Bronze Age New World: Empire of the Steppe (Part 1)
[Russia and Siberia, 1492-1691]
==
The year Christopher Columbus comes ashore to find ruined Arawak
cities on Hispaniola, the Russians are barely a decade out from under
the Tatar yoke. The tremors from that world-shaking event will take
many years to reach all the way to the lands of the Grand Duke of
Muscovy. But though the wings of the butterfly flap slowly, they
flap; the consequences to Europe and the Mediterranean of the Bronze
Age New World will in time transform Russian society…as will what they
will find waiting for them across the Pacific Ocean.
The first glimmer of change occurs in 1558, when the armed forces of
Ivan Grozny, Czar of All the Russias, conquer the Tatar khanates of
Astrakhan and Kazan…with nothing more than words of protest from the
envoys of the Ottoman Empire. This is the harbinger of things to
come, as an Ottoman Empire weaker on its northern frontier is hard-
pressed to marshal military resources against Russian expansion; and,
when it does, rarely enjoys much success.[1]
The consequences of the discovery of the New World upon western
European international relations are complex, but generally less
beneficial to Russia. But the changes that are sweeping through
Europe do nothing to deter the deeper, underlying strategic impulses
that take the Russians beyond the Urals. To compete in the bloody
arena of European power politics—and thereby avoid indignities like
that suffered in, when Polish forces occupy the Czar’s capital at
Moscow--the Russians must have strong armies, and to put a well-
equipped, large army into the field requires specie. Being a country
poor in precious metals, Russia must have a resource that it can
exchange at market for specie—and that resource is furs, with which
Siberia teems.
Four kinds of Russian penetrate Siberia: the _promyshlennik_, the
independent fur-trapper; the merchants who buy the furs and sell food
and equipment to the trappers; the Cossacks who build the fortresses,
keep the native at bay with sword and musket, and make them pay their
yasak, their annual fur tribute to the Czar; and the government
officials who administer it all. The Russian conquest of Siberia is a
muddle—driven sometimes more by government agents and the whim of the
Czar, sometimes by bold _promyshlenniki_, sometimes by calculating
merchants. The details vare interesting perhaps to future local
historians, but the end result is easily summarized: by the mid-17th
century, the banner of the Double Eagle is planted at the shores of
the Sea of Okhotsk.
But the changes to Russia’s European fortunes will in time change
Siberia—and, indeed, make it central to Russia’s national history than
it was in our world, as Russia under the Shuisky czars[2] turns to its
vast territory beyond the Urals to supply more and more of its
national needs. In many ways the story of 17th-century Russia is the
story of Russia turning away from western Europe and becoming a grand
empire of the Eurasian steppe—the first and only to begin in the west
and conquer the east. There is no one decision made to turn away from
the west; it is simply a logical consequence of the subtly shifting
strategic situation.[3]
The Russian Empire requires four things for its preservation: large
quantities of fur; outlets to markets where they can sell fur for
specie; farmlands, so that they can feed the men who bring in the fur;
and military strength, to ensure their control over the three other
necessary resources. Siberia provides fur enough and more. For most
of the 16th century, Arkangelsk was their outlet to the fur-hungry
peoples of Europe (and their inlet to European finished goods and
machinery); but as the 17th century dawns and the Russian merchants in
Siberia begin to open up contact for their fur in East Asia, and so
Kiakhta, the Russian trade town on the Mongolian border, becomes the
Empire’s principal point of entry for gold and silver.
In Europe, the Russians find themselves often bested in warfare; it is
more and more common for them to lose wars to Sweden, Poland, and
Lithuania, and they lose their outlets on the Baltic. Only one
maritime port in the west remains: Arkangelsk, and the English are so
dominant there that they practically run it like a foreign concession--
Englishmen living in the town are not subject to Russian law, for
example. Starved of the useful machines and tools of western Europe,
the Russians, forced to greater levels of self-reliance, begin to
focus on extracting resources besides fur from the Siberian vastness:
timber from the taiga, coal from the Kuznets basin, iron from the
great Lodestone Mountain, Magnitnaia, in the Bashkir country; gold on
the upper Lena.[4]
But the transportation difficulties associated with bringing these
resources back west over the Urals, and the general backwardness of
Russian industry, means that the Russian Empire cannot effectively
translate their material abundance into military strength; and so as
the century progresses Russia loses not only its outlets on the Baltic
but valuable farmland on the Polish frontier. Fortunately, there is a
solution: pacify the wild lands of the Don Cossacks and the Crimean
Tatars and settle it with Slavic farmers. And so the Ukraine and
Crimea become a formal part of the Russian Empire in the mid-17th
century.[5] Odessa becomes Russia’s second port, but as the Ottomans
still control the Dardanelles, it's of somewhat limited value.
But these new farmlands are not quite enough to make up for the lands
lost to Poland, and even if they were, they are a long way from
Magnitnaia, let alone the fur frontier, which by 1650 has already
reached the Pacific. And the Cossacks, convicts, and free laborers
who work the mines and saw the lumber are becoming harder and harder
to keep feed. This, along with a desire to gain more direct access to
the markets of fur-hungry China, drives Russia to attempt to conquer
the Amur Valley, but the vigorous new rulers of China, the Manchus,[6]
quickly repulse the far-flung armies of the Czar. The Treaty of
Nerchinsk, signed in 1676[7], denies the fertile Amur lands to the
Russians. An effort to plant an agricultural colony in the relatively
fertile lands between the Ob and Irtysh Rivers in western Siberia is
not a failure, per se--the farms do produce a transportable surplus--
but it is still not quite enough. Matters have not quite reached a
crisis point by 1690; nobody in Siberia is actually starving to death
(at least, nobody Russian). But the viability of some of the mining,
timber, and fur-trading enterprises is starting to become suspect if
the logistical problems cannot be solved fairly soon. And without its
extraction enterprises, Russia cannot supply its armies; and without
its armies, Moscow itself will be in danger from the Swedes and the
Poles, the latter of whom are on the Dnieper.
The event that happens in the spring of 1691, then, is of the highest
consequence. Two _promyshlenniki_ trapping for sable on the lower
Kolyma River encounter a Chukchi village chief of their acquaintance,
who is sporting a curious round ornament around his neck. Although
quite exquisitely detailed with oddly-proportioned bird designs
unfamiliar to the Russians[8], the medallion no longer has much
luster, having turned rather dull and greenish with age--as bronze is
wont to do. Here in the howling wilderness of frozen Asia, the
eastern extremity of Europe has encountered the farthest-flung
fragments of the Bronze Age New World.
The provenance of the ornament is unknown to either Slav or Chukotsk,
but it happens to be a medallion from the celebrated Games of the
Puget Sound Salish. Originally a Tlon trade trinket in the form of a
bracelet, it was brought to the Salish by Chumash traders, then melted
down, hammered into shape, and etched by a Salish artisan on Puget
Sound in about 1642. The proud young man who wins it is, a decade
later, passing into early middle age and beginning to make his
reputation as a chief of great wealth and prestige--so he gives it
away in potlatch to a cousin from northern Vancouver Island. Four
years later, the medallion, along with a young woman, is given in a
marriage ceremony to a Nuxalk chief, in part of an elaborate (but
ultimately unsuccessful) plan by the Vancouver Salish to form a
dynastic alliance with the Bella Coola folk. In 1663 it is pulled
from the corpse of the Nuxalk chief by a Haida raider[9], who is
himself killed less than two years later during one of the many
battles of the long and bitter Tlingit-Haida war for control of Prince
of Wales Island. The Tlingit warrior gives it to his Sitkan clan-
chief, who gives it via potlatch to Katlian, the mighty and renowned
chief of the Inside-the-Glacier People in Yakutat, as a demonstration
of his fealty, the following spring. Katlian having no real need of
it, it ends up in a storage shed in the High King’s grand longhouse
compound, neglected. Fifteen years later, the Tlingit having
developed a flourishing artisanal bronze-ornamentation industry in the
interim, the current Lord of Raven’s Sky is more than happy to have
someone polish up the old and unstylish thing and fob it off on the
gullible chief of the barbaric Ahtna Athabaskans, as part of a
potlatch-like ceremony that in fact establishes Tlingit suzerainty
over the Ahtna. That distinguished gentleman bequeaths it to his
favorite son, who is killed in a skirmish over hunting-ground usage
with a band of Koyukon Athabaskans in 1684. Unfortunately, the winter
of 1685 is a very harsh one, and the Koyukon warrior who claimed it is
forced to give it up as part of a disadvantageous trade for seal meat
with the Norton Sound folk during the annual Koyukon trade journey to
Unalakleet, on Norton Sound. Three years later, also at the
Unalakleet trade fair, a Norton Sound Inupiat hunter informally trades
it to his affable third cousin, a Siberian Yup’ik from the Chukotka
Peninsula with a taste for novelty, in exchange for a pouch of the
strange, intoxicating thing that the Siberians have been bringing
across the Straits over the last decade or so: tobacco[10]. And
indeed, the Siberian Yup’ik hunter soon thereafter trades the
medallion, its novelty having worn off rather quickly, for a fresh
supply of tobacco—he knows a guy from the Kolyma valley, an irascible
Chukchi[11], who supposedly gets it, in exchange for a pelt or two,
from the kass’aq,[12] the hairy men from the west.
This is not the only New World bronze artifact in Siberia in 1691, but
there aren’t many; it is thousands of miles from the Kolyma Valley to
the nearest bronze crucibles in Yakutat Bay. But coincidence by
coincidence, raid by raid, exchange by exchange, the products of the
New World percolate up from Salish country and beyond, through a
continent and onto another. Over the next few years, New World
artifacts—occasionally bronze and, much more commonly, copper
artifacts of nearly-identical design[12]—are seen more and more in the
northeastern-most parts of Siberia. The implications are quickly
realized by the Czarist administrators in the Siberian outposts, and
word is sent back to Moscow.
Although the Russian courtiers at the Kremlin are not very connected
to the intellectual life of Western Europe, it has been almost two
centuries since the initial Spanish encounters, and the existence of
high civilization in the New World is common knowledge. So the
conclusion that Russian officials make is obvious: there must be a
land connection between the New and the Old World in northeastern
Siberia—and, the bronze artifacts bearing no resemblance to any of the
known New World civilizations, there must be a new civilization in the
northern parts of America. And if there is a civilization, there must
be fertile land, to feed and sustain that civilization. It is also
well-known that the New World civilizations, while not
inconsequential, are far less puissant than (for example) the Empire
of the Great Qing. If the Russians can find and overrun this
civilization, then the problems of feeding their empire of the steppe
will be solved. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly in this empire
of the steppe, but they turn, and plans are made to carry the Orthodox
cross and the Double Eagle onto a third continent.
==
[1] As detailed in “Brave New Old World: Suleyman the Fierce” by Mr.
Mike Ralls, which details the consequences of a Bronze Age New World
to the Ottoman Empire. The Empire isn’t exactly weaker per se—it has
advantages and disadvantages both that are different from OTL—but its
presence in Europe is definitely not as robust. OTL, the Russian
conquest of these Muslim Khanates provoked a small, unsuccessful
military response on the part of the Ottomans, the first of many, many
Russo-Turkish wars over the next three centuries. ATL the Russians
have much more of a free hand in far southern Europe.
[2] The Time of Troubles, essentially representing the collapse of the
Rurik dynasty in the early 17th century, had a different resolution
ATL. Basil Shuisky briefly held the throne OTL but was deposed by a
coterie of nobles led by Michael Romanov; ATL the Shuisky family holds
on for good due to butterflies.
[3] Indeed, in OTL the decision to Westernize was largely, but not
completely, the result of one bold decision by Peter the Great. In
his absence, Russia goes down what might be a more “natural” path,”
focusing on its vast Eurasian continental domains.
[4] The iron deposits of Magnitnaia, which in OTL became the great
Soviet industrial center of Magnitogorsk, were known to Russians in
the 17th century but not developed until the early 18th ATL. OTL
Magnitogorsk was a point of both extraction and processing; here and
elsewhere in Siberia, Russia is mostly just doing extraction, the
goods mostly being taken west and sold in western Europe. There is a
wrought-iron industry in Magnitnaia, though. The goldfields on the
Lena are also historical; their discovery was more or less by chance—a
Siberian noticed some locals wearing gold jewelry—so with greater
Russian population densities in Siberia it happens sooner ATL.
[5] This didn’t happen until the reign of Catherine the Great OTL;
stronger strategic imperative to do so, plus less ability by the
Ottoman Empire to stand in the way, makes it happen considerably
sooner here.
[6] The consequences of a Bronze Age New World have already
significantly changed Chinese history; but the have not changed them
so much that they could prevent the fall of the decadent Ming and the
victory of the sons of Nurhachi
[7] 1689 OTL
[8] But instantly recognizable to anyone who’s seen a totem pole, or a
picture of one
[9] The Haida have learned better than to venture into Puget Sound by
this point, but they still occasionally raid their more immediate
neighbors.
[10] This is as OTL. Tobacco (as a finished good, not as a crop) made
its way from Mesoamerica to western Europe to Russia to Siberia and
across the Bering Straits. The Russians OTL found Eskimos chewing a
mixture of tobacco and mildly-hallucinogenic mushroom, called ikmik.
If any of this seems fanciful, consider that in OTL, the Russians
first made landfall on Kayak Island, in Prince William Sound—something
like fifteen hundred sea-miles from Asia--in 1741. In the empty Eyak
hut they entered, they found an iron pot and a Chinese pipe, among
other things. The trans-Bering Straits trade was robust OTL, and will
be even more so ATL because of greater population densities on both
ends.
[11] The Chukchi are not Eskimoan; in habit and culture they are
roughly analogous to Alaskan Athabaskans, although the groups are not
linguistically related.
[12] _Kass’aq_ (that’s the standard orthography; there are about a
zillion other spellings) is a moderately derogatory Eskimo word for
white person. It almost certainly is derived from “Cossack,” one of
the many Russian loanwords in Eskimo languages. It’s probably the
only Eskimo word that is ultimately of *Turkish* origin, though.
[13] Bronze is quite rare in Alaska; its manufacture is kept as a
state secret by the Tlingit High Kings, and the wearing of bronze
jewelry and labrets is reserved only for Tlingit nobles. Tlingit,
Eyak, and Ahtna *commoners,* though, are allowed to wear copper
jewelry, and in a practice very common historically in all sorts of
cultures, they do so in ways that imitate the nobility as much as
possible.
[Russia and Siberia, 1492-1691]
==
The year Christopher Columbus comes ashore to find ruined Arawak
cities on Hispaniola, the Russians are barely a decade out from under
the Tatar yoke. The tremors from that world-shaking event will take
many years to reach all the way to the lands of the Grand Duke of
Muscovy. But though the wings of the butterfly flap slowly, they
flap; the consequences to Europe and the Mediterranean of the Bronze
Age New World will in time transform Russian society…as will what they
will find waiting for them across the Pacific Ocean.
The first glimmer of change occurs in 1558, when the armed forces of
Ivan Grozny, Czar of All the Russias, conquer the Tatar khanates of
Astrakhan and Kazan…with nothing more than words of protest from the
envoys of the Ottoman Empire. This is the harbinger of things to
come, as an Ottoman Empire weaker on its northern frontier is hard-
pressed to marshal military resources against Russian expansion; and,
when it does, rarely enjoys much success.[1]
The consequences of the discovery of the New World upon western
European international relations are complex, but generally less
beneficial to Russia. But the changes that are sweeping through
Europe do nothing to deter the deeper, underlying strategic impulses
that take the Russians beyond the Urals. To compete in the bloody
arena of European power politics—and thereby avoid indignities like
that suffered in, when Polish forces occupy the Czar’s capital at
Moscow--the Russians must have strong armies, and to put a well-
equipped, large army into the field requires specie. Being a country
poor in precious metals, Russia must have a resource that it can
exchange at market for specie—and that resource is furs, with which
Siberia teems.
Four kinds of Russian penetrate Siberia: the _promyshlennik_, the
independent fur-trapper; the merchants who buy the furs and sell food
and equipment to the trappers; the Cossacks who build the fortresses,
keep the native at bay with sword and musket, and make them pay their
yasak, their annual fur tribute to the Czar; and the government
officials who administer it all. The Russian conquest of Siberia is a
muddle—driven sometimes more by government agents and the whim of the
Czar, sometimes by bold _promyshlenniki_, sometimes by calculating
merchants. The details vare interesting perhaps to future local
historians, but the end result is easily summarized: by the mid-17th
century, the banner of the Double Eagle is planted at the shores of
the Sea of Okhotsk.
But the changes to Russia’s European fortunes will in time change
Siberia—and, indeed, make it central to Russia’s national history than
it was in our world, as Russia under the Shuisky czars[2] turns to its
vast territory beyond the Urals to supply more and more of its
national needs. In many ways the story of 17th-century Russia is the
story of Russia turning away from western Europe and becoming a grand
empire of the Eurasian steppe—the first and only to begin in the west
and conquer the east. There is no one decision made to turn away from
the west; it is simply a logical consequence of the subtly shifting
strategic situation.[3]
The Russian Empire requires four things for its preservation: large
quantities of fur; outlets to markets where they can sell fur for
specie; farmlands, so that they can feed the men who bring in the fur;
and military strength, to ensure their control over the three other
necessary resources. Siberia provides fur enough and more. For most
of the 16th century, Arkangelsk was their outlet to the fur-hungry
peoples of Europe (and their inlet to European finished goods and
machinery); but as the 17th century dawns and the Russian merchants in
Siberia begin to open up contact for their fur in East Asia, and so
Kiakhta, the Russian trade town on the Mongolian border, becomes the
Empire’s principal point of entry for gold and silver.
In Europe, the Russians find themselves often bested in warfare; it is
more and more common for them to lose wars to Sweden, Poland, and
Lithuania, and they lose their outlets on the Baltic. Only one
maritime port in the west remains: Arkangelsk, and the English are so
dominant there that they practically run it like a foreign concession--
Englishmen living in the town are not subject to Russian law, for
example. Starved of the useful machines and tools of western Europe,
the Russians, forced to greater levels of self-reliance, begin to
focus on extracting resources besides fur from the Siberian vastness:
timber from the taiga, coal from the Kuznets basin, iron from the
great Lodestone Mountain, Magnitnaia, in the Bashkir country; gold on
the upper Lena.[4]
But the transportation difficulties associated with bringing these
resources back west over the Urals, and the general backwardness of
Russian industry, means that the Russian Empire cannot effectively
translate their material abundance into military strength; and so as
the century progresses Russia loses not only its outlets on the Baltic
but valuable farmland on the Polish frontier. Fortunately, there is a
solution: pacify the wild lands of the Don Cossacks and the Crimean
Tatars and settle it with Slavic farmers. And so the Ukraine and
Crimea become a formal part of the Russian Empire in the mid-17th
century.[5] Odessa becomes Russia’s second port, but as the Ottomans
still control the Dardanelles, it's of somewhat limited value.
But these new farmlands are not quite enough to make up for the lands
lost to Poland, and even if they were, they are a long way from
Magnitnaia, let alone the fur frontier, which by 1650 has already
reached the Pacific. And the Cossacks, convicts, and free laborers
who work the mines and saw the lumber are becoming harder and harder
to keep feed. This, along with a desire to gain more direct access to
the markets of fur-hungry China, drives Russia to attempt to conquer
the Amur Valley, but the vigorous new rulers of China, the Manchus,[6]
quickly repulse the far-flung armies of the Czar. The Treaty of
Nerchinsk, signed in 1676[7], denies the fertile Amur lands to the
Russians. An effort to plant an agricultural colony in the relatively
fertile lands between the Ob and Irtysh Rivers in western Siberia is
not a failure, per se--the farms do produce a transportable surplus--
but it is still not quite enough. Matters have not quite reached a
crisis point by 1690; nobody in Siberia is actually starving to death
(at least, nobody Russian). But the viability of some of the mining,
timber, and fur-trading enterprises is starting to become suspect if
the logistical problems cannot be solved fairly soon. And without its
extraction enterprises, Russia cannot supply its armies; and without
its armies, Moscow itself will be in danger from the Swedes and the
Poles, the latter of whom are on the Dnieper.
The event that happens in the spring of 1691, then, is of the highest
consequence. Two _promyshlenniki_ trapping for sable on the lower
Kolyma River encounter a Chukchi village chief of their acquaintance,
who is sporting a curious round ornament around his neck. Although
quite exquisitely detailed with oddly-proportioned bird designs
unfamiliar to the Russians[8], the medallion no longer has much
luster, having turned rather dull and greenish with age--as bronze is
wont to do. Here in the howling wilderness of frozen Asia, the
eastern extremity of Europe has encountered the farthest-flung
fragments of the Bronze Age New World.
The provenance of the ornament is unknown to either Slav or Chukotsk,
but it happens to be a medallion from the celebrated Games of the
Puget Sound Salish. Originally a Tlon trade trinket in the form of a
bracelet, it was brought to the Salish by Chumash traders, then melted
down, hammered into shape, and etched by a Salish artisan on Puget
Sound in about 1642. The proud young man who wins it is, a decade
later, passing into early middle age and beginning to make his
reputation as a chief of great wealth and prestige--so he gives it
away in potlatch to a cousin from northern Vancouver Island. Four
years later, the medallion, along with a young woman, is given in a
marriage ceremony to a Nuxalk chief, in part of an elaborate (but
ultimately unsuccessful) plan by the Vancouver Salish to form a
dynastic alliance with the Bella Coola folk. In 1663 it is pulled
from the corpse of the Nuxalk chief by a Haida raider[9], who is
himself killed less than two years later during one of the many
battles of the long and bitter Tlingit-Haida war for control of Prince
of Wales Island. The Tlingit warrior gives it to his Sitkan clan-
chief, who gives it via potlatch to Katlian, the mighty and renowned
chief of the Inside-the-Glacier People in Yakutat, as a demonstration
of his fealty, the following spring. Katlian having no real need of
it, it ends up in a storage shed in the High King’s grand longhouse
compound, neglected. Fifteen years later, the Tlingit having
developed a flourishing artisanal bronze-ornamentation industry in the
interim, the current Lord of Raven’s Sky is more than happy to have
someone polish up the old and unstylish thing and fob it off on the
gullible chief of the barbaric Ahtna Athabaskans, as part of a
potlatch-like ceremony that in fact establishes Tlingit suzerainty
over the Ahtna. That distinguished gentleman bequeaths it to his
favorite son, who is killed in a skirmish over hunting-ground usage
with a band of Koyukon Athabaskans in 1684. Unfortunately, the winter
of 1685 is a very harsh one, and the Koyukon warrior who claimed it is
forced to give it up as part of a disadvantageous trade for seal meat
with the Norton Sound folk during the annual Koyukon trade journey to
Unalakleet, on Norton Sound. Three years later, also at the
Unalakleet trade fair, a Norton Sound Inupiat hunter informally trades
it to his affable third cousin, a Siberian Yup’ik from the Chukotka
Peninsula with a taste for novelty, in exchange for a pouch of the
strange, intoxicating thing that the Siberians have been bringing
across the Straits over the last decade or so: tobacco[10]. And
indeed, the Siberian Yup’ik hunter soon thereafter trades the
medallion, its novelty having worn off rather quickly, for a fresh
supply of tobacco—he knows a guy from the Kolyma valley, an irascible
Chukchi[11], who supposedly gets it, in exchange for a pelt or two,
from the kass’aq,[12] the hairy men from the west.
This is not the only New World bronze artifact in Siberia in 1691, but
there aren’t many; it is thousands of miles from the Kolyma Valley to
the nearest bronze crucibles in Yakutat Bay. But coincidence by
coincidence, raid by raid, exchange by exchange, the products of the
New World percolate up from Salish country and beyond, through a
continent and onto another. Over the next few years, New World
artifacts—occasionally bronze and, much more commonly, copper
artifacts of nearly-identical design[12]—are seen more and more in the
northeastern-most parts of Siberia. The implications are quickly
realized by the Czarist administrators in the Siberian outposts, and
word is sent back to Moscow.
Although the Russian courtiers at the Kremlin are not very connected
to the intellectual life of Western Europe, it has been almost two
centuries since the initial Spanish encounters, and the existence of
high civilization in the New World is common knowledge. So the
conclusion that Russian officials make is obvious: there must be a
land connection between the New and the Old World in northeastern
Siberia—and, the bronze artifacts bearing no resemblance to any of the
known New World civilizations, there must be a new civilization in the
northern parts of America. And if there is a civilization, there must
be fertile land, to feed and sustain that civilization. It is also
well-known that the New World civilizations, while not
inconsequential, are far less puissant than (for example) the Empire
of the Great Qing. If the Russians can find and overrun this
civilization, then the problems of feeding their empire of the steppe
will be solved. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly in this empire
of the steppe, but they turn, and plans are made to carry the Orthodox
cross and the Double Eagle onto a third continent.
==
[1] As detailed in “Brave New Old World: Suleyman the Fierce” by Mr.
Mike Ralls, which details the consequences of a Bronze Age New World
to the Ottoman Empire. The Empire isn’t exactly weaker per se—it has
advantages and disadvantages both that are different from OTL—but its
presence in Europe is definitely not as robust. OTL, the Russian
conquest of these Muslim Khanates provoked a small, unsuccessful
military response on the part of the Ottomans, the first of many, many
Russo-Turkish wars over the next three centuries. ATL the Russians
have much more of a free hand in far southern Europe.
[2] The Time of Troubles, essentially representing the collapse of the
Rurik dynasty in the early 17th century, had a different resolution
ATL. Basil Shuisky briefly held the throne OTL but was deposed by a
coterie of nobles led by Michael Romanov; ATL the Shuisky family holds
on for good due to butterflies.
[3] Indeed, in OTL the decision to Westernize was largely, but not
completely, the result of one bold decision by Peter the Great. In
his absence, Russia goes down what might be a more “natural” path,”
focusing on its vast Eurasian continental domains.
[4] The iron deposits of Magnitnaia, which in OTL became the great
Soviet industrial center of Magnitogorsk, were known to Russians in
the 17th century but not developed until the early 18th ATL. OTL
Magnitogorsk was a point of both extraction and processing; here and
elsewhere in Siberia, Russia is mostly just doing extraction, the
goods mostly being taken west and sold in western Europe. There is a
wrought-iron industry in Magnitnaia, though. The goldfields on the
Lena are also historical; their discovery was more or less by chance—a
Siberian noticed some locals wearing gold jewelry—so with greater
Russian population densities in Siberia it happens sooner ATL.
[5] This didn’t happen until the reign of Catherine the Great OTL;
stronger strategic imperative to do so, plus less ability by the
Ottoman Empire to stand in the way, makes it happen considerably
sooner here.
[6] The consequences of a Bronze Age New World have already
significantly changed Chinese history; but the have not changed them
so much that they could prevent the fall of the decadent Ming and the
victory of the sons of Nurhachi
[7] 1689 OTL
[8] But instantly recognizable to anyone who’s seen a totem pole, or a
picture of one
[9] The Haida have learned better than to venture into Puget Sound by
this point, but they still occasionally raid their more immediate
neighbors.
[10] This is as OTL. Tobacco (as a finished good, not as a crop) made
its way from Mesoamerica to western Europe to Russia to Siberia and
across the Bering Straits. The Russians OTL found Eskimos chewing a
mixture of tobacco and mildly-hallucinogenic mushroom, called ikmik.
If any of this seems fanciful, consider that in OTL, the Russians
first made landfall on Kayak Island, in Prince William Sound—something
like fifteen hundred sea-miles from Asia--in 1741. In the empty Eyak
hut they entered, they found an iron pot and a Chinese pipe, among
other things. The trans-Bering Straits trade was robust OTL, and will
be even more so ATL because of greater population densities on both
ends.
[11] The Chukchi are not Eskimoan; in habit and culture they are
roughly analogous to Alaskan Athabaskans, although the groups are not
linguistically related.
[12] _Kass’aq_ (that’s the standard orthography; there are about a
zillion other spellings) is a moderately derogatory Eskimo word for
white person. It almost certainly is derived from “Cossack,” one of
the many Russian loanwords in Eskimo languages. It’s probably the
only Eskimo word that is ultimately of *Turkish* origin, though.
[13] Bronze is quite rare in Alaska; its manufacture is kept as a
state secret by the Tlingit High Kings, and the wearing of bronze
jewelry and labrets is reserved only for Tlingit nobles. Tlingit,
Eyak, and Ahtna *commoners,* though, are allowed to wear copper
jewelry, and in a practice very common historically in all sorts of
cultures, they do so in ways that imitate the nobility as much as
possible.
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