Crusader Kings II - Paradox Entertainement (02/12)
- Thread starter Tellus
- Start date
Paradoxer
Banned
It just pissed me off when they said “we don’t want to do exactly same things or elements as last time”. It would have not be that hard to copy and paste everything from 2 after getting on top of current base game release content. Even if tagged on last minute and they waited to fix bugs or any problems that arise.
As American I often hate how our gaming industry rush products and copy and paste sequels too much but Swedish paradox and other Euro games seem to have opposite issue.
Everyone of them dick around too much and try to be “creative or new” when it isn’t needed or even smart. Don’t change or get rid of shit people like or expect. Just refine and tone it up to improve it where it was weak.
I remember reading dev dairy from Paradox mentioning how they got back to work after “holiday break” in middle of fucking summer. What holiday do they have? Lol
Those people can often work from home and have whole god damn mod community who gives them ideas. If those modders can make some of mods they do with their lack of resources and at home paradox really has little excuse.
Modders do it in their spare time and at home. You are telling a corporation of people with strong clique fan base and funding who do this for living can’t provide updates, dlcs, additional content, and information? I call bullshit.
The assholes can’t even provide the date for one of first major dlc yet royal court.
Paradox needs someone to give them shit more often for screwing around as they do. But this seems be issue with Euro gaming industries in general.
Like new warband game would have gotten dropped and canceled if it took that long in states and likely people involved fires for dicking around and leaking release date info.
One great part about US gaming industry when they make game right they will often wait until thing is practically finished to announce a release date of game. Also they would already have team working on dlcs immediately after that and testing game for more bugs until release.
Wish Japanese would but paradox or create their own version of it honestly lol. Would be less Eurocentric too
25 days of legally mandated holiday. Good thing they take that break, too. Better for their health, and thus better for the quality of the game.
Paradoxer
Banned
Ok my bad. But still they take too damn long. The work modders do alone with much less resources and knowledge of codes leave little room for slack on paradox part.
Unlike a console game they could scroll the mod workshop to get general idea of what people want.
For example, if I made game like crusader kings I would want to make game so rpg filled on choices and gameplay styles I would hope people would not even have to make that many major mods.
Also when you do mod game you don’t have to stack your files with multiple mods that slow down your computer and gameplay.
Dude. Chill the fuck out.
There's a difference between game development and mod development. Modders use the tools of the game and the engine. They build on what's there, splashing on fresh coats of paint, adding accessories, or even remodeling the house. But Paradox builds the frame and foundation allowing modders to do what they do. In fact, many paradox employees are the same modders you praise so highly.
In addition, the fact of the matter is that Paradox treats its employees far worse than they ought to. Conditions are poor, pay is low, and expectations are high. The crappy initial releases are often because of this reality.
You make a lot of comparisons to American and Japanese companies, but there are literally no other companies making games comparable to Paradox. Civ and Total War are fundamentally different and more arcade-like, which is fine. But you have literally no frame of reference to say a Japanese company would be any different. Nintendo, 343, and Paradox aren't comparable. They all make different games with different design philosophies.
There is legitimate criticism to level at PDX. But that doesn't mean you should shit all over them for long development cycles or trying to offer something new to the player base.
Never really used the Antipope mechanic in my games. Don't see the point of risking tanking Catholic Moral Authority just to install a pope that is to my liking...
Plus in my game probably half or more of the College of Cardinals are bishops of my Empire so... I've even had two popes that belonged to my dynasty, including one that was the younger brother to one of my emperors.
Also don't have Free Investiture, but that's more because even if I had it I wouldn't use it... I tend to stop often to check way too many things, so bishop nomination woud just feel tedious...
This game really gives me tough love...
So it turns out Thibault III was the first to die. Fucking Pope Leo IV is 75 and yet he lived...
And now I'm playing Thibault III's son and successor Emmanuel III... AND HE'S A FUCKING SECRET NESTORIAN!
Now I will be able to fix this... I could try to go for the Nestorian Emperor but I've spent five centuries and sixteen characters building the largest possible catholic empire in the world... Turning Nestorian now would be suicide. Though I do love the irony given the previous conflict between the Pope and his father...
Kinda annoys me though that I have secret Nestorians in my Empire... Because it makes no fucking sense given how much time I've spent converting my Empire to Catholicism, even with my Excommunicated Emperor... I don't understand where they come from.
I really love this game but sometimes it's just so frustrating...
So it turns out Thibault III was the first to die. Fucking Pope Leo IV is 75 and yet he lived...
And now I'm playing Thibault III's son and successor Emmanuel III... AND HE'S A FUCKING SECRET NESTORIAN!
Now I will be able to fix this... I could try to go for the Nestorian Emperor but I've spent five centuries and sixteen characters building the largest possible catholic empire in the world... Turning Nestorian now would be suicide. Though I do love the irony given the previous conflict between the Pope and his father...
Kinda annoys me though that I have secret Nestorians in my Empire... Because it makes no fucking sense given how much time I've spent converting my Empire to Catholicism, even with my Excommunicated Emperor... I don't understand where they come from.
I really love this game but sometimes it's just so frustrating...
Planet of Hats
Donor
Yeah yeah, I know, I should be playing CK3. Nevertheless, here's another of these. I whipped up a mini-mod to add the Veps to the Finno-Ugric culture group. Here's the narrative of how a bunch of obscure Baltic Finns came out of nowhere to become important.
Noumea Surakondine, or Noumea the Great Bear
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (October 20, 776 - August 12, 824)
* Chief of Änine (769 - August 12, 824)
The prehistory of the White Sea and Interlake region - broadly, Vepsä - is fairly obscure in the early going, but the most notable figure in regional lore is Noumea. There's serious debate as to whether he actually existed or if he's a creation of the family myth of the ruling Suräkondine clan, but he looms large in Vepsian mythohistory nevertheless.
Salinder Noumeane, or Salinder the Wordslayer
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (August 12, 824 - August 19, 847)
While mythohistory suggests the semi-legendary Noumea was succeeded by his son Salinder, it's again unclear how much reality there is to his existence. Not much is actually spoken of him save in passing by later members of the Suräkondine clan seeking to draw from the legacy of Noumea and family.
Sokhroi Salinderne, or Sokhroi the Bottomless
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (August 19, 847 - December 8, 888)
Known mainly through secondhand written sources, Sokhroi is nevertheless the first member of the Suräkondine lineage almost universally agreed to have existed in something like what the historical record indicates. It's unclear when he actually emerged, but we have a clear period for his death - the winter of 888 AD - and a broad sense of what he did with his life. Notably, he's the first of the dynasty to have a name that is more clearly of Vepsian descent.
Khodari Sokhroine, or Simoi the Fox, or Simoi the Confessor
* King of Vepsa (circa 896 - July 17, 916)
* King of Norway (May 2, 905 - July 17, 916)
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (December 4, 888 - circa 896)
In early Vepsian history, Simoi the Fox is undoubtedly the historical figure of greatest consequence. It is under his rule that the Vepsian people exploded onto the world stage, emerging as a developed society and a power in the far north.
Noumea Surakondine, or Noumea the Great Bear
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (October 20, 776 - August 12, 824)
* Chief of Änine (769 - August 12, 824)
The prehistory of the White Sea and Interlake region - broadly, Vepsä - is fairly obscure in the early going, but the most notable figure in regional lore is Noumea. There's serious debate as to whether he actually existed or if he's a creation of the family myth of the ruling Suräkondine clan, but he looms large in Vepsian mythohistory nevertheless.
As far as oral tradition recounts, Noumea was a seven-foot-tall giant of a warrior who emerged as a key chief of the eastern Vepsians in the area east of Lake Onega. The story goes that he rallied a band of warriors to his cause and subjugated other clans along the shores of the White Sea, forcing them to recognize him as the paramount chief in the area. Tradition from there suggests that he hand-carved the first boat on Lake Onega from a tree he uprooted with his own two hands, which he then sailed down the Volga to the Byzantine Empire on a massive adventure in which he fought a bear in the middle of Constantinople before the Emperor Bardanes himself.
Tangible records are hard to come by, but reconstructing Noumea through archaeological and linguistic sources reveals that he was likely not Vepsian at all: The name "Noumea" is more common among Uralic speakers living east of Vepsa. Moreover, several finds of weapons and artifacts from the mid-to-late eighth century bear resemblance to arrowheads and spear points utilized by the Burtas and the Khazars, and a number of burials in the area reveal DNA traces more reflective of Uralic peoples from the inner tundra. The archaeological Noumea seems likely to have been the leader of an eastern Uralic tribe displaced by Khazar and Slavic expansionism who migrated north and carved out a network of tributaries among the mostly Vepsian and Karelian-speaking Finns around Lake Onega and the White Sea coast, integrating numerous people of Nenets extraction along the way.
Remarkably, other archaeological finds support connections between the White Sea rim and the contemporary medieval world. At one burial near Melašohu, an individual was found buried in the fashion of a warrior alongside grave goods from abroad, including numerous coins from contemporary Kent and Wales and a sword of clear Greek manufacture. A find at Aunus on the western shore of Lake Onega revealed the burial of a woman of status who was of clear South Slavic descent, but buried with grave goods resembling Vepsian women of the time. Yet another find uncovered a large amphora in a Visigothic style. The origin of these curiosities may be debated: It's unclear if they arrived through regular trade and travel or through conquest, though the appearance of a South Slav in early 9th-century Vepsa suggests the Veps may have raided the Adriatic in a fashion similar to the Vikings and brought back captives.
What appears most tangible is that, as early as the first quarter of the ninth century, a hillfort was constructed at Pälemä, overlooking Lake Onega at the river of the same name (known to the Slavs as Pyal'ma). The etymology of the fort seems to stem from the proto-Finnish "pää," or "head," indicating some importance. Stonework and petrified timber finds at the site provide the earliest evidence of Pälemä's use as a harbour of consequence, likely for both Finnic traders and for Rus' and Norse traders traveling down the Volga along a trade route utilized to reach the Caspian Sea. Control of the Trade Route to the Varangians seems to have been crucial to the regional chiefs, and the ability to exercise influence over the profitable routes through Lakes Onega and Ladoga allowed for goods to flow into the region not only from the Hellenized world, but from the Islamic centres around the Caspian and from the Khazar-controlled steppes. The stonework itself forms the foundation of what is now known as the Stone Port on the Änine, which would become a major lake port in generations to come.
Tangible records are hard to come by, but reconstructing Noumea through archaeological and linguistic sources reveals that he was likely not Vepsian at all: The name "Noumea" is more common among Uralic speakers living east of Vepsa. Moreover, several finds of weapons and artifacts from the mid-to-late eighth century bear resemblance to arrowheads and spear points utilized by the Burtas and the Khazars, and a number of burials in the area reveal DNA traces more reflective of Uralic peoples from the inner tundra. The archaeological Noumea seems likely to have been the leader of an eastern Uralic tribe displaced by Khazar and Slavic expansionism who migrated north and carved out a network of tributaries among the mostly Vepsian and Karelian-speaking Finns around Lake Onega and the White Sea coast, integrating numerous people of Nenets extraction along the way.
Remarkably, other archaeological finds support connections between the White Sea rim and the contemporary medieval world. At one burial near Melašohu, an individual was found buried in the fashion of a warrior alongside grave goods from abroad, including numerous coins from contemporary Kent and Wales and a sword of clear Greek manufacture. A find at Aunus on the western shore of Lake Onega revealed the burial of a woman of status who was of clear South Slavic descent, but buried with grave goods resembling Vepsian women of the time. Yet another find uncovered a large amphora in a Visigothic style. The origin of these curiosities may be debated: It's unclear if they arrived through regular trade and travel or through conquest, though the appearance of a South Slav in early 9th-century Vepsa suggests the Veps may have raided the Adriatic in a fashion similar to the Vikings and brought back captives.
What appears most tangible is that, as early as the first quarter of the ninth century, a hillfort was constructed at Pälemä, overlooking Lake Onega at the river of the same name (known to the Slavs as Pyal'ma). The etymology of the fort seems to stem from the proto-Finnish "pää," or "head," indicating some importance. Stonework and petrified timber finds at the site provide the earliest evidence of Pälemä's use as a harbour of consequence, likely for both Finnic traders and for Rus' and Norse traders traveling down the Volga along a trade route utilized to reach the Caspian Sea. Control of the Trade Route to the Varangians seems to have been crucial to the regional chiefs, and the ability to exercise influence over the profitable routes through Lakes Onega and Ladoga allowed for goods to flow into the region not only from the Hellenized world, but from the Islamic centres around the Caspian and from the Khazar-controlled steppes. The stonework itself forms the foundation of what is now known as the Stone Port on the Änine, which would become a major lake port in generations to come.
Salinder Noumeane, or Salinder the Wordslayer
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (August 12, 824 - August 19, 847)
While mythohistory suggests the semi-legendary Noumea was succeeded by his son Salinder, it's again unclear how much reality there is to his existence. Not much is actually spoken of him save in passing by later members of the Suräkondine clan seeking to draw from the legacy of Noumea and family.
Archaeological records indicate a sudden growth in the number of hillforts dug out in the interlake region beginning in the early ninth century and continuing on into the decades. Evidence also emerges of increasing use of sedentary agricultural techniques around the more fertile parts of the lakes, particularly around the Pälemä hillfort. The agricultural package introduced here seems to have benefited enormously from both Slavic and Scandinavian influence, likely coming in through Pälemä. This period seems to have been important for the Vepsians in that it marked a rapid transition from a mostly slash-and-burn semi-nomadic society to one rooted in a more central organization based on more modern farming techniques, a major shift that left them further ahead in their development than most of the Baltic Finnic groups.
Salinder himself is remarkably undetailed in what we know of him, though he apparently came to the throne an old man and kidnapped a woman from somewhere in the Adriatic to become his bride. He has, however, been connected with the Raids on Venice during this period. A find of Venetian coins in a stash on the Kola Peninsula suggests two things: That the Veps had extended their influence far into the north, and that they were involved in attacks in the Adriatic around this period.
Salinder himself is remarkably undetailed in what we know of him, though he apparently came to the throne an old man and kidnapped a woman from somewhere in the Adriatic to become his bride. He has, however, been connected with the Raids on Venice during this period. A find of Venetian coins in a stash on the Kola Peninsula suggests two things: That the Veps had extended their influence far into the north, and that they were involved in attacks in the Adriatic around this period.
Sokhroi Salinderne, or Sokhroi the Bottomless
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (August 19, 847 - December 8, 888)
Known mainly through secondhand written sources, Sokhroi is nevertheless the first member of the Suräkondine lineage almost universally agreed to have existed in something like what the historical record indicates. It's unclear when he actually emerged, but we have a clear period for his death - the winter of 888 AD - and a broad sense of what he did with his life. Notably, he's the first of the dynasty to have a name that is more clearly of Vepsian descent.
The primary source for this period - the Chronicle of Theudebald - describes Sokhroi as posthumously, noting him as being "half Slavonian" and claims him to have been known among the Vepsians to have been both just and kind for a pagan. He is described as being "of the Northmen" in his ways as a seafarer and raider.
The other source for Sokhroi is a record from 10th-century Egypt describing a raid on Alexandria in about 875. The records suggest raiders referred to by the Egyptians as "the Saqaliba, of the warrior Shuqar" arrived at Alexandria during a rebellion and sacked the settlements along the coast, even stealing treasures from the Great Lighthouse. Hordes from the late ninth century indeed reflect a greater proliferation of coins with Arabic, Coptic and Greek markings, suggesting the Vepsians of the period raided as far south as Egypt, Crete, Cilicia and the Peloponnese. Italian coins are also well-represented.
Sokhroi's reign seems to have coincided with the continuation of the wave of hillfort construction that began earlier in the century. Well-developed settlements popped up along Lakes Onega and Ladoga, and Finnic artifacts have been found around Uzulinna/Novgorod, suggesting the Vepsians were able to extend their influence even into the collapsing polity of the Ilmen Slavs. This expansion likely came along with substantial assimilation of Slavic and Finnic polities in Ilmenia, further bringing new agricultural technologies into the Finnic realm.
The other source for Sokhroi is a record from 10th-century Egypt describing a raid on Alexandria in about 875. The records suggest raiders referred to by the Egyptians as "the Saqaliba, of the warrior Shuqar" arrived at Alexandria during a rebellion and sacked the settlements along the coast, even stealing treasures from the Great Lighthouse. Hordes from the late ninth century indeed reflect a greater proliferation of coins with Arabic, Coptic and Greek markings, suggesting the Vepsians of the period raided as far south as Egypt, Crete, Cilicia and the Peloponnese. Italian coins are also well-represented.
Sokhroi's reign seems to have coincided with the continuation of the wave of hillfort construction that began earlier in the century. Well-developed settlements popped up along Lakes Onega and Ladoga, and Finnic artifacts have been found around Uzulinna/Novgorod, suggesting the Vepsians were able to extend their influence even into the collapsing polity of the Ilmen Slavs. This expansion likely came along with substantial assimilation of Slavic and Finnic polities in Ilmenia, further bringing new agricultural technologies into the Finnic realm.
Khodari Sokhroine, or Simoi the Fox, or Simoi the Confessor
* King of Vepsa (circa 896 - July 17, 916)
* King of Norway (May 2, 905 - July 17, 916)
* Paramount Chief of the Vepsians (December 4, 888 - circa 896)
In early Vepsian history, Simoi the Fox is undoubtedly the historical figure of greatest consequence. It is under his rule that the Vepsian people exploded onto the world stage, emerging as a developed society and a power in the far north.
Much of what we know about Simoi comes through the records of Theudebald von Geldern, Prince-Archbishop of Utrecht. Theudebald records that Simoi was born Khodari and was Sokhroi's only son, the youngest of three children behind two daughters. Khodari emerged into the consciousness of greater Europe after taking part in a raid along the Frankish coast, subjugating a slice of Viking-controlled land in Picardie and briefly holding it as an exclave. The Vepsians exchanged emissaries with the Church in the region, and a legate met with Khodari at the city of Amiens, finding him receptive to Christian ideas.
At the behest of Queen Bladovildis the Missionary, the last Karling monarch of Middle Francia, Theudebald traveled to the north, where his records shed light on the state of Khodari's realm. Theudebald describes several "imposing stone fortresses upon high hills" and reports arriving via "a great gulf in the lands of the Northmen" - likely the Gulf of Finland - before following a road through mostly wilderness to a more developed area corresponding with the interlake region. In particular he describes arriving in Pälemä and finding it "fair large and impregnable," also providing the first written descriptions of the Stone Port, where he reported seeing Varangians as well as Vepsians. At Pälemä, Theudebald baptized Khodari as Simon - Simoi, in the Vepsian language - along with several of his nobles in the waters of Lake Onega. As part of the ceremony, Theudebald crowned Simoi with a coronet of amber and acknowledged him as King of the Vepsians and the Finns.
The conversion was not universal, and Theudebald reports that several subject chieftains in the hinterlands revolted and attempted to break free of Vepsian lordship. Simoi seems to have dealt with this rebellion through main force and settled in to continue to develop a realm that, outside of the environs of Pälemä, was still mostly tribal and barely hospitable, much less developed. However, subsequent events would cement the Vepsians as a surprising entry into Christendom.
In 900, Pope John IX sent out the call to Crusade. Initially preaching against a heretical uprising in central Germany, the crusade would be shifted north to focus on quelling Norse raiders coming out of lower Norway and Sweden. The Swedish ruler of the time converted to Christianity upon receiving a threat of Papal interference - only to be overthrown within a couple of years by his angry pagan vassals - but Christian troops would descend nevertheless on Norway beginning in 902.
The Vepsians did not contribute anything close to the largest force, according to contemporary accounts. Christian chroniclers report that "the northmen of Vepesia" proved most useful as frontiersmen with expertise fighting in frigid tribal and mountain lands. Vepsian soldiers arrived in the company of three thousand Khazar horsemen, but they landed as several smaller forces and constructed hillforts out of which the Crusaders could operate and resupply in the austere Norwegian mountains. These hillforts allowed the Christian hosts to store provender and move in greater numbers, equalizing the conflict against the more mobile Norsemen.
As the spring of 905 arrived, with the Norse badly beaten, the new Pope acknowledged Simoi as King of Norway, much to the surprise of the rest of Christendom. Enormous amounts of war booty and treasure flowed from the Papal coffers into the interlake region, where Simoi broke ground on the oldest known cathedral in the area, Pudoga Cathedral on the southeast shore of Lake Onega.
Records around this period also suggest Simoi spearheaded the sweeping out of Viking presence from peninsular Finland. New hillfort construction in the area sparked early in the 10th century, and coinage displaying Simoi and the Christian cross increasingly appears in the area below Lapland.
At the time of Simoi's death in 916, the Vepsians were at war with the nomadic Ryn Khazars in Estonia.
At the behest of Queen Bladovildis the Missionary, the last Karling monarch of Middle Francia, Theudebald traveled to the north, where his records shed light on the state of Khodari's realm. Theudebald describes several "imposing stone fortresses upon high hills" and reports arriving via "a great gulf in the lands of the Northmen" - likely the Gulf of Finland - before following a road through mostly wilderness to a more developed area corresponding with the interlake region. In particular he describes arriving in Pälemä and finding it "fair large and impregnable," also providing the first written descriptions of the Stone Port, where he reported seeing Varangians as well as Vepsians. At Pälemä, Theudebald baptized Khodari as Simon - Simoi, in the Vepsian language - along with several of his nobles in the waters of Lake Onega. As part of the ceremony, Theudebald crowned Simoi with a coronet of amber and acknowledged him as King of the Vepsians and the Finns.
The conversion was not universal, and Theudebald reports that several subject chieftains in the hinterlands revolted and attempted to break free of Vepsian lordship. Simoi seems to have dealt with this rebellion through main force and settled in to continue to develop a realm that, outside of the environs of Pälemä, was still mostly tribal and barely hospitable, much less developed. However, subsequent events would cement the Vepsians as a surprising entry into Christendom.
In 900, Pope John IX sent out the call to Crusade. Initially preaching against a heretical uprising in central Germany, the crusade would be shifted north to focus on quelling Norse raiders coming out of lower Norway and Sweden. The Swedish ruler of the time converted to Christianity upon receiving a threat of Papal interference - only to be overthrown within a couple of years by his angry pagan vassals - but Christian troops would descend nevertheless on Norway beginning in 902.
The Vepsians did not contribute anything close to the largest force, according to contemporary accounts. Christian chroniclers report that "the northmen of Vepesia" proved most useful as frontiersmen with expertise fighting in frigid tribal and mountain lands. Vepsian soldiers arrived in the company of three thousand Khazar horsemen, but they landed as several smaller forces and constructed hillforts out of which the Crusaders could operate and resupply in the austere Norwegian mountains. These hillforts allowed the Christian hosts to store provender and move in greater numbers, equalizing the conflict against the more mobile Norsemen.
As the spring of 905 arrived, with the Norse badly beaten, the new Pope acknowledged Simoi as King of Norway, much to the surprise of the rest of Christendom. Enormous amounts of war booty and treasure flowed from the Papal coffers into the interlake region, where Simoi broke ground on the oldest known cathedral in the area, Pudoga Cathedral on the southeast shore of Lake Onega.
Records around this period also suggest Simoi spearheaded the sweeping out of Viking presence from peninsular Finland. New hillfort construction in the area sparked early in the 10th century, and coinage displaying Simoi and the Christian cross increasingly appears in the area below Lapland.
At the time of Simoi's death in 916, the Vepsians were at war with the nomadic Ryn Khazars in Estonia.
Planet of Hats
Donor
A few more of these.
Hasaba Simoine, or Hasaba the Young
* King of Vepsa (July 17, 916 - November 18, 930)
Simoi's death saw Vepsian holdings split between his heirs. His second son Artä received the throne of Norway, while his eldest, Hasaba, inherited Vepsä proper.
Tišoi I Hasabane, or Tišoi the Missionary
* High King of Šoomenma (April 4, 960 - January 9, 969)
* King of Vepsa, Suomi and Ižora (November 18, 930 - January 9, 969)
Hasaba's eldest son and a commander in the Vepsian armies, Tišoi was crowned by the Archbishop of Vepsia and Merya and set his sights immediately on improving his realm. That said, he wasted little time in extending Vepsian suzerainty up the White Sea coast, installing Christian chiefs over the Nenets and Komi-speaking tribes around the River Mezen and the Kanin Peninsula.
Hasaba Simoine, or Hasaba the Young
* King of Vepsa (July 17, 916 - November 18, 930)
Simoi's death saw Vepsian holdings split between his heirs. His second son Artä received the throne of Norway, while his eldest, Hasaba, inherited Vepsä proper.
Hasaba entered his reign on the field, completing the driving out of the Ryns from their strongholds along the Gulf of Finland. From there he made speed back to Pälemä and was crowned on the shore of Lake Onega in a ceremony led by the highest churchmen in the realm, the newly-appointed Archbishop Tyushten of Vepsia and Merya.
Eager to diminish the influence of the Vikings in Finnic lands, Hasaba launched a lightning campaign in 920 to seize a Swedish hillfort built some years prior to control the lands of the Votes. With the Vendel rulers of Sweden caught up in several other wars and reeling from a realm-splintering succession, the Vepsians quickly seized control of Votia, the last outstanding Viking stronghold in Ingria, and stormed King Baldr af Vendel's stronghold in Uppsala to cap off a speedy victory.
Hasaba's reign was dealt a breath of relief in 924, when the Swedish embraced Christianity at the urging of King Frotari of Austrasia. This second conversion was followed by another short civil war, but this time King Baldr was joined in taking the cross by the lion's share of Norse leaders, and the rebellion was put down quickly. This conversion spelled an end to the worst of the constant raids along the river route to the Byzantine Empire, allowing Hasaba to turn more of his attention to suppressing attacks from the Khazars, Ryns and Bashkirs - and to small border wars to expand his territory. Chieftains living around the southern end of Lake Peipus in the southwest and among the Mari in the east would come to acknowledge the Vepsians as their overlords in this period.
By and large, however, Hasaba would prove a transitional king, passing away in his sleep at the age of 52.
Eager to diminish the influence of the Vikings in Finnic lands, Hasaba launched a lightning campaign in 920 to seize a Swedish hillfort built some years prior to control the lands of the Votes. With the Vendel rulers of Sweden caught up in several other wars and reeling from a realm-splintering succession, the Vepsians quickly seized control of Votia, the last outstanding Viking stronghold in Ingria, and stormed King Baldr af Vendel's stronghold in Uppsala to cap off a speedy victory.
Hasaba's reign was dealt a breath of relief in 924, when the Swedish embraced Christianity at the urging of King Frotari of Austrasia. This second conversion was followed by another short civil war, but this time King Baldr was joined in taking the cross by the lion's share of Norse leaders, and the rebellion was put down quickly. This conversion spelled an end to the worst of the constant raids along the river route to the Byzantine Empire, allowing Hasaba to turn more of his attention to suppressing attacks from the Khazars, Ryns and Bashkirs - and to small border wars to expand his territory. Chieftains living around the southern end of Lake Peipus in the southwest and among the Mari in the east would come to acknowledge the Vepsians as their overlords in this period.
By and large, however, Hasaba would prove a transitional king, passing away in his sleep at the age of 52.
Tišoi I Hasabane, or Tišoi the Missionary
* High King of Šoomenma (April 4, 960 - January 9, 969)
* King of Vepsa, Suomi and Ižora (November 18, 930 - January 9, 969)
Hasaba's eldest son and a commander in the Vepsian armies, Tišoi was crowned by the Archbishop of Vepsia and Merya and set his sights immediately on improving his realm. That said, he wasted little time in extending Vepsian suzerainty up the White Sea coast, installing Christian chiefs over the Nenets and Komi-speaking tribes around the River Mezen and the Kanin Peninsula.
Like most of the areas owing tribute to the Vepsians, the Mezen and Kanin regions were underdeveloped and dominated by scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers and coast fishermen. Settlement in the Vepsian kingdom of the early 10th century was largely restricted to the coastal regions of Lakes Onega and Ladoga and on down the immediate shoreline of the Volga River, where cities largely clustered along the rivers and lakes for the sake of ease of travel. While some hillforts had been developed into cities along the coast of the Gulf of Finland, the areas of the most cohesive settlement were threefold: The east coast of Lake Onega in the area around Pälemä, the region around Kägisalmi and Sortavala near Lake Onega, and a series of formerly Rus' settlements down the Volga, headlined by the small forts of Kuostemää (Kostroma to the Rus') and Vaugeda (Vologda).
The steady growth of the Vepsian realm was interrupted by the disastrous Second Crusade - though the Finnic nobility seem to have been, at best, minor participants. The Crusade, initially aimed to seize the Holy Land, was redirected to the Byzantine Empire. Over the course of a year ending in July of 939, Byzantium was shattered, ending when the Emperor Eustratios was captured on the field by Hildebald Karling and forced to surrender his empire. The Byzantines shattered almost instantly, leaving Hildebald to rule a much-diminished empire from Constantinople. Tišoi's realm was distant enough from the fighting that the Vepsians managed only to send in a few thousand men to lay siege to Abydos and Mytilene, the latter army being defeated by a Roman army and scattered - though Tišoi's brother Orešku, riding with the Knights of Calatrava, was nevertheless granted rule of Traianopolis.
The loot from Abydos financed new improvements to Tišoi's fortresses. It also financed missionary activity abroad: In 940, Tišoi traveled to Denmark to meet with the Saxon Queen Wiltrud the Just, presiding over the conversion of she and her entire court to Christianity. The baptism of Denmark removed the last major bastion of pagan Vikings in Scandinavia, though remnants continued to cling to strongholds in the Baltic.
In the wake of the crusade, the Vepsian rulers seem to have placed new focus on building up the more fertile areas of the north, with a particular focus on the Northern Dvina River. A hillfort in the region was developed into the nucleus of the town of Kalmomäki, with a few surviving edicts suggesting Tišoi had ordered the construction of roads and other amenities in the hopes of raising the region's prosperity. However, this process seems to have gone painfully slowly owing to the general inhospitable climate of the region.
By 950, Vepsian troops were pushing outwards once more, again concentrating mainly on rivers and coasts. The coastal Nenets around the isle of Kolguyev seem to have come under tribute to Pälemä by this time, but the more consequential conflict came in the face of the crumbling of the Alans of the central Rus' riverlands, in lands once occupied by the Slavs. With the Alauni rulers besieged on all sides, Tišoi marched his men into the Alan-controlled north to besiege what are described as the Mochkava Forts: A string of hillforts along the River Mochkava, a tributary of the Oka. Control of these forts would begin the process of establishing a natural border along the Mochkava and Oka Rivers, in lands once dominated by the Ilmen Slavs and later the Alans but still mostly occupied by Meshchera tribes speaking a Finno-Ugric language. While the Ryn Khazars came to the Alans' defense, the combined forces of the Alans and Ryns were routed by the Vepsians at the Battle of Kashin Hill, and the hillforts passed into Vepsian control.
A short war with the divided Khazars followed, with Vepsian forces seizing the formerly Rus' settlement of Suzdal and a couple of surrounding hillforts. These strongholds were farmed out to Tišoi's second and third sons, the twins Vesei and St'opu, and to the Mordvin chief Vechkas. From there, an opportune rebellion among the Khazars allowed Vepsian troops to move a little further south and capture the hillfort of Murom. A generation prior, the rulers there had taken the cross at the behest of King Simoi the Fox; here, Tišoi liberated their lands with little effort, extending Vepsian control to the confluence of the Volga and Oka. Koshel of Murom, son of Murunza the Confessor, was named Tišoi's man in the region, and the new hillforts along the rivers were parceled out to he and other boyars to administer. One more hillfort was captured by 960: The Mordvin fort of Gorodets on the Volga, a bastion of the Bashkirs.
The wars brought valuable new land into the Vepsian polity, mainly land that could actually be farmed with greater ease than the frigid interlake region. Nevertheless, Tišoi resolved to keep the capital at Pälemä and retain his vast and underdeveloped holdings along the Northern Dvina, the fief written up as Tšuddema, or Bjarmaland to the Norse. Much of this seems to have been a play for the sea access that had allowed Vepsa to develop, as well as to control the immense profits flowing through Pälemä via the fur trade.
It's around this point that Tišoi's styling seems to have changed. Historians mark the transition between the Vepsian kingdom and the so-called Finnic High Kingdom, or the High Kingdom of Šoomenma, to April 4, 960 - the date noted on the Pillar of Tišoi. This enormous menhir, standing a ways outside Pälemä, carries depictions of a coronation and refers to Tišoi as "he who is High King of Vepsä, of Ižora, of Šuomi, of Merya, lord of the Eryza, Moksha, Sami, Nenetše and Ruotši, Master of the North, of all the Rivers and Lakes of Šoomenma." The term "Finnic High Kingdom" is a historical term; the actual polity seems to have been fairly decentralized and referred to mainly as Šoomenma, an appellation likely derived from the proto-Finnic "Sooma". Externally the polity was referred to in its time as the Land of the Samians, or simply Samaland.
The capture of this new, more fertile land seems to have marked a shift in Tišoi's focus. Budget formerly diverted to Tšuddema was routed to the region south of Suzdal, where a site known to the Rus' as Vladimir's Tor was steadily built up into a strong hillfort and ultimately a castle in the Vepsian-Frankish style. This fort was given the name Hältuma, a Finnicized form derived from the name Vladimir. A town was established nearby at a site the Slavs called Starodub and the Veps called Stjamotuma.
A plot by Tišoi's younger son St'opu to murder his eldest, Tišoi the Younger, saw the king strip the young man of his holdings in Suzdal (Finnicized to Suotsdäl). That fort, too, was slated for improvement.
Tišoi passed in the early winter of 969 following a years-long battle with a cancerous tumour, for which he underwent a surgery that allegedly left him castrated in the later years of his life. He left behind the largest realm in Christian Europe by geography, one in a state of steady transition from northern backwater to rising land power.
The steady growth of the Vepsian realm was interrupted by the disastrous Second Crusade - though the Finnic nobility seem to have been, at best, minor participants. The Crusade, initially aimed to seize the Holy Land, was redirected to the Byzantine Empire. Over the course of a year ending in July of 939, Byzantium was shattered, ending when the Emperor Eustratios was captured on the field by Hildebald Karling and forced to surrender his empire. The Byzantines shattered almost instantly, leaving Hildebald to rule a much-diminished empire from Constantinople. Tišoi's realm was distant enough from the fighting that the Vepsians managed only to send in a few thousand men to lay siege to Abydos and Mytilene, the latter army being defeated by a Roman army and scattered - though Tišoi's brother Orešku, riding with the Knights of Calatrava, was nevertheless granted rule of Traianopolis.
The loot from Abydos financed new improvements to Tišoi's fortresses. It also financed missionary activity abroad: In 940, Tišoi traveled to Denmark to meet with the Saxon Queen Wiltrud the Just, presiding over the conversion of she and her entire court to Christianity. The baptism of Denmark removed the last major bastion of pagan Vikings in Scandinavia, though remnants continued to cling to strongholds in the Baltic.
In the wake of the crusade, the Vepsian rulers seem to have placed new focus on building up the more fertile areas of the north, with a particular focus on the Northern Dvina River. A hillfort in the region was developed into the nucleus of the town of Kalmomäki, with a few surviving edicts suggesting Tišoi had ordered the construction of roads and other amenities in the hopes of raising the region's prosperity. However, this process seems to have gone painfully slowly owing to the general inhospitable climate of the region.
By 950, Vepsian troops were pushing outwards once more, again concentrating mainly on rivers and coasts. The coastal Nenets around the isle of Kolguyev seem to have come under tribute to Pälemä by this time, but the more consequential conflict came in the face of the crumbling of the Alans of the central Rus' riverlands, in lands once occupied by the Slavs. With the Alauni rulers besieged on all sides, Tišoi marched his men into the Alan-controlled north to besiege what are described as the Mochkava Forts: A string of hillforts along the River Mochkava, a tributary of the Oka. Control of these forts would begin the process of establishing a natural border along the Mochkava and Oka Rivers, in lands once dominated by the Ilmen Slavs and later the Alans but still mostly occupied by Meshchera tribes speaking a Finno-Ugric language. While the Ryn Khazars came to the Alans' defense, the combined forces of the Alans and Ryns were routed by the Vepsians at the Battle of Kashin Hill, and the hillforts passed into Vepsian control.
A short war with the divided Khazars followed, with Vepsian forces seizing the formerly Rus' settlement of Suzdal and a couple of surrounding hillforts. These strongholds were farmed out to Tišoi's second and third sons, the twins Vesei and St'opu, and to the Mordvin chief Vechkas. From there, an opportune rebellion among the Khazars allowed Vepsian troops to move a little further south and capture the hillfort of Murom. A generation prior, the rulers there had taken the cross at the behest of King Simoi the Fox; here, Tišoi liberated their lands with little effort, extending Vepsian control to the confluence of the Volga and Oka. Koshel of Murom, son of Murunza the Confessor, was named Tišoi's man in the region, and the new hillforts along the rivers were parceled out to he and other boyars to administer. One more hillfort was captured by 960: The Mordvin fort of Gorodets on the Volga, a bastion of the Bashkirs.
The wars brought valuable new land into the Vepsian polity, mainly land that could actually be farmed with greater ease than the frigid interlake region. Nevertheless, Tišoi resolved to keep the capital at Pälemä and retain his vast and underdeveloped holdings along the Northern Dvina, the fief written up as Tšuddema, or Bjarmaland to the Norse. Much of this seems to have been a play for the sea access that had allowed Vepsa to develop, as well as to control the immense profits flowing through Pälemä via the fur trade.
It's around this point that Tišoi's styling seems to have changed. Historians mark the transition between the Vepsian kingdom and the so-called Finnic High Kingdom, or the High Kingdom of Šoomenma, to April 4, 960 - the date noted on the Pillar of Tišoi. This enormous menhir, standing a ways outside Pälemä, carries depictions of a coronation and refers to Tišoi as "he who is High King of Vepsä, of Ižora, of Šuomi, of Merya, lord of the Eryza, Moksha, Sami, Nenetše and Ruotši, Master of the North, of all the Rivers and Lakes of Šoomenma." The term "Finnic High Kingdom" is a historical term; the actual polity seems to have been fairly decentralized and referred to mainly as Šoomenma, an appellation likely derived from the proto-Finnic "Sooma". Externally the polity was referred to in its time as the Land of the Samians, or simply Samaland.
The capture of this new, more fertile land seems to have marked a shift in Tišoi's focus. Budget formerly diverted to Tšuddema was routed to the region south of Suzdal, where a site known to the Rus' as Vladimir's Tor was steadily built up into a strong hillfort and ultimately a castle in the Vepsian-Frankish style. This fort was given the name Hältuma, a Finnicized form derived from the name Vladimir. A town was established nearby at a site the Slavs called Starodub and the Veps called Stjamotuma.
A plot by Tišoi's younger son St'opu to murder his eldest, Tišoi the Younger, saw the king strip the young man of his holdings in Suzdal (Finnicized to Suotsdäl). That fort, too, was slated for improvement.
Tišoi passed in the early winter of 969 following a years-long battle with a cancerous tumour, for which he underwent a surgery that allegedly left him castrated in the later years of his life. He left behind the largest realm in Christian Europe by geography, one in a state of steady transition from northern backwater to rising land power.
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Planet of Hats
Donor
And another of these.
Tišoi II Tišoine, or Tišoi Vazaraine, or Tišoi the Hammer
* High King of Šoomenma (9 January 969 - January 28, 1001)
Tišoi came to power surrounded by enemies, detested by his Muslim wife Gunes Ryn (having fathered a bastard with a distant kinswoman) and by the powerful High Chief of Vepsä, and with a reputation as a careless and foolish youth, yet with a substantial war chest and significant holdings to his name. He wasted little time in opening the treasury to the Pope, organizing a splendid coronation - and buttering him up to approve a divorce from Gunes, who had already borne him a son and three daughters. Weeks later, he arranged a marriage to Princess Vida of Lithuania.
Juša Tišoine, or Juša Oakskin, or Juša, the Sword of Jesus
* High King of Šoomenma (January 28, 1001 - May 22, 1034)
* King of Jerusalem (July 16, 1009 - October 28, 1009)
Son of a Muslim Khazar mother who despised his father, Juša came to the throne known for his quiet sympathy for both Muslims in general and nomads in particular. Patient but paranoid and described by secondary sources as having a noticeable speech impediment, he is known more intimately than any Finnic monarch before him because he left a primary source: A book written in the Old High Finnic script, entitled "The Silver Mirror." The book is essentially Juša's memoir, written in the form of conversations with the ghost of his father, appearing to him in a mirror.
Tišoi II Tišoine, or Tišoi Vazaraine, or Tišoi the Hammer
* High King of Šoomenma (9 January 969 - January 28, 1001)
Tišoi came to power surrounded by enemies, detested by his Muslim wife Gunes Ryn (having fathered a bastard with a distant kinswoman) and by the powerful High Chief of Vepsä, and with a reputation as a careless and foolish youth, yet with a substantial war chest and significant holdings to his name. He wasted little time in opening the treasury to the Pope, organizing a splendid coronation - and buttering him up to approve a divorce from Gunes, who had already borne him a son and three daughters. Weeks later, he arranged a marriage to Princess Vida of Lithuania.
Scarcely a year into Tišoi's reign, however, the call to Crusade rang out - this time aimed at the Holy Land. Tišoi, strapped for cash after paying dearly for a spectacular coronation ceremony, put his building programs on hold to focus on building up a war chest for the long voyage to the Holy Land.
Determined not to repeat his father's mistakes from the Second Crusade, Tišoi mustered his fleets in the Finnish Gulf, gathering the bulk of his army in Estonia proper and leaving his retinues behind to defend Pälemä. More than 14,000 men from across the Finnic world poured into the ships and set sail - only to find the Abbasid Caliphate had mustered more than 50,000 men and stationed them along the coast of the Holy Land, ready to pounce.
The Finnic Crusaders made landfall at the only weak link they could find in the Caliphate's defenses: Arsuf. Demolishing a small scouting force of 250 men there, Tišoi split his armies, sending the bulk of them south to join a column of the Knights Hospitaller to form a host of about 17,000 strong. That army went on to defeat a host of 12,000 Saracens before the gates of Ascalon. The bulk of Caliph Nizam's host, meanwhile, was mustering in the north to form a single massive army of well over 30,000 men, hovering like a guillotine blade over the Crusade. As the smaller army of Lord Petrakoi of Sudalyvka reduced Arsuf, Tišoi personally oversaw the siege of Ascalon.
Astonishingly, the great host of Caliph Nizam remained holed up behind the walls of Scandalon through 973 and 974 even as the Crusaders crushed smaller armies throughout the Holy Land. Over the course of 973, Tišoi completed the sieges of towns and forts surrounding Ascalon, finally capturing the city itself, before swinging southward to personally lead a combined Crusader army into battle with Nizam's second army: A host of 13,000 men that had been holding fort in Darum. The Christian host swelled to 28,000 men through the course of the Battle of Gaza, enough to overwhelm the Saracens and leave more than half their number dead on the field.
With the southern host broken, Tišoi and Petrakoi swung the Crusader armies northeast to Beersheb. Sensing that the Saracens' will had broken, however, Tišoi veered north with his personal host, driving past Hebron and punching through a small Abbasid relief army en route straight to the gates of Jerusalem. More than 17,000 men reached the Holy City and settled in to lay siege, 8,000 of them from the Finnic north, the remainder Lombards, Croats and Knights Hospitaller. A protracted siege was not to be, however: Within days, the wali of the city raised the banner of surrender and opened the gates. It would be the first city of many to fall: Even with tens of thousands of men at arms perched within a few days' march, Caliph Nizam had capitulated. Accounts from the time suggest that Tišoi was the first of the Crusaders to enter the Holy City following the surrender, where he's said to have attended the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and prayed before the Rock of Golgotha.
Celebration rang out in the Christian world as the Crusaders settled into castles and cities across the Levant. Tišoi was hailed as a hero, and he arranged for his cousin Semoi to receive the largest share of the Crusaders' bounty, present for the young man's coronation as King of Jerusalem. Only as he ushered his men onto the ships for home did Tišoi learn why the Saracens had remained holed up in Scandalon: Caliph Nizam had committed to setting sail for Africa to aid an ally against Sardinian incursions there, but most of the Abbasids' fleets were limited to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and an attempt to portage them across the Sinai had ended disastrously.
The immense wealth captured from the Holy Land neatly resolved the issue of the enormous amount of coin Tišoi had poured into transporting his armies from the Finnic lands to the Levant, and he broke ground on an immense royal castle in Hältuma - Hältumanlinna Palace - and ordered an expansion of Pudoga Cathedral. It is the establishment of the new palace that defined the division of administration under Tišoi: Pälemä would remain the summer capital and northern trade hub of the High Kingdom, but Hältuma would act as the second city and winter capital. Hältuma had the advantage of far more fertile land and a more frontier-oriented location. Tišoi's eyes at this time were squarely on the continued threat of nomadic raiders from the east and south as well as on control of the wheat-growing lands and energy-rich peat bogs around Hältuma and Suotsdäl. Control of these lands was increasingly vital to ensuring the north could not be starved out by invaders.
As the 970s wore onward, Tišoi poured the wealth of the Levant into strengthening his southern strongholds, even as his men pushed east down the Volga to capture a few more hillforts along the riverline. The realm's development slowed in the 980s as a wave of typhus swept down the Volga, neatly following the line of castles and towns aligned down the trade route, but it would pass with time - albeit not without decimating the tribes of Tšuddema.
In 989, a rebellion led by the Duke of Ižora was put down, and the title of Pihkova was split from the duchy's holdings, dividing a strong realm in the former lands of the Ilmen Slavs. With that war settled, Tišoi dispatched a band of Cumans into the far north to subjugate a number of scattered Nenets and Komi chiefdoms on the periphery of the Khazar influence, deepening the High Kingdom's network of subjects in the north. Pushing to the Urals would prove impossible, however - the Khazars had gained control of much of Great Perm by this point, and their mastery of cavalry would prove a challenge even for a numerically superior Finnic host.
Years of quiet wound by, interrupted only by the steady procession of Khazar raiders off the Permian tundra and the steady flow of gold south to Hältuma. Tišoi received a boon, at least, in 998, when the rump Norse raider Hysing the Conqueror was captured in the Northern Dvina delta, allowing a ransom for a princely sum.
Infirm and afflicted with gout in his later years, Tišoi made a late-in-life pilgrimage to Jerusalem, revisiting his cousin Semoi and once more praying in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Rather than a miracle, he returned home with scurvy and died in his bed at Hältumanlinna Palace on the Volga, the construction of which he would newly witness.
Determined not to repeat his father's mistakes from the Second Crusade, Tišoi mustered his fleets in the Finnish Gulf, gathering the bulk of his army in Estonia proper and leaving his retinues behind to defend Pälemä. More than 14,000 men from across the Finnic world poured into the ships and set sail - only to find the Abbasid Caliphate had mustered more than 50,000 men and stationed them along the coast of the Holy Land, ready to pounce.
The Finnic Crusaders made landfall at the only weak link they could find in the Caliphate's defenses: Arsuf. Demolishing a small scouting force of 250 men there, Tišoi split his armies, sending the bulk of them south to join a column of the Knights Hospitaller to form a host of about 17,000 strong. That army went on to defeat a host of 12,000 Saracens before the gates of Ascalon. The bulk of Caliph Nizam's host, meanwhile, was mustering in the north to form a single massive army of well over 30,000 men, hovering like a guillotine blade over the Crusade. As the smaller army of Lord Petrakoi of Sudalyvka reduced Arsuf, Tišoi personally oversaw the siege of Ascalon.
Astonishingly, the great host of Caliph Nizam remained holed up behind the walls of Scandalon through 973 and 974 even as the Crusaders crushed smaller armies throughout the Holy Land. Over the course of 973, Tišoi completed the sieges of towns and forts surrounding Ascalon, finally capturing the city itself, before swinging southward to personally lead a combined Crusader army into battle with Nizam's second army: A host of 13,000 men that had been holding fort in Darum. The Christian host swelled to 28,000 men through the course of the Battle of Gaza, enough to overwhelm the Saracens and leave more than half their number dead on the field.
With the southern host broken, Tišoi and Petrakoi swung the Crusader armies northeast to Beersheb. Sensing that the Saracens' will had broken, however, Tišoi veered north with his personal host, driving past Hebron and punching through a small Abbasid relief army en route straight to the gates of Jerusalem. More than 17,000 men reached the Holy City and settled in to lay siege, 8,000 of them from the Finnic north, the remainder Lombards, Croats and Knights Hospitaller. A protracted siege was not to be, however: Within days, the wali of the city raised the banner of surrender and opened the gates. It would be the first city of many to fall: Even with tens of thousands of men at arms perched within a few days' march, Caliph Nizam had capitulated. Accounts from the time suggest that Tišoi was the first of the Crusaders to enter the Holy City following the surrender, where he's said to have attended the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and prayed before the Rock of Golgotha.
Celebration rang out in the Christian world as the Crusaders settled into castles and cities across the Levant. Tišoi was hailed as a hero, and he arranged for his cousin Semoi to receive the largest share of the Crusaders' bounty, present for the young man's coronation as King of Jerusalem. Only as he ushered his men onto the ships for home did Tišoi learn why the Saracens had remained holed up in Scandalon: Caliph Nizam had committed to setting sail for Africa to aid an ally against Sardinian incursions there, but most of the Abbasids' fleets were limited to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and an attempt to portage them across the Sinai had ended disastrously.
The immense wealth captured from the Holy Land neatly resolved the issue of the enormous amount of coin Tišoi had poured into transporting his armies from the Finnic lands to the Levant, and he broke ground on an immense royal castle in Hältuma - Hältumanlinna Palace - and ordered an expansion of Pudoga Cathedral. It is the establishment of the new palace that defined the division of administration under Tišoi: Pälemä would remain the summer capital and northern trade hub of the High Kingdom, but Hältuma would act as the second city and winter capital. Hältuma had the advantage of far more fertile land and a more frontier-oriented location. Tišoi's eyes at this time were squarely on the continued threat of nomadic raiders from the east and south as well as on control of the wheat-growing lands and energy-rich peat bogs around Hältuma and Suotsdäl. Control of these lands was increasingly vital to ensuring the north could not be starved out by invaders.
As the 970s wore onward, Tišoi poured the wealth of the Levant into strengthening his southern strongholds, even as his men pushed east down the Volga to capture a few more hillforts along the riverline. The realm's development slowed in the 980s as a wave of typhus swept down the Volga, neatly following the line of castles and towns aligned down the trade route, but it would pass with time - albeit not without decimating the tribes of Tšuddema.
In 989, a rebellion led by the Duke of Ižora was put down, and the title of Pihkova was split from the duchy's holdings, dividing a strong realm in the former lands of the Ilmen Slavs. With that war settled, Tišoi dispatched a band of Cumans into the far north to subjugate a number of scattered Nenets and Komi chiefdoms on the periphery of the Khazar influence, deepening the High Kingdom's network of subjects in the north. Pushing to the Urals would prove impossible, however - the Khazars had gained control of much of Great Perm by this point, and their mastery of cavalry would prove a challenge even for a numerically superior Finnic host.
Years of quiet wound by, interrupted only by the steady procession of Khazar raiders off the Permian tundra and the steady flow of gold south to Hältuma. Tišoi received a boon, at least, in 998, when the rump Norse raider Hysing the Conqueror was captured in the Northern Dvina delta, allowing a ransom for a princely sum.
Infirm and afflicted with gout in his later years, Tišoi made a late-in-life pilgrimage to Jerusalem, revisiting his cousin Semoi and once more praying in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Rather than a miracle, he returned home with scurvy and died in his bed at Hältumanlinna Palace on the Volga, the construction of which he would newly witness.
Juša Tišoine, or Juša Oakskin, or Juša, the Sword of Jesus
* High King of Šoomenma (January 28, 1001 - May 22, 1034)
* King of Jerusalem (July 16, 1009 - October 28, 1009)
Son of a Muslim Khazar mother who despised his father, Juša came to the throne known for his quiet sympathy for both Muslims in general and nomads in particular. Patient but paranoid and described by secondary sources as having a noticeable speech impediment, he is known more intimately than any Finnic monarch before him because he left a primary source: A book written in the Old High Finnic script, entitled "The Silver Mirror." The book is essentially Juša's memoir, written in the form of conversations with the ghost of his father, appearing to him in a mirror.
Upon Tišoi II's death, the childless Juša went uncrowned for nearly a year as he feuded with Pope Clement II over the terms of his coronation. Juša rebuffed the pontiff's demand that the Finns sail to the Levant to dethrone King Semoi of Jerusalem, who had been excommunicated sometime prior, but Juša insisted the trek was both too far and too demanding. In his memoirs, he makes clear that he knew that his kinsman Semoi remained childless and that he stood to inherit the Holy Land without a fight anyway. In any case, the negotiations wound down with Juša paying a handsome sum to Rome in exchange for a grand coronation ceremony, emptying the coffers in the process.
Fully anticipating the call to Crusade to come within the next few years, Juša devoted the first decade of his reign to two tasks: Building up his war chest and trying to sire a son. By 1009, however, word came that his kinsman King Semoi had died, and the crown of Jerusalem had passed to Juša. The sheer distance between Šoomenma and the Levant made the prospect of governing that realm impossible, but it did not stop Juša from traveling to the Holy Land to honour his kinsman - and to take the bulk of the gold and the choicest artifacts from his personal treasury.
Seeing that Semoi had expelled the Jews from the Holy City, Juša issued the Decree of Toleration that summer, welcoming them back into Jerusalem and granting them leave to worship at their holy places. The edict covered Muslims as well, much to the consternation of Christians in the Levant - and it applied throughout the Empire, permitting Jews and Muslims even living among the Finns to worship without official penalty. That done, he took stock of the Holy Kingdom, finding much of the Crusader nobility dominated by Lombards and Franks. With few kin he trusted with the Holy Land, he sought out the bravest warriors in Jerusalem, ultimately choosing to crown a Lombard knight, Cleph the Brave, as Doux over the Holy City. After a few months more, finding that Cleph could easily muster a substantial host, Juša crowned him King in the Holy Land and made preparations to leave him to his independence.
Juša returned home just in time to meet his infant son, Mihalu.
Anticipation of a call to Crusade was not unwarranted: A year and a half later, word came that Christendom would muster to attempt to seize Egypt from the Saracens. Juša committed men and funds to the cause readily despite the immense power of the Abbasids, the Caliphate of the day being the equal of all of Christendom's combined might.
The sheer distance to Egypt again strained Šoomenma's finances, but the war chest Juša had built up was sufficient to manage it. Finnic men arrived to the crusade a year into the call, finding crusader armies already roaring out of Jerusalem to war in the Sinai. Juša, seeking to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors, made landfall at Alexandria with more than 20,000 men and laid siege to the city, aiming to capture the Great Lighthouse. The Finnic armies, however, were quickly assaulted by a Saracen host of similar size, over 20,000 strong. The Battle of Abukir was bloody and close, with thousands fallen on both sides, but soon the Abbasids broke and withdrew to be reinforced by another massive relief army. Only the arrival of King Cleph the Brave of Jerusalem and armies from Sardinia and Sweden prevented a massacre of the Christian host at Burj el-Arab, but in the end, a host of 45,000 Crusaders routed upwards of 30,000 Saracens and scattered them eastward into the Nile Delta.
His hosts depleted by the immensity of the battles, Juša remained behind, storming the gates of Rasheed and tearing through the city before swinging back to the west as he pursued his goal of capturing Alexandria. However, soon enough, another host of 20,000 Saracens bore down on the remaining 12,000 Finns. The army, led by Dukes Putyayta of Mari and Nurunza of Murom and by Juša himself, stood their ground at Hammam. The High King and the Dukes led a stubborn delaying defense, grinding down the Abbasids' attacks and exhausting the bulk of their forces, buying time for the armies of Sardinia to march to the rescue. As reinforcements poured in on both sides, bodies stacked up on the field, until finally the Abbasids broke once more and fled, leaving the Finnic host badly depleted - but the Saracens even more so.
Even as the armies of Christendom moved east, however, the Finnic host remained encamped near Alexandria - a potentially fatal error. Still more Abbasid armies swept out of the delta, fully 17,500 strong compared to just 8,500 Finns. Juša was absent for the ensuing Battle of Marabout, away as he was seeing to the token siege efforts at Alexandria; it would fall to Putyayta and Nurunza to face the overwhelming odds, with no Crusader hosts in range to help.
And yet, the host somehow withstood the force of double its own number in Saracen warriors. Withdrawing into a defensive formation with heavy infantry and pikes forward, the two dukes met the Abbasids' light infantry-loaded army with the patient, defense-focused heavy infantry tactics common to the Baltic region. Of the roughly 5,000 light infantry in the Abbasid army, more than 3,000 were killed in a futile attempt to break through the Finnic shield wall, and the core of the Abbasid archery corps was decimated, while Baltic pikes inflicted gruesome losses on the Saracen cavalry. By the time the battle ended, the Finns had taken more than 7,000 Saracens to the grave at the cost of less than 2,000 Finnic lives, once more sending the Abbasids scampering.
With scouting reports showing no further Saracen columns marching in from Ifriqiya, the battered and bloodied Finnic host settled in to complete their siege. The gates of Alexandria fell on the 8th of May, 1015, and a weary Juša entered the city to survey the Lighthouse for himself. There, the Finns uncovered the grave of Saint Mark the Evangelist and claimed his relics. The city was secured before the host continued on to Abukir. It was there, on the 12th of July, that a Saracen war party reached him and brought word of Caliph Shamir II's surrender. Beaten at every turn, the Abbasids pulled out of Egypt.
Recognizing the sheer valour of the Finnic host and monarch, Pope Clement II crowned Juša's nephew Tišoi King and Protector of Egypt; another nephew, Sir Vavyla of the Knights Hospitaller, was crowned Duke of Alexandria. Juša remained just long enough to join the pontiff in Fustat for Tišoi's coronation before loading his armies wearily back onto the ships. Of just over twenty thousand Finns to sail to Egypt, just 6,000 would return.
Upon returning home, Juša brought with him thousands of gold talents worth of wealth. His first stop was Pudoga, where he laid the skull of Saint Mark in the reliquary there, rechristening the cathedral the Basilica of Saint Mark the Evangelist, or Pühän Markus Evankelista Basilika.
In late 1016, seeing an opportunity to consolidate control over the riverlands, Juša marched the entire levy of the Finnic High Kingdom and a band of allied Cumans down the Volga to the confluence with the Kama in the hopes of capturing a vast swath of flatland around the north-bank encampment known to the Khazars and Bulgars as Qazan. A three-year war with the Khazars ensued as the nomads poured across the Volga to resist the attack. The Battle of the Kama, in the shadow of a newly-erected Finnic hillfort constructed to hold the occupied fork, pitted nearly 20,000 Finns against 15,000 seasoned Khazar horsemen, but once again the heavy infantry tactics of the Finns held out: Despite losses, Juša's army drove the Khazars east and south, out of the junction.
The land of Qazan being mostly the domain of scattered nomads, Juša diverted significant funding to constructing new forts and cities on the plains, drawing upon the deep chest of loot obtained from Egypt. The hillforts inland were left to local Komi chieftains, but the hillforts along the river were given to kinsmen who had distinguished themselves in the Fourth Crusade, with Qazan itself granted to his half-brother Noumea.
In 1021, finding Herttuatar (Duchess) Ilme of Vaugeda scheming against him, Juša took the opportunity to force her into open rebellion. Upon putting her token force down, he proceeded to strip her of her herttuakunta along the Volga. The small rebellion allowed Juša to begin restructuring the royal demesne, taking personal control of the eastern shore of the Volga on down to the confluence with the Oka, creating a contiguous strip of royal land from Pälemä south to Hältuma and Gärdaset. The land of Tšuddema was handed off to the local fur-trading houses to govern as a merchant consulate, with smaller enclaves along the frigid Northern Dvina entrusted to kinsmen and husbands of kinswomen. The move reduced the size of the Finnic fleets somewhat by leaving fewer ports under royal control, but increased the number of burghers and landholders paying taxes to the crown and contributing troops to the levy - and put a renewed focus on opening up the northern fur lands to trade.
It was in the woodlands outside the river fort of Vaugeda that Juša allegedly discovered a great hole that led straight down to Hell. With the aid of the local villagers, he ordered the gap filled up with stones and sealed.
Soon enough, Juša's son Mihalu came of age, showing more interest in the administration and finance of the High Kingdom than in matters of war. Juša was quick to name the young man his regent and junior partner in governance, crowning him co-king and granting him the right to directly oversee the flow of the fur trade through Pälemä. Juša himself would largely remain entrenched at Hältumanlinna Palace from this point, overseeing affairs on the frontier - namely, relations with the Khazars and the improvement of the Volga forts and ports. It's here that he composed his memoirs; they are dated from the year 1026.
The later pages of the book are noticeably more filled with surreal imagery, at one point featuring an angel appearing in the mirror. Juša seems to have wound down the book after this point, but later sources depict him as increasingly withdrawn and erratic, some outright describing him as having gone insane.
He retained, at least, enough sanity to oversee the reorganization of the core of the Finnic military. The kingdom's forces had long been centred on a retinue of light and heavy foot and light horse drawn from the tribes, but Juša dismissed these troops and instead hired a specially-equipped body of very heavy infantry, the Sebrans - or Companions of the monarch. These troops, backed by a smaller cadre of crack archers, would form the core of a new heavy retinue specialized in the kind of defensive warfare that had won Egypt for the cross.
Death eventually took Juša in his sleep in the spring of 1034, leaving a much-expanded kingdom for his son, Mihalu.
Fully anticipating the call to Crusade to come within the next few years, Juša devoted the first decade of his reign to two tasks: Building up his war chest and trying to sire a son. By 1009, however, word came that his kinsman King Semoi had died, and the crown of Jerusalem had passed to Juša. The sheer distance between Šoomenma and the Levant made the prospect of governing that realm impossible, but it did not stop Juša from traveling to the Holy Land to honour his kinsman - and to take the bulk of the gold and the choicest artifacts from his personal treasury.
Seeing that Semoi had expelled the Jews from the Holy City, Juša issued the Decree of Toleration that summer, welcoming them back into Jerusalem and granting them leave to worship at their holy places. The edict covered Muslims as well, much to the consternation of Christians in the Levant - and it applied throughout the Empire, permitting Jews and Muslims even living among the Finns to worship without official penalty. That done, he took stock of the Holy Kingdom, finding much of the Crusader nobility dominated by Lombards and Franks. With few kin he trusted with the Holy Land, he sought out the bravest warriors in Jerusalem, ultimately choosing to crown a Lombard knight, Cleph the Brave, as Doux over the Holy City. After a few months more, finding that Cleph could easily muster a substantial host, Juša crowned him King in the Holy Land and made preparations to leave him to his independence.
Juša returned home just in time to meet his infant son, Mihalu.
Anticipation of a call to Crusade was not unwarranted: A year and a half later, word came that Christendom would muster to attempt to seize Egypt from the Saracens. Juša committed men and funds to the cause readily despite the immense power of the Abbasids, the Caliphate of the day being the equal of all of Christendom's combined might.
The sheer distance to Egypt again strained Šoomenma's finances, but the war chest Juša had built up was sufficient to manage it. Finnic men arrived to the crusade a year into the call, finding crusader armies already roaring out of Jerusalem to war in the Sinai. Juša, seeking to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors, made landfall at Alexandria with more than 20,000 men and laid siege to the city, aiming to capture the Great Lighthouse. The Finnic armies, however, were quickly assaulted by a Saracen host of similar size, over 20,000 strong. The Battle of Abukir was bloody and close, with thousands fallen on both sides, but soon the Abbasids broke and withdrew to be reinforced by another massive relief army. Only the arrival of King Cleph the Brave of Jerusalem and armies from Sardinia and Sweden prevented a massacre of the Christian host at Burj el-Arab, but in the end, a host of 45,000 Crusaders routed upwards of 30,000 Saracens and scattered them eastward into the Nile Delta.
His hosts depleted by the immensity of the battles, Juša remained behind, storming the gates of Rasheed and tearing through the city before swinging back to the west as he pursued his goal of capturing Alexandria. However, soon enough, another host of 20,000 Saracens bore down on the remaining 12,000 Finns. The army, led by Dukes Putyayta of Mari and Nurunza of Murom and by Juša himself, stood their ground at Hammam. The High King and the Dukes led a stubborn delaying defense, grinding down the Abbasids' attacks and exhausting the bulk of their forces, buying time for the armies of Sardinia to march to the rescue. As reinforcements poured in on both sides, bodies stacked up on the field, until finally the Abbasids broke once more and fled, leaving the Finnic host badly depleted - but the Saracens even more so.
Even as the armies of Christendom moved east, however, the Finnic host remained encamped near Alexandria - a potentially fatal error. Still more Abbasid armies swept out of the delta, fully 17,500 strong compared to just 8,500 Finns. Juša was absent for the ensuing Battle of Marabout, away as he was seeing to the token siege efforts at Alexandria; it would fall to Putyayta and Nurunza to face the overwhelming odds, with no Crusader hosts in range to help.
And yet, the host somehow withstood the force of double its own number in Saracen warriors. Withdrawing into a defensive formation with heavy infantry and pikes forward, the two dukes met the Abbasids' light infantry-loaded army with the patient, defense-focused heavy infantry tactics common to the Baltic region. Of the roughly 5,000 light infantry in the Abbasid army, more than 3,000 were killed in a futile attempt to break through the Finnic shield wall, and the core of the Abbasid archery corps was decimated, while Baltic pikes inflicted gruesome losses on the Saracen cavalry. By the time the battle ended, the Finns had taken more than 7,000 Saracens to the grave at the cost of less than 2,000 Finnic lives, once more sending the Abbasids scampering.
With scouting reports showing no further Saracen columns marching in from Ifriqiya, the battered and bloodied Finnic host settled in to complete their siege. The gates of Alexandria fell on the 8th of May, 1015, and a weary Juša entered the city to survey the Lighthouse for himself. There, the Finns uncovered the grave of Saint Mark the Evangelist and claimed his relics. The city was secured before the host continued on to Abukir. It was there, on the 12th of July, that a Saracen war party reached him and brought word of Caliph Shamir II's surrender. Beaten at every turn, the Abbasids pulled out of Egypt.
Recognizing the sheer valour of the Finnic host and monarch, Pope Clement II crowned Juša's nephew Tišoi King and Protector of Egypt; another nephew, Sir Vavyla of the Knights Hospitaller, was crowned Duke of Alexandria. Juša remained just long enough to join the pontiff in Fustat for Tišoi's coronation before loading his armies wearily back onto the ships. Of just over twenty thousand Finns to sail to Egypt, just 6,000 would return.
Upon returning home, Juša brought with him thousands of gold talents worth of wealth. His first stop was Pudoga, where he laid the skull of Saint Mark in the reliquary there, rechristening the cathedral the Basilica of Saint Mark the Evangelist, or Pühän Markus Evankelista Basilika.
In late 1016, seeing an opportunity to consolidate control over the riverlands, Juša marched the entire levy of the Finnic High Kingdom and a band of allied Cumans down the Volga to the confluence with the Kama in the hopes of capturing a vast swath of flatland around the north-bank encampment known to the Khazars and Bulgars as Qazan. A three-year war with the Khazars ensued as the nomads poured across the Volga to resist the attack. The Battle of the Kama, in the shadow of a newly-erected Finnic hillfort constructed to hold the occupied fork, pitted nearly 20,000 Finns against 15,000 seasoned Khazar horsemen, but once again the heavy infantry tactics of the Finns held out: Despite losses, Juša's army drove the Khazars east and south, out of the junction.
The land of Qazan being mostly the domain of scattered nomads, Juša diverted significant funding to constructing new forts and cities on the plains, drawing upon the deep chest of loot obtained from Egypt. The hillforts inland were left to local Komi chieftains, but the hillforts along the river were given to kinsmen who had distinguished themselves in the Fourth Crusade, with Qazan itself granted to his half-brother Noumea.
In 1021, finding Herttuatar (Duchess) Ilme of Vaugeda scheming against him, Juša took the opportunity to force her into open rebellion. Upon putting her token force down, he proceeded to strip her of her herttuakunta along the Volga. The small rebellion allowed Juša to begin restructuring the royal demesne, taking personal control of the eastern shore of the Volga on down to the confluence with the Oka, creating a contiguous strip of royal land from Pälemä south to Hältuma and Gärdaset. The land of Tšuddema was handed off to the local fur-trading houses to govern as a merchant consulate, with smaller enclaves along the frigid Northern Dvina entrusted to kinsmen and husbands of kinswomen. The move reduced the size of the Finnic fleets somewhat by leaving fewer ports under royal control, but increased the number of burghers and landholders paying taxes to the crown and contributing troops to the levy - and put a renewed focus on opening up the northern fur lands to trade.
It was in the woodlands outside the river fort of Vaugeda that Juša allegedly discovered a great hole that led straight down to Hell. With the aid of the local villagers, he ordered the gap filled up with stones and sealed.
Soon enough, Juša's son Mihalu came of age, showing more interest in the administration and finance of the High Kingdom than in matters of war. Juša was quick to name the young man his regent and junior partner in governance, crowning him co-king and granting him the right to directly oversee the flow of the fur trade through Pälemä. Juša himself would largely remain entrenched at Hältumanlinna Palace from this point, overseeing affairs on the frontier - namely, relations with the Khazars and the improvement of the Volga forts and ports. It's here that he composed his memoirs; they are dated from the year 1026.
The later pages of the book are noticeably more filled with surreal imagery, at one point featuring an angel appearing in the mirror. Juša seems to have wound down the book after this point, but later sources depict him as increasingly withdrawn and erratic, some outright describing him as having gone insane.
He retained, at least, enough sanity to oversee the reorganization of the core of the Finnic military. The kingdom's forces had long been centred on a retinue of light and heavy foot and light horse drawn from the tribes, but Juša dismissed these troops and instead hired a specially-equipped body of very heavy infantry, the Sebrans - or Companions of the monarch. These troops, backed by a smaller cadre of crack archers, would form the core of a new heavy retinue specialized in the kind of defensive warfare that had won Egypt for the cross.
Death eventually took Juša in his sleep in the spring of 1034, leaving a much-expanded kingdom for his son, Mihalu.
Planet of Hats
Donor
More madness.
Mihalu Jušane, or Mihalu the Pious
* High King of Šoomenma (May 22, 1034 - August 18, 1076)
* Joint King of Šoomenma (March 1027 - May 22, 1034)
Mihalu came to the throne a different sort of man than his paranoid father. Not the warrior Juša was, Mihalu grew up immersed in the merchant-focused bureaucracy of the Finnic High Kingdom, managing traders and furriers coming in and out of the north. While competent enough as a martial man, he was by nature an administrator and a logothete.
Tišoi III Mihalune, or Tišoi the Holy
* High King of Šoomenma (August 18, 1076 - February 5, 1112)
Coming to the throne at 31, Tišoi, once seeing to his coronation, settled in to begin shoring up his treasury once more. He recognized the pattern of the Christian world clearly enough to expect another call to Crusade within a few years.
Mihalu Jušane, or Mihalu the Pious
* High King of Šoomenma (May 22, 1034 - August 18, 1076)
* Joint King of Šoomenma (March 1027 - May 22, 1034)
Mihalu came to the throne a different sort of man than his paranoid father. Not the warrior Juša was, Mihalu grew up immersed in the merchant-focused bureaucracy of the Finnic High Kingdom, managing traders and furriers coming in and out of the north. While competent enough as a martial man, he was by nature an administrator and a logothete.
More to the point, he came to the throne unmarried and with only a bastard son to his name, betrothed to a young Princess of Jerusalem but with his sister as heir presumptive. This left many of the dukes of the High Kingdom eyeing him sidelong even as he was crowned later that summer.
A quick war in 1037 and 1038 brought the county of Livland into the empire as Finnic troops handily trounced the armies of Sweden, chasing them off the eastern Baltic coast on behalf of the Herttua of Sakala. He returned home at year's end, in time to receive word from Rome that his father, Tišoi II, had been proclaimed a saint.
In the year to follow, Mihalu, tiring of constant Khazar raids from the east, turned his attention down the Kama and launched a massive campaign to drive the Khazars out of the core of Great Perm. The entry of the Bashkirs into the mini-Crusade required the calling up of the Teutonic Order and the Knights Templar following the defeat of a Finnic army near Ryazan, but the crusading knights turned the tides soon enough, buying time for a smaller army to besiege the Komi hillforts in the Permian core. By the end of 1041, Mihalu had brought the Khazars to terms, reducing their northern presence to a few disconnected holdouts in the Urals - forts likely to fall from Khazar influence in the years ahead. Central Perm was entrusted to the most centralized tribes in the area, headed up by the Chibysh clan of the Udmurts, who adopted Christianity in a fairly nominal way.
Sure enough, Khagan Buzer died less than a year following the conflict, and the Permian tribes living in the Urals and the far north were left without Khazar support. Not in any hurry to send his own men into the desolate winter wastes, Mihalu called up a band of Cuman kazaks and sent them off to the frontier to deal with these tribes. The war in the mountains was short and brief, the tribes there being entrusted to a new church diocese headed up by Archbishop John Num of Uralia.
A final short war in the farthest north brought the last of the organized Komi tribes under Finnic suzerainty. Beyond those small forts and austere lands lay little more than barren tundra, the occasional stray reindeer and a few scattered Arctic nomads, in lands too frigid for even a few dozen men to campaign in. With the northern tribes brought into the empire, Mihalu ordered his badly winter-devastated retinue to return home, his expansionist plans seemingly realized: The Finnic High Kingdom now stretched all the way to the Urals and controlled everything north of the convergence of the Volga and the Kama.
No sooner had the Sebrans returned to Pälemä did the call of Crusade once more ring out, this time targeting the Abbasids' holdings in Ifriqiya. Once again, Mihalu sent word that he was right willing to call forth the hosts of Šoomenma to do war in the Mediterranean.
The logistics of mustering a host from a realm as vast as the Finnic High Kingdom forced Mihalu to call up men a full year before the Crusade, and even then, a few hundred stragglers from Permia were left standing on the docks at Kingisepp as the fleet of nearly 300 ships took sail. Again the Finnic realm's distance from the Crusade worsened matters, ensuring that the 25,000 men at arms would arrive late. Nevertheless, they made landfall six months later, in January of 1048, with 10,000 men landing outside Tunis and 15,000 at Mahdia. Mihalu joined the former host for a time to oversee the siege of Tunis.
Eventually, finding a host of thousands gathered and the Abbasids facing similar mustering woes owing to the immensity of the Caliphate, Mihalu opted for a more brute-force solution. Gathering a massive host of more than 30,000 men, many of them men of Norse Irland, he simply stormed the gates of Tunis and the surrounding cities, then continued on to crush Mahdia with similar overwhelming numbers. Only then did the massive host split into three to begin slower sieges of inland strongholds.
The quick attacks combined with the fierce efforts of the Latin Empire to demolish the Abbasid armies before they could reach Ifriqiya. By the end of 1048, Ansovald the Bold had been crowned King of Africa. While the Finnic efforts had been relatively late due to distance constraints, Mihalu was nevertheless able to crown his illegitimate son Mikul Duke of Tripolitania, setting him up in the old city of Tripoli.
The rapid success of the Crusade gave Mihalu the funds he needed to begin a final round of expansion work on Hältumanlinna Palace. It also gave him leave to send a band of Cumans over the Daugava to collect a trio of loose principalities around Polotsk, entrusting them to Duke Yaropolk Aminoff. Mihalu's intention seems to have been to prepare as much of the land south of the Finnic High Kingdom as possible as a buffer state, one he hoped he could spin off at a later time.
As winter of 1052 drew towards a close, Mihalu sent the entire host of the High Kingdom over the Oka into Ryazan, seeking to carve the lands off from the polity of the rebellion-plagued Khazar horde. The war was short and bloody, the Khazars being unable to muster even a third of Mihalu's force, and even then in a scattered fashion. The Finnic armies quickly drove the Khazars from the Oka before sweeping Islamic chieftains out of individual hillforts near the headwaters of the Don. These lands, too, were turned over to Russian lords with the intention of connecting them across the gap controlled by the then-Grand Chief of Tver.
Soon enough, the death of the Khagan left the Tverian counties floating free of Khazar domination. A series of short wars followed, the largest actually being in Sweden, where Mihalu forced a series of claims in Rovaniemi and Kemi to claim the lands of the southern Sami for the Finnic kingdom. The counties of Zubtsov and Novosil were quickly brought under control as well, but the work of assembling claims to the Tverian lands was still to come.
Even as he worked to shore up his claims, even getting a helping hand from the Pope, Mihalu worked to decentralize the increasingly complex administration of the High Kingdom. Seeing the distand north and east as too remote to effectively administer, he created Herttua Sarak of Mezen as Varakuningaz (Vice-king) of the Nenets. In the east, he granted Viryas Chibysh, Herttua of Perm, as Varakuningaz of Great Perm and the East. While monarchical in name, the title of Varakuningaz had a key difference: It would be a non-inheritable title, one given only by the High King, with rulers chosen by fiat of the monarch at Pälemä.
The sudden inheritance of Tver by a Muslim gave Mihalu his opportunity, alongside a claim on the lands of Bryansk in the Magyar realm of Chernigov. While a band of Cumans and Pechenegs was sent to capture Bryansk, Mihalu mustered his own hosts to descend on Tver. The wars were short, brutal and predictable.
Reorganizing his new lands, Mihalu distributed fiefs to boyars of Russian and Hungarian extraction, with many Hungarian nobles in the southern reaches retaining their lands following the takeover. The lord of Polotsk, Vyshata, was crowned Grand Prince of Chernigov, though one title was denied him: Mihalu ensured that Murom, traditionally part of Chernigov's purview, remained subject to the Herttua of Mustajoki. Unlike the title of Varakuningaz, the title of Grand Prince would be a formal elected office with power derived from the crown itself, not from Mihalu's personal appointment: His intention was to develop Chernigov and eventually spin it off into a client state.
Through 1071 and 1072, Mihalu engaged in a series of brief civil wars with the lords of Savo and Pihkova as he sought to rein in their accumulation of counties beyond their herrtuakuntas. These wars were more nuisances than severe threats and wrapped up with new herttuas being appointed over each land. Thereafter, he settled in for a period of relative quiet, his largest achievement in those years being breaking ground on a major school in Kuostemää, the Suräkondine Kuntasali (the Gymnasium Surakondinium).
Eventually, the stress of managing the empire got the better of Mihalu, and he died clutching at his chest in the summer of 1076.
A quick war in 1037 and 1038 brought the county of Livland into the empire as Finnic troops handily trounced the armies of Sweden, chasing them off the eastern Baltic coast on behalf of the Herttua of Sakala. He returned home at year's end, in time to receive word from Rome that his father, Tišoi II, had been proclaimed a saint.
In the year to follow, Mihalu, tiring of constant Khazar raids from the east, turned his attention down the Kama and launched a massive campaign to drive the Khazars out of the core of Great Perm. The entry of the Bashkirs into the mini-Crusade required the calling up of the Teutonic Order and the Knights Templar following the defeat of a Finnic army near Ryazan, but the crusading knights turned the tides soon enough, buying time for a smaller army to besiege the Komi hillforts in the Permian core. By the end of 1041, Mihalu had brought the Khazars to terms, reducing their northern presence to a few disconnected holdouts in the Urals - forts likely to fall from Khazar influence in the years ahead. Central Perm was entrusted to the most centralized tribes in the area, headed up by the Chibysh clan of the Udmurts, who adopted Christianity in a fairly nominal way.
Sure enough, Khagan Buzer died less than a year following the conflict, and the Permian tribes living in the Urals and the far north were left without Khazar support. Not in any hurry to send his own men into the desolate winter wastes, Mihalu called up a band of Cuman kazaks and sent them off to the frontier to deal with these tribes. The war in the mountains was short and brief, the tribes there being entrusted to a new church diocese headed up by Archbishop John Num of Uralia.
A final short war in the farthest north brought the last of the organized Komi tribes under Finnic suzerainty. Beyond those small forts and austere lands lay little more than barren tundra, the occasional stray reindeer and a few scattered Arctic nomads, in lands too frigid for even a few dozen men to campaign in. With the northern tribes brought into the empire, Mihalu ordered his badly winter-devastated retinue to return home, his expansionist plans seemingly realized: The Finnic High Kingdom now stretched all the way to the Urals and controlled everything north of the convergence of the Volga and the Kama.
No sooner had the Sebrans returned to Pälemä did the call of Crusade once more ring out, this time targeting the Abbasids' holdings in Ifriqiya. Once again, Mihalu sent word that he was right willing to call forth the hosts of Šoomenma to do war in the Mediterranean.
The logistics of mustering a host from a realm as vast as the Finnic High Kingdom forced Mihalu to call up men a full year before the Crusade, and even then, a few hundred stragglers from Permia were left standing on the docks at Kingisepp as the fleet of nearly 300 ships took sail. Again the Finnic realm's distance from the Crusade worsened matters, ensuring that the 25,000 men at arms would arrive late. Nevertheless, they made landfall six months later, in January of 1048, with 10,000 men landing outside Tunis and 15,000 at Mahdia. Mihalu joined the former host for a time to oversee the siege of Tunis.
Eventually, finding a host of thousands gathered and the Abbasids facing similar mustering woes owing to the immensity of the Caliphate, Mihalu opted for a more brute-force solution. Gathering a massive host of more than 30,000 men, many of them men of Norse Irland, he simply stormed the gates of Tunis and the surrounding cities, then continued on to crush Mahdia with similar overwhelming numbers. Only then did the massive host split into three to begin slower sieges of inland strongholds.
The quick attacks combined with the fierce efforts of the Latin Empire to demolish the Abbasid armies before they could reach Ifriqiya. By the end of 1048, Ansovald the Bold had been crowned King of Africa. While the Finnic efforts had been relatively late due to distance constraints, Mihalu was nevertheless able to crown his illegitimate son Mikul Duke of Tripolitania, setting him up in the old city of Tripoli.
The rapid success of the Crusade gave Mihalu the funds he needed to begin a final round of expansion work on Hältumanlinna Palace. It also gave him leave to send a band of Cumans over the Daugava to collect a trio of loose principalities around Polotsk, entrusting them to Duke Yaropolk Aminoff. Mihalu's intention seems to have been to prepare as much of the land south of the Finnic High Kingdom as possible as a buffer state, one he hoped he could spin off at a later time.
As winter of 1052 drew towards a close, Mihalu sent the entire host of the High Kingdom over the Oka into Ryazan, seeking to carve the lands off from the polity of the rebellion-plagued Khazar horde. The war was short and bloody, the Khazars being unable to muster even a third of Mihalu's force, and even then in a scattered fashion. The Finnic armies quickly drove the Khazars from the Oka before sweeping Islamic chieftains out of individual hillforts near the headwaters of the Don. These lands, too, were turned over to Russian lords with the intention of connecting them across the gap controlled by the then-Grand Chief of Tver.
Soon enough, the death of the Khagan left the Tverian counties floating free of Khazar domination. A series of short wars followed, the largest actually being in Sweden, where Mihalu forced a series of claims in Rovaniemi and Kemi to claim the lands of the southern Sami for the Finnic kingdom. The counties of Zubtsov and Novosil were quickly brought under control as well, but the work of assembling claims to the Tverian lands was still to come.
Even as he worked to shore up his claims, even getting a helping hand from the Pope, Mihalu worked to decentralize the increasingly complex administration of the High Kingdom. Seeing the distand north and east as too remote to effectively administer, he created Herttua Sarak of Mezen as Varakuningaz (Vice-king) of the Nenets. In the east, he granted Viryas Chibysh, Herttua of Perm, as Varakuningaz of Great Perm and the East. While monarchical in name, the title of Varakuningaz had a key difference: It would be a non-inheritable title, one given only by the High King, with rulers chosen by fiat of the monarch at Pälemä.
The sudden inheritance of Tver by a Muslim gave Mihalu his opportunity, alongside a claim on the lands of Bryansk in the Magyar realm of Chernigov. While a band of Cumans and Pechenegs was sent to capture Bryansk, Mihalu mustered his own hosts to descend on Tver. The wars were short, brutal and predictable.
Reorganizing his new lands, Mihalu distributed fiefs to boyars of Russian and Hungarian extraction, with many Hungarian nobles in the southern reaches retaining their lands following the takeover. The lord of Polotsk, Vyshata, was crowned Grand Prince of Chernigov, though one title was denied him: Mihalu ensured that Murom, traditionally part of Chernigov's purview, remained subject to the Herttua of Mustajoki. Unlike the title of Varakuningaz, the title of Grand Prince would be a formal elected office with power derived from the crown itself, not from Mihalu's personal appointment: His intention was to develop Chernigov and eventually spin it off into a client state.
Through 1071 and 1072, Mihalu engaged in a series of brief civil wars with the lords of Savo and Pihkova as he sought to rein in their accumulation of counties beyond their herrtuakuntas. These wars were more nuisances than severe threats and wrapped up with new herttuas being appointed over each land. Thereafter, he settled in for a period of relative quiet, his largest achievement in those years being breaking ground on a major school in Kuostemää, the Suräkondine Kuntasali (the Gymnasium Surakondinium).
Eventually, the stress of managing the empire got the better of Mihalu, and he died clutching at his chest in the summer of 1076.
Tišoi III Mihalune, or Tišoi the Holy
* High King of Šoomenma (August 18, 1076 - February 5, 1112)
Coming to the throne at 31, Tišoi, once seeing to his coronation, settled in to begin shoring up his treasury once more. He recognized the pattern of the Christian world clearly enough to expect another call to Crusade within a few years.
Sure enough, the call went out in September of 1078 to prepare to march to Jerusalem in support of the beleaguered crusader kingdom. Learning his father's lessons well, Tišoi preloaded the levies of the Finnic kingdom aboard the ships and was halfway to Jerusalem by the time the Crusade was called on Christmas Eve of 1079. His first act was to make landfall in Ascalon - where he found a narrow snip of Jerusalem remaining, the Holy City itself besieged by a host of near 20,000 Saracens.
Remaining behind in Ascalon to administer the Crusade, Tišoi entrusted his armies to Ervko Kozhvine, a loyal retainer, and sent the bulk of his host to reinforce Jerusalem. Upon routing that host in a massive battle in the shadow of Rammala, Tišoi moved his reserves up to the city and split his forward army in two, besieging Kerak and Tiberias. He remained with the reserves in Jerusalem, ready to pounce on any Saracen host that took the bait he had set up. The armies quickly stormed the cities and forts in both counties before moving back northwest to relieve Tyre.
Those gains would not last long: A vast host of 40,000 Saracens soon came barreling out of the Arabian Peninsula, forcing the Finns to withdraw to the coast. However, perhaps plagued by the scarcity of provender in the Negev, Caliph Mahdi soon split his host, sending more than half of it north into Syria to spar with arriving Crusader armies. Ervko and Tišoi swept back in, charging back into Madaba to intercept the smaller of Mahdi's armies at Bethsan.
As the Crusader armies jockeyed for position, word soon reached the ships at Ascalon that Caliph Mahdi had attempted a brazen gambit: He had sailed a large part of his armies to Rome to lay siege to the Holy City itself. Loading his depleted armies up, Tišoi made haste to Rome to find the city already fallen and occupied by over 9,000 Saracens, with another 10,000 or so roaming the Italian peninsula. Driving the initial army out of Rome in a close battle, the outnumbered Finns liberated the city and set up camp behind its walls, struggling to free fortresses against the massive and scarcely-opposed hosts. The Abbasids continued to mount bloody counterattack after counterattack: 32,000 men had taken to the ships in Šoomenma and 15,000 had landed in Latium, but by October of 1082 only 5,500 men remained to garrison Rome. By next February, only 3,300 remained, ground down by holding out against counterattack after counterattack.
Exhausted behind the walls of Rome, Tišoi sent word back to Pälemä for reinforcements. Ships set sail carrying the home guard - the elite Sebrans - and 4,500 Cumans. By the time they arrived that spring, only 2,700 Finnic levies remained, and Tišoi sent them home to allow his elite units to chase the Saracens out of Italia. Even as the last of the host was mopped up, however, startling word emerged: Even as the crusade raged, Caliph Mahdi was beset by civil war as a massive insurgency of Shia Muslims came roaring out of Syria to open up a new front.
By 1084, Tišoi arrived back in the Holy Land with another 16,000 levies, the Sebrans and the Cumans, only to find that most of the fighting had moved north into Syria. He did the only thing that made sense: He sent his men over the walls, retook Kerak and stormed down the Jordan, storming every city, town and mosque he could find before the Abbasids could regroup.
The strategy worked like a charm. With the Caliph preoccupied with the Shia, Abbasid forces trying to move into the area found the Crusaders gloating behind the walls of captured fortresses across Oultrejordain. Caliph Mahdi could do little but spit impotently as the Pope crowned Tišoi's brother Orešku as King of Jerusalem - in fact a competing King, for the /actual/ Jerusalemite monarch had been excommunicated years prior.
A quick rebellion among the Khazars allowed Tišoi to cross the Volga in 1090, bringing the Slavic hillfort of Nizhny Novgorod into the empire. Finding the fort still mostly surrounded by tribeland, Tišoi appointed his son Jarre steward and regent of the High Kingdom and dispatched him to the hillfort he renamed Noovegärd, entrusting him to build up its infrastructure to something resembling modern standards.
In 1096, word arrived in Pälemä of the fall of Egypt to the rising Shia Caliphate of the Musawids. Tišoi looked on this occurrence with consternation, but soon turned to building up a series of new trade posts along the Volga, concentrated around Hältuma, with the purpose of governing and taxing the profitable trade in amber and furs southward to the Mediterranean.
Increasingly, Hältuma came to operate as the centre of the Finnic High Kingdom. Tišoi made this official in late 1104, moving his court to Hältumanlinna Palace year-round and setting his son and regent Jarre up in Pälemä to continue to regulate the coastal trade. While the north remained a major centre of economic activity, mainly through the flow of furs through the Stone Port, Hältuma was "closer to the action" in terms of the political needs of the High Kingdom.
It was not long after the move, however, that word arrived of a pandemic beginning to spread down the Silk Road. As reports filtered in from acruss Eurasia, Tišoi found himself mourning the death of his son and heir, Jarre, stricken by an unknown illness. He settled in to finish raising his grandson Ondrei, lined up as the High Kingdom's heir apparent, even as the Plague swept the Mediterranean.
Inexorably, the Plague swept through the Finnic riverlands, and Tišoi closed the gates of Hältumanlinna Palace, communicating with the commons mainly through messengers and decrees from the balcony. The Plague came with the High King aging, racing against time to ensure Ondrei reached his majority. That seemed in doubt when the young lad caught the Plague - but somehow he managed to pull through.
Only a few areas of the world, mainly in the Carpathian highlands, escaped the plague. Locked behind the walls of his palace, Tišoi watched with horror as the Black Death killed upwards of half of Europe. It was there, secluded from the world, that he passed not from the Plague but from severe stress in the winter of 1112.
Remaining behind in Ascalon to administer the Crusade, Tišoi entrusted his armies to Ervko Kozhvine, a loyal retainer, and sent the bulk of his host to reinforce Jerusalem. Upon routing that host in a massive battle in the shadow of Rammala, Tišoi moved his reserves up to the city and split his forward army in two, besieging Kerak and Tiberias. He remained with the reserves in Jerusalem, ready to pounce on any Saracen host that took the bait he had set up. The armies quickly stormed the cities and forts in both counties before moving back northwest to relieve Tyre.
Those gains would not last long: A vast host of 40,000 Saracens soon came barreling out of the Arabian Peninsula, forcing the Finns to withdraw to the coast. However, perhaps plagued by the scarcity of provender in the Negev, Caliph Mahdi soon split his host, sending more than half of it north into Syria to spar with arriving Crusader armies. Ervko and Tišoi swept back in, charging back into Madaba to intercept the smaller of Mahdi's armies at Bethsan.
As the Crusader armies jockeyed for position, word soon reached the ships at Ascalon that Caliph Mahdi had attempted a brazen gambit: He had sailed a large part of his armies to Rome to lay siege to the Holy City itself. Loading his depleted armies up, Tišoi made haste to Rome to find the city already fallen and occupied by over 9,000 Saracens, with another 10,000 or so roaming the Italian peninsula. Driving the initial army out of Rome in a close battle, the outnumbered Finns liberated the city and set up camp behind its walls, struggling to free fortresses against the massive and scarcely-opposed hosts. The Abbasids continued to mount bloody counterattack after counterattack: 32,000 men had taken to the ships in Šoomenma and 15,000 had landed in Latium, but by October of 1082 only 5,500 men remained to garrison Rome. By next February, only 3,300 remained, ground down by holding out against counterattack after counterattack.
Exhausted behind the walls of Rome, Tišoi sent word back to Pälemä for reinforcements. Ships set sail carrying the home guard - the elite Sebrans - and 4,500 Cumans. By the time they arrived that spring, only 2,700 Finnic levies remained, and Tišoi sent them home to allow his elite units to chase the Saracens out of Italia. Even as the last of the host was mopped up, however, startling word emerged: Even as the crusade raged, Caliph Mahdi was beset by civil war as a massive insurgency of Shia Muslims came roaring out of Syria to open up a new front.
By 1084, Tišoi arrived back in the Holy Land with another 16,000 levies, the Sebrans and the Cumans, only to find that most of the fighting had moved north into Syria. He did the only thing that made sense: He sent his men over the walls, retook Kerak and stormed down the Jordan, storming every city, town and mosque he could find before the Abbasids could regroup.
The strategy worked like a charm. With the Caliph preoccupied with the Shia, Abbasid forces trying to move into the area found the Crusaders gloating behind the walls of captured fortresses across Oultrejordain. Caliph Mahdi could do little but spit impotently as the Pope crowned Tišoi's brother Orešku as King of Jerusalem - in fact a competing King, for the /actual/ Jerusalemite monarch had been excommunicated years prior.
A quick rebellion among the Khazars allowed Tišoi to cross the Volga in 1090, bringing the Slavic hillfort of Nizhny Novgorod into the empire. Finding the fort still mostly surrounded by tribeland, Tišoi appointed his son Jarre steward and regent of the High Kingdom and dispatched him to the hillfort he renamed Noovegärd, entrusting him to build up its infrastructure to something resembling modern standards.
In 1096, word arrived in Pälemä of the fall of Egypt to the rising Shia Caliphate of the Musawids. Tišoi looked on this occurrence with consternation, but soon turned to building up a series of new trade posts along the Volga, concentrated around Hältuma, with the purpose of governing and taxing the profitable trade in amber and furs southward to the Mediterranean.
Increasingly, Hältuma came to operate as the centre of the Finnic High Kingdom. Tišoi made this official in late 1104, moving his court to Hältumanlinna Palace year-round and setting his son and regent Jarre up in Pälemä to continue to regulate the coastal trade. While the north remained a major centre of economic activity, mainly through the flow of furs through the Stone Port, Hältuma was "closer to the action" in terms of the political needs of the High Kingdom.
It was not long after the move, however, that word arrived of a pandemic beginning to spread down the Silk Road. As reports filtered in from acruss Eurasia, Tišoi found himself mourning the death of his son and heir, Jarre, stricken by an unknown illness. He settled in to finish raising his grandson Ondrei, lined up as the High Kingdom's heir apparent, even as the Plague swept the Mediterranean.
Inexorably, the Plague swept through the Finnic riverlands, and Tišoi closed the gates of Hältumanlinna Palace, communicating with the commons mainly through messengers and decrees from the balcony. The Plague came with the High King aging, racing against time to ensure Ondrei reached his majority. That seemed in doubt when the young lad caught the Plague - but somehow he managed to pull through.
Only a few areas of the world, mainly in the Carpathian highlands, escaped the plague. Locked behind the walls of his palace, Tišoi watched with horror as the Black Death killed upwards of half of Europe. It was there, secluded from the world, that he passed not from the Plague but from severe stress in the winter of 1112.
Okay....coming here with some tech support questions. I tried running the After The End: Old world mod, but it crashed as I clicked on Start New Game. Not only is it happening on this one, but to my displeasure the main After The End Mod is seeing the same too, as are custom maps I'd thought about playing on, and that's when the game launches at all. I've tried verifying my game files, I've tried reinstalling the game, not sure of what else to do. It sucks, cause mods like these are the main reason I even play CK2.
You should probably ask in the After the End Discord. I think the link is back at the Paradox forums.
Are you sure you're using the update mod and the right version of the game?
The game is really cool,but you guys know what it is not cool :
"Hey Kid King whant to go in a Hunt"
"Uh sure"
Me:....Oh no
They killed at least 3 Kings Baratheons in this way in a gameplay of mine lol.
"Hey Kid King whant to go in a Hunt"
"Uh sure"
Me:....Oh no
They killed at least 3 Kings Baratheons in this way in a gameplay of mine lol.
Does anyone notice something really weird about the game? You don't really need too be good in most of the stats. Its easy to disrupt plots If you have a decent spymaster that likes you you are invincible, learning is utterly useless, Diplomacy isn't particularly amazing since It gives you only pretty minor buffs to opinion even on high levels and this really makes it so that the only stats I would argue are actually needed are martial because that gives you levies and which can't be done as effectively by a councillor and Stewardship which gives you the ability to hold more land and the ability to get more money. Though keep in mind I am mostly used to CK2 so maybe this is different in CK3?
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