| United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland (red) | Capital: London (nominal), Oxford (de facto for the gov't), Windsor Palace (royal residence)
In the years following the Third World War, members of the British royal family and political establishment plotted their return & the rebuilding of their kingdom from the safety of their bunker, and their descendants finally began to realize their scheme upon emerging to a bombed-out, anarchy-ridden Britain in 2171. At first, the reconstituted British Army was able to swiftly (if brutally) restore order to the Home Isles thanks to their significant stocks of pre-war weaponry, while the Windsors became more than just monarchs - they became symbols of British unity, peace and prosperity in the harsh post-apocalyptic years, and the Church of England began to proclaim their line to not be one of mortal men, but rather literal flesh-and-blood descendants of Christ from a union with (of all things) a Britonic slave in Judea, making them as close to being living avatars of God as the Archbishops of Canterbury dared without completely forgetting their Christian roots. Naturally, living descendants of Christ and therefore God were considered too great for the common man to see, and so the Windsors were steadily isolated from society while Prime Ministers (now elected only by the House of Lords) or the Archbishops of Canterbury took over for them in all public appearances outside of coronations, royal weddings and declarations of war or peace. The result is that by 2565 the Windsor Kings & Queens of Britain have been reduced to figureheads with a godlike air around them while the nobility, clergy and military top brass run the country in their name with varying degrees of effectiveness, a situation somewhat similar to the relationship between pre-war Japan's Emperors and Shoguns. More recently, Britain has reestablished contact with the Ontarian Viceroyalty, whose ambassadors swore allegiance to the late King Arthur II at the start of the 26th century.
As of 2565, the British are still battling Irish secessionists, who they first declared a 'suppressive operation' against after the successful Kilkenny Rising of 2430. A new front has also opened in Scotland, where they lost control of the Highlands to a mix of Christian and Neo-Celtic secessionist clans in 2470 and must now battle Presbyterian Scottish nationalists centered around Glasgow. Further behind the lines, Jediism is making a resurgence among Northerners disillusioned with the royal cult that the Church of England has become, to the shock of the British establishment who believed the Army had finally eradicated it in the Battle/Massacre of Lancaster in 2233. The Lords have elected Field Marshal Iain Newman, an accomplished & notably ruthless military leader who can count 'successfully defending Armagh while outnumbered 5:1' and 'killing 2,000 Jedis while putting down an uprising in Fylde' among his achievements, in hopes of forcing a quick end to all of these threats. |
| Ireland (green) | Capital: Kilkenny (Leinster regional command center), Limerick (Munster RCC), Mayo (Connaught RCC), Ballyshannon (Ulster RCC)
Ireland was brought back under the British yoke between the 22nd and 23rd centuries, and almost immediately cemented its reputation as the most rebellious part of the United Kingdom when riots broke out on the first anniversary of the British conquest. Its people still remember just how fun British rule was for their ancestors the first time 'round, thanks to the history books carefully maintained by Irish monks, and their Catholic faith has only been deepened by the trauma of the apocalypse - and contact with the royal cult that now masquerades as the Church of England. Britain's insistence on repeating history by shutting down their churches & monasteries and on turning Irish lands into estates for absentee landlords living in England has done their rule no favors, and in 2430 the Irish nationalist 'Brotherhood of Saint Patrick' staged their first successful uprising in Kilkenny with the support of a large mob, lynching the town's appointed British mayor and killing or driving away the entire garrison. 125 years later, the Brotherhood has been joined by over 30 other Irish nationalist organizations (including seven variations on the Irish Republican Army) who control most of Ireland between themselves, and as their rebellion appears closer to success than ever before they have begun to go public with their plans for the new Ireland: some wish to establish a Catholic monarchy with either their organization's leader or a foreign Catholic prince from France or Spain as the new monarch, while others aim for a Catholic or even secular republican government. Tensions are now heating up between the Irish rebels over exactly what post-war Ireland should look like, and if they aren't careful the British will be able to exploit their disunity to roll back all the progress they've made over the past century... |
| Scottish Republic (yellow) | Capital: Glasgow
Inspired by the Irish example, Scottish nationalists and Presbyterian zealots opposed to the British establishment began to stockpile gear for a revolt of their own as early as the 2440s. Capitalizing on the successful 2470 anti-British rebellion in the Highlands, the Scottish National Covenant sprung its own uprising in 2475, swiftly seizing Glasgow and isolating British garrisons in Edinburgh & Berwick. In the next 90 years however, they suffered a number of setbacks after British reinforcements arrived to clear them out of the Anglo-Scottish border, link up with loyalist Scottish lords and break the siege of Edinburgh, and in more recent years the SNC has also been increasingly torn between secular republican nationalists & Presbyterian fanatics determined to revive the 17th-century Covenant, who have decided to fire up infighting at a time where they can least afford it. |
| Highland clans | In the wake of the apocalypse, the Scottish Highlands reverted to clan-based 'governance' and also experienced a rebirth of Druidism, with many clans on the mainland in particular embracing the Neo-Celtic faith. When the British Army first came-a'knocking to restore London's Oxford's rule in 2235, Christian and Neo-Celt alike battled them for sixty years to preserve their independence, submitting only after the exasperated British government finally agreed to guarantee their religious freedom & immunity from most taxes in the Dundee Accord. From 2295 to 2465 Highlanders served in the British Army as elite shock troops and special forces, where they proved instrumental in crushing Irish and Lowland Scottish rebellions time & time again. However, when Prime Minister Ben Stanley revoked the Dundee Accord in 2465, those same elite formations turned around and did what the Irish could not for over a hundred years in five: driving the British out of their islands & mountains and securing their people's liberty once more. Unfortunately, unity between the clans disintegrated as soon as the British had withdrawn, and now the Scottish Highlands have degenerated into a state of borderline anarchy & chronic low-scale warfare between the newly independent clans. As of 2565, the three dominant clans are the Neo-Celtic Cattenachs in the Highlands proper, the Presbyterian Baikies of Orkney who enjoy close ties with Denmark-Norway, and the Catholic Kerrs who rule the western isles from Iona and have entered an alliance with the Irish rebels to expel the British from Ulster once & for all. |
| Fourth French Empire (dark blue) | Capital: Paris
The French nation was reunified in 2377 by the Parisian warlord Jean-Baptiste Delouvrier, but - in true 19th-20th century French fashion - it found political stability highly elusive, even as its myriad leaders stoked the fires of French civic nationalism (and at times, Catholic fanaticism) to keep the country itself intact. Delouvrier was crowned King of France at Reims the year after & enjoyed a prosperous reign, but his son Guy proved to be an incompetent misfit and was overthrown in a violent revolution in 2400. The Fifth Republic that was proclaimed lasted only twenty years before being overthrown by one of its generals, Marcus Lagaillarde, after it allowed the army's pay to go into arrears; Lagaillarde established the Third Empire atop the republic's bones, and his family ruled it for three generations (including his own) until his grandson was overthrown and a Sixth Republic proclaimed following the loss of Belgium to the Germans in 2500. Following another defeat at German hands in 2555, this republic was again overthrown by its chief general, Jean-Paul Faucher, who inaugurated the Fourth Empire in an unusually austere coronation. Faucher, the lowborn son of gardeners, now swears to clean out corruption (read: destroy the surviving French republicans organizing in the south to challenge his rule), provide his subjects with 'good governance' (read: a reversion to what is essentially clerical & centralist fascism, in hopes of crushing all regionalist sentiments) and to avenge France's past humiliations at German hands by recovering Belgium & Alsace-Lorraine. |
| Sixth French Republic (light blue) | Capital: Bordeaux
The 6th Republic is the pre-coup government of France, established after the 2500 overthrow of the Third Empire on a promise to recover Belgium from the Fourth Reich only to lose Alsace-Lorraine to said Germans in 2555. Though it was driven from Paris by Jean-Paul Faucher's bayonets and tanks that same year, survivors of PM Marceau Gagnon's government were able to reorganize in Bordeaux around Finance Minister Nicolas Lapointe, who soon gained the allegiance of loyalist army formations in southern France and also appeased Occitan regionalists with oaths to grant autonomy to Provence & to make Occitan a second state language in the event of a republican restoration. |
| Dutch Republic (orange) | Capital: Amsterdam
The entire Dutch royal family was, as far as anyone knows, lost in the Third World War, forcing the Dutch government to look elsewhere for government after the war. They found new symbols of national unity in the republican past of the Netherlands, culminating in the merger of the independent republics & communes of Amsterdam, Groningen, Rotterdam and Friesland into the Second Dutch Republic; said republic, in truth more of a plutocratic oligarchy where anyone can run but nobody can win without financial backing from the great business families, has since emerged as one of Europe's leading financial centers (with bankers serving Highland clansmen, the German Kaisers and Swedish Vikings) and an icon of social liberalism, where one's religion does not forbid you from running for public office (just from winning, unless you're rich) or force you under state discrimination. To some it is a remnant of the Old World to aspire to, to others it is a den of amoral hedonistic consumerists who prioritize personal pleasure & wealth over everything else, but the latter has so far been unable to significantly harm the Republic due to its clever use of Dutch dykes in defense and the republic's leaders' willingness to preemptively bankroll the enemies of whichever power is most likely to attack them before war breaks out. |
| Kingdom of Spain (gold) | Capital: Madrid (de jure), Oviedo (de facto)
The Spanish kingdom was reestablished in 2330 when Martin de Araujo, a warlord based around the ruins of Madrid, proclaimed a descendant of the Spanish Bourbons Queen of Spain in a grand ceremony to legitimize his recent unification of Spain & immediately set aside his infertile first wife to marry her so he could set his children on the throne he'd just built. For the next ~200 years the House of Araujo ruled Spain with an iron fist which grew increasingly ineffective as they became mired in corruption, culminating in the 2556 overthrow of the child-king Alfonso XVI by an alliance of the secret republican organization 'Congress for Progress and Liberty' and the Asturian-born General Fruela Pelaez in the wake of a disastrous double-whammy of Catalan secession & a Moroccan invasion that conquered most of Andalusia. But the Congress's leaders congratulated themselves too quickly and trusted Pelaez too much; as the eldest son in a fiercely devout family of Asturian miners, he had no intention of answering to a bunch of soft bourgeois republican eggheads from the south. Pelaez moved to arrest and kill as many of the Congress as he could, then proclaimed himself King in the Araujos' place and was crowned as such by a Papal nuncio in Oviedo even as his republican enemies reorganized in the southeast. As of today, King Fruela I of Spain has succeeded in containing the Moroccans to just Granada and may take advantage of a recent ceasefire with Marrakesh to turn his sights on the Catalan Commune & the Third Spanish Republic in the east and/or the Portuguese republic in the west, with or without aid from the Basques. Whatever his future endeavors turn out to be, he is confident that he won't have to fear an internal coup at the very least, having coup-proofed his own government by filling it with as many allies & lackeys from his native Asturias as he could find while also enjoying the support of the Church (and by extension, the crusaders who traveled to Spain to aid it in its Second Reconquista) & the Order of Santiago. |
| Third Spanish Republic (orange) | Capital: Valencia
The Congress for Progress & Liberty was once a secret organization, founded in 2360 and dedicated to ousting the House of Araujo, but since it actually accomplished that goal in 2556 its leaders decided to transition to becoming a proper political party in time to contest the newly-declared Third Republic's first elections. Or that was the original plan anyway, before the Congress was betrayed and purged by the Asturian general Fruela Pelaez; evidently, the devout working-class military strongman disagreed with the bourgeois Congressional leaders' plans for a progressive liberal republic. The Congress has since fled to Valencia (where its message was best received), where it named its most senior surviving member Pablo Dato the first President of the 'provisional government of the Third Spanish Republic'. The republic has not yet had time to hold any elections, having been under a state of permanent martial law since its founding, and Dato must contend with an increasingly disillusioned populace on top of a likely war with the Spanish Kingdom - there can be only one Spain as far as both the 'Republicanos' and Pelaez's 'Realistas' (royalists) are concerned, after all. |
| Catalan Commune (salmon) | Capital: Barcelona
The Catalans took advantage of the chaos caused by the republican coup of 2556 & its subsequent betrayal by General Fruela Pelaez to secede from the Spanish state. Though a liberal republic was originally proclaimed in Barcelona, it was largely ineffectual due to most of Catalonia becoming autonomous anarcho-syndicalist communes, some of which sent their armies into Barcelona to shut the republican government down after it made too many noises about imposing its authority upon them in 2562. Nowadays however, the Catalans may well regret destroying their own chance at a centralized government as King Fruela I returns from a favorable ceasefire with the Moroccans to impose his authority on all of Spain, and they happen to be everything he hates in one conveniently bombable package - socially permissive, anarcho-syndicalist secessionists. In this hour, liberal Catalan nationalism will be tested against the fire and steel of Catholic Spanish nationalism, and when the dust settles only one can walk away victorious. |
| Basqueland (blue) | Capital: Bilbao
Vasconia was one of the more unruly parts of the Spanish kingdom, where Basque nationalists had waged a bitter guerrilla struggle against the Royal Spanish Army for an even longer period of time than their Catalan counterparts. Naturally, in the aftermath of the republican coup of 2556 said nationalists were able to capitalize on the chaotic state of Spain's forces to proclaim an independent Basque Republic. However, as of late a civil war has erupted between the republic's Christian democratic leaders (estimated to have the support of 60% of the Basque population) and the revolutionary socialists of the Basque National Liberation Movement (ENAM in Basque) frustrated at their defeat in the presidential election of 2562. As the more numerous but less organized Basque National Army has been losing ground to ENAM, Bilbao is considering a 'deal with the devil' - rejoining the Spanish Kingdom with autonomy under a feudal Basque fuero, in exchange for military support to crush their ENAM ex-comrades once and for all. |
| Portuguese Kingdom (aqua-green) | Capital: Porto
The Portuguese monarchy was proclaimed in 2350 by the Porto-based warlord Luis Pereira, who in the absence of a legitimate Braganza heir had himself crowned the first king of the House of Pereira. Since its inception the kingdom has had to grapple with liberal republican forces prominent in the south of the country, and though some Pereiras tried to reach a compromise the dynasty as a whole gave up on any solution beyond shooting republicans in the face after King Antonio II was rewarded for his efforts to create a democratic parliament with a fatal bombing by republican radicals (determined to remove any hope of compromise between monarchists & republicans) in 2480. In 2556, republican insurgents inspired by the success of their Spanish counterparts launched a conventional uprising in Lisbon & Algarve, which succeeded in driving King Joao XI all the way to Porto. However, their refusal to even entertain the possibility of cooperation with the military brass (in hopes of avoiding what eventually happened to the Spanish Republicans) meant said brass remained uniformly loyal to the monarchy, allowing them to rebuild their army in the monarchist strongholds up north. Now King Joao has entered an alliance with the Spanish King Fruela I, sealing their bond with a double marriage of his granddaughter Mafalda to Fruela's eldest son & heir Rodrigo + Fruela's eldest daughter Olaya to his grandson Bartolomeu; the elderly king hopes that, with the aid of the Royal Spanish Army and the Order of Santiago (into which Portugal's native holy order, the rebuilt Order of Aviz, was merged in 2558) his forces will be able to turn the tide, crush the republicans & restore the House of Pereira to Lisbon. |
| Portuguese Republic (cream) | Capital: Lisbon
Southern Portugal has always resented the rule of the Pereiras, who they saw as backwards thugs imposing the traditional northern ways upon a liberal, mercantile south. In 2556 Portuguese republicans attempted to imitate the success of their Spanish counterparts and overthrow the monarchy, but miscalculated and failed to enlist the aid of the military, with the result that King Joao XI was able to flee to & rebuild around his powerbase in the north. Now the Lisbon government, having just held its first elections under the tense climate of a civil war, must fight to finish the job and take Porto - something that will no doubt be made much harder by the Portuguese monarchy's new alliance with the Spanish King Fruela and the inevitable deployment of the elite Knights of Santiago to the front. |
| Italian states (yellow, orange, pink, blue) | Capital: Milan (Lega Nord), Florence (Florentine Republic), Naples (Kingdom of Naples), Palermo (Sicilian Republic)
As of 2565, northern Italy is divided into two states: the authoritarian, nationalist Lega Nord centered on Milan, and the more liberal Florentine Republic. The 'Northern League' adheres to an anticlerical, authoritarian and militaristic Italian ultranationalism - the original Fascism, some would say - and has loudly proclaimed its intention to unite Italy from Trento & Savoy to Sicily for all to hear, placing itself in opposition to virtually all of its neighbors (and conveniently vindicating the ruling Lega Nord Party's militarism). Its leaders claim that though they have utmost respect for the Church (as evidenced by their blackshirts occasionally defacing churches & destroying religious sculptures or icons so they can replace them with Lega Nord banners) the Popes have no business exercising temporal power & getting in the way of a reunited Italy, which of course said Popes disagree with vehemently. The more cosmopolitan Florentine Republic is widely known as one of Europe's greatest hubs for artists and business, though it has taken turns towards religious conservatism in recent decades as well: in 2535 its ruling People's Party signed an alliance with the Papal States, and in 2540 the Order of Saint Stephen was revived, ostensibly to defend the Mediterranean from corsairs & Muslim warships as well as to guard the Florentine borders against the Lega Nord, but 25 years later it has grown significantly stronger than the Florentine National Militia & Navy themselves (which have undergone multiple budget cuts so the government could reinvest the money elsewhere), stoking fears that the Papacy could remove the Florentine government and annex the republic at a moment's notice while the Florentines wouldn't be able to do a thing to stop them.
The south is divided into two states as well: the Kingdom of Naples and the Republic of Sicily. The former was founded by a Provencal adventurer, Pierre Gaudin, who conquered the area in the 23rd century and eventually went native, marrying a Neapolitan woman and referring to himself as 'Pietro Franzese' toward the end of his days. The latter was founded in the 23rd century ostensibly as a democratic republic, but in practice its government has become little more than a legitimate-sounding front for the Cosa Nostra and anyone who complains too much about electoral results or tries to get any substantive change done inevitably ends up being exiled or sent to sleep with the fishes. |
| Switzerland (dark gray) | Capital: Rotates between cantons every 10 years
An isolationist power that has recently emerged from the reunion of the Swiss cantons, with constitutional provisions guaranteeing religious liberty to keep the peace between Protestant & Catholic cantons. The Swiss have so far counted on their soft power (they are Europe's third major banking powerhouse, next to the Dutch & Papacy), their mountain strongholds & the fact that their people are, on average, better armed than any other Western European nation's subjects to keep outsiders at bay. It's joked that besides banking transactions and cuckoo clocks, the greatest Swiss exports are their own citizens - the aforementioned well-armed citizens are known to head abroad to fight as mercenaries, whether individually or in groups, in Europe's constant wars, with some companies even fielding heavy armor or air power for a price, and the Popes themselves count the Swiss Guard as an entire company of their household guard corps.
There are rumblings that some of the cantons, particularly Protestant Schaffhausen and Catholic Valais, desire to expand Swiss borders: the Catholics tend to argue fighting either the anticlerical Lega Nord or Protestant Germany, while Protestants advocate fighting France or the Habsburgs. Whoever prevails, should the expansionists get their way, the rest of Europe had best beware the march of Swiss troops. |
| Papal States (beige) | Capital: Rome
The Papacy reemerged as a major player in Europe in the years following the apocalypse, as many religious Catholics across the continent turned to them for guidance and solace after the Third World War killed billions and destroyed everything else they knew. The Papal Army steadily established Rome's control over central Italy up to Ravenna, but by and large the Popes still rely on soft power and holy orders whose strength lie outside of Italy to get things done across the entire continent. Not only are they the spiritual leaders of Catholicism, but Papal bankers are one of the three great forces in pan-European banking outside of the Netherlands and Switzerland, handling financial transactions for individuals and governments alike around the entire Mediterranean and even as far as Bucharest & Kiev/Kyiv. On top of that, as mentioned earlier the Church's holy military orders provide it with hard power outside of Italy. These orders are:
- The reconstituted Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon ('Knights Templar'), headquartered in Reims, recruiting from France/Belgium/the British Isles: 15,000 men as of 2565, presently engaged in Ireland (supporting the rebels) and France (supporting the 4th Empire)
- The Order of Saint John ('Knights Hospitaller'), headquartered in Malta, recruiting mostly from the Mediterranean Basin: 12,000 men as of 2565, presently engaged in Iberia (supporting Spanish/Portuguese royalists) and France (supporting the 4th Empire)
- The Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem ('Teutonic Knights'), headquartered in Vienna, under the hereditary authority of Habsburg Hochmeisters, recruiting mostly from Germany/Austria/Hungary/Transylvania/Croatia: 10,000 men as of 2565, presently manning the Habsburg Empire's borders
- The Order of Santiago, headquartered in Santiago de Compostela, recruiting from Spain and (since its merger with the weakened Order of Aviz in 2558) Portugal: 10,000 men as of 2565, presently engaged in Iberia (supporting Spanish/Portuguese royalists)
- The Order of Saints Cyril & Methodius, headquartered in Prague, recruiting from Czech & Slovak lands/Poland/Ukrainian Galicia: 9,000 men as of 2565, presently engaged in Ukraine (against the Don-Kuban Host) & observing the Ukrainian-Belarusian borders
- The Order of the Knights of Courland, headquartered in Kernave, recruiting mostly from Lithuania/Latvia/Estonia: 4,500 men as of 2565, presently engaged against Swedish/Finnish pirates in the Baltic & observing the Baltic border with Russia
- The Order of Saint Stephen, headquartered in Florence, recruiting mostly from Italy/Croatia: 4,000 men as of 2565, presently engaged in Iberia (supporting Spanish/Portuguese royalists) & the Mediterranean
Each order is composed of (usually) zealous and highly trained Catholic volunteers outfitted with the best gear the Pope's money can buy, including armor, anti-tank and anti-air capabilities, ships and even helicopters as of late. Non-Catholic volunteers, whether Protestants or Orthodox Christians, are also accepted as auxiliaries within each order, and in the case of the Knights of Courland and Saints Cyril & Methodius, actually make up a majority/plurality of their respective orders. Finally, after reestablishing contact with America at the start of this century and in keeping with his ancestors' plan of turning the whole world Catholic, reigning Pope Sylvester III has tabled plans to turn the Knights of Columbus from a charitable, nonviolent order which has been running schools & hospitals for the past 500 years into the armed vanguard of Catholicism in the Americas. |
| Second German Empire (light gray) | Capital: Aachen
When the bombs fell, Germany's political & military leaders shared a bunker with some European Union functionaries near Aachen, and many years later their descendants emerged to find any hope of a united and democratic Europe reduced to radioactive ashes. Nevertheless, they resolved to try again where their ancestors had failed, electing one of their own - Gregor Lindner, a descendant of the last Prime Minister of Germany before the war - as the first Chancellor of the New German Republic. But Lindner had other plans, and as the Republic swelled in size he did his damndest to take the credit for all of his underlings' achievements (while sending anyone who complained too much on suicide missions) to make sure that he'd never lose a poll, while also quietly maneuvering his supporters into critical positions within the government and armed forces. When it looked as though he might actually suffer an electoral defeat in 2270, Lindner burned the Reichstag building in Aachen down, blamed it on supporters of his jealous rival Gunther Kohl to give himself an excuse to arrest & kill the man for treason, and after predictably winning a landslide he made sure the new parliament voted him 'emergency powers' 'indefinitely' - powers which he used to proclaim himself Kaiser in 2275, to the thunderous applause of his parliament of pawns.
The imperial Fourth Reich has since striven to impose its authoritarian, Protestant (specifically, the 'German Evangelical Church', a state church in the vein of pre-war Anglicanism) rule on all of Europe, and has made significant strides in the past centuries: they have conquered Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine from France, and in true realpolitik fashion also joined the Second Eastern Crusade against Russia despite obviously not being Catholic, enabling them to reclaim East Prussia in the aftermath. However, in more recent years they've suffered some reverses as well: the ever-resilient Poles and Habsburgs have so far resisted their efforts to drive into Bavaria & secure a corridor to East Prussia, and most recently the Swedish have snatched East Prussia away from them in a surprise amphibious invasion. Worse yet, the reigning Kaiser Friedrich V (who, though originally a dynamic and aggressive monarch, has become a senile old fool in his graying years) approaches his 90th birthday with no legitimate children of his own, meaning that it is likely the Reich will dissolve into civil war between his recently-legitimized bastard Johann and his nephew Gregor upon his death. |
| Habsburg Empire (white) | Capital: Vienna
Even after they lost their crowns, the Habsburgs of Austria remained significant players on Europe's social and political scenes, with Otto von Habsburg (the last heir to the Imperial & Royal throne of Austria-Hungary) being a famous 20th and 21st century example. Indeed, brothers Rudolph and Friedrich von Habsburg were the last pre-war President and High Commissioner of the European Union respectively, and both found shelter in their Tyrolean bunker with their families, other prominent EU officials and the brass of the European Union Defense Forces. Their descendants emerged 150 years later to find Europe in ruins, and like their future competitors in Germany, the Habsburgs would resolve to try and continue their ancestors' work & unite Europe - on their terms, naturally. Thus, as of the present day the Habsburg Empire reigns supreme again over much of central Europe: this multinational empire binds feudal Austria, even more feudal Hungary, agrarian Bavaria, urban and liberal Bohemia and mercantile Slovenia under the Kaiser in Vienna. The Habsburgs have officially revived the title of 'Holy Roman Emperor', complete with actual Papal approval (which they got around the same time they resurrected the Teutonic Order as a hereditary military arm of theirs), though they have no intention of making that title elective again & are still better known as simply 'the Habsburg Kaiser' outside of their domains. Unlike the German Reich, which was meant to be a centralized empire, the Habsburg Reich is highly decentralized, with each of its five 'Crowns' (Austrian, Bavarian, Hungarian, Slovene and Czechoslovak) having their own noble peerages and in the latter two's cases elected parliaments, bureaucracies, and lingual freedom; the Habsburgs are quite aware that they can turn the clock back only so much, and 'before 1918' is not an option.
As of 2565, Kaiser Ferdinand III has just settled a long-running war over Transylvania with the Romanians in the compromise Peace of Visegrad, ceding most of Transylvania to Romania but keeping Upper Transylvania & forcing the Romanians to allow his cousin Hochmeister Leopold to maintain a significant military presence in the ceded parts of the region. He now looks with interest to the eternally-feuding South Slavic states, but his hand has so far been constrained by fears of German attacks into Bavaria, Lega Nord attacks into Slovenia and Ukrainian attacks into Zakarpattia. |
| South Slavic states (except Bulgaria) + Albania | Capital: Zagreb (Croatia), Sarajevo (Bosnia), Belgrade (Serbia), Tirana (Albania), Ragusa (Ragusa)
There are some things that war can never change. Ethnic hatreds are obviously one of those things (unless by 'change' you mean' make things even worse'), as the South Slavic Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs, as well as the non-Slavic Albanians, know all too well: in the chaotic and bloody centuries after the Third World War, they found themselves fighting each other again instead of trying to recreate the pre-war path to peace they had once walked. The Catholic Croatian Kingdom, founded in 2310 by warlord Domoslav Karamarko with the aid of German, Swiss & Italian mercenaries, had been locked in wars with the Serbs and Bosniaks even before the shadowy ultranationalist & ultra-Catholic organization known only as 'Torch', said to be working towards the creation of a Croats-only Yugoslavia, found backers in the military & clerical establishment and effectively reduced the boy-king Anton II to their figurehead; the Bosnian Emirate, founded by the ambitious imam Munib Hadzihasanovic in 2325, is currently riven by a struggle between reigning Emir Sefer (who seeks to forge a ceasefire and trade ties with the other South Slavs...after reclaiming all historical Bosnian lands & cleaning out the extremists in their governments, of course) and his more radical half-brother Alija (who seeks to forge an alliance with the Turkish Davutoglu Empire & dominate the Balkans as their satrap); the Kingdom of Serbia, re-founded in 2297 by Smederevo-based warlord Vojislav Dusic, remains hellbent on carving out at least a Greater Serbia and at best, for themselves anyway, a Serbs-only Yugoslavia under their zealous and wrathful King Ratko, who has just ascended to the throne last year after killing his father for daring to open ceasefire talks with Bosnia; and the Kingdom of Albania, whose Permeti dynasty was overthrown by Colonel Ahmet Meta in 2560, and which is now gearing up to 'permanently secure, by all conceivable means' the Kosovo region from the Serbs. As the region gets more gas poured on its already-burning flames of war, all parties share a single unwritten & unspoken agreement: that they will show no quarter, nor expect any themselves.
So essentially, this is not a great time to live in what was Yugoslavia an age & a half ago. Even if you do happen to be a soldier on any side. Only the Republic of Ragusa, a cosmopolitan island of religious tolerance and economic prosperity in the wartorn western Balkans, offers a hope for a better life to anyone in that rough neighborhood who isn't up for killing anyone not part of their sect and/or ethnicity, and even they have to contend with Adriatic pirates on top of the three Yugoslav states trying to destroy them. |
| Hellenic Republic (pale blue) | Capital: Athens
The Greek state wasn't in great shape even before the Third World War temporarily obliterated it, and economic & political stability have remained elusive even after it was reunited by the Athenian warlord/shipping magnate Theodoros Kammenos in 2222. Kammenos proclaimed a Greek Kingdom, naturally with himself at its head, but his heirs lacked his competence at essentially everything and weakened the country to the point where the Bulgarians were able to crush the Royal Hellenic Army and occupy Greek Macedonia in 2300, resulting in the overthrow of his dynasty and the proclamation of the Fourth Hellenic Republic. Said Republic failed to recover Macedonia, leading to its overthrow by Admiral Panos Polydoras in 2375 and the establishment of the Fifth Kingdom. As king, Polydoras succeeded in recovering Macedonia in 2388, but was assassinated by Bulgarian spies in 2392; within five years, his son Alexandros lost everything he had just gained except for Thessalonica, resulting in his overthrow and the proclamation of the Fifth Hellenic Republic. The Fifth Republic endures to this day as a plutocratic republic claiming to be fully democratic, lurching from crisis to crisis: whether it be the defeat of Greek forces at Bursa in 2462, the revelation that Greek oligarchs were stealing from the national pension fund under President Aristidis Samaras' nose in 2480, or the loss of Crete to the Egyptians in 2500, the Republic was always able to survive, usually by making a show out of the offenders' trials and executions. Most recently, several shipping magnates connected to Prime Minister Ioannis Koundoriotis - including his brother-in-law - were found to have been involved in the Middle Eastern slave trade just last year, destroying any goodwill he might have gained from the partial reconquest of Crete in 2564.
No doubt in an attempt to distract his people from the slavery scandal, Koundoriotis has declared war on the Spartan Kingdom (ostensibly over its practice of slavery) and has moved almost all of Greece's military assets westward to crush the Spartans. In doing so, he has unintentionally left Smyrna dangerously undermanned at the worst possible time: just as the Davutoglu Caliphate is gearing up for a major westward offensive. |
| Kingdom of Sparta (red) | Capital: Sparta
The Spartan kingdom is quite possibly the greatest historical accident to have emerged from the Third World War. It got its start with a bunch of tourists who, having watched one too many reruns of the early 21st century hit '300', decided that this obviously accurate historical documentary (combined with what few history textbooks they dug up after emerging from shelter) gave them more knowledge on ancient Greek history than the Greeks themselves. After blundering on several weapon stockpiles in abandoned police stations, they set out to remake their idea of the Spartan monarchy, which among other things entailed having only one king, enslaving local Greek survivors at the point of their guns, and keeping their family lines pure through eugenics. The result by 2565: a ridiculously xenophobic, militaristic, Social-Darwinist, Olympian-worshiping, slavery-practicing caricature of ancient Sparta is now ruling the Peloponnese. The only thing of theirs that other Europeans don't laugh about is their army, which is admittedly an effective fighting force - but one with such a limited recruiting pool and high death rates in training that it is nigh impossible for them to replace their losses, as King Eurycrates is finding out to his dismay in the face of the Hellenic Republic's offensive into his peninsula. |
| Bulgarian Tsardom (green) | Capital: Sofia
The Bulgarians were the first Balkan nation to have pulled themselves together in the aftermath of the Third World War, and have benefited tremendously from this fact. The warlord Boyko Kostov reunified his nation in 2180, and he and his descendants spent the late 22nd and early-to-mid 23rd centuries going on a conquering spree: he himself conquered Vardar Macedonia before dying in 2196, his son Plamen seized the ruins of Istanbul and promptly moved his seat (along with thousands of his subjects) to the rechristened Tsargrad, and Plamen's grandson Simeon snatched Greek Macedonia & Thessalonica from the Greeks, Dobruja from the Wallachians and Nis from the Serbs. However, the Bulgarian empire's expansion stalled after Simeon's death, and under a string of incompetent rulers it was reversed in some areas - the Greek King Panos I recovered Thessalonica in 2388 (though he soon lost the rest of Macedonia to a Bulgarian counterattack), the Wallachian Voivode Petru II reclaimed Romanian Dobruja in the Eleven Years' War of 2410-2421, and the Serbs reconquered Nis (and killed every Bulgarian who couldn't get away from them quickly enough) in 2432. Making things worse, in 2561 Turkish forces under the personal command of Sultan Selim V Davutoglu stormed Gallipoli and swiftly defeated the undermanned Bulgarian garrison there, before proceeding to crush an ill-thought out counteroffensive and killing Tsar Kiril the next year.
The Bulgarian Tsardom of 2565 is a stagnant power on the precipice of collapse, where Kiril's three-year-old son Ivaylo (who wasn't even born until two days after his father's death) is a puppet completely at the mercy of his grasping mother and her rival ministers; not the greatest of positions to be in when the Turks are gearing up to kick his front door down, the Greeks have an eye on reclaiming Thessalonica, and the newly united Romanians are considering making a grab for the rest of Dobruja. |
| United Principalities (red) | Capital: Bucharest
After the Third World War, Romania fell apart into its three constituent principalities: Wallachia (traditionally ruled by the Cosma family), Moldavia (traditionally governed by the Druc family), and Transylvania (ruled by the Simas). Each principality pursued its own goals, which at times clashed with each other, and their disunity & propensity to war with each other made them easy for outside powers to exploit. The Wallachians lost Dobruja to the Bulgarians in 2388 and had to fight a brutal eleven-year war to reclaim it many years later; the Moldavians joined the First Russian Crusade out of alarm after the Russians stormed Ukrainian Odessa in 2384, and were rewarded for it by having their capital of Iasi occupied by the Russian Army for 8 years (after which said Army withdrew) and the Transdniester region to the present day (due to said Army never withdrawing from that area); and the Transylvanians wound up being conquered & annexed by the Habsburgs in 2428 after Voivode Corneliu III murdered his wife, a niece of then-Emperor Karl II, in a fit of jealous rage. However, things have begun to look up for the three principalities in recent years, thanks to the ascension of Alexandru II (popularly known as 'Dracul', the Dragon, after slapping a Dacian dragon on the national tricolor) to the Wallachian voivodeship in 2549. A highly ambitious & ruthless warlord who practically radiates demonic charisma and considers Vlad the Impaler to be his greatest role model, Alexandru poisoned his cousin Anatol to inherit the crown of Moldavia one year after his coronation, then proceeded to brutally suppress boyar rebellions and impale their ringleaders to clear the path for his ascension to the title of Domnitor. On a more positive note, he did staff his government with individuals chosen on basis of merit rather than birth (and impaled anyone who took umbrage at this), clean out corruption in the bureaucracy (with impalement as his auditing tool of choice) and reclaim most of Transylvania at the conclusion of the Thirteen Years' War of 2551-2564, though he had to allow the Habsburgs to keep Upper Transylvania and the Teutonic Order to maintain a number of fortresses in Lower Transylvania.
As of 2565, having expanded enough into Transylvania for the time being, the Domnitor is looking for new places to make war upon. He has been negotiating with the leadership of the Ukrainian People's Republic, with whom he has mutual territorial tensions (Romania claims Ukrainian Bessarabia, Ukraine claims Romanian Cernauti/Chernivtsi), in an attempt to temporarily bury their past grudges and form a mutually-beneficial alliance against the Tsarist remnant in Transnistria as well as against the Habsburgs. Rumors abound that he is also set on sealing this alliance by marrying his only son and heir Vlad, a young musician & mystic who he considers a complete failure for not sharing an ounce of his bloodthirst or paranoia, to Ukrainian Prime Minister Semyon Chernenko's eldest daughter Sofia - a sign that he either intends this alliance to last forever, or that he means to try to inherit Ukraine despite it not being a monarchy. |
| Third Polish Republic (beige) | Capital: Warsaw
'Poland is not yet lost', so the Polish anthem goes. The Third Republic, the Polish people's latest hope of proving that to be true, arose from the radioactive ashes of old Poland in 2177. Though a democratic republic - a definite rarity in a post-apocalyptic Europe dominated by monarchies, theocracies & generic dictatorships - Poland has actually become more religious since the apocalypse, to the extent that it has written provisions forbidding non-Catholics from running for office into its constitution and attempted to implement economic distributism by buying estates from landowners & breaking it up into lots for redistribution to peasant families; it is not for nothing that it has been called the 'Pope's pet eagle'. The Polish Army has played a critical role in all three Russian Crusades to date, frequently spearheading offensives and being the last to retreat when on the defensive, cementing its role as Eastern Europe's primary shield against Russia; it especially proved its worth in the early days of the Second Russian Crusade of 2407-2412 where, even as the Polish government fled to Gniezno, its soldiers heroically fought in and around Warsaw long enough to be relieved by the other crusaders. On a less pleasant note, the Poles stand accused of multiple atrocities in their wars against Orthodox Ukraine and Protestant Germany, and have also proven that simply being fellow Catholics will not save one from being attacked by them in their eleven Silesian Wars with the Habsburgs (the most recent of which they won, crippling the Teutonic Order for a generation in the Battle of Legnica 2490).
In the years since the successful Third Russian Crusade, Poland has established a protectorate in Belarus, naturally led jointly by the Catholic Archbishop of Minsk and Polish & Lithuanian liaisons. They also maintain close ties with Lithuania, their oldest and staunchest ally and joint occupier guardian of Belarus, and far less friendly ties with Ukraine, whom they have been allied with through each anti-Russian crusade but otherwise frequently warred with over Galicia-Volhynia. The newly-elected President Tadeusz Wojciechowski is currently preparing to sign 'eternal peaces' with the Habsburgs and Ukrainians, ceding bits of Silesia to the former and recognizing Galicia-Volhynia as part of the latter, to free his forces to fully focus on securing the Oder against German efforts to push back into Greater Poland & containing the resurgent Russian menace, but in doing so has unwittingly exposed himself to a potential military coup from a faction of hardliners who are opposed to any solution short of total Polish victory on all fronts, led by General Ignacy Lisowski. |
| Ukrainian People's Republic (blue) | Capital: Kiev
'Ukraine has not yet died', the Ukrainian anthem cries out in response to Poland's. The second Ukrainian state emerged out of a consensus between Kievan warlords, Galician peasant leaders and Cossacks in the south and east of the country, dubbed the 'Act Zluky' or Unification Act of 2230. The new Republic's path was set by its first Prime Minister, Mykhailo Udovychenko: a liberal warlord of peasant extraction from Kiev, he attempted to clone Polish economic distributism by buying or forcibly expropriating the feudal warlords' & landowners' estates for redistribution to peasant families - thereby simultaneously enriching them and establishing himself as their patron - while also proclaiming 'eternal' religious tolerance for Catholics even as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was proclaimed the state religion and designating Ukrainian Cossacks as a military elite, but one without the right to meddle in politics (what they would've thought of their cousins in the Great Plains Sich an ocean away, only God knows). Ukraine's technically democratic elections have been consistently marred by irregularities as each powerful oligarch cranks up their political machine to secure as many votes for themselves as possible through populism and bribery, while its external borders have been fiercely contested with Poland, Moldavia/Romania, the Habsburg Empire and of course Russia. The Russians, in particular, launched two great invasions of Ukraine which were the focus of the First and Third Russian Crusades: the first was launched by Catholicism to contain the Russian Empire's westward march in 2385 after then-Tsar Mikhail III loudly proclaimed that his next target would have been Poland, resulting in the relief of the Siege of Kiev in 2386 and the stabilization of the Ukrainian border at the Dnieper (save for Russian exclaves at Odessa & Transdniestr), and the third (between 2467 and 2480) saw Ukraine gaining territory past the Dniepr for the first time since those lands were first lost in the lead-up to the First Russian Crusade.
As of 2565, the Ukrainians are approaching the best days of their post-apocalyptic existence. The western border with Poland has been stabilized (whether it can stay that way will be determined by Polish President Wojciechoswki's ability to resist a coup), an alliance with the admittedly bloodthirsty and paranoid Domnitor of Romania against the Habsburgs and leftover Russian troops in Transnistria is in the works, and Russia itself has just undergone a vicious civil war in which the Tsar has wound up with a rump state in Crimea & Transnistria while the Caucasus and the Don-Kuban Host have emerged as independent states. The Ukrainian Army is now pressing eastward against the Don-Kuban Cossacks, a significantly easier opponent than the full might of the Russian Army. But this situation cannot last forever, and Ukraine had best watch out for the day the resurgent Russians come by to replace their spring with winter. |
| Baltic states | Capital: Vilnius (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), Tallinn (Estonia)
The Baltic states were Europe's frontline in the Third World War, and in the years after the bombs fell any livable parts were warzones being fought over by various warlords (including the descendants of Russian Army units trapped there after the apocalypse). Order was reintroduced to the land by the iron fist of the Imperial Russian Army in the late 22nd and early 23rd centuries, but the Balts chafed under the Tsars' extreme Russification policies. They did not get both order and freedom until the armies of the First Russian Crusade expelled the Russians from Lithuania, and those of the Second Crusade liberated Latvia and Estonia. Each Baltic republic has since had their work cut out for them: they must rebuild their nations after years of Russian domination and Russification policies, again, while also handling a delicate religious balance between Catholics (in Lithuania) or Protestants (in the northern Baltic states), Russian Orthodox Christians and the resurgent adherents of Romuva (Baltic paganism), whose ranks had swollen as a non-Christian 'religion of resistance' in the 22nd and 23rd centuries. The Knights of Courland, a Catholic military order ostensibly founded to help defend the denizens of these Baltic states from further Russian attacks, aren't exactly helping with those religious issues either, what with their habit of harassing or outright murdering Orthodox & Romuvan believers for the slightest provocation or no provocation at all. |
| Russian Union (salmon) and Tsardom (gray) | Capital: Moscow (Union), Sevastopol (Tsardom)
The years after the bombs fell were dark for Russia indeed, darker perhaps than even Operation Barbarossa (at least the Nazis didn't turn Moscow and Petrograd into radioactive slag). It was no surprise to the Russians that to extract themselves from those hard times, they needed a hard man in charge: and they found just the right guy in Igor Bragin, a warlord based out of Nizhny Novgorod who managed to out-brutalize all of his competitors by 2195 to proclaim himself the first Tsar of the Second Russian Empire. Devout and murderous in equal measure, Bragin held up Ivan Grozny as his inspiration and followed the man's lead on how to rule the country, including rebuilding the Okhrana secret police complete with Oprichnik-themed black uniforms and dog's heads on broomsticks for 'official events' while also pushing extreme Russification policies that included making speaking non-Russian languages punishable by flogging, burning non-Russian books and shooting or jailing clerics of other religions for arbitrary totally-not-religiously-motivated reasons. His descendants launched wars to reclaim Russia's 'natural borders' (the 1904 borders of the empire, which Igor's son Ivan found on a preserved historical map), though they ultimately overreached and provoked three Catholic crusades against their empire: once in 2385-7 when Tsar Mikhail III just had to broadcast his plans for the conquest of all of Eastern Europe on the verge of victory at Kiev, again in 2407-12 when his son Nicholas III attempted to conquer Poland through Belarus and ended up losing the latter (as well as Lithuania) to crusader counterattacks, and finally between 2467-80 where Tsar Ivan VII's desperate attempts to conquer Ukraine, Poland & Lithuania before the rest of the crusaders could arrive in force backfired and resulted in the loss of the other Baltic states and southern Ukraine after thirteen years of heavy fighting. Since the heavy defeat of the Third Crusade, the Russian Empire stagnated and stewed as everybody within the military, political and religious establishment blamed each other (and, at least once, the Jews) for these three disasters, which combined with a string of increasingly ineffective Tsars resulted in the empire's disintegration into civil war in 2530.
When the dust settled some twenty years later, neither the Tsarists, nor liberal forces, nor those who sought to revive the word of Marx, nor the common bandits had prevailed: the victory instead went to a complete dark horse, rogue general turned warlord Vasily Druganin, who initially promised nothing more than 'stability' and 'a restoration of national glory' in the future, and could finally declare himself Vozhd of the Russian Union after taking Moscow in the winter of 2550. Thus far he seems to have made good on the first half of that promise, rebuilding Russian industry and infrastructure with the use of totally-not-slave-labor conscripted from the ranks of the defeated factions while also shooting anyone who he even remotely suspected of dissent, and so his people expect him to make good on the second part the minute he's ready. What nobody outside of his inner circle knows is that he plans to continue the Tsars' policy of Russification with his own twist - anyone who does not immediately choose to assimilate is to be shot out of hand if he gets his way. And he's already got some targets lined up as well: to the south lay the Don-Kuban Cossack Host, the Azeri-led Caucasus Emirate loyal to the Turkish Davutoglu Caliphate, and the Georgian Republic, all states which dared secede from the old Empire during its civil war, while to the west he has Russia's old enemies in Poland, Ukraine and the Baltics (as well as a Polish puppet state in Belarus) to contend with.
Aside from Dragunin's Union, the Tsarist government has survived (barely) in Crimea, where Tsar Alexei IV retreated in a risky secret maneuver through Cossack lands in the last days of the civil war. His Sevastopol-based government can also count on the support of the Imperial Russian 9th Army, which has been fortifying itself in Transnistria since it was cut off from the rest of Russia in the aftermath of the Third Russian Crusade, but both there and on the Crimean peninsula he is under threat of a Romanian-Ukrainian offensive; while the 9th Army is not expected to hold Transnistria for more than a year at best against an attack from two sides, in Crimea itself Alexei must deal with the long-repressed Crimean Tatar minority who are now smelling blood in the water and may well happily trade his dynasty's iron-fisted rule for Ukrainian governance if the situation permits. |
| Davutoglu Caliphate (orange) | Capital: Ankara
The Davutoglu, a Turkish dynasty claiming descent from a prominent pre-war political family that includes several 21st century Turkish Prime Ministers, first emerged from their bunkers in the early 22nd century, though they did not succeed in reuniting Turkey until the reign of Osman II 'the Red' (so named for his red hair and fiery temper) in 2290-2308 and did not actually claim the title of Caliph until the reign of Reccep I in 2430. The Davutoglus are vigorous proponents of 'Neo-Ottomanism', a 'friendly Turkish Islam' in which religious & ethnic minorities were theoretically tolerated as part of the Neo-Ottoman cultural mosaic even as Sunni Islam remains the state religion. In practice, this translates to treating non-Muslims as second-class citizens subject to the jizya tax and sharia law, and though non-Muslims need not fear a return of the devsirme conscription system (for the Davutoglu know, from all the pre-war literature on the ancient Ottomans they've been painstakingly compiling, exactly how poorly the janissary system ended) they must still be wary of Davutoglu princes who may take a liking to their daughters - the punishment for laying a hand on the new Turkish royalty no matter the reason is death, end of story. Nevertheless, the Davutoglus have claimed that they are still infinitely more benevolent to minorities than the Nejdi al-Utaybis and the Iranian Shirazis, which is true but still makes for very low bars to clear.
In recent years, the Davutoglu have ben blessed with the ascension of their greatest ruler to date: Selim, nicknamed 'the Sour' due to his abrasive disposition, short temper and seeming lack of humor (though his friends would claim he has quite the dry wit). An accomplished general who earned his spurs under his father Mahmud II (and in fact succeeded him on the battlefield of Ardahan when Mahmud's helicopter was downed by Armenians, 2558), Selim kickstarted his reign with a brutal campaign of vengeance against the Armenians that resulted in them being driven back into their mountains & cut off from the Black Sea. He followed that up with a westward thrust in which he successfully conquered Gallipoli from the Bulgarians and routed a Bulgarian counterattack, and his invasion of Europe was only short-circuited when Caliph Hussein al-Utaybi invaded the southern reaches of the Davutoglu Caliphate with his lackeys in the Emirate of Syria; Selim counterattacked, routed the Nejdi forces and turned Syria into his own puppet as an 'Islamic Republic'. With the al-Utaybis and Armenians defeated for now, he is preparing to repeat his Ottoman spiritual predecessors' work and fully invade Europe as of 2565. |
| Al-Utaybi Caliphate (dark gray) | Capital: 'Afif
The Arabian peninsula was already in turmoil before the bombs fell, on account of the precious oil there drying up. Without oil money to pay off its disgruntled population, the Saudi monarchy disintegrated in an episode pre-war pundits believed was a key stepping stone on the road to the Third World War. The relatively good news is that few nukes struck Arabia, especially the Nejdi desert; the bad news is that the former Kingdom was trapped in a whirlwind of murderous anarchy as tribes, brigands and Muslim zealots waged an endless war against each other until 2178, when Faisal al-Utaybi led his 'Ilkhwan' to victory. A black-clad warlord from the sandy heart of Nejd who considered the original Ibn Saud to be a soft sellout, al-Utaybi established a rigidly reactionary and utterly uncomprosiming Wahhabi Caliphate with the founding mission of opposing virtually every sociopolitical development since the Middle Ages (except, of course, Wahhabism itself). His heirs have continued to bear his message, spreading their especially radical interpretation of Islam into the former Jordan & western Iraq by sword and bullet over the next few hundred years and outright massacring anyone who dared refuse to convert on the spot: they consider the jizya tax to be an inefficient way of controlling religious minorities, and one that leaves the possibility of said minorities surviving for another generation or even rebelling, so 'tis clearly better to kill them all & let Allah sort them out. That the most 'liberal' past al-Utaybi Caliphs are those who 'merely' enslave anyone who doesn't immediately subscribe to their especially extreme view on Islam should tell you something about how benevolent the 'Black Banner Caliphate' is.
As of 2565, the al-Utaybis are still reeling from a recent defeat at the hands of their Davutoglu rivals to the north, having lost thousands of men in battles in central & northern Syria on top of their Syrian puppet government/buffer zone. Caliph Hussein is an old man in his 70s, and even his children expect him to croak soon. His eldest son, 55-year-old Prince Talal, is a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary like him and has already been designated his heir, but his claim is challenged by his nephew (Hussein's grandson through his second son Abdullah, who was KIA in the recent war with the Turks) Prince Ali, who seeks to push the Caliphate into the High Middle Ages with liberalizing measures to allow religious minorities to live under jizya instead of facing instant extermination and the reading of non-Islamic texts. Talal's supporters claim Abdullah will lead the country down the same path as pre-war Saudi Arabia (a 'den of hypocrites' where princes partied with whores even as their imams preached Wahhabism) while Abdullah's claim men like Talal can only lead the Nejdi Caliphate to further defeats. |
| Shirazi Caliphate (purple) | Capital: Shiraz
Iran suffered heavy damage over the course of the Third World War, and what parts of it were still livable after the bombs fell became a battleground for multiple feuding factions: by 2250 Kurds controlled the west of the country, Zoroastrian revivalists were clashing with invading Sunni Turkmen & Afghans in the north and east, the Iraqi forces of the Shiite Al-Amiri Sultans held the southwest, and in the southeast the strictly Shiite Shirazi dynasty was battling Baloch tribes for control. That year, the young Shah Muhsin Shirazi prevailed over the last surviving confederation of independent Baloch tribes, freeing his forces for campaigns against everyone else in the Land of the Aryans. This born conqueror succeeded in uniting all of Iran within thirty years (when he hit the age of 52), and capped off his career by reducing the Al-Amiris to mere emirs under his suzerainty while assuring himself of their loyalty by marrying his son Rustam to soon-to-be-former Sultan Nuri al-Amiri's most treasured daughter Arwa. Muhsin's descendants extended the Shirazi borders as far as the former Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan in the north, to the southern reaches of the Indus River in the east, and the former Iranian Azerbaijan. In 2475, Shah Ali I capitalized on the prestige he'd won from his trouncing of the Sultanate of Pakistan that year to proclaim himself Caliph: the Shirazis had long claimed descent from Muhammad's daughter Fatima through the marriage of Rustam I and Arwa al-Amiri, but Ali was the first to claim that his victories were a sign that Allah had chosen him to lead the faithful. The result is that by 2565, the Shirazi Caliphate is the only major Shiite empire on the planet, as well as the first Shiite caliphate since the days of the ancient Fatimids.
As of 2565, the Shirazis have begun to turn west under the leadership of Caliph Gholam, a veteran of wars with the Pakistanis and Indians who nevertheless signed a truce with them within weeks of his ascension in 2557, temporarily ending a thirty-five year low-intensity conflict on his empire's eastern borders. The Shirazis, ever devout Shiites who have little patience for Sunni Islam and only slightly more for non-Muslim minorities (placing them somewhere between the Davutoglu & al-Utaybi on a scale of extremism), have long made it known that their ultimate endgoal is to claim Mecca and Medina for the Shiite creed, and now with their eastern border stabilized they can finally take the next step towards that end by working to drive the al-Utaybis out of Iraq entirely & bringing the Kurdish nation to heel. |
| Kurdistan (green) | Capital: Erbil
The Kurds finally, definitively secured their independence after the bombs fell and temporarily destroyed all who would suppress their aspirations...though much like the case with said enemies, it took them 200 years to organize into a coherent state. The Kurdish Confederacy formed by a pact between all Kurdish chiefs in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq is a tribal oligarchy, headed by a President elected by and from the ranks of the tribal chiefs, who in turn enjoy sweeping autonomy in all matters save foreign policy: each chief maintains his own army, acts as a supreme tax farmer for the lands occupied by his tribe, and can generally do whatever he wants as long as he doesn't infringe on the other tribes' territory or people nor does he draw them into a war with outside powers. Although the Kurds initially expanded their reach westward into NE Syria and eastward into Iranian Azerbaijan, they have steadily lost ground outside of their mountainous central homeland due to Turkish and Iranian pressure, and in recent years a younger and much more aggressive cabal of military leaders (mostly sons or grandsons of the reigning chiefs & junior officers in the tribal militias) has emerged to press for the rapid centralization of the Confederacy into a unitary republic capable of better coordinating military efforts against Kurdistan's enemies. |
| Kingdom of Israel (blue) | Capital: Jerusalem
During the Third World War, Israel had to fight for its life against the armies of the neighboring Arab states in addition to internal Palestinian militants, and may have been the first country in the world to offensively employ its nuclear weapons in 'Operation Samson' and thus start a chain reaction that led to the Old World going down in nuclear fire (the other candidates for that dubious honor being the USA, Russia and China). Post-war Israel/Palestine remained a bloody mess where Jewish and Arab militias (both actual Palestinians and survivors of the other Arab armies still stuck in what used to be Israel) continued to fight their war for two hundred years, until the Jewish side caught a lucky break with the emergence of Meir Shamir: a dedicated zealot, astute statesman and formidable warlord descended from a WW3 IDF colonel who managed to beat or bribe the other Jewish factions into merging with his 'Bnei Zion' (Sons of Zion) militia in 2247, then engaging in a brutally effective campaign to oust the still-disunited Arab forces from the Holy Land. Believing that pre-war Israel's Palestinian policies didn't go nearly far enough and that their failure to 'permanently' deal with the 'Palestinian Problem' was a key factor in their near-defeat before the Third World War turned into a lose-lose scenario for everyone, he spurred his followers to kill every non-Jew they found and enslave or drive away those they could not. And though he initially supported the recreation of the pre-war Israeli Republic, like many of his fellow post-war strongmen, he wound up engineering his own election as President-for-life before proclaiming himself King of Israel and trying to rebuild the Third Temple as he neared his death in 2272.
Over three hundred years later, the Kingdom of Israel is still going strong under his descendants. The Israelis can boast of a small, but highly professional and extremely well-equipped Royal Army (including large quantities of tanks & heavy artillery as well as a helicopter fleet bought from various European nations) supported by the 'Civil Defense Forces', a less well-equipped national guard into which all Israelis of age must serve in some capacity for three years with no exceptions. Starting with King Yehuda II in 2360, Israel has also abolished slavery & significantly loosened its restrictions on Christian pilgrims and Arabs in an effort to normalize relations with the European producers of their heavy arms. Also starting with Yehuda II, the Israeli state has turned its focus from simple isolationism & self-defense to the active conquest of a 'Greater Israel' stretching from Sinai to the Euphrates, officially on the logic that Abraham was after all born in what would become Iraq. |
| Lebanon & Syria | Capital: Beirut (Lebanon), Damascus (Syria)
Post-war Lebanon and Syria are the odd men out in the Mideast, with the former being the sole majority-Christian nation left in the Levant and the latter being less of a country & more of a geopolitical football being tossed between the three warring Caliphates and Israel. The former is a Maronite Christian-dominated Emirate, founded by the Mt. Lebanon-based warlord Elias el-Kazen (a descendant of prewar Lebanon's last Tourism Minister) in 2301, that allows its surviving Muslim and Druze minorities limited cultural autonomy and representation in the Lebanese State Assembly (where representatives are appointed by clan chiefs and the Maronites are conveniently guaranteed 6:5 numerical superiority over everyone else). The el-Kazens have been careful enough to stay out of all Levantine conflicts, only alternately siding with the Davutoglu and Israel when opportunity permits, to bunker down in the central Lebanese mountains until trouble blows over when the going gets too tough, and to cultivate trade and military ties with the nations of Europe. Starting in the late 25th century they have also been exhaustively lobbying the Popes to revive the Order of the Holy Sepulcher so they can make their 'little fortress' of a nation even more difficult to crack with the addition of European crusaders, but as of late Emir Amine el-Kazen has found a new hurdle in the form of Israel's newly professed tolerance for Christians, which has gotten Pope Sylvester to try to convince him to trust in Jerusalem to guarantee Lebanese independence so he can conserve Papal resources for other fronts.
Postwar Syria, meanwhile, has been little more than a convenient buffer zone & geopolitical football at the mercy of its neighbors. It was originally directly annexed by the al-Utaybi Caliphate in the 2200s, but was 'liberated' by the Davutoglu Empire in 2320 as an emirate ruled by the third son of then-Sultan Mahmud I (who, naturally, kept the northern half of the country for himself). The al-Utaybi rolled back into the neighborhood & ousted the Davutoglu in 2355, at which point Syria was made into a fief for then-Caliph Uthman I's cousin's son and Daraa was annexed into the Caliphate while Hama & Homs, seized from the Davutoglu in the same war, were given to the new Syrian appanage as consolation prizes. Israel managed to temporarily oust the al-Utaybi Emir and occupy Damascus 2425-36, where the secular Republic they proclaimed just happened to have Jewish ministers appointed by Jerusalem in all important defense, economic & foreign policy portfolios, only to be thrown out in renewed al-Utaybi offensives a decade after they first secured Damascus. In 2480 the Shirazis managed to briefly occupy Syria in a lightning offensive that carried them to the borders of Arabia proper, but were chased away in al-Utaybi counteroffensives over the next five years before they could properly establish a Shiite satrapy in Damascus. Most recently, the al-Utaybi have been driven out of Syria yet again in 2564, after which the Davutoglu decided to remake Syria as an 'Islamic Republic' (naturally with an Ankara-appointed Prime Minister, Ferhad Pasha, who also commands a sizable Turkish garrison headquartered next to the new parliament building). How long this arrangement can last before another foreign power rolls in, or less likely the Syrian people succeed in evicting the Turks, is anyone's guess. |
| Kingdom of Armenia (dark blue) | Capital: Yerevan
The mountains of Armenia make for some impressive defenses, even from nukes. Thus the Armenian people were better able to weather World War III than most, and much like postwar Bulgaria they were united fairly quickly by one of their warlords: Aram Petrosian, great-grandson of a prewar Armenian general, who was able to crown himself King of a reunited Armenia in 2175. Also like Bulgaria, Armenia's star went up high and then fell rapidly - between 2175 and 2285 the Petrosians were able to make Wilsonian Armenia a reality (not that they even knew who Woodrow Wilson was...) and, under the reign of Martiros the Great 2250-2267, even pushed as far as Cilicia. Unfortunately, a string of unworthy successors combined with their neighbors also pulling themselves together resulted in reverses on all fronts, and in 2399 the last Petrosian King Hovhannes III (a severely mentally handicapped puppet of his mother & her family) was deposed in a palace coup by the captain of his own guards after losing Ardahan to the Davutoglu. Said captain, Vahan Kocharyan, proceeded to usurp the throne and held it ably for twenty years, holding Armenia's borders until his death. But he was unable to permanently recover any of the lost territories, and after his death his heirs continued to lose ground until by 2500 Armenia had become a landlocked country again. As of today, the aged King Serzh Kocharyan stews in the mostly-rebuilt capital of Yerevan, plotting to regain at least a connection to the Black Sea before the younger & more radical officers in his military gain enough support for a coup against him. |
| Republic of Georgia (teal) | Capital: Tbilisi
The central Caucasus has never been a great place to live post-war due to the exact same problem the Western Balkans had & still has: the reawakening of ethnic blood feuds, in this case the grudge between Georgians, Abkhazians and Ossetians. Georgia was reunited first as a kingdom by Telavi-based warlord Giorgi Chavchavadze, a descendant of the last pre-WW3 Georgian Minister of Defense who in turn was descended from Georgians driven out of Abkhazia during the 1992-3 war there by Abkhaz death squads: and having grown up on his father's tales of how the Abkhazians and Ossetians were to blame for everything bad to have ever befallen Georgia, he decided to repeat history by storming into those two formerly-disputed regions, imposing strict regulations and additional taxes on anyone who could not speak Georgian, and shooting anyone who dared oppose his new dictates. When the Russians conquered Georgia in 2358 after a grueling 11-year campaign, they reversed the tables by turning a blind eye to the new Abkhaz & Ossetian volunteers in their army who decided it was high time to avenge past wrongs by going on a raping/murdering/looting spree against Georgians. But there would come a time when the Georgians would regain the upper hand, and that time came when the Russian Empire started disintegrating in the 26th century, allowing Georgia to reclaim its independence as an authoritarian and vehemently Georgian-supremacist 'republic' in 2532. The new government set its course when Zviad Eliava, whose father was murdered by Abkhaz militiamen on suspicion of masterminding a terrorist bombing (the real culprit was caught a few months later) when he was 11 and responded by actually joining the resistance, was elected its first president and paraphrased the Biblical Rehoboam as he set out his new Abkhaz/Ossetian policy: 'where our forefathers chastised you with whips, I will chastise you with scorpions'.
As 2565 dawns, outside of a tiny upper class of collaborators Abkhazians and Ossetians have been made prisoners in their homeland, shunted into ghettos and mistreated by Georgian troops determined to avenge the wrongs visited upon their ancestors, while reacting with terror-bombings, lynch mobs and assassinations that in turn invite even heavier retaliation; most notably, newly-elected President Alexandre Tsereteli was assassinated by Abkhaz radicals at his inauguration in Tbilisi last year, and his VP/successor Ilia Eliava - grandson of the same Zviad quoted above - has sworn to exact bloody vengeance in his name. Time will tell if one side can start leading by example, or if this mountainous republic's peoples are doomed to continue wallowing in their vicious cycle of hatred. |
| Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus (black) | Capital: Grozny
In the first three centuries after the Third World War, the northern Caucasus wasn't too bad a place to live. Most of it was divided between the Chechen Emirate of Grozny and the Azeri Islamic Republic, but neither followed particularly extreme forms of Islam - indeed, despite being a clan-based monarchy the Chechens actually followed a less stringent offshoot of Sufi Islam than the Azeris thanks to influences from native Chechen traditions, and in any case they were significantly more welcoming to minorities than the nearby Georgian kingdom. But that all changed when the Russians invaded the region in the 2330s, after which the Tsars implemented their Russification program and levied crushing new taxes as well as oppressive 'public safety regulations' on the Muslims of the region. Those who dissented were shot or press-ganged into becoming slave 'penal' labor for the recovering petroleum industry, where they had great fun toiling for no pay at all so the Imperial Russian Armed Forces could have all the oil they needed to fuel their next campaigns.
It was no surprise that, when Russian control evaporated as the Tsardom spiraled into civil war in the early 26th century, the overwhelming majority of Chechens and Azeris had become impoverished and radicalized zealots who proceeded to establish an extremely harsh Islamic regime that tyrannized previously-tolerated Christian peoples (and Orthodox Russians, but that goes without saying) in the lands it claimed. In 2557, Sultan Aslan Yandarbiyev swore allegiance to the Davutoglu Caliph in Ankara, becoming an emir in service to Selim the Sour in exchange for significant subsidies and shipping precious oil to support the Turkish armed forces through Georgia (whose government has also been getting generous 'gifts' from Ankara to support their campaigns against Abkhaz/Ossetians to allow such shipments). Thanks to his new Turkish gold, the Emir has been able to pay off his critics or at least, pay other Chechen clansmen to shoot those who won't shut up, and unless the Cossacks or Armenians pull themselves together soon he can expect to live out the rest of his days as a very wealthy satrap for the Turks. |
| Don-Kuban Host (yellow) | Capital: Novocherkask
When the resurgent Russian Empire starts to roll southward in the early to mid 2300s, the Cossack communities living on the banks of the Don & in the Kuban region were divided. Some preferred to maintain their independence, while others were prepared to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors and ride under the Russian flag once more. In the end, the Russians solved this conundrum by paying some of the Cossack clans handsomely, offering the rest sweeping autonomy and Old Tsarist-era privileges, and then getting their supporters to wipe out those Cossacks still opposed to them. For 200 years the Cossacks served Moscow as skilled cavalrymen and tankers, though their faith in their Tsars gradually waned as Russia was defeated in each of the three crusades directed against it and dissent mounted in Russia proper. When the civil war broke out, they were again torn between those who sought to leave a sinking ship and those who placed their loyalty to the Tsars above all else, but this inter-Cossack civil war came to an end after Tsar Alexei IV was forced to flee his own capital for the relative safety of Crimea; even the Cossack assemblies who sheltered him as he made his risky getaway had to admit that his cause was essentially finished.
Thus the Confederation of the Don & Kuban Hosts emerged, jointly headed by the Atamans of both hosts in a sort of elective diarchy, though in its still-brief years of independence it has had to deal with plenty of difficult issues: a lack of cooperation between sitting Atamans Matfei Solntsev (Don) and Ivan Kaledin (Kuban) who happen to bear clan grudges against each other, a lack of trained bureaucrats to rebuild an economy devastated by the civil war (most Cossacks are great at killing things but left day-to-day administration to Russian officials when the Tsardom was still around), and an ongoing war with Ukraine (including its own western Cossacks) over the Donbass which they must wage with an exhausted & bloodied army. Combine that with a vengeful Russian Union eager to reassert Moscow's authority over the southern steppes, and it is clear that these proud riders are in for some tough times. |
| Denmark-Norway (orange) | Capital: Copenhagen
The Kingdom of Denmark-Norway was reborn when its predecessor states, the kingdoms of Denmark & Norway (re-founded in 2198 and 2223 respectively by the most powerful warlords within their former borders) were merged through the marriage of the Danish prince Christoffer Rasmussen to Norwegian princess Liv Solberg, who was her father's only child and heiress, in 2370. Thus, after their deaths their eldest son inherited both kingdoms, combining Denmark's robust army and fleet with Norway's still-significant offshore oil reserves. Between 2400 and the present day, Denmark-Norway has been able to profit tremendously from selling their oil to fuel the re-growing armies and industries of the other European nations, allowing them to generously subsidize their subjects with the most advanced welfare network in all of postwar Europe while still having enough cash left to afford enough mercenaries to keep Swedes hungry for their wealth at bay; only the Rasmussens' disinterest in expanding their domain (for they're already making a killing with the resources they have, and they can already influence other powers into doing their bidding by threatening to turn off the taps) prevents them from turning their piles of money into a weapon. The lure of Dano-Norwegian citizenship & membership in its state church, with all the privileges it brings, has attracted so many immigrants to the united kingdom that it doesn't even need slaves to work its oil rigs - it's got plenty of poor volunteers desperate to prove their worth to the Kings and Queens in Copenhagen to handle that, to the point where reigning Queen Vilhelmine has started to actually turn away immigrants now. |
| Kingdom of Sweden (blue) | Capital: Stockholm
Postwar Sweden was in a significantly worse spot than Denmark/Norway/Denmark-Norway due to its lack of oil reserves and its warlords' vulnerability to being paid off to fight each other by their western neighbors, resulting in it failing to reunify until 2380 (over a hundred years since both Denmark & Norway were reborn) when the Borlange-based warlord Abdirizak Romson, a descendant of 21st-century Somali migrants to prewar Sweden who at this point had united eastern Sweden beneath his banner, defeated his Dano-Norwegian-backed rival Jonas Sahlin. Romson proceeded to get himself killed within another decade after futilely charging Dano-Norwegian defensive lines which had been stiffened by their import of mercenaries from as far south as Switzerland, but his descendants managed to hold the country together with equal parts brute force and their revival of Early Medieval Swedes' favorite pastime: Viking raids across northern Europe. Between 2380 and 2565 the Swedes earned a reputation as brutal raiders, cunning merchants and intrepid explorers all in one, a reputation perhaps best exemplified by the contrast between their successful storming of Petrograd in 2500 & the presence of Swedish sailors in the European expedition that reached North America that year. As of 2565 the Swedes have secured beach-heads on continental Europe with their conquest of not only Petrograd but also East Prussia, and reigning Queen Sherissa Romson has begun to entertain the idea of transforming Sweden into a true Empire around the Baltic: after all, they wouldn't need to keep raiding their neighbors if they had already all the resources and slaves ahem, 'state laborers' they needed under their thumb, as a dark mirror to what the Dano-Norwegians have going... |
| Finland (cyan) | Capital: Turku
Unlike Sweden, Finland wasn't able to reunify itself at all in the centuries after WW3. When the Russians first stormed into Finnish Karelia in 2367, they found that the former country was still divided between multiple warring petty-fiefdoms, and though it took them thirty years to subdue the stubborn Finns they did eventually manage that herculean task due to a lack of national unity & some Finnish warlords' willingness to become their vassals in exchange for support in putting down their rivals. Even those Finns who did join Russia voluntarily were decidedly less than pleased when Moscow turned around and imposed strict policies of Russification upon them as it did to the rest of its subjects however, and several Finnish rebellions broke out only to be suppressed swiftly & bloodily in the country's two centuries of subjugation. When the Russian Civil War erupted, the Finns seized their opportunity to proclaim independence as a republic, and under their first President Timo Vennamo they ably defended their newfound freedom from the Russian suppression brigades thrown their way. However, though the Finns definitively secured their independence in 2548 they found that freedom would not instantly give them economic prosperity, and had to enter economic deals with the Dano-Norwegians to get a slice of their oil wealth. As a result, many Finns got their jobs working on the Narvik Pipeline connecting the two states or as rifle-toting mercenaries in the Dano-Norwegian army, while more & more politicians are becoming dependent on Copenhagen's donations to campaign effectively; some Finns have realized that their country is becoming a satellite of Denmark-Norway's and are turning to Sweden for help (even offering to recognize Swedish control of the Aland islands) while others are coalescing into a 'National Alliance' to resist all who would make Finland their puppet, and their infighting (exacerbated by Denmark-Norway and Sweden's orders to pit their proxies against one another) is leaving Finland increasingly vulnerable in the face of the resurgent Russia... |
| Mashhur Caliphate (olive) | Capital: Edfu
Egypt suffered tremendously during the Third World War: not only did nukes destroy the Suez Canal and most of its population centers, but another nuclear weapon directly struck the Aswan Dam in its final hours, resulting in many of the survivors of the first nuclear strikes being literally washed into the Mediterranean. It should not come as a surprise, then, that it took much longer for Egypt to pull itself back together than its neighbors - in fact, the real surprise is that the Egyptians managed it at all. But humans always find a way it seems, and so in 2299 the warlord Anwar el-Shafei (a descendant of pre-war Egypt's military elite) managed the seemingly impossible task of forging a new country in the utterly devastated Lower Egypt, while in 2366 Upper Egypt too was rebuilt as one nation under Ma'mun Mashhur (another warlord who counted a member of the last pre-war underground Muslim Brotherhood's Majlis al-Shura among his ancestors). The rival sultanates in Giza & Edfu soon came to blows, although Lower Egypt's greater devastation by WW3 left it roughly equal in power to the traditionally less populated Upper Egypt and meant both powers were locked in a stalemate for the next ~200 years, during which they did not forget to rebuild and repopulate themselves as well. In 2530, Sultan Mostafa II Mashhur of Upper Egypt was able to overrun Lower Egypt in a surprise attack after they had just been defeated by the Israelis in a war for half of the Sinai peninsula, breaking the stalemate with a rapid advance through Lower Egypt's weakened southern defenses and culminating in a great battle near what little was left of Old Memphis in which he killed Sultan Sa'ad el-Shafei in a one-on-one tank duel. Mostafa melted down the two crowns of Lower & Upper Egypt and refashioned them into a single caliphal crown for himself, and his son & successor Umar is now set to throw the rising might of Egypt into the contest for leadership of the Sunni world in opposition to both the Davutoglu & al-Utaybi; but the el-Shafei and their allies, dispossessed and driven underground after their defeat, have been rebuilding their strength in secret. If Umar is not careful, his counterpart Abdel will soon undo Mostafa's work and at best force them to relive their ancestors' grudge match as Upper & Lower Egypt again, at worst put an end to the Mashhur's family of an Egyptian caliphate spanning from North Africa to Central Asia before it even properly begins. |
| Second Libyan Jamahiriya (green) | Capital: Al Jawf
Libya is the African counterpart to Bulgaria & Armenia, a country whose post-war star rose and fell very rapidly. In 2357, this former morass of squabbling bandit chiefs & small-time oil sheiks was forcibly reunited by the eccentric Tripoli-based warlord Saif Sulayman al-Obeidi, who attempted to rebuild the Libyan state on the foundation of what few scraps of the pre-war 'Green Book' of Muammar Gaddafi he had been able to recover. Al-Obeidi proclaimed that whoever wrote that book must have been a literal avatar of God and deserved worship as such, following up minutes later by proclaiming that he was also most definitely a descendant of Gaddafi on top of being the literal Mahdi (essentially the Muslim Messiah, prophesied to rule for several years before the Day of Judgment & cleanse the world of all evil) and thus deserved the same respect. Al-Obeidi's armies, filled with new zeal in their leader, managed to make impressive gains against the less organized Lower Egypt and Morocco for several years before he was killed in battle with the Moroccans, promptly shattering his troops' previously-invincible morale. Since then, al-Obeidi's descendants have been busy trying to hold his 'Second Jamahiriya' together in the face of endless rebellions (almost always orthodox Muslims who don't feel like being led by a dynasty of frauds) as well as foreign aggression and their own tendency to intrigue against one another for power. Most recently, just to add insult to injury in 2562 the united Egyptian Caliphate was able to overrun the Libyan coast & Tunisia in a lightning campaign while Brotherly Guide, Leader and Obeidist Mahdi Mutassim II was busy dealing with one of his many rebellious cousins, taking the capital of Tripoli & completely cutting the Jamahiriya off from the Mediterranean coast; Mutassim was promptly disposed of in an 'accident' probably engineered by his son Abu-Bakr al-Obeidi, a hardened military veteran who hopes to make his country the foremost power in Africa once more and succeed as Mahdi where his ancestors have failed...with the aid of all those sub-Saharan African mercenaries he's been spending the state's coffers on for several years, of course. |
| Alaouite Caliphate (purple) | Capital: Marrakesh
Morocco was a low-priority target for both sides in WW3, and thus managed to escape the destruction of the world with less casualties & infrastructure damage than other parts of the world. Most importantly, many members of the ruling Alaouite dynasty - including the last pre-war Moroccan crown prince, Hisham ibn Abd al-Rahman - managed to flee to their luxurious bunkers, built in the years before the war with their private funds, even as their patriarch Abd al-Rahman III stood his ground at & died in Rabat. Decades after the war, the Alaouites used both their status as the pre-war monarchs of Morocco & their provable dynastic descent from Muhammad himself as major sources of political legitimacy, allowing them to reunite their country (mostly through bribing & cajoling most of the post-war warlords who had cropped up there into becoming their vassals, not through violence) by 2240. In 2275, Sultan Qasim ibn Hassan felt confident enough to proclaim himself Caliph, well ahead of all of his dynasty's future competitors for that title save the Nejdi al-Utaybis. Although Morocco has spent most of its post-war history fighting to claim control of all of North Africa and especially the Maghreb, with several past Caliphs trying to repeat the 16th-century Saadi dynasty's conquest of NW sub-Saharan Africa, in the 2550s Caliph Hisham III turned his attention to Spain after the Madrid government failed to prevent a Catalan secession, capitalizing on the momentary Spanish weakness to carve a path all the way to Cordoba in an attempt to reenact the Islamic conquest of Spain. In more recent years he has been turned back by reinvigorated Spanish forces under their new Asturian monarch, but although his Spanish holdings have been reduced to just Granada Hisham is not giving up and to this day is still marshaling forces to cross the straits of Gibraltar again, even if it means stripping his eastern garrisons on the new border with the Mashhur Caliphate of men. |
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S A M U R A I F O O L
Re: 2015 IH planning thread
Originally Posted by chesser2538
Mr. Conservative
I've decided to go with a mix of decentralized but large & often multinational states and smaller but more centralized national-states. It's been 500 years since the bombs fell, so I figure the reconstruction of larger states with borders close to or matching the modern ones aren't too far-fetched. That said, I've got far fewer revived ancient religions on my map than in Dan's, replaced by upsurges in medieval or modern nationalistic/religious grudges. Today I wrote the nations of Western, Central and (most of) Eastern Europe, and tomorrow I'll hopefully be able to finish things up. (there's not TOO much left to do fortunately, just Scandinavia/the Caucasus/MENA)
Vicarius Provinciae
Dux Limitis
Praeses
Consider that 'in' immediately. Given their shared background & the Western/Eastern Roman parallels to South/North California I had in mind while designing both factions, it works perfectly.
Dux Limitis
Idea missing.
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