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Here is your political map everybody:
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Norway is in blue, I lost my two Irish provinces plus I sold off some of my German lands, but I hold Norway, most of England, some parts of Iberia, southern Italy and part of Sicily and the Holy Land.
 
Sory for my absence ! To be honest I saw this yesterday night but I had not the time to comment ! apparently you lost somne land ,the Reformation stroke the realm hard but our spirit is Norse and we shall return !
 
Sory for my absence ! To be honest I saw this yesterday night but I had not the time to comment ! apparently you lost somne land ,the Reformation stroke the realm hard but our spirit is Norse and we shall return !
We shall, and the reformation hasn't happened yet, it will in the coming update! And another central theme in eu3 will happen
 
Chapter 42:
Nova Mundi, Nova Ecclesie
Excerpted from
A Saga Without Heroes Volume 2: The New Worlds by Erik Haraldsson, ©2013 Nidaros University Press.
Used with permission.

As the thirtieth anniversary of Iustitia Regis came, Norway was in dire straits.
An incompetent king, Hakon VIII, son of Halfdan, was unable to prevent massive heretic rebellions, excommunication by an angry Pope, and a declaration of war by the resurgent Svearike.
The war lasted eleven months, until on the first day of December 1483 he was forced to sign a humiliating peace that forced him to withdraw his 'special advisors' that in effect ruled the kingdoms of Baden and Frankfurt as clients of Norway, and also do what no Yngling had ever done publicly:
He bought peace for 150 ducats.
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Not many tears were shed when Hakon died on the 22nd of May, 1485*, leaving the throne to his underaged son, Harald.
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The years of the regency for Harald were some of the darkest years in Norse history: More peasant revolts, ever-higher taxes, and a shortage of army leadership all contributed to a general feeling that Norway's time as a regional power was coming to an end.
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But seven years later, Harald, having finally come of age, was crowned in the year 1492 as King Harald V of Norway.\
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It was, in fact, the best thing until this date that had happened to Norway since Erlend Alfsson election as King of Norway following the battle-death of Aslak Olafsson in 1138.
Even his name was portentous: Harald was the first Norse king since Hardrade's death in 1068 to bear that name, and all Norway venerated him as St. Harald the Conqueror who defeated the infidel Harold and conquered Angland, although in fact most of that work was done by his son Olaf the Wise after Harald's incapacitation at the beginning of the battle of Jorvik.
The new king began his reign by invading Valsherland, which had defected to the kings of Munster some decades back after a successful revolt.
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Harald proved his prowess at military planning when Munster's Svenske allies were defeated when they invaded Norway itself, at Oppland.
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After some months of campaigning and repelling Skottland's invasion in support of Munster, the Eirannmenn agreed to hand over the northern half of Valsherland, which was only part of the goal but as Castille had invaded and was winning Harald heartily agreed.
On the Castillian front things went far worse:
Harald signed away Wurzburg to Castille and renounced claims on most of the lands that had belonged to the Norse crown, including Fyn in Denmark and various Hispanic territories.

But salvation, unlike the Torah, was at the edge of the sea...

Excerpted from 1495: The Year That Changed The World, by Erlend Sveriger, ©2013 Bourbonnais Nationalen Près.
Used with permission.
In 1495 the Catholic Church of Rome was a tired, corrupt beast.
Weakened by the militarily strong Cathar and Hussite heresies, corrupted by cash-strapped popes selling indulgences to the highest bidder, and manipulated politically by the Norwegian kings who had installed their own Norwegian candidate long ago and since then the Papal States had been a client of Norway, the Church, almost sixteen hundred years after the death of its supposed founder was far from the vision of an all-encompassing institution focused solely on guiding souls to heaven.
And in the small kingdom of Bourbonnais there was a heretic queen.
The queen, Anne, had not been seen in any church ever since her coronation, but many were surprised when, on Friday, the 20th of February, 1495 they were herded into the public squares for an important announcement.

Anne's heralds declared that since she deemed that the Pope in Rome (although by this time he had been forced out of Rome by the Byzantine conquest and was now a German residing in the city of Fulda in Nassau) was no longer the true successor to St. Peter or worthy of being the Vice-Regent of God on Earth, she would no longer accept his authority, temporal or spiritual. She then declared herself leader of the Church of Protesting Followers of Jesus, which would be known as the Protestant Church for short.
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The major differences from the Catholic Church were mostly in the authority of bishops and especially icons, which the Protestant Church abolished as idolatry, and the celibacy of priests, which the Protestants did not enforce.
This radical new theology, emboldened by the successes of the Cathar and Hussite heresies, spread quickly.
Exactly three months after the establishment of the Protestant Church, Otto, King of Switzerland, a former Norse client broke with Rome, although mostly following the Catholic ritual of Mass and such, but without icons, creating what he called "The Church of Reformation of the Faith of Jesus", which is usually shortened to the 'Reform Church'.
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From there the Reformation was unstoppable...

Excerpted from A Saga Without Heroes Volume 2: The New Worlds by Erik Haraldsson.
The Reformation first arrived in the Norwegian realm in December 1495 when the populace of Badajoz rose up against the archbishop and replaced him with their own Reform Church Archbishop who had no allegiance to the Pope.
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In Halagoland though, the Protestant church itself took root.
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Angered by his allowing 'this most foul of heresies and abominations' to spread mostly unhindered in his realm, the Pope excommunicated Harald as his predecessor, the last pope in Rome, had Harald's father, but with each province that broke with Rome that punishment grew emptier and emptier. More than anything, it was a sign that the Middle Ages, in which an excommunicated king had no authority and so was putty in the Pope's hands were truly gone.
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Realizing this, the pope soon rescinded the punishment.
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Harald now had bigger troubles. The Fatimid Caliphate, ever the enemies of Christianity in the Holy Land, declared war in a bid to win back what they called 'al-Quds'.
At first Harald tried to ship some troops from his new standing army to Jorsal-land, but it was a lost hope.
In Janurary 1498 Harald surrendered. The commandant of Jorsalaborg marched out with his remaining troops, and according to popular legend he knelt in the Holy Sepulchre and wrote 'Remember Jorsalaborg'. After 339 years of Christian rule the Norse troops sailed away, to Italy, leaving behind a mostly Norse-speaking, Catholic population under the yoke of the victorious Muslims.
Accounts of their misery and the cruelty of 'the Mamluk', which was a generic name for a Muslim, after the Turkish slave-soldiers of the Fatimid caliphs were widely circulated and Harald was the first King of Norway to adopt what is the motto of House Yngling to this very day: Memento Hierusalem. Remember Jorsalaborg.

In the meantime, the Pope was beginning to fight back against both the Reform and Protestant churches.
In June 1499, he called a General Council of all Catholic bishops in the Provencal city of Apt.
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There, the pope, along with the bishops, analyzed the causes of the Reformation and found that the primary reason was the corruption and misconduct of the Catholic Church.
So, they drew up a list of what they called 'purifications', 'reforms' being a taboo word.
Chief among them was the abolition of indulgences and absentee bishops, along with changes to the Mass and even limits on the use and production of icons.

Historians have called it the 'Counter-Reformation', although the Roman Catholic Church would frown on this, for obvious reasons.
King Harald embrace the Counter-Reformation eagerly, especially the restrictions on the wealth of monasteries and bishops, which he enforced diligently.

1500 was a Jubilee Year, as declared by the Pope, but many ill-informed pilgrims went to Rome, having never heard that the Pope had long since lost the Leonine City to the Byzantine Emperors in Croatia, thus reducing the revenue expected by the Church.
But 1500 was a far more important year in Norway, due to an event that occurred on the last night of the fifteenth century.
To celebrate the Jubilee and the New Year, Harald held a great feast at his court at Nordhamptaborg.
At the feast there was much food and ale and bards and most of the important men of the realm were invited, including Nån Ulvsen, the governor of Lincea and of Danish extraction, and Leif Bårdsson, governor of Vestisland. Nån and Leif had sons of a rather adventerous nature, named Simon and Folke, respectively. During a break between courses they called for a bard, whose name is unfortunately lost to history. According to the Simonsaga, a seventeenth-century history of the colonization of Folkland, they requested the bard to sing the Vinlandsaga, a long epic poem, or saga, telling of Erik the Red, who having been exiled from Iceland for manslaughter, discovered a great frozen island he named Greenland (in what is the first known case of false advertising) in order to entice settlers, and of his son Leif Ericsson who sailed from Greenland and discovered lands he called Markland and Vinland and natives whom he called Skraelings, or weaklings.

Excited by this tale (and probably too many swigs of ale), Simon and Folke resolved to find Greenland and Vinland and asked if 'there are any valorous and valiant men in this hall?'.
Harald, being also in incomplete control of his faculties, said that he would give them fourteen ships and thirteen regiments to find and settle those lands in his name, provided they wiped out the pirates that had been bottling up most of the fleet in a harbor in Austisland.
Enthusiastic, they immediately assigned Folke as commander of the ships and Simon as commander of the troops.
They spent the winter months, which as all know are an extremely bad time for long-distance sailing assembling their ships and plotting a course, and finally in late July they departed from the port of Lancsterborg to universal acclaim.

As expected, when they passed through the coastal waters of Iceland they handily beat the pirates, and finally, after a long and dangerous voyage they found land on September 12, 1500, which is celebrated as Folkedag. Immediately, the troops disembarked and not surprisingly, they found no people, the colony now abandoned. However, when they looked for a place with some wood for a fire, they found the remains of what seemed to be a village remarkably like any in Norse-speaking Angland and Norway. Since it was west of the site where the came ashore, they named it Vestbygden, the Western Village.
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They celebrated the proof that the saga was true, and decided to remain for a while to explore for further traces of Erik the Red's settlement.
The Norsemen spent a month in the territory of Vestbygden, but after a battle with some natives they called the Skraelings after the abroginal people in the Vinlandsaga they decided to depart in October, bearing the news of their discovery.

The return voyage to Reykjavik, the capital of Austisland and the westernmost port in the Norwegian realm went by astonishingly quickly, perhaps because the crew was sped on by the prospects of the eternal glory they would win when news of their rediscovery spread, and before the sixteenth century officialy started a group of a hundred colonists, comprised mostly of Folke's crew arrived back in Greenland and established a colony they called 'New Vestbygden'.
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The next sailing season Folke and Simon, accompanied by the experienced general Wilhelm Ernest Rauh, a German hireling, sailed from Reykjavik with a new crew and this time they sailed even beyond Greenland further west despite the pleas of the crew that, unlike all learned men believed they would fall off the edge of the flat world and it was a miracle they hadn't done so in the first expedition.
They came to another land, and when it was discovered Folke shouted: "This is my country! I am son of both Leif Bårdsson and Leif Eriksson and it shall be called Folkesland!" but Rauh and Simon, backed up by the majority of the crew persuaded him to allow them to officially name it Markland, for they believed it was the Markland Leif Eriksson in the saga had discovered, and archeological findings in the area of coins bearing the marking 'Rex Gloriae' have confirmed their belief.
But Folke won the greater prize in the end. For, he was the first European since Erik the Red's Greenland colony failed to set foot on the shores of the mainland of the West Hemisphere. And so by 1520 or so it is common to see that continent known as 'Folkesland', and although other nations also came to those shores and developed their own names for them, 'Folkesland' became the universal name, and when it was discovered that they were two and not just one continents it was amended to 'North Folkesland' and 'South Folkesland'.

Although the first colonization attempt, in Septembre 1501, failed, in January a second attempt succeeded in building a permanent colony in Markland, which became self-sufficient within a decade.
Thus began an entirely new chapter in the history not just of Norway, but of the world.

Despite a disastrous war against Tunisia in the first half of the 1510s that ended in Harald, now on his last years paying double the sum his father had paid in 1483, it was clear as the news traveled south, east, and west of Norway and its lands that the Norsemen had discovered that not only was the world round but there was an entirely new 'world' just a few month's voyage from, say, Coimbra or Bordeaux just waiting to be exploited and colonized, that Norway was not on the way out, but its star would only continue to rise and rise and rise...

*22nd of May is my crush's birthday. Is the game trying to send me a message concerning her?
 
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eave the corrupted Old World and its sin behimd ! With the might of the Folkeland we shall return to punish all the penetrators !
 
Good to see the Norse Ekspandert to Ame- Folkeland.

Interesting to see the Protestant events - having only received EU3 because of the 500k gift (thanks Pdox :),) I'm yet to properly play with it, so seeing things here is helpful in giving me some sort of prior experience :)
 
Good to see the Norse Ekspandert to Ame- Folkeland.

Interesting to see the Protestant events - having only received EU3 because of the 500k gift (thanks Pdox :),) I'm yet to properly play with it, so seeing things here is helpful in giving me some sort of prior experience :)
Folkesland!
Oh yes, what a ride you're in for with EU3...
 
Oh,and take controll of all British Islands.
 
Chapter 43:
Rule the Waves
Excerpted from
A Saga Without Heroes, Volume 2: The New Worlds, by Erik Haraldsson, ©2013 Nidaros University Press.
Used with permission.


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It was a golden age of sea travel.
In the second decade of the sixteenth century Norway had been established as the pre-eminent naval power in Christendom. This trend was exemplified by the burgeoning colonies in Greenland and Folkeland, which despite native attacks especially in Markland and its sister colony, the more southerly province of Simonsen, which was named after Simon Nånsen's infant son born around the time of the founding of the colony.
But such peaceful prosperity could not last.
Good King Harald, as latter folk songs would affectionately name him, had passed away in 1515 and now his son, Håkon, named after his failure of a grandfather had inherited the throne.
Every Yngling needed conquest to legitimize his rule, so, in 1519 Håkon went to war with the Protestant kingdom of Hainaut to which the Protestant provinces of Lincea and Lancsterland had defected following a revolt by Protesting Church zealots.
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It was the spark that re-ignited an old feud.
Hainaut itself was a pushover; Norse troops poured into the defected Anglish provinces while their brothers recruited from the Breton provinces attacked Hainaut itself.
But, that was not even close to the end of it.
The kingdom of Svearike had been one of the first realms to turn the Protesting Church into its state religion, so when Håkon declared war on Hainaut Svearike declared war in defense of its co-religionists since the Sveriger king had proclaimed himself 'protector of the Protestant Church'.

And so the result was a war that lasted far, far longer than it should have and generated results far beyond anyone imagined. Hainaut was routed within a year and a half of declaration of war, along with its neighboring ally Gelre and Svearike's continental ally Alençon, which was forced to return to the Catholic fold and its ruler became a client of Håkon, and as such was demoted from a king to a Duke.
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But Svearike had other allies. The excommunicate German king of Tunisia, for one. He invaded, using his extensive Mediterranean navy, both Håkon's Sicilian and Iberian holdings, almost forcing the Norsemen to cede them.
But if Norway could not save its lands from foreign domination with swords, pikes and the newly-introduced Brannhjulen, or fire-wheels, which fired stone shot from a large round hole using a black powder that had been one of the Cathaian things brought over by the Helmenn along with paper and swelldeath, then it would have to resort to its other secret weapon: its treasury.

In April 1523, five and a half years after the beginning of what is called 'The Protesting War', Håkon dispatched an envoy to the Sveriger capital at Stockholm to make peace.
He was carrying an unprecedented sum of 600,000 borgenmynts, the Norse currency that was fast becoming the numisma franca of Europe thanks to Norse merchants pervading many of its markets.
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The king of Svearike accepted peace and the fat sum, but the damage was done.

Thousands of young men and grizzled mercenaries lay dead on the fields of Alençon, Asturias de Oveido or Lecce, and countless more at the bottom of the North and Irish seas.
The reputation of Norway as 'the Great Power of the Northwest', obtained at such a high cost on the fields of Preston and Durhaborg two hundred years previously was now more or less down the drain, along with the rise of Svearike as its replacement.
Another legacy, since many were not interested in lying under arable land or crashing waves, was one of the great exoduses since Moses led the Jews out of Egypt:
Many, fleeing the persecution of the Inquisition that had been founded by Pope Johann I in the years since the beginning of the Reformation and sanctioned by the Catholic Yngling kings, found a more tolerant land across the great sea, in Folkesland.
Although most of the new colonies that were being set up in these energetic years such as Nåva Orkney or Nåv Penthiev remained mostly Catholic, at least in the beginning, there was a large minority that kissed no bishop's ring. Protestants, Reform Church men and women, and even Jews who were targeted with even more ferocity than Christian heretics by the Inquisition, all found refuge in those lands where a man was not judged on Sunday or Saturday but all week, not by how he prayed and to how many gods but by how much he contributed and how helpful he was when the natives who were universally called 'Skraelings' after the natives in the Saga of Erik the Red attacked.

Frankly, Håkon was not sad to see them go, and even funded the many colonial expeditions which traveled up and down the eastern coast of North Folkesland.
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And even the Pope was happy, when he proclaimed Harald a saint for protecting the Church during the early Reformation, thus making him the second King Harald of Norway in a row to be canonized.
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But in the next decade, the 1530s, things did not go as well.
In 1531 childless Håkon's younger sister Margaret was killed in a hunting accident, and thus for a time the continuity of the Yngling dynasty seemed at an end.
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In the meantime the Skottmenn had heard of the great riches of the Skraelings and how they possesed great cities made entirely of gold, and in 1536 King James III of Skottland authorized the first Skottish expedition to Folkesland, landing on the eastern coast and establishing the colony of Jamesbail. Although a second colony was destroyed by a native invasion, the Skotts did become something of a fixture in their enclosed areas.
Another important piece of Folkeslander history occurred in these years with Kasper's Expedition.
Kasper Leifsson (a cousin of Folke) arrived in Simonsen in 1532 with a three thousand-strong army and immediately began exploring down the Folkeslander coast and west, into the Skraeling-infested mountains. Kasper ranged as far as Central Folkeslander and defeated the entire Aztec, Mayan and Toltec empires with his army that was never more than fourteen-thousand strong (with reinforcements from Angland).


But as always in Norse history, defeat and calamity was never far behind triumph and good fortune.
In 1537 Håkon, an old man by now, was helpless as yet another swelldeath epimedic swept through first Norway, then Angland, and, borne on one of the many ships that bore colonists to the New World, to Greenland and Markland.
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The Simonsen colony was especially affected, and so the stream of immigrants thinned out quite a bit for a while.

And four years later, a wizened old Håkon converted to the Protestant Church.
It was not entirely the result of weakened faith as a result of the death of his sister and the plague: In fact he had married and begotten a son and heir, Olav some years previously.
No, it was mostly the result of decades of Protestant and Reform Church revolts; the decades of unending turmoil, the self-doubt on the part of the Catholic king.
But it didn't matter; He soon returned to the fold.
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After a few more years of Kasper Leifsson conquering Aztec lands and a failed attempt to reconquer Jorsal-land, Håkon finally gave up the ghost in 1544.
A rider sped to spread the news; If Harald Hardraada had been reborn, it was time for his son, Olaf the Wise to do so as well.
 
Has the dynasty continued? Or has the death of the heir sparked a change?

A good update as always - I had another little play of EU as Braunschweig earlier, and I'm haemorrhaging money. If you know of any way to stop this, I'd be grateful.
 
Has the dynasty continued? Or has the death of the heir sparked a change?

A good update as always - I had another little play of EU as Braunschweig earlier, and I'm haemorrhaging money. If you know of any way to stop this, I'd be grateful.
This isn't the main EU3 forum, but from my rather limited experience i can suggest:
Disband some troops- you have to pay upkeep which is higher the more troops you have
In the economy screen advance the treasury slider so more money goes into it (be warned that causes inflation although I don't really know what that does)

Back to AAR talk:
Thank you for your continuing support, and as for your question:
Get set for a rather unexpected surprise in the very beginning of the next update!
 
exploration under way... Religious wars ... change of fate and back again ....Iam very excited about the enxt update !
 
Unify the British isles now :)
I'd like to, but the Skotts are my allies and Munster (which rules Wales, Cornwall and all Ireland) has Svearike as allies.
You'll see what I mean next update, plus, who needs Britain when you can have Ame- Folkesland?
 
I'd like to, but the Skotts are my allies and Munster (which rules Wales, Cornwall and all Ireland) has Svearike as allies.
You'll see what I mean next update, plus, who needs Britain when you can have Ame- Folkesland?


Betray Scotland and Annex!MUAHAHAHAHAHA.The Whole Great Bretain,Denmark,Ireland,Kaleria and baltic states must be integrated in Norway before the end of XVI century
 
Betray Scotland and Annex!MUAHAHAHAHAHA.The Whole Great Bretain,Denmark,Ireland,Kaleria and baltic states must be integrated in Norway before the end of XVI century
I'd like to...