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"Lucius, procurator of the commonwealth, to Arthur, king of Britain, according to his desert. The insolence of your tyranny is what fills me with the highest admiration, and the injuries you have done to Rome still increase my wonder. But it is provoking to reflect, that you are grown so much above yourself, as wilfully to avoid seeing this: nor do you consider what it is to have offended by unjust deeds a Senate, to whom you cannot be ignorant the whole world owes vasselage. For the tribute of Britain, which the senate had enjoined you to pay, and which used to be paid to the Roman emperors successively from the time of Julius Caesar, you have had the presumption to withold, in contempt of their imperial authority. You have seized the province of the Allobroges, and all the islands of the ocean, whose kings, while the Roman power prevailed in those parts, paid tribute to our ancestors. And because the senate have decreed to demand justice of you for such repeated injuries, I command you to appear at Rome before the middle of August the next year, there to make satisfaction to your masters, and undergo such sentence as they shall in justice pass upon you. Which if you refuse to do, I shall come to you, and endeavour to recover with my sword, what you in your madness have robbed us of."

"But to return to the history; when the inhuman tyrant, with many thousands of his Africans, had made a devastation almost over the whole island, he yielded up the greater part of it, called Loegria, to the Saxons ... therefore the remainder of the Britons retired into the western parts of the kingdom, that is, Cornwall and Wales; from whence they continally made frequent and fierce interruptions upon the enemy."

- A totally and indisputably accurate work of history, Geoffrey of Monmouth

I produced this map for AlternateHistory.com, but wasn't quite sure if it was the right place for it, as this is quite obviously an accurate map of 6th century Europe. After all, I based this on Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History Of The Kings of Britain, accepted well into the 16th century as a scholarly work of history. And who could blame them, as it features such well-known historical polities and events as, er, British Iceland, British Sweden, Ireland rendered forever uninhabitable via bombardment by an African warfleet, the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire before the loss of Rome, and King Arthur pulling a Hannibal and crossing the Alps. Yes, it's the original Britwank, but interestingly Geoffrey actually turns it into a dystopian crapsack scenario where civilisation falls and all hope for Britain is lost forever, thanks to those terrible Anglo-Saxons. You wonder how he's going to turn that around to bridge the gap between this scenario and everyday life in the 12th century - but that's the end of the book. Quite depressing as alternate history, utterly baffling as history.

Anyway, this depicts the Monmouthverse Empire of Britain at its height, with its vassal-kings and occupied Italy. It's heavily influenced by a short story I produced at Uni called 'I Am Arthur', which accepts the broad outlines of THOTKOB but adds in some ancient Greenlandic supertech for good measure. This map takes a much straighter view of the source material, along with an inset box showing Mordred's proposed Faustian pact with the (Anglo-)Saxons.

Description
"Lucius, procurator of the commonwealth, to Arthur, king of Britain, according to his desert. The insolence of your tyranny is what fills me with the highest admiration, and the injuries you have done to Rome still increase my wonder. But it is provoking to reflect, that you are grown so much above yourself, as wilfully to avoid seeing this: nor do you consider what it is to have offended by unjust deeds a Senate, to whom you cannot be ignorant the whole world owes vasselage. For the tribute of Britain, which the senate had enjoined you to pay, and which used to be paid to the Roman emperors successively from the time of Julius Caesar, you have had the presumption to withold, in contempt of their imperial authority. You have seized the province of the Allobroges, and all the islands of the ocean, whose kings, while the Roman power prevailed in those parts, paid tribute to our ancestors. And because the senate have decreed to demand justice of you for such repeated injuries, I command you to appear at Rome before the middle of August the next year, there to make satisfaction to your masters, and undergo such sentence as they shall in justice pass upon you. Which if you refuse to do, I shall come to you, and endeavour to recover with my sword, what you in your madness have robbed us of."

"But to return to the history; when the inhuman tyrant, with many thousands of his Africans, had made a devastation almost over the whole island, he yielded up the greater part of it, called Loegria, to the Saxons ... therefore the remainder of the Britons retired into the western parts of the kingdom, that is, Cornwall and Wales; from whence they continally made frequent and fierce interruptions upon the enemy."

- A totally and indisputably accurate work of history, Geoffrey of Monmouth

I produced this map for AlternateHistory.com, but wasn't quite sure if it was the right place for it, as this is quite obviously an accurate map of 6th century Europe. After all, I based this on Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History Of The Kings of Britain, accepted well into the 16th century as a scholarly work of history. And who could blame them, as it features such well-known historical polities and events as, er, British Iceland, British Sweden, Ireland rendered forever uninhabitable via bombardment by an African warfleet, the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire before the loss of Rome, and King Arthur pulling a Hannibal and crossing the Alps. Yes, it's the original Britwank, but interestingly Geoffrey actually turns it into a dystopian crapsack scenario where civilisation falls and all hope for Britain is lost forever, thanks to those terrible Anglo-Saxons. You wonder how he's going to turn that around to bridge the gap between this scenario and everyday life in the 12th century - but that's the end of the book. Quite depressing as alternate history, utterly baffling as history.

Anyway, this depicts the Monmouthverse Empire of Britain at its height, with its vassal-kings and occupied Italy. It's heavily influenced by a short story I produced at Uni called 'I Am Arthur', which accepts the broad outlines of THOTKOB but adds in some ancient Greenlandic supertech for good measure. This map takes a much straighter view of the source material, along with an inset box showing Mordred's proposed Faustian pact with the (Anglo-)Saxons.