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[Sparthage]

Just saw the view count. 2,200+! For a thread as young as this you would expect fewer. But of course, about 30 of those are mine.

 

[Snowstar]

Just saw the view count. 2,200+! For a thread as young as this you would expect fewer. But of course, about 30 of those are mine.

And if guest views count, then even more are probably mine. I've checked on this thread a lot, even as a guest.

 

[BuckyRea]

The Circle of Strife
The Dynastic and Warring Periods in Euria

Ancient Anatolian wool merchants

Complete writing systems emerged in Iroquoia and across the Byzantine states in the 10th and 9th Centuries BCC. By 800bcc Byzantine style writing was seen in the Gaulish kingdoms as well albeit with uniquely Celtic flourishes in the design. By 500bcc the Celts had developed their own style of written symbolism as well. These earliest records reveal Iroquoian success at settling the Iron Hills region and displacing the local Carib potentates. Various Carib bands migrated north to the Poison River valley or southward onto the Pacifikan continent.

Horses were rarer in the Eastern Hemisphere and the wild herds produced a far less robust warbeast than those found in the West. Still, during the 7th Century BCC, Byzantine warriors were known to ride to combat in the Celtic fashion, if not actually use the animals in combat yet. A brisk commerce in the northlands provided ample opportunities for trade between the two civilizations while most of Iroquoia stayed isolated by the hostile Illinoian tribes of the Black Desert. Often it fell to the more outgoing Byzantine forces to tame the violent Illini.

​

By late antiquity it was common to find quality Celtic wines throughout Pan-Byzantium as well as Thracian and Anatolian wool products protecting the Gauls in the brutal winters of the Gallic woods.

However not every aspect of culture smoothly passed between Gaul and Byzantium. In character, the Byzantine culture was more chaotically commercial while orderly Celt society diverted much of its wealth and resources into grandiose projects like developing the distant colony of Lugdunum to control the Diamond Strait or the construction of the Great Pyramid that loomed over the settlements at Entremont (completed 710bcc).

​

To the south, expansion of the Iroquois culture brought settlers into conflict with the Illinois River Valley tribes. Byzantine-armed brigands, not the Iroquois, in 730bcc finally brought the rampaging Illinois to heel. Illinois bandits in the high desert area remained lawless for centuries to come. Still, little by the little, the fighting Illini came under the sway of civilized cultures and the people gave up desert subsistence for more stable village life along their riverbanks, fashioning their lifestyles after the increasingly sophisticated Iroquois.

​

"Yaar!" "Arrgh!" "Gnerg!"​

"Gnerg"?​

Like the Celts, the Iroquois of the Dynastic Era valued stability and grand achievement in their communities. Unlike the Celts, they rarely found it. Not long after the emergence of writing, the world's first recorded literature began to appear in the Iroquoian dialects of the late 8th Century BCC. Iroquoia's earliest writers complained of lost loves, bitter feuds, cruel gods, mysterious ailments that brought misery, and the heartache of dying infants. And there were the many tales of chaos, crowding, and violence—particularly in Salamanca, the largest and most developed urban center of antiquity. The Great Riot of Salamanca occurred around 590bcc, ending the Middle Dynasties and leading to the Age of Tyranny. Keeping the teaming populations of Salamanca, Allegheny, and Cattaraugus in their places and adequately fed required the firm discipline and ruthless efficiency of tyrants, not the gentle authority of village elders.

Unlike in the West, in the eastern traditions both men and women wrote. In Iroquois courts and at private tutorial sessions among the grand merchants of Constantinople, Adrianople, and Varna, women of the cultured classes read, argued, wrote and otherwise engaged in literary pursuits virtually on a par with their men. In Celt society, where literacy was not the norm among men or women, the ladies of society were just as inclined to pick up the sword and defend her home as the men, although they demurred from entering combat fully nude as the men sometimes did in the summer time.

With the ending of the last ice age about 1700bcc, the pressure of war with the Celtic societies relented, leading to a lasting peace and a growing population in the Hudson and Connecticut valleys. But for both Iroquoia and Gaul, peace led to prosperity and prosperity led to overpopulation until overpopulation lead to conflict and more violence. By 700bcc a new "little ice age" was cooling the farmlands of Gaul earlier in the harvest seasons, sparking a new competition for resources in the northern hemisphere. Thus, a thousand years of relative quiet ended not long after the Great Pyramid of Entremont first peaked out from the snow dappled Green Canopy of Upper Gaul.

​

In the 7th Century BC, the Celts entered a golden age. Being a pugnacious and violent people, their golden age triggered a return to their prehistoric atavistic nature. Throughout the 6th and 5th Centuries BC, a growing military class of warriors took over Gallic societies. In this Warring Period, it was brutality in personal combat rather than property or ties of kinship that offered the path to tribal leadership. Warchiefs rallied their men to grab hold of village or hamlet by force to live off the taxing of peasants. The great communities of Entremont and Alesia became the final proving grounds where the most aggressive war-teams squared off for control of the grand temples and the treasures they held. This new class of warrior lords returned the tribes to their warrior spirit and only calmed down by the end of the 5th Century BCC when enough personal alliances by marriage and trade made quick internal wars of conflict too costly to pursue. That is when internecine war was replaced by a general call on all the Celtic peoples to return to their earliest tradition: the raid and slaughter of the Iroquois.

Spoiler :

 

[Sparthage]

Just wondering, do the Celts have iron working? If they do, do they have iron? And does this mean a war is about to break out?

 

[BuckyRea]

Tyrannic Prosperity
Classical Euria

In old Byzantium, business was originally conducted in seasonal trade fairs held on the outskirts of the walled cities of the northern coast. But the promise of improving tax revenues slowly brought trade inside the city walls. The prosperous merchants of Constantinople eventually developed the first permanent, regulated marketplace—a central square where the commerce of the land could stay under the watchful control of the Byzantine monarch—around 650bcc.

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The king commanding this construction was Komnios III the Flagrant, a visionary yet ruthless despot who conquered and crushed the independent kingdom of Byzia—held by tradition to the be the birthland of all the Byzantine peoples. In 663bcc he captured Varna and reduced Caesarea to a vassal state. His wars against Thrace proved less successful and caused too much disruption of commerce. The primitive marches of the Treblands were too undeveloped at the time to be worth his conquest. The Komnian Empire lasted another two hundred years and reached new heights of stability and artistic achievement.

Spoiler :

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Constantinople began to take on its grand character, with tall buildings and impressive fortifications for protecting the people within. When Byzantine states warred on one another, the troops would go first after the farmlands—an important commodity in the chilly north—so each of the great cities soon developed extensive granaries (an improvement on the older Celtic designs) and access to deep underground springs. Byzantine merchants traded in beads, glasswares, gems, horses, burros, exotic Japanese spices, Alesian wines, Ionian rugs, and Illinoian, Carib, and Celtic slaves. After 550bcc, they also traded in maps of the secret trade routes that held the keys to great fortunes. The business of Byzantium was business.

​

The success of regular currency exchanges impacted all of Euria. Celtic traders first used Thracian, then Anatolian coins, then by the Golden Age were minting their own. By 500bc the kingdoms of the Iroquois culture also began to adopt regulated currency for trade, first with Byzantium, then with one another. A cash culture, with all its attendant problems, quickly evolved in the Iroquoian heartland.

Byzantium was more of a prolific cultural exporter, but not much of a cultural importer, however. While the Gaulic Golden Age produced a great first flowering of Celtic literature, as warchiefs sought to spread their fame by hiring bards to spread word of their exploits (the practice of "rapping," as the Celts called it), the written word was slow to find a welcoming audience among on the Byzantine coast. Literature was a waste of manpower in the eyes of Byzantine monarchs and merchants.

In the mid 5th Century BC, the Celtic Warring Period drew to an end and the first Age of Unity began as druids vied for favor from the local despotic leaders by calling for renewed assaults on "Vile Iroquoia." Celtic tales of daring and slaughter amused and frightened northern villages and the priests of the sundry gods all denounced war tales as unwholesome diversions from the proper pursuits of farming, fighting, and trading wares. The Celts saw little purpose in the Byzantine practice of mapmaking. No cultural exchange occurred for a very long time. Celts readily bought the horses of Byzantium, for gold or for wine, but significantly the ancient Breton word for "wiping privates" is based on the Thracian word for "map."

When literature finally came to Thrace and Anatolia, it was modeled on the Iroquoian poetry of lament and complaint. The Imperator Romulus's reign led to a cultural flourishing and a spontaneous expansion of his palace by a grateful people. The Celts accepted currency, but used it mainly for acquiring sturdy northern horses and other crafts from the clever Byzantine merchant lords.

​

In Iroquoia, the debauched ways of court life increasingly offended the simple traditional folkways of the past. In response to this growing cosmopolitanism, a cult of mysticism began to rise up among both the peasantry and society's privileged elite. Yet this only led to a greater stratification of society. Farming folks sought to return to the values of their ancestors. To the Iroquoian nobility, however, there were not just economic, but also spiritual shortcomings to the peasants they employed. The wealthy of Seneca and Mohegan embraced epicurean indulgence in the courtly life to better entice the senses into a spiritual life. The elite of society drank cheap wines—good Celtic wines were illegal—and local cactus-beers, held official court orgies, and lived pampered lives.

As Iroquoian society decayed under the weight of its own self indulgence, the Celts were just reaching the peak of their war worshiping epoch.

 

[BuckyRea]

Cathaoirs at the Gate:
The First and Second Harpiads against Iroquoia

Peaceful Iroquoia. For now...

Spoiler :

​

In 370bcc the Celts attacked Iroquoia with waves of fervent, scuttling, mushroom-hopped swordsmen. The attack continued with an unrelenting ferocity.

​

Centralia in the north of Cayuga fell with a horrible slaughter of Iroquoian spearmen. The insular and unprepared Iroquois reacted with panic. Kings from all nations immediately rushed their available troops toward Cattaraugus, the next kingdom in the path of the Celtic hoard. As the Celts approached Cattaraugus, the brave braves launched a short counterattack, led by King Old Turtle. Old Turtle won his battle, but retreated to the village when Celtic warlord Nevian Frieth mustered his forces with a three-to-one advantage. Frieth's men then moved into the farmlands down river from the village and defeated the main body of Iroquoian spearmen and swordsmen under the warchief Proud Rabbit in the Battle of the Sugar Fields. Proud Rabbit's forces scattered. Only Old Turtle's exhausted army was left to hold the village itself.

​

Miraculously, his spearmen stood off Frieth's troops with brief skirmishes until reinforcements arrived from the other kingdoms to complete the town's defenses. The atlatl-armed Regisians, the Oneidans with their deadly tomahawks, the Silver Shields who guarded the High Tyrant of Salamanca, even the crazed Arrowmasters of Oil Springs: all converged on Cattaraugus for what they hoped would prove a disheartening defeat of the northmen. Virtually all of Iroquoia's military strength was dedicated to the defense of Cayuga's high valley—any surprise attacks from another direction would lead to collapse.

Again Old Turtle took command of the field, arraying his warriors in defensive blocks that prevented the normal Celtic flanking maneuvers, then sent in his archers from the riverside groves. The Slaughter of Cattaraugus was the largest battle fought in world history up to that time. The Celts were once again routed and driven away—seemingly for good. The First Harpiad was over.

But against Celtic intransigence, no victory was permanent. A decade later, Frieth returned, having recuperated his ranks at Centralia. His entire force charged back into Cattaraugus, hoping to overwhelm the capital's defenses, but again the Iroquois held him off—Old Turtle dying in this great siege—and the humiliated Celts withdrew. Frieth retired to his farm, a broken warrior. Other warmakers would step forward now.

The Grand Warmaster of the Gauls, Donal the Fierce, determined to drive the Snakes down to the coast. His conclusion was that Frieth and his generation had lacked the raw numbers to overwhelm the Iroquois and so viciously whipped the people in Entremont to the strains of the percussion harp to procure and arm a new field of swordsmen. Yet with most of their equipment lost deep in Iroquois lands, this latest harpiad resulted mostly in a worker exodus from Entremont and the end of the Celtic Golden Age.

​

The Celts under Donal's son, Baignderrin, called a truce. His father having secured the Central River as their new southern border, Baignderrin was determined to make the new lands Celtic in character. Further, he was that his forces were far more undermanned than their opponents realized. His people would need time to recover and reclaim their glory.

The Iroquois under the Sachem-Tyrant Ambersleeve agreed to the truce. Peace resumed, legally speaking, but both empires had a new purpose in the world—preparing for war and crushing their foe. Celtic resolve to punish the "Snake Kingdom" took on an almost mystic quality—a mysticism directly inspired by the Iroquois surrendered to the Celts as a result of the peace arrangements. The captured Iroquoian province of Centralia was now a Celt military colony to be exploited for the pleasure of the conquering swordsmen.

The Iroquois were also being pressed down on from the north—not by the sword but by trade. At the start of the 3rd Century BCC, the Black Desert, home of the Illinois tribes once tamed by the Mohegani, came under the economic sway of the Byzantine trading community of Trebizond. This large outpost along the trade routes joined western Anatolia to Iroquoian lands. With Iroquoia militarily strained from Celtic incursions and entangled in local insurrections in the aftermath of the second Celtic War, the nobles of Trebizond easily bought greater influence along the trade routes and eventually commandeered all the caravanserai across the Black Desert. In time they would establish themselves as independent from both Mohegan and Anatolia.

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By 200bcc the first large masonry construction in the eastern hemisphere, undertaken by the southern Byzantine trading kingdoms, led to larger granaries and the development of stone city walls. With these new construction techniques, Trebizond's networks of caravanserais would soon match the defensive might of the Great Northern coast. Byzantium's political superiority on the continent became manifest when they acquired Iroquoia's mystic practices around 200bcc in exchange for granting the insular Iroquois their boat-building skills. This trade seemed to deplete half the wealth from the besieged Iroquoian coffers.

Despite their military hardships, or maybe because of them, for the Iroquois, the Age of the Harpiads was an age of expanding awareness and interest in the world, as the first true Iroquoian philosophers began to raise questions about logic, ethics, and the meaning of their existence in the face of rampaging assaults by their cultural inferiors. As a rule, the most successful philosophers of Seneca and Cayuga were those who concluded that a firmness in law was the key to a happy society. Crises brought by Gaul and a surging Ainu barbarian empire, as well as tricky Byzantine trade hustlers, brought about a legalistic tradition to control increasingly stratified Iroquoian society.

The decadence of the Dynastic Era was gone, mostly, but their civilization seemed little stronger in the Age of Tyrants.

 

[BuckyRea]

Just wondering, do the Celts have iron working? If they do, do they have iron? And does this mean a war is about to break out?

Yes, yes, and oh hell yes. And we're not done yet. I've never played the Celts before. I never realized how clobberlicious those fast nekkid swordsmen could be.

 

[wolf_brother]

Yes, yes, and oh hell yes. And we're not done yet. I've never played the Celts before. I never realized how clobberlicious those fast nekkid swordsmen could be.

You've got to be careful, as the Celts can easily become a run-away civ. Between the Agri/Reli trait combo, the early Golden Age, the super-powerful UU and you gave them the Pyramids...

 

[Sparthage]

I LOVE Gallic Swordsmen. But beware, they downgrade to Medieval Infantry.

 

[Sparthage]

Sorry 'bout the second straight post . But this story just reached 2,500 views ! After a year there might be 10,000 !

 

[Daeron]

I've always thought those Gaelic swordsmen are a little overpowered. Would have been better if they had only 1 defence like the mounted warriors, more realistic as well.

 

[Sparthage]

I, personally, believe that the Gallic Swordsmen are fine for a swordsman UU. But overall, yes, it would have been much more realistic if they weren't as talented on the defense.

 

[BuckyRea]

What would be totally awesome would be if you modified them to have the missiles characteristic. Then, every time a Gallic swordsman kills someone, he explodes!

Chop chop hack slash Ka-BOOM!

By the way, Sparthage, I checked and noticed that The Rat's thread "CCM - An introduction to a great mod" started about two weeks after mine, but has about 3000 more pageviews.

 

[Sparthage]

Actually, only about 250. But still, it's more than my 90 for my story .

edit: okay now I have more than 350, but still 2,500 is a lot. Also, another point on CCM, It had more continuous updates, until it ended because of an accident.

edit note: I'm going to stop updating my view count now.

 

[GamezRule]

only read through the first page but looks good, subscribed (kinda late though)

 

[BuckyRea]

only read through the first page but looks good, subscribed (kinda late though)

Late is still perfectly welcome. My posting pace has slowed down of late due to work stuff (we're going into NCLB standardized testing season right now, so my spare time is minimized).

But I'm working on a couple of posts. Here's one chapter to tide yall over.

 

[BuckyRea]

The Goddess of War
The Celtic Warrior Goddess:
Andarta to the Entremontese,
Andraste to the Alesians

The Isthmus of Sarosima

Between 150bcc and 100bcc, the Ainu of Sarosima were driven off from their volcanic isthmus by expanding American frontiers. The nomadic Ainu, turned west and now pressed into Iroquois lands. The western Iroquois kingdom of Oneida was left mostly ungarrisoned by the wars in the north against the Celts. The barbaric Ainu spread up and around the Poison River valley and clashed with the northern Caribs who lived there. The barren valley had been long dismissed as a no man's land, a region too haunted with predators and diseases and "devilish spirits" to allow true civilization. When it had been Carib land life there was retched. Yet over a few generations the Ainu thrived here and their numbers increased. In time they wiped out the Carib villagers of that fetid floodplain. But as they came to know the wealth of Iroquoia and the Celt lands, they began to move out and try to capture it for themselves.

In increasing numbers, during the 40s BCC, they moved out across the wastelands surrounding the disease-ridden Poison Valley and sought to conquer the kingdom of Treveri . From the capital of Treveri at Lugdunum, the Ard-Rí of Treveri, Faolan the Steadfast, selected the strongest men of each village of the Straits and granted them the newest design of sword—the steel sword—and relentlessly trained them at Banagher Hill for five years. During those five years there was relentless slaughter along the southern encampments between the Treverite guards and hulking, savage Ainu.

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In 35bcc the Ainu commander Meadu the Swollen won a great victory over the frontline Celtic guard and set his sites on the heart of southern Gaul. In 34bcc, as the Ainu hoard prepared to march north into the heart of Treveri, Faolan sent forth his Steel Swordsmen to crush the savages. It is said that the Steel Swordsmen of Banagher Hill ran as fast as the Ainus' mounts and could cleave horses' necks with a single slash. They met the enemy at the Carr Kelby, or Kelby Marsh, and tore through the disorganized ranks of the savages in three great battles, followed by a decade more years of mopping up the remaining bands of resisters. Meadu the Swollen withdrew and looked westward for conquest.

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Soon, new bands of Ainu moved to capture the northern Oneida settlement of Oil Springs. Inspired by their defeat by the Celts, they came to worship the Alesian goddess of war, Andraste, and they rode slow runt ponies into battle and fought to the death. Like the Celts of Treveri, the Oneidans of Oil Springs were only too glad to oblige the Ainu barbarians in that "to the death" part. In 27bcc The Iroquois defenders faced Meadu's tribal army, a force even larger than those slaughtered at Carr Kelby.

The Ainu had been increasing their raids on the upper Poison Valley for years, but when the Celts drove them from the lower valley, the Ainu marched inland in massive numbers. In their simple violent minds, the dainty Iroquois should make for easier targets. They were wrong. War chieftain Walks On Mountain was an experienced Ainu fighter. The unsophisticated tactics of the barbarians made his setting traps and ambushes against them fairly easy work. By the time the main Ainu salient reached the countryside around Oil Springs, their numbers were diminished and their best men and horses worn down. In the final pitched Battle of Curare Grove, 27bcc, Walks On Mountain lured the Ainu warriors across a dry gulch and brought down the rocks of the gulch itself onto the panicked barbarians.

​

The outnumbered Iroquois suffered grievous casualties and their treasuries were depleted by the victory, but they, and civilization itself, had won the day. Final taming of the last of the Ainu would still require another two decades of war from the Iroquois. As an interesting side note, the tales of all this violence inspired in the Byzantine coastal culture an arcane and roundabout form of philosophizing during this century.

The Byzantines had no great enemies in that time, as they traded peacefully with all nations. But the bloody tales of civilization crushing barbarism thrilled the Byzantine heart. Trade made a wider knowledge of the world possible, but the wars against the Ainu made that knowledge seem romantic. Their curiosity about the wider world beyond their North Sea shore was demonstrated by the popularity of the celebrated travel tales of Marcos Poulous.

By 10bc Iroquois civilization was exhausted by the defeated of the Poison River Ainu. Their defenses were spread between its northern frontier, facing the Celtic stronghold of Centralia, and the depleted eastern frontier along the Poison River, facing both the Celtic victors over the Ainu force, the Steel Swordsmen of Banagher Hill, and the emerging American empire. In Entremont, Gaulish Ard-Rí Bronwyn IV deemed the Iroquois sufficiently exhausted and spread thin to make them vulnerable for conquest. He had his druids call for a Third Harpiad.

Andraste, the Goddess of War, still held her place of honor in the hearts of men.

 

[Sparthage]

Nice to see my Celtic brothers are doing fine. But I want the Iroquois to DIE! DIE-DIE! DIE!

 

[GamezRule]

Why hatin' on Hiawatha.

 

[BuckyRea]

Why hatin' on Hiawatha.

For real, Gamez! I thought the 3 dynamic action pictures of the Iroquois clobbering the barbarians would win over the crowd's sympathy.

(Trivia challenge: can anyone actually identity what show those three battle shots came from?)