Why History and Magic Don't Mix
This is gonna be a weird one. This is a collection of stories about magic in history, and why a lot of modern magic settings don't make much sense, Harry Potter being one notable example. Basically: magic is a powerful equalizer and can do amazing things. Why didn't it change history? Here are a few stories where that is exactly what it did.
1. Rex Britannorum
Felix could scarcely believe that they were here, the prows of their triremes slicing through the salty waters of the ocean that lay past Gaul. Julius Caesar had ordered a great campaign to bring the people of the isle of Britannia to heel, and it still felt like a dream.
For most of his life, he thought Britannia and her sister island, Hibernia, were the stuff of fantasy, hoaxes fabricated by Greek explorers, but when he saw the milk white cliffs of this strange land, his heart raced. He had accompanied Caesar on his first expedition to the island, but they were forced to leave by poor weather. The glory of going beyond the edge of the known world was more than worth it, and now the Romans returned in force.
They had heard rumors of the tribes of this strange land forming a great coalition under the command of a Cassivellaunus, who was king of a tribe called the Trinovantes. This land was rife with petty lords, but these tribal allies had proven useless against the might of Rome. Now, Julius Caesar marched against the stronghold of Cassivellaunus, and it was as grand and terrible as buildings could get outside of Rome.
It was situated on a great hill, whose top was ringed by palisades of sharpened logs stood up and ditches dug into the soil. A great series of earthworks at the top of the hill held what may have passed for a palace for these barbarians, a great circular structure made of logs that seethed with activity, both with soldiers and with men in great white robes who must have been the druids who played such a large part in the ruling of this land.
Caesar rode beside his men on a horse as black as the night, the muscles of its back covered with a leopard pelt from foreign Anatolia or from the northern reaches of Africa or Mauretania. When Caesar rode in front of the men, Felix could hear shouting in the barbarian hillfort, as if they realized how truly outmatched they were by Julius Caesar.
Squinting, he could see some of the druids leading a goat up to the walls, before cutting its throat with a knife, letting the red blood drip unto their hands before raising them to the sky and beginning to chant as a sort of ghastly miasma rose from the goat's body. It gathered in their hands, in a shimmering ball of foul energy that made Felix sick just by looking at it. He opened his mouth to warn his fellows, to warn Caesar, when the ball soared with all the speed of a ballista bolt, straight towards Caesar.
The moment the foul energy struck Caesar, a gash cut across his neck, sending him stumbling from his horse as the legionnaires broke into a panic and the Celts began to attack, those damned druids shouting a strange, intelligible war cry that sent chills down his back as they began to charge. "Get off our bloody island, you Roman bastards!"
They fled, but the ships they used to arrive in Britannia were under attack as well, by a great chimera made from fire, all writhing bodies and gnashing teeth but shaped from flames instead of flesh. Felix lived up to his name and was lucky enough to escape onto one of the boats that wasn't consumed by the flames. As they sailed away, they could see the cliffs of Britannia being swallowed up by a tremendous fog, and when the wind blew it clear there was nothing at all, as if the entire country had disappeared, Caesar and the majority of his men along with it.
2. A City on the Lake
Hernan Cortes had come to conquer the backwards heathens of the New World, and made allies with the tributaries of these strange devil worshippers. While they were heathens who knew nothing of the true God, they were useful heathens who could help him overthrow the Aztec Triple Alliance.
Cortes first met their pagan emperor in their city Tenochtitlan, which stood on the center of lake Texcoco and was truly a marvel, as loath as he was to admit it. Vibrant gardens bloomed with plants of all sorts, and while some floated on the surface of the lake, many floated in the air, suspended by whatever strange magicks these people used. He was not unfamiliar with magic, of course, but to see it so widely accepted made his stomach churn. His men marched across a narrow bridge to the city proper, strange shadows rippling across the steel of their armor as the floating gardens drifted overhead.
Their culture was incredibly strange, they had wealth beyond imagining, their foul idols crafted with gold and jewels, and yet they couldn't even realize how valuable all that gold was- they traded with beans from a plant, of all things! The markets bustled with people beyond counting, and they had great temples, constructed upon massive pyramids which were made of a white material, although their stairs were dyed a deep red for a reason Cortes could not comprehend.
The emperor wore a tunic of a dark blue material, and his retinue wore grand headdresses full of beautiful feathers that seemed to gleam in the sun, and some even changed colors, shifting between vibrant greens, light blues, and deep crimsons in strange rippling patterns. What sort of strange bird had feathers like that? They wore the skins of jaguars and carried shields and strange wooden clubs with razor sharp fragments of obsidian sticking out.
The emperor had invited him to stay, and Cortes agreed. They were accommodating beyond all measure, although they refused to let him erect a cross and an image of the Blessed Virgin next to their pagan idols, and they soon broke out into fighting, and while the Spanish had steel arms and many allies from the Aztec's rivals, the Aztec priests seemed to practice a foul sort of magic that stunned his men with ease and sent him into a deep sleep.
He awoke to the sun high in the sky above him, and although he could barely sense anything other than the heat and glare of the sun, he thought he could see the glint something black reflecting the sun before he felt a great pain in his chest, saw a pair of hands holding something red above him, and then knew no more.
3. A Domesday Doomsday
When William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invaded England and made himself king, he found himself ruling a country that he knew very little about, and he set out to conduct a grand survey of all England, to see what land belonged to the king in every shire in England. The Domesday book would allow William to conduct taxes after his invasion so thoroughly reshaped England, and he meant to see all of his subjects, including the magical sort.
Magical communities spotted the country, but still swore their fealty to the King of England, and they were included in William's great survey, even if they stifled under his control. Some of the most notable conductors of these surveys were a collection of exiled ex-French magical nobility who fled with William, and while they won themselves a great place in William's new government they would forever be branded as treacherous men of bad faith, or in their native French, "mal foi", and in time the nickname became the official name of the House of Malfoy.
Of course, with such a valuable document, copies were made, especially with the printing press, and many copies were squirreled away all over Britain. Of course, that never became a problem until the wizarding world decided to hide itself away from the muggle world, and while magical editors did edit the official copy of the Domesday Book to make the portions describing magical communities only readable by a wizard, many copies went undetected…
"Professor?"
"Yes, what is it?
"I've been looking through the university's copy of the Domesday book, the oldest one, and there are several locations mentioned that more modern surveys don't bring up."
"Whatever do you mean, my boy?"
"There are tracts of land in many towns that aren't reported in more recent sources, houses in places like Appleby and Ottery St Catchpole. Entire portions of London have disappeared, and a settlement called Hogsmeade has vanished from the books entirely."
"Well, perhaps we should investigate this. Come on, I've got some contacts in London!"
It was almost pathetic that the wizards went to all the effort to hide their society with magic and charms only for a university student to blow the whole case wide open.
4. The Great War
More than anything, Andrew wished that he was home again, in his mother's arms or listening to his father's advice over dinner, instead of in these damned fields in Belgium. The land had been churned into a great sea of brown by the shells, and it felt like he was drowning in the foul air of the trenches, but couldn't surface for fear of a German sniper.
He had gotten his father's permission to enlist, high on stories of glory and fame, but the trenches were anything but. Of course, there were parts of the trenches he was sure no one at home would believe, and he knew any attempts to talk about it in his letters would be pointless.
The first time he realized that something supernatural was going on was during the Christmas truce, when the men stopped fighting for a few glorious hours. At first, he thought he was dreaming, but the soldiers of both sides were stunned into silence by an incredible display in the sky, like the most complex fireworks he had ever seen- great snakes of fire dancing in the sky, bursts of light that changed from glimmering emerald to gold and every shade imaginable, and the strangest feeling of contentment settled over him.
Of course, the truce was temporary, and more supernatural things came, terrible things. In the middle of January, the German high command released something near the trenches, and whatever it was it made the air even colder than normal, sending shivers down Andrew's spine as suddenly he was back in the trenches in October, holding Edward in his arms, crying bitter tears as his friend's blood mixed with the mud-
And then a sense of sheer joy overcame him, like he was back at home in England with his family, and looking up he saw a great lion roaring triumphantly in no man's land, its cloak a gleaming, translucent silver that shone as bright as the moon. From the German trenches, an eagle of the same coloring soared, and the two animals played with each other, nipping at each other's tails as the lion leapt over the craters and the eagle soared over the barbed wire.
In spring, an unusual man was attached to their division, who the higher ups called a "Unconvential Combat Specialist" and he introduced himself as Geoffrey. Andrew was convinced that George was suicidal, because some nights he would crawl on his belly into no man's land, with the simple explanation that he was gathering flowers. However, he did something with those flowers and made the a medicine for trench foot that practically made it vanish, so he supposed it was fine.
Andrew was a god-fearing Christian, but even he couldn't deny what he was seeing forever: ghosts were gathering by the thousands in no man's land, both modern soldiers, men he might have once known, and soldiers from the past. Napoleonic skirmishers clad in bright blues and reds broke bread with ancient Belgae tribesmen, their bare chests wet with blue woad and criss crossed with silver wounds. Ghostly pikes were planted in the muck as English men-at-arms rested next to heavy French cavalrymen they might have died fighting, as Dutch musketeers polished their ghostly arms.
By night, great hosts of phantom cavalry stormed through the fields, sounding their horns and letting out whooping battle cries in a dozen languages.
If the horrors of the war were not great enough already, magicians (because Andrew could no longer deny that was what they were) made it worse. Wards made poison gas look tame, and entire regions of the battlefield were rendered impossible to cross by a few placed stones. Complex spellwork made the trenches physically shift and bend, cutting off any enemies fortunate enough to get inside and flooding the hole with mud. Machine gun nests were invisible and artillery shells landed without a sound, great explosions that sent dirt hundreds of feet into the air with all the silence of a film.
He had heard horrible rumors of the Eastern front-:vampires and werewolves, those children's tales, prowling the lines, eating their fill of Russian conscripts for the sake of their Austrian overlords. Summoned djinn doing battle in the Levant for the sake of both the Turks and Arabs, the Greeks had unleashed a basilisk into Macedonia, and Banshees killing thousands of British soldiers in Ireland.
What exactly was so great about this war?
5. Cold War
The United States of America had always had their problems with magic users. While the Salem Witch Trials didn't actually catch any real magic users, they were part of a larger anti-magic trend, and they felt obligated to follow the words of the Bible: suffer not a witch to live.
When the American Revolution came, relations between the higher ups of the American government and the magical community were poor, as they organized themselves in a structure very much like the nobility of the old world, and Congress had made a rather big deal of not issuing noble titles to their citizens.
Relations between the United States and native magic users were about as good as their relations with the other natives, which was to say exceedingly poor. Clashes between largely muggleborn mage battalions under the United States government and native magicians were common, and this animosity made expansion into the west… difficult. Somehow, the native shamans had reached an amicable agreement with the thunderbirds, and never shared the secret of this arrangement with the US government, leading to the creatures being a thorn in America's side until they got anti air guns.
The Soviet Union did not have such scruples, especially considering how oppressed magic users were by the Orthodox government of the Tsardom of Russia. Stalin did eventually have plans for a purge of magic users, in the same way he had purged the army and the doctors, but it never panned out before his death. While the noble magical families didn't manage so well, great societies of muggleborn magicians were formed, to serve the union. They also recruited many German and East European mages to enhance their research.
In secret labs in both nations, magicians explored the power of atom and discussed how it could be harnessed, made more effective or negated entirely by magic. Alchemy made acquiring obscene amounts of fusion material easier than ever before, and primitive fusion reactors were constructed used the power of magic. Nuclear bombs were enchanted to be harder to detect, enchanted to teleport like a portkey, and given limited time shrinking charms to make them easy to transport.
However, neither side was bold enough to strike, both worrying that the other had somehow created a nuclear countermeasure, which was the true holy grail of magic during the time. Magic became integrated into war, enchantments and runes as common on the battlefield as bullets.
The space race was another field that benefited tremendously from magic, especially with the discovery that transportation magic like portkeys and apparition worked to move things to space. All it took was one good rocket launch to propel a nation to the cosmic stage, or an ally with a space program. Moondust was discovered to be a powerful potion ingredient with properties that could practically cure lycanthropy, if applied correctly, and it certainly wasn't in short supply when it was only a teleport away.
Although the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over the entire world by the end of century, it did not hang over every world in the solar system, across dozens of planets and moons seeded with human life, with magic, by the work of both powers. Faster than light technology was another easy step for magic, and while mankind may have been divided, the universe waited for them, both magical and muggle.
So that was fun to write! Just a few random ideas about how history could have been changed by magic. Might expand on this, might not. These are just a few basic moments of history, I could explore it in a lot more depth if I wanted to.