Earth, c.1200
Charlemagne's empire endured and continued. This was achieved by granting major fiefs only to the Imperial princes, i.e the sons and grandsons of the Emperor. For example, the Crown Prince holds the title of King of Italy, and thus reigns over Italy as his personal fief; the Emperor's second son is King of Aquitaine; the Crown Prince is the King of the Saxons. And so on. These fiefs are all legally a part of the Frankish Kingdom and estates of the Holy Roman Empire.
Imperial military endeavours in northern Spain yielded good results; a Visigoth king was restored in Barcelona. They successfully supported Visigothic campaigns in Asturias and Gallaecia, and aided Portuguese rebels in western Hispania. The on-and-off Gallaecian Wars between the Visigoths and Gallaecia sapped men and money from both Kingdoms.
In the late 1000s, the Byzantine Emperor requested the aid of the West to push back Arab and Saracen incursions. The Western Empire responded with a great show of force, and established several puppet kingdoms in the east, initially just in the Levant, but by 1129, they had conquered Sinai and Egypt as well. The Caliphate collapsed by this time, and had splintered into several warring Emirates and Sultanates. The Arab Caliphate was reduced to a small portion of the Arabian Peninsula. In Persia, the old civilization re-established itself in power, and Zoroastrianism once again became the official state religion, although now it had a significant Islamic influence.
However, in 1198, the Byzantines were also losing power. Angered by food shortages and bad harvests, a burgher and peasant revolt began in Constantinople which turned into a large-scale revolution in Greece against the nobility and the Emperor, who fled into central Anatolia. Encouraged by this, other large rebellions were perpetrated by Bulgars and Serbs, long oppressed by the Byzantine rulers.
To the north, the Norsemen had maintained their realms and native faith against Frankish incursion. However, as Daneland, Norway, and Sweden centralized into Kingdoms, many Norse settlers fled west, to the isles in the far-off Atlantic Ocean, seeking freedom from the kings. They established the first large-scale state with a republican system of government since the time of the Roman Republic. They developed complex system of government based around a federal structure, with each province, called a
Free State, having their own popularly-elected legislative assembly, called a
Statsthing, which chose that state's representative for the nationwide unicameral legislative council, called the
Althing, and elected the
Forseti, who presided over the council, acting as head of state and head of government. The Norse Commonwealth spread into North America, where they encountered native tribes. Although initially suspicious of the newcomers, the natives came to amicable terms with the Norse, and they formed long-standing economic alliances. The Iroquois Confederacy was established in the 1140s by a series of inter-tribal councils, with mediation by the Norse Commonwealth. Nearby, however, conflict started to brew between puppet states of the Iroquois Confederacy and the growing power that was the Cherokee Empire.