Kinilan Revolution

The Kinilan Revolution was an uprising of the peasant class against the nobility.  It began with the Great Burning of Antius, and ended with the abdication of the Abizin Dynasty to the leaders of the revolution.

The Conflict

Prelude

In the decades leading up to the Kinilan Revolution, the nobility became increasingly self-involved, spending ever more absurd amounts of money hosting lavish events, and ever more obsessed with sabotaging their political rivals. Hiring mercenaries to interfere with a rival house's affairs became common practice, though one misstep could lead to assassins visiting in the night or being openly denounced to the Kinilan Peace Brigade for instigating civil war, which had similarly fatal results. Things reached a point where the mercenaries and other supposed "accidents" resulted in significant shortages in critical supplies. The resulting shortages reached a point where the peasantry decided to do something about it, and when they struck, the nobility were taken completely by surprise.

Major Events of the Revolution

The Revolution started with a series of riots in the capital, Antius. The nobility responded by putting out a call to the Kinilan Peace Brigade, giving them the unprecedented order to put down the riots at all costs, and while the Brigade was en route to the city, they had the city's food supplies moved from warehouses and granaries spread throughout the city to their homes, with the intent of protecting critical supplies from destruction in the riots.  However, this move was interpreted, correctly or otherwise, as a plan to starve the peasantry into submission, and when the Peace Brigade arrived and got word of this, most turned coat, siding with the rioters against the nobility.  A few days later, the rioters, now led and organized by former officers from the Peace Brigade, marched on the Noble Quarter, looting and burning the nobles' palaces one by one.  These fires eventually merged and grew out of control, in what is now called the Great Burning of Antius, before they were finally put out by a cadre of mages.
Word of this spread quickly, and similar coups happened in other cities.  In Rethis, the local nobility, complacent because of their remoteness from the Royal Court, held a ball to celebrate the unprecedented opportunity for advancement they expected to enjoy once the peasant uprising had been quelled.  This gave the local peasants the ideal opportunity to strike, slaughtering the vast majority of the local nobility by burning The Old Bastion, where the ball was being held.
Other cities were less complete in their uprisings.  Many noble houses took the news from Antius at face value, and fled the cities to their country holdings, which were typically better fortified.  Some cities had noble houses that were less abusive in their excesses, or those who adapted quickly enough to developing events that they managed to avoid being burned by the mob. 
Weeks later, having been besieged in his palace since the Great Burning, King Katayun XIV ordered his colours lowered, signifying surrender.  He eventually managed to negotiate the surrender of the country to revolutionary forces based on two conditions: that the revolutionary forces pursue peaceful options in future dealings with nobles still holding out against them, and that his wife and daughter were left unharmed.

Outcome

In the end, King Katayun XIV abdicated the throne in favour of the provisional council that led the revolution in and around Antius - an organization that would take months to establish even tenuous control over all of the revolutionary forces in the country, and agreed that House Abizin would never again rule Kinilan.  As the dust settled, most of the surviving nobles acknowledged at least the de facto rule of the provisional council.  A few holdouts (Houses Andraste, Nechtan, and Attar) held out behind the high walls protecting their estates until all of the other noble houses had capitulated, before finally bending the knee as well, managing to negotiate their continued ownership of their lands under the new regime.

Aftermath

It took Kinilan nearly thirty years to establish a semblance of normalcy, with the provisional council eventually adopting a system of constitutional monarchy with an elected High King or Queen limited by an elected council of advisors to depose the monarch without resorting to another bloody revolution.  It is this long recovery period and the perceived weakness of this newly limited from of rule that led to Chelestra's invasion of the Iron Hills a decade later, at the start of the Great War. 
Meanwhile, the Houses of Andraste, Nechtan and Attar almost immediately reverted to the old ways of running their lands, adopting hitherto unknown levels of control of the workers serving them.  They have openly defied the Kinilan government many times, even going so far as to officially found a group they call the Abizin Loyalists - professing that they hold to their oaths of fealty to House Abizin, the rightful rulers of Kinilan (an argument that is undermined by House Abizin's continued support of the official government).

Conflict Type

War