Not sure if it works on the defensive but during wars you can "mark" provinces (via the province screen if I remember correctly) that you want your allies/vassals to attack/deal with which in my experience can help with stuff like that.
Europa Quarantina IV: No SV, You Are The Early Modern State - A Quest-Based Europa Universalis IV Playthrough
Not sure if it works on the defensive but during wars you can "mark" provinces (via the province screen if I remember correctly) that you want your allies/vassals to attack/deal with which in my experience can help with stuff like that.
Denmark-Norway Part 2: The Norwegian Perspective (1484-1528)
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
While legally an equal of the Kingdom of Denmark in the shared confraternity of the Kalmar Union, the Kingdom of Norway had long been the third wheel of the Union. With little population of the population or great fields of Denmark or the wide-reaching territory of Sweden, Norway had essentially been shackled to the Danish Crown, left to stew and seethe as it impotently clawed for power with ineffectual means. However, compared to Sweden, Norway would prove to have one advantage which the Swedish nobility would be shown to lack: Loyalty. Where the Swedes grumbled and complained with every infringement of their rights from the Danish Crown, the nobility of Norway were well-aware that they were the lesser partners in this union in practice if not in principle.
So the nobles bowed their heads, journeyed across the belts and sound to far-off Copenhagen, spoke the Danish tongue and proudly carried the Dannebrog and three crowns in battle. Bow and scrape they did, but this very bowing and scraping earned them Lappland and the Scottish Highlands and protected their rights, where the Danes clashed against the Swedes at every other moment. So bowing and scraping it would be. In 1484, the Kingdom of Norway had expanded further than it had for centuries, but it would remain the Kalmar Union's poor and forgotten backwater yet for many years to come.
As the Union was only dynastic and personal, it was a matter of fact that the internal situations of the realms could differ greatly with little to no royal oversight. This was the reality of life in the Kingdom of Norway, where the Crown could not even claim to own ten percent of its own land and the nobility held almost half of the land in the entire country. Privilege after privilege had been demanded and given to the estates, who had only eagerly taken them to demand further privileges yet. Much of this had been attempts by the Crown to shore up some amount of money with which to fund its endeavours.
Worst of all were the monopolies. The estates had been given a large amount of privileges and monopolies on certain trades and products, sharply limiting the amount which the Crown could actually tax. In the moment, these had been taken to avoid a deficit, but in the long term, they weakened the power of the Crown and heightened the tax burden overall, leading to a large amount of dispossessed and impoverished peasants stuck in extractive tenures as the small amounts of arable land possessed were ruthlessly managed to produce as much income as possible.
As transatlantic travel slowly opened up, Norwegians sought to escape to newly-redisovered Greenland, but Norwegian ships could not yet travel far enough to support such colonial endeavours. As such, the result was overpopulated Icelandic shantytowns of thousands waiting for the ship that could one day take them further beyond. To say that these were full of disease and largely unhygienic and unhealthy is perhaps a foregone conclusion. However, this was not the only issue affecting the Kingdom.
An alliance had been signed between the Electorate of Brandenburg and the Kalmar Union and had been in effect since 1444. The purpose of the alliance was purely defensive of course, to protect both from the rising power of the Polish-Lithuanian union and - following the reacquisition of the Duchy of Estonia - to protect the Union's Baltic territories. In 1494, the Kingdom of Bohemia declared war upon Brandenburg and the Kalmar Union came to its defence, citing the intervention of the Union, Poland-Lithuania intervened on part of its ally, the King-Elector, as well, transforming the war into a series of battles across the southern coast of the Baltic Sea until the Kalmar Union retreated from the war, ceding Latgalia to Poland and granting them a ten-year indemnity. Following this, a peace was signed in which the Kalmar Union was forbidden to sign an alliance with Brandenburg again.
While the war itself was not particularly harsh on the Union - all that had been lost was a fairly irrelevant Baltic province after all - the payment of the decennial indemnity lead to a higher tax burden on the nobles of the realms, leading the magnates and grandees themselves to raise the taxes on their respective peasantries. In Denmark, the pressure imposed by this tax burden on the peasantry - combined with the perception of Catholic bishops as living indulgent and pampered lives in frequent absenteeism and a failure to tend to the needs of the faithful - lead to the priest Kennet Larsson to initiate the Lutheran Reformation in Denmark. Kennet had himself been a follower of Luther before but it would not be long after his protests that Lutheranism was instituted by royal decree as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic creed of the Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden. Norway would remain Catholic de jure for two decades more.
In Norway, however, where this tax pressure impacted the already tax-yoked peasantry even harder than in Denmark, the results were catastrophic. Cities suffered enormous population decline as their residents fled the countryside and hid in the mountains to guard from the tax collectors, harbours to Iceland bustled and the Crown was forced to take several loans from the wealthy Hanseatic burghers simply for the royal Norwegian budget to stay afloat. In this moment of weakness, the Norwegian nobility and high clergy approached the Crown with a proposal; inviolable property rights in return for significant land returns. The Crown had little choice but to agree.
As the harbours bustled and unfree people of Norway clamoured for freedom from the taxman and deliverance from the yoke, an almost apocalyptic temperament filled the harbours of Norway. With little to no alternative, the Crown had little option but to permit them and in 1498, an expedition launched from the harbour of Reykjavik, seeking to establish a permanent residence in Greenland. What they found, however, was a largely frozen land with little opportunity for spacious settlement, nor much arable land or any of the remnants of the original settlers, but the ruins of a long-unused Catholic church. In the apocalyptic sentiment of the pilgrims and pioneers that arrived in the young colony of Eiriksfjord, the Kalaallit natives were attacked several times and driven from their lands, to retreat further north. This would be the first of many colonial frontier tragedies to which the Church would protest on the grounds of attempts at conversion, but ultimately ignore in the grander scheme of things.
With the steady growth of the Eiriksfjord colony, further expeditions were launched west in an attempt to glean a stronger picture of how the other transatlantic lands of this brave New World must look. Little success were had with these expeditions, but the successful founding of the Eiriksfjord colony delighted the Danish King, who pronounced it a miracle and at once appointed a Lutheran bishop as "Bishop of Greenland" from the traditional see of Gardar, no longer titular, but no longer Roman Catholic either. It would only be in 1506 that the settlements of Eiriksfjord were significant enough to merit proper charters and to allow for the construction of a harbour, in which ships could resupply and from which further expeditions could be launched.
And launched they were. From the harbours of Eiriksfjord, greater and greater expeditions were launched, royal benefice and blessings heaped upon successful explorers returning with stories of foreign lands and fearsome heathens - stories that inflamed the minds of Norwegians, Danes and Swedes alike. Suddenly the court was alight with the discoveries of these Norwegian explorers and their dastardly deeds of daring in the New World - which had already been named America in honour of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. While Portuguese and Castillian explorers had largely named and explored the majority of the South American east coast, it would be Dano-Norwegian explorers who mapped and categorized the east coast of North America.
However, it would prove to be a brief period of peace, as in 1511, the Holy Roman Emperor declared war upon the Poles, calling upon his marriage ties with the Kalmar Union's Wittelsbach kings to follow him into the war. Unlike the previous war with the Poles, this war was prosecuted efficiently as an army marched into the Baltic and swiftly seized Latgalia, restoring Danish rule in the province in days. Following this, it transformed into a cat-and-mouse game as the King of the Romans pursued his war first in Bohemia, then in Poland and Lithuania while the Danes and Swedes fought in the north. Norwegian soldiers went undeployed for this war, as the small royal retinue of the Norwegian Crown was largely used to suppress revolt in the Highland and to guard the colonial frontier. Following the war's conclusion in 1515, any indemnities to be paid were canceled and Latgalia was permanently returned to Denmark, the Poles forced to cede their claim.
In the same year, Norway was formally made Lutheran; a largely grassroots process anyways as Lutheranism had already won great inroads with the population as a result of Swedish and Danish missionaries. This was a largely peaceful process helped along by Danish royal support, leading to the construction of Lutheran churches in several provinces. Later in 1516, a confederation of Norwegian nobles rose up to defend their rights and laid siege to Oslo in an attempt to prevent recent Danish overtures to the Norwegian viceroy to strengthen the state's hold on the nobility. The city was relieved, however, only months later by a combined Danish and Norwegian army, which forced the nobles to rout before giving pursuit and defeating them decisively. The Norwegian Lutheran Church would largely be modeled off the Danish Church, organized through the traditional system of bishoprics and with a propensity towards the expulsion of catholics and extremist reformers towards the colonies.
By 1517, the integration of the Kingdom of Sweden had been completed. This is not to say that it was simply abolished; the King remained King of Denmark and Sweden. Rather, this is to say that the bureaucratic apparati and institutions of the two countries were harmonized, even as Sweden possessed significant autonomy and say in internal affairs. The time of a fractured north was over. The United Kingdom of Denmark-Sweden - and its royal partner Norway - could now truly claim Dominium Maris Baltici; Dominion of the Baltic Sea. From Copenhagen to Stockholm, Umeå, Borgå and Riga flew the Royal Danish banner and from Eiriksfjord to Hansatia and Christiania in the New World flew the Lion of Saint Olaf. The Union had now truly entered the ranks of European great powers once and for all.
It did not take more than a few years for Denmark-Sweden to demonstrate its power; an assault on the State of the Teutonic Order in 1523 seized Danzig and forced the old knightly order to bow, even while a self-proclaimed "Faithful Catholic Host" raged through western Norway and Teutons laid siege to Viborg. The Catholic Host was defeated in 1525 with little trouble as a host of more than 20,000 Dano-Swedish soldiers broke it decisively, although in practice the lands it had seized would remain outside effective state control for many years yet.
In 1528, Norway was in a strange position. While the Kingdom was increasingly poor, its territories were larger than they had ever been before, possessed of a burgeoning North American colony with no immediate rivals. The Baltic Sea was transforming into what could best be described as a Danish lake - a true mare balticum nostrum - and Norwegian merchants oversaw an extensive transatlantic chain of trade, unprecedented in the world but for Castille. But the wealth of Norway remained declining, even as the star of the Union as a whole was rising. Only time could tell what would become of Saint Olaf's kingdom.
So the nobles bowed their heads, journeyed across the belts and sound to far-off Copenhagen, spoke the Danish tongue and proudly carried the Dannebrog and three crowns in battle. Bow and scrape they did, but this very bowing and scraping earned them Lappland and the Scottish Highlands and protected their rights, where the Danes clashed against the Swedes at every other moment. So bowing and scraping it would be. In 1484, the Kingdom of Norway had expanded further than it had for centuries, but it would remain the Kalmar Union's poor and forgotten backwater yet for many years to come.
As the Union was only dynastic and personal, it was a matter of fact that the internal situations of the realms could differ greatly with little to no royal oversight. This was the reality of life in the Kingdom of Norway, where the Crown could not even claim to own ten percent of its own land and the nobility held almost half of the land in the entire country. Privilege after privilege had been demanded and given to the estates, who had only eagerly taken them to demand further privileges yet. Much of this had been attempts by the Crown to shore up some amount of money with which to fund its endeavours.
Worst of all were the monopolies. The estates had been given a large amount of privileges and monopolies on certain trades and products, sharply limiting the amount which the Crown could actually tax. In the moment, these had been taken to avoid a deficit, but in the long term, they weakened the power of the Crown and heightened the tax burden overall, leading to a large amount of dispossessed and impoverished peasants stuck in extractive tenures as the small amounts of arable land possessed were ruthlessly managed to produce as much income as possible.
As transatlantic travel slowly opened up, Norwegians sought to escape to newly-redisovered Greenland, but Norwegian ships could not yet travel far enough to support such colonial endeavours. As such, the result was overpopulated Icelandic shantytowns of thousands waiting for the ship that could one day take them further beyond. To say that these were full of disease and largely unhygienic and unhealthy is perhaps a foregone conclusion. However, this was not the only issue affecting the Kingdom.
An alliance had been signed between the Electorate of Brandenburg and the Kalmar Union and had been in effect since 1444. The purpose of the alliance was purely defensive of course, to protect both from the rising power of the Polish-Lithuanian union and - following the reacquisition of the Duchy of Estonia - to protect the Union's Baltic territories. In 1494, the Kingdom of Bohemia declared war upon Brandenburg and the Kalmar Union came to its defence, citing the intervention of the Union, Poland-Lithuania intervened on part of its ally, the King-Elector, as well, transforming the war into a series of battles across the southern coast of the Baltic Sea until the Kalmar Union retreated from the war, ceding Latgalia to Poland and granting them a ten-year indemnity. Following this, a peace was signed in which the Kalmar Union was forbidden to sign an alliance with Brandenburg again.
While the war itself was not particularly harsh on the Union - all that had been lost was a fairly irrelevant Baltic province after all - the payment of the decennial indemnity lead to a higher tax burden on the nobles of the realms, leading the magnates and grandees themselves to raise the taxes on their respective peasantries. In Denmark, the pressure imposed by this tax burden on the peasantry - combined with the perception of Catholic bishops as living indulgent and pampered lives in frequent absenteeism and a failure to tend to the needs of the faithful - lead to the priest Kennet Larsson to initiate the Lutheran Reformation in Denmark. Kennet had himself been a follower of Luther before but it would not be long after his protests that Lutheranism was instituted by royal decree as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic creed of the Kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden. Norway would remain Catholic de jure for two decades more.
In Norway, however, where this tax pressure impacted the already tax-yoked peasantry even harder than in Denmark, the results were catastrophic. Cities suffered enormous population decline as their residents fled the countryside and hid in the mountains to guard from the tax collectors, harbours to Iceland bustled and the Crown was forced to take several loans from the wealthy Hanseatic burghers simply for the royal Norwegian budget to stay afloat. In this moment of weakness, the Norwegian nobility and high clergy approached the Crown with a proposal; inviolable property rights in return for significant land returns. The Crown had little choice but to agree.
As the harbours bustled and unfree people of Norway clamoured for freedom from the taxman and deliverance from the yoke, an almost apocalyptic temperament filled the harbours of Norway. With little to no alternative, the Crown had little option but to permit them and in 1498, an expedition launched from the harbour of Reykjavik, seeking to establish a permanent residence in Greenland. What they found, however, was a largely frozen land with little opportunity for spacious settlement, nor much arable land or any of the remnants of the original settlers, but the ruins of a long-unused Catholic church. In the apocalyptic sentiment of the pilgrims and pioneers that arrived in the young colony of Eiriksfjord, the Kalaallit natives were attacked several times and driven from their lands, to retreat further north. This would be the first of many colonial frontier tragedies to which the Church would protest on the grounds of attempts at conversion, but ultimately ignore in the grander scheme of things.
With the steady growth of the Eiriksfjord colony, further expeditions were launched west in an attempt to glean a stronger picture of how the other transatlantic lands of this brave New World must look. Little success were had with these expeditions, but the successful founding of the Eiriksfjord colony delighted the Danish King, who pronounced it a miracle and at once appointed a Lutheran bishop as "Bishop of Greenland" from the traditional see of Gardar, no longer titular, but no longer Roman Catholic either. It would only be in 1506 that the settlements of Eiriksfjord were significant enough to merit proper charters and to allow for the construction of a harbour, in which ships could resupply and from which further expeditions could be launched.
And launched they were. From the harbours of Eiriksfjord, greater and greater expeditions were launched, royal benefice and blessings heaped upon successful explorers returning with stories of foreign lands and fearsome heathens - stories that inflamed the minds of Norwegians, Danes and Swedes alike. Suddenly the court was alight with the discoveries of these Norwegian explorers and their dastardly deeds of daring in the New World - which had already been named America in honour of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. While Portuguese and Castillian explorers had largely named and explored the majority of the South American east coast, it would be Dano-Norwegian explorers who mapped and categorized the east coast of North America.
However, it would prove to be a brief period of peace, as in 1511, the Holy Roman Emperor declared war upon the Poles, calling upon his marriage ties with the Kalmar Union's Wittelsbach kings to follow him into the war. Unlike the previous war with the Poles, this war was prosecuted efficiently as an army marched into the Baltic and swiftly seized Latgalia, restoring Danish rule in the province in days. Following this, it transformed into a cat-and-mouse game as the King of the Romans pursued his war first in Bohemia, then in Poland and Lithuania while the Danes and Swedes fought in the north. Norwegian soldiers went undeployed for this war, as the small royal retinue of the Norwegian Crown was largely used to suppress revolt in the Highland and to guard the colonial frontier. Following the war's conclusion in 1515, any indemnities to be paid were canceled and Latgalia was permanently returned to Denmark, the Poles forced to cede their claim.
In the same year, Norway was formally made Lutheran; a largely grassroots process anyways as Lutheranism had already won great inroads with the population as a result of Swedish and Danish missionaries. This was a largely peaceful process helped along by Danish royal support, leading to the construction of Lutheran churches in several provinces. Later in 1516, a confederation of Norwegian nobles rose up to defend their rights and laid siege to Oslo in an attempt to prevent recent Danish overtures to the Norwegian viceroy to strengthen the state's hold on the nobility. The city was relieved, however, only months later by a combined Danish and Norwegian army, which forced the nobles to rout before giving pursuit and defeating them decisively. The Norwegian Lutheran Church would largely be modeled off the Danish Church, organized through the traditional system of bishoprics and with a propensity towards the expulsion of catholics and extremist reformers towards the colonies.
By 1517, the integration of the Kingdom of Sweden had been completed. This is not to say that it was simply abolished; the King remained King of Denmark and Sweden. Rather, this is to say that the bureaucratic apparati and institutions of the two countries were harmonized, even as Sweden possessed significant autonomy and say in internal affairs. The time of a fractured north was over. The United Kingdom of Denmark-Sweden - and its royal partner Norway - could now truly claim Dominium Maris Baltici; Dominion of the Baltic Sea. From Copenhagen to Stockholm, Umeå, Borgå and Riga flew the Royal Danish banner and from Eiriksfjord to Hansatia and Christiania in the New World flew the Lion of Saint Olaf. The Union had now truly entered the ranks of European great powers once and for all.
It did not take more than a few years for Denmark-Sweden to demonstrate its power; an assault on the State of the Teutonic Order in 1523 seized Danzig and forced the old knightly order to bow, even while a self-proclaimed "Faithful Catholic Host" raged through western Norway and Teutons laid siege to Viborg. The Catholic Host was defeated in 1525 with little trouble as a host of more than 20,000 Dano-Swedish soldiers broke it decisively, although in practice the lands it had seized would remain outside effective state control for many years yet.
In 1528, Norway was in a strange position. While the Kingdom was increasingly poor, its territories were larger than they had ever been before, possessed of a burgeoning North American colony with no immediate rivals. The Baltic Sea was transforming into what could best be described as a Danish lake - a true mare balticum nostrum - and Norwegian merchants oversaw an extensive transatlantic chain of trade, unprecedented in the world but for Castille. But the wealth of Norway remained declining, even as the star of the Union as a whole was rising. Only time could tell what would become of Saint Olaf's kingdom.
It's interesting to note- I'll do a more thorough update from a gameplay perspective later but I'm not in a *great* position moneywise either. I'm not consistently negative like @ManusDomini is, but I'm only just catching up in tech and I'n consistently hovering at around +3 ducats per month, so I haven't been able to build much, for example. I may well put the effort in next session to try and build up some actual *funds* and infrastructure in Denmark, Sweden and- yes, in Norway as well.
...might even take out some loans deliberately
...might even take out some loans deliberately
Last edited:
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
fucking danes always talking about how bad they have it oh so terrible oh its gotta feel so bad actually making mon-
best king in history of kings glorious king ruling over kings most christian most catholic most pious king most wise king who puts other kings to shame how many provinces do you want named after you in the new world i will rename my capital in your honour
love the flavor you put into the norway updates manus, and I can't wait too see more from the danish perspective soon horn.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I always disliked reading Let's Plays on the Paradox forum that were just some guy talking about his economy or whatever or making outdated EU4 memes. Horngeek makes it work because it's two sides of the same coin and because unlike the majority of such Let's Plays, horngeek actually has a sense of humour. I'm really excited for when we get to Asia proper and I can start going full alt-hist and describing local syncretism and similar stuff.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay thread, before the session today begins, let me just ask you a question. We are in the 1590s and just about to launch a large-scale invasion of England, we wish to keep you updated but there are some 10-20 years we just forgot to take any screenshots of. How would you wish us to deal with that in terms of updating you.
- Location
- Not the asylum anymore
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Text, maybe? Just a short description of what the screenshot would've been?
- Location
- in the trash
constantly make reference to the events of those missing 10-20 years for the rest of this playthrough while never actually explaining what happened during them in any detail, so as to drive us all mad
blame this on bad recordkeeping
blame this on bad recordkeeping
genius
Do this, not even joking that sounds cool as hell.Write a academic screach about the lack of surviving sources because of X , and try to pierce the details back together academia styled
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
the main problem is that fuck-all happened in that period, so it's just a random gap lol
that is what the kalmar konspiracy wants to tell you! Whake up sheeple!
Fallenblades643
Seeker of the Divine Taste
All I'm gonna say is,
[X] Motion to Vassalize and March Dithmarschen in perpetuity.
It must be preserved for all to see its marshy goodness in times yet too come.
[X] Motion to Vassalize and March Dithmarschen in perpetuity.
It must be preserved for all to see its marshy goodness in times yet too come.
It's actually still around lol- I've never actually been comfortable picking a fight with the HRE, and events have never conspired to get me in a position to take the dammed thing without picking a fight with the Emperor.
I will say, one *major* issue we have with Emperor popped up in this week's session- the increased tendency for the AI to go for Defender of the Faith leads to a situation where the overlord *will* get instantly involved in a colonial war because they're also the Defender of the Faith.
- Location
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
Doesn't defender of the faith only apply on the same continent?
- Location
- Earth, Milky Way
Wanted to chime in and say this quest seems pretty cool, and even if it doesn't continue I really like the concept. I thought it was especially interesting how y'all played both Denmark and Norway, rather than it just being one person playing. Really gave it a comfy teamwork vibe.
So, the save actually got corrupted unfortunateky, but we're looking at options for something else. I've pointed out that Crusader Kings 3 comes out this coming week, so we're gonna see how functional it is on release.
- Location
- Earth, Milky Way
Exciting!
I've never played a paradox game that was good on release, but hopefully this time will be different. I'd be happy if you made a threadmarked post in this thread linking to the new quest, but I don't know if that would upset people expecting an update.
If you are moving to a new thread when you start again with ck3 or what have you, I'd like to make a suggestion to move to a different part of the forum as this thread feels a little out of the way.
Mind you I don't know where you would put it, cause this feels like where it is supposed to be, but still.
Mind you I don't know where you would put it, cause this feels like where it is supposed to be, but still.
This section is where Let's Plays go, which this is.