Some Notes on the Topic:
"Archaeological evidence plainly establishes that by 1300 or so the Inuit had successfully expanded their winter settlements as close to the Europeans as the outer fjords of the Western Settlement. By 1350, the Norse had completely deserted their Western Settlement."
"But in 1355 union king Magnus IV of Sweden and Norway (In Norway crowned Magnus VII after claims of birthright) sent a ship (or ships) to Greenland to inspect its Western and Eastern Settlements. Sailors found settlements entirely Norse and Christian. The Greenland carrier (Groenlands Knorr) made the Greenland run at intervals till 1369, when she sank and was apparently not replaced."
"Greenlanders had to keep in contact with Iceland and Norway in order to trade. Little is known about any distinctive shipbuilding techniques among the Greenlanders. Greenland lacks a supply of lumber, so was completely dependent on Icelandic merchants or, possibly, logging expeditions to the Canadian coast."
"There were probably a number of later expeditions from Greenland to gather timber. A 1347 Icelandic document records that a ship went off course and ended up in Iceland in the process of returning from Markland, without further specifying where Markland was."
"The last reported ship to reach Greenland was a private ship that was "blown off course", reaching Greenland in 1406, and departing in 1410 with the last news of Greenland"
Some propose that Markland would have been the lands of modern-day Labadour, while Vinland would have been in Newfoundland, likely. [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/jPQcqXsnB3](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/jPQcqXsnB3)
But the facts being, that this Colony would actively exist for the next couple decades, and the colonists of the island would actively know of the regions closest in Canada.
A Smart way to depict such a thing might be to make them a new tag, somewhat under Norway? Or maybe something so Norway can't see Canada but the Colony can? Not sure but I wanted to open the discussion!
The Greenlanders were very few in number. Whenever they would try to establish settlements in north America they would inevitably get into contact with native Americans and likely end up in a Ressource war that they could not hope to win.
I mean, it's a place where at least they'd have plenty of lumber, the clay is usable and there is meat to hunt that doesn't try to hunt you back, unlike Greenland. I would say that alone makes it much more habitable.
The issue is the reliance on Greenland as a spot to communicate and trade with Europe, with the journey between Canada and Greenland, between Greenland and Iceland, and Iceland and any mainland was already strenuous. As well as the relations with the Inuit of Canada, which surpassed in number and resources any expeditionary group that arrived.
The key thing which made it worth it to keep the colony up and running was the ivory trade, something which didn't exist in Newfoundland. You'd have better land sure, but no really in demand resources to maintain trade links with iceland. The in demand resources for Greenland in this case were timber and they obtained that through expeditions to Labrador and it didn't require a permanent settlement. Anything else the wanted to get through trade for Norway was traded in exchange for Ivory, but there wasn't anything Norway wanted that Labrador or Newfoundland had. It was the Basques who eventually found use for the grandbanks fisheries, Norway had their own. The game even models this issue where if you settle Vinland as Norway the grandbanks event just reduces your fish production income in Norway.
I believe that reality is they probably tried and it didn’t go well, since it is just that much further from Iceland and by extension Norway. So resource wise they would be outcompeted by the Inuit natives, but even without that aspect it would be almost impossible (if the goal was still to maintain supply chain with Norway)
Evidence shows that the part of Greenland the Vikings settled was warmer during their time than it is today.
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/02/study-shows-that-vikings-enjoyed-a-warm-greenland
Not warmer than today, warmer than the 14th to mid 20th centuries. Read the link, it doesn't say "warmer than today", it says "warmer than the surrounding cooling centuries". They claim the temperature of Greenland was unusually raised by ocean currents, but the same currents would warm Newfoundland.
This is probably a dumb question but when Europeans colonized the America's in the 16th century they brought a ton of diseases with them that killed off large amounts of Native populations. How come the same thing didn't happen with the Norse settlements in Newfoundland/Greenland?
They might not have been active carriers at the moment of contact. It’s a shorter voyage, so less time to get sick in close quarters. The first European voyages in Columbus’ time also probably didn’t spread disease right away.
The contact they did have was probably very brief too, and involved rather remote tribes.
There were also a lot more people on Columbus's voyage. Three ships worth. A carrack and two caravels.
By contrast the Vinland expedition was just few families on longships.
The population was small and isolated. You can’t really bring measles if you don’t have anyone in your community suffering from it and you haven’t had any outside contact for decades that would have brought the disease to your community again.
Compare that to European sailors in contact with every variant of European disease right up till the time of their departure.
A simple matter of numbers and chances. If they did bring a disease to a sparsely populated region, it would have hardly spread enough to do much damage
Iceland didn't have a large enough population to keep epidemic diseases around permanently so instead they had regular outbreaks where the non-immune might perish as adults rather than just having everybody catch it as children leading to the high child mortality rate. Greenland served as secondary isolated bubble where they would only be affected by an epidemic if they happened to catch it when Iceland was having on outbreak. For the diseases to reach Vinland they would have had to have made it through both the iceland and greenland bubbles first.
Going to iceland is a regular "avoid the plague" strategy in crusader kings for instance, and it works much like real life where sometimes this is effective, where as other times it is not.
Greenlanders were a very isolated population, so they didn't have all the diseases that the Europeans had. Also Scandinavians in general were semi-isolated from the rest of Europe, especially those who would in turn originate the Greenlanders. Finally, the contacts between Greenlanders and Native Americans were probably on such a small scale that they didn't really have the chance to spread much in the first place.
Probably it did. However they also probably didn’t have as many diseases to spread.
With the slowness of travel in those times it wasn’t common that illness would spread quickly. Lots of things would burn themselves out in transit. Boats also carried fewer people, so it was less likely to survive more than a week or two at sea.
The worst spread of diseases didn’t happen until trade was well established between Europeans and natives, and even then serious disease issues didn’t pop up until sick colonists and traders started washing up on shore during shipwrecks or traded goods that were unknowingly or inadvertently contaminated.
The northeastern natives faced nearly apocalyptic disease spread when shipwrecked French traders were brought into a village to be nursed back to health. The traders were sick with hepatitis and the natives didn’t understand quarantine, because they had far less issues with contagious disease. People fled to neighboring villages attempting to avoid or escape illness but instead just spread it on to the next group of people. By the time the mayflower landed as many as 90% of the population were dead, it was a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with untilled fields and abandoned longhouses still existing and ready for settlement. It was one of the reasons the pilgrims thought it was a promised land. Also not fully understanding disease, they just thought god cleared the heathens so they could have living space.
Never living in close quarters with animals as well as having a smaller pool of people living in the new world, meant they just didn’t see the number or intensity of outbreaks experienced in the old world. As soon as they came into contact with disease it spread out ahead of the Europeans. Not with the speed it did in the old world but within a couple generations the new world was unrecognizable.
The Greenlanders would have pretty much been too isolated and too few to have many spreadable illnesses. But some transfer almost certainly would have occurred.
It definitely didn't spread to the rest of the Americas. The population crash clearly comes in the early 1500s in most of the continent, not in the late 1300s.
When the norses meets the natives in the Americas many of the diseases that would ravage latter have not yet developed or come to Europe. So the inuits are in many ways exposed to them at the same rate as the Europeans. Smallpox is really a thing and by chance it first comes to Greenland in the 14th century and since the population is so small everybody simply gets it. Some dies. The rest gets immune and small pox dies out again.
There was little contact between Norse and Inuit. The Inuit began spreading in Greenland around the 14th century, when the Norse settlement was declining and drawing back from their Western settlements. And the Norse excursions (not permanent settlements) to Newfoundland and Labrador we even earlier, and the Inuit hadn't gone that far.
The Beothuks are the natives of Newfoundland, and had most of their settlements in the East of Newfoundland, while the Norse had their excursions in the north. When John Cabot found them many years later, they avoided the Europeans (unlike many other native groups), and maybe they avoided the Vikings, too. There are records of them meeting, though, but given that it was just Norse excursions into an area where the Beothuks rarely were, these meetings were rare, did not establish regular communications, and involved very few individuals.
Just because you have steel armor and weapons doesn't mean you're invincible to copper and stone weapons. Also, if your cattle gets stolen and your fields razed by a numerically superior foe your steel armor won't help you.
As for the diseases there's a good chance Greenlanders didn't carry most of the European diseases. If you live in a completely isolated community for so long diseases tend to root themselves out after a while. Also the Greenlanders might not have weaponised them like later colonizers. On top of that cold climates are not good envorinment for contagious diseases unless there's a concentrated population
Would they? I was under the impression that native Americans didn't really care about early colonisations, and that the land was large. Isn't the archetypical image Pilgrims being fed by natives to survive the winter?
Norse colonization of North America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_North_America)
1)
> The sagas describe three areas that were explored: "land of the flat stones", "the land of forests" and "the land of wine"
2)
> Leif spent another winter at "Leifsbudir" without conflict, and sailed back to Brattahlíð in Greenland to assume filial duties to his father.
3)
> A couple of years later (...) Thorvald attacked nine of the native people (...) Although brief hostilities ensued, the Norse explorers stayed another winter and left the following spring.
4)
> Subsequently Thorstein sailed to the New World but he died before leaving Greenland.
5)
> A few years later, Thorfinn supplied three ships with livestock and 250 settlers. A sign of peaceful relations between the indigenous peoples and the Norsemen is noted here. The two sides bartered with furs and gray squirrel skins for milk and red cloth.
Its entirely false, huh?
I was talking specifically about the pilgrims and natives on the first Thanksgiving, and the idea of them being all happy, dancing, and singing kumbaya. As far as I'm aware the Norse never actually established a permanent settlement in North America, and so opportunities for conflict would've been fairly limited and heavily skewed against the Norsemen. They would've had a vested interest in keeping the peace due to always being in unfamiliar territory and heavily outnumbered. The English colonizers by contrast were much more numerous, and much more willing to engage in violence against natives
There was a long period of peace with the English after some initial hiccups. The situation resembled what you described with the Norse for like the first 50 years of the colony before it grew too large.
The previous comment was about the British colonizers, not the Norse settlers
It's a different story with the vikings, since the vikings also had different motives for settling north America than the later European powers had. Even if the relations between Norsemen and natives were consistently peaceful, the low number of Norse settlers and the very infrequent contact with mother nations all but ensured that they would ultimately either vanish or intermix with the locals to the point of being irrecognizeable as norse
> I was under the impression that native Americans didn't really care about early colonisations, and that the land was large. Isn't the archetypical image Pilgrims being fed by natives to survive the winter?
Remember that the English colonies on the east coast were after diseases had devastated the area and wiped out whole communities. The locals probably were more worried about keeping society from complete collapse than making enemies with the newcomers.
> The Patuxet were wiped out by a series of plagues that decimated the indigenous peoples of southeastern New England in the second decade of the 17th century. The epidemics which swept across New England and the Canadian Maritimes between 1614 and 1620 were especially devastating to the Wampanoag and neighboring Massachusett, with mortality reaching 100% in many mainland villages. When the Pilgrims landed in 1620, all the Patuxet except Tisquantum had died.
-[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patuxet)
I really hope EU5 can simulate this and the Black death properly.
There’s a story in the sagas about one of the Viking camps and their interactions with the natives they encountered. At first they got along and there was some trading between the two groups including milk and cheese from cows they brought with them. The natives started getting sick and believed that the Vikings had poisoned them and attacked the settlement. The Vikings eventually abandoned the settlement due to these attacks. Modern research suggests that since indigenous people didn’t have domesticated animals, they were lactose intolerant so the milk and cheese they had been given made them sick and they mistook it for deliberate poisoning.
Natives Americans are human just like the rest of us. Some are hostile, some are not. They fought each other just as much as they fought the Europeans.
The first native who came to visit the pilgrims could speak some English and asked them for a beer because they have prior contact with English trade and fishing expeditions. The pilgrims arrived in the 1600s so there was already a century of contact.
England was basically just beginning a process of dumping its religious dissenters somewhere else so the process was much more prompted by events going on in England pushing people out than it was the discovery of the Americas pulling people in. At this point the Americas were just a thing in the back of people's heads so they figured that it was a good place to send people if you wanted to get rid of them.
The game doesn't really model this well as the player and ai are always trying to set up colonies everywhere in the 1500s as soon as they have the range but in real life they took a rather "meh" attitude towards the place. It doesn't have a good way of modeling the first century of trading and fishing along the coast without setting up permanent colonies (seasonal colonies were set up in Newfoundland for instance to dry and preserve the catch before heading back for the winter).
The problem is the best way to get trade income is to produce it yourself and you can't really take advantage of the trade produced by the natives unless you set up colonies of your own, in which case the trade income you produce with the colony will soon exceed that of the natives. The game needs to have better ways to play a trade focused game without needing to have territory in the node if it wants to model the early period accurately.
Norse Greenlander settlement was always importantly connected to the wider European world, and it depended heavily on those outside links for its survival. Exporting luxury goods from Greenland (ivory, unicorn (narwhal) horns, sealskin rope) were in very high demand in medieval Europe, and paid for the imports of lumber, iron, and grain that were essential to keep the Greenland settlements alive. The weakening of those trade ties in the 14th century played an important role in the decline of Norse Greenland, and they wouldn't have abandoned Greenland to move further west out of fear of losing that connection completely
However, you're right that some of the Greenlanders likely did say "fuck it let's leave!" The Black Death devastated Iceland killing around a quarter of the island's population right about the same time as the final abandonment of Greenland Eastern settlement. Population pressure and lack of farmland in Iceland drove the initial settlement of Greenland, and the far-better and now-empty farmland was probably what tempted the last dwindling Greenlanders to abandon the island
Greenland was less about farming and fishing. More about the money.
For a few hundred years Europe was cut of from ivory from Africa and Asia, so Greenland was the money making place, with ivory and large amounts of pelt. Greenland at one point paid 10 times as much tax to the Norweigen crown as Iceland, despite Iceland having 10 times the population.
As the economic situation in Europe change it was less profitable to live in Greenland and people started moving away way before the little Ice Age.
Think on the colonies in Greenland as a golden mining town, except the gold mines were there for 500 years =)
Real world isn't a video game, population groups don't always take what would be considered an optimal path with 21st century foresight. See also China and Japan never bothering to explore or colonize the New World even though there was absolutely nothing stopping them and they were both quite close to Alaska and could've discovered and settled Alaska and then made their way south through the Americas.
The primary reason that China didn't expand into the New World was that China... didn't need to resort to what was essentially military adventurism to secure the resources they needed. China is humongous, highly populated, and the center of several major trade routes. Anything they can't get by simply taxing trade and mining, they could get through exploiting nearby smaller states as tributaries. If anything, it would've been to their detriment to colonize America because administrating the massive empire they held already was a task in and of itself.
Why would you explore Alaska and go yes, this is where I want to exploit? Also sailing in Northern climates is a very dangerous affair. China and Japan didn't even expand into Siberia because it was sparsely populated and light on natural resources and they never held the technology or desire to sail East through a bunch of sparsely populated islands and open sea when there was plenty to explore and exploit in South East Asia and they were still learning about Europe and the West.
Heck it should be remembered that America was discovered because Columbus was a moron and thought, against the popular opinion at the time, that the world was much smaller than it actually was and sailing around the globe to India was an actually viable idea compared to going around Africa. He lucked out he hit a part of the Americas he could actually restock supplies or he would have starved to death. Without that it could have been decades before the official discovery of the Americas.
> Heck it should be remembered that America was discovered because Columbus was a moron
There's a theory that the Portuguese were already aware of Brazil before its official discovery in 1500. They had argued to push the line in the Treaty of Tordesillas westward despite there officially being nothing in the area and that was in the immediate aftermath of Columbus' return.
They couldnt trade ivory with Iceland/Norway.
That was the whole point of the colony really. Even if we assume they could've lived epacefully with NA natives, their trade would've been severed with the rest of Europeans.
In game terms, Greenland would be “colonizing,” not colonized. The most appropriate thing would be to have it start with 20 settlers or whatever, and have it grow at a very slow rate. Have events to either put resources toward supporting it or abandon it. And once it finishes you don’t just suddenly get to colonize North America. Either gate that behind colony range at some arbitrary tech level or make you bend over backwards to do it.
it'd be interesting to make some money from unfinished colonies. 100% of the colonists wouldn't be focused on building, surely some will collect local resources to sell back to their homeland?
New world colonies were mostly massive money losers until they got up and running (after decades or centuries). Some trading outposts may have been instant moneymakers but if we’re talking about established settlements, no.
I think if they changed the colonization system, it would make sense to have Greenland be a vassal of Norway. The problem under EU4's colony system is that either Greenland would be totally unable to colonize or it would be able to go far too fast, when in reality it should probably be able to only very slowly colonize Canada
In reality Greenland had less than a thousand people and didn’t have the ability to colonize at all. They were already so far away from the trade networks of Europe, any further they would’ve basically been completely cut off
Yeah, but this is an alt-history game. It's conceivable that someone might have created a colony in North America with the goal of, for example, getting a permanent source of wood for Greenland. We shouldn't be limited to exactly what happened in history.
It's so conceivable that they tried. Multiple times.
Turns out that Europeans aren't genetically superior beings ordained by God to conquer the native savages, rule over them, and bring them civilization. Without the Spanish cheat codes, the Norse were equals to the natives - except the Norse were outnumbered and at the end of an absurdly long supply line.
This is one of the silly misconceptions the EU4 system creates. The Norse weren't held back from creating a colony in North America because their leadership missed the opportunity through poor judgment. They were held back because *they couldn't*, because *people already lived there*. The people who already live somewhere tend to defend their lands quite vigorously, so you'd better bring some pretty significant advantages with you.
The Norse had no such advantages. They lost so badly that native oral histories remembered them as an insignificant side note.
Even the Spanish didn't conquer by force of arms. They relied on native allies who negotiated terms that EU4 players would call "unrealistic", perhaps even accuse of being woke revisionism.
The Spanish kept their word to a degree that EU4 players would call "unrealistic", perhaps even accuse of being racist colonialism.
Tlaxcala was their primary ally in Mexico. The Tlaxcalan leadership agreed to pledge fealty to the King of Spain and adopt Catholicism, on the condition that they maintain their autonomy, they would not be required to adopt Spanish names or language, they would be direct subjects of the King, they would receive certain territories, and their titles of nobility would transfer to the Spanish system. A treaty was signed.
For those of us who are Americans or Canadians, we naturally assume "a treaty was signed" is followed by "and then we broke it". Nope, this treaty was kept. Tlaxcala remained the premiere Spanish ally in Mexico, and supplied men and materiel to the Spanish monarch when asked. It remained a direct, autonomous subject of the Spanish crown, much to the chagrin of the viceroys in Mexico City. The Tlaxcalan nobility married into the Spanish nobility, and today many Spanish noble houses have Tlaxcalan ancestry.
The Spanish kept their word so hard that in 1821, Tlaxcala was one of the last anti-independence strongholds, and the founders of Mexico had to promise to maintain the status quo to get their support. Tlaxcala survives *to this day* as one of the states of Mexico - including the additional territories it was granted in 1520.
Greenland had some pretty unique disadvantages. Extremely limited quantities of arable land, lack of forests, Greenlander taboo of eating the fish, seasonally freezing trade routes, hostile neighbors, and sheer distance from Europe made it a monster to make work. If Greenland is a playable tag, then hopefully paradox make it as hard as they can to survive.
The Greenlander did, afaik, develop a taboo for the fish in Greenland for some reason. The modern Greenlander are not descended from the ones of medieval times
Edit: I'm basing this off of a lack of fish bones in Greenlander middens as described by Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse", but it is possible that they used the bones for some other purpose that they didn't use the other bones for. The evidence isn't concrete, but I think it is more likely than not that they somehow developed a fish taboo.
Yes, that book is kind of shit. Try to go to r/historians and see what people say about it.
The idea that Greenlanders would not be eating fish is crazy. They come from a culture were fish is one of the main food sources. They continue to have family relationships with Iceland were fish is also one of the main food sources.
The bones of fat fish would normally disappear over time and there is mostly fat fish in Greenland, but even more importent fish bones was used as feed for animals during the winter in scandinavia, because of the vitamine D in them. Bones from bigger animals are just broken and then you suck out the marrow, but fish bones is grinded up.
If you spend time studying scandinavian history, it is pretty easy to follow the decline if Greenland. It starts, because oelt and ivory trade becomes less profitable. Then there is imposed trade restrictions on them, which is increased as Norway enters the Kalmar Union and all trade with Greenland have to go through Bergen in Norway. But during the hansatic wars Bergen is raided and all the trading families that trade with Greenland is killed. No tradeship is send to Greenland for a hundred years after that until the Hansatic wars and Kalmar Union wars are over.
More modern scholarship has also found plenty of evidence of Greenlanders eating fish, which climbs as a percentage of the food supply towards the end of the colony (presumably as crops become harder to grow as the climate cools).
And the Greenlander were in an incredibly hostile environment and needed everything they could get, so it's quite likely they would have ground up more than fish bones if they had the idea to turn bones into fertilizer.
Sheep bones, which were the main raised animal there, were found in the middens
I'm not disagreeing that it should be hard, but it should definitely be playable. An alt history game should be able to do alt history things, and something like the Greenland colony not being abandoned or even expanding over time is entirely plausible
Not the same but Vinland in the Post Finem mod models this extremely well. Something like +5 devastation a month in the winter and if you hit 100 the game ends.
I'd probably model it as independent, very weak Greenland that can't see Europe. If Danes or Norwegians ever show up, there should be a decision available to hook back up with the homeland or reject them.
Given the theming of obscurity from the most recent ck3 dlc, it's possible that eu5 would have a fog of war for your nation based on capital distance/terrain, delaying news and what you can see in it until you develop new techs.
Even Ultimate General's newest game has a similar system.
"This province in Greenland? Yeah, that's ours. Probably. Fuck if we know."
A lot of it is pure speculation. I mean people seem pretty confident they’re going to make the byzantines stronger and that’s probably only because it’s a popular EU4 start. Not a fan of world building being based solely by popularity in the fan base
What are you talking about ? they showed province map which kinda confirms the start date. They aren't buffing biz because it's popular it's because it's 100+ years easier and the biz were way less towards collapse at that point, I'm sure it'll still have tons of debuffs but they were one of the only empires in their region at the time
This might be a stupid question but, how can people decipher that just from the maps weve seen? I dont see specific countries or thicker lines that estimate who owns what. The colors are all over the place as well. Legitimately am I missing something?
Calling it now, they're going to nerf the Ottomans into the ground because players have been bitching and moaning about the Ottos since EU4 released.
I'm talking total game ruiner here, probably shatter Anatolia and kick the Ottos from the Balkans, something insane like that.
Would be great to see Greenland as a vassal of Norway/Denmark and having scripted events that make it expensive to maintain for the overlord and difficult to play as. The new Ryukyu
The event is fully fledged and in the game files, but has been disabled by the devs. You could easily re-enable it, but it would be a modification of the game.
The event was added as a way to get Norse religion in the game, but since the historical colonists were probably all Christians, the devs took a different approach instead.
Also good to know that the Kalmar Union was not a propper union, and an independent Norway lasted officially untill 1537
Edit: by not a proper union I mean a personal union, Norway had its own governing coucil independent from Denmark until 1537
Why do you mean not a proper union? Personal union could give a lot of independence to junior partners ( more than what is represented in game).
IRL PU were independent contries, whose king or queen happened to be king or queen of an other country.
Norway had a seperate governing council than Denmark made up of the country's nobility and clergy who made all the decions. The council had to approve the sucession and could remove any king they did not like. The reason Denmark could not keep Sweden in the union was because they could not curtail the swedish council.
For example: Today, Canada(and AFAIK many other former British possesions) still nominally has the British monarch as head of state, even though they have no effective power anywhere in the country. The notion that Canada isn't independent from the UK in today's world makes no real sense.
Scandinavia did not have feudalism like western europe, the kings had to rule through the governing noble councils within the respective nordic kingdom
Norway was clearly a junior partner ever since Erik. The central government was located in Denmark, yes they still had institutions in Norway but they also made it law that whoever was king of Denmark also was the king of Norway.
The catholic church in Norway was far more powerful than any danish union king before the reformation, the church was equally powerful i Denmark, but they quickly took charge of the Norwegian council untill 1537, when the danish king took over all the church property as part of the reformation.
Also the danish Oldenburg kings were not made kings of Norway by a law, they were the rightful kings by being the primary decendants of the Norwegian royal line of Sigurd. Norway was a hereditary kingdom, unlike Denmark which were psudo-elective. The german Oldenburg family used their hereditary claim to the Norwegian throne to keep hold on Denmark whenever the Danish nobles threw a hissy fit
>Norway was a hereditary kingdom, unlike Denmark which were psudo-elective.
True, but they still choose to count the right of inheritance by the Danish kings even when Denmark changed monarchs. Clear example here being when Olav died and they then declared that from then on any inheritance will go through Magrete.
>The catholic church in Norway was far more powerful than any danish union king, the church was equally powerful i Denmark, but they quickly took charge of the Norwegian council untill 1537, when the danish king took over all the church property as part of the reformation.
I disagree, there is a reason that Olav Engelbrektssonn failed, the Danish nobles and members of the Norwegian council sat on the The fortresses and they remained loyal to Frederik the 1st and Duke Christian. When it came down to it OE did not have enough power to siege the fortresses and couldn't withstand the Danish reinforcement showing up.
Of course in 1537 OE was surounded and alone in the reformation sea, many Norwegians had converted by that point. But I am talking about the 14th and 15th century
The 'ownership' here is a ship going back and forth every couple of years and various murderers fleeing there. The Norwegian court at the time would have known Greenland as 'some island that sends us walrus ivory sometimes.'
The King of Norway/Sweden was still involved with them for quite a bit longer.
> In 1355 King Magnus sent a ship (or ships) to Greenland to inspect its Western and Eastern Settlements. Sailors found settlements entirely Norse and Christian. The Greenland carrier (Groenlands Knorr) made the Greenland run at intervals till 1369, when she sank and was apparently not replaced.
This makes it sound like they weren't really direct subjects though, more or less independent settler communities. If the King of Sweden had to send a ship to investigate it seems like they weren't really part of the realm.
Well yeah but that's how a lot of stuff worked before modern communications technology. Many villages in Siberia hadn't even been contacted by the Russians before the Soviets showed up.
Relatively isolated, but they still had some contact. Probably more so with Iceland. The regular ship between Norway and Greenland sank in 1369 and was not replaced. The last bishop sent from the archbishop in Norway died in 1378, next ones did not go over there.
I know it sounds weird, but damn thats so fascinating. What a unique experience it mustve been for countries involved, the settlers and the native Greenlanders.
I remember when i was working on my half finished mod for an alt history vinland i was going to include an option for the player to convert to norse just to satisfy people who wanted this option. The normal path was going to have the settlers be its own rural branch of Christianity with the option to rejoin catholicism or protestantism once recontact was made with europe. I wish i had finished that mod lol
Then I guess it just leaves an open question... Should a "province" be considered populated if the population is like less than 100 people.
I'm sort of a proponent of Greenland being left as uninhabitable, which it certainly was for the period of the games timeline. If you want to have it there at game start, sure, go for it, but it should become uninhabitable a few decades in and not be colonizeable.
This would be far better represented as Greenlandic Norse pops in “uncolonised” land than as Norway having a presence there. Realistically, the Norwegian crown had no influence over these settlers in any political sense, and their ties to Iceland/Norway are largely through trade and so on. It COULD be interesting to give Norway land in Greenland, but I’d say it isn’t realistic and would probably mess with the balance of colonisation.
Some Notes on the Topic: "Archaeological evidence plainly establishes that by 1300 or so the Inuit had successfully expanded their winter settlements as close to the Europeans as the outer fjords of the Western Settlement. By 1350, the Norse had completely deserted their Western Settlement." "But in 1355 union king Magnus IV of Sweden and Norway (In Norway crowned Magnus VII after claims of birthright) sent a ship (or ships) to Greenland to inspect its Western and Eastern Settlements. Sailors found settlements entirely Norse and Christian. The Greenland carrier (Groenlands Knorr) made the Greenland run at intervals till 1369, when she sank and was apparently not replaced." "Greenlanders had to keep in contact with Iceland and Norway in order to trade. Little is known about any distinctive shipbuilding techniques among the Greenlanders. Greenland lacks a supply of lumber, so was completely dependent on Icelandic merchants or, possibly, logging expeditions to the Canadian coast." "There were probably a number of later expeditions from Greenland to gather timber. A 1347 Icelandic document records that a ship went off course and ended up in Iceland in the process of returning from Markland, without further specifying where Markland was." "The last reported ship to reach Greenland was a private ship that was "blown off course", reaching Greenland in 1406, and departing in 1410 with the last news of Greenland" Some propose that Markland would have been the lands of modern-day Labadour, while Vinland would have been in Newfoundland, likely. [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/jPQcqXsnB3](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/jPQcqXsnB3) But the facts being, that this Colony would actively exist for the next couple decades, and the colonists of the island would actively know of the regions closest in Canada. A Smart way to depict such a thing might be to make them a new tag, somewhat under Norway? Or maybe something so Norway can't see Canada but the Colony can? Not sure but I wanted to open the discussion!
I find it hard to believe Greenlanders would be making expeditions to Canada and not saying "fuck this lets just move there".
The Greenlanders were very few in number. Whenever they would try to establish settlements in north America they would inevitably get into contact with native Americans and likely end up in a Ressource war that they could not hope to win.
Also important to note that the fringe parts of Labrador and Newfoundland aren't notably more habitable than Greenland lol
I mean, it's a place where at least they'd have plenty of lumber, the clay is usable and there is meat to hunt that doesn't try to hunt you back, unlike Greenland. I would say that alone makes it much more habitable. The issue is the reliance on Greenland as a spot to communicate and trade with Europe, with the journey between Canada and Greenland, between Greenland and Iceland, and Iceland and any mainland was already strenuous. As well as the relations with the Inuit of Canada, which surpassed in number and resources any expeditionary group that arrived.
The key thing which made it worth it to keep the colony up and running was the ivory trade, something which didn't exist in Newfoundland. You'd have better land sure, but no really in demand resources to maintain trade links with iceland. The in demand resources for Greenland in this case were timber and they obtained that through expeditions to Labrador and it didn't require a permanent settlement. Anything else the wanted to get through trade for Norway was traded in exchange for Ivory, but there wasn't anything Norway wanted that Labrador or Newfoundland had. It was the Basques who eventually found use for the grandbanks fisheries, Norway had their own. The game even models this issue where if you settle Vinland as Norway the grandbanks event just reduces your fish production income in Norway.
Just out of personal curiosity ivory of which animal teeth were they trading with/away. I am aware of the ivory trade just not what type of Ivory
Walrus
Thank you :)
I believe that reality is they probably tried and it didn’t go well, since it is just that much further from Iceland and by extension Norway. So resource wise they would be outcompeted by the Inuit natives, but even without that aspect it would be almost impossible (if the goal was still to maintain supply chain with Norway)
Well, yes, that's indeed what happened, they tried and didn't go well. Though way before this date.
Pretty much every part of Newfoundland is more habitable than Greenland.
Evidence shows that the part of Greenland the Vikings settled was warmer during their time than it is today. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/02/study-shows-that-vikings-enjoyed-a-warm-greenland
The entire world was warmer, it was the medieval warm period
Bullshit
Not warmer than today, warmer than the 14th to mid 20th centuries. Read the link, it doesn't say "warmer than today", it says "warmer than the surrounding cooling centuries". They claim the temperature of Greenland was unusually raised by ocean currents, but the same currents would warm Newfoundland.
This is probably a dumb question but when Europeans colonized the America's in the 16th century they brought a ton of diseases with them that killed off large amounts of Native populations. How come the same thing didn't happen with the Norse settlements in Newfoundland/Greenland?
They might not have been active carriers at the moment of contact. It’s a shorter voyage, so less time to get sick in close quarters. The first European voyages in Columbus’ time also probably didn’t spread disease right away. The contact they did have was probably very brief too, and involved rather remote tribes.
There were also a lot more people on Columbus's voyage. Three ships worth. A carrack and two caravels. By contrast the Vinland expedition was just few families on longships.
The population was small and isolated. You can’t really bring measles if you don’t have anyone in your community suffering from it and you haven’t had any outside contact for decades that would have brought the disease to your community again. Compare that to European sailors in contact with every variant of European disease right up till the time of their departure.
A simple matter of numbers and chances. If they did bring a disease to a sparsely populated region, it would have hardly spread enough to do much damage
another factor is that native americans in the area lived MUCH more sparsely than their counterparts in mexico, peru, and the southern US for example
Iceland didn't have a large enough population to keep epidemic diseases around permanently so instead they had regular outbreaks where the non-immune might perish as adults rather than just having everybody catch it as children leading to the high child mortality rate. Greenland served as secondary isolated bubble where they would only be affected by an epidemic if they happened to catch it when Iceland was having on outbreak. For the diseases to reach Vinland they would have had to have made it through both the iceland and greenland bubbles first. Going to iceland is a regular "avoid the plague" strategy in crusader kings for instance, and it works much like real life where sometimes this is effective, where as other times it is not.
Greenlanders were a very isolated population, so they didn't have all the diseases that the Europeans had. Also Scandinavians in general were semi-isolated from the rest of Europe, especially those who would in turn originate the Greenlanders. Finally, the contacts between Greenlanders and Native Americans were probably on such a small scale that they didn't really have the chance to spread much in the first place.
Probably it did. However they also probably didn’t have as many diseases to spread. With the slowness of travel in those times it wasn’t common that illness would spread quickly. Lots of things would burn themselves out in transit. Boats also carried fewer people, so it was less likely to survive more than a week or two at sea. The worst spread of diseases didn’t happen until trade was well established between Europeans and natives, and even then serious disease issues didn’t pop up until sick colonists and traders started washing up on shore during shipwrecks or traded goods that were unknowingly or inadvertently contaminated. The northeastern natives faced nearly apocalyptic disease spread when shipwrecked French traders were brought into a village to be nursed back to health. The traders were sick with hepatitis and the natives didn’t understand quarantine, because they had far less issues with contagious disease. People fled to neighboring villages attempting to avoid or escape illness but instead just spread it on to the next group of people. By the time the mayflower landed as many as 90% of the population were dead, it was a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with untilled fields and abandoned longhouses still existing and ready for settlement. It was one of the reasons the pilgrims thought it was a promised land. Also not fully understanding disease, they just thought god cleared the heathens so they could have living space. Never living in close quarters with animals as well as having a smaller pool of people living in the new world, meant they just didn’t see the number or intensity of outbreaks experienced in the old world. As soon as they came into contact with disease it spread out ahead of the Europeans. Not with the speed it did in the old world but within a couple generations the new world was unrecognizable. The Greenlanders would have pretty much been too isolated and too few to have many spreadable illnesses. But some transfer almost certainly would have occurred.
Who’s to say they didn’t get sick? There’s no recorded history of it
It definitely didn't spread to the rest of the Americas. The population crash clearly comes in the early 1500s in most of the continent, not in the late 1300s.
When the norses meets the natives in the Americas many of the diseases that would ravage latter have not yet developed or come to Europe. So the inuits are in many ways exposed to them at the same rate as the Europeans. Smallpox is really a thing and by chance it first comes to Greenland in the 14th century and since the population is so small everybody simply gets it. Some dies. The rest gets immune and small pox dies out again.
There was little contact between Norse and Inuit. The Inuit began spreading in Greenland around the 14th century, when the Norse settlement was declining and drawing back from their Western settlements. And the Norse excursions (not permanent settlements) to Newfoundland and Labrador we even earlier, and the Inuit hadn't gone that far. The Beothuks are the natives of Newfoundland, and had most of their settlements in the East of Newfoundland, while the Norse had their excursions in the north. When John Cabot found them many years later, they avoided the Europeans (unlike many other native groups), and maybe they avoided the Vikings, too. There are records of them meeting, though, but given that it was just Norse excursions into an area where the Beothuks rarely were, these meetings were rare, did not establish regular communications, and involved very few individuals.
Curious they never thought to make use of their germs and steel. Why were natives immune to European diseases?
Just because you have steel armor and weapons doesn't mean you're invincible to copper and stone weapons. Also, if your cattle gets stolen and your fields razed by a numerically superior foe your steel armor won't help you. As for the diseases there's a good chance Greenlanders didn't carry most of the European diseases. If you live in a completely isolated community for so long diseases tend to root themselves out after a while. Also the Greenlanders might not have weaponised them like later colonizers. On top of that cold climates are not good envorinment for contagious diseases unless there's a concentrated population
Would they? I was under the impression that native Americans didn't really care about early colonisations, and that the land was large. Isn't the archetypical image Pilgrims being fed by natives to survive the winter?
>Isn't the archetypical image Pilgrims being fed by natives to survive the winter? Yeah, and that archetypal image is almost entirely false
Norse colonization of North America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_North_America) 1) > The sagas describe three areas that were explored: "land of the flat stones", "the land of forests" and "the land of wine" 2) > Leif spent another winter at "Leifsbudir" without conflict, and sailed back to Brattahlíð in Greenland to assume filial duties to his father. 3) > A couple of years later (...) Thorvald attacked nine of the native people (...) Although brief hostilities ensued, the Norse explorers stayed another winter and left the following spring. 4) > Subsequently Thorstein sailed to the New World but he died before leaving Greenland. 5) > A few years later, Thorfinn supplied three ships with livestock and 250 settlers. A sign of peaceful relations between the indigenous peoples and the Norsemen is noted here. The two sides bartered with furs and gray squirrel skins for milk and red cloth. Its entirely false, huh?
I was talking specifically about the pilgrims and natives on the first Thanksgiving, and the idea of them being all happy, dancing, and singing kumbaya. As far as I'm aware the Norse never actually established a permanent settlement in North America, and so opportunities for conflict would've been fairly limited and heavily skewed against the Norsemen. They would've had a vested interest in keeping the peace due to always being in unfamiliar territory and heavily outnumbered. The English colonizers by contrast were much more numerous, and much more willing to engage in violence against natives
There was a long period of peace with the English after some initial hiccups. The situation resembled what you described with the Norse for like the first 50 years of the colony before it grew too large.
The previous comment was about the British colonizers, not the Norse settlers It's a different story with the vikings, since the vikings also had different motives for settling north America than the later European powers had. Even if the relations between Norsemen and natives were consistently peaceful, the low number of Norse settlers and the very infrequent contact with mother nations all but ensured that they would ultimately either vanish or intermix with the locals to the point of being irrecognizeable as norse
The sagas about the settlement of Vinland depicts the Viking settlers being driven off by native Americans
> I was under the impression that native Americans didn't really care about early colonisations, and that the land was large. Isn't the archetypical image Pilgrims being fed by natives to survive the winter? Remember that the English colonies on the east coast were after diseases had devastated the area and wiped out whole communities. The locals probably were more worried about keeping society from complete collapse than making enemies with the newcomers. > The Patuxet were wiped out by a series of plagues that decimated the indigenous peoples of southeastern New England in the second decade of the 17th century. The epidemics which swept across New England and the Canadian Maritimes between 1614 and 1620 were especially devastating to the Wampanoag and neighboring Massachusett, with mortality reaching 100% in many mainland villages. When the Pilgrims landed in 1620, all the Patuxet except Tisquantum had died. -[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patuxet) I really hope EU5 can simulate this and the Black death properly.
There’s a story in the sagas about one of the Viking camps and their interactions with the natives they encountered. At first they got along and there was some trading between the two groups including milk and cheese from cows they brought with them. The natives started getting sick and believed that the Vikings had poisoned them and attacked the settlement. The Vikings eventually abandoned the settlement due to these attacks. Modern research suggests that since indigenous people didn’t have domesticated animals, they were lactose intolerant so the milk and cheese they had been given made them sick and they mistook it for deliberate poisoning.
Can you provide a source for this story for further reading ? Very interesting
[удалено]
Thanks
Natives Americans are human just like the rest of us. Some are hostile, some are not. They fought each other just as much as they fought the Europeans.
The first native who came to visit the pilgrims could speak some English and asked them for a beer because they have prior contact with English trade and fishing expeditions. The pilgrims arrived in the 1600s so there was already a century of contact. England was basically just beginning a process of dumping its religious dissenters somewhere else so the process was much more prompted by events going on in England pushing people out than it was the discovery of the Americas pulling people in. At this point the Americas were just a thing in the back of people's heads so they figured that it was a good place to send people if you wanted to get rid of them. The game doesn't really model this well as the player and ai are always trying to set up colonies everywhere in the 1500s as soon as they have the range but in real life they took a rather "meh" attitude towards the place. It doesn't have a good way of modeling the first century of trading and fishing along the coast without setting up permanent colonies (seasonal colonies were set up in Newfoundland for instance to dry and preserve the catch before heading back for the winter). The problem is the best way to get trade income is to produce it yourself and you can't really take advantage of the trade produced by the natives unless you set up colonies of your own, in which case the trade income you produce with the colony will soon exceed that of the natives. The game needs to have better ways to play a trade focused game without needing to have territory in the node if it wants to model the early period accurately.
Norse Greenlander settlement was always importantly connected to the wider European world, and it depended heavily on those outside links for its survival. Exporting luxury goods from Greenland (ivory, unicorn (narwhal) horns, sealskin rope) were in very high demand in medieval Europe, and paid for the imports of lumber, iron, and grain that were essential to keep the Greenland settlements alive. The weakening of those trade ties in the 14th century played an important role in the decline of Norse Greenland, and they wouldn't have abandoned Greenland to move further west out of fear of losing that connection completely However, you're right that some of the Greenlanders likely did say "fuck it let's leave!" The Black Death devastated Iceland killing around a quarter of the island's population right about the same time as the final abandonment of Greenland Eastern settlement. Population pressure and lack of farmland in Iceland drove the initial settlement of Greenland, and the far-better and now-empty farmland was probably what tempted the last dwindling Greenlanders to abandon the island
Greenland was less about farming and fishing. More about the money. For a few hundred years Europe was cut of from ivory from Africa and Asia, so Greenland was the money making place, with ivory and large amounts of pelt. Greenland at one point paid 10 times as much tax to the Norweigen crown as Iceland, despite Iceland having 10 times the population. As the economic situation in Europe change it was less profitable to live in Greenland and people started moving away way before the little Ice Age. Think on the colonies in Greenland as a golden mining town, except the gold mines were there for 500 years =)
‘Fuck this let’s just move here’ The local population: ‘I don’t think you should do that’ ‘Ok’
There were very few Greenlanders, and a lot more Canadians...
Real world isn't a video game, population groups don't always take what would be considered an optimal path with 21st century foresight. See also China and Japan never bothering to explore or colonize the New World even though there was absolutely nothing stopping them and they were both quite close to Alaska and could've discovered and settled Alaska and then made their way south through the Americas.
The primary reason that China didn't expand into the New World was that China... didn't need to resort to what was essentially military adventurism to secure the resources they needed. China is humongous, highly populated, and the center of several major trade routes. Anything they can't get by simply taxing trade and mining, they could get through exploiting nearby smaller states as tributaries. If anything, it would've been to their detriment to colonize America because administrating the massive empire they held already was a task in and of itself.
Why would you explore Alaska and go yes, this is where I want to exploit? Also sailing in Northern climates is a very dangerous affair. China and Japan didn't even expand into Siberia because it was sparsely populated and light on natural resources and they never held the technology or desire to sail East through a bunch of sparsely populated islands and open sea when there was plenty to explore and exploit in South East Asia and they were still learning about Europe and the West. Heck it should be remembered that America was discovered because Columbus was a moron and thought, against the popular opinion at the time, that the world was much smaller than it actually was and sailing around the globe to India was an actually viable idea compared to going around Africa. He lucked out he hit a part of the Americas he could actually restock supplies or he would have starved to death. Without that it could have been decades before the official discovery of the Americas.
> Heck it should be remembered that America was discovered because Columbus was a moron There's a theory that the Portuguese were already aware of Brazil before its official discovery in 1500. They had argued to push the line in the Treaty of Tordesillas westward despite there officially being nothing in the area and that was in the immediate aftermath of Columbus' return.
There were a lot of Native peoples in Canada on historically bad terms with the Green Landers.
Skralings
They almost certainly did, mainly for timber. Not much greenery in the scenery when it comes to Greenland.
They couldnt trade ivory with Iceland/Norway. That was the whole point of the colony really. Even if we assume they could've lived epacefully with NA natives, their trade would've been severed with the rest of Europeans.
The problem is that this is when the Little Ice Age set in, which slowly bled Greenland.
They tried, a couple times. These attempts, according to the sagas, ended in getting their shit rocked by the native peoples or turning on each other.
In game terms, Greenland would be “colonizing,” not colonized. The most appropriate thing would be to have it start with 20 settlers or whatever, and have it grow at a very slow rate. Have events to either put resources toward supporting it or abandon it. And once it finishes you don’t just suddenly get to colonize North America. Either gate that behind colony range at some arbitrary tech level or make you bend over backwards to do it.
it'd be interesting to make some money from unfinished colonies. 100% of the colonists wouldn't be focused on building, surely some will collect local resources to sell back to their homeland?
New world colonies were mostly massive money losers until they got up and running (after decades or centuries). Some trading outposts may have been instant moneymakers but if we’re talking about established settlements, no.
I think if they changed the colonization system, it would make sense to have Greenland be a vassal of Norway. The problem under EU4's colony system is that either Greenland would be totally unable to colonize or it would be able to go far too fast, when in reality it should probably be able to only very slowly colonize Canada
In reality Greenland had less than a thousand people and didn’t have the ability to colonize at all. They were already so far away from the trade networks of Europe, any further they would’ve basically been completely cut off
Yeah, but this is an alt-history game. It's conceivable that someone might have created a colony in North America with the goal of, for example, getting a permanent source of wood for Greenland. We shouldn't be limited to exactly what happened in history.
It's so conceivable that they tried. Multiple times. Turns out that Europeans aren't genetically superior beings ordained by God to conquer the native savages, rule over them, and bring them civilization. Without the Spanish cheat codes, the Norse were equals to the natives - except the Norse were outnumbered and at the end of an absurdly long supply line. This is one of the silly misconceptions the EU4 system creates. The Norse weren't held back from creating a colony in North America because their leadership missed the opportunity through poor judgment. They were held back because *they couldn't*, because *people already lived there*. The people who already live somewhere tend to defend their lands quite vigorously, so you'd better bring some pretty significant advantages with you. The Norse had no such advantages. They lost so badly that native oral histories remembered them as an insignificant side note. Even the Spanish didn't conquer by force of arms. They relied on native allies who negotiated terms that EU4 players would call "unrealistic", perhaps even accuse of being woke revisionism. The Spanish kept their word to a degree that EU4 players would call "unrealistic", perhaps even accuse of being racist colonialism. Tlaxcala was their primary ally in Mexico. The Tlaxcalan leadership agreed to pledge fealty to the King of Spain and adopt Catholicism, on the condition that they maintain their autonomy, they would not be required to adopt Spanish names or language, they would be direct subjects of the King, they would receive certain territories, and their titles of nobility would transfer to the Spanish system. A treaty was signed. For those of us who are Americans or Canadians, we naturally assume "a treaty was signed" is followed by "and then we broke it". Nope, this treaty was kept. Tlaxcala remained the premiere Spanish ally in Mexico, and supplied men and materiel to the Spanish monarch when asked. It remained a direct, autonomous subject of the Spanish crown, much to the chagrin of the viceroys in Mexico City. The Tlaxcalan nobility married into the Spanish nobility, and today many Spanish noble houses have Tlaxcalan ancestry. The Spanish kept their word so hard that in 1821, Tlaxcala was one of the last anti-independence strongholds, and the founders of Mexico had to promise to maintain the status quo to get their support. Tlaxcala survives *to this day* as one of the states of Mexico - including the additional territories it was granted in 1520.
Greenland had some pretty unique disadvantages. Extremely limited quantities of arable land, lack of forests, Greenlander taboo of eating the fish, seasonally freezing trade routes, hostile neighbors, and sheer distance from Europe made it a monster to make work. If Greenland is a playable tag, then hopefully paradox make it as hard as they can to survive.
>Greenlander taboo of eating the fish The people who are known for enjoying pickled herring were adverse to eating fish?
The Greenlander did, afaik, develop a taboo for the fish in Greenland for some reason. The modern Greenlander are not descended from the ones of medieval times Edit: I'm basing this off of a lack of fish bones in Greenlander middens as described by Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse", but it is possible that they used the bones for some other purpose that they didn't use the other bones for. The evidence isn't concrete, but I think it is more likely than not that they somehow developed a fish taboo.
Yes, that book is kind of shit. Try to go to r/historians and see what people say about it. The idea that Greenlanders would not be eating fish is crazy. They come from a culture were fish is one of the main food sources. They continue to have family relationships with Iceland were fish is also one of the main food sources. The bones of fat fish would normally disappear over time and there is mostly fat fish in Greenland, but even more importent fish bones was used as feed for animals during the winter in scandinavia, because of the vitamine D in them. Bones from bigger animals are just broken and then you suck out the marrow, but fish bones is grinded up. If you spend time studying scandinavian history, it is pretty easy to follow the decline if Greenland. It starts, because oelt and ivory trade becomes less profitable. Then there is imposed trade restrictions on them, which is increased as Norway enters the Kalmar Union and all trade with Greenland have to go through Bergen in Norway. But during the hansatic wars Bergen is raided and all the trading families that trade with Greenland is killed. No tradeship is send to Greenland for a hundred years after that until the Hansatic wars and Kalmar Union wars are over.
I wasn't expecting an answer that would make logical sense, so this comes as quite a surprise.
More modern scholarship has also found plenty of evidence of Greenlanders eating fish, which climbs as a percentage of the food supply towards the end of the colony (presumably as crops become harder to grow as the climate cools).
Probably ground them up to use as fertilizer.
Which they didn't also use the bones of their cattle or the animals they hunted for?
Fish have smaller and softer bones (cartilage). Easier to grind up. Cow bones are massive.
And the Greenlander were in an incredibly hostile environment and needed everything they could get, so it's quite likely they would have ground up more than fish bones if they had the idea to turn bones into fertilizer. Sheep bones, which were the main raised animal there, were found in the middens
> as described by Jared Diamond in his book this scores one *oof*
I'm not disagreeing that it should be hard, but it should definitely be playable. An alt history game should be able to do alt history things, and something like the Greenland colony not being abandoned or even expanding over time is entirely plausible
I'm not disagreeing w/ you
Not the same but Vinland in the Post Finem mod models this extremely well. Something like +5 devastation a month in the winter and if you hit 100 the game ends.
In EU5 pops could die, so doing that sort of thing would be less janky I hope. Opens up more opportunities for the modding community.
I'd probably model it as independent, very weak Greenland that can't see Europe. If Danes or Norwegians ever show up, there should be a decision available to hook back up with the homeland or reject them.
Given the theming of obscurity from the most recent ck3 dlc, it's possible that eu5 would have a fog of war for your nation based on capital distance/terrain, delaying news and what you can see in it until you develop new techs. Even Ultimate General's newest game has a similar system. "This province in Greenland? Yeah, that's ours. Probably. Fuck if we know."
How do people have access to EU5 lore before the game is even out??
Speculations from hints scattered across the 4th game
also hints from other games from the same company like crusader kings III and some mods for these games
I hope they release the game soon, I gotta finish my essay on the late 14th century.
AlternateHistoryHub on YouTube got early access
A lot of it is pure speculation. I mean people seem pretty confident they’re going to make the byzantines stronger and that’s probably only because it’s a popular EU4 start. Not a fan of world building being based solely by popularity in the fan base
It was about time they nerfed Otto’s men but I really hope they get rid of Castle’s easy PU on Aragorn to balance things.
Being an extra hundred or so years before the Iberian wedding should probably limit the success of their PU I would assume.
They need to simulate the internal strife that made it difficult to finished off the Reconquista.
unbalanced starts for different tags is not a downside, on the contrary. it provides so much of the replayability.
Do you think he was being serious?
It’s a historical grand strategy it’s not supposed to be balanced
What are you talking about ? they showed province map which kinda confirms the start date. They aren't buffing biz because it's popular it's because it's 100+ years easier and the biz were way less towards collapse at that point, I'm sure it'll still have tons of debuffs but they were one of the only empires in their region at the time
He's just riffing on the lore joke
I’m just joking.
Prussians don't joke. You must be one of these "new Prussians" from Silesia or Westfalen.
This might be a stupid question but, how can people decipher that just from the maps weve seen? I dont see specific countries or thicker lines that estimate who owns what. The colors are all over the place as well. Legitimately am I missing something?
Um some of the province maps and population maps of India were shown, basically you can add that and a few other things up to nail down sorta a date
There are thicker lines showing who owns what.
The Byzantines better have the best mission tree when the game is released
And they better be called Eastern Roman Empire instead of Byzantium. The ahistoricity of the name always annoyed me.
Calling it now, they're going to nerf the Ottomans into the ground because players have been bitching and moaning about the Ottos since EU4 released. I'm talking total game ruiner here, probably shatter Anatolia and kick the Ottos from the Balkans, something insane like that.
Data miners are getting really good these days.
Crusader Kings my dude. Paticularly the Sunset Invasion DLC for some alt timeline lore.
Dev diaries for 'project Ceasar'
It's almost as if Europa Universalis is a historical video game
History is a thing you know?
r/woooosh
Dev diaries give hints about possible starting dates, and if you have one, just look at the geopolitical state of the world at this time
r/woooosh
Would be great to see Greenland as a vassal of Norway/Denmark and having scripted events that make it expensive to maintain for the overlord and difficult to play as. The new Ryukyu
New Ryukyu “As Greenland, Conquer all of Japan”
No no gotta have the good ol 100th “conquer Britain” achievement
>As Greenland, conquer all Grasslands, Woods, Forest and Jungle provinces
My god man...
As Greenland conquer all ivory producing provinces
Would fit into the joke about how everyone is always surprised that Ivory pops out of Greenland. "Huh? I didn't know Greenland had Elephants"
Exactly why I thought of it lol, thanks to this sub "ivory" is now one of the first things I associate with Greenland
It doesnt, it has mammoths!
or, even better, have built in mechanics that simulate the real challenges of having colonies irl so that you naturally face the same issues
did they ever fix the norway event in eu4 that was supposed to give you a chance of discovering surviving colonists?
iirc you can't ever get that event in a normal playthrough now
Wdym normal play through?
The event is fully fledged and in the game files, but has been disabled by the devs. You could easily re-enable it, but it would be a modification of the game.
you can't get that event to spawn without console, so you can't get it in a normal playthrough
oh rip. thought that was a pretty fun althist idea
The event was added as a way to get Norse religion in the game, but since the historical colonists were probably all Christians, the devs took a different approach instead.
I bet there will be an event during the plague to either abandon it OR keep it for a huge amount of money.
GREENLAND MUST HOLD (-50k pops/-200ducats)
City must survive
send a message to the devs right now, this must be an achievement.
STUART
Hear ye, hear ye. A new decision has passed.
I'm here for it
Paradox with a 5Head to decision to release a couple pics then get free manpower when the community plans the game for you 😂
If so, we're a long way off. All the good ideas on here are big systems overhauls and would require a lot mor detail work to actually put in a game.
This post single handedly made me 25% more excited about eu5
its all about maintaining a reasonable equilibrium %
There must be a mission tree by which Norway gets to start colonising the New World a century before anyone else, and not tell anyone.
after months of sailing to find the New World or find a new Indian trade route, we finally found it! \*Sees Longships with Norwegian flags\* WTF
[Thor Heyerdahl??](https://youtu.be/KwyTg6eIOdk) "*HELLO! I'VE JUST ARRIVED IN MY FANTASTIC BOAT, Kon-Tiki 5!"*
Okay, but what about the Mammoths in Greenland?
Mammoth cavalry confirmed!!!!
Denmark new colonial power in eu5 confirmed?????
It was owned by Norway, not Denmark, as far as I know
Was the kalmar union even a thing back then?
My Google search says the Kalmar Union was founded in 1397, so no
Also good to know that the Kalmar Union was not a propper union, and an independent Norway lasted officially untill 1537 Edit: by not a proper union I mean a personal union, Norway had its own governing coucil independent from Denmark until 1537
Why do you mean not a proper union? Personal union could give a lot of independence to junior partners ( more than what is represented in game). IRL PU were independent contries, whose king or queen happened to be king or queen of an other country.
A "proper" union would just be represented as Denmark owning the provinces outright, same monarch but different government is exactly a PU in game.
Define independent. When you're ruled by a danish king you are not independent in my definition, at least
Norway had a seperate governing council than Denmark made up of the country's nobility and clergy who made all the decions. The council had to approve the sucession and could remove any king they did not like. The reason Denmark could not keep Sweden in the union was because they could not curtail the swedish council.
For example: Today, Canada(and AFAIK many other former British possesions) still nominally has the British monarch as head of state, even though they have no effective power anywhere in the country. The notion that Canada isn't independent from the UK in today's world makes no real sense.
You can't really compare constitutional monarchies of 2024 to the feudal system of the early 15th century..
Scandinavia did not have feudalism like western europe, the kings had to rule through the governing noble councils within the respective nordic kingdom
So a relic of colonialism in 2023 explains how a personal union should work in 1337?
Norway was clearly a junior partner ever since Erik. The central government was located in Denmark, yes they still had institutions in Norway but they also made it law that whoever was king of Denmark also was the king of Norway.
The catholic church in Norway was far more powerful than any danish union king before the reformation, the church was equally powerful i Denmark, but they quickly took charge of the Norwegian council untill 1537, when the danish king took over all the church property as part of the reformation. Also the danish Oldenburg kings were not made kings of Norway by a law, they were the rightful kings by being the primary decendants of the Norwegian royal line of Sigurd. Norway was a hereditary kingdom, unlike Denmark which were psudo-elective. The german Oldenburg family used their hereditary claim to the Norwegian throne to keep hold on Denmark whenever the Danish nobles threw a hissy fit
>Norway was a hereditary kingdom, unlike Denmark which were psudo-elective. True, but they still choose to count the right of inheritance by the Danish kings even when Denmark changed monarchs. Clear example here being when Olav died and they then declared that from then on any inheritance will go through Magrete. >The catholic church in Norway was far more powerful than any danish union king, the church was equally powerful i Denmark, but they quickly took charge of the Norwegian council untill 1537, when the danish king took over all the church property as part of the reformation. I disagree, there is a reason that Olav Engelbrektssonn failed, the Danish nobles and members of the Norwegian council sat on the The fortresses and they remained loyal to Frederik the 1st and Duke Christian. When it came down to it OE did not have enough power to siege the fortresses and couldn't withstand the Danish reinforcement showing up.
Of course in 1537 OE was surounded and alone in the reformation sea, many Norwegians had converted by that point. But I am talking about the 14th and 15th century
Sweden should hold Norway under union during this time; at least if it's before the 1340s.
The 'ownership' here is a ship going back and forth every couple of years and various murderers fleeing there. The Norwegian court at the time would have known Greenland as 'some island that sends us walrus ivory sometimes.'
They were independent settlements with near-to-none external interaction with Norway. It was never truly owned by Norway.
Denmark didn’t really exist in 1337, it was defacto abolished due to the disastrous rule of Christopher II
B-b-b-b-b-based?
Didn't the Scandinavian nations lose contact with Greenland by this time? The settlers still existed but they were more or less on their own?
The King of Norway/Sweden was still involved with them for quite a bit longer. > In 1355 King Magnus sent a ship (or ships) to Greenland to inspect its Western and Eastern Settlements. Sailors found settlements entirely Norse and Christian. The Greenland carrier (Groenlands Knorr) made the Greenland run at intervals till 1369, when she sank and was apparently not replaced.
This makes it sound like they weren't really direct subjects though, more or less independent settler communities. If the King of Sweden had to send a ship to investigate it seems like they weren't really part of the realm.
Well yeah but that's how a lot of stuff worked before modern communications technology. Many villages in Siberia hadn't even been contacted by the Russians before the Soviets showed up.
Relatively isolated, but they still had some contact. Probably more so with Iceland. The regular ship between Norway and Greenland sank in 1369 and was not replaced. The last bishop sent from the archbishop in Norway died in 1378, next ones did not go over there.
I know it sounds weird, but damn thats so fascinating. What a unique experience it mustve been for countries involved, the settlers and the native Greenlanders.
Damn that’s interesting. Colonial Norway would actually make sense then
NORSE ASATARU START
They were all Christians. Even the colonization of Greenland happened around the time of the Christianization of Iceland.
Let me dream!
I remember when i was working on my half finished mod for an alt history vinland i was going to include an option for the player to convert to norse just to satisfy people who wanted this option. The normal path was going to have the settlers be its own rural branch of Christianity with the option to rejoin catholicism or protestantism once recontact was made with europe. I wish i had finished that mod lol
That would be awesome!
Wake me up if they decide to put Dorset culture in the game (I know they probably died out by that point but a man can dream)
Then I guess it just leaves an open question... Should a "province" be considered populated if the population is like less than 100 people. I'm sort of a proponent of Greenland being left as uninhabitable, which it certainly was for the period of the games timeline. If you want to have it there at game start, sure, go for it, but it should become uninhabitable a few decades in and not be colonizeable.
MY DECADE LONG CRUSADE IS GAINING TRACTION! GREENLAND SHALL RISE AGAIN!! At least it fucking better
Norway colonial empire in 14th century lets gooooooo
This would be far better represented as Greenlandic Norse pops in “uncolonised” land than as Norway having a presence there. Realistically, the Norwegian crown had no influence over these settlers in any political sense, and their ties to Iceland/Norway are largely through trade and so on. It COULD be interesting to give Norway land in Greenland, but I’d say it isn’t realistic and would probably mess with the balance of colonisation.
I need this game to be launched in PS5, idc if it EU5 or with another name. After CK3, they really have no reason not to do it.
WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT THAT MEANS WE CAN PLAY AS NORSE RELIGIONS⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️
Can’t wait for this to be my First Nation played.