So yeah, instead of Pokemon, I'm writing up an AAR for an in-progress game of Europa Universalis 4 of Seina, a country I had never heard of before I started playing. To answer the question of why I'm on FF instead of Paradox's forums, it's because I don't like making posts on forums excluding a certain imageboard that shall not be named. Also, I didn't get a lot of screenshots during the early years so anything of the forums would feel empty.
Siena, like other Tuscan hill towns, was first settled in the time of the Etruscans (c. 900–400 BC) when it was inhabited by a tribe called the Saina. The Etruscans were an advanced people who changed the face of central Italy through their use of irrigation to reclaim previously unfarmable land, and their custom of building their settlements in well-defended hill forts. A Roman town called Saena Julia was founded at the site in the time of the Emperor Augustus. The first document mentioning it dates from AD 70. Some archaeologist assert that Siena was controlled for a period by a Gaulish tribe called the Senones.
The Roman origin accounts for the town's emblem, a she-wolf suckling the infants Romulus and Remus. According to legend, Siena was founded by Senius and Aschius, the two sons of Remus, who was in turn the brother of Romulus, after whom Rome was named. Statues and other artwork depicting a she-wolf suckling the young twins Romulus and Remus can be seen all over the city of Siena. Other etymologies derive the name from the Etruscan family name Saina, the Roman family name Saenii, or the Latin word senex "old" or its derived form seneo "to be old".
Siena did not prosper under Roman rule. It was not sited near any major roads and lacked opportunities for trade. Its insular status meant that Christianity did not penetrate until the 4th century AD, and it was not until the Lombards invaded Siena and the surrounding territory that it knew prosperity. After the Lombard occupation, the old Roman roads of Via Aurelia and the Via Cassia passed through areas exposed to Byzantine raids, so the Lombards rerouted much of their trade between the Lombards' northern possessions and Rome along a more secure road through Siena. Siena prospered as a trading post, and the constant streams of pilgrims passing to and from Rome provided a valuable source of income in the centuries to come.
The oldest aristocratic families in Siena date their line to the Lombards' surrender in 774 to Charlemagne. At this point, the city was inundated with a swarm of Frankish overseers who married into the existing Sienese nobility and left a legacy that can be seen in the abbeys they founded throughout Sienese territory. Feudal power waned however, and by the death of Countess Matilda in 1115, the border territory of the Mark of Tuscia which had been under the control of her family, the Canossa, broke up into several autonomous regions. This ultimately resulted in the creation of the Republic of Siena. (1)
Starting in the early 1440s, the merchants of Siena began to plot to expand their markets and establish dominance over the Italian peninsula and with it, the whole of the Mediterranean. Signing an alliance of mutual defense with the Duchy of Ferrara and the Kngdom of Urbinob in 1444, the doge of Seina ordered the forging of documents that laid claim to the whole of Tuscany to north. Once these were presented to the Holy Roman Empire, the Doge allowed the anger of the Tuscans to build and simmer while he and the nobles made the final preparations in training troops and hiring mercenaries for a army numbering roughly eight thousand men. These men, along with the six thousand provided by Ferrara and Urbino, would be enough to deal with the Tuscan force of eight thousand.
Finally, the doge struck. Sending men dressed in the garbs of the men who swore fealty to the Tuscan nobility, he ordered an attack on the house of a minor Sienese merchant who had been quite outspoken against the doge and his allies' policies. Ensuring that there were witnesses to the beheading of the merchant and his family along with the subsequent burning of their house and property, the doge used this pretense to launch an invasion, known as the First War of Italy, in February of 1445 that overwhelmed the Tuscan forces. Within two weeks, both the cities of Firenze and Pisa were under siege and by the end of October, both had surrendered. By securing the complete annexation of Tuscany, the doge had also secured his reelection and began using his connections in the port of Pisa to dominate shipping there from states such as Genoa and Venice and the recently Austrian turned city of Antwerpen in the former Kingdom of Burgundy. With these moves, the rise of Siena to the title of merchant republic and beyond began.
In 1446, the tragic death of the doge surprised the citizens of Siena, however, from the tragedy came a momentous opportunity for his successor. In the preceding years before, the growing influence of the corrupt clergy was to be found throughout all of the fighting Italian states, gathering power and riches for itself. In the eyes of the common people, the Church had become an entity poisoned by the devil's temptations and earthly pleasures and so it found no sympathy from the people when the doge made allegations that the Hungarian-controlled pope had ordered the murder of their respected leader in jealousy of the state's new found wealth and power which, while meager when compared to Castile or England, now rivaled that of Venice or Aragon.
With these claims, it was simple to organize an invasion of Rome in 1448 after their troops had recovered from what few casualties they had endured. While Urbino found the military action heretical and Aragon attempted to intervene along with its vassal the Kingdom of Naples, the republic had found in 1447 an ally in the Kingdom of Castile. The support from the Spaniards easily exceeded that lost from Urbino's withdrawal from what some were soon to call the Latin Triple Alliance. With their strike on mainland Aragon, Siena and Ferrara, along with Ferrara's ally Modena, were able to coordinate and first occupy the entire Papacy, including its holdings to the northeast of Firenze (modern-day Florence) and it's enclave within the Kingdom of France thanks to the French granting them military access, before moving to annex the Neapolitan lands to Siena, culminating in the Battle of Calabria where a combined Ferraresi-Sienese force of thirteen thousand forced the last three thousand fighting men of Naples to surrender, effectively ending the Second War for Italy.
With the 1450 Treaty of Paris, Castile annexed the Aragonian provinces of Alicante, Pirineo, and even the crown jewel, Aragón. With the sole exception of the Vatican itself which was stripped of most of its gold and wealth so as to render the Church a apostolic state, Siena annexed the entire Papacy state along with the entire Kingdom of Naples. This left the island of Sicily, an Aragonian holding, in a precarious position as unmarked Sienese fleets began to regularly raid the coastal villages while ironically patrolling the surrounding waters for any pirates that may prey on trade routes of the Mediterranean that Siena was quickly exerting a monopoly on.
While the doge waited for the period of required non-aggresion, a laughable idea given the previously mentioned piracy that was only enforced due to the possible riots that would ensue if the truth was broken, with Aragon to expire, he began to hire men as explorers to map the western coast of Africa and as colonists to establish Sienese holdings over the land. However, the wild land of Africa was hostile and the Sienese arrogant, and soon, natives rose up and destroyed several early attempts to civilize the land. To try saving face, the next colonization effort went with an armed escort of five thousand men-at-arm, two thousand cavalry, and an additional two mercenaries who at the first sign of trouble led a so-called "subjugation" campaign that amounted to genocide and forced relocation of the indigenous populations. Excluding lands held by the savages of Morocco and Mali, by the 1460s, the coastlines of Africa west of the prime meridian and Cape Verde had been colonized with the province of Rio De Oro turning into a vibrant outpost for future expansion of the Sienese republic.
However, this rapid colonization effort caused the materialization of two crucial issues. The first was that the colonies, having been more or less sponsored by the same nobles who provided the majority of the contents in the nation's coffers, were becoming an incredible economic burden and soon, inflation set in as the government was forced to take loans and cuts were made to the ground forces. The second involved the Moroccan Sultanate's perception of the expansion as an attempt by the republic to conquer the whole of Morocco. While the doge would have loved to wipe the map of any traces of the Muslim faith, he neither had the financial and emotional support to justify a war so when the Sultan declared war in 1454, the Armata d'Africa (Army of Africa) had slipped into a state of underfunded and morale-deprived soldiers.
The War of Moroccan Aggression was the deadliest in terms of lives lost for the republic since it first began its power-plays. As Castile faced the forces of Granada which had answered Morocco's call to arms and aided in the blockading of Tunis and Morocco, Siena was left alone to face the forces of the barbaric forces of the Sultan. In the Twin Battle of Rio De Oro and Ifni, the republic emerged victorious at the heavy cost of roughly five thousand five hundred men of the original eight thousand man force while the Moroccans incurred an estimated eight thousand casualties of the original force of ten thousand. In the end, it took the movement of the veteran former Armata d'Italia (Army of Italy), now rebranded the Escerito Relief (Relief Army) and totaling ten thousand men, to the lands of Africa that were now considered Nuovo Siena (New Siena) to force the defenders of Ifni to surrender and the Moroccans to enter peace talks.
When the war was brought to an end in 1457, the Moroccans relinquished occupied Ifni. However, the general public reaction was that the new land, which would take decades to convert from heretical beliefs, did not bring justice to the men lost. In the end, the republic made its voice heard in the next elections, replacing their leader with a new star on the field. The new doge, Giustino Labriola, had been popular with the common people of Siena as a bureaucrat for enacting several local reforms that softened the blow inflation had brought to the economy of the republic. Giustino would now lead the republic as the new decade set in and they faced Aragon a second time.
While the popular belief was that Siena would be the cause of the next conflict with Aragon, it proved to be disagreements between Castile and Aragon over the provinces that Castile had previously annexed. When the call came from Castile, the people responded with cries of support as their beloved ally in the Latin Triple Alliance (though by this point Ferrara was a vassal of Siena and thus was an ally simply due to owing allegiance to the republic) came under attack from Aragon and the Italian state of Savoy. Thus began the Third War for Italy or as the people called it, the Quiet War due to the Sienese fighting force known as the Armata d'Italia that had replaced the Escerito Relief after it had become the standing force in Africa only occupying the islands of Sicily and Sardinia and facing only a small force of a thousand Aragonians in Palermo.
In the end, Aragon and Savoy were defeated easily, though Savoy was let off relatively easy with their merchants being banned from any ports Siena exerted power over. On the other hand, Aragon was effectively neutered as a nation as it was forced to relinquish any claims to Castilian land and release Sicily and Sardinia to Siena. That was how 1463, the Year of Triumphant, began and the God's favor for Siena only grew as its coffers swelled from trade and Nuovo Siena began to turn a profit. By May, the republic was prepared to face Venice and Genoa for complete control of the western Mediterranean and so, on March 22th, Doge Labriola issued the Dottrina Repubblica (Republic Doctrine) which stated that, "All states within the Italian peninsula and islands that claim to be the rightful ruler of the land of Italy shall be dealt a harsh blow by the Republic. From this day forth, our grand republic shall stand as the guardian of the Italian people and as the successor to both the Kingdom of Italy and to the Roman Republic. From this day forward, we shall be known as the Grande Mercante Repubblica di Siena (Grand Merchant Republic of Siena) and as the one true law of the Mediterranean."
With that declaration, Labriola made clear his nation's intents towards all others. To further emphasis his words, the republic proceeded with the peaceful annexation of Modena, the signing of an alliance with the Kingdom of England, and its exit from the Holy Roman Empire. What had once been the Latin Triple Alliance between the republic, Ferrara, and Urbino had over the years fully shifted to a world shaking power bloc known as the Alliance of the Seas between Castile, England, and the republic due to each nation's control of their regional waters thanks to their relatively large navies. While the next few years would be quiet in terms of wars as the country intergrated Modena into Sienese society, the nations that bordered the Alps quivered in fear as their southern brethren began to make preparations for war with Austria and the HRE for control of the Alps.
(1)Everything before that little one there is ripped from Wikipedia. I decided I wanted some information about Siena to be included so that you all had some idea of who the hell I'm playing as.
So yeah, I had a crazy time with this little one province starting state. Thank god for mercenaries as well because that's the only way to get as many men as you need to beat down Tuscany even if you have help from the guys I included.
If anyone else has played EU4 and is wondering if I'm going make the actual country known as Italy, I have an answer. No. That's the goal of all players who play an Italian state in any game, including me usally. I decided to do something different since Siena starts as a Administrative Republic and has a chance to become a Merchant Republic. Basically, the Republic Doctrine (the Merchant Republic decision) and my breaking ties with the HRE (Which I did a lot sooner than I wrote, it just felt like it fit better with the declaration) was how I told all the other mini-Italies to fuck off and that I would do things my way. Then again, given my state as a African colony developer this early, I'm pretty sure I'm already breaking the tradition of most Italian state players.