GENERAL INFO
CONSTANTINOPLE. ISTANBUL. KONSTANTINOUPOLIS. قسطنطینیه.
KOSTANTINIYYE
Glory of Byzantium;
Heart of the Ottoman Empire;
Sacked by the British;
Now the greatest free city in either East or West, governed by Council with representatives of the Great Powers: the British, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.
A city of religious tolerance, where Jews, Muslims, Eastern and Western Christians have equal rights.
(A man with no god is a man with no soul, and a man with no soul is no man at all; and you may do what you will with him - Edicts of the City of Kostantiniyye)
A city of political stability, hardwon and proudly protected.
(Any man, woman or eunuch who plots against the City is guilty of treachery, and their life is forfeit.)
In a world where:
There was no Protestant Reformation, but there was an
Industrial Revolution - in the seventeenth century, giving rise to the
Age of Steam;
Monogamy is unusual, triadic marriage is common and pederasty and corerasty are enshrined in law;
Byzantium lost Constantinople to the Ottomans, but its Empire never fell;
The British Empire controls much of the continent called New England, and protects the throne of the
Pope in the West, who sits in New York, while the
Pope in the East now sits at Alexandria after the Byzantines lost Konstantinopoulis;
The British in their turn took Istanbul from the Ottomans, but lost Constantinople; and a
Great Peace was made that enshrined Kostantiniyye forever more as a free city.
(Until someone takes it back.)
I don't want to get toooo bogged down in history, and I think in a way game play can help develop that organically, so I will just provide a rough sort of sketch. Then there are information posts on specific areas that you might want to think about.
As I explain in more depth in another post, there was (as in our world) a major Schism within the Church that resulted in the Eastern and Western Churches. The Eastern Church (which is a more cohesive unit than Eastern Orthodox churches in our world) has become and remained very powerful because it is the official religion of the Byzantine Empire. For general purposes I think we'll mostly say the history of the Empire bears a strong resemblance to what happened in our world (Wikipedia gives quite a good basic intro here). But unlike in our world, the Byzantine Empire does not start to decline in the late 12th century -Andronikos I Komemnos continues his reign in the balanced way it started and he's not overthrown. Furthermore, the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade do not attack Constantinople in 1204 and so it does not fall. So the city is not a weakened shadow of its former self when the Ottomans are rising in power as it was in our world.
The Ottoman Empire also has a similar background history. In our world, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 is what really cements their position. It's a bit more complex in this world. Konstantinopoulis does eventually fall to the Ottomans, who rename it Istanbul, but the Byzantine position is not so weakened that they accept Ottoman incursions into their territory. There are quite a lot of bloody conflicts. Eventually the Ottomans, having made some gains from the Byzantines, instead turn their interests to Western and Southern Europe. In particular, their wholesale conquest of Portugal means that the Portugese Empire of the New World falls under Ottoman control in the late sixteenth century. The Battle of Lepanto is a decisive victory for the Ottomans, and for a long time after this it is the Ottomans who are the great naval power in the world.
This changes with the rise of the British Empire. In the seventeenth century, seeing the domination of the waters by the Ottomans, and with technological developments (see section on science and technology), the British (which officially is the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland and Normandy) - with the Dutch as their allies - make a concerted effort to develop their naval power. By the early 18th century, the British have developed ocean-going steamliners and have comprehensively settled North America, which in this world is called New England. The Dutch have a number of colonies in this new continent, but the British are dominant. Mexico lies as an uneasy zone between the Ottoman Empire in South America and the British in the North. For some years the British were content to focus their domination on their new colonies, but with their new economic might they turned their attention back to the Old World. The mid-eighteenth century saw a period of stagnation in the Ottoman Empire, as well as revolts within a number of its member states against the Empire. The British took tactical advantage of this and, using their new naval advantages, conquered Istanbul from the sea and named it Constantinople. Thirty years later, though, the Ottomans tried to take it back. A bloody siege lasted a year until the Byzantines helped the two powers to broker a deal, by which it was decided that the newly named Kostantiniyye should be a Free City governed by all three powers, and so it has been for the past 75 years. Peaceful on the surface, there are of course lots of factional interests and everyone wants control of the city.
The overall aim of the game is to take Kostantiniyye. This could mean taking it back for one of the imperial powers, or overthrowing imperial control, perhaps by taking advantage of help from states not within the three major empires... Lots of options, lots of scheming. Lots of fun, hopefully.
FURTHER INFO:
Sex, marriage, gender
Politics, law, admin
Technology, science, magic
Religion and culture
Geography and economy