Introduction

Hi there, and welcome to my first attempt at a Let's Play!

Introduction:

This will be me trying my hand at a Paradox mega-campaign. Stretching across almost 900 years, we'll be tracing the journey of a minor power in 1066 through to 1948, watching it transform as it goes through everything from the Enlightenment to the Age of Nationalism. To do this I'll be playing through 5 games - Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, March of the Eagles, Victoria 2 and Hearts of Iron 4.

I've already read a couple other Paradox LPs on here, so I know they're pretty popular, but I figure there's no harm in giving it a jab myself. For CK2, I'll be running on the latest version of CK2+, along with all the official expansions except Sunset Invasion, simply because...

Who will we be playing as?

The Sheikh of Cádiz, a single-county minor clinging onto the edges of the Iberian peninsula. Our first character will be Muhammad Jizrunid, a 63 year old Sunni zealot without any heirs whatsoever, making for a particularly challenging start.

So what's different about your LP?

I'll be frank, nothing much. I've completed a couple megacampaigns before, and they generally went pretty well, but they were usually with Catholic powerhouses. It'll be really cool to take a Muslim power through the ages, facing the constant threats and basking in the boons that come with our positioning, suffering through the inevitable setbacks and attempting to bounce back... it'll be a wild ride.

What are your goals, then?

Firstly, this won't be turning into blob simulator. I'm hoping to avoid ever getting too powerful, mostly by roleplaying my characters to the extreme. Hopefully I can still make updates fun by focusing more on the stories that CK2 crafts, rather than just shoving endless war into every chapter, so we'll see how that goes.

With that, I'm going to see where the game takes me from there and work with what I'm given. I will obviously be expanding within de jure Andalusia, but I also want to eventually have a few scuffles in the Crusades and maybe, way down the line, test myself against the great powers of the world. All this assuming I don't fuck up and manage to survive the first few years, of course.

So, a bit more on Al-Andalus?

Iberia has a long and interesting history, as many probably already know, one dating back thousands of years to where it was little more than a battlefield, bearing witness to the clash of the two superpowers that were Rome and Carthage. Lots happened, but to put it short, Rome won and went on to dominate the Mediterranean. All empires fall, however, and they too eventually collapsed. Just one of many causes attributed to the fall of the Roman Empire are the raids and migrations of Germanic peoples into Western Rome, from the Vandals to the Ostrogoths. Iberia in particular would largely come under the occupation of the Visigoths, who managed to establish dominance over the peninsula.

All very nice, but the only history that we're really interested in begins a few centuries after all of this, around the early 710s AD, which was when the Arabs launched the first of many incursions into Visigothic Iberia.

Divisions within the Visigothic Kingdom made it easy for a Berber-Arab force expand into southern Iberia, culminating in a decisive battle in which the Visigothic King Roderic was killed. Left leaderless, they crumbled before the oncoming Muslim armies, who overran much of the peninsula over the next eight years. Once the Visigoths were fully subjugated, the Umayyad Caliph promptly forgot about Iberia. It was, after all, nothing but the distant frontier of a vast and powerful empire.

That is, until they were overthrown. The Umayyads were the successors of Prophet Muhammad, seizing control of the Muslim Empire in the mid-600s and ruling as Caliphs up until the 750s. But their rule was not universally beloved, and the prestigious Abbasid family would eventually lead a revolution against the Umayyads, who eventually suffered many defeats on the battlefield. The now-entrenched Abbasids then led a mass slaughter of every Umayyad they could their hands on, desecrating their tombs and seizing control of the Muslim world for themselves.

They couldn't track down every Umayyad, however, and Abd ar-Rahman I managed to escape and establish a new kingdom in Iberia. Abd ar-Rahman's descendants would go on to renew the Umayyad Caliphate, spurring what was the golden age of Andalusian civilisation as they ruled over a thriving ethnically and religiously diverse population.

This golden age would not last long, just a little over half a century, before giving way to a period of devastating civil war, also called the Taifa period.

The chronic infighting quickly led to the demise of the Umayyad Caliphate and the collapse of Muslim hegemony on the peninsula. The Christian powers of the north took advantage of Andalusian disunity and rapidly expanded, with their raids quickly escalating into large-scale reconquest. A series of decisive Catholic victories has ensured that Islam is now on the retreat within the Iberian peninsula, and unless something is done to end the conflict of the Taifas and reunify Al-Andalus, there is a legitimate risk that the united Catholic powers may end up victorious.

And it is into this dynamic and volatile setting that we come into play.