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Welcome to the domain of hatred and evilness happiness and lollipops belonging to me, Cyan, cynic, main propagator for the death of Jeremy Wilken and general evil person who’s very much in love with a neologist. It’s awesome, really.

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Posted: 17th April 2009

The Rise of the Venetian Empire I: Counterfactual Advances

Categorized: empire: total war, games, history.

Venezia. The beautiful city of water. Capital of the autonomous region of Veneto in north-east Italy. Founded by refugees escaping the increase of Germanic raids on Roman cities, the incola lacunae—Latin for lagoon dwellers—grew in strength as the Byzantine campaigns in the country continued. Eventually, Venice became independent. It became one of the Repubbliche Marinare, the Maritime Republics, a collection of city-states rising from the former territory of Byzantium. It was fairly enlightened, having its neighbouring towns rallying to its defence when it was threatened. Interestingly, it did not treat Jews well—no change there, then—confining them to the Ghetto Nuovo and, later, the Ghetto Vecchio. Oddly, the adjectives of the ghettos were reversed; nuovo meaning new and vecchio meaning old, based upon when the old foundries in the region had the sites built. It is, indeed, the language from which we get the word ghetto. It grew into an imperial power, acquiring Cyprus, Crete and other islands in the area. It brought Byzantine power to its knees when it captured Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. Venice grew wealthy on its monopoly on the main land route to India, profiting from being the European intermediary. At its height, 36,000 sailors operated its 3,000-strong navy.

With this in mind, when I picked up Empire: Total War, I wanted to play them. At first, I had a go with Prussia, then France. And, to be honest, they’re a bit…easy. It doesn’t take a genius to create an empire from a nation which has, historically, one of the most advanced militaries in the world, nor one from a country which already had an empire. So, with the aid of a helpful mod, I unlocked all the so-called “minor factions”, nations which were considered to be too small to warrant a full-scale, unmodified campaign, as playable. To be honest, the choices weren’t that exciting; the only really cool ones were Georgia, the Italian States, the Barbary States and the Pirates. Exciting though taking over the world as a pirate is, I daresay it is kind of hard to charge a European regiment with their bayonets levelled against you with a raggle of sailors armed with nothing but a short, curved knife. So I picked Venice. Why Venice? If you said that it had everything to do with the fact that the infantry is dressed in deep purple overcoats and spoke Italian, there would be nothing I could do to deny it. With that style of thinking in mind, let’s move onto the conquests.

The blokes over at Creative Assembly start the city-state with the territory of Morea in the south-western Greece. It was not in the most brilliant region to have under one’s control; the biggest thing to its credit was a couple of farms. Venetia itself possessed some vines and a cotton weaver’s cottage in Verona. I knew immediately that early expansion and trade would be the key to success, knocking out the smaller, neighbouring nations before they had a chance to build up their armies and to secure myself from the Austrians. I knocked down the cotton cottage at Verona, replacing it with a school in order to gain an early advantage in terms of military technology over my soon to be enemies. Having secured an alliance with Spain, I built up a small army of line infantry. With a measly unit of artillery which was provided to me at the beginning tagging along, we marched straight into Rome. After a short battle (alas, I don’t have screenshots for this period of time, but there will be some of my later campaigns), Rome was mine and all of Italy, barring Naples, which was historically under Spanish control, was under the Purple Banner.  As an afterthought, I took on Malta.

At this time, the island of Malta was controlled by the Knights Hospitaller, referred to as the Knights of St John in-game, and also known as the Order of St John, was a Christian organization established as a hospital in Jerusalem, serving pilgrims who became sick during their visit to the Holy Land. During the First Crusade it became a military order, providing the pilgrims with an armed escort in addition to the infirmaries. Along with the Knights Templar, they became a powerful religious order, answering only to the Pope. Eventually, Islamic soldiers kicked them out of the Holy Land, and the Knights retreated to the island of Cyprus. Subject to the politics of the region, the Knights claimed sovereignity over Rhodes, conquering it and constructing a stronghold. Here, the newly-branded Knights of Rhodes fought with the Barbary States, also represented in-game, the Ottomans and Egypt. Finally, a 200,000 strong Ottoman army near-wiped out the Knights. The remains of the Order were allowed to retreat to Sicily, whose Viceroy—subject to the King of Spain—gave them Malta and Tripoli, in exchange for the delivery of a Maltese falcon each year.

Compared to their historic stand against the Ottomans in later years, they fell hard as the assortment of militia charged my line infantry, coming up against cold steel instead of the crude clubs they were using their rifles as. Malta proved difficult to settle. The lack of entertainment buildings meant that the populace was incredibly unhappy. Coupled with resistance to my occupying armies, and the tax I was forced to impose on them due to a decisive lack of income, the Maltese were dangerously close to rebellion.

With the immediate danger gone, and my trading ports starting to roll in the stock, I set my sights on India; in particular, Mysore. However, as my fleet was crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, I was blocked by the navies of Morocco, three of them, no less! Needless to say, I was pissed, so I landed my soldiers and took the capital. I bolstered the garrison with reinforcements from Rome whilst taking my main army—which I had named The Purple Ones—onwards towards India.