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.
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
Ancient Milosia
Oral tradition holds that, before ever the dougle-headed dragon banners of Zeth flew, Milosia lay within the bounds of the old Aurean Empire, that loose confederation of southern tribes first bound together by the legendary Lars Tarsca to make war on the goblin hordes of the Antasian heights. Two peoples held the land between the mountains and the sea. In the western uplands dwelt the Sabamelii, a hard hill-folk of herders, miners and clan-warriors who dug copper and iron from the Antasian roots, kept the old faith of grove and spring, and reckoned the wild boar the beast of their chieftains. Below them, on the plains and along the bay, lived the Milgians, ploughmen, fishers and traders, who raised the first townlets on the coast and bartered with the foreign galleys that beached there from across the Aurean Sea. Of the Twenty Cities said to have ruled the Aurean Empire, one is rumored to have stood where the capital stands today, a timber-walled town the old tongue is said to have called Verusna, mother to later Berugia; but the Aureans built in wood, and almost nothing of those years survives save copper in the earth and names worn thin in song. As the old Aurean Empire withered and drew back at last into Ganesia, the peoples here were left to themselves, the Sabamelii to their hills and their gods and the Milgians to their coast and their foreign trade, divided as often as not by feud.
The Third Age
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.
The Dark Times
The long rise of Milosia ended in catastrophe born at the heart of the Empire. When the Heretic Emperor Lucius of House Zetar seized the throne and bore the imperial seat away to the distant Sapphire City in 1252 IC, the old order began to fail; his death the year after opened the Fourth Succession War and behind that conflict came the Crimson Plague. It struck Milosia hardest where the people were thickest, in the crowded lanes of Calvenna and the coastal towns, carried (men said then and say still) in Aescalapean hulls. The communes did as the cities of a later, warier age would do: they shut their gates, set watch on the roads, turned plague-ships from the harbor to die at anchor, and walled the sick within their houses. Some among them fell to flagellant processions and to the hunting of scapegoats, and more than one Aescalapean factor was murdered on a Calvennan wharf; others, the magistrates and the monks of Spelora chief among them, kept order and tended the dying as best they could. When the dying was done a third of the realm lay in the ground.
Worse than the plague was the silence that came with it, for in those years the old gods withdrew, and the imperial temples that had answered prayer for a thousand years fell still. The Recession of the Old Gods broke the heart of the Ecclesia; its priests prayed into emptiness, and the people, abandoned, looked elsewhere for comfort. They found it in the old faith of the hills. Out of the Mabean Marches, the wild upland now divided between Mabagne and Donnagh Saoristat, came the druid known as Brannoc the Guide, who led a company of the Tuatha's servants over the hills and into Milosia to succor a people the imperial gods seemed to have forsaken. The druids tended the plague-stricken, blessed the fields, and kept the rites of grove and spring that the Sabamelii had never wholly forgotten, and in the uplands they won a devotion that has never since been undone. When at last the gods returned, the priests came back to find the druids settled in the hearts of the hill-folk, and the quiet war between temple and grove that troubles the realm to this day had begun.
Through all of it, the plague and the silence and the long anarchy of the Dark Times, the Sixth Legion did not break. With no Emperor to recall it and no orders to obey, it went on garrisoning the cities, holding the passes, and governing in the name of a master who would never return, the one unbroken thread of authority from the imperial age into the broken present. That the Prefecture exists at all is the Legion's doing.
The Fourth Age of Man
The Fourth Age dawned in 1312 IC with the Restoration of the Gods, and Milosia set about rebuilding the world it remembered, clinging harder than ever to the conviction that the Empire endures and that Milosia keeps its true flame. Recovery has been slow but real, and the surest sign of it has come from the sea. Calvenna's fleets returned stronger than before, until Milosian shipping once more ruled the northern Aurean Sea and reached far beyond it; the founding of the Aureliad Consortium in 1350 IC, that rising league of Narbonnais financiers, Vistrian miners and Milosian shippers, set the seal on the realm's return to wealth and weight in the world.
Yet the recovered peace is uneasy, and the Fourth Age has brought its own riddles. Of late the scholars and priests who pick over the ruins of Tasca Obodos have broken into vaults beneath the Temple of the Triumphant that were sealed when the old kingdom fell, and word has gone abroad of strange finds there, of the regalia of vanished House Velthuri and of older things that perhaps should have been left undisturbed; pilgrims, treasure-seekers and the Legion's own watchmen now converge on the holy ruin. And on the water, the loss of a great Aureliad treasure-galleon to a clear-sky storm in the Bay of Calvenna, cargo and crew and all, has set rival houses, salvers and stranger interests quietly racing to find where it went down, and why a ship should founder on a calm sea.
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