The Korth Edicts

Political event

In the seventh year of his war to unite Khorvaire, Galifar made a deal with the dragonmarked houses of the Five Nations, offering them neutral status and natural economic monopolies in the new united kingdom he was building in exchange for their financial and political support in his campaign to unite the Five Nations under one crown.

In the seventh year of his war to unite Khorvaire, Galifar made a deal with the dragonmarked houses of the Five Nations, offering them neutral status and natural economic monopolies in the new united kingdom he was building in exchange for their financial and political support in his campaign to unite the Five Nations under one crown.   As Galifar’s armies grew and conquered more of the Five Nations, it became apparent to the patriarchs of the dragonmarked houses that Galifar ir’Wynarn might succeed where Karrn the Conqueror had failed. When the house leaders met Galifar at his request in the Karrnathi capital city of Korth at the height of his drive to unite the Five Nations, the would-be king swore to protect the houses’ integrity from all royal interference and agreed to a number of provisions that would ensure their continued economic strength by establishing official economic monopolies for each house over the area of commerce they already specialized in. In return, the houses agreed to legal restrictions on their political and military power so that they would not compete with the power of Galifar’s new state—or with the perogatives of the Five Nations’ feudal nobility, whose support for the new kingdom was crucial.   For the next thousand years, the Korth Edicts prevented any individual member of a dragonmarked house from holding a grant of land and placed limits on the size of the house enclaves and the armed forces that could be garrisoned there. Special exceptions were carved out for HouseDeneith, which retained the right under the Edicts to assemble military forces specifically for mercenary service in the Blademarks and Defenders Guilds. The Edicts further specified that no member of the nobility of the new kingdom could be bound to a member of a dragonmarked house in marriage without one of the two explicitly surrendering their heritage and all their rights to a noble title or a place in the dragonmarked house. Since the dragonmarked houses could not own land, the Edicts laid out a system of rents to be paid to the Galifaran Crown (and its later successors) in exchange for the territory the houses required in the Five Nations to meet their needs. The KorthEdicts established the present-day structure of the dragonmarked houses and laid the foundation for their domination of the new Kingdom of Galifar’s trade, commerce, and craftsmanship. Only agriculture, the primary basis of the Five Nations’ economies (and foundation of the nobility’s wealth), was off-limits to the dragonmarked houses, though House Lyrandar’s Raincallers’ Guild still managed to make enormous sums off of aiding Khorvaire’s farmers.