Europa

Map
Please see the map below for a very good representation of Europe in 1200 CE. Map image courtesy of Cyowari. Visit his DeviantArt page for other excellent maps!



History
Europe is in a period of massive growth. Two centuries of largely temperate weather combined with re-stabilization after the final fall of the Roman Empire have led to prosperity and a population boom. After centuries of chaos, marked by raids from nomadic peoples from the north and east, the kingdoms are slowly coalescing into stable forces.

The power of the Catholic Church has recovered from the schism with the Orthodox east in 1054, and with the launching of the Crusades, it has finally chosen to wield political power across the continent. More than that, the final conversion of the cities to Christianity has come to pass, and the last lights of paganism are going out, all over the known world.

In the west, England is in the midst of recovering from the disastrous reign of Richard the Lion-Hearted, whose brother, John Lackland has ascended to the throne. In France, Philip Augustus is consolidating the power of the Franks over his domain. The Iberian Peninsula is a fractious place, with Muslims, Aragonians, Basque, and other groups vying for dominance. Italy is broken down into scheming city-states, which in turn is contributing to the rise of the merchant class.

Nothing underscores this rise moreso than the Hanseatic League, a confederation of merchant guilds wielding power in northwestern and central Europe on a scale previously unimaginable. For the first time since the fall of Rome, the roads in that part of Europe are making land caravans worth the risk.

In the northeast, the Slavic peoples of various wage a constant battle against an array of barbarian forces, preventing them from solidifying any sort of true empire. In the central north, the pagan Norse have been replaced by a succession of Christian kings, who are slowly but determinedly taming the wild people who inhabit those lands.

It is the kingdoms of central Europe that dominate the known world, commercially, culturally, and militarily. The power is divided evenly between two great forces -- the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic peoples and northern Italy, and the Kingdom of Hungary, dominating eastern Europe.

The Holy Roman Empire consists of four kingdoms: Germany, Italy (not including the kingdom of Sicily), young Bohemia (a mixture of Slavic and Germanic peoples), and Burgundy. Insulated from the Muslim expansion, and long since recovered from the depradations of Attila the Hun, it is also the center of western Christian authority in Europe. Wealthy and prosperous, it is has unchallenged dominance.

The Kingdom of Hungary, on the other hand, has been established since the time of legendary Attila, has been stable for 200 years. Sedate and settled on its western side, the eastern side sees the kingdom harried by Slavs and the confederacy of Cumans and Kipchaks, pagan nomads each ruled by a local leader they call a "khan." More than that, the eastern side is largely undeveloped, having only a few cities (large towns, in reality) and few natural resources deemed worthy of the effort needed to claim them.

In the Holy Land, the Third Crusade ended eight years ago, and both Europe and the Holy Land are awash with hardened veterans and ill will. It is rumoured another Crusade will soon be launched. The failure to recapture Jerusalem from the legendary Saladin sits poorly with the Christian monarchs.

The Kingdom of Hungary
The setting of our game is in the Kingdom of Hungary.

The Kingdom, while powerful, is experiencing some unrest. The legendary king, Béla III, died four years ago, and his son, Emeric, wears the crown uneasily. King Emeric's brother, Andrew, has stirred nearly continuous revolts, largely centered in the cities of the west. In the east, however, these troubles pass largely unnoticed among the scattered, small population.

It is worthwhile to note that the Kingdom of Hungary is one of the most tolerant and multi-ethnic kingdoms in Europe. With relative peace reigning between Hungary and the Cumans and Kipchaks, it is not uncommon for traders to pass through from all points. Christian, Muslim, and pagan mix freely, especially in the smaller towns in the east and south. Magyars mix with Slavs, Croatians, Oghurs, and Teutonic Saxons. Interestingly, a side effect of this has been to render Latin more commonly spoken here than in many other parts of Europe, as it is used as a common trading tongue between the various groups, in a form known as Vlach, with many loan words from other dialects.

Hungarians, like much of the rest of Europe, are divided into four groups: nobles, freemen and women, serfs, and priests. In practice, the serfs of Hungary enjoy a freedom unmatched in other European countries, keeping large portions of their crop for themselves, and living relatively unmolested by the nobility. A far larger portion of the population were free, about 3 in 5.

The relationship of nobles to the king was also much different than in other parts of Europe. Anyone who owns land is a noble, no matter how small. Nobles are not required to fight on behalf of the king, though they may have hereditary duties agreed upon as part of the price of purchasing the land from the king. As such, they enjoy much broader freedoms than nobles do in many of the western kingdoms.

So here we have the Kingdom of Hungary -- in the west, a cosmopolitan nation, with a strong merchant backbone, and in the east, a sparsely populated land of breathtaking mountains, vast forests, and a fiercely independent people.