The Ghost of Admiral Mahan

I've blogged previously on how playing Empire Total War helped me see the truth of Admiral Mahan's dictum that naval power is the key to world power.

It now turns out that this observation has become topical. The Chinese are now busy building a navy.

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/china/articles/20100124.aspx

All this economic activity has increased Chinese dependence on the sea. This is unique in Chinese history, for in the past, China was self-sufficient and ignored naval matters. No more. The admirals are pointing out that, without control of long sea routes to Africa, Australia and South America, the Chinese economy would choke. Forget about exports, it's the raw materials China needs, and only a stronger fleet can guarantee access.

The Education that is Empire Total War (Part 2)

One of the best things about computer war games is that on the strategic level they can get you very familiar with who all the players are in a historical period, and they can get you into the head of a ruler of a given land.

After I had played Empire Total War a number of times, I began reading about the period. I read Joseph J. Ellis' biography of George Washington, "His Excellency." I read David Fraser's biography, "Frederick the Great." I read Virgina Rounding's "Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power." (No, there never was an actual Potemkin Village, and no, Catherine did not die as a result of having sex with a horse.) I read about half of Paul Douglas Lockhart's "The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army" (I should have bought it instead of reading it sporadically at Barnes and Nobles). I was even curious enough to want to know what Prussia was all about and read Christopher Clark's "Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947." I also read a small biography of the Duke of Wellington.

As I was reading these books, they talked about some very old governments that aren't on the map any more: Prussia, the United Provinces, the Ottoman Empire, the Marathas. And some governments that are still around but in greatly different form with greatly different borders: Great Britain, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Poland, Russia, and the USA. But thanks to playing the game, I knew where these countries were on the globe and what their continuing strategic objectives were that were shaping their relations with their neighbors.

This came to me from playing a campaign for each faction of Empire Total War. I learned that Great Britain was destined to become a great naval power and thereby a world power. The continental Europeans tended to be fighting amongst themselves so often that their strategic attention was monopolized by the continental landmass to the detriment of their navies. Britain's natural isolation by sea guaranteed that the Royal Navy would always be her main arm. And, as Rr. Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan was later to point out in his "The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1660-1783)," sea power is the key to world power.

Prussia was an upstart new nation consisting of the Duchy of Prussia (nearer to Poland, Sweden, and Russia) and the Margraviate of Brandenburg (nearer to France), and with great swaths of Poland between the two. Prussia's strategic goal is to avoid being eaten by the older, larger states around it. France wants a piece. Sweden wants a piece. Poland wants a piece. Russia wants a piece. And in particular, Austria (the Austro-Hungarian empire in embryo) wants a piece. And so the Prussians must scramble to survive. And thus Prussia becomes "not a country that has an army, but an army that has a country." They have the finest army in Europe. And at Valley Forge, Baron Steuben was later to transfer some of the "DNA" of that army to the nascent American army.

Russia's big strategic goal is to grab Istanbul (and the lands surrounding it) away from the Ottoman Empire so as to allow their ships to go from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, while also clearing the naval pathways from the Baltic Sea into the North Sea. Why? Trade. Russian has plenty of natural resources, but needs to import the goods needed for a more modern civilization. Overland, any old country can step on her trade lanes and impose tariffs. The sea is Russian's vital lifeline and future. Rr. Adm. Mahan again.

And so on and so forth. As I read these books, again and again I saw things that would have escaped me had I not played Empire Total War. Why was Frederick the Great so upset that Marie (soon-to-be-headless) Antoinette had married the heir to the throne of France? She was an Austrian Archduchess, and the marriage meant an alliance with France and Austria against Prussia. Why was Frederick the Great so interested in partitioning Poland? A smaller Poland meant a larger and more connected Prussia. Why did the American Marines land on "the shores of Tripoli?" Because the Barbary pirates had made sea trade through the Mediterranean extremely expensive and trade was the United States life-line to finished goods from Europe.. Rr. Adm. Mahan, yet again.

These are the connections that playing a game like Empire Total War allowed me to make. I could actually get inside the head of a European ruler and while reading a biography about him or her, mentally say "Yes, I understand why you did that." This is something different from stuffing your head full of old dates and old names, and old battles. This is the stuff of true education.

On a side note, Prussia, being a new kingdom in this period, gave me a glimpse into what a kingdom is in essence. In the modern age, we tend to think of the old kings and queens as being exalted persons of great power and long linage. The Sun King, Louis XIV, Catherine the Great, Czarina of all the Russias. Etc.

(but there are some amusing titles as well: Ethelred the Unready. English King, c. 968 – 23 April 1016. He lost a battle.)

But on reading the history of Prussia, I began to realize that these long-lived titles that evolved into great nations where all originally started by what can only be called entrepenuers. And entrepenuers of marriage in particular.

"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!" sayth the Bible (Isaiah 5:8) But that's exactly what these entrepenuers of marriage did.

They started out as minor nobility with set pieces of land and they intermarried until their descendents were handed down parcels of land big enough to be a duchy. (The Habsburg rulers of Austria in fact bragged about doing this. At one point their motto was "What others achieve by war, let you, happy Austria, achieve by marriage.")

With two duchy's, you could qualify for the title of king. Which is apparently what the first "King IN Prussia" managed to do. The first King IN Prussia (he settled for being a king IN Prussia instead of King OF Prussia so as not to alarm the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire - who happended to be the ruler of Austria) not only had a first name, Frederick, but a last name, Hohenzollern. Think of it. The Kingdom of Prussia was started by a guy named Fred Hohenzollern because he got permission to call himself "King IN Prussia."

Who's at the bottom of these other European kingdoms? Let's use a short hand of archetypes. Louie Bourbon? (France) Charlie Habsburg? (Austria), Gus Vasa (Sweden), Pete Romanov? (Russia). Could the whole of European history in the 1700's be envisioned as Fred Hohenzollern, Louie Bourbon, Charlie Habsburg, Gus Vasa, and Peter Romanov being put in a small, crowded backyard and commencing to have a great big poop-kicking party? I leave to you, my readers, to decide.

The Education that is Empire Total War (part 1)

Rome Total war, Medieval total war, and Empire total war give a very good thumbnail sketch of European history that can stimulate any sufficiently curious person to follow up with some selective (and entertaining) reading. This is something that Americans have needed for a very long time as they could do with some knowledge of the history of other continents. The continuity of European history has become most apparent to me as I've played through the Total War series.

Rome Total War tells the story of how the government of a mere city became the government of the entire land mass surrounding the Mediterranean Sea as the offices of the city were exported to the lands Rome conquered. "Consuls" became "proconsuls," "praetors" became "pro-praetors," and the honorific of "imperator" ("commander") gradually became the title "emperor." It tells of how the government of that city consisted of aristocratic families that constantly competed for positions within it, and of how they essentially bought off the lower classes through "bread and circuses" The Rome Total War expansion, The Barbarian Invasions, goes on to tell the story of how the empire in the west was felled by having a lot of steal-ables, while having lost the economic power to support a military strong enough to protect those steal-ables. They didn't have an Adam Smith back then to tell them how nations acquire and retain wealth. One thing they they tried was freezing everybody into their father's job. That became the birth of the serfs. People who were attached to given plots of land by law. This became the foundation stone of the medieval era that came later.

The Barbarian Invasions also tell the story of how the empire in the east lasted long enough for its destruction to help kick off the Renaissance as Greek refugees from the eastern empire brought Greek culture back to the attention of Western Europe.

With Medieval Total War, we see how the collapse of the Roman Empire gave birth to the kingdoms that gradually became the nations of modern Europe. With a little reading, we can see this in the titles of what became the ranks of peerage. As the Roman military collapsed, the Roman legions became smaller detachments of soldiers lead by a "leader" (In latin, "dux"). The title "dux" became our word for "duke." (In Italian this is duce'. Hence Mussolini was "Il Duce," "the leader') These leaders had subordinate officers called "companions" (in latin, "comes.") "Comes" became "comte" in French and "Count" in English. A Count was someone who ran and protected a "county" for a "Duke" (who ran and protected the larger whole, a "duchy"). An English "viscount" was a vice-count. Counties that were on the borders of a barbarian tribe were called "marches." Hence the French title marquis and the English titles, "marquess" (male) and "marchioness (female). There are German towns with "mark" at the end of their names that thereby denote that they were once in a march of the old empire. The word "prince" is from the the Latin word "princeps." In the old Roman republic, the princeps was the first citizen of the republic. He was the senator who spoke first in a meeting of the senate. In the transition to the empire, the title of princeps was taken over by the emperor, who found it useful to be the first to speak in the senate because it let the senators know which way the win was blowing in regards to what he wanted them to do. So the latin term "princeps" came to mean "ruler." Hence, the medieval expression "a prince of the realm." So, all those Europeans with these high sounding titles are in essence descendants of the rough hewed military types who kept chaos at bay when the Roman empire fell.

In the military chaos that followed the fall of Rome, the dukes were the most powerful military men on the scene. And there was a lot of competition among them for the spoils of Europe. With a weak economy, the solution for creating large armies was a system of payments and obligations between superiors and subordinates. The man above promised to give lands and resources (serfs!) to the man below, in return for the man below providing management and protection to the serfs, and in return for providing soldiers when the man above needed to go to war. The man below was the vassal, the man above, his liege lord (the origin of the term "land lord.") . This, in essence, was the Feudal system. As groups of dukes banded together to to protect themselves from other bands of dukes or barbarian invaders, the need was felt to have one of their number speak for them all. So the dukes elected one of their number - usually the weakest - to be the nominal king of their group. Thus did the first kingdoms of Europe come into being.

And thus began the struggle of the kings to suppress their dukes and establish the primacy of their own power. In France, this process was successful and ended in the absolutism of the later French kings who ruled until the French revolution. The success of the Sun King of France resulted in much emulation in Continental Europe. In England, there were an number of detours, one of which was the Magna Charta. These detours ended with England becoming a constitutional monarchy, pretty much in opposition to the absolute sovereigns of the continent.

Between Medieval Total War and Empire Total War is the story of how the Renaissance engendered the Protestant Reformation, and how the Protestant Reformation engendered the Catholic counter-reformation. Wars of religion were fought that were so horrific that both royal hierarchy and religious hierarchy became discredited amongst the new class of "savants." This intellectual class had proceeded apace with the initial impetus of the Renaissance. Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" is about this period. Art and science flourished and a new concept of man was formed. The Enlightenment begins, and Empire Total War is about this event.

Now days, we in America give tributes to the veterans of our wars by saying "freedom is not free." In one sense that is true. At the cost of their lives or limbs, our soldiers have allowed our freedoms to continue. "Freedom is not free" because they have paid for it. But if you really believe that "freedom is not free" then you are buying into the feudal argument that freedom ultimately comes from a king (essentially a military man) who can grant or withhold it as he wills. Louis XIV used to have his cannons stamped with a Latin phrase that meant "the final argument of kings." The foundation of the Enlightenment was the realization that freedom is indeed free. Men are born free and only consent to give up some of their freedoms when those freedoms impinge on another's. The key thing the Enlightenment philosophers realized was that the Feudal system that gave rise to royalty and aristocracy was, in essence, a protection racket. The king and his vassals promised you ( at the very minimum) the protection of your life in return for everything you thought you owned. The 1700's was about the people of Europe and the Americas waking up to what feudalism really was and deciding they'd really rather try something else instead.

(To be continued)