Sharlayan State
Sharlayan is a city-state located on an island in the Northern Empty, they pride themselves on being an education and knowledge based nation. Sharlayan lays host to alot of organsations and guilds such as the Circle of Knowing, Sons of Saint Coinach and the Students of Baldesion as well as many more. Their main patron is considered to be 'Thaliak, the Scholar' of the Twelve.
History
Sharlayan was founded in the wake of the Great Flood that characterized the Sixth Umbral Calamity. In the time prior to the calamity, a Roegadyn scholar from the distant island of Aerslant, known as Nyunkrepf Nyunkrepfsyn, predicted that the flood would hit the realm of Eorzea as a consequence of the War of the Magi currently being waged there. Creating a giant magical Ark that would be known as Nyunkrepf's Hope, he sailed down to Eorzea and tried to convince as many as he could about the coming disaster. When the Flood finally hit, Nyunkrepf saved as many as possible aboard his Ark.
The ship came under threat of being overturned by the churning tides, and Nyunkrepf invoked a spell that transported the Ark high atop the peaks in Gyr Abania, where they remained stranded for a while. As the flood waters began to recede, the passengers of the Ark looked to Nyunkrepf for leadership, especially when they needed to contend with other survivors in the region, the ancestors of the Ala Mhiganns. Nyunkrepf forswore conflict with their opponents and instead guided his people across Abalathia's Spine to the Orn Wild in the Dravanian Hinterlands, from where they constructed a new ship and set sail north to the currently uninhabited islands of the Old World. It is here that the original Sharlayan was founded, taking Thaliak the Scholar as their patron deity in honor of their Eorzean roots.
In 1311, many years after the founding of Sharlayan, an expedition of scholars returned across the seas of the Northern Empty to the Dravanian Hinterlands where they built an outpost to study the aetherial sea. This became a stop for all academics who ventured to Eorzea to conduct their research, and a hostelry was constructed for long-term tenure upon foreign shores. This small collection of buildings grew more numerous, and in time became a handsome settlement. Rumor of this community of learned men spread, and students began to converge upon the place from every corner of Eorzea. In 1361, upon the fiftieth anniversary of the research outpost, The Forum formally proclaimed it a colony and the Sharlayan settlement joined the six city-states of Eorzea.
The Hinterlands colony attracted students from all across Eorzea, and grew into a beacon of knowledge and wisdom. This was not to last as tidings that Garlemald had captured Ala Mhigo reached the city. To the Sharlayans, the Empire was a threat to their very way of life. They had spent an age stubbornly resisting all war, and the Imperial invasion of Ilsabard and Othard was a bane to the values they had held dearly since Nyunkrepf's time. Sharlayan sent ambassador after ambassador to Garlemald with entreaties to stop their advance. They even strove mightily to parlay a peace, but all these pleas fell on deaf ears, and the envoys returned home empty-handed.
In the wake of the failed negotiations, Fourchenault Leveilleur and the faction he led within the Forum elected to forsake their colony in Eorzea, abandoning the realm to struggle alone against the Garlean Empire. Following five years of elaborate and painstaking preparation, the plan to evacuate the settlement's entire population to the northern archipelago of their homeland was put into motion. The city of Sharlayan became a maze of empty streets and buildings in the space of a single evening. Despite the Forum's decrees of remaining neutral, Louisoix Leveilleur defied Sharlayan's policies of nonintervention when he learned the possibility of another Calamity and founded the Circle of Knowing to prevent it.
Knowledge Seeks No Man
Type
Geopolitical, City-state
Alternative Names
Old Sharlayan
Demonym
Sharlayan
Founders
Location
Related Ethnicities
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