The Slave Revolt at Furmelle

The country of Chrenada has tightened their laws and policies regarding slavery in an effort to quell unrest, but in some cases the harsher policies seemed to spur additional resistance. Slave revolts are not as common a threat to public safety as Ryuven attack, but they do happen, and one notable recent example was the city of Furmelle.
This conflict is classified here as a skirmish because it was never an equal battle. That is not to say that it was not a horrific encounter; Furmelle represents one of the larger and more devastating slave revolts in recent history. Citizens hid in their homes as roving bands of slaves tore apart freemen in the street.
No one is absolutely certain where fighting first broke out. Some say it was at a slavers' yard where a small lot had been turned over for corrections, while another report says it began at a kitchen where a drudge turned on an overseer with the knife he was using for jointing a rabbit.
Regardless of how it began, the insurgence spread quickly, leading some to believe the revolt was at least partially organized, perhaps an action in planning and prematurely launched by the outbreak. Within hours, the city guard had given up trying to isolate the multiplying hot spots of fighting and warned citizens to stay in their homes. By the next day, the streets belonged entirely to the slaves. Furmelle, while a city in Chrenada, shows a predominance of Wakari architecture, so that most of the proper homes (not belonging to the impoverished) were built with outer walls and inner courtyards, providing protection against the wandering mobs. While early fighting had been waged with fists, feet, teeth, chains, and perhaps the implements of their labor, the rebels soon armed themselves from the buildings they took. The city guard's primary armory was never breached, but slaves found weapons in the houses they broke into, murdering and ransacking, or took rakes, kitchen and butchering tools, grain bale hooks, and other such objects.
Regardless of the quality of their weapons, the slaves were neither trained to use them nor were well-organized, and the military was quickly dispatched to quell the revolt. Reports from their first views of a city which had spent six days under the rule of mobs killing all they found greatly disturbed the rest of the country, effectively countering what anti-slavery arguments had been circulating.
The Furmelle collar was introduced when the military was sent in to regain control of the city, as never before had so many dangerous slaves needed to be handled so many at a time. This was in addition to the standard slave cuffs required by Chrenadan law, wrist bands with integral loops to accommodate rope or chain.
While it is certain not all slaves in Furmelle participated in the revolt, and while many claimed they had joined the mob only to save their own lives, few citizens in Furmelle wished to keep the slaves who had turned against them and with the exception of a minority of trusted family servants, most were sold. The sudden glut on the labor market depressed prices for over a year.

Conflict Type

Skirmish