## Overview --- ![[flag_RKC.png]]The ***Royal Kingdom of Ciselmany***, also known as Old Elmany, Royal Elmany, the Elman Kingdom (or simply Ciselmany) is a country encompassing the northern expanse of the [[Kedavaara|Kedavaaran]] continent. It is almost equal in size to its southern neighbors [[Transelmany|Transelmany]], but slightly bigger thanks to its control of the Confluence of Fates. It has a temperate climate, dominated by river valleys and plains to the south of the Elman Mountains in the south. Like Transelmany, it borders the other three nations on Kedavaara; [[Ankylosante|Ankylosante]] to the west, Transelmany to the south and the [[Velsh Union|Velsh Union]] to the southeast. It once spanned the entire length of the continent as the [[Old Elmany|Kingdom of Elmany]], but a [[History of Transelmany — Foundation & Protracted Rebellion (648-658 AL)|seven year-long rebellion]] led by Yemisi Fayowa against the Royal Elman Church in the southern half of the kingdom resulted in the Treaty of Haal, signed pre-emptively to avoid a Civil War. The treaty redefined the former province of South Elmany as the People's Republic of Transelmany, with the rest of the kingdom in the north renamed as the Kingdom of Ciselmany. | Common Name | Ciselmany | | ------------------------ | ------------------------- | | Capital and largest city | Haal | | Official languages | Elman | | Demonym | Ciselman | | Government | Unitary absolute monarchy | | Foundation | 1 Gamuti 162 AL | | Area | 212,000 sq km | | Population | 11,800,000 (2nd) | | Currency | Royal Elman Karat *(EKR)* | ## History --- *see also: [[Old Elmany]], [[Transelmany]]* ### Early History (0―170 AL) Elmany is the oldest continuously inhabited society on Kedavaara. It can trace its history back to the year 0 AL (Anno Lumens, the year Lumen appears) when the first Saint, Lumen, is said to have been visited by the Lord of Light, and bestowed the power of Lumination, a connection to the flux that manifests as the ability to generate, refract and emit light waves and particles. Lumen was a nomad about whom little is known. But he created the [[Royal Elman Church|First Church of Light]], and gained numerous followers. His visitation is said to have occurred at the peak of the Elman Mountains, and as such it is sacred ground for Elmans. Lumens made a pilgrimage from the peak, following the River Elin down until he arrived at an inland lake. He found a small village close by, and joined them. He amazed them with his miraculous Lumination, and this village became his first followers. Lumen organized and grew the village, and it would eventually become the city of Øfa. Lumen's Church was not a kingdom, and he was not a King. Øfa practiced collective leadership, and were able to subsist on agriculture and fishing. As time passed, the descendants of Lumen and his followers would come to adopt the practices of their neighbors in order to defend themselves from aggression, creating armies and commodifying land and the crops that were grown on it in order to participate in regional trade (to afford those armies). By 140 AL, the North fell into regional war. It would last for twelve years until Rodrick, the king of a city called Haal, was able to defeat the other armies and bring them under his charge. When Rodrick's army arrived at Øfa, they surrendered and were incorporated into his new kingdom. Lumen was long dead by this point, but his descendants had all inherited his Lumination. One of them was Amina, who would fall in love with Rodrick. He would take her back to the capital of his new Kingdom, Haal, and marry her there on 1 Gamuti 162 AL, establishing the peaceful union of Øfa and Haal as the Elman Kingdom. As Queen, Amina would make the Church of Light the seat of Rodrick's power, and convert the majority of the Kingdom's subjects to what became known as Lumenity. ### Foundation of Royal Elman Kingdom (170—236 AL) Their son Kevin would inherit the same powers as Amina, but an especially powerful variation of it. When Rodrick died in 170 AL, Kevin would become King. He would begin the campaign to expand the kingdom, southwards from the Elman Mountains down to the Kylan Ocean. It would take him twenty years, but in 230 AL he succeeded in conquering the entirety of North and South Elmany, with the exception of [[The Green|the Green]]: a dense jungle inhabited by followers of an ancient spiritual religion also known as the Green. They wielded a connection to the flux that manifested as the ability to control plant life, and natural toxins. Rodrick tried to invade the Green twice in 232 and 233 AL, but his expeditionary forces were completely destroyed both times. In spite of this, Rodrick had more soldiers, and the ability to dam the Voromir River that was vital to the Green's sustenance. In 236 AL they agreed to become vassals of Elmany, paying tributes and relinquishing control of their borders in exchange for Elmany promising not to dam the river. At this point Elmany had become by far the largest country on the continent, and was able to develop rapidly thanks to its abundance of both natural resources and arable farmland. It was also able to achieve a prolonged period of peace thanks to its natural, highly defensible borders. Other countries would eventually achieve unity and stability, but Elmany was almost two centuries early. ### Internal Crises (640—648 AL) By 640 AL, Elmany under King William had entered into an advanced stage of the societal decay that Hagios of the West Plateau had written about centuries earlier. The monarchy was wasteful and the country had experienced extremely uneven development, as future monarchs after Rodrick had neglected the even-handed approach he brought to policy, focusing on wealth accumulation and extravagance in the capital at the expense of the rest of the country, especially South Elmany. The Green at this point were a notable exception, being de facto independent once again, as the agreement allowing Elman Royal Deacons to be stationed within their territory had been allowed to expire a century ago because Elmany did not bother to enforce it. Their new leader Qa'ri loathed the monarchy, but was keen on avoiding an armed confrontation with the Kingdom. The rest of South Elmany was badly mismanaged, and rife with corruption. Royal authority in the region was weak, and several parts had fallen under the control of wealthy nobles, such as the Lake Lords in the southwestern Riverlands province. This situation was clear even to members of the Royal Elman Church, as Lumen's once humble following was now known. The King ruled Elmany in the Church's name, and it employed a vast network of agents known as disciples, who served as the country's primary security apparatus. The elite force was maintained by conscripting youths with powerful connections to the flux, varied in rank from Disciple at the bottom to Archbishop at the top, and the most powerful flux users in the Church were Bishops or higher. However, its large size meant that it was very prone to factionalism and subversion, with numerous scandals relating to both corruption and attempted treason. Accountability was hard to come by, and the people of Elmany were often the victims of brutal repressions and abuses of authority at their hands. The Royal Deacons were a special company of disciples in the Church who had special administrative authority, serving as vassals for the King. The majority of territories outside the capital province were governed by Royal Deacons, who commanded their own detachments of Church disciples. ### Advent of Orthodox Hagioism (648—650 AL) But not all royal disciples were as ruthless. Yemisi Fayowa was a Bishop in the Royal Elman Church, serving in the capital. Already bitterly resentful of her society, that resentment turned into total disillusionment when a series of very harsh discriminatory measures against users of 'dark' flux by King William was enacted later that year. She would spend the next eight years researching the history of anti-monarchist activity all over the continent: research that would lead her to Hagios of the West Plateau and his seminal work On Monarchy. By the end of the decade, she would publish her first book, *[[Deadline]]*. It detailed the decay brought about by the monarchy and predicted a hard deadline of 10 years before Elmany would collapse unless a full-scale revolution abolished royal authority nationwide and replaced it with a people's government directed by the workers and peasants of the country, through a vanguard in the form of a New Elman Church which would rule according to a set of principles she would describe as *[[Hagioism|hagioism]]*. Despite the fact that most of Elmany's population was not literate, it still managed to spread far and wide; eventually reaching even beyond Elmany's borders and being translated into other languages. This was an act of open treason by a sitting Royal Bishop, and King William put a warrant out for her immediate arrest after banning the book from legal circulation. By 650 AL, Fayowa had recruited fellow Bishop [[Gordon Alastair]] to her side, laying out a plan for what she called a Protracted Rebellion in South Elmany that could establish dual power alongside the Royal Authority before eventually smashing it with mass uprisings of radicalized workers, students and peasants in a deliberately slow process that would avoid a full-scale war that would undoubtedly destroy them. As they were about to leave Haal for the mountain, they saw that a Deacon, Zainab Garba, had been arrested for distributing copies of Deadline in the capital. They returned to free her from prison, before escaping together to South Elmany. They were also joined by seven-year-old Princess [[Marie Adonai]], heir to the Elman throne, who had read Deadline in secret and followed her friend Gordon in the hopes of joining the Protracted Rebellion. She could not follow them that night, but Garba arranged for her to be smuggled to them once they established a base of operations in the South. ### Foundation of Transelmany (651—658 AL) *see also: [[History of Transelmany — Foundation & Protracted Rebellion (648-658 AL)|Protracted Rebellion]]* On 20 Gamusi 650 AL, inside a small encampment on the south face of the Elman Mountains, Yemisi Fayowa, Gordon Alastair and Zainab Garba created the [[Transelman Church of Saints]] and promoted Zainab to the rank of Bishop within it. Just one year later, now with a network of several hundred new apostles, and thousands of students & workers in their vanguard, the [[Hagioism|Hagioists]] would liberate the nearby city of Muntbatten in the northeastern Altus province of South Elmany: which was home to the Royal Academy and a literate student body already familiar with Deadline, since censorship was much harder to enforce in the South. On 12 Sasanka 651 AL the Muntbatten hagioists successfully defeated the Royal Bishops stationed there, capturing their Royal Deacon. The hagioists immediately begin the work of occupying Muntbatten, seizing authority from all former nobility and royalist sympathizers, handing it over to the allied peasantry. Fayowa declared the foundation of the Transelman People's Republic later that day from the provost outlook of the Academy, with her Church as its central governing body. In line with the hagioist theories described in Deadline, several new organs of power are created to establish dual power with existing royal institutions: the Council of Bishops; functioning as the highest level of central authority, and workers' councils called basilicas that would inhabit regional power, and give confidence to the Council of Bishops. As a result of the highly successful Protracted Rebellion (a seven-year guerilla campaign to establish dual power by subverting all Royal Authority, as envisioned by Fayowa in her book *What Comes Next?*) that followed, by 658 AL the entirety of South Elmany had come under the control of the Transelman Church of Saints, and more than a third of its cities and towns had established governing basilicas. Transelmany would also gain formal recognition from its northern neighbor later that year on 4 Tarusi 658 AL, when the Treaty of Haal was signed by Sofie Adonai, the younger sister of Marie Adonai who had inherited the throne in her stead after King William's death. Queen Sofie and Fayowa agreed on a year-long Amnesty for all hagioists in the north to move south to Transelmany, and all monarchists south to return to the north, after which both groups would become enemies of their respective states and be subject to detention. After this year passed, the border with Transelmany was officially closed on 4 Tarusi 659 AL. ### Modern Era (659 AL— present) Since the Treaty of Haal, Ciselmany has remained peaceful and relatively prosperous, albeit for a disproportionately small segment of its population. The nobility and the Church hold all the power and wealth as they always have, but the worker and peasant population remains sorely downtrodden. Because the hagioist presence in the North was peacefully transferred to Transelmany during the Amnesty, there are no longer any threats to the Church's authority. ## Administrative Divisions ![[Ciselmany_political.png]] *Map of Ciselmany showing its administrative divisions.* The dioceses of Ciselmany are the primary administrative divisions of the Kingdom. With the exception of the special regions of Haal and Øfa, they are all governed by Royal Deacons who rule in the Queen's name. These dioceses are all named after geographic features or cardinal directions. Haal and Øfa and directly administered cities answerable to the Queen, while the Northern, Ocean, Central, Eastern, Mountain and Southern dioceses answer to the Royal Elman Church through their Royal Deacons. These dioceses all have a similar level of economic productivity as well as similar populations, as they were created to maintain rough parity with each other in line with demographic patterns. Each diocese is intended to contain around 1 million people, with the exception of Haal and Øfa, which has 2 million people combined despite their much smaller area. As political organization is banned, these dioceses are all governed by the REC internally. The Southern Diocese is unique for being located beyond the Elman Mountains, and being the only part of Ciselmany that has a border with more than one foreign country. Despite this, the only land crossing between Ciselmany and Transelmany is in the Mountain Plateau. ## Geography ![[Ciselmany_climate.jpg]] *Map of Ciselmany showing its various climates.* #### Area At just over 210,000 sq km, Ciselmany is roughly equivalent in size to its south neighbor Transelmany. This was due to the fact that both countries inherited the former territorial provinces of North and South Elmany respectively, which were created to be roughly equal in size. #### Population Ciselmany has an estimated 12,000,000 people, concentrated mostly in the major urban centers of Haal and Øfa. Its most populous city by far is Haal, housing almost 2,500,000 people. #### Climate The central regions of Ciselmany are dominated by arable temperate grasslands. There is small rainforest cover in the mountains, but this quickly transitions into more savanna as you move north. The southeastern and western coasts that flank the country's two major rivers are more marshy, but rainfall is consistently moderate across the country. The northern region centered around Sumy-- a strong Flux region-- is enveloped in perpetual snowfall, and subzero temperatures. It is the coldest region of the continent.