Talk:Levantia

Human History and Geography

Levantia is home to a number of diverse cultural groups, with a number of faiths, ethnicities, and cultural heritages creating a wide array of traditions and peoples throughout the continent.

Western Levantia

Known by the residents of so-called "Catholic Levantia" as Gothica since the time of the Ancient Goths and considered part of the greater concept of Ultmar, Western Levantia is typically understood to mean the territory west of the Deric States, north of Urcea and south of the Vandarch. Gothica was historically relatively isolated from the Holy Levantine Empire, both by a series of mountain ranges between the Vandarch and the Odoneru Ocean and by the native Gothic peoples' stubborn military resistance to Levantine-Catholic encroachment. This stalemate was only broken in the fifteenth century, as a crusade saw Joanus de Martigueux installed as the ruler of the new state of Yonderre. Yonderre has served as a bridge between the Catholic Levantine sphere and the Gothic world to this day, while its southern neighbour Carna - likewise a fusion of Gothic and foreign cultures, although in this case Ænglish and Gaelic rather than Yonderre's East Gothic and Burgoignesc - has often acted more as a barrier against Urcean expansion westwards.

Beyond the hybridised states of the borderlands, Gothica remains thoroughly Gothic. The southern Vandarch states of Hendalarsk and Eldmora-Regulus were never conquered by Latins, and evolved in their own ways. Hendalarsk is home to a heavily syncretic version of Christianity, known as the Hendalarskara Catholic Church, the legacy of an incomplete Christianisation by Latin Catholic missionaries, while its native Gothic language has undergone far more influence from Khunyer and the autochthonous Nünsyi language than any Latin tongue.

The Vandarch Gothic states have largely kept their distance from the wider Urcean sphere through the centuries, although in recent decades this has begun to change. This process was accelerated by the opening of the Carolina-Grand Canal in the nineteenth century and the Grand Vandarch Canal in the twentieth and an attendant integration of the entire Vandarch littoral into the international system of trade. Yonderre has latterly become the first state outside the bounds of the Holy Levantine Empire to join the Levantine Union. The Odoneru Gothic states had undergone this process of integration long before, a consequence of their easy access to the great sea lanes between Kiroborea and Sarpedon. Carna forged a continental empire in Crona, eventually birthing the nation of Arcerion, while Carnish troops even fought alongside Urcea in a brief rapprochement during the Second Great War, although this thaw was thoroughly reversed by the subsequent Carnish Revolution.

Polities and Territories

After the turmoil of the early twentieth century drew to a close, Levantia has been a comparatively stable area. The continent is largely governed by centre-right to right-wing governments, particularly within the sphere of the Levantine Union, although Carna is notable as the continent's only one-party socialist state, while Hendalarsk's relative distance from the Union and caution in foreign affairs has allowed it to preserve a broadly democratic-socialist government from the end of its civil war down to the present day.

Levantine Concepts

Policing

Different kinds of policing

Different kinds of policing

Levantine policing is known for being centralized, state-run, and overt. It is the original civilian, publicly-funded policing model but newer more localized and egalitarian have taken hold in Crona and Sarpedon, known as policing by consent. Thus, by exclusion, the older, more centralized model has coined the neologism "Levantine policing".

The word "police" was borrowed from the Latin word politia, meaning an agent of the state or civil administration. It was first used in the modern sense in the mid 17th century in Urcea, but soon spread throughout Levantia. It was often associated with political and religious policing but was also used in other sundry functions of government administration, depending on the country. The word has modernized to police in the many modern languages through its adoption in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, outside of Levantia, the word, and the concept of police itself, was disliked as a symbol of foreign oppression.