Istria, from Trieste to Fiume

 

At last, at an end to sea hexes for a while. I am grateful they're behind me.

Dalmatia and Kordun are Venetian, and as such grow rich upon Adriatic trade both with Italy and from throughout the Mediterranean. Trieste is a gigantic market port, with more than a hundred thousand people, while Fiume is the centre of a rich centralised district; note the manner in which the roads surrounding Fiume have little connection with the outside, so that virtually everything made or grown or dug out in this part of the world passes through Venetian hands.

Trieste is not Venetian; it is a Free City connected to the Hapsburgs, so that it's a commercial and political irritant to Venice. In setting terms, as a rival port, Trieste permits Hapsburg money to flow throughout the Mediterranean into the hands of Venice's enemies, particularly Genoa and even the Ottomans, byt a strange back door. On land, the Hapsburgs are the enemy of the Ottoman Empire; but at sea, where the Ottomans are yet a thorn in Venice's side (despite their loss at Lepanto in 1571), it serves Hapburg interests (through the mask of Free Trieste) to keep the Turks a bit fluid, as it were. This creates a double stalemate; the Ottomans don't push too hard against Hungary-Austria on land, and the Hapsburgs don't bother them at sea.

The islands are strategically valuable to Fiume because they control movement through the Kvarner, the strait between the Adriatic and that port. Each has supply stations, pirate refuges, fishing grounds, smuggling bases and places where ships wait for weather or news. A Venetian captain, a Habsburg patrol, an Uskok boat and an Ottoman courier could all be operating in the same waters without anyone having full control.

At the same time, refugees are moving west and north from Ottoman pressure: Slavs, Croats, Vlachs, soldiers’ families, priests, bandits, deserters and displaced peasants. Some are settled deliberately by Habsburg authorities as armed frontier populations to harry the Venetians. Some are unwanted by towns that fear disease, famine or spies. If a party meets one of these groups, it raises the question: who is a refugee, who is a raider, which is a Venetian mercenary group, which are bandits in the pay of Trieste. It's a very messy part of the world, especially with all that uninhabited forest atop karst, which is filled with caves and therefore, dungeons.

From here I continue on across a corner of Italy and into Austria... with the first mapping of the Alps.