A pair of royal-themed sequels that Netflix has created since 2017 have been the center of a cinema world that now includes more than a dozen movies.
Netflix has to create two European countries: Aldovia ( where a New York journalist meets her” Christmas Prince” ) and Belgravia ( where Vanessa Hudgens ‘ baker character agrees to a” Princess Switch” with her royal doppelganger ) by conjuring up the raw materials the plots demand: monarchies and picturesque snowy villages.  ,
Both of these are intended as a setting for the adult dream of dancing with a duke in a warm Christmas castle and on a pretty dress. However, my mind immediately wandered to a completely different place as a female history guy whose wife forced him to see these awful movies.
The painful Thucydidean realities of politics and war must be hidden behind all that cocoa-sipping visual.
The Map
In” The Christmas Prince 3: The Royal Baby,” courtiers brief Queen Amber regarding a ceremonial treaty renewal with the ( equally fictional ) kingdom of Penglia, the biggest hints about the geopolitics of the Netflix Christmas universe are revealed.
Up until this point in the trilogy, I believed these imaginary countries to be small dullards like Monaco or San Marino, who had existed for centuries without having a significant impact on world history.  ,
Then, we see the map ( which is just the names and borders of Aldovia, Belgravia, and Penglia superimposed onto a page from a 16th-century Dutch atlas ).
Incredibly, it does not present any other places. It does demonstrate that all three countries are dominant power. Aldovia covers modern-day Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, north Greece, and Turkey land east of the Bosporus. Belgravian place corresponds in our timetable to Lithuania, Latvia, southeast Poland, Belarus, and eastern Ukraine. Penglia covers Caucasian Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
The Story
Aldovia
Aldovia is a condition that the 4th Crusade created after sacking Constantinople in 1204. It is a condition that the 4th Crusade created as a leader status to the Latin Empire. The true Latin Empire lasted less than 60 years, but in the Netflix Christmas timeframe, it endured, slowly reclaiming old Roman land in Southern Europe.
Why King Richard and Queen Amber are wed in a church without an icon stand ( or iconostasis ) is explained by the Catholicism of the Latin Empire. It also explains why Greece isn’t part of Aldovia: they remained resolutely Catholic and, at some point, won freedom.
My theory also explains why Aldovians are ruled by royal residences called Devon and Charlton and who speak English and wrote their feudal tales in the same vocabulary. In our timeframe, when Constantinople fell to the knights, their officials named Count Baldwin of Flanders as the new king. What if a gentleman from England joined the Crusade and was chosen otherwise? The new royal house would have eventually attracted more Anglophone knights and clergy to the east, solidifying English as the court’s and ( eventually ) the people’s primary language.  ,
The kingdom would also steadily drop its Roman royal aspirations, styling its sovereign a “king” and taking as its fresh name the phrase” Aldo” — Old High German for “old” and “noble”. Rome lives on as, simply, the” Grand Old Kingdom”.
Penglia
The most challenging aspect of Penglia is explaining their East Asian heritage. The current king and queen are Tai and Ming, both of whom are Chinese names, while the medieval prince who fought Aldovia was called Jun. Additionally, the treaty’s penglian side appears to be written in Chinese characters.
The Yuan dynasty in China, which the Mongol warlord Kublai Khan established in 1271, is the best place to explain this. In our timeline, the Mongol Empire quickly disintegrated into four independent states, with powerful Khans refusing to recognize the Yuan emperors ‘ overlordship.
In the Netflix Christmas universe, Yuan leadership is able to keep the empire together while establishing Chinese as the universal language of government, but they are still overthrown by the Ming dynasty in the late 1300s. When that occurs, chaos sets in and numerous Yuan refugees, both Chinese and Mongol, flee to the Caucasus. They establish the Kingdom of Penglia as a cultural center in the West there.
The Aldovian-Penglian War ( we learn ) ended in 1419, was fought over Silk Road trading routes, and included a land campaign in eastern Aldovia. A less well-known alternative traveled north around the Caspian Sea, through Penglia, and across the Black Sea, which would allow traders to land in Belgravia and bypass Aldovia altogether. The main Silk Road route route traveled through Anatolia and across the Bosporus into Aldovian territory. Aldovia’s war strategy may have required Penglia to impose a ban on trade with China, which would have flown more smoothly without a language barrier.  ,
In this scenario, Penglia is forced to invade Aldovia by sea because its elected English king doesn’t want to anger the Aldovians while he’s fighting the Russians. Prince Jun is preventing Aldovia’s navy from striking down Aldovia’s naval supply lines, which keeps them from disrupting. After years of inconclusive fighting, the two sides declare a truce.
The Status Quo
As you watch these movies, it becomes clear that Aldovia’s monarchy still has a lot of power. We meet a prime minister, but we also see Richard personally managing his kingdom’s economic policy. Belgravia and Penglia appear to operate in the same way. They aren’t absolute monarchies, but they aren’t the ceremonial figureheads either. Lichtenstein and Morocco are likely to be our greatest historical parallels.
Although America still fought for her independence, nothing like the French Revolution ever happened, and that this kind of government continues to exist today on such a large scale suggests to me. Which means no Napoleon, no WWI, and no Hitler.  ,
The fact that neither Aldovia nor Penglia have a standing army is perhaps the most intriguing fact we know about the state of geopolitics right now. This suggests a world that is far more peaceful than the one in which we currently reside.  ,
A quick glimpse of a bank statement reveals that the euro ( and therefore the European Union ) exists in this timeline, but perhaps this EU formed much earlier than ours, and it’s clearly less heavy-handed in imposing neoliberalism. Is it too much to hope that the Netflix Christmas episode will feature real national sovereignty and 500 years of European peace?  ,
Well, maybe. A Reddit user using the hashtag co209 took a good look at mapping the rest of Europe and explaining how it came to be. In his telling, Aldovia, Belgravia, and Penglia fought alongside the U. K. against France, Germany, and Russia in two major 20th-century conflicts equivalent to our world wars. This would explain why Aldovia and Penglia didn’t have standing armies because they were forced to do so after losing the second one.  ,
In the end, it’s up to the individual to decide whether Aldovia is a harmonious plurinational Catholic empire made up of farmers, merchants, and honorable guild craftsmen, or whether it is an unstable, oppressive, impoverished aggressor state funding public works to stop the peasants from snatching King Richard up like a mistletoe sprig of mistletoe. In either case, you can make a case.
And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? Netflix’s deliberate failure to create such a rich alternate universe while providing so little information about it. Next time, they should throw the husbands a bone.
Grayson Quay is a Young Voices contributor based in Arlington, VA. His work has been published in The American Conservative, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Spectator US.
