It Begins In Glorious Conquest!
Sometimes I sit in my throne room, glaring despondently at the swarms of petitioners, and I ask myself how in heaven's name I ended up here. Today, however, I remembered to make a note to go check wikipedia after the Royal Audience, and the internet tells me that the Island was last conquered in the third crusade by the king of England, who sold it to the Knight's Templar, who didn't want anything to do with it so they found some sucker Frenchman to buy it off them, who just so happened to be my distant ancestor. And now here I am, a French Catholic ruling over a Greek Orthodox island desperately coveted by the Mamalukes, under constant threat by the rising Ottomans and falling Venetians, and by all rights property of the ancient and majestic Roman Empire whose last crumbling remains still thrive in Constantinople.
But as for me, ever since I was a tiny child I have dreamed the dream of all true Frenchmen. This dream is not the nightmare of a mildly pleasant rock in the Eastern Mediterranean. No, it is the Great Dream, the dream that one day a young and handsome Frenchman will conquer the Italian Peninsula and manage to turn himself from an uncivilized Frenchman into a civilized Italian. Of course, I could never forsake my family home in Nicosia, but as I sit here listening to these bickering foreign peasants with their petty complaints my mind drifts so easily to a better place.
I don't think that peasant was through with his story, but I am certainly done listening to it, so I order him beheaded. My advisor steps carefully over the old man's head as it rolls across the hallway as she approaches the throne. I say advisor, but of course our realm is too poor to afford luxuries like good advice, so I have appointed an illiterate peasant woman as Chief Advisor of All Things Requiring Advising, at least until we can get a professional shipped all the way out here. She staggers up the steps, encumbered by the heavy administrative tome that records the full extent of the poverty and sadness present upon my tiny isle. She drops it at my feet with a thud, and then collapses herself upon the steps.
"Here it is, your highness, the report you requested yesterday."
I look at the book skeptically before pronouncing my heavenly wisdom to the throne room. "This book is too big."
"But, your highness, it is a full accounting of--"
"Executioner, behead this book."
The executioner proceeds up the stairs at a deliberate pace, his halberd dripping a little peasant blood with each step. He stopped one step below the top and hefted his mighty weapon, swinging it down powerfully until hesitating mere inches above the leather cover. Holding for a moment with his face in a tangle as if he were pondering where, precisely, the head of a book resided, he apparently came to the conclusion of smacking at it a few times, leaving a pile of leather and parchment scraps at my feet.
"You see, advisor," I proclaimed, for a king never merely speaks, "Here is a man who knows his duty. Were it only the same for you, I would not have to," my advisor recoiled in fear, pulling her head in as if to minimize exposed neck area, "have you reconstruct this information into something pleasing to the eye which requires only a bare minimum of literacy." She squeaked out some obsequiousness and grabbed as much of the parchment pile as she could carry in her two arms before retreating into the corner, scattering land holdings and military formations across the throne room, to glue it back together.
Honestly, I don't know why my courtiers are all so timid all the time.
In any case, the next audiences were a peasant who stole some cattle (executed), a peasant accused of practicing the Orthodox Religion (executed), and a peasant whose children had caught the plague (executed). After that, my advisor slowly ascended to the throne, her hands shaking so badly I could hardly read a thing. I snatched the page from her hands and called out "cut off her..." but looking at the page I became distracted before I could finish my thought.
"I have a daughter?" I cried out.
"Yes, your highness," replied my Executioner, "If you will recall, you had her mostly executed a few months ago."
"Mostly executed, you say? What on earth does that mean?"
"Ah, she was crying in the night, so you told me to 'have her executed, but only a little bit'".
"That isn't 'mostly executed' at all, is it!? I only wanted her a little bit executed, not mostly executed. Now she is an idiot!"
"My apologies, your highness. If you would like, I could go chop off my head?"
I looked over the page a little further while considering the possibility. But the fact is, Cyprus is simply too poor to afford a second executioner to execute the first one, so he will have to be forgiven. What I really need is more money, and the best way to make money is to kill people. And the best way to kill people is to have lots of money. Hmmm...
"Executioner, go down to the docks and round me up a grand army and a transport fleet." In the meantime, I command my advisor to put together a report on the military strength of nearby targets.
It seems the executioner had to do quite a lot of executing before he could put an army together, so we are a little understrength. Fortunately, it seems Ragusa is even poorer and weaker than we are, and it is closer than ever to the Italian Peninsula! My diplomats tell me that I have no real reason to invade them, so I let them know that the conquest of Ragusa would be used to fund a second executioner! They were so overwhelmed with excitement that the news managed to destablize my realm.
and it turns out that restablizing is going to be prohibitively expensive. Oh well, it will be 50% cheaper after we conquer Catholic Ragusa and get a our "stability enforcer". We sail over to the Dalmatian coast, which is a whole lot farther away than I had thought it would be, so we ask Venice if we could land on their coastline. They ask if we are going to invade them, and we say no. Then we invade Ragusa and they get all mad and I am like, "what did you think we were going to do with this army?". Anyway, the war starts out pretty quick, but then turns into an immensely long siege. I keep telling my troops to go behead the Ragusans, but apparently you can't behead someone if there is a wall in the way, something I will file away for future study.
Anyway, there I am, minding my own business, waiting patiently to slaughter the Ragusans in the streets, when I receive absolutely dire news:
Hah, no. I had considered invading Athens, but the thought of more Greeks in my globe-spanning empire made me throw up all over my collection of heads on pikes (and I had to get replacements for three of them). Also, they were allied to Castille, and I didn't feel like conquering any Spaniards that day. No, the dire news is this:
Ungrateful peasants! My executioner leaves for a year and they get all sorts of ignorant notions in their heads. I figure I can wait a bit, because once my siege is done I will be rolling in the wealth of a great trade node and have plenty of time and money to knock off a few dirty rebels. And, indeed, only a little while later the conquest is complete!
I make my way through the blood soaked streets of Ragusa, preceded only by some slave children mopping a clean path for my feet, followed by my trusty executioner and slightly less trustworthy itinerant courtiers, up to the local throne room. I toss the corpse of the previous king out of the chair and turn my attention to the matter at hand-- do they have three rooms full of treasure or four? My adviser pulls out a gluestick and pastes this to some cardboard.
Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I execute my treasurer. Then I think better of it and have his head sewn back on, because I am going to need him to get me a loan. I send his body over to the bank and they get the message, the message that I am a worthy creditor who is in need of some humanitarian assistance. Ragusa is too far away from my kingly infrastructure to trade or core or really do anything at all, my income is even smaller than when my empire spanned only one island, and my expenses have risen considerably. As a cost cutting measure I burn half my fleet and order half my soldiers executed. The streets run red with the blood of my peasants and soldiers, the vaults are empty except for the blood that trickles in from the streets, and every single man, woman and child in Nicosia has risen up in rebellion to prevent me from returning to my ancestral homeland. On the bright side, my advisor's collage crafts are finally receiving the recognition they deserve.
So there I sit as the months turn to years. I tried sending my army out to fight them, but we are so poor even after the budget cuts that the army cannot afford soldiers with legs, and so they just sit there, arms, heads and torsos, propped up on the shattered walls of the city. Eventually, the inevitable happens.
I console myself with thoughts of revenge, for it won't be long before the Ottomans take Constantinople and leave Cyprus vulnerable to re-conquest. As I am fantasizing about all the beheadings that will come, a messenger rushes into the throne room. He slips on the blood-soaked floor and hits his head on the tile, so I come down from my throne and pull the message from his fingers.
"Execute this messenger!" I roar. My loyal executioner considers the best angle of approach and decides that decorum will only allow him to kick the dead body a bit. It is sufficient, for it appears the wretch has learned his lesson. How could that messenger have allowed the cores on Cyprus to have slipped through his fingers?
Actually, I honestly don't know the answer. I had thought it required 50 years to lose a non-cultured core. I ask my advisor to fetch me the EUIV manual, but she reminds me that I made Steam translate itself into Japanese and have forgotten how to turn it off, so I don't actually know where the manual is.
In any case, I no longer have a capitol, so I look to my neighbors for likely targets of conquest. Or, perhaps not:
But wait, smugglers? I can't trade in my only province and yet there are smugglers? My entire income is expressed in hundreths of a ducat and yet there are people engaged in trade? What are they selling, severed heads? Are they the ones who have made off with the legs of my soldiers? Have I somehow gone from playing EUIV to "REPO!": The GSG? I fly into a black rage and when I awake in the morning under a pile of animal carcasses my nation has inexplicably returned to +0 stability, so the last thing I want is to be going back into negative stability over some creepy ass-smugglers.
In any case, I realize now that I am in pretty dire straights, being even poorer than I was nine years ago. But then I see that at least my religious unity has climbed back to 100%, so I figure I am now pious enough to ask the Pope for a favor. I send my diplomat over to Rome to tell the pope that I will cut off his head if he doesn't give me fleet basing rights out of Romagna, which convinces the old man pretty good. To save face, he asks for a little donation of .4 ducats, which is approximately what my entire nation produces in four months so I say "sure I am staring into the blackened maw of poverty in any case, feel free to take the food from my starving, idiot child". Another loan later and things are finally starting to look up.
I have a core, a capital, some trade, and, of course, my trusty executioner. It is time to rinse the blood off the floor and start preparing my GRAND INVASION OF ITALY.
We will meet again.
