Trofiriyan Royal Ministry

For a long time the crown held little actual power in Trofiriya. The Royal Ministry was founded in 2171 by King Hugo II. It had little power or influence, however, being little more than an order of bodyguards protecting the king and foiling plots against him. During the War of the Guidestones 20 years later, though, their knowledge and experience in plotting and tactics became invaluable to the war effort as they became an intelligence corp. The king, too, was able to tighten his grip and centralise power for himself, as the country needed to be united for the war effort. In the reign of Eron V, during the War of the Guidestones, the crown took and began directly administering much of the land in the South of the country in order to help the war effort. Royal Ministry advisors were placed in all the courts of the various houses, initially to help the war, but after the war was lost, the ministers remained to report on and coerce the nobility. More than a few nobles went mysteriously missing or dead in the decades following the war as Eron V purged his political enemies. King Eron V had not been popular amongst the gentry or commoners; he had taken power from the gentry, and there was large-scale famines and provisioning, as well as widespread abuse of the common folk by the Trofiriyan army, all for a war that was ultimately lost and resulted in the destruction of a sacred religious artefact, and after his death in 2210, there was hope among the nobility that his successor, Hugo III, would loosen the hold on power the crown now held in order to win back approval. Hugo III, however, further tightened the clamp on the nobility by swaying the common people to his cause. He instituted a number of reforms that granted the common people a host of new benefits and began a series of building projects directly funded by the crown. Among them were bridges, roads, and temples, all of which the common folk greatly appreciated, but he also began to seize swaths of land in order to build these projects and fund them. He sent surveying teams to the Olok Mountains to search for valuable mineral deposits, seizing land for mines to directly fund the crown. His largest project, and mostly one of vanity, was the royal library named after him at Godhome, to which the headquarters of the Royal Ministry was eventually moved. There were several attempts at coups by the nobility during his reign, but most were snuffed out before they could ever amount to anything. There was never a coup nor a civil war, but the nobility had not accepted their new, diminished place. A cabal within House Kaad attempted to seize a copper mine that laid in what had previously been there lands back from the crown; several weeks of armed struggles over the land ensued and threatened to break out into a full-scale civil war before the insurrection was put down and the heads of the plot executed. The next years saw tensions wax and wane, but ultimately the nobility were forced to accept their new place, and those that didn’t were removed. The Royal Ministry would ultimately be dissolved following the breakup of Trofiriya in 2256.

Type

Governmental, Ministry