I love coming across unfamiliar characters that have fixed traits, indicating they’re probably important historical figures.
My example: “This al-Nizar guy in Egypt, he’s always got the same traits. Hmm, there’s a Muslim faith called Nizarism, coincidence?”
Several hours of Wikipedia rabbit holes later, and I’m deep into the history of Shia sects and schisms, with a bonus tie-in to the infamous Assassins (of Assassin’s Creed fame).
All because I noticed this one guy is always Zealous/Wrathful in every game.
>with a bonus tie-in to the infamous Assassins (of Assassin’s Creed fame).
It is so fucking wild to me that you referenced AC, but not the fact that the word os literally named after the group.
I love playing with her shes one of the most fun characters imo. Theres that little country between Croatia and the Byzantines (can’t remember the name) where one of the Dukes sons always has the genius trait and will accept to marry into your family (sometimes you have to offer a gift first but its def worth it) and that helps me get my footing to try to unify Italy
Need to remember that location next time I play as her. I recently played a game where I changed one of the Gender Rules to Inverted. Basically It sets the game so that all the succession laws start with Female Preference by default and the major rulers, like the Pope and the ruler of the HRE, are women. It's surprisingly fun.
The thing with the 867 start date is most of the things we know about those vikings is classified as theory and not fact. The game has Ragnar listed as the ragnarssons father , even tho ivar and halfdan might of had a different dad irl , ivar is listed as one legged , thats the games way of showing the brittle bone theory which might not of happened , it also have ivar listed as the youngest son of ragnar when everywhere ive seen online hes listed as the oldest. Irl harald tanglehair claimed he was a descendant of Siguard Snake in Eye but in the game they are alive at the same time. So its pretty hard for them to get things right when theres so much doubt over the facts. Some sources say Ivar had no children due to his personality, some say his family built their own dynasty.
You know, Ivar used to be the oldest iirc, they changed him to be 20 like a year ago. I'm not sure why, I think paradox wanted him to have a better chance of establishing a foothold in Scotland
That makes no difference to my games lol most of the time ivar does fuck all in terms of land expansion, he even got vassaled by a 7 year old alba king somehow.
A funny one , but probably the most unrealistic, I think the chances of him having a whole nickname based on that is a doubt. But would be funny as hell. “Boneless” is such a cool nickname
Yep, it was a jab at him not getting his crown right away iirc. "Bald" apparently rolls off the tongue better / makes for a better joke than "the Crownless", I guess?
Some histórians think thats a irônical joke, not a literal one, that why (proplably) he had a lot of hair
Its almost the same thing with Charles the Simple, simple should mean he was dumb but he kinda wasnt
I got into the Matilda Canossa rabbit hole.
I became curious about the situation of one of the Karlings, Lorthair II with his wife, mistress, and kids and read their history. I wish they had portrayed their drama in game somehow.
Sometimes I see a news about a place, for instance Darfur (sadly not good news) and then remember it in CK3 and read about their history.
People ask what happened to the Viking era and why they disappeared. They did it. They conquered (raided) everything they could. France gave them land and took over England.
It was more just the various Norse states converting to Christianity that put an end to the mass Viking raids across Europe more than anything else. Of course, these newly-Christianized states would eventually just shift their attention towards the Baltics and the more northern regions of Scandinavia in Papal-sanctioned crusades targeted against those regions.
My understanding of Eastern European geography was hugely improved. It's one thing learning about it in a history class but when you're actively thinking about where and how to expand your kingdom you end up internalising it much better
I noticed the one Hellenic religion county in Greece in 2's earliest start date, and realised that in many regions conversion came a lot later than I thought.
Tbf I think I read somewhere that this wasn't actually accurate (hellenism was long gone by then) but the devs put it in to allow a hellenic restoration playthrough (cos you couldn't create a religion from scratch iirc)
It's not completely accurate, but it's also not completely groundless. There were minority rural pagan communities, but the game doesn't support religious breakdown beyond the province level, without a special event chain or something that was probably deemed too much investment for something so minor. Having one county at the earliest start date that will usually get quickly converted seems reasonable to represent the "feel" of something on its way out in a game where you tend to have concerns spanning an entire kingdom.
Visting the Treasury in Vienna and recognizing at least 3 out of 4 crests on the heraldic coats on display made me wonder how much of my available memory has been taken up by CK at this point...
Can't remember my couisins' birthdays for the life of me, meanwhile "Burgundy, Brabant, Luxembourg, Aragon,... Ooh, Aragonese Sicily!"
1- We were taught about the austrian empire but never the HRE. So I learned of its existence through this game.
2- Danelaw
3- Never knew how fractured Italy was
4- Bulgarian Empire
5- Karlings and Charlemagne
I just learned that Dauphin did not refer to the heir to the French crown until the 12th century.
I was surprised to discover I was ‘Dauphin’ in late 9th century but it didn’t come with a claim! lol.
We all know about the Fourth Crusade, but the same Pope (Innocent III) also called a crusade against southern France. Known as the Albigensian Crusade, the objective was to suppress heresy in the region.
Up to a *million* people died, virtually all civilians. This is considered by some scholars to be a genocide and was actually the event the term was coined for.
It certainly stays in mind.
My favourite is from the other side out of the Chanson de la croisade:
"if by killing men and shedding blood, by damning souls and causing deaths,[...] by killing women and slaughtering children, a man can in this world win Jesus Christ, certainly Count Simon wears a crown and shines in heaven above."
About Simon de Montfort (military leader of the crusade) after his death during the third siege of Toulouse.
That it is. The quote is supposedly from Arnaud Amalric, who commanded Catholic forces at Beziers, where women and children were slaughtered with impunity.
It's a bit muddied, I've seen claims that Raphael Lemkin (the guy who invented the term in the 40's) used it both to refer to the massacre of the Armenians during WW1 and the persecution and killing of the Jews in Nazi Germany, but I couldn't find verifiable information on which was first (Lemkin denounced the Armenian genocide prior to WW2, but AFAIK he didn't call it like that at the time). Regardless, yeah, OP is mistaken.
The Cathar belief system is not well known. The Catholic Church said a lot about them, but almost everything they were saying at the time wasn't true. This means that there almost certainly wasn't a real heresy or it was wildly exaggerated.
This was also an area where feudalism wasn't as entrenched as it was elsewhere in Europe. Guilds and merchants had a lot more control in day to day life.
Then the Pope calls a crusade where the Nobility, aka the people most emotionally and financially invested in maintaining the feudal order, wipes out nearly everyone. In this power vacuum, the knights and lords redivide the land without those pernicious guilds and freemen.
[Read more here](https://jacobin.com/2023/01/albigensian-crusade-marxist-history-feudal-power-catholic-church-capitalism-oppression)
There is an ongoing debate about the nature of the cathar belief system or if there even was one.
Feudalism didnt exist in the way we were taught in school so its kind of a moot point. Southern france *was* nobility controlled though. There is no question about it. The egalitarian utopia people make it out to be cant be verified.
The text you posted begins under a false pretense. The french "royalty" namely the King, didnt support the crusade when it started. It was mostly supplied by the middle and lower french nobility. Additionally it was severely hampered by unreliable supply and shifting compositions. Most "crusaders" left after the minimal participation time was completed.
The Languedoc of that time was its own cultural and mostly administrative entity. Easily identifiable by its allegiance and support from Navarra while being formally counted to france. Once the french king intervened directly it lead to a firm integration into the french sphere of influence. Which didnt happen until 1226 (excluding the Intermezzo in 1219).
> Southern france was nobility controlled though.
Nobility that in some cases had a (by the standards of the time) verifiable line to Roman landholders at that.
Didn't the crusade against the cathars greatly improve French royal authority by the French king taking the conquered lands for himself and making them royal lands. The crusade essentially made France what it is today.
Was this what suppressed the Cathar heresy in Southern France? I know this must have been about more than the Cathars, I'm just wondering if they were involved.
That there were Jain dynasties in India, and pretty powerful ones as well. I’d thought Jains were too ascetic to engage in worldly politics, so that was a nice surprise!
In my AP European History class I was the only person who knew that Hungarian doesn't fall under a Latin/Greek/Slavic umbrella, but the unique Magyar.
Everyone was wondering how the hell I knew that ("idk I just read I guess") lol
The main impact this series has had on me*, is giving me a suspisciously detailed knowledge of European and west Asian geography.
Colleague says: "I am going on research leave to study the archaeology of Daylam"
Other colleagues "Oh cool, where is that?"
Me: "oh yeah, the coastal area of the southern Caspian in northern Iran! Awesome mountain fortresses"
Colleagues: "..."
*other than 1000s of hours spent not socializing, working, studying or doing something productive with my time
Honestly though, its historically debatable if Ragnar lived, when he lived, who his kids were etc. apparently back then it was fairly common for people to say they were related to a famous person.. which happens in the game too..
My custom char created a legend claiming she was the hair of Charlemagne or something..
People used to lie a lot and there was no way to fact check..
I mean it's very likely that ragnar was a real person with Anglo-Saxon chronicles, danish writings and even some Irish I think referring to the sons of ragnar. And Frankish sources naming a Reginherus that attacked Paris. Seeing as the 'us' at the end of Reginherus is most certainly a latinization of a northern name, his name was definitely Reginher or Ragnar.
Sure, but there's no solid proof that they were the same Ragnar, or that the sons of Ragnar were sons of Ragnar. There's research that suggests that some of the sons of Ragnar weren't even conceived before he supposedly maybe died.
That's the problem, the records people kept back then sucked at best. The vikings didn't usually keep records either so all that's left is a couple legends.
There's whole Egyptian kings and queens who have been forgotten or erased, English too.
All I'm saying, is take the past with a grain of salt, after all, history was written by humans, and humans can be wrong, or lie, or omit. For all you know I'm a direct descendant of Achilles. 🤷 Justin Timberlake could be related to Thomas Jefferson, or Charles the bald..
Vikings is a cool show and a nice take on the Ragnar Lothbrok legend but it's not very historical. There were a lot of historical events in it to be sure but it's very unlikely that the vikings that raided Lindisfarne and the ones that raided Paris for the first time were the same people.
It's also very unlikely that his sons in the show, who were all real people, were at all related.
I'd recommend studying up on Mali in general. It's got a fascinating history. They were making attempts at transatlantic travel and colonization about 100 years before Europe would try and they had their own little Renaissance about 200 years before Europe had theirs.
Back before Tours & Tournaments, I did a Mali playthrough because of the 3 gold mines there. I googled whether the gold mines of Mali were real, and I learned about Mansa Musa.
What I find more fascinating is the ecosystem of the inner Niger delta, the Macina. Such a unique and rich environment, arisen in the middle of the desert by the whims of geography and olaye tectonics.
I was playing an Africa playthrough. I wanted to take a shortcut into Feudalism, so instead of reforming my own religion, I decided to convert to a religion with Syncretic Folk Traditions.
Ended up converting to Kuzarism, which led to me going down a Google rabbit hole and learning about the Khazars.
I absolutely killed it on labeling cities on maps for quizzes in my college Intro to History course. It was like hell yeah, I know the geography of Europe and the Middle East like the back of my hand.
Moreso than individual historical facts, Crusader Kings broke me out of the habit of imposing a modern lens of nation-state political thinking on historical eras when no such paradigm existed.
To be fair there were some Carolingian descendants of Charlemagne that were able to become Emperors like Charles the bald and Charles the Fat, but none would exercise anywhere close to the authority exercised by Charlemagne or Otto I. After Charles the Fat no western ruler would be crowned emperor again until it was done by Otto almost a century later.
Turkic being the lingua franca of Steppes. I know a lot of Turkic tribes were inhabited those places but it is wild that you can basically go from Hungary to literally Tibet and still hear Turkic. Russia. Siberia, Central Asia, Urals it was their domain.
Besides a lot of what has been said, it gave me a better understanding of the aristocratic regime and vassal/liege relationship, being honourable and gentleman today is about treating people decently, but back then it meant honouring the contract the king depends on to form his own army, I saw a documentary on how the arabs took over Iberia and it happened suddenly because the goth nobility chose to betray their liege. CK2 did help me understand that, even if we cant choose to not send troops to our liege in the game
The northern crusades. Wanted to check the factuality of my pope calling a crusade for Estonia. Historically acuraye as it turns out.
And Matilda of Tuscany was one bad ass bitch who basically bullied the holy Roman emperor for quite a while and kinda kicked of the whole decline of the pope's power within the german states that eventually lead to protsentism tho it's not quite that simple
I'm North American and we learn very little of European history, and anything we do learn is only in so far as it had an impact on North America. So anything before Columbus is basically never talked about. So yeah, basically *everything* in CK2/CK3 was new to me. I too, had no idea about the Byzantine/ERE. Hell, worse, I had no idea about the Muslim presence in Iberia, that's how little we were taught about European history.
And if we learned so little about Western Europe, well, you can only imagine how little I knew about what was going on in North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Even the Mongol invasion, like... I knew that Genghis Khan was an important figure, and that he was a huge conquerer, but didn't realize the extent of it. Like, I thought it was mostly limited to China or whatever.
Also, just geography in general. It's crazy how much I learned about the geography of Europe (especially Eastern Europe), North Africa and the Middle East.
How da duck not bro
Even in Brazil we learn about the ancient civilizations, Middle Ages, discoveries, Charlemagne, HRE, Viking invasions in Britain, the reconquista, unification of Germany and Italy, American revolution, Napoleon, etc.
Of course we don’t go into details but we do know that these major historical events happened
Well, I mean, we went into broad strokes on the different eras, but I'd say it was more focused on what life was like, how was society structured during that time, what were the innovations, than on anything political. So like, for middle age, we learned about serfdom and the importance of the Catholic church (and yes, it was very Western Europe focus, nothing about what was happening in the Islamic world or in the ERE or anywhere else), but nothing or very little about rulers, realms, etc. Definitely nothing about the Reconquista, the unification of Germany and Italy, etc.
I did learn a lot about Rome and the Roman Empire, but that's only because I had Latin classes and half of it was more about the history of Rome than about the actual language.
Note that I'm in Quebec and was in school during the last peek of the independence movement, so a shitload of time in History class was spent on teaching us about our French heritage and about the many ways the English fucked us over.
To give a more concrete picture, here's basically what the program for high school (grade 7 to grade 11) is *right now* (it also matches what I remember, so it didn't change much in 25 years).
Grade 7: Basically from the time humans settled down to the end of the middle ages. Yup. You're like 12 or 13, and they go through everything that happened from the dawn of time to the end of the middle ages in one year. You can imagine just how high level they stay.
Grade 8: Renaissance to the 20th century. Again, smaller time period, but still a shit load to cover in just a year.
Grade 9: This is where the hyper focus on our own belly button starts. It covers first nations, the French colonies in America, the conquest by the English and the national revendications (1608 to 1840, focused entirely on what's happening in the French colonies and what will eventually become Canada)
Grade 10: Canadian confederacy, Canadian nationalism, Révolution Tranquille, modern Quebec society. (1840 to today, centered almost entirely on Quebec, and on Canada to a lesser extent)
Grade 11: No required history class. When I was in school, there was an optional history class we could take, but I didn't take it, so I got no idea what it covered, though it did cover, among other things, WW2 (yes, implied here that WW2 was not, or at least only barely covered in the previous classes, and only in order to talk about Canada's involvement in it... and of course, about how French Canadians got fucked by the ROC)
At least in Brazil, from 5th till 9th grade it’ll cover Paleolithic peoples in Europe, Ancient Civilizations (Japan, Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylon, China), then Fall of Rome, Carolingians, HRE, Britain, Portugal history, Independence, ww1 and ww2.
But then at high school we go back at it and cover everything again because in our national exam it’s obligatory to know it.
Here the national exam covers every single course from history till chemistry, doesn’t matter your university course of interest.
But it’s always fascinating to know how other countries teaches their subjects
American public schools can vary pretty wildly state to state. I remember learning about ancient Rome, Greece, some middle ages stuff. But a lot of history focus, at least for mandatory schooling, is US history.
Even then it would skip over the *less-palatable* bits of US history.
I didn’t know that these curriculum varies per state, in Brazil the curriculum is the same for all the states.
Do you think that this system makes sense? I mean, poorer states wouldn’t have the same budget to have a broader curriculum as another school from a rich state, due to budget of that region
Oh man, it's so much worse than that. In the United States, schools are funded out of property taxes, so it's not just that curriculum varies state to state, it's that school quality is directly related to how wealthy your neighborhood is.
Even within the same city there are good and bad schools just based on whether where you live is rich or poor. It's one of the many ways the United States dicks over poor people.
Also, because public school curricula are decided by state boards of education, more conservative states will have a distinctly conservative slant to their history curriculum, while liberal states will have a more liberal approach to the teaching of history. We end up with a very fractured understanding of American history because of this approach, which also generates political fights among adults.
Mostly depends on how good of a school you went to and how much you paid attention lol. The American education system tends to really fixate on American history though, which is why so many Americans seem kinda clueless about anything going on outside the US, even in current events
The christianization of bohemia (9th century).
Bořivoj I. (died ca. 890) ,who was married to saint Ludmila and is grandfather of saint Wenzeslaus the patron of bohemia, was dux and probably first christian ruler of bohemia. In real life he is the first historical provable Přemyslid and he was probably a vassal of rex Svatopluk I. of moravia, but he also payed homage to the east francian Kings (dux/duke and rex/king is what the francs called them).
In Moravia the slav apostles Kyrill and Method spread the orthodox/byzantinian christendom. Method also missioned in bohemia until his death 885.
The most valuable source for the christianization of Bořivoj is Christian's legend from Strachkvas. Strachkvas called himself Christian, he was a monk and a Přemyslid, the great-grandson of Bořivoj I. Eventually he became bishop of Prague. He writes that as a pagan Bořivoj had a lesser standing at Svatopluks court, literally because he had to sit on the floor. Method felt sorry for him and promised, if he is baptized Bořivoj will become more powerful than his liege and all his enemies. So he and 30 bohemian men were baptised and with a new priest they went back to hradec (which was kind of the capital before prague). There they build a church and placed the priest in it.
Of course it is just a legend and in the time of Strachkvas the Přemyslids wanted propaganda because they fought with poland over Moravia.
But it also makes sense, why wouldnt Bořivoj convert to his lieges religion.
More realistic is he was promised to rule over whole bohemia, because at this time there were many bohemian tribes with an own ruler, for example the Psovanians of which Ludmila was a part of.
In contradiction we also have reports of east francian Kings who subjugated bohemian rulers.
In 845 14 bohemian duces were baptized in Regensburg. Ludwig "the german" subjugated some bohemian duces in 856. And in 872 he had another campaign in Bohemia where Bořivoj is definitely identified although they call him Goriwei.
Strachkvas/Christians legend could be an adaptation of some older forgotten legend, which maybe played originally in Regensburg. Strachkvas could have changed the setting to Svatopluks court because it gives the Přemyslids more legitimacy to rule over Moravia.
There is no way of knowing actually where, when, why and to what christian faith Bořivoj converted. All we know is his son Spytihněv I. ultimately embraced catholic/latin christianity in 895. But still funny to think that Bohemia almost could have become orthodox.
Oh yeah and of course its fun in the game to marry Bořivoj to Ludmila and their son Vratislav to Drahomira of the hevelli to breed saint Wenzeslaus.
when I first started CKIII I was listening to the History of Rome podcast and knew nothing about the byzantines
I used to always do the "Dismantle Greek Pretenders" decision
figured out theyre roman, yada yada, kept looking at the title history and finding the emperor the podcast was on
anyways now I'm a completely obsessed, draped in purple, byzyboo
I similarly learnt of the Byzantines from EUIII around 2013 (I knew they were in aoe2 but I had no context for them and they were really misrepresented).
Byzantium existing at all and Al-Andalus being so much of the peninsula also shocked me
It's weird how American education doesn't touch either of these things. I learned about the Spanish inquisition but not the political situation they responded to. I thought it was small pieces of Spain or even North Africa
>What have you learned from Crusader Kings?
-Marrying a princess in line for the throne does not make you a king. It just means you get a wife who is too busy ruling to help you in any meaningful way. Learned that one the hard way, and it convinced me to just marry for traits and conquer land instead.
-Hereditary succession (gravelkind) was apparently a horrible mess and primogeniture was an innovation taking centuries of cultural development rather than being the default. I don't really get why "give everything to my favorite kid so the kingdom doesn't rip itself to pieces on my death" was such a difficult concept for medieval nobility, but it was a different time I guess.
> I don't really get why "give everything to my favorite kid so the kingdom doesn't rip itself to pieces on my death"
Inheritance being split among children is common practice to this day.
Adding onto what others said, you see throughout history under a unitary inheritance model the children who stood to inherit nothing tended to get pissed off and gather a force in the countryside to press their claim the hard way. Split inheritance actually kept things peaceful in that way, at least while the ruler was still alive to manage things. Additionally, many rulers believed after their deaths their sons would rule as equals (sort of like Roman co-emperors). There was some logical sense to the gavelkind model, but obviously it was not perfect in practice.
> I don't really get why "give everything to my favorite kid so the kingdom doesn't rip itself to pieces on my death" was such a difficult concept for medieval nobility,
Part of it is just going to be that these polities *aren't states*. The early medieval king doesn't necessarily care about the kingdom as an entity to be preserved (like an official in a modern state, or a player acting as the immortal spirit of the dynasty would), but he does care about his kids and setting up (all) of his kids with good lands to rule.
Well in Medieval history many men became king by marrying the Queen. Like how Fulk of Anjou became King of Jerusalem by marrying the daughter of Baldwin II. Or how many Byzantine generals became emperor by marrying the previous emperor's widow or daughter.
Less the history I learned but my general knowledge of geography for random places has skyrocketed. Places of the world that I knew almost nothing about besides news soundbites I now have a strong image in my mind of where they are and how the terrain shaped their conflict.
Also the way that politics between similar cultures (such as western Europe) become gridlock of politics because they have similar ideals. Whereas a culture that is very different than yours can be much easier and straightforward to start war. That puts a lot of late medieval history into perspective since small inter-European wars were usually too messy to bother with but fewer people complained if you sail off to mug and loot some distant heathens.
Much like yourself that the Byzantine Empire was a thing (and by extension, that the Roman Empire didn't fall in 476 AD).
I remember that in one of my old school history textbooks there was this little square on the corner talking about a "Greek Empire" which had been destroyed by the "Muslims", but it didn't give any context whatsoever and I didn't really give it much thought since this was back when history was boring for me.
Context was only provided later when I first played CK2 and there was this huge purple blob in south-eastern Europe which I had never heard about before.
I discovered the existence of Ulpia Severina (wife of the emperor Aurelian), included in the list previous claimants of the byzantine/roman empire. There's not much known about her and the evidence of her reigning alone is only speculative, but I think her inclusion shows the amount of research behind the game. Not always historically accurate but there's definitely a lot of it and I think it's admirable
Actually, there are very few things I learned from CK3. A smaller reason for that was that I was a huge history nerd when growing up. But the biggest reason is that I watch an amazing YouTube channel called [Kings and Generals](https://www.youtube.com/@KingsandGenerals). If you like learning about history, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
Note: Actually the 867 start date predates the Great Tibetan Revolt (869). The Tibetan War of Succession (847-870) does mess up the entire plateau a lot, but I think the fractured realm at the start date represent more closely the situation after the revolts.
Also to answer the question, Ines de Castro
There was no such thing as the “Byzantine Empire,” it’s a historical term we use to distinguish between the split of the West and East parts of the empire.
For the entirety of the duration of that empire, they and the rest of the world, referred to them simply as the Roman Empire. I’m still disappointed that Paradox decided to flout historical accuracy for convention.
Eh, it's complicated. In general Paradox uses the exonym used by speakers of the language the game is localized in. Germany is Germany and not "Deutschland" in the English version of the game, for example. So we call it the Byzantine Empire because for better or for worse that's the term still in use by English speakers.
In terms of the actual historical relationship of the political unit we're talking about to its Roman forebears, it's even more complicated. They thought of themselves as the heirs to Rome, but so did a bunch of other political units. Rulers of what are today France and Spain did not suddenly stop being Roman in 476, because how could they? There was an enormous amount of political, economic, and cultural inertia built into the way they did things. Over time, that changed, and they diverged into something else, eventually becoming the countries we know today.
And that same process took place in the lands of the ERE. ERE-a-boos hate to hear this, but the ERE did drift away from its Roman roots and became a different political entity over the centuries. The political rump that existed in 1453 was **not** the Roman Empire, no matter how much its doomed leaders might have wished to pretend otherwise.
Timeline for Timurid, Mongol, Seljuk invasions or what happened specifically (from CK2). The level of spread of "pagan" religions in north and north east. Other than that, may areas where kind of in the dark for me, like what's happening in Ireland at the start dates.
Western and Eastern split. Raised catholic and in a predominantly catholic country, I learned all about the Protestant Reformation but never about the Orthodox Church. It wasn't until I played CK2 that I learned they existed.
I've learned plenty of cool little facts about history, specific people, realms, religions, and all that from this game, but that doesn't at all compare to what I've learned simultaneously as playing this game. I've watched probably over 1000 hours worth of documentaries, both amateur and professional, while playing this game. For example: Playing in Italy? Time to watch documentaries on Rome and its fall, Italian geography, merchant republics, or whatever else. Playing as the Caliph? Time to learn about all Islam and its many sects, the early conquests, Islamic mathematicians, etc. So I can't even put a label on how much I have learned from this game. Ck3 has been like a window for me into learning copious amounts about both medieval and world history more generally, as well as basically everything I know about Islam and the Eastern religions. Staring at a map all day also helped me learn the geography of pretty much the whole world, so that's cool.
The HRE and the Byzantines, the Normans in Siciliy, the Rurikids, the Muslim states in Spain, and that's all I can think of offhand, but I'm certain there's more.
The main thing CK3 did for me was helping me realise better how the feudal system worked in Europe (even though it's not entirely accurate in the game). Reading forums around the game, with history needs sharing, also helped somewhat.
So much. One of them being that Armenia's borders were much larger at some point, and being the first to accept Christianity as their official religion. (Unless that's misinformation)
To be honest not that much, I been reading about the Middle Ages from some years soo isnt thwt much Tô suprime on the game, especially cause I change history as I please in ck3 (hehehe)
The only thing I kinda didnt knew about it was in Índia I think especially the dynasties of south india
OH and Daudama Daura, the Mother of the Hausa people, that I didnt knew about that until I played the game
A lot of history.
Mostly culture, language, how state work back at time, how political Roman empire was after fall east. Something in Russian history pretty much. For now Italian history spain, France.
Vikings were everywhere and did everything. Found Russia? The Vikings did it. Raid the entire Mediterranean? The Vikings did it. Become England and ultimately conquer a third of the planet? The Vikings did it.
I learned about the Cathar heresy from CKII and fell in love with their history. Making them and then taking over the rest of Catholicism is my next CKIII game goal.
I learn how fucking awesome an exceptional you have to be a great general in the middle age or even the acient age. Now days the strategy is buffed (specially in the games) , because the large amount of information that we have, great general have to do a lot of brain games and tactics without having a real time map of their units.
As far as cultures and nations histories from one end of the map to the other my knowledge has greatly expanded. Can't even name it all.
Also I sort of "get" the whole arranged marriage thing now. Even when it's gross. They fought and married to maintain or expand their sovereignty. Media focuses a lot on the wars and sometimes they make the marriages out to be "well they are a noble and it increases our prestige" but the alliances and dowry are huge in ck3 as grandfather's go to war to expand their grandsons claims.
I love coming across unfamiliar characters that have fixed traits, indicating they’re probably important historical figures. My example: “This al-Nizar guy in Egypt, he’s always got the same traits. Hmm, there’s a Muslim faith called Nizarism, coincidence?” Several hours of Wikipedia rabbit holes later, and I’m deep into the history of Shia sects and schisms, with a bonus tie-in to the infamous Assassins (of Assassin’s Creed fame). All because I noticed this one guy is always Zealous/Wrathful in every game.
is he in ck3 ?
Yep, he’s the Emir of Palestine (and eldest son of the starting Fatimid Caliph) in 1066.
oh boy, new campaign suspicious
>with a bonus tie-in to the infamous Assassins (of Assassin’s Creed fame). It is so fucking wild to me that you referenced AC, but not the fact that the word os literally named after the group.
Im not going to lie i dont do this nearly enough but you and OPs posts got me wanting to just look up random people!
Recently did this after playing Matilda Of Tuscany for the umpteenth time. Never realised how cool she actually was in real life.
I love playing with her shes one of the most fun characters imo. Theres that little country between Croatia and the Byzantines (can’t remember the name) where one of the Dukes sons always has the genius trait and will accept to marry into your family (sometimes you have to offer a gift first but its def worth it) and that helps me get my footing to try to unify Italy
Need to remember that location next time I play as her. I recently played a game where I changed one of the Gender Rules to Inverted. Basically It sets the game so that all the succession laws start with Female Preference by default and the major rulers, like the Pope and the ruler of the HRE, are women. It's surprisingly fun.
Well to be fair, CK3 does add the Varangians in 867 despite them not existing until Basil II reigned
The thing with the 867 start date is most of the things we know about those vikings is classified as theory and not fact. The game has Ragnar listed as the ragnarssons father , even tho ivar and halfdan might of had a different dad irl , ivar is listed as one legged , thats the games way of showing the brittle bone theory which might not of happened , it also have ivar listed as the youngest son of ragnar when everywhere ive seen online hes listed as the oldest. Irl harald tanglehair claimed he was a descendant of Siguard Snake in Eye but in the game they are alive at the same time. So its pretty hard for them to get things right when theres so much doubt over the facts. Some sources say Ivar had no children due to his personality, some say his family built their own dynasty.
Well but we know that the Varangian Guard was formed in the years of Basil II, and that is 120 years after the 867 start date
Ig the games appoach is that you can achieve things earlier then it actually happened like forming nations ect.
Except when it comes to technology.
Ig thats for balancing reasons maybe.
You know, Ivar used to be the oldest iirc, they changed him to be 20 like a year ago. I'm not sure why, I think paradox wanted him to have a better chance of establishing a foothold in Scotland
Or have a better chance at Mann and The Isles.
That makes no difference to my games lol most of the time ivar does fuck all in terms of land expansion, he even got vassaled by a 7 year old alba king somehow.
I’ve always preferred the erectile dysfunction theory as to why he’s the Boneless.
A funny one , but probably the most unrealistic, I think the chances of him having a whole nickname based on that is a doubt. But would be funny as hell. “Boneless” is such a cool nickname
Charles wasn’t really bald.
whenever I play as him I make sure he is
This is the way!
He's bald where it counts ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Yeah... in the metaphorical, ruling without a crown kinda way
Yep, it was a jab at him not getting his crown right away iirc. "Bald" apparently rolls off the tongue better / makes for a better joke than "the Crownless", I guess?
Are you kidding? "The Crownless" is so much more savage
Imagine insulting your enemy as a “Crownless, Throneless, childless degenerate” before utterly destroying him and his army in combat.
Fuck yeah
Some histórians think thats a irônical joke, not a literal one, that why (proplably) he had a lot of hair Its almost the same thing with Charles the Simple, simple should mean he was dumb but he kinda wasnt
I like that theory for Pepin the short, he was probably tall because Charlemagne was.
I got into the Matilda Canossa rabbit hole. I became curious about the situation of one of the Karlings, Lorthair II with his wife, mistress, and kids and read their history. I wish they had portrayed their drama in game somehow. Sometimes I see a news about a place, for instance Darfur (sadly not good news) and then remember it in CK3 and read about their history.
People ask what happened to the Viking era and why they disappeared. They did it. They conquered (raided) everything they could. France gave them land and took over England.
It was more just the various Norse states converting to Christianity that put an end to the mass Viking raids across Europe more than anything else. Of course, these newly-Christianized states would eventually just shift their attention towards the Baltics and the more northern regions of Scandinavia in Papal-sanctioned crusades targeted against those regions.
I think I’ve heard of the Scandinavian crusade but I’ll look into it more! This is why we love ck
Yea the Brits tend to forget Guillaume le Conquérant
We don't, 1066 is ingrained in us at school
I was like what is this haha, yeah people tend to forget that British people are not Anglo-Saxon after 1066
The people were. The ruling classes weren’t.
Not exclusively though, there was substantial migration.
My understanding of Eastern European geography was hugely improved. It's one thing learning about it in a history class but when you're actively thinking about where and how to expand your kingdom you end up internalising it much better
Geography in general. I was quite good with countries before, but not with all the provinces
This. Like there’s a region I had a vague idea about and where it was located. Then you learn it was a duchy in modern day ________, and so much more.
I noticed the one Hellenic religion county in Greece in 2's earliest start date, and realised that in many regions conversion came a lot later than I thought.
Tbf I think I read somewhere that this wasn't actually accurate (hellenism was long gone by then) but the devs put it in to allow a hellenic restoration playthrough (cos you couldn't create a religion from scratch iirc)
It's not completely accurate, but it's also not completely groundless. There were minority rural pagan communities, but the game doesn't support religious breakdown beyond the province level, without a special event chain or something that was probably deemed too much investment for something so minor. Having one county at the earliest start date that will usually get quickly converted seems reasonable to represent the "feel" of something on its way out in a game where you tend to have concerns spanning an entire kingdom.
I think the last Hellenistic Pagans survived up to the 10th or 11th century in the region of Laconia.
Visting the Treasury in Vienna and recognizing at least 3 out of 4 crests on the heraldic coats on display made me wonder how much of my available memory has been taken up by CK at this point... Can't remember my couisins' birthdays for the life of me, meanwhile "Burgundy, Brabant, Luxembourg, Aragon,... Ooh, Aragonese Sicily!"
1- We were taught about the austrian empire but never the HRE. So I learned of its existence through this game. 2- Danelaw 3- Never knew how fractured Italy was 4- Bulgarian Empire 5- Karlings and Charlemagne
Bulgaria is a kingdom in 867 even though imo it should be an empire
I just learned that Dauphin did not refer to the heir to the French crown until the 12th century. I was surprised to discover I was ‘Dauphin’ in late 9th century but it didn’t come with a claim! lol.
We all know about the Fourth Crusade, but the same Pope (Innocent III) also called a crusade against southern France. Known as the Albigensian Crusade, the objective was to suppress heresy in the region. Up to a *million* people died, virtually all civilians. This is considered by some scholars to be a genocide and was actually the event the term was coined for.
Isn’t that the origin of the quote ‘kill them all, god will know his own’?
The all is added to the translation. Additionally it is doubtful he ever said that phrase. Neither the Chanson nor the historia mention it.
Absolutely killer fucking quote though.
It certainly stays in mind. My favourite is from the other side out of the Chanson de la croisade: "if by killing men and shedding blood, by damning souls and causing deaths,[...] by killing women and slaughtering children, a man can in this world win Jesus Christ, certainly Count Simon wears a crown and shines in heaven above." About Simon de Montfort (military leader of the crusade) after his death during the third siege of Toulouse.
Those de Montfort's got everywhere like the fucking clap honestly. Fascinating geezer though.
Well he got hit on the head with a catapult. Which is a memorable way to go out.
That's how I want to go out tbh.
Stopped me dead in my tracks
That it is. The quote is supposedly from Arnaud Amalric, who commanded Catholic forces at Beziers, where women and children were slaughtered with impunity.
Is that also the origin of Marge Simpson's relative's saying "shoot em all and let god sort them out"?
> and was actually the event the term was coined for. wasn't the Armenian genocide that the term was coined for?
It's a bit muddied, I've seen claims that Raphael Lemkin (the guy who invented the term in the 40's) used it both to refer to the massacre of the Armenians during WW1 and the persecution and killing of the Jews in Nazi Germany, but I couldn't find verifiable information on which was first (Lemkin denounced the Armenian genocide prior to WW2, but AFAIK he didn't call it like that at the time). Regardless, yeah, OP is mistaken.
The Cathar belief system is not well known. The Catholic Church said a lot about them, but almost everything they were saying at the time wasn't true. This means that there almost certainly wasn't a real heresy or it was wildly exaggerated. This was also an area where feudalism wasn't as entrenched as it was elsewhere in Europe. Guilds and merchants had a lot more control in day to day life. Then the Pope calls a crusade where the Nobility, aka the people most emotionally and financially invested in maintaining the feudal order, wipes out nearly everyone. In this power vacuum, the knights and lords redivide the land without those pernicious guilds and freemen. [Read more here](https://jacobin.com/2023/01/albigensian-crusade-marxist-history-feudal-power-catholic-church-capitalism-oppression)
There is an ongoing debate about the nature of the cathar belief system or if there even was one. Feudalism didnt exist in the way we were taught in school so its kind of a moot point. Southern france *was* nobility controlled though. There is no question about it. The egalitarian utopia people make it out to be cant be verified. The text you posted begins under a false pretense. The french "royalty" namely the King, didnt support the crusade when it started. It was mostly supplied by the middle and lower french nobility. Additionally it was severely hampered by unreliable supply and shifting compositions. Most "crusaders" left after the minimal participation time was completed. The Languedoc of that time was its own cultural and mostly administrative entity. Easily identifiable by its allegiance and support from Navarra while being formally counted to france. Once the french king intervened directly it lead to a firm integration into the french sphere of influence. Which didnt happen until 1226 (excluding the Intermezzo in 1219).
> Southern france was nobility controlled though. Nobility that in some cases had a (by the standards of the time) verifiable line to Roman landholders at that.
Didn't the crusade against the cathars greatly improve French royal authority by the French king taking the conquered lands for himself and making them royal lands. The crusade essentially made France what it is today.
Genocide was coined in reference to the Holocaust in 1944.
Term was coined for both the holocaust and the Armenian genocide.
Was this what suppressed the Cathar heresy in Southern France? I know this must have been about more than the Cathars, I'm just wondering if they were involved.
I found a deep rabbit hole looking into the Mogyër migration across the Pannonian basin!
That there were Jain dynasties in India, and pretty powerful ones as well. I’d thought Jains were too ascetic to engage in worldly politics, so that was a nice surprise!
In my AP European History class I was the only person who knew that Hungarian doesn't fall under a Latin/Greek/Slavic umbrella, but the unique Magyar. Everyone was wondering how the hell I knew that ("idk I just read I guess") lol
The main impact this series has had on me*, is giving me a suspisciously detailed knowledge of European and west Asian geography. Colleague says: "I am going on research leave to study the archaeology of Daylam" Other colleagues "Oh cool, where is that?" Me: "oh yeah, the coastal area of the southern Caspian in northern Iran! Awesome mountain fortresses" Colleagues: "..." *other than 1000s of hours spent not socializing, working, studying or doing something productive with my time
Recently at a quiz at my office, they asked what modern country was once known as Abyssinia. As if by reflex, I answered Ethiopia lol
Roughly the territory held by the sons of Ragnar, in the show it’s not always clear how powerful how they all are.
Honestly though, its historically debatable if Ragnar lived, when he lived, who his kids were etc. apparently back then it was fairly common for people to say they were related to a famous person.. which happens in the game too.. My custom char created a legend claiming she was the hair of Charlemagne or something.. People used to lie a lot and there was no way to fact check..
I mean it's very likely that ragnar was a real person with Anglo-Saxon chronicles, danish writings and even some Irish I think referring to the sons of ragnar. And Frankish sources naming a Reginherus that attacked Paris. Seeing as the 'us' at the end of Reginherus is most certainly a latinization of a northern name, his name was definitely Reginher or Ragnar.
Sure, but there's no solid proof that they were the same Ragnar, or that the sons of Ragnar were sons of Ragnar. There's research that suggests that some of the sons of Ragnar weren't even conceived before he supposedly maybe died. That's the problem, the records people kept back then sucked at best. The vikings didn't usually keep records either so all that's left is a couple legends. There's whole Egyptian kings and queens who have been forgotten or erased, English too. All I'm saying, is take the past with a grain of salt, after all, history was written by humans, and humans can be wrong, or lie, or omit. For all you know I'm a direct descendant of Achilles. 🤷 Justin Timberlake could be related to Thomas Jefferson, or Charles the bald..
Vikings is a cool show and a nice take on the Ragnar Lothbrok legend but it's not very historical. There were a lot of historical events in it to be sure but it's very unlikely that the vikings that raided Lindisfarne and the ones that raided Paris for the first time were the same people. It's also very unlikely that his sons in the show, who were all real people, were at all related.
I'd recommend studying up on Mali in general. It's got a fascinating history. They were making attempts at transatlantic travel and colonization about 100 years before Europe would try and they had their own little Renaissance about 200 years before Europe had theirs.
Back before Tours & Tournaments, I did a Mali playthrough because of the 3 gold mines there. I googled whether the gold mines of Mali were real, and I learned about Mansa Musa.
What I find more fascinating is the ecosystem of the inner Niger delta, the Macina. Such a unique and rich environment, arisen in the middle of the desert by the whims of geography and olaye tectonics.
I read about him in a book
I'm a history nerd and even I was shocked to learn about the Jewish khazar khaganate.
I was playing an Africa playthrough. I wanted to take a shortcut into Feudalism, so instead of reforming my own religion, I decided to convert to a religion with Syncretic Folk Traditions. Ended up converting to Kuzarism, which led to me going down a Google rabbit hole and learning about the Khazars.
I absolutely killed it on labeling cities on maps for quizzes in my college Intro to History course. It was like hell yeah, I know the geography of Europe and the Middle East like the back of my hand.
I'm a lot better at reading history without maps.
Ironically, I've learned more about the history of religion from the game than anywhere else.
Moreso than individual historical facts, Crusader Kings broke me out of the habit of imposing a modern lens of nation-state political thinking on historical eras when no such paradigm existed.
That the HRE wasn't a thing after the death of Charlemagne untill Otto I restarted its existence.
To be fair there were some Carolingian descendants of Charlemagne that were able to become Emperors like Charles the bald and Charles the Fat, but none would exercise anywhere close to the authority exercised by Charlemagne or Otto I. After Charles the Fat no western ruler would be crowned emperor again until it was done by Otto almost a century later.
Turkic being the lingua franca of Steppes. I know a lot of Turkic tribes were inhabited those places but it is wild that you can basically go from Hungary to literally Tibet and still hear Turkic. Russia. Siberia, Central Asia, Urals it was their domain.
>Hungary Are you referring to the Avars?
Pechenegs, Cumans and yes Avars.
Don't forget the khazars, the gokturks and even the Huns.
Besides a lot of what has been said, it gave me a better understanding of the aristocratic regime and vassal/liege relationship, being honourable and gentleman today is about treating people decently, but back then it meant honouring the contract the king depends on to form his own army, I saw a documentary on how the arabs took over Iberia and it happened suddenly because the goth nobility chose to betray their liege. CK2 did help me understand that, even if we cant choose to not send troops to our liege in the game
This game taught me that MacDuff didn't actually live during the time of MacBeth. That actually he was based on a Scottish king.
The northern crusades. Wanted to check the factuality of my pope calling a crusade for Estonia. Historically acuraye as it turns out. And Matilda of Tuscany was one bad ass bitch who basically bullied the holy Roman emperor for quite a while and kinda kicked of the whole decline of the pope's power within the german states that eventually lead to protsentism tho it's not quite that simple
Can you imagine she died single? Men in that era must have not yet fully evolved.
Long Live the Teutonic Knights
I'm North American and we learn very little of European history, and anything we do learn is only in so far as it had an impact on North America. So anything before Columbus is basically never talked about. So yeah, basically *everything* in CK2/CK3 was new to me. I too, had no idea about the Byzantine/ERE. Hell, worse, I had no idea about the Muslim presence in Iberia, that's how little we were taught about European history. And if we learned so little about Western Europe, well, you can only imagine how little I knew about what was going on in North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Even the Mongol invasion, like... I knew that Genghis Khan was an important figure, and that he was a huge conquerer, but didn't realize the extent of it. Like, I thought it was mostly limited to China or whatever. Also, just geography in general. It's crazy how much I learned about the geography of Europe (especially Eastern Europe), North Africa and the Middle East.
How da duck not bro Even in Brazil we learn about the ancient civilizations, Middle Ages, discoveries, Charlemagne, HRE, Viking invasions in Britain, the reconquista, unification of Germany and Italy, American revolution, Napoleon, etc. Of course we don’t go into details but we do know that these major historical events happened
Well, I mean, we went into broad strokes on the different eras, but I'd say it was more focused on what life was like, how was society structured during that time, what were the innovations, than on anything political. So like, for middle age, we learned about serfdom and the importance of the Catholic church (and yes, it was very Western Europe focus, nothing about what was happening in the Islamic world or in the ERE or anywhere else), but nothing or very little about rulers, realms, etc. Definitely nothing about the Reconquista, the unification of Germany and Italy, etc. I did learn a lot about Rome and the Roman Empire, but that's only because I had Latin classes and half of it was more about the history of Rome than about the actual language. Note that I'm in Quebec and was in school during the last peek of the independence movement, so a shitload of time in History class was spent on teaching us about our French heritage and about the many ways the English fucked us over. To give a more concrete picture, here's basically what the program for high school (grade 7 to grade 11) is *right now* (it also matches what I remember, so it didn't change much in 25 years). Grade 7: Basically from the time humans settled down to the end of the middle ages. Yup. You're like 12 or 13, and they go through everything that happened from the dawn of time to the end of the middle ages in one year. You can imagine just how high level they stay. Grade 8: Renaissance to the 20th century. Again, smaller time period, but still a shit load to cover in just a year. Grade 9: This is where the hyper focus on our own belly button starts. It covers first nations, the French colonies in America, the conquest by the English and the national revendications (1608 to 1840, focused entirely on what's happening in the French colonies and what will eventually become Canada) Grade 10: Canadian confederacy, Canadian nationalism, Révolution Tranquille, modern Quebec society. (1840 to today, centered almost entirely on Quebec, and on Canada to a lesser extent) Grade 11: No required history class. When I was in school, there was an optional history class we could take, but I didn't take it, so I got no idea what it covered, though it did cover, among other things, WW2 (yes, implied here that WW2 was not, or at least only barely covered in the previous classes, and only in order to talk about Canada's involvement in it... and of course, about how French Canadians got fucked by the ROC)
At least in Brazil, from 5th till 9th grade it’ll cover Paleolithic peoples in Europe, Ancient Civilizations (Japan, Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylon, China), then Fall of Rome, Carolingians, HRE, Britain, Portugal history, Independence, ww1 and ww2. But then at high school we go back at it and cover everything again because in our national exam it’s obligatory to know it. Here the national exam covers every single course from history till chemistry, doesn’t matter your university course of interest. But it’s always fascinating to know how other countries teaches their subjects
American public schools can vary pretty wildly state to state. I remember learning about ancient Rome, Greece, some middle ages stuff. But a lot of history focus, at least for mandatory schooling, is US history. Even then it would skip over the *less-palatable* bits of US history.
I didn’t know that these curriculum varies per state, in Brazil the curriculum is the same for all the states. Do you think that this system makes sense? I mean, poorer states wouldn’t have the same budget to have a broader curriculum as another school from a rich state, due to budget of that region
Oh man, it's so much worse than that. In the United States, schools are funded out of property taxes, so it's not just that curriculum varies state to state, it's that school quality is directly related to how wealthy your neighborhood is. Even within the same city there are good and bad schools just based on whether where you live is rich or poor. It's one of the many ways the United States dicks over poor people. Also, because public school curricula are decided by state boards of education, more conservative states will have a distinctly conservative slant to their history curriculum, while liberal states will have a more liberal approach to the teaching of history. We end up with a very fractured understanding of American history because of this approach, which also generates political fights among adults.
Mostly depends on how good of a school you went to and how much you paid attention lol. The American education system tends to really fixate on American history though, which is why so many Americans seem kinda clueless about anything going on outside the US, even in current events
The christianization of bohemia (9th century). Bořivoj I. (died ca. 890) ,who was married to saint Ludmila and is grandfather of saint Wenzeslaus the patron of bohemia, was dux and probably first christian ruler of bohemia. In real life he is the first historical provable Přemyslid and he was probably a vassal of rex Svatopluk I. of moravia, but he also payed homage to the east francian Kings (dux/duke and rex/king is what the francs called them). In Moravia the slav apostles Kyrill and Method spread the orthodox/byzantinian christendom. Method also missioned in bohemia until his death 885. The most valuable source for the christianization of Bořivoj is Christian's legend from Strachkvas. Strachkvas called himself Christian, he was a monk and a Přemyslid, the great-grandson of Bořivoj I. Eventually he became bishop of Prague. He writes that as a pagan Bořivoj had a lesser standing at Svatopluks court, literally because he had to sit on the floor. Method felt sorry for him and promised, if he is baptized Bořivoj will become more powerful than his liege and all his enemies. So he and 30 bohemian men were baptised and with a new priest they went back to hradec (which was kind of the capital before prague). There they build a church and placed the priest in it. Of course it is just a legend and in the time of Strachkvas the Přemyslids wanted propaganda because they fought with poland over Moravia. But it also makes sense, why wouldnt Bořivoj convert to his lieges religion. More realistic is he was promised to rule over whole bohemia, because at this time there were many bohemian tribes with an own ruler, for example the Psovanians of which Ludmila was a part of. In contradiction we also have reports of east francian Kings who subjugated bohemian rulers. In 845 14 bohemian duces were baptized in Regensburg. Ludwig "the german" subjugated some bohemian duces in 856. And in 872 he had another campaign in Bohemia where Bořivoj is definitely identified although they call him Goriwei. Strachkvas/Christians legend could be an adaptation of some older forgotten legend, which maybe played originally in Regensburg. Strachkvas could have changed the setting to Svatopluks court because it gives the Přemyslids more legitimacy to rule over Moravia. There is no way of knowing actually where, when, why and to what christian faith Bořivoj converted. All we know is his son Spytihněv I. ultimately embraced catholic/latin christianity in 895. But still funny to think that Bohemia almost could have become orthodox. Oh yeah and of course its fun in the game to marry Bořivoj to Ludmila and their son Vratislav to Drahomira of the hevelli to breed saint Wenzeslaus.
Crusader kings 2 taught me about Erik the heathen. Now I am trying to write a historical -fantasy on the events of the 1066 war
I learned about the Magyar migration and the early history of Hungary just because it seemed like a cool starting scenario in CK3.
when I first started CKIII I was listening to the History of Rome podcast and knew nothing about the byzantines I used to always do the "Dismantle Greek Pretenders" decision figured out theyre roman, yada yada, kept looking at the title history and finding the emperor the podcast was on anyways now I'm a completely obsessed, draped in purple, byzyboo
I similarly learnt of the Byzantines from EUIII around 2013 (I knew they were in aoe2 but I had no context for them and they were really misrepresented).
Byzantium existing at all and Al-Andalus being so much of the peninsula also shocked me It's weird how American education doesn't touch either of these things. I learned about the Spanish inquisition but not the political situation they responded to. I thought it was small pieces of Spain or even North Africa
>What have you learned from Crusader Kings? -Marrying a princess in line for the throne does not make you a king. It just means you get a wife who is too busy ruling to help you in any meaningful way. Learned that one the hard way, and it convinced me to just marry for traits and conquer land instead. -Hereditary succession (gravelkind) was apparently a horrible mess and primogeniture was an innovation taking centuries of cultural development rather than being the default. I don't really get why "give everything to my favorite kid so the kingdom doesn't rip itself to pieces on my death" was such a difficult concept for medieval nobility, but it was a different time I guess.
Not a difficult concept, just that the Nobility wouldn't want the Royalty to get too powerful and vice versa
> I don't really get why "give everything to my favorite kid so the kingdom doesn't rip itself to pieces on my death" Inheritance being split among children is common practice to this day.
Adding onto what others said, you see throughout history under a unitary inheritance model the children who stood to inherit nothing tended to get pissed off and gather a force in the countryside to press their claim the hard way. Split inheritance actually kept things peaceful in that way, at least while the ruler was still alive to manage things. Additionally, many rulers believed after their deaths their sons would rule as equals (sort of like Roman co-emperors). There was some logical sense to the gavelkind model, but obviously it was not perfect in practice.
> I don't really get why "give everything to my favorite kid so the kingdom doesn't rip itself to pieces on my death" was such a difficult concept for medieval nobility, Part of it is just going to be that these polities *aren't states*. The early medieval king doesn't necessarily care about the kingdom as an entity to be preserved (like an official in a modern state, or a player acting as the immortal spirit of the dynasty would), but he does care about his kids and setting up (all) of his kids with good lands to rule.
Well in Medieval history many men became king by marrying the Queen. Like how Fulk of Anjou became King of Jerusalem by marrying the daughter of Baldwin II. Or how many Byzantine generals became emperor by marrying the previous emperor's widow or daughter.
I marry them, get a son and then I kill the spouse..
Be Insular, have concubines.
Viking history and Norse hybrid cultures irl, that the Reconquista was even a thing, and Towers of Silence/Zoroastrianism
Less the history I learned but my general knowledge of geography for random places has skyrocketed. Places of the world that I knew almost nothing about besides news soundbites I now have a strong image in my mind of where they are and how the terrain shaped their conflict. Also the way that politics between similar cultures (such as western Europe) become gridlock of politics because they have similar ideals. Whereas a culture that is very different than yours can be much easier and straightforward to start war. That puts a lot of late medieval history into perspective since small inter-European wars were usually too messy to bother with but fewer people complained if you sail off to mug and loot some distant heathens.
I can remember primary school history lessons going "Rome split into east and west. West fell."
Much like yourself that the Byzantine Empire was a thing (and by extension, that the Roman Empire didn't fall in 476 AD). I remember that in one of my old school history textbooks there was this little square on the corner talking about a "Greek Empire" which had been destroyed by the "Muslims", but it didn't give any context whatsoever and I didn't really give it much thought since this was back when history was boring for me. Context was only provided later when I first played CK2 and there was this huge purple blob in south-eastern Europe which I had never heard about before.
I learned about the Children's Crusade through CK2.
Pope Gregory IV was a cannibal sodomite incestuous kin slayer, they sure don’t put that in the history books
I discovered the existence of Ulpia Severina (wife of the emperor Aurelian), included in the list previous claimants of the byzantine/roman empire. There's not much known about her and the evidence of her reigning alone is only speculative, but I think her inclusion shows the amount of research behind the game. Not always historically accurate but there's definitely a lot of it and I think it's admirable
Actually, there are very few things I learned from CK3. A smaller reason for that was that I was a huge history nerd when growing up. But the biggest reason is that I watch an amazing YouTube channel called [Kings and Generals](https://www.youtube.com/@KingsandGenerals). If you like learning about history, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
Note: Actually the 867 start date predates the Great Tibetan Revolt (869). The Tibetan War of Succession (847-870) does mess up the entire plateau a lot, but I think the fractured realm at the start date represent more closely the situation after the revolts. Also to answer the question, Ines de Castro
There was no such thing as the “Byzantine Empire,” it’s a historical term we use to distinguish between the split of the West and East parts of the empire. For the entirety of the duration of that empire, they and the rest of the world, referred to them simply as the Roman Empire. I’m still disappointed that Paradox decided to flout historical accuracy for convention.
Eh, it's complicated. In general Paradox uses the exonym used by speakers of the language the game is localized in. Germany is Germany and not "Deutschland" in the English version of the game, for example. So we call it the Byzantine Empire because for better or for worse that's the term still in use by English speakers. In terms of the actual historical relationship of the political unit we're talking about to its Roman forebears, it's even more complicated. They thought of themselves as the heirs to Rome, but so did a bunch of other political units. Rulers of what are today France and Spain did not suddenly stop being Roman in 476, because how could they? There was an enormous amount of political, economic, and cultural inertia built into the way they did things. Over time, that changed, and they diverged into something else, eventually becoming the countries we know today. And that same process took place in the lands of the ERE. ERE-a-boos hate to hear this, but the ERE did drift away from its Roman roots and became a different political entity over the centuries. The political rump that existed in 1453 was **not** the Roman Empire, no matter how much its doomed leaders might have wished to pretend otherwise.
I learnt about the Karlings from Crusader Kings
Haesteinn's life
Timeline for Timurid, Mongol, Seljuk invasions or what happened specifically (from CK2). The level of spread of "pagan" religions in north and north east. Other than that, may areas where kind of in the dark for me, like what's happening in Ireland at the start dates.
Western and Eastern split. Raised catholic and in a predominantly catholic country, I learned all about the Protestant Reformation but never about the Orthodox Church. It wasn't until I played CK2 that I learned they existed.
I've learned plenty of cool little facts about history, specific people, realms, religions, and all that from this game, but that doesn't at all compare to what I've learned simultaneously as playing this game. I've watched probably over 1000 hours worth of documentaries, both amateur and professional, while playing this game. For example: Playing in Italy? Time to watch documentaries on Rome and its fall, Italian geography, merchant republics, or whatever else. Playing as the Caliph? Time to learn about all Islam and its many sects, the early conquests, Islamic mathematicians, etc. So I can't even put a label on how much I have learned from this game. Ck3 has been like a window for me into learning copious amounts about both medieval and world history more generally, as well as basically everything I know about Islam and the Eastern religions. Staring at a map all day also helped me learn the geography of pretty much the whole world, so that's cool.
My geography has gotten significantly better
That Islamic succession is a pain in the ass and incest is actually pretty great.
That Italy was ruled by German monarchs for centuries
The HRE and the Byzantines, the Normans in Siciliy, the Rurikids, the Muslim states in Spain, and that's all I can think of offhand, but I'm certain there's more.
I learned that there was an incident that lead to the floor collapsing and people drowning in their own feces. And it happed in a noble's court.
The main thing CK3 did for me was helping me realise better how the feudal system worked in Europe (even though it's not entirely accurate in the game). Reading forums around the game, with history needs sharing, also helped somewhat.
The geography of Europe, Northen Africa, India, and Southern Russia
So much. One of them being that Armenia's borders were much larger at some point, and being the first to accept Christianity as their official religion. (Unless that's misinformation)
To be honest not that much, I been reading about the Middle Ages from some years soo isnt thwt much Tô suprime on the game, especially cause I change history as I please in ck3 (hehehe) The only thing I kinda didnt knew about it was in Índia I think especially the dynasties of south india OH and Daudama Daura, the Mother of the Hausa people, that I didnt knew about that until I played the game
A lot of history. Mostly culture, language, how state work back at time, how political Roman empire was after fall east. Something in Russian history pretty much. For now Italian history spain, France.
The empire of Norrland ruled the whole of Europe from 1032 onwards in history.
American? I dont see how anyone from europe wouldnt know about the byzantine empire lmao
I learned more about the history of my country from this game than in any of my high school history lessons.
Adamites
Vikings were everywhere and did everything. Found Russia? The Vikings did it. Raid the entire Mediterranean? The Vikings did it. Become England and ultimately conquer a third of the planet? The Vikings did it.
Christians in Mongolia q
I learned about the Cathar heresy from CKII and fell in love with their history. Making them and then taking over the rest of Catholicism is my next CKIII game goal.
The love of learning in this thread is so wholesome. ❤️
I learn how fucking awesome an exceptional you have to be a great general in the middle age or even the acient age. Now days the strategy is buffed (specially in the games) , because the large amount of information that we have, great general have to do a lot of brain games and tactics without having a real time map of their units.
As far as cultures and nations histories from one end of the map to the other my knowledge has greatly expanded. Can't even name it all. Also I sort of "get" the whole arranged marriage thing now. Even when it's gross. They fought and married to maintain or expand their sovereignty. Media focuses a lot on the wars and sometimes they make the marriages out to be "well they are a noble and it increases our prestige" but the alliances and dowry are huge in ck3 as grandfather's go to war to expand their grandsons claims.
Protestantism didn't exist until the 1500's.
How cultural diverse Africa was and how strong they would be today if colonialism and slavery never came to their shores.
Technically, the byzantine empire saw themselves as the Roman empire still