He lived long enough to see himself a villain but also a legend who shake the foundation of the empire to its core with his reforms.
Along with conquering, kicking ass and taking names.
Along with conquering, kicking ass and taking names.
Where the River Flows: The Story of Misia: A Native American Superpower
- Thread starter JSilvy
- Start date
Chapter 31: Mimia the Great
Chapter 31: Mimia the Great
In the Spring of 1666, chaos in the imperial court ended when then Princess Mimia ended her maniacal father’s life. When she emerged from the palace gardens with the Emperor’s corpse, the guards simply helped her bring the cadaver to the morgue. The following day, on April 20, the date of Mimia’s 33rd birthday, she was crowned as the new Empress.
Prior to that point, Mimia had a rather eventful life. In 1643, as a young girl, Mimia snuck into a carriage to join her father on his campaign eastward against the rebel generals. Despite angry letters from Wahpimosa, Maquah opted to keep the young girl by her side rather than send her home to Cahoqua, and she joined him all the way through the treaty of Sandusti. When she returned to Cahoqua to an angry mother, Mimia longed to travel again. When she turned 18 in 1651, Mimia begged her parents to allow her to travel North America to learn about the world around her. Once again, Wahpimohsa was concerned, although her father, wanting to build a future for his heir, agreed to sponsor a well-guarded voyage for her in a loop around the continent. That summer, she set out, sailing up the Inokaspi to Shikakwa and journeyed through the Great Lakes. Crossing the Ongniara Canal to Lake Ontario, she explored the Haudenosaunee heartland and visited Kawanoteh before sailing down the Wepistuk and visiting St. John’s on Takamcook. She then sailed down the eastern coast of the continent all the way to Tekesta, the entire way meeting with dignitaries in the various cities she visited.
In the Bahamas, Mimia’s ship was sent off course and she was kidnapped by a group of pirates. As they held her ship for ransom, she warned them all of her father’s brutality, causing them to fear retribution. Eventually, they turned against their captain giving Mimia control. Once she led the crew to return the boat to the rest of the fleet, she sent the pirates away on their own ship with a small sum of money which she paid them for their efforts. She also left a torch on the ground next to a barrel of gunpowder, which ignited and sank the entire boat as she went off towards Shawasha.
Mimia would continue to make several more voyages, taking a more active role in the navigatory aspect. In her famous southern journey, she stopped at Hispaniola and traveled all the way to British Argentina, witnessing the the ongoing process of armed settlers moving onto the vast plains of the Pampas. On the way back, she visited Spanish Central America, remarking that it would be an ideal site for a canal linking the two oceans, and then visited the Meshica Empire, remarking that the port of Zempoala, while smaller than Shawasha, was just as wealthy if not even wealthier.
Perhaps the most famous of her journeys was her Transatlantic voyage. After a brief stop in Takamcook, she crossed the Atlantic to Britain, also visiting France and the Netherlands, where she was impressed by the local water management and canal systems, leading her to refer to the Dutch as “the most civilized of the race of pale men”. Sailing around Iberia, she stopped in Gibraltar before journeying across the Mediterranean, following the northern shores all the way to the Ottoman Empire, becoming the first American in history to set foot in Constantinople and met with the Ottoman Sultan. She traveled down the Levantine coast. At the port of Jaffa, she dismounted to explore what she had learned from Christians and Jews in the New World to be holy land. Her description was as follows:
“In the land known to the Eropiaki race as Palestina and to the Yehutiaki as Israel, the alleged Holy Ground is barren, with not a sign of the Great Spirit’s blessing. While a handful of ports bustle with a moderate trickle of activity, the land is stripped barren. Indeed, the climate is pleasant and delightful, but the holy ground of the Cristiaki and Yehutiaki is desolate and unlovely. Yerushalem, described as a “City Upon a Hill”, is indeed the crown jewel of this land and worthy of perhaps some praise, but the city is small, the size of a standard Mihsiwahki village, and its population appears to be no greater than the isle of Makinak. While great houses of worship exist, the crowded city leaves the Yehutiaki little room to worship at their most sacred site, the wall of a destroyed temple atop which is constructed a Muselimi shrine. Clearly, the men across the Atlantic have not the slightest clue as to how to respect their gods.”
Mimia also commented that it was “peculiar that no canal exists between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.” Afterward, she returned to Cahoqua from her Transatlantic journey in December of 1665, just in time for Peponki. However, rather than returning to a happy feast, she found that her mother had been dead for over a year, her father had gone mad, and the court was in disarray.
As Empress, the first challenge Mimia faced was military failures in the plains and boreal regions. While Kilsu settlements were being established, endless attacks on them by the native tribes persisted. The military, while more than capable of massacring entire villages, had fallen into disarray with its chief commander going mad and its resources spread thin, unable to guard every single town. In response, Mimia, after reorganizing the military, issued a decree to provide every settler with a firearm, much like what she had witnessed in Argentina. In the following decades, attacks on settlements decreased significantly, and in her 1667 decree, Mimia declared an end to the indiscriminate slaughter of plains tribes by the military.
This state, however, was short-lived. Following the death of a young Misian boy under mysterious circumstances in 1671 in Kwakwansi, a village not far west of the city of Mayalamsem, the local Chatiks were blamed. In response, a group of villagers took their guns to the plains and attacked an entire Chatik camp, leading to an all-out war in which an alliance between the Chatiks and the locals. This conflict would spread, and soon the Oceti Sakowin alliance between the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota joined. While Mimia never restored the genocidal order, she declared that the military was permitted to do as it pleased to any native village or camp deemed by settlers to be a threat, leading to a continuation of the massacres from before.
Meanwhile, as settlement on the plains increased, populations shifted throughout the empire. Most notably, poor landless workers from the south moved west or north to fill niches left by northerners moving west. In response, in 1676, Misia endorsed the importation of more African slaves primarily from the Spanish Caribbean colonies. However, the increase in Spanish ships in Shawasha and Mabila was met with large-scale protests by many of the local Tainos. The 1676 Taino rebellion was swiftly put down by the Misian military, although to prevent future unrest, Mimia declared that Taino merchants would be granted priority in conducting trade between Misia and the Caribbean at Misian ports. The increasing presence of Taino merchants actually led to an increase in the Taino population in the Caribbean, even expanding the size of the Aragua on Hispaniola. Ironically, the very people who had for nearly two centuries hated the Spanish for their genocidal actions were now themselves taking part in Spain’s atrocities, taking a larger part in the Spanish empire’s slave trade and forming a middle class. As a result, resentment against the Taino also began to grow among the black population and poor mestizos. Slave results and popular uprisings, while crushed, would often target the Taino population. This prejudice would eventually play a role in shaping the future Ayitian-Latin conflict.
As more far-out settlements neared the Assinwati mountains, trade had increased with the Dinei Empire. Initially, this trade was mostly peaceful, however, as more gold mined in Dzilola and surrounding regions made their way to Cahoqua, rumors of a city of gold in the mountains just east of the continental divide came with them. In 1682, Mimia ordered an expeditionary force to the far west to investigate the city. Although Dzilola had been established only 57 years prior, its population had grown significantly. The plurality of the city’s population was Dinei and Indei, but it also possessed significant populations of Sosonis, Ashipes, Kutsans, and even Afro-Assinwatians and had grown to be a major urban center of the Dinei empire. As such, the Dinei saw it fit to defend their city and attacked the armed group, fighting them off. When word returned to Cahoqua, Mimia ordered a force of 50,000 troops to march on Dzilola. When they arrived in 1684, the Dinei were unable to muster a force of that size, and Dzilola was completely overrun. The Misian force pursued the Dinei into the Assinwatis as they tried to take over other mining colonies, but found that the Dinei were able to pick off Misian forces in the mountains quite easily. With their trade being disrupted, the French attempted to bring the Misians and the Dinei to the negotiating table. When the French Misia Company based in Kiawah sent their request to Cahoqua, Mimia responded by telling the French not to “interfere with matters involving the domain of the Great Kingdom” and told them to “focus more on civilizing your own nation on your own continent” (likely a reference to Mimia’s belief that all Europeans barring the Dutch were inferior to the Hileni). Eventually, the French convinced the Dinei to agree to give up Dzilola in exchange for a promise to allow the local Maasawists to continue living freely and that the Misians would not seek to take more territory in the mountains. In 1688, in the city of Dzilola, the Dinei formally signed over control of the city and other territory east of the mountains to the Kilsu, and keeping their agreement, the Kilsu largely maintained the existing population of the city primarily if nothing else in order to keep the city productive. Immediately after, Dinei Emperor Adriel invited Meshica Emperor Montezuma VII to meet him in Yenecami, where the two formally signed an anti-Kilsu alliance.
Still, although the Great Kingdom’s borders stopped at the Assinwatis, the “Four Seas Doctrine” came to be near gospel in Misia. As the idea went, the Hileni people were meant to spread across the continent to touch four bodies of water– the Atlantic Ocean in the east, the South Misian and Caribbean Seas in the south, the Great Lakes to the north (although in some cases this was in reference to the Hudson Bay and Arctic Ocean), and the Pacific Ocean to the west. As Mimia’s published travelogs spread, some even considered it Misia’s destiny to control “five seas” by expanding Misia’s influence across the ocean, not unlike the European powers who were spreading their influence in the Americas. However, the Misians would first have to contend with one more major European power entering North American affairs.
One more European power. I wonder who that could be cos the French, Dutch, Spanish, English and Portuguese are already there. Maybe a Scandinavian country? Or a German one even?
Indeed, these men across the sea all seem to be rather primitive (except of course for the Dutch).
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Why does the Queen of Misia like the Dutch?
Also, I get that this timeline is Jewish-centric, and not that I am complaining, but what happened to the hundreds or possibly thousands of crypto-Muslims who left the Spanish Kingdom from Inquisition to the New World colonies and still practice Islam there (and use legit means like navigators, cartographers, etc.), and the Muslims who are enslaved in the New World due to the trans-atlantic slave trade? Especially since many initial refugees from the former al-Andalus were rich, but the middle, working, artisans and the poor were left behind at the mercy of Ferdinand and Isabella?
There's the Moroccan slave Mustafa Azemmouri who is the ibn-Batuta/ibn-Fadlan of the New World when he got separated by his slave masters and travelled across the continent?
Also, will the French Revolution happen, and how would the natives of North and South America react to the guillotine of a king and queen? And Robespierre?
Will we see Fourierists and Simonianists travel to North America to experiment socialism by establishing artificial communes/communities?
Also, I get that this timeline is Jewish-centric, and not that I am complaining, but what happened to the hundreds or possibly thousands of crypto-Muslims who left the Spanish Kingdom from Inquisition to the New World colonies and still practice Islam there (and use legit means like navigators, cartographers, etc.), and the Muslims who are enslaved in the New World due to the trans-atlantic slave trade? Especially since many initial refugees from the former al-Andalus were rich, but the middle, working, artisans and the poor were left behind at the mercy of Ferdinand and Isabella?
There's the Moroccan slave Mustafa Azemmouri who is the ibn-Batuta/ibn-Fadlan of the New World when he got separated by his slave masters and travelled across the continent?
Also, will the French Revolution happen, and how would the natives of North and South America react to the guillotine of a king and queen? And Robespierre?
Will we see Fourierists and Simonianists travel to North America to experiment socialism by establishing artificial communes/communities?
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Same reasons as the japanese I believe
The dutch care little about conversion and a lot of making good money so they look professional, their religious practices in turn are somewhat compatible with the misian ones(just call Big G as the Great Spirit), they arent requesting much special status and wield the greatest corporation the world has ever seen which also led to their cities looking fucking spectacular and havent been devastated by natural disasters like the spanish & portuguese were(which for the misians mean they've been clearly blessed by the Great Spirit)
Yeah the dutch are all about defying the oceans with their mere existence in the coastlines, for misians thats just awesome
Add that collecting and storing grains is a huge priority for them and the sight of the omnipresent dutch mills become something to behold, its like if we found a society that has a fusion powerplant in every city of theirs, its astonishing
It’s actually because of canals. Misia, as a country with many navigable rivers that historically never had horses before the arrival of Europeans, and so they see canal construction as a sign of civilization. Roads are important, yes, but what does that compare to completely manipulating the water around you?
Because she thinks they are industrious and inventive people who dig great canals.
Shades of Manifest Destiny, though I wonder if we'll see a fairly defined Misiosphere a la the Sinosphere. Misia itself, states of the Pacific Northwest, the northeastern statelets of Iroquoia, Powhatan, the Wabenaki, etc.? The Rockies outside getting to the Pac Northwest would give the *Southwest, *Deseret, and *California protection from any Misian influence they don't want to take when push comes to shove.
I like that way of phrasing it.
I can imagine someone’s racist uncle at the dinner people talking about how Europeans are lazy people who move everything by crappy roads but the Dutch are smart and know how to manage water.
I can only imagine a dinner conversation between an Taino family if one of the younger members was friends with/dating a Spaniard.