Transylvania/Mad

Thoughts on Yarth's Transylvanian History
In 1146, Géza II of Hungary married Euphrosyne, sister of Grand Prince Iziaslav II of Kiev.

That's an useful spot to start, given the coincidence in names and the fact that Géza is attributed as the first of the Hungarian kings to starting hiring in the various sorts of German tradesfolk to settle in Transylvania.

Yarth history up to this point seems generally parallel, barring the odd Spark here and there, to our history — the Romans conquered the Dacians (Getae) who were living in this downright idyllic basin created by the sharp-edged Carpathian Mountains and the mighty Danube River. For all the rough reputation of the mountains, the lower lands are lush and support a wide range of fruit trees and other crops.

(Another side note, while I was looking at things to assemble for this — the Dacians/Getae allegedly had a fondness for wolves, and wolf-shifting. Lycanthropy came early to Transylvania.)

The Romanised Dacians survived the withdrawal of the Empire, and had to deal with miscellaneous other conquerors before the Hungarians over in Pannonia (a former small seabed, and lovingly described by Steven Karl Zoltán Brust in his science fantasy series) got their acts together and decided Transylvania was theirs. I mean, wouldn't you?

The Huns had already come and gone through the area, giving this new kingdom its collective name; the Mongols were coming, and heralds warned the Transylvanian and Pannonian inhabitants well in advance.

We know the first Castle Heterodyne was built in 1042, which allows a small assumption that the clan were already fairly well-established and in control of the territory. When the Mongols arrived not many years after, Agatha's 'ancestors learned so much from them!'

Our Hungarians only had to worry about Mongols. Their Hungarians, and the rest of Europa, had to worry about the Mongols AND the Heterodynes. This brings us back to mercenary Germans. Although the primary reason for Géza II's invitation was border defense with the Szeklers against invaders, Germans were also sought for their mining expertise and ability to develop the region's economy. The first settlements were WSW of where Beetleburg and Mechanicsburg seem situated, but over the next handfuls of decades, towns built by colonists and fortresses built by the Teutonic Knights (who were quickly kicked out for appearing too powerful) and Kirchenburgen would be found all around the Transylvanian Plateau.

The Mongols ravaged the area in our timeline, despite the best defence the colonists and the Hungarian armies could put forth. I should like to extrapolate that the Heterodynes ended up eating the Mongols for lunch, then took over the ravaging themselves. In the mid-1200s, instead of Mongols tearing it up and leaving, I put forth that the Heterodynes tore it up and said 'That was fun!' then said 'Mine.' From this point on is when the Heterodynes started to become the continentally-feared power we hear whispered of in the histories.

Despite the devastation, though, there were still plenty of survivors from all the major ethnic groups — the native Dacians, the colonist Germans (who were being called 'Saxons' by the locals) and the Szekly/Magyar from the west. People who fight for a land tend to get stubborn about it. In our history, the Sachsen became a legally-protected sort of bourgeoisie, with privileges the Romanian (read: Dacian) peasants never got.

This social status and the original intent of importing these demi-mercenary populations suggests where the Barony of Wulfenbach originated, although the documented (Secret Blueprints) regard of the most recently late Baron and Baronin Wulfenbach – and by extrapolation, plausibly their predecessors and so on in reverse – for the peasants over whom they had responsibility is exceptional for the time. This exemplary attitude of service-from-above was passed on to their son and heir, who we know intended to instill it in his own students, as noted in the novels (“The Baron insists that those with lands that need planting in the spring should help oversee the process personally, and actually assist if they’re old enough.” “He says that it gives them a better appreciation of where their power comes from and who’s actually keeping them fed.” – Chapter 5, ...Airship City)

The rapid expansion of cities populated by the Saxons led to Transylvania being known in German as Siebenbürgen and Septem Castra in Latin, referring to seven of the fortified towns – presumably the following list [names in German/Sachsen (Romanian) [Hungarian] {Latin})]:

This is the source of the arms of the Siebenbürgen: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Wappen_Großfürstentum_Siebenbürgen.png – the seven towers. You can easily see how this relates to the Wulfenbach single-tower badge and to the Mechanicsburg seven-towers-assaulted arms. My interpretation of that design, for what it’s worth, is not an attack on a specific city as much as symbolic of how the Heterodynes, using Mechanicsburg as a base of operations, have dominated the Seven Fortresses and the surrounding lands in general. It’s a brag.

History is, of course, complicated and has many things going on simultaneously. In our timeline, the cities were founded between 1142-1208; the Mongols invaded during 1241–1242 and again in 1285. During this same period on Yarth, the Heterodynes would have been gobbling up Europa, heading towards the Valois in the west/northwest from their southeastern stronghold, growing stronger and stronger from appropriated troops, tribute and loot. As of two centuries before Agatha’s time, ‘the Heterodynes had been unchecked for centuries’ (...Clockwork Princess) – that’s four or five more centuries of mass gleeful violence than the hotspot warring of our timeline. Except that the Heterodynes obviously protected their own – in some way or another - Transylvania’s survival is nearly miraculous and Budapest’s, no matter its current post-Wars condition, even more so. This does still beg the question of the location of Sturmhalten and Balan’s Gap, and how far the Heterodynes’ immediate terror spread before stopped by the Coalition. That may yet be hinted at in time. For now, though, we have a good idea of one of the major forks between our Terra and Agatha’s Yarth, and the developments which might be extrapolated from those changes. As terrible as some of our own wars have been, we can see how much worse it could have been with Sparky ingenuity driving Ares’s war chariot.

Appendix:

For an excellent view of the countryside in question, relatively unmarred: "A Transylvanian Bimmer-Go-Round" http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?p=10397524

A Cartographic Essay to Resolve Problems of Visualising Travel and Distance in Transylvania, and an Attempt at Locating Sturmhalten
This entry shall attempt to provide a context for travel in Yarth's Europa at the time of the emergence of Agatha, Lady Heterodyne. Given that the one map we have been provided has been declared to be a few shades of unreliable, and in the histories are at best confusing, I present a few tools over which heads may be scratched.

Providing a map seems to have resulted instead in generating several maps with an added sharp veer into airship operations, to wit: Given that the Goodyear blimp (current circa-2006 roundy edition) travels by itself between 20-30mph,  it seems to be a fair extrapolation that the Castle Wulfenbach travels about normal-human walking speed, rounded for convenience to 5kph.

This gives us a straight-line daily travel distance of 120 kilometers, which can vary by a kilometer depending on which end of the ship you're using to measure the distance, and does not account for Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, headwinds, tailwinds, crosswinds, up/downdrafts, hostile ground-to-air fire, accidental fire in the dustbin, storm diversions or any other possible variable. (This is a pitiful distance - I do 2⁄3s this distance just for work and back, but like the CW, I get to travel in nearly straight lines with little environmental interference, unlike ground travel in much of Europa.)

Agatha spends more than one day on the Castle Wulfenbach — her ends with meeting (but not being introduced to) Krosp; she  to Moloch's lab for her second day. The Airship City novel (chapter 6) mentions 'The biggest problem was caused by Agatha herself, who continued to sleepwalk each night, ending up in the lab, sprawled over one of the workbenches.' This suggests a few more days, unenumerated, in-between. (which may mean the morning of anywhere from her fifth to eighth day on board) she wakes up from sleepSparking again, belts Moloch after their fight and reports to Gil's lab that afternoon. The hive engine is activated. Agatha on her next morning in Gil's lab, having build her first fully-operative Dingbot and the Rescue Engine. Unfortunately, that's about the time the evacuation alarms go off, she and Gil fight the Slaver Queen, Lilith and Adam come to rescue her and Krosp flies off with her in a little airship.

This gives us perhaps six to nine days of travel — let's be stingy and round like crazy and say 600 to 1000 kilometres of travel. We don't have a starting point, as the retaking of Beetleburg was done with Wulfenbach units, not the Castle. Let's pretend, however, that she was looming over Mechanicsburg, not far away, as she would do in a few months from the start of the histories.

Okay... where's Mechanicsburg?

Let's look at a map.

We have to remember AT ALL TIMES that the geography is not going to be exactly congruent; in some cases, it's radically different. All we can use, however, are the tools at hand and be ready to make wild allowances when we get contradictions. That stipulated, (in all Her various names) seems to be surprisingly similar in course, nearly identical. She provides a great alignment and scaling tool for our cartography. Here is an apologetically shiny closeup of the Mechanicsburg-Beetleburg area in Transylvania:



Off to one side, you can see Budapest. What state Budapest is in in Europa is anybody's guess at the moment, but it is likely extremely battered if it is still there at all. Given what we can extrapolate about Transylvanian history in Agatha's timeline, it was likely the front lines for many, many battles for many, many years. Poor Budapest.

To the south, somewhat out of place, there's ; although it is a natural feature, someone very likely decided to be literal about it and built something across the gorge even more impressive than either or the modern hydroelectric dams in our timeline.

Here's an overlay of the modern Transylvania of our time. The teardrop marker is over, named after Wednesday/Mercury. I'll explain why it's in that particular spot in a moment. The name is from a tradition of naming some places after market-day. (By the way, any John Landis fans out there? Are you cracking up yet?)



Notice the Mechanicsburg dot lines up almost perfectly with — but Miercurea-Ciuc is a much more logical candidate for being the proximate location of Mechanicsburg. Remember, unreliable maps. Ciuc is surrounded by highlands, if not actual mountains, while Targu Mures is on the rolling lowlands. Situated on ( Marisus, Maros, Moriš, Мориш, Mieresch, Marosch or Muresch), the market town was an important salt-trading post and had been settled since at least the early 1200s. However, it's too exposed to be Mechanicsburg.

Miercurea-Ciuc, on the other hand, was an Iron Age settlement, and later Dacian and Szekler villages developed there. The Olt River (Alt, Aluta or Alutus, Alytos, Άλυτος), originating in the copper-bearing mountains not far to the north, runs through the city, not too unlike the Dyne.



Here you can see the Mures and the Olt overlaying our Yarth-based map. The Olt is the unlabelled river running vertically from the bottom of the frame and 'pointing' at Beetleburg. Ironically, the town closest to the Olt's source, and possible Beetleburg location, is Bălan — but would be a very poor location for Balan's Gap and Sturmhalten (it's only 38 km away).

Let's get a sense of distances. It seems fairly safe to presume that the proportions of Transylvania are the same, and things are neither vastly farther apart nor absurdly closer together than they are here. Here, for instance, are two routes from the famous location that used to be called the Borgo Pass (now Pasul Tihuţa, ) to our temporarily-stipulated 'Mechanicsburg':





The first route is 192 km; the second, 249 km. Hardly an intimidating distance even for the sauntering Castle Wulfenbach, nor something that it like would take months to reach, even under challenging travel conditions (not including kidnappings, imprisonment, burial, et alia).

Here's some radii of possible Castle travel — the smaller circle is about four days' good sailing, 420 km; the larger is 1000 km:



Notice 'exactly how much of Europa and surroundings can be reached by the Castle in a little over a week of normal headway. That's almost half of the major cities in the east, Istanbul (not Constantinople) and Athens.

Just for the sake of it, here's another more general map I made plotting the approximate borders of Europa Wulfenbach against an our-world map:



Mechanicsburg and the ruins of Wulfenburg (Wulfenbachburg?) are marked with stars; the routing is Othar's journey from his alternate-timeline Twitter account. You will note on the other maps above that Schloss Wulfenbach seems awfully congruent with the modern city of, which was known in Roman times as Castrum Clus or Claudiopolis. I'm just going to leave that second name there for you to look at for a while.

Looping back to one of the problems that maps are supposed to resolve: Where in Newton's name is Sturmhalten?! Even using the completely unsupported assumption that the Castle Wulfenbach set off from Mechanicsburg once Agatha was appropriated, the radii above show that it would be nearly impossible to guess just from that alone. We do know, however, that Agatha crashed in the Wastelands; that the Circus took months just to get to Balan's Gap and Sturmhalten; that Sturmhalten itself, 200 years before the main storyline in the histories was heavily fortified by Andronicus Valois to beat back the Heterodynes from invading western/northwestern Europe. I would like to suggest that a large portion of the Wastelands, and the land Agatha and Krosp overflew was once what we call the. There is a gap between the easternmost Austrian Alps and the Western Carpathians, where Bratislava and Vienna are situated where the Circus might have travelled, and the between Austria and Italy is said by Wikipedia to be the lowest and one of the most desired passes through that mountain range. Could Agatha have travelled that far, beyond the Alps? Not over the Alps themselves, but easily within reach of the mountain passes, which would have been crossed by the Circus over Wulfenbach-laid roads and bridges.

We might never know for certain where our world's Sturmhalten-equivalent lies. There may, in fact, be nothing there; or Balan's Gap may have been named after the Spark who blew up half a mountain range to create it. At least we can surmise where it is not and work from there.

A Thought on Dacian Rituals and Extended Symbolism
I had a thought, dwelling on that bit I found about the Dacian rituals - if you take this wholly into the realm of symbolism, as I am fairly certain none of these cultures intended it this way, the Dacians can be tied to the Wulfenbachs not just by their wolf symbol, but by being signifiers of 'the old way' of doing things in Transylvania, even though the Sachsens themselves were relative newcomers to the land.

The Baron's rule is challenged and at least demi-overthrown by the 'new' Heterodyne (although her family have been resident for as long as the Szkely), the way the Dacians were taken over by first the Romans then by any-bloody-other group with bigger weapons who came by, poor things.

But — the Wolf overtaken by the Dragon. And who was the most famous Transylvanian of them all prior to this? The Son of the Dragon himself, Voivode Vlad.