CKII: Therefore I am against thee

Behold, therefore I am against thee, and against thy rivers, and I will make the land of Egypt utterly waste and desolate, from the tower of Syene even unto the border of Ethiopia.

- Ezekiel 29:10

Now that Crusader Kings III is here, I guess I'd better finish what I'm doing in the previous one! When we left off last time, the Abbasid empire fairly dominated the Crusader Kings II map. Soon enough, that would change. The Muslim expansion into Francia had riled up the Catholics so much that they invented crusades, and soon enough, they launched their most ambitious one yet: a crusade for Egypt.

They tried this several times in real life and it never worked out at all. To be honest, I didn't really expect this to turn out a smashing success either, but at least it would distract the Abbasids and maybe let us profit. As we did.

I was pleasantly surprised when we managed to grab some land off the Muhallabids; and frankly shocked when the Crusade succeeded.

The Muhallabids never recovered from the loss of Egypt, and their empire went the way of the Abbadids.

While a Christian Egypt is a tremendously good thing for us, there is one downside: forming the empire of Abyssinia is only possible if you hold the kingdom of Egypt, and the last thing I want to do is go to war against our new Frankish friends. This is why we have the Charlemagne DLC: it lets us form a custom empire when we hold three kingdom titles. I was already King of Abyssinia and Nubia; with the Muslims in complete disarray, the third kingdom title I grabbed was Yemen.

With Crusader Egypt to the north and a scatter of independent chiefdoms to the east, the Abyssinian Empire was secure, and started expanding. Soon enough, we made inroads into Central Africa and reached the Persian Gulf.

**

And that was where I left things for quite a while, maybe for good. Like I said, Crusader Kings III is now out, so this feels like as good a time as any for some possibly closing thoughts on number II.

I talked about some of the shortcomings of the game earlier, mainly about the combat system and the lack of any meaningful diplomacy, and I stand by that. In my Ethiopian game, it's just been disappointing that I can't really have any proper interactions with the Byzantines or Crusader Egypt. It was an interesting challenge to get my realm established and fight off the Muslim holy wars, but I guess the problem becomes that once you've built up your blob, the game is no longer all that interesting. Especially since it's rare to get real opportunities to expand your realm outside of warfare, and war really boils down to the side that has more soldiers winning.

To sort of paraphrase Bilbo Baggins, though, I like this game a lot more than I think it deserves, and it's mostly because of the stories it generates. I'm never going to forget mad aunt Siobhan destroying her dynasty, or blowing up the heroic Duke of Semien in a manure explosion. So yeah, when Crusader Kings II is good, it's really good; when it's not, it's kinda boring. I've definitely enjoyed myself.

CKII: The House of Solomon

And Sulaiman was Dawood's heir, and he said: O men! we have been taught the language of birds, and we have been given all things; most surely this is manifest grace.

- the Qurʼān, 27:16

Like I said in my previous Crusader Kings II post, there have been so many changes to the game since I last played that I need to figure it all out again. When I finished my teaching last fall, it felt like a good time to do just that. One of my lecture courses was on the Cold War, and I talked about the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. He reckoned himself part of a dynasty reaching all the way back to the Biblical King Solomon. How am I supposed to not think about Crusader Kings? I tried playing as a tribal ruler in Africa before, and it didn't go great. Maybe I should try being a successor of King Solomon?

I set the start date to 769, found the Solomonid King of Abyssinia, and got started. The goal in this game is going to be very simple: survive. In reality, the Solomonids made it to 1975, when Emperor Haile Selassie was murdered by communists. In Crusader Kings, this isn't very easy to do; the defensive advantages of the Ethiopian Highlands aren't that great in the game, and the Prophet's alleged command to his followers to leave the Abyssinians in peace is nowhere to be found. Allegedly, the Prophet sent his daughter Ruqayyah and her husband ʿUthmān, the future Rāšidūn caliph, to safety in Abyssinia when the Quraysh were still opposed to Islam, and in gratitude commanded his followers to respect the Abyssinians' Christian faith. In Crusader Kings at least, the Abbasid caliphate is already firmly established and not particularly well-disposed toward Abyssinia, and I'm not sure if there's a lot I can do to stop being swallowed up by them. I'm just going to have to hope they have better things to do - and that the Catholics invent crusades soon.

In the game, the Solomonids are miaphysites, which may well have been the case if they actually ruled as far back as then. I'm planning a series of lectures on the Crusades, and I think much of, if not all of the first one is going to have to be dedicated to Christology, because it's very difficult to understand the Middle East before the Crusades without understanding the Christological debates that split Christianity into so many different sects long before the east-west divide.

To make a long and complicated story very short, the issue is the physis (φύσις) or nature of Jesus. Early theologians believed that Jesus was both divine and human, but how did that work in practice? By the time the Gospel of John came to be written, Christianity was already being expressed in the language of Greek philosophy: in the beginning, there was the logos (λόγος). While this made Christianity a lot easier to sell in the Hellenic world, it also gave rise to several intractable theological problems. By associating Jesus's divinity with the Platonic ideal of the logos, it creates an issue with Jesus's actions and experiences because the logos resides in the perfect and unchanging realm of ideas. If he is the logos, then he must be perfect, and implicit in the Platonic definition of perfect is that a perfect thing cannot change. If Jesus cannot experience change, can he be said to have actually suffered on the cross? And if he didn't suffer, did he really redeem mankind?

The official opinion of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and indeed Anglican and most Protestant churches is duophysitism, as defined as the Council of Chalcedon in 451: Christ is fully human and fully divine, having two natures (hence duophysitism) which cannot be separated from each other. An opposing view was championed by Cyril of Alexandria, a complete villain and vicious antisemite, whose thugs murdered the philosopher Hypatia: Cyril maintained that Christ had only one nature, which united the divine and human. This position came to be called miaphysitism, and became the creed of the Oriental Orthodox churches, including the Coptic church of Egypt and the church of Ethiopia. Hence Crusader Kings II models miaphysitism as a branch of Christianity with a Coptic pope resident in Alexandria but mostly practiced in Abyssinia.

A more extreme formulation of the same idea is monophysitism, a doctrine that maintains Christ had only one nature, in which the divine and human were not united, but the divine nature of Christ effectively replaced some parts of the human nature. Apollinarism, named after Apollinaris of Laodicea, maintained that Jesus had a human nature, but his soul had been effectively replaced by his divinity. I've always thought of it as saying that Jesus was, in a sense, a man possessed by god. The even more extreme doctrine of Eutychianism maintains that Jesus's human nature was dissolved into his divinity, and therefore Jesus really only had a divine nature. Monophysitism is condemned as a heresy, and is modelled as a heresy of miaphysitism in Crusader Kings II.

In the first century or so of my campaign, monophysitism is key. It's apparently a popular heresy along the upper Nile, and we used this to our advantage early on: an independent province or duchy would experience a monophysite revolt, convert, and we'd declare holy war and conquer the heretics. After some heresy-driven consolidation, we ended up at a rough strategic balance at the uppermost reaches of the Nile on the game map: the miaphysite realms of Abyssinia, Makuria and Alodia, all miaphysite and all approximately as strong. We and the Makurians were under pressure from the Muslims to the north and east, the Alodians from the pagans to the west.

The first dramatic change to this balance was when Alodia converted to monophysitism, which led to several serious wars over the exact nature of the divine person of Christ. The second was when the Abbasids swallowed up almost half of Makuria and all of Alodia.

The Abbasid expansion made life a little bit more complicated for us. Luckily, the caliph's attention was elsewhere, but we still had to fight off several holy wars from minor Abbasid rulers. We defeated an invasion from Yemen, but the sultan of Egypt then invaded with a far superior force. Our only chance was to defeat his two armies separately, and we were rewarded with a tremendous stroke of luck.

Soon thereafter, King Rema Armah was succeeded by his son, but we don't talk about him.

King Rema Armah's grandson Kifle Solomonid died at the young age of 34; the stress of defending the kingdom and trying to keep Makuria standing got to him. He was succeeded by his son, King Benaim (859-921), and that's when things really started to get interesting.

In 879, the Abbasids exploded.

Muslim dynasties in Crusader Kings II can suffer from decadence. If their decadence gets high enough, they can get Howardianly invaded by a more virile nomad tribe, which usurps the dynasty and shatters their realm. In our case, the Abbasids were overthrown by the Muhallabids, and all of a sudden the map looks very different!

In the year 900, appropriately enough while we were still in the middle of a holy war, the Catholics invented crusading. Apparently the Umayyads of al-Andalus expanded far enough into France to trigger the crusades, which works for us.

Now that crusades are a thing, in 903 King Benaim founded the Miaphysite holy order, the Order of Saint Anthony. Apparently there was never any such chivalric order in Ethiopia, but many westerners thought it existed and it was in fact created by the Ethiopian monarchy in exile in the 1980s, so hey, why not. In the game, they provide a tremendously useful force of heavy cavalry that's available for free when defending against a holy war. This is an excellent investment for us, and I for one am delighted that the Umayyads were so interested in France.

Eventually, the Abbasids recovered the caliphate, but not their territories in Persia and beyond. King Benaim was able to take advantage of the chaos to conquer the Horn of Africa and even grab Socotra, where we founded a vassal merchant republic of our own.

With that additional income in the royal pockets, it was time to start construction on my first ever great work: the Great Library of Aksum. One of the (frankly ahistorical) downsides of starting in Abyssinia is the abysmally low technology level, and I feel like we need to do everything we can to change that. A Great University would be even better, but we don't have the tech for it, and anyway the Great Library was always my favorite wonder in Civilization.

**

As the story has it, the historical empire of Aksum was destroyed by Queen Judith of the Jewish kingdom of Semien. My Abyssinian kingdom was spared a Judith, but that's not to say they didn't try. Semien had tried to stab us in the back several times, launching a holy war when we were distracted somewhere else, but we'd managed to hold them off. After King Benaim's death, they made another attempt.

Instead of a Judith, they had a King Pirkoi, who was pretty much a military genius. When my idiot vassals decided to start a rebellion for more council power, Pirkoi launched a holy war and managed to conquer Aksum. The morons and their council cost us the heart of the kingdom. I had the ringleader executed, and damn near quit the whole game there and then.

Things looked great for King Pirkoi. He'd conquered Aksum, humiliated the dynasty of Solomon, and was now the proud owner of the Great Library of Aksum. Empires have been started with less, by lesser men. It would be a real shame if something happened to him.

A key part of the success of our plot was the enthusiastic participation of his wife. Pirkoi was succeeded by his son, who was still a child when we retook Aksum in a holy war. The second holy war saw an invasion of Semien itself, the capture of the young king, and the extinguishing of his kingdom.

While all this was going on, we also made an unusual addition to the royal treasury.

Ever since the Hermetic Order was founded, I've tried to get my kings to be members. The Learning boosts really help with developing technology, and I've also started a collection of magnum opuses. The stat bonuses they offer are simply too good to pass up.

Meanwhile, we've also worked to develop tolerance so we can advance the status of women in Abyssinia. While I like that you can work to change the gender laws in Crusader Kings II, I'm also disappointed that the default "traditional" model everywhere is maximum misogyny, when we don't actually know that was necessarily the case at all. Still, at least the game makes the most basic argument for gender equality: full status of women doubles the amount of available commanders.

In 974 we got a whole new kind of challenge: the plague. The royal family survived in seclusion, with food threatening to run out when the pandemic moved on, but the destruction was almost complete.

By the millenium, the Muhallabids had returned to the throne again, and their empire stretched from Spain to Afghanistan. In 1008, they won a jihad against Byzantium for the kingdom of Anatolia.

This is how things stood in 1024. Eastern Europe was dominated by the pagan realms of Serbia and Novgorod; Catholic Sweden had risen to a surprising stature with lands all the way down to the Adriatic; and a Nenets noble had founded the Holy Roman Empire in Italy. Dominating the Middle East and Africa is the Muhallabid empire.

Facing this massive Abbasid/Muhallabid blob, there's not a lot I can do except strengthen my realm, hope they stay busy elsewhere and bide my time. In other words, try to survive. We've almost made it to the starting date of the vanilla game, after all, with a strong kingdom, a flourishing dynasty and several great works to our name.

**

Finally, some thoughts.

In the past, I've tried to get my realm to primogeniture succession as fast as possible, but over this campaign I've actually become very fond of feudal elective succession. Of course, you need the right circumstances for it, but if you can manage to have at least most of the significant electors be from your dynasty, the risk of game over is very low, and I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. You can pick the person best suited to be king, instead of being saddled with potentially useless children, and since the electors will rarely pick minors, inconvenient regencies are very rare. When you can avoid the risk of the title passing to another dynasty, I feel like feudal elective is a really good system. Best of all, it has no technology requirements, so you can move straight from gavelkind to feudal elective.

It does come with some surprises, though. For instance, one duke who was elected king turned out to have founded a mercenary company, which is not something I'd have done in our current situation. I couldn't figure out how much money I was making out of it, and I wanted my troops back, and had a hell of a time catching the company between jobs so I could disband it. Seeing as how that seemed to make next to no difference to my economy, it didn't seem like a great deal. Although I did get the achievement!

Also, in these post-Monks and Mystics days, you're guaranteed at least one surprise Satanist per dynasty, and maybe more with feudal elective. Still, I think it's worth the occasional werewolf.

**

Next time: a new millenium.

CKII: Eadfrith the Cathar

Last time, the Mercian empire went through a sequence of short-lived queens until Emperor Eadfrith the Great (1173- took the throne, nominally on the death of his mother in childbirth, and for real when he came of age. He got things started with moving the capital to Damietta.

Once the court was established there, my court chaplain discovered he was really into a heresy called Catharism. Finally, a chance to try running a secret cult! Sadly, as I've understood it, you can only ever belong to one secret society at a time, but then again, the Mercian hermetic tradition was broken during the Interregnum, so what the hell. Besides, Mercia is the largest Catholic realm in the world, so if I could flip at least a large part of it, we might be on our way to supplanting Catholicism altogether. It's a long shot, but hey, we'll see.

Meanwhile, Eadfrith became King of Norway.

Unfortunately, he also became insane and appointed his horse chancellor. It's the syphilis ("Great Pox"), I'm afraid.

**

At this point, I took a longish break from the game, for life reasons, but also because if I'm honest, running a secret cult turned out to be kind of boring. The first problem is that you can only belong to one secret organization at a time, which is a real shame, because it means I had to give up Hermeticism to become a Cathar. The bigger problem is that there's not a whole lot of interesting things to do as a Cathar. Now, I'd love to be able to convert my entire realm to Catharism and achieve full gender equality, but the way you go about it is occasionally sponsoring a secret community in a province, or trying to recruit a character. Neither of these is very interesting in itself, and being a secret cultist gives your character stress. When you combine the stat loss from giving up the hermetic grimoires, it's just a bad deal in pursuit of an outcome that may never happen, and like I said, is boring.

I'm bummed about this because it would have been really awesome to kick out the pope and replace him with a Cathar woman, but unfortunately I'll have to try that some other time. The paradox of a secret cult seems to be that converting a smaller realm is easier, but then that leaves you a potential victim of your more orthodox neighbors; converting a larger realm is just dull and time-consuming.

On a broader note, since I graduated I simply haven't had the time to immerse myself in Crusader Kings any more, and with several new DLCs and lots of minor updates out since I last played, I'm afraid I don't think returning to this game feels like a good idea. I think I need a completely new campaign to figure out how everything works again! I'm fondly dreaming of getting the kind of 9-to-5 job that would let me do some proper gaming, but I'm really not sure if those actually exist any more.

Still, building Mercia on the Nile was great fun, and I'm happy I did it. I'm also vaguely interested in the board game, although the reviews have been kind of mediocre. Anyway, Crusader Kings 2 is an amazing game, and I wish I had more time to play it.

CKII: The Great Mercian Interregnum

Last time, I chronicled the life of the Empress of Mercia, Éowyn the Great. Sadly, both of her daughters died before she did, leaving the throne to the least competent of her children, Emperor Cynewulf the Monk (1123-1155).

Cynewulf picked up where his mother left off: she had inherited a claim to the duchy of Orkney from her mother and, being Éowyn the Great, conquered it. Her son decided it might be nice to own more of Norway, and secured a foothold in Scandinavia.

Frankly, Cynewulf's stats were useless, and it's a miracle there wasn't a revolution. I tried to use the theology focus to get rid of his slothfulness, but it didn't work. A pilgrimage to Rome helped a little, though.

Cynewulf also joined the long line of Mercian hermetics, and I decided to break some new ground by creating a horoscope for his oldest child Eleanor.

Apparently the horoscope picks an attribute for the character that you can then encourage, or not. Eleanor got Intrigue, and I went with it, which got her a bonus and (maybe?) the Deceitful trait.

Meanwhile, through a sequence of events I don't fully understand, the Byzantine Emperor was a Taoist, and the Pope - driven from Rome to Germany by Byzantium - called a crusade on Byzantine Italy. Now, this was a little too Fourth Crusade for my taste, and with Taoist Byzantium capable of mobilizing 75 000 men, there was no way we were going to win this. I decided to participate by storming the strategically vital Byzantine stronghold of, um, Corsica. Handily getting everyone, including Cynewulf's oldest children, the twins Eleanor and Æthelflæd, the Crusader stat, and running away like hell as soon as the first massive Byzantine army showed up. Eventually the whole thing ended on an anticlimax when the Taoist emperor was overthrown and replaced by an Orthodox ruler.

In other futile holy wars, the party of 'Ali tried again, but they made only a token effort and were easily defeated.

Unfortunately, there were sad times ahead for the imperial family. Princess Eleanor died of disease, leaving her twin sister Æthelflæd first in line to the throne. A well-forged claim and a brief war gave Cynewulf the duchy of Vestlandet in Norway, but as he was fighting to secure the last of its counties from the King of Norway, he was killed in combat.

As you can see, Emperor Cynewulf the Monk never did improve his miserable attributes. But he did his best for his children, left a larger realm for his daughter than he inherited himself, and seeing as how he went out with a sword in his hand, he died his mother's son.

**

After Cynewulf's death, things became... complicated. He was succeeded by Empress Æthelflæd the Drunkard (1155-1162), which was a completely unfair nickname because she became Temperate almost immediately after receiving it. She also found the Seljuk empire in surprisingly bad shape, and launched a holy war on the duchy of Bahrain.

The war went well for the empire, but badly for her: she was terribly injured in battle and died shortly thereafter.

Both of Æthelflæd's sons took monastic vows during her reign, so the throne went to their sister, Empress Æthelflæd II (1162-1166), who was 14 when she became Empress. She brought the conquest of Bahrain to a succesful conclusion.

Sadly, Æthelflæd II only reigned for two years until she was assassinated - I have no idea by whom.

She was succeeded by her sister, Empress Cynehild (1166-1173). Her reign started with another Sunni jihad on Arabia.

She came of age defending the realm from the infidel.

The Pope was distinctly unhelpful! Can you imagine excommunicating a ruler defending themselves against a holy war?!

As the war was still raging, Empress Cynehild died giving birth to twin sons.

The older of the twins then became Emperor Eadfrith the Great (1173- before his first birthday, losing his mother and getting credit for defeating the Sunni jihad.

Some years into Eadfrith's regency, the Islamic world looked to be in enough trouble for us to try another holy war, this time on Basra.

The former Seljuk empire had split in half, into a Seljuk realm and the Persian empire, and while they were fighting who knows who, we took advantage.

This is what the map looked like after we captured Basra: the Persian empire is now the Taid empire, and they've lost a lot of territory to the Byzantines. With their holy places in Christian hands and their jihads failing, the moral authority of both Sunni and Shi'ite Islam has collapsed.

Meanwhile, as my regency neared its end, the inevitable civil war broke out.

During the war, Eadfrith came of age and turned out to be pretty decent at managing money.

The civil war, though, was going very badly. My troops were mopping up the Middle East just fine, but we lost a couple of big battles in England and were running out of money to hire more mercenaries - until I had an amazing stroke of luck.

With the leader of the rebellion in my hands, it was all over.

**

The civil war ended in January 1189. So in total, the 35 years since Cynewulf's death saw the reigns of three empresses, and a sixteen-year regency for Eadfrith, capped off by a massive civil war that, frankly, I was going to lose. In retrospect, it's kind of amazing we got through all that with the imperial line and realm still intact. You think that with primogeniture and everything that you can plan the succession, but lol nope.

Anyway, now that we have a young ruler with an impressive if somewhat unearned sobriquet on the throne, maybe we can achieve a little stability.

CKII: An Empress of Mercia

Fennis mira feritas, foeda paupertas: non arma, non equi, non penates; victui herba, vestitui pelles, cubile humus: solae in sagittis spes, quas inopia ferri ossibus asperant.
- Tacitus, Germania, XLVI

Emperor Éomer I (1056-59) inherited both the Mercian empire and the crusade in Finland. With his son, Éomer Éomersson (I did not pick that name), coming of age on his succession, we now have three consecutive generations of crusaders against the Finnish pagans. I was all set to write up our conquest of Finland, with an appropriate epigraph and everything, but then:

God may have been pleased, but I was not. Looking at the map, you can see why I was excited by a foothold in the north: the Seljuk juggernaut still blocks our way east. If you squint a little, you can see a splash of Mercian purple on the Baltic: that's where the Queen of Scotland, Wærburg the Daughter of Satan, conquered a chunk of Prussia. With my ambitions in Finland thwarted, maybe we could look into expanding there.

First, though, Spain. With the collapse of the Iceling kingdom of Italy and Africa, there were suddenly a lot of small independent counties and duchies in the Iberian peninsula, and at some point several of them were taken over by Vikings. We got some of them back.

Sadly, in addition to smiting the infidel, Éomer I also liked eating, and he passed away at the relatively young age of 45 from the gout. We barely knew him.

**

Éomer Éomersson succeeded to the throne as Emperor Éomer II (1059-1083), and got some help:

In his capacity as King of Jerusalem, Éomer II immediately vassalized the Templars, giving us almost ten thousand holy warriors to call on against the infidel, and most importantly, a massive force of heavy cavalry. Having been on the receiving end of the Catholic holy orders, I assure you they're no joke. Éomer put them to work in the Baltic.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Jerusalem completed its de jure drift into the Mercian empire.

One aspect of Éomer II's reign, however, stands above all others. We finally gathered enough cultural technology points to raise Tolerance in Leicester to VI, which meant that once enough members of the council were persuaded, Éomer II enacted full status of women in Mercia.

With that done, it was time to change the succession law in the empire, and in every damn kingdom I still held in it. Luckily, this doesn't require council approval; unluckily, it requires something even worse. To change the succession law in a kingdom, no dukes in it can have a negative opinion of you, nor can they be fighting each other. That's a tall order!

The problem is that if you get some but not all succession laws changed, the inheritance may get split. I had this for a long time, with the duke of Jerusalem fighting an interminable war with the King of Ireland for Jaffa. It eventually ended before Éomer died, but it made for a nervous time.

While that was getting sorted, we declared a holy war on the pagan Lithuanians. The supply limit in pagan counties is very, very low unless you have enough Military Organization tech. We don't, so we had to split up our army into several detachments. They had to be small enough to not take horrible losses from attrition, large enough to succesfully besiege the tribal holdings, and close enough to each other to take on bigger pagan armies together. As a sign of our new realm laws, the empress is in command of her husband's army.

Our superiority in both quality and quantity was crushing, so the outcome was never in any real doubt.

Eventually, Éomer II succumbed to severe stress. He left behind the core of a Mercian Lithuania, and more importantly, achieved my most cherished goal for this playthrough: full status of women and equal succession.

**

Now that we have equal succession rights, Éomer II was succeeded by his oldest child, Empress Éowyn the Great (1083-1123). As you can see, this is starting to be more like it.

To start off her reign, Éowyn expanded Mercia to the Persian Gulf by snapping up a county from the Aramid Empire.

Then, as we were busy fighting in Lithuania, the Pope called another crusade.

Sadly, crusades seem to be out of fashion, as no-one except a couple of tiny independent states joined in. Since it looked obvious that this was a lost cause, Éowyn sent in the holy orders, and rotated her commanders and vassals through so everyone got a Crusader trait. Meanwhile, domestic affairs intruded:

I don't know where the kid ended up, but I did have her mother killed.

In her younger days, Éowyn picked up the Poet trait, which nowadays has uses I never knew about:

However, in the middle of all this fun and games, we had no idea that the greatest challenge to Mercia since the Vikings was just over the horizon.

I said before that I was shocked we were able to hang on to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but with both Abyssinia and Byzantium conquering Muslim realms north and south, we were mostly ignored. Now, though, Islam was resurgent: the Seljuks had reconquered most of Mesopotamia, and now their co-religionists were coming for us.

We met the first major enemy force at Rafha, in the Nefoud. After a tremendous battle and some dicy moments in the skirmish phase, our massed heavy cavalry rode them down. Empress Éowyn led her troops in person, and paid a price:

She would eventually recover from her wounds, but was left permanently disfigured. But what mattered was that we won the war: the jihad failed.

With Arabia secure, we were free to expand our foothold in Lithuania far enough to create the kingdom.

As a good hermeticist, Éowyn also spent a lot of her time studying the stars, and eventually wrote her magnum opus on astrology.

I realize in retrospect that while the Hermetic Society missions are a bit repetitive, it's the magna opera that make it worth it. They're essentially hereditable stat bonuses, and the ability to pick your apprentice lets you ensure your heir also has access to them. Éowyn eventually became head of the whole society.

While fighting to expand our holdings in Lithuania, Éowyn was seriously injured again, this time losing a hand.

Look, being Empress ain't easy. She fought in one last great war, this time against a Shia jihad for Arabia, and won.

Finally, in 1123, Empress Éowyn the Great left us. I really feel that along with Éomer the Strange and the demon-emperor Gedalbert, her reign was one of the high points of the game. After securing the Kingdom of Jerusalem and expanding all the way to the shores of the Persian Gulf, we finally faced not one but two serious Muslim counter-attacks - and defeated them. Our northern expansion seemed foiled, but Éowyn ended up Queen of Lithuania, alongside her other titles. She was valiant, succesful and as the first Empress of a newly gender-equal Mercia, set an example that will never be forgotten.