Nation On A Hill: A Timeline by Xanthoc
- Thread starter Xanthoc
- Start date
Another amazing Flag Interlude! I love all the attention to detail you are spending on Vexillology in your timeline. I love how these flags are somewhat aesthetically pleasing while also maintaining enough discourse found IRL. I love the look of the Virginia colony flag, though I think The Grand Duchy of New York's is superior to all others.
I'm assuming this will be covered in the next update, but why is the Albionic Empire becoming the catch-all term for Canute's realm as opposed to the Empire of the north sea. Not that I don't love both terms. (Also poor wales, excluded from the flag once again).
P.S. I'm planning on fixing that map with the changes you mentioned, but I thought I might as well wait to update #19
Cheers!
Nice Flag update.
All the flags seem reasonably derived (myself and others have used similar designs with much the same reasoning) and approximately sensible for the era of standardisation.
I'm glad you've not gone with the "let's give everything a flag!" vibe that occasionally puts me off designing for people.
All the flags seem reasonably derived (myself and others have used similar designs with much the same reasoning) and approximately sensible for the era of standardisation.
I'm glad you've not gone with the "let's give everything a flag!" vibe that occasionally puts me off designing for people.
I'm glad you like it! Certainly, the flagmaker in me wants to just give everything its own cool unique flag, just like I'd love to make nice clean borders everywhere. But history doesn't work that way. As people can see in the Prologue's closing image, the New English flag won't change too much more, and while I like it, I personally think it could be cooler and more snazzy. But the evolution has to make sense, so I make due with I got.
Part #19: Famine, Fraternity, and Fimbulvetr
Part #19: Famine, Fraternity, and Fimbulvetr
“How hindered are we by our lack of understanding. The diseases we might cure, the crops we could grow, the wealth we could amass. Blessing we once thought only the work of God…”
“To describe the peace as uneasy would be an understatement. The Treaty of Naples may have ceded Abruzzo to the Papal States, but it was only a delaying action on the part of the Ottomans.[2] The region had been filled with dissidents, both those who tried fleeing north to escape Muslim rule, and those who crossed into their territory to begin a rebellion. Both cheered as the flag of the Papacy was raised at a hastily constructed border post. They won, in a sense, having raised enough issues as to see the Ottomans let them go.
But in reality, the Sultan wanted a means of appeasing the Catholics for the time being. They were not in any shape to fight, but that had not stopped the Italian League from nearly dragging Europe into a Crusade anyways. By enlarging the Papal States, they hoped to make Christians feel at the least appeased, content to prepare for a proper war when the time was right, lest they fail in that war. That would give Osman III the opportunity he needed to straighten out his own Empire…
...Even with his attempts at reform, the Janissaries remained a threat and a hindrance to the Ottomans. Osman had hoped that his sponsorship of merit-based promotion, over the tradition of inheritance that had since formed, would spark a ripple effect within the organization, fostered by his reintroduction of conscription and specialized training, rendering the Janissaries once again a more elite and exclusive organization. But these plans were only ever that: plans, written on paper, executed on documents. The reality was that the Sultan’s sponsorship only elevated the most sycophantic, obsequious brown nosers to positions of authority, charming Osman and convincing him of their superior ‘skill’.[3]
Thus while new people were indeed rising to leadership, almost none deserved their positions. The Old Guard of the Janissaries ironically became more meritocratic in their views, disdaining anyone not competent in a position of authority of being a ‘snake charmer,’ such anger fueled only by the fact that they had failed to convince the Sultan of their superiority.[4] A greater irony arose still when the Sultan’s other policy of reform strengthened the Old Guard and hindered the new leadership. With conscription of children, young men, and even adults reinstituted as a criminal punishment in vassal states and non-Muslim communities aside from Al-Nemsa, it was believed fresh recruits would be fewer but better, with fresh ideas and beliefs, rising by their skill. But even as the Great Eastern War ended and the first boys conscripted became vetted soldiers, they remained ever on the bottom. Their lack of skill with Arabic or Turkish, foreign accents and appearance, and generally coarse and common demeanors made it impossible for them to move up.
This was not helped by the fact nearly every last new recruit in the first years of reform were young peasant men. Even when crimes were committed by wealthier families with young children, peasant servants were often bartered as a replacement offering, and bribery saw some less advantaged noble families targeted to be accused of crimes, children taken in the night. With the Sultan blind to this process, while the Janissary Corps and much of the military became more open to his ideas for new weapons and tactics, a festering rot of corruption in the nation only grew worse. The success of the Great Eastern War had only cemented the tactics and positions of the snake charmers, who cared little for the debts of the Empire, taking funds and taxes for themselves on multiple occasions, most infamously in the case that led to the Wallachian Rebellion…
...The Sultan was quickly appraised of what was happening thanks to this revolt, but there was little he could do in the immediate moment. The nation was bankrupt, and like the West, the economy was falling to pieces. Pay for the military and essentials bureaucrats was lessened but not ended, but for those deemed unessential or off in the periphery of Ottoman territory, many now found themselves without income and only more taxes. Once, the aforementioned ‘periphery’ would have meant that all but Anatolian and Levantine officials would have lost pay. But now, the two peninsulas, Balkan and Anatolian, were becoming the focus of the government, evidenced best by the negotiation in 1757 between the Metropolis of Ungro-Wallachia, the Ottoman Sultanate, and the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which split the Eastern Orthodox millet in half, with Greeks, Macedonians, Bosniak, and all Orthodox Christians south of Greece falling to the Constantinople, and Bulgars, Wallachians, Moldovians, Serbs, and other northern Orthodox Christians having the now elevated Patriarch of Wallachia as their ethnarch. This negotiation and appeasement of minorities was seen in outrage by many.[5]
It would not be long after the agreement that the Hashimi movement gained greater traction, as more and more Muslims were convinced that the Sultan, while perhaps a capable ruler, was not fit to act as the spiritual leader for Islam…
...It was a breaking point in many ways. Many did not believe it initially, but it was true. An assassin had crept into the Sultan’s chambers and killed him, with his son Mehmed dying on the same day in similar circumstances. Everyone knew it was the Janissaries, but no evidence existed at the time, but certainly their actions indicate that they had knowledge of the events before they came into being. A group of Janissary officers, many older and sidelined in recent years, marched into Konstantiniyye and brought with them Ahmed, second born of Osman, and had him quickly declared Sultan Ahmed IV. Certainly not favored to inherit, Ahmed was a furious religious zealot, but not in the manner of the Hashimis. In fact, he loathed them as heretics, and was a strong traditionalist, who wanted to see a all of Islam and its empires united, from Persia to Morocco to Vienna, if not politically than in faith.
Such an endeavor, however, would take money he did not have. He then made the grave mistake, of trying to make those funds appear.[6] Unhappy with the archaic and inefficient tax system before him, he issued edicts to see the whole thing uprooted and changed, while also demanding a series of new taxes, heightening jizya on all non-Muslims dramatically. He called upon the Khedive in Al-Nemsa to do the same, and in fact attempted to curb the autonomy of the large, fragile state, sending in imams to preach and convert the masses. And then, he cracked down on the Hashimis, sending in the military to arrest the movement’s leadership, resulting in a clash between Hashimi zealots and an undermanned, underfunded, and underequipped Ottoman army not far from Mecca, where the Sharif had secured not just himself, but his uncle and other prominent Hashimis. These commands, in order, resulted in a tax system that ceased to function while also seeing the mass abuse of peasants and nobles alike by tax collectors; alienated the Khedive who already viewed the new Sultan as a puppet of corrupt Janissaries; and saw his army falter and retreat at Mecca, forever granting the Hashimis a feeling of divine blessing…
...Unable to gain any proper funds, the army that had just lost to the Hashimis at Mecca then turned to their cause and their money. Fearful and paranoid, Ahmed IV, rather than try to appease and rally the Janissaries to his cause, turned on them, trying to purge any who might work against him. In some ways this was positive, as it removed many of the snake charmers that had risen under Osman III, but the new leadership, radicalized of dreams of a glorious past, did not respect Ahmed’s authority or his ideas. Instead, they came to follow and support Bayezid, the fourth son of Osman III, who was very much like his father, but with a greater wit and mind for strategy and academics. In the chaos that was mounting all across the world, despite rumors that Bayezid was homosexual, despite his mousy voice and small frame, despite the discontent of his brothers, the Janissaries asserted firmly that only men with the skill to rule should be in charge, likening the crumbling regime of Ahmed to the Byzantines and Bayezid to Mehmed the Conqueror.[7] So in 1762, a second Sultan was enthroned by the Janissaries, though Ahmed was merely locked away in a room full of food and women for the rest of his days.
Sultan Bayezid III acted swiftly, as it was not long before the Hashemite Sultanate was declared. Sultan Jafar I not only declared his only rulership, but that of his uncle Ibrahim as Caliph Ibrahim III, Medinia was made the political capital, and Mecca the spiritual, leaving the aging founder of the Hashimi movement to issue out greater proclamations of faith while his nephew amassed an army and went out to bring others into the fold with his charisma. While certainly a threat, this rebellion was a golden opportunity for Bayezid. His brother and father had tried and failed to reform the tax system, but that system was now in total shambles. With the rebellion, however, resistance to an attempt to straighten out this issue would be minimal. So Bayezid began to create a European-modeled tax system, taken from Austria, and first implemented it in Anatolia and then the Balkans, hoping to steadily spread his reforms. While not perfect, he was far more successful than his predecessors, and soon enough was gaining enough tax to properly field an army that, while not able to even push into Hashemite territory, was able to stop them at Damascus. Of course, this meant that the north was now practically undefended.
The Wallachians had been thoroughly trounced in their attempt to uprise, leaving them a weakened, battered people with little desire for war. But the Moldovians were willing and ready, as were the Crimeans, who had grown sick of Ottoman abuse. In 1763, they began their own separate revolts, forcing Bayezid to call on two unlikely allies: Russia and Poland-Ruthenia.”[8]
“The Great Famines begin with winter of 1756. It was one of the coldest on record, and came at one of the worst of times. Fresh from war, Western Europe was seeking to settle into a period of comfort, licking its wounds in preparation for the future. Instead, the bitter chill wreaked havoc and misery. Worse yet, it was a long winter, one that would be followed by the almost equally as cold winter of 1757, which began early. Both are attributed to the minor eruption of several small volcanoes in the Pacific, one of which is believe to have been caused by an incident during attempted sulfur mining efforts of the Dutch Republic…[9]
...This poor harvest created a massive effect, particularly in Italy. Devastation of farmland during the War of the Italian League meant that starvation in the north was higher than anywhere else, while both France and Spain in minor famine. Thanks to 1757’s winter, however, those famines became terrible very rapidly, compounded by the fact that the price of grain and meat was ever rising, the French economy in shambles, dragging Italia and Iberia down with it. The Bavarian famine was, in comparison, rather tame, allowing the Empire a bit of breathing room as its foremost enemies suffered heavily.
But while Italy was hit hardest, perhaps one of the most widespread famines was in the Albionic Empire. Ireland had been experiencing minor starvation and poor harvests for some time, but English and Welsh grain had kept them afloat, and hand done much for bringing the newly unified Crown of Albion together. But the winters struck hard. The overworking of English fields to supplement Ireland meant that soon enough, the Midlands were starving, and Ireland along with them. [10] Hope only came from Denmark, which had thus far weathered the first winter well, but they could do so much as Norway also began to hunger, and the Swedes only had enough for themselves. While in better straights than the rest of the North Sea Empire, Scandinavia was the epicenter of the cold, with reports of entire towns freezing to death, though this may be exaggerated by fear.
As 1757 rolled in, a word was soon uttered from blued lips and through chattering teeth: Fimbulvetr, the Great Winter, and first sign of an apocalypse. In the eyes of many, they were nearly right…
...Sun-King Louis XV had come to his throne during the height of France, and would leave it during one of its lows. But he was, by all accounts, a successful monarch. He had brought French influence higher than ever before, successfully reformed woes of the state, and had established himself as an almost god-like figure in French culture. Hated as he was by many, he was respected by all. In 1757, famine ever worsening, he died content that his son Louis would save the nation. He was oh so wrong.
Rather than become Louis XVI, the young prince, desiring to distinguish himself, took his third name as his regnal name, and so became Sun-King Pepin IV, gladly likening himself to the first Carolingian to become King of France.[11] And despite the economy being effectively rendered nothing more than a liar’s promise of credit, he had an extravagant coronation, with food stores opened in celebration. In some ways, this at first provided a bit of stability, as the day of feasting gave the peasantry a few days of reprieve. However, it also meant that there was almost no food for the rest of the winter.
Other expenses achieved mostly by threat of wrath included the alteration of the altars of state to have Pepin’s face rather than Louis’ in the stain glass. Of course, during Pepin’s reign, the boxes at the altars quickly filled up and stayed that way, rendering each town near it feeling as if their god had turned away from them. But many hoped things would get better. Spring was approaching, and the colonies of France had been less affected by the winter. Louisiana and the newly christened Laurentia were in fact flourishing, partially aided by the arrival of farmers and fishermen from France hoping to settle and find a new life. And if France could bounce back before Albion, the Empire, Italy, or even the increasingly rivalrous Spanish, they could claw their way to economic prosperity again. The pervading feelings of discontent were tempered by the idea that they only had to push through the night into the dawn. Pope Tryphon even issued out his own proclamation, in which he had as many cathedrals, monasteries, and nunneries come together to pray everyday for the prosperity that was bound to come. In his own words, he widely and loudly proclaimed, in an effort to inspire hope, that God had sent him signs that ‘by Easter we shall all enjoy the mercy of God.’[12]
But starvation begets poverty, and poverty begets illness. The Spirit of Famine had ridden across Europe for two years. Now as his relief, Pestilence would ride in after him…”
“Listen up, seedstains,[13] we have now moved past all the obscure garbage, and are getting to the meat of this history course. I get that none of you still want to be here, but as I said at the start, all of us are required to know how we got to this point. Luckily, here on out it’ll be a bit more fun.
French Flu. What is it? Well it’s a disease. I hope you all knew that much before this. Flu comes from Influenza, Italian for Influence, an archaic name for the basic disease we study today. We know now that it is a highly mutable virus. But back when this thing was destroying Europe, no one knew what viri really were. They had no idea that chance just got them right in the groin. Mutating as it did, replicating rapidly thanks to the poor conditions of the Great Famines, it was almost bound to happen.
A few people get sick, they spread it. No one has a strong enough immune system to resist, but then the rapid rate of expansion means people’s bodies start trying to resist, and all that infection means rapid replication. It replicates and replicates and replicates, and then...
Boom. An extraordinarily aggressive and lethal variant, with delayed symptoms, rapid spread, and almost certain death if you didn’t get proper care.[14] And whaddya know? Famine means there isn’t much to spare on medical care. Now best as we can tell, it did start in France. Right there, in the south. At first people just thought it was more regular flu, a common thing. Before they even realize how bad it is, this thing has already infected a few trade ships that likely stopped in Savoy before looping back into Spain and then to Portugal. From Savoy, flu gets into Northern Italy, and it ended up killing an entire monastery. Well, except for the monks who left to go visit Rome, where they brought the disease with them too. This map here gives you a nice image of the spread.
I know right? Nasty little fucker.
It’s moving into the Rhineland and the Low Countries within a few months. People know something’s up by then, but it’s too late. Finally it gets to England, and doesn’t get too much further north, aside from a few reported cases in Scotland. To the best of our ability, we believe better food conditions, climate, and lessened trade is what prevented it from getting much farther northeast than the Austrian heartland. Vienna had a few incidents, but generally pretty clean.
Southwards, though, it creeps along the coast, and we even get a handful of sick in Konstantiniyye. At about that point, the Sultan, dealing with a fuckload of other problems, cuts trade with any Christian nations and quarantines any port that gets sick. Wasn’t a perfect solution, but worked well enough to prevent a true outbreak.
Now, France was the natal zone, but the most devastation was really in Iberia, Italy, and central England. The French certainly felt a good deal of proper pestilential devastation, but they had enough people getting sick that immunity was starting to build up, while places outside of France hadn’t had that time, but when you look at effects of the disease… France probably had the most. Because Spain and Portugal tried to deal with what was happening, the Italian States devolved to city states that tried to protect themselves, and Albion handled things pretty well, if with a bit of tough love. But France had the misfortune of being led by a selfish, idiotic fop that we here at Dunwar should all be happy to take down. So while they should have come out on top, they ended up being hit harder than anyone…”
“We’re going to die. I know it. I tell Colette every day that things are going to get better, but I know they will not. I cannot save her mother, I cannot save her, and I feel the sickness crawling inside myself even now. We will all die in this hovel, if hunger doesn’t get us first. So many years of study, of turning my back on my family, of holding myself high above the common masses from whence I came. And now I am going to die just like them. Cold, hungry, sick, huddled in a shack…
...her in the back. There’s no room in the cemetery. I had to use my hands; we sold our spade ages ago to buy some bread. Even if we sold ten spades we wouldn’t have enough to buy a loaf now. I thought we’d never need it. What use was a spade to an accountant? What an arrogant fool I was. Even then, in times of plenty, it ought to have been my duty, my obligation, to bury my wife myself. Not pay someone else.
Colette kept asking what I was doing… I told her that putting her mother in the dirt might help her get better. Then Colette asked if I was going to bury her next, to make her better. I didn’t have to lie. I know I will…
...I am sick. No question of it now. The flu holds me, and Colette gets worse by the moment. Even now, as I write in the light of one candle, I can hear her struggling to breath in her sleep. Why am I even writing? I would sell my ink if anyone would buy it. But no one will, so I suppose I write to make use of it. I write on the back of files that once held the power to make nobles cower as I held their fate as much as any doctor or priest. All that power, and now I am powerless. I will die without a cent, alone, my only possessions being the clothes on my back, and the dirt under my nails after I bury my daughter. And these pages. I will have these pages, and maybe, if this is not the end of the world as some cry, someone will come along and find my body. They will read these pages and someone will know me. Know of my family. Or more likely they’ll burn all of this to warm themselves…
...Colette will not last the next day. I know it. I know it. I cannot save her, I cannot cure her, I cannot relieve her pain. But I can write. So I will write, to you who reads my pages. I wish to tell you of Gaspard Fourché, a fool accountant, and his wife Edmée, who foolishly loved him, and of his daughter Colette, who smiled happily even in the face of death. I am going to tell you of how Gaspard left his home, and his loving but strict father and mother, in the dead of night to go to learn at a salon. I will tell you of how he refused to learn history and philosophy, and left that salon to become a accountant. I will tell you how he met Edmée and convinced her to abandon everything for him. I will tell you of the first time he held his daughter in his arms, and likely will tell you of the last time. I will tell you about her first steps, her first words, her first painting, and all the silly thoughts that escaped her head and came from her mouth. I will tell you this because her paintings, so beautiful for her age, will never go in a gallery. They will never be seen and cherished, bought and valued, famed and discussed. She will never wed and bear a lineage of her talent, will never feel the love a husband can give his wife, not give the love a parent can give to their child.
She will leave no legacy in this world. So I will leave one for her. In these pages. I will tell you her life and the life of her parents that made her come to be. I will memorialize her in this ink, so that, if only for a moment, for the days between her death and when some desperate soul loots my corpse and burns this paper for warmth, her memory will exist beyond her lifetime, and even beyond mine.
It all began that night in Loire, so many years ago…
...favorite flowers. I stole them, technically. But the house down the road has been long empty. The famine killed its owners I think. They did not even experience this hellish plague. But someone has been watering those flowers, keeping them alive. They will likely be saddened to see I have taken so many. But if they knew how much Colette loved them, I think they would accept letting them rest on her grave. I think maybe my grief has made me numb, as I barely notice my coughs and headaches anymore. The disease cannot hurt me anymore. There is no more room for pain in my heart. I suppose I ought to take solace in that. Perhaps it is a small comfort from God. I have been pondering God lately.
Clearly, I think, he has never even spared the Pope a thought. Certainly not the monks either. All their abstention from the world and yet they died faster than most of us. And in all the sacraments I have done in my life, an ordained priest ensuring I did them right, I never felt close to the Lord. But I think I have felt him in my life. I felt him as I held my wife close, when we made love beneath soft sheets. I felt him when I laughed with my daughter and when she held my hand so tightly as she died. I felt him when I stumbled drunkenly home, arms locked with Pierre and Jean, laughing like schoolboys over the simplest of jokes. I felt him today, in the warmth of the sun on my skin after such a bitterly cold night. That warmth drove me to prayer, to weep, to beg for forgiveness and death.
God is not in wine rituals, in men with white robes, or burning candles.
God is in life, in the moments we let pass us by so quickly. God is in the senses…
...I am getting better. I thought myself simply apathetic to my symptoms, but I have noticed now. My cough is nearly gone. My body feels stronger. I found cured and dried meat, actual meat, in a box in an empty house. Likely stolen by the former occupant, dead before he could feast. I ate some, and feel my body revitalizing itself. And I hate it. Is this more punishment? Have I been made to suffer, to watch my family suffer, to bury those I held dear with my bare hands, only to not be allowed to join them? The cruelty of God is great…
...Now I know. As we tore the gate open, uncaring if the guards fired upon us, I realized. I am not being punished. I am being granted a second chance. The plague is gone from this town. Those who are left are getting healthy again. And as if fate were urging us on, someone found a toppled carriage of guns, swords, and munitions. And someone else figured out how to get into the chateau. We acted with little thought than food for our bellies, but as it started to work, as Monsieur Chevrolet inspired us all to charge without fear, it became clear as day. The punishment came. Penance was reaped. Now is the time for our redemption. Now is the time for a revolution. No. Not a revolution. Monsieur Chevrolet said it well: now is the time for a purification!”
“As the price of grain and crawled higher and higher, not just in England but across Europe, people clamored for solutions.[15] We know well of Thomas Allens, who wrote his treatise On the Pursuit of General Prosperity, which outlined what we know today laying the groundwork for open market economics, or prosperism.[16] Surprisingly international in its calls to action, the treatise called for the end of tariffs and mercantile ‘insular policies’ that resulted only in ‘cyclical results’. Free trade, an open market unconstrained by government interference, would be the only means of clawing Europe up from the pit it had fallen into, at least in Allens’ view.
He proposed a ‘natural flow’ within an open market, driven by the satisfaction of what he called the economic triumvirate: the innovators, the producers, and the consumers. The first group, innovators, creates idea, organizes labor, and manages businesses. They desire profit and popularity. The second group, producers, manufactures products, performs menial labor, and maintains a business. Effectively a new term for workers, they desire compensation for their labor and the satisfaction that they have value. The last group, consumers, tests ideas, purchases products, and grows a business. They want good products at reasonable prices. These three thus begin to balance one another. Innovators want high profits, but then producers desire fair compensation, but then consumers want low prices. A breaking point must then be reached, where compensation is just, prices reasonable, and profits decent. According to Allens, this delicate balance reveals the ‘true value’ of any item. Furthermore, as innovators want popularity, and producers want satisfaction, and consumers want good products, a second balance is reached wherein products must be efficient, effective, and useful. Finally, innovators need a business and so must rely on both the maintenance down by producers and the growth created by consumers, but producers need a well managed business to work at and need it to grow to receive good pay, and consumers require a both well-run and well-maintained business to make their investments in and purchase products from. This third balance thus creates businesses that are both internally well managed, physically presentable and effective, and that survives via healthy external investment.
These ‘three balances’ create the natural flow. Bad products receive no investment, can attract no producers to create them, and so business that make them wither and die on the vine. Business that make good products, however, prosper. But a good product requires good management and good labor. What people think of, buy, and are willing to work to make all pushes the economy forward. Wealth flows from one good product to another as producers and innovators, with their pay and profits, become consumers elsewhere, consumers becoming producers and innovators. Money, food, resources, the trade flows on endlessly, and with the destruction of barriers of trade, that endless flow can extend into one ‘global market’. Allens offered up how the Spanish were weathering famine by using their colonies, but Portugal, a neighbor, had no colonies with much food production. In an open market, Spanish colonial foodstuffs could flow into Portugal, while spices and exotic items from the Portuguese trade-post empire could then enter Spanish hands. Virginians silk might flow into Italy, and then Italian gold might flow into England, which could then be used to buy Baltic grain from Russia and the Empire.
‘Everyone has something someone else needs,’ remarked Allens in one of his many famous farmer analogies, ‘When a dairy farmer needs grain, he goes into town and buys it from the wheat farmer, who happily buys some milk and cheese. But if the dairy farmer needs even more grain that what the wheat farmer can offer, he does not throw up his hands and give up because of some foolish notion that he cannot let men in other parts of the country make profit. No, instead he travels a shire over and finds grain there, likely finding someone else who needs his dairy. Thus he makes profits from two men, and finds all that he requires.’ Inspired by the poetic trends of his day, Allens used such analogies and simple, clear language that made his treatise powerful and in many ways inspiring. If an Englishman was starving, why not sell his trinkets to a Frenchman so that he might buy a Spaniard’s grain? ‘We are all in dire straights. Why unequally divy up the bounties of Europe and her empires when we might be able to share our wealth? Why force ourselves to slowly die from differing deficiencies?’
Certainly, there were many flaws in Allens’ work. For one, his simple language gave way to many vague descriptions, such as simply calling for ‘good management’ and ‘fair compensation’ of producers. What that really meant was hard to measure, and left open many issues: what if the compensation was fair but the producers greedy? What if they did not realize that the compensation was not fair? What made good management? What of the harms bad products wrought? Should bad products be halted from creation? But then was that not government meddling in that natural flow? Many Allensian prosperists maintain that he had such answers, seen in his own textile businesses in England, which used a clear hierarchy of management, paid well, and produced highly inspected products. Given how few workers he hired, however, the mess of paperwork his ideas generated, and the slowed production of goods, his wealth was primarily generated from investment in other businesses run by men who treated workers like slaves, cut corners, and lied to consumers. Thus most critics and historians hold that his vaguery came from the fact that he did not know what needed to actually be done, merely that it should be done by someone…
...Prospertist economics caught on in both Iberia and in Albion quickly enough, such that King-Emperor Canute IV of Albion, King Alfonso XII of Spain, and the newly crowned Queen Catarina of Portugal came to sign the First Open Market Agreement in 1758, with disease beginning to ravage all three nations. Sun King Pepin IV was livid to hear his cousins were acting without his acquiescence, and intentionally aided a group of Catalan rebels in early 1759.[17] However, with the Portuguese and Albionic India, the African trade posts, the Viceroyalty of the New World, the Albionic Colonies, and North Sea trade all working together, the resulting joined economy was relatively prosperous. Iberia in particular saw a rise in hope as, while the French Flu rose death tolls, there was feeling of brotherhood rising, and food became more readily available. That hope rose as Catarina became pregnant with the child of Alfonso’s son and heir Carlos: the future and beloved King Jaime I, only seconded in fame by his grandson Gabriel the Great...
...Lisbon had been struck by an earthquake in 1755, on All Saints’ Day. By pure fortune, the aged King Pedro III had desired to leave the palace, and called for a festival not within the city, but in its outskirts. When the city shook and crumbled, the death toll was greatly lessened by this action, and Pedro, a king whose popularity hung by a thread after his surrender to Spain four years prior, was hailed as saviour. He attributed his desire for a festival to the influence from God, though he had a distaste for urban living even in his youth.[18]
As the famines had not yet hit, reconstruction began slowly but surely, the national debt straining under the weight, but with lumber and stone taken from Spanish colonies, the process had made headway, spurred on by the administrative reforms that reconstituted the Portuguese government along the totalist lines of Spain and France. When the Fimbulvetr came, and famine began, the use of Spanish border troops to instill order was necessary, but thankfully brief. Lisbon’s reconstruction was halted, buildings closed up to provide protection from the cold, but nearly every rebuilt building was only a single story tall, even the royal palace. And yet, this became the style of Lisbon for years to come. Catarina, likely staging events, allowed writers to come and see first hand the meager conditions of the Portuguese monarchy, how servants were treated well, and how meals were only slightly better than those of the average merchant or minor noble. A nationally promoted newspaper latched onto these stories, and Catarina and Carlos became icons as populist monarchs, leading to greater popularity of the monarchy in Spain as well. And the aforementioned hope became all the greater, personified in a child who became the first instance of true national celebrity; Jaime’s youth was well documented, as the writers within the palace reported on his measurements, development, and education. Hope, even as flu brought back the terror tales of the Black Plague, is perhaps what kept Portugal and Spain from suffering fates like that of France…
...Albion also experienced benefits from the open market, as Spanish colonial trade brought in fruits, spices, and the ever more loved drink that was barrow. But the French Flu turned the Midlands into a zone of anarchy. Towns vanished and transit became dangerous as bandits and scavengers littered the roads. King Canute ordered that the Royal Army be mobilized, and he sent them to roam the countryside. Soon enough, economic cost demanded these activities be limited, but an elite corp of the Royal Army was detached and recreated into a separate institution. Not one commanded by the King, but instead created by an act of the recently empowered Parliaments of Albion. A new position on the Privy Council was created, and granted its own department, answering in its culpability to the Parliaments themselves. This new department was the infamous Bureau of Health and Security. Doctors from the Royal College were recruited to join, and given a new mandate: to find a means of treating and stopping the flu, with special authorization to perform experiments that were previously well beyond the accepted confines of law.[19]
The Bureau, as it’s commonly known, was sent out to roam the countryside. More than a few of the sick were seized and vanished, bodies harvested, and towns rife with infection were burned to the ground. But while this use of force was criticized, it greatly advanced the field pestilentology and minivitology, with proper development of germ theory and the development of the refined microscopes to study microbiology. Viri are, of course, beyond the scope of such things, but bacterial diseases were being understood at a rapid pace, and the theory of viri was advanced as being either an organism or a sort of vapor, and measures were invented to prevent contact through face masks, covering up skin, and using forms of filters in new experimental masks…”[20]
“Maryland’s War is another name for the Third Metacom War. It is generally agreed that the this third and final conflict between the novan tribes the United Colonies of New England was unnecessary and for the most part entirely an aggressive and expansionist act by the New English government. The growing colony was steadily becoming a regional power even amongst its fellow colonies, much to their distaste. The secular turn of the royal government since the Bloody Year, and especially of the King, had turned a number of Anglicans towards the cause of Puritanism, believing that the Church of England was becoming too friendly to Catholics. While they often praised attempts to make the Church of Scotland match that of England, recent Catholic allowances and disregard for further reforms had frustrated many of the pious.
These New Puritans had come to New England, where they found what was effectively a new, purely Protestant English Christianity awaiting them in the form of the Greater Congregation of New England. While they did have to adapt many of their beliefs, the beliefs of the New English puritans was in a sense more palatable because it was a new form of thought. The newness was attractive, without betraying loyalty to the Crown by converting to a continental Protestant sect. With new tracts of land to fill with settlers, this suited the New English Commision just fine, and the religious fervor of the settlers helped to bring more of the novans to the north into the fold, particularly as they lost all alliance with the French Laurentians who, now as a proper growing colony, came into territorial conflict with these native tribes in far greater frequency…
...Often the formalizing of the New English government is seen as a cause of the Third Metacom War, the conflict serving to distract detractors and to rally the colony under their leadership. It began with the admission of the Provinces of Galilee, Primrose, and Kingston-on-Penobscot. Expanding the Commission had required new organization of debate, discussion, and voting procedure, and talk came of reform to the government as a whole, primarily from reverends who felt that the ‘greed-driven’ legislation of the past few years had shown failures in the system. Such legislation was primarily rooted in trade with French Laurentia. While profits had been beneficial to the colony, many merchants and craftsman opposed the bills on grounds of profit, while the Greater Congregation opposed trade with Catholics. Ambitious commissioners had forced the bill through via less than legal means of coercion.
Riding the sentiment of religious fervor from the New Puritans and the political malcontent of the merchants, the Constitution Congress was called, a major event that called for a restructuring of New England’s government. After several months of debate, no written document was provided. Instead a series of bills were produced to create reforms, such as the prohibition of winter votes, heightened vote requirements, direct election of provincially-approved candidates for commissioners, staggered elections, the requirement of annual meetings of government rather than simply the tradition of it, and the creation of Boston as a separate, federally administered capital city. But most crucially, infamously, and shockingly, the Greater Congregation of New England, the most powerful religious organization in the United Colonies, which held near total control of the regional governments of most provinces, was recognized officially as the Upper House of Legislature. The Commission and the Congregation, jointly, would rule the nation. Congregational approval would be required for bills, though origination of bills remained in the hands of the Commission alone, and the Congregation was officially the highest court of appeals in the nation.
Theocracy had at last been formalized.[21]
While the popular view is that the New English people accepted it with thunderous applause, many held doubt and criticism. Not, however, the sensible thought of you or I, that such a government would never respect the freedom of its people, but rather a belief that the arrangement would harm the Greater Congregation. They feared that politicizing the Congregation in such an official capacity would hinder and taint the reverends who were part of it, dividing them and harming their ability to act as true leaders for the community. While certainly, it did create greater divisions amongst this pseudo-clergy, as the Congregation acted to moderate the Commission’s less-than-pious acts, many people came to praise. But fear of backlash remained, and war became a useful tool…
...Almost no Metacomans in the traditional sense actually remained in New England. The Hodeno, or Hohdeno, that were within their borders had even gone so far as to make treaties with the New English government. But many recalled that certain tribes of the Hodeno had fought against their forefathers not too many years ago. They did not care that the vast majority of the novan confederation had been neutral, they saw them all as one vast enemy. Intentionally pushing settlement beyond Primrose further and further past the agreed demarcation between the confederation on the colony, it would not take long for conflict to rise. In 1759, Puritan hunters were attacked, miles past the recognized treaty line.
The Hodeno were already preparing a threat when New England used the attack, which took one Puritan life and three Hodeno, as justification for war. Suddenly, the Rangers were being mobilized, and the militias were arming themselves. The Hodeno were terrified, unsure of what to do, and so they sent a message to the government of Maryland, with whom they had signed a pact of mutual defense, the intended purpose being against western tribes that had began to push against Hodeno territory as they ran from encroaching French settlement. Maryland had signed a number of such treaties with other tribes in their territory, believing that the selection of a few key tribes to dominate the others would mean the creation of loyal novan puppets.
But now, the Hodeno were asking Maryland to calm the New English down, to convince them to came to the table for negotiations. With time short, and emergency meeting of government want called in St. Mary City. An envoy of the Hodeno pleaded their case, and the government of the colony began heavy discussion over what to do. They knew that New England would never listen to reason, particularly not from Maryland, a ‘nation of rogues’ as the Puritans so often called them, due to their proud harboring of the former settlers of Rhode Island, not to mention their own Quaker, Catholic, and Muslim settlers. The debate was long, at times heated, but eventually, a bold path was decided upon.
By an act of the Colonial Assembly of the Province of Maryland, approved by the governor, they would honor their legally binding treaty of defense with the Hodeno Confederation. They would go to war against New England.
As Thomas Penn stated, ‘They will call it treason, of course. But we shall stand by our agreements and obligation, while they, even greater heretics than anyone here, sinfully break their oaths for personal gain. Win or lose, we hold the moral ground.’[22]
This statement proved true, and the man was sent to New Jersey, who agreed to aid Maryland in the war, viewing the New English as the colony in violation of an agreement that a representative of the crown had authorized and negotiated. Tribes settled in the south agreed to join as well, while the colonies of Virginia and Carolina stayed neutral. They hated the Puritans, and shared new Jersey’s view, but the idea of alliance with and defense of novans against settlers made any proper Virginian or Carolinian, be they blainco, negro, or mulatto, scowl and curse. Regardless, the war was one, though trade remained relatively unhindered due to lacking offensive navies by either side, leaving the European-focused King and Parliaments only vaguely aware of a small conflict between colonies…”
“The prince was now without rival. His elder brothers were all disfavored or dead. He and his twin brother, had always been the favored children, the first sons born after Emperor Tiandao’s ascension, and to his favorite consort. Qianzhen had been the Crown Prince for years. But at last, his disgrace had earned him first lost of rank, and then arrest, only for the prince to run away, never to be seen in Jongkuo again. Qianli was secured in his title, and in 1733, he ascended as Emperor Xianhe,[23] being the first Emperor to be openly Daoist. His father had been sympathetic to Daoism, and he had brought the texts of Daoism into the Imperial Library once again, but he never officially professed his belief in it.
Xianhe did so constantly, and began to make his nation follow the belief as well. He was a patron for several Daoist monasteries, and hired several philosophers to teach Daoism at court. Perhaps most crucially, he included Daoist texts into the imperial exams, requiring knowledge of the books and poems, as well as writing of Doaist poetry by the applicant.[24] This meant that even lower nobles and wealthy families who desired for their children to gain a position in government were now purchasing Daoist works, exposing their children to them, and even studying it themselves.
It was not an overnight conversion, but by the end of his reign, Xianhe had successfully strengthened the presence of his religion in Jongkuo. His style of governance similarly reflected this, as he demonstrated a greatly of restraint in government. Laws on decorum were laxed or even repealed, and efforts to strengthen the position of women were undertaken, as Xianhe believed a society with too much patriarchal power would be out of balance and destined to fail. His own Empress-consort held a great deal of power, particularly in her influence on court fashion, which saw more colors, greater displays of skin, and accentuation of the human form. Condemned by many, the fashions still became popular, particularly as the Emperor inforced harsh punishments on any who attempted to enforce morality without the explicit consent of the Emperor. Ruled as working against the stability of society, some were executed, and those who were not were castrated.
This made Xianhe popular amongst commoners, who viewed him like a savior from nobles who ruled their own laws. What secured Xianhe’s reign, however, was the patronage of the military. Believing that the appearance of unstoppable strength was the key to keeping any nation safe, he grew the army in size, and began a policy of testing the strength of his neighbors. In his reign, war in the south occurred twice, first of several Annam Wars. The Great Viet Empire had been a vassal in Jongkuo’s ancient past, and tensions had arisen under Tiandao that had never truly been resolved. Emperor Trinh Minh Sam in particular desired to expand his borders westward and southward, but was hindered by Jongkuan funding of his enemies to prevent Viet from becoming a threat. Demanding this end, Minh Sam rose an army in 1739 to go to the border with Jongkuo, believing rumors that the new Emperor was in fact a pacifist. Seeing this a threat and invasion, Xianhe sent his army to strike first, invading west of the Viet army’s position and attacking from their flank. The first battle was decisive, and within a year, the Great Viet Empire had to surrender.
The would not truly be subjugated for another seven years, however, in 1747, the new Nguyen Dynasty, uniting the north and south reaches of Viet, struck and began an invasion of Lan Sang, which then called to Jongkuo to aid them against a common threat. Xianhe felt that this would be a violation of his defensive principles, but a local garrison in the south believed that the call would be answered, and so attacked into Viet territory without proper approval. This rogue action would force Xianhe’s hand. The army went in, and spent two years fighting the Nguyen Dynasty. In the aftermath, descendants of the once favored Mac Dynasty were installed as puppet rulers, the reestablishment of the Annam province complete in all but name. The Nguyen would rule in the southern region of Dong Trang, but would never successfully reclaim the north…
...This war had been mounting for some time. In 1692, the death of the queen consort Inhyeon had left the now infamous Queen Jang as one of the most powerful figures in Choshin. But as the Southern Faction split into the Nonamin and the Sonamin factions, her power was challenged as the Sonamin Faction began to rally behind Consort Myeong and her newborn son, Prince Yi Dan. Jang’s son, Prince Yi Yun was only around five years older, making the contest for the throne viable. King Sukjong attempted to end this madness by manipulating the factions in his typical style.[25]
But he could not prepare for his own death. Some, of course, accuse Queen Jang, but killing the king would only prevent his support for her son in the future, as he had made it clear he was not going to reconsider Prince Yi Yun’s place as heir for at least several more years. It is believed the accident was just that, with evidence of the admittedly unseen event appearing true. The king took a fall off his horse, robes caught on the saddle. He fell as the horse reared slightly at a sharp rock, and cracked open his own head on a large stone…
...Within only hours there was chaos. Queen Jang gathered her Nonamin allies and took control of the palace. The doors were barred and the guards rallied to defend her and Prince Yi Yun. Consort Myeong, while not a political creature, felt she could not let Choshin fall into Jang’s hands. She spoke herself to the arguing Sonamin lords, and convinced them that they had to act. The battle that followed was intense, and no clear victor seemed like it was going to occur. A lull settled as the defenders of the palace held out. And then, from amidst the dust, Myeong stepped forward, hold her child. Voice strong, she commanded the guards to let her in, as a consort of the king, holding his true heir, presenting a likely fabricated missive that named her son as the true crown prince.
There was enough dissent amongst the palatial guards that some made to actually do as she asked, at least to allow her refuge from the fighting. But the door opened on its own, or so the story goes. Jang, her son a few paces behind her, stood to stare down Myeong. And then, quick as ever, she flung two knives forward into the heir. One killed the baby in Myeong’s arms, while the other struck the consort herself in the gut. As silence rang out, the Queen gave the order to attack the Sonamin traitors…
...Though the palace had been secured and Myeong and her son killed, Choshin remained unstable for several years, as Sonamin and Nonamin lords in the countryside clashed, now over the fact that the Queen was acting as regent alongside General Kim Yeonghae, who was suspected as being her lover. It was in this chaos, his draconian mother whispering ruthlessness into his ears, that Prince Yi Yun grew…
...In 1707, at nineteen years of age, Yi Yun, now King Gyeongjong of Choshin, struck. His mother had taught him to let no obstacle, for any reason, stand in his way. Her drowning was allegedly from a fall into a river, but it is commonly believed that the King ordered guards to hold her beneath the water as he watched. At last free of her control, he began truly consolidating Choshin under his rule. The last of the still rebellious Sonamin lords that had not bent knee in totality were at last rounded up and executed. And then, in a shock to many, the most corrupt and cruel of his Nonamin allies were arrested and executed as well.
Gyeongjong would tolerate no corruption in his kingdom, which he fervently reminded his subjects was the last bastion of true, Ming civilization, regardless of how they had to kiss the ring of their Qing overlords. He began proper westernization of his military as well, caring little for the traditionalists in his military. Rifles, cannons, vestments, all adopted quickly, and the schematics for constructions were purchased as well, receiving similar treatment as the rebult palace. It was from Gyeongjong’s influence that Oriental rifles and cannons possess extravagant and unnecessary styling and decoration…
...Many years were spent preparing, building up his forces, and communicating with the Shogun in Nihyeon, who had already convinced their emperor to back Gyeongjong’s scheme. In a swift declaration in 1750, the Qing armies still attempting to maintain control of their newly created Annam vassal, at 62 years of age, Gyeongjong at last had his war. He had himself proclaimed Emperor of Choshin, and sent his armies across the border and sent his new navy to begin attacking northern Jongkuan ports. As his Nihyeoni allies, with far more traditional weaponry and outdated rifles, arrived to aid him, it is believed the sight of the modern Choshini army is what created such a rapid desire for modernization in Nihyeon. But while these forces were better equipped, they were still dwarfed by the Jongkuan army, though it would be sometime before they could move the bulk of their forces north in defense…”
Author's Note: Wew. This was a pretty big and key chapter. I hope you all like it, and I hope it all made sense. I worry I didn’t stress just how economically fragile and terrible everything is in Europe before jumping right to the plague and capitalism and more developments. But then in universe sources treat knowledge like that as a given, so it was hard to make it sound natural, and that was why there are no notes in Gaspard’s letter to help it flow better and feel more impactful. Getting ready, lads, things are about to really accelerate. War in the Orient, civil war in the Ottoman Empire, intercolonial war for Albion, and that ‘purification’ that’s going to be hitting France. Fun times ahead.
“How hindered are we by our lack of understanding. The diseases we might cure, the crops we could grow, the wealth we could amass. Blessing we once thought only the work of God…”
- Early writing of Xander Cross[1]
—|—
“To describe the peace as uneasy would be an understatement. The Treaty of Naples may have ceded Abruzzo to the Papal States, but it was only a delaying action on the part of the Ottomans.[2] The region had been filled with dissidents, both those who tried fleeing north to escape Muslim rule, and those who crossed into their territory to begin a rebellion. Both cheered as the flag of the Papacy was raised at a hastily constructed border post. They won, in a sense, having raised enough issues as to see the Ottomans let them go.
But in reality, the Sultan wanted a means of appeasing the Catholics for the time being. They were not in any shape to fight, but that had not stopped the Italian League from nearly dragging Europe into a Crusade anyways. By enlarging the Papal States, they hoped to make Christians feel at the least appeased, content to prepare for a proper war when the time was right, lest they fail in that war. That would give Osman III the opportunity he needed to straighten out his own Empire…
...Even with his attempts at reform, the Janissaries remained a threat and a hindrance to the Ottomans. Osman had hoped that his sponsorship of merit-based promotion, over the tradition of inheritance that had since formed, would spark a ripple effect within the organization, fostered by his reintroduction of conscription and specialized training, rendering the Janissaries once again a more elite and exclusive organization. But these plans were only ever that: plans, written on paper, executed on documents. The reality was that the Sultan’s sponsorship only elevated the most sycophantic, obsequious brown nosers to positions of authority, charming Osman and convincing him of their superior ‘skill’.[3]
Thus while new people were indeed rising to leadership, almost none deserved their positions. The Old Guard of the Janissaries ironically became more meritocratic in their views, disdaining anyone not competent in a position of authority of being a ‘snake charmer,’ such anger fueled only by the fact that they had failed to convince the Sultan of their superiority.[4] A greater irony arose still when the Sultan’s other policy of reform strengthened the Old Guard and hindered the new leadership. With conscription of children, young men, and even adults reinstituted as a criminal punishment in vassal states and non-Muslim communities aside from Al-Nemsa, it was believed fresh recruits would be fewer but better, with fresh ideas and beliefs, rising by their skill. But even as the Great Eastern War ended and the first boys conscripted became vetted soldiers, they remained ever on the bottom. Their lack of skill with Arabic or Turkish, foreign accents and appearance, and generally coarse and common demeanors made it impossible for them to move up.
This was not helped by the fact nearly every last new recruit in the first years of reform were young peasant men. Even when crimes were committed by wealthier families with young children, peasant servants were often bartered as a replacement offering, and bribery saw some less advantaged noble families targeted to be accused of crimes, children taken in the night. With the Sultan blind to this process, while the Janissary Corps and much of the military became more open to his ideas for new weapons and tactics, a festering rot of corruption in the nation only grew worse. The success of the Great Eastern War had only cemented the tactics and positions of the snake charmers, who cared little for the debts of the Empire, taking funds and taxes for themselves on multiple occasions, most infamously in the case that led to the Wallachian Rebellion…
...The Sultan was quickly appraised of what was happening thanks to this revolt, but there was little he could do in the immediate moment. The nation was bankrupt, and like the West, the economy was falling to pieces. Pay for the military and essentials bureaucrats was lessened but not ended, but for those deemed unessential or off in the periphery of Ottoman territory, many now found themselves without income and only more taxes. Once, the aforementioned ‘periphery’ would have meant that all but Anatolian and Levantine officials would have lost pay. But now, the two peninsulas, Balkan and Anatolian, were becoming the focus of the government, evidenced best by the negotiation in 1757 between the Metropolis of Ungro-Wallachia, the Ottoman Sultanate, and the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which split the Eastern Orthodox millet in half, with Greeks, Macedonians, Bosniak, and all Orthodox Christians south of Greece falling to the Constantinople, and Bulgars, Wallachians, Moldovians, Serbs, and other northern Orthodox Christians having the now elevated Patriarch of Wallachia as their ethnarch. This negotiation and appeasement of minorities was seen in outrage by many.[5]
It would not be long after the agreement that the Hashimi movement gained greater traction, as more and more Muslims were convinced that the Sultan, while perhaps a capable ruler, was not fit to act as the spiritual leader for Islam…
...It was a breaking point in many ways. Many did not believe it initially, but it was true. An assassin had crept into the Sultan’s chambers and killed him, with his son Mehmed dying on the same day in similar circumstances. Everyone knew it was the Janissaries, but no evidence existed at the time, but certainly their actions indicate that they had knowledge of the events before they came into being. A group of Janissary officers, many older and sidelined in recent years, marched into Konstantiniyye and brought with them Ahmed, second born of Osman, and had him quickly declared Sultan Ahmed IV. Certainly not favored to inherit, Ahmed was a furious religious zealot, but not in the manner of the Hashimis. In fact, he loathed them as heretics, and was a strong traditionalist, who wanted to see a all of Islam and its empires united, from Persia to Morocco to Vienna, if not politically than in faith.
Such an endeavor, however, would take money he did not have. He then made the grave mistake, of trying to make those funds appear.[6] Unhappy with the archaic and inefficient tax system before him, he issued edicts to see the whole thing uprooted and changed, while also demanding a series of new taxes, heightening jizya on all non-Muslims dramatically. He called upon the Khedive in Al-Nemsa to do the same, and in fact attempted to curb the autonomy of the large, fragile state, sending in imams to preach and convert the masses. And then, he cracked down on the Hashimis, sending in the military to arrest the movement’s leadership, resulting in a clash between Hashimi zealots and an undermanned, underfunded, and underequipped Ottoman army not far from Mecca, where the Sharif had secured not just himself, but his uncle and other prominent Hashimis. These commands, in order, resulted in a tax system that ceased to function while also seeing the mass abuse of peasants and nobles alike by tax collectors; alienated the Khedive who already viewed the new Sultan as a puppet of corrupt Janissaries; and saw his army falter and retreat at Mecca, forever granting the Hashimis a feeling of divine blessing…
...Unable to gain any proper funds, the army that had just lost to the Hashimis at Mecca then turned to their cause and their money. Fearful and paranoid, Ahmed IV, rather than try to appease and rally the Janissaries to his cause, turned on them, trying to purge any who might work against him. In some ways this was positive, as it removed many of the snake charmers that had risen under Osman III, but the new leadership, radicalized of dreams of a glorious past, did not respect Ahmed’s authority or his ideas. Instead, they came to follow and support Bayezid, the fourth son of Osman III, who was very much like his father, but with a greater wit and mind for strategy and academics. In the chaos that was mounting all across the world, despite rumors that Bayezid was homosexual, despite his mousy voice and small frame, despite the discontent of his brothers, the Janissaries asserted firmly that only men with the skill to rule should be in charge, likening the crumbling regime of Ahmed to the Byzantines and Bayezid to Mehmed the Conqueror.[7] So in 1762, a second Sultan was enthroned by the Janissaries, though Ahmed was merely locked away in a room full of food and women for the rest of his days.
Sultan Bayezid III acted swiftly, as it was not long before the Hashemite Sultanate was declared. Sultan Jafar I not only declared his only rulership, but that of his uncle Ibrahim as Caliph Ibrahim III, Medinia was made the political capital, and Mecca the spiritual, leaving the aging founder of the Hashimi movement to issue out greater proclamations of faith while his nephew amassed an army and went out to bring others into the fold with his charisma. While certainly a threat, this rebellion was a golden opportunity for Bayezid. His brother and father had tried and failed to reform the tax system, but that system was now in total shambles. With the rebellion, however, resistance to an attempt to straighten out this issue would be minimal. So Bayezid began to create a European-modeled tax system, taken from Austria, and first implemented it in Anatolia and then the Balkans, hoping to steadily spread his reforms. While not perfect, he was far more successful than his predecessors, and soon enough was gaining enough tax to properly field an army that, while not able to even push into Hashemite territory, was able to stop them at Damascus. Of course, this meant that the north was now practically undefended.
The Wallachians had been thoroughly trounced in their attempt to uprise, leaving them a weakened, battered people with little desire for war. But the Moldovians were willing and ready, as were the Crimeans, who had grown sick of Ottoman abuse. In 1763, they began their own separate revolts, forcing Bayezid to call on two unlikely allies: Russia and Poland-Ruthenia.”[8]
- The House of Osman by Lucas DeVoe
[1] He’ll be actually showing up soon.
[2] That and it makes a nicer border.
[3] Come now, you didn’t actually think you can just reform the Janissaries in a snap, did you?
[4] They really don’t realize how hypocritical they are, as they still feel that, by their lineage and past works, they really have earned their place.
[5] The hope is both divide and conquer, but also acts as appeasement because of large disagreements between the Greek Orthodox and those in much of the Balkans.
[6] A tactic that really hasn’t worked throughout all of history.
[7] Plus they expect he’ll let them do as they please, as opposed to his brother who tried to ‘reform’ the corps again.
[8] I hope to touch up on this state’s history in the next part, but it is admittedly less of a priority than other things.
[2] That and it makes a nicer border.
[3] Come now, you didn’t actually think you can just reform the Janissaries in a snap, did you?
[4] They really don’t realize how hypocritical they are, as they still feel that, by their lineage and past works, they really have earned their place.
[5] The hope is both divide and conquer, but also acts as appeasement because of large disagreements between the Greek Orthodox and those in much of the Balkans.
[6] A tactic that really hasn’t worked throughout all of history.
[7] Plus they expect he’ll let them do as they please, as opposed to his brother who tried to ‘reform’ the corps again.
[8] I hope to touch up on this state’s history in the next part, but it is admittedly less of a priority than other things.
“The Great Famines begin with winter of 1756. It was one of the coldest on record, and came at one of the worst of times. Fresh from war, Western Europe was seeking to settle into a period of comfort, licking its wounds in preparation for the future. Instead, the bitter chill wreaked havoc and misery. Worse yet, it was a long winter, one that would be followed by the almost equally as cold winter of 1757, which began early. Both are attributed to the minor eruption of several small volcanoes in the Pacific, one of which is believe to have been caused by an incident during attempted sulfur mining efforts of the Dutch Republic…[9]
...This poor harvest created a massive effect, particularly in Italy. Devastation of farmland during the War of the Italian League meant that starvation in the north was higher than anywhere else, while both France and Spain in minor famine. Thanks to 1757’s winter, however, those famines became terrible very rapidly, compounded by the fact that the price of grain and meat was ever rising, the French economy in shambles, dragging Italia and Iberia down with it. The Bavarian famine was, in comparison, rather tame, allowing the Empire a bit of breathing room as its foremost enemies suffered heavily.
But while Italy was hit hardest, perhaps one of the most widespread famines was in the Albionic Empire. Ireland had been experiencing minor starvation and poor harvests for some time, but English and Welsh grain had kept them afloat, and hand done much for bringing the newly unified Crown of Albion together. But the winters struck hard. The overworking of English fields to supplement Ireland meant that soon enough, the Midlands were starving, and Ireland along with them. [10] Hope only came from Denmark, which had thus far weathered the first winter well, but they could do so much as Norway also began to hunger, and the Swedes only had enough for themselves. While in better straights than the rest of the North Sea Empire, Scandinavia was the epicenter of the cold, with reports of entire towns freezing to death, though this may be exaggerated by fear.
As 1757 rolled in, a word was soon uttered from blued lips and through chattering teeth: Fimbulvetr, the Great Winter, and first sign of an apocalypse. In the eyes of many, they were nearly right…
...Sun-King Louis XV had come to his throne during the height of France, and would leave it during one of its lows. But he was, by all accounts, a successful monarch. He had brought French influence higher than ever before, successfully reformed woes of the state, and had established himself as an almost god-like figure in French culture. Hated as he was by many, he was respected by all. In 1757, famine ever worsening, he died content that his son Louis would save the nation. He was oh so wrong.
Rather than become Louis XVI, the young prince, desiring to distinguish himself, took his third name as his regnal name, and so became Sun-King Pepin IV, gladly likening himself to the first Carolingian to become King of France.[11] And despite the economy being effectively rendered nothing more than a liar’s promise of credit, he had an extravagant coronation, with food stores opened in celebration. In some ways, this at first provided a bit of stability, as the day of feasting gave the peasantry a few days of reprieve. However, it also meant that there was almost no food for the rest of the winter.
Other expenses achieved mostly by threat of wrath included the alteration of the altars of state to have Pepin’s face rather than Louis’ in the stain glass. Of course, during Pepin’s reign, the boxes at the altars quickly filled up and stayed that way, rendering each town near it feeling as if their god had turned away from them. But many hoped things would get better. Spring was approaching, and the colonies of France had been less affected by the winter. Louisiana and the newly christened Laurentia were in fact flourishing, partially aided by the arrival of farmers and fishermen from France hoping to settle and find a new life. And if France could bounce back before Albion, the Empire, Italy, or even the increasingly rivalrous Spanish, they could claw their way to economic prosperity again. The pervading feelings of discontent were tempered by the idea that they only had to push through the night into the dawn. Pope Tryphon even issued out his own proclamation, in which he had as many cathedrals, monasteries, and nunneries come together to pray everyday for the prosperity that was bound to come. In his own words, he widely and loudly proclaimed, in an effort to inspire hope, that God had sent him signs that ‘by Easter we shall all enjoy the mercy of God.’[12]
But starvation begets poverty, and poverty begets illness. The Spirit of Famine had ridden across Europe for two years. Now as his relief, Pestilence would ride in after him…”
- The Great Famines and the Chaos of the 18th Century by Alphonse Ulrick
[9] A few harsh winters hit during this time as well, but the increase of human activity in the Pacific and Oceania is going to have consequences of more minor eruptions. Over time this is going to cause fluctuations in the atmosphere in the New World, which means El Niño is going to get pretty odd ever so often. With chance being all thats stopping the perfect storm from aligning, a bit of help from the Narrative makes the great winter come to be. Not to mention I’ve been putting off several famines in Europe, so some of these are just at last beign triggered by the push of a harsh winter.
[10] The downside of greater cooperation, but also why Irish famines have been a lot less intense.
[11] He wants to be more original, so he immediately takes the name of a different king. Yeah, that should seem odd, and more just show that he’s a narcissistic brat.
[12] A broken prophetic promise and the loss of Vienna. Yeah, expect the Papacy to not be doing so hot after all of this.
[10] The downside of greater cooperation, but also why Irish famines have been a lot less intense.
[11] He wants to be more original, so he immediately takes the name of a different king. Yeah, that should seem odd, and more just show that he’s a narcissistic brat.
[12] A broken prophetic promise and the loss of Vienna. Yeah, expect the Papacy to not be doing so hot after all of this.
“Listen up, seedstains,[13] we have now moved past all the obscure garbage, and are getting to the meat of this history course. I get that none of you still want to be here, but as I said at the start, all of us are required to know how we got to this point. Luckily, here on out it’ll be a bit more fun.
French Flu. What is it? Well it’s a disease. I hope you all knew that much before this. Flu comes from Influenza, Italian for Influence, an archaic name for the basic disease we study today. We know now that it is a highly mutable virus. But back when this thing was destroying Europe, no one knew what viri really were. They had no idea that chance just got them right in the groin. Mutating as it did, replicating rapidly thanks to the poor conditions of the Great Famines, it was almost bound to happen.
A few people get sick, they spread it. No one has a strong enough immune system to resist, but then the rapid rate of expansion means people’s bodies start trying to resist, and all that infection means rapid replication. It replicates and replicates and replicates, and then...
Boom. An extraordinarily aggressive and lethal variant, with delayed symptoms, rapid spread, and almost certain death if you didn’t get proper care.[14] And whaddya know? Famine means there isn’t much to spare on medical care. Now best as we can tell, it did start in France. Right there, in the south. At first people just thought it was more regular flu, a common thing. Before they even realize how bad it is, this thing has already infected a few trade ships that likely stopped in Savoy before looping back into Spain and then to Portugal. From Savoy, flu gets into Northern Italy, and it ended up killing an entire monastery. Well, except for the monks who left to go visit Rome, where they brought the disease with them too. This map here gives you a nice image of the spread.
I know right? Nasty little fucker.
It’s moving into the Rhineland and the Low Countries within a few months. People know something’s up by then, but it’s too late. Finally it gets to England, and doesn’t get too much further north, aside from a few reported cases in Scotland. To the best of our ability, we believe better food conditions, climate, and lessened trade is what prevented it from getting much farther northeast than the Austrian heartland. Vienna had a few incidents, but generally pretty clean.
Southwards, though, it creeps along the coast, and we even get a handful of sick in Konstantiniyye. At about that point, the Sultan, dealing with a fuckload of other problems, cuts trade with any Christian nations and quarantines any port that gets sick. Wasn’t a perfect solution, but worked well enough to prevent a true outbreak.
Now, France was the natal zone, but the most devastation was really in Iberia, Italy, and central England. The French certainly felt a good deal of proper pestilential devastation, but they had enough people getting sick that immunity was starting to build up, while places outside of France hadn’t had that time, but when you look at effects of the disease… France probably had the most. Because Spain and Portugal tried to deal with what was happening, the Italian States devolved to city states that tried to protect themselves, and Albion handled things pretty well, if with a bit of tough love. But France had the misfortune of being led by a selfish, idiotic fop that we here at Dunwar should all be happy to take down. So while they should have come out on top, they ended up being hit harder than anyone…”
- Department of Unconventional Warfare, Recruit training program
[13] Uh… yeah this should be pretty obvious what it means.
[14] Akin to the mutations that created the Spanish Flu.
[14] Akin to the mutations that created the Spanish Flu.
“We’re going to die. I know it. I tell Colette every day that things are going to get better, but I know they will not. I cannot save her mother, I cannot save her, and I feel the sickness crawling inside myself even now. We will all die in this hovel, if hunger doesn’t get us first. So many years of study, of turning my back on my family, of holding myself high above the common masses from whence I came. And now I am going to die just like them. Cold, hungry, sick, huddled in a shack…
...her in the back. There’s no room in the cemetery. I had to use my hands; we sold our spade ages ago to buy some bread. Even if we sold ten spades we wouldn’t have enough to buy a loaf now. I thought we’d never need it. What use was a spade to an accountant? What an arrogant fool I was. Even then, in times of plenty, it ought to have been my duty, my obligation, to bury my wife myself. Not pay someone else.
Colette kept asking what I was doing… I told her that putting her mother in the dirt might help her get better. Then Colette asked if I was going to bury her next, to make her better. I didn’t have to lie. I know I will…
...I am sick. No question of it now. The flu holds me, and Colette gets worse by the moment. Even now, as I write in the light of one candle, I can hear her struggling to breath in her sleep. Why am I even writing? I would sell my ink if anyone would buy it. But no one will, so I suppose I write to make use of it. I write on the back of files that once held the power to make nobles cower as I held their fate as much as any doctor or priest. All that power, and now I am powerless. I will die without a cent, alone, my only possessions being the clothes on my back, and the dirt under my nails after I bury my daughter. And these pages. I will have these pages, and maybe, if this is not the end of the world as some cry, someone will come along and find my body. They will read these pages and someone will know me. Know of my family. Or more likely they’ll burn all of this to warm themselves…
...Colette will not last the next day. I know it. I know it. I cannot save her, I cannot cure her, I cannot relieve her pain. But I can write. So I will write, to you who reads my pages. I wish to tell you of Gaspard Fourché, a fool accountant, and his wife Edmée, who foolishly loved him, and of his daughter Colette, who smiled happily even in the face of death. I am going to tell you of how Gaspard left his home, and his loving but strict father and mother, in the dead of night to go to learn at a salon. I will tell you of how he refused to learn history and philosophy, and left that salon to become a accountant. I will tell you how he met Edmée and convinced her to abandon everything for him. I will tell you of the first time he held his daughter in his arms, and likely will tell you of the last time. I will tell you about her first steps, her first words, her first painting, and all the silly thoughts that escaped her head and came from her mouth. I will tell you this because her paintings, so beautiful for her age, will never go in a gallery. They will never be seen and cherished, bought and valued, famed and discussed. She will never wed and bear a lineage of her talent, will never feel the love a husband can give his wife, not give the love a parent can give to their child.
She will leave no legacy in this world. So I will leave one for her. In these pages. I will tell you her life and the life of her parents that made her come to be. I will memorialize her in this ink, so that, if only for a moment, for the days between her death and when some desperate soul loots my corpse and burns this paper for warmth, her memory will exist beyond her lifetime, and even beyond mine.
It all began that night in Loire, so many years ago…
...favorite flowers. I stole them, technically. But the house down the road has been long empty. The famine killed its owners I think. They did not even experience this hellish plague. But someone has been watering those flowers, keeping them alive. They will likely be saddened to see I have taken so many. But if they knew how much Colette loved them, I think they would accept letting them rest on her grave. I think maybe my grief has made me numb, as I barely notice my coughs and headaches anymore. The disease cannot hurt me anymore. There is no more room for pain in my heart. I suppose I ought to take solace in that. Perhaps it is a small comfort from God. I have been pondering God lately.
Clearly, I think, he has never even spared the Pope a thought. Certainly not the monks either. All their abstention from the world and yet they died faster than most of us. And in all the sacraments I have done in my life, an ordained priest ensuring I did them right, I never felt close to the Lord. But I think I have felt him in my life. I felt him as I held my wife close, when we made love beneath soft sheets. I felt him when I laughed with my daughter and when she held my hand so tightly as she died. I felt him when I stumbled drunkenly home, arms locked with Pierre and Jean, laughing like schoolboys over the simplest of jokes. I felt him today, in the warmth of the sun on my skin after such a bitterly cold night. That warmth drove me to prayer, to weep, to beg for forgiveness and death.
God is not in wine rituals, in men with white robes, or burning candles.
God is in life, in the moments we let pass us by so quickly. God is in the senses…
...I am getting better. I thought myself simply apathetic to my symptoms, but I have noticed now. My cough is nearly gone. My body feels stronger. I found cured and dried meat, actual meat, in a box in an empty house. Likely stolen by the former occupant, dead before he could feast. I ate some, and feel my body revitalizing itself. And I hate it. Is this more punishment? Have I been made to suffer, to watch my family suffer, to bury those I held dear with my bare hands, only to not be allowed to join them? The cruelty of God is great…
...Now I know. As we tore the gate open, uncaring if the guards fired upon us, I realized. I am not being punished. I am being granted a second chance. The plague is gone from this town. Those who are left are getting healthy again. And as if fate were urging us on, someone found a toppled carriage of guns, swords, and munitions. And someone else figured out how to get into the chateau. We acted with little thought than food for our bellies, but as it started to work, as Monsieur Chevrolet inspired us all to charge without fear, it became clear as day. The punishment came. Penance was reaped. Now is the time for our redemption. Now is the time for a revolution. No. Not a revolution. Monsieur Chevrolet said it well: now is the time for a purification!”
- Journal of Gaspard Fourché
“As the price of grain and crawled higher and higher, not just in England but across Europe, people clamored for solutions.[15] We know well of Thomas Allens, who wrote his treatise On the Pursuit of General Prosperity, which outlined what we know today laying the groundwork for open market economics, or prosperism.[16] Surprisingly international in its calls to action, the treatise called for the end of tariffs and mercantile ‘insular policies’ that resulted only in ‘cyclical results’. Free trade, an open market unconstrained by government interference, would be the only means of clawing Europe up from the pit it had fallen into, at least in Allens’ view.
He proposed a ‘natural flow’ within an open market, driven by the satisfaction of what he called the economic triumvirate: the innovators, the producers, and the consumers. The first group, innovators, creates idea, organizes labor, and manages businesses. They desire profit and popularity. The second group, producers, manufactures products, performs menial labor, and maintains a business. Effectively a new term for workers, they desire compensation for their labor and the satisfaction that they have value. The last group, consumers, tests ideas, purchases products, and grows a business. They want good products at reasonable prices. These three thus begin to balance one another. Innovators want high profits, but then producers desire fair compensation, but then consumers want low prices. A breaking point must then be reached, where compensation is just, prices reasonable, and profits decent. According to Allens, this delicate balance reveals the ‘true value’ of any item. Furthermore, as innovators want popularity, and producers want satisfaction, and consumers want good products, a second balance is reached wherein products must be efficient, effective, and useful. Finally, innovators need a business and so must rely on both the maintenance down by producers and the growth created by consumers, but producers need a well managed business to work at and need it to grow to receive good pay, and consumers require a both well-run and well-maintained business to make their investments in and purchase products from. This third balance thus creates businesses that are both internally well managed, physically presentable and effective, and that survives via healthy external investment.
These ‘three balances’ create the natural flow. Bad products receive no investment, can attract no producers to create them, and so business that make them wither and die on the vine. Business that make good products, however, prosper. But a good product requires good management and good labor. What people think of, buy, and are willing to work to make all pushes the economy forward. Wealth flows from one good product to another as producers and innovators, with their pay and profits, become consumers elsewhere, consumers becoming producers and innovators. Money, food, resources, the trade flows on endlessly, and with the destruction of barriers of trade, that endless flow can extend into one ‘global market’. Allens offered up how the Spanish were weathering famine by using their colonies, but Portugal, a neighbor, had no colonies with much food production. In an open market, Spanish colonial foodstuffs could flow into Portugal, while spices and exotic items from the Portuguese trade-post empire could then enter Spanish hands. Virginians silk might flow into Italy, and then Italian gold might flow into England, which could then be used to buy Baltic grain from Russia and the Empire.
‘Everyone has something someone else needs,’ remarked Allens in one of his many famous farmer analogies, ‘When a dairy farmer needs grain, he goes into town and buys it from the wheat farmer, who happily buys some milk and cheese. But if the dairy farmer needs even more grain that what the wheat farmer can offer, he does not throw up his hands and give up because of some foolish notion that he cannot let men in other parts of the country make profit. No, instead he travels a shire over and finds grain there, likely finding someone else who needs his dairy. Thus he makes profits from two men, and finds all that he requires.’ Inspired by the poetic trends of his day, Allens used such analogies and simple, clear language that made his treatise powerful and in many ways inspiring. If an Englishman was starving, why not sell his trinkets to a Frenchman so that he might buy a Spaniard’s grain? ‘We are all in dire straights. Why unequally divy up the bounties of Europe and her empires when we might be able to share our wealth? Why force ourselves to slowly die from differing deficiencies?’
Certainly, there were many flaws in Allens’ work. For one, his simple language gave way to many vague descriptions, such as simply calling for ‘good management’ and ‘fair compensation’ of producers. What that really meant was hard to measure, and left open many issues: what if the compensation was fair but the producers greedy? What if they did not realize that the compensation was not fair? What made good management? What of the harms bad products wrought? Should bad products be halted from creation? But then was that not government meddling in that natural flow? Many Allensian prosperists maintain that he had such answers, seen in his own textile businesses in England, which used a clear hierarchy of management, paid well, and produced highly inspected products. Given how few workers he hired, however, the mess of paperwork his ideas generated, and the slowed production of goods, his wealth was primarily generated from investment in other businesses run by men who treated workers like slaves, cut corners, and lied to consumers. Thus most critics and historians hold that his vaguery came from the fact that he did not know what needed to actually be done, merely that it should be done by someone…
...Prospertist economics caught on in both Iberia and in Albion quickly enough, such that King-Emperor Canute IV of Albion, King Alfonso XII of Spain, and the newly crowned Queen Catarina of Portugal came to sign the First Open Market Agreement in 1758, with disease beginning to ravage all three nations. Sun King Pepin IV was livid to hear his cousins were acting without his acquiescence, and intentionally aided a group of Catalan rebels in early 1759.[17] However, with the Portuguese and Albionic India, the African trade posts, the Viceroyalty of the New World, the Albionic Colonies, and North Sea trade all working together, the resulting joined economy was relatively prosperous. Iberia in particular saw a rise in hope as, while the French Flu rose death tolls, there was feeling of brotherhood rising, and food became more readily available. That hope rose as Catarina became pregnant with the child of Alfonso’s son and heir Carlos: the future and beloved King Jaime I, only seconded in fame by his grandson Gabriel the Great...
...Lisbon had been struck by an earthquake in 1755, on All Saints’ Day. By pure fortune, the aged King Pedro III had desired to leave the palace, and called for a festival not within the city, but in its outskirts. When the city shook and crumbled, the death toll was greatly lessened by this action, and Pedro, a king whose popularity hung by a thread after his surrender to Spain four years prior, was hailed as saviour. He attributed his desire for a festival to the influence from God, though he had a distaste for urban living even in his youth.[18]
As the famines had not yet hit, reconstruction began slowly but surely, the national debt straining under the weight, but with lumber and stone taken from Spanish colonies, the process had made headway, spurred on by the administrative reforms that reconstituted the Portuguese government along the totalist lines of Spain and France. When the Fimbulvetr came, and famine began, the use of Spanish border troops to instill order was necessary, but thankfully brief. Lisbon’s reconstruction was halted, buildings closed up to provide protection from the cold, but nearly every rebuilt building was only a single story tall, even the royal palace. And yet, this became the style of Lisbon for years to come. Catarina, likely staging events, allowed writers to come and see first hand the meager conditions of the Portuguese monarchy, how servants were treated well, and how meals were only slightly better than those of the average merchant or minor noble. A nationally promoted newspaper latched onto these stories, and Catarina and Carlos became icons as populist monarchs, leading to greater popularity of the monarchy in Spain as well. And the aforementioned hope became all the greater, personified in a child who became the first instance of true national celebrity; Jaime’s youth was well documented, as the writers within the palace reported on his measurements, development, and education. Hope, even as flu brought back the terror tales of the Black Plague, is perhaps what kept Portugal and Spain from suffering fates like that of France…
...Albion also experienced benefits from the open market, as Spanish colonial trade brought in fruits, spices, and the ever more loved drink that was barrow. But the French Flu turned the Midlands into a zone of anarchy. Towns vanished and transit became dangerous as bandits and scavengers littered the roads. King Canute ordered that the Royal Army be mobilized, and he sent them to roam the countryside. Soon enough, economic cost demanded these activities be limited, but an elite corp of the Royal Army was detached and recreated into a separate institution. Not one commanded by the King, but instead created by an act of the recently empowered Parliaments of Albion. A new position on the Privy Council was created, and granted its own department, answering in its culpability to the Parliaments themselves. This new department was the infamous Bureau of Health and Security. Doctors from the Royal College were recruited to join, and given a new mandate: to find a means of treating and stopping the flu, with special authorization to perform experiments that were previously well beyond the accepted confines of law.[19]
The Bureau, as it’s commonly known, was sent out to roam the countryside. More than a few of the sick were seized and vanished, bodies harvested, and towns rife with infection were burned to the ground. But while this use of force was criticized, it greatly advanced the field pestilentology and minivitology, with proper development of germ theory and the development of the refined microscopes to study microbiology. Viri are, of course, beyond the scope of such things, but bacterial diseases were being understood at a rapid pace, and the theory of viri was advanced as being either an organism or a sort of vapor, and measures were invented to prevent contact through face masks, covering up skin, and using forms of filters in new experimental masks…”[20]
- Europe during the Great Famines by Emilia Farnesworth
[15] Constant warfare, expansion, rebuilding, and overspending has soiled the economy of Europe. No one is doing well. At all.
[16] Capitalism, though with different thoughts behind similar ideas.
[17] This will have some implications, if not just because of the fact that Pepin is spending more money funding rebels.
[18] The earthquake is still devastating, but not as structurally changing to the Portuguese state as it would be if they weren’t already centralizing.
[19] The King has a lot on his plate, which makes a good opportunity for the creation of far stronger legislatures.
[20] This has just as many terrible implications as you think, especially since it seemingly worked, and the uses of ideas like the Bureau is now acceptable.
[16] Capitalism, though with different thoughts behind similar ideas.
[17] This will have some implications, if not just because of the fact that Pepin is spending more money funding rebels.
[18] The earthquake is still devastating, but not as structurally changing to the Portuguese state as it would be if they weren’t already centralizing.
[19] The King has a lot on his plate, which makes a good opportunity for the creation of far stronger legislatures.
[20] This has just as many terrible implications as you think, especially since it seemingly worked, and the uses of ideas like the Bureau is now acceptable.
“Maryland’s War is another name for the Third Metacom War. It is generally agreed that the this third and final conflict between the novan tribes the United Colonies of New England was unnecessary and for the most part entirely an aggressive and expansionist act by the New English government. The growing colony was steadily becoming a regional power even amongst its fellow colonies, much to their distaste. The secular turn of the royal government since the Bloody Year, and especially of the King, had turned a number of Anglicans towards the cause of Puritanism, believing that the Church of England was becoming too friendly to Catholics. While they often praised attempts to make the Church of Scotland match that of England, recent Catholic allowances and disregard for further reforms had frustrated many of the pious.
These New Puritans had come to New England, where they found what was effectively a new, purely Protestant English Christianity awaiting them in the form of the Greater Congregation of New England. While they did have to adapt many of their beliefs, the beliefs of the New English puritans was in a sense more palatable because it was a new form of thought. The newness was attractive, without betraying loyalty to the Crown by converting to a continental Protestant sect. With new tracts of land to fill with settlers, this suited the New English Commision just fine, and the religious fervor of the settlers helped to bring more of the novans to the north into the fold, particularly as they lost all alliance with the French Laurentians who, now as a proper growing colony, came into territorial conflict with these native tribes in far greater frequency…
...Often the formalizing of the New English government is seen as a cause of the Third Metacom War, the conflict serving to distract detractors and to rally the colony under their leadership. It began with the admission of the Provinces of Galilee, Primrose, and Kingston-on-Penobscot. Expanding the Commission had required new organization of debate, discussion, and voting procedure, and talk came of reform to the government as a whole, primarily from reverends who felt that the ‘greed-driven’ legislation of the past few years had shown failures in the system. Such legislation was primarily rooted in trade with French Laurentia. While profits had been beneficial to the colony, many merchants and craftsman opposed the bills on grounds of profit, while the Greater Congregation opposed trade with Catholics. Ambitious commissioners had forced the bill through via less than legal means of coercion.
Riding the sentiment of religious fervor from the New Puritans and the political malcontent of the merchants, the Constitution Congress was called, a major event that called for a restructuring of New England’s government. After several months of debate, no written document was provided. Instead a series of bills were produced to create reforms, such as the prohibition of winter votes, heightened vote requirements, direct election of provincially-approved candidates for commissioners, staggered elections, the requirement of annual meetings of government rather than simply the tradition of it, and the creation of Boston as a separate, federally administered capital city. But most crucially, infamously, and shockingly, the Greater Congregation of New England, the most powerful religious organization in the United Colonies, which held near total control of the regional governments of most provinces, was recognized officially as the Upper House of Legislature. The Commission and the Congregation, jointly, would rule the nation. Congregational approval would be required for bills, though origination of bills remained in the hands of the Commission alone, and the Congregation was officially the highest court of appeals in the nation.
Theocracy had at last been formalized.[21]
While the popular view is that the New English people accepted it with thunderous applause, many held doubt and criticism. Not, however, the sensible thought of you or I, that such a government would never respect the freedom of its people, but rather a belief that the arrangement would harm the Greater Congregation. They feared that politicizing the Congregation in such an official capacity would hinder and taint the reverends who were part of it, dividing them and harming their ability to act as true leaders for the community. While certainly, it did create greater divisions amongst this pseudo-clergy, as the Congregation acted to moderate the Commission’s less-than-pious acts, many people came to praise. But fear of backlash remained, and war became a useful tool…
...Almost no Metacomans in the traditional sense actually remained in New England. The Hodeno, or Hohdeno, that were within their borders had even gone so far as to make treaties with the New English government. But many recalled that certain tribes of the Hodeno had fought against their forefathers not too many years ago. They did not care that the vast majority of the novan confederation had been neutral, they saw them all as one vast enemy. Intentionally pushing settlement beyond Primrose further and further past the agreed demarcation between the confederation on the colony, it would not take long for conflict to rise. In 1759, Puritan hunters were attacked, miles past the recognized treaty line.
The Hodeno were already preparing a threat when New England used the attack, which took one Puritan life and three Hodeno, as justification for war. Suddenly, the Rangers were being mobilized, and the militias were arming themselves. The Hodeno were terrified, unsure of what to do, and so they sent a message to the government of Maryland, with whom they had signed a pact of mutual defense, the intended purpose being against western tribes that had began to push against Hodeno territory as they ran from encroaching French settlement. Maryland had signed a number of such treaties with other tribes in their territory, believing that the selection of a few key tribes to dominate the others would mean the creation of loyal novan puppets.
But now, the Hodeno were asking Maryland to calm the New English down, to convince them to came to the table for negotiations. With time short, and emergency meeting of government want called in St. Mary City. An envoy of the Hodeno pleaded their case, and the government of the colony began heavy discussion over what to do. They knew that New England would never listen to reason, particularly not from Maryland, a ‘nation of rogues’ as the Puritans so often called them, due to their proud harboring of the former settlers of Rhode Island, not to mention their own Quaker, Catholic, and Muslim settlers. The debate was long, at times heated, but eventually, a bold path was decided upon.
By an act of the Colonial Assembly of the Province of Maryland, approved by the governor, they would honor their legally binding treaty of defense with the Hodeno Confederation. They would go to war against New England.
As Thomas Penn stated, ‘They will call it treason, of course. But we shall stand by our agreements and obligation, while they, even greater heretics than anyone here, sinfully break their oaths for personal gain. Win or lose, we hold the moral ground.’[22]
This statement proved true, and the man was sent to New Jersey, who agreed to aid Maryland in the war, viewing the New English as the colony in violation of an agreement that a representative of the crown had authorized and negotiated. Tribes settled in the south agreed to join as well, while the colonies of Virginia and Carolina stayed neutral. They hated the Puritans, and shared new Jersey’s view, but the idea of alliance with and defense of novans against settlers made any proper Virginian or Carolinian, be they blainco, negro, or mulatto, scowl and curse. Regardless, the war was one, though trade remained relatively unhindered due to lacking offensive navies by either side, leaving the European-focused King and Parliaments only vaguely aware of a small conflict between colonies…”
- The Metacom Wars by Lucas Prince
[21] Dun dun duuuuuuuuun. Well. Theodemocracy technically. But still.
[22] Intercolonial wars, famine, plague, chaos has come at last. Praise Khorne!
[22] Intercolonial wars, famine, plague, chaos has come at last. Praise Khorne!
“The prince was now without rival. His elder brothers were all disfavored or dead. He and his twin brother, had always been the favored children, the first sons born after Emperor Tiandao’s ascension, and to his favorite consort. Qianzhen had been the Crown Prince for years. But at last, his disgrace had earned him first lost of rank, and then arrest, only for the prince to run away, never to be seen in Jongkuo again. Qianli was secured in his title, and in 1733, he ascended as Emperor Xianhe,[23] being the first Emperor to be openly Daoist. His father had been sympathetic to Daoism, and he had brought the texts of Daoism into the Imperial Library once again, but he never officially professed his belief in it.
Xianhe did so constantly, and began to make his nation follow the belief as well. He was a patron for several Daoist monasteries, and hired several philosophers to teach Daoism at court. Perhaps most crucially, he included Daoist texts into the imperial exams, requiring knowledge of the books and poems, as well as writing of Doaist poetry by the applicant.[24] This meant that even lower nobles and wealthy families who desired for their children to gain a position in government were now purchasing Daoist works, exposing their children to them, and even studying it themselves.
It was not an overnight conversion, but by the end of his reign, Xianhe had successfully strengthened the presence of his religion in Jongkuo. His style of governance similarly reflected this, as he demonstrated a greatly of restraint in government. Laws on decorum were laxed or even repealed, and efforts to strengthen the position of women were undertaken, as Xianhe believed a society with too much patriarchal power would be out of balance and destined to fail. His own Empress-consort held a great deal of power, particularly in her influence on court fashion, which saw more colors, greater displays of skin, and accentuation of the human form. Condemned by many, the fashions still became popular, particularly as the Emperor inforced harsh punishments on any who attempted to enforce morality without the explicit consent of the Emperor. Ruled as working against the stability of society, some were executed, and those who were not were castrated.
This made Xianhe popular amongst commoners, who viewed him like a savior from nobles who ruled their own laws. What secured Xianhe’s reign, however, was the patronage of the military. Believing that the appearance of unstoppable strength was the key to keeping any nation safe, he grew the army in size, and began a policy of testing the strength of his neighbors. In his reign, war in the south occurred twice, first of several Annam Wars. The Great Viet Empire had been a vassal in Jongkuo’s ancient past, and tensions had arisen under Tiandao that had never truly been resolved. Emperor Trinh Minh Sam in particular desired to expand his borders westward and southward, but was hindered by Jongkuan funding of his enemies to prevent Viet from becoming a threat. Demanding this end, Minh Sam rose an army in 1739 to go to the border with Jongkuo, believing rumors that the new Emperor was in fact a pacifist. Seeing this a threat and invasion, Xianhe sent his army to strike first, invading west of the Viet army’s position and attacking from their flank. The first battle was decisive, and within a year, the Great Viet Empire had to surrender.
The would not truly be subjugated for another seven years, however, in 1747, the new Nguyen Dynasty, uniting the north and south reaches of Viet, struck and began an invasion of Lan Sang, which then called to Jongkuo to aid them against a common threat. Xianhe felt that this would be a violation of his defensive principles, but a local garrison in the south believed that the call would be answered, and so attacked into Viet territory without proper approval. This rogue action would force Xianhe’s hand. The army went in, and spent two years fighting the Nguyen Dynasty. In the aftermath, descendants of the once favored Mac Dynasty were installed as puppet rulers, the reestablishment of the Annam province complete in all but name. The Nguyen would rule in the southern region of Dong Trang, but would never successfully reclaim the north…
...This war had been mounting for some time. In 1692, the death of the queen consort Inhyeon had left the now infamous Queen Jang as one of the most powerful figures in Choshin. But as the Southern Faction split into the Nonamin and the Sonamin factions, her power was challenged as the Sonamin Faction began to rally behind Consort Myeong and her newborn son, Prince Yi Dan. Jang’s son, Prince Yi Yun was only around five years older, making the contest for the throne viable. King Sukjong attempted to end this madness by manipulating the factions in his typical style.[25]
But he could not prepare for his own death. Some, of course, accuse Queen Jang, but killing the king would only prevent his support for her son in the future, as he had made it clear he was not going to reconsider Prince Yi Yun’s place as heir for at least several more years. It is believed the accident was just that, with evidence of the admittedly unseen event appearing true. The king took a fall off his horse, robes caught on the saddle. He fell as the horse reared slightly at a sharp rock, and cracked open his own head on a large stone…
...Within only hours there was chaos. Queen Jang gathered her Nonamin allies and took control of the palace. The doors were barred and the guards rallied to defend her and Prince Yi Yun. Consort Myeong, while not a political creature, felt she could not let Choshin fall into Jang’s hands. She spoke herself to the arguing Sonamin lords, and convinced them that they had to act. The battle that followed was intense, and no clear victor seemed like it was going to occur. A lull settled as the defenders of the palace held out. And then, from amidst the dust, Myeong stepped forward, hold her child. Voice strong, she commanded the guards to let her in, as a consort of the king, holding his true heir, presenting a likely fabricated missive that named her son as the true crown prince.
There was enough dissent amongst the palatial guards that some made to actually do as she asked, at least to allow her refuge from the fighting. But the door opened on its own, or so the story goes. Jang, her son a few paces behind her, stood to stare down Myeong. And then, quick as ever, she flung two knives forward into the heir. One killed the baby in Myeong’s arms, while the other struck the consort herself in the gut. As silence rang out, the Queen gave the order to attack the Sonamin traitors…
...Though the palace had been secured and Myeong and her son killed, Choshin remained unstable for several years, as Sonamin and Nonamin lords in the countryside clashed, now over the fact that the Queen was acting as regent alongside General Kim Yeonghae, who was suspected as being her lover. It was in this chaos, his draconian mother whispering ruthlessness into his ears, that Prince Yi Yun grew…
...In 1707, at nineteen years of age, Yi Yun, now King Gyeongjong of Choshin, struck. His mother had taught him to let no obstacle, for any reason, stand in his way. Her drowning was allegedly from a fall into a river, but it is commonly believed that the King ordered guards to hold her beneath the water as he watched. At last free of her control, he began truly consolidating Choshin under his rule. The last of the still rebellious Sonamin lords that had not bent knee in totality were at last rounded up and executed. And then, in a shock to many, the most corrupt and cruel of his Nonamin allies were arrested and executed as well.
Gyeongjong would tolerate no corruption in his kingdom, which he fervently reminded his subjects was the last bastion of true, Ming civilization, regardless of how they had to kiss the ring of their Qing overlords. He began proper westernization of his military as well, caring little for the traditionalists in his military. Rifles, cannons, vestments, all adopted quickly, and the schematics for constructions were purchased as well, receiving similar treatment as the rebult palace. It was from Gyeongjong’s influence that Oriental rifles and cannons possess extravagant and unnecessary styling and decoration…
...Many years were spent preparing, building up his forces, and communicating with the Shogun in Nihyeon, who had already convinced their emperor to back Gyeongjong’s scheme. In a swift declaration in 1750, the Qing armies still attempting to maintain control of their newly created Annam vassal, at 62 years of age, Gyeongjong at last had his war. He had himself proclaimed Emperor of Choshin, and sent his armies across the border and sent his new navy to begin attacking northern Jongkuan ports. As his Nihyeoni allies, with far more traditional weaponry and outdated rifles, arrived to aid him, it is believed the sight of the modern Choshini army is what created such a rapid desire for modernization in Nihyeon. But while these forces were better equipped, they were still dwarfed by the Jongkuan army, though it would be sometime before they could move the bulk of their forces north in defense…”
- The Early Modern Orient by Songhua Gibbons[26]
[23] ‘Universal Harmony’
[24] Reading, writing, reciting, and analyzing poetry was all part of the exams before, now different examples are being used than before.
[25] Aye, remember all this from a while ago? Figured it was time we caught back up with the Orient properly.
[24] Reading, writing, reciting, and analyzing poetry was all part of the exams before, now different examples are being used than before.
[25] Aye, remember all this from a while ago? Figured it was time we caught back up with the Orient properly.
—|—
Author's Note: Wew. This was a pretty big and key chapter. I hope you all like it, and I hope it all made sense. I worry I didn’t stress just how economically fragile and terrible everything is in Europe before jumping right to the plague and capitalism and more developments. But then in universe sources treat knowledge like that as a given, so it was hard to make it sound natural, and that was why there are no notes in Gaspard’s letter to help it flow better and feel more impactful. Getting ready, lads, things are about to really accelerate. War in the Orient, civil war in the Ottoman Empire, intercolonial war for Albion, and that ‘purification’ that’s going to be hitting France. Fun times ahead.
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This is probably the longest post yet, and will hopefully stay as the longest (21 pages with footnotes!).
There's a lot in there, and a lot Im hoping I didn't botch. As usual, I cross my fingers someone my knowledgeable about East Asia will see if I have any errors. This is sort of the true point in the TL where the big overarching dreams I started with are going to not just be viable, but actually happen. Given the time this took and the final exams I need to do, expect mostly graphics (flags, maps, etc.) with a smaller Part #20 to come after those. As usual, always happy to hear everyone's thoughts and criticisms.
There's a lot in there, and a lot Im hoping I didn't botch. As usual, I cross my fingers someone my knowledgeable about East Asia will see if I have any errors. This is sort of the true point in the TL where the big overarching dreams I started with are going to not just be viable, but actually happen. Given the time this took and the final exams I need to do, expect mostly graphics (flags, maps, etc.) with a smaller Part #20 to come after those. As usual, always happy to hear everyone's thoughts and criticisms.
This slipped past me before, but I wanted to say Im happy to hear you enjoy it! I really try to break up the the monotony of suspiciously similarly written excerpts of textbooks and monographs, so Im glad it's adding to the style.
Also, this last update will hopefully make both the Ottoman conquest a bit more palatable, as well as hint at New England's path to the prologue.
I’ll try to from here on out. If I have time tonight, I may edit this latest Part to be like that, see how it looks.
Glad you're liking.
I've edited Part #19. I think I figured how to do it and make sure it looks decent, utilizing the Spoiler system to make them collapsible after each section.
I'm personally looking forward to the dawn of aviation, and the subsequent Carribean Republican Air Force. The idea of an honest-to-god nation having the Jolly Roger in their roundel is exciting to me.
I just finished reading through this TL again, and I have to say, I love it
There are jsut so many unique ideas at play here. From the grand duchy of New York, to the Empire of the north sea, even a Pirate {Carribian} republic! I am just yearning for more. Do you have any plans to continue this TL further? I sincerly hope so!
There are jsut so many unique ideas at play here. From the grand duchy of New York, to the Empire of the north sea, even a Pirate {Carribian} republic! I am just yearning for more. Do you have any plans to continue this TL further? I sincerly hope so!
I certainly do! I've been working on Part #20, but with a vacation, sickness, and a new job, I've had little time to really sit down and write. But never fear, NoaH (Nation On A Hill) marches on!
I have felt bad for the delay though. So I guess I'll do what I did during my last little hiatus and give a flag-based teaser while I work on the next installment.
Teaser 1: Something coming soon
Teaser 2: Something to come...some time after that
Chapter 2: The Purification
"The time is near... So near, we can feel its call in our bones. Our time, my brothers, my sisters, is coming. For now, we scurry, we gather, we draw out strength in the strongholds we have founded. But the day is coming. The day when we will rise in a wave of Human Will, driven to action to act as the embodiment of the will of the Metaphysical God!"
"And on that day... There will be no hiding for them. For those fools who led us to pain. To disease and misery. Who, holding all power in monopoly of industry, of wealth, of armies, of knowledge, did nothing but pursue short-sighted ends. They drove this nation into debt. And not just debt to filthy banking vermin, though such idiocy is certainly part of the problem. But debt to the masses! To us! To we whose taxes bought wars, whose investments funded greed, whose sons and fathers marched to death. We are owed gold! And we are owed blood!
"But, brothers and sisters, do not be fooled! They will say that our blood is theirs, that what was spilt was felt by them as much as it was you or I. I ask you to think! To look back! Look back to lessons taught at your salons, to stories told to you by friends and family, to ancient scraps of history passed down throughout the ages, half forgotten and twisted by the fallibility of the tongue. Think to the past. Think to when this was a wild land, when its first true cities were being constructed, when Roman banners were placed in its soil. What did our ancestors think when their ancestors commanded them? Forced them into chains and into servitude?
"They bent knee, and regretted it from then on. But we forgot this regret. We began to believe ourselves beneath these foreigners. Began to believe ourselves commanded by the pale gentry, weak and sickly in their towers. We believed such deformed creatures were our kin, disfigured cousins to speak kindly of for the sake of family. Let me tell you now: They are the invaders! The foreign! Even when our kin road beneath the noble Charlemagne, these vile creatures infiltrated his government, and seized power, bastardized his name! But in all this time, with this blood swirling in our veins, we have never forgotten what makes us who we are: toil and labor! The pursuit of life, property, and enlightenment!
But we are not alone. The proud Briton of the West. The fierce Norman of the coast. The hearty Frank of the Rhine. The clever Basque in the South. The brave Savoyard in the East. They, like we Gauls, suffer beneath the Roman yoke! We are united only by the language we took from our masters! We took it and made it ours! That unites us! But now, we must unite more than our tongues. We must unite our minds! Our hearts! We must take arms! Unite! Stand together against the rot that has destroyed this beautiful land and left it in ruin! Stand as one French People against the Roman gentiles!"
They will run! And we will not relent! They will apologize! And we will not listen! They will beg! And we will show no mercy!
The time is near. Hold fast to your beliefs. To your ideals. There will come tough times. There will come pain, and tribulations as we pursue a free French nation. As we pursue a place free of their corruption. This process will demand much from us. I do not expect as all to be able to pay that cost. But I know we will succeed. We will fight their armies! We will burn their cities! We will crush their spirit! We will win! We will have victory! We will have peace! We will have truth! We will have freedom! We will take this land of ours, and we shall wash away the stain, we shall burn away the vileness! We will do more than merely revolve the wheel of fortune! Let this be the start of this country's purification!
"And on that day... There will be no hiding for them. For those fools who led us to pain. To disease and misery. Who, holding all power in monopoly of industry, of wealth, of armies, of knowledge, did nothing but pursue short-sighted ends. They drove this nation into debt. And not just debt to filthy banking vermin, though such idiocy is certainly part of the problem. But debt to the masses! To us! To we whose taxes bought wars, whose investments funded greed, whose sons and fathers marched to death. We are owed gold! And we are owed blood!
"But, brothers and sisters, do not be fooled! They will say that our blood is theirs, that what was spilt was felt by them as much as it was you or I. I ask you to think! To look back! Look back to lessons taught at your salons, to stories told to you by friends and family, to ancient scraps of history passed down throughout the ages, half forgotten and twisted by the fallibility of the tongue. Think to the past. Think to when this was a wild land, when its first true cities were being constructed, when Roman banners were placed in its soil. What did our ancestors think when their ancestors commanded them? Forced them into chains and into servitude?
"They bent knee, and regretted it from then on. But we forgot this regret. We began to believe ourselves beneath these foreigners. Began to believe ourselves commanded by the pale gentry, weak and sickly in their towers. We believed such deformed creatures were our kin, disfigured cousins to speak kindly of for the sake of family. Let me tell you now: They are the invaders! The foreign! Even when our kin road beneath the noble Charlemagne, these vile creatures infiltrated his government, and seized power, bastardized his name! But in all this time, with this blood swirling in our veins, we have never forgotten what makes us who we are: toil and labor! The pursuit of life, property, and enlightenment!
But we are not alone. The proud Briton of the West. The fierce Norman of the coast. The hearty Frank of the Rhine. The clever Basque in the South. The brave Savoyard in the East. They, like we Gauls, suffer beneath the Roman yoke! We are united only by the language we took from our masters! We took it and made it ours! That unites us! But now, we must unite more than our tongues. We must unite our minds! Our hearts! We must take arms! Unite! Stand together against the rot that has destroyed this beautiful land and left it in ruin! Stand as one French People against the Roman gentiles!"
They will run! And we will not relent! They will apologize! And we will not listen! They will beg! And we will show no mercy!
The time is near. Hold fast to your beliefs. To your ideals. There will come tough times. There will come pain, and tribulations as we pursue a free French nation. As we pursue a place free of their corruption. This process will demand much from us. I do not expect as all to be able to pay that cost. But I know we will succeed. We will fight their armies! We will burn their cities! We will crush their spirit! We will win! We will have victory! We will have peace! We will have truth! We will have freedom! We will take this land of ours, and we shall wash away the stain, we shall burn away the vileness! We will do more than merely revolve the wheel of fortune! Let this be the start of this country's purification!
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Part #20: Purity
Part #20: Purity
“None of us are special. The highest king, lowest peasant, the wealthiest merchant, the poorest whore. In the end we are all the same rotting flesh, the same worthless matter. We are not unique, valuable little gems. We are all only ugly stones.”
“With the divide between the French nobility and peasantry widening, harsh winters, and soldiers returning home after living like kings in war, the idea of a fresh start in the frontier was promising. The death of the First Sun King meant the ascension of the Second, with bold ideas for his colonial holdings. Seeing the prosperity of the English, he tried to mimic them, creating large settlement-focused colonies in place of the decentralized trade hubs and hunting grounds that had been promoted by his grandfather…[2]
...Louis XV had found his holdings in the New World in an interesting state of affairs. First and foremost was New Modena, the English penal colony that happened to see a prisoner revolt at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession.[3] When the French government first agreed to annex the territory and allow the prisoners to run things, they expected they would have to lend them aid and funds to help create functional settlements. Instead the arriving officials found a system reestablishing itself after a brief hiatus, a colonial charter and legal constitution presented as soon as the ship docked. Governor François Auberjonois, a legitimized bastard of the Duke of Brittany, signed these documents with little hesitation, as it was made clear to him that everything would be handled, and all he had to do was join the members of the Moot for a pint in the Gilded Chalice every so often.[4]
And so the colony renamed for Saint Denis as Denisia was a place without any inkling of sainthood. The official government capitol was a brothel and tavern, and the wealthy aristocracy that controlled the Moot preferred shadowed deals and off-the-record payments to open government. None of these things were illegal, and while there was a sense of law and order, with binding agreements and courts established to ensure compliance, there was little you couldn’t buy or do in Denisia with enough money. This meant that while the King was happy to take a cut of profits, he was less than pleased with the culture of the colony.[5] Many still migrated, the enticing call of the large city of New Modena itself bringing gamblers and drinkers of all walks of life, but only those escaping something terrible, or those wanting to invest in the sinful industries would actually come to settle, the cost of the plantations ultra allowing for the elite to maintain their status. So at both the King’s encouragement and the general pull of building a new and blessed life, Laurentia, formerly French America, became the fastest growing colony.[6] The fertile Atlantic coast, shared with the Scots, drew fisherman, while adventurers tried to brave the more northern reaches of the interior, and farmers began to build homesteads along the bends of the river for which the colony was named.
Montreál became the first capital, and the new government, rather than the aristocratic oligarchy of Denisia, was built along the totalist arrangement of France, albeit without the divinist underpinnings. The governor was picked from the House of Orleans, in this case Gouverneur Philippe I, the third son of the King’s cousin Duke Philippe II, who took his position and treated it as a proper title, and built for himself a small but grand manor to hold court, choosing to bestow titles of so-called ‘colonial nobility’ to the most prominent and loyal families already in the colonies.[7] The Colonial Marquis of New Bordeaux, for instance, was merely given his title for a being a wealthy man in a tiny town, while the Colonial Duke of Tadoussac was created for being the scion of one of the oldest, but still wealthy, families in French America.
This government was distinctly loyal to the Sun King in Paris, but, in hindsight, this political arrangement made the ability of the colony to separate from France herself rather simple. Which, of course, would be inevitable for some time due to the less than agreeable state of affairs afflicting Paris in the 1760s…[8]
...Louisiana was the third colony that Louis XV would find in his possession. Effectively holding a reduced Portuguese colony, there was concern of the loyalty of the population, but the popularity of the soon-to-be Bourbon monarchy living in Lisbon had helped to make the transition of all the more palatable. French settlers trickled in, but stories of their success helped to embolden others. Regardless, many local officials and towns simply changed the flag that flew and when right back to business as usual.
The more ambitious colonial officials took on French names and surnames, hoping to make their way up by getting familiar with their new crown representatives. And with the leadership advised to staff the administrations with French-speaking locals, such men who took time to learn a second language were rewarded with status and authority. These efforts helped to developed Louisiana’s culture, with a sizable French minority and a largely bilingual Portuguese-mestizo majority today.[9] Unlike Laurentia, no one of royal blood was sent to rule, but instead a council was formed of seven French military men who were rewarded with a large estate alongside their position, to help select and test the locals brought in to administer the colony. This unique arrangement would have a powerful impact on the political history of the colony in the coming years…”
“Madame de Fer[10] once quipped, ‘The English, ruled by Scotsmen, hate the Scots. The Scots, ruled by Englishmen, hate the English.’ The quote refers to the animosity between Scotland and England, later Albion, ruled by Clan Bruce and the House of Stuart respectively. As fitting and pithy a statement as it is, there is far more to the story. The first half is simpler: the House of Stuart was originally Clan Stewart, ruling Scotland after Walter Stewart married Marjorie, daughter of King Robert I, who was from...Clan Bruce. Their son became Robert II, beginning the Clan’s royal status. From there James IV of Scotland married Henry VII’s daughter, allowing his descendants to lay claim to the English throne, culminating in the ascension of James IV & I as King of Scotland, England, and Ireland.[11]
Along the way Stewart became Stuart, as it has remained to this day. However, being born and raised in England, learning English and French but not Scots, and working to play politics with the lords of England in the London Parliament resulted in the conversion of the Stuarts to identifying purely as English, not Scottish. By the end of the reign of Richard IV, to mention the Scottish heritage of the royalty was to forever earn their ire. By the end of the reign of Canute IV, to call the Stuarts Scottish would earn you a calm response that likened the migration of the Angles and Saxons into the isles to the movement of the Clan southward.[12] The ruling House of Albion even today deflects any reference with ease, and some more patriotic Englishmen will likely spit at anyone who would dare compare the monarchy to the ‘filthy Scotchskirts’.
The policies undertaken by Richard IV certainly help to reveal just how this anti-Scottish tradition became so well-established...
...For the Scottish, the explanation admittedly holds greater complication. Charles Bruce, 3rd Earl of Ailesbury, became King of Scotland in 1706, though he would not be recognized until 1713 with the Peace of Copenhagen. Though he was of Clan Bruce, he was, officially, of the so-called ‘English Bruces’. Originally the Earls of Elgin, a Scottish Peerage, they came to become the Earls of Ailesbury, an English Peerage. While of Scottish heritage, the family immediately came to reside in England and, like the Stuarts, spoke primarily English and French, and became prominent in the court of the King. In fact, the 2nd Earl of Ailesbury, and 3rd of Elgin, Thomas, father of Charles, was one of King Charles II Stuart’s trusted allies,[13] though he disagreed with succeeding Duke-regent and King Richard IV greatly. In fact, his disagreements with Richard were great enough to mark him an enemy, hatred spurred on by his Scottish roots and sympathy for the Covenanters.
With his father imprisoned and later dead, Charles Bruce, but a young man, lived in fear. He fled north to Elgin, a now ancestral home, paranoid of being killed, surrounding himself with men his father trusted and with Scotsman who put loyalty to coin and kin above all else, even their King. It was here he fell in with the Covenanters, learned proper Scots, and came to loathe the monarchy, a monarchy that cared little for him once he was far from London, far from being able to meddle in the King’s affairs.[14] It was Charles’ charisma and his fanaticism that earned him his crown, but the fact remained that his mother was fully English. And this is where Madame de Fer’s words become true: he was over half English by blood, was born and raised in England and in the English court, and even spelt his name in the English form, writing ‘Bruce’ over the Scots ‘Brus’ all the way until his coronation...
...In many ways, this history explains many of his actions after becoming King of Scotland. Charles was seemingly determined to become the most Scottish Scot in all of Scotland. For his coronation, he wore a kilt and had for himself a custom tartan made, one that came to be worn explicitly and only by the monarch of Scotland. Known as the Royal Tartan, it was primarily of tyrian purple in hue, with cross-stitchings of red, green, and black, making it expensive and difficult to make.[15] Charles wore it for his kilt and had a cape fashioned with it rather than a plaid, the bottom given a gold thread trim and the top decorated with pine marten fur. Then he grew a beard, thick but kempt, and completed his ensemble with a custom and extragent claymore, a thick two-handed blade that had come out of service in the English military. His portrait made him appear the very image of a Highlander, almost a caricature. And then, one of his major contributions as king was the Cultural Revitalization Act of 1717, which established funds for royal and parliamentary patronage of artists such as Francis Boyle, Donald Clark, and Alistair Bowie, creating beautiful paintings celebrated for years to come. It also funded research of the Pictish Stones, helping to created Pictish sculptures as an artform, utilizing the knots and intricately carved symbols to depict a number of themes, from people to animals to Biblical events. But most impactful was the Act’s creation of Modern Scots, being initially a vague agreement to fund the research of lost aspects of the language, which had more and more become influenced by English. Many rather bitterly noted, years later, that attempts to purge English had not ‘restored’ the language of Scots in anyway, but instead only altered it in new ways. The quick witted Charles supposedly replied back, ‘It is better we make our own language than speak our enemy’s.’
His level of devotion to adopting and bettering the culture of Scotland earned him many friends, even among those who initially doubted him. But some were never able to look past his heritage, and they formed the core of the Jackanapes, embracing the slur hurled at them by the King’s Loyalists, acting as his opposition, taking in many who had no personal issue with Charles, but disagreed with his policies.[16] Notably, Jackanapes and Loyalists often came to blows over the limit of royal power. In Scotland, Parliamentary supremacy was generally agreed upon, with the King able to assert himself when needed. But, fearful of how such an arrangement could result in an English system, Charles himself eventually helped to author the Acts of Governance and Rights in 1719. The Acts established the explicit powers of Parliament, alongside the rights of Scottish citizens. Speech, protest, bearing arms, due process of law were carefully described alongside other rights, such as the protection and supremacy of the Church of Scotland, known as freedom from heresy. The King of Scotland was declared to have a royal prerogative to intervene in government only when he feels an act of Parliament violates the rights of citizens. Beyond that, the King’s signature was only needed for laws pertaining to external affairs of trade and alliance, and of course both the King and Parliament must jointly agree to war…[17]
...And so to conclude this long exposé into the modern histories of Albion and Scotland, having analyzed the ancestry, policies, and personalities of four generations of monarchs for each nation, we can simply say this: the English hate the Scots, and the Scots hate the English. Whomever their monarchs are, and wherever they are from is irrelevant to the conflict between these two peoples.”
“...Which brings us to the beginning of modern scientific thought. But funny enough, the field of human lebenslehre got its first major leap forward from sports. It was the 52nd Annual English Hastilude Tournament. It was the first tournament to require that to compete a fighter must have placed in the top 10 in any 3 other tournaments of the 15 recognized smaller tournaments across the country. In that same year, 1757, the 1st Irish Hastilude Tournament was held, but that’s just me giving you all another useless bit of sports trivia.[18]
Anyways, non-nobles had always been allowed to compete, but in those 51 prior tournaments, no one of common birth had ever become Champion. There had been three bastard champions, but two were legitimized bastards, and the third was still recognized and raised alongside his legitimate siblings. But at the 52nd English, it all changed. The man’s name was Nathan Fletcher. His father was Paul Fletcher, founder of Fletcher & Friends Garments, which began as a small tailory and expanded as the man innovated the idea of the precreated suit.
Now that might sound pretty simple, but it was traditional for a suit to be made custom, unique for each person. Fletcher had the idea to make multiple suits in standard shapes, employing his brothers and friends to help him fill his shop with a number of suits, and opened three shops in London by 1720.[19] They weren’t machine-made, horde-fab[20] suits, people would come in, put them on, see if they liked it, and then Fletcher would modify them to be more custom measurements. But it allowed men of wealth to come in, find colors and pattern they liked, see right then how it looked on them, and then leave that very day with that suit. It made the Fletchers very wealthy, very fast.
To the people of London, it was an inspirational tale, and any one of Fletcher’s many children could have grown to be nationally famous. A number became politicians, while most came to expand their father’s business as the advent of mechanised sewing exploded their business. But Nathan was different. He was the youngest child, born of Fletcher's third wife, whom he married in 1739 when he was 72 and she 32. The family did not approve, and Nathan was an outcast, but was close with his father, mother, and Daniel, his half-brother who was 10 when Nathan was born. When Paul Fletcher died in 1753, Nathan and his mother were practically shut out by their family, aided only by Daniel, who helped Nathan pursue his passion: hastilude. Armor, training, and tourney costs, the Fletcher fortune helped the young man compete and become a skilled fighter. So skilled that in the 52nd English, he was crowned Champion, a title that only be earned by competing in at least three of the five events, and ranking in the top 5, the fighter with the best average rank being champion. If two fighters tie, they duel for the title. Nathan competed in all five events, and placed first in three, the Joust, the Grand Melee, and the Duels, placing third in the Passage of Arms, and second in the Volley. An amazing feat, he tied with the noble Patrick of Limerick, an Irishman, resulting in an English audience cheering Nathan on despite his origins. And Nathan won. He knocked Sir Patrick’s helmet flying off, disarmed him, retrieved the sword and got his submission as Patrick kneeled before him, two swords ready to scissor his head off. Well not really, but placed to make the threat.
Nathan Fletcher was Champion. His own helm had covered his face the whole event, and as he removed it to bask in applause, the cheering crowd barely noticed as the pride of a commoner Champion overrode any other sensation. But as they calmed, a small problem became apparent: Nathan was a Negro.[21]
Now if you recall, we went over the lacking racial consciousness in much of the Albionic Empire outside of the colonies. But in the 18th Century, that changed radically. New colonies in the Caribbean meant a load more plantations, most seized from French and Spanish owners and gifted to officers and lords of Albion. These men made hefty profits from the use of chattel slavery, but there were a number of lords who heavily disapproved of what they called barbaric practices. A minority to be sure, but a vocal one. Vocal enough to scare some planters into worrying that, if not that day, then in a generation their slaves might be taken from them. And that brings us to the Whitmore & Björnson Colonial Exposé. Elliot Whitmore was an English naval officer gifted a plantation for his service, while Sven Björnson was a Swedish merchant that had been buying up plantations in the former Danish Caribbean, the two becoming friends after a number of business agreements. Both had a vested interest to preserve total slavery. They gathered what they called their ‘best and brightest’ slaves. As much as we can tell, while certainly some of the strongest specimens were brought, many were imbecilic[22] or suffering from cerebral damage, and others still had no grasp of English and/or were under threat not to speak for fear of beatings. With these slaves, this Exposé claimed to give an accurate representation of the ‘African race within modern society’. Audiences could speak with, touch, and command the slaves, who appeared dimwitted and loyal. While most were solemn or apathetic, a few slaves enjoyed the awe of the crowd at their feats of strength, and enjoyed performing.[23]
Unfortunately that joy was mistaken for a joy of servitude. An Albionic lord actually wrote this: ‘Once I, having never seen a man darker than a Spaniard, believed the Negro akin to pagan Germans; fully capable of society, but lacking the light of Christendom. I have heard of Negro citizens suffering and struggling to ascend to any respectable position. I thought this merely a struggle of cultural adaptation. But now, having had the ability to meet a true Negro, I see it is a case of a creature forced out of its natural state. The Negro desires servitude, in Africa to harsh pagan gods, and in Christian society to the mentally superior European peoples. I have seen it, in their joyful eyes and dim expressions, a look so familiar to me I could not place it until I returned home and saw it in my loyal fetchhound.’[24]
Now this didn’t change any laws to strip rights from free Negros, but it did create a lasting negative view of them in Albion and Europe as stories and even drawings circulated out of London, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin, and York, the 5 cities the Exposé visited. Certainly the view was worse than in the Albionic America. Back to Nathan Fletcher, compounding the issue was that his mother had been born to freed slaves that left the English Caribbean. The victory was immediately controversial, and the more racially biased members of the Tournament Directors considered arguing for some form of disqualification, but could find no reason to do so. King Canute, who was in attendance, was also consulted. He held an especially low opinion of Negros, likely in large part to a near poisoning by slaves gifted to him from Carolina. However, he, and his son Edmund, the Prince of Wales, ruled that the man was freeborn and an Albionic citizen. He had won fairly, and deserved his title. Canute added that he was sure this was only an anomaly, likely owed to his half-English heritage, and that letting the victory pass would help to keep Negros throughout his empire from growing rebellious.[25] Prince Edmund added that it would do the same for commoners, but that if Nathan ever chose to defend his title, and succeed, it may cause discomfort for the nobility, some of whom were already preparing to boycott the Tournament.
So Nathan Fletcher was allowed to become Champion, and then was knighted Sir Nathan Fletcher, known far and wide as the Black Knight of London.[26] He would win two more Tournaments before an injury in the last forced his retirement, and he created the Black Knights Hastilude Academy, a place for common and noble boys to train in hastiludes. But both of those victories were as a noble, helping cement the idea that being common didn’t hold you back, but rising to nobility was always the goal. Nobles were people who had made it, not people to envy or hate, forever changing the social structure of Albion. And statues of Nathan cropped up in every major Negro town in Albionic America, giving them hope that even in Albion itself they could succeed.
Now I see a lot of curious faces. ‘That was a nice story Professor Linden, but what did all that have to do with lebenslehre?’ Well, admittedly a lot of that was fluff and just fun facts that I wanted share. My other degree is in history. But there is a reason the story matters. A number of lords firmly believed the entire affair was somehow inherently wrong. But they couldn’t articulate why. For instance, while a Negro by their definition, Nathan appeared every bit as mentally capable as his fellows. They realized that they wanted proof, scientific, rational proof of the inferiority of Negros. The first idea was to approach the Newtonians, but that was scrapped when they instead heard the story of Erwin Lehnsherr. A Württembergese scientist, he emigrated to Sweden and studied at the University of Lund under Carl Nilson. Nilson had heavy influences on his pupil, having been the author of Species Plantarum, which is today a sort of founding document for the modern Lebenslehre sub-school of Florology.[27] He had an unfinished and unpublished work entitled Species Animalium, itself the result of his failure to publish an encyclopedia on both plants and animals, a lack of funds hindering his expeditions. With the ability to more easily import exotic plants for study over animals, Nilson focused on them, admittedly his preferred topic, and became renowned for it. He never forgot about his greater plans, though, and made a number of trips and requested numerous specimens to put into Animalium. However, Nilson would die before his work was complete, suffering a heart attack in 1753. But in the years prior to that, he took Lehnsherr with him on those trips, and with his passing, the pupil became a master. He made several more journeys before he published Species Mundi in early 1757, just a few months prior to the Tournament. It took a new, expanded edition of Plantarum and added in the entirety of Animalium that he had completed.
Ambitious as the man was, he credited his teacher as a fellow author, but put himself as the more prominent contributor. We can never know how much work he actually did, but some accuse of Lehnsherr of doing practically nothing at all. One major contribution, at least culturally, is that he gave lebenslehre its name, meaning the doctrine or science of Life. Furthermore, he created modern animal taxonomy but translating Nilson’s Latin names into Greek, a language he preferred and to make it easier to see a difference between Florology and Faunology. And yet he didn’t stop there, but also gave everything, from plants to animals, German-based names, what we know today as layman taxonomy, merely a translation of the Latin or Greek into a modern language, acting as a stepping stone between the scholarly name and the common name of any species.[28] Lehnsherr believed heavily in ensuring that all sciences were accessible to everyone, and his book saw great acclaim. It also made German the language of lebenslehre for some time, before its wider acceptance saw laymen’s names be properly translated into the language of the reader.
Lehnsherr was already preparing what would become his second edition when he was contacted by a group of English lords, who wanted to fund research into what they called the ‘many discrepancies between the species we call the races of Man.’ Lehnsherr was intrigued, having had to make many defenses of his grouping of apes and humans together in the group Anthropomorpha[29]; backers willing to throw money at an even greater examination of humans as a species seemed almost too good to be true. And in a sense it was, since he quickly realized all they wanted was proof of the inferiority of Africans. Still, they had the funds and he had the passion. So he left in Autumn on an over three year voyage. He traveled to the Mediterranean coast of Africa and the Near East, he went to trade posts that barely pierced the dense African thicket, he even visited the Dutch Republic. With them he saw India and much of the Orient, before at last seeing South America and the Caribbean. At last he went to North America, visiting Virginia and Carolina, before finishing in New England. That’s a lot of places for only three years, and I brushed over many stops. But ahead of him were messages to help ensure that living and dead specimens of varying races were ready for him to examine.
He returned to Europe with a rough manuscript of what would become his most famed work: The Races of Man. A year would be spent until it was published, during a time of increasing chaos in 1761,[30] but it was a controversial book, one that was printed and reprinted in numerous languages and discussed everywhere. It’s theories were provocative, groundbreaking in many respects. Ironically, it did not achieve what its backers wanted, but they foolishly approved the funds to aid in printing and sale before reading it. This quote from the opening passages of the book should help illuminate why they regretted this: ‘The Races of Man, I have discovered, a not many species as some believe. We are one. We are all one species, sharing the same branch on the tree of life, all made by God. God made our loyal hounds, it was our choice of breeding and the conditions of varying environments that resulted in the numerous breeds we know today. And the same ideas apply to Man. We are not many races. We are many breeds, surviving in a variety of conditions as we spread across the Earth, selectively choosing our wives to create the distinct groups we now know, deviating from the unified form we once had when we were created in our natural habitat of Eden. Were we to take the concept of breeding to all of mankind, we very well could see greater variation. Some breeds today are stronger, other more intelligent, and others more suited for intricate crafts. But we are all one species, like any other animal.’
That passage has become infamous for inspiring three separate movements in human lebenslehre: Racial Artificing, Resynthesis, and Equalization.”[31]
“The first attack predictably came from the New English. Primrose Province existed not far from the Finger Lakes, and the Rangers turned the small town of Heraldston into the main headquarters, a status that would persist for the rest of the war and afterwards. To this day it is home to one of the largest military land forts near the American Atlantic Coast.
From Heraldston, the 8th King’s Own Ranger Division were sent to scout out enemy forces, killing small hunting parties and taking their garbs to better maintain anonymity. But while their mission was purely one of reconnaissance, the 8th discovered a troubling sight: an envoy of French settlers erecting a Catholic church in a Hohdeno village. For many years the novan confederation had resisted attempts at conversion, but if the French were being let in, it meant the tribes were likely trying to better relations, perhaps draw in Laurentia into the conflict. An attack on the northern frontier by the French, the western by the Hohdeno, and the southern by the Marylanders would be disastrous for New England.
After a great deal of debate, the 8th attacked. But not with rifles and bayonets. Instead, they charged with axes and arrows, waiting for nightfall. The local defenders barely had time to react before the church, and the Frenchman meeting within it, were attacked. As clearly Hohdeno arrows rained down on there and fire was set to their Church, a novan Ranger shouted to them in broken French that they had fallen for the Hohdeno ‘trap’ and that they and every other mission sent into the confederation would be quietly killed.
Rightfully terrified, the French ran, all but three picked off by arrows. They were long gone before the village’s defender had realized what exactly was happening. The ensuing skirmish would result in a retreat for the 8th, but the damage was done: the Laurentian colonial government, acting under order from Paris to ensure the colony’s success by any means, mobilized its militias and informed New England that while they were not allies, they now shared a common foe in the treacherous Hohdeno Confederation.
Once debriefed, the 8th Division would spare no details, but it was only years later that the events of the attack were revealed to the general public, to the outrage of Laurentians. Having not lost a man despite such a bold and risky move, the men of the ‘Jammy 8th’ were treated as heroes. When offered to hold the safe posting of reinforcing the Heraldston garrison, they declined, and were redeployed back to the West, where the 3rd and 4th Rangers were presenting beginning a painful campaign to pierce through the Hohdeno…
...Baltimore-native General Joseph James Johanson II had received his position only two days prior to the battle that would make him and his family one of the most important in the URN’s history. Aware of the large New English militia marching across the Allegheny Riverlands to force Maryland’s surrender, Johanson was determined to the meet them head on. With time on his side, he rallied the 3rd New Jersey Volunteer Militias to abandon their set posts and join his army, comprised of the 4th, 7th, and 9th Maryland Regiment of the Foot, one regiment of mixed novan forces primarily from the Lenape tribe, and a small detachment known as the Khalan Volunteers, a group sent by the growing settlement of al-Khalas to do their part in the war effort, the Muslim town’s first Maryland-born generation coming into age.
This eclectic force moved into northern New Jersey and quickly erected Fort Resistance, a small, ramshackle installation that had the sole purpose of making Johanson’s army harder to drive back. The general fully expected that his own forces would eventually lose and be forced to fall back, but General Arthur B. Connor was waiting near the Chesapeake, training up a slightly larger force through Prussian-inspired drills. If Johanson could take down a number of Puritan soldiers, “blunt the tip of their spear,” in his words, Connor’s army would then have a good chance of defeating them. If losses were few enough, Johanson believed his army might even swing around to reinforce Connor with an attack to the rear. With a commander so open that the army was a sacrificial force, desertion was a keen fear, but Johanson used it to his advantage, as once within the Fort, he rallied the soldiers with delusions that the scouts had informed him that the New English would be ill-prepared to take on the fortification. “All who wish to survive, need only fight to keep these walls standing,” he had said.
In either case, the battle was not one he actually expected to win. The approaching Puritans were composed of 4 full regiments, dwarfing the 5 and a half ‘colonial’ regiments, which were anywhere from half to two-thirds the size. Johanson was still determined not to retreat until he had crushed half of them. He had several novans scale trees and hide in them, arrows knocked, while colonial troops covered themselves in leaves and mud and waited to jump up, scattered along the path to the fort.[32] The rest waited in more traditional circumstances, manning the walls and awaiting a breach of the gate. Lastly, however, was Old Gristle. Old Gristle was a cannon, aged and in poor condition found when the army began its march from the Chesapeake, likely thrown off the deck of a ship and washed ashore. It was loaded with 1 shot, and a few more cannonballs had been found on the shore with it. With a crack at its tip, rust, and barnacles, the soldiers were unsure when Johanson made the call to haul the thing with him.
But he was adamant they take every advantage, and saw the cannon as a sort of blessing. The long-fuse was cut and rationed into three short-fuses, and an attempt at cleaning was made. Nicknamed by the men, Old Gristle sat just inside the door of the fort. Lieutenant Walter Kent manned it, being a former sailor before becoming an aged colonist. Even he was dubious, afraid the cannon would explode on them, but he remained waiting for Johanson’s order to fire. Novan bird calls through the trees told them that the Puritans, led by General Imshael Nelson, was coming. Marching in proper formation, clad in white uniforms accented by red, the militia had all the trappings of a proper, European military, an effort the government in Boston had gone to great lengths and great costs to achieve, and they were equipped with some of the best rifles that could be bought — meaning, of course, purchased for cheap illegally from the Dutch and Danes in New York.
A Spanish innovation, the new paper housings, or ‘papelistas,’ were used to hold shot, powder, and batteur cap in one case, burned up after use. While they would eventually be usurped by proper metal housings, the debate raged for some time between the papelists and ‘metallicos’, metal casings that which had to be removed or ejected.[33] A few papelista rifles were in Johanson’s possession, and he had these men at the gates, but others were still equipped with older weapons, hunting rifles and familial sabers. Between that and novan arrows, odds remained slim. But soon Nelson was getting nearer and nearer. Johanson made the call for the furthest novan scouts to war. The forest was dense there, and only clear path of retreat for the New English would be from where they came. So it was when the army was actually in sight, that he gave the order for the novans to fire, sending arrows through skulls and body, while the hidden Marylanders began taking wild shots. Nelson gave the call to arms immediately, and soldiers charged ahead to the fort, unable to properly fight those hiding in the brush. Johanson’s soldiers fired volleys from the fortifications, falling as deadly accurate New English riflemen picked them off the ramparts. But a sizeable dent in the New English force was initially made before they began to hammer at the doors, General Nelson believing that a simple breach and swift surrender was the best solution.
At their general’s orders, two soldiers within the fort ran to the gate and shoved the barricading bar aside. The doors quite suddenly flung open. But the victorious cheer of the Purtians was ended rapidly as Lieutenant Kent fired Old Gristle into the clumped horde of troops. The cannonball cracked as it was shot, sending pieces of metal in a spray. The bloody devastation shocked the attackers, enough that Old Gristle was already getting reloaded. The ball was loaded, and rocks, sticks, and even the chains used for hauling the cannon were shoved inside, and when fired the blast again caused mayhem. Much didn’t even hit the New English directly, but the sounds and the bits that did were what mattered. The third shot was almost loaded when the New English properly responded, killing the loader, forcing Lieutenant Kent to take cover behind the cannon itself. In the fighting, a small firepit used for cooking was kicked, sending hot coals between the firing ranks. Then, in another act of chance, a water pouch burst. The small burst of steam blinded the New English, and Kent took his chance. He finished the loading and then behind the cannon again to hide from gunfire as conflict resumed, he shoved Old Gristle forward. But it seemed the New English would take the day before they could repelled.
So Kent lit the short fuse and ran, hoping to create an opening for a retreat. Instead, his predictions were accurate about the aged cannon. It exploded, the metal warping, shards of cannon, rock, and shot flying around, just as the New English properly surged back into the fort. Their bodies absorbed the blast, and suddenly there was a shift. Those in the rear, once again seeing their comrades blown to pieces, attempted to flee. And it was the scream of these deserters that revealed to General Nelson and his men that the novan scouts told not to attack, and those on the path, had come up from the rear, moving in on the New English troops only now attempting to encircle the fort. Sandwiched between these forces and the now empowered men in the fort, the New English army broke. Despite their still larger size, fancy uniforms, and advanced weaponry, these were not experienced soldiers, but militiamen, told to expect an easy, overwhelming victory. So they ran, Nelson eventually calling for a proper retreat to those who tried to stay, just before he was killed by a stray round.
The Battle of Fort Resistance, miraculously, had been won by Maryland and Her allies…”
“None of us are special. The highest king, lowest peasant, the wealthiest merchant, the poorest whore. In the end we are all the same rotting flesh, the same worthless matter. We are not unique, valuable little gems. We are all only ugly stones.”
- Tor Ström, Analects of Dirt[1]
—|—
“With the divide between the French nobility and peasantry widening, harsh winters, and soldiers returning home after living like kings in war, the idea of a fresh start in the frontier was promising. The death of the First Sun King meant the ascension of the Second, with bold ideas for his colonial holdings. Seeing the prosperity of the English, he tried to mimic them, creating large settlement-focused colonies in place of the decentralized trade hubs and hunting grounds that had been promoted by his grandfather…[2]
...Louis XV had found his holdings in the New World in an interesting state of affairs. First and foremost was New Modena, the English penal colony that happened to see a prisoner revolt at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession.[3] When the French government first agreed to annex the territory and allow the prisoners to run things, they expected they would have to lend them aid and funds to help create functional settlements. Instead the arriving officials found a system reestablishing itself after a brief hiatus, a colonial charter and legal constitution presented as soon as the ship docked. Governor François Auberjonois, a legitimized bastard of the Duke of Brittany, signed these documents with little hesitation, as it was made clear to him that everything would be handled, and all he had to do was join the members of the Moot for a pint in the Gilded Chalice every so often.[4]
And so the colony renamed for Saint Denis as Denisia was a place without any inkling of sainthood. The official government capitol was a brothel and tavern, and the wealthy aristocracy that controlled the Moot preferred shadowed deals and off-the-record payments to open government. None of these things were illegal, and while there was a sense of law and order, with binding agreements and courts established to ensure compliance, there was little you couldn’t buy or do in Denisia with enough money. This meant that while the King was happy to take a cut of profits, he was less than pleased with the culture of the colony.[5] Many still migrated, the enticing call of the large city of New Modena itself bringing gamblers and drinkers of all walks of life, but only those escaping something terrible, or those wanting to invest in the sinful industries would actually come to settle, the cost of the plantations ultra allowing for the elite to maintain their status. So at both the King’s encouragement and the general pull of building a new and blessed life, Laurentia, formerly French America, became the fastest growing colony.[6] The fertile Atlantic coast, shared with the Scots, drew fisherman, while adventurers tried to brave the more northern reaches of the interior, and farmers began to build homesteads along the bends of the river for which the colony was named.
Montreál became the first capital, and the new government, rather than the aristocratic oligarchy of Denisia, was built along the totalist arrangement of France, albeit without the divinist underpinnings. The governor was picked from the House of Orleans, in this case Gouverneur Philippe I, the third son of the King’s cousin Duke Philippe II, who took his position and treated it as a proper title, and built for himself a small but grand manor to hold court, choosing to bestow titles of so-called ‘colonial nobility’ to the most prominent and loyal families already in the colonies.[7] The Colonial Marquis of New Bordeaux, for instance, was merely given his title for a being a wealthy man in a tiny town, while the Colonial Duke of Tadoussac was created for being the scion of one of the oldest, but still wealthy, families in French America.
This government was distinctly loyal to the Sun King in Paris, but, in hindsight, this political arrangement made the ability of the colony to separate from France herself rather simple. Which, of course, would be inevitable for some time due to the less than agreeable state of affairs afflicting Paris in the 1760s…[8]
...Louisiana was the third colony that Louis XV would find in his possession. Effectively holding a reduced Portuguese colony, there was concern of the loyalty of the population, but the popularity of the soon-to-be Bourbon monarchy living in Lisbon had helped to make the transition of all the more palatable. French settlers trickled in, but stories of their success helped to embolden others. Regardless, many local officials and towns simply changed the flag that flew and when right back to business as usual.
The more ambitious colonial officials took on French names and surnames, hoping to make their way up by getting familiar with their new crown representatives. And with the leadership advised to staff the administrations with French-speaking locals, such men who took time to learn a second language were rewarded with status and authority. These efforts helped to developed Louisiana’s culture, with a sizable French minority and a largely bilingual Portuguese-mestizo majority today.[9] Unlike Laurentia, no one of royal blood was sent to rule, but instead a council was formed of seven French military men who were rewarded with a large estate alongside their position, to help select and test the locals brought in to administer the colony. This unique arrangement would have a powerful impact on the political history of the colony in the coming years…”
- Nouvelle-France by Alexei P. Gorbachev
[1] This man and his is going to be very… influential as we move forward
[2] In OTL, the French only began colonization efforts with the founding of New Orleans. Even then, the city was the only major settlement with such goals for many years.
[3] If we all recall, Anglican radicals and what we would call Whigs were sent here, wedged between loyalist Carolina and Spanish Florida. It is with great irony that they now serve the Catholic King of France.
[4] Even with a formal charter recognizing the Moot as in control, the people of Denisia still prefer a more ‘informal’ government.
[5] His issues at home and the general situation in Denisia means he can’t do much to really change it.
[6] The Denisians don’t mind. The may speak Court French, but in the end the fewer Frenchman on their shores, the better.
[7] These hold no legal authority outside of Laurentia, and really serve more to bribe locals into managing affairs for the government.
[8] Foreshadowing
[9] Regardless of how you slice it, it’s too late to really see a majority Francophone Brazil. Bilingual and French dominated, however, is possible.
[2] In OTL, the French only began colonization efforts with the founding of New Orleans. Even then, the city was the only major settlement with such goals for many years.
[3] If we all recall, Anglican radicals and what we would call Whigs were sent here, wedged between loyalist Carolina and Spanish Florida. It is with great irony that they now serve the Catholic King of France.
[4] Even with a formal charter recognizing the Moot as in control, the people of Denisia still prefer a more ‘informal’ government.
[5] His issues at home and the general situation in Denisia means he can’t do much to really change it.
[6] The Denisians don’t mind. The may speak Court French, but in the end the fewer Frenchman on their shores, the better.
[7] These hold no legal authority outside of Laurentia, and really serve more to bribe locals into managing affairs for the government.
[8] Foreshadowing
[9] Regardless of how you slice it, it’s too late to really see a majority Francophone Brazil. Bilingual and French dominated, however, is possible.
“Madame de Fer[10] once quipped, ‘The English, ruled by Scotsmen, hate the Scots. The Scots, ruled by Englishmen, hate the English.’ The quote refers to the animosity between Scotland and England, later Albion, ruled by Clan Bruce and the House of Stuart respectively. As fitting and pithy a statement as it is, there is far more to the story. The first half is simpler: the House of Stuart was originally Clan Stewart, ruling Scotland after Walter Stewart married Marjorie, daughter of King Robert I, who was from...Clan Bruce. Their son became Robert II, beginning the Clan’s royal status. From there James IV of Scotland married Henry VII’s daughter, allowing his descendants to lay claim to the English throne, culminating in the ascension of James IV & I as King of Scotland, England, and Ireland.[11]
Along the way Stewart became Stuart, as it has remained to this day. However, being born and raised in England, learning English and French but not Scots, and working to play politics with the lords of England in the London Parliament resulted in the conversion of the Stuarts to identifying purely as English, not Scottish. By the end of the reign of Richard IV, to mention the Scottish heritage of the royalty was to forever earn their ire. By the end of the reign of Canute IV, to call the Stuarts Scottish would earn you a calm response that likened the migration of the Angles and Saxons into the isles to the movement of the Clan southward.[12] The ruling House of Albion even today deflects any reference with ease, and some more patriotic Englishmen will likely spit at anyone who would dare compare the monarchy to the ‘filthy Scotchskirts’.
The policies undertaken by Richard IV certainly help to reveal just how this anti-Scottish tradition became so well-established...
...For the Scottish, the explanation admittedly holds greater complication. Charles Bruce, 3rd Earl of Ailesbury, became King of Scotland in 1706, though he would not be recognized until 1713 with the Peace of Copenhagen. Though he was of Clan Bruce, he was, officially, of the so-called ‘English Bruces’. Originally the Earls of Elgin, a Scottish Peerage, they came to become the Earls of Ailesbury, an English Peerage. While of Scottish heritage, the family immediately came to reside in England and, like the Stuarts, spoke primarily English and French, and became prominent in the court of the King. In fact, the 2nd Earl of Ailesbury, and 3rd of Elgin, Thomas, father of Charles, was one of King Charles II Stuart’s trusted allies,[13] though he disagreed with succeeding Duke-regent and King Richard IV greatly. In fact, his disagreements with Richard were great enough to mark him an enemy, hatred spurred on by his Scottish roots and sympathy for the Covenanters.
With his father imprisoned and later dead, Charles Bruce, but a young man, lived in fear. He fled north to Elgin, a now ancestral home, paranoid of being killed, surrounding himself with men his father trusted and with Scotsman who put loyalty to coin and kin above all else, even their King. It was here he fell in with the Covenanters, learned proper Scots, and came to loathe the monarchy, a monarchy that cared little for him once he was far from London, far from being able to meddle in the King’s affairs.[14] It was Charles’ charisma and his fanaticism that earned him his crown, but the fact remained that his mother was fully English. And this is where Madame de Fer’s words become true: he was over half English by blood, was born and raised in England and in the English court, and even spelt his name in the English form, writing ‘Bruce’ over the Scots ‘Brus’ all the way until his coronation...
...In many ways, this history explains many of his actions after becoming King of Scotland. Charles was seemingly determined to become the most Scottish Scot in all of Scotland. For his coronation, he wore a kilt and had for himself a custom tartan made, one that came to be worn explicitly and only by the monarch of Scotland. Known as the Royal Tartan, it was primarily of tyrian purple in hue, with cross-stitchings of red, green, and black, making it expensive and difficult to make.[15] Charles wore it for his kilt and had a cape fashioned with it rather than a plaid, the bottom given a gold thread trim and the top decorated with pine marten fur. Then he grew a beard, thick but kempt, and completed his ensemble with a custom and extragent claymore, a thick two-handed blade that had come out of service in the English military. His portrait made him appear the very image of a Highlander, almost a caricature. And then, one of his major contributions as king was the Cultural Revitalization Act of 1717, which established funds for royal and parliamentary patronage of artists such as Francis Boyle, Donald Clark, and Alistair Bowie, creating beautiful paintings celebrated for years to come. It also funded research of the Pictish Stones, helping to created Pictish sculptures as an artform, utilizing the knots and intricately carved symbols to depict a number of themes, from people to animals to Biblical events. But most impactful was the Act’s creation of Modern Scots, being initially a vague agreement to fund the research of lost aspects of the language, which had more and more become influenced by English. Many rather bitterly noted, years later, that attempts to purge English had not ‘restored’ the language of Scots in anyway, but instead only altered it in new ways. The quick witted Charles supposedly replied back, ‘It is better we make our own language than speak our enemy’s.’
His level of devotion to adopting and bettering the culture of Scotland earned him many friends, even among those who initially doubted him. But some were never able to look past his heritage, and they formed the core of the Jackanapes, embracing the slur hurled at them by the King’s Loyalists, acting as his opposition, taking in many who had no personal issue with Charles, but disagreed with his policies.[16] Notably, Jackanapes and Loyalists often came to blows over the limit of royal power. In Scotland, Parliamentary supremacy was generally agreed upon, with the King able to assert himself when needed. But, fearful of how such an arrangement could result in an English system, Charles himself eventually helped to author the Acts of Governance and Rights in 1719. The Acts established the explicit powers of Parliament, alongside the rights of Scottish citizens. Speech, protest, bearing arms, due process of law were carefully described alongside other rights, such as the protection and supremacy of the Church of Scotland, known as freedom from heresy. The King of Scotland was declared to have a royal prerogative to intervene in government only when he feels an act of Parliament violates the rights of citizens. Beyond that, the King’s signature was only needed for laws pertaining to external affairs of trade and alliance, and of course both the King and Parliament must jointly agree to war…[17]
...And so to conclude this long exposé into the modern histories of Albion and Scotland, having analyzed the ancestry, policies, and personalities of four generations of monarchs for each nation, we can simply say this: the English hate the Scots, and the Scots hate the English. Whomever their monarchs are, and wherever they are from is irrelevant to the conflict between these two peoples.”
- Britannia, Divided by Jonathan Parker & Louise Kleiner
[10] TTL’s Voltaire, as the man in question died before he became too prominent. Madame de Fer is the pen name of Emilie du Chatelet ITTL.
[11] This is all just actual history. Enjoy the lesson!
[12] “Now, my good sir, it would indeed be lunacy to refer to England and her people as Germans, would it not? Quite right, it would! And as such, to refer to His Majesty as a Scot is in the same vein of folly, you see? Yes, yes, I am sure you do.”
[13] Again, right up to this point this is just actual history.
[14] This concept was taken from Scottish-descended peers who moved back to Scotland after the Civil War and after the Acts of Union.
[15] Clan-affiliated tartans are a more modern concept, not developed until the Victorian Era. Here it will remain regional, cultural, and by preference if not a restricted tartan, like the Royal Tartan described.
[16] These Scots sure are a contentious people…
[17] While not identical, this is very similar to the system established by William & Mary in England, and the basis of the constitutional monarchy as we know it. England/Albion is more absolutist, with the King supreme to Parliament, and acting not just to intervene for the common good, but openly to ensure his own agenda.
[11] This is all just actual history. Enjoy the lesson!
[12] “Now, my good sir, it would indeed be lunacy to refer to England and her people as Germans, would it not? Quite right, it would! And as such, to refer to His Majesty as a Scot is in the same vein of folly, you see? Yes, yes, I am sure you do.”
[13] Again, right up to this point this is just actual history.
[14] This concept was taken from Scottish-descended peers who moved back to Scotland after the Civil War and after the Acts of Union.
[15] Clan-affiliated tartans are a more modern concept, not developed until the Victorian Era. Here it will remain regional, cultural, and by preference if not a restricted tartan, like the Royal Tartan described.
[16] These Scots sure are a contentious people…
[17] While not identical, this is very similar to the system established by William & Mary in England, and the basis of the constitutional monarchy as we know it. England/Albion is more absolutist, with the King supreme to Parliament, and acting not just to intervene for the common good, but openly to ensure his own agenda.
“...Which brings us to the beginning of modern scientific thought. But funny enough, the field of human lebenslehre got its first major leap forward from sports. It was the 52nd Annual English Hastilude Tournament. It was the first tournament to require that to compete a fighter must have placed in the top 10 in any 3 other tournaments of the 15 recognized smaller tournaments across the country. In that same year, 1757, the 1st Irish Hastilude Tournament was held, but that’s just me giving you all another useless bit of sports trivia.[18]
Anyways, non-nobles had always been allowed to compete, but in those 51 prior tournaments, no one of common birth had ever become Champion. There had been three bastard champions, but two were legitimized bastards, and the third was still recognized and raised alongside his legitimate siblings. But at the 52nd English, it all changed. The man’s name was Nathan Fletcher. His father was Paul Fletcher, founder of Fletcher & Friends Garments, which began as a small tailory and expanded as the man innovated the idea of the precreated suit.
Now that might sound pretty simple, but it was traditional for a suit to be made custom, unique for each person. Fletcher had the idea to make multiple suits in standard shapes, employing his brothers and friends to help him fill his shop with a number of suits, and opened three shops in London by 1720.[19] They weren’t machine-made, horde-fab[20] suits, people would come in, put them on, see if they liked it, and then Fletcher would modify them to be more custom measurements. But it allowed men of wealth to come in, find colors and pattern they liked, see right then how it looked on them, and then leave that very day with that suit. It made the Fletchers very wealthy, very fast.
To the people of London, it was an inspirational tale, and any one of Fletcher’s many children could have grown to be nationally famous. A number became politicians, while most came to expand their father’s business as the advent of mechanised sewing exploded their business. But Nathan was different. He was the youngest child, born of Fletcher's third wife, whom he married in 1739 when he was 72 and she 32. The family did not approve, and Nathan was an outcast, but was close with his father, mother, and Daniel, his half-brother who was 10 when Nathan was born. When Paul Fletcher died in 1753, Nathan and his mother were practically shut out by their family, aided only by Daniel, who helped Nathan pursue his passion: hastilude. Armor, training, and tourney costs, the Fletcher fortune helped the young man compete and become a skilled fighter. So skilled that in the 52nd English, he was crowned Champion, a title that only be earned by competing in at least three of the five events, and ranking in the top 5, the fighter with the best average rank being champion. If two fighters tie, they duel for the title. Nathan competed in all five events, and placed first in three, the Joust, the Grand Melee, and the Duels, placing third in the Passage of Arms, and second in the Volley. An amazing feat, he tied with the noble Patrick of Limerick, an Irishman, resulting in an English audience cheering Nathan on despite his origins. And Nathan won. He knocked Sir Patrick’s helmet flying off, disarmed him, retrieved the sword and got his submission as Patrick kneeled before him, two swords ready to scissor his head off. Well not really, but placed to make the threat.
Nathan Fletcher was Champion. His own helm had covered his face the whole event, and as he removed it to bask in applause, the cheering crowd barely noticed as the pride of a commoner Champion overrode any other sensation. But as they calmed, a small problem became apparent: Nathan was a Negro.[21]
Now if you recall, we went over the lacking racial consciousness in much of the Albionic Empire outside of the colonies. But in the 18th Century, that changed radically. New colonies in the Caribbean meant a load more plantations, most seized from French and Spanish owners and gifted to officers and lords of Albion. These men made hefty profits from the use of chattel slavery, but there were a number of lords who heavily disapproved of what they called barbaric practices. A minority to be sure, but a vocal one. Vocal enough to scare some planters into worrying that, if not that day, then in a generation their slaves might be taken from them. And that brings us to the Whitmore & Björnson Colonial Exposé. Elliot Whitmore was an English naval officer gifted a plantation for his service, while Sven Björnson was a Swedish merchant that had been buying up plantations in the former Danish Caribbean, the two becoming friends after a number of business agreements. Both had a vested interest to preserve total slavery. They gathered what they called their ‘best and brightest’ slaves. As much as we can tell, while certainly some of the strongest specimens were brought, many were imbecilic[22] or suffering from cerebral damage, and others still had no grasp of English and/or were under threat not to speak for fear of beatings. With these slaves, this Exposé claimed to give an accurate representation of the ‘African race within modern society’. Audiences could speak with, touch, and command the slaves, who appeared dimwitted and loyal. While most were solemn or apathetic, a few slaves enjoyed the awe of the crowd at their feats of strength, and enjoyed performing.[23]
Unfortunately that joy was mistaken for a joy of servitude. An Albionic lord actually wrote this: ‘Once I, having never seen a man darker than a Spaniard, believed the Negro akin to pagan Germans; fully capable of society, but lacking the light of Christendom. I have heard of Negro citizens suffering and struggling to ascend to any respectable position. I thought this merely a struggle of cultural adaptation. But now, having had the ability to meet a true Negro, I see it is a case of a creature forced out of its natural state. The Negro desires servitude, in Africa to harsh pagan gods, and in Christian society to the mentally superior European peoples. I have seen it, in their joyful eyes and dim expressions, a look so familiar to me I could not place it until I returned home and saw it in my loyal fetchhound.’[24]
Now this didn’t change any laws to strip rights from free Negros, but it did create a lasting negative view of them in Albion and Europe as stories and even drawings circulated out of London, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin, and York, the 5 cities the Exposé visited. Certainly the view was worse than in the Albionic America. Back to Nathan Fletcher, compounding the issue was that his mother had been born to freed slaves that left the English Caribbean. The victory was immediately controversial, and the more racially biased members of the Tournament Directors considered arguing for some form of disqualification, but could find no reason to do so. King Canute, who was in attendance, was also consulted. He held an especially low opinion of Negros, likely in large part to a near poisoning by slaves gifted to him from Carolina. However, he, and his son Edmund, the Prince of Wales, ruled that the man was freeborn and an Albionic citizen. He had won fairly, and deserved his title. Canute added that he was sure this was only an anomaly, likely owed to his half-English heritage, and that letting the victory pass would help to keep Negros throughout his empire from growing rebellious.[25] Prince Edmund added that it would do the same for commoners, but that if Nathan ever chose to defend his title, and succeed, it may cause discomfort for the nobility, some of whom were already preparing to boycott the Tournament.
So Nathan Fletcher was allowed to become Champion, and then was knighted Sir Nathan Fletcher, known far and wide as the Black Knight of London.[26] He would win two more Tournaments before an injury in the last forced his retirement, and he created the Black Knights Hastilude Academy, a place for common and noble boys to train in hastiludes. But both of those victories were as a noble, helping cement the idea that being common didn’t hold you back, but rising to nobility was always the goal. Nobles were people who had made it, not people to envy or hate, forever changing the social structure of Albion. And statues of Nathan cropped up in every major Negro town in Albionic America, giving them hope that even in Albion itself they could succeed.
Now I see a lot of curious faces. ‘That was a nice story Professor Linden, but what did all that have to do with lebenslehre?’ Well, admittedly a lot of that was fluff and just fun facts that I wanted share. My other degree is in history. But there is a reason the story matters. A number of lords firmly believed the entire affair was somehow inherently wrong. But they couldn’t articulate why. For instance, while a Negro by their definition, Nathan appeared every bit as mentally capable as his fellows. They realized that they wanted proof, scientific, rational proof of the inferiority of Negros. The first idea was to approach the Newtonians, but that was scrapped when they instead heard the story of Erwin Lehnsherr. A Württembergese scientist, he emigrated to Sweden and studied at the University of Lund under Carl Nilson. Nilson had heavy influences on his pupil, having been the author of Species Plantarum, which is today a sort of founding document for the modern Lebenslehre sub-school of Florology.[27] He had an unfinished and unpublished work entitled Species Animalium, itself the result of his failure to publish an encyclopedia on both plants and animals, a lack of funds hindering his expeditions. With the ability to more easily import exotic plants for study over animals, Nilson focused on them, admittedly his preferred topic, and became renowned for it. He never forgot about his greater plans, though, and made a number of trips and requested numerous specimens to put into Animalium. However, Nilson would die before his work was complete, suffering a heart attack in 1753. But in the years prior to that, he took Lehnsherr with him on those trips, and with his passing, the pupil became a master. He made several more journeys before he published Species Mundi in early 1757, just a few months prior to the Tournament. It took a new, expanded edition of Plantarum and added in the entirety of Animalium that he had completed.
Ambitious as the man was, he credited his teacher as a fellow author, but put himself as the more prominent contributor. We can never know how much work he actually did, but some accuse of Lehnsherr of doing practically nothing at all. One major contribution, at least culturally, is that he gave lebenslehre its name, meaning the doctrine or science of Life. Furthermore, he created modern animal taxonomy but translating Nilson’s Latin names into Greek, a language he preferred and to make it easier to see a difference between Florology and Faunology. And yet he didn’t stop there, but also gave everything, from plants to animals, German-based names, what we know today as layman taxonomy, merely a translation of the Latin or Greek into a modern language, acting as a stepping stone between the scholarly name and the common name of any species.[28] Lehnsherr believed heavily in ensuring that all sciences were accessible to everyone, and his book saw great acclaim. It also made German the language of lebenslehre for some time, before its wider acceptance saw laymen’s names be properly translated into the language of the reader.
Lehnsherr was already preparing what would become his second edition when he was contacted by a group of English lords, who wanted to fund research into what they called the ‘many discrepancies between the species we call the races of Man.’ Lehnsherr was intrigued, having had to make many defenses of his grouping of apes and humans together in the group Anthropomorpha[29]; backers willing to throw money at an even greater examination of humans as a species seemed almost too good to be true. And in a sense it was, since he quickly realized all they wanted was proof of the inferiority of Africans. Still, they had the funds and he had the passion. So he left in Autumn on an over three year voyage. He traveled to the Mediterranean coast of Africa and the Near East, he went to trade posts that barely pierced the dense African thicket, he even visited the Dutch Republic. With them he saw India and much of the Orient, before at last seeing South America and the Caribbean. At last he went to North America, visiting Virginia and Carolina, before finishing in New England. That’s a lot of places for only three years, and I brushed over many stops. But ahead of him were messages to help ensure that living and dead specimens of varying races were ready for him to examine.
He returned to Europe with a rough manuscript of what would become his most famed work: The Races of Man. A year would be spent until it was published, during a time of increasing chaos in 1761,[30] but it was a controversial book, one that was printed and reprinted in numerous languages and discussed everywhere. It’s theories were provocative, groundbreaking in many respects. Ironically, it did not achieve what its backers wanted, but they foolishly approved the funds to aid in printing and sale before reading it. This quote from the opening passages of the book should help illuminate why they regretted this: ‘The Races of Man, I have discovered, a not many species as some believe. We are one. We are all one species, sharing the same branch on the tree of life, all made by God. God made our loyal hounds, it was our choice of breeding and the conditions of varying environments that resulted in the numerous breeds we know today. And the same ideas apply to Man. We are not many races. We are many breeds, surviving in a variety of conditions as we spread across the Earth, selectively choosing our wives to create the distinct groups we now know, deviating from the unified form we once had when we were created in our natural habitat of Eden. Were we to take the concept of breeding to all of mankind, we very well could see greater variation. Some breeds today are stronger, other more intelligent, and others more suited for intricate crafts. But we are all one species, like any other animal.’
That passage has become infamous for inspiring three separate movements in human lebenslehre: Racial Artificing, Resynthesis, and Equalization.”[31]
- Prof. Patrick Linden, Lecture on the History of Race
[18] Bit of context on how to read this section: the speaker is a rambling college lecturer speaking at his own multi-hour after school guest lecture.
[19] It took the advent of the Industrial Revolution for this to take off as an idea. Here, work-ethic, connections, and a bit of bribery help make it cost effective for Fletcher before then.
[20] Mass-produced.
[21] Just as a review, this term in TTL is used the North America to refer to wealthy Carolinian black families. In Albion it just means a black person.
[22] TTL’s less than politically-correct word for Mentally Disabled or Handicapped.
[23] You can’t exactly blame them. Good food, the shock and awe of the crowd, no regular beatings or field work, catchy stagenames and colorful tents. They had no idea just how much impact this would have. If they even realized this was more than just a showing off of slaves, most assumed whites already thought little of them.
[24] I can’t even reread this quote without feeling disgusted…
[25] Just in case you thought ya boi Canute was some perfect Neo-Dane God-King.
[26] Would he really have gotten any other nickname?
[27] Known better in OTL as Carl von Linné, Carolus Linnaeus, and Carl Linnaeus. He used the Latin name his father created TTL too, but some anti-Latin revisionism means he’s known by his patronym of Nilson.
[28] This means more plainly that all plant scientific names are in Latin, all animal in Greek. And then both have names that are translations. For example, cheetahs are classified Gatas-Gamma Acinonyx dakrysmenos, but are also known as the Still-clawed Tearstained Cat. Irrelevant and unnecessary? Utterly. But that’s the theme of science in this TL
[29] Linnaeus did this, but here Lehnsherr gets the credit and the blame since he doesn’t clarify that what parts of his ideas were taken from his teacher.
[30] Foreshadowing
[31] Strap in, boys and girls. Thanks to the French flu, scientific ethics are a lot looser in TTL.
[19] It took the advent of the Industrial Revolution for this to take off as an idea. Here, work-ethic, connections, and a bit of bribery help make it cost effective for Fletcher before then.
[20] Mass-produced.
[21] Just as a review, this term in TTL is used the North America to refer to wealthy Carolinian black families. In Albion it just means a black person.
[22] TTL’s less than politically-correct word for Mentally Disabled or Handicapped.
[23] You can’t exactly blame them. Good food, the shock and awe of the crowd, no regular beatings or field work, catchy stagenames and colorful tents. They had no idea just how much impact this would have. If they even realized this was more than just a showing off of slaves, most assumed whites already thought little of them.
[24] I can’t even reread this quote without feeling disgusted…
[25] Just in case you thought ya boi Canute was some perfect Neo-Dane God-King.
[26] Would he really have gotten any other nickname?
[27] Known better in OTL as Carl von Linné, Carolus Linnaeus, and Carl Linnaeus. He used the Latin name his father created TTL too, but some anti-Latin revisionism means he’s known by his patronym of Nilson.
[28] This means more plainly that all plant scientific names are in Latin, all animal in Greek. And then both have names that are translations. For example, cheetahs are classified Gatas-Gamma Acinonyx dakrysmenos, but are also known as the Still-clawed Tearstained Cat. Irrelevant and unnecessary? Utterly. But that’s the theme of science in this TL
[29] Linnaeus did this, but here Lehnsherr gets the credit and the blame since he doesn’t clarify that what parts of his ideas were taken from his teacher.
[30] Foreshadowing
[31] Strap in, boys and girls. Thanks to the French flu, scientific ethics are a lot looser in TTL.
“The first attack predictably came from the New English. Primrose Province existed not far from the Finger Lakes, and the Rangers turned the small town of Heraldston into the main headquarters, a status that would persist for the rest of the war and afterwards. To this day it is home to one of the largest military land forts near the American Atlantic Coast.
From Heraldston, the 8th King’s Own Ranger Division were sent to scout out enemy forces, killing small hunting parties and taking their garbs to better maintain anonymity. But while their mission was purely one of reconnaissance, the 8th discovered a troubling sight: an envoy of French settlers erecting a Catholic church in a Hohdeno village. For many years the novan confederation had resisted attempts at conversion, but if the French were being let in, it meant the tribes were likely trying to better relations, perhaps draw in Laurentia into the conflict. An attack on the northern frontier by the French, the western by the Hohdeno, and the southern by the Marylanders would be disastrous for New England.
After a great deal of debate, the 8th attacked. But not with rifles and bayonets. Instead, they charged with axes and arrows, waiting for nightfall. The local defenders barely had time to react before the church, and the Frenchman meeting within it, were attacked. As clearly Hohdeno arrows rained down on there and fire was set to their Church, a novan Ranger shouted to them in broken French that they had fallen for the Hohdeno ‘trap’ and that they and every other mission sent into the confederation would be quietly killed.
Rightfully terrified, the French ran, all but three picked off by arrows. They were long gone before the village’s defender had realized what exactly was happening. The ensuing skirmish would result in a retreat for the 8th, but the damage was done: the Laurentian colonial government, acting under order from Paris to ensure the colony’s success by any means, mobilized its militias and informed New England that while they were not allies, they now shared a common foe in the treacherous Hohdeno Confederation.
Once debriefed, the 8th Division would spare no details, but it was only years later that the events of the attack were revealed to the general public, to the outrage of Laurentians. Having not lost a man despite such a bold and risky move, the men of the ‘Jammy 8th’ were treated as heroes. When offered to hold the safe posting of reinforcing the Heraldston garrison, they declined, and were redeployed back to the West, where the 3rd and 4th Rangers were presenting beginning a painful campaign to pierce through the Hohdeno…
...Baltimore-native General Joseph James Johanson II had received his position only two days prior to the battle that would make him and his family one of the most important in the URN’s history. Aware of the large New English militia marching across the Allegheny Riverlands to force Maryland’s surrender, Johanson was determined to the meet them head on. With time on his side, he rallied the 3rd New Jersey Volunteer Militias to abandon their set posts and join his army, comprised of the 4th, 7th, and 9th Maryland Regiment of the Foot, one regiment of mixed novan forces primarily from the Lenape tribe, and a small detachment known as the Khalan Volunteers, a group sent by the growing settlement of al-Khalas to do their part in the war effort, the Muslim town’s first Maryland-born generation coming into age.
This eclectic force moved into northern New Jersey and quickly erected Fort Resistance, a small, ramshackle installation that had the sole purpose of making Johanson’s army harder to drive back. The general fully expected that his own forces would eventually lose and be forced to fall back, but General Arthur B. Connor was waiting near the Chesapeake, training up a slightly larger force through Prussian-inspired drills. If Johanson could take down a number of Puritan soldiers, “blunt the tip of their spear,” in his words, Connor’s army would then have a good chance of defeating them. If losses were few enough, Johanson believed his army might even swing around to reinforce Connor with an attack to the rear. With a commander so open that the army was a sacrificial force, desertion was a keen fear, but Johanson used it to his advantage, as once within the Fort, he rallied the soldiers with delusions that the scouts had informed him that the New English would be ill-prepared to take on the fortification. “All who wish to survive, need only fight to keep these walls standing,” he had said.
In either case, the battle was not one he actually expected to win. The approaching Puritans were composed of 4 full regiments, dwarfing the 5 and a half ‘colonial’ regiments, which were anywhere from half to two-thirds the size. Johanson was still determined not to retreat until he had crushed half of them. He had several novans scale trees and hide in them, arrows knocked, while colonial troops covered themselves in leaves and mud and waited to jump up, scattered along the path to the fort.[32] The rest waited in more traditional circumstances, manning the walls and awaiting a breach of the gate. Lastly, however, was Old Gristle. Old Gristle was a cannon, aged and in poor condition found when the army began its march from the Chesapeake, likely thrown off the deck of a ship and washed ashore. It was loaded with 1 shot, and a few more cannonballs had been found on the shore with it. With a crack at its tip, rust, and barnacles, the soldiers were unsure when Johanson made the call to haul the thing with him.
But he was adamant they take every advantage, and saw the cannon as a sort of blessing. The long-fuse was cut and rationed into three short-fuses, and an attempt at cleaning was made. Nicknamed by the men, Old Gristle sat just inside the door of the fort. Lieutenant Walter Kent manned it, being a former sailor before becoming an aged colonist. Even he was dubious, afraid the cannon would explode on them, but he remained waiting for Johanson’s order to fire. Novan bird calls through the trees told them that the Puritans, led by General Imshael Nelson, was coming. Marching in proper formation, clad in white uniforms accented by red, the militia had all the trappings of a proper, European military, an effort the government in Boston had gone to great lengths and great costs to achieve, and they were equipped with some of the best rifles that could be bought — meaning, of course, purchased for cheap illegally from the Dutch and Danes in New York.
A Spanish innovation, the new paper housings, or ‘papelistas,’ were used to hold shot, powder, and batteur cap in one case, burned up after use. While they would eventually be usurped by proper metal housings, the debate raged for some time between the papelists and ‘metallicos’, metal casings that which had to be removed or ejected.[33] A few papelista rifles were in Johanson’s possession, and he had these men at the gates, but others were still equipped with older weapons, hunting rifles and familial sabers. Between that and novan arrows, odds remained slim. But soon Nelson was getting nearer and nearer. Johanson made the call for the furthest novan scouts to war. The forest was dense there, and only clear path of retreat for the New English would be from where they came. So it was when the army was actually in sight, that he gave the order for the novans to fire, sending arrows through skulls and body, while the hidden Marylanders began taking wild shots. Nelson gave the call to arms immediately, and soldiers charged ahead to the fort, unable to properly fight those hiding in the brush. Johanson’s soldiers fired volleys from the fortifications, falling as deadly accurate New English riflemen picked them off the ramparts. But a sizeable dent in the New English force was initially made before they began to hammer at the doors, General Nelson believing that a simple breach and swift surrender was the best solution.
At their general’s orders, two soldiers within the fort ran to the gate and shoved the barricading bar aside. The doors quite suddenly flung open. But the victorious cheer of the Purtians was ended rapidly as Lieutenant Kent fired Old Gristle into the clumped horde of troops. The cannonball cracked as it was shot, sending pieces of metal in a spray. The bloody devastation shocked the attackers, enough that Old Gristle was already getting reloaded. The ball was loaded, and rocks, sticks, and even the chains used for hauling the cannon were shoved inside, and when fired the blast again caused mayhem. Much didn’t even hit the New English directly, but the sounds and the bits that did were what mattered. The third shot was almost loaded when the New English properly responded, killing the loader, forcing Lieutenant Kent to take cover behind the cannon itself. In the fighting, a small firepit used for cooking was kicked, sending hot coals between the firing ranks. Then, in another act of chance, a water pouch burst. The small burst of steam blinded the New English, and Kent took his chance. He finished the loading and then behind the cannon again to hide from gunfire as conflict resumed, he shoved Old Gristle forward. But it seemed the New English would take the day before they could repelled.
So Kent lit the short fuse and ran, hoping to create an opening for a retreat. Instead, his predictions were accurate about the aged cannon. It exploded, the metal warping, shards of cannon, rock, and shot flying around, just as the New English properly surged back into the fort. Their bodies absorbed the blast, and suddenly there was a shift. Those in the rear, once again seeing their comrades blown to pieces, attempted to flee. And it was the scream of these deserters that revealed to General Nelson and his men that the novan scouts told not to attack, and those on the path, had come up from the rear, moving in on the New English troops only now attempting to encircle the fort. Sandwiched between these forces and the now empowered men in the fort, the New English army broke. Despite their still larger size, fancy uniforms, and advanced weaponry, these were not experienced soldiers, but militiamen, told to expect an easy, overwhelming victory. So they ran, Nelson eventually calling for a proper retreat to those who tried to stay, just before he was killed by a stray round.
The Battle of Fort Resistance, miraculously, had been won by Maryland and Her allies…”
- The Rebel & Indian War by Ahmed ibn Patrick
[32] Americans used tactics like these at Concord and Lexington.
[33] The debate between paper cartridges and metal cartridges happened IOTL too. Many saw the need to eject before reload and the leaving of shells as wasteful and inefficient. But increased effectivity and lessened misfire, alongside the fact that paper remnants forced extensive gun cleaning meant that metal won out.
[33] The debate between paper cartridges and metal cartridges happened IOTL too. Many saw the need to eject before reload and the leaving of shells as wasteful and inefficient. But increased effectivity and lessened misfire, alongside the fact that paper remnants forced extensive gun cleaning meant that metal won out.
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