Yeah, plenty of people would argue that the 1066 Scotland is wrong, too. Arguably you could put a "medieval" Scotland maybe 1124 under David I, but the real Scottish state is probably better dated into the 1300s or so.
It's easy to nitpick when it's a subject you're intimately familiar with, particularly when you've read the sources that 'history' is based on, and the recent academic works that try to interpret them. That being said, I'm usually willing to cut paradox a fair bit of slack - they're a relatively small company with limited resources, and they've managed to create a very special game within those constraints, even if they do get the history wrong sometimes. Though don't even get me started on the other bookmarked start dates!
If so, it is a little weird to complain about it now. I checked Wikipedia and they date the formation of the kingdom as 843, treating the Kingdom of Alba as the same thing as the Kingdom of Scotland and etc. If you consider the existence of the kingdom to be wrong even in 1066, why be surprised the kingdom still exist "wrongly" back in the 800s? The way I see it, as a layman, is this is just another way to see history and name things.
There is a reason why nobody cites wikipedia. That may sound a bit harsh, and while there are certainly a great many well written and adequately cited entries, relatively obscure topics (such as most of the items I mentioned in the first post) are rarely well treated. If I were to get out my red teacher's pen, a lot of those entries would be covered more in red than black and white!
I've already explained it elsewhere, but here's the bullet point form why you can't call it Alba/Scotland in 867:
(1) No one at the time called it that for another thirty years.
(2) Really, no one? No one! Not their neighbours, not anyone else who left a written record up to that point. The closest you get is Irish Chroniclers using Alba as a geographical term for 'Britain,' or 'the area of Britain North of the Saxons.'
(3) When they did become the Kingdom of Alba, the Kingdom was initially known in latin as
Albania before it began to be commonly known as
Scotia (Scotland). Yes, Scotland used to be known as Albania. The Kingdom was referred to as Albania before it is referred to as Scotland. I'll stop repeating myself now. Albania. (Note I don't really think we should call early Scotland Albania in game, just to be perfectly clear).
(4) Pictland (Pictavia), Picts, Fortrenn (Fortriu) are all very well attested for the period immediately preceding 867 and a few decades afterwards.
(5) Every nation makes their own foundation myths, one of the ones that arose in Scotland involved tracing their descent from Scota, daughter of a Pharoah (yes, really) who lived at the same time as Moses. Another legend of equal historical validity is to consider Kenneth MacAlpine the founder of the Kingdom of Scotland. Even the Chronicle of Melrose (a much later source) states that "
He was called the first king, not because he was [the first], but because he first established the Scottish laws, which they call the Laws of Mac-Alpin." This probably gets to the source of how some of the legends around him developed, he was an early state-builder, and his early Pictish laws were incorporated into the early Kingdom of Scotland.
I could keep going, but it's not even a serious Academic point of contention amongst historians at this point.
Heatth said:
If I understand right, it is not all that wrong to call the kingdoms in that age "Scotland", although very anachronistic.
We're slaves to modern geography. When we talk about Scottish history, we include the history of the area that falls geographically within the modern nation. Using the term Scotland in a geographic sense is a shortcut that avoids contrived terminology that may be unfamiliar, or impart less meaning to the average reader. That's one of the reasons why Historians use Alba when referring to the early Scottish Kingdom - it's how the Kingdom was known at the time, you're not going to confuse it with say, Pictland in 867, or the true Scottish state that arrived centuries later. The term is, as you correctly point out, anachronistic. So yes, it is incorrect to refer to any Kingdom within the geographic bounds of Modern Scotland as 'Scotland' before the Kingdom is actually referred to as such, and even then you're better off using the term Alba for the first few hundred years if you're having an Academic discussion.
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What I would personally like to see is that if you're a Gaelic ruler of Pictland, it will trigger an event with a Mean Time to Happen of 30 years. It then gives you the option to become the Kingdom of 'Scotland,' mentioning how the majority of your subjects are no longer Pictish, time to embrace a new identity, blah blah blah. That's all that's really needed to fix the most glaring issue. It'll make the game more historically accurate, allow an option for those players who were looking forward to playing as Pictland, and prevent the AI from fostering a Pictish nation that lasts until the fall of Constantinople.
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