Imperial Blood: A CK2-Stellaris Megacampaign
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There is a big K on a greenish country rigth next to the Abbassid about where the Yarmag was, so I guess the answer is yes.
Although there is also a Persian empire, so they migth've lost some terrain to the Shah.
Well, it went far better and quicker then I expected.
Part Eight
The Darkening Sky
The Darkening Sky
WHEN the present seems bleak, it is good to remember that this is not the first time the Empire has been at the brink of total destruction.
All things - people, factions, and even nations - have their highs and their lows, certainly. On the scale of the Empire, both are greatly magnified. The dawn of the thirteenth century was the bleakest the Union has ever seen, far more so than our present troubles. Yet even in its darkest and most harrowing hours, the North survives. Take these lessons of history to heart. Our Union is one of survivors, and while it is not the grandest or most opulent Empire to ever shine across Earth's banks, it is the most resilient.
The end of the thirteenth century saw the reign of Fylkir Sigurd the Second, a brilliant young Emperor whose personal charisma and intelligence had only barely stopped the Union from total fracture upon his succession, and the devastating civil war that came in its wake. Despite Sigurd's personal merits, large-scale depopulation and a nearly two decade long civil war between three separate Imperial factions had caused the Empire to lose massive swaths of territory to all of its neighbors. While France and the associated states of the League of Dreiteilig had taken the most Imperial ground, significant portions were lost to Poland, Russia, and even the British states. Even once Harald of Denmark was finally imprisoned and exiled to Vinland, the Union remained deeply fractured and divided, with powerful independent feudal lords in Bohemia, Finland and the Baltics clamoring in the Grand Assembly for increasing rights, behind which threats of another civil war quietly loomed. Without such a commanding presence as Sigurd, many believed that the Union's remaining territories would finally fracture for good and wipe the Imperium off the maps as yet another artifact of history.
When the young and talented Emperor died in 1194 ER at the age of thirty-seven, feasts were hosted in Vienna and Paris. Letters from Polish lords in that year detail plans for seizing independent regions of Prussia, and speculations that the Union would be dissolved before the year 1200.
Sigurd was succeed by his older brother and close friend, Aleksandr the Second. While Aleksandr was an accomplished, respected general and a powerful presence, he was thought of as an incompetent and uninterested administrator with violent mood swings and a crippling paranoid streak. The initial months of his rule were spent grieving over the early death of his brother, and when he returned to court, it was with a newfound, arbitrary sense of aggression and haphazard decision-making. At times, the new Emperor was said to gibber at members of court in Russian or English, shouting in furious, heavy tones.
By December, rumors prevailed that Aleksandr was insane. For the most part, that didn't seem very far from the truth. Aleksandr had, at the very least, clearly taken the loss of his brother exceptionally poorly. With his wife having died years before and Aleksandr only having a single daughter - Karoline - his support network was wrung extremely thin, despite the sprawling size of the Sverdklydige dynasty. In some ways, it's a miracle that the Empire didn't completely collapse over the next few years of Aleksandr's haphazard and deranged leadership - but despite his erratic nature, it'd be wrong to say Aleksandr was incompetent or malicious. Fundamentally, Aleksandr was not a Nero or a Caligula, just a deeply disturbed man.
Of course, that didn't make the end of the twelfth century any less difficult for the Union.
Shortly before Aleksandr's assumption of power, Italy had collapsed into a violent civil war over the loss of its African territories, a state that had left a power vacuum reverberating through much of Europe. Many of the Union's enemies were distracted, with England and France fighting bitterly over Normandy and both Russia and the League engaged in separate wars for the fading power of Bulgaria's land.
Quite a few transcripts from the Grand Assembly survived this period, and they tell us a comprehensive tale of the years between 1194 and 1197. For the most part, further Imperial breakaways seemed to be subdued only by the herculean effort of keeping Aleksandr himself in check - and, perhaps, a fear of the Emperor himself. Aleksandr was a huge, imposing man covered in countless scars, with flaming red hair and a "Nose broken so badly it twisted at a visible angle". Countless bile-filled sessions of screaming and occasional physical violence in the Assembly gave the Emperor an exceptionally fearsome gravitas, especially since the rest of the nation was nearly universally opposed to the Emperor's vehement demands to declare war against Poland. At this time, while power rested in the Emperor for nearly everything else, a declaration of war needed to be ratified by the Assembly - something Aleksandr spent three years attempting to get them to do by any means possible. Aleksandr cared nothing for the possible consequences or the possibility that Russia and the League's troops would swivel out of Bulgaria to fight a distracted Union. All he wanted was the reclamation of the proper Imperial borders, at any cost.
While some plots and coups did brew in those arguing years, Aleksandr put them down just as viciously and efficiently as any of his predecessors. And without a replacement, eventually, the Emperor's demands were accepted. On the twenty-third of March in 1197 ER, the Union declared war on Poland once more.
Of course, Imperial troops were woefully underprepared. Aleksandr, even in his unhinged later life, was a remarkably skilled tactician, but the long-term strategists of Harald's War, Eigil and his brother Sigurd, were long since dead. As a result, the Leidangr were undermanned, unevenly equipped, and poorly organized. Although the elite Blackshirts of the Union still maintained solid numbers and top-of-the-line equipment, the rank and file soldiers of the Union, left depopulated from recent wars, were downright pathetic in both quality and quantity.
The initial months of the war went well regardless. Poland on its own could hardly offer much resistance to the far larger and wealthier Union, and small Polish armies on the border found themselves crushed repeatedly by the invading Imperial force.
But Aleksandr's success didn't last long.
By July, forces from both Russia and the League had agreed to help the Polish, and even the local forces of King Leszek had consolidated enough to offer serious resistance to Aleksandr's men. When the forces of the League and the Russians came to support them, the insufficiently trained and equipped Leidangr completely crumbled, scattering back into Imperial territory.
Faced with armies well over three times the strength of the standing Leidangr in both manpower and equipment, Aleksandr issued a draft across the Union, the first time any Emperor had done such a thing since the unification of Germania. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands were pulled from farms and villages across the continent, hastily equipped, trained, and organized into fighting formations, and sent to march against the professional armies of the eastern states. Overwhelming manpower won a few initial battles as the lines of fighting began to form, but ultimately, it wasn't a viable strategy.
By mid 1198, the Imperium was losing on every front. The lesser forces of Russia and the League whittled down their mostly untrained and unprofessional troops, seizing towns and fortresses across Bohemia and Lithuania. Worse still, the massive expenses of maintaining such a huge army had already sent the Union deeply in debt, and Aleksandr would continue to acquire loan after loan throughout years of war.
The lessons of the Mad Emperor's War were not lost on the Empire. Near its close in March of 1199, a League army famously ambushed a large Imperial detachment in the forest of Grodno. Although well-chosen orders were sent out almost immediately from the commanders present, multiple regiments of Leidangr panicked and broke at first contact. A total slaughter was only narrowly prevented by the tiny number of Blackshirts in the regiment filling wide gaps in the formation- and even then, uneven spacing and the spread of panic within the Imperial lines caused an over two-to-one casualty ratio. To much of the Union's nobles at the time - and more importantly for the future, its strategic historians - the Gordno Ambush represented a key argument against quantity-sided warfare.
While not as dramatic as the forest ambush at Grodno, the rest of the war followed roughly its same pattern. Aleksandr won his fair share of victories, but the poor quality of his hastily-raised troops made serious damage against the professional armies of his opponents, the League in particular, practically impossible. The war dragged on seemingly without end - and the Union had been suffering from serious debt since 1197 and heavy depopulation since even earlier. It would be appropriate to say that Aleksandr's war razed the nation without touching a single Imperial village.
The force of attrition and Aleksandr's relentless determination had swung the war somewhat in his favor by 1199, even if scoring minor victories back had drained the Imperial treasury multiple times over. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Union's enemies were almost unwilling to negotiate when Aleksandr reached out for peace; the extremely strained state between Imperial factions made it seem like another few years of war would lead to the total collapse that man in France and Poland had been betting on since 1194. But they, too, were low on funds and resources from four years of fighting, and neither side had held onto any noticeable territorial advances. So the Union abandoned its goals of reclaiming Poland's lands, and struck out armistice with its enemies in the name of white peace.
In February, the offer was accepted, and the Union was once more able to relax its tensions.
That's not what happened, of course.Aleksandr had left a huge debt and tens of thousands of dead Imperial citizens in his wake, for a war that had gone nowhere and nearly lost the Union yet more land. The nobility and peasantry alike were furious, and even its elite militarized factions in organizations like the Blackshirts and Jomsviking Order wavered noticeably in their dedication through individual letters and writings of concern. The Union had not collapsed by the dawn of the thirteenth century. But with the war in Poland over and the nation's attentions entirely refocused inward in the wake of an unsatisfying and borderline humiliating peace deal, it seemed certain that it would not survive another ten years.
Yet it did. Throughout everything, and against all odds, the Union persisted. The obvious question that remains is - how? The short answer is that the Union has a life of its own, embedded in those old stone statues at Jafnadgr. But let us not turn to the mystic, or descriptions of the so-called survivor's spirit to explain why the Union has not and will not die, but instead to the political structures and organization of its voices. It is not just that the Union's people refuse to let it collapse; it has been set up, from top to bottom, to ensure its survival at any cost. The framework set out by Maximilian and later Felix had evolved, even as early as the time of Aleksandr II, into a complex and pervasive beast, capable of extending the power of its elite out just far enough that neither they nor the Emperor themselves could push or pull without outside aide, and new voices that have risen since then have carefully positioned into a shifting-but-unbreakable societal structure, checked by a labyrinthine web of competing factions.
At the dawn of the thirteenth century, it appeared from the surface that all major players of the Union were against the Fylkir, and an Empire without an Emperor soon collapses. To begin, let us examine those factions, both in antiquity and the present day, and why they did what they did when faced with the political crisis of the Mad King. His rule and the survival of the Union was not mere luck or the voice of the nation crying out; it was simply the most logical option present.
- Sieg van Alden, "On the Apparent Decline of the Imperial Union" Prelude. Circa 1862.
Attachments
I just read through this and it is up there with Rome AARisen. Good characters and fun wars combined with Byzantine intrigue in the Germanic religious courts. Keep updating and may th he God(s) guide your tale.
Don't worry, the holy Yamag is still there. I just moved their location more fully into central asian and gave the Persians a spot in - well, persia.
That they can. Though the Union is well past the influence of a mere idea...
Typo fixed, thank you. Aleksandr isn't necessarily a 'bad' emperor, he's just a bit... unhinged. But, well, people are dying, regardless of intent or competence.
Thank you! I try to represent all aspects of the Union as best I can through a number of different perspectives. God, clarifying the political situation in Victoria II and beyond is gonna be a total mess.
From what I read about them, they seem to be a Zoroastrian offshoot that turned itself into a political theocracy.
Part Nine
The Pit
The Pit
Why did the Union not collapse in the thirteenth century?
Before looking at the specific situation of the Mad Emperor, the Union as a whole should be examined. The key glue is in the far north, the area referred to as the North and South Way. While the North Way has always been under the direct governance of the Imperial family (albeit with a few lower-level representatives in the region), the South Way, the only administrated neighbor of the Imperial capital, has traditionally been governed by a semi-autonomous Jarl. In many regards, this limits interaction with the Emperor to interactions through the South Way. At least, in the grander sense, for things like insurrections and coups. Let us examine a map of segregated political power within the Union:
Fig 3.1: Political Power Distrubtion
Though borders have fluctuated, they tend back towards these rough cultural lines. The light blue area is the direct administration of the Fylkir-and-Emperor, bordered only by the dark blue South Way and the red Jarldom of Norðrríki. The extremely sparse population of the far northern Sami lands have never had any significant measure of power or influence, leading the South Way to be the only direct neighbor of the Emperor. Of the remaining regions, only five have Jarls associated with them; the Jarl of Finland, the Jarl of Lithuania, the Jarl of Denmark, the Jarl of Bohemia and the Jarl of Iceland. There has never been a top-level title associated with Germania, the most densely populated region of the Empire, and as such it has been semi-directly governed by the Emperor under the association of a large number of ducal-level Hertug. Power in the green region of Pommeralia or Prussia has been distributed at various times between the Jarldom of Denmark, the Jarldom of Lithuania, various Germanic Hertug, and the present Jomsvikings order. The flowing distribution of power within the Union's borders, far more so than its most pressing contemporary of the Roman Empire, expands outwards from the central authority.
To put it in other words, where the Roman Empire held Rome at its capital, the capital of the Imperial Union has been politically insulated. A degree of this can be seen in the centralization of Great Britain, which has always been more politically stable than its longstanding rival of France for, among many other reasons, the fact that power in France expands outwards from Paris while power in London is insulated. It is far more difficult due to simple geographic and political constraints for a rebellion in Scotland to spread to London than a rebellion in Brittany to spread to Paris.
Power in the Union dramatically compounds this by offering near complete insulation through the South Way. While rebellions can (and frequently have) formulated in detached regions such as Bohemia and Finland, to have significant impact as a revolution dissent needs to 'spread' from one region to another. The contested region of Pommeralia makes it exceptionally difficult for dissent to spread from Lithuania to the Union as a whole, and cultural barriers plus sparse northern populations make a spread of dissent from Finland to Sweden thoroughly hard in that regard. While a conspiracy may spread to to Jarl of Bohemia or a number of Hertug, organized and powerful revolutions need comprehensive support, and the layout of the Union's geography and politics make that an astoundingly difficult affair.
But, of course, political insulation doesn't necessarily count for much if other conditions are right. And what's more, the Grand Assembly's centralized location in Jafnadgr has always provided a good deal of communication between even geographically and politically isolated nobility. By no means are powerful revolts an impossibility for the Union; Harald's rebellion, which originated with the Jarl of Denmark and held widespread support amongst many Hertug and outlying territories, should more than prove that. They simply have a higher tolerance for it.
With that understanding, the lack of a major uprising against the severe debts and apparent insanity of the Mad Emperor Aleksandr II becomes much more clear with the understanding that he was extremely close personal friends with the Jarl of the South Way during this time, Knut af Mumso.
With the understanding that Sweden, the central 'insulator' of the Empire, would not take up arms against Aleksandr, the ability of other nobles to effectively organize against the Emperor was severely limited. In practice, he was given a great deal of slack in his personal affairs. And, to be fair to Aleksandr, he did little to mismanage the Empire during his reign. The thing that brought the Union closest to revolution was the Emperor's judicious use of force and legal authority to imprison and execute powerful enemies - or perceived enemies.
Ultimately, Mad King was something of a misnomer. There were no dramatic antics on Aleksandr II's behalf, merely an overarching paranoia. Today we would say that the Mad Emperor perhaps had a case of dementia of some kind, or paranoic delusions. Ultimately, it was not his supposed madness that nearly collapsed the Union
Aleksandr II fervently supported his only child, Karoline, to be his successor as Fylkja and Empress. While Karoline was said to be a charming and highly intelligent woman, her reputation across the Empire was for being an adultress in her youth, shortly after her matrilinnear marriage to Jarl Knut's third son. Many held an extremely poor opinion of her, evidenced by the stymie in the Grand Assembly that arouse from her unique position.
Aleksandr II refused to appoint any candidates other than his daughter for the position of Emperor, but the unpopularity of both father and daughter meant that Karoline was unable to gather the necessary votes to confirm her appointment. This was, interestingly enough, the first time in the Union's history such a thing had occurred, and one of its very few instances.
At the time of Aleksandr II's reign, there was neither precedent nor protocol for such a situation, a fact that worried much of the Assembly even further. And admittedly, they had very valid reasons to feel so.
Most likely, Karoline's influence had mellowed her father, because in 1204 ER Aleksandr II agreed to a compromise with many of the bickering Imperial factions of the Assembly, those who were unsupportive of his debt-stricken reign and unwilling to allow Karoline to succeed him. It was agreed that should the Assembly be unwilling to confirm a nomination and the Emperor unwilling to nominate any alternatives, the Emperor would be obliged to provide three titled noblemen 'in good faith', with the obligation that the Assembly need choose one of the three.
The flaws of this early incarnation of the system were made apparent when Aleksandr II chose a Bavarian drunkard with the hereditary title of gentleman, a veteran Blackshirt who adamantly refused the nomination, and his own daughter. Effectively given the choice between placing a nameless idiot at the head of the largest European empire of the millennium or agreeing to Aleksandr's original choice, Karoline was nominated as successor to Aleksandr. It took less than a century for the procedure to be thoroughly revised, and for the better part of the last millennium precedent has stood as the inverse of the original lawset; instead of the Emperor presenting additional nominations, an Emperor who fails to gather support for their nominations in the Grand Assembly is made to select from a selection of nominees chosen by the Assembly itself.
To the ultimate point, the Union did not collapse under the reign of the Mad Emperor in part because of its carefully-placed political system and in part because Aleksandr the Second was hardly so mad as he is oft made out to be. Before we explore the crisis of the modern day, an interesting piece of trivia - both the head of the Chinese dynasty of Jin and Aleksandr II died within six months of the Great Khagan unifying the tribes of Mongolia. Perhaps it is inappropriate to say that the heads of both the great empires of the Earth faltered in his wake, since China was so deeply fractured at the time of his rise. But it certainly makes for interesting speculation.
Sounds like the madness of Aleksandr was definitely exacerabated by an unsympathetic historical tradition 
And so a new ruler to face the Mongols. Let us see what she can do.
And so a new ruler to face the Mongols. Let us see what she can do.
Decadents
Part One
Unburied
Despite maintaining a shaky but present hold on most of its territories, the Union at the time of Empress Karoline's ascension was in its weakest position since the passing of the Black Plague, with the smallest and illest-equipped standing army of the major European powers, a significant amount of lingering debt to both national and foreign moneylenders, shaky economics and even shakier politics from the Mad Emperor's ill-advised forrays. The Grand Assembly was a revanchist hotbed, with the upper house (now semi-formally referred to as the 'High Thing') the most powerful it had been in a long time, and the independence-minded lords of Finland and Southern Germany waiting for the first oppurtunity to break away from the Empire and pursue their own destiny. The slipping control of the throne in the last three decades had allowed for warring dukes and jarls to ravage sections of the Empire - and expand their own power in the process, consolidating smaller mini-empires within the Imperium. Some of them had become powerful enough to directly challenge Aleksandr II near the end of his reign - not militarily, but politically, directly and vocally opposing the appointment of his daughter, Karoline, on grounds of her poor reputation as a youthful adultress.
Although aided by the fact that Karoline was an unpopular choice, the ability of the nobility to outright oppose an Emperor's nomination was not only unprecedented but monumental. Although no laws or statures were associated with the rallying cries of the Union's bannermen, the nobility had never before been in a position to challenge as monumental an Imperial decision as the appointment of the next Emperor. Although a clever introduction of quagmire rules had landed Karoline the position anyway despite significant opposition in the Grand Assembly, the implications of the incident in and of itself were not lost on the lords of the Empire - nor on the new Empress Karoline, coming into office at nearly forty years of age. Some bemoaned the introduction of 'weak southern ways' slowing down the political system with its increasingly byzantine tracts - but the majority of the Union's nobles scrambled to consolidate their newfound power and authority.
Unfortunately, Karoline was not about to let them.
Although a scandalous affair in her twenties and lack of any notable achievements had left the Empress profoundly unpopular, Karoline had been entrusted with governance of Hedmark by her father for many years and had proven herself many times over a skilled administrator. Little of the ferocious military might in the vein of Sigurd the Dragon or Elisa the Wolf seemed to run in her veins, but it had been another ancestor of hers - Felix, the Smiling Fox - who had written the Kvikréttr, the binding codes and laws that formed the backbone of the Union's entire legal structure. The loopholes and law-bending used by so many tight-lipped archdukes to hoard economic chokepoints and lord over lesser nobles had flown by without much notice or care by Aleksandr II, but Karoline was not so careless. The first three years of her reign was an involved, systemic reorganization of both the Empire's entire judicial and legislative structure and the nobles who had sought to exploit it, carefully applying and clarifying the letter of the law to break up factional blocs and mini-empires within the Union, bringing key points of economic power directly under Imperial or local control, and setting Jarls in balance with multitudes of powerful and semi-independent vassals. Though the legal code and administrative structure grew increasingly complex, those who had hoped for a byzantine and indecipherable mess to bury themselves in found themselves only locked out of important regions through power-sharing restrictions and inheritance laws; the power of the throne had let Felix write his laws for efficiency instead of equality, seemingly percipient of the day when that relentless efficiency would be needed to set the Empire's structure back on course.
Somewhat ironically, Karoline's soft voice and mild presence led many to consider her spineless as Empress, even during the process of her killing the formulation of their miniature empires in stillbirth. In another situation, she may have been forgotten as a useless leader, like Tjudmund the Lamb's long and uneventful reign had been. But she was a true woman of her time, and provided exactly what the Union was in desperate need of - a leader to starve off mounting structural corruption before it and the fat, greedy noblemen who rode its back collapsed the Union into a sham-empire of a thousand squabbling archdukes.
Their kind would return, in time. But in the thirteenth century, Karoline had stopped them, a feat that would never be praised in as high tones as Vilhelm Odinsword's dramatic subjugation of Bohemia or even Maximilian the Jackal's infamous war-alliance with the duchies of Northern Germania - but one perhaps even more important. Perhaps it is telling that what the Empress Karoline is remembered for was not her breaking up of the Jarl-kingdoms, or paying off the insurmountable Imperial debt, or even rebuilding and retraining the Leidangr, but her war - the First Birthright War, known in Poland as the Third War of the Alliance of Poznan.
By 1217, the Union was remarkably more stable than it had been at Karoline's appointment to the throne. The Leidangr was still nowhere near what it had been at its peak under the Emperor Vilhelm almost two centuries ago, but it stood over thirty thousand strong now, with an estimated one hundred fifty thousand able to be raised from across the Empire on short notice if necessary, with the necessary provisions in the Imperial treasury to properly equip and train them to the increasingly professional standards of modern warfare - increasingly complex and archaic as the practice was.
While the ancient alliances of Poznan still stood between Poland and the League against aggression from the North, Karoline had chosen her advance far more carefully than her father. The League had gotten itself involved in the Italian civil war, allying itself with the neighboring city-state of Venice against the large remnant kingdom of Sicily - an extremely perilous gamble that pit the League's armies not only against the various condottiteri of Italy's rough mountains, but also against the still-powerful Byzantine Empire, which threatened at any moment to make a lurch into Italy. While they would be obliged to send men up to help their Polish allies, it was apparent that they would be begrudged to send too many away from Italy, and Poland's armies alone were no match for the Union's terrifying black-and-red armies.
Karoline was no military commander, and even the generals she appointed to lead in her stead were generally mediocre political picks, men chosen to appease their fathers or get them out of the way. No, she was something far more important than a skilled general - a crafty politician. There was no need to study the battles of the First Birthright War, because Karoline had ensured she wouldn't need to gamble on military skill or risky manuvers, because she had rigged the game in advance - the meager armies of Poland and the laughably small amount of aide they received from their supposed southern allies were driven before vastly superior Northern forces, under banners that almost never outnumbered their foes anything less than two-to-one. Even in what few skirmishes had near even numerical fronts, Karoline had spent the last three years re-training and re-equipping her armies to a point, filing the semi-professional core that was the Leidangr like a blade against a whetstone. Though the Polish hussars had become increasingly renowned, far more of both Polish and League forces were made up of nearly-untrained peasant levies that served little purpose than to be trampled under the thunderous hooves of the Alsverk.
The Russians were of no concern this time around. Once more, they were engaged with their own conflicts in Bulgaria and with the minor nomadic tribes to the east - but more paralyzingly, the Tsar was said to be increasingly nervous about rumours swirling far to the east of Steppe horsemen and ancient pagan Gods. It mattered little what he was afraid of, really. Fear is a useful agent, regardless of whether it's founded or not.
Without any bother from the Russians and only minimal resistance from the League to her claims on the former Union territories along the Baltic sea, it seemed apparent to the young Polish king that the war was a hopeless cause after only a few months of crushing defeats and a slew of sieges along the territories claimed by greedy northern fingers.
There is still something to be said for the likes of Sigurd and Elisa, the militaristic, axe-swinging brutes who built the Empire on blood and iron, and something to the gruff, coarse disdain for idle diplomacy and careful politicking that dominated the minds of the Wolf-state when its soldiers swung axes in barbaric tarries instead of holding pikes in neat rows under crown-appointed Sergeants with red-white tassels, and sung songs in strange harsh tongues of Ragnar Lothbrok and Sigurdr Kynlingr atop ships bound for Byzantium instead of quiet, political tongues in stone halls. They knew, if nothing else, the kinds of lessons only learnt of sweat and blood, lessons that Karoline and her sort had always found difficult - lessons that say that no matter how well a plan is prepared, both battles and wars can shift in the blink of an eye.
Historically, the Britons had fought little with the Union, despite their frequent scuffles with the Imperial protectorate of Holland and the lingering Imperial presence on the Orkney islands. Until recently, there had been a significant amount of Imperial settlement in Caitness, but all the Union's territory in mainland Britannia had been unceremoniously seized by the English during Harald's civil war. Perhaps the act of doing so emboldened the newly-minted Emperor, since his declaration of war in 1218 came as a complete shock to both Karoline and the Union as a whole. While she had prepared for the unlikely event of the Union's peripheral but omnipresent enemy in France entering into a Polish conflict, for Britainnia to do so seemed unthinkable. But then again, if there was ever a time to cement their gains and push the Union out of the British isles for good, it seemed to be the present.
Surpise does not win wars by itself, though. The British had patently underestimated the remaining strength of the Union in their initial landing, which was woefully unprepared to face the significant amount of Leidangr they faced near Oslo. While a force of two thousand men was never intended for much more than a distraction tactic, nearly the entirety of the division was annihilated by the immediate response of nearly fifteen thousand Imperial soldiers in their single skirmish - an effort that cost the defensive movements up to Scotland nearly no time at all.
Worse still, the initial assaults on Orkney proved disastrous. The island had been heavily fortified over four hundred years of Imperial rule, and a naval assault on a heavily fortified, mountainous island is about the worst tactical situation imaginable. The forces that had been left at Orkney only numbered in the hundreds, and both their training and equipment were dated and mediocre. By all means, a force of four thousand should've been more than enough to take out the five hundred odd troops at Orkney - but the stone walls of an island fortress are not something to be underestimated.
Lacking the ability to properly transport siege weapons, the British assault was turned and stranded on Orkney. The loss of the majority of their boarding force, along with some of its key commanders, meant that when the main Imperial fleet landed at the tip of Scotland, British forces were notably outnumbered. Although the British army did manage to intercept the Imperials at their landing on Scotland's northern coast, the north edge of Caithness had no reinforcements whatsoever, having bordered with the friendly Orkney islands for centuries. The advantages simply weren't enough to cope with the raw numbers of the more populous Union, and their shattering defeat on the coast of Caithness sealed the war.
Caithness sealed more than the British involvement in the Birthright war. While the Union's generals eagerly pushed the advantage, Karoline offered a white peace to Richard the Second, unbeknownst to the Assembly. Although it seemed the Union had the defeated British armies on the run, fighting through the mountains of Scotland would allow them to whittle away the Union armies into nothingness - and more pressingly, two years of war had drained most of the significant Imperial treasury. Most of the raised Leidangr was pulled back to Orkney without explanation, defending from a passive British blockcade until February of 1219, when Richard II officially signed peace with the Union - marking the end of the First Birthright War.
Even though Karoline had won back the Union's Polish territory and nearly reunited the Baltic Sea as an Imperial lake, the nobility was infuriated. White peace in a British war meant cementing the British claim to Caithness as legitimate, effectively surrendering territory that had belonged to the Union for hundreds of years over to the younger, upstart British Empire, a fact widely construed as military weakness despite Polish gains and military success over the Britons. Although they hadn't managed to drive the Union out of Orkney, the British had very successfully thrown a wrench into Karoline's birthright war, changing the attitudes of her massive and disgruntled nobility from jubilation over claiming Danzig and Poznan to bitter resentment over submitting Caithness to the British. While they ultimately hadn't managed to claim Orkney as their own, the British had accomplished something perhaps far more lasting; permanently besmirching Karoline's reputation as a weak and ineffectual Empress.
That entirely undeserved perception was cemented by a relatively long and idle rule after the First Birthright War, encompassing fourteen years of peace and stability, rebuilding trade contacts and prosperous towns neglected and decaying from the reigns of ignorant or distracted rulers. It was precisely the opposite of the hand-wringing idleness that ruled throughout the useless reign of Tjudmund the lamb, yet that is exactly what it was perceived as. Karoline, for lack of better explanations, simply lacked the charisma of the Union's famous stewards; she didn't quite have the silver tongue of Maximilian or the commanding presence of Felix, and so her essential contributions to the Empire went ignored or even mocked.
In some strange fashions, perhaps Karoline was sort of kin in her reign to the rising Empire in the east. The Empires of the west mocked and laughed at both, taken seriously only in circles of 'barbaric' Russians and 'effete' Byzantines. Yet both had already left some of the greatest footprints the world had ever seen - no matter how many refused to recognize them.
Though perhaps it is unfair to compare the two. It is true that Karoline revived her nation in many ways, reversing the social and political decline that had taken root after the troubled reign of her father (and decades of increasingly complex backstabbing). But her imprint, as significant as the Union may be, was limited to the kingdoms of the North in all their unending trials and tribulations.
The Mongols suffered no such limitations.
And that's when the Brits wrote "Rule, Britannia!"
Even though they didn't quite win anything but a moral victory.
As an aside, could you do an update on what the biggest, wealthiest, most populous cities in Europe are? I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of worldbuilding background.
Even though they didn't quite win anything but a moral victory.
As an aside, could you do an update on what the biggest, wealthiest, most populous cities in Europe are? I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of worldbuilding background.
Historians should treat her kindly. Caithness would only, I feel, be a drain on the Union. The Baltic is their heartland.
I do think an important element of AH world building is having a pop-history narrative and a real history narrative.
Considering the size and Diversity of the Union, it would make sense for it to start breaking down. I'd give it till the Nordic Reformation and Renaissance in (possibly) 1488.
Just because the Empire is big doesn't mean the union can hold them out. Infantry in the right passes can make all the difference for a Calvary based army.
Just because the Empire is big doesn't mean the union can hold them out. Infantry in the right passes can make all the difference for a Calvary based army.
Certainly. I'll make a specific note to cover this more in-depth in the 1300 global update, but for the moment here's a basic estimate of the largest and richest cities within Europe:
#1 remains Constantinople, the Jewel of the West. Although it, like Byzantium itself, has remained in slow but nefarious decline over the last few centuries, the prolonged power of the Eastern Romans has only made the greatest city in the West stronger and prouder.
#2 is Venice, which saw a large number of emigration from Rome after the fall of the Empire and has established itself as the world's premier city-state, holding an ideal position between the chaotic regions of Italy and the stability provided by Byzantium and the League.
#3 is Paris. At the heart of Charlemange's Empire, Paris was recently given a massive boost to its population, stability, and wealth, one which frequent wars with England and the Union have failed to put a significant dent in. Although challenged by upstart cities from the larger Union, Paris remains larger and wealthier than any city other than those of the fallen Roman Empire. However, its growth is notably slower than the much faster rise of cities like Cologne and Oslo, which have grown from relative hamlets to massive megalopolises in record time.
#4 is Cologne. Already the largest city in Germany, being granted the office of the Kappeidsman (the second highest religious authority below the Fylkir) has spurred Cologne's growth as the kingdom of Germany's de facto capital. With Germany having among the warmest climates and most welcoming soil of the Empire, it's no surprise that Cologne remains its largest city, and periods of growth have put Cologne hot on the heels of the French in terms of size.
And #5 is Oslo itself. Although located in a fairly cold and inhospitable climate, being at the capital of the Imperial Union has spurred dramatic growth among the northern city. Paris may have been a full-fledged city when Oslo didn't even exist, but centuries of holding the administrative capital of the largest empire in Europe has turned Olso from a struggling hamlet into the fifth largest city in all of Europe. It would be a strange day to see such a cold and unwelcoming place being the largest city of mankind's second most populous continent, but Europe has never been a place to stick to the rules.
And that's why you get elements of both in Imperial Blood's storytelling. Reality often differs from perception, but understanding both is important!
They'll show up sooner than anyone expects.
Good times never last forever.
Part 2
Thunderclap
Thunderclap
Three weeks after the Dragon Crown was set on Finn av Sverdklydige's head, a small black box arrived at Jafnadgr, held up in postulation by a redheaded servant. The simple latch opened with a gentle click; inside sat only a brown bag, no bigger than the inside of a hand.
Finn picked it up, rustling around the corded leather to the rustling of sand. Raising an eyebrow, the Emperor-and-Fylkir looked over to his still-kneeling aide.
"What is this?"
"A present, my Emperor. From Tsar Konstantin - of the Rus."
The long-haired Emperor opened the bag. Inside was nothing but sand, ground into a fine powder. A powder a particular shade of black.
"Yes, but what is it."
"A curiosity from the Russian skirmishes at Novgorod." The courtier's eyes flickered up to the bag, only for a brief moment. "The Eastern Skræling use it in their war engines."
The bearded Emperor scoffed, bringing his fingers in to pinch the contents of the bag between two heavy fingers. "This?" Finn asked, bringing a few grains of heavy, dark pebbels inches from his eye. "This is nothing but black sand."
A few grains clattered to the stone floors of Jafnadgr, rolling across perfectly-polished floors under the cracking and faded stone gazes of three dead men. The courtier's eyes followed them.
"This was simply left at one of their camps, but the Russians say that it can make thunder crack into the ranks of the enemy. From the mouth of manmade dragons they bring out to the battlefield."
Finn again looked at the bag in his hand. It felt no heavier; just a pouch of fine, dark sand, rolling with a soft clish in its bag.
"Insanity. Or witchcraft. What do the Russians hope to prove by sending this to me without comment?"
The courtier shrugged his shoulders almost involuntarily, instantly snapping them back into place. "I believe, my Emperor, the Tsar wishes us to prepare."
The Union had one reliable and powerful ally: time. The Mongols fought on nearly every front, conquering swathes of Siberia and Arabia as smaller groups skirmishes with the Russians to the north, where the extent of both territories met. Even with the bulk of the Mongolian army in Arabia, the Russians staunchly refused to launch an offense against the eastern hordes; even if they might be able to beat them back now, the Mongols had a terrifyingly large numerical advantage and a significant technological edge with their poorly-understood (if rare and thoroughly primitive) cannons, whose deafening fire consistently terrified and scattered poorly-trained groups - although so short-ranged and simple to be nearly incapable of causing any significant number of actual casualties. The clearly increasing threat of the Mongols had finally put the empires of central Europe on alert, and for a time, there was peace even between the bitter rivals of the Union and the League as both built up and retrained their armies.
Late in 1233, the first Khan of the Mongols, the man who had unified the tribes and conquered much of China and the near east succumbed to grave wounds inflicted while fighting the Fatmids of Persia and Arabia. Many, even in the Union, expected his fourteen-year-old child successor to lead to the 'barbarian horde' collapsing, and for two years, training and recruitment screeched to a breathy halt. It was particularly insulting for the Union to do so; one of the statues of its founders that stood above Jafnadgr's hall of Justice was the Empress Elisa, who was given control of the Union at exactly the same age as Temujin's young son, Buri. Elisa had gone on to shatter and conquer the powerful realms of Southern Germany and the western Baltics in the span of a few years, as one of the most singularly brilliant generals the Empire had ever seen.
They would have gotten along well.
Two years after his appointment as successor to the Great Khanate, Buri had subjugated the Cumans, broke the Fatmids, and conquered great swathes into the Mamluks and Northern Indians. More than that, he had restructured the Tengri faith, formalizing and centralizing the doctrine in a surprisingly organized fashion, taking the shamans and seers of the Mongol steepes into a regulated hierarchy. It was said that the Easterners revered Buri even more than his father - which meant that the Eastern Horde would be stable so long as he breathed.
By 1236 ER, eastern and central Europe had become more stable than they had been for the last three centuries. The remarkable peace and stability newfound at the edge of Europe was hardly due to a sudden spurt of love for the Emperors and Tzars of the region; Finn was thought of as a rather simple hedonist, the Russians had a new, untested, and terribly young Tsar by the name of Vyshta II, and both the League and Byzantium were still engaged in a bitter stalemate over the slowly cooling Italian situation. But more than petty grievances and minor qualms about lordships, nobles and commoners alike were united in abject fear of the vicious savages who had razed and butchered millions without a word of remorse. True, when Sigurd and the raiders of the North had reigned, they too had sacked holy sites and stolen artifacts from Jerusalem and Constantinople, but even Sigurd, the Dragon of the North, had never massacred a city for some diplomatic affront. The cruelty and destruction of the Mongolians on their unceasing warpath, it seemed, could only be matched by the indestructible strength and size of their enormous armies.
A serious push into Russia would come soon, once the Mongols had had their glut in Persia and north Arabia. To strike them first would certainly be suicidal and uncoordinated, so between the strategy meetings and hurried discussions over tables in Moscow and Cologne, it was all the Emperors of Europe could do to wait, tensely sitting in their chairs as courtiers served meals that no longer tasted quite so divine.
No message came in November of 1238 ER. There was no declaration of war, no formal document, no gathering of heads. The Mongols had stopped sending envoys to the Russians as soon as it became clear they were unwilling to pay tribute. The only message that came to the Emperor-and-Fylkir was one from the Tsar himself, a brief, short note saying that the Mongolians had crossed the Volga in force and razed the city of Saratov.
The Tsar spoke little when he met with Finn. The demands of the Union were simple - they would help the Russians at no cost, but former Imperial land around Ingria would be sold off to the Union at the war's end in exchange. In the circumstances, there was astoundingly little protest.
There was a formal document sent to the Great Khan Buri when the Imperial Union declared war in defense of the Russian Tsardom. The messenger did not return.
