So there is a very divided coalition. Will be interesting to see who gains the upper hand in the war that is comming!
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Yeah the coalition is definitely starting to feel its age at this point. Entry coming in soon!
The Situation in Turkey
From ‘The War of the Mediterranean and the End of the Old Age’, by A. de Tocqueville, written 1785
In the writings of that great man, d’Artagnan the younger, he describes the politics of that great city Constantinople, and the shard of antiquity he found there. In it was a sentence which those who care to study Turkey would find most prescient: “...and across the Bosphorus stands the city of Bithiya, and in it, the great Senate of the Ottoman Empire. Populated by learned men of great nobility, this body, formed in the century hence, has been quite ambitious in extending the reach of its power. On a riverine raft one can see many transports along the bay, bringing ministers and senators to the Sultan’s estate. But, I dare say, within the space of a century it is the Sultan who shall be coming to the senate, hat in hand, rather than the other way around.”
As with much of d’Artagnan’s writings on the Orient, there is much insight and much inaccuracy, and it would help many the reader to take d’Artagnan’s works sceptically, as one would a newfangled medicine, lest you be sucked in by his witty prose and luxurious hystericisms. Turkey does, indeed, have a legislative body, and as d’Artagnan notes they do have a garb similar to the senators of old, but they are not merely ‘learned men’, they are priests.
An Imam of the 18th century, at the height of the ‘Maghreb Renaissance’
They form the legislative and judicial bodies of the Caliphate, an organization not unlike the Papacy in Christendom. The body was formed in the 16th century, when Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the Egyptian Mamluks and took Mecca, and for a long time they were merely a judicial body, who chose the Caliph who was a mere figurehead. But, as a product of courtly intrigues too complex to recount here, the Vizier began to rely on this body (which he retitled the Court of God) to create what laws he could not get out of the Sultan. This, combined with a series of weak and inbred Sultans, led to the Ottoman Empire moving in the opposite direction of her continental peers: while nearly every other kingdom in Europe was centralizing and strengthening an absolute crown (with the notable exceptions of England and Scandinavia), Turkey was decentralizing, and increasingly this decentralization was coming to the benefit and of the Maghreb.
As the Court of God’s functions expanded, its size was also expanded, until it included notable priests from all the religions of the Ottoman Empire. Jews, Christians, Shi’a Muslims and various branches of Sunni could all be seen in the Court, and to a larger and larger degree they became something like a parliamentary body with both legislative and judicial powers, that is the ability to create laws and to legitimize them. But the expansion of the Court created an unintended side effect; with Turkey and the Levant represented by several discordant groups, North Africans became an increasingly powerful faction within the Court.
Circuits of the Court of God in 1700 and the factions their members belonged to
For a period of time, factions did not exist in the Court, and thus the Court was merely an instrument of the Viziers’ will. But, over the course of the 1660s and 1670s, the first faction was formed after the expansion of the court to include Christians, Shi’a Muslims and Jews, a faction which called itself the Hosguru. This group advocated for increased tolerance of the country’s minorities, an increased devolution of power to the provincial governors, rights for minorities to avoid conscription, and most importantly an increased role of non-Sunni religious laws. This group was soon countered by the Dindar, which consisted of conservative priests who advocated an increased place for Sunni Islam in the court, the abolition of the millets, and increased power for the Court. Following shortly were the Sultanin, who advocated a larger place for the Sultan and Vizier, a larger army, and weaker governors.
This three-sided conflict continued for a decade, before the two ‘secular’ factions arose, whose politics had little to do with the conflicts over judiciality and entirely over legislation. These two groups were the Yollar, who wanted the Sultan to turn away from the military and develop the provinces and the abolition of laws against usury, and the Maghrebi. The peoples of North Africa were put in a difficult position by the tripartite conflict in the Court. A traditionally tolerant and independent land, they were at first members of the Hosguru against the Dindar. But their position at the frontier also led to a desire for a stronger army and a more capable central government. But their position at the Mediterranean also led to another tendency that they shared with the Yollar; that is their place as a trading hub for European trade to the far Orient led to them, also, desiring an expanded infrastructure and less limitations on lending.
An Alexandrian garden in 1684
The overrepresentation of the Maghreb in the Court, the unexpected solidarity of the Maghrebi, and their ability to manipulate the different factions to their benefit, led to a Maghreb-led modernization of the Ottoman Empire in the 1680s and 90s. Over the course of those 20 years, under the Vizier Kemer Shah (himself an Egyptian), a huge number of reforms were passed, strengthening the power of the Court, the governors, building roads and canals, and expanding the army primarily through recruitment of Sunni Maghrebis. It was this military expansion, in an area which had long been a backwater, which ironically led the Balkans (and Europe as a whole) to the largest conflict it had seen in a century.
Raulf Dey
The Hafisid Dynasty, which spanned before the time of the Ottomans, had left a hard mark on the Maghreb. Conflicts between the Tunisian heirs of this dynasty always viewed themselves as a higher breed than their neighbors to the west and south, but the larger powerbase of Algeria had led to much meddling by Turkish governors of Algiers in Tunisian affairs. So it was rare that so refined and so thoroughly Tunisian a man would become the governor of Algeria, and the face of the Maghreb Renaissance. The grandchild of Yusuf Dey, Raulf was more interested in trading, and amassed a small fortune in Alexandria and Suez off of the French trade with the East Indies. During this time he gained an interest in the arts of China and in thought occurring in France, and so he returned to Tunis, used his money and influence to gain the governorship of Algeria, and began an administration of “Enlightened Absolutism”, a phrase he happened upon in his studies of China.
Supporting printer’s shops at any cost, Raulf Dey faced a great deal of controversy when he allowed printers to print cheap copies of the Quran, and faced even worse difficulties when he completely relaxed laws punishing userers. But his chief foe was not his internal enemies, who became weaker and weaker as he became an imperial celebrity, but the Moroccans, who supported rebellions in western Algeria and occasionally made raids as far as Oran. But any attempt to counter these Morroccan raids led to further issues, because those Moroccans had, for a long time, been allied with the Holy Coalition.
The North African coast, showing Raulf Dey’s unprecedented double Beyships, the Moroccan kingdom, and the set of Coalition fortresses which lined the African coast
That the Holy Coalition would be allied with a Muslim Kingdom would seem odd to the contemporary reader, fostered as they were with the image of the Austrians, Italians, and Iberians as unflexibly devout. But the Moroccan alliance with Spain served the coalition’s purposes to a great degree; it began when the Spaniards intervened into the Succession War on the side of the Fez faction, and after the war ended in 1614, the new King Abdallah II pursued a vigorous policy against piracy and allowed the Spaniards to use Moroccan ports. But over time this alliance grew to be more of a vassalage; made unpopular by his alliance with the Coalition Abdallah and his son grew to rely more and more on their Catholic allies and their several thousand men positioned in garrisons across the Barbary Coast. This led to more and more enclaves being gifted to the Iberians, and a stronger and stronger rivalry between the Moroccan kings and their Turkish neighbors.
In 1706, Raulf was given a second term as Bey of Algeria, and an unprecedented second Beyship in Tunisia. The resources that these governorships gave him, combined with his ever larger fortune, allowed him to raise a modern army of 40,000 in Algeria and Tunisia, enough to fight both the Moroccan army and their Coalition allies. What followed was a year of horrid tension, with a series of Moroccan raids being chased off by Algerian forces with few blows being traded.
But, in the early days of 1707, a Moroccan raiding party came with a brigade of Iberian hussars. This raiding party was intercepted by Algerian forces, and unlike the year before, the Moroccans and Iberians fought and were repulsed. News of this defeat swiftly traveled along the coast, and the coalition fortresses mobilized in preparation for war, and a force of two thousand was sent across the Gulf of Tabriz to Morocco. Battles along the Moroccan border were met by attacks on the Coalition forces, and soon news came to the capitals of all the Coalition members that a war was underway in the Maghreb.
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Two mighty power-blocks are going to clash in this war, and it will for sure have more important consequences than what the initial raiding party imagined.
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Super interesting, and I really like the style. I am really looking forward to what comes next...
Thanks for the support, I've been moving between a bunch of jobs and getting ready to move to Philly (and my discover of the New World Order mod) but the entry detailing France's reasons for intervening and the situation in France will be up soon.
The War of the Mediterranean, part 1: The Intervention of France
Chapter 2, ‘A Soldier’s History of the Mediterranean War’, Armand de Villeneuve, published in 1764
One might very well ask: what led to the intervention of France into this war, which largely had to do with the Maghreb, an area that, at the time, France had little interest in? The reasons were threefold: the disruption of French trade, the long standing rivalry between France and the Holy Coalition, and the increasing personal and political desire for a war.
For over sixty years, the Kingdom of France had relied on the trade which flowed from the East Indies and the Suez Passageway for a large portion of her revenues. Even after this was regularized through colonial debts, the tribute from the principalities of Travancore, Ceylon, and the Kingdom of Min still amounted to as much as a tenth of French revenues. But the merchant ships who brought eastern treasures to Toulon and Marseilles were targeted (by choice or accident) by the naval war the Holy Coalition was fighting in the Mediterranean. Over the course of 1707 and 1708, fourteen merchant ships were lost to these ‘anti-piracy’ efforts, amounting to a loss in the tens of thousands of livres to the French crown.
These lost ships were more than an affront to French honor, they plunged the French crown into a deeply desperate financial situation. In order to make the expansion of his court and the creation of Versailles palatable to the parliaments, Henri promised not to raise a single new tax over the course of Versailles’ construction, this being a period before he found holding himself to such promises unnecessary. With a budget constrained by an ever increasing navy, a hugely expensive army, and an extravagant court, Henri was forced to create ever more colonial debt, which was providing lower and lower returns due to investor’s worries regarding the Mediterranean War.
Beyond this, when the war began going poorly in the Balkans Henri’s council began to fear what could happen after the end of the hostilities. The Holy Coalition had been a hard limit on any French aggression for nearly six decades, and need to defend against overwhelming aggression across the Pyrenees and Alps had limited France’s capabilities in all the wars she had fought under Louis XIII. Worse still, the Holy Coalition had threatened to intervene into a multitude of internal conflicts; none on the council had forgotten Habsburg support for the Duke of Burgundy during their childhoods. The Holy Coalition, in turn, were checked by the alliance’s other foe: the Turkish Empire. Just as the majority of French soldiers had remained on France’s southern borders during the Franco-Dutch War, the majority of Austria’s armies fought the Turks when they intervened into that war, allowing for their swift defeat in Alsace. The Mediterranean War thus held the possibility that France could finally break apart the force which had limited her expansion for nearly sixty years, and a lack of intervention brought the threat that the Coalition’s powers would be insurmountable.
The Court of Versailles was tremendously expensive; in its first two years of construction Versailles took up more of the budget than the army and navy combined
But it was pressure that Henri felt from the officer class that led France into the decade long Mediterranean War. Already bristling at the lack of influence they had in Henri’s kingdom, the lower ranks became even angrier when it became obvious that--for the first time since the 1650s--the army was not a motor of personal advancement. The army’s ‘stagnant’ growth* combined with few chances for combat experience outside of the Orient, meant that many who bought a commission as a colonel had remained colonels for nearly ten years. While this was alright before Louis XIII’s ban on the speculation of higher posts, strict requirements for experience and a lack of chances to gain that experience had enraged large parts of the army.
Henri III was no fool; he was not pressured into a massive war against nearly every one of France’s rivals by a set of junior officers alone. But he was hyper aware of anger within the army because, as was typical for his early regime, he saw his administration as analogous to Henri II’s, and knew that, at any moment, military discontent could turn into an outright coup attempt.
Henri mobilized his armies in the autumn of 1708, just as the Second War of Silesia began between the Coalition and Prussia. In order to gain a nominal casus belli, Henri began rapidly improving relations with Prussia, and delivered a speech in the Imperial Parliament on the importance of the sovereignty of the German Princes if the German Empire were to retain its position as the center of Europe and threatening war if Austrian forces were to march on Berlin. Thousands of livres a month poured into the Prussian treasury, and when the Empire made its predicted moves to end the war by sieging Berlin, Henri sent his armies over the Rhine and Pyrenees. The War of the Mediterranean, which would come to span the whole of the world and last over fifteen years, had begun.
Alliances in the Mediterranean War in 1709
*Mind you, France possessed an army of nearly 150,000 on the continent, as large as Iberia’s and Italy’s armies combined.
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Holy crap, that is going to be one big, long war, Merrick. Looking forward to finding out how it goes!
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Seems to be this alternate timeline's equivalent to the Seven Years War, but even longer!
No we're also going to get that, I've felt weird about how...peaceful this alternate history was and I've been planning this war for some time, but I'd like to just tell you guys that I'm going to be focusing partially on events going on inside France and the colonies and how they're affected by the war, because (as the 40 Years War showed me) I can only write campaign entries so many times
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Just caught up Merrick. A global, fifteen year war is a humbling prospect, though a bit levened by it being called the Mediterranean War such os the evil of eurocentric historiography!
Sorry for the delay, this update took a while and I’ve been going back into my job search
Jean Desmoulins, the First Republican
When one reads the works of d’Artagnan the younger. the last thing one would believe was that d’Artagnan was seeking to begin a tradition. His work was not political, it did not intend to change minds. It was a story of personal discontent with his society, and how he worked through that discontent. That he created a series of traditions, that generations of young men would take up his journey and travel Europe seeking some meaning, would likely have surprised him.
What would have surprised him more was that his purely personal work would be recouped by a group of republican radicals, to the point that d’Artagnan’s travels is one of the first texts read by the Jacobin clubs, and Marat’s introduction to the 6th publication of the text began with: “The first step towards revolution is the realization of dissent”. But, like many of the texts which would become revolutionary over the 18th century, Travels in Europe and Travels in the Near East were not seen this way, they only became revolutionary after they were recontextualized. This occurred due to the importance d’Artagnan’s work had in one of the most important lives of the Ancien Regime: Jean des Moulins.
Jean Des Moulins and his companion were the first men to explicitly connect each of the proto-revolutionary thinkers into an ideology aimed directly against the Ancien Regime
The son of a prominent Parisian political family which traced its origins to Louis XII, the des Moulins family counted three mayors, two intendants, and a military governor among their ancestors. But that governor, Louis des Moulins, had put an unmistakable blemish on the family’s honor when he participated in the attempted coup against Colbert, which led to the family falling out of favor with the court. And so an ancient family was forced to begin again from the start, and when Jean des Moulins was born in 1686 the family was nearly destitute by aristocratic standards. But they were still able to afford a tutor, the Jansenist Francis de Tremont, who taught Jean the Classics, Greek and Latin, and a deep sense of piety. Although Jean wanted to go to the Latin quarter and continue his life as a scholar, his family’s desire for social advancement led them to buy him a commission as a lieutenant in Paris’ 1st Grenadiers. It was here that Jean met what would become his best friend, the Flemard Antoine Roeier, a Calvinist preacher's son who enlisted in the Grenadiers after his father was arrested for incendiary activities.
Antoine was the first Calvinist Jean had ever met, and his intelligence and separatist sentiment interested the young lieutenant. They often argued about the classics, about theology, and history, but each argument brought one closer to the others heart. When the War of the Mediterranean began the two were close friends, and, knowing that the Grenadiers were one of the deadliest regiments in the French army, the two left the country avoiding mobilization, following in d’Artagnan’s footsteps towards Italy.
But Jean and Antoine found that Italy was, if anything, even worse of a place since the times of d’Artagnan. Closed minded, suspicious of foreigners and Frenchmen, the cosmopolitan spirit of northern Italy had died out in six decades of Medici tyranny. This was worsened by the War, which led to a resolute hatred of Frenchmen. Jean and Antoine spent a year there, before traveling further south to Naples, with an intent of traveling to Turkey.
But after they had only spent two weeks in Naples organizing their travels, the Councilor of the King visited them with an offer. In excavating an area slightly to the north of Naples for a new royal palace, the workmen had found a site of some importance, and given that Jean was a man who knew both Greek and Latin, the King wanted him to travel to the site of the palace and lead the excavation of what seemed to be a major Roman town.
This site was soon revealed to be Pompeii (1), a Roman resort town which had been destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Its destruction by lava and ash had left it astonishingly well preserved, and Jean, ever the antiquarian, spent the next three years of his life excavating the site and avoiding the occasional Italian patrols into Sicilian territory (in this he was helped by the fact that the major front of the War was in Northern Italy and Abruzzo).
Jean’s findings were perhaps the greatest discovery of the century. The elevation of Roman life from a thing only found in the texts of Livy and Tacitus to a real thing benefitted Latin studies tremendously, and when the war shifted towards Sicily, Jean answered a Papal request to come to Rome to become Chief Archivist and to present his findings. In this he brought along his newly literate servant and friend, Antoine.
Where Italy was closed minded and Sicily provincial, Rome under the Francophones was the last bastion of Italian cosmopolitanism, albeit a Catholic cosmopolitanism
In Rome Jean found the kind of city he had been searching for. No longer the overly zealous place of d’Artagnan’s writings, under a series of French Popes the city of Rome was a beacon of tolerance and Humanism. Urban XIV had reopened the northeast corner to Italian exiles, Jews, and Orthodox Christians, and two years later reopened the Vatican Archives, which included several ancient Latin texts on Roman history which had only recently been discovered. Des Moulins, who was already a minor celebrity (2) and who had recently publicly embraced a more orthodox Catholicism, was put in charge of organizing these archives, and the series he wrote during this period produced some of the most widely owned books after the Bible.
Ordinary Life in Rome were the first texts which reflected the massive change the Pompeii finds produced. While Europe had been obsessed with Rome and Romans since the fall of the Western Empire, Rome was still considered an idealized place, where literary figures and few else resided. This image of Rome, a product of the limited resources available to historians, created such a dominant mindset in the European mentality that it could scarcely be called an ideology. This was, of course, the aristocratic conception of the world, where great men entered the stage, changed the world to their wishes, and disappeared to much fanfare. It was a world where the great masses of humanity were resigned to the position of choir, merely acting as props to these superhumans.
The social foundation of this ideology had been eroding for quite some time, but still it remained the dominant way of thinking. It was only with the discovery of Pompeii that the lives of the ordinary masses began to be seriously examined, and in that examination Des Moulins found something which led him out of the academy and into the midst of Parisian politics.
The Ordinary Lives of the Aventine was the first realization of the importance of the people. It detailed the information he gained from the Roman archives, which he then filled in with mostly fictitious portraits of the Roman proletariat. Far from being a mere history, there was a great deal of criticism of the current system hidden in his criticism of Roman politics and their pretentions of being a ‘Republic’: ‘What was the republic to the poor? What did it mean when they did not show up to even the most important of elections? Was it because they were to a man chattel, unaware of their rights within a supposedly Republican nation? Or was it because they were aware, since the earliest times, that the Republic was not made for them?”
While the theme of ‘the false Republic’ only appeared sporadically during the earliest parts of the Ordinary Lives series, they became a larger presence in the two years before ‘The Gracci and the Republic’
While Des Moulins’ criticisms came only occasionally in the earlier years, the books we now know to be written by Roeier were quick to connect the situation of the Roman peasants, slaves, and artisans to the situation of the European people in his time, and his critiques went from poverty (“To be a common man in Rome, so far from the light of our Christian god, was to be considered suspect, a failure, to have your humanity stripped of you and to be considered little more than a beast”) to the idea of the ‘mixed government’ under the Empire and Republic (“If the idea that a Republic could coexist with Empire seems ridiculous to us now, we should know that it was only acceptable because it was just as much of a lie as that which supported Rome during the Republican years; that is, that a Republic could coexist with massive inequalities” ).
Roeier’s radicalism came from the fact that Rome was no where near as charming to a Calvinist Flemard as it was to a newly Orthodox Catholic Frenchman. Regularly excluded from trips to the Vatican, Roeier spent his time in the ghetto, learning Hebrew and managing his friend’s increasingly large estate. Opposed to Des Moulins, who had a general sense of discontent with society which was common to many in his generation, Roeier’s anger was far more specific, and came from his early life as a poor Flemard with few prospects for advancement.
These attacks on the Ancien Regime produced less beloved books and much more strain with Des Moulins’ Papal patrons, but it led to a stronger friendship as Des Moulins came to understand Roeier’s position (as he was forced to, since Roeier often wrote under Des Moulins’ name). This came just as the Vatican’s patience for its increasingly radical Archivist was ending, and as the March to Tuscany was inciting hatred against Frenchmen of all kinds in Italy.
The Italian Front went through several phases, with the Sardinian Campaign taking years to complete, but the Venetian Revolt and the French push past the Arno led to a wave of xenophobia, specifically Francophobia
As the Tiberian Campaign played itself out, Roeier and des Moulins got ready to leave on a ship bound for France. But, on the ship, the long held in tensions between the two came out: Roeier’s anger at being little more than Des Moulins’ servant, Des Moulins’ anger at Roeier’s use of his name, and Roeier’s anger at going to Paris, a place where he remained a second class citizen. In Marseilles, the two agreed to finish one last book together (the only book which acknowledged Roeier’s writing), ‘The Republic and The Gracchi’, and to leave each other shortly after. The book, which summed up all the angers and desires of this erstwhile couple, was the most direct attack on contemporary Europe they had ever penned, attacking the faux Republic which inhabited the cities, and quoting de Houssaye at length, arguing that the feebleness de Houssaye ascribed to aristocrats of the Empire was shared by the common man of all systems. “What we need is a new Republic, a true Republic, which will give equal rights to its citizens, which will treat all its peoples as human beings”. This was the last line they wrote before sending it to a publisher and parting ways. It was also the last line that Jean des Moulins wrote under his own name; as he entered Paris he took on a new persona: Tiberius Gracchus.
1-In OTL Pompeii was discovered a little bit later into the 18th century, but this was because Sicily lacked a domestic King until the 1735. It seems legitimate to presume that if Sicily had a king earlier that Pompeii would have been discovered earlier
2-Editor’s Note: Although ‘Ordinary Life in Rome’, and ‘The Gracci and the Republic’ were two of the most famous and influential works Des Moulins did, he published a large amount of works on Pompeii, which were the works which put him on the map. Although they are now considered poor academia (and many now argue that much of this work was ghost written by Roeier, who took care of Des Moulins’ estate during their travels), many still have a degree of popularity in certain circles, especially ‘The Cult of Minerva’, which was featured in many low brow horror novels written in the early 20th century.
Jean Desmoulins, the First Republican
From ‘The End of the Ancients’, by Louis Antoine de Saint Just
When one reads the works of d’Artagnan the younger. the last thing one would believe was that d’Artagnan was seeking to begin a tradition. His work was not political, it did not intend to change minds. It was a story of personal discontent with his society, and how he worked through that discontent. That he created a series of traditions, that generations of young men would take up his journey and travel Europe seeking some meaning, would likely have surprised him.
What would have surprised him more was that his purely personal work would be recouped by a group of republican radicals, to the point that d’Artagnan’s travels is one of the first texts read by the Jacobin clubs, and Marat’s introduction to the 6th publication of the text began with: “The first step towards revolution is the realization of dissent”. But, like many of the texts which would become revolutionary over the 18th century, Travels in Europe and Travels in the Near East were not seen this way, they only became revolutionary after they were recontextualized. This occurred due to the importance d’Artagnan’s work had in one of the most important lives of the Ancien Regime: Jean des Moulins.
Jean Des Moulins and his companion were the first men to explicitly connect each of the proto-revolutionary thinkers into an ideology aimed directly against the Ancien Regime
The son of a prominent Parisian political family which traced its origins to Louis XII, the des Moulins family counted three mayors, two intendants, and a military governor among their ancestors. But that governor, Louis des Moulins, had put an unmistakable blemish on the family’s honor when he participated in the attempted coup against Colbert, which led to the family falling out of favor with the court. And so an ancient family was forced to begin again from the start, and when Jean des Moulins was born in 1686 the family was nearly destitute by aristocratic standards. But they were still able to afford a tutor, the Jansenist Francis de Tremont, who taught Jean the Classics, Greek and Latin, and a deep sense of piety. Although Jean wanted to go to the Latin quarter and continue his life as a scholar, his family’s desire for social advancement led them to buy him a commission as a lieutenant in Paris’ 1st Grenadiers. It was here that Jean met what would become his best friend, the Flemard Antoine Roeier, a Calvinist preacher's son who enlisted in the Grenadiers after his father was arrested for incendiary activities.
Antoine was the first Calvinist Jean had ever met, and his intelligence and separatist sentiment interested the young lieutenant. They often argued about the classics, about theology, and history, but each argument brought one closer to the others heart. When the War of the Mediterranean began the two were close friends, and, knowing that the Grenadiers were one of the deadliest regiments in the French army, the two left the country avoiding mobilization, following in d’Artagnan’s footsteps towards Italy.
[
Italy had become even more closed minded and ‘modern’ since d’Artagnan traveled the area in the 1670s.
Italy had become even more closed minded and ‘modern’ since d’Artagnan traveled the area in the 1670s.
But Jean and Antoine found that Italy was, if anything, even worse of a place since the times of d’Artagnan. Closed minded, suspicious of foreigners and Frenchmen, the cosmopolitan spirit of northern Italy had died out in six decades of Medici tyranny. This was worsened by the War, which led to a resolute hatred of Frenchmen. Jean and Antoine spent a year there, before traveling further south to Naples, with an intent of traveling to Turkey.
But after they had only spent two weeks in Naples organizing their travels, the Councilor of the King visited them with an offer. In excavating an area slightly to the north of Naples for a new royal palace, the workmen had found a site of some importance, and given that Jean was a man who knew both Greek and Latin, the King wanted him to travel to the site of the palace and lead the excavation of what seemed to be a major Roman town.
This site was soon revealed to be Pompeii (1), a Roman resort town which had been destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Its destruction by lava and ash had left it astonishingly well preserved, and Jean, ever the antiquarian, spent the next three years of his life excavating the site and avoiding the occasional Italian patrols into Sicilian territory (in this he was helped by the fact that the major front of the War was in Northern Italy and Abruzzo).
Jean’s findings were perhaps the greatest discovery of the century. The elevation of Roman life from a thing only found in the texts of Livy and Tacitus to a real thing benefitted Latin studies tremendously, and when the war shifted towards Sicily, Jean answered a Papal request to come to Rome to become Chief Archivist and to present his findings. In this he brought along his newly literate servant and friend, Antoine.
Where Italy was closed minded and Sicily provincial, Rome under the Francophones was the last bastion of Italian cosmopolitanism, albeit a Catholic cosmopolitanism
In Rome Jean found the kind of city he had been searching for. No longer the overly zealous place of d’Artagnan’s writings, under a series of French Popes the city of Rome was a beacon of tolerance and Humanism. Urban XIV had reopened the northeast corner to Italian exiles, Jews, and Orthodox Christians, and two years later reopened the Vatican Archives, which included several ancient Latin texts on Roman history which had only recently been discovered. Des Moulins, who was already a minor celebrity (2) and who had recently publicly embraced a more orthodox Catholicism, was put in charge of organizing these archives, and the series he wrote during this period produced some of the most widely owned books after the Bible.
Ordinary Life in Rome were the first texts which reflected the massive change the Pompeii finds produced. While Europe had been obsessed with Rome and Romans since the fall of the Western Empire, Rome was still considered an idealized place, where literary figures and few else resided. This image of Rome, a product of the limited resources available to historians, created such a dominant mindset in the European mentality that it could scarcely be called an ideology. This was, of course, the aristocratic conception of the world, where great men entered the stage, changed the world to their wishes, and disappeared to much fanfare. It was a world where the great masses of humanity were resigned to the position of choir, merely acting as props to these superhumans.
The social foundation of this ideology had been eroding for quite some time, but still it remained the dominant way of thinking. It was only with the discovery of Pompeii that the lives of the ordinary masses began to be seriously examined, and in that examination Des Moulins found something which led him out of the academy and into the midst of Parisian politics.
The Ordinary Lives of the Aventine was the first realization of the importance of the people. It detailed the information he gained from the Roman archives, which he then filled in with mostly fictitious portraits of the Roman proletariat. Far from being a mere history, there was a great deal of criticism of the current system hidden in his criticism of Roman politics and their pretentions of being a ‘Republic’: ‘What was the republic to the poor? What did it mean when they did not show up to even the most important of elections? Was it because they were to a man chattel, unaware of their rights within a supposedly Republican nation? Or was it because they were aware, since the earliest times, that the Republic was not made for them?”
While the theme of ‘the false Republic’ only appeared sporadically during the earliest parts of the Ordinary Lives series, they became a larger presence in the two years before ‘The Gracci and the Republic’
While Des Moulins’ criticisms came only occasionally in the earlier years, the books we now know to be written by Roeier were quick to connect the situation of the Roman peasants, slaves, and artisans to the situation of the European people in his time, and his critiques went from poverty (“To be a common man in Rome, so far from the light of our Christian god, was to be considered suspect, a failure, to have your humanity stripped of you and to be considered little more than a beast”) to the idea of the ‘mixed government’ under the Empire and Republic (“If the idea that a Republic could coexist with Empire seems ridiculous to us now, we should know that it was only acceptable because it was just as much of a lie as that which supported Rome during the Republican years; that is, that a Republic could coexist with massive inequalities” ).
Roeier’s radicalism came from the fact that Rome was no where near as charming to a Calvinist Flemard as it was to a newly Orthodox Catholic Frenchman. Regularly excluded from trips to the Vatican, Roeier spent his time in the ghetto, learning Hebrew and managing his friend’s increasingly large estate. Opposed to Des Moulins, who had a general sense of discontent with society which was common to many in his generation, Roeier’s anger was far more specific, and came from his early life as a poor Flemard with few prospects for advancement.
These attacks on the Ancien Regime produced less beloved books and much more strain with Des Moulins’ Papal patrons, but it led to a stronger friendship as Des Moulins came to understand Roeier’s position (as he was forced to, since Roeier often wrote under Des Moulins’ name). This came just as the Vatican’s patience for its increasingly radical Archivist was ending, and as the March to Tuscany was inciting hatred against Frenchmen of all kinds in Italy.
The Italian Front went through several phases, with the Sardinian Campaign taking years to complete, but the Venetian Revolt and the French push past the Arno led to a wave of xenophobia, specifically Francophobia
As the Tiberian Campaign played itself out, Roeier and des Moulins got ready to leave on a ship bound for France. But, on the ship, the long held in tensions between the two came out: Roeier’s anger at being little more than Des Moulins’ servant, Des Moulins’ anger at Roeier’s use of his name, and Roeier’s anger at going to Paris, a place where he remained a second class citizen. In Marseilles, the two agreed to finish one last book together (the only book which acknowledged Roeier’s writing), ‘The Republic and The Gracchi’, and to leave each other shortly after. The book, which summed up all the angers and desires of this erstwhile couple, was the most direct attack on contemporary Europe they had ever penned, attacking the faux Republic which inhabited the cities, and quoting de Houssaye at length, arguing that the feebleness de Houssaye ascribed to aristocrats of the Empire was shared by the common man of all systems. “What we need is a new Republic, a true Republic, which will give equal rights to its citizens, which will treat all its peoples as human beings”. This was the last line they wrote before sending it to a publisher and parting ways. It was also the last line that Jean des Moulins wrote under his own name; as he entered Paris he took on a new persona: Tiberius Gracchus.
1-In OTL Pompeii was discovered a little bit later into the 18th century, but this was because Sicily lacked a domestic King until the 1735. It seems legitimate to presume that if Sicily had a king earlier that Pompeii would have been discovered earlier
2-Editor’s Note: Although ‘Ordinary Life in Rome’, and ‘The Gracci and the Republic’ were two of the most famous and influential works Des Moulins did, he published a large amount of works on Pompeii, which were the works which put him on the map. Although they are now considered poor academia (and many now argue that much of this work was ghost written by Roeier, who took care of Des Moulins’ estate during their travels), many still have a degree of popularity in certain circles, especially ‘The Cult of Minerva’, which was featured in many low brow horror novels written in the early 20th century.
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Will be interesting to follow what importance that statement will have for the future of France.
Excellent stuff Merrick, can't say much more. Just so interesting to see in-game events being woven into the lives of people like Moulins. This is truly an AAR like no other.
As someone who has been job hunting for months (luckily recently ended successfully) I say bon chance and look forward to when you can post more.
As someone who has been job hunting for months (luckily recently ended successfully) I say bon chance and look forward to when you can post more.
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I am absolutely gobsmacked at the quality of this AAR. I just recently started from beginning to end and am thoroughly impressed and now enraptured! Definitely taking some cues from this for my own AAR and sophomoric attempts to weave real history within an alternate timeline. Your skills as a researcher are superb and the graphics you've found bring the whole thing to life.
I noticed you've modded in some custom events and I was wondering if you have any other mods running? The background of one of the recent screenshots seems to show a different merchant icon?
Anyways, bravo on this so far. Seriously, this is one of the best I've read.
I noticed you've modded in some custom events and I was wondering if you have any other mods running? The background of one of the recent screenshots seems to show a different merchant icon?
Anyways, bravo on this so far. Seriously, this is one of the best I've read.
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Whoops! That's what I get for reading two AARs at the same time. Corrected.