Cambrecia and a Fragile Peace

This is an article on the History of Feyworld
Years: 920 NC to 1026 NC
Age: The Third Age of Man
Continent: Duria
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The History of Cambrecia
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Cambrecia and the Long Discontent	The Cambrecian Civil Wars

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.