@Vol
Almost all of the civs you listed are in Civ Gold 5.0.
I'm actually with TMIT on this one, the more the merrier. I mean, part of civ is the "what if" factor. What if the Polynesians had done more than simply sit on the beach eating fish, and get in little coracles and find themselves on a new island. I mean, what if they had discovered Japan, built a surprise army, invaded and conquered it?
What if the Zulu had thrown the Euro's out of S. Africa, and then consolidated Southern Africa under their control.
What if the Nez Perce had defeated the US cavalry?
As regards to religion, I myself am a follower of Yeshua, and therefore a pacifist, but I cannot think that you can point to protestantism as a beacon of pacifism. Quite the contrary. There was the 30 years war between the Catholics and Protestants. There was Cromwell. There's Bush, who utilized protestant rhetoric to galvanize the American nation to support an economic war under the guise of self-defense from religious fanatics. A signifcant base of his support comes from Protestants (especially Baptists) who believe that war is viable and just. There's Luther who impregnated Germany with the seeds of anti-semitism that grew to maturity under Hitler. There's kingdom now theology. When I examine modern American Protestants today, the vast majority of them are warmongers.
I've actually just started writing a novel about the early Christians and why they were detested by the Romans, which was largely because of their pacifism. Christian converts were required to leave the army and abandon their magisterial posts because such duties conflicted with their "hippie" culture. For an empire, its continued existence is predicated upon a martial nature; the Christian pacifist ethic directly opposed this necessity. Nero could not tolerate his soldiers not wanting to kill anymore.
Emperor Constantine destroyed Christianity when he turned it into the Roman state religion, and used it to strengthen a national identity. Not everyone withing the Roman empire was Roman (that is, ethnically the same), but everyone could accept and follow a religion that had crossed ethnic borders. Constantine simply observed that Christianity could suit his purposes of further uniting and controlling a vastly heterogenous empire. He turned a pacifist religion into a war religion. He controlled the appointments of bishops, and therefore controlled the nature of theology. The changed climate that he created resulted in the militaristic theology of Augustin.
Yet, having stated this, this sentiment has not carried over into protestantism today. Luther and Calvin both derive their theology from the militarism of Augustin. In fact, the princes of the many German principalities simply became "little popes" in their regions who held the right of selecting clergy and simply used the new religion to create a unique national (princedom) identity to galvanize his people and solidify his rule. A bunch of new Constantines. In fact, when the german peasants accepted Christianity, they suddenly yearned for egalitarian ideals that would result in freedom from the tyranical rule of a despotic aristocracy and to set up a democracy in the 1500s. Of course, the german nobility could not tolerate such enlightened thinking and brutally subjugated the peasant revolt, killing several hundred thousand of these new protestants. Luther himself, took the side of the aristocracy and supported the slaughter of his new converts.
Although the German princes would not permit freedom for their subjects, they themselves wished for freedom from Catholic political rule (the HRE), and hence these princes utilized their new religious status as reasons for autonomy and played upon the emotions of their people in exciting them to gain religious freedom from Rome. In other words, while not wanting to grant democracy to their peasants, they did at least wish to redirect their passions for freedom towards wars against the Catholic potentates.
To a lesser degree, Bush has carried on this tradition in this decade, but instead of fighting catholics, we're now fighting fanatical Moslem terrorists who are presumedly hell-bent on destroying all things holy and right within the world. For the modern American Christian, Bush preyed upon religious fears in order to harness a modern crusade, which truly, had nothing to do with the real reasons Bush wanted war with the middle east--which was that he wanted to create an oil monopoly.
Truly, Christianity is about pacifism; yet we cannot presume the same for Protestantism.
@LM
Roman Catholicism was not the only major form of Christianity until the Reformation. I think we are forgetting the Great Schism of the 11th century that resulted in two major sects of Christians: the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox.
As to the Crusades, their true cause wasn't religious in nature. They simply resulted from needing to give landless, younger sons of aristocrats--who would not gain any inheritance--something to do. The Crusades existed as a mechanism for these troublesome, jealous younger sons to gain new lands, titles and responsibilities. Religious rhetoric was employed, ala Constantine/Bush, to arouse and incite the common peasants into joining into what was really a political operation.
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