INES I: Anno Domini
- Thread starter Imago
- Start date
das
Regeneration In Process
Oh yes. They are so predictable noone will see them coming, which was the general idea.
@fantasmo: The orders are fine.
The update is about a third done, but the Middle East section is completed.
The map is about a third done as well, but at least I already placed most of the cities. There has been no headway made on the stats at all.
The update is about a third done, but the Middle East section is completed.
The map is about a third done as well, but at least I already placed most of the cities. There has been no headway made on the stats at all.
Luckymoose
The World is Mine
sending orders now
they be sent homzizzle.
they be sent homzizzle.
BT 1
The Americas
At the convergence of the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers, Adena, the Empire of the Sun God, was born in the 500s. Since then, the Adenas, highly civilized, compared to their neighbors, have expanded south along the Mississippi, hoping to one day reach the great ocean they have heard so much about. The mound-building Adenas have a lot of potential for expansion, but their unlikely empire is old, now, and may well fall apart in the years to come…
Europe
The Nordic lands, after experiencing a brief period of pseudo-civilization in the form of Stockholm, quickly disintegrated into barbarism once more, as the Norse were simply too disparate to unify, and Stockholm’s leaders were far more interested in raiding then they were in civilizing. All was quiet in the region until the late 300s, when, propelled by Hun-led barbarian invasions of the civilized lands, the Scandinavians realized that they had been presented with a unique opportunity. The Vikings struck Europe just after the Huns. Built on plunder from Gaul and the British Isles, nations formed in Scandinavia, as the Danes, Norse, and Svear all began to unify. A short lived coalition of all the northern raiders came to pass under King Haakon the Great, but he failed to make the proper provisions for succession after his death, and the Union of Copenhagen fell apart under the rule of his son. Soon after, disorganized Viking fleets were soundly defeated by the resurgent English at Orkney, and the Nordic raiders returned to their homelands, to war amongst themselves, and generally make their nations fall apart. The Nordic did make some recoveries after that, as a general economic boom came to Europe in the 600s, but the raids of the resurgent nations of Denmark and Svearland are now more east-focused, and those nations enjoy honest trade with the west. Norway is the lone ‘true Viking’ power remaining, and still irritates the Scottish to no end, but even its western raids are tapering off, especially with the Norwegian king’s fascination with the newly discovered island of Iceland, to the north. The whole region is converted to Celtic Trinitism by now, providing even more links to the lands in the heart of Europe.
Wessex, under a variety of capable yet rather paranoid rulers, quickly surpassed Mercia in wealth during the Third Century AD. As the former grew rich off of trade, the latter stagnated. A brief alliance against the remaining free Welsh gave Mercia some measure of prestige, as the Welsh were crushed, but Wessex got the best lands, and Mercia became increasingly economically and domestically tied to its southern brother. In the late 200s, with Celtic backing, Scotland and Ireland formed nations, giving Mercia and Wessex cause to unite again against a common threat, as Anglo-Saxon allies against the remaining Briton Celts, but King Harold I of Wessex decided that Mercia was the greater enemy. After all, by this point, he and his nation had converted to Celtic Trinitism, so he and the Britons Celts were brothers, after a fashion. In his logic, Harold largely ignored the fact that Mercia was Celtic Trinitist, as well, but so too did many of his subjects. As Wessex signed an alliance with Scotland against Mercia, there were cries of outrage, but they were muted, and the voices of the protesters had little influence. In the short Mercian War, the aforementioned nation was quickly conquered and split between the Scots and the Wessex. A treaty of friendship was signed between the two nations, so that ‘war would never again come to Britannia,’ but of course, that proved to be a lie. Harold crowned himself the first king of England, and turned his attentions south. In the early 300s, of course, the Celtic Empire was in its death throes, and so, taking advantage of that, Harold in his last years ordered a full scale invasion of northern Gaul. That invasion proved surprisingly successful, but, by the 400s, the English were forced to retreat from their mainland gains, as their nation went though a period of stagnation, helped by Viking destruction of northern trade routes. When the English reemerged out of their isolation in the 500s, defeating the main Viking fleet at Orkney, they were by nature more north-oriented. With the collapse of the Celtic Empire, they no longer had reason to tread carefully with Celtic Ireland and Scotland, and so a variety of wars broke out within the British Isles. The British were still recovering from the damage the Viking Wars had inflicted on their lands, and so their gains were not as impressive as they could have been, but Scotland’s borders were rolled substantially northward, and Ireland’s attempts to take Wales were defeated. The dawn of the year 700 had a resurgent England dominating the Isles, but with the Scots and the Irish still nations, and wanting revenge for their defeats. With the return of the mainland Celts as an important faction on the mainland, England once again was hemmed in. While the Isles are all still Celtic Trinitist, at least nominally, there is significant pressure for the English king to break off from Avignon, and form his own church.
In the late 200s, the Celtic Empire was beset by Aegyptian invasion. In truth, the Aegyptians had never signed any treaties with the Celts, but it still seemed oddly like a betrayal. A feint at northern Italia followed by a crushing drive up the wealthy Rhone nearly crippled the Celts, but they recovered, as urbanization programs had succeeded in improving the stability of the nation. Unable to strike a crippling blow, the Aegyptians nevertheless fought on, and the Rhone War dragged on for a decade, until they were finally evicted. The Rhone War had unfortunate implications for the Celts, but no dire ones. South and Central Italia were lost to both the Celts and the Aegyptians in the Rhone War, as native Romans used the cover of the fighting to rise up again, and establish a series of small states on the peninsula, but neither empire’s economy was greatly affected. During the war, the Isle of Man and some British colonies were sold to the Scottish and the Irish, to fund the war effort, but the loss of those small territories was hardly a crushing blow. Growing more and more powerful, the Celtic Empire conquered Alemannia, and pushed east, up to the Rhone, and then up to the Elbe. Trinitism spread even faster, into Iberia, and into even free Italia, but cultural differences broke those two regions off from the Celtic church, and Roman Trinitism, with its own High Priests at Rome, and focused around the gods Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, began to prosper in its own right. The crushing blow came in the 300s, with the rise of the Huns, and a variety of other lesser barbarians that came with them. The Celts fought back, but splintered under the attacks of the barbarians, and for a time, darkness fell over Europe. However, the Huns were eventually defeated by the Byzantines and their barbarian allies, and, by the 500s, unity had come to the Celts once more, in the form of the Holy Celtic Empire, centered at Paris. This came about because the Celtic Trinitist church, based in Avignon, gave its blessing to the warlord Clovis, who established control over what was by then known as France, and then proceeded to reconquer Germany. Of course, two hundred years under barbarian rule had mixed the Celts with a variety of other tribes, but, in the name of religious purity, all that was forgotten, or at least cast aside. Clovis reconquered almost all of what were once Celtic lands before he died. Even now, the Holy Celtic Empire plods on, still oddly united by religion. Fractures are beginning to grow, and regionalism is a significant issue, but the urbanized Holy Celtic Empire is far stronger then the first Celtic Empire ever was.
Iberia’s journey on the river of time was just as chaotic, and perhaps even more bloody. Shortly after the failed Rhone War, the Aegyptians defeated the Punics in Iberia, and then declared war against the Madrians. This war failed, mostly due to internal problems, rather then impressive tactics on the part of the exile Romans, but the Aegyptians were nevertheless forced to be content with southern Iberia. The 300s, of course, witnessed the collapse of the Aegyptian Empire, a fall which Madria took advantage of. The Mauritanians that were the successors to Aegyptian power in the region put up a substantial fight, but when the Mauritanians in turn were succeeded in Iberia by the Tingis, the Madrians finally forced the Africans off the peninsula. Of course, they were hardly Madrians by then; diffusion had left the Roman culture predominant, but there were Celtic and Punic elements in the culture as well. Iberia was ruled by a fragile coalition of something else entirely, and while the Iberians were rapidly growing into a single ethnic group, ethnic allegiances shifted into regional allegiances. Soon enough, a variety of civil wars broke out amongst the victorious Madrians, resulting the present day nation simply known as Iberia. The more powerful of the two Roman Trinitist nations, Iberia stands against the Ctha’r hordes to the south, but is ever in danger of being overrun. Its only real ally is Italia, formed by a union of Romans on their home peninsula during the Hunnic Wars, but Italia is weak, and a poor nation to hold the city of Rome, the center of the Roman Trinitist faith.
In the 200s, Byzantium rapidly became Kyrian. The nation focused on northward expansion for a time, securing regions up to the Danube, and the Sava. After the fall of Aegypt, Minoa was occupied and incorporated in a brief war. However, rapid Persian expansion in Mesopotamia turned the Emperors’ attention to the Middle East, and there Byzantine armies fought and died, first against the Persians, and then against the Rubenid hordes that replaced them. The Huns and their various barbarian allies struck from the north in the 300s, and for two centuries, it was Byzantium that waged the primary war against them, as the Celtic Empire had received the brunt of the assaults and had quickly fallen. The colony on the Bosporan was lost, but in the end, all the barbarian tribes were defeated, save the Bulgar Khanate, converted to Kyrianity, which settled down into a nation along the Danube, never recaptured by the Byzantines. Turning from their warmongering ways, the Bulgars enjoy a healthy trade relationship with the Byzantines, who have managed to withstand the passage of time, if not prosper for it.
After the Rubenid Empire fell, Yehudan Khazaria gained its independence in the 500s, and became the sole civilized state in Eastern Europe. Occupying the lands above the Black Sea, the Khazar nation is even now surrounded by barbarians.
Africa
Aegypt of the 100s and had rapidly expanded northward, gaining territories as far away from its Cuhorsehockye homeland as Italia and Iberia. In short, it was overstretched. Nationalistic fervor had sustained it for a time, but as divisions between the Cuhorsehockyes and the Egyptians grew, it became harder and harder for Aegypt to hold onto its far-flung gains. The Rhone War proved this, as Aegypt’s advances ended in complete defeat. The Iberian Wars were moderately successful, but drained the empire’s resources, and pulled more and more troops away from the homeland, where they would soon be needed. In the late 200s, a prophet known as Ctha became prominent along the Nile, preaching a radical form of Egyptian Polytheism, that stated that all other gods were naught but aspects of Amon-Ra. This religion, oddly enough known as Ctha’r, quickly gained hold among many of the people of the Nile. The Pharaohs remained orthodox in their religious beliefs, but did not stamp out Ctha’r, or even declare it a hearsay. It was the Ctha’r worshipers that made the first move, and bloody civil war spread throughout the Nile. This civil war spread to other parts of the empire, as the Punics, perhaps the most eager to convert to Ctha’r, rebelled en mass, as well. When the dust settled, Aegypt was partitioned into two Ctha’rist states, Punic Mauritania, and Egyptian Ctha’ria. The ethnic differences were by now largely nominal, as intermarriage had fostered close links between the Punics and the Egyptians, but the Ctha’rists were simply too weak after the successful rebellion, to remain united. In both successor nations to Aegypt, religions other than Ctha’r were brutally stamped out, and the religion spread even faster then Yehudaism did, in the Middle East. Nevertheless, problems external and internal plagued the two nations. By the mid 400s, Ctha’ria, or Egypt, as the outsiders insisted on calling it, was invaded by the Rubenids, and collapsed. Mauritania, constantly at war with Iberia, was torn apart by factions from within, and split into Morocco and Tunis, the former nation of which was ejected from Iberia once and for all. Egypt, meanwhile, reformed and rose again as the more moderate Empire of the Nile, still Ctha’rist, and still somewhat fanatic, but with many more scholarly influences, as the Rubenid rise had forced the non-Yehudan learned men of the Middle East into Egypt, for their protection. The Nilotics pushed the Rubenids out of their lands, once and for all, and then settled down, and entered a somewhat prosperous age. The greater empire was gone, true, but the core lands were still unified (though now under an Egyptian dynasty, as opposed to a Cuhorsehockye one). Morocco and Tunis were, by comparison, much more fanatic, fighting a variety of wars with the European Trinitists, as a whole, one such war leaving Sicily in the odd position of being split between Tunis, and Italia, but for now, for the year 700, things have calmed down once again. The Trinitist-Ctha’r conflict may well resume at any time, however…
Axum, meanwhile, weathered the years admirably. Conquering Aden in a brief war, Axum after that suffered periods of stagnation and decline, but always pulled through. Now, the entire Horn is Axumite, and Axum is the last bastion of Orthodox Judaism, as opposed to the Yehudan version that the Arabians champion. Always centered on trade, Axum has endured an economic upsurge recently, but as tensions with the Empire of the Nile rise, that may all fade away.
In the Second, Third, and Fourth Centuries, Greater Indian colonists occupied the island of Madagascar, along with the African east coast. With the collapse of Greater India at the end of the Fifth Century, Indian colonists on Madagascar attempted to set up a India-within-Africa. This effort failed, and a coalition of Malagasy tribes retook the island. However, they did not disintegrate into barbarism once more, and, helped by Indian collaborators, the Malagasy established a unified state, which even sent up colonies on the mainland, retaking lands for civilization that the Greater Indians had lost during their fall. However, while Malagasya is now a powerful trade state, second to only Axum in the region, the large Indian minority is a constant problem.
In sub-Saharan West Africa, a tribe known as the Ghana settled down in the Seventh Century, and now forms a bud known as the Awakar Kingdom, that could grow into a great empire.
Middle East
In the years of the Third Century AD, tensions grew between Byzantium and Persia, because of the former’s aggressive foreign policy, and because of the latter’s continual expansion across the regions of former Assyria. As soon as Persia conquered enough lands to have an honest border with Byzantium, war broke out. The First Mesopotamian War, of course, was completely indecisive, and short, compared to some of the other conflicts the world had experienced, but it paved the way for the Second Mesopotamian War. And the Third. And the Fourth. Meanwhile, to the south, Bachira was far from quiet, though for some time, it was ignored. The conquered Arabian lands taken from Persia were never even attempted to be retaken, as the Shahs were far more focused on the Fertile Crescent. Even the isle of Bahrain was taken from the Persians with little fight. Dilmun was converted and incorporated with ease, and the Arabian part of Aden was annexed after Axum conquered the rest, but the civilized lands still went about fighting their own wars, in ignorant bliss. They had no idea what was about to befall them. A reformer king, Ruben I, came to power in Bachira in the late 300s. At first known mockingly as Yehuda II by ‘civilized’ historians, he instigated yet another Jewish revival, which destroyed Bachira, at least in name. It was during Ruben’s rein that Yehudan Judaism and Axumite-championed Orthodox Judaism finally made an official split, but there was no mourning for the bonds broken in Arabia. The Rubenids, as the Bachirans had come to be called, were far more interested in the north than in the south. And so northward they came. Mesopotamia, squabbled over for two centuries by the Byzantines and the Persians, was taken over in its entirely by Rubenid hordes, which then pressed on in every conceivable direction, in the name of Yehudanism, and the Rubenid Empire. Campaigns against Byzantium soon halted, as that nation became preoccupied with European barbarian wars, and sued for peace, but Yehudan hordes redoubled their efforts on Persia. Persian forces were routed at the Battle of the Caspian, only to regroup, in order to be routed yet again at the Battle of Peresopolis, when the ancient capital was burnt to the ground. The Persian Empire died, though one of its military leaders, General Harpagus, led a good number of Persians eastward to reunite with the Zoroastrian natives of the Greater Indian province of Iran, and established Ghaznavid Persia. After fighting some nominal wars of independence from Greater India, Ghaznavid Persia was largely left alone, as the Greater Indian Empire was stagnating, and its rulers saw the value of a buffer state between them and the Rubenid hordes. (Relations between Ghaznavid Persia and Greater India were actually quite good from then on, until the latter’s fall, whereupon the former took advantage of the Tibetian invasion, to sieze the lands of the Indus.) Quite soon after the creation of Ganaznavid Persia, stagnating Sogdiana was incorperated into that empire, in a brief war. The Rubenids, meanwhile, turned to collapsing Egypt as the main source of new expansion in the mid 400s, but, after conquering the lower Nile, and, in the process, destroying the Sinai Canal, they were thrown out of the region fifty or so years latter by resurgent Nilotics. The last major advance of the Rubenid Empire was across the Caucasus, in the late 400s, but, after converting the Khazars to Yehudaism, and conquering the north coast of the Black Sea, the Rubenid Empire began to suffer from overstretchment. The rapid expansion had left the Rubenids unstable, governed from an unwieldy capital in Medina, far from their northernly gains. By the early 500s, the Rubenids had collapsed. Both Byzantium and Ghaznavid Persia recaptured some of their lost territories, but were halted by a new Yehudan empire, reforming around Bagdad. This empire, the empire of the Benjids, reconquered much of what the Rubenids had ruled. Khazaria was a lost cause; the Caucasus was too much to be penetrated a second time, and so, the Khazars formed their own independent Yehudan state, but the Benjids retained a sizable empire. Stagnation has now begun to set in for the Benjids, the Arabian Yehudans are becoming quite rebellious, and the merchantile Persian Gulfers grow ever more autonomous, but a Yehudan empire still lives, much to the anger and fear of its neighbors.
India and Southeast Asia
Greater India was always an especially stable nation, and indeed, contrary to a popular saying, it was not destroyed from within. It was destroyed from without, and that is a different story entirely. The Third Century, surprisingly enough, saw no sudden drop in Indian fortunes. The people of the subcontinent were coalescing, and beginning to show signs of proto-nationalism, as they were united in their drive to turn the Indian Ocean into a truly Indian lake through colonization. The Council of India, combined with the benevolent monarchy, made living standards in India quite high compared to the rest of the world, and the nation, while officially at peace, hired out its soldiers as mercenaries to neighboring warring lands, keeping them in shape. There was some stagnation in the 300s, and the crazed Persians fleeing eastward from the Rubenids and carving out a new nation in Iran didn’t help any, but the damage done by the loss of that fringe territory was minor. It was not until the late Fifth Century that Greater India began to die. As is traditional, a storm in the form of a barbarian horde struck from the north, even as most of the elite Indian soldiers were off in the colonies and in Ghaznavid Persian lands, fighting to make sure the rest of that nation didn’t get overrun by the Jewish hordes. That storm came in the form of the Tibetans. Shivaist fanatics, the Tibetans headed south in force, and, before much resistance could be mustered, sacked Delhi and seized the Ganges delta, cutting Greater India in two. They conquered Bengal as well, for good measure. With the collapse of the central government, so too did Greater India fall. The last prince of India, driven insane over the death of his father, died in the desperate Battle of Burhanpur, but the victory was a pyrrhic one for the Tibetans. After conquering northern India, and winning a hard-fought victory at Burhanpur, they had largely run out of steam, and their hordes halted, to attempt to digest the massive regions the had conquered. Free south India, while spared, was hardly better off. The collapse of the central government had left the colonies de facto independent, and the Indian warlords that remained were more interested in squabbling with each over what was left then trying to reestablish control over far-off lands. The colonies in Indonesia simply collapsed, and were overrun by natives. The colonies in Africa, much more developed, did something else entirely, but that was already described. The Pandya, or rather, the Simhalans, as the Pandya had been integrated into the Ceylonese culture after their exile to the island, saw the events on the mainland as an opportunity, and established control over the tip of the subcontinent, easily defeating the majority of the Indian warlords. Tibet, meanwhile, as stated, attempted to digest its gains, a feat which proved impossible for the steppe empire. In the Sixth Century, rebellions broke out in central India under a man named Sharan. Centered at Delhi, Sharan’s rebellion quickly grew in influence, as much of the pan-Indian identity left over from the days of Greater India still remained. The Tibetans were pushed back to the Ganges delta, and even lands in the former Greater Indian province of Pagan were secured. Sharan, after his rapid successes in the north, quickly brought what remained of the warlords in the south under his wing. An attack at Tibetan heartlands, however, failed to even push past the Ganges, as by now the Tibetans had regrouped. However, the Tibetans could not conquer the lands Sharan held either, and so, a truce was formed. There were no negotiations-the Tibetans hated the Sharanites, and the Sharanites hated the Tibetans, but neither side perused an offensive. No longer at war, Sharan consolidated his holdings into the oddly positioned Kingdom of Delhi, which, which its capital was indeed at Delhi, stretched mostly east from there, across the Bay of Bengal, making Delhi a very poorly situated capital, indeed. However, Sharan was too proud to move it, and his son was likewise too proud, after Sharan died. The awkward nation managed to live on, feeding off a sense of Greater Indian-established national identity, but its large holdings were held together by a weak government. When a descendant of Sharan tried to conquer Simhala, his armies were horribly defeated, and the country nearly broke out into civil war. Only Tibetan preoccupation with internal matters prevented a reconquest. Now, at the dawn of the Eighth Century, the Kingdom of Delhi struggles to survive. Compared with its neighbors, even dying Tibet, the Kingdom of Delhi is rife with corruption. It will take a strong hand to save this nation, and make it the true successor to Greater India.
In southeast Asia in the 300s, a mad Cambodian king attempted to conquer the Malaysian peninsula from the Greater Indians, at a time when Greater Indian power was at its peak. The resulting war destroyed Cambodia, but the Greater Indians were unable to annex the region, and so, the way was paved for new powers. As Greater India waned, maintaining a hold on the Pagan province, but abandoning its hold on the other, more far-flung colonies, two native states rose to power, the state of Angkor, centered around fallen Cambodia, and the state of Srivijaya, centered around the straits of Malaysia. These two states even now fight amongst themselves for predominance in the region.
East Asia
The story of the east is a simple one. As the great empires of the west fought and died in their wars, the Chu-Nan Empire prospered. A variety of reforms were set into motion, and great works were built, most notably a museum to the Stick War, in Yangzhou (the rebuilt Shanghai). Territories were conquered, most notably in the east, as both Japan and Wu Taiwan were conquered. The passing of time brought new dynasties to China, and in dynastic wars, Japan was lost to its fiercely independent natives in the Sixth Century, but now, the Yang Dynasty rules over a still-united China. The Tibetan barbarians were always a problem, and are still one, though they were more a problem for India, then for China, and recently, Xiong-nu and Mongols alike have joined together under the banners of Koeke Moengke Tengri, but the storm has not fallen upon Yang China. In the Korean peninsula, the passage of time replaced the Koguryo state with the Korean nation of Silla, but aside from that, little has changed. It all may well change soon, though. As of the year 700, it has only been a single year since Tengri unified the primary tribes of the north…
The Americas
At the convergence of the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers, Adena, the Empire of the Sun God, was born in the 500s. Since then, the Adenas, highly civilized, compared to their neighbors, have expanded south along the Mississippi, hoping to one day reach the great ocean they have heard so much about. The mound-building Adenas have a lot of potential for expansion, but their unlikely empire is old, now, and may well fall apart in the years to come…
Europe
The Nordic lands, after experiencing a brief period of pseudo-civilization in the form of Stockholm, quickly disintegrated into barbarism once more, as the Norse were simply too disparate to unify, and Stockholm’s leaders were far more interested in raiding then they were in civilizing. All was quiet in the region until the late 300s, when, propelled by Hun-led barbarian invasions of the civilized lands, the Scandinavians realized that they had been presented with a unique opportunity. The Vikings struck Europe just after the Huns. Built on plunder from Gaul and the British Isles, nations formed in Scandinavia, as the Danes, Norse, and Svear all began to unify. A short lived coalition of all the northern raiders came to pass under King Haakon the Great, but he failed to make the proper provisions for succession after his death, and the Union of Copenhagen fell apart under the rule of his son. Soon after, disorganized Viking fleets were soundly defeated by the resurgent English at Orkney, and the Nordic raiders returned to their homelands, to war amongst themselves, and generally make their nations fall apart. The Nordic did make some recoveries after that, as a general economic boom came to Europe in the 600s, but the raids of the resurgent nations of Denmark and Svearland are now more east-focused, and those nations enjoy honest trade with the west. Norway is the lone ‘true Viking’ power remaining, and still irritates the Scottish to no end, but even its western raids are tapering off, especially with the Norwegian king’s fascination with the newly discovered island of Iceland, to the north. The whole region is converted to Celtic Trinitism by now, providing even more links to the lands in the heart of Europe.
Wessex, under a variety of capable yet rather paranoid rulers, quickly surpassed Mercia in wealth during the Third Century AD. As the former grew rich off of trade, the latter stagnated. A brief alliance against the remaining free Welsh gave Mercia some measure of prestige, as the Welsh were crushed, but Wessex got the best lands, and Mercia became increasingly economically and domestically tied to its southern brother. In the late 200s, with Celtic backing, Scotland and Ireland formed nations, giving Mercia and Wessex cause to unite again against a common threat, as Anglo-Saxon allies against the remaining Briton Celts, but King Harold I of Wessex decided that Mercia was the greater enemy. After all, by this point, he and his nation had converted to Celtic Trinitism, so he and the Britons Celts were brothers, after a fashion. In his logic, Harold largely ignored the fact that Mercia was Celtic Trinitist, as well, but so too did many of his subjects. As Wessex signed an alliance with Scotland against Mercia, there were cries of outrage, but they were muted, and the voices of the protesters had little influence. In the short Mercian War, the aforementioned nation was quickly conquered and split between the Scots and the Wessex. A treaty of friendship was signed between the two nations, so that ‘war would never again come to Britannia,’ but of course, that proved to be a lie. Harold crowned himself the first king of England, and turned his attentions south. In the early 300s, of course, the Celtic Empire was in its death throes, and so, taking advantage of that, Harold in his last years ordered a full scale invasion of northern Gaul. That invasion proved surprisingly successful, but, by the 400s, the English were forced to retreat from their mainland gains, as their nation went though a period of stagnation, helped by Viking destruction of northern trade routes. When the English reemerged out of their isolation in the 500s, defeating the main Viking fleet at Orkney, they were by nature more north-oriented. With the collapse of the Celtic Empire, they no longer had reason to tread carefully with Celtic Ireland and Scotland, and so a variety of wars broke out within the British Isles. The British were still recovering from the damage the Viking Wars had inflicted on their lands, and so their gains were not as impressive as they could have been, but Scotland’s borders were rolled substantially northward, and Ireland’s attempts to take Wales were defeated. The dawn of the year 700 had a resurgent England dominating the Isles, but with the Scots and the Irish still nations, and wanting revenge for their defeats. With the return of the mainland Celts as an important faction on the mainland, England once again was hemmed in. While the Isles are all still Celtic Trinitist, at least nominally, there is significant pressure for the English king to break off from Avignon, and form his own church.
In the late 200s, the Celtic Empire was beset by Aegyptian invasion. In truth, the Aegyptians had never signed any treaties with the Celts, but it still seemed oddly like a betrayal. A feint at northern Italia followed by a crushing drive up the wealthy Rhone nearly crippled the Celts, but they recovered, as urbanization programs had succeeded in improving the stability of the nation. Unable to strike a crippling blow, the Aegyptians nevertheless fought on, and the Rhone War dragged on for a decade, until they were finally evicted. The Rhone War had unfortunate implications for the Celts, but no dire ones. South and Central Italia were lost to both the Celts and the Aegyptians in the Rhone War, as native Romans used the cover of the fighting to rise up again, and establish a series of small states on the peninsula, but neither empire’s economy was greatly affected. During the war, the Isle of Man and some British colonies were sold to the Scottish and the Irish, to fund the war effort, but the loss of those small territories was hardly a crushing blow. Growing more and more powerful, the Celtic Empire conquered Alemannia, and pushed east, up to the Rhone, and then up to the Elbe. Trinitism spread even faster, into Iberia, and into even free Italia, but cultural differences broke those two regions off from the Celtic church, and Roman Trinitism, with its own High Priests at Rome, and focused around the gods Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, began to prosper in its own right. The crushing blow came in the 300s, with the rise of the Huns, and a variety of other lesser barbarians that came with them. The Celts fought back, but splintered under the attacks of the barbarians, and for a time, darkness fell over Europe. However, the Huns were eventually defeated by the Byzantines and their barbarian allies, and, by the 500s, unity had come to the Celts once more, in the form of the Holy Celtic Empire, centered at Paris. This came about because the Celtic Trinitist church, based in Avignon, gave its blessing to the warlord Clovis, who established control over what was by then known as France, and then proceeded to reconquer Germany. Of course, two hundred years under barbarian rule had mixed the Celts with a variety of other tribes, but, in the name of religious purity, all that was forgotten, or at least cast aside. Clovis reconquered almost all of what were once Celtic lands before he died. Even now, the Holy Celtic Empire plods on, still oddly united by religion. Fractures are beginning to grow, and regionalism is a significant issue, but the urbanized Holy Celtic Empire is far stronger then the first Celtic Empire ever was.
Iberia’s journey on the river of time was just as chaotic, and perhaps even more bloody. Shortly after the failed Rhone War, the Aegyptians defeated the Punics in Iberia, and then declared war against the Madrians. This war failed, mostly due to internal problems, rather then impressive tactics on the part of the exile Romans, but the Aegyptians were nevertheless forced to be content with southern Iberia. The 300s, of course, witnessed the collapse of the Aegyptian Empire, a fall which Madria took advantage of. The Mauritanians that were the successors to Aegyptian power in the region put up a substantial fight, but when the Mauritanians in turn were succeeded in Iberia by the Tingis, the Madrians finally forced the Africans off the peninsula. Of course, they were hardly Madrians by then; diffusion had left the Roman culture predominant, but there were Celtic and Punic elements in the culture as well. Iberia was ruled by a fragile coalition of something else entirely, and while the Iberians were rapidly growing into a single ethnic group, ethnic allegiances shifted into regional allegiances. Soon enough, a variety of civil wars broke out amongst the victorious Madrians, resulting the present day nation simply known as Iberia. The more powerful of the two Roman Trinitist nations, Iberia stands against the Ctha’r hordes to the south, but is ever in danger of being overrun. Its only real ally is Italia, formed by a union of Romans on their home peninsula during the Hunnic Wars, but Italia is weak, and a poor nation to hold the city of Rome, the center of the Roman Trinitist faith.
In the 200s, Byzantium rapidly became Kyrian. The nation focused on northward expansion for a time, securing regions up to the Danube, and the Sava. After the fall of Aegypt, Minoa was occupied and incorporated in a brief war. However, rapid Persian expansion in Mesopotamia turned the Emperors’ attention to the Middle East, and there Byzantine armies fought and died, first against the Persians, and then against the Rubenid hordes that replaced them. The Huns and their various barbarian allies struck from the north in the 300s, and for two centuries, it was Byzantium that waged the primary war against them, as the Celtic Empire had received the brunt of the assaults and had quickly fallen. The colony on the Bosporan was lost, but in the end, all the barbarian tribes were defeated, save the Bulgar Khanate, converted to Kyrianity, which settled down into a nation along the Danube, never recaptured by the Byzantines. Turning from their warmongering ways, the Bulgars enjoy a healthy trade relationship with the Byzantines, who have managed to withstand the passage of time, if not prosper for it.
After the Rubenid Empire fell, Yehudan Khazaria gained its independence in the 500s, and became the sole civilized state in Eastern Europe. Occupying the lands above the Black Sea, the Khazar nation is even now surrounded by barbarians.
Africa
Aegypt of the 100s and had rapidly expanded northward, gaining territories as far away from its Cuhorsehockye homeland as Italia and Iberia. In short, it was overstretched. Nationalistic fervor had sustained it for a time, but as divisions between the Cuhorsehockyes and the Egyptians grew, it became harder and harder for Aegypt to hold onto its far-flung gains. The Rhone War proved this, as Aegypt’s advances ended in complete defeat. The Iberian Wars were moderately successful, but drained the empire’s resources, and pulled more and more troops away from the homeland, where they would soon be needed. In the late 200s, a prophet known as Ctha became prominent along the Nile, preaching a radical form of Egyptian Polytheism, that stated that all other gods were naught but aspects of Amon-Ra. This religion, oddly enough known as Ctha’r, quickly gained hold among many of the people of the Nile. The Pharaohs remained orthodox in their religious beliefs, but did not stamp out Ctha’r, or even declare it a hearsay. It was the Ctha’r worshipers that made the first move, and bloody civil war spread throughout the Nile. This civil war spread to other parts of the empire, as the Punics, perhaps the most eager to convert to Ctha’r, rebelled en mass, as well. When the dust settled, Aegypt was partitioned into two Ctha’rist states, Punic Mauritania, and Egyptian Ctha’ria. The ethnic differences were by now largely nominal, as intermarriage had fostered close links between the Punics and the Egyptians, but the Ctha’rists were simply too weak after the successful rebellion, to remain united. In both successor nations to Aegypt, religions other than Ctha’r were brutally stamped out, and the religion spread even faster then Yehudaism did, in the Middle East. Nevertheless, problems external and internal plagued the two nations. By the mid 400s, Ctha’ria, or Egypt, as the outsiders insisted on calling it, was invaded by the Rubenids, and collapsed. Mauritania, constantly at war with Iberia, was torn apart by factions from within, and split into Morocco and Tunis, the former nation of which was ejected from Iberia once and for all. Egypt, meanwhile, reformed and rose again as the more moderate Empire of the Nile, still Ctha’rist, and still somewhat fanatic, but with many more scholarly influences, as the Rubenid rise had forced the non-Yehudan learned men of the Middle East into Egypt, for their protection. The Nilotics pushed the Rubenids out of their lands, once and for all, and then settled down, and entered a somewhat prosperous age. The greater empire was gone, true, but the core lands were still unified (though now under an Egyptian dynasty, as opposed to a Cuhorsehockye one). Morocco and Tunis were, by comparison, much more fanatic, fighting a variety of wars with the European Trinitists, as a whole, one such war leaving Sicily in the odd position of being split between Tunis, and Italia, but for now, for the year 700, things have calmed down once again. The Trinitist-Ctha’r conflict may well resume at any time, however…
Axum, meanwhile, weathered the years admirably. Conquering Aden in a brief war, Axum after that suffered periods of stagnation and decline, but always pulled through. Now, the entire Horn is Axumite, and Axum is the last bastion of Orthodox Judaism, as opposed to the Yehudan version that the Arabians champion. Always centered on trade, Axum has endured an economic upsurge recently, but as tensions with the Empire of the Nile rise, that may all fade away.
In the Second, Third, and Fourth Centuries, Greater Indian colonists occupied the island of Madagascar, along with the African east coast. With the collapse of Greater India at the end of the Fifth Century, Indian colonists on Madagascar attempted to set up a India-within-Africa. This effort failed, and a coalition of Malagasy tribes retook the island. However, they did not disintegrate into barbarism once more, and, helped by Indian collaborators, the Malagasy established a unified state, which even sent up colonies on the mainland, retaking lands for civilization that the Greater Indians had lost during their fall. However, while Malagasya is now a powerful trade state, second to only Axum in the region, the large Indian minority is a constant problem.
In sub-Saharan West Africa, a tribe known as the Ghana settled down in the Seventh Century, and now forms a bud known as the Awakar Kingdom, that could grow into a great empire.
Middle East
In the years of the Third Century AD, tensions grew between Byzantium and Persia, because of the former’s aggressive foreign policy, and because of the latter’s continual expansion across the regions of former Assyria. As soon as Persia conquered enough lands to have an honest border with Byzantium, war broke out. The First Mesopotamian War, of course, was completely indecisive, and short, compared to some of the other conflicts the world had experienced, but it paved the way for the Second Mesopotamian War. And the Third. And the Fourth. Meanwhile, to the south, Bachira was far from quiet, though for some time, it was ignored. The conquered Arabian lands taken from Persia were never even attempted to be retaken, as the Shahs were far more focused on the Fertile Crescent. Even the isle of Bahrain was taken from the Persians with little fight. Dilmun was converted and incorporated with ease, and the Arabian part of Aden was annexed after Axum conquered the rest, but the civilized lands still went about fighting their own wars, in ignorant bliss. They had no idea what was about to befall them. A reformer king, Ruben I, came to power in Bachira in the late 300s. At first known mockingly as Yehuda II by ‘civilized’ historians, he instigated yet another Jewish revival, which destroyed Bachira, at least in name. It was during Ruben’s rein that Yehudan Judaism and Axumite-championed Orthodox Judaism finally made an official split, but there was no mourning for the bonds broken in Arabia. The Rubenids, as the Bachirans had come to be called, were far more interested in the north than in the south. And so northward they came. Mesopotamia, squabbled over for two centuries by the Byzantines and the Persians, was taken over in its entirely by Rubenid hordes, which then pressed on in every conceivable direction, in the name of Yehudanism, and the Rubenid Empire. Campaigns against Byzantium soon halted, as that nation became preoccupied with European barbarian wars, and sued for peace, but Yehudan hordes redoubled their efforts on Persia. Persian forces were routed at the Battle of the Caspian, only to regroup, in order to be routed yet again at the Battle of Peresopolis, when the ancient capital was burnt to the ground. The Persian Empire died, though one of its military leaders, General Harpagus, led a good number of Persians eastward to reunite with the Zoroastrian natives of the Greater Indian province of Iran, and established Ghaznavid Persia. After fighting some nominal wars of independence from Greater India, Ghaznavid Persia was largely left alone, as the Greater Indian Empire was stagnating, and its rulers saw the value of a buffer state between them and the Rubenid hordes. (Relations between Ghaznavid Persia and Greater India were actually quite good from then on, until the latter’s fall, whereupon the former took advantage of the Tibetian invasion, to sieze the lands of the Indus.) Quite soon after the creation of Ganaznavid Persia, stagnating Sogdiana was incorperated into that empire, in a brief war. The Rubenids, meanwhile, turned to collapsing Egypt as the main source of new expansion in the mid 400s, but, after conquering the lower Nile, and, in the process, destroying the Sinai Canal, they were thrown out of the region fifty or so years latter by resurgent Nilotics. The last major advance of the Rubenid Empire was across the Caucasus, in the late 400s, but, after converting the Khazars to Yehudaism, and conquering the north coast of the Black Sea, the Rubenid Empire began to suffer from overstretchment. The rapid expansion had left the Rubenids unstable, governed from an unwieldy capital in Medina, far from their northernly gains. By the early 500s, the Rubenids had collapsed. Both Byzantium and Ghaznavid Persia recaptured some of their lost territories, but were halted by a new Yehudan empire, reforming around Bagdad. This empire, the empire of the Benjids, reconquered much of what the Rubenids had ruled. Khazaria was a lost cause; the Caucasus was too much to be penetrated a second time, and so, the Khazars formed their own independent Yehudan state, but the Benjids retained a sizable empire. Stagnation has now begun to set in for the Benjids, the Arabian Yehudans are becoming quite rebellious, and the merchantile Persian Gulfers grow ever more autonomous, but a Yehudan empire still lives, much to the anger and fear of its neighbors.
India and Southeast Asia
Greater India was always an especially stable nation, and indeed, contrary to a popular saying, it was not destroyed from within. It was destroyed from without, and that is a different story entirely. The Third Century, surprisingly enough, saw no sudden drop in Indian fortunes. The people of the subcontinent were coalescing, and beginning to show signs of proto-nationalism, as they were united in their drive to turn the Indian Ocean into a truly Indian lake through colonization. The Council of India, combined with the benevolent monarchy, made living standards in India quite high compared to the rest of the world, and the nation, while officially at peace, hired out its soldiers as mercenaries to neighboring warring lands, keeping them in shape. There was some stagnation in the 300s, and the crazed Persians fleeing eastward from the Rubenids and carving out a new nation in Iran didn’t help any, but the damage done by the loss of that fringe territory was minor. It was not until the late Fifth Century that Greater India began to die. As is traditional, a storm in the form of a barbarian horde struck from the north, even as most of the elite Indian soldiers were off in the colonies and in Ghaznavid Persian lands, fighting to make sure the rest of that nation didn’t get overrun by the Jewish hordes. That storm came in the form of the Tibetans. Shivaist fanatics, the Tibetans headed south in force, and, before much resistance could be mustered, sacked Delhi and seized the Ganges delta, cutting Greater India in two. They conquered Bengal as well, for good measure. With the collapse of the central government, so too did Greater India fall. The last prince of India, driven insane over the death of his father, died in the desperate Battle of Burhanpur, but the victory was a pyrrhic one for the Tibetans. After conquering northern India, and winning a hard-fought victory at Burhanpur, they had largely run out of steam, and their hordes halted, to attempt to digest the massive regions the had conquered. Free south India, while spared, was hardly better off. The collapse of the central government had left the colonies de facto independent, and the Indian warlords that remained were more interested in squabbling with each over what was left then trying to reestablish control over far-off lands. The colonies in Indonesia simply collapsed, and were overrun by natives. The colonies in Africa, much more developed, did something else entirely, but that was already described. The Pandya, or rather, the Simhalans, as the Pandya had been integrated into the Ceylonese culture after their exile to the island, saw the events on the mainland as an opportunity, and established control over the tip of the subcontinent, easily defeating the majority of the Indian warlords. Tibet, meanwhile, as stated, attempted to digest its gains, a feat which proved impossible for the steppe empire. In the Sixth Century, rebellions broke out in central India under a man named Sharan. Centered at Delhi, Sharan’s rebellion quickly grew in influence, as much of the pan-Indian identity left over from the days of Greater India still remained. The Tibetans were pushed back to the Ganges delta, and even lands in the former Greater Indian province of Pagan were secured. Sharan, after his rapid successes in the north, quickly brought what remained of the warlords in the south under his wing. An attack at Tibetan heartlands, however, failed to even push past the Ganges, as by now the Tibetans had regrouped. However, the Tibetans could not conquer the lands Sharan held either, and so, a truce was formed. There were no negotiations-the Tibetans hated the Sharanites, and the Sharanites hated the Tibetans, but neither side perused an offensive. No longer at war, Sharan consolidated his holdings into the oddly positioned Kingdom of Delhi, which, which its capital was indeed at Delhi, stretched mostly east from there, across the Bay of Bengal, making Delhi a very poorly situated capital, indeed. However, Sharan was too proud to move it, and his son was likewise too proud, after Sharan died. The awkward nation managed to live on, feeding off a sense of Greater Indian-established national identity, but its large holdings were held together by a weak government. When a descendant of Sharan tried to conquer Simhala, his armies were horribly defeated, and the country nearly broke out into civil war. Only Tibetan preoccupation with internal matters prevented a reconquest. Now, at the dawn of the Eighth Century, the Kingdom of Delhi struggles to survive. Compared with its neighbors, even dying Tibet, the Kingdom of Delhi is rife with corruption. It will take a strong hand to save this nation, and make it the true successor to Greater India.
In southeast Asia in the 300s, a mad Cambodian king attempted to conquer the Malaysian peninsula from the Greater Indians, at a time when Greater Indian power was at its peak. The resulting war destroyed Cambodia, but the Greater Indians were unable to annex the region, and so, the way was paved for new powers. As Greater India waned, maintaining a hold on the Pagan province, but abandoning its hold on the other, more far-flung colonies, two native states rose to power, the state of Angkor, centered around fallen Cambodia, and the state of Srivijaya, centered around the straits of Malaysia. These two states even now fight amongst themselves for predominance in the region.
East Asia
The story of the east is a simple one. As the great empires of the west fought and died in their wars, the Chu-Nan Empire prospered. A variety of reforms were set into motion, and great works were built, most notably a museum to the Stick War, in Yangzhou (the rebuilt Shanghai). Territories were conquered, most notably in the east, as both Japan and Wu Taiwan were conquered. The passing of time brought new dynasties to China, and in dynastic wars, Japan was lost to its fiercely independent natives in the Sixth Century, but now, the Yang Dynasty rules over a still-united China. The Tibetan barbarians were always a problem, and are still one, though they were more a problem for India, then for China, and recently, Xiong-nu and Mongols alike have joined together under the banners of Koeke Moengke Tengri, but the storm has not fallen upon Yang China. In the Korean peninsula, the passage of time replaced the Koguryo state with the Korean nation of Silla, but aside from that, little has changed. It all may well change soon, though. As of the year 700, it has only been a single year since Tengri unified the primary tribes of the north…
Reservations you should be able to guess, though Nuclear kid. no longer has a reservation on Japan, as he did not send BT orders.
I'll open up a new thread for this as soon as I finish the stats. Direct all questions there. (Oh, and now the order deadline is 20:00 GMT WedNESday. I changed it again.)
I'll open up a new thread for this as soon as I finish the stats. Direct all questions there. (Oh, and now the order deadline is 20:00 GMT WedNESday. I changed it again.)
Luckymoose
The World is Mine
Awesome BT. I'm ready to continue playing as Iberia!
EDIT: ANY ETA ON STATS?
EDIT: ANY ETA ON STATS?
LittleBoots
The Bloody Banner
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2006
- Messages
- 1,979
Beeeeyoooooteeeeefullll
BEHIND_THE_MASK
A Liar... A Cheat...
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2006
- Messages
- 1,840
so now i have to fight to unite Scandinavia... well thats good i suppose. I got some land out of it.
Sheep
Orange Shrooms!
So I take it I have the entire Middle East section.....
Nice!
Nice!
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