The tale of Lenniweck, also known as Fort Moor, Bababinnetudun, Lenniwick, or Illenewek, is a long history, characterized by brutality, violence, racism, and classism. The first city on the site, was known as Pagewacteego by the Mahenata Natives [1] was established roughly in the 9th century, though settlement can be traced back to at least 600 AD. Flourishing during the Interregnum Thaw, the residents of Pagewactiego formed part of the Chenco Culture, also known as the Moundbuilders or the Netongans (after the Netongo River)[2][3]. The society was sedentary, characterized by social stratification and large scale trade networks among smaller polities. The end of the Chenco culture arrived during the Early Modern Glaciation, with climate changes disrupting agriculture. Pagewactiego was emptied of people by 1400, and was not reoccupied until the Pulakar.
Fleeing from the English colonies in Raleighsland, black slaves had been trickling into the Native populations, both as slaves and as freedmen. By chance, a Todoro, a Muslim scholar, Muhammadu ibn 'Umar, was enslaved, and survived against the odds to get to America. His ideology spread among European and Native slaves. When the Hitcheeti had to call in allies to surpress a slave revolt, Muslim slaves entered the remnants of the Chenco trade routes. Many freed Africans set up smaller states in competition with the Natives. Ibrahim Kande Ba, leading the Fula speakers he led from captivity, settled Pagewactiego, giving it the name Babanbinnetudun, or 'Great Burial Mounds'. He built fortifications around the largest Mound, el Babanbinnetudun and fished and traded with local Freedmen states for food and survival.
The Inoca Peoples and Babanbinnetudun initially fought, but an eventual alliance was formed after the Wiedeaux Crusade, when large numbers of Natives were displaced, fleeing into the Netongo-Great Lakes Basin. Fula caste system and Islamic political thought entered the ideologies of the Inoca peoples and into the Netongo River basin. A mosque made from mud-bricks were built in Babanbinnetudun, and Kande Ba named himself Emir, and created a loose heirarchy based off of the Pulaaku codes. There were districts set up housing the various social classes: The Dimo (nobility) and Emir's court lived in the East of the city; The Sansari soldiers housed in the West. Non-Muslims were not allowed in the city proper, and the Natives (shatabaku) and middle class Pulukar lived across the Inoca River, and the servile Buzu were housed further away, on the banks of the Netongo River proper. In spite of these conditions, and tension between the radical Islamic Babans and the Ancestor worshiping Inoca, the alliance held firm for more than a century. Population expansion brought by Spanish Cattle was directed outward in a series of jihads against neighboring tribes such as the Shawnee and Miami. Trade brought Afro-Islamic ideology as far north as the Hudson Bay, and West to the Goldstone Mountains[4].
The Inoca-Pulakar period was ended in 1730 when the The Noveau Navarrese Company made the Tribes of the Netongo River Basin swear fealty to Noveau Navarre. Babanbinnetudun refused, and the next summer 13,000 Frenchmen and Native allies captured Babanbinnetudun, executed the Emir, and enslaved thousands of residents. Fort Moor was built over-top of the site of Babanbinnetudun, and only the Emir's Palace, the Great Mound, and the Al-Binnetudun Mosque (re-purposed as a Catholic Cathedral).
Noveau Navarrese Rule proved violent and destructive, with most of the original population of the area enslaved or killed, taking with them a legacy of the Netongans and the Pulukar. Though Native and African wives were very common Fort Moor was a segregated slaveocracy, with a complex racial hierarchy (ironically based in part of the Fula codes) where white French plantation owners lived at the top. For the most part, with the importation of more African Slaves, the social order stabilized into a three tiered system, with 'visible whites' as the ruling class, the 'Metis' forming a middle and lower class, and Africans forming the underclass of slaves.
The Netongo Rebellion saw the abolition of slavery, and the rise of the Watchman State. Taekota Pizi (Peter L'Ami in Noveau Navarre) lead the Netongo Revolution, and devolved power to smaller collectives (sachems), under the oversight of a federal polity. Each sachem could rule their own with various laws, but all obeyed the Great Sachem's laws. Sharia, Roman Law, and tribal codes all coexisted alongside a hybrid representative republic running it all.
Though after Taekota's Death the Netongo State fell to French vassalage once more, his ideas were adopted by the French administrators to keep revolts from occurring again. Eventually, the concept of a watchman state, watching over smaller states while being one polity was adopted all across the globe to varying degrees of success.
Eventually the Netongans were granted independence after the Dissolution of the French State, and the name Fort Moor was retired in favor of Lenniweck, after an early Courlandish translation which appeared on Willhelm von Windau's account of the ruins of the city.
[1] The Beaver Wars as we know them do not occur. The Ohio Basin and Mississippi region still contain Siouan speakers. The POD was James Hawkins contacting the tribes of Georgia, in an attempt to make an alliance against the Spanish.
[2] Netonga River - Mississippi River, as a result of the Courlandish contact with the Siouan speakers of the region rather than the Algonquian tribes of OTL. This name is a known Siouan word.
[3] Pagewactiego means approx. 'Big Mounds/Fort/Hill' in Omaha, the closest surviving language to the extinct Siouans of the Mississippi Basin. I took liberties given the lack of knowledge about Pre-Beaver War Mississippian dwellers.
[4] Rocky Mountains
