Gifted city by barbarians?

A strange thing happened in my BNW campaign. I'm playing Morroco on a large continents map, Prince difficulty. I had an open borders agreement with Russia (we're not friends), and sent my archaeologist over to Novgorod to excavate some antiquities.

It turned out that while my archaeologist was digging, some barbarians were attacking the city. (This is during the modern era. I didn't know barbarians spawned then.) Anyway, the barbarians sacked the city, and the next thing I know, I get the menu asking me if I want to annex, raze or puppet the city!

Has anything like this happened to you before? I just want to know if this is normal...

Uh, that's weird...
Care to post a save? Or at least screenshots?

It sounds like you weren't paying attention to the cultural victory screen.

When a civ suffers from unhappiness to an extreme extent, they have barbarian uprisings, and if the unhappiness is due to Tourism pressure from a civ with a different Ideology, their cities start to convert to the dominant civ, which was you in this case.

You flipped their city. The barbarians were another symptom of the same problem, not the cause.

Ideology flip, maybe?

Eagle Pursuit said:

It sounds like you weren't paying attention to the cultural victory screen.

When a civ suffers from unhappiness to an extreme extent, they have barbarian uprisings, and if the unhappiness is due to Tourism pressure from a civ with a different Ideology, their cities start to convert to the dominant civ, which was you in this case.

You flipped their city. The barbarians were another symptom of the same problem, not the cause.

Click to expand...

Ah! That must be it. This also explains why after I made Novgorod a puppet and my happiness dropped to negative, all these barbarians came marauding my cities....