The Kingdom of Norenia
"Kingfisher ha! Kingfisher ho! The flock walks the whole world to and fro!"
--Royal Army Marching Chant, translated
Structure
Queen: Head of State, Commander in Chief, and Primary Legislator
Crown Prince (husband of the Queen): Queen's advisor, Chief Diplomat, and Master of Coin
The Twelve Ministers: The lords of the twelve provinces of Norenia. They serve as advisors to the Queen and retain the power to propose and ratify laws.
Regional Lords
The Barony
Public Agenda
Currently, Her Royal Majesty the Queen has been seeking to solidify her claims to the Raised Lands and the nebulous borders they created by appearing. This has resulted in a war against The Free States, which many think was the actual intention all along; find a valid causus bellum for a more protracted war of expansion.
The Queen is also using this conflict as an excuse to modernize her army, running the world's first dedicated cannon squads and gunpowder regiments.
For many generations, the Noradi have been looking to reunify with the small independent principality of Eastcliff. The Queen has all but promised that her reign will include the reabsorption of the area.
Assets
The Noradi army is among the finest and largest of the world, boasting nearly 800,000 professional soldiers and engineers.
The Norenian government is not particularly wealthy, but the nationalism of the country's citizens allows for a tight and efficiently run system. As a result, it boasts the most well-connected and well-maintained road system in the world, and solid infrastructure.
Norenia is famed for its castle towns.These include Wolu's Palace (home of the Queen and central government), Mosswall, and Daiyu Fortress.
Chir, the large island off the north coast, boasts the finest marble in the world. Its quarries have produced marble used in historic statuary and architecture for thousands of years.
Long ago silver mines produced a majority of the world's coins, but for the past several hundred years silver ore has become an increasingly rare find in the Noradi countryside. These days, the smelters and foundries spend more of their time dealing in lead, nickel, and thorium.
History
The region we today call Norenia was once populated by nearly thirty smaller city-states as well as three elven clan-controlled territories and a dwarfhold called Karlokovlya in an area that cartographers referred to as Shamaljabal, or "North of the Mountains."The human city-states shared similar linguistics and cultural tradition, being descended from nomadic tribes who lived in the Proqheart Mountains. They spread across the land to establish villages and farms that grew into separate territories. Over time, these consolidated into three states; the Badadeul Kingdom, the Republic of Minju, and a loose confederation of states referred to by locals as Sujib. This land was prosperous and peaceful for centuries until the Mage War, which effectively sank the entirety of Minju into the sea and lead to the collapse of Badadeul and Sujib into independent city-states. Many of these were further fractured or dispersed by the famines and monster attacks that followed the Mage War.
Over time, the region began to recover and reform in much the same way it did during its initial settlement by humans, and by the 330s was organized into twenty six provinces and principalities of varying size. These smaller geopolitical units and former countrymen had complex relationships with each other, constantly shifting between alliances and enemies, trade partners and rivals. Of these states, the four most powerful to emerge were Estclef (now Eastcliff) south of the Proqhearts, Daiyu in the central river basin, Jedo along the eastern coast, and Da-Gyu (now Woluna) at the edge of the elven forests to the northeast.
During the two years of the War of Suthers, the Shamaljabal area largely ignored the path of destruction caused by Warchief Delil and his marauding cavalry from Suuthi, still consumed by their local politics. Surviving documentation from the time demonstrates that more than one principality underestimated the threat thanks to the isolation provided by the surrounding topography; in reply to a warning from Joanes in Reach, Prince Deng Shoping famously wrote back "...there is no world beyond the [Aistididar] Mountains, and I do not fear something from nothing." In a twist of poetic justice, Shoping's province was the third to fall to the Suutherlanders when they finally did make it north in late 597, completely overwhelming the internally focused proto-Norenians. Delil made more or less unimpeded progress for nearly a year before Queen Wolu did something unprecedented: she invited all the other leaders in Shaljabal to her keep to discuss uniting their defense. One of the elven clans and the dwarves of Karlokovlya refused to send ambassadors.
Wolu's scholars note that the first three days of this 'convocation of clans' were made up of careful posturing and introductions to build trust. On the fourth day, Wolu gathered the chieftans and princes to unveil her plan--an agreement that would bind the whole region into a single entity with the kind of authority needed to command and organize a grand composite army. In a deft political move, however, she did not place herself at the top of the hierarchy. Instead she proposed that Crown Prince Cao Shimin, heir to Daiyu, be granted control of the combined forces. Her own principality of Da-Gyu would retain some powers to check this authority, as would Estclef. Crown Prince Shimin accepted immediately without revision, and four hours later Estclef followed suit, bringing along eighteen smaller allied territories. The ambassadors from Jedo withdrew from the meeting with three vassals. In 599, facing the decimation of their forces in the face of the Suuthi army, Jedo would seek aid from Shimin's united army and receive only this message in reply: "it was within your right to respectfully withdraw when you were called upon. It is your destiny to live or die by that decision." By Qotar of that year, Jedo was basically obliterated, with refugees fleeing west towards the Gulf of Teeth.
Wolu managed to keep the elven clans she had solicited involved, using them as scouts and guerilla units and coordinating the intelligence Shimin needed in order to win two decisive battles in 600 that turned the Suutherlands back south. Writing his father, Crown Prince Shimin praised Wolu as "the best soldier to never grace a battlefield." By the end of that year, Shimin and Wolu were married when she came to visit the camp. In 601, Warchief Delil was killed during the Battle of Trade Way, bringing the war to an end as the Suuthi warbands fractured and dispersed without leadership. Citing the end of the war as the end of the alliance, Estclef and several smaller principalities tried to reclaim their troops and independence--but Crown Prince Shimin and his new wife had other ideas. They combined their holdings into the Kingdom of Norenia (meaning 'Unified Land') in Proqar 602, and Crown Prince Shimin proclaimed that there was no ending to the agreement created by Wolu. In effect, any participating territory that tried to retain its independence as the war came to a close was simply a place of mutineers in open revolt. This did not sit well even with the allies of the new Kingdom, who resented Shimin and feared fighting off one warlord only to create another. In a baffling political move, Queen Wolu offered a compromise: accept her as Queen and there would be no king. She would gain authority over the Crown Prince, and Norenia would become a matrilineal culture. When Wolu rewarded the first two chieftans to accept local authority and parliamentary powers, others quickly followed suit. Da-Gyu was renamed Woluna in honor of the Queen and became the capitol of Norenia in 604.
Estclef was finally brought to heel and incorporated into the Kingdom under Wolu and Shimin's granddaughter, Queen Aesook. Seeking to solidify control of the region as a whole, Aesook attempted to negotiate the elven clans in the northeast into vassalhood. Unfortunately, Aesook lacked some of the political savvy of her grandmother, and the discussions quickly turned sour. The conflict escalated to skirmishing, but after heavy losses the Queen was forced into an armistice. For the next hundred years, wracked by economic crises and two wars of succession in the early 700s, the power of Norenia began a steady decline. During this time, Eastcliff revolted, claiming its independence and grinding the Royal Army down for ten years before their sovereignty was recognized. The Kingdom continued to cede territory in the south and along the Teeth, shrinking back down to approximately what it was during the War of Suthers.
In a twist of fate, Norenia was likely saved from total collapse by the Dragons' War, which fractured the Terivan Empire and greatly weakened the kingdoms in the center of the continent. Everyone else's loss because Noradi gain, as they soon found themselves one of the strongest remaining nations in the world. Ravaged countrysides began relying on Noradi produce to feed themselves, stimulating and resuscitating the Norenian economy.
At present day, Norenian nostalgia and expansionism has been reawakened by the arrival of Ead Ardun and the Raised Lands, and current reigning Queen Bohun II has vowed to push Norenia towards the destiny it was denied in its middle years of history.
The Flock Takes Wing
Founding Date
602
Type
Geopolitical, Kingdom
Demonym
Noradi, Norenians
Leader
Government System
Monarchy, Constitutional
Power Structure
Feudal state
Economic System
Mixed economy
Currency
Standard weighted gold coin.
Official Languages
Neighboring Nations
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