The Nomad Empires or Traction Empires were a number of governments in Europe in the Black Centuries and the first half of the Traction Era.
History[]
Origins[]
Initially, these nomadic societies rose when Europe was still a maze of volcanoes and weather was unpredictable due to the mass destruction and environmental disruption of the Sixty Minute War. Such natural disasters prompted many groups to begin living a nomadic lifestyle. Populations which adopted this way fo life and took it to an extreme included the Arkhangelsk from Russia, the Novaya-Kazakh from Kazakhstan and the Suomi from Finland, though of course they quickly left their former homelands behind. During the following centuries many wars were fought between the various nomad groups.
Initially, these groups lived just as nomads had for centuries before, simply building collapsible shelters and carrying them from place to place. Eventually, slaves and draft animals began to be used to drag more rigid houses across the ground. Some of these mobile habitats used primitive tracklaying systems with pulleys and cranes to move a succession of logs underneath them and roll along on top. Around 1 TE the Nomads began converting to wheeled and tracked vehicles powered by steam, internal combustion, and slave-driven engines, leading to the dawn of the Traction Era. They began building bigger and more powerful vehicles, employing fleets of Landships and Traction Fortresses in their wars, though their overall scope was reduced outside of the North as the rest of Europe returned to a static existence.
Middle and later Traction Era[]
Two of the most powerful Nomad factions, the Arkhangelsk and the Movement, were still powerful enough to wage a mass war with one another in the late 400s to early 500s TE, but this period would prove to be the end of their long history. When Movement Land Admiral Nicola Quercus took his forces south to England he turned against his nomad allies in his effort to convert London into a mobile habitat of unprecedented scale. His creation destroyed the combined Movement and Arkhangelsk armies arrayed against it.
The other Nomad Empires were ground down by the following decades of war against the new Traction Cities, the static nations and city-states and eventually the Zagwan invasion of Europe; the rise of Municipal Darwinism may have been the final nail in the coffin, as by the end of the Third Traction Boom they had been completely supplanted by the Traction Cities. However some of their cultural legacy persisted into the late Traction Era in cities such as Arkangel, bearing the bastardised name of the Arkhangelsk who founded it, and Wagenhafn.