An Age of Miracles Continues: The Empire of Rhomania

[Basileus444]

Rhomania in the early 1640s​

While Roman soldiers were campaigning in Mesopotamia, Persia, and India, news of their exploits trickled back to be expounded in Roman newspapers. Many Romans latched onto those exploits as a salve for rough times. The harvest of 1642 was an improvement on 1641, but it could be labeled indifferent at best, and following years up to 1644 were similar. The 1645 harvest wasn’t as bad as 1641, but was worse than the 1642-44 run. With the harvest by far the dominant economic activity, the poor returns ensured a continued sluggishness of the Roman economy. Furthermore the poor times of the early 1640s would mean that the bad times of the late 1640s would hit people who were already undernourished and whose reserves had run down.

The loot and plunder brought back from the east would help a little, but was woefully inadequate to revive the Roman economy. For starters, gold and cotton textiles are not an effective dietary supplement to a grain harvest that has been halved by early frosts. Also the amount that makes it to Rhomania, after what is spent in India, and after the Persians take their 60% (because they provided 60% of the army at that point), isn’t that big. It is huge by personal standards, but not so much compared to Imperial budgets or Roman GDP.

The part that accrues to the Roman government mainly goes to paying off some war debts, with the remainder funding the start of the Arsenal transfer from the Golden Horn to its new location on the Bay of Nikomedia. With the security of the Marmara basin on a much better footing compared to when the Arsenal was established, the argument for putting it behind Constantinople’s land walls no longer apply.

However the move offers the opportunity for more space, improved security from foreign espionage and poaching of workers since they’re no longer right next to the commercial heart of one of the greatest ports in the world, and also promises a cost reduction, at least once the process is completed. Supply lines to Constantinople only need to be tweaked slightly to support the new location, so there’s little change there. But it is next to a substantial forest, which because of its proximity to the capital is better protected by Forest Wardens. While it can’t provide for all the timber needs for ship construction, particularly the mast timbers, it can provide many of them, with its proximity making shipping costs and waste minimal, even when compared to the original Constantinople site.

On a small-scale, the boost is more substantial where it does hit, with many examples of ‘hometown boy makes good’. The quantities may be paltry by jaded Smyrna’s or Constantinople’s standards, but the plunder brought back to small hilltop villages scratching out a meager existence from thin soils and mountain-pastured flocks is staggering by their standards.

A more amusing economic historical note from this period comes from 1643 when the Regent Athena makes a revision to the tax code. Afterwards, all stock exchange buildings, for purpose of evaluating building taxes, are placed in the same category as gambling establishments. The purpose is for social commentary rather than revenue increase, and is still on the books today.

The most notable innovations of Athena while her brother is still reigning are in the religious sphere, with the first step dealing with the legacy of Ibrahim in the religious landscape. The standpoint of the Roman government is clear; the supremacy of the Orthodox Church is not to be challenged. All non-Orthodox are once again barred from having services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. As for the various monasteries that Ibrahim seized from the Orthodox Church and redistributed, the Russian, Georgian, and Ethiopian ones are left alone because of the diplomatic issues that would arise were they not left alone.

However that is out of the question for the monasteries given to the Armenian and Coptic Churches, which include some of the most significant in all of Syria, including Saydnaya. These are all seized by Roman soldiers who evict the occupants, Orthodox monks coming in to take their place. Both the Armenian and Coptic Churches are given some landholdings taken from the evicted Sunnis as compensation, but economically they are worth less than the original monasteries and lack anything compared to their historical and religious significance. The Armenians and Copts are naturally annoyed, but many of the Orthodox are also unsatisfied. They wanted the Armenians and Copts to also have to return any profits they made for the years they held the properties, as well as pay an additional indemnity.

The long-term effects are impossible to quantify, but they reinforce the preexisting tensions between the Orthodox and Armenian and Coptic Churches. Theologically, the latter two are more in error according to the Orthodox Church than are the Catholics. They likely contribute to the relative ease with which Iskandar the Younger is able to persuade Armenian merchants and artisans to immigrate to Persia during his reign.

The other religious developments are all internal to the Orthodox Church which in theory would make them less acrimonious, but anyone who would think that would make it the case in actuality clearly has not been paying attention to Christian history. The city of Rome is now officially, de jure and de facto, once again part of the Roman Empire, unlike during the reign of Andreas I when the Eternal City was ruled by a vassal. This means the issue of the Pentarchy has come up.

Of the four eastern Patriarchs, the most significant and powerful is that of Constantinople. Besides its proximity to Imperial power (a source of danger as well as patronage), its financial holdings, number of subordinate metropolitans and bishops, and parishioners is far in excess of the other three.

Next is the Patriarch of Antioch. Its finances and followers can’t compare to Constantinople, but the mission field in the east falls under Antioch’s purview, not Constantinople, a right the Antiochean Patriarchs vigorously defend. This factor gives them more weight than they would hold by virtue of raw resources alone, but it is still not enough to make them the equals of Constantinople, much to the annoyance of the Antiochean Patriarchs. (Some argue that the vigor with which Antioch encourages proselytization in the east is motivated primarily by the desire to ‘beef up’ the Patriarchate vis-à-vis Constantinople.)

Jerusalem cannot compare with even Antioch, much less Constantinople. Its presence in the Holy Land, with the many religious sites, pilgrims, and donations they bring increase its weight substantially. However the area of the Patriarchate is small with no scope for expansion, that having been cut off by Antioch. The number of local metropolitans, bishops, and parishioners is also quite small. Its distance from loci of political power also hampers it; the Patriarch of Antioch is at least based in the third city of the Empire.

But compared to all three, the Patriarchate of Alexandria looks like a sad joke, with only the title giving it any semblance of equality. It has religious dominion over all of Africa, and there are many Christians in Africa, but almost all of them are not Orthodox. The Patriarch of Alexandria has no subordinate metropolitans and only two bishops, with limited congregations. Income-wise he is dwarfed by his three Orthodox counterparts, as well as the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria who has far more subordinate clerics and parishioners.

Everyone agrees that an Orthodox Bishop of Rome should be established, and given his position he would be a Patriarch. But there are disputes over his holdings. Constantinople wants it restricted just to the Roman enclave around Rome itself. Others say it should be over all of Italy, including Venetia, Sicily, and possibly even Istria and Dalmatia. The Patriarch of Constantinople is opposed to this because as of now, all those metropolitans answer to him. However nobody wants a Patriarch even more pathetic than Alexandria, and so the majority view wins out. The metropolitans of Italy, Sicily, Istria, and Dalmatia will answer to the new Patriarch of Rome.

There is no debate however on the status of the new Patriarch of Rome. He is the First Among Equals of the Pentarchy. That is non-negotiable. That was the way of the ancient Church. That the Latins went on to claim more for the Popes than what was due them will not excuse denying what is due to the Patriarchs of Rome. To demote Rome, to deny what it is due, would be an innovation, and in theology that is a bad thing. The West have deviated from the way of the Apostolic Church but the Orthodox have, and will, remain faithful. (This is in religious matters. Because of the economic and political geography, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is more significant in secular affairs.)

Then there is the question of the selection of the Patriarchs. As the vast majority of his parishioners are Sicilian, the Despots of Sicily want to determine who the Patriarchs will be. Clergymen naturally don’t like the idea of secular rulers getting involved in such matters, but their arguments are limited given the proximity of the White Palace and the history of Roman Emperors in such ventures. Eventually it is agreed that the Patriarch of Rome will be elected by a Holy Synod of senior clerics in the Roman Patriarchate, with the wishes of the Despot to be ‘consulted’ and the wishes of the Emperor to be ‘considered’.

One would think that would be the end of these things, but all the talk of Patriarchs and precedence has helped inflamed a grievance in the north. As a matter of pride, the Russians find it irritating that their senior-most religious official is a mere Metropolitan, the Metropolitan of Kiev. In terms of wealth he is the richest of all Orthodox Metropolitans, and in number of parishioners he far exceeds any of the Patriarchs, including his titular superior the Patriarch of Constantinople once the Kievan parishioners are removed. Yet even among the Metropolitans he does not have titular seniority, with several Roman metropolitans with older sees taking precedence.

This is no longer acceptable and in 1644 a delegation with members from all the Russian states arrive in Constantinople with the ‘request’ that the Metropolitan of Kiev be elevated to the rank of Patriarch. The Patriarch of Antioch enthusiastically supports this request as a means to curb Constantinople, with the timing strongly suggestive that he was forewarned of the endeavor. The Patriarch of Constantinople is extremely resistant, having just lost his Italian bishoprics to Rome, but he is forced to give way when Athena enters the lists against him. Alienating the Russians is not an option. The Metropolitan of Kiev is promoted to Patriarch of All the Rus.

There is a coda to this, although no one is surprised. The Japanese Orthodox Church is autocephalous but in communion with the ‘main’ Orthodox Church, like the much older Georgian Orthodox Church. Unlike the Georgian Church, which is led by a Patriarch (because of the autocephality, the Georgian Patriarch doesn’t count for matters that are internal to the main Orthodox Church), the Japanese Church is headed by the Metropolitan of Aira.

When the autocephality was established, the Japanese had initially wanted a Patriarch but had been convinced to go with a Metropolitan. However with the Russians getting a Patriarch, their sense of honor and pride demands the Japanese have a Patriarch as well. Technically they don’t need the main church’s approval for the promotion, but for diplomacy’s sake they request it, and for diplomacy’s sake the main church promptly approves said promotion.

In terms of eastern affairs, the promotion doesn’t change anything. Given that the Japanese Church was already autocephalous beforehand, Antioch’s purview isn’t shrunk in the slightest. (It’s highly likely that Antioch’s support of a Russian Patriarch to curb Constantinople was revenge for Constantinople’s earlier support for an autocephalous Japanese Church to curb Antioch.)

The Russian Patriarch is somewhat different. Technically all of the Patriarchs are equal, with ceremonial precedence at most. In that manner, the Patriarch of the Rus is the most junior, on the grounds that it is much newer than the other five. However real power, as opposed to titles and procedures, can follow different rules. The Patriarch of the Rus, after all, has a comparable number of parishioners as the Pentarchy, Georgian, and Japanese Patriarchs combined.

 

[Basileus444]

How about trade posts and proselytizing missions, with hope of recruiting locals for both, in Africa instead of colonizing the whole place?

East Africa is Ethiopian/Omani turf and they would not appreciate the competition. Meanwhile Atlantic Africa has nothing of interest to Rhomania; anything it can provide can also be provided by East Africa, which is closer.

The Algiers Expedition​

In the west, the Regency of Athena was extremely quiet in foreign affairs, with the one exception of the Algiers expedition. This was not a popular move in the halls of the White Palace. The expense was something that the exchequer very much wished to avoid while the benefits of any success would accrue mostly to the Latins and Sicilians. Since Roman shipping rarely went west of Sardinia anymore and Roman shores were far away with Sicily in the way, corsairs were not a notable problem.

The Roman contribution was solely because of commitments made in the negotiations over Italy, but the feeling was that Latin problems should be dealt with by Latins using their own men and money. As for the Sicilians, there was animus against them because of their perceived betrayal over the matter of Italy, which only irritated the Sicilians who were not impressed by Roman sour grapes over what the Sicilians considered the reasonable defense of their legal rights and interests.

The expedition is set for 1642, with the various allied fleets to rendezvous in Minorca, the island holding of the Hospitaler Order. However due to delays of raw material shipments needed for maintenance, the Roman contingent is delayed in departing Rhomania and further slowed by contrary winds in making its journey across the Mediterranean. As a result, when the Romans finally arrive in Minorca, the ships of the Order, Spain (which includes some Aragonese vessels), Arles, the Kingdom of the Isles, and Sicily all have been there for at least three weeks.

Thus the various allies are not in a particularly good mood when the Romans arrive. The enforced three weeks of idleness has been a voracious pit devouring their limited supply of moneys and victuals. Furthermore the crowded conditions are inevitably unhygienic, with disease outbreaks beginning to affect the crews.

The Romans try to explain the delay away by the material factors, but they fail to mollify the allies for various reasons. One is that the Roman contingent is somewhat underwhelming, not justifying the delay. The Spanish provided 22 ships, the Arletians 14, the Sicilians 16, the Order 6, and the Islanders 4 (the Order and Islander ships are combined into one squadron for tactical and administrative purposes). The Romans bring 15 ships to the armada.

Another reason is the behavior of the Roman commander, Navarchos Andronikos Platanas. Historians are divided on the question of whether Platanas was ordered by the White Palace to try and sabotage the expedition, or if the tensions were the result of his personality.

(Leo Kalomeros has been transferred to the Mediterranean by this point, but is not part of the expedition. Some historians argue that this was because it was felt that given his recent battle experiences with the Spanish, he would be a poor choice as part of a fleet that was operating with Spaniards. However there is no direct evidence of this and if that was the rationale for excluding Kalomeros, it makes the inclusion of Platanas even more puzzling. It should also be noted that at this point Kalomeros was still a junior officer with no ability to demand assignments, and so his inclusion or absence was not a matter of priority.)

The various allies have not been completely idle while waiting for the Romans. While the Commander-in-Chief of the combined fleet is to be the Hospitalier Grandmaster, Pierre de Monte, as agreed upon beforehand, he is not to become autocratic commander of all units. National pride won’t allow that. So the allies draw up Articles of War to govern the conduct of the combined fleet.

Tactically the fleet is divided into national squadrons to be commanded by their own officers, with the Grandmaster having complete command authority during battle. The various officers recognize the need for a clear and simple chain of command when shot is flying. However all important strategic decisions are to be made by a Council of War. The Council is to be comprised of the three senior officers from each national contingent, Hospitalers & Islanders, Spanish, Arletians, Sicilians, and Romans. Voting is to be done publicly and in rotation, with the senior most officer of each contingent voting first, to be followed by the second-most of all contingents, and then the third, although voting will cease once a majority is reached. The Hospitaler & Islander contingent, because it contains the Commander-in-Chief, gets first vote in the rotation. The order of the others is determined by lot, with it going Sicilian, Arletian, and Spanish. The Romans, because they are not present when all this is decided, are given the last slot.

Platanas is outraged that Articles of War have been drawn up that will govern the Romans without Roman input, and he wants new ones drawn up. However the other allies just want to get the expedition going already. For the sake of expediency, Platanas says he will agree to the Articles but demands that the Romans take the second slot after the Hospitalers & Islanders. This is rejected since in neither hulls nor weight-of-shot can the Romans justify preeminence; if that determined precedence as opposed to chance, the Spanish would take it. Eventually, after much argument and time during which at least a hundred allied sailors die of disease, Platanas agrees to the Articles provided the precedence-determining lots be cast again. This is accepted with the lots cast. The Romans still get the last slot, much to the amusement of the allied officers and the rage and fury of Platanas.

Finally the fleet sets sail, after a meeting that determines its target. For all the disputation over how the war council was to operate, the first meeting is quick for the target is obvious: Algiers. Corsairs operate from many ports along the North African coast, and are not restricted even to the Mediterranean, with the rovers of Sale on Morocco’s Atlantic coast raiding as far away as the Grand Banks.

But Algiers is by far the greatest of the pirate ports. In 1640 it has around 60,000 inhabitants, with ten to fifteen thousand of them slaves, mostly European although some are Africans purchased from the Sahara trade. That same year 61 corsair vessels put out to sea, hitting targets from Brittany to Crete. In the last case the corsairs seized 31 people, fishermen and sailors working small coaster trading vessels; Rhomania suffers much less than the western Mediterranean but is not immune.

Many of the corsairs are of North African stock, but many are not. The exceptions are European renegades, many (but not all of whom) have converted to Islam. Some were drawn to the lifestyle and opportunities for riches and advancement offered by the corsair lifestyle. Others are captives who when taken prisoner were offered the choice of being a slave or a corsair and took the latter course.

Algiers is nominally subject to the Marinid Sultan, but were he to abolish piracy, he would be ignored. It is vital to the prosperity of Algiers and the elite of the city are too invested in the practice to give it up. While there is a governor of the city, there is also a guild of captains, comprised of the senior corsairs, that is a major locus of power in Algiers. They are not going to give up their way of life, and the profits from it, easily.

The commander of the coastal artillery, Mohammed Pasha, an Arletian renegade and convert to Islam (he was captured on his family’s fishing boat as a boy), makes that quite clear when the Grandmaster makes his demands. He straps an elderly Spanish priest to the muzzle of one of his guns and threatens to blow him, and more prisoners, from his cannon if the allies attack. The allies are not dissuaded, with the first shot of the battle killing the priest. At least twenty more Algerian prisoners are murdered in similar fashion. [1]

The battle of Algiers (1642) is a fierce gunnery duel between the allied fleet and the coastal defenses of Algiers. The allies are restricted to naval options as they have little in the way of army units save for sharpshooters posted on vessels for additional firepower. The last serious incursion into North Africa, a Roman venture, was demolished by a Marinid army 50,000 strong. The allies don’t have the sealift capacity to move an army big enough to challenge that, so they don’t even try. It is just as well. Considering the supply and sanitation situation on Minorca, adding soldiers to the mix would just have increased the death toll.

Three of the Spanish vessels are bomb ketches which have proven their worth in the Andalusi war, their high-angle long-range heavy mortars wreaking havoc on the city while the conventional ships engage the coastal batteries. Firing is hot and thick, both sides taking heavy losses. The Great Mosque of Algiers is damaged by the bomb ketches and many harbor guns are put out of action. But those harbor guns did not go down quietly, the batteries along the Grand Mole proving particularly dangerous. The Spanish flagship alone is hit over two hundred times. Both sides distinguish themselves, with the conspicuous exception of the Romans who stand off and engage in an ineffectual long-range cannonade. Three Roman vessels break from this pattern, moving in closer to fire more effectually; they are reprimanded and recalled by Platanas.

At dusk the duel ends, both sides licking their wounds. The mood in the council of war is ugly. Losses are heavy, much powder and shot has been expended, supplies are running low, disease is still raging in the crews, and everyone is utterly fed up with Platanas. To his face, the Spanish admiral (whose nephew, serving as an aide, lost a foot that day to a shot from one of the mole batteries) tells him that if Platanas was his subordinate, he’d have him hanged from a yardarm for cowardice in the face of the enemy.

The Algerians rub salt in the wound the next morning by offering, as a gesture of goodwill, to release thirty five captives gratis. They are all Romans, which confirms in the eyes of practically all of the allied officers that Platanas is in league with the Algerians.

Combined with all these issues, it is late in the season and many an expedition against Algiers has met bloody ruin by the wrath of Mother Nature in these waters. Thus the expedition breaks up with bitter recriminations. Despite the expenditure and effort and the thousands of shot fired into Algiers, it would seem that this attack on Algiers, like the many before it, is a bloody failure.

But it is not a total failure. Unlike those earlier attacks, this one did inflict serious harm on Algiers and cause many casualties amongst the mariner population that crews the corsair ships. In 1643, thirty five put out to sea. And in another way this is different from earlier assaults, as the 1642 attack is not a one-shot but is followed up by renewed effort.

In 1644 a fresh allied force puts out to sea, with Spanish, Aragonese, Hospitalier, Islander, Arletian, and Sicilian contributions. The Romans are not invited. (Platanas returns to Constantinople and faces neither commendation nor condemnation, giving no hint as to whether he was acting on orders or if his personality was just spectacularly unsuited for the task.)

This fleet sets sail much earlier, in much better health and provisions, and with more shot and powder. Again the guns sound, both sides taking heavy losses, but the allies keep up the attack and after three days of shelling they are clearly getting the better of the exchange. The city of Algiers is finally forced to come to terms.

Surrender is not unconditional and the Algerians are stubborn bargainers. But they are forced to relinquish a thousand captives and allow three thousand more to be ransomed. Allied efforts to get more run into the stumbling block that many of the captives are private property, not slaves of the state, and their masters are reluctant to part with them. So while many slaves are freed, many more remain in bondage.

The Algerians are also forced to sign pledges not to attack the shipping of the allied powers. Again this is difficult to enforce because corsairs tend to ignore orders they don’t like, and piracy and slavery are essential for maintaining Algiers’s economy at its current level of development. Still it is a success, even if not a complete one. Corsairs still put out from Algiers, but in 1645 their ships only number twenty three, and they never again attain the numbers or reach that they held before 1644.

[1] This is from the OTL French bombardment of Algiers in 1683.

 

[Basileus444]

Italy in the 1640s​

It could well be said that the Romans, in regard to the War of the Roman Succession and the Italian Peninsula, won the war but lost the peace. The 1644 expedition, where the Sicilians went it alone with the Latin allies but without the Romans, is a good illustration. While the initial disagreements between Constantinople and Messina had been bandaged up, the wounds would not heal without scarring. Sicilian efforts to improve direct relations with Arles and Spain were a result of this wariness.

Some Romans would complain about this, perceiving this as Sicilian ingratitude for the territorial gains they’d made in Italy. However those territorial gains had only exacerbated this issue. Sicily was a mixed state, with a large Greek-speaking Orthodox element, significant in the upper and mercantile classes. However it had a majority that was Italian-speaking (various dialects notwithstanding) and Catholic, which still had substantial elements in the upper and mercantile classes as well. The Sicilians were careful to always present the Greek face when looking to Constantinople, but at least 60% and likely more of the pre-war Sicilian population was Catholic.

The Greek Orthodox element skewed bigger because of its prominence in the upper tiers of society, but even here it was not unchallenged before the war. But after the war the element’s dominance was weakened even more than it already was, for all of the new holdings were Italian-speaking Catholic. As a result, Sicily left the war as more of a Latin Catholic state and society than it had been before the war, which naturally weakened its ties with Rhomania.

Furthermore increasing trade with Spain and Arles, especially after the corsair threat was lessened, was to the benefit of Palermo and Naples. Palermo was a mixed city religiously and linguistically while Naples was wholly Latin and Catholic. This gave them more economic weight in the politics of the Despotate, at the expense of the ports of Messina and Bari, which were mostly Greek-speaking and Orthodox.

To the north lay the Roman enclave around Rome, the existence of which was more of a sop to Roman vanity than of economic value. The city of Rome had little in the way of industry and most of its allure had been based on the presence of the papal curia. The Popes and Cardinals and all their retainers and hangers-on, plus all the bureaucrats and clerics, had to be housed and fed and dressed and feted. Without those, business dried up.

The Orthodox Patriarch of Rome and his staff hardly made up the difference. The pilgrim trade also dried up. Many of the most significant relics had been spirited out of the city by the Catholic faithful, Catholic faithful were wary of undertaking pilgrimage to a heretic city, and Orthodox faithful preferred the familiar Constantinople and Jerusalem routes.

Thus the Eternal City decayed to a sleepy settlement of 15,000, repeatedly blasted by waves of malaria. The Patriarch of Rome, for health reasons, rarely resided in the city, and the wealthy always vacated the city during the summer. Its only real draw was its many ancient monuments which attracted antiquarians as well as artists, who were struck by the sight of humble Umbrian shepherds guiding their flocks through the remains of the palaces of emperors. But these numbered in the dozens compared to the thousands of pilgrims who’d once flocked to the city when the Pontiff made it his residence.

Continuing north is the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which is certainly no sleepy undeveloped tract of countryside with only memories of past glories to warm its aching bones. Firenze recovers rapidly from its wartime troubles, once again heavily involved in textile manufacturing, glassblowing, financiering, and art. Livorno continues its wartime boom, now because Grand Duke Galilei turns it into a free port, bringing much trade and traders to the port.

While it does create much prosperity for Livorno and the parts of Tuscany that import and export via Livorno, which was Galilei’s goal, there is a sting in the tail, one Romans are not surprised to see coming. It leads also to the creation of a powerful clique of Livornese merchants who, growing used to being left alone, strongly resent any curb on their moneymaking and prove to be a massive political problem for future Grand Dukes who wish to do some curbing. (This is why economic pro-free trade arguments do nothing for most Romans, as they recognize, unlike most economists, that economic issues such as this are rarely just economic issues.)

Galileo Galilei is personally friendly to Constantinople as he is an honest man, meaning that once bought he stays bought. Starting in 1640, his daughter Celeste spends much of her time in Constantinople, personally tutoring Athena in astronomy and the use of the telescope. The telescope personally constructed by Celeste and used by Athena in some of these lessons is today on display in the Imperial Museum of Science. Celeste also oversees renovations and improvements to the Imperial observatory and corresponds regularly with Roman intellectuals on astronomical and related topics, a respected figure in the intelligentsia.

However that is a personal connection and not enough to counteract other, more impersonal, forces. Tuscany is an Italian-speaking Catholic country, and it is on the west coast of Italy. Livorno faces west toward Spain and Arles. While Roman and Sicilian merchants are active in the free port of Livorno, Spanish and Arletian ones handily outnumber them. Roman trade boomed here when the Romans controlled the port, but with a legally level playing field, geographical proximity proves key. Galilei’s personal feelings aside, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany decidedly leans westward, not east.

The Romagna might be expected to be different, because it is on the east coast proximate to Rhomania. But the geographical, personal, and cultural factors play differently, yet result in a similar result to Tuscany. The inhabitants of the Romagna are considered to be xenophobic and chauvinistic even by Italian standards, and they intensely and fiercely resent a Greek Orthodox ruler being imposed on them.

Theodoros of Nineveh is hardly the type to overcome such initial antipathy. Mild-mannered and interested in chemistry, he is not the type to win over embittered Romagnol notables and townspeople. Out of grudging politeness for Roman power they won’t kill him or ride him out of the country back to his own barbarian kind as they would like, but that’s the extent of it.

His wife Isabella of Portugal, an illegitimate daughter of King Ferdinand of Spain, fares much better. She is a Spanish Catholic, which is not nearly as good as being a Romagnol, but it’s far better than being a Greek Orthodox. That she is less overtly imposed on them by outside powers also helps. She is also better looking than the plain Theodoros, which always helps, and she much more quickly and proficiently masters the Romagnol Italian. As a result she is openly given more attention, love, and respect by the people of the Romagna, the snubbing of Theodoros and Romans their way of protesting their treatment. Furthering closer ties with Spain, coordinated through Isabella once she is older (she is far more politically astute than her husband), is also a way for the Romagnol elite to avoid the region falling into Roman orbit.

In the Kingdom of Lombardy the situation is generally quiet during the early 1640s, with efforts focusing on recovering from the devastation of the war, with some success. Despite the stripping of much of its moveable wealth, Milan is a large and developed city, a center of manufacturing by the European standards of the day.

Yet for all the attentions modern historians lavish on trade and manufacturing, it is agriculture that is the base of pre-industrial society, upon which everything depends and without which nothing can be done. The mid-1640s see the bottom fall out of Italian agriculture.

In 1644 drought causes the harvest in Lombardy to fail. The damage that year, while hard, is not too devastating by itself, with reserves and shipments from Sicily cushioning some of the blow. During the early 1600s, the island of Sicily with its volcanic soils has become an important breadbasket, with wheat and barley yields that are the highest in all of Christendom, with wheat at 7-10 grains harvested per grain sown, and barley at 9-11. However those high yields are dependent on a benevolent and cooperative climate which was already fading in the early 1640s. Marginal lands, cultivated to take advantage of the grain boom of earlier years, in the early 1640s were seeing yields as low as 1:3, before the collapse. [1]

The next year, 1645, is when the real crash happens. Torrential rains sweep Sicily, ruining the harvest, with an eruption of Mt. Etna compounding the damage. Sicily can’t produce enough food to feed itself, let alone support Lombardy, which is ironically still suffering from drought. Because there’s not enough irony around, in 1646 the rains dissipate and now Sicily is afflicted by its own drought, which ruins that year’s harvest as well as 1647’s. All of Italy by this point is suffering similar plights to Sicily’s, although areas that had become used to drawing on Sicily’s bounty during their times of dearth are hit the hardest.

Horsemen of the Apocalypse rarely ride by themselves and by 1648 plague has added itself to the list. The likely source is Germany, with Italian mercenaries returning home to enlist new recruits for their companies, as well as substantial trade through the Alpine passes; Milanese armaments are an important component of the fighting in Germany. Bubonic plague chews its way through the peninsula, hammering a population already weakened by malnourishment.

Famine and plague working together reap a bountiful harvest, unlike the unfortunate Italians, from the Lombards in the north to the Sicilians in the south. By 1651, Italy’s population is one-fourth less than what it was a mere seven years earlier. The only consolation, and it is not much of one, is that the Italians would be far from alone in their laments.

[1] This is from OTL. See Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, pg. 687.

 

[Basileus444]

In the Family​

The task facing Alexandros of Baghdad as he enters the city where he was born is a most formidable one. He is a Roman Orthodox ruling over Muslim subjects who have been devastated and wrecked by Roman soldiers and so naturally he cannot expect to be a popular choice. One advantage is that given the devastation and depopulation, any rebellious tendencies on the part of the Mesopotamians has been burned out of them. They are focused on rebuilding their shattered lives and societies. They want peace.

A bigger advantage Alexandros has is his mother. Maria of Agra immediately goes on a charm offensive, meeting with and wining and dining the great and the good of Mesopotamian society. It is a spectacular success, with Maria winning the notables’ support for the new regime. Given the weakness of the new government and the need to win loyalties, the notables are left with substantial power and authority in their local spheres, but they are willing to cooperate with the center rather than work against it.

Another advantage Alexandros has is his new wife, Tara, the granddaughter of Suleiman Pasha. Fifteen years old to Alexandros’s twenty-one, the couple have never seen each other prior to their wedding. However as arranged marriages go, this is one of the better ones. Love comes after the wedding but it does come, the pair becoming close confidantes and allies of each other.

Meanwhile Alexandros’s younger brother Nikephoros is kept busy as the commander of the small new Mesopotamian army. It is quite an important position for someone so young, but naturally Alexandros wants somebody there he can trust. The Mesopotamian force is small but highly diverse, with Roman, Persian, and Spanish mercenaries numbered in the ranks. The Topkapi Palace, which is renovated to be the new royal palace, is guarded by an Ethiopian squadron.

In the White Palace, the status of Mesopotamia is not very high up the list of priorities. Athena, acting as Regent for her nephew, is well known historically for her skills in scholarship and administration. However she would not count as the ideal mother by modern standards. Governing the Empire of the Romans is no small matter, especially when it involves chauvinist male officials who seem to think that their anatomical equipment takes precedence over a substantial inferiority in hierarchical rank.

Speaking of men, Athena’s husband Alexandros Drakos had been heavily involved in Odysseus’s training and drilling of the army before the Expedition, and participated in the Expedition without injury. However in Bengal he caught a fever. At first he seemed to recover, but after returning to Constantinople he passes away in late 1646. It is noted that Athena, while observing the proper mourning, does not seem to be particularly grief-stricken, but the marriage was arranged for political advantage.

When she wishes to relax, Athena’s idea of fun does not involve little people. As a result she is distant from the next generation of Sideroi; raising children is what tutors and governesses are for. This applies even to her own children, much less those of her brother. She is not completely absent from their lives, but is not a close warm presence.

The next generation of Sideroi are as follows (age they turn in 1645 in parenthesis): Sophia (13), Ioannes (8) and Jahzara (5) by Athena and Alexandros Drakos; Herakleios (13) and Demetrios (6) by Odysseus and Maria of Agra.

Sophia, who is betrothed to her first cousin as arranged by her grandfather Demetrios III when he was still alive, is the one who most closely resembles her mother. Showing exceptional intelligence and devotion to study, she is the closest relationship-wise to the Regent, Athena recognizing and encouraging a kindred spirit. Athena is one of those people who have difficulty abiding small and inane talk with little intellectual weight, and no interest in dealing with people unable or unwilling to discuss deeper topics. This is one of the reasons interacting with children is not something she enjoys. However Sophia is able, despite her youth, to intelligently engage those deeper topics, so Athena enjoys spending time with her eldest daughter the most.

Ioannes is, frankly, not significant historically and one of those individuals who is mentioned because of their ancestors and descendants rather than because of anything they did.

Jahzara, the youngest of the brood, gets a special treatment and education. In preparation for her journey west to meet her bridegroom on the other side of the Atlantic, a collection of Mexican tutors oversee much of her education. While she also gets the schooling typical of an upper-class Roman woman, she will be well versed in Mexican culture and society long before she actually arrives in the land of Mexico.

The Mexican tutors, who draw interest from the crowds of Constantinople (not an easy trick considering the jadedness of the audience), are also responsible for diffusing some aspects of Mexican culture into Roman society for their first time. Some, like the consumption of maize and tomatoes, are not initiated by them but they help encourage, at least in a small way, the expansion of these foods.

Another impact is slightly more convoluted. The Mexicans bring some Chihuahuas with a few eventually purchased by curious Roman couples. One day in 1647 Athena is out walking near the Sweet Waters of Europe, a popular resort area for wealthy inhabitants of the City, attended by a small entourage. She likes walking there as the weather and scenery is typically quite pleasant and it is an easy way to relax. It is also a way to see and be seen by the dynatoi of the City in a more casual atmosphere than at court and is actually quite useful for popularity. Sometimes she has attendants play music or read a book out loud as she gets some exercise. At other times, she is accompanied by a member of the Roman intelligentsia and they discuss topics of scholarship. She greatly enjoys these moments, especially on days of fine weather.

That day, a couple is out with their Chihuahua at the same time. The dog, displaying the typical gratuitous aggression of the breed, decides to attack Athena. The entourage is completely surprised, given the completely unprovoked nature of the attack especially when combined, when one considers the size disparity, the suicidal nature. Even though the animal is too dumb to recognize the concept of ‘member of Imperial family’, one would think it would have the intellect to realize attacking another animal that outweighs it 30-to-one is just dumb.

The dog rips some fabric on Athena’s clothing but doesn’t break any skin before she kicks the creature. That’s not the end though as an enraged Athena takes the halberd from one of her guards and kills it. She does not appreciate unprovoked attacks on her person.

The couple don’t come out of this well. Their dog attacked the Regent, an act for which they are liable. And to physically attack the Regent is, simply put, treason. That the attack was utterly incompetent has no bearing, as the law does not recognize that, only the effort. The couple argue in their defense that it was accidental. This is an important point. Going back as far as Biblical law, there are far greater penalties for an owner whose ox has a known habit of goring and fails to control it as opposed to an owner whose ox suddenly gores someone out of the blue.

However in interviews with the neighbors, it is shown that the dog has a history of unprovoked aggression, with the couple clearly failing to restrain it and blaming the victims of the attack. Given this, they are completely liable. They are thus liable for the full penalty of the law for treason. In a show of mercy, Athena forgoes the death sentences but the couple still lose half their property which is confiscated by the government.

Just two days later another Chihuahua makes the news. In the same area as Athena’s attack, another launches a completely unprovoked attack on a horse striding by, startling the animal which pitches its drowsy rider. The nine-year-old boy smashes his head on the cobblestones and dies a day later, never regaining consciousness. The owners are convicted of manslaughter.

The stories spread rapidly throughout the Empire and imprint themselves strongly in Roman cultural memory. As a result Chihuahuas are extremely rare as pets in Roman society. The image of a creature that will launch completely unprovoked assaults, even when simple self-preservation would argue against it, strikes a raw nerve. A Roman stereotype today is that by owning a Chihuahua, one is demonstrating one’s hatred of the human race.

It is just Chihuahuas that get this exceptional treatment, not even other small lapdogs that can be just as annoying and aggressive. But then, they had the brains to not attack a member of the Imperial family when she was out minding her own business and thereby make their breed infamous to the Roman people.

A small creature of more historical significance is Herakleios Sideros, firstborn son of Odysseus Sideros and Maria of Agra. In many ways he seems the typical boy, interested in outdoors activities, sports and hunting, and not his studies. Intellectually he is not dumb, but he is not brilliant either, although his tutors say that if he focused he could at least be somewhat better at it. His utter lack of any intellectual interest though means said focus is unlikely, while also alienating him from Athena who can’t appreciate or respect such a mindset. There is some evidence to suggest he is dyslexic, which certainly doesn’t help in his studies. (One of the uglier aspects of Roman society to this day is a general lack of sympathy for those with learning disabilities.)

Like his father, he is short but despite his outdoor activities he has a slight, delicate look to him, one that strikes many around him as rather feminine. When Herakleios was 11, the new Scandinavian ambassador mistook him for a ‘beautiful young girl’.

It is possible that his feminine appearance and the comments it inspires drives Herakleios in a fixation on his outdoor and stereotypical masculine activities, but if so it fails. Furthermore it also makes him a boor by the standards of Roman society, which uses the phrase ‘two-book man’ as an insult indicating someone of limited culture and intellect. “A man who can speak only of horses and kick-balls is not a man, but a brute” are the words of the Bishop of Klaudiopolis around this time, and Roman society agrees. The mentality is still going strong today.

Aside from the Scandinavian ambassador, another person who finds him beautiful is Anastasia Laskarina, a wealthy widow and landowner who first sighted the Kaisar when he was 13, describing him as “the most beautiful boy she had ever seen”. She was twenty seven at the time. Two years later, Herakleios is in her bed. His choice of mistresses is surprising, although a few do point out that if the age differences were reversed, no one would bat an eye. A warden at the Sweet Waters of Asia sees the couple one time sitting on a park bench, Herakleios on Anastasia’s lap as she feeds him grapes, “looking for all the world like mother and child”, a phrase that has certainly caused much heated speculation in the historical literature throughout the centuries.

Many historians have argued that Herakleios was starved for affection. His birth parents as well as his aunt had been distant or absent figures, while his milk mother, the wet nurse that suckled him, died when he was six. There is no evidence that any other persons in his upbringing were particularly close to him. Anastasia may have helped fill this emotional void, to whom he would latch most tightly.

The relationship is a scandal, more so that would be the usual royal affair. Athena’s intervention does not go well. When she suggests sending Anastasia away, a distraught and angry Herakleios grips the pommel of his sword; for anyone else to do so in the same room as the Regent, save for guards performing their duties, is an act of treason punishable by death. Anastasia will not be sent away.

Anastasia does encourage Herakleios to at least pay a little more attention to his studies, helping him learn to read. A beautiful bore is still a bore after all, and nobody wants that.

The feelings of lack of affection would almost certainly have been exacerbated by Herakleios’s younger brother, Demetrios, seven years his junior. In 1645 he was just six but the namesake of Demetrios III was already proving to be quite the character. As he grew, he would display a similar zeal to outdoor activities like his brother, but unlike Herakleios also a formidable intellect and interest in scholarly studies, particularly astronomy and history. This certainly made him far more amenable to Athena, who found she could engage with him in intelligent conversation as opposed to his boorish older brother.

Demetrios also possesses an impressive charm and charisma, even from a young age. It is said his tutors have difficulty disciplining him because of his ability to charm them out of such inclinations. But at age nine, when his ability to wheedle sweets out of the palace kitchens starts giving him more of a paunch than he would like, he forces himself onto a diet and exercise plan to get rid of it, and while still indulging in sweets afterwards makes sure to moderate his intake.

Unlike Herakleios, who it is said was never sighted with an open book in hand, Demetrios is a voracious reader and curious about the outside world. Some of his favorite reads are the various Expedition Journals that are appearing on Roman presses all over the Empire in the late 1640s. These are accounts of the Expedition written by members, their literary quality varying depending on the skill of the authors, but the genre is extremely popular. Tales of adventure in a far-off exotic land are always exciting and Demetrios loves to read accounts of the exploits of his father who he never knew.

(As an aside, the Expedition Journals also come out at the same time as the Island Asia Compendium. Despite his death, Demetrios III’s plan for a major scientific, historical, and anthropological survey of the east had gone ahead, with the expedition setting sail in 1641. The expedition members had spent three years conducting their research, returning in 1645. The massive compendium came out in 1648, a giant learned tome. It was also extremely dry and academic and utterly buried by the far more interesting Expedition Journals. One historian of Roman science remarked that ‘the only person that would’ve been interested in reading the Compendium was Demetrios III, and he was dead’. As a result, the Compendium, a substantial scientific achievement, would lie unread and dusty on the bookshelves.)

Demetrios also spends a lot of time with the Mexican tutors of his cousin Jahzara. He is interested in their tales of the exotic land of Mexico, but his chief focus is on David I who’d conquered the Aztecs. The tale of a youngest son of a legendary Emperor, who found no place for himself in the constrictions of the old Empire, but who then went to claim a kingdom for himself in a faraway corner of the world, is an appealing one.

 

[Basileus444]

The Lands of Germany, 1640-42: ​

After the Ravens had settled in Magdeburg, Germany had settled down somewhat. The heat was still on, but the water was at a simmer, not a boil. Henri II was supreme in the west but unable to force a legal settlement on Ottokar, meaning his position relied solely on naked force. Ottokar was too far away and too strong in his local base to be coerced, but the Bohemian monarch was too weak to cross swords directly with Henri II with any hope of prevailing. However the impasse could not endure forever.

* * *​

Near Munich, May 17, 1640:

Theodor could feel it, them, simmering in the dark corner of his mind, thrumming like the sound of the wings of dragonflies. He knew what they were, or at least he knew what he thought they were. They were his madness, lurking, ever present, waiting to seize him at any unexpected moment. Perhaps. Or he was imagining it. Perhaps there was nothing there. He was crazy after all.

But not at the moment. At the moment he was sane, at least by the standards of the world, a standard which impressed him less nowadays. These lucid moments however were, in their own way, worse than the bouts of madness. At least in the bouts he did not know or care. But in these moments he knew what lay in store for him, and it haunted him. Were he not already insane, the suspense would’ve driven him mad years ago.

He looked out the glass door. He was in the west wing of the Summer Palace, built on the outskirts of Munich. Because it had been used as a command post during the siege of Munich by the Hungarians and Romans, it hadn’t been damaged. After the peace it had become his abode, his gilded cage, the corner into which he had been shoved, the awkward object that couldn’t be disposed but nobody wanted to keep around.

He was on the top story, the large glass doors opening out onto a stone balcony which overlooked a fine garden, just starting to flower in a riot of colors. He opened them, stepping outside to feel the warmth of the sun and the caress of a cool breeze, the two perfectly balancing each other. Birdsong carried in the air, along with the rustle of some small creatures hopping about in the garden. In the distance was the indistinct sound of Munich, of farmers working their lands outside the city, of carters moving goods, of the call to pray from a nearby small monastery.

It felt…good.

Here, for now, the thrumming stopped.

But it would just be for a moment. That was all he was given, now. Unless…It was an extreme choice, but then he was down to extreme measures. The world would condemn it, but then the world was stupid. Its condemnation meant nothing. And God was merciful; he would understand.

Was he sorry? He was sorry about how things had turned out, but he was not sorry for what he had done. He had had the right; that was plain and clear. God, in his infinite and admittedly confusing wisdom, had chosen not to back the right. That was his purview, but that did not change the fact. The death of the usurper in a pile of his own excrement was at least some small vindication. And it was a far better thing to have sought the right, and to have failed, then to have never to have sought the right at all.

He stepped up onto the stone railing, standing there, enjoying the gentle caress of sun and wind. It was not fear that held him there; death, but death in soundness of mind, had no terrors for him compared to the madness thrumming in the recesses of the mind. It was just…it felt nice.

“Your Majesty!” a voice exclaimed, the sudden noise startling him and nearly making him fall off. He turned his head to see a servant staring at him in shock. The man yelled back into the hallway. “Help! His Majesty is trying to kill himself!”

Theodor sighed. He’d been wanting a few more moments and then a quiet end, but that was apparently too much to ask. He heard the sound of footsteps, pounding on the tiled floor. If they had their way, it would be restraints, and treatments. He didn’t remember much, thankfully, from his episodes of insanity, but he remembered some of the treatments. He wouldn’t use those techniques on Greek spies to extract information, on the grounds of Christian mercy. They wanted to keep him from taking his life, by making his life worth nothing. But then, the world was stupid.

Some servants and guards entered the chamber, gingerly approaching the balcony. “Your Majesty, come down from there,” one of them said.

Theodor’s nostrils flared. He knew what people called him, a madman, a fool, an imbecile. Well, they could say what they liked, but that didn’t change the fact that they were small and insignificant. The world barely noticed their birth, and it would notice even less their deaths, and they would not be remembered afterwards. Yet God has chosen to place him here, now, one of those few that did matter. And he was not going to have such insults here, and now, of all places and times.

“DOGS!” he bellowed, his voice thundering like a Triune cannon. “You would dare command US?! I am Theodor von Wittelsbach, by the Grace of God and not of men, Emperor of all the Romans. Say what you will about me, but at least I KNOW who I am.” He sneered. “How many of you can say likewise?”

He turned back around to face the horizon, savoring the sun and wind for one last precious moment, and calmly took one step forward.

* * *​

The suicide of Theodor comes as a shock to Europe and is the shock that breaks the deadlock in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. The Duke of Hesse-Kassel, Hesse-Marburg, Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, and Hildesheim (Hesse-Brunswick for short) Philip Sigismund II, head of the House of Welf/Guelph, the most powerful prince of the Empire after the once-mighty Wittelsbachs and the Premyslids, has been largely quiet since the war against Rhomania. But during his silence he has been carefully nurturing the recovery of his lands, populace, treasury, and army, with impressive results. In theory he could put, as a maximum effort, forty thousand men into the field (drawing substantially on mercenaries admittedly), although how long he could fund such an effort is questionable.

After the death of Theodor he finally begins to speak, arguing that Ottokar really isn’t a legitimate Holy Roman Emperor, having taken the title while Theodor was still alive, and thus the Imperial title is actually vacant. If so, one Philip Sigismund II is an obvious candidate. Furthermore, even if Ottokar is Holy Roman Emperor, the chief responsibility of the Emperor is to defend the Empire against foreign aggression, and that he has singularly failed to do. Plus there is the whole issue of the Ravens.

Ottokar, who is suffering from ill health and old age, snaps back that the support of the princes, even in areas of common interest, has been noticeable by its absence. Philip however undercuts this by promising his full support and recognition of Ottokar as Emperor, providing he actually act in full force against Henri’s aggression. He claims prior failure to do so to be because of lack of resources, a problem that has been made good. Given his allies and connections with many of the minor princes, he can also bring far more support than just what his own domains can provide.

Ottokar is suspicious of Philip Sigismund’s sudden offering of honey, but his hands are tied. If he doesn’t act now against the Triunes with these offers of support, he will absolutely destroy his legitimacy as Holy Roman Emperor, and the Duke’s legal arguments do have a point.

It isn’t until 1642 that things really begin moving in earnest due to the difficulty of organizing large armies and the supplies and moneys to sustain them. However then Crown Prince Vaclav leads forth an army 40,000 strong, comprised of Bohemians with some German, Polish, and Hungarian mercenary contingents. (Ottokar’s continued ill health means he is in no condition to lead an army.) It links up with a Reichsarmee of comparable size commanded by Duke Philip Sigismund II, with 25000 from the Duke’s domains and the remainder from smaller German princes.

The objective of the combined force, the largest the Holy Roman Empire has fielded since Thessaloniki, is Cologne. It is a bold choice, perhaps too bold, but the times demand something dramatic. Seizing the wealthy and prominent city, seat of one of the Imperial-Electors, would be a prestigious victory. Such a blow would surely galvanize the Princes to provide even more support, necessary to drive the Triunes out, while providing an ideal base with which to do so. From Cologne they could strike at Liege, a key armaments manufacturing area, the greatest in Western Europe, and possibly convince the rump Kingdom of Lotharingia to enter the lists on their side.

The Triune forces in the path of the juggernaut scatter, hopelessly outmatched in numbers and firepower. Still the Reichsarmee’s march is slow due to the constraints of supply, especially with the need to gather equipment to cross the Rhine. On August 14, the Reichsarmee runs into the Duc d’Orleans, with a Triune army of comparable size, near Wiehl, east of the Rhine, and both deploy for battle.

The battlefield is huge, sprawling across the area of the modern park with its many hiking trails. Although fighting is confused, the terrain hampering communication which is not helped by the incessant noise and gun smoke, honors seem about even until midday. At that point though Philip Sigismund orders his forces to withdraw, retreating eastward.

With the confusion, Prince Vaclav doesn’t realize his flank is exposed until Triune cuirassiers slam into and annihilate it. What follows afterwards is utter carnage as the Bohemian and attached contingents are wrecked by a Triune force that now has a two-to-one material advantage and even greater morale ascendancy. Vaclav tries to organize an orderly withdrawal but Triune cavalry are everywhere and around 3:30 PM he is hit by a musket ball. He orders his men to tie him to his saddle so he won’t fall off, propping himself on a raised lance, and continues trying to lead his men out of danger. Forty five minutes he is struck by a cannonball, this shot killing him.

It is an utter rout, the Bohemian force losing half its number. Triune losses are around 3000, with the casualties in Philip Sigismund’s contingent slightly more than half that.

That is not the only blow to befall the Bohemians. When Ottokar hears the news, including the death of his son and heir, he seems to go into shock. On August 20, he has a heart attack, and then another two days later. On August 24, he too perishes. The Imperial crown is truly vacant.

As is the Bohemian crown. Vaclav had no living children of his own (he had three, but all had died before their third birthday) and with the death of Ottokar and Vaclav the House of Premyslid is extinct in the royal male line. Ottokar has another child, his daughter Mary, married to King Stephan VII of Hungary. The Bohemian nobles, while not happy about a foreign overlord, agree that Hungary would be preferable to a likely-to-turn-violent argument over which Bohemian noble has the best claim to the throne. A significant factor in this decision is Ottokar’s wife, Queen Zoe of Prussia, who is determined to protect the rights of her daughter.

On October 10, Stephan and Mary are crowned King and Queen of Bohemia, with a personal union now in effect between Bohemia and Hungary. The couple agree to only use Bohemian officials in Bohemia, and to spend twelve out of every twenty-four months in the Kingdom of Bohemia. When they are absent, the Queen Mother Zoe will be Regent.

The Imperial crown is another matter. Stephan VII as Holy Roman Emperor is absolutely not an option. The Hungarian history with the Holy Roman Empire is too bloody for that. The Wittelsbach option is Karl Manfred, the Lady Elizabeth’s son and nephew of Theodor, except he is only just about to turn eight.

And so it seems Philip Sigismund is the only real choice, despite it being clear he is in collusion with Henri II. The retreat at Wiehl could’ve been a mistake, but the Duke removes all doubt when he publicly negotiates with Henri to arrange safe passage for himself and the electors to hold the election in Mainz. That will give the decision they make more legitimacy.

They make the expected decision. On Christmas Day 1642 Duke Philip Sigismund II is crowned King of the Romans in Mainz by the Archbishop-Elector (the office of Pope is currently vacant due to the death of the incumbent, and papal coronation is, theoretically, required to assume the Imperial title).

 

[Basileus444]

The Lands of Germany, 1643-46:​

There were no Popes. For the first time since the schism had begun near three centuries earlier, both Pontiffs had passed away in near proximity to each other, and both thrones were vacant. This was clearly viewed as an opportunity by many.

The theological differences between the Avignon and Roman Papacies were practically nonexistent. Certain cardinals and clerics might be more reform-minded than others, and certain theological issues considered more pressing at times, but this was the usual variety present in any large organization and something with which the Catholic Church was used to dealing. The split had been because of disputes over power and position, and maintained by the same desire, by the refusal to give up perks one had gained in the name of compromise.

It was clear to many of the faithful, including those in the upper hierarchy, that the situation had gone on far too long, and was actively dangerous to the faith. Since the schism heresy had flourished. In the early 1640s, the mightiest states in Europe were heretical, either Orthodox or Bohmanist. Everywhere Catholicism seemed to be on the retreat, with a few successes in Terranova the only patches of light in the darkness, and even then Mexican Catholicism wasn’t the most doctrinaire.

Nobody asked ‘what had gone wrong?’ That was because the answer was bloody obvious; it was the schism. The Orthodox and Bohmanists were wrong, but they were united. (Fractures and dissensions in both groups were less obvious to outsiders such as Catholics, but even so neither of them so obviously demonstrated disunity by having two Heads of the Church.) A house divided against itself could not stand, so of course Catholicism was failing. It was time, well past time, to make it right.

The Pope in Avignon had been the first to die, at the end of 1642, but it was known that the Roman Pope, Clement VIII, was ill in Prague and not expected to last much longer either. Pope Clement had opened negotiations with the See in Avignon as early as 1640 to explore a means of ending the Schism. The sack of Rome and the flight from the Eternal City had underscored the weakness of the Catholic Church and the resulting dangers. A reunited Catholic Church, which had the loyalty of the faithful of the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Arles, Hungary, Poland, and Scandinavia, would be far more secure.

Everything has been arranged by the time Pope Clement breathes his last in Prague in July. As a compromise location, the Curias meet in Mantua, hosted by King Niccolo, who is eager to use the opportunity to boost the prestige of the monarchy and his parvenu dynasty. The electors are the combined colleges of cardinals from both Papacies, making this a rather crowded conclave, but letting everyone keep their red hats was necessary to keep the reconciliation process going.

The election lasts for five weeks, which is lengthy but far from the worst in the history of the Catholic Church. The delay is due to the need for compromise. Everybody wants the process to work but doesn’t want to wreck things by forcing a hasty decision. It is much better to take time to establish a consensus rather than trying to ram through a candidate that might inspire one side to leave and continue the schism.

To that end, any of the cardinals are out, which throws out the obvious candidates. There are certainly bitter disputes and arguments, but in the main area where deliberations occur, a cavalry saber from Rhomania and another saber from the Triple Monarchy are laid out in the center of the room. There must be no confusion about the stakes here. Many of the Roman cardinals had lost family and friends in the sack of Rome, while the cardinals of Avignon had had to fear similar fates in the concerns over Roman expansionism in Italy.

Eventually a decision is reached, with a compromise candidate found and selected. He is not Spanish or Arletian, associating him with Avignon, nor is he Italian, associating him with Rome. He is a native of the Bernese League, which ties him to Avignon, but the Bernese League is still de jure part of the Holy Roman Empire, tying him to Rome. He is Ferdinand von Habsburg, Bishop of Speyer.

He takes the name Callixtus IV, partly because that name choice doesn’t involve any awkward questioning about numbering. For numbering purposes, declaring one line illegitimate at this point would just alienate the other branch, which nobody wants. (Eventually, the numbering system is that both lines are considered valid, with numbering reordered as necessary, with precedence determined by when their reigns started. Doing such is messy, frankly a little embarrassing, and not something the Catholic Church much likes discussing, but if that is the price for unity, so be it.)

Callixtus is a robust man in his late 50s, known for his appreciation of fine wines and his interest and skill in botany and bee-keeping. He also has an appreciation for religious art, delighting in sponsoring budding artists to create works for churches in his see. Because of his interest in botany, he is part of the unofficial Europe-wide Society of Letters, corresponding both with Bohmanist Lotharingian botanists (in French) and with Orthodox Roman botanists (in Greek). He also has a fondness for the wines of Morea and Attaleia.

His relationship with Rhomania is complex. He continues, even after becoming Pope, his correspondence with some of the wardens at the Sweet Waters of Asia, as well as his orders of Roman wines. He opposed Theodor’s war on the grounds it would waste German gold and blood for no gain whatsoever, but he was enraged by the massacre of Ulm and is a stout opponent of Roman expansionism in Italy.

His relationship with the Triple Monarchy is simpler; he doesn’t like it. When he is elected Pope (to his surprise), he is at some of the Habsburg family lands in the League. Triune forces had occupied Speyer, and the contingent included a large portion of English troops, and these troops were largely Puritan in religious sympathies. They’d been outraged by the ostentatious decoration and religious art they’d seen everywhere and gone on an iconoclastic rampage, destroying most of the local art dating back centuries. They’d also destroyed his apiary, which included bees he’d studied through a microscope, some of the first studies of bees using the instrument. Ferdinand had been apoplectic, excoriating the soldiers as brutes.

(This, along with other incidents, results in English troops having an exceptionally bad reputation in Germany. This is unfair, as overall their behavior is no better or worse than French troops. But English troops are the ones responsible in several high-visibility events such as this, partly because as English soldiers are more likely to be Puritan, they are more likely to engage in religiously-motivated violence, such as the torture of Catholic priests. The English company that has a banner depicting a naked man with a drawn sword and erect penis and the motto ‘ready to use both’ also contributes substantially to anti-English sentiment. [1])

He is not amused by the behavior of the new Holy Roman Emperor, which is how Philip Sigismund is styling himself. The argument is that papal coronation is required to assume the Imperial title, although the case is undercut by the fact that the Wittelsbachs largely ignored that requirement and got away with it.

For now, Philip Sigismund ignores the diatribes from the new Pope, who sets up shop in Avignon, as had been the plan after the conclave. It was a secure base, safe from heretics and territory controlled by the Popes directly. He is focused on the Rhineland. In negotiations with Henri II, he agrees to cede the west bank of the Rhine to the Triune Emperor. The east bank is more complicated, with a redistribution of territories and consolidations of holdings to create a series of small-to-middling coherent and compact German states such as the enlarged Duchy of Baden.

The purpose of these reorganized states is to serve as a buffer for the now much-enlarged Kingdom of France’s border. The states on the east bank are still officially part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the rulers know on which side their bread is buttered. Their consolidated and larger holdings are due to pressure from King’s Harbor. This is not altruism on Henri’s part. Their gain does impose a debt of gratitude on the princes involved.

However while their power is such as to still not be a threat to the Triunes, they are stronger vis-à-vis the Holy Roman Emperors, and thus less likely to take kindly to marching orders. One example of possible orders would be an attack to regain the west bank, triggering a war with the Triunes that would be of extreme danger to the east bank states. The example of Sicily, agitating against Constantinople in anger over a risk of war of which Sicily would bear the destructive costs, is possibly in Henri’s mind.

But that does not end matters. Philip Sigismund does have several issues still facing him. There is the matter of the Ravens’ Rebellion, the need to secure compensation for the various minor princes who’ve lost territory, and the two powers in the Holy Roman Empire that can pose a credible threat to his authority, the Kingdom of Bohemia in union with Hungary, and Elizabeth von Wittelsbach, effective ruler of Bavaria and Wurttemberg on behalf of her son.

He tries to resolve the first issue with an attack on Magdeburg in 1644 with his troops, although he is not in command. After some success massacring peasants who aren’t quite fast enough to get away, the Hesse-Brunswick soldiers encounter a very angry Friedrich Zimmermann. Using the same tactics of a mass of skirmishers to cover the approach of columns who then break the firing line of the enemy, the Ravens shatter the Imperial army. In reprisal, they kill everyone who aren’t quite fast enough to get away.

It is a humiliating blow to Philip Sigismund’s power and authority and he is now forced to lean even more heavily on Henri II for money and even troops to maintain his position. This is much to the disgust of the German intellectual Manfred von Nimitz, who castigates Philip Sigismund as one willing to sell out the Empire to foreigners so long as he sees a profit.

Manfred von Nimitz is far from the only one making such claims, which is alarming to both Philip Sigismund and to Henri, who doesn’t want to see a pliant Emperor replaced by someone more difficult. The greatest threats come from those two large Imperial states, Bohemia and Bavaria-Wurttemberg.

In 1644, Bohemia looms as the bigger threat. King Stephan is an adult male, as opposed to Elizabeth who is a woman acting as regent for a son, so by the argument of sexism Stephan is more dangerous. On less misogynistic grounds, Stephan has more material resources. Aside from Bohemia, he has Hungary, Austria, and Saxony, an alliance with Poland, and some kind of Russian connections. He even includes in his army 4000 Greek mercenaries, all veterans.

The attack comes in 1645, directed at Saxony. Bohemia is protected by mountains, while an offensive into southern Germany would have to tangle with Wittelsbach forces as well, and potentially trigger a Roman intervention. By this time the Roman garrison in Vienna has been removed due to Austro-Hungarian pressure, but that is still a risk in Philip’s and Henri’s mind.

There is some sharp fighting, but mostly restricted to siege works, and Saxony falls to the vastly superior numbers of the Imperials and Triunes by the time winter sets in to end the fighting. The treaty of Leipzig signed in early 1646 ensures that hostilities don’t resume in the spring.

In the treaty Stephan forfeits the Duchy of Saxony, but is recognized by both Philip and Henri as King of Bohemia. Furthermore Stephan must abandon all agreements with enemies of the two Emperors and agree to extradite any enemies who should arrive in his lands. This is to close an obvious bolt hole for Elizabeth, who’d been allied to Stephan but unable to provide any assistance to Stephan in Saxony.

Stephan agrees to these terms to guarantee the security of his remaining holdings. Keeping the fight contained to just Saxony is to his benefit. An Imperial-Triune invasion into Austria and Hungary would be immensely destructive, and Stephan has no desire to trigger a Roman intervention either, even if it is to ostensibly help him. Given the extremely bad grace many in Constantinople greeted his request to remove the Roman garrison in Vienna, even though it was granted in the end, he is skeptical that if the Romans came to help, they would leave when he no longer needed the help. He would prefer not to take the chance.

For a new Duke of Saxony, Henri proposes an unexpected candidate, Leopold von Habsburg, the nephew of the new Pope. The obvious reason is to conciliate the new pontiff; popes have a habit of wanting to aggrandize their nephews. Furthermore such an effort would help conciliate the Bernese League, agitated by all the border adjustment just across from its northern frontier. Henri is well aware of the vulnerability of his southern frontier and has no wish to end up fighting the Accord powers while still mired in Germany. Finally, Saxony is a major Imperial state in its own right, while the Habsburgs seem to be content with being a big fish in the small pond of Alpine politics. Even with a Saxony, they are unlikely to be a threat.

Leopold is an athletic twenty-two-year-old at the time of his appointment as Duke of Saxony. While the Habsburg family has been known for its handsomeness, Leopold seems to have been quite the looker even by their standards, if the testimony of the Roman ambassador to Arles, Ioannes Mantzabinos is anything to go by.

“His face is oval, his nose graceful, his eyes like two almonds set in a bowl of milk…

The body of Leopold is that of the most brilliant of the ancient statues, perfect in form and symmetry. His limbs are long but perfectly proportioned to his body, stout and strong, lean and powerful. His hair is that of the soft downiness of youth just turning into the thick locks of manhood. His loins…”

Errr, it’s getting a little hot in here. Ioannes, why don’t you eat something cool to calm down?

NOT the cucumber!

Sigh, the things I have to deal with with this…

Anyway, Leopold becomes the Duke of Saxony in early 1646. Despite the humiliation of 1644, the power of Philip Sigismund and particularly Henri is clearly in the ascendant. The Ravens may be difficult to root out from their nest, but they are not an expansionist threat. Meanwhile the only serious rival remaining is the isolated Elizabeth.

But having said that, Henri’s plan for a Holy Roman Empire beaten down and subservient to Triune interests would falter due to two mistakes. The appointment of Leopold was the first.

[1] This is from an OTL English company from the English Civil Wars that had that exact banner.

 

[Basileus444]

The Lands of Germany, 1647:​

Germany at the beginning of 1647 was not a happy place. The military movements of the past year, even as circumscribed as they were, had caused the chaos and depredation typical of any movements of armies, exacerbated as the weather turned worse and crop yields fell. The latter not only causes the usual concerns of grain riots and famines, but undermined any economic recovery made since the invasion of Rhomania.

Despite the seeming neutralization of Stephan, Philip Sigismund still had reason to be wary. Hungry people tend to be irritable people after all. The Ravens were still solidly ensconced in Magdeburg, an open sore on his legitimacy, but to root them out would require calling on the Triunes even more for military aid. Aside from the embarrassment of needing help, calling in foreigners, already a sore issue, would be made even worse by said foreigners eating up and ruining already scarce crops.

But that could be managed, provided there were no obvious alternatives. Yet there was one, in the form of Elizabeth von Wittelsbach. With control of just Bavaria and Wurttemberg, her material resources alone did not make her a threat, but as a locus for opposition she easily could be. The power of her name, of Wittelsbach, even after the disaster of her brother, could not be underestimated.

The Wittelsbach family had cultivated the reputation, finding the aura it provided to be most useful. It was a reputation for being both lucky and really hard to kill. The Wittelsbachs, as Holy Roman Emperors, had certainly had their tremendous trials yet had always won through in the end, usually in dramatic style. In fact, it could be argued that Elizabeth’s position in 1647 wasn’t even the worst the Imperial Wittelsbachs had been in, compared with the Great Hungarian War, when at one point Wittelsbach holdings had been reduced to just Schleswig-Holstein.

Based on her future actions, it seems likely that Elizabeth would’ve accepted the new order provided her and her son’s possession of Bavaria and Wurttemberg had been guaranteed. However Philip Sigismund either does not know or does not believe that and is determined to eliminate the House of Wittelsbach as even a potential threat. To that end he starts a propaganda campaign against Elizabeth, arguing that as the most landed prince in the Empire outside of Bohemia, she should contribute to the compensation of the west-bank princes. Elizabeth fails to see why she should sign away her son’s rights to those with no claim in order to pay for Philip Sigismund’s policies. Furthermore she knows this is only the thin end of the wedge and thus won’t give an inch so as to not set any precedent.

Philip Sigismund expected as much. The effort does win him some favors from some of the princes, who wouldn’t mind seeing Wittelsbach holdings cut down to size if they can benefit in the process. There’s always a prosperous abbey or lush vineyards that would make a fine addition to the portfolio. But an attack on Elizabeth is harder to justify than one on Stephan, who is conveniently foreign. So before Philip moves on her, he wants to bolster his Imperial credentials.

The method is obvious, finally dealing with the Ravens. It will showcase him finally dealing with an issue that Ottokar failed to resolve, wipe out the earlier humiliation, and eliminate a problem that it should be noted initiated in Elizabeth’s lands. So in summer 1647 Philip Sigismund personally takes command of a mixed Imperial-Triune to finally deal with the nest.

Friedrich Zimmermann marshals the Ravens to oppose the invasion, but while his tactics have proven extremely successful before, they are now known. Despite the strains on supplies, the Reichsarmee has an increased cavalry contingent to counter the Raven skirmishers. The Raven columns can still beat off even these more powerful cavalry charges, but then they are stalled by field fortifications. These are extremely makeshift; an Ottoman officer would deride the effort as pathetic. However they are just enough to hold the columns in place, and as such they are absolutely perfect targets for the field guns of the Triune contingent. It is a slaughter, especially as after the guns have finished their work in shattering the columns, the Imperials’ cavalry superiority ensures a deadly pursuit that ends only with the fall of night.

Friedrich Zimmermann manages to escape, retreating to Magdeburg with what is left of his army, Philip Sigismund pursuing to put the city under siege. Friedrich’s authority remains unbroken though; with the enemy at the gates there are no other options anyway. This is to be no ordinary siege though. Religious wars are often considered to be most terrible conflicts devised by humanity, but they are not. Mass peasant uprisings, and the savage, practically genocidal, reprisals that are the typical response, are the worst. Neither side can expect quarter or mercy, and they know it, and they ask for none, and they give none. An aide to the Roman ambassador to the Court of Philip Sigismund, a veteran of the sieges of Mosul and Baghdad, is present at Magdeburg, and privately writes that he considers Magdeburg to be the most horrifying and brutal.

It is not just at the city. Flying units of the Imperial army, which are bluntly called ‘punishment columns’, fan out across the territory that has been controlled by the Ravens. Their orders are simple: kill everyone they find. All who dwell in the land are condemned, and condemned to death. The Ravens have been a grave and terrible threat to the established order; nothing less than extermination is acceptable. Those who can, flee, but the princes of neighboring lands are quite happy to follow the same strategy, and so flight is only rarely a source of salvation.

Meanwhile the siege continues, until finally the Triune guns smash through the walls and the breaches are stormed. Unlike some other sieges though, that the fighting still continues in the streets is not a surprise. With grenade and ambrolar, Magdeburg is ‘cleansed’ as the Ravens are exterminated. Unsurprisingly, how the Three Chief Ravens, Friedrich Zimmermann, Johann Eck, and Alexios Asanes, die varies dramatically depending on the source, but all the sources do agree that all three die fighting and are not taken alive. Given the horrors they would have suffered if they had, it is understandable that death in battle would be preferable. As for those prisoners who are taken, all of the human ingenuity for dealing out pain is lavished on many before they are finally granted the mercy of death.

So it is done then. The decade-long experiment of the Raven State, of a roughly egalitarian peasant-and-commoner run state, is over. The forces of order and hierarchy have prevailed and the rights of private property of large landowners upheld.

Not quite. The influence of the Ravens extends beyond their grave. The most immediate effect pertains to the concept of graves, for a great many are needed. It is estimated that between the extermination of the Ravens and the deaths suffered by the Imperial army, at least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 150,000 have died. Many of these are from human violence, but many are from the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions of a city under siege and the army camp of the besiegers.

And that is just the warmup. The forces of order may claim that their victory shows that God is on their side, but those sympathetic to the Ravens could argue that the follow-up shows that while God may not have intervened on behalf of the Ravens, he is angry, very angry. The already unhealthy conditions of the siege camp are made even worse by the mountains of putrefying bodies left by the massacre.

While not definitive, it is frequently attested that here is where the outbreak of the Black Death starts. It is spread by the soldiers and their suppliers through Germany and beyond, the Triune soldiers taking it west of the Rhine while grain merchants bring it east to the lands of Poland and Russia. Mercenary captains, needing to replenish their weakened contingents for the fighting against Elizabeth to come next year, spread it south of the Alps. There it lashes through Italy, where merchants from the peninsula carry it west to Spain and Arles and other merchants carry it east to Rhomania, where it kills sixty thousand in Constantinople alone. On the borders of Rhomania it does finally cease, as the Roman devastation of northern and central Mesopotamia and massacre of so much of the population has unintentionally created a cordon sanitaire.

The Black Death is hardly a new phenomenon, but the outbreak of the late 1640s to early 50s is one of its most lethal episodes, up there with The Black Death of the 1340s and the Justinianic Plague. That is because of the wide reach of the outbreak, spread via intricate trade routes, and that like its infamous predecessors, it is striking populations already weakened by poor nutrition from years of bad crop yields. The number lost can’t be tallied, but it numbers in the tens of millions.

But the Ravens’ Rebellion is more significant than just for facilitating a disease outbreak; given the movement of armies it is likely something similar would’ve happened anyway. But the Ravens are special in the history of peasant uprisings. Most are small and constricted, known only to local historians and at best a footnote in wider histories known only to elite scholars. The big ones, which are well known in the history books, flare hot and fast but are then crushed quickly and savagely. They are meteors flashing in the firmament, brilliant to see but burning up without any obvious trace.

The Ravens however were decidedly not local, starting in northern Bavaria and ending in Magdeburg. And they lasted for a decade, not a few weeks like the Jacquerie. Unlike the accounts of the latter, written by and for elites, which can name all of the nobles slain, but not one of the tens of thousands of peasants slaughtered, for the Ravens we have some of their own words. The printing press and Johann Eck’s skillful use of it ensured that the words of the Ravens would be distributed far and wide.

They also managed to create a society that endured for some time, a rare accomplishment, and it seems to have worked, at least for the time allotted it. Although the destruction of the wealthy elites of Magdeburg meant the cessation of monumental architecture, extravagant art, and large commercial enterprises that get most historians’ attention, the quality of life for the non-elites, also known as the vast bulk of the population, seems to have improved. Having even just a small patch, even if just a garden and spot to raise some chickens and goats, is a massive improvement over being a landless laborer dependent on odd and inconsistent agricultural labor.

As for artisans, nobody might be riding in gilded carriages, but the wealthier peasantry needed and wanted more nails, shoes, little woodcuts, and other small items, the mass demand more than making up for the destruction of a very small elite market. The goldsmiths might not have any customers, but the far more numerous blacksmiths and cobblers and carpenters and the like had more demand for their goods than before. While the Ravens suffered from the Little Ice Age, the comparative lack of the utterly destitute, who had no reserves of land or steady work and who thus always died the most in times of scarcity, meant that the overall population seems to have suffered comparatively less, at least until they were massacred.

There were certainly long-term generational issues in the setup of the Raven State. The small-plot farming system works against agricultural economies of scale and thus the creation of a surplus that could feed large non-farming populations. But then the creation and enlargement of urban centers was not a Raven goal. For them, the sustainment of market and artisanal towns that could facilitate the creation and exchange of the basic goods needed by the overwhelmingly rural society was enough. Also there is the question of how the Ravens would’ve dealt with the insistence on every peasant having their own land and the press of a growing population over generations. They were destroyed before it became an issue, so the question cannot be answered. That said, having difficulties in dealing effectively with generational issues is hardly unique to the Raven State.

In short, the Ravens are important because they are remembered. The three Chief Ravens knew they would likely be killed, never having achieved their goal, but they ensured they were not forgotten. And their ideas and words would spread, and be used by others, from the Army of Suffering just some years later down to the present day.

The Ravens argued against the privilege of birth, that one should be the elite simply because they were born into a certain family, while others were beneath them because they were born into different families. This would become a very popular idea, especially for mercantile families who resented the monopolization of political power by aristocratic elites.

Modern society likes to claim that it has resolved this problem, which is no longer an issue. That assertion is questionable. But the Ravens were not doctors and lawyers and long-distance merchants, who while not political elites in early modern Europe, were economic elites compared to the vast majority of the population. The Ravens were, at heart, peasants, with a sprinkling of the urban poor, the journeymen and apprentices, not the guild masters and civic clerks. And so their rhetoric went much further than mere criticism of the privilege of birth, to areas where modern society often does not wish to go.

It has been observed that many of those middle-class individuals who criticized the privilege of birth were, whether deliberately or not, completely blind to the privilege of capital. [1] The Ravens were not so blinkered. They had been oppressed by both types of privileges, by the landowner and the moneylender, and for those outside the club with no hope of entering, tweaked club membership rules made no difference.

The Ravens sought to curb such privileges, so that they might not be expressed to the detriment of others. The Ravens did not believe in complete economic equality; even a free peasant village, the model for their ideal society, did not have all farmers being equal. But they insisted that everyone should be guaranteed enough land to support themselves, no matter what, and that said land cannot be alienated for any reason or cause. Only once that basic necessity had been met for all could others accumulate more from that surplus. Under those conditions, building such a surplus was acceptable, so long as it was understood that if it were necessary for more basic allotments to be distributed, it would be taken from those who held more than they needed, and firstly from those who had the most to spare. To quote Johann Eck, “no man should eat capons while another man is starving”.

They spoke of the dangers of the market, of the disadvantage of the poor operating there. For the stratum of society from which the Ravens came did not see the great townhouses raised by successful Roman and Lotharingian merchants, paid from sugar and silk and slave profits. For them the market was more often a source of danger than wealth, from manufacturers trying to minimize piece-work wages to loan sharks offering loans for a bad year that, if things went badly, would result in the peasant losing even the small patch he possessed. The logic of the market, the profit to be gained by feeding Constantinople, was what drove the landowners of Vlachia to oppress their peasantry, to squeeze ever more labor and profit out of them. In a market where everything, and everyone, is for sale, no one is truly safe, and especially the poor.

These ideas, these questions and concerns and fears, have endured over the centuries since the last of the Ravens lay dead and rotting in the streets of Magdeburg. They have endured because for all the local concerns and expressions, they speak to fundamental human concerns. How does one organize a just and humane society? How does one secure the wellbeing of all? What is the value of property, and of human rights, and the relationship between the two? By what right, if any, can one claim a better station than another? Those questions are still being asked today. And therefore, the question Johann Eck asked in a field in northern Bavaria near four hundred years ago is still relevant today.

When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentle man?

[1] To borrow an observation and expression from Fernand Braudel in his Civilization & Capitalism trilogy.

 

[Basileus444]

The Lands of Germany, 1648, part 1: ​

At the beginning of 1648, Emperor Philip Sigismund demanded that the Lady Elizabeth von Wittelsbach hand over all her landholdings to him. An unspecified amount would be returned to her, but only after suitable confiscations had been made to be used as compensation for all the princes of the Empire who’d lost land west of the Rhine. If she failed to do so, she would be placed under the Imperial Ban and rendered an outlaw throughout the Holy Roman Empire.

The legal justification for such demand and punishment was extremely questionable, but legality meant little. Some princes saw an opportunity for a snack from carving off a bit of the Wittelsbach patrimony. Those princes not motivated by greed were motivated by fear; Philip Sigismund, backed (or controlled) by Henri II, was too powerful to challenge. And so they keep silent.

Elizabeth refuses the demand, but the situation is hopeless. Imperial and Triune forces invade Wurttemberg from the north and west simultaneously, then sweep onwards toward and then through Bavaria. There is little active fighting, even compared to the combat in Saxony. The force disparity is such that the defenders see little reason to risk their lives in a pointless doomed defense. Still, having large armies moving through the countryside, even if not engaged in active combat, leaves a lot of mayhem and disease in their wake.

Elizabeth, along with her young son Karl Manfred and those few trusted retainers still willing to remain loyal, are forced to flee from Munich in early June. Going south is not an option. The hospitality of King Niccolo Farnese is not to be trusted; information from Elizabeth’s agents warn that he’d likely ransom her to Henri II for a nice sum if he got her in his custody. Fleeing to Rhomania is definitely not an option; doing so would justify the sequestering of all her lands in the eyes of the Germans, and she will need German support if she is to have any hope of ever regaining the Wittelsbach patrimony.

The party makes their way north, although due to the need for secrecy their itinerary is mostly unknown to historians. It seems that they went through Bohemia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, with the connivance of their Hunyadi, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern rulers respectively. None of them were willing to openly defy Philip Sigismund and Henri by sheltering her openly and permanently, but they were willing to look the other way if she was passing through the land.

Braver, or more foolish, is the Duke of Pomerania, Wartislaw X, who compensates somewhat for his limited resources with substantial energy. He’d done much to blunt Scandinavian efforts to expand beyond Schleswig-Holstein in the mid-1630s even before Ottokar’s army had arrived to reinforce him. But in doing so he had humiliated King Peter II, who is not inclined to overlook the insult even after this delay.

Elizabeth’s presence in the Pomeranian capital of Stettin is a horribly kept secret, soon known to the world, and Elizabeth and Wartislaw quickly drop even the pretense. The Duke announces that he is protecting the Lady Elizabeth who has been unjustifiably stripped of her lands in violation of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. He calls upon all princes who respect the constitution and German liberties to join him.

The response is that of deafening silence. No one else is willing to stand openly against the two ‘Emperors of the West’, as one pamphlet styles Philip Sigismund and Henri II. In the defense of Wartislaw, he didn’t expect much of a response at first. Had princes been willing, the substantially more powerful rulers of Bohemia, Saxony, or Brandenburg would’ve stepped forward. However he believes that there will be one of two outcomes, which will work for him in the end.

The first is that Philip Sigismund will march out against him. However he is a land power, utterly lacking in naval strength, a prerequisite for reducing Pomerania and its ports. So he will be stalled, hemorrhaging material strength, prestige, and authority, and in his growing weakness others will be willing to rally against him and join Pomerania.

The other option is that Philip Sigismund will march out against him, but will enlist naval strength to make up his lack. But to do so will require him to turn once again to foreigners, either the Triunes or the Scandinavians or both. So once again the Holy Roman Emperor, the supposed defender of the German states, will be deliberately inviting in foreigners to chastise a prince of the Empire. Philip had used Triune troops against the Ravens, which had been embarrassing, but no prince was going to argue too much considering the target and the success. It would be far more scandalous to do the same when the target was a prince of the Empire. German public opinion is extremely unlikely to take fondly to that, and fear will give way to anger, and others will be willing to rally against Philip Sigismund and join Pomerania.

To now go against Wartislaw, there is a flaw in his reasoning. He had assumed that if Philip Sigismund took the second option, which is the more materially threatening to Pomeranian security, it would take time, at least until 1649, before it could be mustered. But even before it would be mustered, it would be clear what the Emperor was doing, so Wartislaw would have several months to stoke up German public opinion before he was seriously attacked.

However Philip Sigismund is able to get moving with an army far earlier than Wartislaw expected. It is a fairly small army, and dependent on several Triune regiments on loan from Henri II which is awkward, but against Pomerania it is strong enough. In addition, squadrons of Scandinavian warships appear off the coast and blockade the port cities as Philip Sigismund prepares his siege lines. The Emperor’s speed is due in no small part to a lack of siege artillery, but the lack is made good by the offloading of cannon from some of the warships.

There is a price for Peter’s aid, and it is a stiff one. The Scandinavian monarch wants Pomerania for himself, to rule as Duke of Pomerania as an Imperial prince, as the Danish kings once ruled Schleswig and Holstein as Imperial dukes before the Wittelsbachs seized the duchies. Philip is aware of the outrage this will cause across the Holy Roman Empire but calculates this will be better than waiting and giving Wartislaw and Elizabeth more time to rally opinion against him.

With cannon hammering the walls of Stettin and the blockade getting stronger with the addition of Triune vessels, the outlook for Pomerania looks grim. Philip’s quick response, even with its foreign components, makes him look strong, so no one else is willing to challenge him. Flight is the only option, save for surrender. The latter is not an option Elizabeth is willing to take, and neither is Wartislaw.

On September 3, a small party that includes Elizabeth, Karl Manfred, Duke Wartislaw, and his heir Bogislaw (who as commander of the Pomeranian contingent is a veteran in the campaign against Rhomania) is able to sneak out of Stettin in small rowboats sticking close to shore, getting past the siege lines. However with all the Scandinavian and Triune warships on the prowl they are unable to get out into the Baltic. As planned, they land, picking up horses at a predetermined site, and ride east toward a planned second rendezvous for transport out of Pomerania.

* * *​

September 4, 1648, somewhere in Pomerania:

The Triune cavalry patrol had been pursuing them for a better part of an hour, with horn calls signaling to others, making it clear that their hunters were not alone. Elizabeth resisted the urge to ask again how close they were. She knew they were close, really close, but so were their pursuers. It would be such a pity to have come so far and fail this near to their objective. Their party was small, with just a few guards and retainers to protect and support her and her son plus the Duke and heir. It would not take many men to overpower them.

Eight men on horseback suddenly burst out in front of them, charging and yelling. She heard Bogislaw swear in Polish as he whipped out a kyzikos and fired while at full gallop. One of the assailants toppled off his mount just before the two groups collided.

One of the attackers grabbed her, his hand gripping her upper left arm. “Surrender, bitch!” he yelled. She jerked her arm towards her, the man yelping in surprise as she yanked him forward. She lowered her head so that his face smashed into her forehead. He shrieked and Elizabeth heard the crunch of a nose flattening, spraying her with blood as some of his teeth bounced off of her. His grip dropped and she shoved him off onto the ground, trampling him deliberately with her horse as she blinked away blood off her eyes. She shook her head; that had worked rather well but her head was not hard enough to make that a good repeat tactic.

Looking around her, she saw three of the riders fleeing with some more men on the ground. Wartislaw, Bogislaw, and Karl Manfred were fine, her young son trembling and perched on a horse in front of Jakob, her captain of her guard, who’d been with her since she’d been a girl in the strange land of Constantinople, all those years ago.

Jakob looked behind them. The land here was mostly clear, with scrubland interspersed with copses of stunted trees, with the smell of the Baltic Sea hanging on the air. More riders were coming up behind them and the fight had slowed them down. Jakob frowned, edged his horse closer to Elizabeth, and then with one hand picked up Karl Manfred and plunked him down in the saddle in front of Elizabeth. “You’re almost there, milady. Ride hard. I’ll buy you the time you need. Hans, Adolf, you’re with me.” He looked at Bogislaw. “You get her through.”

“I will.”

“God go with you, Captain,” Elizabeth said, resisting the tears.

“God go with you, milady.”

They rode.

* * *​

“Contact! Hot pursuit!” the lookout bellowed from the crow’s nest.

“All hands to stations!” the captain shouted. “Hot extraction!” He looked over to see the boats ready to launch, while gun ports drew open and the men loaded cannons. “Be sure to mark your targets,” he said. It wouldn’t do to accidentally shoot their passengers.

“Here they come!” the lookout shouted. “Close pursuit!”

The captain looked to the shoreline. This little cove wasn’t much of an anchorage, with a hill near the shore blocking most of the view inland. He saw a small party of riders crest the hill, charging down towards the shore. And then right behind was a much larger party of horsemen. “Gun-master, when you’re ready,” he said. The man nodded.

A few seconds passed. The larger group was spreading a bit, with fresher mounts pushing forward, but even that would be enough to overwhelm the initial group unless they got help.

“FIRE!”

* * *​

Elizabeth saw the ship as soon as she crested the hill, lying black-hulled in the water, with white stripes of paint along her gun decks. She wasn’t good with ships. It wasn’t a small ship, but it wasn’t anything like those hulking Triune monsters, or even the bigger Lotharingian warships she’d seen on a diplomatic visit. But she recognized the banners flying from the mastheads.

Karl clutched her arms tightly as her foaming horse pounded toward the shore. She could hear the loathsome sounds of French and English behind her. They’d stilled momentarily upon sighting the ship, clearly their rendezvous, but the pursuers were close. They could still overwhelm Elizabeth and her party before they could get off the beach.

Then the ship spoke, cannonballs ripping through the air, the whistle sounding like they were aimed at her head. Now that would be an ironic way to die, she thought. But they whistled past, and the triumphant calls were immediately replaced.

Elizabeth did not much care for the sounds of French or English speech. But the sound of French or English screams, that was sweet.

* * *​

The first cannonade hadn’t killed that many of the Triunes; the ship had fired only a few cannons, concerned about the close quarters shooting. But going up against a ship armed with 25-pounder cannons when one was only armed with a few carbines plus kyzikoi and sabers was unhealthy, so after another two cannonades the Triunes had fled back behind the hill, allowing a quick but safe withdrawal from the beach.

Elizabeth climbed up the ladder from the boat, trying her best to look dignified as she clambered over the railing, which was difficult considering how her clothes were soaked in sweat and she still had a lot of dried blood on her face and in her hair. Once on deck, she immediately looked around, quickly identifying the captain. “Kentarchos,” she said in perfect Constantinople Greek. “We thank you for your good service.”

The Kentarchos, a fairly short and young-looking man, with a triangular chin and long pointy nose, smiled. “Your Imperial Highness,” he replied in Greek, with an accent she recognized as Egyptian. “It is our pleasure to aid an Empress. I am Kentarchos Leo Kalomeros. Welcome aboard the Theseus.”

He glanced behind her. “That’s everyone,” one of Kalomeros’s officers said. Elizabeth looked herself and then confirmed it.

“Good,” Kentarchos Kalomeros said and then looked over at the helmsman, giving a string of nautical orders that completely went over her head. Something about points and jibs…

She looked over at Bogislaw, who nodded that the orders were of the type they should expect. If all went well, if God be willing, soon they would be in Narva.

 

[Basileus444]

The Lands of Germany, 1648 part 2:​

Eastern Baltic, September 5, 1648:

The Theseus seemed a fine ship, by her admittedly ignorant standards, but Duke Wartislaw and Bogislaw, who knew much more about marine affairs, also seemed to agree, which made Elizabeth feel a little better.

She needed that. Part of her ill feeling was seasickness, which had not been helped by her needing to nurse her seasick son. Vomiting was contagious.

She looked up at the mizzenmast head, where the Roman banner was flying. She frowned internally, but kept her face blank. The use of a Roman vessel was…troubling. First was the political angle. Even though it was just a getaway ship, not taking her to Rhomania, any association with the Greeks would hurt her cause in the eye of the princes. Hopefully it would be a manageable hurt; it was just the getaway ship after all. It was hoped that the Triunes and Scandinavians wouldn’t be willing to stop and board a Roman warship, as opposed to, say, a Lotharingian merchantman.

One had been available because the new Roman ambassador to Prussia had wanted to go by sea rather than overland, for reasons Elizabeth’s stomach could not understand. So Wartislaw’s and Elizabeth’s agents and the Prussians and the Russian ambassador to Riga had talked things out with the new Roman ambassador and arranged for a loan. And so they’d gone for it. It was a gamble, and a questionable choice, but good choices were few and far between.

But it was more than just the politics.

She had been young and foolish when she’d been in Constantinople, unable to hide her anger at her husband’s blatant disregard for their marriage vows. The double standard still rankled; if she’d engaged in such extra activities, especially so flamboyantly, all of society certainly wouldn’t have demanded and expected Andreas to smile and bear it, and condemn him if he grew angry, and especially if he’d had the audacity to express it. But she had since learned the need to dissemble.

But for her foolishness, she had not deserved the abuse she’d received. Never had she felt such roiling hatred, such steaming malice, as that which had been poured by the Constantinople mob at her. And then they had wondered why she preferred to spend her time elsewhere, and used that as a reason to despise her all the more, fueled by paranoia that saw any gesture, no matter what, as evidence of some sinister design. That was not something she could forget, or forgive. Even if going to Constantinople had not been political suicide, even if it had been a possible source of aid, she would not go there. She would not endure that again, and she certainly would not expose her son to that. Some prices were just too high.

This ship ride was necessary, probably, but it was enough. It was not just her seasick stomach that would be excited to not be standing under that banner.

* * *​

Andronikos Lukaras, the Protokarabos [1] of the Theseus, examined the Triune fregata through his dalnovzor. The wind had been uncooperative so they’d made bad time getting away from the Pomeranian coast, and then the morning had revealed this ship. Better positioned in regards to the wind, and with the wind favoring her rather than them, the Triune had been able to cut the angle and intercept them. It didn’t help that the Theseus’s hull had not been careened since she’d left Constantinople, so she was not as speedy as she could be.

And while this fregata was smaller than the Roman, which ran towards the larger end of that ship type, there was a squadron on the horizon bearing down on them with full sail. This Triune would soon have many friends.

They hadn’t tried to make a run for it. The Kentarchos hoped that they could argue their way out of this; the eagle banner would hopefully give the Triunes pause. If they had tried to flee though, the Triunes would certainly smell a rat and that possibility would vanish.

Andronikos looked around at the deck. All of their passengers were hidden below while the ship was cleared for action, with gunports open. The Triune ship also had her gunports open and cannons rolled out.

Kentarchos Kalomeros joined him at the stern, the Triune approaching from the port side, speaking trumpet in hand. “I expect we’ll have to fight,” he said.

“I agree.” The Triune’s continued approach even after the Roman banners were clearly visible in the early morning light suggested a polite ‘bugger off’ would not make them go away.

A shout came from the Triune and then a voice speaking French through a trumpet. “This is His Majesty’s ship Foudroyant. Heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

Leo looked at Andronikos, smiling a bit. “Since we’re probably going to have to fight, that means I don’t have to be polite, doesn’t it?”

“I believe so. Your capacity to find the good in any situation is always surprising,” he drolled, smiling a bit himself.

“Excellent.” Leo lifted the speaking trumpet to his mouth and replied in French. “This is his Imperial Majesty’s ship Theseus. By what right, sheep-copulater, do you make such demands?”

“I do not copulate with sheep!”

“You’re English. Don’t lie.”

“I am from Nantes!”

“My mistake. You are, in fact, a cow-copulator. Now by what right do you make such demands?”

“It is possible you are carrying persons of interest to his Majesty Henri II. We will inspect your vessel. Now heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

“I do not recognize your authority to investigate a ship of his Imperial Majesty Herakleios III.”

“I do not require your recognition, only your obedience.”

Leo lowered the trumpet and looked at Andronikos. “Can’t really think of a clever response to that.”

“And even if an argument keeps him off the ship, his friends are gaining on us.”

“Well, that settles it. We’ll just have to kill him instead.”

“I’ll try not to get too excited at the idea.”

Leo smiled and put the trumpet back to his mouth. “You know what, cow-copulator? Kiss my ass!” He turned to look up the deck. “Pour it on them, boys!”

The cannons roared.

* * *​

Elizabeth looked out at the sea. As long as she focused on the horizon, her stomach was mostly quiet, although the shaking of the ship as it pounded through the waves, wind filling its sails, was not helping in the least. The Theseus had made quick work of the Foudroyant, which for all its bluster hadn’t seemed to actually be expecting a fight. They’d left it partially dismasted so it couldn’t follow, hauled up as many sails as the masts could bear, and fled east, the Triune squadron pursuing.

The indistinct sound of Karl Manfred’s voice made her turn around and look at the deck. Her son was with Duke Wartislaw, who was explaining some of the arcane lore that was a ship at sea. The distraction seemed to be doing him good, although vomiting up everything in his stomach, plus being out of the stuffy below-decks, certainly helped.

Bogislaw came over to her at the railing, arriving just as the sound of a cannon reached them, a moment later a spout of water flying up just short of the ship’s stern. The Pomeranian looked and frowned. “That sloop’s a fine sailor,” he growled.

The Triune ships were flying after them, spread out a bit as each sailed to the best of their abilities. There were five of them, two of which were clearly bigger and better-armed than the Theseus, although they seemed to be slightly slower. Once the Theseus got moving after the duel with the Foudroyant, they hadn’t gained anymore and seemed to be falling behind ever so slowly.

The same could hardly be said for this…sloop, which had been steadily gaining all morning, and apparently was now just in cannon-shot.

Another boom and another water-spout, this time to the side of the Theseus.

“It’s smaller, so we could take it,” Elizabeth mused. “But if we did, we’d lose more time and the others might catch up.”

“Yes,” Bogislaw groused. “But he can just hang back on us, trying to rake us with his bow chasers, or pepper the rigging. One good lucky shot against a mast and we’re done for. He can’t take us alone, but all he has to do is slow us down. And this fine clear weather, there’s no handy squall to hide in.”

A gun from the Theseus roared back.

“You should go back below, your highness,” he continued.

Elizabeth shuddered inwardly, her stomach protesting at the thought of being back down there. The fresh sea breeze was far nicer, and she noted the faint hint of gunpowder. “No. Perhaps if the action gets hotter. But not yet.”

“One chance shot…”

“I know. But if this is to be the end, I’d like to enjoy the sky some more while I still can.”

* * *​

Andronikos looked again at the pestiferous Triune sloop through his dalnovzor, the occasional report of bow and stern chasers sounding. The peppering had continued relentlessly, although with no serious effects, yet. A few times the sloop had gotten closer, its shots telling more. The Kentarchos had angled the Theseus’s course at those times so they could get off a broadside, at least to make the sloop back off or hopefully get in a lucky shot of their own. The maneuvers did make the sloop back off, but no lucky shots, and those course alterations had allowed the slower Triune ships to gain on them a little.

Leo joined him but before either could say anything the sloop’s bow chasers fired again. One ball whistled through the air, cracking against the mizzenmast, and cracking the mizzenmast. The Kentarchos immediately started barking orders for lowering some sails. The masts were carrying maximum canvas, and the now-damaged mast could break completely under the weight.

Leo looked grimly at Andronikos. “We’re still better sailors than the four, but we can’t afford another crack like that. We need to take this bugger off the board, time be damned.”

Andronikos nodded and the two of them started issuing the relevant orders.

* * *​

The sloop hadn’t been willing to trade many broadsides with the Theseus before cutting and running, but then the fregata probably had close to a two-to-one advantage in throw weight. But even the short duel had cost them time and maneuvering space, plus some more shots into their rigging and one small sail shot away. None were individually too much of an issue, unlike the strike against the mizzenmast, but every meter of canvas counted.

The other four had gained during the battle, and with the resumption of the chase the two battle-line ships were now very slowly gaining rather than losing ground. The smaller two, a sloop and a fregata of the Foudroyant type, were gaining more quickly. Night might give them the chance to shake their pursuers, but if the pair could start harassing as the original sloop had, night might not come soon enough. The days were still long this time of year in these northern waters.

Leo went over to the Lady Elizabeth, who was on deck at the bow, with more color in her cheeks since she’d come on board. The seasickness was apparently wearing off. He explained the tactical situation to her. Then he continued. “My orders were to convey you from Pomerania to Narva, but not at the risk of endangering my ship and crew. Fighting off a couple of smaller ships is one thing, but just one of those battle-line ships could break this ship in half. This isn’t our fight, and I won’t order my men into a suicidal last stand, not for this.”

Elizabeth nodded grimly. “I understand, Kentarchos, and I appreciate your honesty and forthrightness. You must do what you must do to protect your own people.”

“Contact! Seven sail, ten degrees starboard!” one of the lookouts in the crow’s nest cried out.

Leo stifled a curse. That was nearly dead ahead; tacking away from them would only let their pursuers gain more ground even faster. “Can you make out their colors?” he shouted back.

“Not yet, sir. They are approaching our course though.”

Andronikos strode over to him. “Any orders, sir?”

“We maintain course. Anything else and the bastards behind us will be on us before nightfall. If those in front are hostile, we might still be able to sneak away during the night. And besides, they might not be hostile at all. This far east they’re unlikely to be Triune.” Andronikos nodded and left, heading over to the helmsman.

“They could be Scandinavian,” Elizabeth observed.

“I know, and he knows, but I like to keep hope alive as long as I can.”

“Me too, Kentarchos,” she whispered. “Me too.”

Minutes passed, probably not that many, but they were long enough.

“I can make their colors, sir! They’re Saint Andrew’s crosses! They’re Russian! Two battle-line ships and five smaller.”

Several of the crew cheered. Leo grinned, looking again at Elizabeth who for the first time since he’d seen her had a smile on her face. “I think hope might just live a little longer.”

“I agree, Kentarchos. And thank you for what you have done to get me this far.”

* * *​

The Lady Elizabeth’s escape from Pomerania and near-certain capture is a near-run thing, but a chance encounter with a Russian naval squadron forces the Triunes to break off their pursuit. Four days after leaving Stettin, she arrives at the port of Narva.

The use of a Roman warship, plus the fire exchanged by said ship with Triunes, does cause a bit of a diplomatic incident, but Henri II, while seething, does not want to push the matter lest it trigger more Roman response. Direct Roman military aid is extremely unlikely, but Roman weaponry and particularly bullion with plausible deniability as to its origins is possible, and he doesn’t want to deal with that. The Roman connection with Elizabeth is played up in an effort to turn German public opinion against her, but there is no push against the Romans directly.

Nevertheless, to avoid any awkwardness, Lady Athena decides to sell the fregata Theseus to the Russian navy rather than having it sail back through Scandinavian and Triune waters. The crew will return to Constantinople overland.

Leo Kalomeros is not the only one headed south. Elizabeth’s journey is hardly complete. After two days in Narva, she is on the move again, proceeding southward to make her appeal directly to the Zemsky Sobor of a reunited Russia.

[1] Term for First Mate or Executive Officer.

 

[Basileus444]

The Gathering of the Rus, part 1:​

As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Russia. Even as early as the mid-1600s, there are complaints from men in Roman port towns frequented by Russian sailors that the womenfolk prefer the company of the supposedly better-endowed Russian men. The accuracy of the complaint is unknown, although Russians have never shown any inclination to argue against it.

Studies of skeletal remains from the period however do show a substantial height differential. They show that in the mid-1600s, the height of the average Russian woman was the same as the height of the average Roman man. The scenario effectively repeats a scene from the classical age, where the Germanic peoples of the north literally towered over the shorter Italians. Based on personal accounts from the period, there were a decent number of Roman men who were into Russian women for this reason, a trend that exists to this day.

The lands of Russia, although divided in the 1630s, are already vast in size and also in population. Aside from the brief fighting that marked the Sundering of the Rus, and some incursions from the steppe, the lands of Russia have been at peace since the end of the Great Northern War in the early 1570s. That bloody and sweeping conflict had been devastating for the Russian people, like the Time of Troubles for the Romans, but like the Roman experience, the Russian experience afterwards had been of a remarkable resurgence. But this one had been even stronger, and unlike the Flowering, which had been poleaxed by the Great Uprising and the Eternal War, the Russian boom has continued.

The result was the greatest known sustained population growth rate in early modern history up to that point, only superseded in the 1640s by the Triune colonies in North Terranova. Between 1550 and 1630 the Roman population in the heartland increased by about 50%. In that same time frame, Russia’s population nearly doubled, and the discrepancy is even higher when one factors in that some of Rhomania’s growth was driven by Russian emigration.

In 1640, Russia’s population is at least 28 million, and possibly higher. Khazaria’s population is almost certainly underreported, not factoring in all the nomadic tribes, Cossacks, and Siberian natives paying iasak (tribute in furs). Great Pronsk alone has 16 million, just a few hundred thousand short of the Roman heartland itself. Of the remaining 12 million, 6 are in Lithuania, with Novgorod, Scythia, and Khazaria splitting the remainder roughly evenly.

This is moreover not a poor population, at least by the standards of the 1600s. The bulk of the population is poor, often landless, existing on the edge of subsistence, but that applies to all societies of the time, including Rhomania. Alongside them though is a large and prosperous subset of the population.

Russia only has one city that is in the top rank of cities in Christendom, Novgorod at 100,000 souls in 1645. But by that time it is richly endowed with many small cities and larger towns, chief of which are Vladimir, Smolensk, Bryansk, Tver, Ryazan, Nizhniy Novgorod, Pskov, Kharkov, Kherson-on-the-Don, Chernigov, Yaroslavl, Pronsk, Kiev, Kazan, Tula, Vilnius, and Voronezh, (the last replaces Draconovsk, which after being damaged by Kalmyk raids and then fires has declined to a shadow of its former self) all of which have at least 25,000 inhabitants. There are many more that are smaller, with one observer saying the Russian towns number as many as the Italian, albeit spread out over a much larger area.

Flourishing and intricate trade networks are the reason for the sprawling urban network. Trade with Rhomania had been the initial spark but it has grown substantially since. The towns are loci for trade internal to Russia, as well as facilitating the flow of exports and imports. From Scythia comes grain and vegetables. From Siberia comes fur and metals. From Novgorod comes timber, hemp, tar, and potash. From Lithuania comes leather, butter, and cheese.

Trade with Rhomania is still by far the most important foreign trade, and it is the same with Rhomania and Russia. Roman imports are a mix of primary and secondary goods, with wine and textiles the main items. The Russians export mainly raw materials, foodstuffs, furs, hides, and metal bars. However it would be a mistake to present this trade as colonial. The Russians are not exporting raw materials and then importing finished goods made out of said materials, like the Egyptians when they export raw cotton and import cotton textiles from Thrakesia or Syria.

The finished goods the Russians import, primarily textiles, are made from raw materials that were not sourced in Russia. Russia does provide many raw materials for Roman industry, principally metals. Due to the limits of transport, the metal is mined and refined on site in Russia and processed into bars, which is how it is shipped, to be reworked into whatever tool once it reaches its Roman destination. However the metal goods produced overwhelmingly stay in the Roman market. For their metal goods, the Russians ship other bars of metal to a Russian town where artisans work it to make whatever good is desired.

As the metal-working example shows, Russian towns are centers of manufacturing as well as trade. Transportation is difficult, even by the standards of the early modern period, and mostly conducted by river. Bulk shipment over the execrable roads, except when the winters freeze them, is not advised. Nevertheless the volume of goods and merchants, travelers and ideas, moving across the landscape of Russia is surprising in number and variety.

The lands of Russia are also expanding rapidly to the east. Although Khazar authority in Central Asia crashed after the death of Theodoros I in 1634, expansion in Siberia has continued unabated. It is done mainly by Cossacks and fur traders and trappers, and at this stage Russian presence is broad but thin in much of Siberia. Most of the Siberian natives have been coerced into paying iasak, a yearly tribute in furs, but are otherwise largely left alone. In 1652 Russian traders and trappers will reach the Pacific Ocean, establishing the outpost at Okhotsk.

Much of the iasak ends up flowing south, not west. While the trade will expand greatly over the later 1600s, already by 1640 there is a thriving caravan trade with China. In some respects it mirrors Russian trade with Rhomania. The Chinese want Siberian forest products and metals, and especially the fine furs. The Little Ice Age, disastrous for many people, is a boon to Russian fur traders. In exchange the Russians get Chinese manufactures, mostly silks and porcelains. As early as 1640, there are contracts for the transport of Chinese porcelain that specify that payment will be denied if more than a certain percentage of the items are broken. Impressively, this clause does not seem to have been invoked very often. Tea leaves are used as packing material and are soon valued as a trade good in their own right.

The Kazan trade fair, timed for when the Chinese goods are expected to arrive, sees Russians converging from all over the principalities, to trade, to party, to talk and debate. It is sometimes said, with good reason, that Russia was reunited first at the Kazan trade fairs.

Another place where Russia is united is in the kaffos houses to be found in every settlement that has any pretensions to culture. Even some monasteries have their own kaffos house, exclusive for the monks and workers at the monastery. Romans consume roughly 60% of the kaffos they import, with Russians consuming most of the remainder. The kaffos houses are popular places, with hot drinks and hot food and good conversation.

Much of the conversation is learned. Russian literacy rates vary wildly, but the city of Novgorod in 1640 has arguably the highest literacy rate in the world at the time, with 90%+ adult male literacy. This continues a long trend, reaching back well into the Middle Ages, of high literacy in the city, although by this stage paper has completely shoved out the birch bark as a reading and writing material. Nowhere else in Russia can compete with Novgorod, but literacy in the towns and in the countryside near the towns is high by contemporary standards. While the average literacy rate in Russia is lower than in Rhomania, the sheer size of the Russian population means that the Russian literary public is bigger than the Roman, and that public has a healthy demand for reading material. Smolensk especially, seconded by Kiev, have major printing industries. (Oddly, Novgorod does not, getting most of its books from Smolensk.)

Some of the literature is in Greek, as a knowledge of that language is considered necessary for a Russian who wants to be cultured, and essential for the merchant class. A cheap paperback edition containing a compilation of ancient Greek myths published in Constantinople in 1629 is a particularly hot item for the Russian presses at this time. But there is a limit to this; both Russians and Georgians, while respecting and appreciating Roman culture, can find Roman assertions of cultural superiority to be rather patronizing and trying. The Russian attitude can be summed in the saying “respect Greek, but do not become one, for you are Russian”.

Works published in Russian, ranging from religious texts to histories to comedies, make up the bulk of Russian printing. Russians have much to be proud of in this regard; the plays of Dmitrii Romanov, author of the Epic of David I, Conqueror of Mexico, are admired throughout Russia with Greek translations being quite popular in Rhomania. It is not just in writing; the creations of Russian icon painters are also quite popular in the Empire to the south.

Russians in the kaffos houses, a mix of locals and travelers getting hot food and drink, not only read the literature available (which often includes newspapers) but also talk. Oftentimes the conversation is about politics. Most agree that the breakup of the Rus is wrong on a fundamental level; it must be made right. The Sundering of the Rus revealed a truth that they hadn’t realized until it was too late, that they were all Russians. And it is not right that such a numerous and mighty people should be divided; it only exposes them to insolence. The outrage of the English at the idea of having to treat Russians as equal in the matter of reciprocal trading rights had been directed at Novgorod, but Russians in all the Principalities had all felt the humiliation.

But that still leaves the question of how Russia is to be reunited, and what the Russia of the future is to be. These are far more complicated issues. But there are a few things on which Russians in general can agree.

The power of the towns had been a strong counter to the power of the great landowners. But the rise of the towns had also helped the peasantry. To feed the towns required a lot of grain, which encouraged the creation of large estates with the advantage of economies of scale. But around the towns also sprung up small landholdings, which provided the towns with vegetables, herbs, flowers, and animal products. Selling these items to the town can be profitable even with relatively small amounts of product, and so a class of small peasant landowners filling this niche has arisen.

Individually they can’t compare to the great rural landowners or the big urban magnates and long-distance wholesale merchants, but as a class they are a power that cannot be ignored. Combined with the towns, they are a formidable counter to the might of big rural landowners who otherwise might wish to dominate society, like in Vlachia or as is steadily more and more the case in Poland, where the demand of western European cities for Polish rye is encouraging the growth of large estates worked by serfs under ever worse condition. The towns and small landowners do not care for that prospect one bit.

There are still many great estates, producing grain in bulk to feed the towns, and the big landowners are elites in Russian society. But their workforce can emigrate to the towns, or south to Scythia or Rhomania (less so now than was the case 50 years ago), or east to Khazaria & Siberia. One way to keep their workforce is by repression, the Vlach and Polish route. But the power of the towns and small landowners makes that not an option. As a result, the big landowners need to rely on the carrot, not the stick.

The small landowners that are near the towns are a minority of the peasant population, with many more poorer peasants with smaller plots, or ones less well suited to take advantage of urban markets. There are also landless laborers and tenant farmers and sharecroppers, these cases providing the work force for the great estates. But despite their lower economic status, the influence from the towns, the increased trade and literacy, means that they know their rights, and they will not yield them. They are not Poles or Vlachs, to be yoked like cattle and treated as slaves. They are Russians, and one does not do that to Russians unless one wishes to die.

As Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev, delegates to the Zemsky Sobor, would say to rapturous applause, “to be Russian is to be free”.

 

[Basileus444]

The Gathering of the Rus, Part 2:​

The first pan-Russian Zemsky Sobor to take place after the Sundering of the Rus, in 1635, had not been very significant in and of itself. There had been some discussions over the need to coordinate foreign affairs, trade tariffs, and the like, but nothing concrete had emerged. There was desire on the part of the delegates to do more, and more of substance, but their powers to do so were sharply limited. By itself then, the 1635 Zemsky Sobor ended up doing very little and by itself would merit barely a footnote. However one decision made was that there should be another Zemsky Sobor, and this one should be attended by delegates with authority to negotiate for a reunification of the Russian principalities and with proposals as to how that should be accomplished and the new Russia restructured.

The devil, as always, is in the details and a question of such importance could not be rushed, which is why the new Zemsky Sobor would face repeated delays before it could open. The first major issue in Russia sparked in Lithuania in 1638. Ivan Sapieha’s term as First Posadnik ended and he ran for re-election. His initial election did not merit the term, as his getting the position had been one of the provisos of the Treaty of Smolensk. This counted against him when he ran now in a real election and he was defeated, to be replaced by his rival Andrias Gostautas.

Ivan, infuriated, had refused to accept the election results and had started gathering retainers and supplies at his estates, looking as if he was going to resist militarily. He also appealed to Demetrios III. For his services to Rhomania against the Germans, the Basileus had played a key role in making him First Posadnik originally. But Demetrios III was sick and dying, while Rhomania was facing the Italian crisis and economic scandals. Ivan’s former commander Odysseus was sympathetic, but practically every member of the Roman diplomatic service was emphatic that the Roman government stay out of it, and so nothing came of Ivan’s appeal.

The Roman diplomats emphatically advise staying out because they’ve accurately read the room. In 1635 Roman prestige had been riding high in Russia, but much had changed in three years. Russians are extremely well informed about what goes on in Rhomania. Many Roman papers have a brisk circulation in the lands to the north, transported on the cargo ships that regularly ply the Black Sea. The Russians know all about the Italian crisis and the economic issues in the Empire.

Furthermore, all that reading also means the Russians know all about Roman pretensions and thought patterns, and they are unimpressed. The belligerency and bellicosity is off-putting and concerning. One Russian merchant who trades in wine and sugar makes the observant remark that the makers of newspapers are more bloodthirsty than regular people, because “paper written in blood sells better than paper written in ink”, an older version of the modern variation ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. But even with that observation in mind, he finds many of the attitudes commonly expressed in the papers to be very tiresome.

The brusque treatment of the Pronsky ambassador Boris Morozov when he tried to mediate in the Italian affair is viewed by many Russians as a deliberate insult. The Scythians can read, in the Romans’ own words, the occasional proposal about how the Empire should annex them, or at least vassalize them, in order to ensure grain supplies for Constantinople. Considering what is transpiring in Vlachia, that suggestion is viewed with horror and fury.

These are hardly, by themselves, a serious danger to overall good Roman-Russian relations. The religious, economic, social, and cultural ties are too strong to be so easily broken. But in the words of the Roman consul in Kherson-on-the-Don, “these expressed sentiments inflame Russian sensibilities, meaning they would be much more likely and quickly and violently to take offense if an issue of actual substance were to arise. It is imperative that no such issue arise.”

In addition, while the Zemsky Sobor has not met again, three years of discussions over kaffos, of printed pamphlets and the occasional tome, has encouraged the growth of pan-Russian sentiments, even if the details are still inchoate. Ivan, by appealing to the Romans in this new atmosphere, thus condemns himself. This is an internal matter, and he is trying to invite foreigners into it.

Many would-be supporters thus turn away from Ivan, giving Andrias the advantage. Andrias can also rely on promised support from Pronsk, Novgorod, Scythia, and Khazaria if it becomes necessary. The ironclad condition for such aid becoming necessary would be if the Romans did intervene on behalf of Ivan. That, fortunately for everyone, including the Romans, ends up never being the case. Ivan, seeing his support fade away, stands down and returns to his estates

The storm thus blows over, but the attitudes expressed are illustrative of the changing times. In 1635 the Romans could intervene in the affairs of Russia and neither they nor their patrons faced any kind of backlash. But three years later, the Russians, more confident in their own strength and more wary of the Romans, were in absolutely no mood to tolerate the same maneuvers. Furthermore, Andrias faced no backlash for his appeals to the other principalities to deal with Ivan, even though the specific affair was internal to Lithuanian politics. But the principalities were not viewed as outsiders in the way the Romans were; they could get involved in a family quarrel because they were, in a sense, family. The Romans were not.

The way interventions were determined to be acceptable or unacceptable in the Lithuanian affair showed that the development of a common Russian identity was well-advanced. It was very clear who was in and who was out. But forging common identities is still a very tricky thing. They usually originate in an oppositional form, defining themselves by what they are not, rather than what they are. It is much easier to agree on ‘we are not X’, as opposed to ‘we are Y’.

One of the issues that made it difficult to agree on the nature of the proposed new Russia was the issue of ensuring that it would be a new Russia, and not some super-Pronsk. Four out of every seven Russians resided in Great Pronsk. One of the big issues that had powered the Sundering of the Rus was the concern that Pronsky power would become too dominant, overshadowing the other principalities. But while the devil is in the details, the concept of federalism was a clear solution to this problem.

The other issue was thornier in the philosophical sense, because it spoke directly to the idea of the new Russia, while the issue of Pronsk was more about technical detail. Was the new Russia to be an autocracy, or more consultative (the term is more appropriate than democratic in this context) in nature?

Consultative traditions are now quite strong throughout Russia. The influence of the Republic of Novgorod has had centuries to percolate throughout the land, and the regional Veches (assemblies) have been ruling Pronsk, Novgorod, Lithuania, and Scythia in their own right since the 1570s. Khazaria is somewhat of an exception, since the Laskarid line remained as Kings there after the Sundering, but they still had to deal with a Khazar Veche of some strength.

Still, there are arguments for other ways. The obvious example for governance and statecraft was the powerful Orthodox state to the south, rich in gold and years, and inspiration had certainly come from those shores. Yet Roman influence had not had things all its own way, and it had created tensions. The Zemsky Sobor of 1573-74 had chosen, after the extinction of the Shuisky dynasty, to bring in the Laskarids as a ruling family.

One argument had been that a foreign family, rather than playing favorites among the major houses of Russia, would help towards unity. Yet another thought was that Romans, with their experience of governance and statecraft, would be helpful in developing Russia, at that time humiliated by the disasters of the Great Northern War. But the Laskarids’s sympathy for a bureaucratic autocracy on the Roman model, at the expense of the regional Veches, had alienated and alarmed a great many Russians. The Sundering of the Rus initially had begun because of fears that the Laskarids were mounting a coup in order to force autocratic power. It was only later, after Laskarid efforts had been defeated, that concerns over Pronsky power filling the vacuum became a major issue.

The main argument for autocracy is that of efficiency. Committees are never known for their prompt decision-making; a wise autocrat consulting with pertinent advisors (in theory) would be much quicker. The obvious counter-argument is that assertion depends on the nature of the autocrat and advisors and is hardly guaranteed. Furthermore a speedy decision is hardly guaranteed to be a good decision.

Russians make those counter-arguments, but they also devise more nuanced ones as well. Stenka Razin argues that the idea of a universal mode of governance that is best for all people is utterly absurd. “People are different. They live in different societies and cultures, shaped by different geographies, climates, and histories, practicing different customs and creeds. It cannot even be agreed upon what are the best foods to nourish mankind. Milk, the great sustainer for so many, cannot even be consumed by a large portion of the human race. And this is regarding food, far more essential to the maintenance of life than governance. To argue that the great city of Novgorod, and the tribesmen of the Chukchi, should be governed by the same laws, and that those laws would be the best possible for both of them, despite their vast differences, is idiocy of the highest caliber.”

Arguments like these do not denigrate the Roman system of bureaucratic autocracy. Many who advance these arguments admire the efficiency and reach of the Roman government. (It must absolutely and unequivocally be stressed that these assessments are by the standards of the early/mid seventeenth century. The capabilities of industrial states vastly exceeds that of the pre-industrial Roman state.)

But while it is a good system for the Romans, it would not work for Russia. Rhomania is a maritime state, at least partially, centered primarily on the Aegean Basin. Six of the eleven themes border the Aegean, with two-thirds of the heartland’s population which produces nearly three-fourths of the Empire’s tax revenue. Thus power and control can be relatively easily and quickly be projected via the medium of sea transport, by far the best way of moving anything during the pre-industrial age.

But that is a function of the availability of sea travel, not governmental nature. A muddy quagmire masquerading as a road does not dry up for horsemen dispatched by an Emperor while remaining a marsh for riders sent by an Assembly. A bridge does not inquire as to the political apparatus before deciding whether or not to be washed out by the spring floods. In short, geography matters. By this argument, the nature of Roman government works because the maritime geography makes it work. Sharp-eyed Russians note that the Roman government’s reach and efficiency dissipates rather noticeably as one moves away from the cities and the sea into the interior.

Russia, obviously, does not have that maritime geography advantage, and thus a Roman model of centralized bureaucratic autocracy just wouldn’t work there. Orders and reports, officials and soldiers, would just take too long to get from the center to the provinces and back again. A centralized autocracy would thus be “a giant with feet of clay. A giant, because it would have the immense resources of this great land and people, but feet of clay, because it would be a clumsy, stupid giant. It would have to act on outdated information, with officials having much opportunity for corruption and vice, given the difficulties of surveillance.” (Those sharp-eyed Russians have also noticed that while Kephales in the interior of Anatolia may be junior in rank to their coastal counterparts, they have more practical autonomy because they are further away, in travel time, from the capital.)

Because of the geography, a centralized autocracy thus could not be an efficient and competent one in Russia. Efficient and competent governance would, the argument goes, necessitate local governance, where the tyranny of distance would be far more manageable, where information could be received and processed while still relevant, and officials supervised. The obvious solution therefore is some kind of federal union. The local regions manage themselves through the local assemblies, while pan-Russian issues such as foreign relations are managed by an assembly of all the Russians.

A major block to Russian reunification has been concerns about the Laskarids of Khazaria and their autocratic sympathies. But the King of Khazaria, Basil I Laskaris, is not like his father and grandfather, steeped in the autocratic traditions of Constantinople. He was born in Kazan, and the only time he was in Roman territory was when as a child he visited the enclave at Azov, a town that was Roman politically, but of which 85% of the population did not come from Roman lands. Given the difficulties of communication and control over his utterly vast and lightly-populated domains sprawling over Siberia, he is extremely sympathetic to the geographical arguments regarding the best proposed nature of Russia’s government. His father played a key role in the Sundering of the Rus, and Basil feels that as a blot, a shame, a disgrace on his and his family’s name. The wrong must be made right.

In early 1640 he publicly announces his support for the reunification of Russia, pledging to support limits on his power if “they be for the good of the Russian people and state. It is not right that the vanity and greed of one man, whatever his title, should take precedence over the welfare of a nation of thirty million souls.”

In 1642, the Zemsky Sobor again meets.

 

[Basileus444]

The Gathering of the Rus, Part 3: ​

The first thing the Zemsky Sobor that gathers in Vladimir in 1641 does is to par itself down to a more manageable size. For an established assembly, a membership of hundreds is not usually a problem, but for formulating a new system of government, it is far too unwieldy. So they agree to delegate the actual formulation to a super-committee of chosen members, although the committee members correspond with the non-included delegates when not in session.

Establishing the size of the super-committee does take some finagling, which in itself is a microcosm of the general issues facing the assembly. Pronsk must be given substantial weight, but a straight vote based just on population would ensure that a united Pronsk bloc could control the committee. (There have been the occasional proposal to break Pronsk and Lithuania up into smaller principalities with the new creations similar in population to Novgorod, Scythia, and Khazaria. But there is no way the Pronsky or Lithuanians would accept this.)

It is agreed that each principality will send one delegate per million of their population, thus creating a group of 28, with Pronsk providing 16. However each principality will also send an additional 7, so the total group will number 63, with 23 of them being Pronsky. Decisions in the committee will be determined by a straight numerical vote, although whatever they draft will then have to be approved first by the delegates remaining in the regular Zemsky Sobor, and then the principality Veches, or in the case of Khazaria, the King.

King Basil is not in Vladimir, as his presence could still cause wariness on the part of those still suspicious of Laskarid absolutism. He is staying in the nearby minor city of Moscow, a prosperous settlement of 11,000, known primarily for its ceramics and especially its samovars. The elegant silver samovars made in the finest Muscovite workshops are famous throughout Russia, and no house in Rhomania with pretentions to quality can go without one.

The willingness of Pronsky delegates to compromise on this matter, despite the disadvantage to their Principality, deserves some comment. Partly it is the growing spirit of pan-Russianism, with a willingness to make some sacrifices to accomplish that greater good. But there is more to it than that.

Pronsk by itself, with its 16 million inhabitants, could technically be one of the great powers of Christendom. But for all its strength, it is in a sense confined and isolated, on the edge of the map, possessing much muscle but lacking the room to flex it. To expand would require one of two choices, both unpalatable. One would be to attack one of the other principalities, an idea that is growing more and more unthinkable. One can quarrel with family, but not shoot them. The one border Pronsk shares with a non-Russian state is with Georgia, but attacking them would risk an entanglement with the Romans. While the Pronsky would not shirk from a fight with the Romans if it became necessary, such as a Roman attempt on Scythia, they would rather not trigger one if they do not have to do so.

However a united Russia gives the Pronsky more opportunities. Wealthy elites, such as the great landowners and urban merchants, want greater access to the opportunities of Baltic and Black Sea trade and Siberian expansion. Even if they just remove all internal-to-Russia barriers to trade, that would provide them with a huge market for their goods. By acting through a united Russia, the Pronsky would be able to expand their opportunities.

The delegates get to work gradually hammering out a constitution for the reunited Russia. There are certainly conflicts and quarrels, fueled by ideological and personal differences, and sometimes the arguments do get rather heated. But those, while frustrating, are manageable because everyone does want the conference to succeed.

The Novgorodians want unity because they still have some unfinished business with Scandinavia. They also see opportunities for their Baltic export business in greater access to Pronsky goods. And there is the matter of that English insult. The Lithuanians want unity both to help ensure political stability within the Principality and to guard against aggression from the west. The Scythians want unity to protect themselves from the Romans. Trade with Rhomania is a vital part of the Scythian economy, but the experience of Vlachia starkly shows the dangers of a smaller state getting too enmeshed with Rhomania. A united Russia would enable Scythia to continue benefiting from the trade, while giving it the strength to defend itself.

After nine weeks they produce a draft that they then present to the Zemsky Sobor. A significant innovation they make is the creation of a two-house legislature, designed to balance the Pronsky claims of preeminence based on wealth and population and the legal equality of all the Principalities. The lower house is styled as the Grand Veche, with its membership to be determined on the basis of population. Each principality automatically gets 3 delegates, with an additional delegate for every third-of-a-million, so Pronsky gets 51 delegates (3+16*3) while Khazaria gets 9 (3+2*3). There is a total of 99 delegates.

It must be pointed out that while the number of delegates is determined by population, those eligible to vote for Grand Veche delegates hardly approaches universal suffrage. The qualifications for voting for delegates to the regional Veches varies from principality to principality, but the delegates propose that for the Grand Veche, any adult head of household who pays at least 40 Novgorod gold rubles in tax can vote for Grand Veche delegates.

The argument is that the Grand Veche is supposed to be a symbol of unity for all of Russia, so it should be elected via a common standard. One argument for an autocratic Russia had been that the monarch could be said symbol. The delegates recognize the need for such a thing but don’t want it to be an autocrat, so the new legislature is meant to fill the gap.

That proposal would mean that roughly 4.5% of the Russian population could vote in these elections. While that seems like a very small proportion by modern standards, that is still one-and-a-quarter million, a huge electorate by seventeenth-century standards. Furthermore, due to the way it is written, a few women who are heads of wealthy households (usually widows) are eligible to vote. That was not intended, but when some women do exercise the right, the legality is upheld. And despite some proposals to add the word ‘male’ to the law, that is never done either, mostly on the grounds that the numbers are tiny and don’t justify tinkering with the Constitution, which shouldn’t be tampered with lightly.

The upper house is styled as the Senate, with each principality sending 3 senators, those to be voted upon by the members of the appropriate regional Veche. The monarch also appoints 4 senators of his own, making a total of 19 senators.

Both houses can debate and initiate legislation, although said legislation has to be approved by both houses. Many powers are left to the principalities, to be managed as they see fit, but the power of the federal legislature is significantly sharpened over its late sixteenth century version. Under that system, only the regional veches could levy taxes that were not customs duties, with a pledge to automatically send 25% of their tax income to fund the federal government. The fulfillment of that pledge was intermittent. That had resulted in a weak federal government that had patently failed in the task of keeping Russia together, and thus is unacceptable.

While the regional Veches can still levy taxes to fund the principalities’ various activities, the federal legislature is empowered to levy federal taxes to fund itself. It will need the fund to perform its duties. These duties include managing all inter-principality issues. All trade and movement barriers between the principalities are to be dropped. The removal of trade barriers is desired by merchants and landowners who produce for the market, while the removal of movement barriers is to encourage the development of Siberia, a project dear to Basil’s heart.

Any legislation regarding foreign affairs, such as treaties, will also be the responsibility of the federal legislature. The federal taxes are also to pay for a federal Russian army and navy. While the principalities can retain regional forces of their own funded from local taxes, a federal army is seen as both a military imperative to protect Russia and also as another means to help unify the Russian principalities and people.

The executive is to be taken up by Basil Laskaris, who will rule as a hereditary monarch, passing the throne and executive position on to his descendants. The Grand Veche and Senate pass the laws but he will be the one to carry them out. He is the commander of the army and navy and can appoint generals and admirals as he sees fit. He can also appoint cabinet officials and ambassadors, although those require Senate approval. His signature is also required to make any legislation valid, but he can veto laws. However, said veto can be overturned if two-thirds of both houses still vote for the legislation to pass.

Another change is the breakup of Khazaria & Siberia. The Principality of Khazaria, comprising the land between the Volga and the Urals, is treated as one of the five principalities. Siberia however is not and is placed under the direct control of the monarchy, with the monarch having the right to appoint regional governors and other officials as he sees fit. This was at the insistence of Basil, who would not accept the constitution otherwise. However it is written that at some point in the future, the assumption being once Siberia’s population has risen to a point more comparable to the other principalities, Siberia will become its own principality within the federal empire with all the rights and privileges thereof.

Basil is losing power in this arrangement, since in Khazaria, while he had to deal with a regional Veche, he had more authority. But he views it as a sacrifice worth making. He is, in his own right, a Russian nationalist, believing in the project.

Furthermore, Khazaria by itself was a small state. With Siberia it might become more substantial, but Khazaria didn’t have the resources to develop it, but a united Russia certainly does. Plus there is a matter of history. He is a Laskarid after all, a scion of the dynasty that took Rhomania from the brink of death and restored it to glory. And yet there is no Laskarid on the throne in Constantinople, and with one brief exception there has not been for over two centuries. He could bring such glory to his hallowed family name by restoring it to rule, albeit in partial fashion, over another great empire, especially one already much larger and populous than Rhomania, and with so much potential. Basil finds the irony too delicious to abstain.

The Zemsky Sobor, as the combined Grand Veche and Senate is styled, must assemble at least once every three years. It can be summoned either by a monarch or by at least three of the Chief Posadniks of the regional Veches, and must sit for at least six weeks before it can be dismissed. Only the monarch has the authority to dismiss the Zemsky Sobor. Vladimir, with its history of failure as the capital of a federal united Russia, is not chosen as the meeting site, despite the formulation assembly taking place in Vladimir. A new start should start somewhere new, and so it is decided that the prosperous town of Moscow should be the new capital of the new Russia.

Another innovation comes in the manner of titles. Basil had been King of Khazaria, but that is too lowly a title for the sovereign of the new Russia. There is the old ‘Megas Rigas’, but that is no longer acceptable either. That had been bestowed by the Roman Emperor, and that is unacceptable for two reasons. Firstly, any aspect of the Russian government is not in the purview of the Roman Emperor, and nothing must be allowed to imply that. Secondly, the title while grander than King, was also meant to still be subordinate to the Roman Emperor.

Boris Morozov, the former Pronsky ambassador to Rhomania and one of the Pronsky delegates who writes the Constitution, proposes the solution. There is an appropriate title, one the Russians have bestowed on only two rulers throughout history. The first was the Roman Emperors, the second the Khans of the Golden Horde. These were both mighty and powerful rulers, but Boris sees no reason why the Russians should shirk placing themselves in such august company. His arguments carry the day, and thus it is decided that the monarchs of the reunified Russia shall be styled as Tsar. (This is also the impetus behind the Russian demand that the Metropolitan of Kiev be promoted to the rank of Patriarch. A true Tsar would accept nothing less.)

There is some debate, but the constitution, while developed by the special committee, had already been examined by their colleagues in the regular Zemsky Sobor, and so it passes there rather quickly. Basil and the regional Veches also give their approval as well.

The official start of the new Russia is typically given as Christmas Day, 1642. After Basil swears an oath to uphold the constitution and to protect and defend the freedoms of the Russian peoples, the Metropolitan of Kiev, in the Church of Holy Wisdom, crowns him as Tsar. The title is a rejection of a Roman title, and a new insistence on equality with the ancient empire to the south, but Roman influence is still clear (Tsar is a variant of Caesar after all), particularly in the way the Metropolitan introduces the just-anointed monarch to his people, in a formulation that has stood to this day.

“By the Grace of God, and by the will of the Senate and People of the Rus, I present to you the Tsar of All the Russians!”

 

[Basileus444]

Changing the Flow: North Africa in the late 1640s​

North Africa had, since the fall of Carthage to the Arabs in the late 600s, always been a very distant and minor concern for Constantinople, even after the reestablishment of a Roman presence in the area in the 1400s. In 1645, Roman presence in the region is represented by its island outposts at Tabarka and Djerba, plus the vassal Emirate of Tripoli, supported by the Kephalate of Malta & Gozo. As well there is the Despotate of Carthage, which controls an area surrounding the city plus an enclave at Mahdia.

These areas had suffered consistently from Roman neglect. Partly this was due to distance, as travel time, one-way, between the capital and these holdings was measured in weeks at best and often in months. Furthermore these lands were simply unprofitable. Tabarka brought in some finance with its coral fisheries, but not enough to even cover the costs of the naval base and squadron stationed there. Everywhere else was even worse. Also for Rhomania, these areas didn’t hold a strategic significance that might justify the cost. In terms of defending the Aegean against piracy, including Barbary corsairs, the squadrons in Crete and Piraeus did much better work, and were cheaper as well.

The purpose of these holdings was to guard against Barbary corsairs, and they had some effect in that regard. The Roman expedition against Tripoli in 1566 had destroyed a small nest of pirates, while the Algerians certainly regarded Tabarka as an annoying thorn. But, as recent history shows, that effect was still rather limited. The Sicilians wanted more, particularly after the unimpressive Roman performance in the expedition against Algiers.

Athena faces a dilemma here. Good relations with Sicily are crucial, yet spending more money on such peripheral areas is absolutely not in the treasury’s interest. Furthermore there is a faction at court and society that views recent Sicilian behavior, going back to the Italian affair, as ungrateful and impertinent. At best they are not inclined to provide funds in an effort that will disproportionately benefit the Sicilians; at worst they argue for some kind of readjustment in the Roman-Sicilian relationship. The faction is small but growing in number, and already includes a noticeable number of mid-ranking army officers, with interests in changing things in the empire far beyond just Sicilian affairs.

Athena at this point is more concerned about the financial issues. Spending money on provisions for Tabarka that could instead go to Thessaloniki (and more efficiently too) is hard to justify. So she comes up with an alternative, signing these territories over to the Sicilians. Tabarka, Djerba, and Malta & Gozo are to become Sicilian lands, while the Emir of Tripoli will henceforth be a Sicilian vassal. This saves the Romans the expense of maintaining these holdings, which had been utterly dependent on Sicily for provisions anyway.

The Sicilians had not been expecting such a proposal, but quickly take it up. From their perspective this is even better, as with direct control of such bases they can apply much sterner pressure on the North African coast, more easily than trying to pressure Romans. But while the Roman exchequer and the Sicilians like the idea, the aforementioned faction is outraged, disgusted at the signing away of Roman holdings, even if they are unprofitable dots on the edge of the map, which is why Athena had thought the transfer would not be an issue. Their anger helps to scuttle a different proposal whereby Rhomania-in-the-West would be sold to the Spanish, a proposal Athena had seriously entertained before deciding, after the Sicilian deal, that the money saved wasn’t worth the political backlash.

The Sicilians are not content to just change out the signs and continue as before. They are both more invested in using these holdings, and also can’t afford to let them be money-swallowing holes. The transfer marks the start of a Sicilian and Carthaginian push against central North Africa, supported partly by these new bases. The push is long and slow, varying in intensity, as the transfer does take place while Sicily is wracked by famine and plague, but it is a noticeable new trend that was not there before.

Tabarka’s coral fisheries continue to be exploited. Djerba’s olive tree groves are massively expanded and exploited, reviving the island’s former reputation as a prodigious producer of fine olive oil. The Romans had not exploited this as the heartland already produced plenty of olive oil and there was a risk of saturating the market. Also it would be competing against locally produced olive oil with that had lower shipping costs, so it likely wouldn’t do well either. The Sicilians didn’t produce as much olive oil per capita as the Romans, so there was a market niche here, and the Sicilians had the opportunity to export it onward to other parts of Italy and the western Mediterranean. Roman merchants, rarely active west of the Straits of Messina, would not have considered such possibilities.

Of bigger significance though are developments on the mainland. Tripoli was a pathetically poor husk under Roman rule, which had suited the Romans who’d only been interested in destroying a potential corsair base much better placed than Algiers to attack Romans in their home waters. Without piracy, Tripoli’s hopes of economic vitality depended on trade across the Sahara, then exporting African goods to markets in the Mediterranean. However the Romans got sub-Saharan African goods in quantity via Ethiopia and the Red Sea and had little need to use the Tripoli route. With no northern customers and no goods to trade with the South, Tripoli withered.

The Sicilians and Carthaginians though are interested in opening up trade routes across the Sahara, with Carthage’s incentives the same as would be the case for Tripoli. The Marinid hold on its eastern territories is again weakening due to bouts of political infighting in their Moroccan power base. (The Marinids have a history of expansion and contraction depending on their stability in Morocco, surviving by an impressively stubborn hold on Morocco itself, even if everything else falls away for a time.) This allows the Carthaginians to begin pushing southward through the ancient Roman province of Africa, imposing authority and winning allies among the villages and Bedouin. An important sweetener is reviving the trade across the sands, which is a benefit to everyone through whose lands it passes. A similar process enfolds south of Tripoli, pushed by the Sicilians via their new vassal.

The main trade items that go north to south are textiles, horses, iron bars, and guns and gunpowder. After the trade is well established, ‘Cart guns’ become a common expression in the lands around Lake Chad. These are poor-quality but cheap muskets that often come from Carthage (although usually made in Sicilian workshops), hence the name. Given their poor quality, they aren’t particularly lethal weapons even by the standards of muskets, which isn’t helped by the fact that the bullets are usually just pieces of the imported iron bars that are shaved off with a knife and shoved down the barrel. [1]

However the relative non-lethality of the Cart guns isn’t a bug but a feature. Items that go south to north include gold dust, salt, and ivory. However the backbone of this trade route is the trade in slaves. Transporting goods across the Sahara is hard, but slaves can walk and also carry other goods as well, so for their owners this is a double-win. The trade in enslaved humans is absolutely essential to the success of Sicilian and Carthaginian efforts in developing this trade route. This is also why the relative non-lethality is useful. The buyers of the Cart guns use them to help procure more slaves to fuel further trade, but dead men can’t be sold as slaves.

The Sicilians and Carthaginians did not create the slave trade, but they do help fuel it in the Lake Chad region, with the provision of horses and guns providing the tools for its expansion. The process is identical, although on a much smaller scale, to that unfolding on the western coasts of Africa that are involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Societies with access to the gunpowder weapons have an advantage, using them to expand empires that are funded by enslaving defeated opponents. The only real differences is that the coastal Atlantic states usually don’t get horses, unlike the Lake Chad areas where ‘gunpowder-cavalry empires’ become the terror of their neighbors, and in numbers. For the time period where the Atlantic trade moves millions, the Libyan trade, as the Sicilian-Carthaginian effort is called, moves tens of thousands.

The Sicilians and Carthaginians rarely export the enslaved humans they purchase in Tripoli and Carthage. The Romans purchase their slaves from Ethiopian merchants in Egypt, while the western Mediterranean powers are tapped into the Atlantic trade. The slaves are mainly used for construction projects, mining (which, like in ancient times, is practically a death sentence), swamp drainage, as workers at large agricultural estates, and as house slaves to adorn the homes of the wealthy. A small revival of the Patriarchate of Alexandria’s finances comes from the Patriarch, via Carthaginian Orthodox merchants, investing in shares in slave trading enterprises, reaping respectable profits.

There is little indication of moral outrage at this trade, as can be seen by the Patriarch of Alexandria’s involvement, which is no secret. The main cries of annoyance come from the use of slaves as agricultural labor that has the potential to push out tenant farmers. Hence the common use of slaves for dangerous and/or extremely laborious work that people are happy to leave to them, such as mining sulfur from Etna and Vesuvius. The unsurprisingly high death rates certainly please the investors in the slave trade, as there is thus a continual demand for more ‘product’.

The transfer takes place in 1647, coinciding with a significant development in trade just to the east in Egypt. The Great Canal, as the Roman canal between Marienburg am Nil and Suez is pretentiously and unimaginatively officially called, had always had issues due to it connecting the Nile and Red Sea. When the level of the Nile was higher than the Red Sea, it deposited vast quantities of silt that had to be cleared. This was back-breaking work, done by slaves purchased from Ethiopian merchants.

However a much greater issue occurred when the Nile ran low, with the Red Sea level being higher. Because the Nile is a freshwater body, while the Red Sea is a saltwater body, and the Canal connects them. When the Nile runs low, the canal dumps saltwater into the Nile, and that is disastrous since the Nile is the source of drinking water and crop irrigation for everyone downstream.

This isn’t a new issue in the 1640s, and rejuvenated Nile floods tend to flush out most of the salt. But that doesn’t alleviate the harm to those dependent on the Nile waters in the interim, and note that not all the salt is washed away. By this point, the effects of a century of the Canal and its salinization are becoming quite noticeable and destructive. The mid-1640s exacerbate this already stark trend, with weak monsoon rains in the Ethiopian highlands ensuring disastrously low Nile floods downstream.

By 1647, the issue cannot be ignored any longer. The Despot of Egypt, Andreas II, orders the Canal to be closed, its Nile end to be sealed up with earth to prevent any more seepage of salt into the river. This back-breaking work is done by the slaves who normally perform the exact opposite task; no historian knows what went through their minds.

This all happens in territory under his dominion, with the ill effects being borne by his subjects, so he does not need to consult the Romans. However they approve of the decision, without much question or argument. There really isn’t one to be made. Water and grain are essentials; pepper and kaffos are not. The grain and taxes of the Nile valley are worth far more than the eastern trade, and the livelihood and survival of three million Egyptian peasants is far more important than ensuring that Aegean basin customers can more cheaply season their dinner.

This hardly means that the trade ends. The Canal still mostly exists; it just ends somewhat short of the Nile, in the eastern suburbs of Marienburg am Nil. Given concerns about saltwater seepage, it was decided to make the earth barrier bigger on the grounds of ‘better safe than sorry’. Goods are still barged up the canal but are then unloaded at the suburban dock, carried over to the old Nile dock that used to mark the terminus of the canal, and placed on a Nile barge for the trip downstream. This process takes far more time and labor than the old system, but it is necessary. Although the Egyptians and Romans of the time do not know of how steady salinization of soil over centuries turned the once lush grain fields of ancient Sumer into desert [2], they did not need that example to know the danger. While the price of goods shipped via this route necessarily go up given the extra expense, the volume of trade does not seem to have been affected.

In response, there are some Roman proposals about digging a replacement canal between the Mediterranean and Red Sea directly, but these are quickly squashed. Even if it was feasible, which is questionable, it would be an incredibly expensive undertaking with the savings being surprisingly small to a modern viewer. Assuming a canal, sailing ships would hardly be expected to be able to reliably transit the canal under their own power. Furthermore, the hazardous winds and currents of the Red Sea would be very dangerous to Mediterranean and Indian Ocean merchantmen, so there would still need to be a changeover for the Red Sea leg, and probably another for the canal itself. So even a direct canal would not appreciably improve the situation, certainly not enough to justify its massive expense. It would not be until the age of steam, which would drastically reduce the cost while increasing its value, as steamships could hazard the Red Sea much more safely, when such proposals could be realistically revived.

[1] This is the same concept behind the ‘Long Dane’ muskets of the Ashanti, which were cheap but low-quality muskets sold to Africans. The Ashanti provided for ammunition in the same manner as well.

[2] In ancient Mesopotamia over time there was a steady decline in wheat production over barley as a stopgap measure, as barley can tolerate more salt than wheat. But this can only go so far, as barley has its limits too.

 

[Basileus444]

Empire of Sorrows: Rhomania in the Little Ice Age​

The White Palace, Constantinople, November 9, 1648:

Athena entered the room, coming to the center and stopping to stare silently at the head of the chamber, where her mother, the Dowager Empress Jahzara, lay on the bed. She had gone quietly in the night, her corpse discovered only when one of her chambermaids came to serve her breakfast, at the same time she’d taken breakfast ever since she’d become Empress. Next to the bed on a wooden nightstand were two items, a copy of her father’s A New and Ancient World and a plain silver chalice that had been her father’s as well.

She stared at the chalice for a moment, wondering briefly, but then concluded it didn’t really matter. Dead was dead after all. Her mother’s health had been declining markedly for many months now. She could’ve gone naturally, but if she’d sped the process along, Athena could not blame her. That was because she loved her mother, cared for her, and she did not like to see those she loved in pain, especially pointless pain, futile pain. She had seen more than enough of that with her father, and was quite content if she never saw it again.

The simple truth, as she understood it, was that life simply is. For life to have worth, it had to have, well, worth. Life, purely for the sake of life, being, solely for the sake of being, was meaningless. Life could, and often did, have meaning, and there were many options available, but it was not a given. And if there was no worth left, and all that remained was pain, then there was no shame in ending it. An end was inevitable anyway, and there was enough pain in the world already without adding gratuitously to it.

Her father had suffered much before finally giving it up and ending it himself, and for what? To uphold some cultural taboo that as far Athena could determine, existed out of some form of society’s sadism? That would be in-character for society, she thought. But she knew it was more complicated than that. Probably the taboo had been invented by some rich priests who, when faced with peasants or slaves weary from the endless drudgery of their lives spent solely to feed the unending appetites of their masters, sought to deny them a means of flight, a path of escape. The dead cannot work, after all, and the priests needed their larders stocked and certainly weren’t going to put in the effort themselves.

If her mother had sought to avoid the same fate as her father, then Athena could only just feel relief that she had succeeded in her task. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she whispered, stepping forward. She adjusted some of the white hair on her mother’s head that had fallen down over her forehead, stroking her cheek, which was cool to the touch. “All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.”

She looked over at the silver chalice. She’d wondered sometimes, after the death of her father and especially of that of her brother, if they were damned, the four of them, the four Sideroi. The White Palace had never felt like home, ever, not like Skammandros or Smyrna, especially since the Night of the Tocsins. They’d taken the throne, the four of them, for all of them had been involved, one way or another. And how had the years passed, and what had history decreed, and what had the fates spun on their threads?

Perhaps there was another reason, besides ill health and the terrible memory of her father’s end. Athena knew how the Sideroi had come to power. It had been Jahzara’s drive and ambition that had taken them to these spectacular heights. But while the view was brilliant up here, the air was also thin, too thin for the likes of Demetrios and Odysseus. Jahzara had achieved her heart’s desire, but there were always costs to such things.

She picked up the goblet, looking at her reflection. Perhaps they were damned. But she believed in a merciful God. All things come to an end, and that included the day. But all things come to an end, and that includes the night as well.

She took the chalice with her as she left her mother’s bedchambers. Her time would come, after all, and she would have need of it then. But as she exited, she remembered a few odd scratches in her father’s journal. “Give me not a long life, but a good one. Not more, but better.”

She gave orders for the gathered attendants outside to begin making the proper preparations for the body. And then she ordered another to ask Sophia to come to her chambers; she needed to hug her daughter.

* * *​

The White Palace, Constantinople, February 1, 1649:

“It looks like a duck,” Athena said, gesturing at the black blotch. The large paper pinned up on the wall was a ‘solar scape’, as Celeste Galilei called it, a pencil drawing of an image of the sun she’d shone through a telescope onto the wall, then copying it down.

Alexeia Kukuritzia, her secretary/bodyguard, one of the women who’d gone to war dressed as a man and a veteran of the Ruse battles, the 12 Days, and Thessaloniki (where they’d met during the siege), tilted her head and squinted her eyes, looking at the blotch. “Maybe a mutant duck perhaps. But I’m not as drunk as you.”

Athena mock-glowered at her. Before she could say anything to her impertinent subordinate, she was interrupted by a string of muttered Tuscan curses. Both Athena and Alexeia looked over at the person responsible.

Celeste Galilei was hunched over her writing desk, papers in front of her, the light from the adjacent fireplace reflecting off her face. This was her study. She reached over to a stand next to the fireplace, picking up an inkpot from there and setting it on her desk, dipping a quill in it. Athena exhaled, her breath fogging, and she moved over to regain the warmth of the fire. Alexeia followed.

“Is the ink thawed?” Alexeia asked.

“Yes, finally,” Celeste muttered.

“So what’s the problem?” Athena asked. “Aside from the obvious.” It was a bad sign when the Regent of the Roman Empire had to thaw her wine over a fire before she could drink it, and wine wasn’t the only thing freezing in the ridiculous chill.

Celeste gestured at the papers in front of her, Athena recognizing the handwriting of many different correspondents. Celeste communicated via letter with many people, from Ethiopia to Sweden. “It isn’t just here. There’s unusual colds in England, Spain, and Moscow.” She gestured at another sheet, this one in Celeste’s hands. “We’ve been sharing thermometer recordings and I’ve been recording them. Average temperatures are down practically everywhere.”

“What could cause something like this?”

“That’s why I’ve been trying to figure out.” Celeste turned and gestured at the ‘solar scape’. “What do you see there?”

“Well, she sees a mutant duck,” Alexeia replied.

Celeste looked at Athena in bafflement. “Some things are best left in ignorance,” she muttered. “But what else?”

“Uh, nothing.”

“Exactly. Aside from that one sunspot, there’s nothing else.”

“So?”

Celeste dug around in her papers for a bit and then pulled one out. “Here are the solar sketches of the archimandrite of the Sumela. He’s been recording them going back to 1623. Notice a pattern?” Athena looked over the drawings. The black spots themselves on the disk themselves didn’t seem to have any kind of pattern, as far as she could tell. But…

“There’s less of them,” Athena said.

“Exactly. They’ve been decreasing in numbers. He’s not the only one that’s noticed. That’s the first sunspot I’ve seen in over two years. When I started, I’d see one a month.” [1]

“Strange, but what does it mean?”

“I don’t know, and that’s what is bothering me. Whatever is causing the cold has to be big, so an obvious possibility is the sun is responsible somehow. I’ve always thought the sun spots are essentially cool spaces in the solar fire, spots where the sun is colder than its usual, much as one might have pockets in a fire that aren’t as hot. But if that’s true, a lack of spots would suggest the sun is running hotter than usual, not colder. In which case, we should be having a heat wave, not freezing.”

Athena nodded and then patted her comfortingly on the shoulder. “Well, let me know when you do figure it out. Although something like this, even if we knew the cause, I doubt we could do anything about it.” Celeste nodded.

Athena turned and looked out through the window, which gave a fine view of the Bosporus, an excellent display of the insanity of this world. The barrier between Europe and Asia had ceased to exist; the Bosporus had frozen over. [2]

* * *​

“The elements, servants of an irate God, combine to snuff out the rest of humankind: mountains spew out fire; the earth shakes; plague contaminates the air.” (OTL: Jean-Nicholas de Parival, Short History of this Iron Century, Brussels, 1653)

“[These] days are days of shaking and this shaking is universal…” (OTL: Jeremiah Whitaker, The Peacemaker, England, 1643)

“This seems to be one of those epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are approaching the end of the world.” (OTL: The Victor, pamphlet, Madrid, 1643)

“Since [1641] I am not afraid of seeing dead people, because I saw so many of them at that time.” (OTL: Yao Tinglin, Record of Successive Years, Shanghai, China, c. 1670)

“Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.” (Bishop Manuel Rekas, sermon in Constantinople)

“The Roman people must become steel. This must be done in fire, and the slag cast out into the waste dump. This is necessary, so let it be done. Mercy will hinder this task, so let it be abandoned.” (Tourmarch Thomas Nereas)

“I sense a great evil in the heart of Rhomania. This tumor must be excised, lest it doom us all. But I fear the surgery will be terrible in its own right.” (Patriarch Adam II of Constantinople)

“Evil must be opposed. No matter the cost, for to surrender to evil is to pay an even greater price.” (Father Andronikos Hadjipapandreou)

“A pebble by itself can do nothing. But a pebble on top of a mountain can start a landslide.” (Anatolian proverb)

“They say, ‘let us go and sell their mother for three hyperpyra, their youngest child for a bag of silver! For why have compassion when one can have money instead?’” (Konon of Galesion)

“What kind of man faithfully stands guard over some cucumbers when his mother is threatened with rape on the other side of the village?” (Kastrophylax Leo Klonares)

“Many people held their lives to be of no value, for the area was so wasted and barren, the common people so poor and had suffered so much, that essentially they knew none of the joys of being alive…Every day one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam and killed himself. Others, at intervals, cut their throats or threw themselves into the river.” (OTL: Huang Liuhong, Complete Book concerning happiness and benevolence, about events in Shandong, China, c. 1670)

“Those who live in times to come will not believe that we who are alive now have suffered such toil, pain and misery.” (OTL: Fra Francesco Voersio of Cherasco, Plague Diary, Italy, 1631.)

“Perhaps now we can make a better world, a better life for our people, if we be wise and compassionate to one another. I will not say it will make the cost we have paid worthwhile, but at least it would not make the cost completely meaningless, and provide at least some salve to our grief.” (Bishop Ioannes Grozes)

“A third of the world has died.” (OTL: Abbess Angelique Arnauld, letter, Port-Royale-des-Champs, France, 1654)


[1] This is the Maunder Minimum, the period from 1645-1715 when the number of observed sunspots plummeted, indication of diminished solar activity.

[2] This is copied from OTL. In the winter of 1620-1, for forty days the Bosporus was frozen. See Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, pg. 342.

(All OTL quotes taken from the beginning of Global Crisis.)

 

[Basileus444]

Before diving straight into the chronological events of Rhomania in the Little Ice Age, I wanted to engage in some social history of Rhomania on the cusp. By outlining these features of Roman society, it will show the tools and mindsets at the disposal of the Romans, their strength and limitations, what is possible and what is not, which will be essential in explaining why Romans react to the crises the way they do. Presenting all this up-front seems to me to be far more efficient than just continuing the chronological narrative and then having to constantly backtrack to fill in necessary background. [1]

The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 1: The (Lack of) Authority of the State​

Rhomania contains multitudes.

Generalizations are inevitable, but they are also dangerous. Simplification is often necessary, but oversimplifications are wrong. The Roman Empire, the Roman people, Roman society cannot be summarized in a short concise package without sacrificing detail and nuance and exceptions. The key to understanding is to recognize that diversity, and allow for it in any summary.

Rhomania on the cusp of the Little Ice Age was a big state. It may look small on the typical political map, especially one blown up to cover the likes of Russia and China, but it was nevertheless a big state. Furthermore ‘big’ also went much further then, when horse and sail were the fastest mode of transport, compared to now. From Vidin to Edessa is about 1900 kilometers. A commercial plane flight could take less than three hours. In 1650, a traveler moving 50 kilometers a day, resting every Sunday, would take about a month-and-a-half.

A traveler traversing that route would encounter many terrains, forests, mountains, swampland, desert, the arid high plateau of Anatolia, great plains of cereals and cotton, and hillsides covered with the vine and olive trees. The many terrains and climates, with all their implications for human habitation, mean that there could be no one Roman experience, but multiple Roman experiences.

One sight the traveler could see would be the Fairy Chimneys of Kappadokia. It is unsurprising that the Roman film industry frequently uses this region for science fiction productions. (Wikimedia Commons)​

For sake of simplicity, let us remove considerations of class and the urban vs. rural dynamic, and focus just on examples of the rural poor. There would be the Albanian shepherd, the Bulgarian charcoal burner, the fisherman-farmer-sea peddler from the islands, the vegetable-and-herb gardener from the Thracian plain, the polyculture smallholder from interior Thrakesia, the pastoral nomad on the high plateau, the ascetic in the Syrian desert, and more.

The fact of diversity, and the fact of distance. These are two essential points to consider to understand Roman society as it entered the height of the Little Ice Age.

Political maps are a useful visual aid, but their presentation creates certain assumptions that are often not valid, especially for pre-industrial states that are more heavily affected by the factors of diversity and distance, especially the latter. A political map of the Roman Empire will show a solid purple mass with sharply delineated borders. It is quite clear on a map where the Roman Empire ends and the Ottoman Empire begins, and a pixel in the most barren stretch of the Anatolian plateau is just as deeply hued as Constantinople itself. With such an image, it is easy to assume that Roman authority is clearly demarcated, with authority being uniform throughout the outlined zone. That is what the imagery suggests.

Reality is anything but.

The concept of a Roman border line, in the modern sense, that is sharp, distinct, and clearly marked with signage and guarded border crossings, is mostly nonexistent in this period. There are some exceptions where natural features can make the border extremely obvious, such as the Danube River, and where large settlements lie near the border. Those areas near those border towns are well patrolled and marked, and so the border near them resembles the modern conception.

But move no more than a day’s march from those settlements, and those features disappear. For along most of the line, there is no line. The frontier is a zone, with extremely fuzzy edges. The Roman Empire doesn’t end at one spot and the Ottoman Empire begin. Instead the Roman zone fades into the frontier, and then as one crosses the zone the Ottoman Empire gradually coalesces on the other side. But without the clear markers that are major settlements, the contours of these zones are impossible to define.

Pastoral nomads whose summer and winter pastures lie on opposite sides of the border line don’t care one bit about the scribbles of bureaucrats in a far-off city. The response of Roman and Ottoman border officials is identical and illustrates quite nicely the fluidity of the border. They are less interested in policing movement than in ensuring that the state they serve gets its taxes. One solution would be to tax the nomads at their pastures, with the Romans taxing them at the pasture on their side of the border with the Ottomans do the same on the other side. However the nomads would despise such a proposal, because it means they are double-taxed.

One option for the nomads to avoid such a thing would be to change their pasturage routes so that they stay within one Empire. However that is vastly easier said than done. There are multiple herds and herders involved, each with traditional pastures and routes in a system that long predates the current border placement. To adjust one would require adjusting many, perhaps all, and that just gets complicated really fast.

Furthermore the ecology doesn’t care about the political boundaries, so there are frequently practical reasons for the pastoralists to want pastures that end up on opposite sides of the border. The Roman lands are predominantly mountainous, with the Ottoman territories down in the lowlands, although this is one of those generalizations with frequent exceptions. Thus Roman lands are good summer pasture, while the Ottoman lands are good winter pasture.

Roman and Ottoman border officials are cognizant of these difficulties. Given the difficulty of policing pastoralists already, they are reticent to implement policies they know would be hated for their attacks on tradition and even basic livelihoods. So they don’t even pretend to enforce a border line. Instead herds and herdsmen are designated as either Roman or Ottoman, in a process of negotiation between border officials and the pastoralists in question. With a few high-profile exceptions, Constantinople and Hamadan are virtually uninvolved in said process. The pastoralists are then taxed on their herds by whichever Empire with which they have been identified, at whatever time of their annual peregrinations they happen to be within said Empire. Given the layout of pasturage, this means that on literally every day of the year, there are Roman pastoralists on the Ottoman side of the border and vice versa. And this is considered, by everyone involved, to be normal. The image of a solid, clearly marked, and impermeable border is completely contrary to the realities of the frontier zone.

The Roman-Ottoman border is the most extreme example, given its length, terrain, and the number of migratory populations, but it is not unique. Roman peasants might take their goods to a Serbian market to trade, because the Serbian market is 3 kilometers away while the nearest Roman town market is 12 kilometers away. And if the market is small enough and isolated enough, the peasants don’t have to worry about customs duties, from either side. It isn’t worth the expense of sending a border patrol just to ensure customs duties are paid on a few dozen eggs, mushrooms, and the odd goat. And if there are disputes between Romans and Serbs, it’s not on the basis of arguments between polities; it is that of two neighboring villages arguing over access to a meadow or the like. They are far more likely to settle it between themselves and only resort to higher authorities if there is no other way to break the impasse.

Replace ‘Serbian’ with ‘Georgian’ in the above paragraph and it represents the situation along much of the frontier on the opposite side of the Empire. Only where major trade routes and settlements and markets are present is state authority more prevalent and enforced.

Roman state authority is based on three loci, with the rule of thumb being that the Roman government is more active and authoritative in areas as they are proximate to one or more of the loci, which can and do reinforce each other. These loci are firstly, the proximity to Constantinople. The second is proximity to cities in general, with the larger the city the more it acts as a center of state authority. (Constantinople is listed as its own loci, because its function as the imperial capital gives it more weight as a center of authority beyond just the large settlement factor.) The third is proximity to the sea. The ease and speed of moving orders and goods and people by sea makes it far simpler for the state to enforce its will if maritime transport is available.

Using that as a model, it shows that Roman lands under the greatest state authority are coastal areas that are near settlements. Meanwhile interior areas far from the shore and cities (and cities in the interior are drastically smaller than coastal ones) would be the areas least affected. Since that describes much of the frontier, that is why the borderlands are some of the territories the least under effective consistent control from the imperial center.

One example of this is an interesting and surprising incident that occurs in the Kephalate of Heliopolis (Baalbek) in late 1648, when the Mufti of a Sunni Muslim village issues a petition to the Kouaistor of the district. A village girl has run away from home and converted to Judaism in order to be with the object of her affections and the Mufti wants the girl returned to her father. It must be noted that this is just a few years after the Great Crime, with the ban on Sunni Muslims in Syria still legally in effect, and yet here we have an entire village of Sunni Muslims, large enough to support a Mufti, making its presence explicitly known to the Roman authorities and even feeling confident enough to make requests of said authorities.

The response of the Kouaistor is also surprising to one expecting clear and sharp obedience to dictates from the imperial center. The Kouaistor agrees with the Mufti and promptly arranges for the girl to be taken into custody and returned to her village, at which point she disappears from the record. There is no attempt to enforce the expulsion order, while the Kouaistor’s order explicitly recognizes the right of the villagers to maintain their internal affairs according to their Islamic customs.

The only hiccup to the smooth transfer is from some marginalia inscribed by an assistant secretary, arguing that since Judaism is closer to Christianity than Islam, the girl should not be forced to return. A note from the Kouaistor responds that such questions as the proximity of religions to one another should be left to theologians. In administration, it is far easier to just let the religious minorities run their own affairs and discipline their own members for apostasy. Only in the case of conversion of Orthodoxy would the administration intervene.

To add an extra wrinkle, the documents that provide the evidence for this instance are from the archives of the Mesazon of Syria in Antioch, meaning that knowledge of this must have moved up the chain and did not stay isolated in the rather-minor Kephalate. Yet there is no evidence of even the slightest reprimand of the Kouaistor, much less an order to enforce the expulsion order on the village. Constantinople might issue orders that were totalitarian in scope, but the capital’s ability to completely enforce compliance clearly had holes.

Distance was a key factor in weakening the reach of the state, but distance can change both horizontally and vertically. A change in elevation could have drastically more effect on the strength of state authority then just moving across the landscape. It has been said that a 500 meter increase in elevation was equivalent to moving 50 kilometers inland in terms of the effect of decreasing state authority. While the ratio should not be taken literally, it does illustrate the magnitude vertical change can have, two orders of magnitude higher than the horizontal change.

This helps to explain the Sunni village. It was located in the mountains of Lebanon, historically a place of limited state authority. That village is also not unique, with other Sunni pockets existing after the Great Crime, although few are as obvious about their continued presence, especially so recently. But all of the exceptions exist in rugged and isolated locations, while their co-religionists in the flatlands were destroyed.

The mountainous zones often have practically no state authority at all, with the inhabitants managing their own affairs. For example, mountain summer pastures and herd-paths are marked by boundary stones. If someone transgresses these markers, the violator is not taken to court. In the winter, the herds move down to winter pastures on the coast, often near port towns where the herdsmen sell their animal products at the markets. After that work is done, the trespasser will be dealt with by a murder in an alleyway of Dyrrachium or Arta or Sinope or Attaleia. It’s much easier to do it then rather than trying to hunt him down in the mountains.

Local authorities are quite familiar with the issue. However, given the practical impossibility of policing the mountains and thus removing the causes of these feuds, the local authorities let such things slide. So long as the herders keep such things to themselves and don’t involve the townspeople and farmers, the authorities won’t bother them. In fact, if the herders direct their energies on each other, that means they’ll have less time and energy to harass said townsfolk and farmers. No urban official wants to make a big fuss over some dead shepherd.

The reach of the state is limited. The reach of the church is far greater. There are 170 Kephales in the heartland in 1650, after the transfer of Malta to Sicilian control. There are nearly 500 bishops in Anatolia alone. While an isolated mountain village might see a secular official a few times a year, if that, it will have a resident priest. The quality and nature of the priest can vary quite substantial. The priest might be rather poorly educated himself on the details of the Orthodox faith, and spend much of his time growing vegetables and chopping firewood as a means of supporting himself rather than dealing with religious matters. But there will be a resident priest, and that basic fact alone gives the Orthodox Church much greater weight in the lives of even the most isolated Romans than that of the Roman government.

There are some gaps in the Church’s reach. The mountain village has a resident priest, but the village inhabitants are sedentary. More mobile populations are much less affected by the Church. Miners, woodsmen, and charcoal-burners, working in isolated areas and often moving around in search of new work, are rarely settled enough for a resident priest to set up shop. Entertainers of all types, including sex workers, are frequently on the road. The free and wanton ways of Vlach shepherdesses is a common cliché, viewed with delight or horror depending on one’s moral inclinations, and it is blamed on a lack of religious instruction because of their mobile lifestyle. And then there are the pastoral and agro-pastoral nomads in parts of Anatolia and Syria, who live in tents on the basis of their herds. All of these mobile groups (and it must be noted that there is substantial variation in how mobile these groups are compared to one another) are viewed with suspicion by their sedentary neighbors, of being suspect morally, in large part because of the lack of Christian influence.

But even here the Church can reach further than the state. For an example, return to those shepherds descending down from the mountains for winter pastures and markets along the coast. If they have a feud, local officials won’t get involved. However when the shepherds arrive, local priests will also arrive. The shepherds will build an altar of cheeses for the priest, from which the priest will bless the shepherds, their herds, and conduct any other religious rites the shepherds desire. When finished, the priest will then take away the cheeses that made up the altar as payment for his services while the shepherds return to their regular affairs. No state official is ever involved.

[1] Inspiration for this current project, a social history of Rhomania as it stands on the eve of the Little Ice Age, comes mostly from the works of Fernand Braudel, principally his two-volume work on the Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II and his 3-volume Civilization & Capitalism. The specific examples of the shepherds resolving boundary feuds by murder in coastal towns during the winter, and also paying priests in altars of cheeses, are both taken from Vol. 1 of his work on the Mediterranean.

 

[Basileus444]

The Contexts of Roman Society, part 2: Transport by Land, an Exercise in Friction​

The weakness of state authority in large swathes of territory that on a map were under its dominion was not done willingly. The mountains could have valuable mineral and timber resources; nomads produced significant animal products. Even if the lands and peoples there didn’t have anything of value themselves, they could cause trouble for other, more tax-lucrative regions.

The difficulty was a practical outcome of the limitations of transportation and communication. Projecting power into these regions was time-consuming, expensive, and often hazardous. Even if it were possible, which was not guaranteed, the rewards would hardly justify the expense. In 1650 the inhabitants of Mount Taygetos are Slavs, remnants of the Slavic invasions of Hellas eleven centuries earlier. Although converted to Orthodoxy, they still retain a distinct Slavic identity after all those years, secured by their mountain holdings. [1]

The sea can make things much easier for the state, hence why government control is much stronger throughout the Aegean themes than in the interior vastness of the Anatolikon and Armeniakon themes. According to Diocletian’s Edict on Prices, sea transport is twenty times cheaper than land transport. And note that this is at the height of the Roman Empire with its fabled road networks. Even with those highways, sea transport is massively more efficient than moving it overland.

That differential has not changed much, if at all, in the intervening 1300 years. The difficulties of land transport compared to sea transport in late antiquity are substantively the same as those of the early modern period. It would not be until significant improvements in road and carriage construction, and then especially the advent of railroads, that the ratio would be appreciably altered. [2] And yet even today most goods still move by sea, with cargo ships by far the cheapest way to move them.

Going by this calculation, it is cheaper to ship a package by sea from Constantinople to Lisbon than it is to transport that same package from Constantinople to Ankyra.

Despite their inferiority to seaborne transport, the Roman Empire does have a series of major roads to facilitate land transport. They include the famous Via Egnatia from Constantinople to Dyrrachion via Thessaloniki, and the Military Highway from Constantinople that cuts diagonally across the Haemic peninsula to Belgrade via Adrianople, Philippopolis (Plovdiv), and Serdica (Sofia). Another main road from Constantinople is the north coastal road that skirts the western shore of the Black Sea to Varna before cutting across to Ruse and then paralleling the Danube upstream. The remaining key highway in Roman Europe is the one that branches south from Thessaloniki, mostly following a coastal route through Thessaly and into Attica, connecting with Athens and then through Corinth, Karytaina, and Mistra to terminate at Monemvasia.

In Anatolia there is the major coastal highway of western Anatolia, which begins at Chalcedon just opposite Constantinople. Aside from swings inland to link with Nicaea and Prusa, it stays near the Sea of Marmara until reaching Kyzikos, before cutting across the northwest corner of Anatolia to reach Adramyttion on the Aegean. After that it remains a coastal highway, linking Smyrna and Ephesus before terminating at Miletus.

There are two main highways that cut through the interior of Anatolia, both of which branch off at some point from the coastal highway. The north one begins at Nicaea and goes southeast until Dorylaion, then pivoting northeast to skirt the northern edge of the Anatolian plateau as it heads east, connecting Ankyra, Euchaita, Evdokia, Amaseia, Koloneia, Theodosiopolis, and Khlat on the shores of Lake Van.

The southern route begins at Smyrna, connecting Sardis, Philadelphia, Chonai, Ikonion, and Laranda, before going through the Cilician Gates and through Cilicia and the Amanus Mountains. Like the northern highway, it skirts the Anatolian plateau, this time along its southern edge.

There are some Anatolian highways that are shorter individually in length than the coastal, northern interior, and southern interior, but are important enough to be included in the main highway category. There is a branch line from the coastal that breaks away at Pergamon that connects with the northern interior at Dorylaion, linking with Kotyaion in the process. Other important branch lines are one that cuts south from the southern interior to the port of Attaleia, with the northern interior having an opposite number that connects the highway to Trebizond.

The northern interior and southern interior highways are also connected by two shorter north-south roads which also continue the custom of skirting the center of the plateau. The western road links Dorylaion and Philomelion via Amorion. The eastern road is longer, beginning at Loulon just before the Cilician Gates and proceeding via Tyana, Kappadokian Kaisareia, and Sebastea before converging with the northern interior at Koloneia.

Greater Roman Syria has three major highways. The ‘frontier highway’, as it is called, breaks away from the Anatolian southern interior as it debouches from the Amanus Mountains, linking with Edessa and Amida before terminating at Khlat.

Then there is the coastal highway, which begins at Antioch and follows the Syrian coast all the way down to Gaza and to Egypt.

The ‘Syrian highway’ begins at Aleppo and parallels the coastal highway, linking with Apamea (rebuilt by the Romans after the conquest of the area), Emesa (Homs), and ending at Damascus. (Roads continue south from Damascus, but they are not nearly on the same level as the Damascus-Aleppo road). There are also several roads linking the Syrian and coastal highways, the chief ones being the Antioch-Aleppo, Emesa-Tortosa (Tartus), and Damascus-Beirut routes.

Both of these are the creation of @aldonius.​

The main roads are of good quality, although areas nearer larger settlements are the best maintained and there are certain chokepoints such as passes and bridges that can be blocked or broken, seriously impeding traffic. Note that there are also wide swaths of the Empire that are completely untouched by these major highways, such as the center of the Anatolian plateau. Maintaining high-quality roads, especially over such distances, is extremely expensive, particularly in rugged infertile areas far from major settlements and sources of supply, and so many areas just don’t rate the expense.

There are many more roads than these, connecting smaller settlements to the main lines, feeding off to service smaller and smaller communities, or there are completely detached networks of minor roads. Caria and Lykia have some roads of their own, but none connect to the main network, and they are not alone in that. Seleukeia is a thriving mid-tier port, even though the road connecting it to Cilicia is described as ‘execrable, if one was feeling charitable’ by one traveler. It pulls in goods from its local hinterland via its own small road network and exports them to Cyprus, Syria, and Cilicia (bypassing the wretch of a road). Pontus is, with the exception of Trebizond, largely unconnected by road to the outside world.

The quality of these smaller roads can vary widely, but the average rating is a poor one. Many, especially in rugged terrain, of which the Roman heartland has plenty, are not passable to wheeled vehicles at all. One needs a dependable pack mule if one wants to move any inanimate goods in bulk.

This is a key factor in limiting Roman authority in mountainous terrain. Those regions by nature cannot sustain large armed contingents that live off the land; they would need to bring in supplies to sustain themselves. However the poor infrastructure means that bringing in bulk goods is hard even by the standards of early modern land transport, so a sustained logistical effort is rarely possible. This sharply limits the pressure the central government can use on mountain folk.

This is all not to say that the roads are not important and not used. They can be quite important and busy. Moving goods by land is often unavoidable, and even when the sea is an option, the land route might still be used. For an item that can move under its own power, like a person or livestock, as opposed to an inanimate good, the land route is the cheaper choice. Also while land routes have their dangers, they are overall safer than the sea. A caravan is unlikely to sink, completely destroying all the cargo and drowning all the human participants, for example.

The roads see all kinds of traffic. There are the various officialdom of church and state. There are landless laborers looking for odd jobs and pastoralists moving their herds. There are wandering holy men and pilgrims. There are carters and muleteers who have hired themselves out during slow periods of the agricultural cycle. There are traveling entertainers of all types. And there are merchants conveying all sorts of goods, although the traders are typically on the very small scales, with peddlers and tinkerers the most common, and the typical merchant having a single-digit number of animals or carts. For shelter they can stay at the many caravanserai along with the main roads, many of the foundations of which date to the Seljuk period.

There is some long-distance trade in bulk in the inland areas, but that typically falls into one of three categories. There is trade in goods that are valuable or strategically significant enough to warrant the expense of long-distance traffic. Example of these are silver drawn from mines in the Pontic Mountains, or saltpeter from Isauria.

The second is where nature lends a helping hand with a river that significantly eases shipping. According to Diocletian’s price edict, riverine shipping is four times cheaper than land transport. It’s not at the level of ocean-going transport, but appreciably better than an ox-drawn cart. Sinope draws in goods from much of the Anatolian hinterland via the Halys River, which is its connection to the interior; there is no road.

The third is the trade in animal products that can be moved on the hoof. A live sheep, since it can walk, is much easier to move cross-country than a cartload of grain. Much of what the interior of both Roman Europe and especially Anatolia export to the more populous and prosperous coastal regions is animal products on the hoof for this reason.

There is a great deal more trade and exchange than the long-distance, but it is local in nature. The peddlers and small caravans are moving goods, but they aren’t going very far and their goods are often rather basic and common, grain, vegetables, small artisanal wares, and the like. Many of the interior cities are hubs of thriving but small regional trade networks, with little input or output into wider trade networks. Sebastea produces woolen textiles, but these rarely travel more than 100 kilometers from the city. Meanwhile Prusa silks are on sale in Novgorod.

The differential is that Prusa is not far from ports on the Marmara, and the sea makes many things possible that are, if not impossible, at least extremely difficult on land. Land transport and trade is important and active, but it is subject to a high level of friction which sharply limits options. Attaleia can, if its immediate hinterland cannot fulfill its agricultural needs, seek to place emergency grain orders in Thessaly or Sicily or Egypt and hope for relief that way. But Ikonion doesn’t have that option. After a certain point, foodstuffs imported from far afield would end up being consumed in the process by the workers and draft animals hauling them, rendering the exercise pointless. If the hinterland harvest fails, Ikonion simply goes hungry.

[1] IOTL, the Slavs of Taygetos lasted throughout the Byzantine period. The Ottomans put an end to them.

[2] In the late 1700s, improvements in road and carriage construction, such as macadam roads and carriages with springs, allowed for a significant decrease in the amount of time it took to move post and passengers. Passenger carriages could even run on strict timetables and regular schedules, a novelty for the period. Arguably this could’ve been a transport revolution in its own right, but it was still new when railroads took over and vastly superseded it with their own definite transport revolution.

 

[Basileus444]

The Contexts of Roman Society, part 3-Moving by Sea: Grain, Wine, and Small Ships​

Moving bulk goods by sea was by far the most cost-effective method, if available. It was here that the great grain haulers plied their trade, alongside galleons loaded with spices, kaffos, porcelain, and the other exotic wares of the east. Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and Alexandria were all bustling busy ports, with peoples and goods from all across the Old World present, and even some from the New World as well. Antioch and Nicaea, both slightly inland, but well-connected with the coast, were also diverse and bustling as well.

The trade in exotic goods from both east and west gets the most scholarly attention. From the west on Spanish and Arletian ships came cargoes of sugar, cocoa, peyote, Mexican mushrooms, dyewood, and cochineal, the latter greatly in demand by the Roman textile manufacturers. These were profitable but also expensive ventures, requiring substantial capital investments and frequent cooperation between international merchants.

However, despite this and the attention lavished on the trade by historians, as a percentage of the Roman economy and trade value, this was actually extremely small, a percent or two at most. Regarding trade value and particularly volume, far more important was trade in bulk goods that were individually much less profitable than silks or spices, but were far more necessary to sustaining life and moved in vastly greater quantities.

The most significant of the bulk trade goods was grain. The huge grain haulers, many over 1000 tons, were instantly recognizable wherever they went and dwarfed anything else on the water except for the larger battle-line warships. Egypt, Scythia, and Vlachia were the main sources and where the biggest haulers went, but smaller grain ships could be seen elsewhere. An example would be the ships frequenting Varna, loading Bulgarian produce to be taken to Constantinople.

The grain trade, vital to the provisioning of the great cities, was a major responsibility of civic government. The Imperial government directly supervised the provisioning of Constantinople, a task that consumed much of its energy and resources and dominated its priorities. With large producers the state negotiated directly for produce, although for dealing with greater numbers of smaller producers the state would hire a middleman to organize purchases. Shipping was typically a private enterprise, the owners working on government contracts, although the White Palace provided subsidies for the construction and maintenance of the big haulers. The grain was then stored in government warehouses and sold to city bakers.

The same model operated in other Roman cities, although there it was managed by the resident Kephale or town council, rather than by Imperially-appointed bureaucrats. The importation and provision of other foodstuffs was also organized and supervised by governmental agents, although not to the extent of grain, and many of the provisions consumed by civic populations were imported and marketed by entirely private entities. Nevertheless it was a top priority of civic governments to ensure that a sufficient supply of staple foodstuffs was always on hand, with disorder guaranteed when (not if) such efforts failed.

Much of the trade movement, by both land and sea, was focused on filling the stomachs of the cities. Just as so much of the energies of France were diverted to filling the maw of Paris, and the energies of England diverted to filling the maw of London, much of the energies of the eastern Mediterranean were diverted to filling the maw of Rhomania’s major cities. Scythian and Vlach grain fed Constantinople, while Egyptian grain fed Antioch, Smyrna, and Thessaloniki.

The quantities involved were massive, especially when one factors in the limitations of the transportation technology of the day. In 1640, Constantinople imported 100,000 cattle, 500,000 hogs, 1.5 million sheep, (these were walked, not shipped to the market, for obvious reasons) 3500 tons of butter, 1800 tons of sugar, 600 tons of honey, and 70 million gallons of wine. The Queen of Cities consumed 300 tons of grain a day, while the White Palace alone used 6700 tons of firewood. [1] And these totals do not include vegetables, fruits, olive oil, herbs, seafood, and all other types of consumables.

Much of this was shipped on rather small vessels too. The great grain haulers were 1000+ tons, but these behemoths were quite rare. Grain, because of the vast bulk that needed to be moved, combined with its rather low per-unit value, made commercial sense to ship in such volume. However with more valuable cargo items, filling such a large ship could be extremely risky; if one of them went down with all its cargo, the loss in investment could be staggering. It was much safer to spread such risk over several smaller ships. Thus many trade vessels plying the waves between the major ports were in the 200-500 ton range.

Yet in terms of numbers, these mid-sized vessels were swamped by light craft covering the waves. Roman ports of this time, when recording the arrival of vessels, divided them into two broad categories, great ships and light ships. The dividing line was a mere 50 tons, with only the tonnage of the great ships recorded. On average light ships outnumbered great ships by a factor of 20-to-1.

The predominance numerically of light ships helps to illustrate an often-forgotten element of maritime trade. The big ships supplying the big ports dominate most historical accounts of the period, but much of the trade was decidedly smaller in scale. Smyrna with its 100,000+ inhabitants depended on a broad maritime network reaching as far as Egypt to sustain itself, but the rest of Thrakesia and its 2 million plus inhabitants sustained itself on local and regional networks, mostly carried by these smaller operators.

On land, the peddler with his cart of goods, moving from place to place, buying and selling whatever was available where opportunity promised, was a common sight. The sea saw a similar thing in these light vessels, hopping from port to port, buying and selling whatever cargoes were available. These sea-peddlers worked the smaller ports, selling everything from vegetables to firewood to metal goods, although they also bought and sold in the bigger cities as well.

The peddler, whether on land or sea, often worked that occupation part-time. Many were farmers with modest landholdings that weren’t enough to sustain them by their produce alone. At the most labor-intensive times of the agricultural cycle, they were at home working their fields. However during the slowdown, they left their wives and children to manage the holding and took to their boats and carts, peddling and transporting as a way to earn more money. One result was that shipping goods at certain times of the year was much cheaper than others, as there were many more boaters or carters available. If one wanted to send a package right at the time of the wheat harvest, one would have to pay well for the service.

Shipping by sea was overall faster and cheaper than by land, but it had its disadvantages. It was more dangerous, as evidenced by the allowance of maritime loans to have substantially higher interest because of the greater risk. In 1644 a storm that suddenly brewed up in the Sea of Marmara smashed a dozen great ships and over a hundred light ships within eyesight of Constantinople. That said, if one was willing to brave winter weather and got away with it, one could make a tidy profit by selling goods at high prices, given the market scarcity that usually prevailed due to the decline in shipping.

Sea transport could also be highly irregular in travel time. While strict timetables were not present in the mid-1600s, some passenger services on land in certain well-serviced areas such as Constantinople-Adrianople, Chalcedon-Nicaea, and Smyrna-Pergamon could follow a mostly-regular schedule with mostly-consistent travel times. Meanwhile the travel time of the mail-ship from Alexandretta to Constantinople could vary by a factor of 5, depending on winds.

Yet while much of this trade was decidedly humble and unglamorous, with fishing boats carrying small cargoes of wine, cheese, and cooking pots (and the same is true for the land; just replace fishing boat with mule or cart), there was a lot of it. The Aegean Sea was full of ships during the sailing season, and while many of the ships were only making small circuits, they knit the region together in an interconnected economic zone. The Aegean themes: the Thracian, Macedonian, Hellenic, Optimatic, Opsikian, and Thrakesian, contained the bulk of the Empire’s population. While there were huge regional variances in this zone, much of the Aegean basin was highly developed and urbanized by the standards of the mid-1600s. Sea transport alone did not make that possible, as the great cities still drew intensely from their local regions even as they imported Egyptian or Scythian grain, but the maritime links were still of crucial importance.


[1] Except for hogs, sugar, honey, wine, and firewood, the figures are derived from the OTL imports of Ottoman Constantinople in the mid-1600s, adjusted for population difference. The hogs are a change ITTL, since it is a predominantly Christian rather than Muslim city, with the hogs substituted for sheep on a 1:1 basis. Sugar and honey imports are adjusted totals for imports into Naples. Source: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1, pgs. 347, 350-1.

Wine is population-adjusted for late 1700s Parisian imports. Source: Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, pg. 7.

Firewood consumption is copied from the OTL Topkapi Palace’s consumption in this period. Source: Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the early modern Ottoman Empire, pg. 31.

I must note some discrepancies regarding sheep consumption in my sources. Braudel lists OTL Constantinople as consuming 4 million sheep a year in the mid-1600s, while White lists only 1.5 million in the early 1600s. Furthermore, according to McPhee’s figures, OTL Paris in the late 1700s, of a comparable size to Constantinople 150 years earlier, only imported 400,000 sheep, plus 40,000 hogs, substantially less meat per capita than Constantinople. It is possible that the denizens of Paris were substantially less carnivorous than Constantinople, and note that the size of the sheep is unspecified (Mediterranean livestock in the early modern period was smaller than northern varieties), but even so the discrepancy is startling.

In short, treat these numbers like figures from an OTL early modern history. As exact figures they are suspect, but they can be useful references to understand the general scale of the process being described.

 

[Basileus444]

The Contexts of Roman Society, part 4-1: Life and Death in the Big City​

By the standards of the 1640s, Roman society was heavily urbanized, although it is important to note that those standards are far different from those of today. In 1645, roughly 20% of the Roman heartland’s population lived in cities or towns. Half of that group lived in cities of 8000 inhabitants or more, with the other half living in towns of between two and eight thousand. This level of urbanization was also a new development. Between 1550 and 1630, the Roman population had increased by about 50%, while the urban population was just short of doubling in the same period, caused originally by the growth of manufacturing and commerce during the economic boom of the Flowering and then by agricultural and land strain in the 1600s.

Roman urbanization also followed a somewhat different pattern to that of other Christian states. Constantinople was not the biggest city in Christendom any longer, with London just short of a half million and Paris just about a half million. However the typical pattern was to have a megalopolis, with any other cities to be much smaller. France had Paris, but its second city King’s Harbor was one-fifth the size. England had London, but its second city Norwich was one-eleventh the size. Spain had Lisbon, but its second city Seville was three-eighths the size. Even pre-war Lombardy, controlling highly urbanized northern and central Italy, had its second city Firenze just 40% the size of its first, Milan.

Rhomania looked much different. Constantinople was still the Queen of Cities here, but the competition was much stiffer. Thessaloniki and Antioch were each half her size, with Smyrna at two-fifths and Alexandria and Nicaea at a third. In stark contrast to England and London, in the Roman heartland there were 16 cities that held at least 10% of the population of Constantinople. The only areas in Christendom with urban networks, comprising a great many cities of fairly-comparable size, which looked like Rhomania were the Low Countries, the Despotate of Sicily, and northern Italy if one removed Milan as an outlier.

One attraction of the big city was the prospect of food. Villages and towns drew their provisions from a small catchment area, while the great metropolises saw provender from across the sea. The foodstuffs shipped to urban areas only fed a fraction of the overall Roman population, but overall the flow was the most reliable given the attention and expense bestowed on it by authorities. This attracted poor rural migrants who came to the cities looking for food and work.

It is important not to oversell the effect. Government authorities wanted to avoid starving mobs, but the urban poor were hardly well-fed. A diet dependent on the bread dole and charity was monotonous, nutrient-deficient, and rarely filling. One could eat almost anything in Constantinople, provided one had enough money, but in times of scarcity, which were inevitable despite all efforts and precautions, those without money would go hungry first.

As a result, Roman urban dwellers of the period show signs of malnutrition compared to their rural counterparts. The rural peasant would be more likely to outright starve to death after a couple of bad harvests, since he or she couldn’t rely on the Egyptian grain haulers as a backup. However if they could avoid that fate, he or she was more likely to enjoy a diet better in calories and nutrients than their urban poor counterpart. Roman army records from the second half of the 1600s that list the height of new recruits show that soldiers from Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Antioch, and Smyrna were on average 3-5 centimeters shorter than those from outlying rural districts in the same theme. [1]

An absolutely key difference between historical and modern cities is that historical cities were demographic black holes. More died there than were born. Urban populations could not and did not sustain themselves naturally; their continued maintenance depended on a continual import of fresh bodies from the countryside. Without that import, pre-industrial cities would wither away, and history is littered with many examples.

People of the past were not stupid, and they no more enjoyed living in filth surrounded by bad smells than moderns do. However they lacked the modern technology to so easily dispose of waste materials, and they also had need of those waste materials in ways moderns don’t, and so were much more limited in how they could deal with such problems. Virtually every household would have a washbasin so one could clean hands, feet, and face, but having to fill and heat by hand a bath large enough for full immersion was too laborious to be readily practical, for example.

Sewers certainly existed, but were woefully inadequate by modern standards, and Rhomania was no exception. The Roman reputation for hydraulic engineering with its aqueducts and baths is deserved, but ancient Rome’s sewers were still distinctly subpar by modern standards [2] and ancient Rome was also an unhealthy demographic black hole. The distinction between clean antiquity and the filthy Middle Ages is grossly exaggerated.

Class and wealth was a factor here. The elites could afford good plumbing and sanitation, but given the expense of such infrastructure projects these were almost always not available to the poor, which represented the vast bulk of the population. Most of ancient Rome, after all, did not live in the fine villas but in cramped and hazardous apartments where the plumbing was a chamber pot plus a cesspit in the backyard. Early modern Constantinople, and other Roman cities, was similar.

Constantinople did have aqueducts, which helped much in ensuring a fresh water supply for the city and to feed the baths, which were an important aspect of city life. However this was less conducive to health than one might expect. The baths were not chlorinated, and while the water was changed, it was not done as regularly as moderns would like. In addition, going to the baths was considered a good cure for someone who was sick.

There were sewers as well, mainly servicing the upper-class districts, although even these could have problems. During a drought in 1650, the low water pressure caused the sewer to back up and overflow, with a truly appalling stench. Most people though were reliant on chamber pots and cesspits, the latter serving apartment complexes, private homes, or public latrines.

Another source of waste and bad smell was the fact that land transportation was all animal-powered, and they had a habit of defecating wherever they felt the need. The streets were swept, but that was only practical at certain times of day when traffic was low. Animals such as dogs and cats, chickens and pigs, roamed the streets, although the latter were useful as a means of trash disposal, since they ate much of it.

People dealt with the smell as best they could. They went to the baths and used their washbasins as and when they could. The rich left for the countryside when the city was at its most ripe, and aromatics were always immensely in demand as a way to cover up the bad smells.

Of course, it was not just a bad smell. City life, as evidenced by it being a demographic black hole, was profoundly unhealthy. Bad sanitation caused many gastrointestinal disorders (which likely contributed to the evidence of malnutrition in the height of urban army recruits) while cramped conditions meant that epidemics always reaped a bountiful harvest. [3] Furthermore the large masses of bodies allowed disease organisms to exist in an endemic matter. Rome was far from the only Roman city to have a malaria season, yet another reason to leave town during certain times of year. While children born in the cities might have some immunity, rural immigrants who’d grown up in cleaner disease environments were immensely vulnerable, a factor that contributed significantly to the demographic black hole.

Gastrointestinal issues were a problem more in the summer and declined with the cold, but in their place came respiratory illnesses. Heating was from burning either firewood or increasingly coal, the latter mostly lignite. The Roman heartland has large reserves of lignite coal in western Anatolia, Thrace, and Macedonia, making that a fairly easily and cheaply accessible source of fuel for the cities of the Aegean basin. Originally the use of coal had only been to heat public buildings such as the great bathhouses, but its use in private homes to replace ever-more-expensive cords of firewood had grown massively in the last fifty years. The result was that many cities were shrouded in clouds of wood and coal smoke, not as bad as future early industrial sites, but a portent of that, and unhealthy enough on their own.

Firewood and coal though still cost money, which could be a problem for the poorest of urban dwellers. Charity distributions helped a little, also dispensing blankets and old clothes for warmth. These donations were very important, as for many poor residents in their cramped and cheap wooden apartments, fires for cooking and heating weren’t an option at all, even if they had fuel. The fire hazard was far too great to allow it.

The comparatively high urbanization levels of Rhomania beginning in the late 1500s thus explain why Roman population growth plummeted after the sharp rise during the Flowering, and the difference in performance between Rhomania and Russia over the same period. Russian populations weren’t drawn into the cities nearly as much, and even then were in much smaller and comparatively sanitary settlements, and so the rural growth rate wasn’t nearly as sucked away by the demographic black hole. It has been estimated that Rhomania’s high level of early modern urbanization post-Flowering is responsible for, at minimum, halving its population growth rate, due to the corresponding demographic black hole effect, and would continue to shape Roman demographic history into the modern age. [4]

[1] This is from OTL. Army records from the reign of Louis XIV show that recruits from Paris were the shortest in the kingdom.

[2] See Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.

[3] During the OTL Great Plague of the 1660s, London had 50% of the fatalities although it had only about 10% of England’s population.

[4] For an OTL example, see early modern London. Around 1700, London required 12,000 new bodies every year just to maintain its level of population. For comparison, that would represent a healthy, for pre-industrial standards, rate of 0.5% annual growth for a population of 2.5 million, half of England (minus London) at the time. Between 1700 and 1750, maintaining London’s population of 600,000 likely resulted in at least 400,000 excess deaths. See Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, pg. 274. While no one Roman city is the size of OTL London, Rhomania is appreciably more urbanized than OTL early modern England. The five largest Roman cities as of 1640 have a combined population approaching a million.

 

[Basileus444]

The Contexts of Roman Society, part 4-2: The Importance of Manure​

Early modern Roman cities are not necessarily centers of manufacturing, as much production is spread out across the countryside, whether as small local operations or as part of a putting-out system. However a Roman city will have at least some manufacturing, although the amount can vary wildly, and this can be another source of pollution. Tanneries, dye works, and butcheries all produce substantial amounts of waste, another trouble for city residents.

Not all pollution in cities is physical. There are many who see cities as sources of moral pollution as well. The large concentrations of population, both residents and travelers, provides the market, while the mass of urban poor provides the workforce. Constantinople and Smyrna in particular are infamous for their red-light districts (although the red lights themselves don’t exist at this time), but every Roman city has one.

Sex workers, like all aspects of Roman society, contain variety. The majority are female, but there are male workers, both boys and adults, for female clients as well as homosexual male ones. In 1649 there is a scandal in Antioch when it is discovered that a brothel there has been working with the 1st Syrian tourma garrisoned in the city, some of the soldiers, from drummer boys to some older hands working as sex workers for some extra money. What makes this truly scandalous though is that some of the officers were acting as pimps. [1]

Some sex workers are trafficked, while others do it because the alternative is starvation. And there are others who prefer this life, for a variety of reasons. Some would say it is because they are licentious and promiscuous. But the women might reply that they prefer it to other alternatives; they view it as no more degrading, or less so, than working as a domestic (where they quite possibly have to put up with sexual pressure from their master), and for a high-end, the pay can be quite substantial.

Sex workers cater to all walks of Roman life, although the richer the clientele, the better-off the sex workers typically are. Soldiers can sometimes be the workers, but they are also an extremely common customer as well. Officers sometimes encourage soldiers’ use of brothels, as they believe it a good way to avoid sodomy. Sex workers who cater to that type of clientele also have their ways to drum up business. Starting sometime and somewhere in the 1640s, but continuing to this day, they’ll say to soldiers passing by “Come you back, you Roman soldier, come you back to the aplekton!” [2][3]

The effects of pollution and the harsh living standards of the poor did not go unnoticed, and there were efforts to mitigate them, even if those were grossly inadequate by modern standards. The grain dole has already been mentioned, and charities managing soup kitchens and distributing food, old clothes, fuel, and even shelters were common. There were regulations regarding waste disposal, such as where one could empty one’s chamber pot (emphatically not in the street), and the need for regular cesspit coverage and drainage. Soap manufacturing was a massive industry by the standards of the day, with its products always in demand.

Another element was the provision of medical services. By the 1600s, the Romans had a tradition of public hospitals dating back uninterrupted to antiquity, with certain practices in use having a pedigree centuries old. Public hospitals were typically charitable foundations, whether by clerical or lay patrons, and were a common form of public largesse in urban environments. Some of these were located in the cities themselves, while others were situated in the suburbs or nearby towns to avoid unhealthy city air. Demetrios III may have founded his hospital in Athyra, outside Constantinople, as a gesture of annoyance with the people of Constantinople, but he was not making a true break with precedent there.

Doctors at the public hospitals worked six-months-on and six-months-off. During their six-months-on, their salary was only comparable to that of a regular unskilled laborer, although they were guaranteed regular employment for the period and also given rations, the main expense of a typical laborer. Thus their pay wasn’t quite as low as it would seem, but it was still decidedly on the small scale.

However working at a public hospital was the way to build up a medical reputation for oneself, and that medical reputation could be leveraged into clientele and high service fees for the doctors on their six-months-off. Then they operated a private practice, which was when they made their real money. But the opportunity required working cheap at the public hospitals.

This was an indirect way for the richer classes to subsidize medical care for the poor. The public hospitals catered primarily to the poor, while the middle and rich preferred the comfort of being treated in their own homes. Plus private care ensured regular attendance and service; the public hospitals operated on a first-come first-served basis and did not necessarily have enough space. But despite those weaknesses, the low wages of doctors when they worked directly at the public hospitals helped those institutes be able to provide cheap medical care to the poor.

The mesoi and dynatoi weren’t always absent from the public hospitals. For emergency care, certain types of surgery, post-op recovery from said surgeries, and long-term care requiring specialized services they would use the public hospitals, although they would have to pay regular rates, not the cheap rates from which the poor benefitted. Since these fees went to the hospital (possibly being split with a doctor who used hospital facilities to perform surgery on a private practice patient), this was another way the mesoi and dynatoi indirectly subsidized cheap medical care for the poorer levels of society. [4]

The importance placed on public hospitals (where practices showed distinct Hospitalier influence) is a clear illustration that Romans of the early modern period were not blind to health concerns. But they faced far more difficulties in handling them compared to modern societies. They had no knowledge of germ theory and instead believed that diseases were spread by bad air and bad smells. Aromatics that could cover up the bad smells were thus viewed as a valuable health service, with civic authorities making efforts to ensure their provision similar to their efforts to ensure availability of grain, vegetables, and mutton. And while rosewater wouldn’t do anything to guard against dysentery, smoking cannabis or tobacco was a good counter to malaria as the smoke drove away the carrying mosquitoes.

The main factor in ensuring the general unhealthiness of cities though was not resolvable by the means of the early modern period. That was the presence of huge amounts of animal and human waste. Even if the infrastructure was put into place to flush that all away had been available, the Romans could not afford to do so. That waste material was far too valuable, too essential, to be just thrown away. It needed to be kept so that it could be used.

Waste was needed for certain processes, such as tanning. Urine was used in several areas, including the cleaning of laundry (because of the ammonia content) and the production of saltpeter (the urine of wine-drinkers was said to be the best for this). But the main use for all this waste matter was as fertilizer for the fields. Basically, the smell of the cesspits was the necessary cost to pay to ensure that the markets had enough food.

Transporting foodstuffs from afield was a necessary part of provisioning cities, but even so urban centers drew intensively on their local hinterlands for sustenance. Nicaea and Antioch were especially prominent in this regard, as their inland locations made large-scale imports much more difficult, but even the great seaports of Constantinople, Thessaloniki, and Smyrna were no exception.

This was an era before artificial fertilizers. Manure was the only game in town in this regard in the early modern period. The peasant farmer would ideally fertilize his fields with manure from his farm animals, but usually the garden would be fertilized by the night soil produced by him and his family. The Roman city operated on the same model, but on a vastly bigger scale.

The fields near the great cities were the most agriculturally productive lands in the whole Empire, and that was entirely due to their receipt of far more fertilizer in the form of urban night soil and street sweepings than other lands. The costs of shipping in this fertilizer was minimal because of proximity, while the cost of shipping the many products of their productive fields to a massive market was also minimal. Thus agricultural lands near the larger cities was of extremely high value, with even small holdings able to produce surpluses and profits unimaginable in areas that depended on far more meager supplies of manure.

This resulted in an aspect of the early modern Roman city that moderns find truly bizarre. Cesspit removal was thus a big business, as landowners outside the cities were willing to pay, and pay well, for the contents of said cesspits. The Bothros family, famous now for the massive chemical company they founded that still exists today, had their start here. While the laborers who did the actual work of emptying the cesspits were viewed as some of the lowest of the low, the managers such as the Bothroi could make serious money. As the saying goes, ‘the Bothroi don’t shit gold, but they can turn shit into gold’.

This resulted in another incentive for people not to want to flush their waste away, as the Bothroi and others in the same business were literally willing to pay for night soil. They’d still make a profit from it. The sale of the contents of civic cesspits went to the city (or Imperial government in Constantinople), while communal cesspits for apartment buildings were split among the tenants on pre-determined settings, such as by suite or by number of occupants.

One aspect of this business model illustrates possibly the most disgusting example of the adage ‘you need money to make money’. Fecal matter from richer neighborhoods and households commanded higher prices than that from their poorer neighbors. This wasn’t class snobbery at work either. Given their better economic status, the producers of the more expensive fecal matter were better fed, which meant their waste contained more nutrients, and so it actually functioned better as fertilizer. Hence the higher price it would command. [5]

Early modern Roman cities were hardly unique in this aspect. Chinese cities made even more use of night soil for fertilizer, much to the disgust of Andreas Angelos, but rice paddy country didn’t allow for grazing of much livestock, so animal manure was less available as an alternative. Nor were they unique in Christendom; Valencians claimed the fertility of their suburban orchards was based on their fertilizing from the sweepings of the street offal. [6]

Modern cities would eventually resolve these issues and stop being demographic black holes. The use of motorized vehicles, replacing defecating draft animals, and the development of artificial fertilizers and improvements in agriculture, obviating the need for huge volumes of night soil, made cities much more sanitary. But those were not available to Romans in the mid-1600s. They recognized the issue and dealt with it as best they could, given their limited means and options and knowledge, but it just wasn’t enough until the rules changed in the modern era.


[1] The OTL example comes from, of all places, Victorian Britain. See Simon Heffer, The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain 1880-1914.

[2] An aplekton is a fortified army base, commonly used as a major storage facility. Given that it is used to store weapons, it has morphed into a slang term for another place to store (male) weaponry.

[3] This is adapted from OTL as well. In Burma under the Raj, Burmese sex workers would try to entice British soldiers by quoting Kipling: “Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay.” See David Gilmour, The British in India: A Social History of the Raj, pg. 290.

[4] These hospital practices are from the OTL Byzantines. See Timothy Miller, “Byzantine Hospitals” in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984).

[5] This is also from OTL, although the example comes from China. See Daniel Headrick, Humans Versus Nature: A Global Environmental History.

[6] OTL. See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1.

 

[Basileus444]

hey Basileus444
(Snipped for length)

Makes sense and thank you for the info. Nothing's set in stone yet but it looks like it'd have to be more complicated. Say Mega-Brazil could beat Mega-Peru in a 1-on-1 fight, but it would be costly and a victorious Brazil would be exhausted that it'd be really easy for those Yanquis to take advantage, so in the long-term it's too risky. (One concept that I really want to have is that concerns over overbearing and interfering TTL-Yanquis is a real concern, but South Terranova is much better placed to resist such pressures than is the case IOTL.)

* * *

The Contexts of Roman Society, part 5-1: A Mostly Subsistence Agriculture
​

As the importance of the content of civic cesspits shows, the need of the farm fields loomed over Roman society in the early modern age. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, agriculture was the absolutely dominant aspect of society and economy, immensely more significant than everything else combined. (In the non-agricultural sphere, most commercial activity involved moving agricultural, not manufactured, items.) Many Romans might complain that the cost and time for shipping packages at harvest times went up, but none questioned the basis for it. Those part-time carters and shippers needed to be back home bringing in the harvest. Everything was subordinated to the harvest, and that could mean everything. In years when the harvest was endangered for whatever reason and needed to be gathered in quickly, local army units could be called out to help, and woe to the commander who was found to be lax in such emergencies.

Roman agriculture in the mid-1600s is a perfect example of the immense diversity contained within Rhomania, ranging from state-of-the-art to extremely primitive.

Near cities and the larger towns, the focus was on what could be called modern market agriculture. The land was consolidated with a focus on producing a few food items in as much quantity as possible, with those items mostly to be sold as opposed to being consumed by the producers. The items would vary, with larger estates focusing on cereal cultivation while smaller plots would concentrate on vegetable, herb, and flower gardens. Given the consolidated land and the amount of cheap fertilizer available from urban cesspits, these areas were the most productive agricultural lands in the Imperial heartland. Another factor that helped in this regard is that these were areas, such as the plains of Thrace, Bithynia, and Lower Macedonia, that had the best soil for farming already.

But while this market agriculture gets most of the attention of historians, it was the exception, not the rule. Twenty percent of Romans lived in cities and towns, which means that a substantially larger eighty percent did not. And even then, the smaller towns usually had a ‘big village’ air about them as well, with large proportions of their inhabitants being farmers who lived in the town but then farmed their outlying fields, and not necessarily on a market basis. The bulk of Roman agriculture was of the subsistence, not market, type.

Agricultural yields could vary widely throughout the heartland, influenced by a number of factors. A field that produced 6 grains reaped for every one sowed (6:1 ratio) was considered first-rate arable land for tax purposes. The market agriculture fields near cities and household gardens could get higher yields, but they benefited from much higher manuring than was typical for most arable farming.

There was substantial regional variation. The fertile Anatolian river valleys could regularly get a 6:1 yield in average years, but most of Anatolia was in the 3-4:1 range. Hellas was somewhat better, with the better areas of the Morea at a 4-5:1 yield. [1] This was a production little changed from the high and late Middle Ages, where a 4-5:1 yield seems a reasonable estimate of the productivity of Roman agriculture. [2] In short, subsistence cereal agriculture, the bulk of cereal agriculture, produced a yield of 3-6:1, which illustrates both the wide variability and the limited productivity.

Most Roman agriculturists were performing subsistence, not market, agriculture, and thus their operating model was substantially different from what a modern would expect. The typical Roman farmer produced many different food items, spreading their efforts throughout many different endeavors. Furthermore their landholdings would not be consolidated but spread out in various packets throughout the village lands, plus their access to the common pastures and woods available to all the villagers.

From the standpoint of efficiency, this was an extremely poor design. Peasant efforts were dispersed throughout many different endeavors rather than concentrating on one or two items, while much time was used up simply by travel between the various strips that a particular farmer would hold. The more productive market agriculture did not have these issues, and that combined with the higher manure, explains said higher production. But such criticisms completely miss the point. The goal of market agriculture is efficiency, to produce as big a surplus as possible to be sold on the market. Any needs of the producers are expected to be filled by the market, assuming the producers can make enough of their target crops. However subsistence agriculture’s goal is not efficiency, but food security. Subsistence agriculture is based on the assumption that the market is not a reliable means to fill one’s needs, which means one must look to one’s fields to fill those needs instead.

That is the reason for diversification. No man can live on bread alone, so the subsistence agriculturists need to produce more than just grain. Also producing multiple items is a way of spreading out the risk. If one crop fails, another might pull through just fine. That is also the reason for the dispersal of landholdings. These take advantage of local microclimates that will favor one crop over another, while again minimizing the risk of a local disaster wiping out all of a peasant’s efforts. It is farming operating under the ‘put your eggs in as many baskets as possible’ principle.

As is typical for a Mediterranean society, the main items were the Mediterranean triad, wheat, olive oil, and wine. These made up the bulk of items produced and consumed in both market and subsistence agriculture. The typical farmer practicing polyculture would not just restrict themselves to those three though. Barley was a backup cereal to wheat, while fruit orchards, vegetable gardens, beekeeping (for both honey and wax), and small-scale animal husbandry were common alternative products. The growth of flax and cotton was, in certain areas such as Cilicia, also a frequent strategy.

While typically grown for subsistence, there was a cash crop aspect to the production of non-cereals. Wine and olive oil were both useful as cash crops and often functioned in that way in addition to subsistence use. Flax and cotton more often functioned as cash rather than subsistence crops, as were the products of apiculture. In this regard, vegetable gardens varied, with those close to active markets often acting as cash crops while those farther away used primarily for subsistence use.

No peasant was completely cut off from the market. They needed coinage to pay their taxes and to get products that couldn’t be sourced locally, such as salt. The peddlers plying the roads and sea routes helped to fill this need, especially in more isolated areas, as did regional and seasonal trade fairs. But due to the limitations of transportation, once one moved away from the cities and towns, the market declined drastically in importance in economic activity.

Thus the goal of subsistence farmers wasn’t to produce as much as possible, because it was pointless to labor hard to produce a surplus that would just rot away in the fields. If there was no market that could usefully absorb such a surplus in a way that would profit the peasant, as opposed to a middleman merchant, there was no incentive. In that case, the farmer would just produce enough for his needs, plus a little extra if possible.

The extra was as a security measure. Some surplus could be stored as a reserve for inevitable hard times, and when available said surpluses were used that way. However given the limited food preservation means of the time, only so much surplus could be effectively used in this manner. If there was a surfeit after this, then it was time to feast instead, and this was the foundation for countryside harvest feasts.

This was also a security measure, since if one was having a feast, one invited one’s neighbors. This was a way to maintain communal ties, an essential insurance policy. If a farmer was having a bad year, his neighbors would help him through it if they could, in the expectation that when things were the other way, the farmer would then help them. The support of the village was a critical support for common peasants, and these feasts were a way of sustaining the ties that guaranteed that support.

Outsiders often considered this an example of peasant sloth and stupidity, devouring their surplus rather than banking it. But that was to completely misunderstand the situation. The peasants out in their rural villages did not have access to banking services as city-dwellers would understand them. Marketing their goods could be extremely laborious and time-consuming and not warrant the effort. Selling some extra wine and eggs to a peddler passing through was a good way to get a new knife or mirror or salt, but was not a model that could sustain life. Their banking was in the goodwill and support of their village, not in a pile of coins or bank certificates deposited in a building. For most of the 80% of the Roman population that was not urban, the market was a part of their economic life, but decidedly secondary and much less important than their subsistence agriculture.


[1] Based on OTL Ottoman agricultural yields from the same period. Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, pg. 66.

[2] Jacques Lefort, “The Rural Economy, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries”, in The Economic History of Byzantium, pgs. 259-60.