The Darkage

[SicilianVespers]

Here's what I have dome so far on the Darkage campaign:





I still need adjust the ownership for:

Regnum Asturorum (Spain)
Regnum Navarrae
Regnum Saxonum Occidentalis (Wessex/England)
Regnum Daniæ (Vikings need Normandy & part of England)
Magyar Törzsek
Bulgar Kanasubigi
Principatus Beneventum (ex. Sicily)

The Aghlabids/Fatimids also need to own Algeria & W. Sicily, and the Khazars need to be added.

This is all pretty minor, and shouldn't take long.

What do you guys think, should we do 888 AD or 895? If we go with 888, the Magyars would be in Yedisan (Etelkoz) and the Bulgars would also get Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transilvania. We would also have to use Portugal as a placeholder for Great Moravia (Instead of Navarra).

Any opinions?

[Aliksander]

Who would the Scots represent on that map? The Kingdom of Alba?

[SicilianVespers]

Yes, Scotland is representing the Kingdom of Alba, but I still have to adjust them. I missed them in the last post . They look more like Strathclyde than Scotland right now.

The Kingdom of Strathclyde will be a rebel faction.

[Aliksander]

Cool, mix of Pictish/Gaelic troops with some briton influence. Another cool faction to try.

[Daray]

Hello!

This map looks good .

What do you guys think, should we do 888 AD or 895?

Interesting question. Both of them makes an interesting game. But maybe the earlier one. It would be nice to make the hometaking with Hungarians .
And I would be also very interested in Great Moravia. It is not represented in any game.

[SicilianVespers]

Hello!

This map looks good .


Interesting question. Both of them makes an interesting game. But maybe the earlier one. It would be nice to make the hometaking with Hungarians .
And I would be also very interested in Great Moravia. It is not represented in any game.

I agree. I am thinking of scripting the Magyar invasions in the same way I did the Mongols for the high campaign.

Basically, When the Mongol Invasion event occurs, the Cumans and Abbasids will change their names to the Golden Horde and Ilkhanate. They are then given $$$ and Mongol stacks to ravage Europe and the Middle East.

This applies to both the AI and Human players.

We should probably do the same for the Danes

[DaVinci]

Basically, When the Mongol Invasion event occurs, the Cumans and Abbasids will change their names to the Golden Horde and Ilkhanate. They are then given $$$ and Mongol stacks to ravage Europe and the Middle East.

This applies to both the AI and Human players.

SV, in the Dark Age campaign as well? Shouldn't we limit the campaign-end-date?
You know the Early era campaign is already date-limited at AD 1222 (by me at least as i provided the final-campaign-startdesign-balancing for the Early era campaign, did you change this in the meantime?).

So i think this event should concern only the campaigns from on High era (?).

Or will the Mongol event occur anyway in every campaign (?), i haven't looked at that thing recently.

[SicilianVespers]

I haven't decided on an end date yet, but it shouldn't really go inti High.

Right now, the Mongol Event is only setup for the high campaign, but it is very easy to implement for early.

[Antagonist]

I notice that there are only 29 factions in that list, will there be a 30th?

Antagonist

[SicilianVespers]

I notice that there are only 29 factions in that list, will there be a 30th?

Antagonist

There won't be adding any more new factions in this release, but I am planning to max out the factions later.

[Shogun144]

Hello all, this is Shogun 144. I have written some background and ideas for the Aghlabid faction of the mod. I hope you find it useful.

Amiraa al-Aghlabiyya:

The Aghlabids were an Arab dynasty founded in 800 AD when Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab was appointed the governor of Ifriqiya, Islamic North Africa, by the great Abbasid Khalifa (ruler of the Islamic world) Harun al-Rashid. Ibrahim I established the city of al-Abbasiyya, named for his patrons, near the fortress of Kairouan, as his capital not long after arrival.

One of the Aghlabids most contradictory legacies was that under their rule Kairouan became a true city, wealthy and prosperous. They also made it into the center of Islamic learning and religion. Yet at the same time the Aghlabids were hardly religious at all, and were afflicted throughout their reign by overzealous clerics, jurists, and teachers who often clashed with them.

This reached a high point in 824 when the third Amir of the dynasty, Ziyadat I, tried to solve his internal problems by disbanding his standing army of Arab troops. They instead rose in revolt, took control of the city of Tunis, and threatened Aghlabid control of Ifriqiya. In an attempt to alleviate the situation Ziyadat sent an expeditionary force under the command of the jurist Asad ibn al-Furat (who lead the intellectual opposition to the Aghlabids) to conquer Roman Sicily in 827. He did this at the urging of the disgraced former ‘emperor’ of Sicily, the Roman general Eufemius. The Aghlabid forces achieved great success at first but were beset by plague and blocked by the spirited defense of the Roman Army and Venetian naval aid. The nominal commander of the invasion, al-Furat, was dead within a year as one of the first victims of plague, but the invasion force bounced back and by 831 they had conquered Palermo. From that point on the war over Sicily continued as a tug-of-war between the Romans and the Aghlabid forces, with the Aghlabids steadily winning one town at a time.

In 836 two important events happened. In Ifriqiya proper Ziyadat I finally managed to crush the last vestiges of the army rebellion in Tunis with the aid of the Berber clans, who were treated unfairly by the Aghlabids. Despite the part they played in quelling the revolt that situation did not change, and Berber dissension continued. In Sicily 836 marked the Aghlabid intervention on the Italian mainland, with naval vessels aiding the Duke of Naples, Andrew II, against his nominal lord, Sicard the Prince of Benevento. Andrew repaid his debt with military assistance in Sicily, and his successors in the Sergi dynasty also honored the agreement. With Neapolitan support the Aghlabids took Messina in 842, setting off a series of cascade victories that lasted until 848 and the fall of Ragusa. This marked the beginning of a long tradition of Muslim mercenaries in Southern Italy.

The late 850s marked the high point of Aghlabid rule. By that point the Amirate, under the control of the sixth Amir, Ahmad ibn Muhammad, was an economic powerhouse. The legacy of Rome in the form of the vast agricultural system they left behind powered the domestic economy while the location of Ifriqiya itself made it the trade hub of the Mediterranean. The capital, still officially al-Abbasiyya, was in reality at Kairouan which had become the focal center of learning and culture in the Islamic west. In Sicily the 850s marked the decisive turning of the tide against the Roman Empire and by 862 they were reduced to Syracuse and Taormina. Attacks on mainland Italy could begin in earnest.

In 875 however the downfall of the Aghlabids began. In that year Muhammad II, the eighth Amir whose military might had been great enough to force the Roman Bishop, John VIII to pay tribute died and was succeeded by his brother, who became Ibrahim II. Right off the bat the ninth Amir was beset by problems. A caravan from Mecca, arranged by his brother, brought a deadly plague to Ifriqiya that devastated the population and the Amirate. In 876 Ibrahim tried to rebuild by commissioning a new capital, called ar-Raqqada and extended the irrigation system. In 878 Syracuse fell to Muslim arms and in actual fact Sicily had been conquered. Aghlabid ships could now range out as far as Greece unhindered, but it did not last.

In 880 the Roman Emperor Basileios I sent a massive naval expedition to Sicily and effectively destroyed the Aghlabid navy. On land Nikephoros Phokas the Elder (the grandfather of the future Nikephoros II) reconquered the Muslim gains on mainland Italy, taking Taranto and clearing Calabria. The threat of Roman resurgence on Sicily loomed but was ultimately blunted. Nevertheless the events of 880 proved to be an indicator of times to come. In 882 the Amirate was forced to deal with a large scale invasion from Misr, as Islamic Egypt was called.

Many years earlier in 874 a Turkic slave general named Ahmad ibn Tulun had rebelled against Abbasid authority and established his own state in Misr. Throughout the 870s ibn Tulun had fought off various attempts by the Abbasids to bring him to heel, and conquered a vast swath of land that included the Levant and Syria. While the Amir was involved in an Abbasid succession dispute his generals tried to invade Ifriqiya. The Tulunid invasion sparked a Berber uprising, and Ibrahim II was hard-pressed to deal with two threats. Amazingly he managed to fight off the invasion and the revolt with great loss of life. Although more likely then not ibn Tulun ended the invasion by calling his troops home for an invasion of Asia Minor. This would be a decision that cost him his life. As for the Berbers, they would continue to rise in revolt, determined now to expel the Aghlabids, or at the least Amir Ibrahim.

In 886 Basileios I died and the Amir, eager to find someway to focus the restive Berbers elsewhere launched an invasion of the Italian mainland. But a sudden uprising in Palermo almost disrupted progress, and proved a harbinger of things to come. In 888 the Roman army was defeated in Calabria, leaving Southern Italy open to invasion. But the Berbers rose in revolt and started to fight the Arab troops in 890. About this time the movement which would spell the end of the Aghlabids came to Ifriqiya.

Said ibn Husayn, better known by the mocking nickname Ubaydallah (Little Abdullah), which he took with pride and made into Ubaydallah al-Mahdi, was plotting a revolution. Ubaydallah was the chief head of a massive religious movement in the Islamic heartlands known as the Isma’ili Shi’a. The Shi’a, those Muslims who owed their religious allegiance not to a Sunni Khalifa but to the House of Ali (the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammad) and were known and despised as troublemakers. The Isma’ili sect, which was a recent creation, had already gained a reputation for extremism. They drew their name from Isma’il ibn Jafar, whom they held to be the Seventh Imam from Ali, instead of Musa al-Kazim as the mainstream did. The Abbasids sought to somehow control or contain the Isma’ili but failed. From house arrest in his home in northern Syria Ubaydallah al-Mahdi managed the great Isma’ili propaganda machine, called the Dawa. His friend, Abu Abdullah al-Shi’i was the formal commander of the Dawa, called the Chief Da’i.

In 892 the Chief Da’i began to spread the Isma’ili message to the Berbers of Ifriqiya, taking advantage of their discontent to forge them into weapon. The overall purpose was to give Ubaydallah an army to challenge the Abbasids for leadership of the Islamic world. Almost immediately al-Shi’i got results, converting the Kutama clan and moving on to the point where he had a formidable army of Sanhaja (the primary Berber confederacy in the area) tribesmen. All the while Ibrahim II was aware of what was going on, but could not find a way to stop al-Shi’i.

In 900 the Amir sent his son, Abdullah ibn Ibrahim, to Sicily in another desperate attempt to deflect attention to outside conquest. But Abdullah met mixed success against both the rioting Berbers and the Roman garrisons. In 902, facing pressure from all sides, Ibrahim II voluntarily stepped down as Amir. His son Abdullah was recalled from Sicily and became the tenth Amir of the Aghlabid dynasty. As his first act Abdullah II exiled his father to Sicily, where he excelled as field general. Ibrahim ibn Ahmad completely expelled the Roman presence on Sicily with the capture of Taormina later that year, but died not long afterwards during an invasion of the mainland.

The tenth Amir would try to futilely fight against the tide of change. Taking the throne as the Chief Da’i of the Isma’ili sect daily called for his overthrow, Abdullah II came down hard on the Berbers, restricting their ancient rights. He also fought with the Islamic jurists that his dynasty had been so plagued with from the beginning. Overextending himself between two hostile factions Amir Abdullah II was assassinated within a year of taking power, in 903. His assassin was none other then his own son, Ziyadat ibn Abdullah, who seized power and became the eleventh Amir as Ziyadat III.

As his first move the new Amir had all of his brothers and uncles executed and withdrew the army and navy from Sicily. The common people of the Amirate of Ifriqiya, tried of the abuse and madness of the dynasty, had enough. They rose in revolt and joined the growing Isma’ili army of al-Shi’i, who went of the offensive. Capturing the city of Setif the Sanhaja Berber army surged forward. Temporarily checked by the battle-hardened Sicilian troops in 905 and again in 906, al-Shi’i tried again in 907, and this time kept rolling forward, annexing southern Ifriqiya. In August, 909 Amir Ziyadat III made one last stand at al-Aribus and was crushed utterly. The Amir fled to Baghdad and the Isma’ili army captured his capital at ar-Raqqada, bringing the Aghlabid dynasty to an end.

Ubaydallah al-Mahdi, who had left Syria some years earlier, was found in an Aghlabid dungeon and promptly freed by his adoring followers. After taking residence in ar-Raqqada he proclaimed himself to be the Eleventh Imam after Ali and at the same time Khalifa, creating a new dynasty and radical state, the al-Fatimiyyun or Fatimid Khalifat. This was named for Fatima (Ali’s wife and Mohammad’s daughter) whom Ubaydallah claimed as an esteemed ancestor.

Special ideas for Amiraa al-Aghlabiyya:

The Ribat: One of the most identifying features of the Aghlabid military was the construction of small frontier military fortresses in North Africa called Ribats. However a Ribat was more then just a fortress, it also functioned as a caravanserai and as a religious retreat. It was not uncommon for settlements to grow up around a Ribat. Not all Ribats were set on the actual borders; the two most famous of these fortresses were set on the coast and even had harbors: The Ribat of Susa (named for the great city south of Baghdad) and the Ribat of al-Munastir sat on the Mediterranean coast. An additional note is that Susa should be the faction’s main military stronghold, as the Ribat there was the primary marshalling point of the Aghlabid military, and it is from there that the expeditions to Sicily were launched.

Sicily and Italy: The Aghlabids focused a great deal of attention on Sicily throughout the Amirate’s existence, primarily because of the heavy Roman presence there and the strong fortifications that dotted the island. If possible then garrison troops on Sicily should have high morale and the landscape dotted with forts and heavily walled towns. If not that then perhaps a special high morale unit could be recruitable on Sicily. I feel that for a good game experience playing as either the Romans or the Aghlabids the tug of war style of warfare on the island should stimulated as much as possible.

As for the mainland, well the main factors for war Italian mainland were many. In short it was the relative wealth of Italy and the constant bickering of the petty states of Southern Italy. Remember Dark Age Italy in this period was a relative hodgepodge of Latin states, Lombard princes, merchant republics, and the Romans coming from across the Adriatic. The Papacy also got involved from time to time, although its power was hardly paramount. Large scale Islamic invasions were rare and resulted in the Christians states putting aside their differences to repel them, see the Amirate of Bari (outside the mod’s timeline but still). Raids were far more common by both official forces aligned with an Amir or acting on their own behalf (i.e. Pirates). Muslim mercenaries were also very common, especially in Naples. They typically could range as far north as Latium itself, but primarily stayed in Naples, Campania, and Calabria. Maybe someone better versed in Italian history can help out with what I am trying to say here, because I don’t know.

Naval superiority: One of the greatest strengths of the Aghlabids was their naval forces, which could still go one on one with the Romans as late as the mod period and reasonably expect to come out victorious. I don’t know how to simulate that, but perhaps the team can come up with ideas? The Fatimids who displaced them inherited that navy, and put it to good use. Especially after the conquest of Misr in 969 from the Ikshidids (who took control of Egypt in 935, usurping power from the Abbasids who put down the Tulunids in 905).

Berber rebellions: Undoubtedly the most infamous hallmark of Aghlabid rule was the Berber rebellions that afflicted the state throughout its existence. But how can that be simulated? Perhaps by making the Berber settlements more rebellious? If at all possible maybe all Berber units could carry a revolt risk, but I don’t know if that is possible or not. This is important, especially later once the Isma’ili Dawa arrives and starts stirring the Berbers into a religious frenzy.

Flag/Banner: A plain black flag would work best honestly, since such banners were the simplified version of the more elaborate black banner of the Abbasid Khalifat, of which the Aghlabids were subject. The Abbasid banner was a black flag with elaborate gold fringe decorated with the shahada, the Islamic statement of faith.

Well these are my ideas on one faction; if you like it I can do more on this and for the other Muslim factions, if not then that is okay with me. Please tell me what you think.

[SicilianVespers]

Great post Shogun.

I am going to shut down for the night, but wanteds to post an update on the Darkage map setup:



I just have to do Benevento and the Khazars, and then some tweaking


[EDIT]

I started testing the campaign, to see what the Magyars behave.

I think we are going to have to start with the Magyars already settled in Pannonia. They COMPLETELY crush the Bulgars...mercilessly.

I will try a few things to force them to turn away from Tarnovo. We'll have to see what happens.

[SicilianVespers]

We now have proper Pagan Magyars




I added a Tengriism Pagan temple line for the Magyars, Cumans & Mongols. I also enabled Pagan Shamans (Taltos for the Magyars) and High Priests.

[SicilianVespers]

Here are the new Magyar Start models:

[\Vazul's Ghost/]

Great Stuff SV!!! + Rep! It will be great to finally play as the Pagan Magyars.

[SicilianVespers]

Thanks VG,

Another update: I added Judaism, for the Khazars last night. I just need to create a Synagogue, Temple and Rabbi now.

I am also thinking of making the Synagogue buildable by other factions. This would allow the building if Jewish Merchants or + trade income, but at the expense of causing unrest.

[The King Of Peasants]

Outstanding this darkages campaign is going to be amazing!

[Војвода Драгутин Кесеровић]

Here's the genealogy for the Serbian Župans from the House of Vlastimirović, who ruled Serbian Županija in the said period:

* Vlastimir (son of Prosigoj) 825-850.

* Mutimir ruled from the second half of 9th century to his death in †891/ 892

* Strojimir (vassal to elder brother Mutimir, later under Bulgarian khan Boris)

* Gojnik (vassal to brother Mutimir, later under khan Boris)

* Knez Pribislav (son of Mutimir), born latest 867, ruled 891/2-892/3

* Bran (Boren) (younger brother of Pribislav, son of Mutimir), born by 867, pretender to the throne 895/6

* Stefan (youngest brother of Pribislav and Bran, son of Mutimir), born ca. 870

* Knez Petar Gojniković (son of Gojnik, grandson of Vlastimir), born ca. 870, ruled 892/3-917/8, captured by Bulgarians, died in captivity.

* Knez Pavle Branović (son of Bran/Boren, grandson of Mutimir), ruled 917/8-921, brought to the throne by the Bulgarians, brought down by Byzantines

* Knez Zaharije Pribisavljević (son of Pribislav, grandson of Mutimir), ruled 921-924 (brought to the throne by the Byzantines, removed by the Bulgarians)

* Knez/Zupan Časlav Klonimirović (son of Klonimir, grandson of Strojimir), ruled 927/8-ca. 950: Liberated the central Serbian tribes from Bulgarian empire.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_o...timirovi%C4%87

[SicilianVespers]

Thanks.

I finished the new CoA/faction symbols for Great Moravia and the Khazars over the weekend. (I also finished Georgia and Wallachia for the Renaissance.)

We are making great progress.

[SicilianVespers]

Here is preview of the Great Moravian banner: