Hištanšahr

Hištanšahr, referred to natively as Uzdehzanistan, was a realm in southeastern Levantia established in the late 7th century by Prince Artaxerxes, a scion of the Audonian Christian Ashrafin dynasty of northwestern Audonia, in what is now Battganuur. As the Ashrafinids were gradually conquered by the emerging Oduniyyad Caliphate, Artaxerxes took several companions and a small army northwest across the Sea of Istroya to the southeastern shore of Levantia, where his small but organized forces easily conquered the small Istroyan cities and Gaelic tribes occupying the area; they would soon be joined by waves of Audonian refugees. Known to its ruling clique as the "realm of the exiled tribe", Hištanšahr grew from a small principality to the dominant military and political power in southeastern Levantia by about 750 before being quickly eclipsed by the new Holy Levantine Empire. The state retained its original Audonian faith despite advances made by the Catholic Empire for the next three centuries. Hištanšahr continued on the periphery of the Empire until the 11th century, when it became part of the Empire following the War of the Three Princes and its ruling class converted to Catholicism; its ruler was crowned the King of Gassavelia rather than Prince of Exiles. The Ashrafinids and cadet branches thereof would continue to rule the Kingdom of Gassavelia until 1301.

The numbers of the Audonian ruling class was likely never more than a few thousand at any given time, and the Audonian-descended ruling classes exclusively intermarried by law until the end of the 9th century with the exception of soldiers and commanders. The Istroyan, Gaelic, and Latins over which the Audonians ruled gradually intermarried among themselves and adopted many cultural mores and traditions of their rulers. Social mobility in Hištanšahr relied on one's ability to speak. The linguistic, ethnic, and cultural mix that Hištanšahr created resulted in the creation of the Gassavelian people.

Name
Among the ruling classes of the realm speaking, the term "Uzdehzanistan" (realm of the exiled tribe) was used. While the term "Uzdehzani" originally referred only to the ruling class, by the early 8th century most records include the term being applied to all subjects of the realm. Outside of Uzdehzani speakers, the term "Hištanšahr" - most likely a Gaelic language corruption of the word Uzdehzani - was used, and this term remains the common name for this state in the, Lebhan, Burgoignesc and Ænglish languages.

Language
The developed in the first decades of the arrival of the Ashrafinids in Levantia. The Uzdehzani elite gradually adopted and transformed large parts of the vocabulary of the Gaelic, Istroyan, and Latin speaking peoples they ruled, naturally synthesizing into a language which became known as "High Uzdehzani". The language, whose use in scholarship and court life peaked around 865, incorporated native terms but retained an extremely formal manner of address and formal sentence structure. The language, which many scholars believe was intentionally difficult to learn, was viewed by many contemporaries as one of the most beautiful of the era, with fluent poets being lauded throughout the Occident for their beautiful tones and delivery.

As the Uzdehzani elite gradually began to marry into the native majority population of the country, the "High Uzdehzani" period gave way to a new Romance Uzdehzani language today known as the Gassavelian language. This new language retained much of the vocabulary of High Uzdehzani but shifted to a -based sentence structure.