Of the Rosantic League and Its Constituent Powers

The Rosantic League and Lusia, its southern neighbour, lie 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 that the Rosantic League can reach Daub.

The League is neither a kingdom nor an empire. It is a coalition born of a charter signed in Valdermach in the previous century, binding forty-three polities together, and they are a curious assortment: seven “free cities”, eleven hereditary margravates, nine prince-bishoprics, various duchies and countships, and one river abbey which, despite lying within Valdermach, keeps an independent vote on account of having been the venue of the signing.

Everything in the League depends upon the river Valder. The name carries at once the meanings of power, of rule and of forest-dwelling. It runs from the eastern highlands to the western sea, and every significant city in the League sits upon it or within a day’s ride. Whoever holds the Valder’s chokepoints has a great say in how goods move and who sides with whom.

Taken together, the League approaches Singhapura in size, and Valdermach alone is a city to match the capital. Its states share a language, a broad culture, and common traditions in law, heraldry and religion. Unlike in Lusia, the letter of the law is the same across the whole body. But where Lusia sets great store by the writing, arguing and enforcement of contracts, the Rosantics prefer simpler oaths, and hold lawyers in general distrust.

Of the Ascended, and Their Involvements

We must begin with faith. Faith, Your Grace, is the dominant feature of the Rosantic League and its politics, and its central expression is the Communion of the Ascended. The Ascended were real people who, through great or terrible deeds in life, crossed at death a threshold that most cannot, and became something akin to minor gods.

They are not equal. At the summit sit perhaps a dozen figures of League-wide significance, invoked for famine, for war, for the outcome of Diet sessions and for the birth of heirs. Centuries of dealings have fixed their personalities, and their miracles are extensively documented. Below them is a substantial middle tier of regional and civic saints, each commonly with a city, a guild, a trade or a category of person under protection. Below that is an almost limitless tail of local and specialized figures.

Noble houses claim descent from the Ascended, usually from the patron of whatever territory they govern. This is taken seriously. It bears directly upon land rights, military obligations, inheritance disputes and heraldic law, and the heraldic colleges of Valdermach and Brenmark keep the records.

The Ascended, and thus the nobility derived from them, have long and complicated histories with one another. Some were allies in life and are invoked together by tradition. Some are never named in the same prayer. A city whose patron saint has a documented enmity with the patron of a prospective trading partner has a very real diplomatic problem, however absurd it may seem to us, and the League’s history is full of such cases. The Diet maintains a subcommittee whose sole business is trouble between saints. Your Grace has difficulty enough keeping the Haugris Church and the Temple of Eighteen from one another’s throats within a single city, and may imagine the scale of it.

The Litanies of the Temple of Eighteen are the nearest analogy, but it falls short. The Litanies have documented effects; there is a great deal of faith around them; and now and then one truly manifests. Yet by and large politics carries on without their daily intervention.

It is not so with the Rosantic Ascended, who manifest far more often than most deities. One of the earliest Singhapura expeditions to those 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 at last they returned home, their families had given them up for dead years before.

Even a minor Ascended may have living devotees who claim to have been healed in person, or set upon their path, by a personal manifestation of their god. There is even some scholarly suggestion that the Light of the Paladins is a Rosantic Ascended, though the documentation on that particular name is scant.

Of the Cities That Matter to Daub

1) Valdermach is the League’s commercial throat. Its noble merchant families rival Lusia and Singhapura for involvement in trade, and much of Singhapura’s tea, clothing, spices and processed materials is exported to the League through it. The trade in holy relics, being critical to League faith and politics, runs through Valdermach as well, together with the finer business of authentication and brokerage. It is a hold upon a great many powerful people, and one rarely visible in the open.

2) Brenmark is where things are made. It is at once a customer of the guilds of Singhapura and their rival. There are guilds here also, and they have teeth, to use the common term. The Goldsmiths’ Hall, for instance, keeps its own court, its own jail and its own ambassadors abroad. Brenmark is also a great pilgrimage centre, because many of its guild patrons are among the oldest Ascended. Pilgrims, merchants and spies all travel the same roads, and a whole economy of inns and way-stations lives upon them.

3) Orvaine is the centre of printing and grimoire production, and home to the Orvaine College of Natural Philosophy. The College is some four hundred years old, founded originally to educate the highest nobility, and its credentials are taken seriously even in Singhapura. It has produced twelve magicians of Paragon rank, contributed a great deal to Taprobane, and printed and reprinted much of the literature we commonly discuss. Its greatest feat was the Reformers Convocation, now a major power in the League; the Reformers’ 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 come to our shores from all across it. But it is these three which, having filled their own borders, look most eagerly at ours. I will add one more for Your Grace’s amusement: the duchy of Halsmoor, beside Brenmark, which consists of one small castle and a bit of village, and has become the most artistic place in the League on account of the cheaper rent.

Of the Diet

It is a curious feature of the League that the number of noble titles is fixed. In the margravates and similar states, titles pass down in families and are held chiefly by force of arms, land and wealth, as they commonly are in kingdoms. In the free cities, the citizens vote every ten years on which families shall hold the titles, so that a title passes from one to another much as a role passes between players in a theatre.

Twice a year, at the summer and winter solstices, these nobles convene as the Diet for six weeks, each representing their own polity. The Diet may pass resolutions, levy funds for common defence, arbitrate disputes between members and censure violations of the charter. 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 no alternative can be agreed, and so accounts for roughly half of all sessions.

The voting blocs are best described in the negative. The cities 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 war. The hereditary nobles distrust one another and the councilmembers of merchant origin. Certain margravates have feuded 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 every city. They are written to conceal the most sensitive matters, but they will still serve Your Grace as an account of how the League works.

Of the Convocation Schism and How It Pertains to Political Reality

The League originally had a single Convocation, established by the Diet. It may be likened to the Haugris Church: one institution of immense political weight, formerly in command of all theological matters. It has since split over the canonization of the Ascended. The Old Rites Convocation maintains the established process. The Reformers hold that the process is corrupt and open to political manipulation. The schism is five decades old, and its consequences continue to make work for the Diet. Neither Convocation holds a seat in the Diet, but each controls a voting bloc.

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 the pilgrims have already decided: a figure dies, miracles occur at the grave, shrines accumulate, and the Convocation confirms.

The military orders hold a third position, that soldiers dying in sufficient extremity of faith and deed Ascend without waiting for tribunals, and that the orders may conduct their own verification. When either Convocation protests, the usual reply is that the Convocations are welcome to visit the sites of battle and bloody their own hands for once.

This produces recurring situations in which one faction will not recognize another’s Ascended, to be resolved either by a sufficiently unambiguous miracle or, more commonly, by political manoeuvre. Much of the League’s near future is populated with crises that are theological in name and, in substance, concern 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 resting upon broadly similar principles, whose methods vary greatly.

The grimoire tradition sits at the top of the social register. Grimoires are potent books of magic, and sometimes decks of cards, a fashion that began with mercenaries and became popular in the streets.

The workings of magic in the grimoires are often attributed to the Ascended. Supposedly each working functions as a contract that pulls for as aspect of an Ascended power; for this reason the most powerful spells, books and cards are jealously hunted and gathered. Their effects follow established patterns closely enough that we can account for what they do, if not always how. Their practitioners are called magisters, or mages, and the most powerful are Archmages, roughly akin to our Grandmasters.

The League has adopted the Singhapura term Paragon for magicians of supreme power, though it is often applied to those expected to be canonized in due course.

Alchemy, imported from Lusia, enjoys far greater prominence here than at home. Serious practitioners keep workshops that are at once laboratory, library and chapel. The noted alchemists of the day are overwhelmingly of noble houses, since the equipment is not cheap, but their potions, unguents and balms are so effective that remedies for flesh wounds are common fare in the cities. The term magister applies here too; there have been at least seven Grand Alchemists of note. Many talented Lusians of little national devotion migrate to the League, where their skills are better appreciated.

The most consequential development is the printing press, a machine by which many words and letters are stamped upon 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 change from one to another according to the day of the week and their fancy. The result is a well-fed population with significant magical capability and comparatively little training.

Guild transmission is the least visible form. Knowledge passes from master to apprentice across generations, and with the knowledge passes a relationship with the guild’s patron Ascended, without which the guild’s secret capabilities appear not to function fully. Brenmark’s blades hold an edge beyond what their steel warrants and have resisted every attempt to copy them; Singhapura’s answer has been to approximate the edge with Ealdorfold steel. Orvaine’s bookbinders produce manuscripts that cannot be burned or soaked, and Valdermach’s coin stamps cannot be forged.

The last tradition is what 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, and an agreement made then outranks any other vow.

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

The League has no standing army. It has the Roses Levy, activated by the Diet, and it has the Free Companies. The Levy has every problem associated with conscripting citizens: unwillingness, poor training and poor equipment, save among the nobles and their retainers.

The Free Companies are standing troops. They have much in common with the Lusian Condottieri: they are expensive, reliable within their contracted terms, and famous throughout the known world for extravagance in taste and dress. Each company bears a relationship to a patron Ascended, and inscribes its heraldry upon banners and uniforms. This is observed with complete seriousness in the field. Many of the men are second sons of nobles, or nobles fallen from favour, with the occasional young zealot on pilgrimage among them, and they will fight over an insult to their saint.

The siege engineering of the Free Companies is without peer in the known world. It sits at the meeting of alchemy, magic and soldiering, and the border wars with Lusia have given it fertile ground. Lusia has tried for decades to produce engineers of equal quality without success, and Singhapura prefers to dominate by strength of magic.

On the larger question of 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. The Free Companies and their descendants, the Paladins among them, first entered the Empire during the Second Ebbing, and it was their example that spurred Singhapura to raise its own specialist Chapters. More practically, the League alternates between feuds and alliances with Lusia and Ealdorfold, so that an invasion of any of the three risks a war the Empire cannot afford. The present policy is trade, and selective hiring as circumstances require.

I close with an observation about the court masque. The Rosantics practise a highly allusive form of theatre that conveys political meaning through allegory. A performance may unfold its meaning over months, and full understanding is difficult without intimate familiarity with Rosantic high culture. There is a Singhapura novel depicting one such masque that carried a different meaning for each of the nobles who saw it, goading three to anger and one to outright war, exactly as its commissioner intended; the meanings, and the motives behind them, were fully deciphered only upon the participants’ deathbeds. Rosantic diplomats have been known to cite this work in actual correspondence. Either Singhapura’s novelists are very good, or Rosantic diplomacy is very strange.

Of What This Means for Daub

The League offers Your Grace two things the Empire cannot easily replace, and brings two dangers with them. I set them out in that order.

1) Soldiers. If Your Grace requires additional military capacity, Singhapura is not the only source, and the Free Companies allow a degree of independent action. I would advise Your Grace to hire them only for defined tasks with defined ends, since they come bearing their own faiths and quarrels and are not easily dissuaded from either.

2) Magic. The same presses that make grimoires a fashion in Valdermach make them easy to acquire and study in Daub. I urge Your Grace to support the LTU in reverse-engineering Rosantic magic. It is the one magical tradition within reach of Daub that Taprobane does not already own.

Now the dangers. Your Grace must keep the Rosantic calendar and know when Carnival falls, because at least two mercenary orders now operating in Daub have named Carnival provisions that compel them to disregard certain oaths and orders. An agreement Your Grace makes with a Rosantic during those three days will outrank every other promise he has made, including to you.

And I would invest, before the next Diet cycle, in a reliable translator of court masques. A performance staged in Valdermach may be an insult to Daub, or an offer, and Your Grace should not learn which from the consequences.