Taeor and Arc
Historians of Arc often write of a period that runs between the years -1018KB and -902KB called the Taeorian Challenge, which describes the threat posed by Taeor to Arc just as the Arcish Empire collapsed and was replaced by a Protectorate, backed by a new currency, the Arcish Levat (see
The Levat and Modern Arcish Currency).
In the year 295 (present day), many strategists and diplomats across the Arclands scoff at the idea that the anarchic, crime infested Taeor could ever seriously have mounted a challenge to Arc’s economic supremacy, but the first generations of Protectors took the threat very seriously and mobilised the entire Arcish economy to resist Taeor and its threat to a vast web of post imperial trading relations across the Arclands and beyond.
Taeor wasn’t so much founded as a city state, rather it emerged as a settlement around the great abandoned watchtower of Joristin, one of Dures II’s most decorated generals.
The tower predated both men, and was founded in the early days of the Vannic Empire by Emperor Hordale, when he returned from what scholars describe as his ‘thirty year absence’.
Hordale never spoke of where he had been and was said to have wept bitterly at the dawn of every day. He undertook several huge architectural projects and claimed that it was The Keeper’s bidding, but it was the Tower of Joristin that he viewed as being fundamentally important, though he was unable to explain why.
The small fortress that was established around the tower attracted local tribes and became a useful waypoint for crossing the barren coastal plains, making the ‘Tower’ or Taeor a focal point for travellers. Ancient trade routes eventually began to divert and change as Taeor grew and when the Vannic empire eventually collapsed Taeor had a 20 year period where it became a self governing entity in its own right.
The Vannic people had never had any love for the place, for the emperors who sought to prevent the Vannic people from occupying the sea level lands of Aestis it represented everything they despised. They saw Taeor as a dirty, chaotic and anarchic place, far removed from the order, culture and perceived purity of the high castles of the Van that populated the Arching Mountains.
The Van garrisoned the Tower of Joristin, as Hordale had directed them to do centuries earlier, but for most commanders the tower was almost as a form of exile or punishment and the Vannic soldiers sent there looked at the Taeorians with open contempt.
When the Arcish empire was founded, the rulers of the rising city of the dawn took a different approach to Taeor, seeing it as a valuable means of exploiting trade routes to the southern part of Aestis.
The rulers of Arc did not suffer their predecessors prejudices towards those who lived at sea level, and throughout the Ordrish and Starrander eras, emperors developed Taeor into a vibrant sea port by building Hamaeda, the great harbour at Taeor, which eventually developed into a small city of its own. In -2030KB Yula Ordrish sent Avastin Syldh to Taeor to rule the city as her viceroy.
The act was typical of the empress’s arrogance, and Syldh arrived unannounced with a fleet of Arcish warships and a division of soldiers. It was simply assumed in Arc that Taeor not only fell into the empire’s sphere of influence, but was in fact Arcish property.
Syldh ruled for three decades and in many ways was the founder of Taeor as an actual polity, using a mixture of authoritarian brute force to impose law and order and skillful diplomacy to raise the status of Taeor in the eyes of Arc.
Syldh created a new legal system for the city and a bureaucracy and these innovations led to the development of a stable mercantile class who knew their property could be protected by law and not by their own swords.
When Syldh died, however, his achievements died with him. Subsequent emperors (particularly the Starrander emperors) took the view that Taeor was an irrelevant backwater and from the -1940s onwards, the decisions of Empress Drassa Askar led to the rise of Dran, a problem that slowly consumed more and more of Arc’s energies.
Generations of viceroys, called Silks by the local people (a corruption of Syldh) became ever more familiar with the intrigues and political infighting that developed in Taeor and ever more removed from the politics of the Arcish imperial court.
Taeor became an under resourced and isolated hub of the Arcish empire and those who operated on the edge of the law or beyond it learned this quickly. Taeor also attracted criminals and mercenaries from other parts of the continent, particularly from Del’Marah, who used the city as a base of operations, often to destabilise their homelands.
Arcish emperors, periodically embarrassed or pressured into ‘cleaning up’ the city, would send new viceroys and ‘hanging’ judges to the city in half hearted attempts to restore law and order, but this only served to reinforce a collective Taeorian ‘us versus them’ identity. Taeorians began to see themselves as the outlaw cousins to Arc and managed to combine this mentality with a sense of being the empire’s underdog.
Tandhaur: Hands Across The Mountains
In the final days of the Arc Empire, a complex web of diplomatic and strategic relations brought about radical changes within Arc as the Protectorate emerged from the fallen imperium.
The empire ruptured under the twin pressures of Dran’s militancy and Del’Marah’s separatism, but when the last emperor, Toun a Dryne, took his own life the Arcish general Taldrine seized power and declared himself protector, it wasn’t external forces that changed Arc, but the politics of the Azure Chamber.
The merchants and bankers had long despised the emperors of Arc and the nobility that fawned over them, seeing them as lazy, corrupt and backward.
When the educated second or third sons or daughters of wealthy merchants, who could not be incorporated into the family business sought positions in the imperial government, it was always aristocrats with little or no knowledge of the affairs of state or training in finance or diplomacy who they were forced to compete with.
The aristocracy and the mercantile classes were bitter rivals, and the aristocracy looked upon the bankers particularly with barely concealed contempt.
The Houses of Coin quickly allied themselves with the army to purge the city of the nobility; the survivors fled beyond the new borders of the Arcish city state and their descendents exist to this day across the northern Arclands, known as ‘Pauper Lords’. To establish the rule of the Protectorate, which was in many ways the tool of the banks, a new currency based on debt and the value of Arcish citizenship, the Levat was created.
Because of the threat of the Oboline, Arc’s debtors either repaid their loans or were condemned to debt slavery for life (wealth was extracted from them in more brutal ways), meaning that the value of a Levat, a paper promissory note, was always kept high.
This meant that rival cities, particularly Taeor, were never able to compete economically against Arc and the new state, shorn of its official empire had a consistent trade surplus against its rivals.
As the Eastern Outer Kingdoms grew in importance, Arc established deep trade links with Veska, prompting Ghotharand to form trade and eventually military ties with Dran.
This was known as the policy of Tandhaur (a Vannic word for ‘hands across the mountains’, referring to the unusual act by Arclander city states of becoming allied to powers beyond the Arclands).
Tandhaur was a direct product of the creation of the Levat and the rise of Taeor as a potential rival to Arc; one of the key motivations for monopolising trade with Veska, the most prosperous city in the east, was to prevent any of the kingdom’s wealth flowing through Taeor.
The Dranians, always greater warriors than traders, found their relationship with the impoverished Ghothars far less lucrative.
Dran has historically benefitted from a steady supply of impressive Ghothar warriors to fill the ranks of its armies, however.
In recent years, Sorias Varren, the lord of Dran has become convinced that the way to break the power of Arc and the value of the Levat is to wage war with the Ghothars against Veska.
By shattering the Arc-Veskan Tandhaur and forcing a weakened Veska to divert its trade through Taeor (which in Varren’s scheme will become a Dranian vassal state, thus keeping the grubby and unseemly business of trade out of the great martial city), he will be able to finally use Taeor to bring Arc to its knees.
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