How many of us really want every Nordic Country and Greenlanders?
At best maybe Nobogordians?
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Greenland and Iceland were settled by Norwegians, there isn’t really a point in making them separate even if a Viking split happens.
Novgorodians would be cool, yeah. Russo-Vikings!
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who would want that?
Danes ARE scandinavian. might as well split Franks into French and Parisians.
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who questions that people want certain umbrellas be split?
And I usually hear expectations for danes, nrse and/or swedes.
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Read the very next post after that.
History sections of Iraqis and Syrians are more or less complete. Possibly too long but I’m a nerd. No AI was used.
Iraqis
By the time of Islamic conquest, Mesopotamia, called Khvarvaran in Persian and known to the Arabs as Iraq, had been the metropolitan core of the various Persian empires for over a thousand years, providing one-third of the land tax income for the entire Sassanid state. Royal palaces dotted the landscape, with the grandest being located at the capital of Ctesiphon. The bulk of the rural population at the time was still Assyrian and Aramean, joined by Persians, Jews, and Mandaeans in multicultural cities. The frontier was settled by Arabs of the Lakhmid Kingdom, a vassal state of the Sassanids with the capital at Hira, who protected the Empire from Eastern Romans and the Ghassanids of Syria.
The last Lakhmid ruler was King al-Nu’man III ibn al-Mundhir, who helped Khosrow II regain his throne from the usurper Bahram Chobin. This help mattered little: after al-Nu’man converted to Christianity and refused to give Khosrow the hand of his daughter in marriage, the Shahanshah had him trampled by elephants. The Lakhmid Kingdom was then annexed by the Sassanid Empire; however, the dissolution of the buffer state proved fatal to the Empire, as it severed the loyalty of the Arab tribes and paved the way for the Islamic conquest less than a decade after Khosrow’s death.
In 633, Muslim commander Khalid ibn al-Walid won a series of battles against Persian forces and forced Hira, the former Lakhmid capital, to surrender after brief fighting. In 636, Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas was appointed as the commander of the new push into Mesopotamia. Sa’d crushed the Sassanid forces at Qadisiyyah and captured Ctesiphon, bringing an end to the millennium of Persian rule in Mesopotamia. Next to Hira, Sa’d founded the city of Kufa, which would briefly serve as the Caliphate’s capital under Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and grandson Hasan, until the latter’s abdication to Mu’awiya, the founder of the Syrian-based Umayyad Caliphate.
The dominance of Syria’s elites and discrimination of non-Arab converts to Islam soon led to resentment among the Iraqi population. After the death of Mu’awiya, Kufans sent a letter to Husayn, Ali’s second son who resided in Mecca, urging him to take the lead and end the Umayyad oppression. On 9 September 680, Husayn left Mecca and headed to Kufa with his family and a small group of followers. The group was intercepted at the plain Karbala by the Umayyad army under governor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad, and subsequently slaughtered. The massacre committed against the members of the Prophet’s family only cemented the resentment against the Umayyads in Iraq. At the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries, Kufa became a hotbed for the Hashimiya movement which promulgated that only members of the Prophet’s household are worthy of leading the faithful. In 717, the leadership of the Hashimiya passed from Ali’s grandson Abu Hashim to the Abbasid family, descendants of the Prophet’s uncle Abbas.
The anti-Umayyad sentiments culminated in 746. Abu Muslim, a Hashimiya revolutionary of Persian origin, raised the black banner of the Abbasids and proclaimed the establishment of a new Caliphate that’d welcome all Muslims regardless of origins. In late 749, the forces of Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah entered Kufa and proclaimed him as Caliph on 28 November. Umayyad forces were crushed at the Battle of the Zab and the remaining members of the former ruling dynasty were hunted down, eventually taking refuge in Al-Andalus.
Al-Saffah was succeeded by his brother al-Mansur, who founded the city of Baghdad (meaning “God-Given” in Persian) as his new capital. Large sums were spent to restore the ancient canal systems to cultivate the countryside. Under Harun al-Rashid, al-Mansur’s grandson, Iraq became the focal point of the Islamic Golden Age, centered on the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and one of the largest cities of the medieval era, rivalling the Tang Chinese capital of Chang’an. Scholars from all over the known world were invited to settle in the Caliphate and translate ancient knowledge to Arabic. The discovery that Persian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Greco-Roman texts often contradicted each other led the scholars to perform experiments meant to verify the truth in the ancient texts, marking the invention of the scientific method; this, in turn, led to new discoveries and inventions in fields of alchemy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, physics, cartography, botany, and many others.
As early as the Lakhmid period, Iraqi Arab armies incorporated regiments of Iranian-style heavily armored cavalry, accompanied by auxiliary tribal forces. Elite cavalrymen called Abna al-Dawla, possibly descended from the Persian Savars, continued to form the core of the Abbasid forces in Iraq until the reign of Caliph al-Mu’tasim, who started to rely on his Turkic Mamluks. The Abbasids also maintained an array of siege weapons and took advantage of the abundant petroleum supplies to form the Naffatun troops, who used naphtha siphons and grenades against enemy infantry and fortifications.
In 861, Caliph al-Mutawakkil was murdered by his Turkic guards, plunging the Abbasid Caliphate into the period of strife known as the Anarchy at Samarra. Civil wars and the Zanj Rebellion severely weakened the Caliphate and limited its reach to the core territories of Iraq. During the 10th century, the Caliphs were reduced to mere puppets, with real political and military power resting in the hands of the Daylami Buyids and the Turkish Seljuqs. The Abbasids eventually regained control of Iraq during the reign of Caliph al-Muqtafi and expanded into Iran under al-Nasir. This rebirth ended in 1258 with the Sack of Baghdad by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan. The waters of the Tigris first turned red from the blood of hundreds of thousands slain inhabitants, and then black from the ink of the countless books and manuscripts of the House of Wisdom that were dumped into the river. Caliph al-Musta’sim was wrapped in a blanket and trampled to death under the hooves of Mongol horses. Iraq would experience a brief revival of cultural and geopolitical importance under the Jalayirid Sultanate but it was cut short by Tamerlane’s conquest and Turcoman revolts.
Syrians
Following the defeat of Queen Zenobia, Syria and Palestine were reorganized as Rome’s Diocese of the East. After the Plague of Justinian decimated the population across the Empire, Rome had to rely more and more on their Monophysite Christian Arab foederati, the Ghassanids, as the protectors of the border with the Sassanid Persia. During the Last Great War of Antiquity fought between the two great empires in the 7th century, Greater Syria and Egypt were occupied by the Sassanids for over a decade; while the peace terms signed in 628 returned the lost territories to the Byzantines, they did not stay Roman for much longer.
In 636, the Rashidun Caliphate army under the command of Khalid ibn al-Walid crushed the joint armies of Eastern Rome and the Ghassanids. Syria and Palestine were reorganized as Bilad al-Sham and put under the control of governor Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, the cousin of Caliph Uthman. Mu’awiya married Maysun bint Bahdal, the chieftain of the Banu Kalb’s daughter, forming an alliance with the former Arab foederati tribes of Syria, and soon grew strong enough to challenge the fourth Rashidun Caliph, Ali. Following Ali’s assassination by the Kharijites and the abdication of Ali’s son Hasan, Mu’awiya was recognized as Caliph.
Mu’awiya built his Umayyad Caliphate relying on the local Christian population, with Greeks managing the bureaucracy and Syrian Arabs forming the bulk of his army. He radically departed from the model of the Bedouin armies of the Rashidun: learning from encounters with the Byzantines, the new military was a professional infantry force specialized in spear wall formation.
After the Abbasid revolution and the exile of Umayyads to Al-Andalus, Syria lost its metropolitan status but remained a bulwark against the Byzantines. The borderlands were settled by Persian, Slavic, and Turcoman soldiers, and a chain of strongholds known as al-thughur was erected. Each major Syrian city fielded the Ahdath, foot militias responsible for maintaining the defenses and siege equipment. These defence systems proved invaluable to stalling the Byzantine counterattack during the 10th century by the forces of Emir Sayf al-Dawla of Aleppo.
As the Abbasid authority waned following Byzantium’s resurgence and the advances of the Fatimids and the Seljuks, Syria turned into a patchwork of autonomous emirates that were too fragmented to form a united front against the Franks. In fact, once the initial shock over the brutal sack of Jerusalem waned, local emirs and Seljuk princelings quickly adapted to the new situation and even formed occasional alliances with the Crusaders: in 1108 at Turbessel the armies of Baldwin II, the Count of Edessa and would-be-King of Jerusalem, and his ally Jawali Saqawa, the Atabeg of Mosul, were crushed by the allied forces of Tancred, the regent of Antioch, and Fakhr al-Mulk Ridwan, the Sultan of Aleppo. It was Sultan Ridwan who first made use of the infamous Hashashins of Alamut to dispose of his rivals. This secretive order subsequently established a foothold in Syria, striking unexpectedly from their imposing strongholds that rivalled those of the Crusaders.
Muslim Syria was finally unified again by Nur ad-Din Zengi. The Zengid military, incorporating Turkish mamluks, Kurdish lancers, and local infantry regiments, was able to match the Frankish forces and even subdue the Fatimid Egypt under the command of Nur ad-Din’s Kurdish vassals Shirkuh and Salah ad-Din Yusuf. The latter eventually declared the establishment of his own Ayyubid Sultanate, united Egypt and Syria, and retook Jerusalem.
As the Mamluks seized power in Egypt following the murder of its last Ayyubid sultan, emirs of Syria recognized Saladin’s great-grandson an-Nasir Yusuf of Aleppo as their overlord and handed him the city of Damascus. This rare show of Syrian unity unfortunately meant little in the grand scheme of things, as a decade later in 1260 the Mongol Empire allied with Kingdom of Armenia and Principality of Antioch steamrolled through the Levant, putting an effective end to the Ayyubid rule in Syria. The Mongols were driven out by the Mamluks under Baybars, who also brought the remnants of the Hashashins under his heel. Syria would remain a province of the Mamluk Sultanate until its conquest by the Ottomans under sultan Selim the Grim.
Link to the doc is unchanged: Saracen split - Google Docs
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Great! Though a missed opportunity to mention Tanukhid Queen Mawiyya for the Syrians. Wish I had the time to make a scenario about her.
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Incas is perfectly correct English. It’s probably more common in history than using “Inca” as a plural. Renaming the civ was a terrible and pointless decision by the devs.
The previous name was “Incans” though. “Incas” I sometimes hear normally, but “Incans” seem to occur only in AoE2 context
There was never a civilization named Incans in any version of any Age of Empires game. It has always been either Incas or Inca.
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Holy Mandela effect lol. Oups.
I think you were mixing them up with Mayans
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Once again Im just saying Saracens should be splited out
There were only Indians now we have Hindustanis, Gurjaras, Bengalis, Dravidians
@TheLiberator236 check out the document I’m working on:
I’ll probably end up adding Yemenis (understood as inhabitants of “Greater Yemen”, that is South Arabia in general) too as I think I’ve done them a disservice by ignoring their potential so far. They weren’t the core region of any caliphate unlike Syria or Iraq, but they still had interesting pre-Islamic and Islamic history. (And probably one of the very few Islamic civs that had long-reigning female rulers viable as campaign protagonists, not an easy thing to come by.)
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