The Eastern Vikings - Baltic Megacampaign Part 1
- Thread starter RedTemplar
- Start date
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So did Al-Andalus reform or is that just an screenshot from early in game.
Good luck with the Mongols!
Good luck with the Mongols!
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Considering the Byzantine Empire's holding on by a thread, I wonder if some other kingdom will become the champion for the Orthodox faith.
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I'm betting on either Armenia or Trebizond or even Byzantium itself, given that it's not quite dead yet.
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What happened to Cevasomething the Wise? Please tell me he founded a dynasty?
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Did you ever hear the tragedy of Cevakattevan the Wise? I thought not. It's a Saxon legend. Cevakattevan was a Tamil lord of the Slavs so wise and powerful he could break CK2+ to spawn...Tamil characters in central Europe even when there was no India. He had such a knowledge of CK2+ he could keep the culture groups he cared about...from being removed. The dark side of pagan court physicians is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be...unnatural. He became so illogical, the only thing he was afraid of was becoming unlanded, which eventually of course he did. Unfortunately he gave his pagan court physician too much influence. Then his pagan court physician converted him and usurped the throne from him. Ironic. He could save the Tamils from being removed from the game, but not himself.
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He is still unmarried, but his expected successor is ANOTHER Tamil Slavic Pagan, who DOES have a wife (though his only two kids are dead at this point)
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Death Comes From the East
971 - 977 AD
The Scourge of Heaven971 - 977 AD
In 971 AD, the leaders of the eastern and western branches of the Christian church battled with one another over which one of them had been divinely ordained as the true and authoritative church of God. In less than five years, many of those same leaders would be questioning whether God truly existed at all.
It started out as a rumor: a great enemy had struck in Dunhuang in December of 972, killing thousands before sweeping through the Tarim Basin and into Persia. People were dying by the masses, they were told, and Basileus Laurentios, the Byzantine Emperor who had supported Patriarch Theophanes leading up to the Schism, was warned to brace himself for a coming enemy. Laurentios mustered his army, sending word to the other Greek kingdoms that a foe was coming, and asking for their cooperation. He made every preparation for a great and glorious war -- but that war never come.
In November of 973, just one year after it ravaged Dunhuang, the great enemy reached the easternmost edge of Armenia. A messenger was dispatched to Constantinople, and he came before Laurentios to warn him that his army would be of no use. The scores of dead from Dunhuang to Armenia had not fallen prey to an army, but to a disease: the Black Death.
The warning sent a panic through the court of Constantinople, but there was little time to prepare for the great pestilence it warned of. Less than a year later in the summer of 974, the Black Death had already reached Constantinople, and its first victims caught the attention of the Christian world. In June of that year, Nilos, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople fell ill to the Plague and died, and just one month later, Laurentios himself died to the Plague as well.
Pope Leo III was the first to publicly point to divine justice as the cause of the Black Plague. It had originated in the East, where Christians faced during the liturgy to worship, and had swept straight to the center of the Orthodox heretics, claiming the Emperor who supported the Eastern Rite and the successor of the Patriarch who excommunicated the Pope. It was abundantly clear, Leo argued, that God had delivered His righteous judgement to the Greeks for defying the authority of the Holy Catholic Church.
Until, that is, it came to Rome.
The Black Death continued to spread at a terrifying pace -- by the spring of 976, not even three full years after its appearance, the dreaded Plague had engulfed all of Italy, most of Germany and France, and had begun to cross the Pyrenees into Iberia. No one, whether Orthodox or Catholic, was safe from its clutches. Casualties numbered from thousands to tens of thousands and beyond, as urban centers saw their populations cut in half, castles became graveyards, and even Christian monasteries were cut to the core as brothers and nuns died by the dozens inside their cloistered walls.
In the Christian world, the Plague came to be referred to as the "Scourge of Heaven." Lacking any medical explanation for its origins, they could only conclude that the division of the Church was the cause of the Plague, as Catholics blamed the Orthodox and the Orthodox blamed Catholics, while leaders of both religions fell in numbers.
In particular, the European nobility suffered greatly at the hands of the Black Death, In 975, it claimed the life of King Alberico of Italy, which caused the throne to pass to his only living heir, a daughter betrothed to the child king of East Francia. She died soon thereafter, and the young East Francian king inherited Italy, making most of the Italian peninsula a subject to his Frankish rule. The summer of 975 took King Hynek of Bohemia, and in December, Duke Fernando II of Navarre and High King Murchad of Ireland fell to the Scourge. June of 976 saw the death of King Earnweald II of Essex, and just three months later Fylkir Arne of Sweden succumbed.
In Estonia, Tietaja Raak put his priests and shaman to work, making great offerings to the gods and chanting protection over the kingdom. Everything in the ritual arsenal of the Suomenosku religion was put to use, as the Estonian people hoped they could, by the force of their great prayer, turn aside the tide of death.
They could not.
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And it already wiped out Italian independence in one fell swoop of pustules and death.
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And... there goes the independence of Italy, the greatest state in Europe. Funny how a plague could bring low the mightiest kingdom so quickly. I wonder if East Francia will recreate the HRE now that it has the kingdoms of Germany and Italy.
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Meanwhile Sardinia and Corsica are just dancing around with their Dancing Plague, some Egyptians are fine with smallpox, and the Danes, Galcians, and Beleares have measles.
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Love how the Christian world just keeps getting crapped on. First all the big kingdoms and empires broke apart, then came the Schism, and now they're all dying from the plague. This would be a great time for the Aztecs to show up.
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Bring out your dead, bring out your dead!
I think you're in a good position to ride out the Black Death actually, isn't the Baltic area a place that got skipped over by the Black Death in OTL.
I think you're in a good position to ride out the Black Death actually, isn't the Baltic area a place that got skipped over by the Black Death in OTL.
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