Chevalier Jean-Baptiste de Morny was a pious and mentally tormented French nobleman whose religious zealotry and apocalyptic visions of a Muslim conquest of Europe drove him to lead France’s first major expedition to the New World in 1555. A younger son with little inheritance, De Morny had spent his life fighting Barbary pirates, developing a pathological hatred for Islam that he characterized as the "Mohammedian Scourge." Desperate to find a route to Asia that bypassed the Madjriti blockade of the southern Atlantic, the French Crown overlooked his instability, hoping his fervor would yield results. After a perilous journey where a storm blew his fleet off course, De Morny made landfall in a humid, forested region he named Vermont, far north of the Madjriti colonies.

Trekking through what he called the "Green Hell," De Morny eventually discovered a grand civilization built upon a lake, the Lacustres. Initially, his religious delusions led him to believe he had found a lost Christian kingdom capable of saving Europe from the Islamic threat. However, this fantasy was shattered in 1556 when he witnessed the Lacustres performing human sacrifices. Revulsed and humiliated after being expelled from their city, De Morny reinterpreted the natives not as potential allies, but as "demons" akin to the Muslims he despised. He resolved to wage a personal crusade to cleanse the land of their influence, viewing the conquest not merely as a colonial venture, but as a spiritual obligation to destroy a satanic entity.

In 1557, De Morny returned with an alliance forged with the Tlascale, a native group hostile to the Lacustres. The subsequent campaign was defined by ruthlessness and the inadvertent spread of Old World diseases, which weakened the defenders. Utilizing heavy artillery, De Morny relentlessly bombarded the Lacustres' capital into submission before storming the city. When his Tlascale allies betrayed him in the midst of the victory, De Morny responded with cold efficiency, using his remaining cannons to obliterate the native leadership and slaughtering their forces. He returned to France as a national hero who had conquered a "demonic" empire, and while the crown officially named the new land Veridia, the populace honored his conquest by popularly referring to the continent as Mornaea.