
                           The 4 Sea Republics
                       a Civilization II scenario
                                   by
                                Pimpinone


INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS:

1) goto your Civ2 directory
2) make a backup copy of the original rules.txt and city.txt files
3) unzip 4searep.zip in the Civ2 directory
4) copy 4searules.txt to rules.txt and 4seacity.txt to city.txt
5) run Civ2 and load the 4searep scenario

BACKGROUND:

One of the reason, arguably the most important one, why Spain and
Portugal sponsored Columbus expedition and later ones to find a west 
route to the Indies was the trade monopoly held on the known East Route 
by the Italian maritime city-states. First Amalfi then Pisa and finally
Genoa and Venice fluorished in the first half of the millenium
by controlling trade, founding colonies and marketplaces, imposing
customs and figthing each other out in large scale naval battles.
Amalfi peaked first, as early as the ninth and tenth century, and
was a cosmopolite center of culture where merchants from all over
the Mediterraneum converged. The maritime code-of-law "Tavola
Amalfitana" developed there was to be the reference for several
hundreds years. Ultimately, however, they quickly declined in
importance under the pressure of the Normans from Sicily. At one
point they allied with the Pisans but were betrayed and sacked.
Their successive history fades in the dominance of the Duchy of
Salerno and in the general continuos change of power the Italian
peninsula was undergoing. The Pisans, in turn, were powerful in
the early millenium and urbane, if you take Dante's portrait of
their leader, Conte Ugolino della Gherardesca, as an cannibal of
his own sons with some skeptiscism. Dante had reasons to be bitter,
since his hometown, Florence, was a long harsh rival of Pisa for
mainland control. While guarding from the newcomer Florence, Pisa
had also to fight in a tourbillion of alliance and vendettas with
the nearby Lucca and Siena. But Pisa's power of the sea was to come
to an end because of the raging war with Genoa which culminated
in the Genoese victory at Meloria in 1284, under the admiral Benedetto
Zaccaria, and, eventually, because of the unceasing action of the river 
Arno, on which Pisa was built, that ultimately led to the disappereance
of the port (Pisa now lays several dozen miles from the sea).
Genoa and Venice emerged eventually as the leading maritime powers
of the time. And they fought each other out to the end. Their main
battlefield were the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea, where they 
alternated in Byzantium's favour, which was in bad need of naval
assistance, which provided them the key to the eastern markets. In the 
continuos shifting of moods and interests, Genoa eventually emerged as 
Byzantium favourite trade partner and naval allied, while Venice was 
playing its cards in the World politics of the Crusades time. At a 
certain point, Crusaders ferried and decisively lead by the Venetian 
blind Doge Eugenio Dandolo managed to conquer Constantinople itself and 
set up their own latin Emperor figurehead, which lasted half a century.
Meanwhile, Genoa and Venice were fighting each other out in home
waters as well, and a certain point Genoa had the best by winning
at Curzola and later at Galata. In this time among the prisoners in
Genoa's dungeons was a certain Marco Polo, who wrote the memoirs of 
his China trips while under custody and the resulting book "Il Milione"
was an extra trigger to the East Route run. Later on, however,
Venice inflicted a serious naval defeat to the Genoese at Chioggia,
near Venice, where the Genoese were trying to set up a colony in
a bold attempt to blockade Venice in its own laguna. Moreover, at
the end of the 15th century, the genoese colony of Caffa in the Black
Sea was contagied with plague by the sieging Mongols (the Mongol leader
had the nice idea to catapult the dead body of his own comrades into
the Genoese city) and from there the Black Death spread over to
Byzantium, to Genoa itself and from there to France, England and
the rest of Europe. These setbacks and internal political struggles
led to the definitive decline of Genoa as a sea power toward the
end of the 16th century, further paralized by the discovery by one
of their own sons, Cristoforo Colombo, of the West Indies as a final
irony. Venice, on the other hand, lasted much longer as an effective
force in the Mediterraneum, thanks also to their stable political system 
and their ability in the international diplomacy game. Though no longer 
a dominant merchant power, the Venice Republic lasted till it was 
eventually conquered by Napoleon and annexed by him to the rest of his, 
short lived, Italian Kingdom. At the same time Napoleon easily 
conquered the remnant of the powerless Genoese Republic (which had just 
sold its last colony, Corsica, to France an year before Napoleon was 
born in Ajaccio). The era of the Sea Republics practically ended at the 
end of the 15th century, at the same time as when Byzantium, more and 
more impoverished and demoralized for the past five hundred years by
the continuos struggles with Muslims, Bulgarian and Serbs, not to
speak of Crusaders and Sea Republics, finally was conquered by
the Othman leader Mehmet II. The only allied Byzantium had in the
final hours was a Genoese, Giovanni Giustiniani, and his small fleet
and one thousand companions. Giustiniani died together with
the last Emperor of the Greeks, Constantine Dragases. 
The East Route was closed forever.

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Pete Alwin for his map of the Mediterraneum,
that I found in the public domain, without which this scenario
would never have been developed.

KNOWN BUGS

For some reason the list of Byzantine cities in 4seacity.txt is
not used by the game. I could not figure out why that is happening. 
