Today’s video is a special dedicated to the upcoming release of Crusader Kings 3.
The game will have 2 starting dates – 867 and 1066 and our friends at Paradox asked
us to show how their gaming world looked during these dates.
We think that Paradox did a great job choosing these 2 dates, as they were pivotal all across
Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Crusader Kings is such a massive game!
You play as a ruler and your goal is to raise your dynasty above every other.
This is done through war, diplomacy, intrigue, religious and legal machinations, and each
of these aspects is extremely deep.
The third game only improved on that successful formula with refined mechanics, gorgeous map,
beautiful graphics, and even more historical accuracy.
So, sit back and enjoy as we take you on a tour of the world of 1066.
We begin our tour in the heart of the Latin world - Rome.
No longer the center of a great Empire, its population had plummeted to less than 30,000
by the early middle ages.
Nevertheless, as the home of the papacy it retained political relevance by virtue of
its religious authority.
By 1066, the Pope Alexander II was deeply involved in European politics, and was the
King of his own realm, the Papal States, bequeathed upon his predecessors by the Franks.
The Papacy had long maintained a complicated, but mutually beneficial relationship with
the Carolingian dynasty.
The Franks became the torchbearers of the Christian Roman legacy in the west and provided
military protection for the Pope in exchange for religious legitimacy.
By 1066, Charlemagne’s successors had turned his Holy Roman Empire into the political heart
of Europe.
However, the historical alliance between the Empire and the Papacy was not to last.
The investiture controversy was only a decade away, and would see the most powerful secular
and religious leaders of Europe clash in a struggle for political power that would shake
the Catholic world to its foundations.
To the east of the German Emperors was the Kingdom of Poland, under the rule of the Bolesław
[boleswaf] II the Generous of the Piast Dynasty.
1066 marked the 100th anniversary of their nation’s conversion to Catholicism.
Over the next five centuries, Poland would slowly become one of the largest and most
powerful Kingdoms of Europe.
Southwards still was the Kingdom of Hungary.
It’s people, the Magyars, had entered Europe as brutal invaders in the early 900s, ravaging
much of Christendom before settling down.
Their King, Stephen II, had converted to the Latin faith at the turn of the millennium,
but the warrior-ways of the Magyars remained strong.
On the other side of the Latin Christian world was the other half of the old Frankish Legacy.
Once a part of Charlemagne’s Empire, the Kingdom of West Frankia had morphed into the
Kingdom of France under the Capetian dynasty.
It was a very decentralized Kingdom, with the Nobility and Clergy wielding power nearly
equal to the King himself, most evident in a certain duchy in the Kingdom’s northern
coast, but we will get to that later.
Notably, by 1066, France had become home to one of Europes’ largest Jewish communities,
and was a haven of Jewish culture and learning.
However, much like in the rest of Europe, they were often subject to royal prosecution
and racially motivated violence.
Heading south across the Pyrenees, we reach a land in perpetual turmoil.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the reconquista was in full swing.
In the four centuries since the initial Muslim conquest, the Christians had pushed back.
To the north, the Christian Kingdoms of Galicia, Leon, Castille, Navarre, Aragon and the Duchy
of Barcelona were looking at the 10 or so Muslim states, chief among them Dhunnunids,
Aftasids and Zirids.
It was around our year of 1066 that saw the rise of one El Cid, Knight, Warlord and Founding
Hero of Castille.
It should be noted that he fought not only Muslims, but also his fellow Christians, sometimes
in the service of Muslims; his life was a testament that the conflict of Iberia was
never a binary religious war, but rather a grand game of thrones with many ambitious
powers.
To the North were the Anglo-Saxons, once divided into many Kingdoms, and invaded by their fearsome
pagan cousins across the North Sea.
Alfred the Great and his descendants slowly pushed the Vikings off of their island, and
in the process, united the Anglo-Saxon peoples into the Kingdom of England.
By 1066, Edward the Confessor, the last King of the house of Wessex, was on his deathbed
with no heirs to his throne.
In the wake of this potential power vacuum, ambitious Saxon Earl Harold Godwinson would
seize the English throne, but not without a challenge.
Meanwhile, the Gaelic peoples of Alba and Éire [air-r[zh]eh], and the Brythonic peoples
of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany remained, mostly in forms of petty kingdoms.
Brittany was still independent of France, while Wales and Ireland were dominated by
a patchwork of minor states.
The Kingdom of Scotland controlled most of the country, but its west was dominated by
the Norwegian kingdom of the Isle and the northernmost portion by the kingdom of Norway
proper.
By 1066, the era of the fearless Vikings was at its twilight.
Around 975, the Danish King Harald Bluetooth had introduced Christianity into his realm,
and while the norse Pantheon retained strong holdouts, it was only a matter of time before
Christendom secured its final victory.
In the Kingdom of Norway reigned the bold and fearless Harald Hardrada, an adventurer
King who had spent time as an elite mercenary for the Emperors in Constantinople.
In his later years, he had returned to claim his throne, and by 1066, had turned his gaze
onto England.
In many places across 11th century Europe, the Viking legacy existed in the form of echoes.
These were regions where Norse warriors had settled centuries prior, assimilating into
the local culture.
The most prominent of these was the Duchy of Normandy in France.
Their current Duke, the iconic William the Conqueror, was as ambitious as his title implied.
By our year of 1066, he had turned his armies northwards, completing the trifecta of rulers
who would compete for the English throne.
The Normans made their mark not just in France and England, but the heart of the Mediterranean
as well.
At the turn of the millennium, they had entered the southern half of the Italian Peninsula,
first as mercenaries, and later as conquerors.
By 1066, they were in the process of seizing the isle of Sicily from the Muslims, who had
controlled the island for nearly 200 years.
Meanwhile to the east, the Kievan Rus was a realm founded and ruled by Norse Princes,
the Rurikids.
While they had assimilated heavily into the customs of the local Eastern Slavs, many aspects
of Viking culture remained strong in the lands of the Rus.
However, by the early 11th century, the Pagan adventurers of old had given way to a land
of scholars and theologians.
Vladimir the Great had famously adopted the faith of the Christian Greeks in 988AD, and
his successor Yaroslav the Wise had turned his massive realm into one of the most culturally
sophisticated states in Europe.
Trouble was brewing for the Rus, however.
With Yaroslav’s death, the united reign of the Rurikids gave way to a patchwork of
functionally independent eastern Slavic princedoms within the borders of the old Kievan realm.
To the south of the Rus was the heart of the Orthodox Christian world, officially split
from the Pope in Rome in the great schism of 1054.
The Byzantine realm was the rump state of Eastern Rome, the Greek-Speaking half of the
Empire that had never fallen to barbarian invaders as in the west.
Constantinople was a testament to this, a splendorous display of classical architecture,
and the largest city in Christendom.
Still, the heyday of the Eastern Romans was centuries ago.
Beset upon by invaders from all sides for centuries, they lost much of their former
territories, including the rich lands of Egypt and Syria, to the powers of Islam.
At the turn of the millennium however, the Empire had regained some stable footing.
Through their economic clout, they had managed to convert their former enemies, the South
Slavs and Bulgars, to Orthodox Christianity, and the military conquests of the Brilliant
warrior-Emperor Basil II had secured their borders.
By 1066, their most pressing issues were the Normans, who were pushing them out of their
last holdings in Italy, and the fearsome Turkic Seljuks in the east.
Now, let’s take a tour of the Islamic world.
Across the northern coast of North Africa, lies the fertile coasts of the Maghreb, home
to tribes known to the west as the Berbers, but to themselves as the Amazigh.
These indigenous people had weathered Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests, and due
to the latter the Berbers were mostly Muslim, but after the decline of the Umayyad Caliphate,
they had managed to establish a series of functionally independent Kingdoms.
The Berbers had long been divided into many tribes, many of whom still clung to their
pre-Islamic polytheistic practices.
This changed with the Amazigh scholar, Abdallah ibn Yasin.
Wielding a draconian brand of Islam, Abdallah managed to unite many Berber tribes under
him, through conversion or conquest.
By the time he passed away in 1059, his new dynasty, the Almoravids, controlled a vast
territory that extended down the Atlantic coast.
In time, this army of desert dwellers would cross the strait of Gibraltar and provide
crucial aid to the struggling Muslims of Al-Andalus against the southward push of the Christian
Reconquista.
The ancient land of Egypt remained diverse in cultures, including Arabs, indigenous Coptic
Christians, and an ancient Jewish community.
Its current dynasty was the Shi’a Muslim Fatimids, whose royal line claimed descent
from the eponymous Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammed.
They ruled not only the fertile Nile, but much of Libya and also the Levant, including
the holy city itself, Jerusalem.
In contrast with other Islamic nations, the Fatimids were relatively friendly with Christendom,
trading and allowing Christian pilgrims to travel unhindered to Jerusalem.
However, it was only a matter of time before a less friendly Islamic power took control
over the holy land, creating a political shockwave across both the Islamic and Christian worlds.
One of the most influential people groups of the middle ages were the Turkic peoples,
a collection of hardy nomadic tribes from the rugged steppe lands of inner Asia who
lived and died on the backs of their horses.
By 1066, the most powerful Turkic confederations were the Pecheneg Horde, and the Cuman-Kipchak
confederacy.
For decades they had fought against the sedentary Slavs of the Kievan Rus.
Originally, the Turkic peoples worshipped Tengri, the same sky god revered by the Mongols.
However, they were culturally malleable, often adopting the religion & faith of the lands
they conquered.
It is from this phenomenon that we see the rise of the most dynamic Empire of the medieval
middle east: the Seljuks.
These Oghuz Turks had converted to Sunni Islam and quickly proved to be the most effective
warriors in the region, and between 950 and 1066, conquered an empire stretching across
Persia and the Fertile Crescent.
Persia had long since become part of the Islamic cultural sphere, but they had embraced the
Muslim world on their own terms.
Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Persia’s ancient culture had become the backbone of Islamic
literature, science and art.
So powerful was their society, that when the Seljuks conquered the formerly-Abbasid controlled
territories, they quickly assimilated into Islamo-Persian culture and pledged symbolic
suzerainty to the powerless Abbasid Caliphs for religious legitimacy.
In 1066, the Seljuk Sultan was one Alp Arslan- “The Heroic Lion”, whose zealous armies
were only a few years away from striking into the Fatimid controlled Holy Land, and into
the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, two conquests that would trigger the First Crusade.
Subsaharan Africa is usually a footnote in most medieval history books.
Unjustly so, for the Kingdoms and Empires in the region were as rich and complex as
any of their European or Middle Eastern counterparts.
In West Africa, the Empire of Ghana dominated.
Founded by the industrious Soninke people, this realm was a cultural and religious melting
pot.
Ghana’s power came from its geographical location as a terminus point in the incredibly
lucrative trans-Saharan trade network, in which many merchants would brave the treacherous
camel rides across the brutal desert to bring Gold, Ivory, Spices, Silk, and Slaves that
enriched Ghana.
As a result of interaction with Arab and Berber merchants, the peoples of Ghana had slowly
become Muslims, creating a blend of indigenous African and Islamic traditions.
We move now to the other side of the continent, to explore lands with deep ties to Biblical
scripture.
Indeed, From the upper Nile to the southern tip of the red sea, Christianity prevailed
as the dominant religion in East Africa, an enclave surrounded on all sides by the growing
influence of Islam.
South of Egypt was the powerful Kingdom of Makuria.
After being cut off from the rest of Christendom by the early Islamic conquests, the Kings
of Makuria had managed to create a stable peace with their Muslim neighbors.
By 1066, the Kingdom was on the horizon of a cultural golden age, establishing their
own unique brand of Nubian Christianity, while their royal capital of Dongola became a land
of riches and splendor.
To the east lay Ethiopia, home to the Solomonic Kings, who claimed descent from the eponymous
Biblical king.
Due to their isolation from the rest of the Christian world, the land of Ethiopia would,
in later centuries, achieve a near-mythical status with medieval Europeans, and be the
inspiration for the dream of Prester John, the King of the gleaming Christian Kingdom,
located deep amongst the heathens of the Orient, which according to Europeans, was home to
the tower of Babel & the fountain of youth.
We now move east, across the Arabian Sea, to the final stop of our tour.
In the 11th century, the subcontinent of India was home to dozens of independent Kingdoms,
cultures and religions, struggling against one another in an intricate web of war and
politics that was as complex as the entirety of Europe combined.
Across the continent, the ancient faith of Brahmic Hinduism was the predominant means
by which Kings established social order in their Kingdoms.
However, smaller faiths like Buddhism and Jainism remained culturally relevant.
In the South, the dominant powers were the Tamil Kings of Chola, whose powerbase extended
from their southern heartlands of Tamil Nadu, to the Bay of Bengal.
Their land was the center of the incredibly lucrative Indian Ocean spice trade.
The Cholas exported their culture across much of Southeast Asia, creating “Indianized”
Kingdoms in what is today Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia and beyond.
In the fertile highlands of the central Deccan Plateau was the Western Chalukya Empire.
They were the Dravidian cousins of the Chola, but had been perpetually at war with their
southern neighbours, with neither side gaining any real footing over the other.
Meanwhile in the Northwest, the Turko-Persian Dynasty of the Ghaznavids had established
control over much of modern-day Pakistan and Punjab, representing the growing influence
of Islam in the Indian Subcontinent.
In many ways, the year 1066 was just another blip in the endless march of the human race.
Yet in others, it was a staging point for an era of great change for many nations, across
multiple continents.
The world was gradually becoming a smaller place, but the horizons of human ambition
were widening.
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