papal states



venice




sicily


milan


france


england


normans


denmark


egypt



aztecs


hre


saxons


byzantium


scotland



mongols


timurids


turks



portugal



poland



spain


moors


russia


hungary





slave - (NB other names can be used depending on the slave character's subfaction)

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Where are all these names from? From the game? Or is it a list you have collected. Some of the Danish names confuse me a bit like "of Lokken" which I guess means af Løkken, but Løkken wasn't founded untill 1678.

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I want text files, too

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Thats not only for danish names, well at least doesnt surprise me that it concerns the whole list : as I said in another post regarding french faction, lots of names arent even french and most arent medieval. As I already worked on this in MTW (the modlet which never got finished due to RTW), I've planned a minor modification for several factions based on these previous files and obviously some enhancements. Since I'm french and working in the medieval era domain, its really easy for me to gather a good acurate list for France in a few hours. Ideally a group of people could be used to rework this area pretty fast and even allow other mods to use it as a base. I doubt they'd want to put a lot of effort just to end up with french kings named Aleaume, Garnot or Bureau (that means desk lol !). Simply kills the ambiance for me.

Well if anyone is interested, in other case I'll simply complete what I did for MTW a few years ago.

From memory, i had list for France, Empire, Spain, England, Ireland, Scotland, Bohemia, vikings and mongols. Althought I dont remember well about all.

One thing that concerns me are special characters. Most worked in MTW end added a nice immersion feeling when playing vikings or irish.

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That sounds very nice. I don't have any research sources myself but I'd definitely like to have a base like that which could be used in medieval-era mods

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That would be the purpose so you can count on it.


I'll wait for the unpack tool before I post anything. Right now I have France and England being reworked with 12th and 13th nobility rolls (either roll of arms or military rolls) so they will be complete very soon. I managed to get my old files for the greeks ang mongols, which are very interesting because they were based on two good studies.
I obviously would need help on eastern factions, specially muslims as I'm really not qualified for those.

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Like alpaca. I dont have any way of doing the correct research, but I would definately use something like it in the projects I'm working on......once the stupid unpacker is released. lol

Kushan

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Well just an update on the work then :)

I restarted from zero, figuring I could do a better work than my old MTW lists. I must say I'm amazed how bad the names are for any of the factions (so far) in the game. 90% of the lists are simply wrong : not medieval, not noble, not spelled correctly or simply not local. I end up with cardinals or generals being called Karembeu, Richelieu, Chanteur or Maquereau in France (!!!!!!). Keeping MTW lists would have been a smart move and at least would have saved their time for bug fixing.

Complete (or near) :
France, England, Empire, Spain. Lists based on 13th and 14th centuries roll of arms, individual seals, knight rolls (french term is a "montre", not sure there's an accurate translation) and some genealogies. Surnames lists are 200-300 names long.
Byzantium. List based on individual seals.
Mongols. No glory, just plaggia from a good article :)

Advanced (50 to 90%) :
Portugal and Venice.
Scandinavians. I do them all at once, so work will be done for mods including Sweden and Norway.
Scots. Half work done.

Started :
Hungary, Poland, Milano and Sicile. (factions I intend to complete before patch).
Bohemia, Ireland and Wales that arent a priority since they are for additional mods.
Aztecs (well since they are in the vanilla, at least get their names right).

So that leaves Russia and muslim factions for now. I may find something for these but thats where help could be useful.


Concerns :
- Spelling and allowed character. I can't test right now so I don't know which characters will be dropped. I guess some will be anyway. Names like Ágærðr are likely to be spelled Ágaerdr or Agaerdr. I hope that at least accents will remain.
- Patronymics. I wont be able to keep any logic in the patronymic system of most languages. For example in spanish : Fernán Gonzalez de Rojas would have to be the son of a Gonzalo (..) de Rojas. Same applies to gaelics or scandinavian bynames (Muiredach macDonnchaid, Alger Haraldsen and even in english William FitzRoger). CA chose to drop most patronymics (12 macs in the whole scottish list !). I myself prefer to keep the esthetics, so I kept an accurate proportion of these. Spanish and Portuguese will have genitive (Ruiz, Sanchez, González) forms in the firstnames (that way they will at least change from generation to another).
We can't expect miracles, just something better than having a king with a 17th century peasant name (or even worse a 21th century football player ...).

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Some very good work going on here - kudos to you, Solo.

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Thanks :)

Little update for these past few days.
Milan and Venice are well advanced now. Milan is more based on north west Italia (including Genoa and Susa families for example) than Milano itself.
Portugal, Ireland, Scotland, Bohemia and Norway are close to complete.

Papacy is a more complex problem to solve since popes and generals names are taken from the same pool (unless I'm wrong). Guess we have to choose between latin and italian names, as mixing them is rather akward imo. Has anyone seen a pope named Guido,Gionta or Zappa ?

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Russian names... Many of them are fantasy of developer!
Chort, Bolda - it is russian abusive words, and they were abusive all the times!
Iosif - jewish name, russian medieval commanders can't be jews
Kuritsa,Drozd,Shchuka,Zaiats,Kozel - it is names of animals, birds and fish! I never heard such names in history and in present! Where did heard them developers in Australia? In the voice of Pacific?
Orekh (nut),Shuba (fur coat),Zub (tooth) - the same, i laughed!

I understand surnames with this words, but Names! Are there really so few normal russian names?

It's interesting, how many knows about russia those who write this? As a land of white bears?

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Believe me, there's nothing special to Russia here. So far all the lists are only a bad mix of :
- Modern names. Like Richelieu and Karembeu in the french list (hey ! my best general is a football player ! if this doesnt kill ambiance for you, it does for me ...).
- Bad spelling. Not even medieval variations (at least not following any accepted form in medieval history, I'm speaking for France but I'm sure others aren't better) : Berthelemi could be either Barthélémy (modern), Bartolomeus (latin) or Bartolomée (common translation of latin form) but certainly not Berthelemi. Same goes for Francoys, Gieffroy, Gauchier, Christofle.
- Repetitions of the same name with an alternate spelling which doesn't make any sense since the latin form is the same. Guillaume, Guillemot and Guillemin are all translations of Willelmus. Same goes with Gocauo, Gonsaluus, Goncallo and Gonsaluu in the portuguese list, or Fernam and Fernando (which is not even spelled correctly) ; Hanrrique and Henrique ; or Joham and Joao. I'm stopping there since there's multiple examples in each list.
- Even worse, some names are total inventions. I really wonder where they got this strange idea to include some names, probably just to make the list longer. Well, bad idea guys, in some language only a few names are given at each generations. I've made a prosopography database specially for this little research and got very interesting results. For example John and William are a 60x more common than Edward in the english 13th c. nobility. The 12 more common first names represents more than 70% of the results.
- Last point reveals another flaw : in these lists some very rare first names are pretty common when they shouldnt even be in the list. My actual king is named Dimenche, talk about historical accuracy here ! Sadly it seems there's no dual pool for names as it was in MTW (kings names/character names). That will be a problem since some names were only reserved to kings. Louis is extremely rare until late 14th c. in France. The only individual named Edward in my english database is the king himself.
- Peasants names !!!! That may be the worst point about these. There's absolutely no way a king would name himself after a 16th c. peasant ! Come on guys I know Australia is far from medieval Europe and its just a game but still, that's simple logic. At least the english didn't get kings called Bill, Ed or Dick instead of William, Edward and Richard but I guess that was a close call given the quality here.

Okay I'm a bit harsh here but you see my point now : it's not about Russia it's about the whole game. I admit not everyone will have the same view on these things as they are moddable and secondary to gameplay but I think they are important when you speak in terms of ambiance and feeling. There are already a lot of people concerned here with units, skins, formations, balance etc ... I guess there must be someone to worry about these too, so since these are related to my researchs (well in fact heraldry, but prosopography/genealogy is closely related and I get to study lots of individuals) I just try to add my contribution to the community.
That said, I'm no specialist to eastern factions so anything you can provide about medieval russian naming habits/spelling is welcome (I can still figure it with a little research but some help won't hurt). It's more a matter of having all lists ready just after the patch or not, but to be honest I don't know where to start for muslim factions so if anyone had the courage to read the post until the end and knows anything on the subject, feel free to contribute :)

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In fact, these are street nicknames and they are real (otherwise there were no so many Boldins,Kuritsins,Drozdovs,Zaitsevs Kozlovs, Orekhovs etc. in Russia), but,of course, they are not proper names. Iosif is a sound Christian name, mostly used by priests (Iosif Volotskiy, for exemple). The problem with russian names in game that in XI-XIII ceturies they were Pagan, but since XIV they become exclusively Greek Orthodox.

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Pagan??? Russia became christian in 989, do u know? And now here is not much lesser slavic names than in XI - for example my name is traditional slavic, my grandfather too, and names of many of my friends. Svyatoslav, Vsevolod, Vladimir, Vyacheslav, Stanislav was popular in Russia in all times, since first written sources in IX century! This names are not pagan, they are traditional. I tink u will not call Richard, Whilliam or Frederic a pagan names, but they are not Christian names by origin!
And about nicknames.. they don't look like medieval nicknames, the forms of them is more like XVIII-XIX centuries. In medieval times this animals was called in some another form. Some nicknames - Postoy, Bezvitny, Ogibalo, Almaz, Minin, Palitsin, Silyanin, Susanin=)) - u can simply find many of them in Yandex. I had never heard in russian history surnames or nicknames like u wrote since XVII.
The peasant names was like Domashek, Voebud, Stanigost, Vdovin, Zhirochek - u can look about them here: http://newspskov.ru/news/sosedi/743/
http://ru.narod.ru/imenaf.htm

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@Solo : well the problem is that you cannot completely do away with the peasant names. It's true that a king called Perrin would never live to the end of the day , but the thing is, you can get generals through Man of the Hour that are just captains from the town militia and suchlike. Those must have names like "Michelot Chevrier", or "Michelot from whatever" available to them, because a militia captain called Louis de Vallois just doesn't work either. Oh, and of course those names are also used for spies, merchants and priests, who come from the wee folk, and are better off with names like Jehan Coeur than Philippe d'Artois.

And the way the game is coded you can't have separate lists, so you have to rely on blind luck sadly .

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The more I read the more I don’t know is this is for or or or . Probably all of that.

Just a quick observation:

Byzantium

First names
Andronicus – Latin and everything else is Greek. It should be Andronicos.
Dragos is Serbian name.
Imbert ???
John is English version of Ioannes.
There are both Constantine and Konstantinos.
Slavos ???
Volkanos is Latinized Serbian name Vukan and it should be Bolcanus. It seems that somebody read wrong translated version of “Alexiad” by Anna Comnena.

Surnames
Prvovencani – This is Serbian and means First-Crowned. They again included it from MTW.
Radomiros – Slavic name Radomir + os.

Hungary

Catastrophe! Somebody copy/paste Hungarian first names in surname category.

First names
Damjan is Serbian version of Damien.
Georgius and after that Gyorgy!
Kowacz is surname and wrong spelled.
Lukac is surname.
Peter and then Petri!

Surnames
Ambrus is first name (Ambrose).
Andras is first name (Andrew).
Bela is first name.
Ferenc is first name (Francis).
Geza is first name.
Gyorgy is first name (Georg).
Imre is first name (Emeric).
Istvan is first name (Stephen).
Jakab is first name (Jacob).
Janos is first name (John).
Jo ???
Karoly is first name (Karl).
Kazimierz is Polish first name.
Marton is first name (Martin).
Mate is Croatian first name.
Matyas is first name (Matthew).
Mihaly is first name (Michael).
Miklos is first name (Nicholas).
Otto is first name.
Pal is first name (Paul).
Samuel is first name.

Women
Adelaide – there is Australian town as name…

I can’t imagine situations in game with characters like Andras Andras, Miklos Miklos and similar.

List of names for the most factions are .

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I have list of Serbian medieval names for Medieval Total Realism, so if you need that, just said. I have also Rus’ medieval names which I included in XL mod 2.1. Names are from Primary Chronicle, so they are authentic. Only a bit is problematic transliteration but it can be solved. And I have some Norman names.
I have for Muslim factions with correct spelling, for so called Byzantium and probably more.

I agree.

Use Latin names for Papal State. Yes, it is too bad for names how they work. In MTW only first 5 names (I think) was used for names of rulers. Italian became language in XIX century when Italy was created (before that were a lot of dialects and even today is not much better).

The same case with Serbian first names (this has nothing with MII TW, but for research and comparison). The most common male first name in Serbia in the last 200 years is Milan (also used by Czechs) but it was never used in medieval!

If you want we can together create list of first names, surnames and women names. I can also contact some of my friends who are good with it.
After finish it you can publish it as a mini mod! Not only for vanilla but for many projects, so we can add names for mods (like Serbian, Czech, Armenian and etc).

What you say?

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Those names are old Slavic. Many of those names are common among other Slavic peoples. Svetislav in Serbian is Svyatoslav in Russian. Stanislav is the same. My name is also used by Russians but rare. Vladimir is common name among Serbs. Names with suffix -slav are the Slavic.
Names like Bogdan, Boris, Bronislav, Ivan, Miroslav, Rada, Radoslav, Svetlana, Vladislav and etc are common among the most Slavs.

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@Kobal2fr
Obviously you're french so you should know that Michelot Chevrier is nothing near a medieval french name :P Well the people I study everyday are mostly extracted from very low nobility but they have the same pattern as high nobility. Just imagine you have 10 to 20 names for your whole map at a same point when I could gather 300 for my list only from one roll. If you really think than one of the 10 or 20 most important names of the time could be a peasant well, not me hehe. I can't tell how much immersion you gain by just correcting the french list, perhaps I should make you a list of my actual general names so you see my point of view.
As a side note, Jean Coeur would be a noble name (you probably know Jacques Coeur) :P Peasants have occupationnal names or no names, more simply (you can just remove surname for spies and assassins if you really want to be picky). Use of locative names over the surnames is more a regional distinction than a social one .They are very common in the franco-provençal and occitan higher nobilities, I could give you example like Artaud, Adhémar, Blacas, Fermineau, Porcellet, Allemand, Pellet, Atton, Taillefer which are all names of great famillies. On the other hand, a family like the Piolenc, which aren't nobles before the 14th c. use the name "de Piolenc" (I can provide a lot more example from my area).

@Duke
Well, since I started this topic I joined the Mediaeval Auctoriso team and discovered they had a similar effort under way. Of course we haven't finished all yet because of the provincial titles mini mod and other works but we have completed a good part of MA & vanilla factions. Since you seem yourself involved with a major modification I'm not sure how we could join our efforts now. I would have to discuss that with the other team members but it may be a bit too late for another community effort since there's another similar project under way at twc (although I really don't agree with their choices ending with a mix of english, french and italian like Baldwin de Montescaglio ...).

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Hello Solo.

Thanks for response. I didn’t know that you joined MA. Now I see from your reply, signature and I checked in MA forum…
No, I never had any intentions to join MA. And this has nothing with my work with Invasio Barbarorum or my previous work with MTR.

Btw, about peasants names and surnames – from what I know in medieval Germany (better say HRE) surname Bauer was prohibited because whole land would be “plagued” with it.

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Well I posted in my other project thread but forgot to do it in this one since it was hardly read by anyone. I would say I'm even surprised with the popularity of the new thread there. Maybe I just launched that a bit too early ...

Never asked you to do that either, you probably misunderstood me. I just talked of a community project but this would be obviously too late already since another team is doing that elsewhere and even if that, I would at least have to ask my team first (that seems like a polite thing to do when several people have been involved with the project).

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