EoD Eurofrica 1: National histories

1: The Glorious Swiss Confederation:

With the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire the Swiss many of the cities sought their protection from the raging wars breaking out across the old Holy Roman Empire. However once the immediate danger had passed and stability began to emerge, the threat of foreign foes lessened and the many Cantons soon began to press their own interests and civil war broke out. Eventually however the original thirteen cantons where able to defeat these rebels and formed a new, more centralized government built on more republican ideals. Forty years ago however the Von Eberlein family launched a military coup in the capitol of Zurich, seizing control of the senate and declaring themselves the dictators of the Swiss Confederacy, a position they cemented in a short but brutal civil war. After the death of his father, and a short power struggle with his siblings, Phillip Von Eberlain managed to place himself as dictator of the Swiss, renaming his position to one of Glorious Leader. Finally the Swiss are properly united and happy with the stability of the Von Eberlain Dictatorship, which has finally allowed them to look outwards to international affairs once again.

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2: Caliphate of Cordoba:

In the late 15th century, King Ferdinand was pressured on all sides by forces, as the growing muslim movement within Spain's borders threatened his sovereignty, and France testing how far they could push Spanish goodwill in Basque. Unable to pursue the war in Granada which he desired, as a result of a unified movement in northern Africa lending support to the Emirate at the time, he instead solidified his position. A few years later, he sent a small fleet to America to follow up on Columbus' findings. Unfortunately, England had had a very similar idea, and the struggle for control would be long and arduous, leaving little room for other matters save where aid could be obtained from others. And so, over the next three hundred years, the Spanish share of the peninsula slowly and unsteadily shrunk, while the Moorish share grew, border dispute by border dispute. Portugal gave way first, revolutionary spirit inspired by France and America leading to a long and bloody civil war in the 1840s that ended with Islamic control over the region. The area never quite stabilized, tensions between Portugal and Spain only intensified by this new change in cultural viewpoints. It was only in 1862,  nearly four hundred years after the originally planned Reconquista, that Spain found itself at war with Granada, scarcely a year after trying to invade Al-Andalus, the newly Islamic Portugal. Fifteen years later, the results: a devastated countryside, an overwhelmingly Islamic population filled with a spirit of righteous fury at persecution, and a sense of unity found only through shared cause and hard struggle. The years after were very informative, and, basing their government on a revised form of traditional Fiqh, they established a state looking inwards, to rebuild, and outwards, to protect what they had worked so hard for.

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3: Eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth:

In the fifteenth century, Poland defeated the Teutonic Order once and for all (a step that would contribute to the later failure of the Holy Roman Empire by preventing Brandenburg from taking its place and forming Prussia), and with Lithuania its vassal and no heathen Ottomans to bother it, this paved the way for Poland to surge nearly atop the world. It absorbed Lithuania, forming the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and even with its odd form of government (sporting an elected king and a congress of nobles known as the sejm) it found many easy targets. Bohemia-Hungary was the first target of the PLC, and with the Holy Roman Empire as it was, Bohemia was in multiple wars anyway -- the Commonwealth swept in and conquered, even proceeding further into Germany over the next century. Then Russia and the Baltic lands over the next two... eventually, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a massive empire.

But that only intensified its own latent internal struggles. Often had the sejm and the king clashed, but power had been shifting to a much more precarious balance even as the Commonwealth looked outwards and conquered, the king's power over his own lands decreasing and his grip weakening, stifled by the rules of the sejm. In the late 18th century, the Commonwealth's odd governmental system finally reached a breaking point, as a brutal civil war broke out between several of the nobility and the king, Benedykt Leszczyński. Though he won, he looked at his nation and realized it risked ending up like the Roman Empire in the end... and he realized he ought to take the same solution as the Romans -- it had worked out for the Byzantines. So he split his Commonwealth, retaining the German, Polish, and most of the Lithuanian parts in the Western half (for they were the core), and placing the Belarusian, Baltic, and Russian parts of his Commonwealth, along with parts of Lithuania under weaker nobles into the Eastern half, centered in Minsk, and gave it to a Belarusian relative.

Said noble, Benedykt Leszczyński, immediately sprang to reform his new nation before any of the much weaker Belarusian or Russian nobles could gather together. In a swift move, he snatched the sejm directly out of the hands of the nobility and instead had the heir to the throne elected by the people, inspired by the Americans... out of his dynasty, of course. This had the effect of largely destroying the power of the nobility, therefore centralizing his rule, and of giving the people representation... although the Polish had long been ahead of their time, anyway. Now, in 1900, the Eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth isn't Polish at all anymore (the Western half never reformed and ended up crumbling to pieces), it's barely Lithuanian, and it's more Belarusian than anything... in fact, it even switched its religion to Orthodox during the early 19th century. Now, with the death of her father, Katsiaryna Leszczyński has been elected Queen of the Eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it is up to her to decide the next chapter of this oddly historied land.

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4: Kingdom of Sicily

The history of the Hohenstaufen line in Italy has been one of survival on the battlefield of the Mediterranean.  A victory barely eked out by Conrad II the Younger at Tagliacozzo in 1266 cemented Hohenstaufen rule in Sicily and Naples, and his ceremonial submission to the Pope of Rome secured an end to Papal animosity, at least temporarily.  The landing of an Aragonian army at Trapani twenty years later to press the claims of King Peter III, brother-in-law of Conrad by an illegitimate Hohenstaufen line, was driven back into the sea by a combination of a Sicilian irregular force and a hastily-raised army brought into Messina.  The Hohenstaufens navigated the diplomatic mires of the Italian Wars of the early 16th century, where the mainland, like most of the Italian peninsula, was ravaged by alternately the French, Byzantine Greeks, or Papacy.  Their princes fought for the honor of the flag and survival of the kingdom to a daring naval victory at Epachtos in 1571, desperately struggling against superior numbers as the Holy Roman Empire was distracted by its own growing domestic pressures but successfully stymying a second attempt by the Byzantine Empire to claim southern Italy as a springboard for a Roman reunification by force.  The Revolutionary Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where the Kingdom expanded to overtake the Papacy and its northern neighbors. Such battles defined a dynasty that had spanned centuries and the kingdom they ruled, one of stubborness and determination, a center of production, trade, and development that rivalled its northern peers.

The greatest threat of the 19th century to the Hohenstaufens, however, would not come from external threats. Growing domestic unrest grew under the latifunda system, economically shackling the Kingdom in peonage to a fading era and trapping its politics in a moribund cycle of self-destruction under a powerful noble aristocracy that dominated both the court in Naples and the people of the Neapolitan and Sicilian hinterlands. When her father died after a 72-year reign, Queen Gisela was only 14 and bound under not only the power of the aristocracy she nominally ruled, but also a domineering, arrogant regency that only countenanced a female heir because its alternative was a foreign king not beholden to them. What resulted was an unholy alliance, formed by a Queen seen by the nobles as no threat, between the petit nobility who owned no great stretches of land themselves, the growing middle-class of merchants of Naples and Messina, and a powerful agrarian class of serfs and tenured workers desirous of their own land. When she reached her age of majority, she revealed her political backing to her regnal council and the House of Lords by compelling them to accept a new Constitution with sweeping economic reforms, dismantling the latifundia and the very basis of their economic and political strength and transferring that to her own supporters.  She followed up with the organization of new laws and a regular national constabulary answerable to her.  The price for this was to shackle her own power within those same constitutional limits, which she viewed as a small price to pay given the broad base of her support and the chance to make the Kingdom great once more.  The premature death of Queen Gisela to illness has since left a gap in the Kingdom's highst echelons of power. She had no son, leaving the succession unsure, but the precedent set by Gisela's ascendance has helped smooth the ascension of her own daughter Elena.  Herself young at 22, and inheriting a land that has economically taken its first steps towards a renewed prosperity but still remains both relatively undeveloped and militarily anemic as international storm clouds gather on the horizon, it remains to be seen whether Queen Elena will succeed in following in the footsteps of a great dynasty, or if she will be its final hurrah.

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5. Free Representatives of France

France, the great nation, has survived in the middle of Europe for centuries and the Qadir family is a respected line, the spitting image of the country itself. Since the 1500's, France grew slowly in Europe before losing some of it's bordering vassal provinces to it's neighbors, who saw France's momentary slowing in expansion as a weakness. Adrien Qadir rose to power through his acts on the battlefield, working closely with other important lineages to make friends in high places. Adrien built his power on a foundation of the men and woman of his nation, and his people's admiration of his defense of them. While Adrien believes in expansion in the form of science instead of physical territory, he can and will defend his people from harm. (sorry for the lackluster history)

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6. Unified Isles of North Atlantic

Alternate History occurred in brevity which changed the political and general state of affairs in Europe. Significant agricultural disasters in the mid-19th century did not occur, and several changes of unification and social progress was the focus of the century until the present, utilizing the industrial power of the British Isles towards social understanding and stability rather than military power and control. Decades of nationalism and secular progress created an independent but unified people, secure in their own identity and stable with the changes and ideas of the times.

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7. Socialist-Nationalist Arab Republic of Egypt

With the Byzantine Emperor keeping the Turks down, the Mameluks kept Egypt under their thumb. Over the years, regime mutated to an hereditary aristocracy. Influenced by some modern ideas from Europe, Hosni Al-Arabi created the ideology of Social-Nationalism, more currently though of as Mamlukanism outside Egypt. It holds that the maluks, their gene pool enriched by the importation of wives and concubines from all over the known world are a genetically superior race, destined to rule mankind for its own good. Internal opposition having been dealt with ruthlessly, the SNARE is now preparing to get the rest of the world under its control.

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8. Kongeriget Nordmark

A Brief Chronology of Nordmark
~1000 CE:
    Kings and priests attempt to Christianize the Norse lands, some of them resort to harsh methods that trigger uprisings and protracted warfare.
    Throughout the wars of religion, the Christian side is weakened by fierce Catholic/Orthodox infighting.
~1100 CE:
    The wars of religion finally end. Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy and Pagan cults have managed to attain roughly equal status in the Norse kingdoms.
1297 CE:
    Fears of German hegemony inspire the creation of the Halmstad Union. The Norse kingdoms are united under one Crown.
1513-1560 CE:
    The Polish threat rises as the German one fades. The Halmstad Union is reaffirmed and institutionalized during the long and successful reign of King Thorbjørn the Great, traditionally regarded as the Father of Nordmark.
~1600-1800 CE:
    Nordmark exists as a peaceful, stable and insular feudal state. The economy is agricultural and stagnant. Foreign influences are concentrated in the national capital and a few other large coastal cities.
~1850-1865 CE:
    There is growing awareness of Nordish technological and economic backwardness, and the concomitant risk of foreign domination.
    Power struggles between traditionalist feudal Jarls and reform-minded royal officials intensify, the latter receiving support from urban business interests.
    The internal conflict comes close to erupting in open warfare, but eventually a combination of political concessions and military superiority pacifies the Jarls. In exchange for agreeing to reforms, members of the old upper class are given positions in the institutions of the new centralized government.
1866 CE:
    A new constitution comes into force. Nordmark becomes a parliamentary monarchy. Voting rights in elections to the Rigsdag are granted to all self-supporting citizens.
1899 CE:
    Modernization efforts, driven chiefly by entrepreneurs, academics and the professional military, have made some progress. Development is still held back by poor infrastructure and insufficient capital resources.
    As industrialization sets great forces in motion across Europe, the Nords are once again looking south, seeing terrible danger but also opportunities for a better future.

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