(Timeline is in the same post if you want to skip my insecure rambling)
Hello all. I’ll make this an impromptu introduction and then just get into the thread quickly so we don’t have to dwell on who the hell I am for the early part of the thread.
I got into AH with the Draka about four years ago. Originally, I just read the book and took it at face value rather than caring too much about the plausibility, but reading the Tvtropes page on the Draka motivated me to track down one of the many pages that talks consistently about the timeline in the back of the book.
By chance I came across Ian’s old Gateway Alternate History website and read the Draka article on there. One critical evaluation later and I had developed an interest AH and history at large that I maintain to this day. I’m far from the idiot I was and much more critical these days, so I sure as hell am not going to emulate the Draka here. I’m kind of fixated on it though, so just excuse that. Deluge is supposed to be sort of the anti-Draka world.
I like to think that I’m well informed on history but not terribly well educated. I probably made a lot of mistakes on this timeline, none of them glaring, I hope, at least. I have a bit of an inferiority complex so I did go over it quite a bit and try to check it with people, but given the area I live in I don’t have very many peers capable of looking it over and pointing out flaws, and I wasn’t part of any online communities that could have provided feedback either.
Honestly, I rely on my ability for exposition to try and justify something if I had the wrong impression. That doesn’t always work I’m aware and sometimes it’s the worst thing to do, so I try to be cautious with it, but I have a tendency to use it as a crutch.
I also tend to have a pessimistic interpretation of humanity, so my interpretations of countries probably act more violent than they did in real life. I try to keep things realistic of course and I believe I’ve mostly succeeded but just keep in mind that countries will go to war a lot in this setting.
As a disclaimer, something that might offend people is my very poor grasp of Serbo-Croatian. I mean no harm, but I lack the time it would take to learn the language and given the backwater area I live in no institution teaches it anyway. I did have a Russian friend who tried his best to help me with the basic construction of Slavic languages but he knew little about the Balkans so there wasn’t a whole lot he could do. Sorry if I’ve butchered your language, it’s the best I was able to do with online translators and reference pages.
Just be gentle, is all I’m asking. I’m kind of new at writing big settings like this, and I don’t believe this timeline should be taken anywhere near as seriously as say, Decades of Darkness, for example.
If hard pressed, I’d say the goal of Deluge is more mechanical than plausibility, though I still maintain the events that happen are *possible* but unlikely. I’ve tried my best to be accurate, of course, but the objective was to explore various warfare doctrines and how an aggressive, “hard power” world would look.
Simply enough, I also wanted to create an interesting setting, which is why I jimmied a few things in directions they’d probably have been unlikely to go in, because everybody has already done their take on Russia, England, the Ottomans, Byzantium, China and so forth. I’m not saying that putting a timeline together around one of those countries is clichéd or something; it’s just that I feel like there’s nothing I could add and so I need a new direction.
That said, I do have to use some shortcuts somewhere. Yes, a lot of real world events still happen in this timeline even though there were multiple points of diversion hundreds of years earlier. Its not as bad as say, the Nazis still coming to power, but there are still various major events and I do still use a lot of monarchs that probably wouldn’t actually show up in the position they’re in.
Part of this is the fact that I can’t micromanage every inch of history, and part of this is that the world still has to be somewhat recognizable, given how extremely different it will look by 1800. I still try to put a unique spin on some of the stuff that I’m ripping off from real history, and the outcome may end up being different.
Also, it may look like I tend to gloss over colonization because I end wars when serious organized resistance ends and only some countries get any details, but unless a rebellion actually shakes up the sociopolitical situation to some extent it isn’t mentioned because this timeline really does not have the scope to handle all of them. Just assume that colonization is just as horrific and brutal in this timeline as it is/was in real life, aside from other methods that will be presented, which I go out of my way to detail.
Things that happen exactly as they were in real history or are only slightly altered will not be discussed. This will be indicative of the Middle Ages mostly, as it’s such a massive span of time to cover and the lack of information about some of it makes it very difficult to string things together. That said; where things turn out slightly different, there will be an acknowledgement of that.
This thread will just start with a straight timeline and go from there. I wrote a ton of fake internet articles in the vein of Cracked or other webshows and article sites I follow so those can supplement while I work on actual stories, which currently only exist as outlines, characters and concepts. Despite having worked on this since April, I’ve focused more or less on the information.
Last note, the timeline is very long. I’ve written most of the info beforehand to make sure it would be presentable when I decided to publish it on the internet. It’s crested 70 pages already and its missing a few consistency events. It’s technically mostly finished but I’m editing it and adding events to try and maintain its coherence, so even though it’s basically *finished* you won’t see it all at once.
Without further rambling (I doubt any message of mine will ever be this long again), I give you the opening salvo of Deluge:
1. Fragmentation, Dinaria 1066-1350
Invasions of Britain – 1066-1078
A combination of difficult ocean conditions and poor, muddy weather divided the landing forces of both William the Conqueror and King Harald Hardrada. Forces intermittently met each other and the English defenders in a long, protracted campaign that resulted in heavy losses due to near constant skirmishing. The moment one leader would attempt to rally their forces; they would find that fragments of enemy forces were within their ranks and causing more chaos.
By the end of the conflict, England was reduced to nearly half its original size and held by what remained of William’s forces, despite the fact that William had died in 1070 of a stray arrow. King Harald had been run down and killed in the countryside.
The Scots to the north took advantage of the fragmentation and laid claim to some of the border territories, and much of the fragmented countries were left as a buffed between the battered Normans and Scotland.
War of Croatian Succession – 1089-1109
Dmitar Zvonimir, the King of Croatia, died in 1089 lacking any male heirs to his throne. The nobility of Croatia assembled a regency council and began the daunting task of deciding who would control Croatia next.
Dmitar’s daughter, Claudia, was unmarried at the time[1], and the regency council decided whoever would marry her would inherit the throne. Numerous suitors arrived to attempt to sway Claudia, but she wanted little to do with any of them.
The bards had fun romanticizing Claudia’s situation at first, but the regency rapidly grew impatient with the young woman and sent a loyal noble to force a marriage with her.
After an attempt at winning her over, the noble decided enough was enough and attempted to beat her. By chance, Claudia managed to grab a candlestick and bash him over the head with it.
Claudia did not keep quiet about the incident, and revolts rapidly spread throughout the Kingdom. The populace loved King Dmitar, and the brutality that the regency had tried to inflict on his daughter was unacceptable.
Nobles who were loyal to the old king began to pledge themselves to Claudia so the regency council could be toppled. The regents were far larger in number however, with many nobles splitting off into splinter factions using the political intrigue for their own gains.
Claudia’s army was small and had only a few loyal nobles and officers to marshal it. In a desperate attempt to gain more soldiers, she convinced the loyalists to begin conscripting droves peasants into their armies, including children from age ten and even women, anyone that could fight.
With just barely enough forces assembled, Claudia and her loyalists dug in as the regent armies marched out of Knin. Despite their large size and better training, they were disorganized and more focused on pillaging the countryside rather than hunting down Claudia’s armies, which blended in well with the peasantry and knew the terrain. Claudia kept her forces from counter attacking, instead moving them into wrecked villages and manors to recruit more soldiers.
Burning with hatred from the stories the new recruits had to tell, Claudia’s armies began focused counter attacks, using the mountains[2] defensively and luring the gullible noble armies into traps and slaughters. Claudia’s armies were swift and brutal, and executed all prisoners that they took due to lack of supplies to care for them.
When stories of Claudia’s resistance swept down from the mountains, regent forces began to desert their posts. In an attempt to restore order through fear, the regents burned the most rebellious villages, but their actions only made the situation worse.
Claudia’s forces began marching down from the mountains. The regent forces were already in disarray and every subsequent battle turned into a rout. The last major resistance from the regents came at the capital of Knin. The regents proved more tenacious than before when they defended their capital, and to permanently end their threat, Claudia ordered the use of any means necessary.
Knin was completely destroyed in the ensuing fighting, and most of the nobility that had pledged loyalty to Claudia had died leading the under equipped and poorly trained peasant armies. All that remained after the battle were her growing peasant forces.
The King of Hungary, upon hearing that Knin had been destroyed, prepared an expeditionary force and marched into Croatia himself to oust his granddaughter from the throne and restore order.
Claudia’s forces met Hungary at the Dunav and suffered heavy losses. The remainder of the nobility and officers in Claudia’s army had been killed. Claudia replaced them with hastily promoted marshals, a sparse few of whom were even female.
The marshals pulled their forces back from the Dunav and into the Dinaric Mountains. Hungary’s forces eagerly chased them, expecting a quick victory, but the marshals repeated the tricks they had learned fighting Croatia’s regency, using traps and starvation to whittle down the enemy. The King of Hungary himself was run down and forced to surrender the fight before being returned to Hungary with a broken nose.
King Ladislaus did not attempt to invade Croatia again. It’s believed that he spoke with Claudia when he was taken prisoner and her words convinced him to call the affair off, if only because of the threat that he would be killed. It’s also likely that the losses he suffered were simply not considered worth the effort of taking an insignificant territory like Croatia.
Croatia had succeeded and kept its freedom, but at a horrific cost. A large portion of the male population had died in the regent armies, and nearly every single noble in Croatia’s court was dead, the survivors having fled to other lands. Much of Croatia’s cropland had been razed, and numerous villages and towns had been destroyed, some areas would not be repopulated for the next one hundred years.
Croatia began the long road to reconstruction. Apocryphally, it’s said that Claudia and some of her advisors ordered the peasantry to use the numerous corpses that littered the landscape as fertilizer.
First South European War – 1189 to 1196
The Emperor of Byzantium, Isaac II Angelos, decided to pursue a policy of expansion against the damaged Croatia. Croatia had been through many decades of reconstruction, but was still not a prosperous country. The only thing that had kept further invasions away were the connections between Croatia and Hungary.
Isaac was unconvinced that Croatia and Hungary had any sort of relationship with each other beyond some heritage between Claudia and Ladislaus. Claudia’s successors had all been hand picked, and all of the Queens of Croatia had refused to reproduce or marry for fear that their suitor would cause another war of succession.
Seeing Croatia as an easy target, Isaac assembled a force of soldiers on the border and invaded Croatia with overwhelming force. Isaac’s advance was slow but utterly unstoppable. Wherever Croatia used their terrain advantages, Isaac would simply use overwhelming numbers of Greek soldiers to wipe out the defenders. He also wisely avoided pillaging towns and villages of anything except for food, and he left enough to keep the populace from starving.
Isaac’s tactics were despised by his men, but they completely undermined all of Croatia’s advantages. The new queen, Mirna Zilavost, could do little but wait anxiously in her capital of Sarajevo. When the Byzantines made too much progress, she fled as far away as possible, to the small town of Rijeka on the other side of Croatia.
When Isaac took Sarajevo, it seemed like Byzantium was going to rule Croatia once again. However, tensions simmering in Bulgaria had not been submerged by the war and came to a head when Isaac diverted some of the army away from the area. Seeing their chance, the Bulgarians seceded.
With most of their forces concentrated in Croatia, Byzantium lost ground against the Bulgarians fast. Bulgarian elements in the Byzantine invasion force also turned against the rest of the force and waged war inside Croatia.
The Croatian army took advantage of the infighting and further whittled down Isaac’s forces as they retreated to handle the far more important Bulgarian rebellion.
The Croats chased the receding Byzantine and Bulgarian forces out of their homeland, but were stalemated by the Bulgarians and eventually made peace with them. However, they made inroads against Byzantium and quickly gained control of much of the Dinaric Mountain Range. By the time Isaac decided to make peace, Croatia was in control of half of Serbia and small upper portions of Albania. Isaac was eventually deposed by his brother for his failures.
Mirna pushed her advantage as much as she could, eventually getting Alexios III to agree to let Croatia keep the territories it had taken. Bulgaria eventually exited the war two years later with the Carpathians, nearly all of Thracia and parts of Macedonia.
Dinaric Wars – 1198 to 1203
With most of the Dinaric Mountains under her control, Mirna Zilavost enacted a plan to bring the races of the mountains together. The Slavs of Serbia were more accustomed to Byzantine tradition rather than the unconventional peasant methodology of the Croats. Epirus had very small Slavic minorities, which Mirna used to justify assimilation of the territory. Serbs were tending towards the promise of an orthodox Slavic kingdom from Bulgaria, and the majority of Epirians longed to be back in the arms of their Greek brethren.
The Kingdom of Croatia, which had existed for over a hundred years and was fought for bitterly by its people, was dissolved in one fell swoop. Mirna reformed the political system radically based on the political system of the Byzantine Empire. Croatia, Slavonia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Serbia and Epirus became provinces, and Mirna changed her rank to reflect her position: Imperator.
The current residents of the country would no longer be known by their previous designations, but as “Mountain Slavs” or Dinarics, named after the mountain range that the territory currently occupied, and the Dinarics would be a united race in the eyes of the world. The country would be known as the Empire of Dinaria.
This did not sit well with various elements from many of the territories, particularly Epirus Nova. Small rebellions broke out across the new country, which Mirna dispatched mercilessly. The Kingdom of Hungary attempted to intervene once again to restore order in the territory, but they were stopped and heavily damaged in the mountains.
Hungary, despite taking heavy losses, won all of the battles they took part in. Mirna’s forces made them pay for every inch of territory taken, staging slaughters on the banks of the Dunav and in the narrow mountain passes that Dinaria took its namesake from.
With intrigues mounting on the border with Bulgaria and Byzantium making aggressive postures towards all powers in southern Europe, Hungary withdrew to consolidate its defenses.
Interlude in South Europe – 1203-1220
The four countries that each ruled a piece of southern Europe prepared their defenses as best they could. Tensions between Bulgaria and Byzantium were rapidly growing while Dinaria continued reconstructing itself from the perpetual warfare that plagued its realm. The rebels in Serbia and Epirus had become bandits, feeding off of the sparse trade caravans that made their way through the Dinaric Mountains every so often.
Byzantium often sent dummy caravans loaded with food and the corpses of dead prisoners dressed in military uniforms. The rebels would “attack” the caravan, and the caravans would be emptied while the corpses were scattered, and the Byzantine guards would join the ranks of the fighters.
Reviewing the losses her forces had taken in the Dinaric Wars against the Hungarians, Dinaria’s newest Imperator, Jeza Misljenje, made the decision to open Dinaria’s coffers and hire army officers from France as military advisors and to train her armies.
The French were amused by the offer, but ultimately wanted little to do with Dinaria. However, some retired French officers privately agreed to the deal and arrived to train Dinaria’s disorganized peasant armies.
Dinaria’s army was receiving some training, but comparatively little. Byzantium’s army was still massive and far better equipped than Dinaria’s, though Dinaria had the advantage of the treacherous mountain terrain. The Hungarians also eagerly eyed Dinaria, seeing the rich Dalmatian coast as the perfect place to begin a navy.
Jeza formed a tenuous alliance with Bulgaria, widely regarded as the spark that started the Second South European War.
Mongol-Khwarezmid Relations - 1218
Genghis Khan finished his conquest of the neighboring Khanates in Central Asia, his forces arriving on the borders of the Khwarezmid Empire. The Khwarezmids were not a simple Khanate, and Genghis decided he may have a lot to learn from them.
The Mongols organized a trade mission and sent it across the border. It arrived in a small Turkish city, and the governor eagerly accepted the goods and allowed the Mongols the right to trade[3]. He sent word to the Shah about the new arrivals.
While various conservative elements within the Empire were against consorting with the Mongols, the Shah was mostly indifferent to them, and allowed the Mongols moderate trading rights within his territory, but leaving his governors to make up their minds whether or not they wanted Mongols in their areas.
The Mongols were warned of this, and avoided the conservative provinces while trading with the ones that were more open.
Second South European War – 1220-1236
Feeling cocky after making an alliance with Dinaria, Bulgaria declared war on Byzantium in the unusually warm March of 1220. Jeza joined the war only a month later, deploying some parts of her army across the border of Byzantium.
The Bulgarians mostly held the Byzantines down while the Dinarics infiltrated positions behind enemy lines in the Dinaric mountain ranges, undermining their control of the region. The Byzantines had prepared for a Dinaric invasion but not such a subtle one. Regardless, they performed raids and attacks on the recently taken positions while the Serbian and Epirian rebels materialized behind the Dinaric lines and began destroying whatever they were close enough to.
Jeza led a force out herself, establishing a reputation as the first fighting Imperator. The southern Dinaric Mountains rapidly turned into a conflagration. Territories raided by the Epirian and Serb rebels were often populated by Epirians and Serbs, leading to dissidence in the local populations against Byzantium.
Villages began to assemble their own militias and violently defend themselves against invasion. Often, the Byzantines had to destroy the entire village just to end resistance from it. Jeza Misljenje was not far ahead of the destruction. She took advantage of the peasantry’s hatred for the invaders and drafted all able-bodied workers into her personal division.
She then evacuated and burned the villages down, along with their crops and all arable land in the area, denying the Byzantines area to live off of during the occupation. The Byzantines marched through miles of scorched earth, desperately trying to stop Jeza before she burned the next swathe of land.
The winter set in, and many of the fleeing Dinaric peasants died of starvation. However, the bandits that survived off the countryside were also mostly wiped out by the temperatures. The massive Byzantine expeditionary force was unfazed, however, and continued their advance despite heavy losses.
Jeza rallied her forces and made a brutal stand at the city of Sarajevo, unwilling to destroy it. The conscripted peasantry was slaughtered en masse by the Byzantines, and their rout flooded straight into Jeza’s more experienced forces.
The Byzantines, believing they had caused all of the Dinaric forces to panic and run, charged headlong into the crowd. Jeza’s forces descended upon them, and the Battle of Sarajevo rapidly turned into a gory and confusing melee. In the confusion, Jeza’s forces and the bulk of the Byzantine expeditionary force were decimated. After weeks of horrific fighting in the cold, both sides retreated to try and regroup.
Jeza made it back to Rijeka and rallied her reserve forces just in time for the Bulgarians to break the Byzantine defense and besiege the walls of Constantinople. The Byzantine forces lost all central control, and the Dinarics did their best to take advantage of the situation and hold onto the battered landscape.
After the first several years of fighting, the militaries of all three belligerent countries were in shambles. Dinaria’s small forces had been lost in standup fights with Byzantine expeditions, while the Byzantine territories were seething with rebellion and pitched defenses against the occasional Bulgarian incursion.
Bulgaria’s disorganized armies performed far worse against the Byzantines that Jeza had originally hoped, and their penchant for head on battles had cost them dearly. Bulgaria’s forces were mangled nearly beyond repair, although they maintained a sizable force that kept the battered Byzantines from reorganizing.
Raiders from the Middle East were beginning to take small chunks out of Byzantium’s eastern borders, and the rebellions in the Greek heartland caused the Byzantines to concede the war, losing everything except the lower reaches of Greece and Constantinople.
The Bulgarians pulled their ranks together just as Hungary stormed across the Dunav with another massive expeditionary force. Bulgaria came to the defense of its ally, marching across the border of Hungary and besieging the city of Budapest after rampaging through the Hungarian countryside. Bulgaria was suffering badly from overextension, and Jeza Misljenje’s last allotment of troops was on the verge of defeat.
However, the current Pope, Gregory IX, upon hearing of the siege of Budapest, sent orders to all three nations to halt the fighting. Bulgaria, though recently converted, was a Catholic nation, as was Dinaria. Both countries held Orthodox territory, and Gregory believed it would be in better interest of the church if the two nations were allowed to assimilate their conquered populations.
Hungary was prohibited from ever violating Dinaric territory again by papal order, and forced to make amends to both Bulgaria and Dinaria by paying large sums of money. To top it off, Gregory recognized the status of Dinaria and the ownership of lands controlled by Bulgaria, so long as Bulgaria remained Catholic.
Dinaric-Bulgarian Land Deal – 1220-1221
Belligerents: Dinaria, Bulgaria
Despite their relative success, the Bulgarians controlled far more territory than they could possibly keep. Hoping to gain a large piece of the former Byzantine heartland, Jeza Misljenje approached the current Bulgarian Tsar, Ivan Asen II. The two formed an awkward relationship with each other, and rumors spread that they were actually lovers.
In reality, Jeza wanted the rest of the Dinaric Mountains, and Ivan lacked trust in the “Imperator” of Dinaria. Ivan, like many others, quietly believed that a woman ruling a nation was improper, but did not say anything to his only ally. Another point of contention between the two rulers was the fact that Jeza’s idea of the full range of the Dinaric Mountains varied from day to day, and the pair spent many long hours arguing over a border.
Ivan wanted to keep the lands his country had taken, but his advisors were eager to release some territory so that Bulgaria could focus on holding on to the territories they already had control of.
On one of Jeza’s good days, Ivan agreed to her interpretation of the Dinaric border, giving Dinaria all of Epirus and most of Serbia. The land issue solved, both powers retreated behind their borders to consolidate their gains and rebuild their losses.
Finnish Revolution – 1235
Ever since they had conquered their rival previously, Sweden had been brutally assimilating the Finnish population. The last of the surviving Finns that still held to their native traditions banded together and began a rebellion in Helsinki that spread quickly across Finland. The Swedish forces had been weakened heavily by resistance from the Finns and a lack of supplies during the long years, and were enveloped. The Finns destroyed the Swedish armies and marched into the Swedish heartland.
Stockholm was taken and the Finns crowned themselves as the new rulers. The Finnish leadership began to conscript more soldiers from the countryside, preparing to exact their revenge against the Swedish population.
Dano-Finnish War – 1235-1237
Knowing full well what the Finns planned to do to Sweden, Denmark quickly declared war and invaded Finland to restore order. The small Finnish peasant armies and sparse soldiers were quickly and easily wiped out by the superior Danish forces.
Sweden was a disaster zone and much of its monarchy had been destroyed, while Finland was in shambles just as the Swedes had left it. Denmark annexed both territories and created the nation of Scandinavia, ruled from Copenhagen.
Mongol Invasion of the Rus – 1223-1240
The Mongols swept through the Rus territories, rapidly consuming most of them, including the powerful Kievian Rus[4].
The Mongol Invasion of Europe – 1241-1280
The Mongol Invasion of Europe began with raids against the country of Bulgaria. Bulgaria had recovered somewhat since its devastating wars with Byzantium, but the invasion of the Mongols was horrific and excessively damaging.
Bulgaria’s depleted army could do little to stem the Mongol invasion. Though Tsar Ivan Asen II was able to defeat their first raid, consecutive raids struck deep into Bulgarian territory, piercing through the flat spots the terrain and circumvented the heavily defended mountains.
Ivan Asen won nearly every battle against the Mongols and repulsed every raid that he was able to reach before they fled back towards Mongol territory, but often the raids would simply avoid his forces and any actual combat severely wrecked his armies.
On top of this, the weaknesses in the Bulgarian army were only further incentive for the Orthodox forces inside Bulgaria’s domain to continue their resistance. The Pope’s guarantee of peace was only valid if Bulgaria held onto and continued trying to convert the Orthodox territories, and Ivan was beginning to grow weary of the treaty.
Around 1260, the Mongols began similar raids into Poland, raids which severely decimated the already fragmented country. Lithuania held up the best, providing the most resistance. To secure the Mongol flank against the Polish, Hungary was invaded and almost completely sacked.
In 1262, Jeza Misljenje began committing allotments of soldiers to Bulgaria to help their ailing ally resist the Mongolian invasion. The Dinaric forces were accomplished mountaineers, and began using the mountains as bases to conduct counter raids against the Mongols.
The Mongolians were still wise to this tactic, and avoided mountain warfare wherever they could. However, the Dinarics would often still successfully bait a stray Mongol force into the mountains and slaughter it. While entire raids were never lost this way, the Dinarics ensured heavy casualties against the enemy.
Ivan Asen was still a competent commander, but his will was beginning to decline. Realizing that Ivan was on the verge of releasing some of the Orthodox territories, Jeza sent several more allotments into Bulgarian territory to keep the peace in the Orthodox zones.
The Bulgarian Tsar was becoming anemic in his rule, and Jeza began taking advantage of it, visiting the younger man often and creating various treaties to boost the wealth of the Bulgarian Empire even as the Mongols continued their raids. While Dinaria’s financial contributions were ultimately piecemeal, they served to restore Ivan’s faith in his Catholic ally.
When Anna Maria of Hungary died in 1269, Jeza saw an opportunity and took it. She married Ivan Asen II[5], becoming Jeza Asen, much to the contempt of the officers in Dinaria.
Jeza was not foolish, however, as her forces had effective control of much of Bulgaria. The marriage was recognized as a personal union, when in reality Dinaria was essentially ruling Bulgaria.
Ivan Asen II was a sickly man, and had no male heirs, and Jeza was too old to foster children. He died lacking an heir in 1274, on the eve of another Mongol raid. Jeza conveniently returned to Sarajevo and the piecemeal force she left behind to defend the routes to Bulgaria’s capital dematerialized.
The Mongols raided Bulgaria’s capital. Though most of the nobility survived, they were broken men and ready to begin paying the Mongols tribute. Jeza stepped in. If the Bulgarians agreed to be merged into the Dinaria[6], their lands would be defended and kept safe. Jeza spent the better part of two years working to convince Bulgaria’s ruling council of the virtues of merging with Dinaria.
A tiny Mongol raiding party of 100 men sacked a town on the border in 1276, causing rumors of another massive Mongol incursion. Though the incursion never appeared, Jeza used the panic to get the Bulgarian nobility to hastily agree to the plan.
Bulgaria was dissolved, and its nobles were stripped of everything but ceremonial power. One by one, over the course of the next decade or so up until the end of her reign, Jeza picked them off or encouraged marriages to domineering Dinaric wives, reorganizing the Bulgarian holdings into more provinces.
The Mongol raids continued until 1280. Lithuania, Hungary and Dinaria all suffered heavy losses. Lithuania and Hungary suffered army losses, while the Dinarics suffered the destruction of villages along the border, particularly in Moldova. Though the Dinarics barely managed military superiority over the Mongols via use of the mountains, they couldn’t make any real progress against them.
The continuous raids were finally ended by political maneuvering via France and the Papacy. After numerous correspondences spanning almost a century, actual relations were established with the Mongols, and French diplomats managed to come to an understanding with them. Catholic Europe would be left alone, and Mongol rule would be recognized over all of the Rus.
The Mongols, more focused on their efforts in Asia due to the guidance of Kublai Khan, agreed to the pact and ended the continuous raids on the Catholic powers.
Eastern Conquests – 1301-1325
Lithuania began to take advantage of the broken a disaffected Russian principalities left behind in the wake of the receding Mongols, overtaking and merging them into the Empire. Poland partook in the same activity, though on a smaller scale. While the new territories were poorly policed, the taxes and plunder collected from them helped to rejuvenate both countries.
As well, some of the weaker principalities joined with Lithuania and Poland, but these were few and far between.
The War of the She Wolf – 1340 to 1356
Isabella of France married the Scandinavian prince Vlademar IV in 1320. She was promised to the Prince as a peace offering and to establish formal relations with Scandinavia. However, the Scandinavian court viewed the marriage unfavorably despite the fact that it went through, and France became more embroiled in its own affairs rather than bothering to improve relations with Scandinavia.
Isabella’s marriage was an unhappy one, and she sought to remove Vlademar herself to be rid of him and seize power in Scandinavia. She secretly brought together a contingent of loyal guards and killed Vlademar only a few months after his coronation as King, leaving Isabella the sole ruler due to the fact that the two had not yet conceived.
The rest of Scandinavia’s nobility was incredulous about Isabella’s story, and believed she was the culprit behind Vlademar’s death. The nobility of Scandinavia dispatched a team of soldiers to deal with her, but her royal guards made short work of them. Isabella reported to her mother that Scandinavia had betrayed her, and France declared war.
Norway joined the war on Scandinavia’s side. The French invaded Scandinavia by sea, having to contend with heavy Norwegian raids. The Scots, looking to end Norwegian piracy against Ireland once and for all, sent expeditionary forces to aid France in the North Sea. The Scots had mixed results.
The French succeeded in landing troops on Scandinavian soil. Though much of Sweden and anarchistic Finland were quickly conquered, Norwegian and Danish troops gave the French forces a tough time. Isabella held out in the palace of Copenhagen for as long as she could with her royal guards.
Eventually, the French forces made a deal with the city of Hamburg and arrived at night. Thousands of French soldiers crossed into Holstein from the south, quickly overrunning Jutland despite fierce resistance from the Danish army.
All involved powers were thoroughly exhausted by the end of the war, though the French eventually succeeded in taking Copenhagen. Norway’s tenuous power structure was also severely damaged by combating with the numerically superior French and Scottish forces, and Finland was once again restless and had begun resisting the French occupation.
The nobility of Scandinavia surrendered the war, and many of them were purged in ensuing trials to remove any threat to Isabella’s power structure. Norway was merged into Scandinavia’s holdings to form a true Scandinavia though Greenland and the Faroes went to France. Scotland was given Iceland and the Hebrides for its trouble, and the France established relations with Scotland that would eventually flourish into a tenuous alliance.
Hello all. I’ll make this an impromptu introduction and then just get into the thread quickly so we don’t have to dwell on who the hell I am for the early part of the thread.
I got into AH with the Draka about four years ago. Originally, I just read the book and took it at face value rather than caring too much about the plausibility, but reading the Tvtropes page on the Draka motivated me to track down one of the many pages that talks consistently about the timeline in the back of the book.
By chance I came across Ian’s old Gateway Alternate History website and read the Draka article on there. One critical evaluation later and I had developed an interest AH and history at large that I maintain to this day. I’m far from the idiot I was and much more critical these days, so I sure as hell am not going to emulate the Draka here. I’m kind of fixated on it though, so just excuse that. Deluge is supposed to be sort of the anti-Draka world.
I like to think that I’m well informed on history but not terribly well educated. I probably made a lot of mistakes on this timeline, none of them glaring, I hope, at least. I have a bit of an inferiority complex so I did go over it quite a bit and try to check it with people, but given the area I live in I don’t have very many peers capable of looking it over and pointing out flaws, and I wasn’t part of any online communities that could have provided feedback either.
Honestly, I rely on my ability for exposition to try and justify something if I had the wrong impression. That doesn’t always work I’m aware and sometimes it’s the worst thing to do, so I try to be cautious with it, but I have a tendency to use it as a crutch.
I also tend to have a pessimistic interpretation of humanity, so my interpretations of countries probably act more violent than they did in real life. I try to keep things realistic of course and I believe I’ve mostly succeeded but just keep in mind that countries will go to war a lot in this setting.
As a disclaimer, something that might offend people is my very poor grasp of Serbo-Croatian. I mean no harm, but I lack the time it would take to learn the language and given the backwater area I live in no institution teaches it anyway. I did have a Russian friend who tried his best to help me with the basic construction of Slavic languages but he knew little about the Balkans so there wasn’t a whole lot he could do. Sorry if I’ve butchered your language, it’s the best I was able to do with online translators and reference pages.
Just be gentle, is all I’m asking. I’m kind of new at writing big settings like this, and I don’t believe this timeline should be taken anywhere near as seriously as say, Decades of Darkness, for example.
If hard pressed, I’d say the goal of Deluge is more mechanical than plausibility, though I still maintain the events that happen are *possible* but unlikely. I’ve tried my best to be accurate, of course, but the objective was to explore various warfare doctrines and how an aggressive, “hard power” world would look.
Simply enough, I also wanted to create an interesting setting, which is why I jimmied a few things in directions they’d probably have been unlikely to go in, because everybody has already done their take on Russia, England, the Ottomans, Byzantium, China and so forth. I’m not saying that putting a timeline together around one of those countries is clichéd or something; it’s just that I feel like there’s nothing I could add and so I need a new direction.
That said, I do have to use some shortcuts somewhere. Yes, a lot of real world events still happen in this timeline even though there were multiple points of diversion hundreds of years earlier. Its not as bad as say, the Nazis still coming to power, but there are still various major events and I do still use a lot of monarchs that probably wouldn’t actually show up in the position they’re in.
Part of this is the fact that I can’t micromanage every inch of history, and part of this is that the world still has to be somewhat recognizable, given how extremely different it will look by 1800. I still try to put a unique spin on some of the stuff that I’m ripping off from real history, and the outcome may end up being different.
Also, it may look like I tend to gloss over colonization because I end wars when serious organized resistance ends and only some countries get any details, but unless a rebellion actually shakes up the sociopolitical situation to some extent it isn’t mentioned because this timeline really does not have the scope to handle all of them. Just assume that colonization is just as horrific and brutal in this timeline as it is/was in real life, aside from other methods that will be presented, which I go out of my way to detail.
Things that happen exactly as they were in real history or are only slightly altered will not be discussed. This will be indicative of the Middle Ages mostly, as it’s such a massive span of time to cover and the lack of information about some of it makes it very difficult to string things together. That said; where things turn out slightly different, there will be an acknowledgement of that.
This thread will just start with a straight timeline and go from there. I wrote a ton of fake internet articles in the vein of Cracked or other webshows and article sites I follow so those can supplement while I work on actual stories, which currently only exist as outlines, characters and concepts. Despite having worked on this since April, I’ve focused more or less on the information.
Last note, the timeline is very long. I’ve written most of the info beforehand to make sure it would be presentable when I decided to publish it on the internet. It’s crested 70 pages already and its missing a few consistency events. It’s technically mostly finished but I’m editing it and adding events to try and maintain its coherence, so even though it’s basically *finished* you won’t see it all at once.
Without further rambling (I doubt any message of mine will ever be this long again), I give you the opening salvo of Deluge:
1. Fragmentation, Dinaria 1066-1350
Invasions of Britain – 1066-1078
A combination of difficult ocean conditions and poor, muddy weather divided the landing forces of both William the Conqueror and King Harald Hardrada. Forces intermittently met each other and the English defenders in a long, protracted campaign that resulted in heavy losses due to near constant skirmishing. The moment one leader would attempt to rally their forces; they would find that fragments of enemy forces were within their ranks and causing more chaos.
By the end of the conflict, England was reduced to nearly half its original size and held by what remained of William’s forces, despite the fact that William had died in 1070 of a stray arrow. King Harald had been run down and killed in the countryside.
The Scots to the north took advantage of the fragmentation and laid claim to some of the border territories, and much of the fragmented countries were left as a buffed between the battered Normans and Scotland.
War of Croatian Succession – 1089-1109
Dmitar Zvonimir, the King of Croatia, died in 1089 lacking any male heirs to his throne. The nobility of Croatia assembled a regency council and began the daunting task of deciding who would control Croatia next.
Dmitar’s daughter, Claudia, was unmarried at the time[1], and the regency council decided whoever would marry her would inherit the throne. Numerous suitors arrived to attempt to sway Claudia, but she wanted little to do with any of them.
The bards had fun romanticizing Claudia’s situation at first, but the regency rapidly grew impatient with the young woman and sent a loyal noble to force a marriage with her.
After an attempt at winning her over, the noble decided enough was enough and attempted to beat her. By chance, Claudia managed to grab a candlestick and bash him over the head with it.
Claudia did not keep quiet about the incident, and revolts rapidly spread throughout the Kingdom. The populace loved King Dmitar, and the brutality that the regency had tried to inflict on his daughter was unacceptable.
Nobles who were loyal to the old king began to pledge themselves to Claudia so the regency council could be toppled. The regents were far larger in number however, with many nobles splitting off into splinter factions using the political intrigue for their own gains.
Claudia’s army was small and had only a few loyal nobles and officers to marshal it. In a desperate attempt to gain more soldiers, she convinced the loyalists to begin conscripting droves peasants into their armies, including children from age ten and even women, anyone that could fight.
With just barely enough forces assembled, Claudia and her loyalists dug in as the regent armies marched out of Knin. Despite their large size and better training, they were disorganized and more focused on pillaging the countryside rather than hunting down Claudia’s armies, which blended in well with the peasantry and knew the terrain. Claudia kept her forces from counter attacking, instead moving them into wrecked villages and manors to recruit more soldiers.
Burning with hatred from the stories the new recruits had to tell, Claudia’s armies began focused counter attacks, using the mountains[2] defensively and luring the gullible noble armies into traps and slaughters. Claudia’s armies were swift and brutal, and executed all prisoners that they took due to lack of supplies to care for them.
When stories of Claudia’s resistance swept down from the mountains, regent forces began to desert their posts. In an attempt to restore order through fear, the regents burned the most rebellious villages, but their actions only made the situation worse.
Claudia’s forces began marching down from the mountains. The regent forces were already in disarray and every subsequent battle turned into a rout. The last major resistance from the regents came at the capital of Knin. The regents proved more tenacious than before when they defended their capital, and to permanently end their threat, Claudia ordered the use of any means necessary.
Knin was completely destroyed in the ensuing fighting, and most of the nobility that had pledged loyalty to Claudia had died leading the under equipped and poorly trained peasant armies. All that remained after the battle were her growing peasant forces.
The King of Hungary, upon hearing that Knin had been destroyed, prepared an expeditionary force and marched into Croatia himself to oust his granddaughter from the throne and restore order.
Claudia’s forces met Hungary at the Dunav and suffered heavy losses. The remainder of the nobility and officers in Claudia’s army had been killed. Claudia replaced them with hastily promoted marshals, a sparse few of whom were even female.
The marshals pulled their forces back from the Dunav and into the Dinaric Mountains. Hungary’s forces eagerly chased them, expecting a quick victory, but the marshals repeated the tricks they had learned fighting Croatia’s regency, using traps and starvation to whittle down the enemy. The King of Hungary himself was run down and forced to surrender the fight before being returned to Hungary with a broken nose.
King Ladislaus did not attempt to invade Croatia again. It’s believed that he spoke with Claudia when he was taken prisoner and her words convinced him to call the affair off, if only because of the threat that he would be killed. It’s also likely that the losses he suffered were simply not considered worth the effort of taking an insignificant territory like Croatia.
Croatia had succeeded and kept its freedom, but at a horrific cost. A large portion of the male population had died in the regent armies, and nearly every single noble in Croatia’s court was dead, the survivors having fled to other lands. Much of Croatia’s cropland had been razed, and numerous villages and towns had been destroyed, some areas would not be repopulated for the next one hundred years.
Croatia began the long road to reconstruction. Apocryphally, it’s said that Claudia and some of her advisors ordered the peasantry to use the numerous corpses that littered the landscape as fertilizer.
First South European War – 1189 to 1196
The Emperor of Byzantium, Isaac II Angelos, decided to pursue a policy of expansion against the damaged Croatia. Croatia had been through many decades of reconstruction, but was still not a prosperous country. The only thing that had kept further invasions away were the connections between Croatia and Hungary.
Isaac was unconvinced that Croatia and Hungary had any sort of relationship with each other beyond some heritage between Claudia and Ladislaus. Claudia’s successors had all been hand picked, and all of the Queens of Croatia had refused to reproduce or marry for fear that their suitor would cause another war of succession.
Seeing Croatia as an easy target, Isaac assembled a force of soldiers on the border and invaded Croatia with overwhelming force. Isaac’s advance was slow but utterly unstoppable. Wherever Croatia used their terrain advantages, Isaac would simply use overwhelming numbers of Greek soldiers to wipe out the defenders. He also wisely avoided pillaging towns and villages of anything except for food, and he left enough to keep the populace from starving.
Isaac’s tactics were despised by his men, but they completely undermined all of Croatia’s advantages. The new queen, Mirna Zilavost, could do little but wait anxiously in her capital of Sarajevo. When the Byzantines made too much progress, she fled as far away as possible, to the small town of Rijeka on the other side of Croatia.
When Isaac took Sarajevo, it seemed like Byzantium was going to rule Croatia once again. However, tensions simmering in Bulgaria had not been submerged by the war and came to a head when Isaac diverted some of the army away from the area. Seeing their chance, the Bulgarians seceded.
With most of their forces concentrated in Croatia, Byzantium lost ground against the Bulgarians fast. Bulgarian elements in the Byzantine invasion force also turned against the rest of the force and waged war inside Croatia.
The Croatian army took advantage of the infighting and further whittled down Isaac’s forces as they retreated to handle the far more important Bulgarian rebellion.
The Croats chased the receding Byzantine and Bulgarian forces out of their homeland, but were stalemated by the Bulgarians and eventually made peace with them. However, they made inroads against Byzantium and quickly gained control of much of the Dinaric Mountain Range. By the time Isaac decided to make peace, Croatia was in control of half of Serbia and small upper portions of Albania. Isaac was eventually deposed by his brother for his failures.
Mirna pushed her advantage as much as she could, eventually getting Alexios III to agree to let Croatia keep the territories it had taken. Bulgaria eventually exited the war two years later with the Carpathians, nearly all of Thracia and parts of Macedonia.
Dinaric Wars – 1198 to 1203
With most of the Dinaric Mountains under her control, Mirna Zilavost enacted a plan to bring the races of the mountains together. The Slavs of Serbia were more accustomed to Byzantine tradition rather than the unconventional peasant methodology of the Croats. Epirus had very small Slavic minorities, which Mirna used to justify assimilation of the territory. Serbs were tending towards the promise of an orthodox Slavic kingdom from Bulgaria, and the majority of Epirians longed to be back in the arms of their Greek brethren.
The Kingdom of Croatia, which had existed for over a hundred years and was fought for bitterly by its people, was dissolved in one fell swoop. Mirna reformed the political system radically based on the political system of the Byzantine Empire. Croatia, Slavonia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Serbia and Epirus became provinces, and Mirna changed her rank to reflect her position: Imperator.
The current residents of the country would no longer be known by their previous designations, but as “Mountain Slavs” or Dinarics, named after the mountain range that the territory currently occupied, and the Dinarics would be a united race in the eyes of the world. The country would be known as the Empire of Dinaria.
This did not sit well with various elements from many of the territories, particularly Epirus Nova. Small rebellions broke out across the new country, which Mirna dispatched mercilessly. The Kingdom of Hungary attempted to intervene once again to restore order in the territory, but they were stopped and heavily damaged in the mountains.
Hungary, despite taking heavy losses, won all of the battles they took part in. Mirna’s forces made them pay for every inch of territory taken, staging slaughters on the banks of the Dunav and in the narrow mountain passes that Dinaria took its namesake from.
With intrigues mounting on the border with Bulgaria and Byzantium making aggressive postures towards all powers in southern Europe, Hungary withdrew to consolidate its defenses.
Interlude in South Europe – 1203-1220
The four countries that each ruled a piece of southern Europe prepared their defenses as best they could. Tensions between Bulgaria and Byzantium were rapidly growing while Dinaria continued reconstructing itself from the perpetual warfare that plagued its realm. The rebels in Serbia and Epirus had become bandits, feeding off of the sparse trade caravans that made their way through the Dinaric Mountains every so often.
Byzantium often sent dummy caravans loaded with food and the corpses of dead prisoners dressed in military uniforms. The rebels would “attack” the caravan, and the caravans would be emptied while the corpses were scattered, and the Byzantine guards would join the ranks of the fighters.
Reviewing the losses her forces had taken in the Dinaric Wars against the Hungarians, Dinaria’s newest Imperator, Jeza Misljenje, made the decision to open Dinaria’s coffers and hire army officers from France as military advisors and to train her armies.
The French were amused by the offer, but ultimately wanted little to do with Dinaria. However, some retired French officers privately agreed to the deal and arrived to train Dinaria’s disorganized peasant armies.
Dinaria’s army was receiving some training, but comparatively little. Byzantium’s army was still massive and far better equipped than Dinaria’s, though Dinaria had the advantage of the treacherous mountain terrain. The Hungarians also eagerly eyed Dinaria, seeing the rich Dalmatian coast as the perfect place to begin a navy.
Jeza formed a tenuous alliance with Bulgaria, widely regarded as the spark that started the Second South European War.
Mongol-Khwarezmid Relations - 1218
Genghis Khan finished his conquest of the neighboring Khanates in Central Asia, his forces arriving on the borders of the Khwarezmid Empire. The Khwarezmids were not a simple Khanate, and Genghis decided he may have a lot to learn from them.
The Mongols organized a trade mission and sent it across the border. It arrived in a small Turkish city, and the governor eagerly accepted the goods and allowed the Mongols the right to trade[3]. He sent word to the Shah about the new arrivals.
While various conservative elements within the Empire were against consorting with the Mongols, the Shah was mostly indifferent to them, and allowed the Mongols moderate trading rights within his territory, but leaving his governors to make up their minds whether or not they wanted Mongols in their areas.
The Mongols were warned of this, and avoided the conservative provinces while trading with the ones that were more open.
Second South European War – 1220-1236
Feeling cocky after making an alliance with Dinaria, Bulgaria declared war on Byzantium in the unusually warm March of 1220. Jeza joined the war only a month later, deploying some parts of her army across the border of Byzantium.
The Bulgarians mostly held the Byzantines down while the Dinarics infiltrated positions behind enemy lines in the Dinaric mountain ranges, undermining their control of the region. The Byzantines had prepared for a Dinaric invasion but not such a subtle one. Regardless, they performed raids and attacks on the recently taken positions while the Serbian and Epirian rebels materialized behind the Dinaric lines and began destroying whatever they were close enough to.
Jeza led a force out herself, establishing a reputation as the first fighting Imperator. The southern Dinaric Mountains rapidly turned into a conflagration. Territories raided by the Epirian and Serb rebels were often populated by Epirians and Serbs, leading to dissidence in the local populations against Byzantium.
Villages began to assemble their own militias and violently defend themselves against invasion. Often, the Byzantines had to destroy the entire village just to end resistance from it. Jeza Misljenje was not far ahead of the destruction. She took advantage of the peasantry’s hatred for the invaders and drafted all able-bodied workers into her personal division.
She then evacuated and burned the villages down, along with their crops and all arable land in the area, denying the Byzantines area to live off of during the occupation. The Byzantines marched through miles of scorched earth, desperately trying to stop Jeza before she burned the next swathe of land.
The winter set in, and many of the fleeing Dinaric peasants died of starvation. However, the bandits that survived off the countryside were also mostly wiped out by the temperatures. The massive Byzantine expeditionary force was unfazed, however, and continued their advance despite heavy losses.
Jeza rallied her forces and made a brutal stand at the city of Sarajevo, unwilling to destroy it. The conscripted peasantry was slaughtered en masse by the Byzantines, and their rout flooded straight into Jeza’s more experienced forces.
The Byzantines, believing they had caused all of the Dinaric forces to panic and run, charged headlong into the crowd. Jeza’s forces descended upon them, and the Battle of Sarajevo rapidly turned into a gory and confusing melee. In the confusion, Jeza’s forces and the bulk of the Byzantine expeditionary force were decimated. After weeks of horrific fighting in the cold, both sides retreated to try and regroup.
Jeza made it back to Rijeka and rallied her reserve forces just in time for the Bulgarians to break the Byzantine defense and besiege the walls of Constantinople. The Byzantine forces lost all central control, and the Dinarics did their best to take advantage of the situation and hold onto the battered landscape.
After the first several years of fighting, the militaries of all three belligerent countries were in shambles. Dinaria’s small forces had been lost in standup fights with Byzantine expeditions, while the Byzantine territories were seething with rebellion and pitched defenses against the occasional Bulgarian incursion.
Bulgaria’s disorganized armies performed far worse against the Byzantines that Jeza had originally hoped, and their penchant for head on battles had cost them dearly. Bulgaria’s forces were mangled nearly beyond repair, although they maintained a sizable force that kept the battered Byzantines from reorganizing.
Raiders from the Middle East were beginning to take small chunks out of Byzantium’s eastern borders, and the rebellions in the Greek heartland caused the Byzantines to concede the war, losing everything except the lower reaches of Greece and Constantinople.
The Bulgarians pulled their ranks together just as Hungary stormed across the Dunav with another massive expeditionary force. Bulgaria came to the defense of its ally, marching across the border of Hungary and besieging the city of Budapest after rampaging through the Hungarian countryside. Bulgaria was suffering badly from overextension, and Jeza Misljenje’s last allotment of troops was on the verge of defeat.
However, the current Pope, Gregory IX, upon hearing of the siege of Budapest, sent orders to all three nations to halt the fighting. Bulgaria, though recently converted, was a Catholic nation, as was Dinaria. Both countries held Orthodox territory, and Gregory believed it would be in better interest of the church if the two nations were allowed to assimilate their conquered populations.
Hungary was prohibited from ever violating Dinaric territory again by papal order, and forced to make amends to both Bulgaria and Dinaria by paying large sums of money. To top it off, Gregory recognized the status of Dinaria and the ownership of lands controlled by Bulgaria, so long as Bulgaria remained Catholic.
Dinaric-Bulgarian Land Deal – 1220-1221
Belligerents: Dinaria, Bulgaria
Despite their relative success, the Bulgarians controlled far more territory than they could possibly keep. Hoping to gain a large piece of the former Byzantine heartland, Jeza Misljenje approached the current Bulgarian Tsar, Ivan Asen II. The two formed an awkward relationship with each other, and rumors spread that they were actually lovers.
In reality, Jeza wanted the rest of the Dinaric Mountains, and Ivan lacked trust in the “Imperator” of Dinaria. Ivan, like many others, quietly believed that a woman ruling a nation was improper, but did not say anything to his only ally. Another point of contention between the two rulers was the fact that Jeza’s idea of the full range of the Dinaric Mountains varied from day to day, and the pair spent many long hours arguing over a border.
Ivan wanted to keep the lands his country had taken, but his advisors were eager to release some territory so that Bulgaria could focus on holding on to the territories they already had control of.
On one of Jeza’s good days, Ivan agreed to her interpretation of the Dinaric border, giving Dinaria all of Epirus and most of Serbia. The land issue solved, both powers retreated behind their borders to consolidate their gains and rebuild their losses.
Finnish Revolution – 1235
Ever since they had conquered their rival previously, Sweden had been brutally assimilating the Finnish population. The last of the surviving Finns that still held to their native traditions banded together and began a rebellion in Helsinki that spread quickly across Finland. The Swedish forces had been weakened heavily by resistance from the Finns and a lack of supplies during the long years, and were enveloped. The Finns destroyed the Swedish armies and marched into the Swedish heartland.
Stockholm was taken and the Finns crowned themselves as the new rulers. The Finnish leadership began to conscript more soldiers from the countryside, preparing to exact their revenge against the Swedish population.
Dano-Finnish War – 1235-1237
Knowing full well what the Finns planned to do to Sweden, Denmark quickly declared war and invaded Finland to restore order. The small Finnish peasant armies and sparse soldiers were quickly and easily wiped out by the superior Danish forces.
Sweden was a disaster zone and much of its monarchy had been destroyed, while Finland was in shambles just as the Swedes had left it. Denmark annexed both territories and created the nation of Scandinavia, ruled from Copenhagen.
Mongol Invasion of the Rus – 1223-1240
The Mongols swept through the Rus territories, rapidly consuming most of them, including the powerful Kievian Rus[4].
The Mongol Invasion of Europe – 1241-1280
The Mongol Invasion of Europe began with raids against the country of Bulgaria. Bulgaria had recovered somewhat since its devastating wars with Byzantium, but the invasion of the Mongols was horrific and excessively damaging.
Bulgaria’s depleted army could do little to stem the Mongol invasion. Though Tsar Ivan Asen II was able to defeat their first raid, consecutive raids struck deep into Bulgarian territory, piercing through the flat spots the terrain and circumvented the heavily defended mountains.
Ivan Asen won nearly every battle against the Mongols and repulsed every raid that he was able to reach before they fled back towards Mongol territory, but often the raids would simply avoid his forces and any actual combat severely wrecked his armies.
On top of this, the weaknesses in the Bulgarian army were only further incentive for the Orthodox forces inside Bulgaria’s domain to continue their resistance. The Pope’s guarantee of peace was only valid if Bulgaria held onto and continued trying to convert the Orthodox territories, and Ivan was beginning to grow weary of the treaty.
Around 1260, the Mongols began similar raids into Poland, raids which severely decimated the already fragmented country. Lithuania held up the best, providing the most resistance. To secure the Mongol flank against the Polish, Hungary was invaded and almost completely sacked.
In 1262, Jeza Misljenje began committing allotments of soldiers to Bulgaria to help their ailing ally resist the Mongolian invasion. The Dinaric forces were accomplished mountaineers, and began using the mountains as bases to conduct counter raids against the Mongols.
The Mongolians were still wise to this tactic, and avoided mountain warfare wherever they could. However, the Dinarics would often still successfully bait a stray Mongol force into the mountains and slaughter it. While entire raids were never lost this way, the Dinarics ensured heavy casualties against the enemy.
Ivan Asen was still a competent commander, but his will was beginning to decline. Realizing that Ivan was on the verge of releasing some of the Orthodox territories, Jeza sent several more allotments into Bulgarian territory to keep the peace in the Orthodox zones.
The Bulgarian Tsar was becoming anemic in his rule, and Jeza began taking advantage of it, visiting the younger man often and creating various treaties to boost the wealth of the Bulgarian Empire even as the Mongols continued their raids. While Dinaria’s financial contributions were ultimately piecemeal, they served to restore Ivan’s faith in his Catholic ally.
When Anna Maria of Hungary died in 1269, Jeza saw an opportunity and took it. She married Ivan Asen II[5], becoming Jeza Asen, much to the contempt of the officers in Dinaria.
Jeza was not foolish, however, as her forces had effective control of much of Bulgaria. The marriage was recognized as a personal union, when in reality Dinaria was essentially ruling Bulgaria.
Ivan Asen II was a sickly man, and had no male heirs, and Jeza was too old to foster children. He died lacking an heir in 1274, on the eve of another Mongol raid. Jeza conveniently returned to Sarajevo and the piecemeal force she left behind to defend the routes to Bulgaria’s capital dematerialized.
The Mongols raided Bulgaria’s capital. Though most of the nobility survived, they were broken men and ready to begin paying the Mongols tribute. Jeza stepped in. If the Bulgarians agreed to be merged into the Dinaria[6], their lands would be defended and kept safe. Jeza spent the better part of two years working to convince Bulgaria’s ruling council of the virtues of merging with Dinaria.
A tiny Mongol raiding party of 100 men sacked a town on the border in 1276, causing rumors of another massive Mongol incursion. Though the incursion never appeared, Jeza used the panic to get the Bulgarian nobility to hastily agree to the plan.
Bulgaria was dissolved, and its nobles were stripped of everything but ceremonial power. One by one, over the course of the next decade or so up until the end of her reign, Jeza picked them off or encouraged marriages to domineering Dinaric wives, reorganizing the Bulgarian holdings into more provinces.
The Mongol raids continued until 1280. Lithuania, Hungary and Dinaria all suffered heavy losses. Lithuania and Hungary suffered army losses, while the Dinarics suffered the destruction of villages along the border, particularly in Moldova. Though the Dinarics barely managed military superiority over the Mongols via use of the mountains, they couldn’t make any real progress against them.
The continuous raids were finally ended by political maneuvering via France and the Papacy. After numerous correspondences spanning almost a century, actual relations were established with the Mongols, and French diplomats managed to come to an understanding with them. Catholic Europe would be left alone, and Mongol rule would be recognized over all of the Rus.
The Mongols, more focused on their efforts in Asia due to the guidance of Kublai Khan, agreed to the pact and ended the continuous raids on the Catholic powers.
Eastern Conquests – 1301-1325
Lithuania began to take advantage of the broken a disaffected Russian principalities left behind in the wake of the receding Mongols, overtaking and merging them into the Empire. Poland partook in the same activity, though on a smaller scale. While the new territories were poorly policed, the taxes and plunder collected from them helped to rejuvenate both countries.
As well, some of the weaker principalities joined with Lithuania and Poland, but these were few and far between.
The War of the She Wolf – 1340 to 1356
Isabella of France married the Scandinavian prince Vlademar IV in 1320. She was promised to the Prince as a peace offering and to establish formal relations with Scandinavia. However, the Scandinavian court viewed the marriage unfavorably despite the fact that it went through, and France became more embroiled in its own affairs rather than bothering to improve relations with Scandinavia.
Isabella’s marriage was an unhappy one, and she sought to remove Vlademar herself to be rid of him and seize power in Scandinavia. She secretly brought together a contingent of loyal guards and killed Vlademar only a few months after his coronation as King, leaving Isabella the sole ruler due to the fact that the two had not yet conceived.
The rest of Scandinavia’s nobility was incredulous about Isabella’s story, and believed she was the culprit behind Vlademar’s death. The nobility of Scandinavia dispatched a team of soldiers to deal with her, but her royal guards made short work of them. Isabella reported to her mother that Scandinavia had betrayed her, and France declared war.
Norway joined the war on Scandinavia’s side. The French invaded Scandinavia by sea, having to contend with heavy Norwegian raids. The Scots, looking to end Norwegian piracy against Ireland once and for all, sent expeditionary forces to aid France in the North Sea. The Scots had mixed results.
The French succeeded in landing troops on Scandinavian soil. Though much of Sweden and anarchistic Finland were quickly conquered, Norwegian and Danish troops gave the French forces a tough time. Isabella held out in the palace of Copenhagen for as long as she could with her royal guards.
Eventually, the French forces made a deal with the city of Hamburg and arrived at night. Thousands of French soldiers crossed into Holstein from the south, quickly overrunning Jutland despite fierce resistance from the Danish army.
All involved powers were thoroughly exhausted by the end of the war, though the French eventually succeeded in taking Copenhagen. Norway’s tenuous power structure was also severely damaged by combating with the numerically superior French and Scottish forces, and Finland was once again restless and had begun resisting the French occupation.
The nobility of Scandinavia surrendered the war, and many of them were purged in ensuing trials to remove any threat to Isabella’s power structure. Norway was merged into Scandinavia’s holdings to form a true Scandinavia though Greenland and the Faroes went to France. Scotland was given Iceland and the Hebrides for its trouble, and the France established relations with Scotland that would eventually flourish into a tenuous alliance.
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