1605 – 1645
Lining up the Ducks.
If you have ever seen a man at peace with himself, if you have ever felt that a person in front of you was
holistic – neither confused, nor lusty, nor angry – then you will easily imagine Chief Ottawa in the last decades of his long and successful life.
For he passed away in the late 1630, during a brief period of peace. His great-great-grand son Chief Mattahori, the most able of our warriors of noble birth, was selected to rule our nation.
Well, we come to this Earth only to dream; and death is the awakening. So we wished Chief Ottawa a pleasant life wherever he awoke to, and went on with our dreams at hand.
This forty-years period of our history can be characterised as rebirth of our country from a poor backwater tribe to a powerful state with strong trading economy and fearsome modern army.
Speaking geographically, we set for ourselves three priorities:
1. Secure our stronghold in
Europe, where we fought constant wars. The results of these wars will be enclosed at the end of this chapter.
Many times, the cursed Spanish went hostile against us. However, these constant wars did not bring territorial gains to either side. They were simply too strong for us with their more modern military technology, their large fortresses, and their domination of the seas. So every war ended up with us paying then a symbolic contribution of a few ducats.
Treacherous French took a habit of attacking us when we were exhausted by hostilities with the Spaniards. They were well punished for this dishonourable behaviour, for we took a few of their provinces (normally two per war), and the rest revolted away from them. For a long while, they only had one province in Europe, that of Isle-de-France. We unfortunately were not able to take them out since they owed many large fortresses in Caribbean and in Africa. Well, their time will come.
Very important for us was conversion of the European Natives to the ways of Manitu. We managed to convert a few provinces, and one or two did so by themselves. Now these lands were able to put up 4,000 – 7,000 warriors when called upon. This was to be a good help in the cruel wars to come.
Of interest was our war with Savoy, who grew rather large in the South of France. We provoked them into embargoing our trade, and led a justified operation to punish the evil-doers. For no one can limit our liberties to trade freely wherever we want. This just war, which was extremely long as we had to take a few large fortresses, gave rise to multiple unrests back home – our people could not understand why it took so long to deal with the overseas savages. In result, we liberated 4 of their 5 provinces (gaining direct access to the Mediterranean sea) and had to spend a few years pacifying our citizens. Cherokee even declared independence for one month or so, but we quickly convinced them to re-join the Empire.
After this war, our European holdings stretched from the Northern seas to the Mediterranean.
Our progress was seriously hindered by the fact that every European city had a medium or large fortress, which we either had to besiege or storm multiple times. Longingly, we looked at the Muslim lands, which were mainly with minimal or small fortifications. Well, we are where we are, and nothing can be done. We did not
want to fight for the mainly poor Muslim lands, as yet.
2. Expand in
Africa. With French, Polish, Dutch and English very active in Africa, we could not stand by and watch them snatch away the African coast. We invested a lot of means into putting a stake at anything we could grab.
Unfortunately, the French terrorists have destroyed many a Lenape trading post, and the territories lost by us were quickly settled by the French themselves, or other European nations. They are people without shame.
Results of this yo-yo land grabbing in Africa will also be enclosed below.
We managed to annex Benin, and build large fortified cities in South and South-East Africa as well as in some places on the West Coast. This enabled us to have common borders with all Pagan nations of the Black Continent.
3. Strengthen our base in
America. Up to this point, many lands in North America remained unsettled, or with low level colonies or simple trading posts, used as a means to keep the outlanders away.
We now started to turn these provinces into cities, slowly but methodically.
We unfortunately did not yet have common borders with the Inca Empire (who had by now annexed Chimu), so they refused all our vassalisation requests so far. We desperately needed a man who would discover the unoccupied provinces between us and them, a man whom our Spanish enemies would call a ‘konkis – tado’.
This is a quick summary from our new Chielf's personal journal:
Land technology - 12
Naval technology - 3
Trade level - 3
Infrastructure level - 3
Inflation -1.6%
Yearly Income - 4048.52
Income from Trade - 1278.43
As promised earlier, here are the maps of our conquests in Europe. Our lands are grey with wigwam cities. Light circles with numbers in them indicate the primary targets for the next decade or two:
And here is the situation in Africa, where you can see our lands noted in grey, and targets for peaceful annexation circled in blue:
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