Milosia

A rising power in eastern Aurea and rival of Narbonne, Milosia was a client province of the Great Empire. The nation is still nominally under the control of a Proconsul, though the position is appointed by the powerful Legate of the Sixth Legion in the name of the Emperor, despite there having been no clear Emperor for a century. Despite the chaos and dissolution in Aescalapea, the Milosians still bear an ancient hatred towards Aescalapeans, for reasons long since lost to time.

Milosia

The Prefecture of Milosia

Geographic Info

Continent: Aurea

Location: Eastern Central Aurea on the northwestern shore of the Aurean Sea

Society

Population: About 2.2 million (93% Human; 3% Dwarves; 2% Half-Elves; 2% Other).

Languages: Aurean, Zetian

Government

Government Type: Imperial prefecture under military rule (Proconsul; Legate of the Sixth Legion)

Ruler: Officially the vacant imperial throne; in practice Lord-Legate Gnaeus Aurelius of House Gradivius, commander of the Sixth Legion, through Proconsul Ottavio Berengaire of Berugia

Arms: Or, a boar passant sable armed and crined argent

Capital: Berugia

Alliances: A wary grain-and-shipping accord with Treva; military and ore-shipping alliance with Vistria

Hostilities: Aescalapea is an ancient enemy, though there is no formal declaration of war; Antasian giant-and-goblin host; Ganesian corsairs; rivalry with the Kingdom of Narbonne

Economy

Exports: Wine and olive oil; wool, hides and cheese; quarried stone and marble; dwarven-forged arms and metalwork; shipping and the carrying-trade; and, above all, mercenary companies and fighting men.

Imports: Grain and foodstuffs above all, chiefly from Treva, on which the realm leans to feed its cities; raw ore and metal from Vistria. Timber and fine goods from across the Aurean Sea.

Coinage: 1 Siliqua (1 cp); 1 Denarius (1 sp) = 10 Siliquae (1 BUC); 1 Double Denarius (1 ep) = 2 Denarii; 1 Aureus (1 gp) = 25 Denarii; 1 Solidus (1 pp) = 4 Aurei

Religious Info

Pantheon: The Imperial Ecclesia; the druidic Tuatha de Danann is dominant among the hill-folk

Patron: Galea the Triumphant and Zelos Goldenhand the State; Vitulus the Architect honored in the cities

Geography

The Prefecture of Milosia lies in east central Aurea, on the eastern flank of the Antasian Mountains and the northwestern shore of the Aurean Sea. Mountains and rivers draw its bounds: the Antasian foothills wall it off to the west; the Garanon River runs along its northern edge, dividing it from the Grand Duchy of Campois and, toward the coast, from Narbonne beyond the Bay of Calvenna. The Taddo River marks its southern border with the Principality of Treva. Within these limits the land falls away from mountain and foothill into broad, rocky plains with thin topsoil towards the coast of the Sea. While there is some agriculture, particularly vineyards, the loose and rocky topsoil is not particularly fertile, so Milosia remains rich in men and stone and poor in bread and food. The imperial road, the Via Augustus, threads the realm from north to south, through the capital city of Berugia, crossing the Garanon to bind it to Campois above, running on past the bay toward rival Narbonne, and fording the Taddo southward into the grain-fields of Treva.

Terrain

The realm falls in three steps from west to east. Highest is the Antasian frontier: bare peaks and deep, ill-famed valleys where the writ of the Sixth Legion fails and the giants and their goblin slaves keep their own counsel, with the dwarves of the Unterreich far beneath. The lands of Cordosia and Dracia lie beyond the divide with no roads or known navigable passes. Below the peaks runs a band of rugged, wooded foothills, broken country that serves as the realm's natural rampart and the seat of its frontier garrisons and hill-monasteries. East of the foothills lies the greater part of Milosia: open, rocky plains carrying the high roads, the river-trade and the bulk of the people, with the capital at Berugia set mid-way between the piedmont and the coast of the Aurean Sea.

Waterways

The River Garanon bounds Milosia to the north and the Taddo to the south; inland, the rivers Morela and Piavo flow. All four rise in the Antasian foothills and run east across the plains to the sea, watering the few grainlands and vineyards, carrying the barge-trade of the inland villages and towns down to the coast. Both have served as battle-lines as often as borders since antiquity. Between them, two interior rivers, the Morela and the Piavo, gather the runoff of the foothills and thread the plains down to the bay; the Morela flows through the capital at Berugia, whose bridges and quays it has shaped, while the Piavo waters the southern vineyards. These rivers all empty into the realm's seafront on the Bay of Calvenna, in the northwestern reaches of the Aurean Sea. Warm and shallow, the bay carries Milosia's shipping and ties its ports to Narbonne, Treva and the merchants of Aescalapea; it carries trouble as well, for the corsairs of the Ganesian shore and even Valtaani raiders range these waters and fall on the coast when the season favors them.

Society & Culture

The Milosians are an Aurean people, heirs of the fallen Empire in blood, in tongue and in temper, and they have never let themselves forget it. Theirs is a martial, prideful folk, quick to quarrel and slow to forgive, raised to the conviction that to bear arms for the realm is the first duty of a free man; for a thousand years their sons marched in the Imperial Legions, and the habit of service has outlived the master it was sworn to. They keep the old forms with a stubbornness their neighbors find by turns admirable and absurd: the ancient rites, the legionary calendar, and the magistracies of a state whose Emperor is a century dead.

Beneath this Aurean overlay runs an older stock. Before the double-headed dragon came, the foothills belonged to a hill-people known as the Sabamelii and the plains were dominated by the Milgians around their ancient capital of Tasca Obodos. Their blood, their stubborn dialect-words and their half-buried customs still surface among the herders and vine-dressers of the interior, the further one travels from the Via Augustus and the coast. Daily life is hard and plain: terraced vineyards and olive groves on the better slopes, sheep and goats on the rocky uplands, fishing-boats and merchantmen out of the coastal ports, and everywhere the sense of a proud people scraping a living from grudging ground.

Milosia is a land of cities, each a jealous commune governed by its own civic aristocracy of old families, magistrates and guild-masters, and each convinced of its precedence over the rest; the realm's politics are in large part the endless feud of these towns, held in uneasy check only by the Legion set above them. Wealth divides as sharply as pride, for the merchant houses of the coast grow fat on the sea-trade while the interior stays land-rich and coin-poor. Humans make up the great bulk of the people, but a notable dwarven minority, exiles and traders out of the Unterreich, keep forges and serve in the ranks, prized as smiths and as steady soldiers; half-elves and a scattering of other folk fill out the cities and the ports.

Two tongues serve the realm. Aurean, the vulgar descendant of the imperial speech, is the language of the street, the field and the market; Zetian, the older classical form, is kept for law, for rite and for the commands of the Legion, and a man's command of it marks his station. To speak Zetian well is to lay claim to the Empire as one's own.

Notable Locations

• Berugia, the capital, set on the Via Augustus midway between the foothills and the sea: seat of the Proconsul's palace and the Legate's praetorium, and the most faction-ridden of the communes. The Morela River flows through Berugia.
• Calvenna, the realm's great harbor on the Bay of Calvenna and the seat of its shipping magnates: founded in antiquity as a foreign merchant colony, and a seed of Milosia's long quarrel with Aescalapea.
• Castravelo, the frontier garrison-city of the Sixth Legion among the Antasian foothills, watching the giant-haunted passes.
• Spelora, the foothill monastery-town and mother-abbey of Milosian hill-monasticism, its great house dedicated to Lord Ptharos, famed for its scriptoria and its terraced vineyards and olive groves.
• Tasca Obodos, the half-ruined ancient royal capital of the Milgian kings before the Empire, now a pilgrimage city gathered about the Temple of the Triumphant, which was raised from the stones of the last king's palace.

Important Persons

• Braccio Forteguerra, the celebrated condottiero whose mercenary companies hold the Antasian passes against the giant-host, and whose loyalty lasts exactly as long as Berugia's coin.
• Eligio da Varano, Pontifex of Galea the Triumphant and keeper of her great temple at Tasca Obodos, foremost voice of the imperial faith in the realm.
• Gnaeus Aurelius of House Gradivius, Lord-Legate of the Sixth Legion and the true ruler of Milosia, who governs in the name of an Emperor a century dead.
• Lucrezia di Casa Sannazaro, the foremost shipping magnate of Calvenna and Milosia's seat on the Aureliad Consortium, whose fleets and credit reach every port of the Aurean Sea.
• Ottavio Berengaire, Proconsul of Milosia and elected civic head of Berugia, a ceremonial first magistrate who reigns at the Legion's sufferance.
• Severino of Spelora, Father-Abbot of the mother-abbey of Lord Ptharos, whose monks kept faith and letters alive through the Dark Times, and conscience of the realm's hill-monasticism.

Government

In form, Milosia remains a province of the Empire, ruled by a Proconsul who administers the Prefecture in the Emperor's name. In fact there has been no Emperor for a hundred years, and the Proconsul is a figurehead: he is appointed by, and holds office at the pleasure of, the Legate of the Sixth Legion, who is the true master of the realm. Ottavio Berengaire wears the proconsular purple and speaks for Berugia; Gnaeus Aurelius of House Gradivius commands the Legion, and with it the Prefecture. Below this imperial scaffolding, every city is a commonwealth unto itself, a jealous commune governed by its own aristocracy of old families, magistrates and guild-masters, and perpetually at odds with its neighbors over precedence, water and trade. What keeps the realm from dissolving into a brawl of rival towns is the Legion set over them all, the one authority that every Milosian, however proud of his own walls, still obeys as the living hand of the Empire.

Law & Order

Milosian justice is the old imperial law: the codified statutes of the Zetian codes, pleaded in the classical Zetian tongue and administered city by city by elected magistrates. In the common run of disputes a man answers to his own commune's courts, and the cities defend their judicial privileges as fiercely as their walls. Over and behind those courts stands the Legion, which claims jurisdiction over the roads, the frontier, the imperial rites and anything touching the safety of the Prefecture, and whose word overrides any magistrate when the Legate troubles to speak. It is a law stable in its forms and fragile in its peace: codes centuries old, honored in every court, laid over a simmering feud of cities that only the Legion's garrisons hold short of open war.

Military

The Sixth Legion is the spine of the realm and the reason it still calls itself imperial. Stationed in Milosia in the high days of the Empire and never recalled, it went on governing when the Emperor died and the Fourth Succession War petered out with no clear successor. The orders ceased and the Legion has held the Prefecture together since. It remains a professional force in the old mold, Zetian in its drill and its commands and marching under the black boar of Milosia; for a thousand years Milosian men have filled its ranks and soldiered abroad in the Empire's wars, and arms remain the surest road to standing for a man of any birth. The Legion garrisons the cities and, above all, the western frontier, where the fortress-city of Castravelo watches the Antasian valleys against the giants and their goblin slaves. Where its own strength runs thin the realm buys condottieri, free companies under captains such as Braccio Forteguerra, whose swords hold the high country only so long as Berugia's coin keeps flowing. The communes keep their own militias besides, a standing quarrel with a Legion that claims command of every sword in the Prefecture; in practice the Legate commands, the Proconsul signs, and the cities obey as slowly as they dare.

Religion & Belief

Milosia is a bastion of the Imperial Ecclesia, and keeps its faith with the same stubborn pride it keeps the rest of the Empire's forms. At the center of public life stands the state cult: Galea the Triumphant, patroness of the Sixth Legion and of victory, and Zelos Goldenhand, god of the State, in whose name the Prefecture is governed. Beneath them the old Triad is honored in every city, and Vitulus the Architect, god of cities, in the proud communes. Yet faith here is fervent and uneasy, for these are gods who fell silent through the long Dark Times and have only lately returned; the priests now contend with the druids of the hill-country for the souls of the people, and magic of every kind is met with suspicion.

Dominant Faiths

The Imperial Ecclesia is the faith of the realm, and at its heart stands the Triad: Lord Ptharos the Father, lord of wisdom and rule, with Betshaba the Wavequeen and Baelthor the Stonehands beside him, worshipped together in the great temples of every city. Above that common devotion rises the state cult that gives Milosia its character. Galea the Triumphant is patroness of the Sixth Legion and of the Prefecture's victories, her worship bound up with the army and the memory of empire, and her holiest house is the Temple of the Triumphant at Tasca Obodos. Zelos is honored as the divine warrant of imperial rule, the god in whose name a vanished Emperor is still obeyed. Vitulus is the particular pride of the communes, and no Milosian city is without his temple and his festivals.

Secondary Faiths

In the uplands and among the old native stock, the druids of the Tuatha de Danann keep a faith far older than that of the double-dragon. Pushed to the margins in imperial days, their worship surged back through the silence of the Dark Times, when the imperial gods seemed to abandon the world, and it has never wholly receded; today priest and druid contend openly for the loyalty of the hill-villages, a quiet war the Ecclesia is far from sure of winning. Among the soldiery runs a grimmer current, the cult of Kratos the Steelhand, god of war, honored in the barracks and on the eve of battle in a way the temples prefer not to see. And in the harbor of Calvenna, where foreign captains and foreign coin have always gathered, the merchant gods keep their shrines, and Minos the Cockerel is reckoned there nearly as much as Galea.

Persecuted Faiths

As across the old Empire, the Dagonian deities are proscribed, and the Legion and the magistrates hunt their cabals without mercy. Milosians reserve a particular loathing for Phlegethon Ironfist, god of tyranny, the dark patron long whispered to have been kept by House Gabinius of Aescalapea, so that to be named his worshipper is to be named both heretic and enemy of the realm. The same distrust runs to magic: since the Heretic Emperor brought the Empire down through Dorakian sorcery and the Dark Times followed, the arcane arts and the worship of Abaris the Enscribed are regarded with deep suspicion, and those who practice them in Milosia do so quietly, or not at all.

Major Temples

The Temple of the Triumphant at Tasca Obodos is the greatest holy place of the realm, raised in the imperial manner from the very stones of King Malakiel's palace after the old kingdom fell, and now the heart of a half-ruined pilgrimage city given over to Galea. In the foothills stands the mother-abbey of Spelora, the great house of Ptharos the Father, whose monks and scriptoria kept faith and letters alive through the Dark Times and whose abbots remain a conscience the Legate cannot lightly ignore. At Berugia the capital keeps both the chief temple of the Triad and the state-shrine of Zelos, where the Proconsul and the Legate observe the rites that bind the Prefecture to its absent Emperor.

Economy

Milosia is a realm rich in men and stone and poor in bread, and its economy turns on that paradox. The rocky plains and terraced slopes give wine and oil, wool, hides and cheese, and fine building-stone and marble from the quarries, but never grain enough to feed the cities; so the Prefecture leans on the granaries of Treva to the south and on the corn-ships of the Aurean Sea, a dependence that is its standing weakness. Wealth runs unevenly. The merchant houses of the coast grow fat on the carrying-trade out of the harbor of Calvenna, while the interior stays land-rich and coin-poor, its cities living on their vineyards, their quarries, their forges and, above all, on the wages of war; for Milosia's surest export is its own men, whose mercenary companies carry Milosian steel into every quarrel in the east and bring home the coin the soil withholds.

Guilds & Companies

The communes are run by their guilds, under the eye of Vitulus, god of cities and patron of guildcraft: the vintners and oil-pressers, the quarriers and stonemasons, and the few dwarven smiths whose forges make Milosian arms prized well beyond the realm. On the coast the great shipping houses of Calvenna command the realm's true wealth, owning the fleets that ply the Aurean Sea and the warehouses that gather its trade; the foremost of them, the house of Donna Lucrezia di Casa Sannazaro, holds Milosia's seat in the Aureliad Consortium, the rising coalition of Narbonnais financiers, Vistrian miners and Milosian shippers founded in 1350 IC. And in a realm that sells war, the free companies are an industry in themselves: condottieri such as Braccio Forteguerra hire out whole bands of fighting men, their contracts and loyalties bought, sold and broken across the whole of the east.

Black Market

What the Legion taxes and the magistrates forbid, the coast quietly trades. Calvenna's wharves run a brisk contraband in untaxed wine and oil, in plunder fenced from the Ganesian corsairs, and in goods slipped past the Legion's tolls, often through the very Aescalapean merchants the realm claims to despise. Grain is the darker trade: in lean years, when Treva tightens the tap, hoarders and speculators move bread through back channels at ruinous prices, and more than one commune has rioted over a granary found full while its people went hungry. Along the western frontier a thinner traffic runs in smuggled ore and dwarven work out of the Unterreich, carried down by the exiles the deep kingdom casts up, and in arms that find their way, now and again, into hands the Legion would rather not see holding them.

History

A former client state of the Empire. Ancient hatred for Aescalapea.

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This article is part of the Player's Guide to Aurea

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