Cambrecia and the Long Discontent

This is an article on the History of Feyworld
Years: 829 NC to 920 NC
Age: The Third Age of Man
Continent: Duria
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The History of Cambrecia
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Cambrecia and the Derlic War	Cambrecia and a Fragile Peace

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 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 him 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, and for the next twenty years he governed Cambrecia in the 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.

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.