Zalgisbeck

Zalgisbeck is the largest city in the nation of Hendalarsk and is also the capital and largest city of the Mouth of the Zalgis province. Located on the estuary of the Zalgis, the longest, largest and most prominent river in the nation, Zalgisbeck is increasingly understood as Hendalarsk's modern cultural capital, although traditional culture and political power remain firmly rooted in the national capital, Frehmenwerth. It is also one of the largest cities of the Vandarch littoral, rivalled within Hendalarsk only by the Pentapolitan city-states of Hukenen and Wrzeszcz-Kokoszki.

History
Zalgisbeck's history long predates its status as part of Hendalarsk, as it was only incorporated into the country in the course of the Maximilianic Unification in the 16th century. The city was connected to the country even before then, however, as its position at the mouth of the Zalgis made it a key entrepôt for Hendalarskara traders intrepid enough to venture into the Vandarch.

Ancient history (c. 1000 BC - c. 100 AD)
Recent archaeological excavations suggest that Zalgisbeck was first settled by the Nünsyak, the auochthonous pre-Gothic inhabitants of northern Hendalarsk, in approximately 1000 BC; at that time the Nünsyak cultural sphere is believed to have encompassed all of the lower Zalgis as well as the better-known Nünsyak settlements along the Herne. Its Nünsyi name is not recorded, although Nünsyak political figures have adopted the name Nönst'Altx (Western Gateway) in recent years; Hendalarskara scholarly convention is to refer to the pre-Gothic settlement as Old Zalgisbeck and this is the only designation which enjoys official recognition.

Old Zalgisbeck was a substantial settlement by the standards of the time, with an estimated population of c.5,000 by 900BC, but was likely peripheral in the Nünsyak order, with the Herne rather than the Zalgis at the heart of Nünsyak culture, cosmology and trade. Although the original inhabitants of the Zalgis watershed before Gothic settlement cultivated the river's banks, there is little evidence of long-distance trade between Old Zalgisbeck and any area of the Zalgis south of modern Agaren, suggesting a patchwork of stable but relatively small subsistence societies along the river's course rather than major polities. Military conflict seems to have begun within a few decades of the Gothic irruption into southern Hendalarsk in around 750 BC, however, as the presence of Gothic-typed weapons in burn layers of the Old Zalgisbeck archaeological record imply destructive Gothic raids along the Zalgis. Both Gothic and Nünsyak oral traditions recorded in the early first millennium AD suggest that the lower Zalgis, and Old Zalgisbeck with it, had been dislocated from the Nünsyak sphere by no later than 500 BC, and Old Zalgisbeck seems to have collapsed as an urban centre of consequence by 300 BC, although small-scale habitation persisted well beyond the city's collapse due to the opportunities for a fishing economy afforded by its natural harbour.

Early medieval history (c.100 - c.1100)
The city's fortunes gradually turned in subsequent centuries. Gothic colonists reached the site by no later than 100 AD, at which point its geographic value once again gradually became clear. Zooarchaeological analysis has begun to highlight the large-scale presence of Vandarch fish stocks in the upper Zalgis by c.200AD ± 35 years, with large middens also found around the port of Zalgisbeck itself. In tandem with the local salt springs, historians have tentatively speculated that early Gothic Zalgisbeck was therefore a fish processing emporium, where freshly caught Vandarch fish was salted and exported up the Zalgis to meet dietary and religious demand. Given the costs involved in transportation hundreds of miles upriver, Zalgisbecker stockfish may have been a status symbol among the nascent Hendalarskara elites. The city's subsequent early medieval political development is unclear, although archaeological and texual evidence implies that it may have been an early beneficiary of the Vandarch slave trade. What is clear is that by 1000 AD Zalgisbeck was a powerful Gothic-dominated oligarchic republic, with commerical interests across much of the Vandarch littoral. Nünsyi texts and oral traditions alike record the city as alternately a trading partner and a baleful foe, while Christian preachers to the region often denounced the city by comparing it to the legendary Babylon - a nickname which many locals have sardonically embraced to this day.

The Archonates (c.1100 - 1472)
Increased awareness of the Latin world around this period led Zalgisbecker rulers to begin styling themselves as "Archons", and the high medieval republic of Zalgisbeck is consequently often referred to as the Archonate of Zalgisbeck (Arkonat Zalgisbeck). By 1250 AD the Archonate was at the height of its power, but the emergence of powerful states further up the Zalgis - previously a commercial boon - came to pose a threat, a dynamic which was also true of the Vandarch piracy which had previously been such a reliable source of slaves for the Archonate's markets. As the city's population swelled, it also became a site of economic production as well as an entrepôt. This in turn spurred the rise of craftsmen's guilds, which came to chafe at their exclusion from positions of power in the Archonate that were overwhelmingly reserved for the city's richest mercantile families. It was this internal tension that ultimately proved the Archonate's undoing, with a string of urban uprisings throughout the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century gradually undermining the Archonate's claims to wider power. The final and most bloody of these was the Rising of 1343, where a coalition of minor merchants and guild militias - with the support of a fleet from the newly-founded Pentapolis - toppled the Archonate, drove the senior merchant families into exile and ruled the city as a guild commune for the next three years. The elite families responded by hiring Gothic and Nünsyi mercenaries, besieging the city in March 1346 and then sacking it six months later. The Archonate was restored and the guilds cowed, but the price of this soon became clear; quite apart from the economic damage of the sack itself, much of Zalgisbeck's hinterland had fallen under the sway of other lordships, the Pentapolitan cities had risen to prominence in the Vandarch trade, and the Archons found themselves under regular political pressure from the mercenaries they were now politically dependent on. The city therefore gradually stagnated until 1472, at which point the mercenary captain Anton Ferdelandt toppled the Second Archonate (also known as the Lesser Archonate) in a bloody coup, supported by the very guilds his forebears had crushed. The newly-minted Captaincy-General of Zalgisbeck soon became a major power in the lower Zalgis basin once more.

Captaincy-General and the Hendalarskara conquest (1472 - 1571)
Whereas the Archonates had based their existence on long-distance trade, both in bulk goods such as grain and luxury goods such as the famed Bernstadt amberware, the Captaincy-General was - in keeping with the circumstances of its foundation - far more oriented around the output of its guilds. Since guilds, unlike mercantile trade, tended to require raw materials such as crops, wood, fuels and metals for their wares, the Captaincy-General was committed to an aggressive policy of territorial expansion from its expansion. A notable example of this militancy came in the form of the Hop Wars of 1492-6, in which Zalgisbeck's influential Ale Guild (Álgilde) successfully lobbied Captain-General Íuló I to conquer the Lower Zalgis city of Goldorz. Goldorz - which had once been a dependency of the First Archonate - occupied a key strategic position on the Lower Zalgis, was home to a large grouping of exiles from the Lesser Archonate who stood accused of various intrigues against the Captaincy-General, and was renowned for the quality of its hops; its artisanal Goldorzbier was generally reckoned to be of a higher quality than anything produced in Zalgisbeck, and the Álgilde consequently sought to destroy a rival. The wars, known as the Hop Wars because of the bountiful hop fields which had drawn the Álgilde's ire and desire, were complicated by the intervention of the League of the Lower Zalgis (Níderzalgisgenosenschafd), a defensive confederation of city-states which counted Goldorz as a member, and the Grand Duchy of Schullerhausen. The Captaincy-General eventually triumphed, and the League's power over the Lower Zalgis was decisively broken, while Schullerhausen itself was sacked.

Historians have nevertheless increasingly come to view Íuló I's campaign as a notable contributor to the rise of Hendalarsk, since the resultant political collapse caused a power vacuum in the region. Hendalarsk subjugated Schullerhausen in 1501, transforming the once-proud Grand Duchy into little more than a frontier protectorate, and the protectionist League's destruction left Zalgisbeck as the only major polity standing between Hendalarsk and direct access to the flourishing Vandarch trade routes. This was compounded by the Captaincy-General's long-running border conflict with the rising Kingdom of Hernemünde, fuelled by both realms' desire to exert hegemony over the increasingly productive mining settlements of the Fourteen Freeholds. Although the conflict only once, in 1518, escalated into a large-scale war, the constant border razzias were both a drain on the Captaincy-General's prosperity and a distraction from its frontier with Hendalarsk and its commercial rivalry with the Pentapolis. By 1558, the Captaincy-General had reached its economic and territorial zenith, its hegemony extending almost 150 miles down the Zalgis and its guilds the richest and most productive in the entire Zalgis and Fröse watersheds. Soon, however, Captain-General Égislad II - known to history as Égislad the Reckless - set in motion the chain of events that would lead to Zalgisbeck's destruction as an independent state.

Égislad took Maximilian II's accession to the Hendalarskara throne in 1558 as a moment of weakness in his mighty southern neighbour and duly moved to annex the County of Rasenwald, which held a key crossroads on the Zalgis and had been administered as a Hendalarskara-Zalgisbecker condominium since 1536. He compounded this by backing two separate failed plots in 1562; a failed coup in Schullerhausen, and an attempt on Maximilian II's life by a disgruntled faction of Hendalarskara nobles. Maximilian survived, unsurprisingly interpreted this twin attack as a declaration of war by the Captaincy-General, and responded by purging the offending aristocratic factions, annexing Schullerhausen outright in 1563 and driving Égislad's supporters out of Rasenwald in early 1564. A five-year truce was signed in the aftermath of Rasenwald's fall, but in 1569 a still-irate Maximilian promptly renewed the Hendalarskara offensive, now couched in almost millenarian terms as the Drang nak Wandák ("Drive to the Vandarch"). A string of crushing military victories followed, as the Captaincy-General's famed pike formations were outmanoeuvred and torn apart time after time by more mobile Hendalarskara forces, including the Khunyer huszar. After an operation to relieve its garrison by sea failed, Zalgisbeck itself was stormed and brutally sacked on June 11th 1571. Eyewitness reports of the carnage sent shockwaves across the Vandarch world, and Zalgisbecker independence burned on the same pyres as its defenders.

Decline and decay (1571 - 1900)
Zalgisbeck lay in ruins for years after the sack of 1571; entire neighbourhoods of the once-prosperous city were abandoned, and it took decades for its population to recover to its pre-annexation high water mark of roughly 150,000. The city was deliberately neglected by Maximilian II and most of his immediate heirs as a consequence of Maximilian's near-death at the Captaincy-General's hands in 1562 and, to add insult to injury, was placed under the jurisdiction of Hernemünde after that kingdom's conquest in 1579 - an administrative arrangement which prefigured the modern Mouth of the Zalgis province. By 1625, Zalgisbeck had once again become a notable port, reaching a population of roughly 85,000, but it continued to pale in comparison to Hernemünde, Frehmenwerth and the ever-rising cities of the Pentapolis. Hernemünde in particular had surpassed Zalgisbeck as a proto-industrial centre, as Maximilian's subjugation of the Herne watershed in the 1600s opened the rich Kupferberg mining districts to Hendalarskara settlement. This was compounded by the Statute of Goldorz, another of Maximilian's tools for punishing the city, which was introduced in 1599 and limited all commercial guilds in Zalgisbeck to a maximum of 25 members, thereby hamstringing the city's industrial recovery.

Transport
Zalgisbeck has a notably high water-table for a city of its size. This has made the construction of a subway network prohibitively expensive, despite repeated attempts to do so since the 1890s. Public transport therefore largely consists of tram, light rail and bus networks, as well as national rail links. Zalgisbeck has been called the most "car-hostile" city in Hendalarsk because of its long-term planning around public transport and pedestrians rather than private vehicles; although the city is encircled by a ring-road, there are no motorways within the city proper, and use of the city's roads by individual private vehicles is extremely heavily restricted. Regulations for commercial vehicles such as delivery trucks are considerably more lenient, but stringent emissions regulations introduced after the Great Fog of 1951 mean that almost all vehicles in Zalgisbeck, public or private, run on electric power rather than internal combustion. The city's ferries across the Zalgis still run on diesel engines, but are planned to be replaced with models that use hydrogen fuel cells by the early 2030s.

Economy
On account of its strategic location at the mouth of the Zalgis, Zalgisbeck has been a major trade entrepôt for its entire history as a Gothic settlement. The Port of Zalgisbeck is by far the busiest port in Hendalarsk outside the Pentapolis, incorporating both maritime trade across the Vandarch and riverine and rail freight within Hendalarsk itself. Over 20% of working adults in Zalgisbeck are employed in industries linked to the port, a figure which has remained steady even amid widespread deindustrialisation across much of the country. Prior to the 20th century, Zalgisbeck had no notable tradition of shipbuilding, but enjoyed a brief boom after the Civil War - historians have mainly attributed this to Hernemünde's comparative devastation in the Civil War, and the simultaneous decline of the maritime copper trade that had been Hernemünde's lifeblood prior to the War and the advent of modern railway infrastructure. Although shipbuilding as a mass industry in Zalgisbeck declined steeply from the 1970s onward, the city retains both bespoke facilities for constructing specialist (particularly scientific) vessels and an extensive network of maintenance drydocks for both foreign and domestic shipping which patronises the Port.

Sport
Zalgisbeck is home to teams in several different sports; by far the most-followed is Viktoria Zalgisbeck, a multi-sport club whose men's footballing department is one of the leading forces in the Hendalarskaras Bundesliga. The Viktoria-Stadion complex, located in the city's Rechtsufer neighbourhood, is Viktoria's home base and also the largest sporting venue in Zalgisbeck, able to hold more than 50,000 spectators. Various other less prominent (but still keenly-followed) football sides are also based in the city. FK Sankt-Amadäus contest the Zalgisbeckrö-Derby with Viktoria, while maintaining friendlier relations with Zalgisbeque Foot, a club originally founded by Yonderian migrant workers. Dinamo Zalgis was the city's most prominent club until the 1930s, but has faded into relative obscurity in recent decades. Beyond football, Zalgiasbeck hosts the nation's most prominent baseball team, the Zalgisbecker Schauermänner, while the country's most prestigious tennis tournament (the Adam-Károlyi-Pokal) has been held in the city in every year since 1889 - with the exception of the years of the Hendalarskara Civil War.