of the capital Londres called themselves "Imperials" rather than "Spaniards", and except for a few diehard English nationalists regarded the Armada's victory as a blessing. Having already conquered South and Central America, the Empire did not have a great need of North America. Rather than conquer and colonize it themselves, the Imperials armed the Mohawks and encouraged them to embark on a great campaign of conquest until the Pacific. The Mohawk leaders, ruling from New Madrid (on the site of our New York City) were taken into the Empire's highest nobility. However, other Native American tribes felt resentful of Mohawk dominance and the European backing for it – a resentment which would turn out to have a crucial importance in the book's later part. In Europe, the Empire was opposed by a "heterogeneous political alliance" of Lithuania, Poland, Prussia, and Russ, known as the "fretful, unstable" Confederacy of the East, regarded by the Empire as its "coeval super-power." Scotland and Sweden-Norroway remained independent, the latter as essentially the last bastion of Protestantism, which the Catholic Imperials regarded as a mildly curious local tradition. In the Far East, the dominant power was the Middle Kingdom of Cathay, with a much more modest role played by its cultural dependency, the islands of Çipangu (whose rulers admired the Empire and "sought to turn their geographically analogous location into a politically analogous independence from the mainland culture of Cathay which had dominated virtually their entire recorded history"). In 1892, an Italian named Carlo Borromeo discovered the secret of time-travel, though otherwise the overall level of technology remained not much higher than it was in the 16th Century, with people travelling primarily on horseback and cities lit by open fires. In principle, time travel could have been used as a means of instantaneous travel, but that would have involved the traveller being in two places at the same time, at least for a split second; fearing a time paradox, such use of the device was strictly forbidden. Moreover, it was quickly realised that time-travel can become in effect a weapon of mass destruction, of which careless or ruthless use might undo the whole of present reality – and in particular, that it might provide the two great powers, locked in a long-lasting cold war, with a means of utterly destroying each other (similar to nuclear weapons in our world). To avert this danger, use of