800-899 (Abrittus)

Major events
...

Economy & Technology

 * Steel production improves and increases considerably in the Celtic and Roman Empires, in Saba, Aksum, Persia, China, Silla, India and Sri Vijaya. It is also begins in Dvaravati and Kitara.
 * Persian engineers discover and use electromagnetism.
 * In a Frankish oil shale deposit some miles East of the Rhine, great numbers of diverse fossils are found by workers. A Celtic businessman hears of the discoveries and stretches them into tall tales, which are divulged by cheaper, popular Celtic newspapers. Albertus Drusus, a biologist from the University of Argentoratum, becomes curious and travels to the oil shale deposit. After years of excavations, preparations and studies, he develops a theory positing an unimaginably old age of planet Earth, during whose long history entirely different species must have lived.
 * Roman, Persian, Aksumite and Chinese cities begin to grow beyond control. The respective governments try to regulate this process with different measures, from restrictive residential policies to reforms aiming at making rural life more bearable, but none of them really succeed.
 * The invention of steel-enforced concrete facilitates the building of larger dams, taller buildings and deeper mine shafts.

Military
Firearms revolutionise warfare. Instead of skilled warriors, great numbers of soldiers and great capacities for the production and fast distribution of arms and ammunition now decide wars.

Philosophy / science
 Inspired by such contradictory Western ideas like Simonist Christianity and Celtic philosophy, which seeped into China through Persia, a new anti-Confucian philosophy develops and (in contrast to other schools) finds broad support among the rebellious Chinese peasantry, which suffers from re-dispossession and a re-concentration of land which they had been given in the early Tang reforms, The main tenets of this philosophy, labelled either Zhi-Wangism after its most prominent thinker or, Westernised, "egalitarianism", are an equal creation of all human beings, the rejection of social structures that legitimise inequality, an economic analysis of debt, rent and profit based systems as inherently instable, omnivorous and socially pernicious, and a propensity to engage in active struggles against such structures.

 At first, its Chinese proponents, who found the Western systems of thought both impossible to digest as a whole, and contradictory (which they obviously were), claimed to re-interpret Confucius (upholding humanity as the supreme value, but rejecting filial piety as a means to achieve it) and Laozi (defining the working population as the natural force that must govern society). Towards the end of the 9th century, the rejection of Zhi-Wangism by mainstream Confucianists and Daoists and the schism becomes conspicuous

Religion

 * In reaction to Zhu-Wangist critique, a new variety of Buddhism (called Chan in China, Thien in Indochina, Seon in Silla and Zen in Nihon) develops. Its monks pursue both sophisticated and simple forms of work and its monasteries no longer serve as covert financial institutions.
 * The Worldwide Simonist Community is established and founds a theological school in Jerusalem.

Nations of Europe

 * The New Frankish Federation (republican) re-unites all of Franconia. Economically, it mostly provides the Celtic Empire with cheap coal, ore and steel.
 * In the 820s, the Celtic Navy smokes out Danish pirates with its new cannons and rifles and allows Saxony and Sweden to occupy the Danish islands. In 841, Danish insurgents lay hands on firearms and manage to free their islands from foreign rule once again; this time united under a Council of the Free Danes, which had led the insurgency and served as an equivalent of the Celtic senate and emperor at the same time later. In the second half of the century, Denmark seeks an alliance with the Venedi to defend itself against Celtic, Saxon and Swedish pressure. After decades - and more skirmishes -, the other nations (including the Frisians, who do most of the sea trade in the Batlic) accept Danish customs claims.
 * Glaciana is settled by Celts, Frisians and Norwegians. The Celtic Church founds several monasteries on the island. Glacianian merchants and missionaries establish permanent contacts with the Inuit, Beothuk and Miqmaq of Northern Atlantis. Toward the end of the 9th century, Celtic monasteries and trading ports are built on Polaris and Nova Hibernia.
 * New Bogatygavan`s Slavic reconquest of the pontic steppe marked the beginning of an enforced modernisation and nation-building. The reconquesters brought with them Roman ideas of how to run a republic, a developed economy, an education system etc., and implemented it step by geographical step in the country they gained control over thanks to Roman firearms. By the end of the century, the Slavonic Republic controls almost all of OTL Ukraine and south-eastern parts of OTL Poland. Its centre is still in the South, at the Black Sea Coast. Its Roman-style general education system teaches not only the Greek alphabet for the Slavic language, but also different Jewish and Christian creeds. Traditional Slavic cult and mythology recede and survive mostly in the countryside, which also undergoes agricultural modernisation to increase output.
 * The Chasars, being pushed further and further to the East by the Slavonic Republic, begin to haunt the Black and Caspic Sea as pirates, intercepting Euro-Chinese trade by Ostrogoths and others and selling whatever they couldn`t directly use to the Slavs. After a decade of piracy, the Roman army occupies the entire Black Sea coast and cracks down on the pirates with gunboats. Two years later, the Persian republic does the same in the Caspic Sea. Sixteen years later, when the Chasars had gotten their hands on firearms, too, they rebelled against Slavic expansion and Roman and Persian military presence. In a concerted effort (which would have been unimaginable in the times of permanent Roman-Sassanid conflicts some centuries ago), the Roman and Persian armies, together with Rome´s close Slavonic allies, march into the Chasar hinterland, where even the fiercest Chasar resistance could not withstand the superior firepower of arms that the Academiae Martianae and their Persian equivalents had recently designed and state factories had produced en masse. All of Chasarstan was split along pre-discussed lines. The treatment of the Chasar population in the conquered territories foreshadowed what would become widespread racist practice in the later age of imperial expansion: In the Slavonic Republic, Chasars were forced to assimilate and settle down, without being given land, i.e. they ended up as cheap agricultural  workforce. Resistance to assimilation was repeatedly met with brutal oppression. In the Roman territory, which did not even become a normal province for a century, which also means that its inhabitants were not automically Roman citizens, arbitary rules governed. Citizenship was granted to some inhabitants (mostly of Armenian origin or other ethnicity less suspicious to Rome), and only this entitled them to own land and exclude others from using it. Here, too, Chasars became an impoverished underclass, but no cultural assimilation was attempted. The territory controlled by the Persians was directly annnexed by the Persian Republic, and here, Chasars fared less badly. Upon interventions by their close ally, Türkestan, who criticised the treatment of the Turk-speaking brothers and sisters, Persia created reservations in which the Chasars could continue their culture and nomadic lifestyle (until, in later centuries, oil would be discovered there).

Nations of Asia

 * India: War breaks out between Chola and Anuradhapura over the control of the Maledive islands, an important stopover on Indian trade routes to Africa. The sea battle ends in a victory for Chola. Three decades later, Chola attacks Anuradhapura with the intention of annexing it. Anuradhapura manages to defend its capital, but cannot push the Chola army back off the island. Chola annexes Northern Sri Lanka.
 * India: With the new firearms, the Gupta try to reconquer Pala. But the Pala have firearms, too, and they are supported by their buddhist neighbors, the Pyu, who are afraid of an omnipotent Hinduist Gupta neighbor. The Gupta must withdraw after long, bloody and inconclusively battles.
 * Dvaravati (India / Indochina): Witnessing the immense casualties suffered by all sides in the wars with the new weapons on the Indian subcontinent, Dvaravati initiates a process aimed at a stable peace order in the region. Nuam Thai and Kambuja join in the process, and the Pyu are at least interested, but the latter insist that a non-aggressive order must include the Indian empires or else leave defensive options against them open.
 * China / Balhae / Türkestan: Mongolians from the Kitan empire overcome the great wall and raid northern China. China asks his neighbors Balhae and Türkestan to join in its counterattack. Using firearms, the Chinese and allied armies devastate the Mongolians and split Kitan among themselves: Türkestan annexes the Western Mongolian part, China annexes Kitan´s former heartland and Balhae annexes the Tungusian East.
 * China / Nihon: Nihonian pirates damage sea trade (not only) between China and Silla. The Chinese navy uses gunboats, but is not as successful in wiping the pirates out as its Roman or Persian equivalents in the Black and Caspic Seas. China occupies and fortifies the Ryukyu / Liuqiu Islands. An attempt to invade Nihon fails spectacularly, but leads to increased Nihonian development and build-up efforts.
 * Sri Vijaya, being the first Indonesian kingdom equipped with the new generation of firearms, annexes Borneo and the islands of the Tagalog (OTL Philippines) and every small island between them. Its huge island empire was repeatedly sabotaged by pirates from Champa, though, until Sri Vijayan troops defeated the Cham and their allies and annexed Champa, too.

Nations of Africa

 * The Horon build more port towns / colonies where the absence of mangroves allows this.
 * To the south of the river Congo, the Congo empire forms.
 * With Saban arms and instructions (meant to contain Aksum`s Massai colonists), Kitara expands to the North, West and South and introduces its new agricultural techniques in the entire tropical central Africa.
 * Two attempts by the Kirinyaga Alliance to reconquer their ancestral lands fail.
 * In central Southern Africa and along the Zambezi river, the Munhumutapa empire with its capital of Zimbabwe establishes itself.
 * Fearing revolution, the Yoruba leadership expels all Simonists, who had formed small communities along the Niger, from their empire. The Nigerian Simonists re-settle among the Bantu in OTL South Cameroon.

Nations of Atlantis
Salvador79 (talk) 13:09, April 21, 2014 (UTC)
 * Decades of Chasar attacks and piracy drove many Ostrogoths into emigration. Whilst most of them moved to Greek-speaking eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, some settled on the islands in the Atlantic ocean, of which only those closer to Europe and Africa were uninhabited. Those closer to the Atlantic (OTL: Northern American) mainland were mostly inhabited by Taino and other Aruak tribes. Here, Ostrogoths and Taino formed various complex social symbioses. On some islands, Ostrogoths rented land from the Taino, intensified and modernised agriculture and enabled the Taino to live idly off the rent; on others, Ostrogoths bought gold mines and began exporting the gold back to Europe. A first wave of epidemics hit the Taino late in the century (and reduced the problematically high number of rent recipients), but the Ostrogoths were able to import medicine from Europe in time to treat many Taino in their island hospitals and prevent their extinction.
 * From the Taino islands, Ostrogoths (and partly assimilated Taino) sailed further to the West in search of the "real" Atlantis from European mythology (concluding from the wealth of gold among the Taino and their relatively primitive society on the other hand - the famous golden civilization had to be near!). In the stormy Caribbean, many ships sunk. Those who reached new shores found belligerent Carib tribes in OTL Venezuela and equally belligerent Maya city states, whose societies were more complex and open for new trading opportunities. Contacts were few and far between in the 9th century, though.

Abrittus