Kingdom of Suilley
Some 300 years ago, the Kingdom of Suilley declared itself an independent kingdom and seceded from the Kingdoms of Foere. Since this time, other large regions of the Borderland Provinces have declared themselves vassals of the Suilleyn king, which has increased the kingdom’s power by an order of magnitude but strained its resources to the utmost. It remains a real possibility that Suilley could collapse under this pressure, in which case vast areas of the Borderland Provinces would be thrown into chaos.
The northern border of Suilley is the King’s Road until it comes within 150 miles of the city of Troye; these 150 miles are within the Duchy of the Rampart. The western border with the County of Vourdon is roughly 100 miles east of Olaric, and although parts of it are disputed, it is considered to run due north and south along this line. The southern border runs northwest from the very southernmost extent of the Lorremach Highhills, with the Flatlander Road approximately 50 miles inside the border, then turning southwest 200 miles south of Manas to join a triple border-point with Keston and Vourdon 150 or so miles south of the city of Olaric.
History and People
In the year 3222 I.R., Ghienvais Pas, the lord-governor of Suilley, had himself crowned as His Independent Majesty Ghienvais I, King of Suilley, Marquis of the Lorremach Highhills, and Warden of The Plains of Suilley. This event is still often called the “Theft of the Kingdom” in Foere, and Suilley the “Stolen Kingdom,” although three centuries have turned the Suilleyn secession into an accomplished fact of history, legitimated by the passage of time. The rebellion’s background can be explained in relatively simple terms, although the details are by definition more complex as it occurred within the larger tapestry of rebellion and secession that afflicted the Kingdoms of Foere during the Wars of Succession.
Essentially, the majority of the Suilleyn nobles came to see themselves as a separate branch of the Foerdewaith but entitled to equal status with the nobility of the heartland kingdoms in terms of taxes and privileges. It is likely that many of them did not anticipate war at all, merely a long and ultimately successful wrangling of diplomats in the Court at Courghais. Thus, the noble class of Suilley united around the lord-governor, marshalled their legal arguments, sent a letter to the royal court explaining their grievances, and crowned a monarch who offered fealty to the overking.
Despite the peacefulness of the intentions, a small civil war immediately broke out among barons in eastern Suilley, with loyalists and monarchists engaging each other in The Plains near the Gundlock Hills, no doubt influenced by the struggles for independence occurring in Burgundia to the east.
Hopes of a peaceful secession were dashed, however, when the overking, watching his empire slip through his fingers as first Ramthion Island, then Pontos Island, and then Burgundia entered into rebellion, declared the king of Suilley to be a usurper and traitor to the crown, and his nobles to be stripped of their lands in favor of new, more faithful, vassals. By doing so, the Court at Courghais transformed a peaceful and ultimately still loyalist modification of feudal rights into a battlefield war, with the Suilleyn nobles suddenly fighting for their lives rather than merely for lower taxes and greater social status.
With its back to the wall, Suilley stripped its fields of able-bodied peasants to form battalions of levied troops, mustered every knight who could straddle a horse and hold a lance, and prepared for an all-out war to the death. Blacksmiths’ hammers rang through the night, couriers rode lathered horses from one manorial estate to the next, and even many of the originally loyalist barons came to realize that they would be executed alongside the rebels if Foere returned in victory to its former province. Surrender was no longer an option, and a soft resolve hardened into iron.
King Ghienvais realized the futility of trying to fight ardently loyalist barons in the east at the same time as a Foerdewaith army to the northwest, and attempted to entice the loyalist nobles in the Gundlock Hills region and the surrounding plains with peace offerings of lucrative trade and influence, but to no avail. Many monarchist nobles of those areas soon fled to the Suilleyn heartlands as the jubilant loyalists held trials and burned accused traitors at the stake, which caused civil war to erupt in eastern Suilley even as the western portion of the nascent kingdom prepared for an invasion by Foere.
The muddy season greatly slowed the assembly of the forces of Suilley, for the barons and supply wagons for the inevitable siege of Manas had to fight their way down mud-soaked cart trails and sodden country lanes. But the new king also anticipated that the mustering of additional forces in the Duchy of the Rampart would take time, even though the higher lands of the Rampart did not face the obstacle of mired supply lines, since so many Foerdewaith troops had already been deployed to Matagost to put down the Burgundian rebellion and defend against Oceander invasion in the east. The new kingdom did what it could to protect the capital city in the meantime. Suilleyn troops occupied the nearby gatehouses along the Rampart without opposition from the garrisons, whose commanders elected to withdraw rather than die in a hopeless last stand, and the great road between the capital cities of Manas and Troye was turned into a fortification.
Authorized for battle by the overking, the aggressive general in charge of the army of the Rampart, Lord-General Baron Cavodeill, moved into action immediately, not waiting for the arrival of the battle-duke from his deployment in Matagost, and not waiting for a full mustering of the barons. While the Suilleyn nobles were still organizing themselves in their rural manors and distant castles, or on the mud-wallowed roads to Manas, the Foerdewaith army marched down the Rampart against a kingdom that had barely started its preparations.
With siege engines in its train and heavy infantry able to fight on the causeway far better than levied peasants or mounted knights, the Foerdewaith army crushed opposition at gatehouse after gatehouse along the Rampart, drawing nearer to the city of Manas day by day. Had the lord-general of the Rampartine forces continued on this relentless march, the city of Manas might possibly have been taken at the outset of the war, although such an outcome would have been unlikely against a fortified city waiting for significant reinforcements to arrive from the countryside. In any case, the assault took a radically different turn when Rampartine scouts stumbled upon the main force of the small Suilleyn army circling around behind the Foerdewaith advance along the causeway. Correctly judging that the objective of the Suilleyn general was to retake the Rampart behind him, effectively cutting off his forces from reinforcement on the fortified road and allowing a hammer-and-anvil assault from behind when he reached the walls of Manas, the duchy’s general moved his cavalry and main forces off the Rampart to prevent encirclement.
The Rampartine army caught and engaged the smaller Suilleyn force not more than a mile from the fortified causeway. In the open pastureland, the Foerdewaith knights and soldiery rapidly broke the smaller, hastily assembled array of Suilley’s local knights and levies and forced them back in disorder to a copse of trees near the pastures of Bullocks Bale. Unfamiliar with the muddy season in Suilley, the lord-general of the Rampartine army immediately followed up his victory and pursued the retreating Suilleyn into the muddy fields below the higher ground around the causeway. Suddenly bogged down in mud and threatened with holes dug by the Suilleyn troops to break the legs of horses, the knights and cavalry of the Rampartine army died in droves from the missiles of archers and slingers sheltering in the copse of trees. The knights of Suilley circled entirely around the battle in the pasture to shatter the still-disorganized advance of the Foerdewaith infantry behind their mired cavalry, keeping to the higher ground near the causeway where their own charge could be delivered over dry, even ground. The army of the Rampart was utterly destroyed, and Suilley’s “theft” into an independent monarchy free of the overking’s authority became an accomplished fact, though it ultimately withdrew from the civil war in its own eastern region and foreswore claim to any of the lands near the Gundlock Hills.
As the power of Foere continued to decline in the provinces and the newly minted District of Sunderland beyond, the emerging Kingdom of Suilley found its power increasing by default. Although Suilley was forced to fight several more battles with the Foerdewaith after the first one, the cost of these conflicts was partially subsidized by other opponents of Foere, namely Endhome, Oceanus, and Burgundia. Captured territories between Manas and the duchy were granted to many of the monarchist nobility of eastern Suilley who had been forced to flee the loyalists, and this area continues to harbor considerable ill will toward the Kingdom of Foere, remembering burning villages and executions by loyalist bands of marauders. This ill will is not directed at the Duchy of the Rampart, for the anti-monarchists were Suilleyn themselves, but the monarchists are quite hostile to any Foerdewaith from across the March of Mountains.
Two major provinces of Foere, the County of Toullen and Province of Keston, ultimately renounced their fealty to the overking of Foere in the year 3336 I.R. and pledged themselves to the king of Suilley as vassal states.
An example of Suilley’s emerging power and authority is its participation in establishing a trading post at Grollek’s Grove in 3423 I.R. in concert with the city of Endhome, the formerly hostile Duchy of the Rampart, and what representatives could be found to stand for the District of Sunderland (many of whom were former loyalists who battled against Suilley’s secession).
The largest problem facing Suilley at this time is actually the result of its own past successes in war and diplomacy. It has inherited the realms of Kes¬ton and Toullen with all their problems, which means the king of Suilley now possesses, largely by default, a wide-ranging and disorganized feudal empire. The Suilleyn monarchy is being entreated from all sides to shoulder the bur¬den of solving vast regional problems caused by the retreat of Foere. With a relatively independent nobility, the king of Suilley would have enough work just organizing his own domain. He is instead being forced into a constant juggling act trying to balance wilderness and depopulation in Keston; problems in the Lorremach Highhills; tax-rebels and petty wars among the barons of his own country; occasional tension with Foere over the King’s Road or the Rampart border; and the task of turning his patchwork confederacy of feudal states into a functioning whole with unified laws and common defense. The core of Suilley, a hundred or so miles around Manas, is a very stable domain, but one cannot rule a vast empire from such a small base, and this is what the King of Suilley faces. The resources simply do not exist to protect, subdue, re¬build, and organize all the things in Suilley’s far-flung domains that need to be protected, subdued, rebuilt, and organized. Very few people realize how ten¬uous King Ulrich’s situation actually has become. The treasury is emptied as soon as it is filled, his personal wealth is tied up in maintaining the army, and his soldiery is stretched thin as a wire. Suilley is a growing empire that could falter and fail simply from a run of bad luck or any significant catastrophe.
Trade and Commerce
A great deal of caravan traffic passes through Suilley on the north-south Trader’s Way from Exeter Province, the east-west route along the South County Road from Olaric toward Endhome, or on the Rampart Road to and from Foere itself. The Trader’s Way route passes through wild and dangerous places, and the Flatlander Road diverts its traffic from a 300-mile stretch of the Lorremach Highhills, but the South County Road and the Manas-to-Troye Rampart Road are both well patrolled and served by towns and fortified inns along the way.
Although Suilley endures a season of rain and mud each year, farms are productive and pillaging is infrequent, especially in the regions up to 25 miles from one of the roads (with the exception of the Trader’s Way). The uninhabited parts of the country’s rural interior — and some wild regions such as the Lorremach Highhills — cannot be described as safe, but they are not unduly dangerous for those who travel in large, well-armed groups.
Suilley has recently been making great efforts to entice northbound merchant caravans coming from Exeter Province to take the Flatlander Road through Manas rather than the Trader’s Way. Given the dangers of the Trader’s Way, even the small incentives offered are enough to per¬suade many merchants to take the Manas route. The result has been to make the Trader’s Way between Grollek’s Grove and Pfefferain even more sparsely traveled and more dangerous, but Suilley’s main concern is the kingdom’s coffers, not the safety of a road far at the realm’s eastern border nor the lawless lands of the Sundered Kingdoms beyond that might suffer from this reduction in trade.
Loyalties and Diplomacy
Because the overking has never officially recognized the independent status of Suilley and the Court at Courghais continues to address the king of Suilley as “our subject,” relations between Suilley and the Kingdom of Foere are uneasy, but both realms are aware that the Kingdom of Foere no longer has the wherewithal to successfully invade Suilley. Relations between the Kingdom of Suilley and the duke of the Rampart are actu¬ally quite friendly, for the trade route between Manas and Troye is an important source of wealth for the duchy and the kingdom. Whatever the overking and his court might think of Suilley, the Duchy of the Rampart would be exceedingly unhappy to find its trade relationship with Suilley impeded by war.
Many of the barons of northern Suilley have their eye on the periph¬ery of the Gaelon River Valley, and a few freehold lords on the northern side of the King’s Road have pledged fealty to the king of Suilley. But at this point, the incursion into the Gaelon River region remains small and scattered. The Kingdom of Suilley is aware that while the Duchy of the Rampart cares little about the Gaelon River Valley, it (along with Foere, beyond the March of Mountains) cares a great deal about who controls the King’s Road. The one event that could lead to renewed hos¬tility between the two realms would be if the Suilleyn border began to creep too far beyond the King’s Road itself, putting the road firmly into Suilley’s control.
Suilley’s good relations with the County of Vourdon on its western border are a high priority for the monarchy. If there is ever another war with the Kingdoms of Foere, Vourdon would threaten Suilley’s flank in a conflict with the Duchy of the Rampart, and although Suilley’s army is strong, it is not strong enough to fight two separate conflicts on different fronts (as evidenced by its failure to curb the civil war in its own eastern territories at the time of its own inception). Keston Province is a vassal of the Suilleyn king, but is too weak to tie down the forces of Vourdon in case of a war. To this end, Suilley maintains an ambassador in the city of Olaric, whose task is to ensure that potential conflicts between the realms are quickly resolved.
Government
Suilley is a monarchy ruled by a hereditary king or queen who derive descent from Ghienvais I, the first king to bear the crown in rebellion against Foere. The realm has eight ducal houses, which makes the king relatively strong compared with many of his peer monarchs, since it is rare for the dukes to agree long enough with each other to unite against the king in any way.
Only one queen has ruled Suilley in its history, for the succession traditionally goes to the oldest male offspring, and to the oldest female only if there is no male heir. The reign of Queen Dacinthe I was initially plagued by her uncle, Prince Huelbert, who claimed that no female could inherit the throne at all, which would make him the rightful king. Eventually, one of Dacin¬the’s loyal dukes captured Huelbert in battle and sent his head to the queen in a large glass bottle. Dacinthe ordered the bottled head displayed as the centerpiece at her next royal banquet to the distress of many of the guests, especially those suspected of complicity with the would-be usurper. All ambiguities in the law were thus completely clarified.
The heraldry of the house of King Ulrich, and thus the device of Suilley, is a golden crown over two red lions rampant, back to back, on a green field.
Wilderness and Adventure
As with most of the Borderland Provinces, Suilley is far more settled, law-abiding, and prosperous in the regions surrounding its patrolled roads than in the rural areas beyond. Much of the interior resembles a thick scattering of villages and castles merging into an equally thick scattering of wilderness. Thus, there are always opportunities to find adventure, even in the country’s heartlands. The Lorremach Highhills and the Wilderland Hills are large wilderness regions with virtually no protection whatsoever and can be very dangerous to those without armed escorts.
Region
Kingdom of Suilley
Subsidiary Organizations
Controlled Territories
Comments