There seems to be a trend on YouTube where people make medieval(-ish) sounding versions of popular songs. This includes some of the soundtracks from the Star Wars movies. I particularly like this version of Battle of the Heroes/Battle over Coruscant.
But this got me wondering: How easy would it be to transplant the story of Star Wars into the historical middle ages? It should be easy, right, after all, it has knights and princesses and stuff. But for some story concepts we would have to be a bit creative.
Starting with the Jedi themselves. There were orders of knights, so of course the Jedi should be one of these. The Jedi are also a religion and live monastic lives. So they are somewhat close to the military orders that formed during the crusades, like the Templers, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights. But the head of the Jedi Order is also the head of the Jedi religion. So we have to create an AU of the middle ages in which the military orders are much closer to the Papacy. I think that is possible with some tweaks. So let’s say at some point the headquarters of (one of) the military orders were relocated to Rome. And as it happens, sometimes who has power in Rome decides who is the pope, so there is a succession of popes coming from the ranks of this order. While we are at it, let’s fix one of the weird things about Star Wars: that we barely see any laity in the Jedi religion. We fix it by simply identifying the Jedi with the Roman Catholic Church.
But how do we translate the science-fiction concepts in Star Wars? They actually exist and are essential to the story. Star Wars is not simply fantasy with SciFi aestetics. The indispensible SciFi concepts in Star Wars are the clone army and the Death Star.
Death Star: The death star is (a) a technology that (b) can destroy planets easily, making plantary conquest unneccessary. There is a bit more to it, but if we concentrate on these two points, we can kinda indentify it with cannons, which make traditional fortifications almost completely useless. If we identify planets with cities and castles, then that works. Though the “Death Star” now has to be accompanied by an army that actually takes and destroys the city. (This just made me realize, that superlaser technology is there to stay in the Star Wars universe and will require an adaptation of military strategy or better planetary shields. Just like artillery in the real world.)
Clone Army: The Clone Army needs to do two things. It needs to (a) be made of soldiers that more or less appear out of thin air and (b) needs to turn against the Jedi on Palpatine’s signal. A good solution: mercenaries. They work for who pays them and in the real history, they were one of the things that replaced the armies centered around knights.
These two things push the AU towards or even into the early modern era, but I think it works. The status quo in Star Wars radically changes in the prequels from Republic to Empire.
So about that change. If Yoda is the Pope, who is Palpatine? Well, one of the people who ended up in conflict with the papacy a lot was... the Holy Roman Emperor. That works, I’d say. So Palpatine is the Holy Roman Emperor and at some point wipes out the Jedi Order Catholic Church and later abolishes the Senate Imperial Diet.
Historically this didn’t happen of course, but a tendency towards centering power in the hands of the monarch existed in other kingdoms within Europe in the early modern era. But why would he want to destroy the Catholic Church. Normally, the Holy Roman Emperor in conflict with the Pope wanted to control it, not abolish it.
In Star Wars Palpatine is a Sith, the archenemy of the Jedi. So I guess in this version he would need to be a Satanist. But actual Satanists very likely didn’t exist in the middle ages. At least one Holy Roman Emperor was accused of being one by the Church during the Investitute Controversy, but that was propaganda.
Is there maybe another religion that a European monarch could follow which would be interested in wiping out the Catholic Church or at least its institutions... oh my God!
The Reformation! We already put it at the edge of the Middle Ages and Early Modernity. This could be an AU in which the Holy Roman Emperor converts to Protestantism and shapes it in a way that serves his own power. It would be a bit further away from actual Protestantism than the Catholic-Jedi are from actual Catholics, but still based on tendencies that existed within the Reformation.
Now add this together: The Holy Roman Emperor Palpatine leads the Order of the Knights of the Jedi into War together with his army of mercenaries, but at some point betrays them and has them slaughtered. He then officially converts to Protestantism and arrests and executes all bishops and priests, while restricting the power of the princes within the Empire in favor of a more centralized administration.
The rest of the story can follow naturally from this, but maybe I will turn it into a bullet point fic.
