The New World of the White Huns
- Thread starter Practical Lobster
- Start date
The ambiguous nature of Xasar rule may make things interesting though... What stops a group of Genovan "merchants" from taking out targets of opportunity with boarding actions? The Xasars can fire on them for getting close, but wait, these are their "innocent subjects" until the minute they aren't... a paranoid incident or two at sea might be enough to spark consequences on the mainland. Xasar captain sinks four Neapolitan galleys for sailing at him funny? Turns out they were actually an innocent merchant fleet owned by a prominent citizen (or were they? reports differ...) and add one more reason for the Italians to be alienated as Xasar increasingly treat them more as enemies than subjects...I can't imagine Naples' merchant fleet has many cannons on it... Or many soldiers.
Otherwise, good points all.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you mean what will languages look like in 2017 AD in TTL, well we're probably all using a language evolved out of Maharashtri Prakrit for global trade. English/Angliske is an obscure regional language rather than a global one. Some Chinese dialect is pretty popular too, I bet. As are a fair few other languages, like Francien and whatever the modern Rusichi language is.
Anyhow, I'm not a linguist and have never pretended to be.
That said, you may have noticed the linguistic changes taking place in place names and character names. Across the board, almost every language has begun diverging in subtle but hopefully interesting ways. Notice things like Aloysius becoming one of the most common Francien names instead of Louis or Milan being called Medilano. Or really the bizarre Irano-Turkish nonsense that is Xasar. Or the Tayzig language which is me mashing Arabic and Iranian together until the end result sounds pretty.
In India, these changes are more subtle but should be noticeable as well. In general if they're more subtle it's because I have less clue what I'm doing there and need everything to at least feel convincing.
The long era of Maukhani dominance in India means that they're linguistically more homogeneous to a degree. The main languages that have not undergone any major divergences are East Asian languages because I have no clue what to do with them.
If you're an Italian, that's pretty much the least of your concerns as various armies march across your country, looting, pillaging and burning indiscriminately as half a continent fights and existential war with the other half of a continent. Also if you're a Xasar captain you probably don't much care anymore. At least if you blow the ships to smithereens you can loot whatever remains and make a pretty penny for yourself and your crew. Who would sanction you for destroying some "pirates?" And who would believe the word of the "enemy" over you?
The Xasar lose much of the interior of Italy very quickly in this war, it's worth mentioning. However, they maintain naval supremacy off and on throughout its entire duration, although they become substantially overstretched once the Syrians stab them in the back and start wreaking havoc across Asia Minor. It's a testament to the endurance of their Empire that the whole thing doesn't fall apart instantly and instead just kind of sputters out slowly over decades. Also, Carinthia is a major choke point, but I already described the first few years on that front in a general overlay - the Xasar smash through and wreak havoc in Germany for a bit before sheer numerical disadvantages and the fact that they're fighting almost all of Europe set in and they get driven back. By the war's midpoint, they're hurting bad.
Thank the Lokapalas for the Great Han.
Very early on in the timeline, there were references to the Roman and Egyptian navies using naphtha in warfare. But these states both fell without ever really having their naval dominance challenged and at some point naphtha use diminished. At this point it's pretty much gone out of fashion among those powers who do have a formula.
Next update will come soon. I know it's been almost a month, but I hope pepole are enjoying my foray into Hellenism.
To be honest, I needed the breather and the chance to explore some other ideas. For those of you who are enjoying the ancient world, don't fear, I'm not abandoning that either.
To be honest, I needed the breather and the chance to explore some other ideas. For those of you who are enjoying the ancient world, don't fear, I'm not abandoning that either.
Paszudesada
Pazudesada was not a nation, but a collection of cities. Of those cities, one, Kintradoni, dominated her two sisters, much as the Kintradoni Shahs might claim all were alike in dignity. Of course, the Kintradoni Shahs also claimed to be supreme autocrats within their own sphere, and the early fourteenth century would prove that to be a lie.
Then again, many visitors to Kintradoni felt it was not wrong that she should rule her rivals. Kintradoni was a wondrous city to behold, “an island dangling as a pearl in the ocean” to quote the legendary Pazudesadan poet Pijuruan Msihqi. Twin bridges connected it to the mainland, but the central city, islanded and aloof from the mainland, was a symbol of awe-inspiring commercial wealth, its streets carefully planned, its avenues well-regulated and well-policed by the city guard.
The Shah of Kintradoni had become a hereditary title, a far cry from the old Sreni-backed Shahs with their short reigns and short lives. Not long after her “sister cities” of Vayubati and Shangani had been subdued by a subtle mixture of diplomacy and economic force, the Kintradoni Shahs had begun manufacturing counterfeit crises to ensure a linear succession that gradually became familial. They rarely used arms against their fellow settlers – but it was rarely necessary. The leading families of Pazudesada were all intermarried in any case.
The distinction for them was between themselves, the insiders, and outsiders, up and comers like the Cevirukkai, a Chandratreyan brassworkers’ guild-cum-banking institution whose tendrils increasingly reached into Pazudesada and towards the tropical resources extracted from the jungles and the fruits of her plantation economies. Unlike the Tamil, the Maharashtrian cities and companies did not have easy access to the Malay, and thus often opted to become a big fish in a small pond rather than try to outcompete their well-established rivals in the east.
For some time, Pazudesada had seen wealth and prestige slowly concentrate – unlike among the Kapudesa, whose cities were loosely aligned at best and who frequently competed amongst each other, Pazudesada was a more aristocratic country. It had to be to survive. For the better part of two centuries, it had weathered migratory pressures of Nilotic peoples from the north, the numerous Maa tribes who gradually had been brought into the fold as federates. The (primarily Arab and Iranian) settlers who had peopled the interior had drawn back to the coastlines and now represented little more than a thin band of loyal citizens clustered in cities. They were primarily employed in factories and mercantile occupations rather than farming, and this withdrawal had concentrated wealth. Small communities of farmers growing spices and food were vulnerable to attack and not economical. Those who survived were those who had protection of larger landholders, and such protection agreements often involved the ceding of important political rights to said landholders.
The destruction of the inland farming colonies changed the Kintradoni military and social structures. Obligations of citizen service were gradually replaced by a more and more mercenary army. Arab, Iranian, and Izaoriaka soldiers were recruited and paid as professionals, a model which mirrored that of certain Kapudesan cities who also did not have a strong interior presence. However, the state alone did not have the wealth to maintain these armies – especially not armies strong enough to keep the migratory Maa in check. Accordingly, over the course of the late thirteenth century, the Shahs became ever more indebted to the Indian companies, whose monetary authority gradually transformed into political concessions. Soon, former “outsider” companies were gaining positions close to the Shahs and the nobles “inside” the cities became increasingly resentful.
By the time the Maa were subdued and made vassals, their culture was deeply Hinduized and had taken on substantial Arab and Iranian influences as well. They adopted the Pazudesada script and many took to worshipping the Hindu Gods, especially the monotheistic cult of Ishvara. Small Jain and Buddhist communities also existed, and one of the most prominent Maa vassal-kings, the semi-legendary Magilani, was a Jain who encouraged his people to abstain from harming any living thing. These policies were eventually tempered by realism, but they nevertheless represent a stunning revival of Jain teachings, a religion which had largely passed into obscurity on the subcontinent among the elites in favor of a new series of intellectual philosophies such as the sensual hedonism advocated by Navacharvaka.
The “Inside” families judged the Maa to be the lesser of two evils. The Maa themselves had little ambition to dominate the coastal cities – they were a primarily pastoral people whose slow transition towards agriculture and plantation development never translated into maritime focus. By making careful political alliances, the great Kintradoni families hoped to turn the Maa into a weapon to keep the great Indian guilds, especially the Cevirukkai, at bay. Besides, the Maa had armies, and those armies were judged to be an effective counterbalance to the mercenaries that the Shah had long been forced to utilize.
Two major Maa clans, the Gajiok and the Gaweer, saw their patriarchs raised in power, showered with titles and offices and permitted to dine with the Shah – a rare gift for a vassal-king. One young man, Kuyra Raia, identified as a “captain of the Gajiok” was given extraordinary influence and for a time even managed the affairs of state as a Vizier as a compromise of sorts. The Shahs of Pazudesada were hamstrung in their own authority. On one hand the companies sought a degree of control they knew they had no hope of gaining over the Kapudesans, and on the other hand their own nobility was eagerly elevating outsider “barbarians” to high ranking positions within the government as a way of frustrating the Indian mercantile guilds.
It was perhaps inevitable that the Kapudesan city-state of Mzishima would become involved. One of the oldest and most powerful of the old Kapudesan trading cities, Mzishima was one of the few East African ports that Bharukaccha was forced by a mixture of ancient custom and pragmatic realism to treat as an equal partner. Without the Mzishima, an agreement like the White Elephant Concordat of 1306 would have been far more difficult to negotiate – the old networks of alliance and patronage that connected the Kapudesans and Chandratreya were really an alliance of two cities within greater polities.
The southern Kapudesans and the Pazudesada were longtime rivals of one another, but it was a relatively friendly rivalry. Kapudesa’s ambitions had always been more global than her northern neighbor, and since the coming of the Maa they had been the stronger power by far. Traditionally, there had been no need to intervene in Pazudesadan politics.
Still, the Raja of Mzishima was a wealthy man with a substantial private army and his own merchant fleet. He had resources and connections on the ground in Pazudesada that the Cevirukkai could not match, and had always hoped to eliminate the threat of Pazudesada and thus ensure that he would never have to condescend to bring them into the White Elephant Concordat and grant them the privileges associated with such a pact.
Bharukaccha had long flirted with the idea of overthrowing local governments in the name of some grand imperial project. They had helped bankroll the massive invasion of Ethiopia which had been an abject failure and had led to the creation of an isolated hermit-kingdom who stubbornly resisted the entreaties of the Hindu Kings across the sea. However, they had refined their philosophies in that time. Instead of brute force, they now utilized more subtle means. The large mercenary armies which had replaced the citizen-soldiers of old were quietly reminded of who their real paymasters were. The Shah, they reminded the Kintradoni officer corps, could not pay their salary if they were to withdraw their support.
A few weeks later, the Kintradoni Shah, Bayrom IV, perhaps having received some subtle hints of which way the wind was blowing, removed Kuyra Raia from his position of power. A month after that, a small fleet from the Raja of Mzishima sailed into their harbor, its decks loaded with heavy cannons aimed at the beautiful central district of the city, where the white-walled villas of the wealthy were located. Mass evacuation became panic as the city’s few bridges were insufficient for the exodus and people feared to utilize river-boats given the presence of the enemy fleet. Hundreds of the richest nobles were trampled to death in the ensuing chaos.
Shah Bayrom did not know where his own fleet was. The palace was in chaos, and a dour-faced banker from Bharukaccha had quietly informed him that the shelling would begin tomorrow if he did not accede to a series of 36 request. Later that afternoon, he would learn that the mercenaries of his own fleet had mutinied, demanding a massive pay raise he was incapable of granting without driving his own house into bankruptcy. Without the mercenary soldiers, the sailors could not act without sailing into a massacre – and knowing this, they had judged it best to simply return to their homes.
August 8, 1309 was a humiliating day. The treaty Shah Bayrom signed essentially made him a prisoner in his own palace and placed a legation from Mzishima in practical control of his city. The League was undone overnight. Vayubata and Shangani were given independence, along with thirty other smaller towns of note. While Mzishima did not extend any formal hegemony over them, the truth was now obvious.
It was a baffling moment for the landholding and “inside” nobility, who had assumed their power to be on the rise. They had mistaken their alliance with the Maa vassals for security, and the Maa, for their part, had been more than happy to adopt the culture of the coastal cities and accepted their favors and marriages, but were too removed from the coastline. Over the next few years, a small Gaweer rebellion would be put down by tufenj armed mercenaries belonging to the “Shah.” The power balance would slowly solidify. The nobles learned that ultimately, the Indian companies weren't so bad, and their sons could even get ranking positions within their structure if they asked nicely and made the right "donations." Commerce and capital, the lifeblood of the Indian Ocean, would continue to flow. Spices and ivory and a hundred other valuable commodities would continue to pass from the inland kings down to the thriving quays of Kintradoni where petty traders would fight to be heard over the din of a polyglot crowd. Naked mystics would debate philosophy with saffron-robed monks for public spectacle, and Shah Bayrom would become famous not for his humiliation but for the construction of a massive university several miles south of "his" city. He would be called "blessed by Ishvara" and the people would mourn his passing, even if some staunch traditionalists mourned the loss of their own power.
The accretion of wealth and the colonization of the world would continue apace - and it was never a pretty thing. As the forests of northern China were leveled to fuel charcoal fires and the untamed jungles of the Malay Isles burnt to make way for plantations, as millions died to disease and rapacious conquest across whole continents in the name of God and distant Kings, the brutal, bloody process that would one day bring modernity slowly became clear.
History was not, as Christendom and the Bakhtiyar had always assumed, a story of degradation, of past glories usurped. Slowly, some thinkers began to realize it could be a different story - the story of a world destroyed to make way for a better future. Without the mistakes of the past, humanity could never learn. Without suffering, there could be no liberation.
Then again, many visitors to Kintradoni felt it was not wrong that she should rule her rivals. Kintradoni was a wondrous city to behold, “an island dangling as a pearl in the ocean” to quote the legendary Pazudesadan poet Pijuruan Msihqi. Twin bridges connected it to the mainland, but the central city, islanded and aloof from the mainland, was a symbol of awe-inspiring commercial wealth, its streets carefully planned, its avenues well-regulated and well-policed by the city guard.
The Shah of Kintradoni had become a hereditary title, a far cry from the old Sreni-backed Shahs with their short reigns and short lives. Not long after her “sister cities” of Vayubati and Shangani had been subdued by a subtle mixture of diplomacy and economic force, the Kintradoni Shahs had begun manufacturing counterfeit crises to ensure a linear succession that gradually became familial. They rarely used arms against their fellow settlers – but it was rarely necessary. The leading families of Pazudesada were all intermarried in any case.
The distinction for them was between themselves, the insiders, and outsiders, up and comers like the Cevirukkai, a Chandratreyan brassworkers’ guild-cum-banking institution whose tendrils increasingly reached into Pazudesada and towards the tropical resources extracted from the jungles and the fruits of her plantation economies. Unlike the Tamil, the Maharashtrian cities and companies did not have easy access to the Malay, and thus often opted to become a big fish in a small pond rather than try to outcompete their well-established rivals in the east.
For some time, Pazudesada had seen wealth and prestige slowly concentrate – unlike among the Kapudesa, whose cities were loosely aligned at best and who frequently competed amongst each other, Pazudesada was a more aristocratic country. It had to be to survive. For the better part of two centuries, it had weathered migratory pressures of Nilotic peoples from the north, the numerous Maa tribes who gradually had been brought into the fold as federates. The (primarily Arab and Iranian) settlers who had peopled the interior had drawn back to the coastlines and now represented little more than a thin band of loyal citizens clustered in cities. They were primarily employed in factories and mercantile occupations rather than farming, and this withdrawal had concentrated wealth. Small communities of farmers growing spices and food were vulnerable to attack and not economical. Those who survived were those who had protection of larger landholders, and such protection agreements often involved the ceding of important political rights to said landholders.
The destruction of the inland farming colonies changed the Kintradoni military and social structures. Obligations of citizen service were gradually replaced by a more and more mercenary army. Arab, Iranian, and Izaoriaka soldiers were recruited and paid as professionals, a model which mirrored that of certain Kapudesan cities who also did not have a strong interior presence. However, the state alone did not have the wealth to maintain these armies – especially not armies strong enough to keep the migratory Maa in check. Accordingly, over the course of the late thirteenth century, the Shahs became ever more indebted to the Indian companies, whose monetary authority gradually transformed into political concessions. Soon, former “outsider” companies were gaining positions close to the Shahs and the nobles “inside” the cities became increasingly resentful.
By the time the Maa were subdued and made vassals, their culture was deeply Hinduized and had taken on substantial Arab and Iranian influences as well. They adopted the Pazudesada script and many took to worshipping the Hindu Gods, especially the monotheistic cult of Ishvara. Small Jain and Buddhist communities also existed, and one of the most prominent Maa vassal-kings, the semi-legendary Magilani, was a Jain who encouraged his people to abstain from harming any living thing. These policies were eventually tempered by realism, but they nevertheless represent a stunning revival of Jain teachings, a religion which had largely passed into obscurity on the subcontinent among the elites in favor of a new series of intellectual philosophies such as the sensual hedonism advocated by Navacharvaka.
The “Inside” families judged the Maa to be the lesser of two evils. The Maa themselves had little ambition to dominate the coastal cities – they were a primarily pastoral people whose slow transition towards agriculture and plantation development never translated into maritime focus. By making careful political alliances, the great Kintradoni families hoped to turn the Maa into a weapon to keep the great Indian guilds, especially the Cevirukkai, at bay. Besides, the Maa had armies, and those armies were judged to be an effective counterbalance to the mercenaries that the Shah had long been forced to utilize.
Two major Maa clans, the Gajiok and the Gaweer, saw their patriarchs raised in power, showered with titles and offices and permitted to dine with the Shah – a rare gift for a vassal-king. One young man, Kuyra Raia, identified as a “captain of the Gajiok” was given extraordinary influence and for a time even managed the affairs of state as a Vizier as a compromise of sorts. The Shahs of Pazudesada were hamstrung in their own authority. On one hand the companies sought a degree of control they knew they had no hope of gaining over the Kapudesans, and on the other hand their own nobility was eagerly elevating outsider “barbarians” to high ranking positions within the government as a way of frustrating the Indian mercantile guilds.
It was perhaps inevitable that the Kapudesan city-state of Mzishima would become involved. One of the oldest and most powerful of the old Kapudesan trading cities, Mzishima was one of the few East African ports that Bharukaccha was forced by a mixture of ancient custom and pragmatic realism to treat as an equal partner. Without the Mzishima, an agreement like the White Elephant Concordat of 1306 would have been far more difficult to negotiate – the old networks of alliance and patronage that connected the Kapudesans and Chandratreya were really an alliance of two cities within greater polities.
The southern Kapudesans and the Pazudesada were longtime rivals of one another, but it was a relatively friendly rivalry. Kapudesa’s ambitions had always been more global than her northern neighbor, and since the coming of the Maa they had been the stronger power by far. Traditionally, there had been no need to intervene in Pazudesadan politics.
Still, the Raja of Mzishima was a wealthy man with a substantial private army and his own merchant fleet. He had resources and connections on the ground in Pazudesada that the Cevirukkai could not match, and had always hoped to eliminate the threat of Pazudesada and thus ensure that he would never have to condescend to bring them into the White Elephant Concordat and grant them the privileges associated with such a pact.
Bharukaccha had long flirted with the idea of overthrowing local governments in the name of some grand imperial project. They had helped bankroll the massive invasion of Ethiopia which had been an abject failure and had led to the creation of an isolated hermit-kingdom who stubbornly resisted the entreaties of the Hindu Kings across the sea. However, they had refined their philosophies in that time. Instead of brute force, they now utilized more subtle means. The large mercenary armies which had replaced the citizen-soldiers of old were quietly reminded of who their real paymasters were. The Shah, they reminded the Kintradoni officer corps, could not pay their salary if they were to withdraw their support.
A few weeks later, the Kintradoni Shah, Bayrom IV, perhaps having received some subtle hints of which way the wind was blowing, removed Kuyra Raia from his position of power. A month after that, a small fleet from the Raja of Mzishima sailed into their harbor, its decks loaded with heavy cannons aimed at the beautiful central district of the city, where the white-walled villas of the wealthy were located. Mass evacuation became panic as the city’s few bridges were insufficient for the exodus and people feared to utilize river-boats given the presence of the enemy fleet. Hundreds of the richest nobles were trampled to death in the ensuing chaos.
Shah Bayrom did not know where his own fleet was. The palace was in chaos, and a dour-faced banker from Bharukaccha had quietly informed him that the shelling would begin tomorrow if he did not accede to a series of 36 request. Later that afternoon, he would learn that the mercenaries of his own fleet had mutinied, demanding a massive pay raise he was incapable of granting without driving his own house into bankruptcy. Without the mercenary soldiers, the sailors could not act without sailing into a massacre – and knowing this, they had judged it best to simply return to their homes.
August 8, 1309 was a humiliating day. The treaty Shah Bayrom signed essentially made him a prisoner in his own palace and placed a legation from Mzishima in practical control of his city. The League was undone overnight. Vayubata and Shangani were given independence, along with thirty other smaller towns of note. While Mzishima did not extend any formal hegemony over them, the truth was now obvious.
It was a baffling moment for the landholding and “inside” nobility, who had assumed their power to be on the rise. They had mistaken their alliance with the Maa vassals for security, and the Maa, for their part, had been more than happy to adopt the culture of the coastal cities and accepted their favors and marriages, but were too removed from the coastline. Over the next few years, a small Gaweer rebellion would be put down by tufenj armed mercenaries belonging to the “Shah.” The power balance would slowly solidify. The nobles learned that ultimately, the Indian companies weren't so bad, and their sons could even get ranking positions within their structure if they asked nicely and made the right "donations." Commerce and capital, the lifeblood of the Indian Ocean, would continue to flow. Spices and ivory and a hundred other valuable commodities would continue to pass from the inland kings down to the thriving quays of Kintradoni where petty traders would fight to be heard over the din of a polyglot crowd. Naked mystics would debate philosophy with saffron-robed monks for public spectacle, and Shah Bayrom would become famous not for his humiliation but for the construction of a massive university several miles south of "his" city. He would be called "blessed by Ishvara" and the people would mourn his passing, even if some staunch traditionalists mourned the loss of their own power.
The accretion of wealth and the colonization of the world would continue apace - and it was never a pretty thing. As the forests of northern China were leveled to fuel charcoal fires and the untamed jungles of the Malay Isles burnt to make way for plantations, as millions died to disease and rapacious conquest across whole continents in the name of God and distant Kings, the brutal, bloody process that would one day bring modernity slowly became clear.
History was not, as Christendom and the Bakhtiyar had always assumed, a story of degradation, of past glories usurped. Slowly, some thinkers began to realize it could be a different story - the story of a world destroyed to make way for a better future. Without the mistakes of the past, humanity could never learn. Without suffering, there could be no liberation.
So now E. Africa has a hegemon... not much else to say but very interesting that this region may enter modernity standing on its own two feet rather than under an outside power.... They're also better placed to take advantage of New World trade.
Actually New World crops might revolutionize the area a lot. The climate is so varied that whatever Indian crop package they started with can't be a good fit everywhere. Lots of potential for supporting greater populations inland...
Actually New World crops might revolutionize the area a lot. The climate is so varied that whatever Indian crop package they started with can't be a good fit everywhere. Lots of potential for supporting greater populations inland...
At this point, global trade is such that the crop package of East Africa has already taken on diverse influences from Iran and Egypt and India and China. Asian rice alone has made a huge difference in the population densities inland.
Various Solvian peppers and legumes will have a huge impact on Asian cooking, especially as legumes will make vegetarianism more viable. Sweet potatoes and manioc will make the spread as well.
Not even gonna start on the exciting diversity of fruits! It's amazing how many fruits we take for granted come from America.
Various Solvian peppers and legumes will have a huge impact on Asian cooking, especially as legumes will make vegetarianism more viable. Sweet potatoes and manioc will make the spread as well.
Not even gonna start on the exciting diversity of fruits! It's amazing how many fruits we take for granted come from America.
Well the Kitai descended Yaol dynasty is. They've had a long run though, and cracks are building beneath the surface.
Said cracks are mitigated by the fact that the Kitai have ensured cheap resources for their economy and presided over an economic boom. But they're still present.
Being a fan of how the potato changed the world, I hear ya. Is vegetarianism still a big thing in Indian socities here?
p.s. for some reason the link goes to like the 10th page of the essay.
I'm hoping the Tanguts weren't wiped out in this timeline and we can see a Tangut dynasty in Northwest China, and perhaps a Jurchen dynasty in North China. I just want to remind you of tan guts, because they are quite fascinating and would love to see them including in a timeline. (I never have). They had quite the terrible fall OTL.
I really applaud your work by the way. I am addicted. Well, while we may never get Tanguts, could we perhaps get an update on Dai Viet and Yaol China's effects on it?
Sounds delicious.
Vegetarianism substantial among certain more devout religious groups, but as a matter of practicality a lot of people do eat meat, and rules about what sort of meat may be consumed are far more common than outright vegetarianism. The Tanguts do exist, they've just never managed to rule anything. They are subjects of the Kitai and frequently serve in their armies as auxiliaries, and have adopted many customs and religious practices peculiar to the way Buddhism is practiced among the Kitai martial upper classes (i.e. more shamanistic) that the "Exoteric" Mahayana Buddhism of the court.
We definitely can get such an update! I've been meaning to go into detail on Dai Viet and the rest of Southeast Asia some more anyways - especially the southern coast of China, where there are still substantial Tai populations and Sinic culture has blended with indigenous and Hindu traditions to a greater degree.
Dai Viet deserves a whole post, but I'll have to do additional research before I'm able to write that post in depth.
Something to keep in mind about Dai Viet in that they are Siniczed, and they frequently fought wars with indianized champa. Dai Viet usually had the edge in technology OTL in these wars, due to their massive contact with china, but since in your timeline India gets very advanced, things might get a little different, and perhaps Vietnam never unifies. Just a guess.Sounds delicious.
The Tanguts do exist, they've just never managed to rule anything. They are subjects of the Kitai and frequently serve in their armies as auxiliaries, and have adopted many customs and religious practices peculiar to the way Buddhism is practiced among the Kitai martial upper classes (i.e. more shamanistic) that the "Exoteric" Mahayana Buddhism of the court.
We definitely can get such an update! I've been meaning to go into detail on Dai Viet and the rest of Southeast Asia some more anyways - especially the southern coast of China, where there are still substantial Tai populations and Sinic culture has blended with indigenous and Hindu traditions to a greater degree.
Dai Viet deserves a whole post, but I'll have to do additional research before I'm able to write that post in depth.
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia in Turmoil
Dai Viet under the To dynasty was defined by the Red River. Along the coastal lands and lowland river deltas, where farming was easy and merchant contact frequent, a distinct and Sinicized culture developed. Uniquely for their region, they resisted the influence of the Indosphere, an influence which penetrated even the highlands to their north, where Tai tribes aggressively resisted the colonial resettlement and cultural assimilation projects of Chinese ministers, tacitly approved by the Yaol Emperors in the distant north.
The great sprawl of the Khmer Empire to the south did not touch Dai Viet for matters of geography – the independent and relatively lightly-governed highlands that delineated Southeast Asia prevented easy overland contact, and the presence of the behemoth Kitai Empire to the North always played a bigger role than any southern realm. Their traditional deities were not syncretized with Indra and Brahma, and rather than the Hindicized Buddhism of the south, their elites adopted the Taoist-Buddhism of China instead, and the common people maintained devotional folk cults to ancestral cults and various nature gods, a system not so different from the incorporation of Shinto worship into Japanese Buddhism. Their temples were often pagoda tiered and decorated with brightly painted Chinese iconography, deeply distinct from the rock-cut reliefs that ornamented the temples of the Kambuja. Both had a similar horror vacui, a stylistic choice which in both cases worked to help visualize the divine for their audiences.
Unlike the Khmer Empire, which was corporate and feudal at the best of times – an association of Kambuja cities, guilds and temples bound by treaties and contracts – the Dai Viet were a bureaucratic regime modeled off of the Chinese example, and indeed in many senses followed the old bureacratic model more accurately than the Kitai did. The Kitai had morphed the Chinese bureaucracy to accommodate the exigencies of their steppe empire and their regime of outsiders. Buddhist religious orthodoxy had become a major component in the exam, and certain ethnic quotas had been established to ensure that Kitai sons could always find a place in bureaucracy.
By contrast, Dai Viet was a striking meritocracy, where men of any background could ascend to great heights. The To were descended from a line of ministers and petty government officials, and in their earlier decades (1190-1240) they deeply understood the benefit of finding capable men and rooting out corruption. This alone would have earned them the admiration of the peasantry, but the Exoteric Buddhist philosophies they adhered to focused on the welfare of the farmers above all – they stockpiled grain during famines and kept a well-ordered, well run state with numerous garrisons to defend against highland raiders.
The ascendency of the petty Shan states had thrown the Khmer into relative anarchy, and combined with the degradation of their traditional agricultural system due to a series of unforeseen ecological stresses, the thirteenth century saw the near-total erosion of their empire. The Kambuja city-states began asserting more autonomy, but their constant warring led to population collapse and opportunity for their subject peoples to begin rising up as well.
The Kingdom of Hsriwa, greatest of the Shan states, continued to win their wars after the debacles of 1258. What had begun as mere raids and punitive expeditions conducted back and forth along a gradually shifting border had become outright chaos. The Hsriwa Saopha (King) Hkun Hmom struck a devastating blow against an alliance of Kambujan armies in 1278, leading to the Hsriwa moving into what had once been the northern lands of the Dvaravati Mon, settling there and continuing to pressure the Kambuja cities into tributary status.
Unlike Dai Viet or even the rising power of Majachaiya, Hsriwa operated along the lines of the common model of the indigenous Indosphere empires. They were keen to establish a hegemonic tributary state, but were less eager to actually administer territories themselves. They kept the guilds active in regions they conquered, and rarely sacked cities outright, preferring to ransom and establish their own rule in the place of the Khmer. They were equally quick to begin the process of assimilation and cultural exchange, losing much of what made them distinctive as they became comfortable lords over the ruins of the Khmer Empire.
No power in Southeast Asia was truly capable of changing the rules of statecraft as they were known besides Majachaiya. As the Kingdom of the Radiant Tree continued to expand, their direct rulership and tendency to annihilate native guilds in favor of their own companies became an increasing worry to the remaining Southeast Asian polities, particularly the Champa and Indranokura. But there was little that could be done. The Champa remained divided and the Khmer Empire was a fiction perpetrated by a succession of puppet emperors in Angkor Thom. The Dai Viet might have been such a transformative polity, but they were ringed on most sides by hostile tribal peoples whose lands were marginal at best. The only clear avenue for expansion was towards the Champa, and there they met with little success. Kauthara, the greatest Champa city, would frequently come to the support of Indrapura and her other federate cities when the Dai Viet attempted one of their routine invasions, utilizing their fleet to blockade the Red River ports and deny Vietnamese merchants access to the sea, to say nothing of frequent coastal raids and punitive attacks.
Saopha Hkun Hmom was succeeded by his nephew Hseng Kaw in 1289. In a break from the tradition of cultivating alliances among other Shan princelings, Hseng Kaw arranged the marriage of his young daughter to the To monarch at the time, To Doung Hoan, whose own wife had recently died. The two leaders began making plans – Hseng Kaw was an ambitious man, who dreamed of uniting a vast territory from the surviving Kyauske rump state to what remained of Indranokura under his loose authority. More than a Saopha, he dreamed of being a Chakravartin. To this end, he knew that the Dai Viet could be immensely useful – even if they had a poor military track record, he was interested in learning the organizational techniques that they utilized. Hseng Kaw had seen the Dai Viet capital, Thang Kinh, and he had marveled at the wealth and the order of it. By contrast, the Saopha had no capital – rotating between his various forts, moving the court with the changing seasons.
Still, the pact and mutual exchange of knowledge was not to be. To Doung Hoan died fighting Tai hillmen on the border with the Kitai in a blossoming border war which by 1301 would spill over the border and lead to an outright clash between the Kitai, their Tai vassals, and the Southern Kingdom. Ambayhan, a half-Kitai half-Naiman commander, was tasked with leading a forty-thousand man expeditionary army to subdue the To dynasty and bring them to heel or annex them outright, whichever was more practical. His force was like nothing the Dai Viet Emperors had ever faced. The Kitai had a well-ordered and professional army, with ranks of disciplined tufenj-soldiers whose modern weapons, known as Che Dian Chong (literally “lightning quick firearm”) could fire at a rate far superior to the Champa armies. By contrast, Dai Viet had lagged behind in the adoption of tufenj.
If not for the fact that the traditional steppe cavalry arm, ubiquitous among major Yaol dynasty armies, had been utterly useless in the hills and marshlands of Dai Viet, Ambayhan would have won a crushing victory. As it was, he was reduced to a long, bloody campaign. Reinforcements, drawn from the garrisons of the southern provinces, fought and died in futile engagements and the To dynasty stubbornly held on in spite of everything. Finally, after five years of ineffective fighting, the Yaol dynasty withdrew, leaving Dai Viet a devastated ruin that would be ultimately overrun by Tai warlords from the north, fleeing the wave of persecution that the Kitai unleashed following their defeat in Dai Viet. It was easier, ultimately, to blame subversive elements within the state on their failure than admit that their tactics and strategies, adapted for fighting in the comparatively open north, were disastrous in the southern hills and forests.
Five years of devastating war in the south destroyed Dai Viet, but ultimately it be hard on the Yaol Dynasty as well. They had held the whole of China for two centuries, and the north for even longer, but times were changing. If they had brought unprecedented prosperity and opportunity to many, they were still foreigners, and the traditional systems of China were not easily cowed into submission. In the aftermath of the Southern War, the cracks in their armor would begin to become more and more evident.
However, China, for its part, remained prosperous and strong compared to the various polities of Southeast Asia. The relatively peaceful world order which had endured for several centuries under Kambuja hegemony was gone, and it was yet unclear what could replace it. Declining population and wealth led to a dark age of sorts. Warlords and mobs were as likely to destroy monasteries and temples as they were to found new ones, and the Shans' personal and tribal form of politics represented a regression from the complex mandala-systems organized by the Kambuja. As endemic warfare became commonplace, the hydraulic systems that sustained the Kambuja finally failed outright, leading to mass famines and apocalyptic chaos.
[I've attached a map of Southeast Asia circa 1311. Majachaiya is on the rise, but her conquests of Dammacraya and Kataha are not yet complete. Dammacraya for its part is at the peak of its power and prestige, and will eventually be reduced to a federation of highland tribes holding on against the Majachaiya juggernaut. The Isyana rump state will fall at the end of the year. Dai Viet is in ruins but hasn't yet been overrun by the Tai. Daksinakhand (Australia) has not yet received any permanent colonists worth noting on the map. Over the next generation Kyauske will fall more completely and be reduced to coastal cities and nothing more.
The choice to make all the Shan the same color is because their states at this juncture are pretty fluid and amorphous. They all have many vassals who at any point could rise up and take over as a major player in the story.]
Dai Viet under the To dynasty was defined by the Red River. Along the coastal lands and lowland river deltas, where farming was easy and merchant contact frequent, a distinct and Sinicized culture developed. Uniquely for their region, they resisted the influence of the Indosphere, an influence which penetrated even the highlands to their north, where Tai tribes aggressively resisted the colonial resettlement and cultural assimilation projects of Chinese ministers, tacitly approved by the Yaol Emperors in the distant north.
The great sprawl of the Khmer Empire to the south did not touch Dai Viet for matters of geography – the independent and relatively lightly-governed highlands that delineated Southeast Asia prevented easy overland contact, and the presence of the behemoth Kitai Empire to the North always played a bigger role than any southern realm. Their traditional deities were not syncretized with Indra and Brahma, and rather than the Hindicized Buddhism of the south, their elites adopted the Taoist-Buddhism of China instead, and the common people maintained devotional folk cults to ancestral cults and various nature gods, a system not so different from the incorporation of Shinto worship into Japanese Buddhism. Their temples were often pagoda tiered and decorated with brightly painted Chinese iconography, deeply distinct from the rock-cut reliefs that ornamented the temples of the Kambuja. Both had a similar horror vacui, a stylistic choice which in both cases worked to help visualize the divine for their audiences.
Unlike the Khmer Empire, which was corporate and feudal at the best of times – an association of Kambuja cities, guilds and temples bound by treaties and contracts – the Dai Viet were a bureaucratic regime modeled off of the Chinese example, and indeed in many senses followed the old bureacratic model more accurately than the Kitai did. The Kitai had morphed the Chinese bureaucracy to accommodate the exigencies of their steppe empire and their regime of outsiders. Buddhist religious orthodoxy had become a major component in the exam, and certain ethnic quotas had been established to ensure that Kitai sons could always find a place in bureaucracy.
By contrast, Dai Viet was a striking meritocracy, where men of any background could ascend to great heights. The To were descended from a line of ministers and petty government officials, and in their earlier decades (1190-1240) they deeply understood the benefit of finding capable men and rooting out corruption. This alone would have earned them the admiration of the peasantry, but the Exoteric Buddhist philosophies they adhered to focused on the welfare of the farmers above all – they stockpiled grain during famines and kept a well-ordered, well run state with numerous garrisons to defend against highland raiders.
The ascendency of the petty Shan states had thrown the Khmer into relative anarchy, and combined with the degradation of their traditional agricultural system due to a series of unforeseen ecological stresses, the thirteenth century saw the near-total erosion of their empire. The Kambuja city-states began asserting more autonomy, but their constant warring led to population collapse and opportunity for their subject peoples to begin rising up as well.
The Kingdom of Hsriwa, greatest of the Shan states, continued to win their wars after the debacles of 1258. What had begun as mere raids and punitive expeditions conducted back and forth along a gradually shifting border had become outright chaos. The Hsriwa Saopha (King) Hkun Hmom struck a devastating blow against an alliance of Kambujan armies in 1278, leading to the Hsriwa moving into what had once been the northern lands of the Dvaravati Mon, settling there and continuing to pressure the Kambuja cities into tributary status.
Unlike Dai Viet or even the rising power of Majachaiya, Hsriwa operated along the lines of the common model of the indigenous Indosphere empires. They were keen to establish a hegemonic tributary state, but were less eager to actually administer territories themselves. They kept the guilds active in regions they conquered, and rarely sacked cities outright, preferring to ransom and establish their own rule in the place of the Khmer. They were equally quick to begin the process of assimilation and cultural exchange, losing much of what made them distinctive as they became comfortable lords over the ruins of the Khmer Empire.
No power in Southeast Asia was truly capable of changing the rules of statecraft as they were known besides Majachaiya. As the Kingdom of the Radiant Tree continued to expand, their direct rulership and tendency to annihilate native guilds in favor of their own companies became an increasing worry to the remaining Southeast Asian polities, particularly the Champa and Indranokura. But there was little that could be done. The Champa remained divided and the Khmer Empire was a fiction perpetrated by a succession of puppet emperors in Angkor Thom. The Dai Viet might have been such a transformative polity, but they were ringed on most sides by hostile tribal peoples whose lands were marginal at best. The only clear avenue for expansion was towards the Champa, and there they met with little success. Kauthara, the greatest Champa city, would frequently come to the support of Indrapura and her other federate cities when the Dai Viet attempted one of their routine invasions, utilizing their fleet to blockade the Red River ports and deny Vietnamese merchants access to the sea, to say nothing of frequent coastal raids and punitive attacks.
Saopha Hkun Hmom was succeeded by his nephew Hseng Kaw in 1289. In a break from the tradition of cultivating alliances among other Shan princelings, Hseng Kaw arranged the marriage of his young daughter to the To monarch at the time, To Doung Hoan, whose own wife had recently died. The two leaders began making plans – Hseng Kaw was an ambitious man, who dreamed of uniting a vast territory from the surviving Kyauske rump state to what remained of Indranokura under his loose authority. More than a Saopha, he dreamed of being a Chakravartin. To this end, he knew that the Dai Viet could be immensely useful – even if they had a poor military track record, he was interested in learning the organizational techniques that they utilized. Hseng Kaw had seen the Dai Viet capital, Thang Kinh, and he had marveled at the wealth and the order of it. By contrast, the Saopha had no capital – rotating between his various forts, moving the court with the changing seasons.
Still, the pact and mutual exchange of knowledge was not to be. To Doung Hoan died fighting Tai hillmen on the border with the Kitai in a blossoming border war which by 1301 would spill over the border and lead to an outright clash between the Kitai, their Tai vassals, and the Southern Kingdom. Ambayhan, a half-Kitai half-Naiman commander, was tasked with leading a forty-thousand man expeditionary army to subdue the To dynasty and bring them to heel or annex them outright, whichever was more practical. His force was like nothing the Dai Viet Emperors had ever faced. The Kitai had a well-ordered and professional army, with ranks of disciplined tufenj-soldiers whose modern weapons, known as Che Dian Chong (literally “lightning quick firearm”) could fire at a rate far superior to the Champa armies. By contrast, Dai Viet had lagged behind in the adoption of tufenj.
If not for the fact that the traditional steppe cavalry arm, ubiquitous among major Yaol dynasty armies, had been utterly useless in the hills and marshlands of Dai Viet, Ambayhan would have won a crushing victory. As it was, he was reduced to a long, bloody campaign. Reinforcements, drawn from the garrisons of the southern provinces, fought and died in futile engagements and the To dynasty stubbornly held on in spite of everything. Finally, after five years of ineffective fighting, the Yaol dynasty withdrew, leaving Dai Viet a devastated ruin that would be ultimately overrun by Tai warlords from the north, fleeing the wave of persecution that the Kitai unleashed following their defeat in Dai Viet. It was easier, ultimately, to blame subversive elements within the state on their failure than admit that their tactics and strategies, adapted for fighting in the comparatively open north, were disastrous in the southern hills and forests.
Five years of devastating war in the south destroyed Dai Viet, but ultimately it be hard on the Yaol Dynasty as well. They had held the whole of China for two centuries, and the north for even longer, but times were changing. If they had brought unprecedented prosperity and opportunity to many, they were still foreigners, and the traditional systems of China were not easily cowed into submission. In the aftermath of the Southern War, the cracks in their armor would begin to become more and more evident.
However, China, for its part, remained prosperous and strong compared to the various polities of Southeast Asia. The relatively peaceful world order which had endured for several centuries under Kambuja hegemony was gone, and it was yet unclear what could replace it. Declining population and wealth led to a dark age of sorts. Warlords and mobs were as likely to destroy monasteries and temples as they were to found new ones, and the Shans' personal and tribal form of politics represented a regression from the complex mandala-systems organized by the Kambuja. As endemic warfare became commonplace, the hydraulic systems that sustained the Kambuja finally failed outright, leading to mass famines and apocalyptic chaos.
[I've attached a map of Southeast Asia circa 1311. Majachaiya is on the rise, but her conquests of Dammacraya and Kataha are not yet complete. Dammacraya for its part is at the peak of its power and prestige, and will eventually be reduced to a federation of highland tribes holding on against the Majachaiya juggernaut. The Isyana rump state will fall at the end of the year. Dai Viet is in ruins but hasn't yet been overrun by the Tai. Daksinakhand (Australia) has not yet received any permanent colonists worth noting on the map. Over the next generation Kyauske will fall more completely and be reduced to coastal cities and nothing more.
The choice to make all the Shan the same color is because their states at this juncture are pretty fluid and amorphous. They all have many vassals who at any point could rise up and take over as a major player in the story.]
I do have a question: Does Shinto still persist in Japan? I know "Shinto" doesn't formally exist yet, however, the precursor to it does, or will it simply be replaced by Zen Buddhism/Esoteric Buddhism?