The Fourth Epoch

from 471 to current

 

Year 471 to Year 1768

The Fourth Epoch is a politically complex period that lasted nearly 1300 years. It begins with the defeat of the last significant Orcish Army at Briunida, in Year 471, and ends with the DECLARATION of in Year 1768 - which came to be referred to as Year 1 of the SOMETHING CALENDAR.

The Fourth Epoch is divided into three major eras, the Imperial Era, the Enlightenment, and the Unification. Broadly speaking, the Imperial Era is a time of near constant warfare that sees the rise and decline of the major Empires that were formed in response to the Orcish Conquests that ended the Third Epoch. The Enlightenment is a much more peaceful era, characterized by learning, discovery, and economic prosperity. During the Enlightenment, centralized Imperial rule gives way to regional governance and a return of the City-State model, while massive world-spanning guilds, colleges and trade organizations rise in power and prominence. After the Great Plague of 1588 and 1589 kills almost half of the global population, people turn to religion. The Unification is a period of great religious transformation and upheaval. Religious wars are fought, religious purges are continuous, and the powerful secular institutions of the Enlightenment are forced to declare religious affiliation.

The Early Imperial Era (Year 471 to year 703)

With the defeat of the Orc Armies at Briunida in 471, a brief period of peace swept the world. A hundred and fifty years of continual war had devastated entire regions, and had left many once great cities in ruin. Key to defeating the Orcs had been populist appeals to species-centric perspectives that led to the establishment of six large nation-states based on historically inaccurate claims of regional origin, and the ideas that certain species had ‘natural rights’ to certain regions.

Regardless of the validity of these ideas, the practical reality for the first two centuries of the Imperial Era was that these centralized governments were essential to reconstruction. Between Year 471 and the start of the seventh century, the Six Empires as they came to be called (even though they were not all Empires), were largely benevolent. The horrors of the Orc Conquests were still fresh in people’s memories, and the work of rebuilding was significant. Each of the Six Empires turned to the Councils and the great families of the former Charter Cities in their territories and created powerful government institutions around them, or appointed them as Crown Companies - private institutions that operated for profit, but were protected and guaranteed by the government in exchange for preferential rates.

As was the case in the beginning of the Third Epoch - all ships rose with the tide. Reconstruction, creation of new organizations and institutions, the reestablishment of global trade, and steadily growing population created a time of peace and prosperity. There was an artistic and cultural renaissance, and universities, colleges, temples and guilds were re-established and empowered to share and expand knowledge. By Year 700, the majority of the great Cities that had been sacked during the Orc Conquests had been restored to glory, with a few of them surpassing their former grandeur, including Kovstepovi, Miga, Calighenna others. Sadly, Briunida was not among them, having been almost totally destroyed when Golga first sacked it, and then reduced to rubble in the final years of the war.

The Middle Imperial Era (Year 703 to year 1070)

In Year 703, King Joric of Tulosz declared his intention to expand his Kingdom across the Sea of Tears to Ayodesh. While the temperate grasslands of the western half of Ayodesh, known as the Plains of Marqash, were still an autonomous region of City States, they had strong economic ties to the Lizari Empire in Inik, as well as good relations the prosperous City States in central Ayodesh and with the many nomadic tribes of the Odeshi Wastes. King Joric began his expansion efforts with overtures and offerings to the Councils of the Charter Cities of Horizon, Azure and Marqash, but his friendly appeals soon became threats, and then suddenly became an invasion.

The war rapidly expanded, drawing in the Lizari Empire, who did not like the idea of Human expansion into Ayodesh. Individual Cities quickly found themselves unable to organize at the scale required to hold out against the organized might of a Nation State, and by 706 every port on the Azure Sea had been captured by King Joric’s forces. Fearful that the for supply coming from the Plains of Marqash would collapse, the Charter Cities of central Ayodesh appealed to the barbarian tribes of the Odeshi Wastes, and by 707, reinforcements from the east and Lizari forces from Inik were holding the line at Mushadeh and Lapis. The war began to stagnate, and while there were still skirmishes and small battles happening across western Ayodesh, it seemed likely that the war would end and King Joric would consolidate his gains.

Then, in 708, an invasion force from Kingdom of Golanicja landed in Goldport in eastern Ayodesh and quickly captured the city. After securing the city, the Dwarven forces began moving north up the coast, as well as up the Gold River. King Joric had a strong interest in securing western and central Ayodesh, but was not interested in crossing the Odeshi Wastes to seize the east coast, and its vast riches of gold, diamonds and coal. But those same riches, now largely undefended, were more than appealing enough to King Gaelan of Golanicja that Joric was able to convince him join the battle so they could split Ayodesh down the middle.

Of course, the Dwarven invasion of eastern Ayodesh greatly troubled the Spriggan in Kashdush, and in 709 they appealed to their long time allies in the Ursan Empire to join them in declaring war against the Dwarves. This was unexpected, as the Spriggan Kingdom and the Ursan Matriarchy had largely maintained isolationist stances in the past. When Ursan forces came ashore at Kovavici, Bovcevin, Gojod, and Port Pleasant, King Gaelan realized he had a big problem.

With war breaking out everywhere, several independent Companies chartered in the Elven Empire were tasked to begin conducting espionage and assassination operations. The Empress Lucillia III also appealed to her sometime allies, the Merfolk, to begin sabotaging shipping across the Sea of Tears to slow the pace of King Joric’s expansions and increase the costs of his war effort.

In 712, Tuloszian Naval Convoy ferrying troops from Mahogany to Horizon to join the war effort in Ayodesh encountered a flotilla of ships flying the flag of the Widow’s Sea Merchant Company who were being pursued by pirates northwest of the Passage of Poglia. As the naval convoy moved to intercept the pirates, the merchant ships sailed in behind them, stole their wind, lowered their flags, and revealed their armaments to join the pirates in the attack. A dozen ships and over a thousand Tuloszian soldiers and sailors were sent to the bottom. Unfortunately, one ship managed to escape and was able to report the treachery. Human intelligence soon revealed the ambush to have been an Elvish plot, and before the end of Year 712, the entire world was drawn back into conflict.

One of the regions most impacted by conflict in the Imperial Era was central Ayodesh. After securing Mushadeh in 710, King Joric was able to fight for control of the Sea of Palms. With Tuloszian forces coming from the west and Golanicjan forces coming from the east, the city of Shahaifor was of critical strategic import. Between 754 and 1185 the city changed hands six times. King Joric II, who was both more aggressive and less strategically savvy than his father, managed to capture the city in 754, but in doing so, over-extended himself. The city was quickly cut off from support as he struggled even to hold Ghoboz. In 759, Jayeesha Zul liberated the city, but because the Lizari were not as expansionist as the Tuloszian’s, and were not particularly interested in governing a city in the sand, she returned the city to Council rule.

A hundred years and five generations later in 872, Queen Sorscja had managed to reinforce her positions in western Ayodesh and pressed again to take Shahaifor. This time the city was better defended, with Odeshi barbarians and Lizari forces fighting in support. Nevertheless, Queen Sorscja was able to capture the city again in 875.

Then, in 923, with Queen Sorscja an old woman ruling from her bed in Desdiima, her son and heir Prince Joric III lost Shahaifor again when Odeshi barbarians from Adeh-Goza crossed the Calcanian Mountains with support from a Spriggan invasion force, and took the city a fifth time in a ruinous siege that left much of the city devastated. Prince Joric III was slain in the battle, and Queen Sorscja is said to have died of grief when she heard the news, leaving the Throne of Tulosz to Prince Mihiu I.

The Odeshi barbarians turned the ruins of Shahaifor over to Council rule once again, and managed to hold the city until the end of the Imperial Era.

For the next five centuries, there was almost constant conflict. But the wars of the Imperial Era were fundamentally different than those of the Orcish Conquest. These were not existential wars of attrition, they were wars of politics and territory. Alliances shifted constantly, and enemies in one decade, on one front, would become allies a decade later on a different front. Furthermore, these wars were fought to capture and hold cities, not to pillage them. While many cities over five centuries of war were laid siege to, heavily damaged, and in some cases captured and re-captured, only a small number of cities were reduced to the point where their Charters were dissolved or abandoned.

Additionally, while none of the Six Empires saw a single year without war prior to 1185, the wars never engulfed the entire world at one time - many Cities, and indeed, many regions, went centuries without hosting a conflict. Despite the fact that war was always happening somewhere, the majority of people around the world lived their entire lives away from war - and in many senses benefitted from it.

The net effects of the Imperial Wars that stretched from circa 700 to circa 1200 were several.

First, people began to lose faith in the idea of centralized leadership. Too many Kings, Queens, Emperors, Matriarchs, and other Rulers with fancy titles strutted the world stage and achieved a fifty-percent success rate for people to take them seriously. The seemingly un-ending parade of entitled nobles revealed themselves as charlatans who didn’t deserve their power, and people grew tired of listening to them. This problem was compounded by the invention of the printing press in 1071, which lead to wider distribution of knowledge and information about what was happening in the world, and made it easier for voices of dissent to reach like-minded people.

Second, while the appeals to ‘homeland’ were very effective in inspiring people to rise up and take back their literal homes from the Orcs, these nationalistic, speciesist appeals felt hollow when used to drum up fervor for wars of conquest. These hateful ideas engendered a general cynicism that led people to first question the historical accuracy of these claims, and ultimately toward the end of the Imperial Era, to reject them outright, undermining the very raison-d’etre of the Empires themselves.

Thirdly, the fact that so many Companies, Guilds and Institutions were effectively autonomous, and controlled so much of the world’s wealth and natural resources created serious problems. The Six Empires essentially spent five hundred years putting themselves into debt to private companies, and as the companies aggregated wealth and power, people began to realize that the benefits provided by companies were more important to them in practical and aspirational terms than the benefits provided to them by their government.

The Late Imperial Era (Year 1071 to year 1259)

In 1185, the Kingdom of Tulosz was so indebted to the Widow’s Sea Merchant Company, the Guild of Obrum, and the Stone Union that the Trade Bank of Bosznel was forced to call in Crown’s debts. Unable to put a financing plan in place, King Mihiu IV renounced his debts and refused to pay. With several of the world’s most powerful companies compromised by this potential loss, the Trade Bank of Bosznel ordered the dissolution of the Monarchy and the division of its assets to pay its debts. The King refused to relinquish power, and was subsequently transformed into a rosebush by his Court Wizard Elena Borciu. King Mihiu IV roses were still flourishing in the gardens at the offices of the Trade Bank of Bosznel nearly six centuries later at the start of the Fifth Epoch in 1768.

Similar Imperial collapses happened around the world between 1185 and 1259.

After King Gaelan of Golanicja captured Sanek’s Gate in Year 709 and Argenta in Year 711, he ordered the formation of new a Crown Company known as the Western Metal and Gem Company that would oversee extraction of gold, silver, platinum and diamonds from mines in the Odeshi Wastes. As Golanicjan forces swept westward, expanding Golanicjan territory toward the Silver Mountains, the Western Metal and Gem Company saw its holdings increase massively. Cities in eastern Ayodesh, at first resistant to Golanicjan conquest, were suddenly benefitting from a huge influx of wealth, as well as from the constant demand for supplies and material to support the Golanicjan conquest.

The Western Metal and Gem Company quickly became one of the most prosperous organizations in the world, and the former Council Families of every city in eastern Ayodesh grew exceedingly wealthy and powerful. But by the last decade of the 12th Century, ‘Empire’ was becoming a dirty word. The Kingdom of Tulosz was being dismantled, and the Kingdom of Golanicja was also badly overextended and in massive debt. In 1199, the Grain Bank of Bulostioi informed Queen Kosuela II of Golanicja that they would have to hold twenty thousand tons of grain until the Golanicjans could properly service their debt.

Queen Kosuela II ordered the Western Metal and Gem Company to immediately dispatch several ships laden with gold and platinum from mines in Ayodesh to Smoljeno and Miga so she could finance the much needed grain shipments that would keep the population fed. When the ships arrived, their holds were filled with sand, and a letter renouncing her authority. Unable to pay the Grain Bank, the. The Queen and the royal family went into hiding, and by 1201 the Kingdom of Golanicja was dissolved.

After centuries of enriching massive companies and guilds by paying them to do the logistical work of war fighting, while hoarding all the misery and suffering for themselves, they collapsed. The companies and institutions they had created, empowered, and protected were remarkably more robust and distributed than the Empires themselves, and in the end, they were more respected, admired, and accessible. By the mid thirteenth century, more than a quarter of the population of the world worked directly or indirectly for one of these large companies. People could aspire to make their lives better by joining one of them. But no one could aspire to be a King or an Emperor, and a life of service and dedication to an Empire or Kingdom typically led to a bloody end in a mucky field outside a burning ruin in someone else’s Empire, half a world away.

As the Six Empires shattered, Imperial treaties were dissolved or abandoned. Many cities found themselves either ‘owned’ by a Company or simply cut loose from centralized rule. In most of them, some important and respected family would dust off a thousand year old Charter and call for the election of a new Council. The Councillors who were elected were typically senior officials coming from the ranks of the larger or more influential companies in a given city.

The last ten years of the Imperial Era saw the slow, mostly peaceful dissolution of Imperial Rule, and the re-establishment of the City States - but this time in a new form. Rather than being the precarious confluences of regional power, intimately intertwined with, and dependent upon, the regional population, these new City States were nodes in a network of power, woven from the threads of dozens of global companies that had been made stronger by centuries of war.

The Enlightenment (Year 1259 to Year 1588)

After being repeatedly rebuilt as a result of multiple sackings during the Imperial Era, Shahaifor was a tangle of city. Every reconstruction effort was always done on an ad hoc basis; never with a central plan, and always mired in politics and corruption.

In the last decades of the Imperial Era, paintings and literary works depict a city filled with towering, ramshackle wooden structures. Tax laws in Shahaifor were such that landowners in the city paid tax based on the footprint of their buildings at street level, but as buildings grew taller, they would typically encroach on the ‘free space’ of the sky - sometimes overhanging the street by as much as half a meter per floor. In the city center where buildings sometimes reached a height of six or seven stories, this meant that many streets were entirely covered by overhanging structures. Still, this bleak, polluted and corrupt morass was the most important trade city in Ayodesh, and the most important port on the Spiral Sea, putting it in the running with Desdiima as the most important city in the world.

When fire struck Shahaifor in 1231, it was devastating. No one knows how the blaze started because by the time word had spread of the fire, it was engulfing buildings faster than people could outrun them. The network of dried wooden tunnels forming the city center led to a firestorm that sucked in air so powerfully that when it reached a critical size, the fire created its own firebreak by sucking entire structures from the fringes into the white hot tunnels and potentially slowing the spread.

The first ‘ring’ of survivors were more than a kilometer from the center of the city when they started fleeing, and many of them were reported to have been severely burned and permanently scarred while running from the intense heat and suction of a fire that was far enough away that they never saw it until they escaped and looked back. The center of the blaze, as seen from the hills twenty kilometers north was reportedly ‘as bright as Azane’ - too intense to look directly into. Thousands are known to have been killed from the charred remains found in the outer rings of the blaze, but in the two kilometer diameter epicenter of the blaze, no remains were found. The middle of the city was described as a ‘bowl of ash’, with glass strewn about everywhere having been fused from the very dirt. Several of the larger stone structures in the inner city were completely collapsed when carved blocks of limestone fractured in the sudden, intense heat. A writer investigating the site of a former smithy at the suspected center of the blaze wrote, “No iron be found here. Could it be the flame raised so intense that molten iron boilt away like steam from a kettle? If not, where the metal?”

While the Great Fire of Shahaifor was without question a horrific tragedy, many would later go on to say that the fire was the best thing to ever happen to the city. The three Great Families of Shahaifor; the Human Llewyn Family, the Dwarven Kolocevic Family, and the Lizard Djugat Family, along with the Spiral Sea Trading Company, the Guild of Obrum, and the Four Winds Bank determined that they would rebuild Shahaifor into the greatest city the world had ever known.

Work began before the ashes were cold, with the Guild of Obrum bringing thousands of workers from around the globe to clear the rubble and begin developing a new urban plan. The Four Winds Bank began making favorable loans to Companies that would invest in the redevelopment, while at the same time buying up property. Within a decade, Shahaifor had reached its previous prominence, but the work was only just beginning. In 1240, construction began on an enormous complex of learning and culture, that would come to be known as the University of the Seven Spheres, after the seven major fields of learning; Art, Science, Magic, Engineering, Labour, Economics and Medicine.

The construction of the University was an unprecedented undertaking, planned to take more than a century to complete, but the development was planned in stages. The first stage was the construction of the Library of the Seven Spheres, which was completed in Year 1259.

Also in Year 1259, came the sudden release of the sextant as a commercial product by the Northeast Whaling Company which introduced significant efficiencies not only in navigation and transportation, but also in construction and urban planning. These process improvements would ultimately act as force multipliers on the reconstruction of Shahaifor, amplifying the importance of the city, and leading to the development of many best practices that would cascade around the world.

Taken together, the beginning of the reconstruction of Shahaifor and the opening of the Library of the Seven Spheres, combined with the sudden, widespread distribution of the sextant (and the force multiplying effects that had on the continued development of the city and the world at large) led to 1259 being considered the beginning of the Enlightenment.

By Year 1300, the number of Colleges, Guildhalls, Companies and other organizations that had the wealth and influence to operate on multiple Continents expanded to over two dozen. Many smaller groups competed with the larger companies, operating on a continental or regional scale - often supported by ambitious Great Families or City Councils that had a regional interest to prevent monopolies from emerging.

Shahaifor was not the only city that was being expanded and rebuilt. Around the world, peace, stability, and the increased fluidity of trade and information led to many cities and corporations investing in development.

Between Years 1270 and 1273, the Western Metal and Gem Company that had effectively bankrupted the Dwarven Empire signed agreements with seventeen major cities to secure mining rights in their areas. While the cities technically had no ownership over these lands, the agreement to develop roads and infrastructure to support Company Mining in exchange for preferential pricing was too good to pass up, and extending security and protection to the remote regions where the mines would be developed would eventually connect these cities to other cities, and increase economic robustness.

As their areas of oversight increased, however, many cities found themselves stretched too thin to protect the new mining towns that were popping up, or the new villages or farmlands that would end up providing for them. In 1281, the Order of the Flaming Sword, which had grown wealthy by providing military support to various Empires in the waning of the Imperial Era, offered its services to most of the City States that had signed mineral rights agreements with the Western Metal and Gem Company. It had been a generation since the Order of the Flaming Sword had been a major mercenary force whose involvement could determine the outcome of an epic battle, but in an era where enforcing tolls, protecting travelers from bandits, and securing villages against scattered bands of raiding goblins was the job, the Order of the Flaming Sword could get the job done for a fair price.

Another mercenary company that found a profitable niche in the beginning of the Enlightenment was perhaps the least ‘enlightened’ of all the companies in history. The Order of Alcinette began as a group of slavers and pirates during the Imperial Era who largely sought to broker prisoner exchanges between Empires. When the Empires collapsed and the Order was left holding the bag - with hundreds of prisoners in their custody, but no one to pay their ransom, they decide to put them to work. Captured soldiers would labour or fight as indentured servants in order to buy their own freedom over time - making a profit for the Order in the process. With Empires fading and collapsing, however, this was a dark and bloody business with no future. Until the leaders of the Order realized that the emerging City States had little to no capacity to deal with criminals. Instead of imposing a death penalty on criminals - which was wasteful and demoralizing on the population, or exiling them - which was inefficient and difficult to enforce, Cities could pay the Order of Alcinette to make their criminals ‘go away’. The Order of Alcinette would sail into port, pick up a boat load of criminals, and then sail them to some far away location and sell their labour to some other company. Getting paid on both sides of the deal made the Order of Alcinette very profitable, very quickly, and their reach and influence, and their horrific practice, spread around the world.

As populations began to spread and intermingle, and as Companies grew in power and provided increasing stability, the exchange of knowledge - both mundane and magical - accelerated. In 1294, there were over sixty different magical schools. Most were small schools that had been founded centuries previously in their cities by a specific Family, or were affiliated with a Temple to one of The Siblings. The call of the University at Shahaifor had an enormous impact on these small schools. They first began aggregating at the regional level, with three or four schools merging into one, using a shared curriculum and sharing their knowledge and best practices. The small schools that took this approach were enormously successful, and by 1300 there were five massive Mages Guilds in the world; the Odeshi College, the Guild of Jumira, the Eastern College (which includes schools in Golanicja, Marcosta, and Tulosz), the College of Music (mostly consisting of former schools from the Elvish Empire in Senecia and the Senecian Archipelago), and the Northern College (with schools in Obersch and Kashdush)

These five great Guilds frequently disagreed over principles, ideas, and the foundational theories of magic. Their students were indoctrinated to be rivals, and on many occasions, rival mages fought to the death. At the same time, however, in the upper echelons of power within the Guilds, ‘co-opetition’ was the order of the day. With virtually every mage in the world ultimately answering to one of five Headmasters (or Archmages, or Grand Wizards… their titles varied), the Guilds were able to seize control of the ‘magical economy’ and increase the profitability of their work manyfold.

A generation after the end of the Imperial Era, many cities around the world reached their highest ever populations, and growth was accelerating; but these cities needed to be fed. Around the world, farmers were working harder and harder, expanding their plots, and plowing more and more land every year to try to keep pace with demand. Land was being overused, and aqueducts were not being built quickly enough. Between Year 1311 and 1317 a series of droughts swept the globe. None of them was serious enough to truly devastate farming in a region, but crop yields were way down and food shortages were commonplace.

The lack of centralized government put the Charter Cities in a difficult position. They had no legal claim to the food being grown in the rural areas outside their immediate jurisdictions, but they could not allow their citizens to starve. Meanwhile, the rural populations were barely managing to harvest enough food to feed themselves, never mind feed the cities. The threat of land seizure by the cities was looming, along with fears of a return to an Empire model.

In the Year 1313, the Grain Bank of Bulostioi was chartered by the Halfling Barbagu Family to begin buying up farmland and employing workers from the cities to work the fields. The land was cheap, and many people were hungry enough to give up their city life and take up back-breaking field work in exchange for a chance to eat. As the Grain Bank expanded, it became apparent that the real benefit was not in employing starving city folk to work the fields and feed themselves, but rather in creating a centralized organization in control of a large food supply that Charter Cities could negotiate with.

Autonomous individual farmers had been reluctant to sell food as long as their own families were going hungry, but The Grain Bank was able to put a price on a bushel of wheat. That price was exorbitant at first, but by 1315, the Cities would pay almost anything to avoid food riots, or the need to start conquering and holding lands.

The Grain Bank began purchasing failing land around the world when it was literally dirt cheap. Their sparse yields were not enough, but because they owned it and the workers did not, they could impose rationing and provide a lifeline to the Cities. The money from the Cities meant that their farm workers were being paid very well. They might not be able to eat much, but they could build nice houses and have nice clothes. Meanwhile, the Grain Bank was funneling cash into developing more aqueducts and improved farming practices.

The Grain Bank’s massive reinvestment in the land didn’t end the drought; the drought faded on its own as part of a natural climatic cycle. Regardless, by 1318, the Grain Bank of Bulostioi had risen to become one of the largest Companies in the world. Almost every City had some kind of provisional arrangement with The Grain Bank, and the scale of their operation allowed them to price out many independent farmers - forcing them to sell their land and become employees of the Company. By the middle of the Enlightenment, the Grain Bank had land holdings on every continent, and owned and operated approximately 10% of all the arable farm land in the world.

Of the Companies that expanded their reach during the Enlightenment, it was the actual banks that gained the most power and influence. In addition to the Trade Bank of Bosznel that had effectively forced the dissolution of the Kingdom of Tulosz, the Bank of Uleila and the Four Winds Bank also made enormous profits off of the dissolution of the Six Empires. Perhaps one of the most impressive rises among all the banks was that of the Sixth Order, who went from being a ragtag group of pirates and mercenaries in YEAR XXXX to being one of the wealthiest banks in the world in only XXX years.