1400
The world before the world everyone knows — plague scars still fresh, empires still young.
As a scenario, it functions as an alternate historical lens: the same core loop of nation management, diplomacy, warfare, and exploration, but with a different distribution of power, a different set of active crises, and a longer runway before the well-known milestones of the 15th and 16th centuries.
- Franchise
- Europa Universalis (Paradox Interactive)
- Genre
- Grand strategy / turn-based
- Developer (franchise)
- Paradox Development Studio
- Publisher
- Paradox Interactive
Lore & Background
Europe's population has not recovered; labor scarcity has emboldened surviving peasants while simultaneously weakening the fiscal base of the great crowns. The Ottoman Beylik has already taken Bursa and is pressing toward Constantinople, which still stands as the last great Byzantine capital. In the Indian Ocean, the Ming treasure fleets of Zheng He are in the process of their voyages, projecting Chinese naval power across the Malacca Strait and into the Swahili coast. The Delhi Sultanate is fragmented, the Mamluk sultanate in Cairo is aging, and the Timurid successor states are still consolidating in Persia and Central Asia. The Habsburgs are not yet the sprawling dynastic colossus they will become. The Portuguese are still a small Iberian kingdom on the Atlantic fringe, not yet on the cusp of the Age of Discovery. The Ottoman state is a rising power rather than an established empire. The player's strategic calculus is therefore different: the crises are earlier, the diplomatic web is looser, and the window for reshaping the continental order is wider but less structured. The scenario's narrative weight comes from the sense of a world in transition. The old medieval order is not yet fully dead, but the new early-modern order is not yet born.
In Their Own Story
A minor Hungarian lord, his household thinned by a fever that still walks the villages, rides south toward the border where Ottoman raiders have been probing for three seasons. His scribe, a young man who learned his letters in a Benedictine scriptorium that no longer has the income to maintain its library, unrolls a map that is more hope than cartography. The lord traces a line from Buda to a fortress that changed hands twice last year. "We will not hold it this time," the scribe says quietly. The lord does not answer. He is already thinking about the grain stores, the winter pay, the letter he must write to the Polish crown asking for a subsidy that will not come. Somewhere to the east, a Timurid general is burying a rival's banner in the steppe. Somewhere to the west, a Portuguese monk is copying a Ptolemy by candlelight in a cell that smells of damp wool. The world is very large, and very few of its pieces are where they will be in forty years. The lord folds the map, mounts his horse, and rides into the grey.
Reader's Guide
Key nations include the Ottoman Beylik (pressing toward Constantinople), the Byzantine Empire (reduced to a rump state around the capital), the various Italian city-states and the Papal States, the fragmented kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, the Habsburg and Trastámara dynasties in their earlier configurations, the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, the Delhi Sultanate, the Ming Dynasty, and the various successor states of the Timurid realm. The narrative arc centers on the consolidation of power in a world where no single hegemon yet dominates. Major player decisions include whether to support or resist Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, how to manage the fragmented Italian peninsula before the great dynastic wars, whether to invest in early naval development (particularly relevant for Iberian and Italian players), and how to position oneself in the Indian Ocean trade network before the Portuguese and others begin their systematic exploration. Branching paths diverge sharply based on early diplomatic alignments: a player who backs the Ottomans gains Balkan territory but faces a powerful neighbor; a player who resists them may secure a defensive alliance with Byzantium or the Mamluks but risks overextension. In the East, the Ming court's maritime policy is a wildcard that can reshape Indian Ocean trade for a generation. The real historical outcome this scenario reflects is the gradual consolidation of the early-modern state system: Ottoman dominance of the eastern Mediterranean, the rise of the Habsburgs, the opening of the Atlantic Age of Discovery, and the slow erosion of the Mongol successor states.
More in Scenarios & Historical Events
Elsewhere in the Europa Universalis universe
Spotted an error? Know more?
This is a living reference — every entry is fact-audited, and reader corrections feed straight into our audit queue. Suggest an edit · See this site's audit record