Aethermarch

You are holding — or reading, or inheriting from someone who held and read — a document that took sixty years to produce and will require, I am told, considerably less time to consume. I will resist the obvious remark about the disparity.

The Orbis Descriptio began as nine separate accounts, each written after a period of sustained engagement with a specific territory and its people. They were not written as a single work. They became one because I could not stop noticing, in the gap between finishing one account and beginning the next, how much each territory I described required the others to make full sense. A description of the Roman province that does not account for the dwarven holds beneath it is incomplete in ways that are not merely academic. An analysis of the orc frontier that does not address the goblin warrens is missing the most consequential political variable of the present century. The world has no interest in the boundaries that scholarship draws for its own convenience.

What you will find here is what I know, how I know it, and — where these are not the same thing — an honest account of the distance between them. I have visited most of what I describe. Where I have not, I have said so. I have relied on sources I consider credible, and I have told you which those are. The world is large and my knees are not what they were; the limits of my direct observation are not a failure of method. They are an invitation to the scholars who come after me to go where I could not, and to correct what I have gotten wrong, which they will find I have left them ample opportunity to do.

I have organised these accounts Roman-centric, beginning with our own province and moving outward by proximity. This is not nationalism. It is the acknowledgment that the Roman reader for whom this document is primarily intended will understand their own territory best, and that understanding proceeds most naturally from the known toward the unknown. The student who finds this ordering parochial is invited to read the chapters in reverse order and report whether their understanding improves.

The world is not what any one people believes it to be. It is the sum of what all peoples have found it to be, most of which they have not told each other.

This document is an attempt at the sum.

G.C.P.S.A. — Nova Romae — 1200 A.P.