Carlia

CAPITAL: Cayem
POPULATION: 4, 052, 463
DEMONYM: Carlian
MAIN EXPORT: Barley

821 was the year when everything fell apart. The hegemony of Andover, thought to be unshakable after more than two centuries of peace, was shattered by a revolutionary uprising that began in the Carlian city of Tamesis in February. Led by members of the city's disaffected middle class who felt alienated by the Andover monarchy's cultural policies and cumbersome administration, it soon rallied people of all stripes who, in a time of poor harvests and a heavy tax burden, finally found an opportunity to make their frustrations seen and heard. The revolution quickly spread through towns and villages all around, and by the time the authorities in Andover had mobilised the 4th King's Rifles Brigade to quash what they termed the Isian Uprising, the people of Tamesis had already drafted a document annulling the Union of the Crowns that had maintained the dual kingdom from its inception. The 4th King's Rifles, commanded by Isambard Fawkes, fired on a company of civilian reservists that Andover military intelligence alleged were marching out from an army supply depot with ammunition. Regardless of the truth, what the Carlian populace saw was a bloody execution of unarmed people, with at least seven hundred Carlians dead by day's end. This event, known in Carlia as the Bitter April massacre, took place on April 3rd, 821.

Carlia, with its vast expanse of agricultural land, is not as industrial and defensible as its neighbour but has over the past decades managed to centralise, cultivating brilliant scholars and engineers and so advancing in many areas of science and technology. Through cleverly-fought battles and cleverly-negotiated diplomacy, the Carlian state has also incorporated many smaller splinter territories into its own, either as tributaries or direct crown lands, giving the whole of Carlia a far greater population than Andover. However, most of their military is made up of rural conscripts, and though this gives them great numbers, they have little in the way of refined military doctrine and possess only a small nucleus of academy-trained officers. Andover, though its military be but little in comparison, wields disproportionately great power on the battlefield due to its experienced military aristocracy. It was in response to the sheer mass of the Carlian army, however, that Andover began recruiting both men and woman to fight, a unique strategy now in its fortieth year.

The resulting armed equity between the two kingdoms has, despite occasional skirmishes and belligerent politicians, managed to last almost a generation now. Still, the rulers of Andover are perpetually on edge waiting for the day Carlia invades to break the Dover hegemony forever; and the Carlians watch as the deliberately incomplete half-crown flag of Andover flutters in the sky over their borders, the kingdom yearning for the day to make its crown whole once again.

The government of the kingdom of Carlia is nominally bicameral, with a State Advisory acting as a set of apparently elected officials which propose laws and other policies. Acting alongside the Advisory is the Royal Council, made up of notable nobles and members of the ruling house. The Council has final say over all laws, but primarily keeps itself busy with foreign policy and diplomacy, leaving much of the internal, non-military aspects of administration to the Advisory.

Carlia’s current ruler is the eighty-two year old King Friedrich III, though some rumours say he is in ill health as of late and the throne will be passed to his youngest son, the politically-savvy Albrecht, who currently functions as a colonel in the army. Should "Old Fritz" die before his will is written, however, Albrecht's older brother Wilhelm may contest the succession: Wilhelm, forty-five years of age and married for twenty of them, with half a dozen children by his wife Augustina, is seen by many as the more stable heir, despite Carlian royal succession traditionally favouring the youngest son first. Albrecht, childless and single, is a popular target for dangerous suspicions about his character, but the Carlian political class has its own concerns with the Princess Consort Augustina's public philandovrian tendencies and her husband's willingness to indulge her.

The royal capital of Carlia is the city of Cayem, famed for the idyllic beauty of its centuries-old architecture, particularly the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the oldest buildings in the known world. Even some Dover poets, upon visiting the city, were intensely charmed by it, falling for its pristine central river and its monumental libraries. Nowhere else in the known world, not even in Cambra, is such architecture to be found, and the halls of the Cul Academy bustle with the activities of scholars, its walls piled with countless books of ancient provenance. There is truly nothing like it in Andover, and the old kings did not hide their jealousy. Infamously, the writer Roger Bach was arrested for felony treason in 775 (among other things, but most of all) for penning a poem that began with the verse: “Within those halls of ancient learne / all men shall kneel, and hearts shall yearn.” He remains today a beloved figure in Carlian literature, who have adopted him as Rudiger Bosch.

Old Rudiger, better known today for his bawdy love poetry, has a statue in the southeastern city where he was raised: Tamesis. This sacred national site, where the Isian Uprising began in 821, is the cradle of the arts in Carlia and the home of most of its writers, bards, painters, sculptors, and poets. The city was named for the river running through its centre, now the home of a broad green park where many would-be lyricists go to relax and find inspiration. Unlike the other great cities of Andover and Carlia, the tallest structure in the city is not a cathedral but an old bell tower, perhaps as old as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - the residents of Tamesis would certainly say so - and a local icon. Despite its advanced age, every day at noon and six in the evening it lets out its thunderous toll, a great low sound that can be heard for miles around, even beyond the city's walls. Of particular popular interest in Tamesis is the Blind Lawyer, a famous pub that has historically attracted even more famous patrons. The beer on tap, straight from the barley fields of the Isian floodplain, is as rich and strong as any Dover mead.

Well away from the cities, the most stubborn point along the border of Carlia and Andover has historically been High Brugge, or Castle Brugge, a hilltop fortress by a riverside town just east of the Dover-controlled river Fen, near the Seven Towns. Many failed battles were fought here, and the Miserloo War, the last great conflict of this century, ended nineteen years ago after the combined Andover army ran out of supplies in its seven-month siege of the fort - its second in three years. High Brugge is surrounded to the west and south by marshland, humid and infested with insects in the summer, impossibly muddy in the spring and fall, and frozen over with treacherous ice in the winter. All the better for the Carlians: without this chokepoint, hundreds of miles of farmland past the rugged hills it guards would be ripe for Andover conquest, a prize that might seal the doom of the young kingdom.

The other notable battleground between the two kingdoms lies nearer to the Eastroad, in a contested valley claimed by both sides. It leads, as its name implies, eastwards to The City, controlling an important entryway towards the expansive Old World ruins and beyond to Cambra. Known as the Lord’s Green, much blood has been spilled here, and the name now is perhaps ironic: the landscape is devoid of much greenery anymore, more often muddy and lacking any life save for crows and soldiers and the occasional lost sheep. Travel here is notoriously dangerous, not only for the possibility of a new skirmish breaking out between Carlia and Andover - as famously happened last summer - but also because of unexploded munitions littering the scarred valley. This has only hampered attempts at breaching further into The City, as both sides know the importance of this particular area for that goal. Should either gain full control of the Eastroad, not only would it dictate the other's terms of trade with Cambra, but the potential riches of The City would be opened at last, its promises of ancient technology lost since the Conflagration potentially revolutionary.

Carlia is governed chiefly through the council of ministers under its king, who acts on the advice and desires of the Landstand, an assembly of all the different social groups in the kingdom. They meet twice a year: once in summer, in Cayem, and once in winter, in Tamesis. By tradition the king does as recommended by the Landstand, and always presides over debates in the Landeshall where they meet. Every meeting of the Landstand is something of a festival, drawing hundreds of people from all across the kingdom to air their grievances in front of the king and his hand-picked council - the councillors of which are typically from the more influential social groups of the realm, as diverse as aristocrats, playwrights, and wealthy farmers. Each Stand, or local assembly, sends a representative or two to the Landstand; the Stande are a great mixed group and a product of Carlia's tumultuous, semi-democratic history: they vary in size from the smallest of villages to whole counties, due to the kingdom itself being a cobbled-together state made up of a wide variety of people from all social classes who were fed up with Andover's hegemony and rebelled against it for their own reasons. When each group individually agreed to be a part of the greater kingdom of Carlia - a process that happened over several decades, and which arguably still is not over - they, understandably, requested that their rights and autonomy be respected by the royal government in Cayem. As a result, despite the vast size of the country and the disparity in the size of different Stande, at some level or another everyone has a say in government, even if it is simply choosing a local representative to send to the Landstande. However, this style of government comes with some risks: as each territory - small as some may be - has its own government and traditional rights, theoretically each could simply disagree with the Landstand system and break off from Carlia to become independent again. Carlian kings, who choose their preferred heir without ratification from the Stande, must keep this in mind lest the country come to disaster under a poor ruler.