Vadim Dekkin
Founder of Portin
Nearly a half century before Gartcha seceded from the Zennonaize Confederacy, former Cavalry sergeant Vadim Dekkin set the precedent by doing the same with his small estate on the shores of the Darsiac Ocean. True, the Confederacy had never really pressed that far west into the Malpighien Steppes. Even Gartcha wasn't founded until 235 AC. And really, that was just to get Kelkantin as far from Zennon as possible.
Still, Vadim a was citizen of the confederacy, using his savings from a lifetime of service and even earning a small pension when he decided that he no longer needed the Confederacy. It was just too far away from the ranch he had built. And between the cattle he grazed along the southern shores of the great bay that would later bear his name and the furred seals he hunted on a rocky peninsula that would get the same honor, he made a good living. Wandering monsters were infrequent in the region and there really weren't any services that the Confederacy supplied. So, on one of his annual pilgrimages to Romajin, where we sold his cattle and fur each fall, collected his annual pension, and paid his taxes to the Dono, he left a note with a local bureaucrat stating that his estate was clearly beyond the boundaries of the Confederacy.
Dekkim thought little of the action and apparently neither did the bureaucrat. Doing the math, he decided that as Dekkim had left the Confederacy, there was no need to pay him his penison. The pension, being larger than the annual taxes, could be used to make that payment, allowing the bureaucratto pocket the rest. The Dono himself was never the wiser. In fact, Zennon did not learn of the situation until nearly a quarter of a century later when, hearing upon Dekkim's death, they stopped paying his pension and noticed the missing tax revenue. By this time, however, two score of other settlers had moved to the vicinity of Dekkim's ranch. They had all worked out the same arrangement with local tax collector who, his pockets swelling with pension payments was more than willing to share the revenue if the capital looked the other way. And so, without really trying, Dekkim became the founding father of the free town of Portin, as everyone was calling his ranch.