The Dual Monarchies of Elleryca
The Kingdom of Elleryca, known colloquially as the Dual Monarchy, is a moderately-sized developing feudal state in western Galisea. By no means a minor power in the region, the complexities of the Ellerycan state make major decisions difficult and dilutes any one authority, preventing any coordinated foreign policy or goals.
Elleryca is notable for it's unique monarchical power structure straddling the line between constitutional and absolute. Essentially, there are two independent absolute monarchies, a halfling bloodline and a human bloodline. Each wield absolute authority over their lords and vassals, who in turn wield authority to rule land in their monarch's name. Its stability is tenuous, due to the complex and somewhat convoluted system of treaties, marriages, religious agreements, and court legal decisions governing the sharing of royal power between it's two thrones.
Currently, the two dynasties are the halfling De̊e̊vunsh and the human Rűng, having been in power for 320 and 204 years respectively. While the human King Aprang Rűng remains a Ashevite faithful, the halfling De̊e̊vunsh family converted to Pandroi in the years preceding the start of their dynasty, and their heads have served as the Ecclesiarch of the Pandroi Church in Elleryca.
Culture
Ellerycan culture is varied, in large part due to the decentralised nature of the feudal state and the isolation of many communities from each other. Ellerycan culture's oldest influence is the Ashevite religion, when the halfling and human communities were respectively incorporated and conquered by the ancient Nimearan Kingdom. Brief control of parts of the region by the Kingdom of Gallaca left a Gallacan influence, and a growing Pandroi faith. Mass persecution of Pandroi in the modern Kingdom of Nimeara increased the Pandroi population. On the other side of the Kingdom, there are several Meridan communities.
Ellerycan culture holds a strong sense of community, arising from a combination of the warrior mentality of the eldest Klemuians, the initial shared Ashevite faith of them and the Koztiri, and their shared defense of the hills that dominate much of the Kingdom. Families are huge, extended groups with the oldest viewed as wise counsel. People are generally free to live as they wish to a certain extent, and arranged marriages, outside the nobility, are practically unheard of.
There is a patchwork of ethnic Koztiri humans and Klemuian halfling communities throughout the Kingdom, and a gradient from predominantly Pandroi in the south to Ashevite in the north. Most Ellerycans are vaguely aware of the outside world, many having made pilgrimage to the Sacred Tree in the neighboring Kingdom of Nimeara or traded with Jorgan, Gallacan, and Aeillan merchants.
History
Province of Ancient Empires
The Elleryc plains were first settled by humans, and indeed the earliest evidence suggests humans have always been present in western Galisea. Later, in the aftermath of the Getnian Cataclysm, the Migration of the Din People brought halflings to the region. The Din were forced further inland, into the foothills of the Odric Mountains near the edge of the Nimearan realm. They were welcomed by the Nimearan people and settled in the sparsely settled outer regions of Nimrea. 400 years later, the expanding Kingdom of Nimeara created provinces out of these lands in what is now eastern Elleryca and innner Gallaca. The people there lived as Nimearan subjects until the Nimearan Yulani War. All former subjects of the Nimearan Kingdom lived as Yulan-tai and Yuan-ti subjects for 541 years. After The Fall of the Yuan-Ti, the Nimearan-era noble families began reasserting their claims, fighting amongst themselves to hold onto lands surrounding their ancestral homesteads. Furthermore, descendants of the Din, the Klemuians, had become well armed and battle-hardened from The War of Frozen Scales and the Fall of the Yuan-ti, and their strongest warriors sought strongholds and defensible valleys for their people.Conquest of the Nimearan Foothills
By the 1430s AS, halfling lands were mostly consolidated under the Klalpsdt line, while the Elleryc plains came to be ruled by the Gog Dynasty. In 1535 AS, Queen Samira Gőg conquered the hills to her south, and pushed to the Nimearan border. In the latter part of the Aeillan Reforging Era, Elleryca also reclaimed it's southern ethnic regions from the declining Gallacan state.Verdun Proclamation on Ellerycan Nobility
The modern Ellerycan state is considered to begin with the Verdun Proclamation, which granted legal rights to the Klemmuian nobility and marked the apex of Klemmu-Kőztiri integration.
A Byzantine Country, Burdened by Complexity
The Kingdom's inefficient systems of governance and travel have been making it difficult to keep up with much of the pace of civil and technological innovation taking place to the south along the Tealastrian Sea.Demography and Population
The Kingdom of Elleryca holds a modest population, with 5,640,000 persons, and in recent years it has been growing at a steady rate in the largest towns as people seek opportunity outside of the rigid systems of land ownership in the countryside. That said, a majority of the population remains ruralised, living as serfs or free peasants in the various duchies that comprise the Ellerycan state.
The single largest city in Elleryca is Zonlőt, current seat of power for King Nyőny of the Kőztiri. It is the ancient capital of the Nimearan imperial province of Elleryca and later the Yulan-tai tributary Kingdom of Nimeara, with 19,700 residents. The largest city of Most of the population lives either in the Ellerycan plains in the west, or in the foothills of either the Volgier Mountains in the north or the Odric mountains in the south.
Ellerycans are divided into one of two groups, the human Kőztiri and the halfling Klemmuians. The largest single minority are the Nimearans, also split between humans and halflings. Smaller minorities include the Meridans, Aeillans, and Eriganese humans; as well as the Volgier and Cyrenic dwarves.
Territories
The Kingdom of Elleryca is a modestly sized country, comprising around 473,650 square kilometers in a roughly triangular shape, with corners northeast, southeast, and southwest. Due to the lack of major roads, traffic along the most heavily used routes can make travel between major cities unusually slow, and the less maintained routes slow travel down in a different way. It can take weeks to traverse Elleryca, as there are no waterways across it's entire length.
The borders of Elleryca are demarcated by the rolling hills between it and Gallaca to the south, the south-flowing Tinib River, between it and Merida to the northwest, and the edge of Nabari Plateau to the east. Local control of the northern valleys in the foothills of the slopes of the Volgier Mountains determines the boundary between Merida and Elleryca after the Tinib River ends. The Kingdom has a short land border with the portion of Nimeara between the Odric Mountains and Nabari Plateau.
Elleryca is home to relatively moist rolling seasonal plains and hills with scattered forests found in the less settled parts of the region. It becomes cooler in the north, and is overall wetter than Gallaca or Nimeara. The northeast and southeast extremes are rockier and drier, respectively, due to the southern spur of the Volgier Mountains and the shelf of the Odrics.
Military
The Kingdom has a very small standing army, with each of monarchs possessing a small retinue of highly elite warriors (the Warrior-Priests Rűng Dynasty, and the elite aerial cavalry Eagle Knights of the De̊e̊vunsh), though these number fewer than a few hundred strong each. The bulk of the strength of Elleryc armies come in the form of the personal retinues of the nobility, which are generally small, no more than 25 persons per retinue. The most experienced and trained members of these retinues make up a semi-hereditary class of professional knights. They are generally cavalry, often equipped with medium armor, commonly breastplates for those seeking modern equipment, and being both skilled horse archers and lancers in equal measure. Infantry is rarer, often drawn from the peasantry and equipped with motley collections of whatever can be given afforded by their patrons ranging from fairly substantial armor and weaponry to no actual equipment other than farming implements salvaged from their homes.
Most Ellerycan lords do not tolerate the presence of mercenary bands within their borders, with the southernmost duchies in particular distrustful of them due to sporadic attempts by Gallacan bandit-kings to seize lands once held by the Kingdom. As a result mercenaries are almost a nonfactor in Elleryc politics and those that do find themselves in their territory are often chased away by a dearth of contracts out right hostilities with the local nobility before than can properly settle down and start operating in the territory.
Remarkably, for a state without direct coastline, the Ellerycan Monarchies have a small navy of 2 war galleys purchased from the Gallacan monarchy 100 years ago, which it uses to ensure access to the Tinib River west of Lake Minogai. They have been well-maintained, in part to the Rűng Dynasty's long running interest in arcane methods of preservation.
Technological Level
Elleryca is at the edge of the reach of the Tealastrian civilisations, and as such is at the gradient between the scientific, technologically forward states like Cyrenica and the largely traditional, pre-industrial, realms like Merida and Erigan. No Ellerycan city or settlement has much of the innovations commonplace in Nimearan, Cyrenic, or even Gallaco-Aeillan settlements.
Religion
The official state religion of the Kingdom of Elleryca is the Ashevite faith, signified through King Nyőny's annual pilgrimage to the sacred tree along the Akhouryan river, in the outskirts of the Nimearan capital. Gallacan missionary work, followed by the persecution of Pandroi faithful in Nimeara, resulted in the southeastern portions of the country becoming predominantly Pandroi. To this day, there is a gradient of Ashevite to Pandroi communities in the Kingdom of either ethnicity, although preexisting demographics tend to result in more halflings following Pandroi.
Foreign Relations
The diplomatic contacts of the Dual Monarchies are extensive, complex, but largely inneffective at exerting any real power beyond it's borders. Several human nobles have married Meridan Dukes or Duchesses, as well as a few Gallacan aristocrats, while the halfling families have distant kinship with Nimearans, relations are cold ever since the expulsion of Pandroists from the Kingdom. Ellerycan trade reaches as far as Erigan and Jorgmark, however there is little by the form of any official contacts.
Beyond royal marriages and trade, the Dual Monarchies have signed treaties with the Kingdom of Gallaca, regarding use of the Rio Allende, which provides access to the Great Western Ocean; and with the Kingdom of Nimeara regarding the latter's borders. Instability in the Gallacan state has made relations between crowns difficult, however both Kőztiri and Klemmuian ties to individual regions within the Gallacan Kingdom remain strong.
Agriculture & Industry
Elleryca is a mostly agrarian economy, with most of the population living in the countryside and working in agriculture. Most Ellerycan duchies have surplus food, however some corruption or poorly managed regions do exist. Furthermore, due to the poor infrastructure of the Kingdom, it makes the redistribution of surplus from one region to another difficult. Its most notable agricultural material is honey, and Ellerycans, Klemmuians in particular, have a reputation as expert beekeepers.
A burgeoning hospitality industry is present along heavily travelled routes to sustain the thousands of travelers that use the roads across the Ellerycan realms. As such, Elleryca has an above-average concentration and frequency of inns and taverns along much of it's routes, practically at every moderately travelled crossroads.
Skilled craftspeople and merchants do come from Elleryca, however they are concentrated along the rivers and highly trafficked routes between major settlements or prestigious nobles. Educated professionals make up a tiny portion of the population, often working in the service of an interested noble or producing manufactured goods out of a personal workshop. Lastly is the extensive dual systems of nobility, who employ numerous scholars and in the case of the Klemmuians, Pandroi Clerics.
Trade & Transport
Trade is not particularly developed, however Ellerycan honey is sought after elsewhere in Galisea, making the Kingdom a destination for foreign trader and an export for Ellerycan traders. Aside from honey and the agricultural surplus, local artisan goods are also available in most Ellerycan markets. Slavery is illegal, with even Pandroi communities still holding onto the Ashevite cultural abhorrence of forced servitude.
Most trade takes place across the mess of roads crisscrossing the Kingdom, although maritime trade does occur in Misegrád, which sits north of Lake Minogai on the Tinib River. With no major road infrastructure of note, there is no clear network of roads linking together the country, making what is available between market to market vary wildly. Land trading routes are safer than those in Gallaca, making it a more attractive route for merchants seeking Volgier or Jörgan markets.
Infrastructure
In southern portions of the country that fell under brief Gallacan rule, some small military fortifications and road infrastructure was built, including several stone bridges crossing deep valleys and wide rivers. In most of the rest of the country, there are paved and decently maintained roads, however they are not very efficient for transiting between different nor is there a notable hierarchy of routes for the most part, leaving the most popular routes crowded and at capacity.
Founding Date
1535 AS
Type
Geopolitical, Kingdom
Capital
Alternative Names
The Dual Monarchy
Demonym
Ellerycan
Government System
Monarchy, Constitutional
Power Structure
Feudal state
Economic System
Traditional
Currency
Ellerycan frétt/freet
Official State Religion
Location
Controlled Territories
Neighboring Nations
Related Ethnicities