Mare Nostrum?
Sorry for the length of time between chapters, but exams, some plot ideas for oneshots, Christmas stuff, etc. got in the way. To make it up to everyone, this should be a little longer than usual, not that I have a consistent length for these things.
I'm sorry if last chapter felt a little… scattered, but there's so much interesting history out there, you know? I'm trying to hem myself in at least a little when it comes to including new technology (not planning for nitroglycerin or guncotton, as cool as they are) but I do want to include some more interesting niche stuff. I mean I could make Lloyd invent TNT, but I the thing that I always liked about Lelouch was the cunning and ability to use what he had at hand in brilliant ways.
At long last, the Persian campaign was over, a new shah installed and concessions made, but Cornelia was already preparing for another trip with Euphemia in tow. News from Europe was slow and could take months to arrive, but she assumed the reason she was to sail for Malta had something to due with Lelouch's Italian campaign. The news reached her while on the march, and while things seemed to be going well from what she had last heard and the war could already be decided, there was also a possibility she would be desperately needed on some front if the war had spiraled beyond her brother's control.
She would be traveling with Euphemia, of course, but her personal retinue and her Knight/aide-de-camp Guilford would be accompanying her. Of course, she hadn't accomplished the campaign with just her personal guard, but she wasn't taking the Indian Sepoys that made up the bulk of her previous campaign's force with her. Cornelia frequently found herself whipping the forces she was given into shape, whether they were Bengali sepoys or colonial guards from the Americas, and she was skilled at adapting to the forces she commanded while also improving upon them.
Cornelia was all to happy to leave- the Persian campaign had proven one of her most costly yet, and a strange disease was spreading among the rank and file. It was always difficult to reduce the spread of disease on campaigns, but this particular disease was endemic, spreading over much of India. Large portions of Britannian India were suffering under the disease, and it spread just as ferociously in what independent states remained on the subcontinent, and Cornelia wondered if this bout of disease would drive the East India Company to do the Sikhs or Sindhi in.
The trip would take perhaps five months or more just to reach Gibraltar, but that meant at least five months of time spent with her sister instead of leaving her in a palace somewhere while Cornelia led in the field.
The Romans had a concept called the Mare Nostrum, which first referred to the Tyrrhenian Sea and then eventually the entirety of the Mediterranean Sea as they ascended to hegemony. Lelouch could possibly claim the first, as he did rule most of the land surrounding the Tyrrhenian: Italy proper, Sicily, and Sardinia, although Napoleon II ruled Corsica.
Of course, Lelouch certainly couldn't claim the second, although before the Italians could truly call either "our sea" a navy would have to be established. The country had a merchant marine, of course, Lelouch had used a portion of those ships to sail to Genoa in the first place, but they were lacking in warships. Of course, the Italian navy wasn't intended to be a wooden wall as the Britannian navy was, but they needed to be able to project naval power. The main reason Lelouch was so keen to invest in the navy was a simple one: the pirates of the Barbary coast.
The corsairs of the Barbary states were a terror of the Mediterranean, and while Sicily's status as a Britannian naval base usually prevented raids, Lelouch knew full well that developing a functioning navy would be a key step to fending off raids on coastal towns or Italian shipping, or in putting an end to the pirates once and for all. The pirates were nominally under Ottoman control, although the Beys of the Barbary coast tended to raid as they pleased, and now that they didn't have a certain, defined target in the Revolutionary French, Lelouch knew they could prove to be a major threat.
Of course, the problem was finding a solution to their lack of a navy without drastically worsening their economic situation, and Lelouch was already stressing about budgets without worrying about maintaining a large navy on top of that. Lelouch's current plans called for a small fleet of low lying paddle steamers, armed with Lloyd's new exploding shell guns. The new technology would be expensive, but fielding something like a ship of the line would require a small army's worth of cannon, as opposed to a few guns, or maybe even just one per ship if an appropriate turret design could be drawn up.
They also had plans to expand the merchant marine, with hopes of increasing revenues through trade. Lelouch and Lord Asplund had gone over some of Lloyd's old plans and found something very intriguing: an iron hulled sailing ship. Of course, there were some situations where a steamship might prove itself better, but at the high seas, far from a coaling station, this new ship could really prove itself. Iron required less maintenance than wood, meant hulls could be made thinner, and with steel mills being built it was suddenly going to get a lot cheaper.
Of course, it was also going to be a display of Italian industrial might and would show the world they were more than just an accessory to the Britannian state. Ashford seemed especially enthused by the designs, and while it would probably take a year or more for the plans to come to fruition, he was already planning a trip to London to sell Italian glass and wine, in addition to showing the ship off to the court. On a military level, Lelouch hoped that a massive iron hulled sailing ship would be more noticeable than the exploding-shell patrol ships that would form the backbone of their navy in the near future. Of course, all of this naval planning was relatively long term, and wouldn't be ready for months or even years.
At the very least, they had one key naval supply in tremendous quantity: citrus. Britannia had a truly tremendous demand for citrus fruits, which had started with lemons but transformed into limes as the Continental System throttled Britannian trade with the Mediterranean. West Indian limes were a favorite to fight scurvy, and with control over Italy proper there was a lot of citrus to work with, which would hopefully be a boon to Italian trade, both as merchandise and to stock their expeditions with.
Sadly, funding the new ships did mean that several other projects wouldn't pan out in the short term due to lack of investment. Lelouch had hoped to experiment with large scale firing exercises and artillery- he hoped to invest in lighter pieces and possibly even rockets to bolster any campaign that might take place in or near the mountains to the north. Britannia had already fielded rockets in battle before, and Lelouch thought they were an intriguing possibility, especially to deal with flammable targets, which would make them a fine addition to the navy, if he had the funding.
Of course, his concerns weren't entirely martial, and while he did set aside some funds for infrastructure and Lloyd's railroads, it never felt like enough. Lelouch also hoped to invest in the Italian people, and education was to be one of his long term goals, but he felt naval power should be a priority in the short term- you couldn't just make a navy overnight.
On the subject of education, he found an interesting solution that wouldn't tax the country's resources, at least quite as much as government run schools. Lelouch had noticed an uncommon trend of literacy in the Peat Gathers, which he assumed to be the cause for their liberal leanings: a man who could read could absorb the works of thinkers like Locke and Rousseau and grow discontent with the Britannian government, making the Peat Gatherers rather self selecting; however, Lelouch was surprised to learn that many of the men had learned the basics of literacy from their churches, and education wasn't nearly as rare as he thought. Of course, their education didn't have the same breadth and depth of Lelouch's years of tutoring, but Sunday Schools that taught literacy and religious doctrine were fairly common. Lelouch supposed that even he could get a little caught up in his ego and forget that the normal people of Britainnia might desire an education as well. It certainly was an interesting idea, and Lelouch wrote a letter explaining the concept and sent it to the Pope. He supposed that he was in something of a privileged position if he could write directly to the Pope and expect an answer, and even if he wasn't religious he appreciated the Pope's sway and the influence the Church held.
Although Lelouch had to pay obligations to both the Empire of the Danube and the Empire of Britannia, as a viceroy he had a lot of economic sway over the country, even if the parliament still controlled things like levying taxes. As long as Britannian Viceroys were paying their proper dues to the Empire and their domains weren't collapsing in on themselves, Charles gave the Viceroys surprising amounts of autonomy to run their little absolutist realms however they saw fit. Some of Lelouch's more forward thinking siblings, perhaps in hopes of proving themselves worthy of the throne, stayed frugal and devoted their funds to public works and the like. However, for every Viceroy displaying forward thinking skills and good husbandry, there was one spending the money however they pleased.
Clovis in particular was famed for this- he had been appointed as Viceroy of the Cape, and basically stumbled into ruling one of the richest portions of the Empire after the French embargo cut off the nobility from their beloved wine. Sure, other parts of the world did grow grapes and the royal family even had their own private vineyards in England, but the when a demand presented itself, the Cape was one of the major parts of the empire that made up the slack (at least for those nobles willing to pay out the nose for their drink). Apparently, one of the nobles in the region had a passion for viticulture, and it was his initiative that led to the Cape's presence on the wine scene. Despite the costs of shipping the wine from one end of the world to the other, the wine was sold as being a "patriotic" alternative to continental wines. The nobility were willing to pay to maintain appearances and throw lavish parties, and when Clovis got his Viceroyship he certainly made use of that money: patronage of artists, the creation of sprawling menageries of exotic creatures, and the construction of a sprawling palatial complex known as Pendragon. Of course, significant portions of those funds also went to funding Clovis' own proclivities, and rumors of his general rakishness even reached Sicily.
Lelouch hoped to get in on the wine trade, or at least appeal to the Britannian middle class by presenting them with "Britannian" (in one sense of the word) wine that would by its nature be cheaper than the famed South African sort due to only having to be shipped from Italy to England instead of having to partake in a trip around a large portion of Africa. Of course, he would face competition from other European countries in this arena given that the Continental System was no longer strangling trade, but for now buying wine from the Viceroyalties was in vogue among the nobility, and richer Britannian commoners were very fond of trying to mimic the nobility's style even if they couldn't afford the greatest excesses.
A new session of the Senate had finally begun, with actual elected officials running the country, and while it wasn't completely alien to the Italians who had spent years under French rule, for the Peat Gatherers and other Britannians, it was quite the novel experience to live in a constitutional monarchy as opposed to an absolutist one.
The sovereignty the Italian state enjoyed even while being a part of Britannia was certainly a stark contrast to the treatment other Britannian territories received. While due to sheer distance they usually had to be ruled by viceroys, they tended to follow the same absolutist model of the original state, and many of the other parts of the empire required garrisoning to stop revolts. The new world colonies in particular were hotbeds of malcontent, especially those recently pried from Spanish control.
If circumstances ever lead to Italy becoming independent, Lelouch certainly wouldn't follow in his ancestor's footsteps by beginning colonial conquests. It just seemed impossible to sustain in the long term, and any economic gains would be negated or severely dampened by the costs of a conquest and keeping the conquered territory docile and productive. Perhaps he was wrong, and colonies were the key to long term sustainability, but he certainly couldn't devote forces to colonial conquests even if he wanted to, considering the neighbors Italy had.
However, potential Italian independence could be bolstered by those same factors. Britannia had diverse lands it needed to keep in check, and pulling away too many men from any of them could cause unrest leading to even more territorial loss. That did mean that Italy wouldn't have to face the full might of the Britannian Army at any point in time, but even then Italy's strength wasn't on par with what Britannia could bring to bear. Perhaps in time things would be different, but for now Italy would stay under Britannian rule, freer than just about every other Imperial territory in the world.
The trickle of Britannian nobility had seemed to peter out, although commoner immigration to the country was much more frequent. The Britannian Empire by its nature led to many people being downtrodden, and the situation was made worse by a lack of any real places to run away to. The new world was largely Britannian, the parts that weren't were at great risk of becoming Britannian, and a majority of Europe wasn't much better when it came to political freedoms. The Britannian volunteers Lelouch had picked up so early on were just some of the more enthusiastic, and now that Italy was secured people proved more willing to move in, especially those who didn't have great prospects anywhere else. Lelouch certainly wasn't going to stop people if they wanted to become part of Italy (as long as they weren't causing a stir, obviously), although he made sure to get news about the cholera epidemic out to everyone, including port officials, so any immigrants fresh off the boat were aware of the disease.
Close oversight on Lelouch's part had managed to keep the spread of cholera very limited in Venice so far, although he heard worrying news of piles of dead in the big cities, places like Milan, Rome, Naples, and Palermo. That last one was especially painful for Lelouch- it was certainly his home more than Britannia was, and he was loath to see his people suffer, although his duties now meant that all of Italy was now, at least in part, his responsibility, so even if he wanted to rush over and coordinate a response, he couldn't.
His contacts across the Danubian border were giving him reports of the disease spreading among coastal cities in the empire, and the dissidents were even kind enough to provide him with translated newspapers when they could get their hands on some. The good news was that Lelouch and Italy weren't being vilified as malicious spreaders of the disease, although the disease hadn't really spread inland quite yet. Lots of cases in the Danubian Adriatic in cities like Trieste, but for now Vienna herself seemed safe, although there were worrying reports from the cities of Buda and Pest.
In the west, newspapers spoke of cases in Toulon and Brest, although Lelouch had recently received a letter from Napoleon II confirming that they were taking measures to prevent the spread. As of yet, Lelouch wasn't getting much news about the Turks, so he couldn't predict happenings in the Levant with certainty.
Lelouch's efforts to modernize the country happened to borrow heavily from Britannia's playbook when it came to things like industrialization, although he tried to keep his mind open to see if any other parts of the world came up with things that were useful.
For example, Lelouch had received interesting reports about Muhammad Ali Pasha, a viceroy of the Ottoman Empire who shared quite a few similarities with Lelouch's own reign. The Albanian ruler of Ottoman Egypt certainly had his work cut for him when it came to modernization, and was playing catch-up with Western Europe in general, although he handled it well. Before Lelouch had exploited unrest in French Italy to further his own ambitions, the Pasha of Egypt had conquered the minor kingdoms and tribes of the Sudan by himself, bringing great portions of the Upper Nile under his control. The man's ambitions were similar to his own, although with time the Pasha had the potential to threaten the Ottoman Empire while Lelouch most certainly did not have the capacity to really go on the offense against Britannia.
In addition, Muhammad Ali's overlord, the Ottoman Sultan, was attempting to modernize as well, hiring gunners and advisors to reform the Turkish Army, although Lelouch had heard reports of unrest among the Ottoman Janissary class about this. Almost like the Roman Praetorian Guard, the Janissary Corps had tremendous sway in the politics of the Empire, and the Sultans who opposed them tended to meet unfortunate ends.
True enough, Sultan Mahmud's hiring of European military experts eventually sparked a revolt in the middle of July, and the Janissary Corps which had served the Ottoman Empire for centuries, since before the fall of Constantinople and Eastern Rome in 1453 were crushed by the Sultan's other forces. This left the Ottomans in an unfortunate position of having roughly 130,000 fewer soldiers, and at a different point in time the other powers of Europe might have tried to exploit the situation, but with the Empire of the Danube stamping out the Italians and Russia's regency, it seemed like the Sultan had picked a good time for military reform.
Of course, Lelouch wasn't looking to pick a fight right now, and as such it seemed like the Turks were in a good position to recover their strength with no real opposition. Of course, there was the potential of the Regent in Russia pushing for something, but all the political finagling would take a while to pan out, giving the Turks time to renovate their armies.
There was also the chance of the Pasha trying something funny, and while Lelouch didn't have anything approaching a full understanding of the man's psyche, if Lelouch was in a similar situation he would do to his best to exploit it.
The hot summer weather wasn't insufferable for Lelouch (he was from Sicily, after all) but it brought on some concerns of its own other than just making sure there was enough saltpeter to cool their drinks. Even as laborers worked in the fields, comparatively mundane diseases such as malaria spread during the summers. The lack of rain in the summer did mean that water levels didn't rise severely, but Lelouch certainly wasn't expecting that to slow the spread of cholera.
Malaria was another interesting disease, and fighting it would be helpful for Italy, although Lelouch had no idea to start with fighting the disease, if he even had the time. It was very common around Tuscany and the Pontine Marshes south of Rome, and it was widely believed to be spread by a foul miasma in the air around swamps. In fact, that theory was practically reflected name, considering that the disease's name literally came from earlier Italian and quite literally meant "bad air".
Cases were common along the length of the Po as well, and there were also significant numbers around Venice proper. This led Lelouch to the conclusion that the disease was water borne in some way, but Lelouch could predict very little about it otherwise. One of the only effective ways to fight the disease was with cinchona bark, which was difficult to acquire in Italy. The malaria certainly wasn't reaching epidemic status as cholera was, but it was something to be cautious about, and Lelouch would refrain from setting up camp near marshes.
For now, the army remained in a state of fairly constant drill, although they were having issues integrating the newer recruits. Doubling the size of the army from 30,000 to 60,000 caused quite a few issues in the command structure, especially considering that there wasn't anything approaching a doubling in the size of the officer corps. Italy wasn't exactly lacking in military schools, but like many other things, an officer's education was something that came with time. In another break from Britannian tradition, Lelouch aimed for a completely merit based officer system as opposed to commission buying, (not that such a system always led to total incompetence) as selling commissions had the side effect of limiting some forms of advancement to those rich enough to pay their way in and slowing advancement for the poor, although the process of commission buying served as a sort of insurance to prevent gross incompetence.
Commissions were a tricky thing, and it was perfectly possible to advance through the ranks without them (although the highest echelons of the military simply couldn't be reached without noble or possibly even royal birth). Britannian pragmatism definitely extended to the lower ranks of military command, and those who bought their positions tended to sink or swim rather quickly, weeding out inadequate commanders during wartime rather violently. An officer incompetent enough to die in battle would have his position filled by a volunteer, a promotion from the ranks, or the like instead of someone who bought their commission.
Lelouch could see the system's merit, of course, and how it encouraged officers to value the men under them and assured that the officer was well off enough not to indulge in profiteering when given the chance. The social exclusivity was the real catch, and Lelouch was already taking steps to promote those men who had displayed skill previously.
While the idea of common born officers certainly wasn't alien to Britannia, it seemed to go over much better in Sicily, likely due to Marianne's influence. If a commoner could rise to become Empress, then surely one could command some infantry. To a limited extent, Jeremiah even agreed with that idea, although he tended to stumble a little when interacting with actual common soldiers who turned out very different his imagined ideal. (The ideal being rather like Marianne, of course.)
As summer ended and fall began, cholera spread into the European continent with speed, taking root in major cities on waterways and spreading from there. Cases popped in Vienna around fall along with Saint Petersburg, and Constantinople got the disease much earlier, a few months after initial cases in Sicily.
Discontent sprung up as the disease spread through Europe, and often compounded on popular discontent. The French people may not have liked Napoleon's wars very much, but that certainly didn't mean the Bourbon Restoration was welcomed with open arms, and among some circles the disease that came shortly after the Restoration would be known as the Bourbon Disease or the King's Disease, although it also had a strong association with Italy due to first appearing there, and was sometimes called the Sicilian Plague.
Confusion about how cholera spread was a large part of this unrest, and while Lelouch's theories did help to calm some Italians, they were frequently mocked by foreign intellectuals, and Lelouch's hypothesis about the disease being waterborne was frequently twisted into meaning that the disease was some sort of poison planted in the rivers by dissidents or foreign agents. The general air of mystery surrounding the disease also made people unhappy with government action taken to stop the spread.
The glamour of the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy was starting to wear off and the same disease borne discontent that plagued other countries was in Italy as well, so Lelouch divided the army into smaller units to keep the peace and to prevent spread due to having the whole army in one place. It certainly wasn't as rigorous as a campaign, but considering the experience level of some of his officers, starting out with marching around Italy, garrisoning towns, and organizing supplies was a good place to start. Lelouch decided to keep a fairly large number of soldiers near Venice: his own Sicilian guard, the Peat Gatherers (mainly because they couldn't speak the language and would be… less than helpful controlling rioting crowds), and the same number of recruits, so that his army was half veteran (in a rather limited sense, of course) and the rest were new recruits.
The colony of Malta was in an unusual position, being a previously Sicilian possession ruled by the Knights Hospitaller before its seizure by the French. However, unlike much of mainland Sicily, Malta remained under more direct Britannian control as a security measure to make sure that the autonomy given to Sicily wouldn't mean that the British navy's capacity to operate in the Mediterranean could be checked by the whims of the Sicilian Parliament.
For Cornelia's purposes, her stop at Malta finally gave her a chance to see what her new assignment was. Their stops at the Cape and Gibraltar were fast and relatively uninformative. She had gathered that Lelouch emerged triumphant in his campaign in Italy so she wouldn't be joining a war against the French, especially considering the fact the French Empire had collapsed in on itself. She had expected that Revolutionary France would start to fall apart after the death of their Emperor, but she didn't expect that it would happen so quickly and decisively.
Instead of fighting a revolutionary France that no longer existed, Cornelia was tasked with drilling and reorganizing the army of Italy, and that was the official story behind her stay. Italy was now a significant portion of the Empire's population, with enough people to rival the home islands, and as such a militia was no longer an acceptable defense, especially given the country's neighbors. Or at least that was what they would tell Lelouch while doing that, Cornelia would keep a careful eye on the Italians, and make sure their military was more in line with Britannian ideals, so to speak.
On the subject of the now unified (if not independent) Italy, Lelouch's success in his campaign of unification was a shock, although the fact that the rest of Europe let him get away with it seemed like an even greater accomplishment to Cornelia, who had just returned from a campaign stymied by politics and attempts to maintain the balance of power.
Cornelia and her entourage arrived in Malta around the middle of December, with plans of landing in Venice in the first days of 1827. While not the official capitol of the Italian state, it was where Lelouch worked from, and Cornelia certainly wasn't going to be taking orders from the Italian Parliament in Rome if she could help it. She understood why the Sicilian and then eventually Italian Parliament existed of course, and appreciated the former's role in laying a foundation for Lelouch's conquest; however, that did not mean she wanted to be ordered around by some jumped up burgesses.
Euphemia seemed exited as well, and Cornelia did share some of her excitement when it came to seeing Lelouch and Nunnally again. Cornelia's campaigns never brought her anywhere near Italy, so she hadn't seen Lelouch at all since his mother's murder and his banishment to Sicily along with Nunnally.
PASHA OF EGYPT REVOLTS!
Seizing on the military disorganization caused by the abolition of the Janissary Corps, Muhammad Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, has revolted against the Sublime Porte, demanding control over the Turkish Levant. The Pasha of Egypt has long since displayed independent tendencies, conquering the Sudan for himself, but this is his first move against the Ottoman Sultans themselves.
Next Episode: Lelouch vi Britannia and the Beys of Barbary…. Or something to that effect.
Iron hulled sailing ships are one of the weirdest thing imaginable. Just some mad lads sailing around in the early 1900s on an iron sailboat with stores full of guano (not kidding) or something. It's so incredibly bizarre. These ships appeared as early as the 1870s, and I don't see why they couldn't be made earlier, at least in theory, although the innovations that made the crews smaller haven't been made yet. It's certainly not the most radical/timeline breaking piece of tech to take from the period, I figure.
The bit about Cape wine was originally supposed to be California, due to them having Mission Grapes, but I felt I was pushing the timeline there, as California was only really colonized in 1769 and would have fallen into Britannian control with the last decade or so, according to my canon. Some research showed that South African wine was a thing for a while by this point. That's the reason behind the Pendragon reference, but I can't imagine the Americas rising to their importance in the original show without a reason for immigration, while the Cape is going to remain important until a Suez canal is built.
Why malaria? Because the past really sucked. I love history and the people who shaped it… but oh boy, it would have sucked to live in the past. And about the popular discontent around measures to prevent disease- not just a covid thing! People rioted in Russia and England in 1831-32 about Cholera too.