Of the Rosantic League and Its Constituent Powers

Both the Rosantic League and Lusia, its southern neighbour, are, by distance only a few days’ sail from the westernmost shores of Wattle, across the Dwimmer Channel. I begin, therefore, with the observation that Daub can reach the Rosantic League, and therefore the Rosantic League can reach Daub.

The Rosantic League is not a kingdom or an empire; rather, it is a coalition born of charter, signed in Valdermach in the previous century, binding forty-three polities together. These number a plethora of political implements - seven ‘free cities’; eleven hereditary margravates, nine prince-bishoprics, various duchies and countships, and one river abbey that, despite being in Valdermach, maintains an indepedent vote on account of it being the venue of signing.

Key to this coalition is the river Valder. The name carries the simultaneous meanings of power, rule, and forest-dwelling; it runs from the eastern highlands to the western sea, and every significant city in the League sits on it or within a day’s ride. Thus the League’s internal logistics and political coalitions greatly favor those who controls the Valder’s chokepoints.

Together, the Rosantic League approximates Singhapura in size. They share a language, a broad culture, and legal, heraldric and religious traditions. Unlike in Lusia, the letter of the law is equal across the body; but whereas Lusia sets a great deal of store by the writing, arguing and enforcement of contracts, Rosantics prefer simpler oaths, and have a general distrust of lawyers.

Of the Ascended, and Their Involvements

We must begin with faith. Faith, Your Grace, is a dominant feature in the Rosantic League and its politics. Its key expressionis the Communion of the Ascended. One may describe this as a pantheon of real figures who, through great or terrible deeds in life, crossed a threshold at death that most people cannot, and became akin to minor deities.

The Ascended are not equal. At the summit sit perhaps a dozen figures of League-wide significance, often invoked for famine, wars, the outcome of Diet sessions, or the birth of heirs. Their personalities are established by centuries of interaction; their miracles are extensively documented. Below them is a substantial middle tier of regional and civic saints, often with a city, a guild, a trade, or a category of person under their protection. Below that, an almost limitless long tail of local and specialized figures.

Noble houses claim descent from Ascended, often from whoever is the patron of the territory they govern. This is taken seriously and directly affects land rights, military obligations, inheritance disputes, and heraldic law. The heraldic colleges of Valdermach and Brennmark maintain these records.

The Ascended (and thus their derived nobility) have a complex history with each other. Some Ascended were allies in life and are invoked together as a matter of tradition. Some are never invoked in the same prayer. A city whose patron saint has documented enmity with the patron saint of a potential trading partner has a very real diplomatic problem, as absurd as it may seem to us; the League’s history contains many such cases. The Diet maintains a subcommittee specifically to manage situations where such inter-saint relations have materially complicated affairs. Your Grace, who manages the push and pull of the Haugris Convocation and the Temple of Eighteen within a single city, will recognize the scale of the problem.

A close analogy would be the Litanies of the Temple of Eighteen, yet the analogy falls short of the mark. There are documented effects, a great deal of faith around the subject, and, occasionally, very real manifestations; yet by and large politics carries on without the daily intervention of Litanies.

It is not so with the Rosantic Ascended. They are known to manifest on more occasion than most dieties; one of the earliest Singhapura expeditions to these lands encountered what appeared to be an old woman offering wine to tired sailors; the sailors partook and fell into a deep sleep, and woke to find every ship sunk and every weapon corroded; when they, at long last, returned home, it was only to find their loved ones in panic, for they had been assumed lost or dead for many years. Even a minor Ascended may have devotees still living who claim to have been miraculously healed or set on some path by a personal manifestation of their god. In fact, there is some scholarly suggestion that even the Light of the Paladins is some Rosantic Ascended, though there is is scant documentation on that particular name.

Of the Cities That Matter to Daub

Valdermach is the League’s commercial throat. The noble merchant families there can rival Lusia and Singhapura for involvement in trade. Indeed, much of Singhapura’s tea, clothing, spices and processed materials are exported via Valdermach to the League. Your Grace should know that the trade of various holy relics, being critical to League faith and politics, runs through Valdermach as well, including the finer workings of authentication and brokerage; and this is a political lever of considerable subtlety, rarely visible in the open.

Brennmark is where things are made. It is simultaneously both customer of and rival to the guilds of Singhapura. There are guilds here, too; and they have teeth, to use the common term. The Goldsmiths’ Hall, for instance, maintains its own court, jail and ambassadors to other nations. Brennmark is also a major pilgrimage center, because many of its guild patrons are among the oldest Ascended. These pilgrimage routes function simultaneously as trade arteries, rest-stop economies, and intelligence networks. The pilgrim, the merchant, and the spy have always traveled the same roads.

Orvaine is the center of printing and grimoire production, and home to the Orvaine College of Natural Philosophy. The College is some four hundred years old, originally established to educate the highest nobility; its credentials are considered serious even in Singhapura. The College has produced twelve major Paragon-level magicians, contributed significant knowledge to the Taprobane University and published and re-published much of our readily discussed literature. As its greatest feat, it gave birth to the Reformers Convocation, which is a major power in the League; its founding theological argument was written by an Orvaine faculty member and first printed on an Orvaine press.

It is often said that the other polities of the League hide behind the skirts of these three. Not so; a great many scholars and Free Companies (of which I shall write further on) come to our shores. But it is these three that, having grown to encompass their borders, look most eagerly to our shores.

Of the Diet

It is a curious feature of the Rosantic League that the number of nobles - or rather, their titles - are fixed. In the margravates and in others these titles are passed down in families, and held primarily by force of arms, land and wealth, as they commonly are in kingdoms; but in the so-called free cities, citizens vote every ten years for families to be appointed to noble title. Thus the titles themselves are passed from one to another akin to roles in a theater production.

Twice a year, at the summer and winter solstices, these nobles, as representatives of every member polity, convene for the Diet for six weeks. The Diet can pass resolutions, levy common defense funds, arbitrate disputes between members, and censure charter violations. The host city is decided four years in advance, giving it time to expand its inns and profit from the occasion. Valdermach hosts by default when agreement on an alternative cannot be reached; thus it accounts for approximately half of all sessions.

The voting blocs follow patterns, but they may be better expressed in the negative. The cities typically vote together on river tolls and divide on everything else. The prince-bishops form a coherent bloc on ecclesiastical questions and are largely ineffective on trade and military matters. The hereditary nobles distrust each other and the councilmembers of merchant origins. Certain margravates have been feuding long enough that their representatives sit on opposite sides of the hall by tradition.

Since the invention of the Rosantic printing press, the Diet’s proceedings have been published and distributed to each city. Though they are written to conceal the most sensitive of matters, they will still serve Your Grace as accounts of the workings of the League.

Of the Convocation Schism and How It Pertains to Political Reality

The League originally had one Convocation, established by the Diet. This may be likened to the Haugris Church; a single institution of immense political value, formerly in command of theological matters. The Convocation has since split on the issue of canonization of the Ascended. The key factions are now the Old Rites Convocation, which maintains the established canonization process, and the Reformers, who argue that process is corrupt and susceptible to political manipulation. The schism is five decades old and its downstream consequences continue to generate work for the Diet. Neither Convocation holds a Diet seat; however, both effectively control voting blocs.

Formal canonization under the Old Rites is slow, expensive, and runs through hierarchies that have made saints of the powerful. Popular acclamation under the Reformers ratifies what pilgrims have already decided: a figure dies, miracles occur at the grave, shrines accumulate, and the Convocation confirms. The military orders maintain a third position: that soldiers dying in sufficient extremity of faith and deed Ascend without waiting for tribunals, that the orders conduct their own verification. Protests by both Convocationes have usually led to the response that the Ascended in question is already receiving prayers, and that the Convocationes are welcome to catch up at their convenience.

This creates recurring situations in which one faction will not recognize another’s Ascended, requiring either a sufficiently unambiguous miracle, or the more common alternative of political maneuvering to resolve. This gives us substantial implications - much of the League’s future is therefore populated with burgeoning crises that are only nominally theological, and in reality bear great import for matters inheritance, the ownership of land, and military authority.

Of Rosantic Magic

Rosantic magic is not a system in the sense of the Taprobane tradition. It is a collection of practices operating on broadly similar underlying principles, but the methods vary greatly.

The grimoire tradition sits at the top of the social register. These are potent books of magic, often attributed to Ascended, that confer power on those who study them. Their effects follow established patterns closely enough that we can account for what they do, if not always how. Its practitioners are called magisters, or mages. Particularly powerful examples of this kind are known as Archmages; in the Singhapura tradition they would be aking to Grandmasters. The League has adopted the Singhapura terminology of Paragons for magicians of supreme power, although this term is often applied to those who are expected to be canonized as Ascended at some point.

Alchemy, imported from Lusia, enjoys a much greater prominence, and sits adjacent: serious practitioners maintain workshops that are simultaneously laboratory, library, and chapel. The noted alchemists of the day tend overwhelmingly to be of noble houses - equipment is not cheap - but their potions, unguents, balms and other products tend to have powerful effects, so much so that potions for healing flesh wounds are common fare in the cities. The term magister applies here, too; there has been at least seven Grand Alchemists of note. As a result, many talented Lusians of little national devotion escape or migrate to the Rosantic League, where their skills may be better appreciated.

The most consequential development is the printing press, a machine by which many words and letters can be stamped onto rolls of paper. The Rosantic presses have made grimoires so widely available that the nobility carries them as a matter of fashion, and the richest even switch from one to the other depending on the day of the week and their fancy. The result is a well-fed population with access to significant magical capability with relatively low training requirements. From Daub’s standpoint, the same technology makes it easier to acquire and study these grimoires; efforts to reverse-engineer Rosantic magic may be worthwhile and should be supported.

Guild transmission is the least visible form. Knowledge passes from master to apprentice across generations; the succession of knowledge is also a succession of relationship with the guild’s patron Ascended, and the guild’s secret capabilities appear to require that relationship to function fully. Brennmark’s blades hold an edge beyond what the underlying steel warrants and have resisted reverse-engineering - Singhapura’s attempt has been to use Ealdorfold steel to approximate this technical edge. Orvaine’s bookbinders produce manuscripts that cannot be burned or soaked, and Valdermach’s coin stamps cannot be forged.

The next tradition is one they call Carnival. For three days, the Rosantics believe the barrier between the living and the Ascended grows thin. Treaties reached during Carnival are held sacred; agreements made at this time will be held over any other vow. Your Grace should be aware of this calendar.

Of the League’s Military Capacity, and of Other Matters

The League has no standing army. It has the Roses Levy, activated via the Diet, and it has the Free Companies. The levy has every problem associated with the conscription of citizens; namely, unwillingness, poor training, poor equipment, save for those nobles and their retainers.

The Free Companies are, in contrast, standing troops. They have much in common with Lusian Condottieri; they are expensive, reliable within their contracted terms, and famous throughout the known world for extravagant tastes and clothing. Each company bears a relationship to a patron Ascended, inscribing its heraldry on their banners and uniforms. This is observed with complete seriousness in the field, and I would not dismiss it as theater; many second sons of nobles, or nobles who have fallen out of favor, march with the Free Companies, as do many a young zealot or pilgrim.

The siege engineering of the Free Companies is without peer in the known world. It sits at the intersection of alchemy, magic, and soldiering, and the League has provided fertile ground for this practice, especially in border wars with Lusia. Lusia has been attempting to produce engineers of equivalent quality for decades without success, and Singhapura prefers to dominate through strength of magic.

The existence of the Free Companies are an important point for Daub. If Your Grace requires additional military capacity, Singhapura is not the only source. This allows for a degree of independent action; however, they come bearing their own faiths and quarrels, and are not easily dissuaded from them.

On the larger military question - how the full Rosantic force would fare against Singhapura? I will say only that Singhapura’s armies are larger and would likely prevail in a direct engagement; but that many Rosantic capabilities remain hidden in ways that make this a dangerous calculation. Indeed, the Free Companies and their descendants, such as the Paladins, historically spurred the Singhapura armies to develop their own specialist Chapters. More practically: the League has alternating feuds and alliances with Lusia and Ealdorfold, meaning an invasion of any of the three risks producing a war the Empire cannot afford. The current policy is trade and selective hiring as circumstances require.

I close with an observation about the court masque. The Rosantics practice a form of highly allusive theatrical performance that communicates political meaning through allegory. These performances often convey meaning across months, with full understanding being difficult without intimate familiarity of Rosantic high culture. In literary circles there is a novel of Singhapura origin that depicts the case of one such masque that had a different meaning for each of the nobles who saw it, and thus goaded three of them to anger and one to outright war, as was intended by its comissioner; these meanings, and the motives behind them, were only fully deciphered on their deathbeds.

I mention it because the Rosantics have been known to cite this work in actual diplomatic correspondence; thus, either Singhapura literature is very good, or their diplomacy is very strange. Your Grace should keep this in mind in any formal dealings, and perhaps invest in a reliable translator of court masques before the next Diet cycle.