The Ziconistic Era

Ever since the earliest human habitation of the Ridnezite Peninsula, there has lain the germ of the civilization we know today as the culture of the Ridnezite nation. The first archaeological evidence of organized human settlements has been dated by the National Institute of Natural Sciences to the beginning of the 5th millennium BRE (Before Revelatory Era). An increase in global temperatures likely precipitated the formation of these early settlements by allowing the recession of glacial sheets over the past several millennia and made possible a revolution in agriculture. The ability to grow and store crops inevitably led to the end of the hunter-gatherer mode of communal life and gave rise to lasting communities. Over the following several centuries, society made technological leaps and bounds, owing to the discovery of iron smelting techniques and development of agricultural tools. The identity of these early inhabitants of the Ridnezite Pensinsula is a mystery to anthropologists and has politically controversial implications. One claim with some support is that late prehistoric cultures represent the earliest stage of the nomadic Northern Hill Tribe civilization, which persevered in various forms until disappearance in the 17th century RE (Revelatory Era). Another theory, embraced by certain extreme-nationalist political factions, is that these cultures represent innovations brought to the region by Noskyavian settlers after centuries-long transcontinental migration.

The earliest known written accounts of Ridnez are attributed to Ziconean explorers circa 1350 BRE. At this time, the land and its indigenous people were characterized by the Ziconeans as barbarians and beneath their level of civilization: "The ousanoi are rude, arrogant, and lacking in all decent manners. On the first day of every week, the young and able-bodied men of the ousanikos tribe take turns inflicting knife wounds on themselves as a test of mettle until one can continue no further. The one who yields first is thus consigned to eating only the scraps of each meal after the rest of the tribe have had their fill, until the next week begins." Nevertheless, the next 3 centuries saw a mass-exodus of Ziconeans across the sea to Ridnezite shores, which reached a crescendo during the peak of the Ziconomachy (1300-1000 BRE), an era of pitched conflict between Ziconean city-states for regional hegemony on the Kanten continent. Ziconean refugees brought their language, religion, and ideas of philosophy and society with them and introduced the eastern coast of Ridnez to the Ziconean model of government. At this time, there was nothing resembling an indigenous Ridnezite government institution; the Ziconean cities of eastern Ridnez were understood by their populations to be an extension of the Classical Ziconean world and initially regarded indigenous peoples as "barbarians" and a threat to their sovereignty. However, developments of later generations gradually began to break down the clear distinction between "citizen" and "barbarian" among the Ziconean colonists, just as indigenous peoples began to assimilate Ziconean ideas about philosophy and religion.

Just as Ziconeans had brought the positive elements of their society with them to Zicona Megali -- as they referred to the area of the peninsula's eastern coast where they settled -- they had also brought the complications inherent to that society. Prior to the Ziconomachy, Classical Zicona was defined by a system of exclusivist polities dominated by aristocratic rule and sharp class distinctions. The period known as the Ziconomachy began after the city of Ptelathon exiled Alem, a dissident member of the ruling council of nobles, for attempting to introduce a democratic constitution to the state, and then heading a insurrection against the council from among the disenfranchised majority of citizens. Alem retreated to the city of Megendos, which had granted him asylum and implemented some of his ideas in order to garner moral support for a campaign against Ptelathon proper. Megendos, itself ruled by a council of notables, sought to install Alem as the ruler of Ptelathon in a capacity as a puppet-leader. However, the Ziconean aristocracy failed to appreciate that the Alemite cause set off ripples throughout Ziconean society, leading to a wave of populist uprisings and the inception of an age of tyrants. The city-states constituting Zicona Megali were largely made up of exiles of the aristocracy and so formed their societies along the same oligarchical principles. However, as the Ziconomachy progressed, the Alemite cause gained traction despite setbacks, and increasingly large numbers of the deposed nobility began to arrive on Ridnezite shores. Without a subject class to rule over, and surrounded by tribes of the indigenous "barbarians" (or ousanoi, as they were called), the nobility increasingly resorted to granting citizenship to the ousanoi in exchange for the cooperation of tribal leadership in rallying their people into militias for the civil defense.

The Ziconomachy ended with the unification of most of Northern Kanten under the dominion of a Ziconean territorial empire founded on Alemite principles. The Koinopoliteia was a society where public civic participation was not merely permitted, but demanded, by the authorities, and where the sovereign ruler (the Despot), shared in supreme power accountable only to the veto of the popular assembly (the Koini Kyriarchia). By this time, the city-states of Zicona Megali had developed stable institutions of their own and normalized relations with the surrounding tribes of the ousanoi, reproducing social patterns that had not been seen in Zicona proper for hundreds of years. In 934 BRE, three of the cities of the Koinopoliteia were purged of public orators against the government by citizen militias raised by Despot Evangelos Alemopoulos. The Despot justified his decision to the Koini Kyriarchia by claiming that the orators had been speaking rhetoric in favor of reinstating the former oligarchical system, thereby necessitating their suppression to defend "democracy". Aside from the purpose this served in Zicona to eliminate critics of the government, the incident granted the Koinopoliteia a cause to war against the aristocratic colonies of Zicona Megali, whose continued existence supposedly emboldened "frustrated noble elements" in Zicona to attempt to overthrow the Koinopoliteia.

From 933-775 BRE, Zicona Megali and the Koinopoliteia were embroiled in a conflict spanning the sea separating North Usea from Kanten, which had named in honor of Alem by the Ziconeans of Kanten. This conflict -- the Civilizational War -- was characterized by both sides as a struggle for the very survival of their way of life. The Koinopoliteia claimed that the perseverance of the exiled nobility on a foreign shore would inevitably stir up corrupt elements in Zicona proper to rebel and overthrow the state; Zicona Megali was united in the belief that the Koinopoliteia was a quasi-anarchic regime that overturned the natural order and threatened to swallow up the last remnants of an authentic Ziconean civilization. Ironically, the Civilizational War saw the Koinopoliteia become more aristocratic with time, and conversely, caused Zicona Megali to become more democratic. The stewards of temples raised in honor of the divinities supported their respective sides. Various oracles and diviners were "consulted" about the justice and outcome of the opposing causes and invariably "relayed the gods' blessings" to the faction of the local rulers.

Out of necessity, Ziconean and ousanikos clans intermarried during this period, in order to foster closer ties between city-states and tribal lands. By the early 8th century BRE, Zicona Megali has coalesced from a disunited cluster of peoples and polities into a web of defensive alliances, all in the service of repelling the followers of Alem from the Usean continent and preserving so-called traditional Ziconean ways. This process of deliberate admixture was reflected in marriage patterns across both the nobility and commoner class of both Ziconean and ousanikos societies. By the end of the Civilizational War, even religious practices and cultural customs had begun to blend between the ethnic groups, while still favoring Ziconean artistic, philosophical, and architectural influences. Retrospectively, the period coinciding with the Civilizational War, as concerns the introduction of Ziconean aesthetic and ideological elements to Northeastern Usea, is known to historians today the "Ziconistic era" of Ridnezite history.

Across the Sea of Alem, the very democratic ideals of the Koinopoliteia's founding made way slowly to the formation of a new aristocratic class, although the view that the "old ways" were eventually reintroduced to Zicona under Alemite rule has always been considered a taboo perspective in the homeland. During the time of the Civilizational War, the aristocratic system was never formally re-established, but the original system of direct democracy intended to govern the provinces was undermined by the ability of effective demagogues to mobilize the weight of majorities to silence and marginalize minorities of the population. With no definite system of checks and balances in place, popular leaders manipulated the masses into turning on critics and dissenters while establishing powerful magistracies to be occupied by relatives and cronies. By this method, a certain few powerful families came to power in the Koinopoliteia, ostensibly reinstating a less formal system of oligarchy over the country.

The Civilizational War ultimately ended with the signing of a peace treaty between the chosen representatives of the factions. The text of the treaty was transcribed in Classical Ziconean onto two papyrus scrolls, to be displayed on both shores across the Sea of Alem. The treaty declared that the nation of Zicona had been split into two halves, each to pursue its own path of free and autonomous development, neither to further interfere in the affairs of the other. The next 250 years were regarded in Zicona Megali as a golden age; the system of treaties and alliances among the cities and tribes was preserved and further codified into a master document, the Dikaio. Furthermore, it was written in the Dikaio that anyone who belonged to a family which contributed in the Civilizational War had a right to stand for council. Given the widespread nature of participation, this opened up the political franchise in most city-states to the vast majority of citizens, and the vast majority of the population in turn was classed as citizenry on account of the earlier process of intermixing of the races. In this sense, the old oligarchical system, which the original Ziconean settlers fled from the motherland to retain, gradually evolved into a legal approximation of its own antithesis, the system of governance which had been advocated by Alem in the old country centuries before. The ousanikos tribesmen, meanwhile, accustomed themselves to agricultural and commercial modes of subsistence, organizing their traditional lands as prototypical small-scale cooperative enterprises.

Starting c. 500 BRE, the relative tranquility and unity of Zicona Megali began to splinter as a result of a rivalry between opposing camps of intellectuals in the three chief university cities -- Mesimeri, Krevati, and Alitheia. The great philosophers of the era had divided into the enotita faction, which favored closer association of the Ziconean political entities on both Usea and Kanten while retaining regional autonomy (and so separate developmental trajectories), and the anexartisia faction, which advocated a continuation of the status quo and the symbolic severance of all remaining political and economic ties with the old country. The dispute did not confine itself to the universities for long, and the city-states of Zicona Megali collapsed to internal strife as the rival factions vied for control of local government institutions, increasingly resorting to political violence and invoking fraternal ties to the ousanikos tribal associations to raise militias in support both agendas. The anexartisia faction ultimately gained dominance after the sack and looting of Alitheia in 480 BRE by a force consisting of 10,000 men -- mostly ousanikos warriors belonging to tribes bound by dynastic ties to the leading political agitators.

The Golden Age of Zicona Megali ended as the Ziconomachy repeated itself in small-scale on Ridnezite shores over the course of another century; the great centers of art, learning, and culture which had been erected in the relative peace of the 7th and 8th centuries BRE were largely degraded and fell into disrepair as much of the better-educated classes returned to the Koinopoliteia, offered greater relative stability and superior patronage by the estates of the wealthy Kanten-based Alemite magistrates. The population flow now running in reverse, and with thousands being slaughtered in Zicona Megali each year, the land of Southeastern Ridnez had already been significantly depopulated. The Usean copy of the peace treaty with the Koinopoliteia was destroyed amidst the chaos, as well as all primary records of the text of the Dikaio. All what is known of the Zicona Megali era is recorded by either ancient historians of the Kanten-based Ziconeans or otherwise the few poorly preserved writings of Usea-based ones. Different interpretations were given for the increasing chaos by both historians. Kanten-based Ziconeans were more inclined to frame the decline of Zicona Megali in terms of divine retribution for defying the work of the Phantasmic Court in the world, as Alem has come to be considered as a holy man or agent of destiny within the context of Kanten-based Ziconean folk religion. The few contemporary records left behind by historians who were part of the Zicona Megali society largely took a xenophobic view, attributing societal collapse to the intermixing of the noble houses with the tribes of the ousanoi, and thereby granting the ousanoi a dynastic excuse to involve themselves in political questions that could otherwise have been solved through "reasoned philosophical argumentation".

Circa 300 BRE, the battered remnants of the Zicona Megali civilization were overwhelmed by the arrival of another ethnic group who was recent to the area. Known as kokkinomalles to contemporaries, this people is believed by modern historians and archaeologists to have been ancestral to West Noskyavia, in the area traditionally occupied by the nation of Utopia. Ostensibly these Utopian precursors has arrived at the Ridnezite Peninsula after a generations-long trek across North Usea, having made their living by way of bloodshed and rapine. Upon arrival in Zicona Megali, these proto-Utopians or kokkinomalles presumably devastated the existing cities and laid waste to the land. It is impossible to determine with absolute certainty, as around this time the output of written records simply ceases, and archaeological evidence indicates a precipitous regression of all forms of material culture immediately after the migration. Oral tradition among subsequent generations of Ziconeans supposedly held that the kokkinomalles were a curse sent by the Earth King Cothestrus to punish Zicona Megali for excesses of amorality and decadence, and for focusing on secular, man-made political issues over the all-important commands of ritual observance; this interpretation of proto-Ridnezite history was in turn adopted by the Corpus Terrae during that institution's period of political and cultural dominance on the peninsula. This period of cultural regression, inter-ethnic conflict, and political collapse became known in the annals of Ridnezite history as the Time of In-Between (c.300 BRE - 200 RE), as this era bridged the end of one civilization (Zicona Megali) and the beginning of another (Ridnez of antiquity).

Beginnings of a Distinct Ridnezite Civilization (WIP)

The year of 1 RE was marked by the event of a large meteorite strike in the Icarus Sea, which was recorded by the ancient Xaviet prophet known as Axon and interpreted as a holy event. Consequently, Axonite monks based their calendar system around this event. While this event took several hundred years to be received in Ridnez, the event was re-interpreted as a sign delivered to the human race by the Phantasmic Court, announcing that the life-cycle of the current iteration of the world was coming to an end in the next 5000 years. As such, a demarcation in the dating system of the Zicono-Ridnezite calendar was adopted: Revelatory Era and Before Revelatory Era. Meanwhile, a uniquely Ridnezite culture and ethnicity began to coalesce around the intermixing and homogenization of proto-Utopian, Ziconean, and native Usean populations to previously inhabit the peninsula.

The term "Ridnez" itself came from a corruption of the Utopian ridens insula -- "laughing island" -- which was initially applied to a small islet off the western Ridnezite coast that the kokkinomalles contacted, where the natives had an annual "laughing holiday" whose significance is unknown. Eventually, the term came to refer to all native Useans of the peninsula, then the amalgamated culture which dominated the peninsula and the large majority of its inhabitants.

Starting in the latter half of the 1st century, two models of government came into evidence. Permeating the southern coast, a cluster of mercantile city-states came into being, prioritizing trade contacts with other peoples and nations from across the Golden Sea. This culture led to a prioritization of naval supremacy at all costs, as a powerful navy could make the difference between integration into the wider maritime economy on the one hand, or poverty and isolation on the other. Aside from competition in the accumulation of naval forces, these coastal cities also developed a more cosmopolitan cultural ethos, as with trade of goods and resources came transfers of population and diffusion of cultural values. In contrast, inland city-states came into flourishing through a parallel process of trade-driven development. However, the form of trade which governed the evolution of the inland cities was not maritime, transoceanic trade, but rather centered on transshipment of valuable commodities throughout the peninsula. As such, inland city-states prioritizes development of formidable armies.

The salient feature of early Ridnezite history continued to be the geopolitical contest between the inland and coastal regions, which had far-reaching ramifications upon societal and state development within their respective regions. At their earliest stage of development, each city-state reflected a layout which placed at its center the veneration of a single patron deity at an associated temple or shrine. The remainder of the land would typically be parceled out into three discrete sectors: one for subsistence agriculture, one for the market square, and one for fishing. Within the following half-century, rapid urban growth and increased links among communities led to a process of religious syncretization, culminating in the genesis of two hegemonic creeds which predictably arose to reify their practitioners' chosen way of life.

The Corpus Terrae and the Corpus Maris both expressed similar positions, ascribing power over nature to enigmatic spirit-beings that would be appeased by elaborate rituals conducted at the shrines. Both religions even shared largely the same pantheon with one another and with the preceding Classical Ziconean belief system; however, the Corpus Terrae stated that the gods had given mankind generally -- and the Ridnezite people in particular -- stewardship over the bounty of the earth, whereas the Corpus Maris focused instead upon the bounty of the ocean. Other distinctions concerned the Corpus Terrae's inclusion of animal sacrifice within their ritual proceedings, while the Corpus Maris also attributed to the sea the attribute of expanding the Ridnezite nation through additions from the nations across the ocean.

Unlike the Corpus Terrae, the Corpus Maris reflected the coastal zone's more cosmopolitan culture by implying that the incorporation of different peoples into the Ridnezite cultural mosaic would eventually result in the unity of all human beings under one religion, one language, and one way of life. The Corpus Terrae, while not explicitly xenophobic, had a more conservative and mistrusting attitude towards foreign cultural influences, viewing them as potential dangers to the alleged truth and consistency of Terrae doctrine. As such, Terrae practitioners were more likely than their Maris counterparts to insist that immigrants assimilate into the cultural institutions of the inland zone, as opposed to the more tolerant attitudes which prevailed among the Maris. Regardless of which religion was predominant, nearly all early Ridnezite city-states institutionalized the veneration of the religion and passed laws which, at very least criminalized public criticism of the faith, and at most made religious adherence and ritual participation compulsory. Both religions agreed that insufficient tribute to the gods could invite their displeasure and consequently destroy the prosperity of the city. As such, heterodoxy and blasphemy were treated very seriously, and religious pluralism was viewed as an aberration.

The earliest known evidence for the existence of a written Ridnezite language dates back to circa 175, which existed in several local dialects, each differing slightly from the other, with the most pronounced distinctions once more being associated with the coastal-inland divide. Presumably, the ancestral Ridnezite dialects attested to by artifacts from the inland regions represent the "purer" forms of the language, while the dialects associated with the coastal regions demonstrate linguistic contributions from now-extinct languages once spoken and/or written by groups that coastal Ridnezites came into contact with through maritime contacts. An spontaneous process of linguistic convergence resulted in gradual diminution of irregularities between both the inland and coastal dialects as groups, as well as within the clusters of coastal and inland dialects themselves. The written language to emerge from this process is now known in historiography as Old Ridnezite and obtained a definite character apart from proto-Ridnezite dialects at approximately the same time as the early city-states were formed. While Ridnezite religion was derived from a Ziconean precursor, Ridnezite language was derived from the language spoken by the members of the proto-Utopian migration wave.

Contemporaneously with the process of conventional state formation, a population in the northern hills of Ridnez came into prominence, about whom precious little is known, save for that the Ridnezites of antiquity regarded them as a different culture. Anthropologists are divided on whether these Hill Tribes represent a group of Ridnezites who had resisted the development of conventional state organization and thus retreated to the hill-regions, which favored a more nomadic way of life, or whether they represented a different ethnicity entirely.

The first government in Ridnez to rule a continuous tract of land beyond city boundaries is known in historiography as the Chryselephantine River State, which emerged in the year of 218 RE. The form of this state and its official name for itself are not presently known, due to the inability of researchers to fully decipher the antiquated Ridnezite dialects used in the scant texts left from the period. In this early stage of the Ridnezite language, it was not uncommon for the Ziconean alphabet to be used to transcribe the written language, although the Utopian alphabet was ultimately adopted as standard instead due to simply being more intuitive for a Utopian-based language. Archaeological evidence supports the theory that the Chryselephantine River State was a monastic polity ruled by the hierarchy of the early Ridnezite clerical establishment, prior to its divergence into Corpus Terrae and Corpus Maris variants. The territory of the state stretched over a tract of land in Central-Eastern Ridnez tracing the course of the Chryselephantine River, likely due to notions that the river was a holy abode of Amadastra, Lady of the Waves.

It is known that a small number of close-knit communities continued to identify as Ziconean and preserve Ziconean language and traditions (as best they understood) even during this time; Ridnezites clearly viewed Ziconeans as a separate people living within their territory. However, because the Ziconean people were responsible for transmitting knowledge of the "true faith" to Ridnezites, Ziconeans were regarded as a protected group who were needed by Ridnezite coreligionists to help them interpret the will of the Phantasmic Court. Despite this, doctrinal disagreements ultimately led to the final split of the Corpus Terrae and the Corpus Maris into separate denominations, precipitating the dissolution of the Chryselephantine River State circa 500 RE. The inciting event which led to the schism is believed to be related to the status of Ziconeans vis-a-vis the Ridnezite ecclesiastical establishment. Both the Terrae and the Maris "innovated" the Ziconean religion by adding the ethnocentric belief that the Ridnezite people would be the instrument by which the Phantasmic Court realized its will in the material world and guaranteed a path to salvation for all humanity, at least since the end of Zicona Megali. Nevertheless, Terrae officiants increasingly cited this tenet to justify a conclusion that the interpretations by Ziconean priests of the holy texts -- the Books of the Land and Sea -- had become invalid.

The 6th century RE was marked by political fracture and religious schism, as elites at the various centers of Ridnezite civilization around the Chryselephantine River took sides. Anti-Ziconean pogroms occurred in the cities of Regium Luceria, Duoflumina, Echelus, Stratum Coeruleus, and Arx Verum, egged on by the Terrae clergy and all within the span of a few years. This precipitated a mass migration of Ziconean communities and Maris sympathizers away from Central and Eastern Ridnez toward the west and south. Praenestus, Aurea, Argentum, Hyacinth, Ad Collum, and Montibus were founded by these exiles from the central valley. On August 3, 612, Terrae high cleric Diodorus Timodemus delivered a plea to the people of Echelus to refrain from further violence, urging that such actions were "un-virtuous" in the eyes of the Earth King and would be punished as such. However, in spite of his position, aspersions were cast on his motives due to his partial Ziconean ancestry, and a mob burned and looted the Temple of Cothestrus Invictus later that day. Diodorus' fate differs depending on the account. Some state that Diodorus was lynched by the inflamed masses; others say that Diodorus fled from Echelus accompanied by a band of his close disciples. Either way, tradition has it that Diodorus, or someone claiming to be him, re-emerged in September 612 from an expanse of wooded forest and founded the city of Nimbus Nuvoloso beneath a pillar of intertwined water, air, soil, and fire descending from an opening in cloud-cover. Diodorus claimed to be appointed by the Phantasmic Court and its rulers, the Earth King Cothestrus and Tide Queen Amadastra, to save the Ridnezite people from debauchery, and was accepted by the entire retinue of his thousand disciples as kaezar (a title of uncertain etymology, indicating foremost leader of civilized peoples) and praetor (magistrate and military commander, equivalent to Ziconean strategos).

At the center of the newly constructed city sat the Palace of the Four Elements, seat of the kaezar's rule, a famous Nuvolosan landmark to this day. In 615, after Nuvoloso's population and fortifications sufficiently expanded, a delegation was sent to Echelus to demand tributes of earth and water -- a symbolic act of submission in the hierarchy coexistent with both Avaris and the Phantasmic Court beyond. The anti-Ziconean zealots who had taken over Echelus by that time rebuked the Nuvolosan emissaries and had them buried alive. The following year, Nuvoloso besieged Echelus, its soldiers carrying the confidence that the spirits' powers were on their side. Echelus fell, but Diodorus reportedly spared the fallen city's leaders, contingent upon their recanting of the anti-Ziconean "heresy" and confirming Ziconeans and Ridnezites as brother-peoples. The kaezar went on to send emissaries to the other Ridnezite cities with demands of earth-and-water tributes. Although not without resistance, Diodorus was successful in commanding the fealty of the major Ridnezite cities of the time. The political structure consolidated through this process is subsequently known in historiography as the First Nuvolosan Empire, though its contemporaries only used the terminology res publica, the Utopian equivalent of the familiar Ziconean politeia. In so doing, Diodorus was consciously emulating the example of the revered Alem nearly two millennia before.

The kaezar proceeded to impose his own legal code, the Lex Imperii, clearly inspired by the historical memory of the Dikaio from ages past. The code was transcribed in Utopian characters and reproduced into parchment scrolls to be sent to Nimbus Nuvoloso's vassal city-states. The contents of the Lex clearly reflected an awareness of the Ziconistic past and a desire to restore some of the standards of "civilized" Ziconean society, albeit in a manner accommodating to the prevailing religious attitudes of the time. Diodorus was no doubt influenced by his own Ziconean heritage in undertaking the task, yet in deliberately selected a Utopian orthography for the language of the supreme law, he was equally influenced by his desire to create a system of laws and mores that would be adapted to the more heterogenous conditions of Ridnezite cultural makeup.

The preface of the Lex Imperii confirmed the religious prescriptions that only virtuous living and subordinacy to the Phantasmic Court could bring mankind's spiritual salvation and that it remained the role of good government on Avaris to promote these things, but stated that the split in beliefs between Maris and Terrae regarding correct interpretation of the holy texts had required ecclesiastical bodies to surrender temporal power to a theoretically neutral secular ruler. In essence, Diodorus claimed that, while only one sect of the faith could be ultimately correct in its interpretation, a degree of toleration between Maris and Terrae was necessary to prevent their shared goal of seeking virtue from being lost to both. In accordance with this philosophy, the Lex Imperii established that the kaezar of Nuvoloso had singular authority to confirm the appointments of praefecti (magistrates) to administer the affairs of subject cities and territories, though means of selecting nominees for the position would be variable depending on location. Some cities implemented an electoral system with a tiered or restrictive franchise, while in others, conventions of Terrae or Maris temple officiants held internal elections for that purpose.

The Lex Imperii established exclusive religious jurisdictions for the Corpus Maris and Corpus Terrae, decided along lines of where each religious sect held temporal power prior. The Lex Imperii further prohibited proselytization between the Maris and Terrae religious jurisdictions and required that each city dedicate an exclusive quarter to house the Ziconean community. The Lex Imperii further stated that the temple establishments and the Nuvolosan state would formally cooperate as allies in maintaining peace and social harmony, binding both the kaezar and the clergy to a relationship wherein neither would be allowed to intrude upon the affairs of the other without prior consultation and approval. While the Lex Imperii might appear superficially as an astonishingly progressive document for the time in which it was drafted, as well as providing the original legal precedent for later elaborations of universal human rights such as freedom of religion, Diodorus and his disciples' sole concern in furnishing this arrangement was to erect a legal order capable of superseding the intolerance and opposing interests of the various religious and ethnic groups. The fallout from collapse of the Cryselephantine River State may have made it necessary once more to distinguish between institutions of church and state, but the principles espoused in the Lex Imperii was not total separation, but rather mutual alliance. Likewise, there was no provision in the Lex Imperii for the sufferance of non-Zicono-Ridnezite belief systems: Such "blasphemers" were assumed to be disruptive of the social fabric, not to mention harmful to the acquisition of virtue through the proper channels by promoting "false gods".

The fundamental guarantee of the Nuvolosan Empire's continued stability consisted in the prestige of its founder, the first kaezar. For the next 200 years, the Timodemus line reigned without interruption, during which time the Empire was relatively peaceful and witnessed a period of moderate cultural renovation, waxing economic prosperity, and technological innovation. After Diodorus' death from natural causes in 658, Diodorus' scion Decimus took over and presided over a project of restoring the Ziconean bathhouse culture, returning ancient aqueducts to working condition, and paving new roads to facilitate less burdensome travel throughout the realm. Educated in a Terrae monastery, Decimus deeply appreciated learning and ordered over 3000 antique Ziconean manuscripts to be copied into Ridnezite language. Decimus pushed the Terrae establishment to promote study of the ancients in standard university curriculum, as this was the age when the temple establishments held control over all transmission of higher academic knowledge. The Terrae high priests (the domini officia) rebuffed the kaezar for allegedly promoting the wicked thoughts that destroyed Zicona Megali and reduced the Ziconean people to a minority population in those lands. The Maris clergy offered a different interpretation, however: that the loss of ancient knowledge was precisely the punishment visited upon the people of the Ridnezite Peninsula for the decadence of Zicona Megali, and that the inspiration of selfsame people to a path of improved virtue under the kaezar would coincidence with a recovery of that lost knowledge. As such, those Maris cities under imperial rule saw a trend implemented from the top-down towards classical education among the elites.

In the year 670, the Northern Hill Tribes made their first definite entry into the historical record, ostensibly being driven out of their ancestral lands by raids by waves of Noskyavian migrants who arrived from across the grasslands of North Usea. When a party of desperate Hill Tribesmen attacked the cities of Hyacinth and Praenestus, Decimus mustered up reserves from Nimbus Nuvoloso itself and repelled the invaders. After a series of skirmishes, Decimus met with the war party leader of the Hill Tribes, recorded in history as Celer, and negotiated terms of settlement for his people in return for an oath of fealty. While an entirely rational decision on its own merits, the Corpus Terrae in particular took umbrage with Decimus' handling of the situation, feeling that settling with nonbelievers regardless of circumstance to be beneath a truly virtuous leader. By the arrangement of the Empire, the Hill Tribe-populated frontier colony of Trabes was founded, so named because of the expectation that the colony would supply lumber from the nearby Volucrum Forest for the capital's building projects.

Decimus passed away peaceably in the year 694 and was succeeded as kaezar by his grandson Arsinius. Decimus' father, the expected heir Sisenna, died of consumption before his time, to the disappointment of Terrae clergy who believed Sisenna's less scholarly inclinations would equate to a more hardline stance against outsider influence on Ridnezite religion and culture. Arsinius' main preoccupation was continuing the construction underway during his grandfather's reign, though his father's example made him keenly aware of the threats facing Ridnez on its northern frontier. Another Noskyavian-descended tribe, the Heisenians, pushed past the Northern Hills and into the countryside. Like the indigenous Hill Tribes whom they previously (in part) displaced, the Heisenians attacked imperial settlements in search of resources and space, but unlike Decimus, Arsinius took a less compromising approach. Thousands of Heisenian men were slaughtered by the Nuvolosan army and Hill Tribes both, while the women and children were largely spared to be enslaved by the latter. This population of Heisenian war captives expanded the city of Trabes sufficiently that several Hill Tribe families were granted a charter from Nuvoloso to found a new city to offload the surplus. Magna Adeptio was founded hundreds of kilometers to the southeast and became a largely agricultural colony utilizing Heisenian slave labor. While the Lex Imperii explicitly forbade slavery, Nuvoloso ignored the Northern Hill Tribes' actions in order to preserve their allegiance towards the state.

In any event, Hill Tribesmen were not considered to be citizens of the res publica, merely subjects of the kaezar by separate treaty, and as such were not expected to adhere to all the formalities and conventions that imperial territories were bound by. Arsinius also took the initiative of expanding mining, smelting, and smithing operations throughout the country, believing that the furnishing of offensive ballistic machinery from metallic ores would one day be the future of warfare. This initiative aroused some suspicion from both the Corpus Maris and Corpus Terrae, who generally preferred commercial and pastoral modes of economic activity, respectively, and shared in common a dislike of "plundering" Avaris' natural resources. Nevertheless, the temple establishments were not invited to give their opinion as this constituted a "temporal" affair, and Arsinius would spend his remaining years chartering and personally working to establish blacksmiths' and craftsmen's guilds in Nimbus Nuvoloso and other cities.

The imperial heir Pudentius assumed power in the late months of 737, after Arsinius died of plague while on a campaign to pacify the Heisenians to the north.

The Third Nuvoloso Empire

The Third Nuvoloso Empire had its beginnings under the reign of Titus I Severinus, kaezar of Nimbus Nuvoloso. Titus had been advised by his chancellor Gaius Lacan that the key to maximizing the wealth of the kingdom was to be found in monopolizing the peninsula's transshipment centers. As more of these centers were brought by military force under a single jurisdiction, then the greater reward could be reaped from asymmetrically dictating terms of trade with other polities, and by exacting higher taxes on commerce within national boundaries. Through this strategy, the Nuvoloso Empire gradually brought all of the inland zone under their control by 1469, the year that Titus I died and was succeeded by his son Tullian. With a monopoly over resource extraction from the heart of Ridnez, most of the coastal cities, which depended on undisturbed trade connections with the interior to support their import-export model, agreed to a treaty with the Nuvoloso Empire, whereby they would retain autonomy of rule and independence in religion and customs, but would transact goods between the inland and the Golden Sea merchants at prices fixed by the Nuvolosan sovereign.

This arrangement remained static throughout the reign of Tullian, with the exception of sporadic revolts by either the people or the government of individual coastal city-states, all of which were efficiently crushed by Nuvolosan armies and resulted in the absorption of these cities into the Empire proper. Cities subjected directly to the Nuvolosan imperial administration, both inland and on the coast, were governed by mayor-protectors. These were appointees of the imperial monarchy who exercised both military and civil authority, acted as magistrates when necessary to preside over civil and criminal trials, promulgated imperial decrees on behalf of the sovereign, and had powers to conscript corvee labor for state projects. The institution of the mayor-protector was designed as a means of differentiating between "crown lands" -- those which were under direct rule of the capital -- and vassal and tributary states -- whose internal state of management was unimportant to the Crown insofar as they remained aligned with the Empire through military, trade, and diplomacy. Despite this, cities governed by mayor-protectors also had a limited degree of de facto autonomy due to the mayor-protector's license to apply discretion in implementation of central policy goals. Through this process of coercion and consolidation, the Nuvoloso Empire came to dominate 2/3 of the Ridnezite peninsula, excluding only the Northern Hill Tribes and a few city-states in the southernmost region of the coastal zone. These "free" areas continued their own cultural and political traditions outside of Nuvolosan influence, though conflicts with the Empire continued to flare up intermittently.

In 1495, Tullian was assassinated by a court plot led by his wife Augusta and her lover Ancus Probus, in order to place the latter upon the Nuvolosan throne. However, Ancus Probus was challenged by a faction of legitimists in support of Tullian's issue by a previous marriage, his infant son Titus II. Mayor-protectors throughout the Empire took sides, and tributary states aligned with whichever group had the more auspicious-seeming prospects from a distance, in the hope of leveraging their loyalty into a more favorable position in the administrative hierarchy. The War of the Cities (1495-1501) saw the recruitment en masse of mercenaries and privateers, both foreign and domestic, in origin by both factions. However, the First Battle of Nimbus Nuvoloso was won by an alliance of the legitimist feudatories and their armies, putting an end to Augusta and Ancus Probus's period of rule. Subsequently, the would-be usurpers were hanged in the public square of the capital to set an example to future schemers, and their reign was erased from the official record. However, Titus II was still in his age of minority by the time that the war drew to its conclusion. While Nuvoloso spared no expense on granting the restored kaezar a grand coronation ceremony, true power was invested in a clique comprised of the mayor-protectors of the most strategically and commercially important provinces of the Empire, who were convened into a temporary governing body known as the Regency Council.

The Regency Council -- comprised of Marcus Bocchus of Praenestus, Claudius Antoninus of Camasiacum, Philip Bocchus of Echelus, and Maximinus Julius Agrippa of Regium Luceria -- exercised their power in right of the Crown to elevate their status to that of rex or king (in essence, a hierarchical role above the mayor-protectors but below the kaezar of Nimbus Nuvoloso) and raised the rulers of those tributary states that cooperated with them to a full position as mayor-protectors, thereby integrating the Empire further while extending their own personal power within that arrangement. Next, the restored Nuvoloso Empire turned their focus against the Northern Hill Tribes, in retaliation for the tribes' unanimous collaboration with the usurper faction (or the Probists, as they preferred to be called). Augusta and Ancus Marcus signed individual treaties with the tribal chieftains, establishing defined northern limits to the boundaries of Nuvolosan expansion in return for the tribes' formal neutrality in the War of the Cities. The Northern Hill Tribes, fearing a return to the prior status quo, actively provided material and logistical support to the Probists. In 1503, the Regency Council commissioned raiding parties to foray into Hill Tribe lands and seize whatever spoils they could, with full guarantee of protection against legal reprisal and an entitlement to half of the collected loot. The Council's intent was to goad the tribes into organizing a retaliatory strike into imperial territory, in order to misrepresent the extenuating circumstances and use the occasion as casus belli to resume hostilities. This subterfuge backfired, as later the same year, the tribal chieftains congregated and agreed to form a loose confederation against the raiders, electing not to violate their peace treaties with the considerably larger and more resource-rich Nuvoloso Empire by going on the warpath outright. This tribal confederacy would impose a decentralized yet unified governing apparatus upon the Hill Tribe peoples and help the tribes coordinate policies and regulate the conduct of their members to best avoid the wrath of the Empire.

Problems continued to present themselves within the Empire's internal affairs due to the religious differences between segments of the population and between commoners and their rulers. As an inland city, Nimbus Nuvoloso had been professedly Terrae from its founding, yet was now placed at the center of an empire divided between Terrae and Maris doctrines. While the issue was previously resolved somewhat by the relative autonomy that Nuvoloso's coastal tributaries held prior to the War of the Cities, the political expediency of converting the Empire's vassals to full status as mayor-protectors came with the emergent problem that all cities and provinces had to comply with the Code of Imperial Law, which sanctioned only the Corpus Terrae to maintain temples, schools, and universities, criminalized the public practice of any other religion, and imposed harsh fines for recusancy of all Nuvolosan subjects. Many of the newly appointed mayor-protectors of coastal cities were content to trade the Corpus Maris for increased authority and influence in the broader framework of the Empire. However, the Maris clergy and many of the common folk -- ranging from peasants to burghers -- perceived the Regency Council's edict as a move to impose a more perfect imperial tyranny. Their faith lost in their own immediate secular rulers, the alliance of the Corpus Maris with communities of coastal Ridnezite commoners generated a cause of social unrest that would rise to the attention of the Nuvolosan elite in the early years of the 1510s.

The 1512 invention of the movable-type printing press by inventor Alexander Marcellus in the coastal city-state of Colonia Solis revolutionized media and communications for medieval Ridnez and played a key role in emboldening the Corpus Maris' efforts to resist imperial repression. Colonia Solis was one of few city-states that had remained outside of the Nuvolosan sphere of influence, and the Solian government quickly realized the potential of this capacity to reproduce and distribute information past the Empire's censorship barriers. Colonia Solis, as a Maris city-state, allied with the subjected Maris clergy and laymen of the Empire, publishing pamphlets promoting the overthrow of those mayor-protectors who had betrayed the Corpus Maris for temporal power (and in so doing, offending the Lady of the Waves). During the years 1512-1513, a series of pro-Maris revolts sprang up throughout the coastal provinces of the Empire, which were harshly repressed by military means and followed by the immediate strengthening of garrisons in coastal settlements. In the aftermath, Terrae clergy and threatened mayor-protectors launched a zealous reaction against the revolts, aimed at weeding out crypto-Maris practitioners and enforcing the new religion at swordtip. In total, thousands of alleged Maris practitioners are estimated to have been singled out for public humiliation, ostracism, beating, and even execution by the local authorities.

Within the Regency Council, opinions were more split how to handle the crisis. The two Bocchus brothers -- who together exercised most power on the Council -- proposed revising the Code of Imperial Law to make religious exemptions for the newly incorporated coastal cities in order to restore order. However, in the summer of 1513, Titus II came of maturity and attempted to assert his prerogative as monarch by dispelling the Regency Council and assuming personal control of state affairs. Titus saw himself as the protector not only of the Empire but of what he considered to be the "true faith," the Corpus Terrae. Unwilling to compromise with elements he was raised to consider subversives and heretics, Titus used the Bocchus brothers' planned reforms to accuse the Regency Council of being in the pay of the Probist pretender to the throne to erode the ruling Severinus dynasty's legitimacy. Already commanding the automatic loyalty of the army, Titus overthrew the Regency Council on July 10, 1513 and ordered the summary execution without trial of Claudius Antoninus and Maximinus Julius Agrippa. Likewise, the Nuvolosan court was purged of known and suspected supporters of the Regency Council. These events live on in infamy as the incipient acts of a grievous tyrant, known to Ridnezites as the Thursday Massacre. Only the Bocchus brothers survived by smuggling themselves out of the capital while disguised as peddlers and were given refuge in Colonia Solis.

Due to their relative lack of contact with the inland zone, Colonia Solis and the other independent coastal city-states of Southern Ridnez had followed a separate course of political evolution until the early 16th century, with the predominant model of government being an elective monarchy which functioned in practice as an oligarchic merchant republic. In these municipalities, a complicated electoral system was in place to select a monarch who would reign for the rest of his or her natural life. This system was effectively restricted to voters and electors drawn from only those families whose names were recorded in the city charter (in essence, those families who were present for the city's founding); the electoral system was also highly randomized so as to prevent factional collusion from deciding the fate of the city. Once elected, the monarch would exercise all ultimate military responsibility for the defense of the realm as commander-in-chief and was empowered to unilaterally decide all diplomatic functions of the city. However, another caveat existed wherein specific families would be designated in the city charter to have prior rights to the ministries. Effectively, the monarch did not have power to appoint or dismiss the ministers, but rather, the ministers passed down these offices like dynastic titles and had an indissoluble prerogative to ignore the monarch's directives and undertake their own initiatives. By making every ministry of the government an autonomous jurisdiction unto itself, it was conceived that this would diffuse power away from the monarch and keep it roughly evenly shared among the notable families, while mandating that the notable families cooperate on the basis of shared interest in order to implement any domestic policy.

It was in this environment that an unprecedented shift occurred in the power dynamics of Colonia Solis: The Bocchus brothers, once given shelter by the city as refugees from the Nuvoloso Empire, were inaugurated into the rite of the Corpus Maris, abandoning their prior Terrae ways. Subsequently, the name of the Bocchus family was written into the city charter, thus allowing the brothers to become influential political figures in their new homeland, as well as local celebrities. Yet, the escape of the Bocchus brothers from the Thursday Massacre and continuing unrest among Maris practitioners in Nuvolosan coastal towns inexorably drove the Empire into a conflict with tiny Colonia Solis. In spring 1514, Titus II convened a war council in preparation for an invasion of Colonia Solis and issued an ultimatum to the Solian government to turn over the Bocchus brothers or face total annihilation of the city itself. King Valerian III Metellus, not in a position to oppose the overwhelming might of Nimbus Nuvoloso, peremptorily placed the Bocchus brothers under house arrest and discussed the matter of appeasing Titus with his councillors. The mood at court was still generally sympathetic to the Bocchus brothers, and consequently, there was some debate over whether to go through with Titus's demands. However, the Maris clergy reacted more fanatically to the King's actions, accusing Valerian of bringing dishonor to the Lady of the Waves by yielding to the disciples of the Earth King. This was but a reflection of the popular sentiment, which feared that an equivocal reaction by the government predicted eventual loss of political independence to Nuvoloso, and with it the associated repression of the Corpus Maris.

Tensions intensified until autumn of 1514, when a Maris temple steward, his name lost to time and legend, reportedly delivered a fiery polemic against Valerian III and his councillors, offering the rhetorical invocation: "Just as the way of the earth is hard and intolerant, so the way of the waters demands change and flux, ebb and flow, cleansing and renewal. If the day has finally arrived that the ancient families have turned from honesty and virtue, who is to say that the reformed infidels from Nuvoloso will not become the Lady's chosen guides?" A crowd grew around the city's main temple which over the course of the day became increasingly implacable and ornery in their discontent. The following day, the crowd surrounded the royal palace in protest and broke into a riot after a minor altercation with palace guards escalated into a shootout. Fearing for their lives, the ministers unanimously resolved to boycott Valerian's course of action. Due to being functionally handicapped without the cooperation of the chancellor, treasurer, and marshal, and fearful of being lynched by the mob egged on by the clergy, Valerian III broke out onto the palace balcony one week later, claiming to have been visited by the Lady of the Waves in a revelatory vision. Allegedly experiencing a religious change of heart, Valerian countermanded his house arrest order and abdicated the throne, exiling himself to the chief temple and adopting the role of a supplicant.

Colonia Solis subsequently held new elections, which unsurprisingly strongly favored both Bocchus candidates at every stage of the voting and elimination process. Ultimately, Philip Bocchus was elected the new King of Colonia Solis as the more charismatic of the two brothers, speaking to the Solian Congress with greater conviction about his newfound devotion to the Corpus Maris. Furthermore, King Philip commanded the confidence of the families who monopolized the ministries, giving him a firm backing from where to rally Maris communities everywhere in Ridnez against the Nuvoloso Empire, but more importantly, a stable base from where to regain the power and influence that he and his brother had lost in the land of their birth. Meanwhile, Titus II was kept informed of these developments by his diplomats and planned to resume with his intentions to destroy Colonia Solis. However, while traveling throughout the inland provinces to conscript militia levies into his army, Titus was swept up and killed in an unexpected flood of the Chryselephantine River Delta, the worst ever recorded in Ridnezite history.

The flooding lasted for 2 weeks and 4 days in the summer of 1515, lending to its name in historical memory as the 18 Days of Wrath, and the length, severity, and timing of the natural disaster -- combined with the death of the Lord of Nuvoloso in its early stages -- led the ecclesiastical councils of the Corpus Maris to declare the incident as an expression of the displeasure of the Lady of the Waves, and implicitly a reaction by the spirits of nature to Titus's despotic actions disrupting the balance of the world. Moreover, the Maris clergy and followers took the flood as a divine message of encouragement, provoking a second wave of pro-Maris revolts in Nuvolosan coastal towns. Philip seized the opportunity to negotiate an alliance with the other independent Maris city-states to liberate their coreligionists from the Nuvolosan yoke. The disorganization of the Nuvolosan central government's response, the concentration of Nuvolosan military forces away from the coasts to build up Titus's army of conquest (a not-insubstantial part of which was also decimated by the flooding), the sheer scale of the Nuvolosan Maris practitioners' rebellion, and the military and economic support by the Solian-led Southern Ridnezite alliance brought about an perfect alignment of conditions for the subjugated cities of the coastal zone to simultaneously break free from imperial hegemony. In the aftermath, the mayor-protectors for the majority of these coastal city-states were hanged by their own former subjects for aligning with the Empire, and new city charters were drawn up granting the Solian monarchy perpetual suzerainty, contingent upon fulfillment of a duty to protect the cities from outside aggression and to defend the Corpus Maris as the true religion. These new arrangements were then formally recognized by Colonia Solis via a system of treaties that further consolidated a broadened military alliance and trade bloc, the Caelesti Classe.

The Two Kingdoms Period (WIP)

Weakened by spontaneous revolt and multilateral secession, surrounded by the Caelesti Classe, and financially burdened by the central relief program to aid recovery from the 18 Days of Wrath, the Nuvoloso Empire was left in a considerably more vulnerable position that any point in its history. The flashpoint struck by galvanization of religious and political tensions virtually undid all the expansion which had occurred since the reign of Tullian, necessitating a shift in strategy. At the same time, Colonia Solis and her allies realized that continued dependency upon their traditional export model would invariably lead to their subjugation to Nuvoloso in time, as even the Empire in retreat still held a monopoly on the most valuable and productive lands for agriculture and therefore held the greatest contribution to Ridnez's overall food production, not to mention access to cash crops like sugar, dyes, and textiles. Philip Bocchus held council with the ministers to address this issue and arrived at a new policy known as "sea-searching". Sea-searching entailed naval expeditions throughout and beyond the Golden Sea and the establishment of trade networks with exotic lands rich in valuable goods and resources. Sea-searching also had a religious component; the Corpus Maris assumed that their devotion to the Lady of the Waves would bode good tidings for any grand marine expedition they decided to undertake. Furthermore, the Maris clergy interpreted sea-searching as a strategy by which the central objective of their faith would be realized: the unification of the world's peoples under "benevolent" Ridnezite patrimony and the strengthening of Ridnezite society through the incorporation of "offerings" from other cultures.

By this method, it was conceived that the Caelesti Classe would not only be able to free themselves from reliance upon the resource-extracting industries of the Nuvoloso Empire and the inland zone, but expand and strengthen existing trade networks by sea, as well as establish new political, commercial, and military relationships with foreign lands about which little was previously known. Up until this time, Ridnezite civilization had been essentially inward-looking; every development of significance in early Ridnezite history -- political upheavals, technological innovations, religious movements -- had been an essentially domestic affair with no connection to the state of the outside world. Even the open-mindedness of the Corpus Maris to other cultures and nationalities was mostly passive in nature, as coastal Ridnezite city-states welcomed immigrants from foreign lands so long as they converted to their faith but did not otherwise have any curiosity about the difference in customs or background. Neither was it the case that coastal Ridnezite city-states prior to the 16th century sought out to expand the general body of knowledge through cultural and material exchange with foreign lands, again simply passively accepting improvements in technology obtained through Golden Sea trade and making superficial modifications.

From 1516 to 1519, the city-states of the Caelesti Classe pooled resources to coordinate the construction of a massive merchant fleet, the first of its kind in the history of North Usea, and Philip Bocchus appointed Solian admiral Licinius Bisonium to command it. Philip tasked Bisonium's fleet with accomplishing his mission of his sea-searching agenda, expectant upon its return that the expedition would lift the veil of mystique from the greater world of Avaris and bring a diversity of far-away nations into the fold of Solian domination. However, the expedition -- known to Ridnezite history as the First Great Voyage -- was explicitly not a military operation. The main goals that Bisonium was tasked to achieve consisted exclusively in enhancing the then-present understanding of the continent's geography, signing treaties with foreign governments and tribes to integrate them into the Caelesti Classe, and bringing back representatives of these peoples with samples of literature, technology, and animal life from their home-countries. The first stop of the merchant fleer was the land of Shah, located south and southwest across the Golden Sea. The Shahi people were one of a few fellow Usean ethnicities that Ridnezites were already well-acquainted with, as maritime contacts between Shah and the coastal zone of Ridnez constituted the majority of the smaller-scale trade that had gone on up until that point. State development in Shah had begun slightly earlier than in Ridnez, but the area's more unpredictable seasonal variation in climatic conditions and soil fertility fostered a more belligerent culture to emerge, at the expense of high art and material culture.

At the time of the Ridnezite disembarkment, Shah was divided into 8 dynastic tribal kingdoms: Ghassemi, Najafi, Derbaz, Kadivar, Ormus, Arbab, Narseh, and Soroush.