Milosia in the Third Age of Man

This is an article on the History of Feyworld
Years: 120 NC to 2012 NC
Age: The Third Age of Man
Continent: Aurea
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Milosia
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Milosia Before the Third Age of Man	Milosia in the Dark Times

Out of the long division of the Sabamelii hill-folk and the Milgians of the planes of Milosia rose, at length, a single crown. Imperial chroniclers, setting down Sabamelii oral memory many centuries after the fact, place around 300 BI the reign of the semi-legendary King Velthur, called the Boar-Crowned, who is said to have bound the hill-tribes and the plains-folk into one kingdom after leading them to a great victory over the giants and goblins who came down from the Antasian vales, the same ancient foe the first Aureans had united to fight. In token of that victory Velthur took the Sabamelii boar for his emblem, and from him the royal House Velthuri claimed descent and the boar that the realm bears to this day. His kingdom, ruled from Tasca Obodos, was a fractious thing, its hill-clans and plain-cities bound more by the king's person than by any deeper union, but it endured for some two hundred years.

That endurance ended with House Gabinius. One of the seven Great Houses of Zeth, sprung from the Septira who founded the city and the bloodiest of that blood, the Gabinii, had been granted the governorship of conquered Aescalapea and ruled it through four decades of tyranny before they turned their forays against Milosia. In 140 BI, rather than wait to be devoured as Aescalapea had been, King Baltos III of House Velthuri declared war, and so began the Gabinian War. It was a long and ruinous business: the Senate at Zeth would send no army, yet Gabinian Aescalapea proved its match, and after five years the Aescalapeans bought the alliance of Cordosia, Milosia's old enemy beyond the mountains. Slowly the tide turned. After fifteen more years of blood, Tasca Obodos was stormed and King Baltos III was taken and put to death. His son, Prince Arnth Velthuri, took up a broken crown and led the remnant of the army over the Antasian Mountains into Cordosia, but Menander of House Gabinius hunted him down and destroyed the last Milosian host near the Cordosian seat of Cardol Briach, where Arnth fell and the line of Velthur ended. In the imperial manner a temple of Galea the Triumphant was afterward raised from the stones of Baltos's palace at Tasca Obodos, so that the seat of Milosia's freedom became the monument of its conquest.

Menander's own triumph turned to ash. Having won, he put the Cordosian King Malakiel on trial for sheltering the Milosians, and condemned and executed a man who proved to be only an impostor, for Malakiel had pledged himself to Zeth and fled, leaving another to die in his place. The Senate, holding the killing an unlawful regicide against a client of the Republic, had Menander quietly arrested and executed, and redivided his conquests along their old borders. Cordosia, in recompense, was suffered to keep its kings; Milosia, whose royal line was already extinguished, was not, and became instead a dependent state of the Republic, governed by an appointed Propraetor. House Gabinius, for all its shame, kept Aescalapea, and so the hand that had destroyed the old kingdom went on ruling at Milosia's door. In that grim turn of imperial justice lies the tangled root of a hatred Milosians still bear Aescalapea, though few now agree on its cause.

Under the Propraetors the conquered realm was remade. The first of them set about binding Milosia to Zeth with road and law and garrison: it was the Propraetor Gaius Sentius who drove the Via Augustus the length of the coast and drained the fever-marshes below the hills, and the Propraetor Lucius Aper who broke a great Antasian incursion of giants and goblins and walled the passes against their return. The Milosians, proud and warlike, took to the legions as if born to them; their auxiliaries earned a name across the Empire, and in three generations a beaten people had made the conqueror's cause their own, appearing more Imperial in their devotion than the men of Zeth themselves. It is the abiding paradox of Milosia that it loves most fiercely the empire that unmade it.

When the Republic gave way to the Great Empire, the Propraetor's title gave way to that of Prefect, and the long imperial noon of Milosia began. For more than a thousand years the realm flourished as a settled province: the Prefect Aulus Verecundus raised the aqueduct and the great amphitheater whose arches still stand at Berugia and endowed the harbor-works at Calvenna; the Prefect Decimus Galeo, after the worst giant-incursion in living memory, founded the fortress-city of Castravelo to hold the western passes with a standing arm of the Sixth Legion. The hill-cities grew rich and quarrelsome on wine and oil and stone, feuding among themselves in the shadow of the Legion much as they do now; the vineyards climbed the slopes, the marble came down from the quarries, and Milosian soldiers marched in the Empire's wars to the edges of the world.

It was in these centuries, too, that the hill-monasticism for which the interior is known took root. The mother-abbey of Spelora traces its founding to the hermit-saint Caelius, who in the middle Imperial age forsook the cities for a cave, a spelunca, in the foothills, and there gathered about him disciples drawn to his learning and his austerity. The house they raised was dedicated to Lord Ptharos the Father, god of wisdom and truth, and grew in time into the greatest seat of letters in the realm, its scriptoria copying and keeping the books of the Empire, its terraces giving wine and oil enough to make it wealthy as well as holy.

And as the Third Age drew toward its close, the old Milgian port of Calvenna came at last into its own. What had begun as a foreign merchants' colony on the bay grew, on the carrying-trade of the Aurean Sea, into the first maritime power of the northeastern coast of the Sea, its shipping houses outbidding the merchants of Aescalapea and Ganesia, its quays heaped with the wealth of a hundred ports. Power in Calvenna passed to a close oligarchy of these magnates, who came to weigh in the affairs of the whole Prefecture as heavily as any hill-city's nobles, and whose fleets made Milosia, landward a realm of soldiers, a sea-power besides.