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Caergwynn: Difference between revisions
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→History: Added a new subheading, dealing with three very important decades in our history, and the creation of the current form of government.
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The misty morning of the Fifth of September saw a Fhain army arrayed a few miles from the city, hoping to block the advance of the seemingly-invincible Caeric men by positioning themselves in a wood by the main road to Oirthidùn. Madoc and his army advanced into the foggy tangle, and though the fighting was fierce, they slowly pushed the Gaels back towards their own distant walls. A few hours later, Madoc, sensing victory at hand, charged on horseback into the enemy van, when the fog once more lowered onto the forest. When it began to clear a few minutes later, the enemy King was dead and his forces scattered, but Madoc and his companions were nowhere to be found. Searches over the next three days proved fruitless, even with every last inch of woodland scoured. The Prince, who in his haste to win glory had never married or fathered an heir, had disappeared without trace. Though their ruler was not officially dead, confusion descended on his army, and after a desultory siege led to a surrender from the still-terrified Fhain, the Caeric army began a sullen, sodden march homewards in the autumn rain. Their Prince was gone, but such a man as he could not simply be replaced without knowledge of his death, let alone without any proper successor. As the great men of the realm met in Dol Awraidd that bitter winter to argue as to how the realm should be ordered in Madoc's absence, the time of the Princes drew silently to a close. | The misty morning of the Fifth of September saw a Fhain army arrayed a few miles from the city, hoping to block the advance of the seemingly-invincible Caeric men by positioning themselves in a wood by the main road to Oirthidùn. Madoc and his army advanced into the foggy tangle, and though the fighting was fierce, they slowly pushed the Gaels back towards their own distant walls. A few hours later, Madoc, sensing victory at hand, charged on horseback into the enemy van, when the fog once more lowered onto the forest. When it began to clear a few minutes later, the enemy King was dead and his forces scattered, but Madoc and his companions were nowhere to be found. Searches over the next three days proved fruitless, even with every last inch of woodland scoured. The Prince, who in his haste to win glory had never married or fathered an heir, had disappeared without trace. Though their ruler was not officially dead, confusion descended on his army, and after a desultory siege led to a surrender from the still-terrified Fhain, the Caeric army began a sullen, sodden march homewards in the autumn rain. Their Prince was gone, but such a man as he could not simply be replaced without knowledge of his death, let alone without any proper successor. As the great men of the realm met in Dol Awraidd that bitter winter to argue as to how the realm should be ordered in Madoc's absence, the time of the Princes drew silently to a close. | ||
=== The Regency === | |||
Madoc's disappearance left the realm headless, and after centuries of strict primogeniture in the line of the Princes, there was no Caeric aristocrat whose kinship to the ruling house was closer than anyone else's. Moreover, the army returning from Faneria was now without a general. Chaos loomed, but before anyone could make the first move, the Archbishop of Dol Awraidd summoned the great and the good of Caergwynn to meet on his own initiative at the capital on Saint Martin's Day in early November. Seeking to assert their interests, the burghers of Dol Awraidd invited themselves to the proceedings-sanctioned by the Archbishop as he hoped their presence would weaken the hand of the leading magnates (cantrefs outside the city tried likewise to send representatives, but were rebuffed). The prelate's plan in fact worked too well, as the assembly or ''Cyngor'' was too factionalized to agree on much of anything. The Prince's mysterious and possibly miraculous fate left many disinclined to claim the throne, lest its rightful occupant return. By December, the army arrived, sharpening minds but itself too divided to impose a solution. Finally, Rhodri ap Bedwyr ap Cadell, the Distain (or Steward) of Caergwynn-the man responsible for the functioning of Princely government and for the military paychest, as well as for the provisioning of the Cyngor itself-broke the deadlock by proposing a Regency (Raglywiaeth), with immediate authority to restart the frozen machinery of rule, to pay back the soldiery, and to take charge of Caeric diplomacy before the Fhain recovered from their shock. By including naval compensation in the scheme (thus profiting the merchants who outfitted and ran the navy) the Distain managed to get both urban traders and local military leaders behind the plan. The Archbishop acquiesced in exchange for promises of church reform, and many nobles supported it, if only to block their rivals from power. Distain's men helped the rest make their minds up by halving the food servings after Epiphany, and when a lackey placed Rhodri's name in contention for the Regency there was no real opposition. | |||
Sworn in (not crowned) on February 4th, 1215 in line with the anniversary of Madoc the Farsighted's arrival, Regent Rhodri claimed merely to be "holding the powers of the Prince until he surely returns." But as the years passed, Rhodri grew more and more comfortable in his seat. And he accomplished much. Maintaining Caergwynn's first peace in over a century, keeping the realm stable, and partnering with the merchant factors of Dol Awraidd to keep Caeric seas free of the swelling menace of Vithinjan raiders, Rhodri's nearly three decades of power left the country more prosperous and better-run than it had been in centuries, despite foreign sniggering about the "Victualler King". Rhodri also upheld his pledges to the Church by ensuring obedience to the hierarchy throughout the scattered villages of Caergwynn, pairing this with subsidizing basic lay education (for boys) through the mendicant orders in a bid to ensure a revival of Christian virtue and knowledge from the bottom up. Yet in the end Rhodri and his reforming impulses ran up against a fundamental lack of legitimacy-the powers that be had put him in Dol Awraidd to conserve the Caeric state, not to change it. And while he was powerful and skillful enough to keep his head above water, discontent simmered, and increasingly used as its figurehead the one man Rhodri could not attack or buy off: Prince Madoc. Already a figure of legend, he was juxtaposed against whatever aspects of present society a person happened to dislike, and represented "true" rulership, as compared to Rhodri's increasingly rocky Regency. | |||
All these issues came to a head when Rhodri died in October of 1243, and his son Iago ap Rhodri ap Bedwyr assumed the Regency for himself. Iago was a strikingly different man than his father. Both were ambitious and had keen minds, but Iago, a renowned huntsman, was brasher and bolder, operating more by charisma and main force than Rhodri's subtlety. Having accumulated an aristocratic coterie in his many jaunts around Caergwynn's forests, he saw himself as essentially a feudal monarch in waiting (in line with notions of royalty that the cultured young man absorbed from contemporary Southern Levantine realms). To Iago, his main problem seemed to be the inherently precarious nature of the Regent's office, and he would solve that in the clearest possible way: by making himself Prince. Instituting elaborate court ceremonial and placing his followers in positions of power, Iago seemed well on his way to a successful takeover. But behind the scenes, many groups in Caeric society were appalled. For the merchants of Dol Awraidd and lesser towns, the new Regent's aristocratic pretensions insulted their own standing and made them fear marginalization of their trading interests if his regime fully got going. For the gentry and lesser nobility, Iago's favoring of a small circle of friends and hunting companions besmirched their honor and made them worry they would be naught but subjects. And for the gentlemen and prosperous local figures of the cantrefs (still smarting from being formally excluded at the Cyngor of 1214), his posturing brought back folk memories of "wicked lords" that the Princes had subdued, coupled with frustration that his father's proactive concern with local issues of administration had slackened. After over a year of maneuvering, matters came to a head. Iago summoned a Cyngor (the third since the one that installed his father) to be held on Midsummer's Day, 1245, with the unspoken purpose of approving the dethronement of Madoc V and the accession of Iago I in his place. | |||
It did not go according to plan. Arrogating a hereditary Regency to himself was one thing, but for most of the assembly, taking the Princely title was a step too far. It magnified the fears of all those who thought to lose from Iago's rule, while giving them an ironclad reason to oppose it. When the Regent's heralds began for the second time to read out a petition for Iago to accept the princely crown, Hywel ap Bleddyn ap Seisyll, a minor aristocrat from the northeast coast , shouted out, "In Caergwynn, an absence of ten thousand years would not suffice for a Steward's son to usurp the throne of Madoc!" This galvanized the opposition, and despite the best efforts of Iago's men the proposal was ignominiously hooted down. Realizing they act to act before Iago could organize a response, Hywel and other diehards began a walkout, which snowballed until nearly half the attendees were streaming out of the chamber. With a cry of "For the true Prince!", they quit the Cyngor. Battle lines had now been irrevocably drawn, and the rump acclaimed Iago as Prince minutes later with a charge to "punish the traitors", before dissolving. | |||
The war began in earnest the next morning, as the garrison and militia of Dol Awraidd followed their civic elite into revolt and pushed out Iago's limited forces. The navy, despite Rhodri's old ties, also largely defected, enabling the rebels to unite many of their scattered forces. However, Iago commanded the loyalty of many nobles and their followers, and was a superb commander. All through the autumn, Iago leveraged his smaller but better-led forces to victory, crushing opposition in the heart of Caergwynn in preparation for a final reconquest of the coast and Dol Awraidd. On the 14th of November, 1245, his army attacked a large force of the enemy at Baddon, a rise about 100 miles south of Dol Awraidd. Iago saddled his destrier and charged into the rebel ranks, tasting victory as they fell back and back, before his attention was wrenched away. A small infantry detachment from the restive mountain cantrefs had intercepted the usurper's force and crashed into its flanks. Iago grimly pushed forwards regardless in a desperate attempt to defeat his main foe, but that merely thinned his own line to the breaking point. Iago ap Rhodri ap Bedwyr was felled by a common spearman named Macsen, and his army scattered in the early dusk. | |||
With the sudden end of the war, the victors were left struggling to define a path forward. Rhodri's line was extirpated or shoved off to monasteries, but that did not solve the larger problem. For lack of anything else to do, a new Cyngor was convened and met in that grim December. Lacking, for the first time, a head outside its own ranks, it elected Hywel as its Arlywydd, or "presiding officer." All those who had not actively supported Iago were allowed to attend, and, with the yeomen of the hinterland a major hub of the rebels' support and the military strength that had struck Iago down at the point of victory, their representatives were finally admitted to the Cyngor, and on equal terms. A few things were easily agreed upon, with Madoc reaffirmed as "our sole lawful and beloved Prince, ruler until the day his death is made known to us, or until the end of all worldly Princes." But with nothing else to guide them and the idea of a Regency seriously tainted, paralysis loomed. | |||
It is unclear who first articulated the solution that eventually presented itself-perhaps it came to many minds at once. The only broad governmental authority with any remaining legitimacy was the institution of the Cyngor itself, dating back at intervals to the original interregnum in 1214. If a single Regent could not be trusted, the community of the realm as a corporate body would surely be less dangerous and more constant. Its Arlywydd could serve as head of state for practical purposes, but without monarchical pretensions and with the Cyngor always able to constrain him. And so the Regency was forever abolished, the Cyngor declared itself "competent to direct the realm in the absence of our Prince", with a pledge for all members to meet at least once every seven years. It then delegated many of its day-to-day powers, including command of the military, to the Arlywydd it elected. In the culmination of this revolution, on March 1, 1246, Hywel ap Bleddyn ap Seisyll addressed the Cyngor, holding a copy of the old Cyfraith Hywel in one hand and a reliquary of Saint David (Caergwynn's patron saint) in the other. He swore before God and His saint to rule justly in Madoc's stead, to obey the laws of Caergwynn and the judgements of the Cyngor, and to lead the men of the realm in battle. With frenzied cheers, the first Arlywydd was inaugurated, and the Republic can be said to have begun. | |||
[[Category:Caergwynn]] | [[Category:Caergwynn]] | ||
[[Category:IXWB]] | [[Category:IXWB]] | ||