PRELUDE: The State of the World in A.D. 1444

From the secret archives of the Black Chamber comes this purported record of a meeting between the French King Raimbaut de Valois-Vexin and his ministers on November 11th, 1444.

HERALD: Most high, most potent and most excellent Prince, Raimbaut de Valois-Vexin, by the Grace of God, King of France, Most Christian Majesty.

MINISTERS, AMBASSADORS, and the DAUPHIN stand. His Majesty the King sits, followed by the others.

HIS MAJESTY: Let’s get down to business. I’m sure we’ve all heard wild rumors left and right– the Ming intend to retake Hungary, a fresh army is on its way from China, all the Ming are marching back to China, and so on.

LOUIS PANCEMONT, COMTE DE CHAMPAGNE: I’ve heard they’ve sacked Jerusalem and shot the Metropolitan of the Holy City into the sea with the largest cannon ever made!

H.M.: Jerusalem remains in Christian hands, Champagne.

ANTOINE HANRIOT, COMTE DE BARROIS: A Turkish mercenary I know swore she’d seen the Senate in Constantinople vote to claim the entire borders of the Roman Empire under Trajan as Byzantine territory, and a Roman army is marching on the ‘province of Gaul’ as we speak!


H.M.: A wild exaggeration.

JEAN-BAPTISTE REVILLON, METROPOLITAN OF THE AUTOCEPHALOUS ORTHODOX CHURCH OF FRANCE: My man in Constantinople wrote that the Hui forced Pedro de León convert to Islam as penance for his role in the revolt of the Leónese, and he did so rather than become a martyr for true religion.

H.M.: Hm. Well, that one’s true.

REVILLON: The Ecumenical Patriarch keeps a close watch on all its children, your majesty.

H.M.: Still! There’s been a lot of quite unnecessary alarm. So, to set the record straight, the Dauphin of France, Martin will give a brief presentation on the current strategic situation in the Near West… excuse me, in Christendom.

MARTIN DE VALOIS-VEXIN, DAUPHIN OF FRANCE: Thank you, Father. As you are all no doubt aware, the Near West is in a state of flux, transition, and– in places– outright chaos. However, I feel that a more stable political order is finally beginning to emerge in the wake of the victory of the Second Hungarian League, the retreat of the Ming Frontier Army from central Europe, etc.

DAUPHIN: First, there is our beloved homeland itself. While our armies suffered grievous losses in our failed attempts to prevent the Papal State from reclaiming Corsica and Sardinia, the metropole remains sacrosanct. When most of the rest of the Near West has been ravaged by events like the conquests of the Ming, the collapse of England and the Holy Roman Empire, civil wars, and a multitude of other such woes, we have never been stronger. In the south, we hold both sides of the Pyrenees. In the west, we are slowly pushing into Germany and the Low Countries. We are surely the foremost Christian nation in the world.

REVILLON: Surely that honor belongs to Rome.

DAUPHIN: A spent force. Its strength has bled out fighting for the benefit of Hungarians and Turks and putting down revolts by the local nobility.

DAUPHIN: Iberia, in spite of being the most far-flung conquest of the Ming Frontier Army, never fully slipped from their grasp. While the southeast remains a patchwork of Andalusian successor states and petty rebel Chinese lordlings, and in the north– incredibly– the Catholic Knights of Calatrava have emerged as an independent power– the bulk of the territory is still under Hui occupation.

DAUPHIN: The de León monarchs remain the nominal rulers of the kingdom, but his grace the Metropolitan astutely observed, they have converted to Sunni Islam. In any case, they are mere puppets of a clique of Hui military officers.

DAUPHIN: Banu Barghawati Mauritania retains its hold on southwestern Iberia, but North Africa remains their true base of power.

DAUPHIN: Across the English channel, the English continue to pay the price of Gregory de Conteville’s great folly. While the petty lords of Wessex, Bedford, Kent, Lancaster, York, and Northumberland all vie for the broken crown of England, Catholic Scotland has emerged from its dynastic infighting stronger than ever, and King Niall Kyle is keen to extend his dominion south of Hadrian’s Wall.

DAUPHIN: In Scandinavia, both Catholic Norway and Orthodox Denmark have benefitted from the destruction of the Kingdom of Sweden. Denmark, however, claimed the richest provinces of Sweden for itself, and now stands as the foremost power of the region.

DAUPHIN: Norway, however, has a powerful ally in the form of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire. Once fought to be more or less finished as a force in European politics after centuries of gradual decline followed by a chaotic struggle for supremacy between the houses of de Conteville, von Bremen, and von Habsburg and, ultimately, the loss of southern Germany to the Frontier Army and its refusal to rejoin the Empire following the victory of the League. Now, however, Karl von Habsburg, with the backing of the Papal State– and, more importantly, the vast fortunes of the coffers of Orbetello and the vast armies of the Church Militant– has been elected emperor and brought the Empire back into the Catholic fold.

REVILLON: Apostasy! Heresy most foul! He has delivered the soul of the German people to hell.

DAUPHIN: His Grace the Metropolitan is correct, of course. But he has managed to entrench the Holy Roman Empire in northern Germany as a sort of ‘Fortress Habsburg’, and this imperial rump state enjoys an ironclad unity even the Holy Roman Empire of Henry IV Salian’s salad days never did.

DAUPHIN: Southern Germany remains a confused mix of liberated German Princes and Hui-dominated revolter states. I suggest we conquer it before the Habsburgs do.

DAUPHIN: East of Germany lie the realms of the Dunin kings. Wincenty II Dunin’s Poland might perhaps be a valuable Orthodox counterweight to the Habsburgs, but of course we are most concerned with Hungary. Greger the Great has been proclaimed a Living Saint by the Ecumenical Patriarch for his victory over the Ming– and who are we to argue? Nonetheless, it should be noted that Hungary was ravaged by the war, and parts of the Hungarian countryside remain in the hands of Ming Frontier Army holdouts who, rather than follow the orders to demobilize, are hiding in the Carpathian Mountains, waiting for some unspecified form of salvation.

DAUPHIN: Even further east, there’s Kiev, Third Rome. Long the ally of their co-dynasts in the second Rome. Yuriy II Yaroslavovich has decided that the impending ascension of Hugh de Mowbray and consequent extinction of the Byzantine Yaroslavoviches is as good a time as any to break the bonds of friendship and become a regional rival of the empire.

DAUPHIN: Which brings us to the Second Rome itself. On paper, they are our closest rivals for the position of the natural leaders of Europe.

REVILLON: Of course, their position as leaders of the Orthodox Church is undisputed.

DAUPHIN: Of course. Still, with respect to our secular and worldly rivalry– the Roman Empire is currently riven by conflict between the central government and the old feudal nobility, and is far more vulnerable than its prestigious role in the revolt of the Hungarian League would indicate.

COMTE DE BARROIS: You’re not telling us anything we don’t know! Tell us about the East.

H.M.: Aren’t you the one who said there was a giant Roman army marching to reconquer Gaul? Shut up.

DAUPHIN: Fortunately, I can still answer the Comte de Barrois’ curiosity. May I present Gräfin Elsa Chunmei von Hohenburg-Qian of Austria, who has come with an Atlas printed in Beijing this very year.

MINISTERS: Gasps, shouts of excitement

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: Ao Di Li— or, if you want to be old-fashioned, “Austria”– is a union of several of the independent Hui states which emerged following the victory of the League of Hungary. So, while we are a Sunni state, Hui and Austrian live side-by-side, and as we have no love for the Ming or its formal successor states, we are prepared to share some of our superior knowledge with Orthodox leaders such as yourselves.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: We shall start with a discussion of those successor states. The Dauphin has already accurately described the status of Lai Ang, so we shall move onto Da Qin.

H.M.: My Mandarin’s a bit rusty… doesn’t Da Qin mean… “Big China”?

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: In this case it is a specific allusion to the name the ancient Chinese gave to the Roman Empire of antiquity, as Da Qin’s capital is in Antioch, the traditional seat of power in the Roman East. The ancients mythologized the Roman Empire as a sort of Western mirror image of China on the other end of the world. In naming his share of Chang Yuchun’s conquests “Da Qin”, Emperor Hu Daihan seeks to evoke this legacy.

H.M.: Everyone wants to be Rome. The Habsburgs, the Byzantines, the Russians, these “Da Qin”… Meanwhile, the Pope is still sitting on the actual city of Rome on his giant pile of gold. Makes you wonder what the whole point is. We’re doing just fine being “France”, you know.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: As you wish, your majesty.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: Much of the former Republic of Somalia has been reclaimed by Somali successor states– Busaso, Mogadishu, and Abyssinia. The areas Hui military officials maintained control over been organized into the merchant republic of Suo Ma Li. It is the weakest of all of the Frontier Army’s successor states, and I doubt it can stand long against Somali aspirations to reform the old Somalian Republic.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: The most powerful of the successor states is the Empire of Yilang. Ruled by the descendants of Chang Yuchun himself, Yilang rules the Persian heartland of the Frontier Army’s conquests, where Hui rule is most entrenched. Much of their northern territory has melted away into a mixture of Mongol and Hui states, while a large swath of the old Levantine Empire was liberated by the Hungarian League or in subsequent revolts.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: India was bypassed by the Frontier Army on its journey west, but fearing a second such great offensive, the princes of the subcontinent have banded together into the Indian League, under the leadership of the Sultan of Delhi. It remains to be seen if this unity can hold, or if the rival princes will all turn on one another and bring the League tumbling down.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: In Southeast Asia, the Confucian states of Annam, Boni, and Manlejia, Sunni Aceh, and– incredibly– Catholic Thailand all vie for supremacy.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: And then there’s China.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: Finally, in far-off Japan, the Fujiwara Empress and the Minamoto Shogun of the Kamakura Bafuku state one another down, while the Genchou— the last remnants of the Mongol Empire which once dominated nearly all of Asia– sulk in the south. In Korea, the hermit kingdoms of Baekje and Goguryeo gaze inwards, while Silla gazes outwards, wondering just what lies beyond over the great wide Pacific…

H.M.: Dragons, I assume.

DAUPHIN: The krakken?

REVILLON: They shall sail off the world’s edge in their pagan hubris.

VON HOHENBURG-QIAN: The world is round, Metropolitan. So clearly if they sail far enough, they’ll reach Lai Ang.

H.M.: Come on, that’s like basic science. Don’t they make you read the classics at whatever Greek seminary stamps you guys out by the dozen?

H.M.: In any case, we’ve covered enough for now. I expect all of you to consider what you’ve learned here as you formulate your ministries’ policies.

WORLD MAP, 1444

I’ve split the first update into this SotW and the first gameplay, so expect another update shortly.