Bujold’s Five Gods Universe (or World of the Five Gods) is loosely based on European history/geography of the late Medieval/Renaisance period. It’s not a perfect match. For example, there’s no equivalent of the Pope and for that matter, no Italian peninsula. Also, it’s moved to the southern hemisphere, so that warmer climates are in the north.
However, there are rough equivalents of many countries. Many of them are fairly obvious, but I can’t figure all of them. Can anyone fill in or confirm the question marks below.
Googling, I find that Raspay is the name of a real village in Spain, so obviously Bujold borrowed that name. She also borrowed Lodi, although in neither case is the real world place the equivalent of the fictional. And it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s no good equivalent of Lantihera.
Holy crap on a stick, if you had asked this before my damned house burnt down and my computer melted, I could have given you chapter and verse from the lips [ok, keyboard] of Herself - I have been a member of the Lois Bujold email list for pushing 18 or 20 years [holy crap, that damned long?!] I know it has been answered several times over the years =)
I think I might be able to port this question over and get direct answers, need to log into my emails =)
Hey, I was on that mailing list back in the 90s. I think I left because there was too much stuff on it that I wasn’t interested in. Got tired of wading through it to get to anything interesting.
Are there direct equivalents for every locale in the stories? I mean, yes, Chalion and Ibra = Castile and Aragon, Cedonia = the Byzantine Empire, the cantons = Switzerland, that stuff is pretty obvious. But it doesn’t seem to me that every city or town is based on a real-world equivalent. It’s sufficient for the story to know that Lantihera is a poor island of the coast of Orbas, whose economy is based on piracy, for example, without needing to figure out its historical analog.
It’s fun to play that game, though, of course. In which spirit I’d say the closest equivalent would be one of the Caribbean “pirate ports”, such as Tortuga or Port Royal. Not geographically contiguous, and neither had the Muslim-Christian conflict that Bujold mirrors with the Quintarian/Quadrene split, but they otherwise match, especially Tortuga.
There were pirate ports in the Adriatic, too, which feels to me more likely to be the historical inspiration for most of Penric’s adventures. I haven’t tried too hard to map the stories onto real-world settings either, but my general impression is Slovenia / Croatia / Montenegro / somewhere thereabouts.