Chapter Five, Part Two: Expanded Connections, 1045-1055 A.D.
Bolverk was not much like his father. While Arvid Far-Seeker was more than willing to sit down and wade through the “boring” business of government, Bolverk possessed an active personality that made him naturally seek to avoid this in favor of hunts, voyages, or skirmishes. This won Bolverk much support from younger men, though his father’s old advisors were worried he would bring down the realm. Luckily for them, Bolverk had a sister, Grelod, who was Bolverk’s opposite. She was more than happy to conduct the day-to-day mundane business, and Bolverk was more than happy to let her do so. This saw some grumbling from the nobility, but Grelod was a capable administrator and Bolverk was more than willing to beat any man that insinuated he was being led around by a woman’s skirts.
The first major activity of Bolverk was the formal expansion of trade along the Talbeahan coastline. While informal contact had been made with tribes along the Atlantic seaboard for years, there had not been a stronger effort to integrate the tribes here into the trading system. This would change when Bolverk would sail south in 1047, overseeing the establishment of a trading post at the mouth of the Bucks River [1] to facilitate the expansion of commercial interests south.
The tribes along the coastline were ready for this integration into the system of trade as well. The coasts had been at the tail-end of the Blade Trade for years, with more well-equipped tribes in the interior launching raids against them, forcing them to form fortified, palisades communities. These proto-city states would be more than willing to trade what goods they had for weapons directly from the source, allowing them a stronger defense against the raiders.
While trade with these settlements would be somewhat profitable, the more potent discovery was made further South. In the warmer tidewater region [2], the furthest South (formally) any European had yet gone, the Paqwachowng were encountered. This tribal kingdom was crafted by the effects of European interactions, though that would not be fully understood for centuries. The tribes on the coasts that had not adopted the palisade strategy had migrated South to avoid raids, encountering and disrupting the ways of life of tribes in this region. Occasional contacts with the Blade Trade would create temporary wealth disparities, kicking off conflicts that eventually resulted in the “centralization” of power into the Paqwachowng realm.
These tribesmen were ferocious, with their men focused on warfare and the hunt, and with the women focused on farming and gathering. Among the crops that were grown by these native females was the much desired oyangwa, which was a major export to Europe, where even the Frankish Emperor had taken to smoking the thick-rolled herb. Oyangwa had been nearly exclusively gained by the European traders through the intermediaries of the Afonbren, but the lands of that Confederation were not very conducive to the growth of that herb. This shifted the oyangwa trade south, ending the Afonbreni monopoly on that commodity.
Not that those tribesmen minded very much- they were in possession of large stocks of maple, which was able to compete effectively with the sugar tax enforced by the grandees within the Kingdom. In fact, the Afonbren in this decade were riding high from the success of the newly forged European connections. Growth of trade with the Old World, as well as the growing demand there for maple sugar, saw silver and iron flow into the Confederation in unprecedented numbers.
However, this trade did not benefit the members of the Afonbren Confederation equally. This new wealth was heavily concentrated in the hands of the Christian trading class and their Iohristani allies. With wealth came power, and this power threatened the traditional balance of authority in the Afonbreni lands. The traditional chiefdoms that made up the Confederation did not mesh well with the increasingly emboldened Christian merchants. The traditional leadership was afraid of losing their authority, as well as growing increasingly concerned with the development of Christianity among their ranks. What had once been a sort of tolerated curiosity began to be perceived as a threat to the Afonbren way of life.
This marked the development of the first anti-Christian movement in the New World, the so-called “Wind Lodge” (Kanónhsa ówera) as the sources close to the time label it. While earlier works painted it as a “fearful heathen response to the triumph of the Cross”, as Volkert Smied put it in The Conquest of the West, putting all sorts of crimes and dark ceremonies to the hands of the Wind Lodge. More modern analysis, however, suggests that the Wind Lodge was more a sort of “protective society”, to prevent the exploitation of non-Christians and the preservation of the role of the chiefs in the Cofnederation. One modern historian even contends that the term Wind Lodge itself is inaccurate, holding that there was no central organized body as suggested in earlier works, and it was a European/Christian appellation to various, semi-related groups throughout the Confederation.
Whatever the case, religious tensions and disputes over power continued to grow among the Afonbren, even in the face of such new wealth. By the end of the decade, the simmering pot had begun to boil over, and the power-dynamic in Northeastern Talbeah would never be the same…
[1]- OTL Penobscot River
[2]- OTL Chesapeake Bay
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