The Stagnation of Altierra
The original inhabitants of Altierra were sixteenth-century English and Spanish. In Europe, the following four centuries saw enormous changes and yet Altierra barely changed in the same time period. Why?
The principal elements were:
- the lack of enemy countries
- the desire for the priestesses to keep control
The key is that Altierra doesn't need to have forgotten how to develop. It needs to have developed just enough to maintain its existing society, while the Priestesses prevent the conditions that normally drive technological change.
1. No external pressure to innovate
On Earth, a great deal of technological development was driven by competition: 1. rival states needed better weapons; 2. nations competed for territory and resources; 3. merchants wanted faster ships and cheaper production; 4. rulers wanted stronger armies; 5. exploration opened up new markets and resources; 6. military competition encouraged advances in metallurgy, engineering, navigation and chemistry. Altierra lacks almost all of those pressures. If the islands are effectively under one religious authority, there is no neighbouring kingdom thinking: If we don't develop better weapons, they will defeat us. A bow that works is still a perfectly good bow when nobody has firearms. Likewise, there is little incentive to invent a faster ship if there is no distant empire to trade with or conquer. This gives you a useful principle for Altierra: Technology advances when there is a problem worth solving. The Priestesses have made sure that most such problems never arise.
2. The Priestesses actively suppress disruptive innovation
This is the much stronger explanation.
The Priestesses don't merely happen to live in a technologically stagnant society. They recognise that technological and social change threatens their authority. They therefore don't need to ban every invention. They only need to suppress inventions that could undermine the existing hierarchy.
For example:
Scientific investigation || Encourages people to question accepted explanations| Development | Why it threatens the Priestesses |
|---|---|
| Firearms | A relatively untrained person can kill someone of higher status |
| Printing press | Ideas can spread outside priestess control |
| Cheap paper | Makes widespread writing and communication possible |
| Improved ships | Allows people to travel beyond their supervision |
| Compass/navigation | Makes independent exploration easier |
| Mechanical clocks | Encourages precise organisation and independent timekeeping |
| Advanced metallurgy | Enables better weapons and tools |
| Large-scale manufacturing | Creates independent wealth outside the hierarchy |
| Universal education | Gives ordinary people access to knowledge |
That last point is particularly important. The Priestesses don't necessarily have to suppress knowledge. They can control who is allowed to possess it.
A priestess might know perfectly well how a particular mechanism works while an ordinary person is forbidden from investigating it.
That makes the society much more believable than one in which everyone has somehow forgotten basic technology.
The Spanish/English division is particularly useful
Your idea that the Spanish realised they could dominate the English without firearms gives you an excellent historical starting point. The original settlers arrive with 16th-century knowledge, but they are not arriving with an industrial civilisation. They have:
- swords
- bows and crossbows
- early firearms
- black-powder knowledge
- sailing ships
- ironworking
- agriculture
- written language
- some knowledge of mathematics and navigation
But once they establish themselves on Altierra, the circumstances change. The Spanish discover that they have a social and military advantage over the English. Perhaps they have greater numbers, better organisation, or control of the most strategically important settlements.
They don't actually need their firearms.
And firearms present a problem: once you teach someone how to make gunpowder and manufacture guns, you have given them a technology that is difficult to monopolise permanently. A sword is comparatively easy for an elite to control. Gunpowder production, firearms manufacture and eventually artillery require specialised knowledge, workshops and materials.
So the Spanish could deliberately decide:
We possess this knowledge, but there is no reason to teach it.
Over generations, that knowledge becomes restricted to a tiny group and eventually disappears from general society.
And this gives you a very believable technological "ceiling"
I wouldn't make Altierra uniformly primitive. Instead, I'd make it selectively advanced. The Priestesses permit technologies that strengthen their society but suppress technologies that decentralise power.
For example:
Permitted:
- sophisticated stone buildings
- good roads
- sailing ships
- agriculture and irrigation
- iron tools
- reasonably advanced medicine
- glass
- pottery
- weaving
- mechanical devices
- mathematics
- astronomical observation
Restricted or suppressed:
- firearms
- printing
- mass education
- advanced navigation
- industrial machinery
- large-scale mechanisation
- explosives
- technologies that permit rapid communication
That distinction could become one of the defining characteristics of Altierra.
There is another consequence that I think would strengthen your world
The Priestesses don't actually have to tell people:
"You must not invent things."
That would be difficult to enforce.
Instead, they could have created a culture in which innovation itself is regarded as suspicious.
For centuries, people have been taught that the world was created in its proper form and that attempting to alter the established order is presumptuous, dangerous or even sacrilegious.
So a craftsman who invents something genuinely useful might encounter:
"Why would you need such a thing?"
And if the invention has social consequences, the Priestesses intervene. This means that tradition becomes the enforcement mechanism.
People don't continually attempt to overthrow the system because they have never been encouraged to imagine a fundamentally different one.
This also explains why four centuries can produce so little change
The important thing is that Altierra isn't simply "behind Europe by 400 years". It has been subjected to 400 years of selection.
Every generation produces clever people. Some will inevitably think of better ways of doing things.
But:
- Useful but politically harmless invention => adopted.
- Useful and politically dangerous invention => suppressed.
- Idea that challenges Divara => condemned.
- Person who persists => punished.
After 400 years, the society naturally settles into a remarkably stable technological equilibrium.
And that makes the Priestesses considerably more frightening, because their greatest achievement isn't preventing technological advancement. It's preventing people from realising that advancement is possible.
That would fit The Snow Beyond the Wall particularly well, because when your characters eventually encounter the modern world, the shock isn't simply that England has better machines. It is that the entire assumption underlying Altierra's civilisation - that the world must remain as it is - turns out to be false.