Boralverse scratchpad

[Jackk]

(I figure an alternate history is Basically a conworld )
This'll just be somewhere else to put some of my notes on the wider world in which my conlang Boral lives [Old Thread here]

Excerpt of the lang:

Macaria Giosforo saf ig l'hiembra noc y ferscip mattin pront la i sal y vec e respir nell'aer fum e mar de Weston, oc bourg commovent.
/ˌma.kaˈʀja ˌʒɔs.foˈʀo saf aj ljɛmˈbʀa nɔk y fɛʀˈxɪp maˈtɪn ˈpʀɔnt la i ˈsal i ˈvɛk e ʀɛsˈpɪʀ ne.laˈɛʀ fɪm e ˈmaʀ de vɛsˈtɔn | ɔk ˈbuʀg ˌko.moˈvɛnt.
Macaria Giosforo knows she's missed the morning ferry the moment she steps off the veck and inhales the smoke-sea air of bustling Weston.

Hmmm, what to post first? How about:

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questions taken from the January 2003 N scitation documents for the course 1471 - 1517: War, Peace and Exploration after the Novomundine Landfall, 37st avenue in Concurrence History at the Tremonow Open School (formerly the Brethin Mesh Institute).

Question 1 (thirty minutes)
Discuss the effect of three new foodstuffs introduced to North Africa and Europe via either (i) the Maroccan involvement in Western Cappatia, or (ii) the New Navarre Enterprise.

Question 2 (ninety minutes)
“Perhaps we should have sent for a Kentish witness! They might learn the subtle craft of ending the wars they start.”
- General Guillen daus Sanz on the eve of the Battle of Margès, 1499
Answer any two of the three questions related to the above quote.

(i) A colleague of yours commends daus Sanz and Lord Menton for achieving independence in just two years, noting that in Albion the conflict lasted for thirty-one. In what ways might you dispute their characterisation of events?

(ii) The quote suggests that, although Burgundy was not directly involved in the Albion Wars of Fealty, knowledge of the conflict was widespread in Europe. Examine the opinion of any relevant courts (for example, that of Ambrose’s Vascony) towards Kent under the Two Henries, and how these impacted Kent’s standing between Albion and Gaul.

(iii) To what extent can we say that the Provençal Secession from the Kingdom of Burgundy inpired the development of the principles of Vicinity? You may wish to consider the writings of Jaume fi Gustau advocating for the Savoisin language, and, if you have time, compare the Secession to the Emergency at Dijon in 1170 (although this falls somewhat outside the bounds of this course).

[Jackk]

Some historical context for Borland itself:

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from The Story of Borland (Y Stoir d’Istr Boral), a school history textbook published 1982 by Cordin Editions

Let us compare how the fall of Rome affected Borland and Britain (when we talk about this part of history, remember that Britain refers to all of Albion, not just the Briton states, and not all of them, either). The end of Roman life in Britain occurred quickly during the first three decades of the fifth century. By contrast, although a lot of people did leave Borland for the continent during this time, it appears that Borland's comparative independence from the rest of the Empire helped it. In fact, there is recent evidence that some Romans left Britain to Borland, especially from the major cities of Londinium and Camulodunum (now London and the Markish town of Conster).

At this time, Germanic people, particularly the Angles and Saxons, came from the mainland of Europe and settled in Borland and Britain. In Britain there was a complete shift away from Roman culture over the fifth and sixth century; the Angles established Anglia and Northumbre in the east, while the Saxons founded Wessex and Markland in the west.

The story in Borland is similar, but less drastic. Much of the south and west coast was settled by Anglian immigrants through the fifth century, where they founded Angland, Sothbar and several more minor kingdoms. At the same time, the informal and decentralised political structures throughout the self-described Roman towns was changing to adapt to the new condition. Several towns in the south were abandoned completely to emigration or assimilation into the Anglish kingdoms (), and most of the more urbanised east was unified under the rule of Prase Victor Rossetus as the diocesis boralo, the Diocese of Boral...

...was a steady influx of Christians into the Diocese of Boral (and later the First Kingdom of Borland) from the latter years of the fifth century, well into the seventh. Early on many of these were Roman or even Celtic Christians displaced by the Germanic migrations, and by the time of Pope Mercury II in 590N, Rome had taken a particular strategic influence in the small kingdom, which at the time was on the defensive against a stronger Sothbar [1].

In the first instance, the new Kingdom was viewed as a vital Christian outpost from which Rome could send missionaries east and west to aid the conversion of Albion and the Danes. Thus the early Borlish monasteries and schools of theology were much more outward-focused than the comparatively insular Irish groups. It was to this end that the Golfhaun sanctuary was first erected (with the Latin name Asylum Æstuarii [2], which contains the oldest surviving church building in Borland.

The opinions of the Papacy regarding Borland were as inconstant as the Popes themselves and the Italian lands they claimed. Many also saw the distant land as a convenient way to make sure inconvenient elements were far away and unable to make trouble. In this way, any given Borland monastery might house semi-heretical monks “entrusted with the conversion of the pagans”, or perhaps several awkwardly-Hellenic men with a suspicious sympathy to one of the Grecian heresies.

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[1] A medieval Anglian kingdom located along the south coast of Borland.

[2] The Estuary Haven, since it is situated on the large island Nestu in the Labbað Sound (upriver of which lies the capital Damvað)

[Jackk]

taken from Middlesea Meals, published bilingually in Wessern and Kernish 1892 by Iscombe Editors. It was translated from the acclaimed 1880 mealbook Pasti Mezziterreni, written by traveller Giosforo Sant’Angelo and intersperses anecdotes from his journeys with his favourite dishes.

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King James Stew (Frigotta de Rei Jaume)
Of all the fish stews I sampled along the solarium coasts of Barcelon and Provence (not to mention the singular mussel-olive dish I was served on the beaches of Mayurca), none compare to the King James. Locally and affectionately called the jaumetia “little James”, this stew is named for James VI (1691-1749), the longest-ruling monarch in Barcelon since its establishment in 1067. Although similar stews existed in the region before his reign, most simply functioned to use up whatever seafood remained from a day’s catch. The King James is perhaps the first such dish made for its own sake, and indeed should for best results use hake or haddock, or a similar whitefish.

Wares (for four)
5ι sweet aumonds
eq. grain garlic, olive oil
1 large onion per cubos
1 whole pepper, sliced
some sweet drypepper, petersly and fendle (fine)
½ pint Empordan or other white
8ι pit shadome or sauce thereof
2п6ι whitefish per frangos
½ limmon, juced

Method
First bake the aumonds until golden and grind to a coarse powder. In a broad pan heat the oil, then gently fry the aumond, garlic, onion and pepper for roughly fifteen minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.
Add the drypepper and half the herbs and stir together. After two minutes add a dram of the wine and allow it to mostly boil off. Now add the shadome sauce or chopped shadomes, pour in the rest of the wine, and cook for fifteen minutes more.
Salt the strips of fish and push them into the sauce. Cover the pan and leave for five minutes, until the fish is just cooked. Uncover, add the rest of the herbs (or whichever amount suits) and cast the juce over the dish. Serve bowled with hardbread.

[Jackk]

scitation questions (in translation) from the Axton University Faculty of Domain History, from the course Religion in the Second Millenium: Belief, Community and Division, given Summer 2007 N following a reconfiguration of their course offering.

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Question 1 (60 minutes)
Write a short speech aimed at the interested layman advocating the three religious developments of the last millenium in Europe which you hold to have been most influential. You should introduce the events with appropriate context, discuss their similarities and differences, and justify their importance. For example, you might choose one of

• the German Secession; the Great Fracture; the Deviance Movement
• the First Crusade; the Muslim migrations northward into the Russias and Tartary; the Prodigal Faiths from Mendeva and Cappatia

Question 2 (120 minutes)
This question focuses in particular on the emergence of Deviance Theology (the Anti-Paradise Movement) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

(i) What evidence is there that <Deviance> originates as a mistranslation from Wessern, and meant at first <defiance, rebellion>? Consider both the semantic plausibility and—crucially—the significance of <defiance> to the Promethean clubs across Albion; the term of course is better evidenced in their Danawan counterparts.

(ii) In both Albion and the Danaw Kingdom at this time shared there were significant religious minorities and the Church (of whichever stripe) was strongly associated with local authority. Was it these commonalities that made them fertile ground for Anti-Paradise thought?

(iii) To what extent was the resurgence of the Modest Arrangement in Spain and Gaul in reaction to these new religious ideas? Compare the fervence of Modest thinkers like the Marquis de Caillat or proto-Blue Marian Diana Theodora Queiroz to the philosophers of earlier Modest-like movements.

(iv) In your opinion, who is, or are, the most likely author(s) of the incendiary 1799 publication Et Nous Amerons les Fux (And We Will Love the Fire), a seminal work in Deviance Theology? Back up your theory with modern and contemporary sources, and contrast the likelihood of at least two other candidates?

[Jackk]

rough map of the extent of the First Drengotian Empire, 1120N (at its greatest extent)

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[Jackk]

from a review in the Fiellas Dimenja (Sunday Leaves/Sheets), a Marsellan weekly newspaper incorporated in 1871. It focuses primarily on recreation and entertainment, unlike the older weeklies dating back to the sixteenth century, which were limited more to “high-brow” topics.

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14th October, 1950

…welcomed back from the New Cumbric facilities; Captains Kerry and Montpiu landed safely at Fort daus Sanz early Friday morning.

FILM REVIEW: Zachariah

A departure from Kiawaman’s usual fare, this blacklayer tale takes us back to the 1820s amid the disintegration of the Long Peace and the beginning of Reaction War. From the gaslit streets of independent Boxa to the recovering shell of Stamboul, this adaptation of Petcov’s classic trevold Majat Cherveniat (The Red Man) tries to recreate the dread and mystery of watching our four heroes slowly discover the true nature of the eponymous Zachariah.

Unfortunately, the beautiful landscape shots and the addition of a rich Tavancian tourist (whose plotline is mostly borrowed from the book’s Elenor storyline) are the high points of an otherwise messy film. In an attempt to incorporate some of the more traditional aspects of vampire folklore, Kiawaman grants Zachariah mystic powers and has the heroes defeat him by means of a sanctified wooden stake (not, as in the book and in popular wisdom, by burning). These new powers, in the hands of a better writer, could have set up a dynamic between Zachariah and Vania as artists of the same craft—instead, we are given the tired trope of a woman torn between the affections of two men. It doesn’t help that the audience barely believes there is any choice to make; Vania has no chemistry with either lead.

The symbolism of fire and butterflies that permeated the book is also entirely absent from this adaptation. Apparently afraid to present Zachariah as light or good in any way, we get a cold manor house and bat-infested (!) roofs. Never mind the rich history of the vampire as a figure clinging to life in all its forms, in the blood of the living, in the dancing flames and in the metamorphosis of the butterfly. The film relies heavily on gory fights (with what is clearly wine as a bad stand-in for blood, in a disappointing reversal) and a pounding orchestra who leave the few quiet scene no room to breathe.

This will be no classic: come only for the views (of beautiful forests, and a bevy of handsome actors, I concede) and two hours of mindless tragedy. - Jacint Brunat

[Jackk]

from The Latin Republics: Jewels under Tyrian Standards by Jacob Trelaune, published by the Yievle Brethin Primers, 1902

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Part VI: The Republic of Provence

It would be ahistorical to claim that the republics of the Mediterranean were brought about due to the unusually totalist monarchies they neighboured, or even to stake out the somewhat more popular position that those Italian monarchies grew so tyrannical as a reaction to the republics. Nonetheless, one case in which the link between republicanism and totalism is undeniable is with the Republic of Provence.

In the first half of the second millenium, Provence was first a county in the First Drengotian, and following the Emergency at Dijon, the largest province (so to speak) in the Kingdom of Burgundy. The county was elevated under the house of Savoy to a duchy in the thirteenth century, and as the direct link between the capital at Geneva and all of Mediterranean sea-trade, it became known as lo panier de Borgogne (the Burgundian breadbasket).

However, with the Novomundine landfall in 1471, and the accompanying Ascendancy of Vascony under Ambrose III, piracy (which had long plagued the very coast which made Provence so profitable, and which was the scourge of the venerable republics of Genoa and Venice, among others) thrived off the general prosperity. In Marsella, the raiding became so frequent that many treated it more as an occupation, and many of the wealthy fled to safer pastures inland.

The aid requests presented to Rudolf VIII went largely unanswered. Charitably, one might say he was distracted by the ongoing Bavarian conflict, and the religious difficulty attendant to being the northwesternmost polity yet answerable to Rome. But it is generally allowed that the young king was simply concerned only with himself (or by extension his many lovers) and with resplendent lakeside banquets.

Things came to a head in the last years of the fifteenth century. Lord Daniel Menton of the house of Amigòt had secured the aid of King Marc V of France (France having finally reached reconciliation with Normandy and avoiding the tangle that was the Albion Wars of Fealty), on the advice of the foundling-general Guillen daus Sanz. Thus prepared, he and several other noble families declared independence from Geneva on the twenty-first of June, 1499 (which to this day is a national holiday in Provence). Though this declaration would not be formally recognised until Burgundy’s defeat two years later at the Battle of Margès, it was this event which cemented House Amigòt’s position as primus inter pares in the new republic.

At least, that is, for the next eighteen years…

[Jackk]

sar /saʀ/ [sɑː] net, fishnet, mesh, also in general a network, an interconnected system

in particular y sar (epistol), literally the letter mesh, referring to the global network of communication devices and other computers, known in English as "the mesh".

< 12C, from Vask sare "net", one of the many naval words taken from Vascon fishermen and later from their sea-traders: see hagr "mast" and bakilau "cod", also from Vask. Extension to general networks first attested 1836; use for the mesh calqued from French mail épistre, itself a reference to 1968 parachthon tale Starsail, published in Rone by Ashford Pasquier.

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Posc pieç minut er y sar remorcað des y mar torvant.
After a few minutes the net was pulled out of the troubled sea.
/pɔx ˈpjɛts miˈnɪt ɛʀ y ˈsaʀ ˌʀe.mɔʀˈkaθ dɛz i ˈmaʀ toʀˈvant/

[Jackk]

excerpt: New Skies, Old Stories by Simon d’Estiala, published by Prindor Marsillès, 1980

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…in her twilight years she campaigned for reforms to Saxony’s inheritance law, ultimately unsuccessfully, although her political society would (after her death) spearhead the suffrage movements in Saxony, Denmark, and across the Latin republics.

The Voidtale craze sparked by Schneider’s seminal work persisted until the Second German War, when its optimistic and exploratory character dropped rather rapidly out of fashion. Nonetheless there are examples generally counted as Voidtale works to be found later: most notable is Narayanan’s series of landscapes depicting the surfaces of other planets orbiting our Sun. Importantly, he portrays these places as barren and inhospitable, in stark contrast to the xenic worlds of Schneider or her imitators. This illustrates the shift in tone in many areas of art following the war, as industry swept the world and the age of the Global Workshop dawned.

It is perhaps foolhardy to attribute the decline of Voidtale trevolds solely to the gloom of post-war Europe. We might say, for example, that the idea of exploring new lands and meeting new civilisations had lost its shine; the opening of Caddicivene left few “mysterious lands” to discover, and the developing steeplemesh allowed people everywhere to communicate far more rapidly (in particular, to discover that distant nations were often much less exotic than one imagined!).

In any case, when it comes to parachthon romance, the middle of the nineteenth century was somewhat of a nazir. Even once Europe had recovered and the general prosperity of the Workshop decades had truly got going, the…

[Jackk]

from the collected study notes for the course 1471–1517: War, Peace and Exploration after the Novomundine Landfall, 37th avenue in Concurrence History at the Tremonow Open School.

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Of course, Vascony was not the only nearby state attempting to reach Asia by sea. Ambrose's nemesis Munir al-Hamdawi of Morrack had in 1463 established a rival marine enterprise in the New World Company (شركة العالم الجديد), and just five years later the ship Orion (الجَبَار) voyaged from Anfa [Casablanca] to Aden. They made port in Vascon Sant Adrian [Bioko] and encountering Chinese merchants in Mombasa, whose reports to the Southern Emperor would change the course of history forever (see 1524-1600: The Collision and the Fracture).

After the Landfall, the Company's efforts were swiftly redirected to the Novomund [the New World] (as were the naval efforts, however paltry, of most of Europe at this time). However, a notable exception was the relatively-new Kingdom of Britain, where Howel's ships had already set up resupply ports along the African coast. Having profited from the ongoing Wars of Fealty which raged across the rest of Albion [Great Britain], the king was convinced more opportunity lay in connecting the European market directly to Asia. Doubtless he also wanted to displace the Borlish supremacy in the northern trade (although this ambition would not be achieved in his lifetime).

In any case, the tale of the twin voyages of the Cynthia and the Phœbos (of Morrack and Britain respectively) remains to this day one of the greatest stories of exploration and discovery the world has ever known, measuring up to Homer's Odyssey and Quoming's Peoples of the Sea. Directed by Umanick and Chinese traders, mac Kellot's Phœbos sailed to Gujarat, Madray and eventually made port at Borune in 1516. This was at the time almost the south-eastern extremity of the known Vetomund.

Meanwhile, the Cynthia under al-Kazmi (himself a Persian immigrant to Morrack) had no less interesting a journey...

[Jackk]

excerpted from the book Des Delt vars Dois : Y Stoir d'Education (From Tablets to Slates: The Story of Education), in the style of an academic textbook but intended for a broad audience, written by Theign Roufler and released 2016 by Cordin Editions.

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It is during the fourteenth century that we see true standardisation of the mediaeval university system across Europe, from Galway to Gratz. For example, in the Kingdom of Borland at this time, Noccair Lyceum taught its students the Five Romantic Arts. These were in essence the descendants of the seven Classical areas of study (and indeed they were also known at the time as the Classical or liberal arts). The Five Arts were Literature, Argument, Reckoning, Geometry and Songcraft. The start of the fifteenth century saw the gradual decline of this system, with various institutions introducing new subjects, such as history, languages and alchemy.

[Jackk]

from the collected study notes for the course 1471–1517: War, Peace and Exploration after the Novomundine Landfall, 37th avenue in Concurrence History at the Tremonow Open School.

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…the south-eastern extremity of the known Vetomund.

Meanwhile, the Cynthia under al-Kazmi (himself a Persian immigrant to Morrack) had no less interesting a journey. First making port at the various Arcabil and Meridian outposts, already a significant source of wealth, the ship continued along the Cappatian coast*. Here in al-Kazmi's logbooks we read of the Dowahin straits and island (from the Arabic for "smoke", after the many smoke-towers the captain writes of seeing the inhabitants of the island build, and which dissuaded him from making landfall thereon).

(*Remember that the continent would not be so named for several more decades yet.)

But the bulk of the Cynthia's journey would come next, as the ship entered the southern Horizic Ocean. At first they sailed north along the jagged coastline, possibly as far as Maboutian lands, although al-Kazmis records are unclear. In any case they eventually sailed west into the blue. It is not entirely clear which Horizic Isles the Cynthia encountered on this part of the voyage. What is known is that on midsummer of 1515 they alighted on Jazirat Asnam (the encounter being infamous for its acrimony), and that on 11 Shaban 921 the crew began to perform the salat forward, not aft, as the astronomer aboard—one Taisir as-Sadik—predicted they had passed the longitude of the antipode of Mecca.*

(*Further recall that truly accurate longitude measurement would not be achieved until the invention of the timehold in the mid-seventeenth century.)

The next spring the Cynthia finally arrived in a place almost recognisable as Asia, though the inhabitants were as dark-skinned as anyone in the Arab world. This archipelago was hence named Asia Cahal (or in modern parlance Cahalla), and in the records of al-Kazmi's time on Bijai (the largest island thereof) there is an account of an old folktale; one which will explain why the Cynthia, on leaving Bijai, went not west, but south…