Valahandia

Kingdom of Valahandia
786 AD–1821 AD
Flag (after 1658)
Capital		Doundain
Languages		Célas
Religion		Catholic (until 1568) Protestant (after 1568)
Demonym		Valahandian
Government		Monarchy
King
•	1351-1378	Cesan I
•	1515-1552	Nikolas II
•	1800-1821	Murchadh II
History
•	Doundain Established	786 AD
•	Feudal Unification	1351 AD
•	Imperial Ascension	1514 AD
•	Disestablished	1821 AD
Currency		Méreg (adopted 1356)

The Kingdom of Valahandia was a medieval and early modern Liberalian state originating as a small, feudal realm, which centralized into an expansive kingdom in the 14th century and emerged as a major power in trans-Tenebric trade throughout the Age of Exploration. At its peak, the empire held dozens of colonies and coastal ports, primarily along the series of straits and waterways linking the south coast of Hesperida with the Promethean Sea. Despite the enormous wealth yielded by controlling these strategic ports and coastal regions, Valahandia was plagued for most of its existence by severe political instability. This was primarily brought on by inept leadership, internal power struggles, frequent border incursions by neighboring nations, and a cultural disinclination to support central authority. The last Monarch of Valahandia, Murchadh II, was bloodlessly removed from power during the Winter Revolution, a popular, partisan uprising supported by rival powers in December 1821.

Etymology

"Valahandia," traditionally pronounced "Fall-ahn-dia," simply means "land of the enduring" in a regional dialect of Célas, which would become the kingdom's official language around 1300. Valahandians often refer to themselves as “The Enduring” in reference to the most notable trait of their mythical first king, Udaín, and his supposed perilous five-year solo journey through the frigid north Liberalian wild-lands in the late-8th century as compiled in The Saga of Udaín (circa 1195).

History

Antiquity

Archeological evidence of human settlements in the region of Liberalia that would come to be occupied by the Kingdom of Valahandia dates back to at least the neolithic era. The Eonedía people, specifically, who developed a fairly sophisticated written language in the 5th-century BC, migrated to the region from the rugged Liberalian interior in waves between 550 and 700AD. By the mid-9th century, five Eonedítie clans (the Valahns, Ceonéds, Laídire, Sumahaín, and Iasgier) had established themselves as the dominant local culture. Around this time, a series of Catholic missionaries arrived on the shores of south-central Liberalia and began converting the Eonedía people. In 928, Chieftain Craheil of the Valahns renounced his pagan ways and decreed that all his kinsmen were obligated to do the same, personally laying the cornerstone of the first Valahn Catholic monastery in 930. Similar conversions to Catholicism occurred throughout the Eonedíte world over the following decades.

Era of the Five Clans and Protofeudalism

According to legend, Udaín of Muén, a Eonedíc chieftain from northern Liberalia, settled with his clan—who would come to be known as the Valahns (alternatively: Valahans)—in the late 8th century, founding the city of Doundain in 786 AD. Other major Eonedíc clan settlements including Baltropp and Celon were founded in the years immediately following the establishment of Doundain. Although hypothetically unified in their goal of glorifying the Christian God by the 10th century, the five clans quarreled frequently (and violently) as a result of the region's lack of arable land, both with each other and internally. As a result, the region was in a constant state of conflict and militarization until the mid-14th century. Most surviving architecture from before the 12th century bears evidence of this combat. Recent studies suggest that, even exceeding illness and starvation, warfare was the primary cause of death for adults during much of the Era of the Five Clans.

Over time, the need to more uniformly (and less violently) manage control of the region's finite resources led to the introduction of a rigid social hierarchy and protofeudalism. The five clans and their constituent families were gradually rearranged into five principalities headed by independent sovereign crown princes (known as Groſstocks) and supported by their landed noblemen (Kursvards). The reorganization significantly reduced the frequency of internal conflict within clans and allowed each clan to more effectively organize their military effort when fighting other clans or external adversaries.

Unified Realm

Occupying only a small, rocky, and forested region of the Eonedíc realms, the Valahns turned to the seas as merchants early in their existence as a centralized clan. Gradually, they constructed an extensive trade network with neighboring kingdoms and became master shipwrights. By the 13th century, Doundain, the capital city of the Valahns, was among the wealthiest port cities in south-central Liberalia. In the early 14th century utilizing the burgeoning Doundain coffers, Heinrich Adelhardsoan, crown prince of the Valahns, raised a massive army to forcibly unify the realm, pacifying the Laidire and Ceoneds and consolidating the Sumahain clan into his own line through political marriage. Although the politically savvy Prince Heinrich died before he could see his life's work come to fruition, his nephew, Cesan Pittersoan, defeated Aike of Iasgieria at the Battle of Goderecht Fortress, bringing the entire country under the Valahn banner. In the years following his ascension to the throne, Cesan attempted to forge a national identity, but had considerable difficulty managing belligerent subservient clans, particularly the descendants of Iasgieria, and Valahandia would teeter on the verge of collapse from entropy for practically its entire existence thereafter.

Mercantile Empire

From the 15th century on, Valahandia established a number of overseas colonies, primarily in Hesperida. Some were only the size of a single port city, while others, such as the Royal Colony of Iustitia, covered huge swaths of land.

Culture

Language

From the kingdom's inception until around AD 1600, Célas, the native tongue of the Eonedítes, served as the primary language of Valahandia, though different regions of the kingdom spoke vastly different dialects. By the 17th century, however, English, the lingua-franca of central Liberalia, gradually supplanted Célas. Due to high lexical and syntactic similarity between Célas and English, many rural regions of Valahandia were slow to transition to English, but even these regions gradually phased out their ancestral language in the early 19th century.

Religion

The pre-Valahandian Eonedíc peoples worshiped a pantheon of pagan deities often associated with natural phenomena such as the winter, the rains, the sky, and death, along with local nature spirits. Evidence of ritual sacrificing and skewering of livestock, probably facilitated by seers, dates to as early as the first century BC, but seems to have quickly fallen out of practice as the Eonedíc peoples made their southern migration in the first millennium. Stefan the Evangelist, a Catholic missionary sent to the Valahandia region around 920 AD, was not the first person to come to the Eonedíc peoples preaching the word of God, but he seems to have been the most persuasive. Meeting with Chieftain Craheil, a forefather of Cesan I and head of the Sumahaín clan, Stefan convinced Craheil to convert to Catholicism and baptized him in the nearby Albikalt River in 928 AD. Catholicism quickly took root in the area following Craheil's conversion, but many pagan superstitions and traditions carried on for decades and even centuries.

Colonies

Colony	Est.	Independence	Age of Colony	Today part of
Royal Colony of Ulinaria	1417	1760	343 years	Lauchenoiria, Ulinaria
Royal Colony of Iustitia	1529	1798	269 years	Libertas Omnium Maximus, Iustitia
Royal Colony in Narkim	1611	1727	116 years	Wosteaque, Narkim
Royal Colony in Mariso	1544	1674	130 years	Wosteaque, Mariso