Today we're continuing our round of previews for the upcoming patch for the Divergences of Darkness mod for Victoria II. Last time we talked about Hungary's efforts to modernise and centralise, today we're going to take a look at the policy of the young state towards its linguistic and cultural minorities.
If you reconquer Croatia, on which you can gain cores on after recovering the Crown of St. Stephen earlier in the game, you will increase significantly the number of non-Magyars in Hungary. This will lead to a debate within the Hungarian ruling class: should Hungary become a nation of nations, at the risk of losing the preeminent position of the Magyar, or should the minorities be forced to Magyarise?
Choosing to follow the first option, the integrationalist path, will allow you to eventually accept the various minorities within your nation. One of these minorities is, of course, the Croats themselves.
Another group are the Transylvanian Saxons, the descendents of military settlers that colonised the region under the auspices of the Hungarian Crown in the XIII Century. The Saxons have kept their privileges in their allotted territory, the Königsboden, to the present day, including some prerogatives which have caused ethnic tension with the Romanian population of the region. You have the chance to solve this issue by forcing the Concivilität, that is, the granting of citizenship to all inhabitants of the Königsboden and the removal of restrictions for non-Saxons to own property.
After the Concivilität has been pushed through, the Saxons can be integrated at a later date.
Finally you can also integrate the Kunok. The Kunok are the descendents of muslim Slavs settled by the Ottomans in Hungary to establish some resemblance of control over this heavily-contested frontier. Although long-since having adopted the Magyar language, their sense of separate identity has remained, and they have reclaimed the slur that was directed to them by Christian Magyars: Kunok, Magyar for Cuman.
If you choose the Magyarisation path you will be able to target the different minorities for assimilation, ignoring cultural cores, at the cost of infamy and militancy. If you conquered Northern Serbia at the beggining at the game, prompted by the event that allows you to jump on the weakened Ottomans, you'll be able to Magyarise serbia and send some settlers to the territory corresponding to the Medieval fiefdom of Macsó.
The Kunok in the Kunsag and the Romanians living within Transylvania can also be targeted.
The Saxons can also be targeted, although this move is guaranteed to cause conflict either within Hungary or with your neighbours.
If you choose to Magyarise the Saxons, and did not crack down hard on the Szekely earlier in the game, a diplomatic incident will break out with a German neighbour (either the Danubian Confederation or, if it exists, Germany itself). If the conflict escalates, war will break out to free the Saxons from your rule. If you did crack down hard on the Szekelys, and also Magyarised the Saxons, you will have created the conditions for a rebellion in Transylvania, uniting the three nations, Magyar, Szekely and Saxon, in opposition to the central government.
The Transylvanian Rebellion opens up an additional opportunity for the player: if you choose to switch to Transylvania and fight out the war against Hungary, you will be able to play as a state that accepts Magyar and Saxon and also can eventually integrate Romanians. The easiest way to do so is during the war, if after a year of conflict you haven't been able to evict the Honved from the territory of the Principality.
Alternatively, after the war with some tech the Romanians can be integrated as well.
Once you do so, a decision becomes available to from Transcarpathia, effectively a Hungarian-Romanian with cores on both Hungary proper and Romania.
Stay tuned for more dev diaries as we gear up for release of the upcoming patch later on in this month. Find the mod here:
Looks very interesting!