[Suggestion] Racial prejudice impeding marital union
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You never lived in a village, did you?? People will make up any reasons to look down on strangers.If the strangers show up often enough, people start systematizing their prejudices and then you get plain old racism.
"Gypsies always steal" ... "Black people are all great dancers but stupid" ... "Jews are nasty money grubbers" ... "City people are all arrogant" ... "Those people from the other side of the hill are all inbred assholes" ... and so on and so on. Not a modern phenomenon.
That's casual xenophobia/othering, not racism.
Also, it was probably less prevalent among nobility, especially high nobility/royalty, who were by necessity more worldly and predisposed to judge people by class/pedigree/nobility rather than ethnicity/race.
Good point. I'd like to see distance penalties make marriages between far flung nations less likely, though not disallowed entirely. I suppose the weight of the distance penalty versus the desirability of the wife and/or alliance would be the deciding factor.
Please don't. We know that marriages between European feudal lords and black Africans didn't happen to any noticeable degree, and it makes sense for the game to adjust to make such pairings less likely. Drawn out discussions as to what constitutes true racism versus what is merely prejudice, the history of racist thought, and confrontational inferences about another poster's values will just sidetrack the discussion to a hostile place while adding very little of value to the discussion of game mechanics.
I love the idea of this as a modifier, although it would need to be tweaked for some realms or poor old Iceland will have real troubles.
I didn't start with racism, the OP did (and others jumped on topic). I agree that in game terms, marriages between Europeans and Africans should be extremely rare. The reason it happens though:
1) whole world map is known by everybody from the start
2) there is a perfect database of potential marriage partners, with information on Abyssinia available to characters in Iceland.
3) AI doesn't take the distance into account, and generally speaking, is pretty poor at making intelligent marriage choices.
There's no absolutely no need to to bring racism and rants about political correctness into this.
I didn't notice that many marriages between European feudal lords and black Africans happening in the game either. Plus, the original post was explicitly about racism and that's what Raczynski addressed. White-on-black marriage doesn't strike me as being a fundamental balance issue. There are many others to address (like, for example, ultra-blobby Byzantines and useless Crusaders), with much less questionable rationalizations.
agreed, there should be some kind of impediment, maybe cultural, if you want, it's not that hard a german princess marries a spaniard king (Alfons of Castille tried to the imperial crown), but Spain knows the existence of Germany and viceversa, maybe there should be stablished some sort of diplomatic relationship... Anyway, the racial prejudice may be a mucho modern invent, or not, there were no marriage between europeans and africans dinasties at that time
It has nothing to do with distance or race and everything to do with isolation. As has been pointed out, Russians married Franks in this time period, and Edgar the Atheling was born in Hungary to an English father and a Russian mother and died in Scotland. This is because there is a continuous area of Christian territory stretching from Brest to Novgorod. However Abysinnia is separated from Europe by one of the largest Muslim countries and difficult terrain, without even a sea route to Europe. The movements of courtiers and diplomats through hostile/difficult territory should be restricted somehow, I think, that would largely solve this problem.
Perhaps if you marry outside your culture, even Germans and Russians marrying, there should be some sort of negative impact on your domestic relations or even foreign relations except for the culture with whom you married? That would solve it without having political/ethical issues, yes?
The reason why inter-continental marriages rarely happened is distance and religious incompatibility. Abyssinia could indeed have taken part in the European match-making market if travel hardship had not been as great as it was. This article details a later attempt at dynastic alliance. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/41299786?uid=3738984&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101468240907
You are right, but that would probably be a convoluted thing to code, I imagine. The game already tracks distance, so tacking it on as a penalty would be simple and largely effective in conjunction with other penalties. Not ideal, certainly, but considering that this isn't a terribly important problem I think an easy quick fix is probably more likely to make the cut than a new isolation mechanic would be.
Well, you could lower the penalty depending on rank. A french king marrying a russian princess? Sure. A french count doing the same? Not likely.
I want an option to hide brown people when looking for marriage partners and such. I'd never pick one even if the fate of whole realm depended on it, but I have to scroll through them anyway...
It's funny you summon knowledge on your side when you yourself show huge deficiencies. In the Middle Ages, African slave trade was already being practiced on a large scale by Arabs. So it's not only funny but ironic that you focus only on African slave trade conducted by Europeans. For all your effort to dismiss racism, you have shown yourself to be a rabid Eurocentric. In the Middle Ages, Europeans had barely any contact with sub-Saharan Africans so how on Earth could one expect them to be racist towards them? And for precisely the same reason, how could one expect them to marry each other and intermingle? As for racism, the Arabs were already saying the same things about sub-Saharan Africans that Europeans were to say centuries later. Ibn Khaldun, for instance, claimed that Negroes were more animal than human (using it as a proof for their susceptibleness to slavery). Starting from the Early Modern Period, Europeans merely took over reins that had long been established by the Arabs.
Sorry this is a video game and I like being able to marry whoever I want, even muslims if I want to (my last game was a bedouin Ireland and that was p. fun); One thing I DO want though is for it to be harder to regular marry queens or princesses in line for the throne.
This is a video game set in the medieval period. Modern issues and tendencies do not have to feature at all. Why are modernists/liberals so obsessed with projecting their idiosyncrasies all over space and time anyway?
why are you so insistent that they should remove the feature to marry someone far away? because it's historically accurate? I'm sorry, fun trumps historical accuracy and I'm PRETTY sure you can mod this anyway.
Terrible, and dumb idea. I shouldn't have to ensure that my dynasty remains a certain race in order to maintain a tactical advantage. The game's diplomatic system is already highly unrealistic at its core, so the motivation for this request is totally bogus. CK2 runs on a diplomatic system where the King of Scotland can interact with the Sultan of Persia instantaneously. if we can accept this, we can also accept that white people might marry black people for political reasons.
Just nitpicking here, but it's not instant, you have to wait a number of days based on distance, to represent the messengers traveling. So it's not that unrealistic.
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