1200-1299 (Abrittus)

The 13th century is this timeline`s Age of (early) Industrialisation.

Steam engines, invented in the late 12th century, revolutionise manufacturing and mining. They create an insatiable thirst for coal, which sparks new territorial conflicts.

While production surges throughout the century in the Roman and Celtic Empires, in Norway, Sweden, Franconia, Burgundy, Venedia, Corvatia and along the Slavic Rivers, in Aksum, Sheba, Eran, on the Indian subcontinent and in South-East Asia, in Sui China, on the Swahili coast and the Liberian coast, and also in Celtic Wabanakiacum and on the Taino islands, transportation remains the main brake preventing an even quicker development. Heavy quantities of raw materials and produced goods cannot be carried across long distances; in many places, sailing remains the no. 1 means of industrial transportation. To this end, new waterways (canals) are built, using pound locks.

Nevertheless, early industrialisation in this timeline led to the construction of entirely new towns in the proximity of coal and ore deposits. Especially in the Roman, Celtic and Chinese Empires, these new towns were built in planned ways, primarily to prevent epidemics like those of the 11th century. Cheap, rational construction methods were used, so the towns all had the same boring look, but they provided their inhabitants with running water, sewers, cleaned streets and waste disposal systems, and often central heating, too.

Scientifically, the 13th century brought great progress in medical and pharmaceutical research, a renewed interest in natural philosophy (this time concerning physics, too, which had been neglected for centuries), as well as an increased politicisation of the rivalling schools of economic throught. Electricity remained a marginalised field of research and development.

In contrast to OTL, the early industrial age in this timeline coincides with a temporarily reduced interest in overseas explorations and colonisations. Transportation across long distances was a problem - and all its capacities being required in the industrial heartlands -, and new industrial technologies provided the field where adventurous explorers turned to. But these two factors alone would not have explained the reduced European, Chinese and Indian interest in Atlantis, Caribia, the Taipingyang and Asambadha Anuttara (OTL: North and South America, the Pacific and Australia). They coincided with massive internal warfare from the Great Lakes of Atlantis in the North to the high mountain ridges of Caribia in the South. Although the wars between the Haudenosaunee and Sioux vs. the Mississippi city states, between Nahua-Mixtec isolationists and Mayan traders, as well as between Chimú and Inca all had different backgrounds, courses of events and outcomes, there was always at least one strong party in these conflicts which opposed contacts with the foreigners from other continents. Hundreds of trading outposts were burned down, caravans massacred, the wells of colonies poisoned. Colonial engagement in Atlantis and Caribia was seen as a costly, unprofitable enterprise throughout much of the 13th century among Celts and Romans. The Taino-Ostrogoths concentrated on increasing trade among their various, quickly industrialising islands, and oriented themselves back West (towards Liberian Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean). Taino-Ostrogothic and Liberian syndicates dotted the South-Western coast of Africa with trading outposts and small colonies, though.

The other major geopolitical event of the 13th century, which slowed down colonialisation, was the collapse of the Sui Empire. Stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Mekong, from Mongolia to the Salish (on OTL Canada`s Southern Pacific coast) and across the archipelagos of the Lusong, the Maluku, the Papua and the East Coast of Asambadha Anuttara, the highly centralised Sui Empire was unable to contain secessionist uprisings, inspired by increasing education levels among local elites and growing anti-Sui nationalisms, fuelled by the mismanagement of corrupt provincial magistrates, when several of these happened at the same time. At the beginning of the 13th century, Sui was still able to defeat a Mazdako-Tengrist rebellion of several Mongol federations led by Genghis Khan and conduct a genocidal punitive campaign, which drove many Mongols far into the Northern woods and shocked the educated classes back home in China and its vassal states. From the 1230s to the 1260s, though, secessionist movements occurred from Dai Viet and the Tai müangs over Lusong and the Maluku to Liuqiu and former Silla. Foreign powers like Sri Vijaya, Dvaravati, the Pyu cities, and Nihon, who had been wary of Sui hegemony and expansion for centuries anyway, supported many of these independence movements. Defeats on several fronts were followed by popular unrest in the Chinese heartland, and finally, the Sui dynasty was overthrown in the 1260s. A decade of revolutionary turmoil followed, in which one in ten Chinese lost their lives, and during which Chinese outposts in Western Atlantis were temporarily abandoned. In 1281, the Ming Dynasty is established, which legalised the secession of more than half of its territory through state contracts, and pursued a policy of ruthless Sinicisation in the remaining Empire.

Another important development during the 13th century is the widespread use of pharmaceutical birth control by Liberian, Yoruban, Sao, Celtic, Roman, Swahili, Persian, Indian, Nusantaran and Chinese women. (Christian Sheba, Aksum and Armenia prohibited the pills.) Not only did they slow down population growth - which was another factor slowing down colonialisation. They also sowed the seeds of questioning patiarchy, open gender conflict, the emancipation of women and new family models, which unfolded with all their might only the following century.