alternatehistory.com
Chapter 20: All is Fair in Business and War
Part 20: All is Fair in Business and War (1560-1568)
1561 began with a surprising discovery. The Portuguese vessel São Manuel, one of the Iberian nation's most reliable ships for trade in the Far East, was blown off course while sailing for a regular trip to Guangzhou, and after a few weeks of travel in unmapped waters, it landed near a strange, mountainous island inhabited by a civilization that, while it resembled the Chinese in some ways, was also quite different. It turned out that the crew of the ship were the first Europeans to step foot on Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun, a territory mentioned by Marco Polo as Cipangu. While the local warlords and civilians of the Japanese isles viewed these Westerners with suspicion, the Portuguese were highly intrigued by the silver mines and production in this land. This archipelago was in fact China's main source of silver and gold, precious metals that Europe was lacking more and more now that it's local mines were being depleted. The Portuguese were also highly surprised by the warrior culture and extreme population density of the nation - this group of islands, most of which is mountainous, can hold more people than France!
Throughout the 16th century, Portugal was the dominating European force in East and South Asia. It pretty much monopolized the trade route to India around Africa, and even had a few treaty ports on the tip of the subcontinent, such as Cochin. The Portuguese also pushed forward, using the yearly monsoons to navigate the Sea of Arabia and the Gulf of Bengal, and often visited China, from which they would bring tea, porcelain and the ever so precious silk. And now Japan, with it's silver and copper, was added to their potential "customers". While the trips from East Asia to the bases in India and then all the way to Europe were dangerous and expensive, the demand for Eastern goods was so great that it more than paid off. Would this lucrative endeavor last forever, though, especially when other naval powers like the Netherlands and Spain explored similar routes?..
There was one more particular good that the Portuguese domineered in - slaves. Slaves from the Black Continent in particular. The Europeans held a few strongholds on the coast of West Africa, but they didn't capture locals by themselves - they had other people. Either local African kings, who would gladly sell war captives or even sometimes their own people to the Whiteskins in exchange for alcohol, Bibles and weapons, or Arabian merchants who would do the capturing for them. It's a dark portion of history of trade and history of Europe, but one that needs to be known. While the Portuguese sent many of the captured slaves to their own colonies in Manuela, where the colonists adopted a neu-latifundium stance towards these massive lands, creating fazenda - large plantations and estates using slave labor - but the biggest customer for the Atlantic slave trade was the Spanish empire.
The Spanish struggled to push inland due to fierce resistance from the locals and competition with the Empire of Mejico, but the Caribbean was firmly in their control. While the first half of the 16th century saw the colonization of the Vespucias to be an expensive endeavor and largely a money sinkhole, the other half saw everything change with the introduction of sugar cane plantations. Before the discovery of the New World, sugarcanes were already common among the Islamic world and Southern Europe, brought there from India, and the warm and humid climate of the Caribbean was perfect for growing this produce that was growing more and more valuable every year. 1563 was a turning point, at least in some places - in the island of Santa Ana, the profits of the colony, most of them from sugar trade, that were sent to the homeland for the first time in the colony's history were higher than the value of material and other support that Spain sent to it. A development that the Governor of Santa Ana, Manuel Xavier Encarnación, famously commented on saying:
"We are exporting white gold."
But, obviously, someone has to grow and extract this "white gold", and that is where the African slaves come in. After all, someone had to work in sugarcane plantations and harvest sugar for Europe to enjoy and buy. The work and living conditions in Caribbean sugar plantations were absolutely awful, the life expectancy of an average slave from their arrival to their death was six years. Only men were brought in, at many times mixed in the same ship with people from different tribes to avoid communication and thus rebellions, their former lives were completely crushed and they were treated as literal living tools by the Spanish owners. And despite the horrible conditions and the situation, the Spanish had little empathy for the African slaves - "what, are we supposed to care about these negroes? They were made by God to slave for someone, if not us, then each other!", they seem to say.
African slaves working in a sugar plantation in Puerto Norte
While the Iberians were conducting business across the world, Europe was bleeding. The Flammantian Wars across France quickly kicked into gear. Most of the French units were organized from lightly armed civilian volunteers gathered in cities and towns, the city levée ("uprising" or "levy"), but Jean de Foix knew that this was not going to cut it - his forces were untrained and equipped with much lower quality weapons than the English, and if some major reorganization and armament is not made, and fast, then the Uprising will fail. It was truly a lot of pressure - in many ways, the Flammantians had to improvise equipment and formations completely. However, the first few years of the war gave the French some luck. First, the French soldiers in the Anglo-French armies and garrisons began deserting and joining the Revolt en masse, provinding de Foix with fresh trained warriors. And second - the foreign situation was on his side.
The Holy Roman Empire, led by Austria, was still bitterover the defeat in Burgundy a few decades earlier, and the Emperor began preparing a campaign into Lorraine to reconquer Imperial territory, and even provided the Flammantians with some financial support to weaken his rival. Spain, meanwhile, led by the religious Philip III, stood firmly against these Reformist rebels, preparing it's own campaign through the Pyrhennes... Austrian help, hired mercenaries using the wealth from raided and looted pro-English estates and French deserters allowed Jean de Foix to form the Liberté Legion. Despite Henry IX landing in Normandy and pacifying Paris - and pacifying through massacring the organizers of the Paris Levee and enacting harsh punishment of the rest - the war was generally calm and focused on low-level combat for the first few years. Neither force really lacked the capability to even "find" the other one, instead resorting on low-scale raids, scouting the land and capturing unprotected cities.
Of course, this idyllic war didn't last forever, as in 1566, the armies of England-France led by Henry IX engaged the Libertè Legion near Limoges, not far from the Flammantian base of operations in Clermont. The Battle of Limoges carried a tint of irony with it - the English, confident in the superiority of their forces and believing that the Legion was just "a group of peasants with muskets", decided to just send a cavalry charge to crush and break the French - the exact same mistake that the French themselves did numerous times during the Eighty Years' War. Meanwhile, the Libertè Legion employed the new and only recently developed pike-and-shot tactic - that is, and army composed of musketeers in the center and pikemen in the corners and sides to protect them from cavalry charges. It worked out just as well as one would expect - with a victory for the French. Not an absolutely crushing one, but a powerful one that echoed and resonated across Europe. God supports the Reformists! The French might actually win! Southern Germany and Bohemia, both Reformist dominated regions, began swirling and shaking a little - maybe they could be just as successful? Jean de Foix was well aware that the war was not yet won, though. However, he still rallied the Second Estates General of Clermont, where the Flammantians decided their strategy, both during an after the war - the kings of the past turned France into an English province, thus, much like the citizens of Rome after overthrowing their tyrant king, the French will organize themselves without a monarch...
The Anglo-French forces pillaged and burned Centrè and the regions around the Loire river as punishment. Henry IX famously stated:
"If God wants to support the Bores, then we will change his mind by killing all of them."
The Parliament of England wasn't particularly keen on mass murdering it's subjects, but what could it do? The Kings of England were covertly, secretly, working on curbing the powers of the Parliament, piece by piece, and the Flammantian Wars were their greatest opportunity to enact "emergency acts" to "save the Kingdoms", and consolidate their power that way.
There is one war participant that hasn't been mentioned yet, though. The Netherlands Free State, a client state of England-France, was officially in war against the Flammantians and de Foix's revolters, as well as Austria, but was relatively neutral. Despite having been freed by Anglo-French forces, the Dutch did not see them as liberators - the pillaged landscapes of the Low Countries after the Burgundian Wars speak for themselves. The burghers and merchants of the Free State were still considering their choices - remain loyal to the English or align with the French? Either way, they were making profit from the mess through English concessions for loyalty and secretly trading with both sides, as well as acquiring a cheap source of colonists through French war refugees. It was the Flammantians Wars period when the Dutch began their own colonization of the Vespucias, starting with Nieuw-Amsterdam in 1567, a stronghold and minor settlement on a long island along the North Vespucian coast. North Vespucia did not blast such advanced native civilizations like the South, but it was nevertheless inhabited, and arriving Dutch merchants immediately saw the potential of the local furs and fish sources.
It would take a while before all this would really kick into gear, though...
The victories of the French Flammantians and Reformist insurrections in the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the spread of the Reformation in general, motivated Pope Nicholas VI to organize a council of the Catholic Church in Salerno, starting from 1567. There, the Papacy would declare the beginning of the Anti-Reformation, a Catholic movement to fight the spread of the Reformists and provide a reasonable alternative to this rebellious faith. Some changes in doctrine were also initiated - for example, indulgences and simony were both banned completely, and Mass was now allowed to be held in local languages along with Latin. However, the Church did not change their stance on things like celibacy and worship of saints, and declared the Reformists, Flammantians and Volanites to be heretical movements. The Inquisition was resurrected from dormancy as the Church's tool in the Anti-Reformation, too...
And speaking of Volanites - Lithuania. In 1567, the only child of Valdislavas II, Sofija Valdislavaitė, was sent away from Lithuania to marry the Prince of the Electorate of Brandenburg, Friedrich von Hohenzollern, in a strategic marriage to get Lithuania and this possible ally against Visegrad closer together - and an alliance against Visegrsd was required, especially after the insulting breaking of betrothal that Valdislavas II enacted dramatically soured relations between the two Eastern empires. However, this did not bode well with the depressed King. Sofija, his daughter, while born from his marriage to Astrida, was indeed deeply loved by the monarch, she reminded him of Viktorija... and now she was gone, in a foreign court, probably never to meet him again.
Five months after the marriage between Sofija and Friedrich, in January of 1568, Valdislavas II suddenly died. From what? None are sure. Sources on this death differ, but considering that the King was only about 50 years old by that time and had no history of former sickness, it couldn't have been a simple natural cause. Some say that he perished from an infected wound that he hid from his court and the doctors. Some say that he accidentally, or maybe even purposefully, ended his life by leaping off the tower of the Trakai Castle, where he lived at the time, some say he was poisoned an unknown spy, or a courtier. Or by himself...
And thus died the last male descendent of Valdislavas I, and the succession was now in turmoil. Logically, it should be Sofija who inherits the throne, but can a woman really rule? Lithuania has never experienced a female ruler, at least... The ideas of a "noble republic" proposed during the Glinskis Regency received a revival, and the Chancellor, Jonas Astikas, who was a supporter of this cause, ordered the troops of his estate to seize Vilnius and declared himself recent until a King is found. Numerous pretenders, descendants of Gediminids or Jagiellons, sprang up to raise their banners for the claim on the throne. And finally, in April, a detachment of 500 Brandenburgian knights with Sofija and Friedrich in the lead landed in Klaipėda...
Who will turn out victorious in this "succession crisis"? Or is this question even meaningful?
---
Here are a few other Vespucian locations, some from the last part that I forgot to inform of:
Santa Ana - Jamaica
Mariana Gulf - Gulf of Mexico
Flevoland - Nova Scotia/Gulf of St Lawrence
Nieuw-Amsterdam - Long Island
Part 20: All is Fair in Business and War (1560-1568)
1561 began with a surprising discovery. The Portuguese vessel São Manuel, one of the Iberian nation's most reliable ships for trade in the Far East, was blown off course while sailing for a regular trip to Guangzhou, and after a few weeks of travel in unmapped waters, it landed near a strange, mountainous island inhabited by a civilization that, while it resembled the Chinese in some ways, was also quite different. It turned out that the crew of the ship were the first Europeans to step foot on Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun, a territory mentioned by Marco Polo as Cipangu. While the local warlords and civilians of the Japanese isles viewed these Westerners with suspicion, the Portuguese were highly intrigued by the silver mines and production in this land. This archipelago was in fact China's main source of silver and gold, precious metals that Europe was lacking more and more now that it's local mines were being depleted. The Portuguese were also highly surprised by the warrior culture and extreme population density of the nation - this group of islands, most of which is mountainous, can hold more people than France!
Throughout the 16th century, Portugal was the dominating European force in East and South Asia. It pretty much monopolized the trade route to India around Africa, and even had a few treaty ports on the tip of the subcontinent, such as Cochin. The Portuguese also pushed forward, using the yearly monsoons to navigate the Sea of Arabia and the Gulf of Bengal, and often visited China, from which they would bring tea, porcelain and the ever so precious silk. And now Japan, with it's silver and copper, was added to their potential "customers". While the trips from East Asia to the bases in India and then all the way to Europe were dangerous and expensive, the demand for Eastern goods was so great that it more than paid off. Would this lucrative endeavor last forever, though, especially when other naval powers like the Netherlands and Spain explored similar routes?..
There was one more particular good that the Portuguese domineered in - slaves. Slaves from the Black Continent in particular. The Europeans held a few strongholds on the coast of West Africa, but they didn't capture locals by themselves - they had other people. Either local African kings, who would gladly sell war captives or even sometimes their own people to the Whiteskins in exchange for alcohol, Bibles and weapons, or Arabian merchants who would do the capturing for them. It's a dark portion of history of trade and history of Europe, but one that needs to be known. While the Portuguese sent many of the captured slaves to their own colonies in Manuela, where the colonists adopted a neu-latifundium stance towards these massive lands, creating fazenda - large plantations and estates using slave labor - but the biggest customer for the Atlantic slave trade was the Spanish empire.
The Spanish struggled to push inland due to fierce resistance from the locals and competition with the Empire of Mejico, but the Caribbean was firmly in their control. While the first half of the 16th century saw the colonization of the Vespucias to be an expensive endeavor and largely a money sinkhole, the other half saw everything change with the introduction of sugar cane plantations. Before the discovery of the New World, sugarcanes were already common among the Islamic world and Southern Europe, brought there from India, and the warm and humid climate of the Caribbean was perfect for growing this produce that was growing more and more valuable every year. 1563 was a turning point, at least in some places - in the island of Santa Ana, the profits of the colony, most of them from sugar trade, that were sent to the homeland for the first time in the colony's history were higher than the value of material and other support that Spain sent to it. A development that the Governor of Santa Ana, Manuel Xavier Encarnación, famously commented on saying:
"We are exporting white gold."
But, obviously, someone has to grow and extract this "white gold", and that is where the African slaves come in. After all, someone had to work in sugarcane plantations and harvest sugar for Europe to enjoy and buy. The work and living conditions in Caribbean sugar plantations were absolutely awful, the life expectancy of an average slave from their arrival to their death was six years. Only men were brought in, at many times mixed in the same ship with people from different tribes to avoid communication and thus rebellions, their former lives were completely crushed and they were treated as literal living tools by the Spanish owners. And despite the horrible conditions and the situation, the Spanish had little empathy for the African slaves - "what, are we supposed to care about these negroes? They were made by God to slave for someone, if not us, then each other!", they seem to say.
African slaves working in a sugar plantation in Puerto Norte
While the Iberians were conducting business across the world, Europe was bleeding. The Flammantian Wars across France quickly kicked into gear. Most of the French units were organized from lightly armed civilian volunteers gathered in cities and towns, the city levée ("uprising" or "levy"), but Jean de Foix knew that this was not going to cut it - his forces were untrained and equipped with much lower quality weapons than the English, and if some major reorganization and armament is not made, and fast, then the Uprising will fail. It was truly a lot of pressure - in many ways, the Flammantians had to improvise equipment and formations completely. However, the first few years of the war gave the French some luck. First, the French soldiers in the Anglo-French armies and garrisons began deserting and joining the Revolt en masse, provinding de Foix with fresh trained warriors. And second - the foreign situation was on his side.
The Holy Roman Empire, led by Austria, was still bitterover the defeat in Burgundy a few decades earlier, and the Emperor began preparing a campaign into Lorraine to reconquer Imperial territory, and even provided the Flammantians with some financial support to weaken his rival. Spain, meanwhile, led by the religious Philip III, stood firmly against these Reformist rebels, preparing it's own campaign through the Pyrhennes... Austrian help, hired mercenaries using the wealth from raided and looted pro-English estates and French deserters allowed Jean de Foix to form the Liberté Legion. Despite Henry IX landing in Normandy and pacifying Paris - and pacifying through massacring the organizers of the Paris Levee and enacting harsh punishment of the rest - the war was generally calm and focused on low-level combat for the first few years. Neither force really lacked the capability to even "find" the other one, instead resorting on low-scale raids, scouting the land and capturing unprotected cities.
Of course, this idyllic war didn't last forever, as in 1566, the armies of England-France led by Henry IX engaged the Libertè Legion near Limoges, not far from the Flammantian base of operations in Clermont. The Battle of Limoges carried a tint of irony with it - the English, confident in the superiority of their forces and believing that the Legion was just "a group of peasants with muskets", decided to just send a cavalry charge to crush and break the French - the exact same mistake that the French themselves did numerous times during the Eighty Years' War. Meanwhile, the Libertè Legion employed the new and only recently developed pike-and-shot tactic - that is, and army composed of musketeers in the center and pikemen in the corners and sides to protect them from cavalry charges. It worked out just as well as one would expect - with a victory for the French. Not an absolutely crushing one, but a powerful one that echoed and resonated across Europe. God supports the Reformists! The French might actually win! Southern Germany and Bohemia, both Reformist dominated regions, began swirling and shaking a little - maybe they could be just as successful? Jean de Foix was well aware that the war was not yet won, though. However, he still rallied the Second Estates General of Clermont, where the Flammantians decided their strategy, both during an after the war - the kings of the past turned France into an English province, thus, much like the citizens of Rome after overthrowing their tyrant king, the French will organize themselves without a monarch...
The Anglo-French forces pillaged and burned Centrè and the regions around the Loire river as punishment. Henry IX famously stated:
"If God wants to support the Bores, then we will change his mind by killing all of them."
The Parliament of England wasn't particularly keen on mass murdering it's subjects, but what could it do? The Kings of England were covertly, secretly, working on curbing the powers of the Parliament, piece by piece, and the Flammantian Wars were their greatest opportunity to enact "emergency acts" to "save the Kingdoms", and consolidate their power that way.
There is one war participant that hasn't been mentioned yet, though. The Netherlands Free State, a client state of England-France, was officially in war against the Flammantians and de Foix's revolters, as well as Austria, but was relatively neutral. Despite having been freed by Anglo-French forces, the Dutch did not see them as liberators - the pillaged landscapes of the Low Countries after the Burgundian Wars speak for themselves. The burghers and merchants of the Free State were still considering their choices - remain loyal to the English or align with the French? Either way, they were making profit from the mess through English concessions for loyalty and secretly trading with both sides, as well as acquiring a cheap source of colonists through French war refugees. It was the Flammantians Wars period when the Dutch began their own colonization of the Vespucias, starting with Nieuw-Amsterdam in 1567, a stronghold and minor settlement on a long island along the North Vespucian coast. North Vespucia did not blast such advanced native civilizations like the South, but it was nevertheless inhabited, and arriving Dutch merchants immediately saw the potential of the local furs and fish sources.
It would take a while before all this would really kick into gear, though...
The victories of the French Flammantians and Reformist insurrections in the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the spread of the Reformation in general, motivated Pope Nicholas VI to organize a council of the Catholic Church in Salerno, starting from 1567. There, the Papacy would declare the beginning of the Anti-Reformation, a Catholic movement to fight the spread of the Reformists and provide a reasonable alternative to this rebellious faith. Some changes in doctrine were also initiated - for example, indulgences and simony were both banned completely, and Mass was now allowed to be held in local languages along with Latin. However, the Church did not change their stance on things like celibacy and worship of saints, and declared the Reformists, Flammantians and Volanites to be heretical movements. The Inquisition was resurrected from dormancy as the Church's tool in the Anti-Reformation, too...
And speaking of Volanites - Lithuania. In 1567, the only child of Valdislavas II, Sofija Valdislavaitė, was sent away from Lithuania to marry the Prince of the Electorate of Brandenburg, Friedrich von Hohenzollern, in a strategic marriage to get Lithuania and this possible ally against Visegrad closer together - and an alliance against Visegrsd was required, especially after the insulting breaking of betrothal that Valdislavas II enacted dramatically soured relations between the two Eastern empires. However, this did not bode well with the depressed King. Sofija, his daughter, while born from his marriage to Astrida, was indeed deeply loved by the monarch, she reminded him of Viktorija... and now she was gone, in a foreign court, probably never to meet him again.
Five months after the marriage between Sofija and Friedrich, in January of 1568, Valdislavas II suddenly died. From what? None are sure. Sources on this death differ, but considering that the King was only about 50 years old by that time and had no history of former sickness, it couldn't have been a simple natural cause. Some say that he perished from an infected wound that he hid from his court and the doctors. Some say that he accidentally, or maybe even purposefully, ended his life by leaping off the tower of the Trakai Castle, where he lived at the time, some say he was poisoned an unknown spy, or a courtier. Or by himself...
And thus died the last male descendent of Valdislavas I, and the succession was now in turmoil. Logically, it should be Sofija who inherits the throne, but can a woman really rule? Lithuania has never experienced a female ruler, at least... The ideas of a "noble republic" proposed during the Glinskis Regency received a revival, and the Chancellor, Jonas Astikas, who was a supporter of this cause, ordered the troops of his estate to seize Vilnius and declared himself recent until a King is found. Numerous pretenders, descendants of Gediminids or Jagiellons, sprang up to raise their banners for the claim on the throne. And finally, in April, a detachment of 500 Brandenburgian knights with Sofija and Friedrich in the lead landed in Klaipėda...
Who will turn out victorious in this "succession crisis"? Or is this question even meaningful?
---
Here are a few other Vespucian locations, some from the last part that I forgot to inform of:
Santa Ana - Jamaica
Mariana Gulf - Gulf of Mexico
Flevoland - Nova Scotia/Gulf of St Lawrence
Nieuw-Amsterdam - Long Island
- Augenis
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