Calradian Demographic History Summarised — Expanded Map, Speculation, and Ideas

[icecream22]

Map​

Info​

• Within the red borders is the official map in Bannerlord, outside of that is the full map from the game files I found on Reddit.
• The arrows depict rough migration paths of the peoples of Calradia, red arrows mean ancient (>2 KYA), orange arrows mean not-so-recent (>1 KYA), yellow arrows mean recent (<1 KYA), and magenta arrows depicts Calradian expansion.
• All text within apostrophes either mean speculation on real-life inspirations for an ethnic group or migration, or inspiration ideas for new people group if it is in italics, which is further divided by cyan (as peoples that may or may not still exist) and orange (peoples who are definitely extinct or assimilated)
• The location of the text is based on speculation on their pre-imperial locations
• Finally, this map builds on the info aggregated by dphilostrate, five bucks, and Estus.

Discussion​

• Estus places the Temetians at the lower part of that Nile-looking river, and indeed "Temetian" just sounds like "Kemetian" (the native ancient Egyptian name for their land), but I said f*ck it where are the Mesopotamians so I just placed them in that Tigris-Euphrates looking region and was too lazy to include possibility A and B like I did for the proto-Vlandians and Calradians.​
• The names of Khuzait settlements and units and whatnot in Bannerlord are mostly Mongolian, including the suffix "-it", despite the actual supposed counterpart of the Mongols (The Great Horde) coming west only in the 1200s AE, speaking of which "AE" (After Empire) and "BE" (Before Empire) conveniently corresponds well with the BCE and CE of our world. Anyways, I guess the Mongolian Khuzait names could just be a weird quirk of M&B lore. I do notice the pattern of Turks being more archaic and Mongols being more modern in the trivial fact learned from Bannerlord that the Khuzaits are settled (just like the Mongols slowly did in our timeline) but it wasn't always this way, and also the Iltanlar being older migrants to the region and using more Turkic-esque lemmas like its suffix "-lar". I imagine the Iltanlar being descended from the first "Asiatic" migrants to the region replacing the Scythians, just like the Oghuric peoples of our timeline. The second part of the name "Baltakhand", "khand", just sounds like a variation of "kand" which meant "city" in the historic East Iranian languages of our world, so that might have been adopted from the counterpart of Scythians in Calradia into the Iltanlar diction. For Chaikand it might have been taken from the counterpart of Sogdians in Calradia, plus its settled inhabitants might still be majourity East Iranian-esque, just like the majour cities of Transoxiana in our world during the Middle Ages. "Ortongard" is completely weird and "gard" is from Norse, or it might be a fictional Khuzait word in Calradia.​
• The personal names of the Vlandians are very obviously Germanic-inspired, specifically Frankish, while the clan and placenames seem to be chiefly French-inspired. Weird, one would expect the clan and given names of the nobles to be Germanic and only the placenames and names of the notables/commoners to be Romance-inspired like it was in our timeline. In the game, it is said that the Vlandians came from the "west", but there doesn't seem to be any significant landmass west of current Vlandia other than those Azores-looking islands, and I think it makes more sense for the Vlandians and Norse to be related as they are both Germanic-inspired, so I added two possibilities for their origin.​
• The same is for Calradians, the likelihood of them originated in that westernmost peninsular region in the Pelassic sea or the one to the east of it is about the same so I added two possibilities as well.​
• The personal names of the Sturgians are a mix of obvious Norse-esque and Slavic-esque, with the slight occurence of Turkic-esque (eg. "Temyr") and Baltic-esque (eg. "Adalindis"). There are also some Romance-derived names like "Magna" which I assume to be traces of Imperial colonisation. The Slavicness versus Germanicness of the Sturgian placenames don't seem to form any directional pattern so I assume it must either be the laziness of the game designers or due to some sort of Vanni countermigration to the west.​
• So yeah, that's all I have to muster for now, if anyone has any comments or suggestions please make a reply.​

 

[JunKeteer]

I'm leaning on the laziness theory. Be nice if that 1/4 of the current game gets completed...they can barely string together more than a paragraph of lore for each one as is.