Santes
A radiant and beautiful city, it has both been one of the jewels of Aquitania and later Saliens. Santes, renamed Santois under Saliens' rule, has a very multifaceted identity, being both on the border between old Aquitania and Saliens as well as an important trading port city, with trade from the mountain areas coming both down the river and from the sea. Especially trade from the colonies made the city very prosperous in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It established academies, in both arts and sciences, in the eighteenth century and the Aquitanian government even considered relocating there, though this idea was abandoned since it encountered so much resistance from the eastern provinces which considered themselves to have a better claim on the identity of Aquitania as a whole (mostly on the grounds of Occitan being named after their region and the troubadours originating from the eastern provinces).
The border position and trade with the colonies also meant that Santes gained several communities of Salient, "Spanish" and coloured people. These communities of coloured people consisted of slaves (Aquitania still permitted slavery of non-European people on its own soil for a long time), those nominally free but indentured servants, and free people who mainly plied trades within their own communities. Many of them were mixed race and came from various Aquitanian or Salient colonies, alongside some small communities of people from the Levant (both of the Mahrim and Sundac religions). As slavery was at least not technically permitted in Saliens, many slaves chanced to escape to their northern neighbours although increasingly restrictive laws there in the late eighteenth century, before the abolition movements really started to gain ground, eventually stymied some of this migration.
In stark contrast to its treatment of all who they considered foreigners, Santes was known as a good place to be for the poor, the street performers and those in generally unstable professions if you and your ancestors were Aquitanian. Generally speaking a wealthy place, Santes had a long tradition of charitable institutions, mostly religious orders, which even established houses in working class parishes for working-class congregations. This was later joined by an ideology of ennobling its citizens through art and science, with a (limited) belief in independence and egalitarianism being part of the Aquitanian cultural identity.
After the conquest of Aquitania, in which Santes remained originally fairly unscathed, there were several extremely bloody revolts against the new empire. This led to many fires in the warehouses, a blockade of the harbour and severe damage to several buildings of great cultural and historical significance to the Aquitanians in Santes. Several statues of national heroes were pulled down and melted, later replaced by Salient figures. These new statues suffered a great deal of vandalism for the first 50 years or so of their existence.
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