Of the Rosantic League, Its Constituent Powers, and What They Mean for Daub

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, technically, a country. It is a coalition born of charter, signed in Valdermach in the previous century, binding forty-three polities — seven free cities, eleven hereditary margravates, nine prince-bishoprics, various duchies and countships, and one river abbey that has stubbornly retained its voting seat since the original signing. Together they approximate Singhapura in size. They share a language, a broad culture, a river, and a set of legal, heraldric and religious traditions.

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 favor, and thus their political coalition, whoever controls the river’s chokepoints.

Of the Ascended, and Their Involvements

The dominant faith of the Rosantic League is the Communion of the Ascended. One may describe this as a pantheon of 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 real in the same sense that the Litanies of the Temple of Eighteen are real; there are documented effects, a great deal of faith around the subject, and, occasionally, very real manifestations that must give any responsible magician or politician pause for concern. 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.

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 Church and the Temple of Eighteen within a single city, will recognize the scale of the problem.

Of the Cities That Matter to Daub

Valdermach is the League’s commercial throat. The merchant families there can rival Lusia and Singhapura for involvement in significant transactions. The relic trade runs through Valdermach as well — authentication, brokerage, the movement of certified holy remains — and this is a political lever of considerable subtlety, rarely visible in the open.

Brennmark is where things are made. Its foundries run continuously. The guilds here 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, reinvented international contract law, and generated the Reformers church, whose founding theological argument was written by an Orvaine faculty member and first printed on an Orvaine press.

Of the Diet

Twice a year, at the summer and winter solstices, 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 merchant councilmembers. 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 as much as they record, they may still serve Your Grace as accounts of the workings of the League.

Of the Church Schism and How It Pertains to Political Reality

The League originally had one church, established by the Diet. The church has since split on the issue of canonization of the Ascended. The key factions are now the Old Rites church, 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 church 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 church 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 churches have usually led to the response that the Ascended in question is already receiving prayers, and that the churches 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 for matters of inheritance, land law, and military authority — it appears to me that much of the League’s future is therefore populated with burgeoning crises that are only nominally theological.

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.

Alchemy 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 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.

This is 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, inasmuch as Your Grace may call upon Rosantic free companies without routing that request through Wattle or the Empire.

The siege engineering of the free companies is without peer in the known world. It sits at the intersection of alchemy, magic, and soldiering. There is the practical necessity of a geography full of well-built walled cities that periodically require opening. Lusia has been attempting to produce engineers of equivalent quality for decades without success, and Singhapura prefers to dominate through strength of magic. Your Grace, whose outer walls have been compared in print to the concept of a wall rather than its execution, might consider that this expertise is worth cultivating a relationship with.

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. 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 the selective hire of free companies 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 arriving only retrospectively. In literary circles there is 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 war, as was intended by the fourth, its commissioner; these meanings were only fully deciphered on their deathbeds.

I mention it because the Rosantics have been known to cite their own fictional depictions of Singhapura in actual diplomatic correspondence, which means either their 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.