Rise of the Ursine Empire: a BEAAR megacampaign (part 2)

[birdboy2000]

This AAR is a megacampaign, running from CK2 -> EU4 -> Victoria 2, but is converting early instead of running through the whole time frame of the earlier games, and will finish in 1900.

Part 1 concluded upon gaining an imperial title, this part will conclude upon reaching 1000 Development. And as I played as a bear of the Jan Mayen dynasty, I had the converter mod take Jan Mayen as the basis for my EU4 nation, although the state maintains the name of Volga-Ural in this phase of the campaign.

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There is an insurmountable chronological problem associated with Volga-Ural after the reign of Emperor Kuma I, one which speaks to just how little we know about the medieval period in general and the ursine state in particular. Taken at face value, one would conclude that nothing happened between the Viking Age and the Renaissance – or, as the ultra-short chronology amends events, that the five centuries between Emperors Kuma I and Kuma II were a scribal error, and that the two were in fact the same individual.

We do not have good synchronisms between the orally transmitted epics of this period’s northeastern Europe and the written records of the Christian and Muslim states further south; the brief references to sending missionaries (most of whom were arrested) or a healer ‘to the bears’ can not, as one might desire, tell us which bear as in power or what they called their country. The Bolghar and Yagbuid khans find little attention in southern sources, the Khazar and Cuman ones do not appear in ursine ones by name.

Two events are typically used to date the reign of Otso, and by association those of Kolik and Kuma; the reference to the Jutlandic Crusade which allowed for the Nenets seizure of Bjarmia Town, and the reference to a war with the Yagbuid Khan Aksonqor. Yet medieval rulers repeat names, the Christianization of Scandinavia was a long process which was never quite completed. Long, Medium, and Short chronologies place these events centuries apart depending on whether Aksonqor I, II, or IV is meant, along with the First, Third, or Fifth Jutlandic Crusade, with Kolik’s arrival anywhere from 867 to 1205, and Kuma’s proclamation of empire likewise anywhere from 933 to 1281.

An even greater difficulty comes from the facts that the Jutlandic Crusade in question failed, and may have been ignored by Christian sources for exactly that reason, and that the reigns of many more bear-kings might have been compressed into 3 by the cult of Otso, who was by far the most famous and deified of the medieval Ursine rulers: they do consist, after all, of Otso himself along with his father and son. If so, absolutely no dates or events can be treated as reliable, and no real chronology can be made for the Volga-Ural Empire before 1444. (and even then, there are, of course, known difficulties around the transition to the industrial era.)

The ultra-short, of course, holds that no time passed at all and the Volga-Ural state was a new creation, its initial ruler still on the thron, in 1444. The state archives begin in that date because the creation of a chancery, and widespread literacy in general, was a part of the consolidation process associated with forming the empire. All the rest was a false archaicism which was performed to give this new state ruled by an inhuman minority a suitably ancient pedigree.

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Volga-Ural spent its first few securely attested years in what could be charitably described as a ‘period of consolidation’, and less charitably as ‘chaos’ or ‘the brink of civil war’. Paramount Chief Kuma, whoever he was, had little support outside the Komi people; even the Nenets-Samoyed, who appear to have comprised the medieval state’s base, had come to view the bears as foreign tyrants. Perhaps this explains the move away from the medieval capital on the Kanin peninsula to Ostrobotten in what was then still called Suomi or Finland, but then again, this was on the wrong side of the empire from his remaining supporters.

Only force of arms and the fear of them preserved the state through this period, but in the pre-firearm age, bears had mighty arms (and hides) indeed.

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Medieval Volga-Ural’s ascendancy was based, in large part, on the lack of meaningful alliances between other states; pagan lords in Northeastern Europe seldom intermarried, often failed to remain on top when they did, and the personal nature of governance made alliances very rare outside of family connections. Volga-Ural entered the Early Modern period with few friends – which was admittedly typical – but the bear-lords, worshiping their own group of gods, struggled to make new ones – save for Estonia, which shared a religion and fear of Novgorod with Emperor Kuma, and a language group with most of his subjects.

Jarl Sverker of Angermanland was one of the period’s rare exceptions – he feared Swedes more than bears, and Norway’s alliance with them was sufficient reason for him to pick Kuma of Volga-Ural over King Gandalfr of Norway as an overlord; he would accept full incorporation in the reign of his son, preferring the life of a courtier surrounded by bears to that of a semi-independent warlord; his subjects would nickname him "the zookeeper" later in life.

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The Volga-Ural Empire notionally consisted of three kingdoms or peoples, or in some sources five: Nenetsia, Perm, and Mordvinia were always included, Finland and Lapland (or Suomi and Sapmi) only occasionally. There was nothing problematic about the inclusion of Nenetsia and Perm, both of which were part of Volga-Ural in their entirety; Mordvinia, claimed on the basis of its former rule by the Bolghar Khan people and the notion of the old Khanate as a territorial unit (to be ruled by the emperor, not the khan) was always more controversial; the Mordvins and other Finnic peoples accepted it, the steppe nomads who actually lived in southern Bolghar never did, and most khans were content to leave them as a buffer state with the Khazars.

A buffer state, however, requires the consent of both neighboring powers. When the Khazars attacked the Bolghars and the Cumans dishonored their alliance, there was no question of avoiding a border with the Khazar khan, only of where said border would be. The Khazar Khanate must be considered the victors of this partition – the ursine army having been concentrated on the Norwegian border at the time – but Volga-Ural was able to console itself with Bolgar itself and Juketau.

 

[Specialist290]

Continuing to follow

 

[birdboy2000]

@Specialist290 - glad to still have you along!

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Emperor Kuma died during the Bolghar War, although he does not appear to have personally campaigned; the Nenets-Samoyed people were never reconciled to his reign, but the high priestess and regent Wilhelmina Beliy, who maneuvered herself into power with their support, regained their support for the empire not long after his death.

The same could not be said of her policy towards the Finns and Sami, for it is in her short reign we find a dramatic acceleration of the Gathering of the Bears. Osterbotten seems to have been known as a ‘bear city’ as early as Kuma’s time, a fact which was surely connected to its status as the capital and location of the tribal court. But it was Wilhelmina’s regency which saw the whole region once called Finland take the name of ‘Bearland’ – and Lapland was not far behind, although in this case the process did not finish before Emperor Cuddles reached his majority.

Bears were not unknown in Finland – or indeed, anywhere in Northern Europe – during the Middle Ages, and in part the shift in name may have simply reflected a growing awareness of that species as political actors, especially given the proximity to their capital. In part, however, it did not. Government records from the period are incredibly concerned with increasing the local bear populations – envoys were sent out both to the ursine minorities in the rest of Volga-Ural and to (quite often brown, not polar) bears across the border, in countries where they could still be hunted for their pelts – along with ensuring a healthy supply of fish and berries for every bear who arrived.

There may, unfortunately, have been a darker side to the Gathering of the Bears, for all the importance it had to Volga-Ural history and culture. Although records usually speak of it positively, in terms of growing bear numbers, more than one modern scholar has accused Regent Wilhelmina of ethnic cleansing or even genocide. Bears have greater caloric needs and different food preferences than humans, and a dramatic, state-sponsored increase in their numbers, often at the expense of good farmland, could not have been good for the latter. Migration across the border, to both Novgorodian Karelia and northern Norway, increased dramatically in this period, and Wilhelmina’s name is still spoken of in Finnish folktales as the archetypal bear-tyrant.

These folktales, however, also speak of the curious phenomenon of assimilation. Some men, it is said, refused to either leave their homes or make do on what little was left to Finns, and instead began to wear bear pelts, speak in growls, and even married she-bears. To the modern mind, raised on Linnean taxonomy, this is of course impossible – but Greenlanders still stereotype Finnish bears as having a dash of human blood, as in the famous Spurdo cartoons, and more than one medieval ruler (at least notionally, if not genetically) had both human and ursine ancestors. It is not easy to say what to make of these stories, except that Finland’s people in the early modern period (and Volga-Ural’s and the world’s, more generally) at least believed that some bears had human ancestors, and that the period was also one of intensified cultural contact.

It is worth noting that, while many chose exile, Finland does not seem to have rebelled against the Gathering; the only rebellion recorded in the period was an ill-fated rising in Juketau, another chapter in the horse and bear wars, of the Bolghar people’s long and futile opposition to Ursine rule.

Internationally, Regent Wilhelmina’s main accomplishment seems to have been an alliance with East Francia, one notable in history as the first pact between the Ursine state and a comparably strong human power, and as the longest lived of Volga-Ural’s alliances. It is noteworthy, however, that she did not send troops across the border, even when a golden opportunity for a land-grab presented itself in the form of the Swedish-East Frankish War; evidently, she did not know which direction the troops would march, especially if the Finns were to see it as an opportunity to rebel.

In 1456, she left Osterbotten and returned to her duties at the Temple of Perm, leaving Emperor Cuddles to finally ascend the throne in his own right.

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Bear-lords, like other early modern political leaders, were expected to be the nation’s chief administrator, diplomat, and especially warrior – never an unimportant position in a country ruled by an ursine minority and held together by the prestige and force of arms a bear could provide.

Cuddles, unfortunately, was not such a leader. Upon his ascension to the throne, in the hopes of proving himself (and acknowledgment of the latter’s weakness after the East Francian War), he declared an invasion of Sweden, considering it his easiest route of expansion.

He was acceptable as a domestic ruler, but below-average as a diplomat – his growling offended the Estonian envoys, who might have reconquered the western half of their country had they participated in this war. As for his competence as a warrior, the actual fighting was left up to the brothers Qoi – childhood friends of Cuddles from a magnate family that had long served the realm.

Had they desired to end the Jan Mayen dynasty, the two likely would have succeeded; Cuddles was reviled as a coward by most of the troops, and his marriage to Rawr Styrbjorn, daughter of an old Kazan family, was viewed as at best poorly timed; “we’re dying out here while he’s on his honeymoon.” He named his son Kuma after his late father, and perhaps as a memory of emperors long ago who this cub would someday surpass.

When the dust settled from the Viking Age, three kingdoms were left, all worshiping the Norse Gods; Ireland in the British Isles and Norway and Sweden, both based in Scandinavia proper, Sweden also incorporating northern Jutland and a number of lands on the south shores of the Baltic Sea. These naval empires, formed by longboats, struggled to survive into the modern age; the conquests remained, but the technological advantages which enabled them had been lost, and the overseas ports in particular faced increased threats from stronger territorial states which their population base struggled to match. In Viking times, the Swedish port of Stade, at the mouth of the Weser, might as well have been an insurmountable fortress; in the early modern period, it was the sight of a catastrophe at East Frankish hands that annihilated the army and is usually used to mark the fall of the Swedish Empire.

The medieval Kingdom of Finland which Emperor Kuma had conquered had not incorporated the entire of either the Finnish peninsula or northern Scandinavia; Swedes held both the Nyland region and Vasterbotten, while the interior of Lapland belonged to the jarls of Angermanland, now under Ursine hegemony. Cuddles saw an easy victory in changing this, although it was the Qoi brothers who did the actual fighting – one leading the siege of Stockholm, the other chasing what was left of the Swedish Army around the Baltic Sea.

The sea itself remained in Swedish hands for virtually the entire war, as the tiny Volga-Ural fleet was no match for the descendants of vikings; with so many islands, it was a haven for blockades and raids that probably killed more bears (and Finnic peoples, for that matter) than the actual army.

It could not, however, change the outcome; one does need an army to fight, and marching through Lapland with the Aland Sea barred was less of an obstacle to an army of polar bears than to an army of men. Not only did the bears seize the Swedish exclaves, but also a broad swath of western Sweden stretching as far as the port of Bohuslan.

 

[birdboy2000]

Modern biographers of Emperor Cuddles and those from his own era agree that, in the early years of his reign, he possessed a single overriding quality. Raised on stories of Otso’s conquests, he was anxious to prove himself, and a victory over a broken Sweden proved nothing.

This fact is usually used to explain the epic 5th Horse and Bear War, but reasons of state should not be ignored; the Cuman Khan ruled over a vast swath of southern Siberia, including many Finnic peoples who Cuddles wished to unify, along with a gold mine in the border province of Bashgird. A different Emperor, however, might have used these facts as the basis for an alliance; the Cuman Khan Maojiang was himself known to sacrifice on occasion to Ukko and Perkele, and a pact with him would have made even the mighty Khazars and the Princes of Novgorod tremble.

It was not to be. Instead, both countries nearly exhausted their numbers of fighting men in an epic five-year conflict, fought in half-frozen steppe which could not support such a large number of people or bears. It was fought in large part as a war of maneuver; the bears won most of the battles, but took more of the casualties. Both rulers feared they would lose if their whole armies clashed, and either might have been undone by the war.

Sources from both sides agree that the Cuman army was actually larger, a fact which, combined with the fact that they were fighting cavalry on the steppe, has led modern historians to view Cuddles’ declaration of war less as heroism than as a stupid gamble that somehow paid off, and Maojiang’s failure to seek a decisive battle as an act of incompetence or rank cowardice.

Already busy with one war, Cuddles could not intervene to protect Estonia from being conquered by Novgorod; they had been a loyal ally, sending their top bureaucrats to aid an overwhelmed Volga-Ural in governing the realm, but the bears did not live up to their end of the bargain.

The Cuman khans had grown rich off of Bashgird gold and the fur trade, and had used this wealth to extensively fortify their western border; the bears spent much of the conflict besieging Tura and Agyidel. The Abaid Khans, Cuman allies, fought well – and with both the Qoi brothers occupied with sieges, Cuddles was forced to lead troops in person for the first time, driving back the Abaid horde in the battle of Perm.

Revisionist historians have actually described Cuddles as a skilled general, who, although reluctant to lead troops as a teenager, had learned a lot from the Qoi brothers and was more than up to the task when he finally assumed command of an army.

When a small group of bears sneaked through enemy lines to menace his main camp at Tyumen, Khan Maojiang finally admitted defeat. He conceded the northern forest of Pelym, which is the gateway to Siberia, along with the gold mine of Bashgird and the neighboring province of Bashkortostan.

Although Volga-Ural’s borders expanded as a result of the conflict, it broke the armies of both powers, and it would take some time for Bashgird gold – in a mine newly expanded to accommodate bear paws – to make up for the cost of the war. Cumania would not long survive the conflict, destroyed by the incursions of Khazars to the west and Kirghiz to the east; Cuddles himself would take advantage of them in a second war.

But Volga-Ural might have met the same fate at the expense of Novgorod if not for an extensive program of fortification; the line of “bear forts”, which he could ill afford to build (undertaking a massive loan from the local fur merchants in order to do so) and struggled to maintain, was enough to give Novgorod’s princes second thoughts.

The Gathering of the Bears had sparked no rebellions in Finland, in large part because many Finns chose flight over fighting back, crossing the border into Swedish Nyland. This option, however, was dependent on the existence of a Nyland which belonged to a separate realm; when this was no longer the case and Ursine troops had departed for the east, the reconquered Finnish exiles hatched a new scheme for revolt.

Alas, assembling the required men took too long, and peace came faster than they expected; when they finally did rise, it was because they preferred to go down fighting than to be executed for treason. Yet the Finnish martyrs resistance, although unable to end Ursine rule, appears to have met with some success; the Gathering was not extended to southern Finland. Landless bears were instead directed to Cherdyn, the first bear colony in Siberia, which at least had the virtue of being virtually uninhabited in the late 15th century; future Siberian bear colonies would replay the events of the Gathering on a smaller but no less oppressive scale, and often be accompanied by rebellions.

The Zemigallians were the furthest southwest of the people who worshiped Tapio and Otso, and had used the Novgorod-Khazar war as a chance to throw off Novgorodian rule, Emperor Cuddles signed an alliance with them immediately upon independence, either because he felt guilty for abandoning the Estonians, or because he hoped their chief could be persuaded, like the jarl of Angermanland, to peacefully join the Volga-Ural Empire.

The alliance was surely imagined by both sides as protection from Novgorodian revanchism, but Zemgale also represented a gap in Swedish holdings on along the southern Baltic, and the Swedes struck first. This was much to the chagrin of Emperor Cuddles, who surely hoped the threat of Ursine intervention would be enough to deter foreign aggression; the bears, at the time, were still recovering from the Cuman war and the Finnish revolt.

Agreeing to defend them in this situation was no easy decision. But Volga-Ural was no longer close to being the strongest nation in Europe, and entreats to foreign courts were already too often answered with whispers about ‘faithless bears’, so Cuddles feared the consequences of breaking his word yet again.

It was to be the last major act of his life. Cuddles Jan Mayen died in 1482 at age 41 while leading an army through Lapland, leaving the throne to his son Kuma II – and the realm in very capable paws.

 

[Specialist290]

Cuddles may have gained Siberian gold for his bear-kin, but at what cost? A vassal lost, thousands of bears slaughtered in needlessly bloody battles, and a reputation tarnished. There are perhaps worse outcomes, but there are certainly better ones, too.

Hoping Kuma II can lead Volga-Ural onwards and upwards!

 

[birdboy2000]

Since the time of Kolik the Bear, Ursine strategy had been fundamentally based on the principle that, when armies of similar size clashed, the army with bears in it would defeat the one composed entirely of men. Privately, Emperor Cuddles had believed this to no longer be the case; although the Cuman Khans had lost the 5th horse and bear war, the casualty numbers had not been nearly so lopsided.

But the Horse and Bear wars were as famous as they were because they represented something of a fair fight, with both sides bringing large animals that could easily kill a man; not for nothing were the hordes so feared by their sedentary neighbors. Struggling with steppe nomads was one thing, struggling with ordinary men – even Norsemen – quite another.

Sirtya Qoi, younger of the two brothers, had predeceased his childhood friend and master by months, and Kudym-Osh did not share their opinion on this subject. Kuma II’s genius for diplomacy was not matched by an equivalent grasp of the battlefield, and Volga-Ural, rather then dispersing its forces and making user of the unforgiving northern terrain, sought to destroy the Swedish army in a single decisive battle.

Unfortunately, the bears had been unaware of the military revolution then occurring in Western Europe, of armies equipped not only with guns, but musket balls big enough to kill a bear in a single shot; to the Swedes, their size only made them a bigger target. Swedish forces repeatedly defeated larger armies in the war, forcing the bears into multiple embarrassed retreats.

However, to accomplish this, the Swedes needed to assemble their entire army – and they were, alas, supposed to be invading Zemgale. A generation of young bears perished in the Zemigallian War, but the fortress of Stockholm fell while the Swedes were on the other side of the Baltic, and the rest of the Swedish mainland not long after.

It was widely held among European courts at the time that Kuma II had asked Zemgale to take the fall of Stockholm as an opportunity to make a favorable peace, but the proud Zemigallian chief refused. This version of events, at the very least, was enough to avoid reinforcing the notion of the ‘faithless bear’ ; as far as Ireland and Greater Poland were concerned, Jan Mayen had bled itself white for a small state which failed to realistically appraise its own limitations and had paid the price, or even for a treacherous chief in the pay of his nominal enemy.

But one should not forget that when the war was over, Stockholm and the Aland islands were under Ursine rule, a sizable indemnity allowed Volga-Ural to nearly repay its debts… and Zemgale was a Swedish vassal. Taken from a Baltic perspective, this was no less a backstab than the Estonians had suffered; Kuma II was just craftier than his predecessor.

A coda to the war can be found in the Stockholm Rebellion. Although the Swedish King and his court, in accordance with their treaty obligations, had dutifully abandoned the city, it had overnight been severed from the southern Baltic trade which supplied much of its commerce and its position as a royal residence, and placed under an alien government which frequently warred with its fellow Scandinavians. All this might have been forgivable if they had been decisively defeated and seen no other choice, but Sweden had actually won the first two battles of Stockholm, and lost the city primarily because the army was somewhere else.

The civic militia of Stockholm did not disband as a result of Sweden’s surrender, merely moved underground; it defeated the first Ursine relief force and inflicted severe casualties on the latter, perhaps as many as Volga-Ural had suffered in the actual war. The Swedish king, however, did not take this as an opportunity to resume the conflict, evidently fearing either the reputation of an oathbreaker or the urban mob he had abandoned more than he did the bears.

On the fourth try, Kuma II indeed reclaimed Stockholm, but at a heavy cost.

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A nation without an army is vulnerable; one without neither an army (and what was left was hopelessly backward) nor allies doubly so. Kuma II spent the next decade or so at peace, taking the time to rebuild – and sending envoys to foreign rulers to persuade them on the merits of an alliance. Ireland, Greater Poland, and even eventually the mighty Kirghiz Khan saw the benefits in calling the bear-lords of the northern forests friends, and Novgorod, Norway, and Khazaria all demurred from challenging such a mighty pact.

Peace was beneficial for Volga-Ural, as was Kuma’s clever tongue; East Frankish artists even migrated north to Ostrobotten to share the innovations of the Western European mainland, while the small Ostyak tribe of Bolshoy Yugan, preferring their coreligionists’ overlordship to either the Cuman or Kirghiz khans, agreed to join the Volga-Ural empire.

Ireland even gave rise to the curious phenomenon of the first ‘dynastic marriage’ in the history of house Jan Mayen. Royal menageries had become commonplace in Early Modern Europe, and Freyja, a bear from the Emerald Isle, would take the dynastic name of the Irish kings and become Kuma II’s wife. Preferring her namesake goddess to the local ones, she became unpopular with the people of her new country, but Kuma seems to have either genuinely loved her or feared offending the Irish king through a divorce.

Kuma II was extremely adept at being portrayed as he desired, and even his noted acts of cruelty probably reflected a counter-productive effort to squash dissent and rebellion and further consolidate royal power. It is difficult to see any personality at all behind his actions as a ruler beyond what he thought best for the empire; whether he was truly a loving husband, alas, may be lost to history.

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It is characteristic of Kuma II that, when he finally did break the peace with Sweden, he did so with so many allies that the bears began the war with a 2-1 advantage in numbers. All Volga-Ural’s allies except for distant Kirghiz participated, while Norway and tiny Latgale came to Sweden’s aid. Although the Horse and Bear Wars have captured modern imaginations, 15th-century works often depict Scandinavians, not equestrian nomads, as the bears’ primary enemies; this was the 3rd war between the two in a half-century.

(The popularity of this began to fall out of fashion, however, even late in Kuma II’s reign – at least where it concerned ‘Norsemen’ and not specifically Norwegians. For so much of Sweden had been conquered that Swedish had increasingly become accepted, alongside Mordvin, Samoyed, and Komi, as one of the major languages of the country – and the Irish, themselves ruled by a Norse people, were Volga-Ural’s loyal allies.)

Unfortunately, it was also characteristic of Kuma II’s wars that, while his allies assailed fortresses in continental Europe, the bears did the brunt of the troop-to-troop fighting – and Kuma II’s ambitious modernization projects had yet to make the bears the equal of the Swedes. The conquest of the Faroe Islands was portrayed as acquiring a forward naval base in the Atlantic, the conquest of western Estonia as penance for the abandonment of its eastern half; the fact that no advances were made in continental Scandinavia, however, may have been in reality a testament to Ursine weakness.

The peace treaty which ended the war also returned independence to the Zemigallians, and Kuma II undoubtedly hoped this would mean the resumption of their historic friendly ties – but Swedish rule had meant the embrace of Swedish gods, and bitterness still lingered from the last conflict. Instead, Volga-Ural pursued an alliance with Lithuania, a rump state based in Samogitia which had also gained independence after the 3rd Swedish War; unfortunately, Turov also claimed the new territory.

 

[birdboy2000]

A military alliance is distinguished from other relationships, such as subjugation or dynastic marriage, in that it is a pact between equals which can be freely abandoned by either side - in peacetime. Not in war. East Francia had done a great deal to support Volga-Ural ambitions in Scandinavia and the Baltic; now, it was the bears’ turn to help against the Bohemians.

Unfortunately for the bears, the East Franks began their next war before the ink was dry on the treaty of Ostergotland – no real issue for a populous country who had spent the 3rd Swedish War besieging fortresses unopposed, but a heavy one for Volga-Ural, which had spent the prior conflict in actual combat.

Volga-Ural had, for the first time in history, been simultaneously dragged into two foreign wars, and Kuma II hoped to defeat the weaker Turov (which had declared war for Lithuania) before sending further troops westward. However, Bohemia and its ally Volhynia saw an opportunity in this, and, skirting Ursine patrols, marched their soldiers all the way east to the bear forts. They relieved the sieges of Turovian Pinsk and Konigsberg, destroyed half the Ursine army in Nyland, and briefly even seized the fort of Viatka and the Bashgird gold mine.

(Ironically, although the forts were built to defend against Novgorod, they would first see action in this conflict – the bears in this period simultaneously fighting literally every other major Slavic state with the exceptions of their own ally, Greater Poland, and Novgorod.)

Had Bohemia maintained its initial strategy of trying to knock Volga-Ural out of the war to focus on East Francia, it would have done so, and might even have won the war. It was not stubbornness which kept Kuma II from accepting their offers of peace, let alone the unshakable loyalty of which he assured the East Franks, but the greed of his enemies for plunder; aware that Prague itself was under siege, he rejected an indemnity which would have bankrupted the country, and the Bohemians lost the western half of their country for their troubles.

Lithuania, however, was not so lucky; its early offensives offered the promise of restoring the height of its medieval borders, but they had relied on bears, not Lithuanians. It was not technically in a state of war with Bohemia, but could not conquer Turov or even survive without Volga-Urallic help. Not long after Bohemia gave up, the tribesmen accepted their defeat, thanked their ally for their services, and surrendered to Turov.

War is rarely good for business, especially when it lasts nearly a generation; it is a rare army which can sustain itself entirely on plunder from its enemies, and the cost of war is always compounded when one’s own side is looted. However, this was not the only major expense which the Volga-Ural state faced in Kuma’s time. Apathetic at best to financial concerns, he commissioned an elaborate series of frescoes which still adorn the walls of Osterbotten Palace and City Hall from both East Frankish and local artists.

The concept of the Renaissance proper meant little in a land which was at best dimly known to Greco-Roman sources, and references to bear hunting in antiquity would have been entirely inappropriate (although one of the scenes does depict a bear, adorned in classical armor, eating a gladiator in the Colosseum), so scenes from Volga-Ural’s own rise in the medieval era were preferred.

The Arrival of Kolik, although often reproduced in history textbooks, was surely full of anachronisms – Kolik did not arrive from the ocean wearing a crown, and the Nenets people who greeted him would not have worn late 15th-early 16th century clothing, and probably did not greet him at all. The image’s enduring fame, however, speaks to its genius as an artistic masterpiece.

Nor were war and debt allowed to interfere with Ursine expansion through northern Siberia – and, once the Faroe Islands had been conquered, across the Atlantic to Greenland. One can not be certain that Kuma II ever actually voiced the ambitions of later rulers that Volga-Ural should rule “everywhere that polar bears roam”, but the eastward and westward expansion of his reign represented the first steps in the direction of such a goal. The Renaissance and polar exploration are often linked in the popular mind, and not without cause; the same merchants (at times even voluntarily) funded both projects, and Kuma II, for all his struggles as a warrior-king, was the greatest patron of both.

(and on a more southerly note, the Zemigallians, after no shortage of persuasion, finally warmed up to the polar bears again, embracing the status of a vassal chiefdom).

One must note, however, that both art and colonization went hand-in-hand with his desired modernization of the army; the ideal Renaissance Man was a mathematician and cannoneer along with an artist. One can not be sure that general Labertam Bjorn, who commanded the surviving body of Ursine soldiers in the Bohemian War, was the same bear as the Labertam Styrbjorn who painted the Ascension of Otso, but the fact that this was believed so widely, spoke to the spirit of the age. And the Right to Bear Arms, that rediscovered doctrine which would do so much for future Ursine wars, would not have been possible without the growing supply of bears from across the arctic.

 

[birdboy2000]

The Jan Mayen dynasty had always referred to its state as composed of ‘tribes’, but a great deal had changed from the days of Kolik’s genuinely voluntary and illiterate war-band. The conquest of Greenland and the 3rd Swedish War would have marked a fitting end to Kuma II’s remarkable life – if he had died at his father’s age. Instead, he would be the longest-lived of all the Jan Mayen Dynasty’s rulers, and his era would go down in history as Volga-Ural’s Golden Age.

However, he would have the ill fortune of outliving his only son, whose savage murder at the hands of rebel tribesmen augured a succession crisis after the death of the elderly emperor.

Rebellion was never quite an absent story in the history of Volga-Ural, but this was different. Only bears could have killed Angelbert – bears who traced their descent from Rawr of Zavarot, bears who escaped and sought sanctuary with their chieftain, who dithered and vacillated before agreeing to hand them over for execution – and who, at the hands of an enranged Kuma, shared their fate.

It is not quite clear what that fate was; our sources refer to them being ‘punished in the traditional manner’, but this was a euphemistic and laconic description, a reference to the fall of an old family that few wished to dwell on excessively. Most readers likely understood this to mean animal sacrifice to Tapio, which was indeed the traditional punishment for treason – but the only known murderer of a member of the Jan Mayen dynasty had been eaten, and a curious and bitter polemic from Norway, among other charges, refers to Kuma II as a cannibal.

Kuma II was 58 at the time of Angelbert’s assassination, his wife 51. He had no living cousins – fertility having diminished in the later Jan Mayen dynasty, either as a result of unfortunate mutations or Osterbotten Palace’s excessively warm climate – nor had he fathered any daughters. He would initially adopt a bear cub named Angelbert of the Cave as his successor, but grew increasingly dissatisfied both with the cub’s own potential and the realm’s whole system of administration.

Such a large empire could not be ruled on the basis of tribes – it needed a firmer constitution, a structure of laws and liberties. A realm not of one dying lineage of bears, but of the bears as a whole.

Emperor Kuma II reigned from 1482 to 1521. At the age of 62, the electors of Jan Mayen chose Grand Prince Kuma II Jan Mayen as the first ruler of the Volga-Ural Republic.

Kuma II, it must be acknowledged, did not understand Christianity, the religion of the former Roman and Carolingian Empires, and consequently of his East Frankish ally. Therefore, he paid it little mind when the small state of Nisani embraced a new sect called Protestantism; its later significance was totally lost on him.

The conquest of Greenland did not mark the end of Volga-Ural’s westward voyages, although it would be some time before another far northern territory would be found with a similarly high population of polar bears. The rich and cold lands of the St. Lawrence Valley, despite the name the colonists would give it, had more Grizzly Bears than Polar Bears, and more humans than both of them – but many humans were driven off by bear troops, or simply migrated elsewhere, and bears from Greenland soon flooded into a vast, rich land which its founder, Sirtya Qoi the Younger., named Polaris after the tail of the god Otso.

The name might have seemed ironic at first, as its capital was to the south of both Greenland and Osterbotten. But already in Kuma II’s lifetime, Volga-Ural had begun to settle the coast of Hudson Bay, which would be incorporated into Polaris as a dependency – and of course, Polaris was and is the northernmost country in the Americas.

Volga-Ural was not alone among European powers in colonizing the west in this period; Norway sought to bypass Greenland and resettle Vinland directly, while the Umayyads had developed extensive colonies in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and Brazil, and West Francia had begun a colony named France Antartique around Marajo.

None of the colonizers treated those already in the Americas well, and Volga-Ural, which had already incorporated a large variety of tribal, polytheistic peoples, was far from the worst of the group. But from a psychological perspective, it must have been easier to be conquered by humans from across the ocean than to accept that one was no longer on top of the food chain.

-

Kuma II would live long enough for the truce to expire, long enough for a new generation of bear-warriors to be born.

Long enough to fight Sweden again.

The Last Swedish War (as it it customarily known, although a rump Swedish state did survive in parts of Denmark’s old territory) must be regarded as an anticlimax. The Right to Bear Arms and the artillery advances of the renaissance had restored the bears to their dominant position in warfare, and the Volga-Ural alliances with East Francia and Ireland left the Swedes and their allies even more outnumbered, without the troop quality to make up for it. Skirting their ursine enemy, Norwegians died en masse in the far north, hoping that seizing Soroki and the Kola peninsula would break Jan Mayen’s will to fight – and lacking the numbers to relieve their capital.

Sweden proper would be conquered, as would its ally Latgale and some of its wealthier Pomeranian ports – and while the bears did not wish to try their luck in actually landing troops in the North Atlantic, they nonetheless eschewed significant gains in the Norwegian mainland in favor of the cession of Iceland and adding Vinland to Polaris. No longer dependent on his allies, Kuma II would be acknowledged far and wide as the ruler of one of the world’s great powers.

To the east, there was a far greater one.

The Chu Dynasty of China had long regarded the nomads to the north as its rightful tributary; the Kirghiz Khan, an ursine ally, disagreed. Kuma II had signed their pact out of fear of Khazaria, but he valued Volga-Ural’s reputation for keeping its word enough to provide token assistance, if not enough to march his bears all the way across his territory to be slaughtered by the far more numerous Chinese.

The Volga-Ural version of events suggests that the bears led Chinese armies into the desolate lands of Siberia (made even more desolate in preparation for their arrival), where they froze and starved in such numbers that they settled for peace without territorial gains; more likely, they had never wanted anything more than tribute to begin with.

 

[Specialist290]

From a position of backwardness and uncertainty, Kuma II has dragged his realm kicking and screaming into the modern world as a Great Power on even footing with nearly all of its rivals. Still, as Volga-Ural drives its frontiers ever onward to the east and west, I imagine his ambitions will find an obstacle that will tax even his seemingly indomitable will.

 

[birdboy2000]

Kuma II would live long enough to win re-election as Grand Prince, but not much longer; he died in 1530 at the age of 71. leaving the bears to select a new leader for the first time in their history.

The Estates of the Realm voted 2-1 in favor of Shamir Gyp over Viryas Qoi, but this should not be mistaken for some sort of overwhelming mandate; the decision was thoroughly debated, and all three estates decided by only a handful of votes.

The new Grand Prince entered office as an unassuming bureaucrat, but had the good fortune to enjoy a period of prolonged European peace – and, perhaps, the caution and common sense not to challenge the Khazars (who had become the tributary overlords of the rump Cuman state) or Novgorod, or to seek further expansion around the Baltic sea.

The same could not be said of the Americas. The scattered Laurentian bands of the upper St. Lawrence valley, or for that matter the Inuit and Cree tribes around Hudson Bay, were too few in number to do more than kill a few bears and get killed in reprisals; those who did not consent to ursine rule had no choice but to move away.

Unfortunately for the new and fragile Volga-Ural Republic, ‘moving away’ meant migrating into the Iroquoian-speaking Mohawk and Iroquois confederations and spreading stories about the many abuses of the bear settlers – and of their small numbers. The fact that they had come from across the sea was often mentioned, but imagined by indigenous political leadership as representing a typical native migration; the fact that their empire stretched as far as Europe, or the numbers of bears living therein, was far beyond the Mohawk imagination.

Polaris, they believed, would be an easy fight. And if not for the emergency deployment of 15,000 bears from Iceland (where they had been stationed in preparation for a rebellion that never came), they would have been right.

Shamir Gyp saw potential in the Polaris colony, but more importantly, he was far too stubborn a bear to submit to an enemy he considered ‘far weaker than horses or vikings’. He landed his soldiers in the new Massachusetts colony – whose locals would revolt twice during his administration, but could not force its abandonment – and from there marched along Long Island Sound to Manhattan while the Mohawks were busy in Polaris.

The newly conquered Mohawk country – perhaps the one real achievement of the Gyp administration – would be renamed Bruinia, a name usually held to refer to the smaller American Black Bear, which was common in the region and made up most of the new country’s ruling class. It is curious, however, that the term ‘Bruin’ itself comes from a word meaning brown.

The war had led to a North America mania in Ostrobotten and 1530s Jan Mayen culture in general; the New World Museum traces its history from the state collection of this period, and the building fresco, with its first-in-Europe depictions of black bears and Iroquoisian peoples, is perhaps the best known artistic monument of the age. But a single victory was not, alas, the end of Shamir’s troubles in North America.

Mohawk refugees joined Laurentian ones in the Iroquois Confederacy, and this time they came with a more accurate description of enemy numbers; numbers which surely would not stand up to Iroquoian wealth when faced with a pan-American crusade. (The numbers, it must be admitted, were not quite accurate as to the size of the Volga-Ural army – but between the size of the Atlantic Ocean and the number of Ursine transports, in practice they may not have been all that far off.)

But the Mohawk rebellion the Iroquois had hoped for never arrived, and no amount of money could convince the various groups of mercenaries who had signed up for the campaign to charge an equivalently sized force composed largely of armed bears. Quebec was actually burnt during the war, but so was the Iroquois capital at Onondaga; in the end, a minor border adjustment was enough to satisfy both near-exhausted countries, or at least their leaders.

For all his administrative skill, Shamir Gyp had impressed few among the Volga-Ural elite, and every re-election always came with fears of monarchy and dictatorship – especially as, unlike Kuma II, Shamir had grown cubs who might realistically become his heirs.

Viryas Qoi, having abandoned his historic base in the nobility (who, having no investments in the colonies, would vote for him anyway) had spent the last eight years extensively canvassing, and learning from, the priests; his skill as a general had atrophied, but he had assuaged all the fears from his first election about his competence should he take over the state bureaucracy. It could not have hurt, for that matter, that he was 8 years older than last time; Volga-Ural was not yet a republic of elders, but a bear in his late twenties did seem a bit extreme if they were choosing based on competence.

Shamir Gyp retained strong support among the merchant guilds, who had invested heavily in the St. Lawrence trade and appreciated his conquests in Bruinia. But he lost the rematch 2-1, and the outcome seems to have been regarded as a foregone conclusion from the moment the estates opened; for the first time in the history of Volga-Ural, and the only one in centuries, a ruler voluntarily retired from his position as head of state. He lived out most of the rest of his life quietly in his spacious hunting grounds on the Kola peninsula.

 

[birdboy2000]

Viryas Qoi was 37 at the time of his election, old enough for older bears to take him seriously, and he came from an illustrious bloodline; his grandfather Sirtya had served illustriously under Emperor Cuddles in both the Swedish and Horse and Bear wars, and his uncle, also named Sirtya, was founder and viceroy of Polaris. (Although, to be fair, Sirtya Qoi the Younger had stayed out of the campaign; no one in Polaris, after all, could complain about Shamir’s rule.)

Whispers of monarchical ambition dogged him throughout his campaign and time in office, far louder than those under his predecessor. Unlike the obscure Gyps, the house of Qoi was exceeded in wealth and power only by the now-extinct Jan Mayen dynasty itself, and Viryas himself depended extensively on members of his own family for counsel.

Viryas Qoi had undoubtedly hoped that his election would begin a period of peace in North America, and he had considered the conquest of the Mohawk and victory over the Iroquois sufficient to grant Polaris and Bruinia at least a few years of peace; at worst, they’d have to crush a rebellion or two.

But Volga-Ural and its colonies had not started the prior two North American Wars, and the Pequot army, most of whom had served as mercenaries in the Iroquoian War, came away with the curious impression that they were fighting ‘paper bears’ – or perhaps they desired revenge, whatever the consequence, as a matter of honor. Tiny Pequot’s declaration of war was at met with laughter when news of it reached Osterbotten, and its annexation was little more in practice than a foregone conclusion; Viryas was more concerned with the political fallout than the actual fighting, but at worst it simply contributed to the general paralysis of the estates.

-

It should be acknowledged, even by those ursine liberals who have since come to see it as an inspiration, that the 1st Volga-Ural Republic, the one instituted by Kuma II, simply did not work. Republicanism served two purposes for Kuma II; to legitimize his power before the people, and to determine what would happen to Volga-Ural when he was gone. The former cause meant far more to him than the latter, and things like ‘checks and balances’ or ‘functional administration outside the Grand Prince’s own decisions’ were at most an afterthought.

Power had indeed shifted towards the estates in Shamir Gyp’s time, but this was less a matter of intentional design than the reality of a weak ruler who had gained office in a novel way and spent most of his time dealing with events in distant North America. Nor were the estates anything like a modern elected legislature; not only was bribery rampant and the franchise highly manipulated and restricted even among bears, but the fundamental ethos of the position was to look after one’s own personal interests as a leading magnate or merchant. (the priests, to their credit, saw themselves as serving the gods, not merely their particular temple.)

Novel and fragile, the republic supplied little resistance to the coup of 1542. It is true that Osterbotten was surrounded by bears at the time and the initial vote of a life term for Viryas cast under duress. It was also true that many of the estates’ representatives present were human and nearly all of them were old.

But the nobility collectively had personal levies which still dwarfed those of the state and the Qoi family, and independence revolts in Sweden and Pomerania, motivated by opposition to the coup, or at least the hope that political instability in Volga-Ural would allow them to regain their independence, required tens of thousands of bears to suppress.

Yet neither should one forget Viryas’ talent as a politician. Despite fears he would enact a monarchy, he could not equal the Jan Mayen dynasty – no one could – and his lone son, a five year old cub, could not be taken seriously as a candidate for office if he did die young. So instead, he followed Kuma II’s example, and even went one step further. Viryas was disgusted by the bribery that both Shamir Gyp (the 2nd time using funds from the treasury) and he himself had engaged in to get elected, and fearing the consequences after he was gone, he resolved that future Grand Princes would be ‘appointed by Otso himself’ – which in practice meant that the names of all bears in the Ursine Estates would be placed into a bear-shaped urn, to be read out by the Speaker.

Furthermore, while he did not retaliate against those bears who had opposed his coup politically, he ruthlessly purged those who abused their position for private gain; it was in Viryas’ time that the beginnings of a central bureaucracy began to push back against the old tribal chieftains. Under Kuma II and Shamir Gyp they had merely renamed themselves feudal lords and consolidated their own personal power.

 

[birdboy2000]

It did not take long after the suppression of the Swedish and Pomeranian rebellions and the eastward movement of the army for Viryas to invade Novgorod, and his decision was likely intended to be taken as soon as Volga-Ural was ready. But curiously, East Frankish historiography is unanimous that bears in the royal forest relayed word of a planned invasion of Novgorod from the other side by the East Frankish kings, and Viryas acted hastily to pre-empt them.

It would be easy to dismiss these sources as the result of the peace treaty and postwar rupture in relations, were it not from a curious letter from the general Borje Bjorn to his wife complaining that ‘the prince declared war before we arrived at the front’.

Novgorod and Volga-Ural had never actually gone to war in the days of the Jan Mayen dynasty, but this did not mean that relations were smooth; it was more of an uneasy peace, with open war only avoided because neither state’s rulers knew who would win. The border was awkward in many places, the result of a medieval race to conquer varying groups of independent Finnic tribes, and the bear forts of Emperor Cuddles were constructed as the result of a war scare between the two in the 1460s. Kuma II seems to have copied much of Volga-Ural’s initial constitution from Novgorod, including the title of its ruler, Grand Prince, and this news offered many Novgorodians a cautious optimism about relations with their northern (and eastern, and with the Baltic ports, now even in some places western) neighbor.

But while Viryas retained the title of Grand Prince, he did not retain its constitution, and certainly did not retain any warm feelings for Novgorod; if anything came of the mild rapprochement under Kuma II, it is in the possibly apocryphal story of a small number of bears fighting on Novgorod’s side with a war cry of ‘For the Republic’! He had observed the reality that conquests in Sweden and the Baltic, the colonies in Siberia and North America, and his alliances with East Francia and Greater Poland (Novgorod being allied with Pomerania and tiny Ryazan) had made his realm the stronger of the two, and saw it as a chance to unify Mordvinia and adjust the Finnish border.

Both powers had spent the last century modernizing their army, and both fielded numbers of soldiers – bears and men – far in excess of what the cold lands of northern Russia and the Urals could support, and the forts slowed things down even further.

Jan Mayen would win said war, on the basis of coming away victorious when both armies did clash, while East Frankish occupation of Pomerania (which granted the bears the wealthy city of Danzig without firing a single ursine shot) and much of Novgorodian Poland did much to force Novgorod to the peace table.

The old Finnic temple of Karelia was restored, and the connection from Sweden and Finland to Volga-Ural proper no longer ran through far northern Soroki – but only a few Mordvins were ultimately ‘liberated’. (or conquered, if one prefers Russians to bears) and a shortage of fighting bears was enough to convince Viryas to exit the conflict before it was too late.

The alliance between East Francia and Volga-Ural had been signed all the way back in the reign of regent Wilhelmina, back when Bearland was still called Finland, and lasted for nearly a century. The two had real, common interests, and their pact had tamed western Bohemia, given Sweden to the bears, and sent many a Norwegian fleeing back across the sea.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, no European state had attacked either of them for the duration of their pact.

The East Frankish king of the time, Adalberto III, however, had gained nothing from the Novgorodian War and seems to have resented the timing of the declaration – or perhaps had made a deal with Viryas on which the latter refused to follow through. What can be safely concluded is that, about a year after the end of the Novgorod war, before the new lands had been integrated into Ursine administration, East Francia asked a Volga-Ural drained of war bears to join its next war against Bohemia – which also meant resuming the war against Novgorod.

And Viryas said no.

In truth, this breach would not lead the two states to rivalry; they retained common enemies. But at the time, it raised the spectre of diplomatic isolation, of the 'faithless bear' being powerless should Khazars and Norwegians attack – of a government not just paralyzed by division, but openly dissenting against their dictator. A treaty of alliance with the Samanids was eventually able to squelch some of this concern, but ultimately Viryas saw no alternative to reconciliation, and eventually Adalberto would forgive him; the fact that East Francia ultimately beat the Bohemians without foreign help undoubtedly made this decision easier. The two would eventually renew their alliance, and bears would eventually aid the East Franks in a war against Bavaria.

Perhaps the memory of this incident why Viryas, later in life, honored his alliance with the Kirghiz; the 3rd Chu tributary war could only end one way, especially with the Ursine army busy elsewhere, but he needed all the foreign friends he could get.

 

[birdboy2000]

The 1st Volga-Ural war with Novgorod was not the first time in its history that an extensive conflict made its rulers run low on fighting bears, but Viryas was determined that it would be the last. The Levee en Masse would be resented by generations of young bears who preferred life in the forest or the tundra to marching with guns or speeding on all fours to maul and kill enemy humans; it marked the first credible argument that either Kolik's arrival or the founding of the republic had been a bad thing not for the humans, but for the bears.

It was, however, far too useful for Viryas or any successor of his to abandon.

Also of note was his policy of 'Polarization', an acknowledgement of the many different types of human who made up the republic, and a determination to accept all of their customs – expanding the state's base beyond Swedes and Finnic peoples to embrace Pomeranians of the southern Baltic and even those Cuman horse nomads who had already been incorporated into the Volga-Ural state.

As for those Cumans who were not...

-

No one has ever made a movie about the 6th Horse and Bear War, and even in history books it appears more often as a backdrop to Maojiang Bugduz's great rebellion than the subject of a full scholarly treatment. That there were Cuman Khans appointed for a full 60 years after the death of Emperor Cuddles is usually treated as an afterthought even in Cuman histories; they ruled over only the eastern fringe of their once-vast territory, and many of them paid tribute to the Khazar Khan.

But wars with Bavaria and the Samanids had left the Khazars in no position to defend their tributary, and the bears, by this point in history, far outnumbered them. It was in large part a Cuman civil war, with hordes from Bashgird and points west raiding their eastern neighbors and introducing them to the benefits of life under the Grand Princes of Volga-Ural – but Cumans with bears in their army and a mighty empire supplying their equipment found little trouble defeating ones who lacked these advantages.

Both Novgorod and Khazaria had paid a heavy price in recent wars with their neighbors, and both rulers badly needed a victory to legitimize themselves – and, as is often the case in international politics, it is easier to bully the weak than to risk defeat by taking on the strong.

Volga-Ural claimed a small portion of both countries as Southern Mordvinia, and could benefit from further acquisitions at the expense of either state; Khazaria ruled over many more Cumans, Novgorod over many more Finnic peoples. The Bavarian war did little to dissuade Viryas Qoi from starting another one; Volga-Ural's participation was minor, and East Francia would in any case soon bring the conflict to a successful conclusion.

But all the same, it did mean East Frankish soldiers were busy elsewhere, and with Novgorod not putting up all that much resistance, it may have influenced which side of the war he chose. Viryas Qoi's final acts of state were to accept the Kirghiz Khan's 2nd call for aid against Chu China and to declare the 2nd Ursine-Novgorod War.

To his defenders, Viryas Qoi had ended the rampant bribery and factional strife that had defined the early (or "1st") Volga-Ural republic, to his critics, he was a ruthless tyrant who had defied the dying wish of the last of the Jan Mayen dynasty's emperors and sought to destroy the republic and place his kinsmen on the throne.

In the process of canvassing support for his coup a decade earlier, Viryas Qoi had outlined an eleaborate process of succession by lottery – but the dead can not govern the living, and there was serious doubt about whether the Speaker of the Estates would actually follow his wishes. Shamir Gyp had emerged from his self-imposed exile in Kola and called for Volga-Ural to 'correct its mistake' and elect him Grand Prince again, but even many of those who had prospered under the 1st Republic had no interest in a return to the North American wars with which he had become so strongly identified, especially while already so busy with wars in Europe.

Although the Speaker shot down this proposal with appeals to the "Constitution of Viryas", the decision to restrict the lottery to bears over 50 was surely his own; Viryas himself, who was 42 at the time of his coup and 53 when he died, would never have embraced such a decision.

One can not, for that matter, rule out the possibility that the lottery of 1556 was manipulated on behalf of Tugan Rrrrr, who was, after all, far better at making friends than at running a country; rumors to that effect would dog him for the remainder of his life, but were dismissed by most bears as the accusations of sore losers.

 

[birdboy2000]

Tugan Rrrrr was selected to be Grand Prince of a country waging three wars at once, so whatever else he might have desired, it should not be surprising that war dominated his term.

Viryas Qoi had been correct in his assessment that the East Frankish-Bavarian War was all but finished, and that Novgorod was no longer in any shape to resist the bears. A Novgorod Republic did survive both the bears and Khazars, and remained strong enough to pillage Jan Mayen's ally of Greater Poland and knock it out of the war. But it would henceforth be based out of Vitebsk, having lost its namesake city.

For Volga-Ural, and for Tugan personally, the war represented a glorious triumph; not only had he liberated those Mordvins still under Novgorodian rule, but he had also created an overland link between Volga-Ural and its possessions in the Baltic, and got to celebrate his victory in the Detinets of Novgorod's old city.

It was good news he needed, for precious little had gone right elsewhere. A glut of fur and fish in the northern European markets, along with a West Frankish embargo, had created a serious trade crisis for the mercantile elite; the Skane market even closed outright in this period.

A group of dissatisfied nobles seem to have planned some sort of coup; it is not entirely clear what events actually lay behind the arrest and expropriation of many of the realm's top magnates. It is hard to imagine a conciliator like Tugan would have acted so radically in the absence of a real threat, especially with so many real threats on his borders.

In the east of the country, Chu China had given their wholehearted support to the Cuman guerilla Maojiang Bugduz, whose rebellion during the Novgorod war had nearly driven Volga-Ural from the southern steppe. In the west – the far west – the Iroquois had unified with some smaller tribes displaced by Bruin and Polaris expansion into the so called 'Stadacona Federation', a pact whose very name spoke of its militant intentions (for Stadacona was an old Iroquois name for Quebec, Polaris' capital), and who took this opportunity to issue a declaration of war.'

If anything saved Volga-Ural, it was the fact that, despite the actions of the Chinese general on the scene, Chu China did not actually want to conquer them or break their empire. Once the Kirghiz Khan was safely brought to heel (and restored as a tributary in the western half of his pre-war territory), the Chinese withdrew, and bears took over the steppe administration; the Cuman rebels fought back, but lacked the numbers or the benefit of outside distractions.

And as for the Stadacona federation, there was absolutely nothing which prevented Tugan Rrrr from shipping an army across the North Atlantic, sacking Onondaga once again, and pushing the borders of Bruinia west to the Hudson River.

Tugan, it should be noted, was not a pacifist, and frustration with inheriting three wars was no reason not to start a fourth – at least, not once he had ruled for many years and given the realm time to recover. The Khazar Khans still ruled the southern steppe, including regions of the former Bolghar Khanate that Volga-Ural had long claimed as part of South Mordvinia, but thought better of than attacking. Yet gunpowder and the Right to Bear Arms had done a great deal to stem the dominance of cavalry, while the wealth of Siberia, the Americas, and the Baltic trade allowed Volga-Ural to support a significantly larger army than their enemy – and the Samanids and East Franks were more than a match for Khazaria's Norwegian alliance.

Norway would occupy much of Sweden, but East Francia would overrun their continental holdings and force them to cede Hjaltland (or Shetland) to the bears.

With eastern Khazaria overrun, but before he could force the khan to make peace, Tugan Rrrrr died in 1566 after a ten-year term in office.

--

The Estates of the 2nd Republic formed in the wake of Viryas' coup, like that of the 1st, were not a representative assembly, and simply being an important bear over the age of 50 was not in itself a guarantee of competence. To his credit, Kuma Gyp – a cousin of Shamir, who had been elected Grand Prince back in 1530 – was a skilled general and commander-in-chief who understood war and retained the support of the army throughout his tumultuous term.

This is, however, perhaps the only thing to be said to his credit. His sharp, blunt tongue led him to often insult his allies, who misunderstood his pleas for supports as threats to devour them. Administratively, power continued to devolve to the local level, for he had never shown the slightest interest in running a state. Worse, he freely mingled state and personal funds; when criticized, he said only that he "had won the lottery, and intended to act like it."

Fortunately, the middle ages were over, and the Volga-Ural of Kuma Gyp's time was a mighty empire – too mighty, in fact, to be laid low by a single ruler, no matter how great his personal failings. At least as long as the effective command and loyalty of the one institution that ultimately held every empire together, the military, was not among said failings.

And for all his faults, the economy boomed during Kuma's term, sparked by the construction of a vast merchant fleet on the Baltic Sea and a depletion of European beaver supplies giving Volga-Ural a virtual monopoly on the international fur trade; perhaps these issues would have destroyed a poorer country.

Kuma Gyp was able to bring the last Horse and Bear War to a victorious conclusion, although he claimed no credit for a feat whose groundwork had been laid in his predecessor's time; a better self-promoter might have been able to use the conquest of Ryazan and South Mordvinia to legitimize his rule.

This would be more or less the end of his foreign policy, but not of his military experience; a large conquest of Bolghars would be difficult to integrate in the best of times, and Kuma Gyp seemed almost willfully blind to internal threats, content to let the courts handle treason accusations and doing little to vet the judges in question.

Even when his own cub was charged with corruption, and the money in question had obviously been embezzled by the Grand Prince himself, Kuma Gyp sat back and let the trial run its course; later generations of lawyers or politicians would see it as a great moment of republican virtue, but in reality it is more likely that Kuma either did not trust his own soldiers to intervene or did not grasp the significance of the trial; the scandal would further embarrass an embattled ruler.

The Finnish conspiracy, a rebellion among Finns who managed to lay siege to Osterbotten, was perhaps the most famous of the many plots against Kuma Gyp, but he spent his entire term in a sort of low-level civil war, both against separatists trying to tear the empire apart and fellow bears seeking a new constitution for the state.

In 1573, Kuma Gyp gave up.

 

[birdboy2000]

The Lottery of 1556 had been set out in the will of a mighty dictator, the longest-serving ruler (unless one counts Kuma II) of the entire early modern republican era. It was, despite some complaints, the only choice that could preserve stability, and Tugan Rrrrr, although by no means remarkable, was widely viewed as a successful pick; there was no complaint about holding another one in 1566.

Had it landed on any other bear, sortition advocates claim, the system would have survived to the present day. But Kuma' Gyp's term proved the system's harshest critics right; he was manifestly unqualified for the task before him, too set in his ways to improve, and his embezzlement from the state treasury even made a mockery of the argument that the system prevented corruption – true, one would have to bribe the whole estate (and was that not simply helping the country?) to guarantee a friendly Grand Prince, but Grand Princes were themselves very capable of abusing their position for personal gain.

Only 60 and in good health, the prospect of a life term seemed nightmarish to Kuma Gyp's critics, that of another lottery absurd. It was not enough for him to abdicate; they would hold another election – and with regional administration so badly neglected even in Tugan's term, an increasingly assertive clergy was able to push the scholar-bureaucrat Boo-Boo Rrrrr, a distant relative of Tugan, into the position of Grand Prince.

Kuma, for his part, returned to a life of quiet anonymity; his cousin Shamir had been voted out, but only he had the bad fortune to be overthrown. No Gyp would ever again run for high office, despite the family's substantial wealth (most of which, despite popular rumors, had not been embezzled before the Revolution of 1573); electing one was simply bad luck.

Back in the time of Shamir Gyp and the 1st Republic, it was widely believed that the colonies of Polaris and Bruinia would grow to dominate North America – and perhaps, given greater interest from future Grand Princes, they would indeed have done so.

It was not to be.

Siberia was closer to home, easier to integrate, and made the politically powerful aristocracy happy, so rulers seeking land moved east instead of west, going all the way to Kirenga and Yakutia. Polaris and Bruinia were mostly left on their own, the former occasionally getting assistance from Greenland in settling its arctic coastline, the latter the odd expeditionary force, but neither could be called a priority. They were mostly left to take matters into their own hands.

The collapse of central authority in Kuma Gyp's time had reached the point where Bruinia actually conquered the small tribe of Mahican on its own, without foreign help, in a type of war they were ordinarily constitutionally forbidden from declaring; had Polaris shown similar defiance, perhaps they could have excluded any foreign powers from northeastern North America.

Instead, the Norse-Gael states of Scotland and Ireland – the latter a longstanding Volga-Ural ally – formed their own colonies on the lands of Atlantic Canada which Polaris had been too slow to reach; Polar and Volga-Ural soldiers, true to a fault, even helped Ireland conquer the small tribe of Mikmaq. The Creek Confederacy was a more menacing foe, and marked the only actual warfare of Boo-Boo Rrrrr's term – its chiefs (and, for that matter, Bruinia's viceroy) plainly not sharing Boo-Boo's conviction that the Great Hibernation was imminent and war therefore pointless.

And for all he broke with the foreign policy of his predecessors, the combination of an expeditionary force, a sack of the capital, and minor border adjustments (in this case, a slice of coastal Virginia) could have been ripped straight from accounts of the Bruinia-Iroquois Wars except for the identity of the opponent.

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Scholars have often tried to link the two great religious movements of the 16th century, the Protestant and Finnic reformations, together, but this is not an easy argument to make. It is admittedly true that East Francia, Volga-Ural's ally, had embraced Protestantism wholeheartedly, and even modern practicioners have often likened the Chronicle of Otso to the Bible.

Both faiths, admittedly, made use of the new technology of printing (although the Finnic far less than the Protestant; printing had not yet spread beyond Scania and Danzig to the vast and isolated northern lands of the rest of Volga-Ural) and both had millennarian elements (the Finnic far more; Boo-Boo seems to have genuinely believed he would be the last Grand Prince before the end of the world) but here the similarities end; they were operating under fundamentally different theologies and cosmologies. Christianity in all its forms seems to have still been poorly understood in 16th-century Ursine circles, despite the aformentioned East Frankish alliance and a number of Orthodox churches in lands recently conquered from the Khazars. And if it had been understood, as many a Volga-Ural citizen has growled to missionaries in more recent times, what self-respecting bear would worship a god who gave Men dominion over the animals?

It is difficult for the historian to understand what led the bears, who have rarely been as intereseted in religion as humans, to this great outbreak of piety in the 1570s; perhaps it related to the increasingly cold climate of the period, or to festivals associated with the conquest of the great shrines of Karelia, Novgorod, and Ryazan.

The religious movement around Boo-Boo is usually identified with the ancient faith stretching back to before Kolik the Bear arrived on the shores of the White Sea, but this is a pious fiction; even in the old Finnic heartlands, a sizable minority of people and bears rejected it, while worshippers of other gods enthusiastically identified them with Ukko, Otso, and the coming End of Hibernation.

Boo-Boo was unique among heads of state in early modern Ursine history in not starting a single war, but not for the reasons cited by modern pacifists; he saw little point in fighting over borders when the world of mortals was about to end. Siberian expansion, admittedly, continued in light of an old prophecy that Otso would return 'when the empire spanned the oceans', but Boo-Boo was far more interested in proselytizing than expanding: "why conquer when there are so many souls still lost within our own lands?"

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(I've hit 1000 development, so this concludes the EU4 phase of the AAR. On to Victoria 2.)

 

[birdboy2000]

The AAR continues into the Victoria 2 era.