possible/playable density and adding more would make it hard to click on those provinces. It would be possible to move the border-county of Sai from Makuria to Nobatia, but still I think that even 15 baronies in 6 counties is little too few for a kingdom.
I made the exception in case of Benin, but that was an essential state and center of power and civilization. Nobatia was influential, yet I don't think it was exceptional enough for a de jure kingdom.
Question:
Lastly - I am considering to split Wadi el-Milk in 2 tiny counties so it could become a duchy, but mainly for just cosmetics - with it being a separate duchy, rather than a county under Makuria, it will make Makuria look less awfull in the duchy map view. OTOH I don't think it's enough to make it a separate duchy. What do you think?
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You've done a great job on the de jure structure, even better than what I had imagined for it - well done!
Re: Nobadia, this could be added as a titular title formed by decision, I can make this as part of my mod for sure. It's probably better this way anyway.
Re your question, do you happen to have any screens what it would look like if you split Wadi el-Milk into a duchy? Makes it easier to compare which looks prettier!
Re: Nobadia, this could be added as a titular title formed by decision, I can make this as part of my mod for sure. It's probably better this way anyway.
Re your question, do you happen to have any screens what it would look like if you split Wadi el-Milk into a duchy? Makes it easier to compare which looks prettier!
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I remember after watching a show on Nubia on the Science Channel looking for Meroë then being confused as to where it was marked to be on the Paradox maps.