Option 4) Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth something-something.Not familiar with their history, so somebody else should suggest how this can happen. @Batrix2070 @ATP feel free to add Polishwhank here.
Well, unfortunately I didn't have much of an idea for a PLC superpower nor do I want to come up with one instead, I remembered a certain project he uses for Two Eagles apropos of one of Poland.
I recommend you to fasten your seatbelts and take it easy, because what you are going to see is a simple historical game based on old Polish AAR from Paradox megacampaign of CK1>EU3>VIC1>HOI2 games.
Unfortunately, the website with this AAR was blown up, but fortunately the author's videos were preserved on YT, allowing me to reconstruct the universe reasonably faithfully created by him.
Overview map of the territory of the Sixth Polish Empire and its dominions as of 2018.
Red: Polish Empire
Orange: Dominion of Jakubins
Pink: Dominion of New Poland
Yellow: Dominion of Great Wolin
The Imperial Flag, White and Red are the national colors and the Gold is symbol of the Piast dynasty.
It is one of the oldest and unchanged flags in the entire history of this world. The first versions of this flag with the emblem of the empire appeared in the 15th century.
Official name: Basileum Polanoi et Imperium Poloniae. (Empire of Poles and Imperium of Poland eng.) (Cesarstwo Polaków i Imperium Polskie pol.)
Short name: Empire/Cesarstwo also Poland/Polska
State Anthem: National song for the prosperity of the Emperor-Imperator(Official Name) , God save Poland (Real Name)
National anthem: March, March Polonia
Motto: To God, with Honor and for the Fatherland. (Often shortened to God, Honor, Fatherland.)
Capital city: Kazimierz
Official language: Polish
Population: 2.4 billion (alone) 3.8 billion (with dominions)
Head of State: James VIII Piast
First Minister: Stanisław Gromski
System: Absolute Constitutional Monarchy
Legislative authority: Emperor with a cabinet of ministers
Advisory body: Sejm
State Religion: Ordocatholic Church
Religious minorities: Protestantism with dominant remnants of Polish National Catholicism, Shinto
Currency: Polish Solid
Historical Background:
Everything began, as old Polish legends say, in the memorable year 1066, when king Bolesław II once looked at the map of the known world, including the map of Ruthenia, and his heart rushing to action had under the influence of a freshly wedded Byzantine princess, how he won her hand from her father no one knows except God and the interested, he wanted to do something great, he wanted to conquer all of Ruthenia and rule the lands from the Odra to the Volga, he and his descendants.
Unfortunately, he was not to live to see this accomplishment, as it was done by his distant great-grandson Boleslaw IV reigning between 1414-1440 and being King of Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia who destroyed the last independent Ruthenian principality.
And his son Stanislaus I the Liberator (1440-1452) was the first as then called Basileus-Imperator holding and uniting both imperial titles into one common one. The HRE was long gone, falling to pieces in internal struggles in the 12th century. And with the fall of Byzantium under Muslim attack in the mid-13th century, the last Empire in Europe disappeared, creating a void of sorts for more than a century before Stanislaus, with the approval of the Pope and Partiarch of Constantinople, crowned himself simultaneously as Basileus Rhomanoi and Emperor Romanum. This was a kind of reward for carrying out the daring and brave Last Fourteenth Crusade and recapturing all the eastern provinces of the former Eastern Roman Empire and breaking Islam by capturing and burning to the ground both Mecca and Medina.
From 1451 to 1667 counts the period of the First Empire, only Augustus V Ladislaus the Great changes the partly old and in some places obsolete feudal-bureaucratic system based on the strong power of the Emperor to the more modern Absolute Monarchy putting an end to any remnants of feudalism in the Empire.
The Second Empire lasted until 1753 when Casimir IX John the Great changes the system of the Empire, modernizes it significantly and creates the first constitution and establishes the Diet.
The Third Empire lasted a short time - until 1824 when Casimir's son George III was beheaded on the guillotine in Krakow, Poland, overtaken by the Republican Revolution, which created the First Polish Republic.
Unluckily for the Revolutionaries, his son Alexander II Augustus the Executioner in the distant capital Kazimierz survived the assassination attempt by igniting a civil war that lasted over 6 years.
The war was bloody, moderate, and exhausting for a country ravaged by the First Great Continental War, but the Revolutionaries could not win, the Loyalists were supported by the Kingdom of Germany and Czecho-Hungary, ultimately nipping the source of the revolution in the bud.
But the price was high, Krakow was lost even though Poland had won the Great War, but the civil war destroyed everything and turned away all the efforts of Polish soldiers, and more than half the territory of Poland proper was taken from Poland as payment for assistance.
The Fourth Empire lasted a little longer than the Third, from 1824 to 1863, and was characterized by a period of contradictions: on the one hand Alexander hated liberal and republican ideals and exterminated them everywhere in a brutal manner, and set up a secret police to search for revolutionaries all over the country trying to kill or imprison them. On the other hand, the not-so-limited Diet continued to wield considerable power and the Constitution was not abolished, but only slightly amended to provide some loopholes for the Emperor's power.
The Fifth Empire lasted until 1920, when the son of Alexander II, Casimir X, relaxed the strict policy of his father and removed in the shadows, making Poland a de facto parliamentary monarchy in which the Emperor only appointed ministers and appointed and dissolved the Sejm.
Existence of the Fifth Empire was ended by a fanatical republican Roman Dmowski who using the dissatisfaction of society devastated by the Second Great Continental War called also World War I made a coup d'état removing the Piasts from the throne creating the Second Polish Republic. Unfortunately, during his lifetime the Second Polish Republic was to die at the hands of the man who had tried unsuccessfully to carry out the coup in 1920, the well-known war hero Major Konrad Gromski.
Dmowski had him and his gang imprisoned and did not care about him, more preoccupied and preoccupied with stripping the hated Piasts of their property and throne. Fortunately for Poland, the republic of his own child disowned his father when Konrad Maliszewski won the election for president. Dmowski was no less pleased with the overthrow of the monarchy and accepted it calmly.
The Second Republic grew rich and prosperous for more than 19 years after the end of the war, benefiting from the enthusiasm of liberalism, which finally broke the curse of the liberals without causing any scandal. Unfortunately, it all came to an end when on February 12, 1929 there was Black Monday, the great stock market crash in Sprigfield, the capital of the Confederate States of America, leading to the Great Depression.
The Liberal Curse broke out with new and unprecedented force, bringing down the Liberal government and paving the way to power for Konrad Gromski and his NPOCP (National Order for the Revival of the Polish Empire). Konrad Gromski was fortunate to find a sympathetic judge who gave him a sentence of three years imprisonment as punishment.
The NPCOCP won the election with 80% support allowing Gromski unfettered power, he quickly overthrew the Republic and created the 6th Empire on February 22, 1930 inviting the exiled Emperor Sigismund III back to the throne.
Gromski went down as a reasonable politician and an efficient statesman, pulling Poland out of the crisis in two years, a full year earlier than the rest of the world. And as the one who regained for Poland its ancient and rightful lands again and destroyed the traitors' states which broke out for independence after the Potsdam Treaty, humiliating for Poland.
This was all the greater, because Poland all war was all the time in attack and not far from the fall of Berlin and with it all Germany. Only a desperate throwing of tanks and help of British Republic allowed the cut Germany to win this war.
But it was a fragile victory and the order was unstable, Czecho-Hungary split into small countries, France fell into civil war and the Communists won, Britain bled to death very quickly despite her brief involvement as a shadow of her former monarchical power, and Poland thirsted for retribution for the insult.
Third Reich, renewed Empire this time only German and not Roman, was in unlucky place. Between a hammer and an anvil, surrounded only by enemies wanting their death. And as it later turned out, the Third Great Continental War was the greatest catastrophe in German history, when French Totalitarian Communism and Polish Authoritarian Monarchy first quietly got together in the Darlan-Rydz Pact to dismantle Germany, then clashed in great battles on German territory, killing millions of Germans in a clash of titans often by accident.
Although Poland fought valiantly to save Germany when it realized what a monster it had aligned itself with, often suffering enormous losses to end the war with over 60 million dead and save Europe and the world from the nightmare of Communism. Germany was massacred and barely 240 million of its more than 600 million people survived. Many millions were deliberately butchered to death by the French or simply murdered in labor camps, although most died by accident, often in the middle of huge battles on German territory.
The war ended with the victory of the anti-communist coalition. It allowed Poland to regain all of its lost territories in the west and to reunite with its breakaway dominions, but the end of the war brought another division of the world between the Americans and the Poles, resulting in the Long Shadow Game, known by the Americans as the Cold War.
Although more than 72 years have passed since the memorable year 1950, the year that ended the war. The Cold War continues, but it is not the threat of nuclear annihilation that keeps the Fourth Continental War from breaking out, no, it is the fear that the Fourth will be so bloody and devastating that there will be no victor in this conflict that keeps the Empire and the Confederacy from at each other's throats.
Both sides are so outnumbered that firing nukes does not make any strategic sense, because even a huge number of missiles will not knock out the enemy due to the existence of solid missile shields and the number of targets that would have to be destroyed.
Still, there is a winner in this game of shadows, the Empire is not as free and liberal as the Confederacy, but it is much more stable than the Confederacy despite the weaker emphasis on freedom than the Confederacy. The dirty work of the Polish intelligence in the form of supporting the American countercultural left starts to reap fruits, while similar actions of America in Poland bring much less effects due to being an authoritarian monarchy.
And Polish dominions are an ideal place to send those dissatisfied with life in a quite harsh and restrictive Empire.
Okay, so much for the feature. I know it's a little bit out of the historical framework and it's more of a fantasy and alter-history but for me it was fun creating this monster.
www.theguardian.com
