Iron Baronies
The Iron Baronies is the name given to a commercial and defensive confederation of powerful guilds, merchant towns, and banking consortiums in the Hyperborean Lakelands and Hyperborean Northeast. It has no central government or capital, but consists of ten member states guided by a Board of Directors who meet in Taine four times a year to discuss business and plan the coming quarter.
The Baronies arose from the many assorted loose associations of traders and crafter towns formed to advance and protect mutual commercial interests from the rampant piracy and banditry of the time. Gradually, camps along trade routes became new commercial hubs, whose traders gained duty-free treatment, protection from danger, and enhanced diplomatic privileges in affiliated communities or along allied routes. As these settlements grew into cities, skilled tradesfolk formed professional associations to protect the rights of the worker. Industrial workers and craftspeople soon followed suit. These predecessors of the modern guilds gradually developed a common system of standards and best practices concerning their merchants and goods. This Code concerns everything from personal conduct to building and sanitary standards to rules for guilds operating their own armies for mutual defense and aid.
Structure
Assets
History
The colonization of the Lakelands did not go gently or easily. Throne charters granting ownership to land in the area found resistance from the Free Clans already resident in the area, who claimed the land as their own. A culture of raiders and reclaimers who had weathered the apocalyptic years of the crusade outside the safety of the mountain vaults, the Free Clans had no love of the Thrones who had left them to die, and bedeviled their settlement efforts to such a degree that by the end of the first decade of the Expansion period, mercenary companies found more work defending settlements than fighting wars.
No history of the Iron Baronies is complete without mention of the guilds which call them home. As the Code evolved, it became a clear set of rules, rights and responsibilities which reduced barriers to trade and resulted in mutual prosperity but also fostered economic interdependence and greater political integration. While intial drafts of the Code concerned mainly mercantile pursuits, they ignored the rights of the workers and craftspeople who produced the goods the merchants sold. In response, local guilds arose in the nascent Baronies to represent the concerns of workers and to regulate the industries, crafts, and professions they worked in. Addressing things like safer conditions, a standardized minimum living wage, a minimum working age, reasonable hours, benefits for the infirm, and pensions for the aged,(1) these guilds used lockouts and strikes to great effect. The merchant princes were forced to heed the workers, and the Code adapted to include these concerns.
By the end of the 8th century IR, these factors had solidified the guilds into a cohesive political organization which controlled the Lakelands entire, despite Throne claims to the contrary. In the 9th century IR, the Guild Barons stopped paying taxes to the Three Kingdoms, and declared their holdings sovereign Guild territory, unbeholden to any king.
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