Cambrecia and the Long Discontent

This is an article on the History of Feyworld
Years: 829 NC to 1473 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	The Cambrecian Civil Wars

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.

The Imperial response was heavy-handed at first, but in 149 IC, the Emperor Metius the Elder decided on a more surreptitious approach to quelling the Cambrecians. In his role as Pontifex Maximus of the Imperial pantheon, he sent the Pontifex of Zelos, god of the State, to Septarium to build a great cathedral and begin the conversion of the populous to Zelos. The Pontifex of the time, Ionnanes II, was a persuasive man, and was able to quickly convert most of the local leadership to his banner. Over the next few centuries, as the power of the Empire waned in its northern territories, the Pontifex of Zelos was able to secure greater and greater power within Cambrecia, often without the Emperor's knowledge or consent. By 534 IC, Cambrecia had become a monarchy, independent in most of its internal affairs.