Perfectly reasonable decision. Sarajevo and Targoviste were both important cities in the Ottoman empire, makes sense to include them under the Ottoman name.
Same with Hungary, which has cities from Romania (Koloszvar, Temeszvar) and Croatia (Zagrab) in its list. If Austria make it, in, you can expect names such as Pressburg (Bratislava) on their list as well.
Sarajevo is also a VERY important city for Austria, which
@Zaarin is always pushing.
Joseph II? What do you gain by that? For Franz Joseph, you at least gain style points.
Wouldn't Charles V be the obvious pick for Austria (and a co-leader for Spain [and even the Netherlands where he spent most of his life]
)?
Franz Joseph is a very interesting in an often overlooked way. Both his handling of dealing of with the rising of multiple nationalist movements threatening to tear the Habsburg Empire apart (and succeeded at the end of WW1) by creating the compromise that was the Dual Monarchy, as well as each half (the Austrian Crownlands and the Crownlands of Saint Stephen/Hungary) having it's own Parliament with notable amounts of empowerment than previously (though typical of a Belle Epogue Central, Southern, or Eastern European Monarchy - not nearly the liberal levels of suffrage or power held by elected legislative chambers in the UK (and several British Dominions), France, Italy, and the United States at that time), as well as his jumping the gun and complete overreaction to Serbia in June and July 1914 - including the "ultimatum that could not, realistically, be met," was because of his tragic family life. His wife, Empress Elizabeth, was assassinated by Anarchists. His only son, Archduke Rudolf, and his newlywed wife, committed suicide in the honeymoon cottages in the countryside. His heir after that, his nephew Franz Ferdinand, decided he had fallen in love with and insistent on marrying Lady Sophie, a member of a minor Slovak noble house - at a time when an heir to a national throne in Europe was expected to marry a "social peer," or at least reasonably close. The men wrangled about the marriage for several years, until Franz Joseph relented - but declared Franz Ferdinand's marriage - which meant their children would inherit nothing but a stipend to live on. Franz Joseph and Franz Ferdinand clashed often over managing and handling the "constitutional and compromise," of the Dual Monarchy, and how it should work, and what should be allowed to these elected legislative chambers, which became dominated by ethnocentric and regionalist advocacy parties (other than the Social Democrats who maintained a pan-ethnic and unified face, but worried the Habsburgs for other reasons), and arguments got so heated and so nasty, fisticuffs often resulted on the chamber floors. A teenage Adolf Hitler watching sessions of the Imperial Austrian Legislature from the public galleries became convinced, for life, that such violence, vitriol, and thuggery were how politics were meant to be conducted. When Gavrilo Princip fired the lethal shots at Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in Sarajevo, who, because of their morganatic marriage, were not allowed in the shielded and covered Imperial Carriage (just like they couldn't sit together in the balcony at operas or orchestral performances, or attend many formal functions, etc.), but were in a convertible automobile (which Royals just didn't otherwise ride in at that time - in fact, prior to that, Teddy Roosevelt was the only sitting head-of-state, period, who had been known to tool around in an automobile), which made them easy targets - that's when, on re-evaluation from the original studies of him right after the war, and for quite a ways thereafter, the trauma and stress of his family tragedies caused him to act precipitously to King Petar I and Prime Minister Nicola Pavic of Serbia, just because it was AN ethnic Serb who pulled the trigger.
I feel like Axum overlaps more with Nubia than other Ethiopia iterations
Despite territorial proximity to Nubia, Axum seems much more culturally related to Ethiopians. Their language appears to be, or be closely related to, the sub-branch of Semitic languages that Amharic and other major Ethiopian languages, as well as the languages (and nations) of the Pre-Islamic South Yemen like the Sabaean Kingdom (better known as Sheba), and Himyarite Kingdom, and Ethiopian scholars are pretty much in consensus of Axum being an ancient, ancestral kingdom of theirs - the Sudan (the modern home of most ethnic Nubians today) only tend to claim to Axum as an ancestral kingdom when trying to stir up an irredentist claim on northern Ethiopian lands.
I'd be fine with Selassie and I think I prefer him on principle given that he ties so much of the Ethiopian history and global legacy together. But I think Ethiopia should have uniques drawn from across its various polities, much like Germany or Russia do. I think it's one of the hardest civs to choose a specific period to represent it, so I would rather they just go the grand tour route.
"So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint,"
I'm afraid that, despite his best intentions, hopes, and desires, a lot of people today think of other things when Haile Selassie, moreso due to a religious movement that Marvin Garvey co-founded that Haile Selassie never even publicly discouraged or attempted to tone down.
Post-unification Italy isn't exactly basking in accomplishments.
