HanEmpire: The Emperors are already pretty mixed-race as is. I have absolutely no clue how the proportions work out but Andreas III has at a minimum Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, and Italian ancestry. At some point I do plan on having Ethiopian and Japanese women as Empresses of the Romans.
Regarding the Ethiopians, the ideas that blacks are racially inferior is just getting started. Although Ethiopia and Kongo could be “rationalized” on the “grounds” that ‘all Africans are inferior, but some are less inferior than others’. And if they wanted to be really difficult, they could just argue that Ethiopian success is due solely to Roman aid (it helped, yes, but the Ethiopians did the heavy lifting; the Romans just gave pointers).
Check out the beginning of the 1610 update for the Sicilian Jews. Short story, Sicily followed the ‘Golden Age of Sepharad’ route, starting really nice and then blowing up in their faces. While it is nice to make the ATL world a better place, it is the 1600s after all and realism demands its pound of flesh.
Sceonn: Yeah, the Atlantic slave trade is still going to screw over Africa in a lot of ways like OTL. But it will, on-average, fare better than OTL (admittedly that’s a low bar), but with wide regional variation.
ImperatorAlexander: There was a tepid one back around the OTL schedule (the initial rise of Bohmanism) but with Avignon Catholicism open to reform a lot of the drive for the Reformation fizzled out. Now with Avignon conservative and corrupt there could be a ‘Reformation MK2’, although Bohmanism is now associated rather strongly with the Triunes.
That said, with my Southern Baptist upbringing that was often an insult to intelligence and basic decency, I have little patience and less respect for Christian theology.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!... To fizzle out
Nobody saw that coming…
TyranicusMaximus: I liked the idea of Spain, of all places, being one of the most moderate Christian countries.
JohnSmith: I admit I have a soft spot for early modern Spain, although it had really serious flaws especially when it came to religious bigotry. So this is my attempt to make a better, in my opinion, Spain. More humanistic, less bigoted, more advanced. And while it certainly won’t attain the heights of OTL, hopefully its course here will be a happier and more prosperous one.
Arrix85: Thank you. It is fun to step out of the chronology and look at the broad brushstrokes. Plus it’s a good way to set up the zeitgeist. Those brief bits about the historic-romantic era weren’t just window dressing.
Babyrage: English is still going strong in England itself although if you’re a member of the middle or upper classes knowing French is always extremely useful and often vital. Considering how well English held up during the Norman and Plantagenet eras I don’t see it going away.
Regarding a military update, I’m not planning one specific update but will be integrating information into the general narrative. Plus some new innovations will be popping up and I don’t want to spoil them.
Kimo321: France, England, and Ireland are all separate sovereignties under the Triune Monarch with their individual governments running their internal affairs but certain broader aspects are controlled by the government in King’s Harbor. The capital is responsible for overseeing customs so England can’t try and start a tariff war with France. The military is also controlled by the government. There’s no French army or English army; there’s just the Triune army, although there are French and English units.
Evilprodigy: I admit I didn’t know that, otherwise I would’ve gone with a bigger number. So I’ll just defend it by saying ‘large’ is relative. Plus while Constantinople is the biggest, there are a lot of other sizeable Jewish communities, say 4000 in Thessaloniki, Smyrna and Antioch, 2000 in Corinth, Nicaea, and Trebizond, 1000 in Attaleia and Sinope… The numbers could add to something more comparable to Ottoman Jewish levels, although there won’t be anything approaching majority-Jewish Salonica.