Ragusa and Venice, on the Adriatic

Back in January 2024, I passed this way and produced the region around the Skader lake in Albania. I've been working around the corner this represented back then, which is now mapped to the south and the west, thusly:

This includes the coast line up to Ragusa, which was a competitor with Venice for a time, but not a successful one. That is to say it was an independent maritime republic, paying tribute to the Ottoman Empire, which protects the state from Venice (who is no friend of the Ottomans), while at the same time Ragusa was careful to cultivate close relations with the Papal States and Catholics (also, no friends of the Venetians).  This, and Ragusa's nearer access to the Mediterranean made it a nimble competitor to Venice, with a fleet of about 150 ships.  Ragusa lasted until Napoleon got rid of them.

Cattaro, on the other hand, just to the east, modern day Kotor, now a part of Montenegro, was organised as a Venetian Viceroy, acting in Venice's behalf, right there next to Ragusa where they could keep watch. Just 90 km apart, round about 55 miles, both were fortified, both were technically Catholic, both had the Ottoman Turks in the hinterland (though, admittedly, it wasn't a very populated hinterland), both were paying tribute to the Turks and both operated on neutral trade, with Cattaro paying out to the coffers of Venice.  It's a bit closer to the Mediterranean, but it's also deep up a channel where it could be defended.

Both are filled with spies, excellent harbours, merchant guilds hiring escorts, smugglers sneaking cargo past Venice or past Ragusa.  Both have vicious plutocracies ready to sabotage the other, while lots of money is available for paying out any capable person willing to join; there's trade, there's piracy, there's escape inland (if you can avoid the Turks) and out to sea (if you don't fall prey to the Spanish across the Adriatic). Fun fun fun.

East Bithynia, Gerze and Amisos

In Jan '23, I produced a map of Bithynia around Sinop. Here is the region to the southeast of that former map, done yesterday and today, because I'm looking for ways to relax between writing just now.

This was a test, to see if I could work at eighteen 20-mile hexes at the same time. Originally, I was doing them two hexes at a time, and last year I'd moved up to six at a time. With images made earlier this year to attach to the authentic wiki, I was feeling more confident about managing more sweeping areas, to see if it would prove more efficient. It's a little of doing the same sort of detail more repetitively, but this does represent three times as much work as I would have done formerly of about the same area.  Which is desirable.

The above represents what are essentially two routes into the upper lands of Anatolia.  Gerze provides access across the Kastamonu uplands, down into the high plateau west of modern Ankara, which would have been an ancient route that contributed to Sardis and Lydia's enormous wealth 27 centuries ago, while Amisos provides access to the upper Halys valley, the seat of Phrygia, and before that the Hittite Empire, going back 36 to 40 centuries.  Both ports are very old, full of waxing and waning over the centuries, while many wars were fought to control both before the Persians did.  The old fights began after the fall of the Persians and the failed hold of the Seleucids, until the Romans controlled them both again.  Then it was the Byzantines vs. the various tribes that invaded starting in the 10th century, until the Seljuks controlled Amisos after the battle of Manzikert in 1071.  The Othmans controlled Gerze and cut the Byzantines off of trade on the plateau from both ends, ending the latter's income from that alternative route.  The Othmans, later the Ottomans, then strangled Constantinople's trade... which took only two and a half centuries, even after the city was plundered in 1204 by the Venetians.  All fun stuff.

Things like this provide structure to blocks of geography that looks like blobs on most maps, to most poeple. The pleasure I get from seeing the structure generate in close-up scale maps gives me a pleasure it's hard to describe... since people don't, generally, understand or care about maps.

Galicia, around Debica

 
Further east now, still heavily populated but beginning to disperse into country towns and villages, rather than commercial and manufacturing centres.  These are still satellite lands of Krakow, as all of Galicia, a large region compared to many of those I've worked on in east-central Europe, this is the powerhouse of the whole Polish state of the era.  Krakow was, for a time, the capital of Poland, in tandem with the other capital in Lithuania, Vilnius, or Wilno.  But the capital was moved to reduce the power of the intellectual class, to isolate the Polish throne from "facts" and "realistic expectations" and so on ... and that went very, very well.

For all of Poland's enemies.

There's much more Galicia to do, until drifting out of this corner of Poland and back into modern Ukraine, around Lwow.  All through the path ahead, I'll be cutting through the region's agricultural heart, right up to where I reach Kiyev.  I imagine that for most readers, a lot of what I'm doing now is a complete mystery to them, a part of Poland they've never looked at in depth.

For example, Nowy Sacz, which was done a few maps ago, is the navigational head of the Dunajec river, just as Krakow is the head of the Vistula.  "Poland" is defined by its rivers, which extend the importance of the Baltic Sea deep, deep into the far reaches of the country, in a great circle from Galicia here to Silesia.  The reason why Poland demanded an open port after WWI is because giving that port to Germany would have been like locking a collar around the entire economic welfare of the whole country.  A German-controlled Danzig would have become spectacularly wealthy on the labour of Poland, and would have funded a war twice the size of the one the Nazis were able to fight.  NO ONE in Europe, in 1919, would have permitted that; they'd have gone to war with Germany again rather than permit that.  So the Germans had to do without it, until they seized it in 1939 ... whereupon it did them no good, because Danzig's trade was throttled anyway by the British Navy keeping the Germans bound to the Baltic and North Atlantic.

It's this trade that made Poland such an appetising prize for the Russians, Austrians and Prussians in the 18th century.  It was the Austrians who gobbled up south and East Galicia in 1772, and then Krakow and Zerrwen in 1795.  True enough, it meant making the Prussians rich, as they controlled Gdansk, but the food production of Galicia and Lwow was prodigious, sufficient to allow Austria to double its population through the 19th century (among other factors). Galicia became known as the "granary of Europe," with its fertile lands producing abundant crops. The region's agricultural prosperity attracted settlers from other parts of the Austrian Empire, particularly from regions facing economic hardships or overpopulation.

Bakony, around Veszprem

And this finishes Lake Balaton.  The landscape all around is farmland with commercial centres designed to collect food and alternately process it or take it on to somewhere that does.  I think I failed to say before that the region is under the control of the Ottomans, so the general direction of food transport is south and east, not north towards Budapest or Vienna ... and yes, those cities dearly miss the good old days of the 15th century when this land was theirs.  It hasn't been since 1526, however.

Consider, that means 5 or 6 generations between the lost Battle of Mohacs and the time of my game world.  There isn't a person left alive who remembers when this was Hungarian territory ... though people do tend to maintain a great deal of nostalgia for past times, even when those happened a long, long time ago.  To put it into perspective, imagine that the United States had been under the control of the Mexicans since the year 1900 ... 124 years.  That's the space of time between Mohacs and my game world.  Would the residents of the Atlantic Seaboard, the Midwest and the Pacific Coast today, having been Mexican citizens all these years, still pine for the old America of late 19th century imperialism, second-rate presidents and a disastrous post civil-war reconstruction (which must have failed if the Mexicans invaded successfully) ...?

I think probably yes.  Though they'd have no idea what exactly they were missing.

Croatia & Bakony, around Varasd

Provides a little more of Lake Balaton at the top, with a slightly less developed agricultural plain than the last map.  The Croatia shown here is a mere rump of the modern state, controlled by Hungary at this time and having surrendered territory to both the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans.  Nonetheless, it is part of the bulwark "protecting" Europe from Vienna and the heart of Germany.  I put the word in quotes because any serious effort to overrun Croatia isn't going to meet sufficient resistance to keep something as large as the Ottoman Empire from succeeding.

In the period, the region did experience passing military campaigns, raids and occasional occupations of some its towns.  The time period had considerable influence on the future resilience, stubbornness and strong religious ties of Croatians overall.

I've got one more step west to make, an infrastructure-dense area consisting of Lower Styria and an small corner of Carniola.  It finishes off Croatia also, and will be the furthest west that I've mapped using this map formula.

Serbia-Kosovo, around Novibazar

Some wild country in northwest Kosovo and eastern Serbia, with two tiny settlements and little infrastructure.  These areas are somewhat easier to design, though the proliferation of mountains takes time.  I look forward to the big open plains of the Ukraine, with nary a hill ... though when I return to that, I'll be missing mountains.

All of these territories for the last couple of months, with the exception of "Cattaro" on the last post, which is under control of the Venetians, are part of the Ottoman Empire.  Despite the geographical obstacles before them, the Ottomans did very well in capturing and maintaining these regions for five centuries.  This left an indelible mark on the land, both in culture and in the manner of financial expenditures and religion.  In the game world, these lands are fraught with repression, religious persecution, blood feuds and political corruption.

The hillpeople, who hated the lowlanders, adopted Islam and become Moslems; the lowlanders remained steadfastly Christian ... though because they were isolated from both Catholicism and the Russian Orthodox entities, they formed local orthodox or catholic chapters that remain independent to this day.

As a pattern for designing game adventures, I find this difficult for my players.  Most aren't invested in either religion or nationalism; it can be hard even for adults to engage in struggles based upon this region's abject hatred for that, on a degree that often seems absurd.  Western soldiers in Kosovo in the 1990s had trouble relating to people's motivations that were based on wild, unrestrained hatred and a desire for genocide — both of which are legacies from such a long time under Turkish rule, where the locals had little control over their futures or social change.  The absence of political control fosters petty discontents.  The 17th century Balkans are rife with it.  Player parties are not, and it's therefore with blank eyes that they respond should I introduce some narrative based on this village attacking that without apparent cause.  So I largely don't.  Too much of it and all the parties want to do is leave and so somewhere more sensible, like France or Scandinavia.

Further Rumelia, west of Sizebolu

One section today, still in Further Rumelia:

It must feel a little confusing, as I'm going at this somewhat inconsistently.  I need to smooth out the west-side edge of the map as I progress.  This section fills in the gap I created in yesterday's map.

Rumelia, like much of the map, is under the control of the Ottomans in the game world.  Rumelia in Ottoman Turkish means "Land of the Romans," which was in reference to Constantinople, not Rome.  It's the same basic construction that was used for the 13th century Sultanate of Rum, that occupied central Anatolia, was also taken from the Byzantines.

Rumelia is a rolling country with wide, fertile plains; it became the home of the Bulgars after 681, once they'd defeated and driven out the Avars.  Being Turkic, the Bulgarians are human, unlike other tribes from central Asia in my world, whom are orcish in race.  They adopted Eastern Orthodoxy from the Byzantines and maintained their faith through the Ottoman occupation, unlike other parts of the Balkans that became Islamic.  However, the Bulgarian Orthodox church is isolated from the main branch of Orthodoxy, which is located in Moskva.

Lakany, Krivassa & Kherson

I was getting a little tired with how slow I was moving through central Ukraine, so I took some time on a slow Sunday, yesterday, and did six sections.  We have a lot to talk about.

Starting with, first, this part of Lakany, northeast of Vozakan.

This links up the Southern Bug.  Note the elevation numbers in the corners; the "6" near Privolson is that many feet above sea level, so we can see how close we are to the Black Sea.  The "738" ft. figure for Lakany is a mystery to me, since I couldn't find anything on GoogleEarth to suggest that elevation, meaning that my source material was in error.  Doesn't matter, really.  I've already committed myself.

All through this area, the rivers are about 200 ft. below the plateau stretching towards the sea ... not enough for a hill symbol, but worth noting.  The infrastructures are thinning out, letting some steppe-hexes through, but not many.  As we progress east, however, the roads also thin out, with the occasional centre becoming more isolated.  Mykil is 18 miles from Abrono; that's a long journey given the density of places we found in Vassia.

Here's the next two sections to the east:

 

This stretches east to the big city of Krivoi.  However, when you read "Krivoi" you should be thinking "Pittsburgh."

There are certain places in the world where iron ore and high grade coal lay side-by-side in a way that makes it brilliant for making steel.  The Ruhr is one such place; Silesia is another.  Others include Pittsburgh, Shenyang and two places in Siberian called Kuznetsk and Minusinsk.  Way, way out in Siberia.  Where it gets brutally cold.

Forgive me while I get political a moment.  The Ukraine has two such areas, about two hundred miles apart.  The bigger one is the Donetsk, which the Russians have occupied since 2014.  There's a great amount of fighting going on over this region, as it was the old Soviet Union's most valuable geographical asset ... which it lost when the Ukraine became independent.  The other coal-iron area is called the Kryvbas, though the coal part is lacking while the iron very much is not.  This is what the Russians want in this war; they want to stabilise the Donbas and they want to take and hold Krovoi; this summer they failed spectacularly in doing both.  But here's something to think about: the west, especially the Germans and the French, are chest deep in the Kryvbas' development; the Kryvbas is one reason Europe wants the Ukraine in the E.U., and if you want to understand why American and European weapons are expensively being sent to the Ukraine, it's here.  If the Kryvbas fell into Russian hands, the price of steel would shoot up, it would sustain the Russian's future war machine and it would be a disaster for many companies who can't afford to lose the place as an asset.

But, as I said, Russia choked and didn't get there.  How come the press hasn't mentioned any of this?  Well, I'll point out the press said jack shit about Cominco's interests in Kosovo in the 1990s, too.  There are very definite muzzling aspects about wars carried out for the benefit of huge multinational conglomerates ... mostly because they own the press.  But go look for it.  The information is out there.  It's just not mainstream, and most of it's written in a way that if you don't know how important Krivoi is, you won't understand why the reporter's discussing it.

Oh, nearly forgot.  Krivoi is Ukrainian President's Volodymyr Zelensky's home town.  He knows exactly how valuable it is.

Mapping Krivoi, then.  I had a surprise to discover there was a big inconvenient lake where I'd previously put the road south of Krystofos above, so some changes needed to be made:

I thought I'd give a wide scale image of the area; sorry if this makes it difficult to read the post and look at the map at the same time.

We haven't seen Krivassa yet.  This is again a made-up province for Little Tartary.  It corresponds to a "raion," or political district that's part of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblask; the city of Dnepropetrovsk (not on the map) has been renamed "Dnipro" since 2016.  Which is easier to say.  It's an eastern bulwark against the Zaporozhians, controlling the west bank of the Dneiper while the latter controls the east bank.  Krivoi isn't a market town, just a big manufacturing burgh in my game world; the outlet market is Kopol, shown on the bottom right of the map with the name cut off.

One last thing about Krivoi. A look at GoogleEarth around the city is fascinating; the city is surrounding by open pit mines, many of which have been closed.  The image shown shows three big ex-pits, with the lake appearing on the map for scale.  I've set the mouse so that it gives the elevation on the nearest, biggest pit, shown in the bottom right of the screen, -925 ft.  The level of the land is 190 ft. above sea level, so this makes the pit nearly 1,100 ft. deep.  The other two are slightly less deep, -566 and -475 ft.  The big pit is 2 miles from edge to edge.  Wikipedia shows them filled with water.

Oh, also, these maps are from 1985.  I use the oldest maps of GoogleEarth I can find.  I leave it to the player to look into what this area looks like today.

Obviously, none of these exist in the 17th century, nor the hills surrounding Krivoi made of the material.  And though it's understood that the discovery of iron in the area began in the 19th century, I'm going to let magic detect the iron before that, so that in my game world Krivoi is a pre-industrial digger of iron ore, just the same.

Moving on, then ...

We're back in Lakany, skipping west and one line south again.  Here's another gap in the Southern Bug that needs connecting.  That river that flows west of Privolson turns out not to be there; it does flow through Privolson, but then it turns south.

There, all nice and neat.  All the rivers drift to the south, towards the Sea.  This is the very bottom of the Kiyev sheet, so I'll be moving south onto the next sheet with tomorrow's post (and copying the top two hexes of that map onto the bottom two of this one).  The Kiyev sheet felt like it took forever to cross.

Two sections left.  Here's the rough:

That's the big Dneiper river on the bottom right, which we'll be mapping soon.  The four hexes here went fairly quickly, with their little bits of infrastructure.  The Inhul and Inhulets rivers dominate the landscape.

That's all of it.  Nice to see some lakes for a change.  This is as far east as the map has ever been, and it's going to to out farther.  But I'll talk about that tomorrow.

Vassia, around Mirg

First, today's maps.  I was going to do a section and then half a section east of that, to make the hexes line up, but as I'm straddling the cut-off between the Kiyev and Dneiper sheets, it's easier to do the half-section first and the section after that.  So here's the pre-map half-section on K.30e - Kiyev:

This gets us into Vassia, which I'm going to talk about today, but first it's all maps.  The infrastructure numbers are getting higher, as Vassia surrounds an important Ottoman province on the frontier with Kiyev.

The distribution was unusual, as I got a bunch of type-4's and a type-2, whereas a single type-1 would have consumed five of these hexes into one.  This distribution continued, curiously enough, into the next section, now on the K-32e-Dneiper sheet:

Settlements aplenty here, and good solid infrastructure numbers, though of course nothing extravagant in the 200s.  When I completed the map, though ...

I got seven type-2's and no type-1's at all.  That's very unusual.  No type-3's either.  This makes for a high distribution pattern, with 12 population centres, the most I've had to add since way back in Ternopol Wald, which now seems like a long time ago.

And here I'm going to talk about breaking some of my own rules with regards to representing the Earth with my game world.  Historically, there is no place called "Vassia."  Moreover, while the city names above are placed in the location of actual places, the names have been changed to reflect a distinctly different culture from either Russian or Ukrainian.  The changes are slight: on GoogleEarth, "Hruz" is Hruz'ke.  "Olek" is Oleksiivka.  "Mirg" is Novomyrhorod, or Novomirgorod as the Russians spelled it in 1952.  "Vassia" the territory, occupies what is today Kirovohrad oblast.

The reason for this is because the region's background until the early 18th century was distinctly NOT Slavic.  The area had been ravaged endlessly by tribes pouring in from the east, from the Visigoths and the Huns to the Pechenegs and eventually the Mongols ... who permanently settled in what's southern modern Ukraine as the "Khanate of the Golden Horde."  Eventually, it became "Little Tartary," as the Mongol Tartar hegemony in this part of the world became known when "Great Tartary" had collapsed and lost it's influence here.  The Tartars, to protect themselves, allied themselves with the Ottomans, giving the latter more and more power until, by the middle 17th century, the Ottomans were effectively in control here.  Wikipedia and historians say that Little Tartary, or the Crimean Khanate, lasts until the early 18th century (1783), when the Russians annexed it ... but personally I've chosen to count it as part of the Ottoman Empire, as it's essentially an utterly dominated client state.

As an interesting note, this part of the Ukraine was known as the "Wild Fields," a historical term used by the Poles and Lithuanians, until the 18th century.  From it, the Tatar tribes raided into Kiyev and Poland, and into Russia too, although this raiding largely subsided in the second part of the 1600s.  My world, remember, takes place in 1650.  The push back came from the Russians, who expanded into Poland between 1654 and 1667, and from the Ukrainian Cossacks, who dwelt east of the Dneiper in the Zaporozhian Sich, and who began to claim parts of what I'm calling Vassia after the 1620s.  Thus some of the villages on the map above are "Cossack villages" and some are "Tatar villages."  In-fighting is  taking place, so it would be a difficult part of the world for a low-level party, who might get randomly attacked on a road first by one side, then the other.  They'd have to be clever and strong to defend themselves and win the trust of one of these groups.  It's a Conan adventure.

Still one more detail to pile on top of all this.  In my game world, because I wanted the presence of non-human races to fit into the historical tapestry, the Mongols were not human, but uruk-hai; "ogrillon" from the Fiend Folio, while I prefer the designation "Haruchai" because it's my own and I can do what I want with the race without getting bogged down by Tolkienesque boundries.  Essentially, orcs with 2 hit dice.  In turn, the Cumans and Pechenegs were orcs; and the original Turkish tribes in the 7th to 10th century in central Asia had a great deal of orcish blood.

My argument, however, is that the orcish genome is weak ... with constant interbreeding with humans, the genome evaporates, leaving behind a completely human genome.  This is what happened to the Bulgars, who were originally a series of half-orcish Turkic tribes in the Volga region in the 7th century, who slaughtered their way into Europe (bigger and stronger because they were orcs), bred with the Slavs and ultimately became Slavic themselves, with no recognisable orcish characteristics to speak of.

This is, of course, fantasy nonsense.  But it allows me to create historical precedents for non-human territories in my game world, such as the existence of Cumana, which in no way exists in human history.  This half-orc state, remaining half-orc through traditional inter-breeding with only half-orcs and orcs, dominates eastern Ukraine, acting as a Kiyevan-like state between Moscovy and the Ottomans.  The existence of this state robs Russia of much trading revenue, thus helping keep the Russian state weaker in the 1600s than it actually was; thus the war against Poland won't go as well in the 1660s as it did in the real world ... also because Russia is hemmed in by two states that restrain it from crossing the Urals and gaining access to the resources of Siberia: a dwarven kingdom called Hoth and a surviving remnant of the Mongols, the orc-haruchai alliance, the Jagatai Empire (or Chagutai).  My Russia is nowhere near as powerful as Earth's Russia.

So ... these are just a few changes to keep in mind as we move south towards Crimea.  The population is largely human, but there are definite half-orcish characteristics throughout.