A More Personal Union

[Grouchio]

....The Cherokee?

[Lavidor]

Probably the Cahokia, but then why don't they know who built the mounds? Have the epidemics already destroyed their society?

[Saya Aensland]

Originally Posted by Hobbesian

I think i can. what starting year should i go with tho?

April 1599. Prior to that, you'd only have a claim on England's throne, and the values that ultimately decide whether or not a personal union commences are not moddable. You'd have to go to war with England to ensure the PU happens.

[TaylorS]

Originally Posted by Lavidor

Probably the Cahokia, but then why don't they know who built the mounds? Have the epidemics already destroyed their society?

In the OTL the Mississippians were still around when De Soto explored the area, but De Soto's men seem to have exposed the people to European diseases and 100 years later the society had mostly collapsed, only the Natchez people, in what us now SW Mississippi, retained the original culture. The folks in the core Mississippian areas around Cahokia, mostly speakers of Caddoan and Siouxian languages, fled west and took up a horse-based nomadic way of life.

[Thespitron 6000]

Spring 1602: Nurhaci and the Jurchen leadership launch a new offensive south into Liaoning, pressing towards Beijing. Wu Weizhong once more moves to block them, but a new danger to their rear means they are perilously distracted. Red Tiger, no longer content to remain a mere bandit, has mobilized the peasants of Hubei and invaded Henan, leading a ragtag army of starving peasants towards the traditional heartland of China and devouring everything in their path. Swamped by tens of thousands of refugees fleeing north into Hebei and Liaoning, Wu finds his strategic position growing more and more untenable with each passing day. Taking advantage of this, Nurhaci and company swarm over the Great Wall, bribing guards who are willing and killing those who are not. Wu, recognizing that he is in serious danger of being driven completely out of the northeast, chooses to make his stand at Jehol.

The movements of both Nurhaci and Red Tiger mean that the Imperial capital of Beijing is in serious danger. Eunuchs, generals, and bureaucrats all plead with the Wanli Emperor to flee south, away from the encroaching Jurchen and cannibalistic “Devourers”, but the Emperor won’t hear of it, confident that his soldiers will turn away the Jurchen as they’ve always done and put down the rebelling peasants. Further, the Emperor is afraid of what he’s heard about the lawlessness of the south, reckoning that it’s better to remain at the capital, where at least he has some control, than to move southward into anarchy.

“Where they go, they leave a wasteland in their wake.” So writes an observer coming close on the heels of Red Tiger and his “Devourers”. The land of Henan is stripped bare, nobles killed and eaten, their whores and sycophants spitted, roasted, and shared amongst Red Tiger’s inner circle of women warriors. Clashes with the Imperial army are inevitable, but the Devourers have numbers on their side, plus a core of skilled and experienced bandit-guerrillas who know how to fight irregularly. Keeping the Imperial units off guard, the Devourers sack their way across Henan, approaching Hebei and the capital by June. “I wonder what it is like,” muses Red Tiger in an unguarded moment, “to devour an emperor.”

Wu, meanwhile, faces the Jurchen at Jehol and is trounced, badly. His men are unnerved by tales of horror to the south brought by refugees; the night before the battle, Wu walks through his camp and finds many of his men weeping, having learned that their relatives have starved to death. Nonetheless, and despite his own doubts, Wu presses on, digging in, in preparation of the Jurchen attack. But the Jurchen, hearing the same rumors, are heartened; further, they have good reason to press hard. Nurhaci, hearing of Red Tiger’s oncoming peasant army, wishes to beat the bandit to Beijing and the Imperial diadem. As a result, Wu’s positions are nearly wiped out as the Jurchen, better supplied and with higher morale, attack and attack again until the Ming are broken in the field. Wu himself is seriously injured in the battle, and must pull back with his men to the southeast, hoping to put a barricade between the Jurchen and the capital.

[Xgentis]

They are lucky that no western powar has the mean to take pieces of China.

[naraht]

Originally Posted by Xgentis

They are lucky that no western powar has the mean to take pieces of China.

But the Japanese do!

[Positively Indecent]

Originally Posted by naraht

But the Japanese do!

And with the beginnings of a colonial empire, possibly the means to keep it

[Thespitron 6000]

Summer 1602: Rudolf, king of the Serbs, is desperately ill. The precise cause of his distress is undisclosed to his people, but given the symptoms--fever, rash, lesions on the skin, jaundice, peripheral edema, and malaise--it is almost certainly hepatitis brought on by syphilis. Throughout the summer months, Rudolf suffers a slow death, finally expiring in August. He is fifty years old.

With his death, power devolves to his son, Vladimir Wolfgang. Vladimir is six, and is not in any kind of condition to rule the fractious Serbs. Rudolf’s anti-Ottoman policy has been very popular, and the king himself was tolerant of his subjects’ Orthodoxy, a fact which allowed them to regard him as a tolerable, if distant, monarch. However, his wife, Anasztazia, is extremely unpopular. Twenty-one years old, Anasztazia is described by the Venetian envoy as follows:

“Of medium height, slim but with a full bosom. Her hair is coal black, and her skin is dark like a Turk’s, although she uses alum to make it fair. Her eyes are very deep and large and black, and she uses kohl to make them darker. She is overly fond of sad poems and songs, and is cruel to her servants. She dresses in naught but black, and is of no great affection for her husband, for she makes merry when she ought not, and indeed should grieve, but her laughter is mockery itself. She has scorn for the Lord’s Supper, and for the Lord’s Bond, by which a man and a woman become one flesh. She is said to travel by night, for the people claim she is a witch, to travel by night and visit the beds of her paramours, for she is the most ridden hackney in Serbia. Many of her lovers are married, but she spits on their oaths and takes them beside. She tempts them with her eyes and her bosom. She is a harlot, and vain and lusty. Her maids report that she is fretful of the loss of her beauty and youth, and if they make merry in her presence, being younger than she, she binds them and whips them, and draws great pleasure from this.

“Her magics are said to be thus: that she might change her shape into a cat or a rat or a bat or a wolf or a wild night mare, such that she might roam the countryside; that she doth curse her enemies; that she taketh the blood of those who displease her and useth it in her decadence and her sorcery that she might have dominion over them; that she trafficketh in alchemy and other unholy arts, seeking the elixir of eternal life and the potions of Venus; that she hath bewitched many men, and made them as strangers to their wives, and that she visiteth these men in the night, and indeed at times their wives do lie beside them, and she couples with them unknown to their wives, but this is not the depth of her depravity, for it is said that she doth at times arouse her lovers’ wives and bid them to join in her debauchery with their husbands, and this the wives do, for she hath bewitched them.

“It is said she has in her an unnatural attachment to her son, whom she keeps with her at all time, and that she still suckle him at her breast, despite his age, and keep him with her while she sleep--and it is given to me by her maids that she sleeps unclothed--and that she has boasted unto many that she shall teach her son to be a man, when the time comes, and that she is reviled for this.

“She is hated by most, disliked by some, loved by none. There are dark mutterings, and the priests say that any who murder her hath no sin on his hands, for she is a witch and a succubus, and a great whore. They claim that they know how best to treat with her kind, and list to me many magical means by which she might be killed. If there is a woman more hated and feared in Christendom than she, I know her not. It is a sadness, for her mother Elizabeth is a saint in her own life, but this Anasztazia Bathory shall come to a bad end.”

Anasztazia takes control of the government, acting as regent for her young son, and using her Austrian and Hungarian guardsmen to maintain order. But even as she does, there are grumblings among the Serbs about this Hungarian witch who has come to rule over them, and her frivolous and licentious nature does little to dispel these concerns.

Vladimir I, meanwhile, is a mere child, and his head has been turned by the trappings of power. He lacks the common touch, something he shares with his father, but while Rudolf’s firm and vigorous policies made him liked and tolerated, even if he was a foreigner, Vladimir has no such ability. Unaware that his mother’s new regime is alienating many who should be his supporters, he amuses himself by inspecting his troops, playing at soldier, and riding in the private forests, far from the concerns of his people.

[Grouchio]

French-esque revolution for Serbia, anyone?

[Saya Aensland]

I wonder how much of Anasztazia's reputation is exaggerated?

On one hand, the witchcraft thing is probably a malicious lie. On the other hand, she IS the incestuous daughter of Elizabeth Báthory the Blood Countess and her uncle, so the possibility of her being a sadistic nutter-butter is not that far-fetched.

[Positively Indecent]

I was just wondering, what would this era be known as? This period was in OTL the Jacobean Era but obviously there is no James VI & I.

[jkarr]

Originally Posted by Positively Indecent

I was just wondering, what would this era be known as? This period was in OTL the Jacobean Era but obviously there is no James VI & I.

it could be the imperialist era...seeing as the amount of empires popping up and falling..or the valois era...

the problem with that though is eras are usually named long after the time past, so it would depend on how modern historians would view it, and given the dramatic change in history, thats anyones guess as to who could be the dominant culture in the modern era

[Xgentis]

Originally Posted by Grouchio

French-esque revolution for Serbia, anyone?

That's not what they need with the Ottoman breathing down their neck.

[Thespitron 6000]

Guild Wars

England/France 1603: The accession of Henry IX to the English Crown has far-reaching and often unforeseeable effects, some of which are rather startling in their seeming non sequiturness. Not least of these is the war that erupts in 1603 between the Worshipful Company of Brewers in London and the Guild of Vintners in Paris. The Spanish occupation of southern France during the Great War resulted in tremendous destruction, particularly to the wine-growing regions. As a result, the wine industry has declined, and will take years, perhaps decades, to recover.

Alcohol happens to be one of the few commodities in this period that both travels well and fetches a high price. Seeing a market opportunity, the Brewers, who have begun to expand into distilling, begin to flood the French market with cheap “jenever”, or “blue jenny”, a juniper-derived spirit that is easy and inexpensive to make. Gaining tremendous market share, the Brewers petition the King to amend their charter to the “Worshipful Company of Brewers and Distillers”, sensing that the future lies as much in liquor as it does in beer.

The French, however, are not in any mood to take this lying down. French vintners, brewers, and distillers start their own political campaign to have exorbitant tariffs placed on English spirit. Crippled by their own excessively restrictive regulations regarding membership, the Vintners are incapable of expanding to meet demand and out-compete the English, and so hope for a royal Hail Mary to turn the tide.

Henri is now put in an impossible position, one that demonstrates at a stroke the absurdities central to mercantilism.

Mercantilism, the dominant mode of thought for most European economic planners of this time, rests on the notion that a positive balance of trade is a good thing. Gold and silver should be pouring into one’s economy while exports pour out. To this end, protectionism is essential to prevent foreign competition in domestic markets. Hence the contradiction: as King of France, Henri is supposed to protect and encourage French distilling, while as King of England, Henri is supposed to protect and encourage English distilling. Obviously, both are not possible. But the power of the idea of mercantilism is so strong that Henri sees no obvious way forward. He is loath to offend the London guilds, who are watching intently to see how the King will rule in this specific case with the obvious concern about how the ruling will reflect general policy. At the same time, his French guilds are howling for something to be done.

Playing for time, Henri does the only thing available to him. He uses royal decree to amend the charter of the Vintners so that the rules for membership are loosened, thus allowing them to recruit more distillers and compete more easily with the English. While the political pressure to rule in favor of one nation or another never fully disappears, it does decrease slightly, as both Paris and London--as well as the rest of Henri’s dominions--are quickly awash in a flood of cheaply distilled alcohol. Not all are satisfied with Henri’s minor compromise, and sporadic arsons take place in both capital cities, as the two feuding guilds attempt to smoke out the competition--literally.

The problem of economic coherency is one that will continue to dog Henri’s reign, but already the seeds have been planted--those whose loyalties are to the King, rather than to France or England, are beginning to have the smallest doubts about the wisdom of mercantilism as a policy. It will take many years before those seeds sprout and flower, but already mercantilism is doomed.

[SavoyTruffle]

So Henri's making slider moves towards free trade?

[Saya Aensland]

Originally Posted by SavoyTruffle

So Henri's making slider moves towards free trade?

I'm guessing it was a lucky event, since he just recently made a slider move towards either Innovative or Centralization.

[J. de Vos]

Sometimes I think everyone on this board plays EU3:P

Nice update! Will France/England ever wind up in a trade war with the Republic up North? They're allies now but once they start competing for commerce things might turn sour.

[Kuld von Reyn]

Let's just hope no-one spots a meteor or comet anytime soon.

Things are turning out quite interestingly in the Valois Empire. If anyone can make this stuff work, it's Henri.

[Xgentis]

I wonder if the Danes aren't preparing themself to finish off Sweden who have more or less fallen into chaos with the usurper in charge. They must have a really backward army if they even have a proper army.