Where the River Flows: The Story of Misia: A Native American Superpower
- Thread starter JSilvy
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Maquah may be an asshole, but goddamn if he isn't good at this whole governing thing. I'm legitimately impressed.
Just you wait, we haven't even gotten to the spiciest part.
At this rate he's going to save diseased orphans from some wily Spaniards while discovering a lode of gold or something!
Think spicy less in the saving-the-world way and more in the people-debating-whether-he-deserves-to-have-a-statue-in-the-21st-Century way
When did Misians accede to the continent being called North America, anyway?
Chapter 29: Defenestration and Colonization
Chapter 29: Defenestration and Colonization
In the early 1600s, Europe was divided. With the ongoing Reformation, the Hapsburg Empire sought to cement its power in Europe through its defense of the Catholic church with the wealth gained from its dominance of the Caribbean and trade with Meshica. Meanwhile, the Protestant English and Dutch along with the majority Catholic but religiously pluralistic France (France had a Protestant king but the Catholic Church was still granted significant institutional power) sought to keep the Hapsburgs from expanding in power. War on the European continent seemed inevitable.
This inevitable war would indeed come in 1618. Following attempts by the Counter-Reformation to suppress Protestantism in Bohemia, fighting broke out between the Bohemian rebels and the Hapsburgs. In March of 1619, as fighting began to spread throughout the Holy Roman Empire, the anti-Hapsburg alliance of France, England, and the Netherlands intervened, sending troops to aid the Bohemians. With the anti-Hapsburg alliance quickly gaining ground, the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began to intervene against the Protestants that August. In 1620, Sweden responded by supporting Protestant rebellions in Prussia and invading Latvia, leading the Commonwealth to divert troops. In 1622, when it was clear that the Protestant powers had an advantage, the Hapsburgs asked Paris for peace, recognizing that France, as a state where the Church still held significant power, would not simply want Protestant hegemony over the Holy Roman Empire. The two sides met in 1623 in the city of Munich, where the Peace of Bavaria would establish the rights to national sovereignty and put an end to the Counter-Reformation. Thus, the relatively brief War of the Defenestration came to an end.
Still, while Europe was ostensibly at peace, conflict remained on a local level. Through the 1640s to the 1660s, poor harvests resulted in famines across the Holy Roman Empire. Although the local rulers attempted to suppress any forms of violence, many Protestants and Catholics began to attack each other. More often, however, the Jewish populations would face the brunt of the blame, leading to pogroms across the Holy Roman Empire. Many of these Jews fled to the Netherlands, Poland, and the European and Anatolian portions of the Ottoman Empire. Some, hearing that the wealthiest Jewish communities in the world could be found across the Atlantic, chose to make the voyage west. However, with the rise of the Sabbatean movement as well as the general belief among many that the conditions in Europe spelt the coming of the end times, many chose to flee to Ottoman Palestine. Many settled in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed, which were by this time regarded as the four holy cities with thriving Jewish populations, but an increasing number of newcomers began to also establish themselves on the coast, establishing vibrant communities primarily in Gaza, Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre. These German Jewish were joined by Polish Jews during the Great Deluge.
Meanwhile, for the rest of Europe, an increasingly popular prospect was to flee to fertile yet sparsely populated lands of British Argentina. Seeking to garrison the north against the Iberians. In particular, the Virginia Province came to be settled largely by English aristocrats. Settlement remained sparse, with the central settlement of Janera only having a population of a few hundred. Following increased investment by James I after taking the throne in 1603, Janera, which was renamed Jamestown under governor John Ratcliffe, transformed from a backwater on the edge of England’s empire into a major sugarcane producing region. St. Paul, the capital of the Drakeland Province, soon found similar improvements. South of Drakeland, the Maryland Province was founded by Lord Baltimore in 1632 with its capital in St. Mary’s.
Further south, a major boon would come to Bonusairs, renamed to Fairwinds, when large numbers of Puritan settlers moved to the city and surrounding areas within the Plate Province and began farming the land, starting in the 1620s. As the Puritans gained increasing power in the state and began to support their particular form of religious orthodoxy, Thomas Hooker and Robert Williams left and established the colonies of Parana to the north and Providence to the south to allow for greater degrees of religious freedom in the 1630s.
Soon, German migrants would begin making their way to these colonies in large numbers, starting in the 1640s, in many cases moving up-river to find new land to settle. However, the province which would end up having the largest German population was that of Pennsylvania. While William Penn initially established the colony in 1680 across the River Plate from Fairwinds and Providence as a haven for Quakers, it quickly became the most diverse province of British Argentina, and Philadelphia quickly became a major city.
England was not the only European power expanding its empire. Although King Philip had initially planned on making Portugal a Spanish province, the ire of nobles and the slipping power of the Hapsburgs elsewhere on the continent made him decide to increase Portuguese autonomy instead, and even help secure Portugal’s colonial interests. While the Dutch East India Company was becoming increasingly powerful in the western portions of the Malay Archipelago, the Portuguese continued to establish their colonies of Lução, Celebes, Tidore, and Timor, collectively known as the Portuguese East Indies.
To the North, Russia was continuing to expand across the Eurasian steppe and taiga and reached the Pacific in 1639. In 1648, Semyon Dezhnyov was the first to lead an expedition through what came to be known as the Dezhnyov Sea separating Siberia from North America. When his expedition discovered the Alaskan Peninsula, Dezhnyov began to realize that the newly discovered land may be connected to Misia. Over the coming decades, the Czar would call for the establishment of trade outposts in order to acquire more furs to be sold on European markets.
However, while Russia was quickly making headway into the Pacific Northwest, it was not the only state with ambitions in that region.