The Triple Alliance finally feels the wrath of the Reich. I can only hope that the peace is extremely crippling.
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Bharat copying your government, I'm okay with. They're powerful and have helped the Reich in the past. But Persia? Oh no, they need to be shown that they are not like you.
Ming and Korea are now one! They're looking quite powerful. They haven't exactly united Asia, but it's getting there. A powerful nation either way.
Operation Sunrise Invasion is going beautifully, and Nahua-Slayer sounds cool. Jin losing is a bit depressing, but the Triple Alliance is starting to crumble under the multiple attacks.
Ming and Korea are now one! They're looking quite powerful. They haven't exactly united Asia, but it's getting there. A powerful nation either way.
Operation Sunrise Invasion is going beautifully, and Nahua-Slayer sounds cool. Jin losing is a bit depressing, but the Triple Alliance is starting to crumble under the multiple attacks.
I honestly can't see womens rights being accepted after this. I mean, that was the single greatest victory in the history of the Reich! All those, be they Europeans or otherwise, can smile in Heaven today knowing that their deaths were avenged by the benevolent Kaiserin Victoria III, may she live forvever!
Meanwhile I still can't claim Defender of the Faith for mechanics reasons. As I've said before, the Augustinian Code already has implemented the most gender equality that can reasonably be implemented in this time period. To go even further would destabilize the Reich and be incredibly anachronistic. Remember that it took the World Wars in real life for women to gain the vote in many European countries and for some minorities in some countries to get full rights.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean that society needs to be the same. In any case, women or men don't have the vote here, so there's no problem.
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Chapter 143: Sunrise Invasion, Part 2 - Containment
"Progress reports arriving. The farms of Zapotec are burning. The beaches of Tulum are burning. The plains of Tejas are burning. The jungles of Yucatan are burning. The pastures of Tlaxcala are burning. The harbors of Havana are burning. The cities of Mexico are burning. The pyramids of Xichen Itza are burning. The prisons of Guantanamo are burning. The jungles of Muisca are burning. The altepetls of the Alliance lie trampled at our feet."
-General Niketas Dalassenos
"'All this has happened before, and it will happen again.' That's what Ocuil Acatl said to my ancestors five hundred years ago. I say that to you now to repay the favor."
-Victoria III, "Nahua-Slayer," to her prisoner, Huey-tlatoani Tlacotzin I Acatl
If the fall of the southern altepetls wasn't enough for the Mexica to consider the Reich a larger threat than the Jin (for some reason, Tlacotzin had ordered his entire army to attack the Jin first), the fall of Tenochtitlan was enough. An Alliance army of about forty thousand men under the command of Acacitli Huemac was spotted in the city of Huastec. After the fall of Tenochtitlan, Tlacotzin had ordered his troops to stand down and surrender, but Huemac refused to surrender and instead attempted to retake Tenochtitlan. Victoria promptly sent one of her strategoi, Florentina Gregorios, to deal with Huemac. In March of 1772, Gregorios's forces engaged the jaguar warriors in the first clash between Roman and Mexica forces of the entire war. Huemac was skilled at shock tactics and strategic mobility, but Gregorios was better than him. On top of equaling Huemac in shock and maneuverability tactics, she was also skilled in artillery command, and her artillery corps numbered almost as much as Huemac's infantry divisions. After several days of relentless bombardment, Huemac was forced to retreat, having lost the bulk of his infantry. Over twenty thousand of the Alliance's most experienced jaguar and eagle warriors were killed in the battle at Huastec. That same day, Tawatinsuyu declared war on the Alliance, seeking revenge and the reclamation of their lost northern suyu from their weakened enemy.
Death of Wilhelm Schneider
Death of Wilhelm af Leon, surrounded by Britannian soldiers
Bombardment of Havana
On 27 July 1772, the Russians sued for peace with Scandinavia, losing several of their northern and western provinces to Scandinavia and the Commonwealth. Many in the government had already started betting on when and where the next Russian-Norse-Lithuanian war would break out.
Gallic soldiers celebrating the victory at Cotoname
Back on the mainland, the collapse of the AOG's monopoly on Asian trade led to the Hansa to research new methods of economics. Working with the Bureau of Trade, new ways of accumulating capital and managing risks were developed, giving rise to the idea of "joint stock companies," where the risk of enterprise was shared among many of the Hansa's shareholders, fueling the growth of the Frankfurt, Berlin, and Amsterdam stock exchanges. This practice quickly spread to Socotra and the AOG, both of whom hoped to repair their losses and regain control over Indian Ocean trade.
Mozart
Treaty of Paris
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Agreed, but I want to keep this as realistic as I can. I just don't think that gender equality can work out in this time period with the current socio-cultural conditions; you can't just implement something that would change society at an arbitrary point and expect people to go along with it. Maybe once we hit the 1820's I'll come up with something about this. I've got a lot of RP updates planned for the 19th century.
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The destruction of their economy and forcing the Triple Alliance to had territory over to Jin and Tawatinsuyu is great to see, but I'm surprised you got nothing yourself. I'd thought we'd see Neu Rhomania control more of the coast. Not the point of the war, I suppose.
On a minor note, Mozart! Yay!
On a minor note, Mozart! Yay!
Well the Triple Alliance won't be rolling over its neighbours for quite some time. Bankruptcy and the loss of over two dozen provinces is a major setback for them. I hope they start getting swallowed up by Jin and Tawatinsuyu.
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I would've demanded more, but I hit 100% warscore after spamming return cores. Even if I had enough to demand provinces for myself, the additions would just go into a new colonial nation, not Neu Rhomania.
Minor note...I see what you did there, though it doesn't make sense musically.
Or even, for some unholy reason, the Mayans. Fear the restored Mayan Empire!
Prediction: The Triple Alliance has a Revolution. This was far more devastating than the OTL 7 Years War.
Chapter 144: Recovery
"The Dalassenoi protect the Imperium from the barbarian hordes!"
-Newly promoted Megas Domestikos Niketas Dalassenos
"First off, it's not Imperium but Reich. And second off, the Mexica aren't even hordes."
-Crown Princess Frederica Augusta von Hohenzollern, replying to Dalssenos
Niketas Dalassenos, field marshal and Chief of the General Staff, official portrait
For his heroic efforts during Operation Sunrise Invasion, Niketas Dalassenos was promoted to Megas Domestikos. The office was vacant ever since Georgios Dalassenos, Niketas's grandfather, died some time ago. The new Megas Domestikos was also appointed as Minister of War, as tensions between Russia and Scandinavia were increasing again, and the Reich, despite having just exited a war, was preparing for yet another conflict in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, the Alliance sued for peace with Tawatinsuyu, renouncing their claims to parts of the northern suyu and paying war indemnities, further straining the already crippled Mexica economy. The Bureau of the Navy negotiated a deal with the viceroy of Neu Rhomania in which timber from the Amazon rainforest was to be used to build more ships for the fleet. The Norse had been building a fleet in an attempt to challenge Roman control of the ocean, something which the Reich noticed.
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So...Aztec Napoleon?
Origins of Modernity 1: The Old World
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Europe
The late 13th century and early 14th century constituted a serious crisis on world history. The collapse of the Mongol Empire, which had held most of Eurasia together, was part of that crisis, and so too was the Black Plague of 1303, which despite lasting for only a single year still killed tens of millions of people in that one year. The reasons why it occurred when and how it did are complex and debatable, but its consequences are not: 'The Plague killed an estimated 50% of all people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa during its rampage, more than the Mongols did in decades, hastening the decline of feudalism in the Reich.'
The Plague is the result of a bacillus, a disease-producing bacterium, which as a recent study found originated in the Tibet-Qinghai region and exploded outward in four strains spread by the Mongols into China and then the rest of Asia. Regardless of how it was transmitted to Europe in 1303, the conditions were set for it to spread rapidly and virulently. First, rats established themselves in Roman towns and countrysides, which were overpopulated from dramatic population growth since 1000. In addition, the climate worsened, with crop yields downs and the length of winters up. Circumstances were ripe in Europe for some kind of disease; if not the Plague, it would likely be something else from another time and place, but the final act of the Reich's Thirteenth Century Crisis could not be avoided. That it was the plague was likely due to Mongol military actions near Taurica.
With the Roman conquest of the Crimea in the eleventh century, Europeans developed a regional trading network linked by the activities of Lombard merchants, particularly those of Genoa and Pisa. Still, the plague might not have spread to Europe if it had not been for another factor. The port of Caffa, in Taurica, was one of the western termini for caravan trade with China and an eastern terminus for trade to the rest of the Roman provinces carried on by Greek merchants, who arrived in Caffa in January of 1303, around the same time a Mongol army was spotted in the area attempting to capture a rebel-occupied city. Rats from the Mongols made their way to the Greek merchants, who went home and took the plague with them. When they arrived a few weeks later in Varna, the plague was let loose on all of Europe. It raged across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, where a ship of infected corpses arrived in Alexandria a few months after outbreak in Taurica. From there it spread along the farming communities up the Nile and on to Cairo, along the way depopulating Aegyptus's rural areas and crippling its irrigation systems. Within the year it had spread all the way to Scandinavia and then that winter on to Moscow before killing its hosts and burning itself out.
The population of Europe plummeted from 80 to 60 million in just one year, while in China, the plague coupled with the Ming revolution in 1356 saw the population tumble from 120 million in 1200 to 60 million in 1400. Plague ravaged the Mediterranean world too as well as every single Roman province except Britannia, Caledonia, and Hibernia. The only major city to escape was Constantinople. The devastation was so thorough that most of the reliable records on the plague detailed Germania, Gallia, and Carpathia. Although few records exist to confirm it, the plague probably devastated the Roman Middle East, the steppes, and India as well.
The death toll was high, and it etched a powerful memory in the minds of the living. But despite the horror of corpses piled high in village land carted off for burial, or set afire on rafts pushed out to sea as in Scandinavia, those living a hundred years later in 1400 had more and better land and other resources than their ancestors, even if the tempo of trade among the various regions of the global trade networks had slowed considerably and more limited plague outbreaks periodically recurred for the next few centuries. The story of the fourteenth-century Black Plague thus not only illustrates the impact of epidemic disease on human populations and hte course of world history; it also demonstrates the very eraly connectedness of world regions. Not only did commodities, people, and ideas ride the trade routes; disease did too.
China
'We have traversed more than one hundred thousand li of immense waterspaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly as] a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were trading a public thoroughfare...'
-Zheng He's words on a tablet set up in Changle, Fujian Province, 1432
Alarm spread quickly through the island of Socotra. Across the sea, out to the horizon, strange storm clouds appeared on the horizon. Fishermen hastily dragged their outriggers to safety on the dry land, while the larger merchant vessels attempted to turn and brace the oncoming storm. As the clouds gathered, it suddenly became clear that they were not clouds at all but sails—sails piled upon sails, too numerous to count, on giant nine-mast ships with large serpent’s eyes painted on the bows. Each ship was the size of many houses, and there were dozens of them, a city of ships, all moving rapidly across the ocean toward Socotra. When they came near, the colored flags on the masts blocked the sun, and the loud pounding and beating of drums on board shook heaven and earth. A crowd gathered at the harbor, and the local patrician was summoned. Work ceased altogether. What was this menacing power, and what did it want?
The fleet moored just off the shore. From the belly of the big ships came small rowboats and men in lavish silk robes. Among the faces were some the patrician recognized. These men he knew. They were the Reich’s ambassadors, whom he had been charged with dispatching months ago to establish diplomatic relations with Asian nations. Now emissaries of the dragon throne were returning them home, and they brought wondrous things to trade. But had so many men and so many ships come in peace, or had they come to make Socotra and its people subjects of the Son of Heaven?
The year was 1422.
Historians agree that the voyages of Kristoff Eimerich across the Atlantic in the 1470s and of Wolfram Ferdinand around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean in the 1460s constitute important developments in the emergence of the modern world. They were. But the debate is on how important they were. Did they usher in a new era? Did they change much at all? Some think it is important to place those voyages of discovery in a broader global context of the real structure of wealth and power in the world around 1500. From that perspective, the Indian Ocean can be seen as the most important crossroad for global exchanges of goods, ideas, and culture, with China, India, and Rome meeting there as the major players, and Persia and Abyssinia as peripheral, marginal players trying desperately to gain access to the sources of wealth generated in Asia. But first, let’s take a look at China.
When the founding emperor of China’s Ming dynasty, the peasant general Zhu Yuanzhang who liberated parts of China from Mongol domination, died in 1398, succeeding him to the throne was not one of his sons but rather his eldest son’s eldest son. This did not go over well with his fourth son, the Prince of Yan, Zhu Di, a talented and experienced military commander, who waited just a year and a half before rebelling in 1399 and after a three-year civil war usurped the throne from his nephew. Zhu Di defeated his nephew’s armies and captured Nanjing, but not without some ambiguity, for rumors abounded that the former Jianwen Emperor had managed to escape his palace’s destruction in a fire. Zhu Di meanwhile declared himself the Yongle Emperor and sought to expand China’s power and influence in all directions. He campaigned in the north against the Mongols, trying to push the hated Yuan “emperors” back into the steppe so far that they could never again threaten China; in this respect he failed, as the Yuan Dynasty would survive until the sixteenth century in some weakened form. He sent embassies far into Central Asia to secure the acknowledgement by those rulers of China’s hegemony. He also increased his empire’s ties with the Tran Dynasty of Vietnam, a Chinese dynasty which was nominally allied with him against the Mongols, with both emperors treating each other as equals using the concept of “northern and southern emperors.” And in one of the greatest adventures in world history, he launched massive maritime expeditions into the Indian Ocean.
In the autumn of 1405, the largest fleet of ships the world had ever seen—or would see for a long time—began assembling in the mouth of the Yangtze River. Over three hundred ships manned by twenty-seven thousand sailors waited for the reliable winter monsoon winds to begin blowing from the northwest to take them south toward Indonesia and then west through the Strait of Melaka into the Indian Ocean, where they had set Calicut, a major trading city on India’s west coast, as their destination. Under the command of the eunuch Muslim admiral Zheng He, this fleet had four goals. First, it was to hunt down the Jianwen Emperor, who was rumored to have escaped; some said he had become a monk, while others claimed he had fled overseas. Second, the outward-looking and expansionist Yongle wanted to “show the flag” of China to the world and impress all foreigners, proving that China was the wealthiest and most powerful civilization in the world. Third, it was to encourage overseas trade, which had collapsed along with the Mongol Empire, as well as find allies that would help them defeat the Mongols. Fourth, he wanted to track down the thousands of lost Chinese who had fled overseas on Song ships or on land into the wastes of Siberia with the Jin. Now that the Chinese were in control of their homeland again, he wanted to bring them home.
In this regard, Yongle was like the rulers of the Tang, Song, and even the Yuan dynasties, who had mostly encouraged overseas trade, well aware of the wealth that could be gained from it. However, his father and nephew were more conservative and inward-looking, preferring to focus on agriculture instead. When Zhu Di took the throne, then, it was just his luck that China was experiencing some economic difficulties. The paper money system had collapsed with the Mongol Empire, and the large amounts of paper money printed to fix that problem only caused inflation and loss of confidence in the currency, forcing Yongle to abandon paper money (it would be reinstituted in the 18th century). Suffice it to say that the collapse of the Mongol Empire led to the severing of overland trade routes linking east and west, Rome and China, and a recognition by the emperor that an aggressive foreign policy might bring some rewards to China, defeating the Mongols and exploring opportunities in the Indian Ocean.
To prepare for these voyages, China had undergone a “frenzy of shipbuilding.” In the three years from 1404 to 1407, over sixteen hundred ships were constructed. The largest ships had nine masts and were about 400 feet long by 160 feet wide. Other ships carried horses, supplies, goods for trade, water tankers, and marines, in case anything went wrong; some ships were fully-equipped warships armed with cannons and even missiles, just as Roman ships of the time were armed with Greek fire. So much wood was used to build the ships that much of the southeast coast was deforested, and timbers had to be floated down a thousand kilometers along the Yangtze to reach the Nanjing shipyards, forcing the city itself to find alternative methods of fuel, such as coal.
Altogether, seven two-year voyages were mounted by the Chinese between 1405 and 1433. During that period, Chinese ships sailed as far as Aegyptus, into the Persian Gulf, all around the Indian Ocean and even mapping out the Cape of Good Hope (Zheng He’s successors would eventually round it and map out the coast of continental Europe decades later), and throughout the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia, where Zheng He helped set up the first Chinese overseas colonies as part of the Scramble for Indonesia. They navigated their huge ships through unknown waters and into unfamiliar harbors, traded and fought with local rulers, collected curiosities such as rare gems and even a giraffe, and in a few instances intervened in local affairs to install pro-Chinese rulers.
On the fourth voyage, which was planned for the Roman and Persian ports in Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the admiral took onboard Ma Huan, another Muslim and one who spoke Arabic, by then a rarity after Islam collapsed under the weight of multiple Christian and Zoroastrian crusades in the twelfth century. For the fourth voyage, which apparently had the express aim of establishing diplomatic relations with the Islamic world (China assumed that Islam was still alive in some degree, though they knew hard times had fallen on it) or whoever replaced it, Zheng He brought his own translator. Indeed, in 1420 the fleet made landfall in Socotra, a Roman outpost in the Indian Ocean, where formal diplomatic relations were established between the Reich and the Ming, and ambassadors from Rome and India returned to Nanjing with the fleet. On the seventh voyage in 1431, Zheng He sailed up the Red Sea and contacted the King of Aegyptus, who working with the kings of Israel-Arabia allowed him to call at the port of Jeddah, a few days’ walk from Mecca, where Zheng He made the pilgrimage.
By 1444, it appeared that a powerful Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean was secure, opening a sea route linking the eastern and western parts of Eurasia with trade circuits in India and Africa, and placing much of the oceangoing trade in at least the Indian Ocean and Asia under Chinese eyes if not control. Yongle’s successors continued to build on Zheng He’s legacy, even as the Mongol threat waned and was ultimately eliminated, followed by the Manchu threat. Zheng He died in 1433 and was buried in an elaborate tomb in Nanjing, and it became customary for subsequent Ming and Tran explorers and then just admirals, once there was no further need for actual explorers, to make pilgrimages to the tomb, where they prayed and offered incense to Zheng He’s spirit asking for success at sea and a safe journey home. In fact, contrary to what many predicted, the destruction of the Yuan and Manchu empires didn’t end any motivations for outward expansion but rather fueled it more as resources were diverted to colonizing as much land as possible to bring civilization and Confucius to the savages and thus eliminate the barbarian menace once and for all; not even the rediscovery of the Jin and Song dynasties in exile slowed down Chinese colonial enthusiasm and aspirations of a global empire to reinforce the Ming’s position as the center of the world. It was in this spirit that the Spice Islands were divided up into Ming, Tran, Indian, and Roman spheres of influence. From 1444 onward, the Chinese state focused on the seas, paid attention to how a colonial system could free up land for non-agricultural endeavors and feed a growing population, and saw its main enemy as its colonial rivals in India and, to a certain extent, their Tran allies. Maintenance and expansion of the imperial fleets became of greater importance to Ming emperors than rebuilding and lengthening of the Great Wall, which fell apart and was eventually rendered obsolete by Chinese colonization efforts and anti-Yuan military expansion in Siberia giving the Ming land on the other side of the Great Wall; parts of the wall remain today as tourist attractions. The abandonment of a land-based system, though, did not mean that Chinese overland trade along the Silk Road ended as well; rather, on the contrary, the Silk Road remained an important lifeline and crossroads of trade well into the nineteenth century.
India
The Mongols’ trade routes along the Silk Road had not been the only trade routes. Where the collapse of the Mongol Empire and the outbreak of the Plague may have been part of a wider continuation of the Thirteenth Century Crisis that affected much of Eurasia, such a crisis was not seen in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the Indian Ocean had been, and would remain, not just a crucially important link in the global trading system, but a source of great wealth and access to luxuries, spices, and manufactured goods to any and all who could get their merchants, goods or ships to the major trading cities on the Indian Ocean. The Chinese thus had not been wrong in seeing the importance of the Indian Ocean and wanting to send their ships there.
In fact, the Chinese excursion was but one episode in a longer history of the Indian Ocean, starting in about 650 with the expansion of the Islamic world and the establishment of the Tang Dynasty and ending around 1750 with Indian trade hegemony in the ocean firmly established, reducing Roman and Chinese influence. During those 1100 years, the Indian Ocean arguably was the single most important crossroads of trade and generator of merchant wealth in the world, and for our purposes its history can be usefully subdivided into three periods.
From 650 to 1000, Arab traders and mariners carried goods and ideas all the way from the Islamic Middle East to Southeast Asia and China, and back again. Arabs spread their language and faith throughout the region, from East Africa to Indonesia until the collapse of Islam eradicated Islam from everywhere outside Mesopotamia. In the second period, beginning around 1000 and lasting around 1700, Chinese merchants saw the profits to be made in the trade and , with or without the support of their government, saild into the Indian Ocean to fill in the vacuum left by the collapse of Islam.
India had three major textile-producing centers: Gujarat on the west coast, Madras in the south, and Bengal on the east. Cotton was spun and woven in artisan homes with material advanced to them by merchants, who then collected the thread and cloth for dyeing and printing before being brought to the market. Most of the cotton cloth met internal demand, but a considerable amount was produced for export. Indian textiles trade as far away as the northern and western provinces of the Reich as well as China. Silver, gold, and other goods flowed into India to pay for these brightly colored textiles. To meet demand, Indians had created a whole manufacturing system, from growing the cotton to finishing it. In turn, those Indians who participated in the textile industry had to look to the market to buy food, further commercializing the Indian economy and increasing productivity and production. Much like in China, the Indian economy was highly developed and was the source of select but important manufactured goods for much of the Reich.
Like China, India was a unified empire, but a young one, with a history of both political disunity and unity imposed by foreign invaders. Although India looks like a “place” on a map because of its easy to recognize shape, it was only politically unified in the eleventh and twelfth century under the Rajput-cultured Paramara maharajas of Malwa, and then at first only tentatively because cultural distinctions took decades to overcome and for Rajput identity to supersede other local identities. Because the independent rulers of most pre-Paramara Indian states promoted and supported trade, political and cultural disunity did not hinder economy activity and actually ceased to exist upon Indian unification under the Paramara dynasty, for as we have seen there was much to be traded when Zheng He began to visit the Indian ports in the early 1400s.
Africa
When Ibn Battuta, one of the last Muslims around in the fourteenth century, traveled in Africa, he was visiting not just places under Roman control or in “the former abode of Islam” but highly developed civilizations with all that included: productive agriculture, cities, ruling and subject class systems, regional trading systems and advanced mining industrial activity, including an iron industry. By 500, the socio-economic characteristics of highly civilized people had spread throughout Africa, and great empires soon arose, the most notable being the Malian Empire which drove out Islam and survived multiple wars with the Reich.
After the kings of Mali converted back to West African paganism, their kingdom continued to expand at the expense of their neighbors. Mali produced some gold itself, but the Muslims’ and later the Romans’ demand for it proved sufficiently strong and the goods they brought to trade in sufficient demand in West Africa (Indian cotton, horses, beads, mirrors, and salt, which could not be found in West Africa) that gold flowed into Timbuktu, fueling an already thriving trade.
Even more extensive than Mali was Mali…that is, the Mali Empire that replaced it. From the 1100s to the early 1400s, Mali controlled and taxed almost all of the trade in West Africa, which was indeed substantial. Huge caravans of up to twenty-five thousand camels stretching for miles across the Sahara brought gold and slaves out of Africa and Indian cotton textiles into Mali. Commerce turned Timbuktu into a great center, attracting scholars, architects, poets, and astronomers to its university, and West African theologians came there to the more than one hundred schools established to study the Book of Chukwu. The Malian army became the best in West Africa, conquering Mali's less advanced neighbors and managing to defend the empire against Roman incursions. Mali eventually became a colonial power through its motivation to find the lost fleets of the Muslim king Abu-Bakr, and most of those colonies were eventually seized by Tawatinsuyu, but the point is that Mali managed to remain relevant into the late 1700s.
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-Reinhard Markos, Professor of East Asian and Eimerican History, The Origins of Modernity, published by Imperial University of Neu Brandenburg, 2015.
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The Mongol Empire is finally, truly dead. Let's just hope they don't come back in some form or another. Speaking of dead empires, I see Persia is looking beaten up again. Who will conquer the buffer 'empire'?
Love the special on the Origin of Modernity. Preparing for V2?
Love the special on the Origin of Modernity. Preparing for V2?
Another war between Russia and Scandinavia? I didn't see that coming.
That is one detailed account of the origin of modernity. I particularly like the part about China.
That is one detailed account of the origin of modernity. I particularly like the part about China.
Chapter 145: The Eighth Commonweath War
"As of right now, you owe me ten ducats. The Russians have invaded."
-Niketas Dalassenos to Nikephoros von Hohenzollern
"Russia. Russia never changes."
-Jane Austen
In the opening moves of the war, the Norse fleet, carrying a berserker army commanded by Fylkir Borkvard I, attempted a breakout into the Atlantic from the Baltic. With superior numbers they easily overwhelmed the small Roman navy patrolling Kattegat and headed straight for Britannia. The Bureau of the Navy hastily ordered the construction of a whole new battle fleet in Britannia to stop the Norse. Meanwhile, a woman named Sophie Germain published several mathematical treatises, impressing Victoria but not the Paris Academy of Sciences, which rejected her application on the basis that "a man could do better." Offended, Victoria
Nikephoros von Hohenzollern, son of the Viceroy of Syria-Anatolia, was a member of the imperial family, of course, but in an unusual way. He was not descended from any of the Kaiserins who had reigned since 1618. Instead, he was part of the Anatolian Greek line of the Hohenzollerns who reportedly traced their lineage back to Friedrich the Great without a single matrilineal marriage; the Anatolian line had survived the Anarchy by going into hiding until Friedrich III was firmly on the throne. While Nikephoros was not inclined to claim the throne anytime soon as he was loyal to the main line, he did have substantial popular and political support. Many citizens and generals supported his claim to the throne, as they believed that Victoria's line had gone through so many matrilineal marriages that its Hohenzollern blood had been diluted beyond saving. Some of them also sympathized with Nikephoros's liberal stance on politics, namely more rights for the people and more power to the Diet but stopping short of a constitution.
Whatever, the case, Nikephoros was given command of a legion and told to stop the Lithuanians. This he did handily. In a decisive battle at Ingil, the Lithuanians were driven back, and Nikephoros became a hero.
Not willing to let the traitorous Lithuanians escape, Victoria ordered Nikephoros to hunt down the army that held Dalassenos before it reached the border.
Yep, Aztec Napoleon. Also, I like how it's now just considered fact that the Fox are assassinating fellow rulers.
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Origins of Modernity 2: The New World
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In the period from 1500 to 1800, several changes occurred. First, most parts of the world were drawn into regular, ongoing contact in ways that had never happened in the past. Where previously there had been several different “worlds”—China, India, Rome, and the Eimericas, as yet unmolested by the Romans—after 1500 two new links connected all of the worlds together for the first time. The voyage of Kristoff Eimerich in 1476 opened up the New World and established new relations among the Eimericas, Europe, and Africa. A second large process was the continued growth and vitality of empires throughout Eurasia. In the 16th century, empires remained the most common political form for bringing land under human control. The most successful political and economic system that humans devised was an empire. Why, then, do most of the former “empires” consider themselves nation-states? The Romans had the resources to establish an empire and most certainly did, but there was fierce resistance from Scandinavia, Lithuania, and Persia, launching a new kind of international political order. The third process concerned the growth of a system of sovereign states in Europe and the linkage between that process and war. Although Europe was divided up into empires in the fifteenth century and had all of the resources necessary to defend themselves, nevertheless the continent was plunged into frequent warfare every ten years as the Russians and Scandinavians sought to destroy each other, forcing Roman intervention. As it was, the system of European interstate warfare favored a particular kind of state that developed in Rome and Scandinavia in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading to conflict between those two for much of the eighteenth century. Fourth was the Little Ice Age, which reduced the amount of solar energy reaching the surface and caused reductions in harvests and thus lower tax rates. But Europe is not the focus of this passage; the Eimericas are. Let's get right to it.
North and South Eimerica prior to the arrival of the Europeans was populated by peoples who had constructed varying kinds of social and economic systems, ranging from despotic kingdoms and duchies not unlike medieval Europe to highly developed agrarian societies and exceptionally creative uses of the Andean mountains for agriculture, in the centuries after humans first migrated into the Eimericas around 15000 BCE. It thus should not be too surprising that these people could also create the highest form of political organization in the biological old regime, an empire. Two in particular are important to our story, the Mexica in Mitteleimerica and the Tawatinsuyu in the mountains of the Andes of South Eimerica
The Anahuac Valley had long sustained impressive civilizations, starting with the Olmecs around 1500 BCE. On the Yucatan peninsula, which was later conquered by the emerging Mexica empire, the Mayans had built a magnificent civilization with cities, large pyramids, and a highly productive agriculture that peaked around 600-900 CE, after which the Mayan state dissolved into numerous smaller agglomerations which became easy prey for the early and bloodthirsty Triple Alliance; in the aftermath of the Mexica conquest of the Yucatan, some Mayans managed to escape into the Caribbean, where they banded together in an elective monarchy to survive, laying for the foundations of the early Mayapan League. By 1000, the Anahuac Valley was dominated by the Toltecs, who had a capital at Tula at the northern end of the valley. With rich soils and regular supplies of water from snow-fed rivers originating in the surrounding mountains, the Anahuac Valley was agriculturally rich and attracted peoples from all over North Eimerica.
Among those migrating into the Anahuac Valley around 1050 were a people called the Mexica. As latecomers with dubious civilization achievements and agricultural competence, the Mexica were shunted off into the worst land—a swampy lake, to be precise—and considered subordinates of other local kingdoms. After an altercation with one of their superiors, the Mexica were exiled to the islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco. However, it was around this time that the captured Norse explorer named Erik the Red and most of his crew, enslaved in the recent destruction of Vinland, arrived in the Anahuac Valley.
Erik the Red journeying to Vinland
Seeing the potential of the Norse, the Mexica quickly secured a deal with the slave-traders and bought the Vikings’ freedom. Erik the Red and his sons worked their way through the Mexica political hierarchy, with Erik eventually being crowned tlatoani. Through skillful diplomacy and playing the Mexica’s neighbors against each other while also training the jaguar warriors in Norse combat tactics, the Mexica became excellent warriors, sometimes working for others but all the while building their own defenses and power. Over the decades, the Norsemen were assimilated into Mexica culture and largely forgot about their origins, retaining only Erik the Red’s desire for revenge against the mainland Norse kingdoms for exiling him to Vinland. This would fuel Mexica foreign policy for centuries to come. Erik the Red’s descendants became known as “Acatl” and developed the Mexica’s first flags, which depicted Jormungandr, the World Serpent, in the guise of the feathered serpent-god Quetzalcoatl, emphasizing the blend between Mexica and Norse culture.
Naval ensign of the Triple Alliance
By 1100, the Anahuac Valley was studded with numerous feudal duchies and kingdoms, most of them constantly at war with each other to secure more sacrifices for the gods. Three or four were major players, while the Mexica were mercenaries and minor players until 1128, when they established a Triple Alliance with two other neighboring groups, with themselves as the most powerful of the triumvirate. The Mexica were then powerful enough to begin conquering and subduing their neighbors, with Itzcoatl I Acatl proclaiming himself “Huey-tlatoani,” ruler of “all Cemanahuac” and going on a conquering spree throughout Mitteleimerica. He and his son Moctezuma I led the alliance, which came to control all of the Anahuac Valley and beyond within a few short years. By the early 1200s, the Mayan states had been subjugated, and jaguar warriors were making incursions into the Muisca kingdom in South Eimerica as well as establishing settlements in the northern plains and deserts and on the largest island in the Caribbean Sea (which was dangerously close to the Mayans), with thousands of subject territories totaling fifty million people expected to pay taxes and provide levies of jaguar warriors to the Huey-tlatoani in Tenochtitlan.
But the Acatls weren’t satisfied with their empire. Ocuil Acatl, the fifth son of the Huey-tlatoani, wanted to fulfill Erik the Red’s desire for vengeance and invade Europe, which at the time was considered part of the mythical “Sunrise Land” on the other side of the ocean. But the myths did not deter Ocuil Acatl. He ordered a huge fleet of five hundred ships constructed on the coast of the Tlaxcala altepetl and mobilized hundreds of thousands of jaguar warriors for battle. In the 1230s scouts were sent out to determine the size of the ocean and who was on the other side. They returned with reports of two vast empires, one Norse and ruled over by the descendants of those who exiled Erik the Red. The other was a vast empire controlling vast quantities of territory rich in resources. Ocuil Acatl decided to attack the non-Norse empire first to secure a foothold in the Eastern Territories before striking at the Norse. He ordered his fleet to leave from Havana in the summer of 1235. The massive armada left the Caribbean Sea and headed for the Mexica outpost in Bermuda before turning east across the vast blue expanse towards Europe. Ocuil Acatl made landfall in the Hebrides, in Caledonia, beginning two hundred years of conflict between the Reich and the Triple Alliance. When Ocuil Acatl managed to conquer swathes of territory in Europe, he declared himself “Huey-tlatoani in the East” and set up fellow triumvirate member Axayacatl I Acamapichtli as “Huey-tlatoani in the West.” This continued for two hundred years until Tlacaelel Acatl was driven out of Iceland in 1429 and forced to return home to Tenochtitlan, upon which he rallied the people and the army against the Acamapichtli rulers, assassinated the Acamapichtli Huey-tlatoani, and abolished the triumvirate, making himself and the Acatl family the sole rulers of the Triple Alliance (which kept the name). Contact with Europe ceased for the next sixty years, until the Roman explorer Kristoff Eimerich was captured while sailing in Alliance waters. The Roman-Mexica rivalry continued for the next three hundred years, culminating in Operation Sunrise Invasion in the 1770s, designed to “do unto the barbarians what they did unto us” and generally force the Triple Alliance to completely acknowledge Roman hegemony and supremacy in the Eimericas. The 18th century was when the Alliance began losing much of its territories, with the Jin and Tawatinsuyu empires seizing several border altepetls and the rising Fox Empire driving the Mexica from the Great Plains. Operation Sunrise Invasion saw the decline of Alliance power for good; the Mexica would no longer be a world power as its neighbors grew strong enough to take revenge for all of the grievances the Mexica had caused them.
Meanwhile, the other native empire being built in the Eimericas, Tawatinsuyu, had a different source of assistance. Unlike the Mexica and the Maya, Tawatinsuyu did not develop a written language until they adopted a Chinese-inspired writing system from the Jin Dynasty, so not much is known of the early Tawatinsuyu empire. Nevertheless, what is known in the records is quite impressive. Settling in the highlands of Biru around Lake Titicaca in the mid-1100s, the Tawatinsuyu gradually expanded outwards for a hundred years before an attempt to meddle in the politics of the Kingdom of Muisca, a Mexica semiautonomous altepetl, brought them into direct conflict with the Triple Alliance of Ocuil Acatl. In the ensuing war, the less-advanced Tawatinsuyu armies were driven back by droves of the Mexica’s Norse-trained elite jaguar warriors, and by 1240 Mexica armies were marching on Cusco itself.
Salvation for the Tawatinsuyu came in the form of the Jin Dynasty, which had recently been exiled to North Eimerica by the Mongols. The Jin, who were also fighting against the Mexica, were looking for allies to help them, and Tawatinsuyu was glad to provide aid in return for some of the Jin’s gunpowder weapons, which were first used to devastating effect in several decisive battles against the Mexica in the northern Andes that turned the tide of the war and protected Tawatinsuyuan independence. Now no longer under constant threat of Mexica invasion (at least until the Alliance developed its own gunpowder weapons), Tawatinsuyu launched military campaigns in the 1300s that created a huge empire, stretching thousands of kilometers from the northern border with Muisca to the southern cape of the continent.
Unlike the Mexica, who annexed enemy states and taxed conquered peoples but otherwise left them alone, the Tawatinsuyuans consciously assimilated conquered peoples into their culture, forcing them to adopt a common language (Quechua, with Classical Chinese required for high-ranking nobility and diplomats) and directly governing them with professional administrators. Besides being exceptionally long, covering most of the Pacific highlands of South Eimerica, the Tawatinsuyu empire was also “vertical.” Many cities sat high up in the Biruvian mountains, and villages were scattered all the way up and down the mountains and valleys. Besides a challenge to governing, verticality was also a challenge to growing food; because of the vast changes in ecosystems arising from the different altitudes, different crops had to be grown in different locales. To ensure the unity of such an unusual empire, Tawatinsuyu paved mountain roads not unlike the ancient Roman roads with cut stone for imperial runners and armies.
Surprisingly, for such a large empire, Tawatinsuyu initially did not have a true writing system but instead developed a unique system of colored, knotted cords that allowed rulers to keep track of vital information for national stability and unity; this quipu system was ultimately discarded in the late 14th century in favor of a fully-developed Chinese-derived writing system like Vietnam’s chu nom, designed by the Jin’s and Tawatinsuyu’s best scholars, which the Sapa Incas had adopted to bring themselves politically closer with the Jin. Movement from one’s village was highly discouraged, and the initial absence of money and private trade limited the development of private property and wealth until Tawatinsuyu adopted Roman and Chinese economic systems. Nonetheless, the empire itself was wealthy, ruling over forty million people and half of the continent of South Eimerica in the early fifteenth century.
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-Reinhard Markos, Professor of East Asian and Eimerican History, The Origins of Modernity, published by Imperial University of Neu Brandenburg, 2015.
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Maybe there is some truth to those rumours of Fox assassinating kings. Is that two or three personal unions now?
Why does everyone have such godly generals?
Why does everyone have such godly generals?
Fox is very quickly growing in North Eimerica. I don't see the Duchy of Cherokee lasting too long on their own, which is a shame. I thought they were rather interesting, and then they got stupid.
Nikephoros von Hohenzollern certainly sounds intriguing. I'd be worried, but it was directly stated that he is loyal and has no interest in the throne. That said, it keeps coming up that people are a little bothered by the Reich having so many female rulers... I'd laugh if you really face a rebellion over gender to install a guy who doesn't want the war.
More wonderful lore for the New World. I love backstory and explaining modding decisions... A big part of my excitement to see how EU4 ends will be to see what you do for the V2 start.
Nikephoros von Hohenzollern certainly sounds intriguing. I'd be worried, but it was directly stated that he is loyal and has no interest in the throne. That said, it keeps coming up that people are a little bothered by the Reich having so many female rulers... I'd laugh if you really face a rebellion over gender to install a guy who doesn't want the war.
More wonderful lore for the New World. I love backstory and explaining modding decisions... A big part of my excitement to see how EU4 ends will be to see what you do for the V2 start.