Hispania in the 12th Century
Hispania in the 12th Century
Though the great mass of wars fought between Turks and Christians in the eastern Mediterranean occupied the imagination of most of Europe during the 11th century, the Iberian peninsula had not ceased to be a frontier of military, economic, and cultural exchange between the two great Abrahamic faiths. The Muslims of Andalusia were still the dominant power in the peninsula, but their ability to project that power had been greatly checked by the Roman presence vis a vis their client kingdom of Catalonia (as the kingdom of Gotholania was becoming known in the local Romance dialect). Low level warfare continued between each of the four states in the peninsula: Anadalusia, Catalonia, Vasconia, and Galicia, though the borders rarely moved much.
The two states that fought the least between themselves were Vasconia and Catalonia, as their interests were the least in conflict, with each side mostly interested in expanding along their respective coasts. The Vasconians and Galicians, however were just as likely to fight each other as either were to fight the Andalusians of Cordoba. However, the great Crusader King Antso of Vasconia had secured a diplomatic marriage with Galicia before leaving for the Levant, which paid dividends when the Galician throne was inherited by Maria in AD 1104, the very princess to whom he had married his son, Pedro. This put Antso's grandson, known as Jose, born in AD 1099, in line to become king of the entire northern coastline of the peninsula. Antso thus began to make preparations for campaigns against the Imamate of Cordoba, and he hoped to wrest as much of the territory of Andalusia as possible within the near future. However, Antso was no impetuous young ruler, and his military and political acumen had been honed over years of rule and campaign. His first order of business was to consolidate the ties between the former rival kingdoms of Galicia and Vasconia. Antso made certain that Queen Maria was afforded all possible respect, and ensured that she would be a staunch ally of his, beyond her marital obligations to his family. He also involved the Galician nobles as much as possible in diplomatic matters, and worked to engineer a great many political marriages between the two realms, to help cement the ties all the way down the feudal hierarchy.
Antso would not live to see his efforts come to fruition, dying in AD 1108, before he could begin to liberate the Christians of Andalusia. His death left the entire project in doubt, but his vision was shared by the most influential person it could have been shared by in either Galicia or Vasconia: Queen Maria of Galicia, his daughter-in-law. His own son, Pedro, was a competent enough monarch, but did not have the vision that Antso did. Maria, on the other hand, was fanatically pious and determined to see the Cordoban rule over Andalusia ended. She picked up right where Antso left off, and began to marshal the armies of the two Christian kingdoms to invade the south. Everything was ready, and the various feuds that would have derailed the campaign were smoothed over for the time being. The only major setback Maria suffered was the Papacy’s refusal to declare the struggle on equal theological footing to the Crusade. In the eyes of the Church, while Christian rule over Hispania would certainly be preferable to Muslim rule, the Imamate was far too fastidious in their general policy of protection for Christians (and Jews). The Cordoban government’s overall good relations with the Roman Republic - aside from the North African war nearly two centuries earlier - certainly colored the Church’s view in this matter. Cordoba and Constantinople were not formal allies with any obligation to defend each other against attack, but they were hardly mortal enemies.
With or without Papal sanction, Maria invaded Andalusia in AD 1109. Her primary goal was the conquest of Toledo and the securing of the Atlantic coastline, or, put another way, the watershed of the Tagus river. Securing the major cities along that river, such as Toledo and Lisbon, would put her unified kingdom in a strong position, making it the pre-eminent power on the peninsula, instead of the heathen Andalusians or the far-off Romans. The overall plan was solid, and, in the first engagement between the Galician-Vasconian army, led by Maria herself (as a figurehead, she left the day-to-day strategic and tactical commands to her two chief generals, Rodrigo de Laredo and Xoán de Coruña), took place outside of a minor Cordoban fortification, known as Mayrit (in Arabic) or Matrit (in Mozarabic). This battle of Matrit was a victory for the Christian forces, though the Muslim forces under their general, Ali ibn Khaldun, were able to retreat in good order.
Ibn Khaldun wanted to wear the Christian army down, as he had an inferior force (well trained, but too few in number), and hoped that he could gradually entrap the invaders deeper and deeper into Andalusian territory, where they would be isolated and easier to defeat. However, his plan relied on the continued loyalty of the local populations, which, even after centuries of Muslim rule, were predominantly Christian. In fact, it was the nature of that Muslim rule that maintained the prominence of Christianity in the region, as the Kharijite denomination of Islam was so demanding of its adherents that conversion was much rarer than in other Muslim realms. Still, the Christians of Andalusia were, by and large, loyal to their Muslim rulers. At least, they were loyal up to and until their lands were taken by Maria’s army. According to surviving records, the war was marked by the peculiar circumstance that not a single town ever switched sides before the invading army reach them, but, once these towns surrendered, they were totally committed to the Galician-Vasconian cause. It would seem that loyalty to the Cordoban government was widespread, but shallow.
Ibn Khaldun had no way of knowing that this would be the case, and, in his effort to draw Maria’s army deeper into his territory, lost several towns around Toledo to her, giving the invaders a strong position from which to attack the great city. Maria’s army laid siege to Toledo, and Ibn Khaldun marched out to relieve the city, and successful drove off her army, inflicting serious casualties in the process. After this victory, Ibn Khaldun decided that the local Christians could not be trusted, and began to remove any prominent Christians from whatever power they had in the region, to prevent them from collaborating with the invaders. This risked alienating many of the consistently loyal subjects of the Imamate, and the government in Cordoba, cognizant of the risk this posed to their entire state, immediately sacked Ibn Khaldun, and replaced him with a more tolerant general. Unfortunately for the Cordoban government, his replacement was not nearly as competent as he was, and, when the invading army returned to Toledo, they took the city with minimal casualties.
The new Cordoban general, Saif al-Moradi, might not have been as capable as Ibn Khaldun had been, but he was accutely aware of the most important fact of the Cordoban war effort: they could not afford to lose their main field army. Containing not only their most highly trained soldiers, but also their most loyal soldiers, if it was destroyed, the Cordoban government simply did not have the demographics to replace it in time, without conscripting Christians, which would both present problems of loyalty of the soldiers themselves and cause their Christian subjects to question their loyalty in general. Why pay the jizya tax in place of military service, if they’d be conscripted anyway? So, al-Moradi shadowed Maria’s army, harrying it whenever possible, but not accepting any opportunity for a set battle. He would not contest her conquest of territory, but hoped to make it costly enough to discourage her from trying to take enough that the entire Cordoban state would be unviable. So, the war progressed in a general westward motion, as town after town and castle after castle along the Tagus fell to the Christian army, and, by AD 1111, Lisbon was under siege. It actually lasted quite a bit longer than any of the previous actions, as, whatever their deficiencies on land, the Cordobans had a very respectable navy, and, in this case, they could continue to re-supply the city with little difficulty (and nobody had any objection to Christian sailors doing this job). In fact, it took over a year for Lisbon to fall to the Christians, and Maria’s army was well-bloodied by that point.
With the fall of Lisbon in AD 1112, Maria and her commanders were satisfied that they had secured enough territory for the time to come to terms with the Imamate of Cordoba. Her basic war goal had been achieved, and the government in Cordoba accepted the loss of the Tagus basin, in exchange for peace. Neither side expected the peace to last for long, as the weakness of the Imamate had been exposed to all of its neighbors, and Maria’s young son, Jose, was soon to come of age, and would be eager to surpass his mother and grandfather in their achievements in war.
The peace lasted quite a bit longer than anyone expected. Maria and Pedro spent the following years consolidating their gains, distributing land and castles to loyal followers, and building many new castles to secure their territory. Pedro would live until AD 1121, and Maria for almost another decade. Jose, as king of Vasconia, was eager to continue the war, but, with the bulk of the new lands under the crown of Galicia, Maria was able to effectively veto her son’s ambitions. The king was left to stew in his mountainous kingdom until his mother’s suspicious death in AD 1129. Jose’s ambitions were grand, and he promptly moved both the courts of Galicia and Vasconia to Toledo, a loud proclamation of his intent to conquer south and eliminate the last vestiges of Muslim rule in Hispania.
Had his parents not taken so long to die, or had they resumed the war themselves, this strategy likely would have worked. However, by the time Jose was able to muster his forces and march south, the Imamate had done what any weaker power faced by invasion would do: they found a more powerful protector. Swallowing their pride, the government in Cordoba had negotiated a treaty of alliance with the Roman Republic, and turned their unique theocracy into another client state of Constantinople. When Jose’s envoys returned from conveying his demands to the Imamate, and returned to tell him that the Republic’s African field army had been dispatched to protect the new ally of Rome, the aspiring King of All Hispania became furious. He’d been raised to bring battle to the Muslim, to conquer the heathens and bring them into the glory of Christ. At every step, he was stymied, and not even by the Muslims, but by other Christians.
Evaluating his options, Jose decided that he would increase the levy demands of his vassals, and go to war anyway. For this decision to fight the greatest power of the era, several chroniclers dubbed him King Jose the Mad. He alienated many in his kingdoms, particularly those closest to the Roman sphere of power. Vasconia would rise up against him, proclaiming that he had violated his feudal obligations, and the Vasconian nobles elected a new king, Antso IV, in AD 1130. So, Jose took his army and, rather than fight the Romans, he fought his own people. For all of his rash decision making, Jose was certainly a skilled military commander, and swept away all opposition in Vasconia, and killed the usurper Antso IV the following year. However, he burned many bridges, and Vasconia was now effectively occupied territory that had to be garrisoned with loyal troops, rather source of soldiers. Adding to Jose’s headaches were the ties that had been formed across the kingdoms under his rule. His parents and grandfather had made certain that the nobles of Vasconia would not feel alienated from those in Galicia. Now, the Galician nobles that Jose’s rule depended on watched their cousins and in-laws executed by their king, and they, too, began to resist his rule.
In AD 1133, the aging Xoán de Coruña, one of the heroes of the war two decades ago, was declared king of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela. The great houses flocked to his banner, and Jose was, once more, denied his opportunity to kick the Roman giant. Jose marched to attack Galicia proper, and, while his army was there, Xoán marched south, and took the Counties of Portucale and Lisbon, securing the entire western seaboard of Hispania. Now, Jose had to march south to face Xoán, which gave Xoán’s old comrade, Rodrigo de Laredo, to raise his own rebellion in the north, declaring himself king of Cantabria. Jose did manage to defeat Xoán in battle, and the rebel king of Galicia retreated to Lisbon, where he settled in for a siege. Now, it was Vasconia’s time to rebel again, putting yet another Antso on their throne. In an amusing footnote, shortly after being crowned, Antso V fell ill, and recommended his cousin Antso as a possible successor, though the new king recovered before his kingdom could go through three identically named kings in as many years (historians do point out that Antso was an incredibly common name during this era, due to the Crusade, making this quirk of history less absurd than it first seems).
Rodrigo and Antso marched to the relief of Lisbon, and, in AD 1134, fought Jose outside the city, driving him off. The king retreated to his capital in Toledo, to regroup and muster whatever forces he had. In this part of the peninsula, he was still popular, but, when the combined rebel armies marched on Toledo, even Jose had to admit that his options were limited. At a conference at the site of the first battle of his mother’s war, Madrid, the kingdoms were carved up. Vasconia would retain its traditional borders, Galicia would take the west, all the way down to Lisbon, and the new Kingdom of Cantabria would have the coastal lands in between the two kingdoms. The rest, the interior, was retained by Jose as the Kingdom of Toledo.
Thus, peace returned to Hispania, and the restless Jose ruled over a calm and prosperous kingdom in the center for the remainder of his life, dying in his bed in AD 1157. The energetic king tried to involve himself in infrastructure and building projects, building new roads, bridges, and castles, but his true passion was war. Deprived of that, Jose devoted most of his time to a series of wives and mistresses. Upon his death, his surviving offspring included 7 legitimate sons, 5 legitimate daughters, and between 12-18 bastards. Having so many claimants to the throne was a recipe for disaster, and the new king, Carlos, had to immediately act to secure his throne. His father likely would have rolled over in his grave if he knew what solution Carlos decided upon. In AD 1159, the Kingdom of Toledo entered into a defensive alliance with the Roman Republic, with Constantinople recognizing Carlos as the rightful king of Toledo. Jose lost most of his kingdom due to Roman interference, and now, his son owed that kingdom to Roman interference.
End
This was a fun one to write. Feudal politics make for great stories.
I decided I wanted to do something nice for my loyal readers. So, my next entry will be about any given region/kingdom you want it to be, whichever gets the most support. Just not: Hispania, the Roman Republic, the Crusader States, or Egypt. We covered those in enough depth recently. Everything else goes, as long as its been mentioned in the timeline so far. Lets see how much I regret this (if you pick something obscure, no promises it will have as much detail as this entry).
Though the great mass of wars fought between Turks and Christians in the eastern Mediterranean occupied the imagination of most of Europe during the 11th century, the Iberian peninsula had not ceased to be a frontier of military, economic, and cultural exchange between the two great Abrahamic faiths. The Muslims of Andalusia were still the dominant power in the peninsula, but their ability to project that power had been greatly checked by the Roman presence vis a vis their client kingdom of Catalonia (as the kingdom of Gotholania was becoming known in the local Romance dialect). Low level warfare continued between each of the four states in the peninsula: Anadalusia, Catalonia, Vasconia, and Galicia, though the borders rarely moved much.
The two states that fought the least between themselves were Vasconia and Catalonia, as their interests were the least in conflict, with each side mostly interested in expanding along their respective coasts. The Vasconians and Galicians, however were just as likely to fight each other as either were to fight the Andalusians of Cordoba. However, the great Crusader King Antso of Vasconia had secured a diplomatic marriage with Galicia before leaving for the Levant, which paid dividends when the Galician throne was inherited by Maria in AD 1104, the very princess to whom he had married his son, Pedro. This put Antso's grandson, known as Jose, born in AD 1099, in line to become king of the entire northern coastline of the peninsula. Antso thus began to make preparations for campaigns against the Imamate of Cordoba, and he hoped to wrest as much of the territory of Andalusia as possible within the near future. However, Antso was no impetuous young ruler, and his military and political acumen had been honed over years of rule and campaign. His first order of business was to consolidate the ties between the former rival kingdoms of Galicia and Vasconia. Antso made certain that Queen Maria was afforded all possible respect, and ensured that she would be a staunch ally of his, beyond her marital obligations to his family. He also involved the Galician nobles as much as possible in diplomatic matters, and worked to engineer a great many political marriages between the two realms, to help cement the ties all the way down the feudal hierarchy.
Antso would not live to see his efforts come to fruition, dying in AD 1108, before he could begin to liberate the Christians of Andalusia. His death left the entire project in doubt, but his vision was shared by the most influential person it could have been shared by in either Galicia or Vasconia: Queen Maria of Galicia, his daughter-in-law. His own son, Pedro, was a competent enough monarch, but did not have the vision that Antso did. Maria, on the other hand, was fanatically pious and determined to see the Cordoban rule over Andalusia ended. She picked up right where Antso left off, and began to marshal the armies of the two Christian kingdoms to invade the south. Everything was ready, and the various feuds that would have derailed the campaign were smoothed over for the time being. The only major setback Maria suffered was the Papacy’s refusal to declare the struggle on equal theological footing to the Crusade. In the eyes of the Church, while Christian rule over Hispania would certainly be preferable to Muslim rule, the Imamate was far too fastidious in their general policy of protection for Christians (and Jews). The Cordoban government’s overall good relations with the Roman Republic - aside from the North African war nearly two centuries earlier - certainly colored the Church’s view in this matter. Cordoba and Constantinople were not formal allies with any obligation to defend each other against attack, but they were hardly mortal enemies.
With or without Papal sanction, Maria invaded Andalusia in AD 1109. Her primary goal was the conquest of Toledo and the securing of the Atlantic coastline, or, put another way, the watershed of the Tagus river. Securing the major cities along that river, such as Toledo and Lisbon, would put her unified kingdom in a strong position, making it the pre-eminent power on the peninsula, instead of the heathen Andalusians or the far-off Romans. The overall plan was solid, and, in the first engagement between the Galician-Vasconian army, led by Maria herself (as a figurehead, she left the day-to-day strategic and tactical commands to her two chief generals, Rodrigo de Laredo and Xoán de Coruña), took place outside of a minor Cordoban fortification, known as Mayrit (in Arabic) or Matrit (in Mozarabic). This battle of Matrit was a victory for the Christian forces, though the Muslim forces under their general, Ali ibn Khaldun, were able to retreat in good order.
Ibn Khaldun wanted to wear the Christian army down, as he had an inferior force (well trained, but too few in number), and hoped that he could gradually entrap the invaders deeper and deeper into Andalusian territory, where they would be isolated and easier to defeat. However, his plan relied on the continued loyalty of the local populations, which, even after centuries of Muslim rule, were predominantly Christian. In fact, it was the nature of that Muslim rule that maintained the prominence of Christianity in the region, as the Kharijite denomination of Islam was so demanding of its adherents that conversion was much rarer than in other Muslim realms. Still, the Christians of Andalusia were, by and large, loyal to their Muslim rulers. At least, they were loyal up to and until their lands were taken by Maria’s army. According to surviving records, the war was marked by the peculiar circumstance that not a single town ever switched sides before the invading army reach them, but, once these towns surrendered, they were totally committed to the Galician-Vasconian cause. It would seem that loyalty to the Cordoban government was widespread, but shallow.
Ibn Khaldun had no way of knowing that this would be the case, and, in his effort to draw Maria’s army deeper into his territory, lost several towns around Toledo to her, giving the invaders a strong position from which to attack the great city. Maria’s army laid siege to Toledo, and Ibn Khaldun marched out to relieve the city, and successful drove off her army, inflicting serious casualties in the process. After this victory, Ibn Khaldun decided that the local Christians could not be trusted, and began to remove any prominent Christians from whatever power they had in the region, to prevent them from collaborating with the invaders. This risked alienating many of the consistently loyal subjects of the Imamate, and the government in Cordoba, cognizant of the risk this posed to their entire state, immediately sacked Ibn Khaldun, and replaced him with a more tolerant general. Unfortunately for the Cordoban government, his replacement was not nearly as competent as he was, and, when the invading army returned to Toledo, they took the city with minimal casualties.
The new Cordoban general, Saif al-Moradi, might not have been as capable as Ibn Khaldun had been, but he was accutely aware of the most important fact of the Cordoban war effort: they could not afford to lose their main field army. Containing not only their most highly trained soldiers, but also their most loyal soldiers, if it was destroyed, the Cordoban government simply did not have the demographics to replace it in time, without conscripting Christians, which would both present problems of loyalty of the soldiers themselves and cause their Christian subjects to question their loyalty in general. Why pay the jizya tax in place of military service, if they’d be conscripted anyway? So, al-Moradi shadowed Maria’s army, harrying it whenever possible, but not accepting any opportunity for a set battle. He would not contest her conquest of territory, but hoped to make it costly enough to discourage her from trying to take enough that the entire Cordoban state would be unviable. So, the war progressed in a general westward motion, as town after town and castle after castle along the Tagus fell to the Christian army, and, by AD 1111, Lisbon was under siege. It actually lasted quite a bit longer than any of the previous actions, as, whatever their deficiencies on land, the Cordobans had a very respectable navy, and, in this case, they could continue to re-supply the city with little difficulty (and nobody had any objection to Christian sailors doing this job). In fact, it took over a year for Lisbon to fall to the Christians, and Maria’s army was well-bloodied by that point.
With the fall of Lisbon in AD 1112, Maria and her commanders were satisfied that they had secured enough territory for the time to come to terms with the Imamate of Cordoba. Her basic war goal had been achieved, and the government in Cordoba accepted the loss of the Tagus basin, in exchange for peace. Neither side expected the peace to last for long, as the weakness of the Imamate had been exposed to all of its neighbors, and Maria’s young son, Jose, was soon to come of age, and would be eager to surpass his mother and grandfather in their achievements in war.
The peace lasted quite a bit longer than anyone expected. Maria and Pedro spent the following years consolidating their gains, distributing land and castles to loyal followers, and building many new castles to secure their territory. Pedro would live until AD 1121, and Maria for almost another decade. Jose, as king of Vasconia, was eager to continue the war, but, with the bulk of the new lands under the crown of Galicia, Maria was able to effectively veto her son’s ambitions. The king was left to stew in his mountainous kingdom until his mother’s suspicious death in AD 1129. Jose’s ambitions were grand, and he promptly moved both the courts of Galicia and Vasconia to Toledo, a loud proclamation of his intent to conquer south and eliminate the last vestiges of Muslim rule in Hispania.
Had his parents not taken so long to die, or had they resumed the war themselves, this strategy likely would have worked. However, by the time Jose was able to muster his forces and march south, the Imamate had done what any weaker power faced by invasion would do: they found a more powerful protector. Swallowing their pride, the government in Cordoba had negotiated a treaty of alliance with the Roman Republic, and turned their unique theocracy into another client state of Constantinople. When Jose’s envoys returned from conveying his demands to the Imamate, and returned to tell him that the Republic’s African field army had been dispatched to protect the new ally of Rome, the aspiring King of All Hispania became furious. He’d been raised to bring battle to the Muslim, to conquer the heathens and bring them into the glory of Christ. At every step, he was stymied, and not even by the Muslims, but by other Christians.
Evaluating his options, Jose decided that he would increase the levy demands of his vassals, and go to war anyway. For this decision to fight the greatest power of the era, several chroniclers dubbed him King Jose the Mad. He alienated many in his kingdoms, particularly those closest to the Roman sphere of power. Vasconia would rise up against him, proclaiming that he had violated his feudal obligations, and the Vasconian nobles elected a new king, Antso IV, in AD 1130. So, Jose took his army and, rather than fight the Romans, he fought his own people. For all of his rash decision making, Jose was certainly a skilled military commander, and swept away all opposition in Vasconia, and killed the usurper Antso IV the following year. However, he burned many bridges, and Vasconia was now effectively occupied territory that had to be garrisoned with loyal troops, rather source of soldiers. Adding to Jose’s headaches were the ties that had been formed across the kingdoms under his rule. His parents and grandfather had made certain that the nobles of Vasconia would not feel alienated from those in Galicia. Now, the Galician nobles that Jose’s rule depended on watched their cousins and in-laws executed by their king, and they, too, began to resist his rule.
In AD 1133, the aging Xoán de Coruña, one of the heroes of the war two decades ago, was declared king of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela. The great houses flocked to his banner, and Jose was, once more, denied his opportunity to kick the Roman giant. Jose marched to attack Galicia proper, and, while his army was there, Xoán marched south, and took the Counties of Portucale and Lisbon, securing the entire western seaboard of Hispania. Now, Jose had to march south to face Xoán, which gave Xoán’s old comrade, Rodrigo de Laredo, to raise his own rebellion in the north, declaring himself king of Cantabria. Jose did manage to defeat Xoán in battle, and the rebel king of Galicia retreated to Lisbon, where he settled in for a siege. Now, it was Vasconia’s time to rebel again, putting yet another Antso on their throne. In an amusing footnote, shortly after being crowned, Antso V fell ill, and recommended his cousin Antso as a possible successor, though the new king recovered before his kingdom could go through three identically named kings in as many years (historians do point out that Antso was an incredibly common name during this era, due to the Crusade, making this quirk of history less absurd than it first seems).
Rodrigo and Antso marched to the relief of Lisbon, and, in AD 1134, fought Jose outside the city, driving him off. The king retreated to his capital in Toledo, to regroup and muster whatever forces he had. In this part of the peninsula, he was still popular, but, when the combined rebel armies marched on Toledo, even Jose had to admit that his options were limited. At a conference at the site of the first battle of his mother’s war, Madrid, the kingdoms were carved up. Vasconia would retain its traditional borders, Galicia would take the west, all the way down to Lisbon, and the new Kingdom of Cantabria would have the coastal lands in between the two kingdoms. The rest, the interior, was retained by Jose as the Kingdom of Toledo.
Thus, peace returned to Hispania, and the restless Jose ruled over a calm and prosperous kingdom in the center for the remainder of his life, dying in his bed in AD 1157. The energetic king tried to involve himself in infrastructure and building projects, building new roads, bridges, and castles, but his true passion was war. Deprived of that, Jose devoted most of his time to a series of wives and mistresses. Upon his death, his surviving offspring included 7 legitimate sons, 5 legitimate daughters, and between 12-18 bastards. Having so many claimants to the throne was a recipe for disaster, and the new king, Carlos, had to immediately act to secure his throne. His father likely would have rolled over in his grave if he knew what solution Carlos decided upon. In AD 1159, the Kingdom of Toledo entered into a defensive alliance with the Roman Republic, with Constantinople recognizing Carlos as the rightful king of Toledo. Jose lost most of his kingdom due to Roman interference, and now, his son owed that kingdom to Roman interference.
End
This was a fun one to write. Feudal politics make for great stories.
I decided I wanted to do something nice for my loyal readers. So, my next entry will be about any given region/kingdom you want it to be, whichever gets the most support. Just not: Hispania, the Roman Republic, the Crusader States, or Egypt. We covered those in enough depth recently. Everything else goes, as long as its been mentioned in the timeline so far. Lets see how much I regret this (if you pick something obscure, no promises it will have as much detail as this entry).
