Kingdom of the Ninerivers
The Kingdom of the Ninerivers was a polity in the northern Vandarch Basin that existed de facto between 739 to 812 AD and de jure from 812 to 1398. Its core territories consisted of the city-states of Daingean and of Ceisdún and their respective dependencies, as well as a significant portion of the eastern Vandarch after 757. Founded by the Daingeic warlord Eleglass of Cranwyrth, the Kingdom formed a regional order that informed interstate relations in Fanerian Ultmar for several centuries and played a major role in the defeat of the Gothic kingdom of Norðgemære as well as the protection of early Christian communities in modern Faneria.
History
The Kingdom of the Ninerivers originated as a revival of the Ninerivers Confederation by Eleglass of Cranwyrth in 738, calling to a near-mythic past to rally Daingean and other states in Dunlann and Ceantalmh against Gothic expansion westwards. Eleglass had been elected Prince in Daingean mainly due to his personal heroism against several professional mercenary groups which had taken to raiding Dunlann between wars, successfully hunting down and killing the majority of them prior to his election and during the initial years of his rule in the city. Daingean was already a regional power which controlled most of the primary ports of call for the Kiravian-Levantine trade route through the Vandarch Sea, and had fought and defeated seaborne Gothic raids on a number of occasions prior. These successes made Daingean the main target of the Nordgemaeres, a Gothic people which had conquered much of the eastern Vandarch in the Xth Century. Nordgemare was intermittently at war with the Kingdom of Svaerige to its extreme north and other Gaelic states in modern Fiannria to the east, but had nonetheless increasingly entrenched an expanding Gothic holding in northern Ultmar. The culmination of this aggression occurred in 734-738 with the invasions and razing of Aughagower and Donmede, which had formed a bulwark for the western Gaelic world along the Mull River since 640. Donmede in particular had been one of the largest individual states in the Vandarch outside of Nordgemare itself, and its conquest incited panic in the western Vandarch which Eleglass exploited to rally a confederation of states under Daingean in a Second Confederation of the Ninerivers.
In the summer of 740, Daingean and several associate states including Ceisdún and Lisryan formed an army to relieve the siege of Inch, a walled city along the coast which had come under siege by Nordgemarine troops following a brief consolidation and series of sackings in Donmede. Lead directly by Eleglass, the Gaelic army fell on the Nordgemarines in the middle of the night and wiped them out. The surprisingly easy victory shattered Fhainnin conceptions of Gothic strength and provided Daingean and Eleglass with considerable leverage over the other Gaelic states, which was used to invite Daingean's allied states to participate in the election of a 'King in the Ninerivers' (although the willingness of other Principalities to participate is a matter of historical debate, as Daingean possessed a far larger pool of wealth with which to raise new armies while its largest rivals' citizen armies were on campaign). In the subsequent years, Eleglass initiated a series of campaigns into Nordgemare which ultimately lead to the death of King Odric IV and his sons at the Battle of Daneshead in 755, after which the bulk of Nordgemarine nobility were executed and staked from Daneshead to Spetsford. Most of former Nordgemare was annexed directly by Daingean and parceled out to Eleglass' personal supporters, with the Gothic populace displaced and sold into slavery in almost its entirety in favor of the native Leufhainn and imported Marfhainn colonists from the west.
Eleglass died in 768, after which the power of the Kingdom diminished rapidly as the conditions behind Eleglass' personal cult ceased to exist. A brief campaign which established the Principality of Eleglasia (modern Ereglas) across the Ereglasian Isthmus was conducted by King Cullan of the Six Armies in 799-802, but after his successor King Farranore died, increasing defections from Daingean's tributary system lead to the suspension of electing subsequent kings in order for Daingean to avoid constant wars with its supposed allies. As a result, the Kingdom became a largely symbolic feature of Daingeic hegemony and a permanent excuse for involvement in the affairs of other states in the Vandarch. Failure to establish a strong central government or disband the Kingdom de jure inevitably lead to a series of challengers. The later Kingdom of the Mar established a practice of declaring kingship in the Vandarch as a traditional challenge to Daingean, with the two engaging in a series of several conflicts. The early Kingdom of the Fhainn challenged Daingeic rule and later subsumed Daingean in 1471 after several decades of fighting including the Red Plains War, Great Basin War, and the Dunlann War.
Government
The Kingdom of the Ninerivers functioned under the laws of the City of Daingean, and as a result elected kings from among the citizens of the city. This system would ultimately fail beginning in the ninth century, with the wealthiest families in Daingean, the Acsaesons and Ghalagchts, trading power throughout the later centuries of the Kingdom's history. Allied cities and territories under the patronage of the Kingdom did not have political representation directly, though they did maintain rights of petition to the capital and were entitled to arbitration and defense by the army of Daingean from Gothic piracy and raids from non-member states. Most importantly, states subordinate to Daingean were granted a portion of war spoils, which was the primary attraction to many of the initial member cities and Principalities. This policy later extended to large-scale raiding of breakaway regions of Daingean's tributary system, which helped maintain Daingean's wealth and political power as a regional hegemon. Daingean was, alongside its sister city Ceisdún, one of the two major origin points of democratic government in Faneria. Its government suffered constant and severe corruption, and Daingeic supremacy over Ceisdún following the reconquest of the eastern Vandarch ended the latter's more functional republican government which closely modelled that of classical Istroyan and Coscivian republics. The Daingeic mercantile and directly democratic model of government ultimately failed to evolve over centuries, which directly contributed to the early electoral and later absolutist natures of the Fanerian monarchy as well as the manner in which historians contextualize democratic movements in pre-modern Faneria.
Culture
The Kingdom of the Ninerivers consisted of several related but geographically and culturally disparate groups, primarily consisting of Maric Gaelic speaking Marfhainn, with minorities of Leufhainn, Gothic slaves, and Cascufhainn communities. The overwhelming majority of the subjects of the Kingdom, whether including the many loosely aligned states of the central and western Vandarch or not, practiced traditional Gaelic pagan practices such as to worship of the Fhainnin pantheon; in spite of this, King Farranore permitted Saint Hendrick to found the first permanent Christian church in Leighlinbridge, resulting in the Principality of Itheachan becoming the Catholic diocese in Faneria and breaking from the pagan west during the Gap War. The large eastern territories, which were directly controlled by Daingean for several centuries after their conquest, were noted by contemporary writings as having a far more homogenous culture, which has lead many historians to consider the decline of the clan as a political and social unit during the Withering as having begun in the eastern Kingdom's colony cities.