Spartan Wars

A series of conflicts fought against Spartan posthumans during the Interstellar Dark Ages. Like the Replicator Wars this was not a large unified war at first, but instead a series of smaller ones fought by individual polities against various Spartan groups. These wars had begun finding success and winding down by the time of the Stellar Compact's foundation; the Compact subsequently brought them to an end and many Spartans were convicted of war crimes and sapients' rights abuses. This outcome ended what had been centuries of Spartan domination in some regions, relegating these once-feared posthumans to a near-marginalized status.

Background

The Spartans, many of whom had served in the militaries of Second Interstellar Period nations, found themselves well-positioned to take advantage when that era came to an end in apocalyptic warfare. Possessing fleets, armies, and a sociopathic willingness to perpetrate atrocities, bands of Spartans quickly set themselves up as warlord-autocrats of various habitats, planets, and star systems. The populations of these places, most of them humans, became something of latter-day helots in service to their new overlords, maintaining an industrial base which the Spartans exploited to fuel their war machines. Life for subject peoples under this regime was quite brutal, and the ruling class often enforced technological restrictions to prevent rebellions.

Conflict

The wars which eventually broke out between the Spartans and their subject peoples came to be known as the Spartan Wars or Wars of Helot Liberation, and evolved from grassroots resistance movements which gradually acquired advanced technology or were given assistance by outside groups free of Spartan dominion, such as toren scavenging clans and Free Traders. These conflicts were brutal, the Spartans following few moral restrictions in their efforts to maintain control, but gradually began to succeed as Starweb civilization slowly crawled out of its dark age.

A number of polities which had thrown off Spartan rule early on were founding members of the Stellar Compact, the unified military forces of which took the fight to the Spartans and liberated planet after planet. The final defeat of the Spartans, which had long seemed impossible, soon approached and came to pass much faster than many predicted.

Aftermath

The Stellar Compact, as a supranational union established to secure a better future for civilization, organized trials for the defeated Spartans under local and international law. Virtually all of the Spartan elite were found guilty of heinous crimes, along with many of the rank-and-file. In modern times, Spartans are near-marginalized, having to make do without servant people and possessed of a warlike psychology rather maladaptive to a long period of peace.

Conflict Type

War

Conflict Result

Spartan power smashed