Encyclopaedia Ardenica

Aborovid Confederacy

The Aborovid Confederacy, formally the State of the Left and Right Flanks (Lutoborian: Dvi Storony, Viysko Dvoh Storony), was a Secote polity established in the early 14th century that claimed control over much of today's Lutoborsk. Something of a historiographical construct, it is usually held to have ended with the investment of Bronimir the Young as Standard-Bearer of the Wide North and his assumption of the title of Vozhd in 1636. However, as a geographical and political subdivision of the Lutoborsk, and as a set of institutions, the 'Flank State' continued to exist formally into the 20th century.

State of the Left and Right Flanks
1319–1636
Flag of Aborovid Confederacy
Aborovid left.png
Left and Right Banners
The Aborovids c. 1400      Confederate lands     Undughu cities     Severnyy Kingdom     Khuikh Quests
The Aborovids c. 1400      Confederate lands     Undughu cities     Severnyy Kingdom     Khuikh Quests
CapitalJaborsk
Religion
Siriash
GovernmentConfederacy
High King 
• 1319-1331
Dorohodar I
• 1636
Bronimir the Young
History 
• Establishment by Dorohodar I
1319
• Dissolution
1636
Preceded by		 Succeeded by
Lutoborovid Confederacy
New Despotism
Prince of the Khuikhs
Polcovodate Lutoborsk
Severnyy Kingdom
Komandje Kingdom

History

14th century

The Confederacy was a product of the last great wave of eastern nomad invasions that also produced the Tirfatsevid Empire to the south. The Aborovids were a cadet branch of the Lutoborovids installed by the Lutoborovid Confederacy to rule over the Kesruba desert in the 1190s, but by the beginning of the 14th century were menacing the Lutoborovids of the Dovhyi Tableland with an independent confederacy of their own, especially after a breakdown in relations with Lutoborovid High King Derzhymir; they now set out to claim the Lutoborovid throne for themselves. Having put Derzhymir's successors on the defensive in repeated raids and conquests of border regions in the 1300s, in 1313 Dorohodar I invaded the Tableland itself, and by 1319 received the surrender of the last Lutoborovid king Mechyslav III.

In its first decades on the Tableland the Aborovids fought the Izyamirovid Wars against the Izyamirovids, the Lutoborovid Princes of the Khuikhs who attempted to retake the Tableland with the resources of the Khuikh Quests. They also invaded the New Despotism on several occasions to secure tribute and allegiance in Unscany. The Izyamirovids were defeated by the 1350s, but when the Aborovid High Kings attempted to exercise their powers of redistributing appanages among the knyazy and prevent the consolidation of fiefdoms, the Hulyaysonovids led an uprising known as the War of the Appanage in 1367–9, securing the autonomy of the Severnyy Kingdom and a broader system of Sanguine Oaths that limited royal power. In terms of status, the High Kings did benefit from recognition as Despots by Unscany after the Casserole War in 1382–5, which dissolved the New Despotism.

Although the Confederacy enjoyed broad hegemony over much of what is today central Lutoborsk, it exercised this hegemony primarily through pledges of suzerainty on the part of smaller entities, and occasional interventions via a representative 'governor'. A native Secote contempt for urban life developed over the first century of the Confederacy into an affected refusal to set foot in cities or have direct dealings with city-dwellers, allowing the cities of the interior to develop their own autonomous governments provided they pay tribute. While the Unscans pledged their allegiance, it was likewise a diplomatic formality, and the Aborovids were far less capable of punishing them should they shirk on tribute. Further south no submission was extracted from Great Doyotia altogether. Thus even in the earliest period, the 'Confederacy' itself in the sense of the Secote knyaz nobility and their nomadic clients remained a largely extramural phenomenon.

15th century

From the very beginning different subgroups and families within the Aborovid elite were forced to compete for positions both as Tableland lords and envoys to tributaries, but with the dissipation of outside threats this became much more pronounced in the 15th century. Even the reservation and redistribution of offices through the Sanguine Oaths failed to keep up with the inexorably growing Aborovid house; individual 'lineages' within the Confederacy soon emerged to tighten their grip on offices in particular regions, and buy off their junior members with land grants to form an early group of knyazchiks. At the same time these lineages conspired against each other for power and advantage at the Confederal level. In the 1450s court intrigues led to the usurpation and murder of several High Kings, and the instability was only ended by the accession of Volodimir II.

Volodimir II established the primacy of the lineage of the Yoromirovids, from whom High Kings were now exclusively drawn. He, and his nephew and successor Volodimir III, asserted their power through reordering the lineages within the Confederacy, designating junior ones as bound to serving in governorships to limit their ambitions. This marks the conventional beginning of the gradual sedentarisation of the Aborovids in the Investing Movement, although it was in effect merely continuing the consolidation of domains already well underway prior, only now to the particular favour of the Yoromirovids. Ultimately, on the Tableland, the two Volodimirs were never able to escape the restrictions placed on them by the knyazy in terms of direct powers exercised. Royal power benefited much more from the Yoromirovids exercising their despotate of Unscan Kothyn in a personal union, which provided the resources to quash several knyaz revolts and sustain the Yoromirovid ascendancy, as well as to put the far north under vassalage through the restoration of the Prince of the Khuikhs, now seated in Ruda, in 1489.

16th century

In 1514 Yaroslav I attempted to increase his control of Unscany by the Urban Persecutions, an expedition in the name of suppressing the growing Vesnite population there and upholding Siriash. But this was fiercely resisted by Kothyn, and in the fiasco the Unscans received their own privileges in the Sanguine Oaths assuring their independence from the west. This heralded a breakdown in the Yoromirovid state as defiance of the High Kings soon rippled to the Tableland. The knyazy, having adopted urban political norms and structures, acquired abilities to revive their intrigues without divesting themselves of interest in it. This period also saw clearer divisions emerge between the 'Two Flanks' (in the sense of a geographically and legally Secote entity) and other constituent parts of the nascent Lutoborian political union, many of which sought to redefine their relationship away from formal subordination to the knyazy state as a whole (which was apparently disintegrating) and towards a more purely dynastic link focused on the person of the High King.

After Vaestism was adopted by some of the knyazes, Aborovid intrigues developed into a sectarian as well as regional conflict. Individual knyazes established alliances with Unscans and Doyotians based on their religious affiliation, coordinating the Confederacy's different associates with capabilities putting the High Kings themselves to shame. In this process, the Banner of the Wide North passed into the custody of Vesnite princes, and vehement disputes within northern Vaestism were correspondingly imported alongside a sense of urgency for Sirians. The Khuikh Quests were also developed as a reserve of resources to be employed in intrigues in the Aborovid heartland, thus becoming became much more interested in Aborovid affairs than before, but also even less subordinated and in outright conflict. The High Kings gradually lost control over feuding between the knyazy, which erupted into a major civil war in the 1590s with the Lesser War of Enlightenment and the Unjust War. This ended in a major Sirian victory, and in the course of sweeping through Unscany allowed the High Kings to reclaim their authority as Despots to the east coast.

17th century

The Sirian triumph proved short-lived: once Mirokrai began effectively intervening in the region the Vesnites would first triumph in the Great War of Enlightenment in 1636, installing Bronimir III (“Bronimir the Young”) as High King, and conventionally ending the Aborovid era. The change to the knyazy state, however, was much more cosmetic; from 1641 to 1656 the throne reverted to Sirians in the First Interregnum, and it was only with the end of the War of the Shackles in 1665 that Lyubomir abolished the Sanguine Oaths and other Confederal institutions to establish an avowedly Vesnite state.

Still, Lyubomir's victory was largely secured by the establishment of the leading Vesnite lineages in specific domains, which continued to quarrel over religious proclivities. While the 'warring states' of the 16th century were bygone, princely tensions erupted again into the Antiprophetic Rebellion of 1684–5. But Vladibor I's rise to power in 1688 ushered in a long period of solidarity driven by fear of the emerging landed knyazchiks and the Tardy War, lasting until the arrival of the general Vesnite crisis (the Crown Wars) in Lutoborsk in the 1730s. The War of the Banner (1734–9) ended with apparent victory for the reactionary knyazy, but the pro-knyazchik policy of Vladibor the Great meant it was to be the last hurrah of the late Aborovid order. The death of most of the leading knyazy at the Battle of Laukuna (1772) resulted in their final destruction as a major political force.

Politics

The Confederacy began with much the same classical Secote political organisation as its counterparts elsewhere: a culturally and ethnically distinct High Nobility descended from the original conquerors holding large independent fiefdoms (storony) ruled over a large and heterogenous subject population with its own institutions and political forms. The High Kings' powers were limited by the Sanguine Oaths, most importantly ceding their rights of incision, meaning they had no imperial claim to dispose of land or remove or appoint Kunentsys. Indeed, this was one of the few formal checks on a ruler's powers anywhere in Outer Joriscia. Diplomacy was conducted in the name of 'the two Flanks' – the two ceremonial orders of aristocrats distinguished by their positioning in the formal order of battle – rather than of the High Kings themselves.

Confederacy

The 'Confederacy' itself was not a territorial but a family unit consisting of members of the Aborovid 'clan' or 'segment' (viysko), who secured their claim to power by their Lutoborovid pedigree but otherwise enjoyed that power exclusively. The sense of common ancestry and familial membership was maintained throughout this period by extensive (and almost exclusive) intermarriage between the relatively small elite and occasionally adoption of promising figures, in keeping with practice in southern Outer Joriscia. The large Aborovid clan formed the senior political elite of the domains under their control – it was only members of the family who bore the title of knyaz – and maintained a complex internal stratification amongst themselves which emphasised the authority of seniority either of age or achievement. This consistent sense of the 'Confederacy' being a family business initially gave the Aborovids an unusual and enduring unity as an elite in the face of outside threats, but the combination of checks on power such as the Sanguine Oaths and growing competition for offices and privileges would cause it to dissolve into a broader galactic polity or diplomatic system as 'Confederates' became more rulers of their own domains during the Investing Movement.

List of High Kings

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