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Welcome one and all the continuation of the Assyrian story. We began in the twelfth century in CK2 and have now reached the cusp of a new era, and more importantly a new game. See the first part of the story by clicking the link in the image below. I will start out with an update summarising the first part in brief for those who want to get stuck right into this one, before posting an overview of the known world and the Assyrian realm. We will then get back on the road with the story itself.
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A Short History of Medieval Assyria
A Short History of Medieval Assyria
Assyria Reborn 1129-1181
Assyria Reborn 1129-1181
The modern Assyrian nation traced its origins to a period in the middle of the twelfth century when the Middle was wracked by the aftershocks of the breakdown of the Seljuk Empire. Through the mire of anarchy that griped the region in these years, a Syriac Christian warlord named Ta’mhas Qatwa seized control over a small territory around Christian-majority Samarra. Through his remarkable career as a territorial ruler, Ta’mhas the Great fought back Turks, Arabs, Kurds and Armenians to take control of all of northern Mesopotamia, establishing the Kingdom of Assyria ruled from Nineveh – formerly Mosul. The conquest of the new realm was accompanied by a period of nation building, in which the Syriac Christians of the Near East – bound together by the strictures of the Church of the East – began to consciously associated themselves as a single Assyrian nation.
Ballad of the Bear 1181-1236
The new Assyrian nation faced a true test to its survival under the reign of Ta’mhas’ two sons – the placid Niv (King from 1163-1200) and riotous Nahir (who led his brother’s armies from the 1180s before reigning in his own stead from 1200-1236). The established of Assyria had been followed by the beginning of the Crusader era in the Middle East, with the conquest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 1170s. The new Catholic state became a close ally of the Assyrians, beginning a centuries long tempestuous relationship between Rome and Nineveh. In the 1180s, the new alliance was forged in blood as the Shia and Sunni joined together in an effort to destroy to new young Christian Kingdoms – facing a bitter defeat as the Latins joined with King Niv’s brother – the mighty Nahir the Bear – to scatter their foes. Over the next twenty years, the Assyrians went on a path of conquest – taking control of all of Mesopotamia, forcing the Abbasid Caliph from Baghdad and reaching the shores of the Persian Gulf. More remarkable feats were to follow as between 1215 and 1220, Nahir, now reigning as King in his own right, led the famous St Thomas Crusade to southern India – establishing the Malabar Raj, an Indian-Christian Assyrian vassal state. Through this time, Assyria grew into an increasingly rich and cosmopolitan land of dozens of languages and creeds. Yet the first seeds of later troubles were already becoming apparent in the last years of Nahir’s reign. As the elderly monarch ruled all the way into his seventy ninth year, he faced increasing instability in his final decade as his rebellious family members and nobility squabbled over power and the impending succession. At the time of his death in 1236, the nation was in the midst of civil war.
Crisis of the Thirteenth Century 1236-1301
Nahir’s death marked the end of almost a century of rabid expansionism and the beginning of an era of division and ill fortune. The Bear’s immediate successor, Avina, was ultimately forced into a compromise to end the civil war had broken out in the last months of his father’s life, relinquishing his own children’s rights to succeed, before dying just a few years later during a war with the Byzantines that saw Assyria capture the wealthy city of Damascus. Avina’s erstwhile rival, Nahir II, then rose to the throne. The first two decades of his reign were dominated by the arrival of the Cumans on the scene in Assyria, a Catholic Turkic people who had migrated into the Middle East to escape the rampages of the Mongols on their Steppe homeland. The Assyrians ultimately allowed them to settle in exchange for taking them into military service – beginning a spiral that would see the Cumans burrow themselves ever deeper into the realm’s political structures. Having struggled against the Cumans in the 1240s and 1250s, the Kingdom was then hit by rebellion and disquiet through the next decade – as the country slowly moved towards the horrors that were to await.
The 1270s witnessed Assyria’s true descent into hell. The nation was hit first by the apocalypse of the Black Death, that swept away the lives of millions, and then by civil war and revolution instigated by the Messalian religious movement that preached class war, anti-Semitism and reform of the Church of the East. As the country bubbled in unrest for years, King Moqli making extensive use of the Cumans to maintain order, the situation unravelled at the end of the decade when the Cumans fled their post in the face of a large Messalian horde – abandoning Nineveh and their King to the heretics who captured the city, executed the King and decapitated any effective central authority in Assyria. In the months that followed the Kingdom began to decintigrate into petty regional fiefdoms, while the Messalians established a state in the north around Nineveh and an unprecedentedly large Islamic revolt took control of most of central Mesopotamia. Assyria was only saved from oblivion by the emergence of its third truly great King – Niv II, the Hammer. The son of Queen Cecilia of Jerusalem, he passed over from his mother’s Kingdom to establish a base in the western provinces of the empire, and over the course of the next decade reconquered the entire Kingdom piece by piece, destroying the Messalian movement, sending its few surviving members into an exodus through the Syrian Desert, crushing Mesopotamia’s Muslims and aligning himself closely to the Cumans. Although Niv was able to reunite the Kingdom by the end of the civil wars in 1291, these years witnessed the end of a generation of Nestorian rule in Malabar as the native Hindu Cholan empire reconquered the land in 1283.
The Three Kingdoms 1301-1380
Through its first two centuries of existence, Assyria had been rooted firmly to Mesopotamia, a homeland that ethnic Assyrians knew as Beth Nahrain. From 1301, its focus took a decisive lurch westward to the Levantine Coast. In that year, Niv II succeeded his mother to become King of Jerusalem. Although her fiefdom had dwindled to little more than the port of Acre, the stature the title was such that the Pope had been unwilling to allow it to fall into the arms of a heretic. When Niv refused to either relinquish it, or support an ecclesiastical union between Rome and Nineveh, war was the only solution. The Palestinian Wars would rage for the next twenty years an encompass a number of different phases and a variety of competing factions. The Assyrians would face the Holy Roman Emperor and the local Latin lords of Outremer in the opening years of the war, before a variety of new and even deadly threats arose – the defection of the Cumans and later migration of anew horde from Anatolia, the rebellion of the Druze near Damascus and an invasion by Muslim tribes into the Hordan Valley. The ultimate result was a half victory. Niv was restyled as the King of Philistia, gained control over Jerusalem and much of the Jordan Valley – but was unable to extend his authority to the Palestinian coastline south of Acre. Meanwhile, a new wave of Cuman settlement in Palestine further enhanced their looming influence through the realm.
The decades after the Palestinian Wars and the death of Niv was something of a drop to earth, as his successor Isho the Unlucky first lost control of territories in the Persian Gulf before spending much of the 1320s locked into an internal struggle against the beguiling Samiyah Karamalish – who he first attempted to tame by marriage and was eventually forced to defeat on the field of battle and lock away in imprisonment. Geopolitically, the half century after Niv saw a gradual consolidation of a third component of the Assyrian realm in Syria. The Kingdom had began expanding into Byzantine Syria in the 1290s, when Niv had taken Alexandretta and Aleppo and began styling himself as King of Syria, but through the fourteenth century this process would continue, culminating in the absorption of the entire province in 1380. Success in the west, was twinned with difficultties in the east. At the end of the thirteenth century the Seljuk Empire, which had endured in Persia long after its retreat from the Near East, collapsed into warlordism, and Assyrian power gradually extended throughout the Zagros Mountains. These gains proved temporary. First a Kurdish revolt saw large parts of the Assyrian Zagros fall at the beginning of the 1360s, before the mighty Khazar warleader Timur took Tabriz in 1375 on the road to his unification of the Persian lands.
End of the Line 1380-1438
The effective unification of the fertile crescent was one of the last great triumphs of Assyria and her sacred ruling dynasty before its drawn out slide toward extinction. In 1388 the Sunni Caliph joined with Timur in a joint invasion of Assyria. These two foes were a genuine existential threat to Assyrian civilisation, together far stronger than the Christian Kingdom. King Niv III, who had ruled since 1369, was killed in battle against Timur in 1390 while the Khazars ran rampant throughout Mesopotamia. The King’s teenage successor Eliya – the first of his three sons who would all sit on the throne – shifted his focus to the west to confront a new Messalian revolt, the heretical movement having relocated to the region around Damascus. The heretics dramatically captured and blinded the King, releasing him only for his own military leaders, headed by the Latin general Manfred di Lorenzo, to execute him and raise his brother Nechunya II to the Kingship. From this point, the Assyrians counterattacked against the Muslims who had done great damage to Mesopotamia and were blessed by the withdrawal of Timur and much of his army that had been forced move east to confront new threats in India. This reprieve did not lead to peace as fighting continued in the west to avenge the blinding of Eliya by the Messalians, a conflict that ultimately spilled over into a wider war with the Byzantines in 1400. Nechunya’s poor prosecution of this conflict in turn led to mutiny in his army and a renewed Timurid invasion. Bloody fighting and another blessing of fortune – with Timur dying in the middle of his campaign – saved Assyria, and allowed her to achieve peace by 1410.
This was only the preclude to the final chapter in the long history of the House of Qatwa. After Nechunya’s death in 1413 his son Sabrisho came to the throne. Under the influence of his mother and a prominent Muslim faction at court, he adopted Zikri Islam – stunning the Assyrian public. His efforts to construct a realm built on religious toleration and openly practice his faith eventually led to a bloody palace coup by his uncle Todos, whose own reign lasted just a few short years before cancer claimed first his ability to procreate and carry on the family name and in 1426 his life. With his death, the last of the male line descended from Saint Ta’mhas the Great was gone. The next decade was consumed by a power struggle between competing claimants to this legacy in which the Crown Prince of Armenia, Aboulgharib ve Zhamo emerged triumphant. The chapter on Assyria’s Medieval history was then close in 1438 as the Aboulgharib inherited his father’s legacy to turn the Three Kingdoms into Five – Assyria, Syria, Philistia, Armenia and Georgia.
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It sounds as if Assyria has had its fair share of downs as well as ups over the centuries.
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Nice to see this continuing briskly on to EU4. Here’s to seeing what carnage unfolds in early modern Assyria!
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The pump is primed and we shall see how Assyria fares in a new age that may still carry over some old problems and introduce new ones for polyglot empire.
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And subbed! May fortune favor this young empire after suffering many setbacks along with the death of the founding dynasty.
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This time, I am in at the beginning!
Do you plan on culture-shifting to Assyrian in-game or modding it to keep the Primary Culture Assyrian? It would keep the original idea of the AAR alive but make the game easier for you, and that doesn't seem to be your style.
Do you plan on culture-shifting to Assyrian in-game or modding it to keep the Primary Culture Assyrian? It would keep the original idea of the AAR alive but make the game easier for you, and that doesn't seem to be your style.
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Assyria & The World in 1438
The World in 1438
Western Europe
Western Europe’s medieval history had been noted for the failure for any consolidated national units to emerge. Everywhere from the British Isles, to France, Spain, Italy and Scandinavia was divided between competing warlords. For much of the Medieval period the Holy Roman Empire, ruling over most of Germany, the Low Countries, Northern Italy, and much of the Holy Land was the hegemon of the Catholic world. However, in the latter Middle Ages this dominance began to slip as the Empire’s grip loosened in Italy and in its Germanic heartland it was challenged by the Thuringian Kingdom.
However, the Late Middle Ages had marked an important transition for the region. For one, Islam was only finally extinguished as a threat to Europe at the turn of the century when a Crusade had destroyed the Sultanate of Andalusia – the last Muslim power in the west. Although there remained large numbers of Muslims in Spain, the rest of western Europe was solidly unified under the religious authority of the Catholic Pope. Meanwhile, although for most of its history western Europe had been much poorer and less civilised than the empires to its east, this gap had shortened noticeably, with Europe increasingly capable of equalling its counterparts in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.
Eastern Europe
From piously Catholic Poland in the west to Tengri Chernigov in the east, Eastern Europe sat upon a civilizational fault line between Europe and Asia, the settled and nomadic, Christianity and Paganism. For much of the Early Middle Ages, the great competition in the region had been a race between Rome and Constantinople to Christianise the Slavs. Although there remained a sizeable residual Greek Christian population scattered across Russia, Byzantiums long period of internal crisis during the High Middle Ages had led to the withdrawal of Orthodoxy from this fight, allowing Catholicism to sweep over the Baltic, and into the Steppe and much of Russia. For a time almost every King in the land swore allegiance to Rome, until the Mongols’ Tengri revolution reignited a pagan backlash in central Russia that allowed the Chernigovians to emerge as the greatest power among the Russians.
Byzantium
For a period of almost two hundred years the Byzantine Empire was engulfed in an anarchy that brought the empire very close to collapse. Its long crisis began with the failed efforts of Konstantinos XI to pursue a religious communion with the west at the beginning of the thirteenth century, that led to a Catholic Crusade after his overthrow and years of religious infighting to purge the Latin influence. Hot on the tails of this crisis was the westward migration of the Cumans – who settled in central Anatolia, along the Danube and in Serbia. This was then followed by the terrors of the Black Plague and an even more damaging religious schism between Old Orthodoxy and the Paulicians. Generations of religious fighting followed before the empire was reunited under the rule of a confidant Paulician dynasty. Nonetheless, the ruling religious sect remained a minority within the empire in 1438, even as their numbers and authority continued to grow rapidly. Through the Byzantine Renaissance, power had been reasserted in southern Italy, the Balkan Cumans subjugated and their Anatolian equivalents reduced while Roman power was also projected across the Black Sea - influencing the Alanian Kingdom and stretching as far as the Volga and Caspian.
North Africa and Egypt
The Crusader era that began in the twelfth century and continued all the way into the early fifteenth century completely reordered the Mediterranean world. At its outset, Muslims ruled most of Iberia, southern Italy, the entire North African coastline and the Levant. By its end all these lands were under Christian, mostly Catholic, rule. Indeed, from Morocco in the west to Egypt in the east, the North African coast was controlled by a string of Crusader states – in which minority Latin elites, sometimes intermingled with indigenous Christian Berber and Coptic natives, lorded over large Muslim populations. By far the wealthiest and most important of these Kingdoms was Egypt. The Land of the Nile was divided between the Crusader Kingdom in the north and an Islamic Emirate in the south – mirroring Egypt’s wider cultural and religious division between the Copts, who dominated the Delta, and Arabs, who predominated in Upper Egypt. Most interestingly, indigenous Coptic Christianity had largely been extinguished by the Crusades, just as they had preserved their culture, as the Coptic Church had been forced into a communion with Rome and the adoption of Catholic doctrines, with only a few dissident sects holding out.
The Steppe and Caucuses
From the early thirteenth century until the end of the fourteenth century the Eurasian Steppe had been mostly unified under the leadership of the Mongolian Empire and its Tengri faith. In the space of a single generation in the first half of the fifteenth century this power struggle broke down completely. Religious emerged as Hindu preachers from India began to penetrate into the Khanate, winning over a number of tribes in Central Asia and breaking the monolithic power of the Tengri religious elite that had held the empire together for so long. When the Great Khan himself grew close to the Hindus, civil war broke out that led to the splintering the empire into a hundred smaller tribal states. On the western frontier, one of the chief beneficiaries of the Mongols’ demise were the Alans, a Greek Christian people who formed a Kingdom dominating the Caucuses – taking over from the Armenians to rule Georgia, a realm nominally claimed by King Aboulgharib in Nineveh.
Arabia and East Africa
The lands around the Red Sea were home of the pygmy Caliphates. In Arabia, the Sulaymans – closely allied to their powerful friends in Persia – were the Sunni Caliph. Across the sea in Ethiopia the Shia Caliphate ruled a kingdom with a Christian majority in the Ethiopian Highlands under the exiled Fatimid dynasty, a family who in generations passed had controlled much of the Middle East and North Africa from their Egyptian territorial base. However neither Caliph was truly a major power in their own right, surrounded by middling tribes and kingdoms in a region that was the plaything for the geopolitical scheming of the greater empires to the north.
The Timurid Empire
In 1438, the Timurid Empire was the largest, richest, most populous and militarily powerful state west of China. Although the insatiable expansion it had undergone under its famous founder Timur Khan had largely ebbed away after his death, the empire had held together in the face of civil wars among Timur’s successors and solidified into a lasting force in Eurasia. Governed by a relatively small and exclusive military caste of Sunni Muslim Khazars, its dominions stretched from the Himalayas and Indus Valley to the Zagros and Caucuses, from the Aral Sea to the Indian Ocean. Culturally, the Timurids had transformed the Persian world – restoring the supremacy of Sunni Islam over the region and in doing so making the Timurid Khan the effective leader of the Islamic world.
India
As had been the case since the early middle ages, India was dominated by a handful of powerful regional empires – each among the richest nations in the world, with millions of subjects. The Hindi states in the north of the continent had been shaken by the conquests of the Timurid empire over the past generation and their failure to unify sufficiently to expel them from the Indus valley. The overlord of the Dravidian south – the Tamil-speaking Cholans – controlled a more disjointed networked of semi-independent vassals and, despite its great resources and commercial strength, was comparatively backward relative to the north.
Assyria in 1438
The Five Kingdoms assembled by the Armenian dynasty were startling in their ethnic, religious, cultural, economic and historical diversity.
1. Assyria
The Kingdom of Assyria corresponded to the Mesopotamian core of the old Assyrian realm, Beth Nahrain, – broadly the boundaries of the Kingdom left behind by her first heroic Kings, Ta’mhas the Great and Nahir the Bear. Through the centuries Mesopotamia had acquired something of a cross-cultural sense of ethnic identity built around the strength of the Church of the East and the history and traditions of the Kingdom.
Although legally united into a single Kingdom, Assyria was divided into two distinctive provinces – Assyria-Superior, sometimes called Assyria Proper, in the north and Babylonia stretching from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. Assyria-Superior formed the core homeland of ethnic Assyrians, also corresponding with ancient Assyria. It was only part of the empire in which they were a large majority – although even then they formed only in the region of two thirds of the population, with large numbers of Kurds, Armenians, Cumans, Jews, Arabs and even Greeks (mostly concentrated around Edessa) living into the imperial heartland.
While Assyria-Superior formed the Syriac homeland, the majority in Babylonia were Arabic. The Arabs were certainly not totally dominant, with the upper aristocracy in the region being firmly Assyria, and Assyrians forming a plurality in its greatest city of Baghdad. Like Assyria-Superior there were also a number of other minority populations including Kurds along the fringes of the Zagros, Jews in the major cities and the distinctive Mandaean people indigenous to the area. Babylonia differed from the north religiously as well. While its main urban centres of Baghdad and Basra were strongly Nestorian, Islam remained strong in the countryside – the area between the two cities having famously birthed the Zikri clique that briefly supported King Sabrisho in power in the 1410s. But perhaps the greatest distinction between Babylonia and Assyria-Superior was the importance of slavery – with plantation agriculture using large numbers of East African slaves having been a part of its way of life for centuries.
2. Syria
Syria had historically been one of Assyria’s most troublesome and independent territories, as well as a battlefield between Nineveh and Constantinople for much of the Late Medieval era. Culturally, with the exception of the area around Antioch that was majority Greek with a sizeable Armenian element, the Syrian countryside was overwhelmingly Arab while its cities were centres of cosmopolitanism with large Armenian, Assyrian and Jewish communities. Religiously, the Kingdom was a genuine mosaic. There were residual Muslim, mostly Shia, populations scattered along the fringes and the Druze homeland to the east of Damascus. Yet aside from these groups, and the urban Jews, Syria had been mostly Christianised – although splintered into around half a dozen major sects. Naturally, the sizeable Assyrian minority was Nestorian, in and around Damascus the infamous Messalians had formed a plurality. In the Lebanon the indigenous Marionite Church, which like the Nestorians used Syriac as a liturgical language although with their own Christological positions, was the largest grouping – focused in a core around Beirut Tripoli, with Messalians influence seeping into the mountains around Baalbek, Catholicism creeping north from Tyre and Orthodoxy advancing southward. Further north, the two largest religious groupings in Syria were variants of divided Greek Christendom, concentrated in the old territories of Byzantine Syria – Old Orthodoxy, strongest around Antioch, and Byzantine Paulicianism, the largest faith in Aleppo. The geography of Syria’s nobility mirrored the popular religious divide – with partially Hellenised Greek Christian Arabs forming the elite in the north and west, while Nestorian Assyrians, reliant on local tribal leaders, controlled the land around Damascus in the south.
3. Philistia
One of the least populous parts of the Five Kingdoms, but also one with more blood spilt over it than most. Philistia was the outcome of the long Palestinian Wars that raged through the first two decades of the fourteenth century as Niv the Hammer’s ambition to secure his birthright led Assyria into an endless war of attrition. The nobility of the Kingdom were quite distinctive, with a culturally European Catholic Latin elite dominant in the west, while their presence was somewhat weaker east of the Jordan River where Syriac-speaking landowners had made some traction. Much like Assyria-Superior, Philistia was also home to sizeable communities of Cumans who had settled there at the conclusion of the Palestinian Wars, many of whom were involved in generational military service. Among the commonfolk, the large majority of the populace were Arabs, they were religiously divided. Along the coast the Arabs were mostly Catholic, but on the Jordan River Nestorian preachers had found great success in proselytising among them – often to the chagrin of Latin gentry, meanwhile in the deserts on fringes of the desert Shia Bedouins predominated. The most distinctive part of the Kingdom was, inevitably, the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. There Nestorians formed a very narrow plurality, but there were also large numbers of Catholics, Jews, Muslims and smaller numbers from other Christian denominations.
4. Armenia
The Kingdom of Armenia centred on Lake Van, Aboulgharib’s inheritance from his father and the cradle of Armenian culture for so long as the heartland of successive Medieval Armenian states, was just one, distinctive, part of a wider Armenian nation. The Kingdom itself was relatively ethnically homogenous, saving for some pockets of Cumans in the west, Kurds around Lake Urmia and long-established Assyrian minorities throughout. Furthermore, Levon’s revolution to re-establish Oriental Orthodoxy had largely succeeded – pushing Greek-rite clerics from the territory. This set the Armenians of the Kingdom aside from the large populations who lived within the Byzantine empire to the west and under Georgian rule around Yerevan to the north, who were mostly followers of Old Orthodoxy. Further to this, Armenians lived scattered as a mostly urban minority throughout the Middle East, mostly in the other parts of the Assyrian empire. Many of these groups had drifted to the religious majority in their respective regions – Nestorianism in Mesopotamia, Orthodoxy in Syria.
5. Georgia
Georgia was nominally the fifth Kingdom of the empire. Having for a time been ruled by Aboulgharib’s illustrious father Levon, Georgia had fallen out of Armenian hands in the face of popular revulsion at his religious reforms and had since come under the orbit of the Alans. Assyria’s King nonetheless, continued to lay claim to the northern land. Georgia housed sizeable Old Orthodox and Paulician religious currents, yet its population were overwhelmingly Greek Christians, hostile to the Oriental Orthodoxy of Armenia and Nestorianism of Assyria alike.
6. Arabia
The true fifth Kingdom of the Assyrian realm was Arabia. Lacking the formal legal structures or recognition of the other Kingdoms of the composite Assyrian state, the Arabian territories were mostly ruled according to local tribal customs and the whims of their, mostly ethnic Assyrian, feudal overlords. The region itself was far more culturally homogenous than the fertile crescent, with Arab Bedouins forming almost the entire population beyond an enslaved African minority. Religiously, the region was far less united. In the desert territories south of Philistia, Shia Islam predominated while in Oman and the Gulf the Sunni were in the majority outside of the Nestorian tribal heartlands in Kuwait and Qatar and Shia Bahrain. Meanwhile, the maritime island of Socotra – with its unique population – was home to one of the oldest Nestorian communities in the world.
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A brief overview of what the known world looks like as we enter into the EU4 era and a dive into the diversity of the Assyrian realm, or Five Kingdoms as we may start to call them more often. The next update takes up the story once again from where we left off.
Welcome aboard for the next stage!
We certainly did over the years of the CK2 part - a heretical movement killing no less than two Kings in periods of anarchy about a century apart, the realm coming to brink of collapse multiple times, a King executing his son by elephant. And on the upside, Crusades to India, great military victories and the creation of a whole new nation.
And in the next update we shall commence anew!
It most certainly will, and this last update has helped ram home just how polygot the realm his. Several different regions, many of them extremely different from one another in ethnicity and religion and all with a sizeable degree of diversity within them as well.
The Qatwa will be sorely missed, soon we will have the chance to see the ve Zhamo's take on the task of ruling this sprawling, multi cultural empire.
It is several weeks since I did the original conversion, so I can't remember if the converter did it automatically or if I made the change - but our primary culture is Assyrian and religion Nestorian. However, Aboulgharib is Armenian culture and Nestorian religion (in line with his CK2 conversion). EU4 lets your ruler and sate diverge in culture so this position certainly makes the most sense (the whole character of Assyria not being changed by the ethnicity of the King). There are in game tensions created there by that gap though.
Aha, he's back!
Welcome aboard for the next stage!
We certainly did over the years of the CK2 part - a heretical movement killing no less than two Kings in periods of anarchy about a century apart, the realm coming to brink of collapse multiple times, a King executing his son by elephant. And on the upside, Crusades to India, great military victories and the creation of a whole new nation.
And in the next update we shall commence anew!
It most certainly will, and this last update has helped ram home just how polygot the realm his. Several different regions, many of them extremely different from one another in ethnicity and religion and all with a sizeable degree of diversity within them as well.
The Qatwa will be sorely missed, soon we will have the chance to see the ve Zhamo's take on the task of ruling this sprawling, multi cultural empire.
It is several weeks since I did the original conversion, so I can't remember if the converter did it automatically or if I made the change - but our primary culture is Assyrian and religion Nestorian. However, Aboulgharib is Armenian culture and Nestorian religion (in line with his CK2 conversion). EU4 lets your ruler and sate diverge in culture so this position certainly makes the most sense (the whole character of Assyria not being changed by the ethnicity of the King). There are in game tensions created there by that gap though.
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Nice little overview.
It does seem that Europe will be an absolute tinderbox when the Reformation arrives at this glance.
It does seem that Europe will be an absolute tinderbox when the Reformation arrives at this glance.
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It may be hoped from this truly staggering degree of religious and ethnic diversity that Assyria will be a pioneer in building multicultural institutions
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Assyria has to be diplomatically savvy, with its position between the mighty Timurid empire and a resurgent Byzantine empire. I wouldn't be surprised by a partition.
Did you use any mod to stop the eu4 blob? in the AARs that go through this game, mega blobs stand out as the main pain on the map.
Did you use any mod to stop the eu4 blob? in the AARs that go through this game, mega blobs stand out as the main pain on the map.
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This version of the Reformation should prove interesting.
Are the other kingdoms of Assyria represented as vassals?
Are the other kingdoms of Assyria represented as vassals?
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Am I right in reading the map to say that the HRE is a single, unified state?
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As is usual, I fell rather behind in part one. But the beginning of part two was a good excuse to catch up!
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