Stub page. Core concept, name, and founding logic are the author's own worldbuilding, developed across three sessions in 2023 (not proposed by GPT — see Thaer's "Post-Yawning blocs" section for the full provenance breakdown). Capital, named leadership, and internal politics are deliberately left open for future development.
Catholic Union
- Theopire
- Catholic Union
- Core
- Dreikronerreich (Austria, Spain, Lombardy–Venetia)
- Constituent kingdoms
- Censer of Vigils (Tuscany), Habsburg–Este (Modena), French Concessions (Parma, Two Sicilies, Netherlands), Papal States, Sardinia–Piedmont, France, Portugal
- Real colonial/native reach
- Angola, Portuguese East Africa, Kingdom of Kongo, Goa, Philippines
One of the four Post-Yawning theological empires. After 1705, the Catholic Church transformed from a religious institution into a full political-military Empire of constituent kingdoms — bishops and cardinals sitting alongside kings as real power brokers, with the Church itself fielding standing armies.
Core territory (per the Thaer Empire Map): France, Spain, Portugal, Italy/the Papal States, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Royal Hungary.
The clearest concrete example of how this plays out: the War-Papa role described on Gift I's page — a wartime supreme commander the Papal State activates in crisis. That a Paladin can have "Church-militant commander" as an actual career track only makes sense because the Catholic Church is a literal empire here, not just a religious authority.
Open
- No capital, named Pope/ruler, or internal court structure yet.
- Relationship to neutral Vienna specifically (Vienna sits inside what was historically Habsburg/Catholic territory) — unaddressed.
- Internal cohesion: unlike Orthodoxy's flagged Greek/Russian tension or Protestantism's looser confederacy structure, the Catholic Union's single-hierarchy nature (one Church, one Rome) makes it the most structurally unified of the four blocs by default — worth deciding whether that's played straight or complicated later.