War and Government Flips

I'm a little surprised I've never done a whole post on this before, as I've definitely mentioned it in the past, but this essay will be decicated to what you might call odd-couplings: The outliers to Medieval America's usual pairings of feudal states/knights, city states/pikemen, and nomadic tribes/horse archers. The first thing to bring up is that, in the desert kingdoms, the rules are, there are no rules. California in particular possesses all three military units, hewing close to the other common dynamic: Forests for knights, cities/littoral regions for pikemen, and grassland/deserts for horse archers. This makes a lot of internal sense, material wealth and intensive agriculture is needed to rear knights, the enclosed but dense cities good for quickly trained citizen armies, and the sparse but wide opened spaces for range cavalry, and California's famously diverse topopgraphy is good for that. To some degree, this is why the relatively more forested Deseret (particularly Idaho) has heavy calvalry while New Mexico has horse archers, though bother armies probably operate similarly to the Mamluks (Though I also think there's similairity to the Crusader orders.)

Texas/Anderson Territory: While this region seems to be very much in line with the wider Nomadic Herdsman/New Israelite culture, it is a feudal state. White has mentioned that pastoralism is not only an incidental way of life, but very much a moral one, and farmers are looked down upon. This might mean the area is occupied by thralls: Farms and villages where the Herdsmen are either the leige lords, or come around every once and a while to collect tribute (Much like Russia during the Mongol occupation.) The Andersons somewhat hypocritically enjoy the benefits of civillization while leaving peasants to do their dirty work. It's unknown if they subeject fellow New Isratelites to a double indignity, or they're a population of Non-Denominationals, Catholics, etc who occupy this rung. If so, this would suggest the faiths of Medieval America are a lot more pluralistic, and White's map merely exhibit the relgion of the ruling class.

Iowa:By contrast, Iowa is a realm that is slowly moving away their nomadic ways, and trying the embrace the culture of the East, and the split between the two sides of the Mississippi is one of a realm still in transition. The ruling family still has to make concessions to the nomads that buffer to the Great Plains, and it's also likely that it's a harder way of life to break away from. (White has mentioned horse archery was a lot more common at the beginning of the collapse, and it's also true that horse archery is a form of combat with a longer history in America.) It remains to be seen if the knights and castles thing is an invetiability for Iowa.

The Apppalachians: I've definitely mentioned this before, but while it's true pikmen are something familair to cities, in medieval times they're not out of place in rugged mountain areas, like the Alps or Scottish Highlands. Really, a lot of Appalchian culture is infromed by immigrants from Scotland and Ireland, and while the maps do say these areas are feudal states, they probably run very similarly to clans found in that time and place. They're not great places to wage warefare with horses, and the soil is probably not great for feeding them, or raising big feudal manors to begin with.

New Jersey: This "discrepency" was in many ways the thing that had be asking questions and creating this very blog. Both northern coasts of the continent are occupied by city states, martime republics, or ecclestical fiefs, in general a very urbanized, town-based society. New Jersey is a little different in that it's clearly a feudal state, and it probably is a little more agrarian than the rest of the region. However, it does boast the largest city in the Northeast, (Phialdelphia), and the distance between it and Trenton looks to be the shortest distance between two cities. So I constantly wonder what New Jersey society is like, where it has a lot of leige lords, but relatively little knights. It's actually quite logical in a lot of ways, as Jersey is kind of compact and hemmed in, and probably fights more defensive, seige-based warfare. It's quite possible it just hires a lot of mercenaries from the rest of the region, people from the Appalachians or New Englands who have come to greener pastures to find their fortunes. I've actually also kicked around the idea of New Jersey resembling Ancient Sparta--many considered a little more feudal than the nearby Greek City states, and at times had to be prodded into improving its naval capabilities.

United States: Something I've mused on many times is why the Delmarva Pensisula is so heavily knight-based, even though the U.S. is a Republic, a thalassocracy, and the pensinsular itself being a little cut off. I've always wondered about the practical use for this as well as the logistics, but it certainly keeps the area defended. From an aesthetic point of view, it is kind of neat to imagine knights carrying the U.S. Federal banner to be something like a cross between the American Civil War and the Crusades.

In summation, I think all these sort of distinct, quirky units (Feudal Texas Archers, New Jersey Pikemen Lords, U.S. Federal Knights), all deserve their own sort of name, made up whatever new language arises in Medieval America. Also of note it that the secretarial states also have their own knights, though I'm not sure if they are particularly different from the rest of the nights found in the Deep South.

Hippie Chic

Social media has definitely been abuzz with the breakout of singer/rapper Shanin Blake, who has been making the discourse rounds as the "Hippe Tiktok Girl", courting various controveries about everything from cultural appropriation to petty complaints about not finding her a pleasant listen. However, it is interesting to note her asthetic and style--A very aryan-looking woman (albeit one who claims Native ancetry), who adopts dreadloks, henna tatoos, and infuses indiginous spirituality into hip hop music, and with a somewhat suggestive, titilating manner of dresss akin to many contemporary pop stars (in a way even liberated counterculrutal figures of usually weren't). In short, she is a complete anachronism, which makes her something to take note of when looking at the project. The Pacific Northwest is the area the site has covered the least, and likely one of the many reasons is that what it'd chronicling what it would be like is the boldest "prediction". In the present day, is a realm of contradictions. Osentisbly foward thinking and unorthodox trailblazers who reject tradition (particilarly Western tradition) a day's away from nature and who's population is inordinately white. In the established canon of Medieval America, they are an almost completely isolated and "hemmed in" civillization, albeit one with an embarrasment of resources. But what makes them especially hard to picture is they are collection of city states, the most prominent being those of Italy, but those of the Meditarrenean Antiquity would do as well. And that is tough to square with a society that draws as much from Asia (where we typically think of things like Imperial China, Feudal Japan, the Mongol Hordes, or even Tibet), and quite possibly the Indginous tribes White never specifically mentions, but would logical bleed into them by trade or war. And even if "Medieval Hippie' is thereotically not hard to imagine (the counter-culture sort of intentionally going for a more tribal look), they're at odds with the materialism and structure one thinks of when they think "city state", even one from thousands of years ago. After a fashion, Blake might provide a foundatin, or a window into this. Her mishmash of cultures into something very opulent, one might say affected might fit very well for a society that has its root in a professed love for nature and easy vibes, but has not reached a point of affluence, even decadence. A civillization that has always had one foot in the east, one foot in the west, one eye on the past and the other in the future. A rapping hippie from Utah who has curated a rather over the top and colorful look might just be what you see when you visit Oregon or Seattle in 2900.

The "Eurozone"

This tweet was posted, with the joke being that Utah was a "great lake" state, but it is vert interesting to compare this region with the rest of the country, especially when imagining Medieval America. It's an easy trap to fall in to depict Medieval America as a carbon copy of other old world cultures, particularly European ones. But the fun, the point of the experiment is to see what kind of unique cultures result from the process. However, the above mentioned area, the Great Lakes region, (nd the St. Lawrence Valley) is definitely what you could call the nexus that most resembled the ten centuries of Medieval Europe. This is because the 1) The geography and 2) the ancestry. People would largely "fall back on" techniques, fashions, warefare and crops their ancestors did. Not full motalgia, not fully necessity, but a sort of synthesis of the two. Someone transported to the Great Lakes region or Quebec would find it the most familiar, if not fully comfortable. The Northeast is not radically different geographically or genetically, and it was settled at the time closest to the Middle Ages (and thus, much of the architecture feels the most "athentically quaint"), the states there have simply become too dependent on or accustimed to Republicanism. Once we get into the south, however, see a climate that's similar to China or Japan--areas that are not unfamiliar with feudalism, but sort of in their own way. And a populace with a largely non-white ancestry might now have as many romantic notions of old Europe. Though I have a theory that the Piedmont region, with its warm but mild climate, tethering to the Old World much like the Northeast, and relatively little warefare would theoertically be the most pleasant place to visit for a European tourist. The right mix of exotic and familiar. I have a theory Interestingly, even though the Pacific Northwest actually has the climate most similar to England and France, it would simply drift too far apart of Western aspects, due to Mexico, Asia, and the Indiginous tribes having as much, if not more influence on the area than Eastern America. (And of course that the West coast is inhabited by folks who porudly flaunt tradition and embrace their own quirks.) And as for Utah? That's something I often imagined. On one hand, this is in the part of country that the new Middle Ages has made the most "eccentric". The perception of Utah, and of the Mormons, has always been a subject of debate. Are tney esoteric, more American than American, or esoteric because they're more American than American. So one if left to wonder what aesthetic Utah would embrace; Something akin to the European Middle Ages, the era the Church was founded, really old school Biblical times, or something altogether new?

Kingdom Tables

 A few months ago, I made a chart displaying the states with the populations of Medieval America. Now is the somewhat more difficult task of the actual nation states of the Medieval America World. This is of course, very, very approximate. And because I already had the data on the cities, I'll list the total urban population as well. I only list realms that are at 500,000 people or more. This means I don't have any of the Cascadian City states, nor do I have Louisiana, which is to be honest, functionally a city state as well.

Because Boston and Providence are a little ambiguous on their borders, I can't for sure state what the actual data for the United States and Massachusetts are--though it's fair to say that the U.S. territory and Southern New England are some of the most urbanized regions of Medieval America. Actually, with New Jersey now claiming Philadelphia, that state is hovering near 10% as well. For the most part, the shifting borders don't have a huge effect, though Tennessee and New York splintering as they did have shifted things around a bit, with New York City not being part of any of the new territories, and a few upstate hinterlands now being very de-urbanized. It's very interesting that the expanded Ohio claiming the cities of nearby states also didn't move the needle much.

Ohio	8.5 million	(in thousands) 369  (4%)
Iowa	3.4 million	76 (2%)
Mississippi	3.2 million	38 (1%)
Georgia	2.8 million	153 (5%)
Michigan	2.6 million	89 (3%)
Redriver	2.5 million	114 (4%)
North Carolina	1.9 million	38 (2%)
California	1.7 million	222 (13%)
Allegheny	1.5 million	38 (2%)
New York	1.4 million	25 (1%)
Wisconsin	1.3 million	25 (2%)
Tennessee	1.3 million	38 (2%)
New Jersey	1.2 million	115 (9%)
Anderson	1.1 million
South Carolina	1.1 million	63 (5%)
Unite States	1 million	165-241 (16-20%)
Missouri	1 million	51 (5%)
Geneessee	950k	115 (12%)
Deseret	900k	216 (24%)
New Mexico	850k	127 (15%)
Florida	850k
Virginia	700k	38 (5%)
Evansville	600k	38 (6%)
Freezone	600k	64 (10%)
Columbia	500k
Massachusetts	500k	25?51?76? (12-18%?
Shelby	500k	51(1%)
Alabama	500k
Arkansas	500k	25 (5%)
West Virginia	500k
Unnamed Louisiana Rump	500k	76 (12%)

Ringing In the New Year

Month was 20th anniversary of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the conclusion to the Lord of the Ring trilogy. The overlap bewteen fans of fantasy novels and this project is probably a considerable one, and the Atlas was made in the year the trilogy was at its biggest level of hype. The movie series probably produced a generation of medievalists with its behind the scenes looks at production, giving an idea of the tayloring, metalworking, sometimes even husbandry of pre-Industrial times. So it is very tempting to draw parallels between Medieval America and Middle Earth. For the most part, you're not going to get a lot of one-on-ones. Medieval America is soley composed of Homo Sapians, possesses no actual magic, its ancestry not strictly in line with Europe, and the climate is also a little more varied. That said, there are a couple realms that evocative of J.R.R. Tolkien's world.

Perhaps the closest match is Iowa and Rohan. The fictional kingdom is pretty much "What if Vikings lived on the plains", and Iowa is very much a land where a Germanic culture found itself depending on the horse. Even in the context of the movies, Rohan feels like an anachronism, a place out of time, and Medieval Iowa has found itself experiencing a pendulum over the centuries. Apparently it was, at one point much like the other kingdoms of the rust belt, before being conquered by nomadic invaders of the west. But in turn, it gravitated towards the feudal, knight based society of the east. White says there is "no relic of its barbarian past" but maps show people still clinging to horse archery and even their old religious practices. The villages and even some of the seats of power probably feel very transitional in almost confrontational way, with more wooden foritfications dotting the area except for Rock Island. It's quite possibly an impressive and impregnable stone fortress from ages past, not unlike the Hornburg (Or as it's sometimes referred to by movie fans, Helm's Deep).

The United States of America probably has it closest relative in Gondor. Well, in general, it might be best compared to the entire Numenorean culture, an advanced and, as historians would look at it, eventually decadent civilization is now lost. In the books, there was a second kindgom of Arnor, which Aragon would reunite with Gondor upon his restoration to the throne. While the vast majority of Medieval Americans probably don't particularly yearn for a return of all 50 state reuniting under one single unit (Like Rome, it's probably likely the dissolution happened at such a gradual rate as to not particularly feel it), there might be some who hold some romantic notion of t. At the very least a figure who was capable of it is probably told him some tales. the U.S.A. and Gondor are both the rump states of these once great fiefdoms, although I'm not sure we could label Gondor a "republic". (I'm not sure what its political category is, I've seen comparison to Lucerne, Switzerland.) In any case though, it probably is relatively similar to Gondor in terms of infrastructure and aesthetics--more of a maritime tradition than great equestrians, and many of the cities probably of the classical Meditarrnean style. (In fact, the citizenry probably looks quite Meditarrnean, something the movies fail to depict.) It's actually very interesting that despite the Northeast being one of the most urbanized regions of the continent, its cities are very small, which probably somewhat resembles the Gondorian cities which feel more advanced, but are relatively small compared to real life Italian city states, and sometimes feeling more like ruins or outposts.

After that, it gets a little vague, but two regions that might feel more like gestalt of cultures, that make give one of the vibe of being on Middle Earth without having direct relative. One is the Piedmont region. Out of all of Medieval America, this is probably the region that most embodies the Acadian ideal of rolling hills and small towns. It's the place on the map that seems least mired in warfare, and it's also prime tobacco-growing country. Tobacco, in the Rings legendarium, being best cultivated in Shire, home of the Hobbits. Of course, it denizens don't literally live in the ground--there are probably castles and knights even the occasional battle. But the Piedmont might be the most relatively comfortable for a Shireling, and I've often speculated, probably the place a real Medieval European might be most comfortable visiting. 

New England, which, last time, I did talk about being something of a Halloweentown. It's something of a contradiction even today, and would very much be so in the New Middle Ages. One hand rustic, on the other, intellectual. Very spiritual, but at the same time hinting on something maybe spooky and eldrich. Austere and quirky in equal measure. I want to say wandering around New England would feel not unlike reading through the Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. We visit the Shire, itself feeling moe like it belongs in a Jane Austen novel than a mythical epic, before going on to Bree, and then the elven realms of Rivendell, Mirkwood, Lothrlorian and ultimaely the Dwarven kingdoms. New England is probably a place where, when it's very colorful, it's very colorful, but when plain it's very plain. Some of the most awe-inspiring libraries and places of worship only a few isles from hits containing woodsmen who you very well believe could turn into bears, and forests which may well hide giant spiders.

Urbanization Tables.

For a while I've been tabulating how "urbanized" each region of the country was. These are some of the figure I've come up with. It should be said I'm using the "old states" that is, those that exist in the contemporary industrial societies. New borders would of course likely have a profound effect on what cities get the most traffic. I divided them into four sections: The North, the South, the "Near West" and the "Transalp" region. Notably, I put Midwest states in Italics--I could very well have put Wisconsin and Illinois in the "Near West" section, but I ultimately I decided if it had a capital to serve as a Non-Denom HQ I would include it. Now I could be off, overall, by a million or so people, but it generally figures. I definitely feel comfortable with the following rank: Ohio at the top at around four million. California, New York, and Georgia at or slightly in excess of 3 million. Texas somewhere in the 3 million range, then Michigan between 2 and a half and 3 million. Alabama a little after that, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana, 

I've also added up the urban population of each state--this has been a little easier to measure, at least in terms of counting all the cities in excess of 25,000. The top ten would be California at 283 thousand, New York 242, Louisiana at 229, Ohio 191, Oregon 166, Kentucky 128, Pennsylvania 115 (Note, this map also has an unnamed city, possibly Wilmington, which may put the it at 140 thousand), Tennessee 114, Alabama 112, and Utah/New Mexico rounding out at 102 thousand.

Then in terms of which states have the highest urbanization, that is, the percentage of their population that lives in the biggest cities, it follows; Rhode Island at 31%, Utah 25%, Oregon  and New Mexico at 20%,  Louisiana at 16%, Idaho 12%, California  and Washington 9%, Massachusetts at 8%, at New York somewhere close to that. Notice that Western America, with a lot of deserts states really fills out the list, and New England makes a strong presence here. In fact, I'm kind of doing a guess for Rhode Island, since it's actually very small even by the standards of medieval polities, and simply calculated 60 people per square mile. The twenty five thousand that live in Providence may count towards the population, or may be a distinct figure that isn't taken into account when tallying other state populations because it usually wouldn't move the needle too much. Either way, it would still probably the be the most urbanized. If one wants to rank the most urbanized states with a population over 750,000, it would be Louisiana, California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. 

Some interesting takeaways is that it's sort of surprising that Ohio and New Jersey, both at 4% are not particularly urbanized, even though the former has one of the largest cities in America (It should be said, that that graphics for the biggest three cities are "maxed out". Cincinnati's population could well be in the hundreds of thousands.) and New Jersey is still pretty densely populated (But then, it also remains a feudal state a sea of republics, so perhaps it ultimately makes sense.) In general, it's possible if not for the Cowboy hordes the region would have much bigger cities, especially as we go further down south they really begin to pop on Mississippi River tributaries. Louisiana is very noticeable, both for the entire eastern half of continent, and especially for the south. Besides Kentucky, which is something of a "border area" that is joined with Ohio into a single kingdom, the South, particularly the Old South, is fairly unurban even for the standards of the time. One might suppose the area is a widening of a larger New Orleans-inspired cities, and perhaps even something of a distinct civilization in and of itself.

Rhode Island: The American Transylvania?

 The fun, and one might say "accurate" part of Medieval America is that it's not about transplanting one on one situations--Ohio being France, 

New England is one of the regions of the continent most long settled by Europeans and waves of immigrants over time; The Puritans, the Irish and Italians, even the recent migration of people from Brazil and Asia have seen it heavily reinvented, making it a region with one foot in the past and one in the future. With the exception New Orleans, it's also the region that has the most "haunted" reputation. The Salem Witch trials, Fall River and Lizzie Borden, Maine being the setting of many Stephen King novels, the and while Sleepy Hollow is in New York, there is the sense of being a no man's land wandering just a little too far from the Eastern Seaboard. Rhode Island (my home state)  for being so small, also has image of spookiness, being the birthplace of H.P. Lovecraft, the home of the Annabelle Doll, and what many might forget, was the site of the first vampire panic on these shores.

An outbreak of Tuberculosis ran throughout New England at the beginning of the 19th century, and this was attributed to vampire attacks, which led to the exhumation, and ritual exorcism, of Mercy Brown's corpse. This was before many vampire novels were even published, and our idea of them being associated with Transylvania in particular To a lesser extent England, and in the U.S., a lot of vampire fiction is set in New York City (partly because it's narratively a great place to hide in plain sight, and party because of the trend of making vampires scenesters), and New Orleans, but in New England was perhaps the first existential fear of the undead.

In some ways, New Englanders being especially afraid of vampires would seem odd in Medieval America. This is, after all, the heartland of the American Non-Denominational Church, and probably has a higher than average clergy per capita. And it its reasonably close the sea, not quite the backwoods per se. But in the original novel Dracula, the count did set his resting place in Carfax Abbey, a former monastery. After a near millennia, already in the oldest settled region, there's probably quite a few ruins, many of them well being former religious sites, making them almost glorified cemeteries. And perhaps something of a circular logic pops up, even propagated by the Church itself--there are so many churches in New England, because England needs so many churches.

In some ways, New England resembles places like Medieval Romania or Buglaria, where it is near the nucleus of a once great empire, but after Boston, what we understand as Western Civilization takes a steep drop. There are no major cities north of Boston, and a hundred miles north we start getting into the mountains, the and the colds of Canada. Perhaps medieval New England is unsettle knowing they are so close to precipe unsettles and worries them. Perhaps they feel every day they're looking directly at the shadow, and the shadow looks back at them.