Cambrecia and the Neptaran Crusade

This is an article on the History of Feyworld
Years: 1026 NC to 1128 NC
Age: The Third Age of Man
Continent: Duria
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The History of Cambrecia
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Cambrecia and a Fragile Peace	The Cambrecian Civil Wars

To later Cambrecian chroniclers, the century of fighting that followed became known as the Neptaran Crusade: a holy war that Pontifex Severinus of Zelos launched against the Neptaran democracy, that a second Pontifex and a second Legate, both brothers, fought all over again two generations later, and that finally guttered out only when a third Pontifex judged the whole enterprise not worth finishing.

Severinus's five-year ultimatum expired in 281 IC with Neptaris exactly as democratic as it had ever been, and the Pontifex called for a Crusade to free the city from itself. The Crusade was slower to gather than he had hoped, priests and lay Zelosites trickling into Septarium through the following year before he judged himself ready, and when he finally marched south he brought an army twice the size of anything Neptaris could field. It did not matter. Severinus was a Pontifex, not a general, and at the Battle of Perrenoth Fields his numbers meant nothing against a Neptaran army under the more experienced Marshal Lewt Morgar that simply outfought him. The Pontifex escaped the field with what remained of his staff and spent the next decade bleeding Neptaris slowly, through Crusader raiding bands that harried the Territories and burned what they could not hold, rather than risking his own person in the field again.

The war Cambrecia actually remembers begins in 296 IC, when Marshall Morgar's men found and destroyed a Crusader camp near the Cambrecian border. King Garulan called it a village under his own protection and declared war on Neptaris for breach of the Treaty of Neptaris. Whether it had ever been a village at all is a question Cambrecian chroniclers have never much wanted to ask out loud, since the Church's own doctrine held that legitimate rule justifies itself through evidence rather than assertion, and Garulan's casus belli was never given much of either. It was, at least, a popular war. By 300 IC, he and the aging Pontifex Severinus had raised an army and marched into the Territories together, the King leading and the Pontifex accompanying him in body if not in command, and for three grinding years they inched toward Neptaris through guerrilla resistance and a summer of miserable weather. They were within sight of the city's walls in 303 IC when Severinus's heart finally gave out. A quarter of the army were crusaders loyal to the Pontifex personally and they departed for Septarium with his body. Garulan, unwilling to spend the rest of the army on a failed siege, retreated with them.

Garulan spent what remained of his reign building Fort Speculium, a fortress raised on the Neptaran border massive enough to anchor a war for a generation. Garulan died in 310 IC with the walls nearly finished, and his son Medeno III, a far less martial man than his father, inherited both the throne and the fortress. He was ready to use it by 313 IC, only to watch the Legion he was counting on sail home to Zeth without him: Emperor Androcles Leto of House Zetar had died heirless, and the First Succession War had begun without any regard for what it cost Cambrecia. The Legion was recalled to secure the Empire at its very capital.

Medeno III spent the better part of a decade fighting alone and losing ground, until the Neptaran Marshal Angar Tivalos put Fort Speculium itself under siege in 321 IC. It held through a mild winter and subsequent spring, and by late summer of 322 IC, just as Tivalos looked ready to finally crack it, the Legion III Cambrecia returned: the Succession War had resolved in Antipater of House Varro's favor, and his first act as Emperor was to send help. Tivalos was broken at the Battle of Mists.

What followed was less a war than an occupation that never quite incorporated the subjugated into the Empire. The Legate, a careful officer named Aulus Ostorius, judged his own losses too heavy to press on Neptaris and withdrew to Septarium and, Zetian bureaucracy being what it is, reinforcements did not reach him again for five years. When they finally arrived in 327 IC, he settled into Fort Speculium as a base and spent over a decade grinding out marginal gains in the Territories that never added up to anything decisive. Tivalos, patient in a way Ostorius was not, simply went around him in 340 IC and marched into Cambrecia proper, burning the undefended countryside between the fortress and Septarium while Ostorius dithered over whether it was even real. By 345 IC, the damage was done: farmers across southern Cambrecia had had enough, and whole communities picked up and migrated north to the empty shore of the Sea of Swords, land that would eventually be settled properly as Enesia three centuries later. Medeno III in 344 IC, still king of a stalemate, and his son took the throne as Corvos II, reviving the founding name in a war that badly needed some of the first Corvos's luck.

For a while it looked like the war might simply exhaust itself. Ostorius's Legion, unable to feed itself from a countryside that had emptied out from under it, ended up farming its own abandoned fields to survive, and Tivalos went home to Neptaris a hero, dying in 353 IC believing he had won for good. He had not; there had never been a treaty, only an absence of anyone willing to keep fighting. That changed in 360 IC, when the Emperor Caurus of House Valerius appointed a new pair of brothers to break the deadlock: Petros as Pontifex, and Demetrious Paolus as Legate, both brothers of House Zetar. They arrived together, refortified Speculium by 363 IC, and ran the kind of coordinated campaign Cambrecia had not seen in generations, capturing the Territories' trade centers to strangle Neptaran supply while methodically outmatching a complacent Marshal Doncan Mathros, who was routed at the Battle of Dry Fields in 367 IC and stripped of his rank for it.

Neptaris answered with its own hard man, a smith named Prentor Perrenoth who imposed martial law and conscripted the city bodily to keep fighting. He put Speculium under an eight-month siege in 368 IC that failed to take the fortress but badly wounded the Legion holding it and when Petros and Demetrios finally struck back in 372 IC, they went straight for Neptaris itself rather than fighting over the Territories again. Five months of siege breached the outer walls and killed Perrenoth in the fighting, and the city's defenders fell back to Castle Zepharos for what should have been the war's final act. It never happened. Before they had even finished reconstructing their siege engines, the entire Legion suddenly picked up and departed for Zeth. Word had reached them that the Emperor Semelius Secundis of House Furius, last of the Elected Emperors, had been murdered by Ditis Carnifex of House Gabinius in 371 IC, plunging Zeth into the Second Succession War. Petros and Demetrios abandoned the siege overnight to go defend Marcellus's claim to the throne. Neptaris took the opening for exactly what it was and retook Fort Speculium while the Legion's back was turned. They pushed gains back into Cambrecian territory that had cost two Legates and thirty years to win in the first place.

By the time the Second Succession Wars were over in 376 IC, Corvos II had been king for over thirty years of a war that had outlived two of his predecessors and consumed a piece of his own kingdom's population. The new Pontifex, a quieter man named Nicanor, had no appetite for reclaiming what the Zetar brothers had lost, and encouraged the aging King to end the war. Corvos II signed the Treaty of Speculium in 378 IC, granting Neptaris the independence it had already effectively won and formally returning what little Cambrecia had actually managed to hold onto. A century after Severinus first called his Crusade, Cambrecia had spent an entire dynasty's patience, an army's worth of dead, and a piece of its own farmland to end up exactly where the Treaty of Neptaris had left things a hundred years before. Notably, Nicanor failed to formally issue a revocation of Pontifex Severinus' Denunciation of Democracy... he simply stopped enforcing it.