Cambrecia

Long the center of the worship of Zelos, God of the State, in the Imperial Pantheon, The Holy See of Cambrecia was long the last nation loyal to the Great Empire in Duria, despite being an essentially independent state. Cambrecia suffered greatly during the Dark Times, with chaos and rebellion ravaging the land after the fall of the Mage-King Lucasa and the Crimson Plague decimating the population thereafter. At the dawn of the Fourth Age of Man, the Potentates of Zelos have re-established their authority, despite losing a great deal of territory during the Dark Times. Despite the more liberal policies of recent Potentates, there are still some rebels covertly working to replace the theocracy with a monarchy.

Cambrecia

The Holy See of Cambrecia

Potent, a book argent bordered by two altars argent with flames gules, to chief a crown or.

Geographic Info

Continent: Duria

Location: Southern Duria, along the shores of the Maroshan Sea

Land Area: 21,197 sq mi

Coastline: 285 mi

Society

Population: 750,000 (90% humans, 4% hobbits, 6% other)

Languages: Cambrecian

Government

Government Type: Theocracy (Potentate, Archbishop, Bishop, Temple Speaker, Podesta)

Ruler: His Holiness the Potentate of Zelos, Gabriel II

Arms: Potent, a book argent bordered by two altars argent with flames gules, to chief a crown or.

Capital: Zelosia City (pop 20,450)

Alliances: Trading agreements with Auteria, Danas, Daredonia, the dwarves of Derlos, Enesia, Kamaros, Koramia, Malvetia, the Freecity of Neptaris and Numentora. No formal military alliances, by decree of the Potentate.

Hostilities: The state has had some skirmishes with pirates from Marosh and Tamerynd, but has no formally declared wars.

Economy

Coinage: 10 copper Pennies (1 cp) = 1 silver Eagle (1 sp), 2 Eagles = 1 Double Eagle (2sp), 25 Eagles = 1 gold Sceptre (25sp), 5 Sceptres = 1 platinum Solid (125sp)

Religious Info

Pantheon: Formally neutral, though there are strong sympathies to followers of the Koramian Heresy

Patron: Zelos Goldenhand

Geography

Cambrecia is a fertile coastal land, enjoying a long, temperate planting season and a short winter. The terrain is primary chaparral that has been extensively cultivated.

Waterways

• Maroshan Sea
• Septimia River

Society & Culture

Important Persons

Archbishop Alexander Desteos of Belora, Archbishop Gawyn Marcos of Amesand, High Protector Marcus Aquilius Severus of the Golden Guard

Government

Military

• Golden Guard

Religion & Belief

The worship of Zelos Goldenhand is absolutely predominant in Cambrecia. Despite a historic prohibition against formal worship of any deity not directly descendant from Lord Ptharos himself, recent Potentates have relaxed these regulations to permit temples to any non-Dagonian god; even Druidic shrines dedicated to the Tuatha are permitted in the countryside. Betshaba the Wavequeen has a strong following along the coastal cities of Cambrecia. Despite their more liberal policies in the last century, the priests of Zelos still maintain their feared Inquisitors, those priests dedicated to finding and executing worshippers of the children of Dagon the Adversary, particularly worshipers of Phlegethon Ironfist, who are reputed to seek to overthrow the Holy See and replace the Potentate with a civilian tyrant.

Economy

Though grapes and olives were once the crops of choice in its southern regions, necessity during the Dark Times required much of the country to focus on corns and bean crops for sustenance. Trade during the Fourth Age of Man has sharply increased in the nation under the gentle guidance of a series of liberal Potentates, who lifted most of the restrictions to trade imposed on Cambrecians during the Third Age of Man. There have even been nascent attempts to restore the once-famous wines of Cambrecia, with the full support and encouragement of the Church.

History

Foundation of Cambrecia

Original article: Foundation of Cambrecia

After completion of the Zetian conquest of Simmeria in 97 BI by Antonius Argentis of House Zetar, the Zetian Senate again elected three consuls to expand Zetian territory on Duria in an attempt to establish a near-contiguous trade route around the Betshaban Ocean. Septimius Varros, a legate loyal to Consul Rufus Voltina of House Livius, was sent with the Zetian armada to Duria with the intent to conquer the Freecity of Neptaris. He arrived on the eastern shores of the Maroshan Sea in 89 BI, where he chose to establish a beachhead at the mouth of a river then known as the Kambros River some 250 miles north of Neptaris. He sent envoys to the local tribe that called the river their home, the Kambros, and began developing a relationship with them. The Kambros quickly took to working with the Zetian Legion, even providing some physical labor for the construction of Legate Septimius' fort on the banks of the river. By the following spring, Septimius was ready to expand his influence and secure the region for his ultimate march on Neptaris itself.

While serving in the Zetian military in its northern frontier on Aurea, Septimius Varros certainly read at least the first four books of Meditationes de Bello Simmerio, those initial writings of Marcus Argentis of House Zetar detailing the methods and tactics he used in the first few years of the conquest of the Divian Peninsula eight years prior (Antonius Argentis, his successor, had yet to publish the final two books of the Meditationes). Legate Septimius put his understanding of Argentis' writings to good use in this new land. By Spring, the leader of the Kambros, a man named Dravos, had formally requested aid from the Legate against their rival tribes in the river basin (presumably, an act encouraged by the Legate or his officers). The Legate agreed, under the condition that the Kambros would consider themselves under the patronage of Consul Rufus Voltina of House Livius, the Legate's sponsor. Perhaps not truly understanding the depth of their agreement, the Kambros enthusiastically accepted the terms. The disorganized men of the local tribes, accustomed to personal combat settling most disputes, proved no match for the highly-trained, professional soldiers of the Zetian Legion. The Duvarna, along the middle of the Kambros River were first to fall, followed by the Sarnoi in the uplands. Hearing of the quick defeat of their nearby cousins, the Amesi, a neighboring tribe friendly to the Kambros, secured an alliance with Kambros by offering up one of their own princesses as a wife to Dravos. By the end of summer, the Legions had also brought the Arishei, Gweri and Moragi under their dominion.

With the northern reaches and much of the coastline secure, Legate Septimius turned his attention to the Kingdom of Kamaros and their allies, the Melvartans and Branduri tribes. For most of the following year, Septimius continued to wear down the Kamaran defenses. The Kamaran, to their credit, realized that they had mobility that the Zetian Legion did not and often would withdraw from a region, allowing it to be taken by the Legion, only to return once the Legion had departed to disrupt the Legion's supply lines. Septimius, however, was relentless in his march on the Kamaros royal seat at Cerunis. After a protracted siege, Cerunis finally fell. As a condition of surrender, the Kamaran King Aaronar VI challenged the Legate to a personal duel. To everyone's surprise, Septimius agreed. The two squared off in the central courtyard of the Kamaran royal castle and, after a lengthy battle, Septimius finally killed the King. This was a striking departure from what had become Zetian tradition: a victorious general was expected to return to Zeth to display his former nemesis in chains in a Triumphal march through the city, where they would then by executed by order of the Senate. Instead, by following local traditions, not only did he become a hero to the Cambrecians themselves, but led to the Napoci and Ossamei to voluntarily join under his Dracones. To ensure a lasting peace, the daughter and heir of Kamaros became a wife of Dravos, who Legate Septimius then saw crowed as King of Kambresia (it would take less than two decades for the spelling to change to Cambrecia). Thus, scholars count the founding of Cambrecia to this event in 87 BI.

The Legate wasted no time moving to pursue a large contingent of Melvartans and Branduri who had fled from the Battle of Cerunis. Both tribes, already semi-nomadic, migrated eastward en-masse to escape the Zetian Legions. They crossed the Krios River just north of Neptaris and, as the Legate Septimius arrived in pursuit, the spring rains came and made the Krios too swollen to safely cross. Septimius quickly realized that he was in a precarious situation... his Legion was now much closer to Neptaris than to the source of his supply lines back on the Kambros River and Neptaris was certainly aware of his presence and had been preparing its own defenses. He could withdraw and lose the gains he had made to encircle Neptaris (at least to the north), nor could he wait for the Neptaran army to come meet him in the field, so he instead chose to march on Neptaris itself. Upon arriving, however, he was surprised to find that Neptaris was not prepared for war. There were few solders manning her legendary walls and the great gates were flung open to greet the Legate and his army. Among those to greet him was a Zetian ambassador sent by a rival of Consul Rufus Voltina named Lucius Crassus of House Manilius. Crassus informed the Legate that Neptaris was undergoing a bloodless revolution from monarchy to democracy and had formed a direct alliance with Zeth for legal advice and assistance during the transition (not to mention a lucrative trade deal that hinged on Septimius keeping the coast secure). Septimius was ordered to stand down and return to Zeth. He obeyed without question, sending his best officers back to see to his colony and support King Dravos in stabilizing his new Kingdom... which was, nevertheless, a client state of the Zetian Republic.

Septimius returned to a hero's welcome in Zeth. Stories had already been circulating about how he purposefully claimed territory in the name of his sponsor instead of aggrandizing himself, had personally fought the Kamaran King to the death and had stood down at the gates of Neptaris in accordance with Zetian law, despite the sizeable, blood-thirsty and victory-stained army at his back. Where returning generals had once faced automatic trial for despotism upon their return to Zeth, Septimius was hailed an exemplar of Zetian adherence to law and order. After a week of deliberation (and celebration), the Senate announced that, for the first time since the foundation of the city by the Septira, they were elevating a family to the status of Great House. House Varro was thus founded in 85 BI. Septimius himself remained in Zeth for over a decade, serving both as Senator and as paterfamilia of his new House, but finally returned to the Cambrecian shore in 68 BI. Again, he was lauded as a returning hero. The settlement he had founded at the mouth of that great river had become the royal seat of the King of Cambrecia (now the young son of Dravos, King Tarnos I). By royal decree, the city was named Septarium and the river that ran through it is called the Septimia River, after Septimus' mother. The former Legate, Senator and Paterfamilia of the first new Great House lived out another three decades in peaceful retirement in the growing city that carried his name, passing peacefully at a Latrunculorum table in his favorite tavern in 34 BI at the age of 87. During this time, Cambrecia and her welcoming people became home to many retired Zetian Legionaires, who often constructed vast agricultural estates near Septarium and employed native labor to work, often becoming indistinguishable from the local people within a couple of generations.

When the Empire was founded by Octavius of House Zetar in 1 IC, Cambrecia, as it had become known, was one of the last of the outer territories of the Old Republic to swear allegiance to the Empire.

Imperial Cambrecia

Original article: Imperial Cambrecia

When word reached Septarium that the Senate had dissolved itself and that Octavius of House Zetar had been proclaimed Emperor in 1 IC, the court of King Tarnos II met the news with open dismay. Cambrecia's client status had been built on a personal bond of patronage: first to Consul Rufus Voltina, then, through Septimius Varros, to House Varro itself. An Emperor drawn from House Zetar, a family with no history of patronage in Cambrecia, offered the Dravosid crown no such assurance. Tarnos II delayed sending envoys to Zeth for the better part of two years and when he finally did swear allegiance, Cambrecia was the last of the outer territories of the old Republic to do so. Some court chroniclers of the following century would frame this hesitation as principled loyalty to the memory of House Varro and, perhaps, a growing sentiment towards the worship of Zelos Goldenhand, god of the state; others, less charitably, suggested that Tarnos II and his ministers, chief among them his uncle Vardanos (a local title roughly translated as 'guardian of the hearth') Aroneth, feared that direct Imperial oversight would strip away the informal privileges the Kamaran nobility had enjoyed as a favored client kingdom rather than a subject province.

The Emperor was not inclined to let the delay pass unanswered. In 6 IC, Octavius dispatched Legate Titus Nepos of House Gabinius, a family already notorious for its uncompromising governorships in Aescalapea, to formalize Cambrecia's place within the Empire. Titus Nepos garrisoned a cohort of the Third Legion within Septarium itself, the first standing Imperial troops the capital had ever hosted. T. Nepos also established a permanent legate's residence beside the royal palace, a deliberate arrangement meant to remind the Dravosid court exactly whose authority now took precedence in matters of war, law, and foreign relations. Alongside him came Procurator Gnaeus Falco, charged with conducting Cambrecia's first Imperial census and establishing the tribute rolls by which the province would be taxed. Falco's assessors moved through the fields and foothills of Cambrecia methodically, and by 11 IC the old exemptions once granted to Septimius Varros's veteran-settlers, whose descendants had, for two generations, paid only nominal dues to the Dravosid crown, were formally abolished. It is said that many of these descendants were worshipers of Zelos Goldenhand, god of the state, and among them there were murmured accusations of tyranny under the new Zetian Emperor.

It was both this loss of exemption and moral outrage that finally broke the Cambrecian people into open unrest. In 13 IC, a coalition of wealthy landowners descended from Septimius's retired legionaries, led by the orator Gaius Fufidius Cato, gathered in the forum of Septarium and petitioned Legate Titus Nepos for the right to elect a body of their own, a Concilium Septariae, to oversee taxation and local law, citing the example of neighboring Neptaris, which within living memory had cast off its own monarchy for an elected Council. What became known as the Sedition of Septarium gathered enough support among the capital's merchant class to shut down the grain markets for the better part of a month, but it found no allies among the Kamaran nobility or the crown, both of whom recognized a Senate of Fufidius Cato's design as no less a threat to Dravosid rule than to Imperial rule. King Tarnos II lent his own household guard to the Legate to help clear the forum, and the Legate had Fufidius Cato and eleven of his fellow petitioners exiled to Ylargebad Island rather than executed, a mercy some historians attribute to T. Nepos's wish not to make martyrs of them so early in his governorship. The Sedition failed, but the grievance did not: the dream of an elected Cambrecian Senate would resurface, in one form or another, for the better part of two centuries to come.

In the decades following the failed Sedition, Cambrecia settled into an uneasy accommodation with Imperial rule. The Kamaran and Dravosid nobility increasingly adopted Zetian dress, law, and even Latin naming conventions to curry favor with the Legate's court, and King Tarnos II's own household grew steadily more dependent on Imperial recognition to shore up his legitimacy against rival branches of the Dravosid line. Resistance did not disappear so much as go quiet. Rural landowners, particularly those descended from Septimius Varros's veteran-settlers, routinely under-reported their harvests to Procurator Falco's successors, and banditry along the upland roads toward the Cambrecian Mountains, often blamed on displaced tribesmen but just as often the work of disaffected settler youth, grew persistent enough that Legate Titus Nepos was forced to keep a standing garrison there for the remainder of his tenure.

Legate Titus Nepos commanded the Legion III Cambrecia for nearly three decades, ruling with the same uncompromising hand that had crushed Cato's rebellion at the Sedition of Septarium, but the Proconsul's refusal to ease taxation even as low-level unrest simmered on eventually drew quiet complaints to Zeth from the Cambrecian nobility itself, carried through channels the aging Legate never suspected existed. He died at his post in 44 IC, worn down less by any single crisis than by the accumulated weight of patrolling a province that had never forgiven him for the Sedition's suppression. His successor, chosen deliberately by the Imperial court to repair the relationship, was Cyricus Isidorus of House Livius, whose appointment in 47 IC was met in Septarium with genuine, if cautious, hope. House Livius had, after all, been Cambrecia's first Imperial patron, sponsor of Septimius Varros's own conquest generations before, and many among the Dravosid court believed a Livius Legate would restore some measure of the old client kingdom's dignity. It was a hope that would make what followed all the more bitter.

Cambrecia and the Derlic War

Original article: Cambrecia and the Derlic War

Under Legate Cyricus Isidorus of House Livius, Legion III Cambrecia moved into the trackless wilds of what had even then become known as the Cambrecian Mountains, chasing rumors of wealthy dwarven miners high in the peaks. In a mistake that would resonate for decades to come and permanently alter the political landscape of southern Duria, the Legion slaughtered an ostensibly peaceful dwarven ambassadorial party from the Kingdom of Derlos, which initiated what would become known as the Derlic War in the Empire with the express intention of conquering the subterranean Kingdom. The Legion spent the first few months of the "War" failing to even locate the entrance to the underground mountain kingdom. The dwarves were shocked by the behavior of humans they thought were friendly and prepared themselves for battle, but cooler heads prevailed and an envoy was sent to Neptaris, who had allied with the dwarves of Derlos some six centuries prior during the War of the Dark Rider. After brief deliberations, the Triumvirate of Neptaris secretly decided to maintain their alliance with Derlos and prepare for war against this new Empire. In 55 IC, Neptaris formally declared war on Zeth and immediately took one of their key military outposts in the foothills of the Cambrecian Mountains, Fort Pagulium.

What began as an exploratory expedition against Derlos quickly grew into a war Cambrecia had not prepared for. Neptaran Marshal Marshal Aador Manx, moving in concert with dwarven irregulars from Derlos, exploited the fall of Fort Pagulium to seize five more Imperial supply depots before the year was out, and for two years Legate Isidorus found himself fighting a war on ground he had not chosen. The tide turned only when the Imperial fleet broke Neptaris's navy at the Battle of Nimble Point in 57 IC and sealed Krios Bay, cutting the rebellious Freecity off from the sea it depended on. Any relief the victory brought was short-lived: a plague swept along the Cambrecian coast the following winter, and among its dead was Isidorus himself, the very Legate whose slaughter of the Derlic envoys had started the war in the first place. Command passed to Legate Valerius Lucius, who spent the next several years rebuilding the Legion's strength even as Neptaris, unbeknownst to the Empire, was doing the same in secret shipyards along its own coast. Marshal Manx fought on until his death at Fort Pagulium, and his successor, Marshall Greor Alcyon of House Markos, briefly seized command of the Maroshan Sea with a fleet of thirty warships, but Imperial spies located and burned Neptaris's hidden shipyards in the winter of 65 IC, and with reinforcement from the fleets of Paladinium in Imperial Simmeria, Valerius Lucius laid siege to Neptaris itself. The city fell within a fortnight when an Imperial sympathizer inside its walls opened the gates, and Marshal Alcyon, upon hearing the news, took his own life rather than witness Neptaris's surrender. With their human allies defeated, the dwarves of Derlos sealed off the entrances to their subterranean kingdom and disappeared into the roots of the mountains.

For Cambrecia, the years after the Derlic War brought no relief, only a change in the shape of their subjugation. The dwarven wealth that had first drawn the Legion into the mountains was never recovered; the Kingdom of Derlos had sealed its gates and vanished into the roots of the mountains rather than ever treat with the Empire again, so the war that cost Isidorus his life had, in the end, won Zeth nothing at all. Command remained with Legate Valerius Lucius, who spent his remaining years in Septarium keeping the Legion garrisoned and the tribute rolls full, but the endless cycle of rebellion made direct military rule an expense Zeth could not sustain indefinitely.

Cambrecia's own house was no steadier than the Empire's patience. In the plague-stricken winter of 58 IC that claimed Legate Isidorus, the same sickness reached Septarium and took King Tarnos III, leaving the throne to his young son, Prince Kestor, no more than five years old. A regency council, drawn from mostly Kamaros-descended nobility and backed by the increasingly influential priesthood of Zelos Goldenhand, ruled in the boy's name. With Zeth's full attention on the war against Neptaris and Derlos, no one in the capital was minding Cambrecia's own succession, and Bellenos Dravos, of the old Amesi-descended branch of the royal house, a line that had never accepted being passed over for the throne generations before, raised his own claim. The resulting Dravosid Kinstrife dragged on for sixteen years, a slow civil war fought in the shadow of the Empire's own occupation, until Kestor, grown to manhood, finally defeated and killed Bellenos in personal combat in 74 IC at the Battle of Vetrenos and reunited the kingdom under his own rule for the first time in a generation.

It was precisely this victory that doomed him. A legitimate, battle-hardened king who had reunified Cambrecia without any help from Zeth was a far more troubling prospect to the Empire than a child regency had ever been, and Emperor Emperor Leto I of House Livius had no intention of recognizing a monarch who might one day decide he owed the Empire nothing at all. In 78 IC, fresh Imperial legions arrived in Septarium, declared Kestor's rule illegitimate despite the regency council's own endorsement years before, and installed a man with no connection to House Dravos whatsoever, Quintus Sarnicos, as King of Cambrecia in his place. What became of Kestor Dravos, the last of his line, has never been settled. Some in Septarium still whisper that he was quietly put to the sword in the dungeons beneath his own palace and buried without rite, so that Zeth would leave the Cambrecian people no grave to mourn at and no martyr to rally behind. Others insist he escaped the city before the legions arrived and lived out his years in exile, some say in Neptaris, others in the depths of the Cambrecian Mountains, given quiet sanctuary by the dwarves of Derlos, who, whatever else divided them from the surface, understood better than anyone what it meant to be betrayed by the Empire's ambitions.

Cambrecia and the Long Discontent

Original article: Cambrecia and the Long Discontent

King Quintus Sarnicos ruled the Kingdom of Cambrecia for seventeen years knowing his crown existed only so long as Zeth found him useful, and he governed accordingly: taxes rose, informers multiplied, and any noble house suspected of lingering loyalty to House Dravos found itself stripped of land and title within five years of his coronation. He died in 95 IC without a son, and the throne passed instead through his daughter, Livia, to her husband, a Zetian-born officer named Lucius Andarion who had spent most of his career garrisoned in the Cambrecian Mountains. Historians would later group Andarion into the same Sarnicid Dynasty as his father-in-law, though in truth the crown had already changed hands by marriage rather than blood, a pattern that would repeat itself more than once.

Andarion's reign is remembered for the Revolt of Duvarna, when the descendants of the old Duvarna tribe, crushed by taxation and by a string of bad harvests, rose up along the middle Kambros River and briefly drove out every Imperial tax-collector between Septarium and the foothills. King Lucius answered with a severity that shocked even his own Imperial advisors: entire villages were burned, and the survivors resettled by force onto Imperial estates further south, a policy that broke the rebellion but left the region depopulated and bitter for a generation afterward. He died in 115 IC, reportedly of a wasting illness, though rumors in Septarium's taverns preferred to whisper of poison.

His successor, King Gaius Marendic, came to the throne with no blood connection to Sarnicos or Andarion at all, simply the next man Zeth judged reliable, and his reign became defined by an uprising of a different character entirely. In 131 IC, a coalition of merchants and lesser priests in Septarium itself, citing Neptaris's Supreme Assembly as their model exactly as Fufidius Cato's petitioners had a century before, attempted to revive the old dream of a Cambrecian Senate under the banner of a rebuilt Concilium. King Gaius crushed the movement's leadership within weeks, but unlike Lucius' brutal cleansing of the Duvarna valley, he could not stamp out the idea itself; the countryside remained restless for the rest of his reign, and it was this stubborn, low-grade defiance, impossible to kill with a sword no matter how many heads it took, that finally convinced the Emperor Metius the Elder of House Livius that Cambrecia needed a different kind of conqueror. By 149 IC, he had settled on the Pontifex of Zelos instead.

Pontifex Ionnanes II was Aescalapean, not Zetian, the fourth son of a wealthy vintner in a province that had spent four decades under the iron rule of House Gabinius before the Church of Zelos even expanded there, and he had grown up watching what that kind of rule cost long after the rebellions themselves were over. "Ionnanes" wasn't his birth name at all, but the regnal name he took upon his elevation to the Pontificate, a custom of the Zelos priesthood that few people outside its ranks paid much attention to at the time, but which, centuries later, the Potentates of Cambrecia would inherit without anyone quite remembering where it started. Emperor Metius the Elder chose him precisely because he wasn't a soldier: where Titus Nepos, Cyricus Isidorus, and every Cambrecian king from Quintus to Gaius had answered Cambrecian defiance with the sword and only sharpened it, Ionnanes proposed something no Legate had ever tried: offering the Cambrecians not a conqueror to submit to, but a god to belong to. The Pontificate of Zelos had stood in Zeth itself since the earliest days of the Republic, seated at the literal heart of the state Zelos embodied, and moving it across an entire ocean to a half-pacified frontier province was, by any measure, a considerable gamble. Neither Metius nor Ionnanes could have known it at the time, but in trading the safety of Zeth for the volatile soil of Septarium, they planted the seed of something the Empire could not have predicted: a priesthood answerable, in theory, to the Emperor, but rooted now in Cambrecian ground, drawing Cambrecian converts, and building, cathedral stone by cathedral stone, a foundation of authority that would one day answer to no Emperor at all and yet maintain Imperial traditions long after the Empire had fallen.

Gaius Marendic died in 149 IC, cut down putting down one rising too many, and the Sarnicid line's last clear claimant proved to be a nephew named Basran Sugurd, hastily acclaimed with none of the old ceremony and no real base of support among either the nobility or the commons. Pontifex Ionnanes II arrived in Septarium that same year with a mandate from Emperor Metius the Elder to raise a cathedral. Where Basran had no foundation to build on, Ionnanes built one immediately: he declared the Neptaran clergy of Zelos still resident in Septarium heretical, expelled them, and sent them back across the border bearing the Emperor's own edict that Neptaris was to be ceded to Cambrecia, transferring all religious authority over the god of the state within Cambrecia to himself in the same stroke. He then made a public liturgy of the doctrine that legitimacy is a debt renewed each generation rather than a prize seized once, a doctrine that flattered no Sarnicid king who had ever held the throne. Commoners found in him a patron who tied the Founding and the Day of Ash and Oath to public works and open courts, while the native nobility, stripped of most of its old authority under decades of puppet kings, found in the Order of the Lawspeaker and the Order of Auditors a new avenue to relevance that did not depend on the crown at all.

Then Neptaris rose. When Marshal Hadrag of House Markos broke the Imperial garrison and declared the city's independence in 150 IC, in direct response to the Imperial edict Ionnanes had sent, King Basran marched on it himself with only five hundred men, ignorant enough of soldiering to attack a fortified city while outnumbered. Hadrag killed the King personally and sent his head to Septarium as a message to the Empire. Ionnanes read that message for exactly what it was worth to him: within weeks he had named himself Regent for Basran's infant son. Ionnanes sent a message to the Legate Zemarchus Comitas of House Gabinius, who was campainging at the head of Legion II Simmeria in northern Ciritasnia, and ordered him to Cambrecia to take command of both Legions and take Neptaris. The young Legate was not about to ignore his standing orders from the Emperor to attend to a mere priest, so continued his campaign north of the Divian Mountains. The Pontifex continued to plead, both to the Legate and the Emperor, but neither seemed inclined to assist. The Pontifex briefly tried to organize the Legion III Cambrecia himself, but as astute a politician and administrator he was, he was no military commander. Thus, for the next decade and a half he governed Cambrecia in a boy's name while the province's nobility continued draining into holy orders around him and the old Sarnicid apparatus withered for want of a king who could actually sit a throne. It was during this time that Ionnanes encouraged the foundation of several wineries in Cambrecia, even going so far as to import cuttings from his father's family vineyard back in Aescalapea. Meanwhile, in 158 IC, the Pontifex called upon an old family friend, the Praefectus Classis Publius Rufus of the Aescalapean minor House Rutilius to bring his fleet to the Maroshan Sea to harass the Neptaran armada, commanded by the city's first Grand Admiral, Garen Taltosbane. Though Taltosbane himself evaded capture, over the next eight years, Rufus slowly wore down the Neptaran merchant and naval fleets, making trade by sea into the city all but impossible.

By 166 IC the boy, named Corvos, whom Ionnanes had personally raised and tutored, had come of age. A cousin of the old Sarnicid line, Decimus Sarnicos, chose that moment to press a rival claim rather than see the regency simply hand power back. Ionnanes settled it the way he had spent almost two decades teaching Cambrecia to expect: Corvos's blood was tested before the Coronal of Twelve Thorns and drew no blood, Decimus' did. The cousin yielded the rest of his claim on the floor of the trial rather than face Corvos in single combat. Corvos was crowned before the Unsheathed Word by Ionnanes's own hand, and rather than keep his father's surname, he took his mother's, a native Cambrecian noblewoman of House Gweri, marking the new line as a deliberate return to home-grown blood after generations of Zetian appointees. He reigned as the first king of the Corvosid dynasty: legitimate by primogeniture, confirmed by combat, and crowned by a church that had just spent sixteen years making itself indispensable to answering exactly that question.

Cambrecia and a Fragile Peace

Original article: Cambrecia and a Fragile Peace

Neptaris had already been an independent, rebel city for sixteen years by the time King Corvos was crowned in 166 IC. Marshal Hadrag had torn it out of the Empire's hands the same year King Basran Sugurd died and Ionnanes's regency began. It wasn't until 173 IC, seven years into Corvos's own reign, that Legate Zemarchus Comitas of House Gabinius took the city within a month and burned three quarters of it to the ground in what would become known to historians as the Pacification of Neptaris. Flush with that victory, he marched his Legion northward the following year by way of the Cambrecian Mountains, razing any foothill town he suspected of harboring rebel sympathy. King Corvos rode out personally to help organize the towns' defense, an instinct no Sarnicid king had ever shown, and took a wound in the fighting that would trouble him for the rest of his life.

The dwarves of Derlos ended Zemarchus's campaign for him. Late in 174 IC, King Jormung's warriors swept out of the mountains and gutted his Legion, sending the Legate fleeing back to Septarium. Instead of the sanctuary he expected, Pontifex Ionnanes II had him arrested for the massacre in Neptaris and subsequent attack on Imperial citizens in Cambrecia. He was charged with tyranny, treason and parricide (the Pontifex contended the hillfolk were his cousins). Ionnanes II himself presided over the trial. When found guilty, the Legate demanded the right of his station to throw himself on his own sword, but the Pontifex instead ordered poena cullei, the "penalty of the sack." Zemarchus Comitas of House Gabinius was dressed in a bloody wolfskin, forced to wear wooden shoes and sewn into a heavy sack with a pack of rats. He was carted, screaming, through Septarium and tossed into the Septimia River to drown. It was a remarkable assertion of authority for a churchman to make over an Imperial commander and sent a clear message to the Legion: Cambrecia was under the patronage of Zelos Goldenhand and no soldier, even a scion of one of the Great Houses, could place himself above the God of the State. Unfortunately, it did nothing to solve the deeper problem: the dwarves of Derlos kept right on arming and training Neptaris's rebels out of Cambrecian territory, a quiet hemorrhage Ionnanes never managed to stop. He spent his last five years trying, and died in 180 IC still negotiating.

His successor, a Cambrecian-born cleric raised through the Order of the Lawspeaker and taking the pontifical name Aurelian, succeeded where his mentor hadn't. Within a few years he brokered what has come to be called the Foothill Accord with King Jormung, a grudging but real peace that finally ended Derlos's support for the rebels. It was overshadowed at the time by Corvos's own decline: his old wound worsened through the early 180s, and grew resistant to magickal healing over time, dying of its complications in 184 IC, a quieter death than any king in living memory. He was only 35 years old. His six year old son, Medeno II was crowned without a single rival claimant coming forward, the first uncontested succession Cambrecia had seen in generations, and Aurelian stepped into the regency Ionnanes had once held as though it were simply the natural order of things.

The decade that followed was the closest thing to an easy stretch in this entire history. The cathedral Ionnanes had started in 149 IC was finally completed and consecrated around 186 IC, giving the regency an early, unifying moment of pride. The Order of the Lawspeaker spent much of the decade compiling the Codex of Twelve Pillars, the first attempt to reconcile a century of contradictory Cambrecian royal decrees into one coherent body of law. Trade recovered, Septarium grew as both a pilgrimage site and a genuine center of legal scholarship, and the whole period would later be remembered as proof that the Goldenhand's own virtues, stewardship, continuity, diligence, could hold a province together without a war anywhere in sight.

It did not last. In 195 IC, with the regency completed only a year prior, Aurelian pressed the newly-arrived Legate Sarapion Leo of House Valerius to operate under the command of the young King in their war against recalcitrant Neptaris. Sarapion ignored the Pontifex and began to march his Legions south, but was seized en-route by crusaders lead by the Order of the Unwilling Crown and hauled back to Septarium on charges of heresy. The Legate, however, escaped his own trial with help from his troops, who stormed the city within the week. Victorious even from a prison cell, Sarapion declared martial law, arrested both the Pontifex Aurelian and King Medeno II on charges of treason against the Emperor and marched on Neptaris anyway. What followed was ugly on every side: atrocities against Cambrecian farmers when Sarapion's supply lines failed, a daring raid by Admiral Blacklocks that burned the rebuilt Neptaran shipyards and years of grinding stalemate that ended only when one of Sarapion's own guards assassinated him in 202 IC.

The Pontifex and young King, even closer than they had been during the King's regency, had been released five years prior, without the Legate's knowledge. In the aftermath of Sarapion's assassination, the Pontifex appointed King Medeno II to the Imperial Legate's vacant post, a startling arrogation of an Imperial military office that nonetheless went unchallenged from Zeth. True to the arrangement, Medeno spent the office fighting the war he actually cared about, the low-grade native insurgency still smoldering in the foothills of the Cambrecian Mountains long after the Foothill Accord had cut the dwarves out of it. For the better part of a decade he simply ignored Aurelian's protests that the coast deserved his attention instead. The Legion slipped from his hands only once, in 219 IC, when Emperor Semelius of House Furius appointed his own brother, Tiberius Phocas, to the post Medeno had held for seventeen years, but a Senate coup in Zeth swept Semelius aside within the year and the Legate's chair reverted to the Crown almost as an afterthought.

Away from the coast, this was Cambrecia's longest stretch of uninterrupted internal peace since the conquest. Aurelian, who had shepherded two Cambrecian kings through the church's partnership with the crown, died of old age around 215 IC and was succeeded by Pontifex Leontius, an Aescalapean-trained scholar with no taste for politics who poured the church's resources into learning instead. Under Leontius, the Order of the Lawspeaker gave the Codex of Twelve Pillars its first major revision in a generation, and Septarium's reputation as a center of legal scholarship hardened into something concrete: the Auditors' College, chartered in 224 IC to formally train the Order of Auditors, drew students from as far as Koramia. Cambrecian wine, an investment in the countryside made by Ionnanes himself, became the province's quiet economic engine through these decades, carried down the King's Road that Medeno had built to move troops to the mountains and that merchants adopted just as happily. It's one of the era's sharper ironies that the tariffs Cambrecia later found itself paying into Neptaris's treasury fell, in no small part, on its own wine reaching Neptaran tables.

Medeno II reigned for fifty-one years and died peacefully in 235 IC, remembered less for any battle than for simply never losing his throne to war, plague, or a rival's blade the way every king before him had. His son took the crown as King Tarnos IV, reviving a name that hadn't sat on a Cambrecian throne since House Dravos fell a century and a half earlier, a deliberate gesture tying the young Corvosid line to the memory of the one it had replaced. Leontius died a few years into Tarnos's reign and was succeeded by Pontifex Cassian, who inherited a treasury already feeling Neptaris's reversal of fortune and spent his tenure trying, and failing, to talk the Neptaran Supreme Assembly out of it.

By 262 IC, and again in 265 IC, the sitting Pontifex of Zelos traveled to Neptaris himself to plead for relief from those tariffs, and was refused both times. He never got a third chance to ask; in 271 IC, pirates sank his ship off the Neptaran coast and all hands were lost. His successor, Severinus of House Gabinius, a man scarred in battle during the last days of the old rebellion decades before, arrived in Septarium in 273 IC in no mood for patience. He demanded the King break the long peace and retake Neptaris outright. The King refused, invoking the Treaty of Neptaris that had ended the Great Rebellion more than forty years before, and for a time it seemed the matter would simply die there. It didn't. Late in 276 IC, Severinus issued the Denunciation of Democracy, declaring the Freecity of Neptaris' very form of government an offense against the law of Zelos, and gave the city five years to reform itself or answer for it.

Cambrecia and the Neptaran Crusade

Original article: Cambrecia and the Neptaran Crusade

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.

The Cambrecian Civil Wars

Original article: The Cambrecian Civil Wars

After years of neglect for its colony, the Empire informed Cambrecia that it would have to see to its own affairs of defense in 724 IC. The Cambrecian nobility, so reliant on the Emperor's support and guidance, immediately began to fall to internal bickering and strife, as civil war broke out across the land. For the next thirty years, war was the mainstay as monarch after monarch fell. Eventually, no heirs became apparent to the throne excepting a three year old child and the nobility, not trusting one another with the regency, elected to place the Pontifex of Zelos as regent to the crown. The Pontifex moved quickly and relentlessly in destroying the economic power of the local nobility, particularly the economies of those who opposed the Empire, Zelos, or him personally. By the time that the King came of age, it was apparent that the monarchy had power only so long as it was supported by the clergy of Zelos. That King's son, Jeremiah Tovex, abdicated his power of rulership to the Pontifex, making Geraldus the first Potentate of Cambrecia in 762 IC. Civil war again erupted over the rulership of the Potentate, but, unfortunately, the power of those rebellious nobles had already been waning over the last few decades, and they proved no match for Geraldus. However, instead of replacing the defeated nobles with more nobility, they were replaced by priests of Zelos. By 800 IC, the rebellions had ended, with nearly sixty percent of the nobility having been replaced by the church hierarchy. In 834 IC, the Potentate declared the laws of inheritance by primogeniture anathema, and by 887 IC, the entire noble hierarchy of Cambrecia had been replaced by the priesthood of Zelos. In 900 IC, the Emperor Metaurus of House Drusus recognized Cambrecia officially as the Holy See of Cambrecia, and the noble class was irrevocably and completely removed from its position of rulership in the nation. It was at this time that the name of the Cambrecian capital was changed from Septarium to Zelosia City. Only the lowest position of secular rulership, that of Urbis Praefectus, remained, and even they were chosen by the religious hierarchy and not permitted position by heredity.

Cambrecia and the Rise of Koramia

Original article: Cambrecia and the Rise of Koramia

After the conclusion of the Cambrecian Civil Wars, the Holy See remained a stalwart supporter of Imperial interests on Duria, assisting in the defense of Imperial naval interests in the Maroshan Sea and in the petty kingdoms of Koramia. When, in 1202 IC, the self-styled King of Koramia placed his own Prelate of Vortumnus in the holy seat of Paeldain, the Pontifex of Zelos handed that king and Prelate an even stronger denunciation than the Pontifex Maximus himself: the See broke off all trade relations with the Kingdom of Koramia, refusing to recognize its sovereignty. This harsh treatment sparked off a minor war between the two nations in 1208 IC and, though the initial fighting lasted only a decade or so, no official treaty was established between the two nations. By 1250 IC, despite a minor movement among some of the priests of Cambrecia, the Potentate was still strong in his opposition to the concept of an independent Koramian Kingdom.

Cambrecia and the Mage War

Original article: Cambrecia and the Mage War

When the Great Empire began its reconquest of Koramia in 1250 IC, Horatius IV, the Potentate of Zelos eagerly joined in the fray. The Potentate not only reiterated that all of Koramia was anathema to Zelos, but declared anyone willing to assist them and/or trade with the Koramians on an individual basis anathema. Despite the Potentate's personal eagerness, he could not commit all of the Cambrecian forces against Koramia: Cambrecia had long, sporadic conflict with the dwarves of the Cambrecian Mountains and soon after the Cambrecians began to withdraw from the mountains to attend to the Koramia campaign, the dwarves suddenly rose up en masse to attack Cambrecia from their ancient strongholds. Unbeknownst to the Potentate, the dwarves of Duria had allied with Koramia and were coordinating against Imperial forces.

While Imperial forces established a beachhead in Koramia, the Cambrecian front began to falter. Unexpectedly, the Mages of Lun Dorak, having quelled resistance among the clans of the nearby Calmerian Marches, began moving troops into the Cambrecian Mountains from the east. The Potentate quickly allied with the Mage-King Lucasa and the Dorakian forces under his command and the dwarves of the Cambrecian Mountains were driven underground. With the dwarves quelled, the combined forces of Cambrecia and Lun Dorak prepared their assault on the Cambrecian front of the war against Koramia.

Early in 1252 IC, word reached Cambrecia that the Emperor Publius Antonius had died and his successor, Lucius was actually the Mage-King himself. The heirarchy of Zelos in Cambrecia initially went into a frenzied debate as to whether the succession was legal according to the laws of Zelos, but the Potentate had already cast his lot. He voiced his support for Lucasa as Mage-King and Emperor, declaring any who disobeyed not only traitors to the Empire, but Anathema. It was at this point that some of the priests of Zelos realized that Potentate Horatius IV had gone quite mad.

The Zelosian Schism

Original article: The Zelosian Schism

After Potentate Horatius IV declared his allegiance to Lucasa as the Imperial Emperor, he commanded renewed attacks against Koramia. Nearly a third of his generals, all priests of Zelos and formerly loyal to Cambrecia, refused. They withdrew their troops to the city of Trias in northern Cambrecia and called the Council of Trias. Though they invited all priests of Zelos to this Council, those who remained loyal to Horatius IV refused. Somehow, the few priests of Zelos who followed the Koramian Heresy in Koramia made it across the Cambrecian Front and attended the Council.

Three weeks of heated debate followed, with those in attendance alternatively calling for unity in the Church of Zelos and for separation from the Office of the Potentate. After three weeks, Dorakian Mages arrived at the Council with documents in hand from the Potentate ordering the Priests to Zelosia City for trial as heretics and traitors, while they would assume command of the wayward armies. The Priests were furious, both at the unilateral decision of the Potentate and at the audacity of the Lun Dorakian Mages. Their decision was made... they would no longer obey the Potentate. The Dorakian Mages were subdued in a pitched battle within the Cathedral of Trias itself, quickly tried and burned at the stake for Heresy. The Council met for one more day... by noon, it had declared Lucasa and Horatius IV both Heretics.

Word of the Council of Trias spread like wildfire throughout Cambrecia. More priests declared their support for the priests, bringing their flocks with them. In the midst of one of the largest wars the world had ever seen, Cambrecia erupted in Civil War. Koramia assumed a policy of containment... they pushed Cambrecia back to their traditional borders and stopped there, instead concentrating what forces they had left against the Empire in central Koramia.

The civil war in Cambrecia eventually coalesced into three main factions. The Imperials were those who remained loyal to Horatius IV and the Mage-King. The Sacerdosi, under the Episcopus of Trias, Cyril the Scholar, declared for the Council of Trias. The third faction were the Royalists, lead by an underground amalgam of dissenters who believed that the people were lead to ruin by the lack of a hereditary monarch. The fighting between the three factions was so intense that few seemed to notice when the Mage-King was defeated in 1253 IC and his continent-spanning Empire collapsed.

For much of the early action in the war, the main conflict was between the Imperials and the Sacerdos, with the Royalists forces skirmishing from time to time with both. No one really took the Royalists seriously until The Freecity of Neptaris unexpectedly entered the fray on the side of the Royalists. Despite having a long and bloody history of fighting against Cambrecia, the Council of Neptaris decided that it would rather have a belligerent Monarchy than a fanatical theocracy as a neighbor. With new troops to bolster their ranks and arguably the world's most powerful navy at their disposal, the Royalists began to make ground against the other two faction or, at least, hold their own in battle.

By 1262 IC, the fighting had reached something of an apex. No faction was prepared to give way or compromise with the other. It seemed that nothing would end the wars. Only the impossible would end the conflict.

That is the year the impossible happened.

Cambrecia and the Recession of the Gods

Original article: Cambrecia and the Recession of the Gods

In the Spring of 1262 IC, the Crimson Plague reached Neptaris and quickly spread into Cambrecia. Despite the Plague's resistance to magical cures, the extensive priesthoods of the Imperial and the Sacredosi factions were able to provide some care to their populace and the disease was not as rampant in the central and northern areas of Cambrecia as it was elsewhere. The Royalist forces were decimated and Neptaris withdrew its military support to help deal with the Plague in their own city. It is generally believed that the Royalist leader, Drogo Garibald, was prepared to surrender by the end of spring and was en route to Zelosia City to lay down arms on the Summer Solstice.

On the Summer Solstice of that year, the Recession of the Gods began. Initially, it was believed in Cambrecia that only the priests of Zelos had lost the blessing of their god. Riots by people convinced the Schism had damned them all immediately erupted throughout the nation. By nightfall, Zelosia City was in flames and by the following morning, Potentate Horatius IV lay dead on the steps of the Great Temple of Zelos, having flung himself from its tower. It is said that when Drogo Garibald saw Zelosia City ablaze and received word that its priests no longer received blessings from the God of the State, he turned his entourage around and returned to the city of Tryscon. Trias, the defacto capital of the Sacerdosi, were faring little better than the Imperials as the people revolted against them. Cyril the Scholar kept his head and soon discovered that all priests of the Old Gods had lost their connection to the divine and showed signs of regaining some semblance of control over the angry mobs in Trias, but he was dead of the Crimson Plague within a week.

Without any divine healing, the Crimson Plague soon took Cambrecia by the same stranglehold it had elsewhere. In a panic and now without divine leadership, those who did not die from the Plague either tried to flee or rallied under corrupt charlatans claiming to have visions of the divine. Most towns and cities were struck the hardest by the Plague, with Trias losing three quarters of its population and Zelosia City some seven-eighths of its population by Autumn. In Royalist territories to the east and south, the leadership remained more or less intact and the people did not panic quite as much as in other regions of Cambrecia... many had already resigned themselves to being Anathema to Zelos, so few were interested in divine guidance already. Drogo Garibald himself was crowned Drogo I, King of Daredonia on the first of Mudens in Tryscon and immediately set about instituting draconian measures to stem the tide of the plague. He canceled all public celebrations, including religious celebrations, and forbade trade of any sort, even between villages. To ensure no one traveled the roads, he founded the Order of the Black Shroud, a band of knights who would grimly travel the roads of Cambrecia, slaying any they found not of their Order, but also forbidden from entering village or town themselves.

By 1263 IC, the wars had effectively ground to a halt. Justinian III, an adviser to Cyril the Scholar, became the leader of the Sacredosi in the north, though he had little authority outside Trias. The Imperials could not gather enough Episcopi to elect a new Potentate, so remained without a Head of State for almost a decade. King Drogo I was successful in stemming the tide of the Crimson Plague in the south and east, but his draconian imprisonment of the populace in their own homes was intensely despised by his people.

None of the three factions had any real ability to conduct war, though there were some skirmishes over the next fifty years. Despite the priesthood having no divine power, the Imperial Zelosians were able to retain power in central Cambrecia throughout the Dark Times by focusing on their traditions and now empty rituals (and, in part, because the people just didn't have the spirit to oppose them). In the north, the Episcopi Zelosians slowly turned over power to secular representatives, in part because of a lack of priests qualified to administer the region. By 1300 IC, the region under Episcopi control was generally known by its traditional, pre-Imperial name of Numentora and was conducting its own affairs as a sovereign nation, though this separation would not be formalized until 1313 IC.

It should be noted that, during these dark times, druids began to arrive in Cambrecia from the Calmerian Marches. Despite being welcomed by the Daredonians and, to a lesser degree, by Numentora, the powerless priests of Zelosia City treated the druids as a threat and forbade their interference and, eventually, even entry into territory they controlled. Unfortunately for the priests, this edict was generally ignored outside of Zelosia City, as the healing magics and wisdom of the druids were seen as a welcome respite to the powerless, corrupt priests of Zelos. Even in Zelosia City, a small number of druids established themselves, hidden from the priesthood's men by the populace.

Most believed that the Old Gods had abandoned the mortal world forever and were fully prepared to take on the beliefs of their Druidic saviors. Then, as abruptly as their gifts were taken away, the Old Gods suddenly returned.

Cambrecia in the Fourth Age

Original article: Cambrecia in the Fourth Age

When the Old Gods returned to the world in 1312 IC, Cambrecia was almost immediately reborn from the ashes of the Dark Times. With no Great Empire to remain loyal to, the few remaining Episcopi still loyal to Zelosia City elected a new Potentate, Gabriel I, and he formally issued the Edict of Absolution, which not only absolved all who had been condemned by the Church in the past (with the notable exceptions of Ditis Carnifex and the Mage King), but it formally declared Cambrecia independent of any civilian government, beholden only to Zelos himself, with the Potentate as his ultimate agent in the mortal realm. Even official priestly titles were altered to the local language: Episcopi and Archisacerdi became Archbishops, Sacerdos became Bishops and Flamen became Priests (the Potentate retained his title, though he declared himself no longer subject to a Pontifex Maximus). Not only were the schismatics from the Zelosian Schism restored to the Church, but ecclesiastic ambassadors were sent to Koramia and, in 1320 IC, Potentate Gabriel I formally announced the Edict of One State, which embraced those worshipers of Zelos following the Koramian Heresy, the Aebasan Orthodoxy and the Imperial Ecclesia, with preference for none. Essentially, the Potentate declared that henceforth, the Church would support the decisions of the legitimate local civilian government on how the gods governed themselves.

Despite having lost much of its territory to the war, strife and the depredations of the Dark Times, Gabriel I and his successors (Ambrose I, Urban IV and the current Potentate, Gabriel II) seem satisfied to rule over the remaining territory as the Holy See. Though ambassadorial overtures to the splinter states were initially received suspiciously at best, the Potentates recognized the legitimacy of Daredonia, Kamaros, Numentora, Auteria and even the Freecity of Neptaris. Zelosia City itself has grown quickly in the Fourth Age of Man as trade routes reopen and pilgrims travel to the Great Temple to pay homage to the renewed God of the State.

This page has been identified as needing a map for clarity.

 

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