The Rus'

[Moopli]

So in the bug report thread I brought up some points about Ruthenia and Rus' not being reasonable kingdoms for the Slavs or any other non-norse people to form.

Here's the relevant post:

I think the whole Rus' vs. Ruthenia distinction is a kludge, used to split up the Rus' lands since one kingdom would've been too big. Thing is, "Ruthenia" is just a latinized name for Rus' -- i.e., they refer to the same state -- which means the whole setup in vanilla CK2 is kind of senseless, with Ruthenia simply taking all the "russian" counties that it didn't seem reasonable to put in Gardariki. Better would be to split the land up into a few different kingdoms which could reasonably be formed by Slavic/Bolghar/Cuman/Baltic tribes unifying, and create a "Rus' Khaganate" title which can be formed by a North Germanic conqueror who takes a certain amount of land in the area. If someone forms the Rus' Khaganate, they'd start a melting pot to convert the provinces and people to the Rus' culture (IRL, the Rus' Khaganate is believed to be the nucleus of the Rus' ethnogenesis, so it works out). IRL, the khaganate collapsed after about 50 years, leaving behind a bunch of city-states, so it may not have been too stable (or, just about as stable as any other tribal realm ). The Rus' then united again under the Rurikids and expanded south to Kiev or so, which probably doesn't need any more special modeling.

So, I guess my thoughts boil down to:

1. Rearrange the duchies of Rus' and Ruthenia into 3 or 4 de-jure kingdoms, formable by everyone
2. Create a special title, probably empire-level, the Rus' Khaganate, or maybe just Rus', which is formable by a north-germanic ruler holding enough land in the baltoslavic region. Perhaps all land, or all kingdoms, held by the creator could dejure drift into Rus', though in that case I think something might have to be done to reduce its stability. Maybe you could destroy the title after a few rulers, or something (that way, descendants could fight to reunite the Rus')
3. Create a Rus' culture, and melting pot events for people/provinces in the Rus' Khaganate.

The part pertaining to the formation of the Rus' should probably wait until we have a system to model the viking expansion, but right now, the kingdoms of Rus' and Ruthenia make sense in neither shape nor name. I'm currently working on figuring out what would be better.

What do you think?

 

[NecroGangster]

Yeah basicly Russia and Ruthenia both mean land of the 'Rus. Russia is greek (Roússia I think) and Ruthenia is latin. The 'Rus was a group of varangians who became the russians after being "slavisized". Since neither of those terms were pertinent until the 7th century they shouldn't be in the game before that.

Also when it exists it should be called just "'Rus" because there were at least 3 of them. The pre-Rurikid 'Rus' Khaganate, which wasn't a nomad horde, they just used the title of Khagan for prestige. Then in the Rurikid period there was Novgorodian 'Rus before the conquest of Kiev and Kievan 'Rus after the conquest of Kiev.

 

[Moopli]

The main question right now is, what do we replace them with? Historically, there was no large-scale (well, large enough to justify a de-jure kingdom, anyway) state-formation in the area until the Rus', as far as I can tell. So the problem boils down to what ahistorical states could form, and where their borders would reasonably be.

We could rearrange de-jures on cultural borders, cutting the non-slavic bits off of Rus' and Ruthenia:

The dotted area has too many provinces imo (that area isn't exactly important in the 500's), and many (Moskva, Vladimir, Suzdal, pretty much all of them) could easily be removed as they won't exist for hundreds of years. Galich has a question mark, as I'm not sure where to put it. Splitting it is an option (after all, it didn't even exist back then), to put Terebovl in Moesia Inferior, while Peremyshl and Galich (the county, that is) go to Lithuania. All the territory left (say, about 8 duchies after some trimming of counties) could fit into one kingdom, about as big as Lithuania.

There might be other ways too -- for example, I was considering 3 small kingdoms earlier, one centered on the Dnieper & Pripyat, another around the upper Volga at the dotted area, and an enlarged Estonia to take chunks out of Rus'; but I'm not sure if it's as justifiable.

Edit: Just thought of another potentially even better solution: no de-jure kingdoms in the area at all. I'm not sure if the game allows it, but it would better model the fact that nobody's going to be forming large states in the area with any claims to land besides the force they can muster.

 

[DC123456789]

No de jure kingdoms doesn't work very well because it breaks kingdom-level cbs (stuff like tribal invasion, crusades, probably migration, etc.). It's allowed but almost certainly not worth the effort.

 

[A Landy]

No de jure kingdoms doesn't work very well because it breaks kingdom-level cbs (stuff like tribal invasion, crusades, probably migration, etc.). It's allowed but almost certainly not worth the effort.

Wouldn't the cbs become duchy-level instead?

 

[DC123456789]

I've never tried it but I probably wouldn't count on it, Paradox's code isn't known for being very resilient.

 

[loup99]

Changing the area has been planned for a while and was even done, but it was lost in one of Enlil's update/merges (if I remember things correctly).

No de jure kingdoms doesn't work very well because it breaks kingdom-level cbs (stuff like tribal invasion, crusades, probably migration, etc.). It's allowed but almost certainly not worth the effort.

This, we are most likely keeping the dejure kingdoms that can be disregarded with the creation decisions. Also, didn't no dejure kingdoms make the game crash?

 

[DC123456789]

Not anymore, it was changed in one of the recent patches IIRC.

 

[Moopli]

Changing the area has been planned for a while and was even done, but it was lost in one of Enlil's update/merges (if I remember things correctly).

Was this before you moved to github? If it was after you moved to github, then you should still have the changes hidden somewhere in the version history, if you know where to look.

 

[loup99]

Was this before you moved to github? If it was after you moved to github, then you should still have the changes hidden somewhere in the version history, if you know where to look.

Yes, it was. I'm not even sure if Enlil received it, but it was showed off in the dev group. Anyway, we do not need to talk about some old change, we can find new setups and this is not especially hard to mod.