Acquisition of Ondolu

The Acquisition of Ondolu was an agreement reached in 1771 between the governments of Azophin and Lacre for the transfer into Lacrean administration of a large, and for the most part sparsely inhabited, area of Serania Minor previously held under the remit of Azophin. The legality of the cession was argued over ferociously at the time and became one of the tinder-box incidents which fired up the Imperial War.

The question of who legally owned Joriscian possessions in Serania Minor – previously part of the Neritsovid realm – had not genuinely been addressed in the seventy years or so since the Great Imperial Restoration of 1701, for a number of reasons. The territories themselves were, in the main, held very tenuously – in many cases, actual boots on the ground extended for limited ranges beyond trading camps and small settlements – and assertions over them were in some respects polite legal fictions rather than genuine claims to possession. In the two to three decades prior to Ondolu, this looseness had been taken advantage of by groups seeking to remove themselves from the supervision of the homelands – the term “pirate states” which began to gain currency in this period spread to include not only the genuinely piratical groups in some areas, but also any community which claimed any real measure of autonomy either from the post-Neritsovid governments or the organised hierarchy of Vaestism. This loose grip, and the sheer distance from the Joriscian metropole, discouraged the home governments from doing much more than maintaining the status quo in Serania – all the more because the authorities of the states which were coalescing out of the Neritsovid wreckage were not always strong, and shoring up and stabilising matters at home was a much greater priority.

If there was a clear assertion of continuity from Great Neritsia, it lay with the Emperor of Terophan, who claimed the title of Emperor of the Vesnites and had seen that confirmed in principle by the Lethpol Covenant of 1735. By the late 1760s, however, separate claims by Azophin, Lacre and other post-Neritsovid polities had punched visible holes in that claim – and the agreement between the Azophine leadership under Boris Alevy and the ambitious Grave of Lacre Oktar Matolchy was an insult too far for Spytihnev III of Terophan. The Acquisition thus helped to detonate open war between Terophan and Lacre (with Azophin as a semi-detached ally of the latter). However, the war between 1771 and 1774 saw Terophan unable to back up its authority, with Spytihnev being shunted firmly aside late in 1773 and a peace settlement in the following year essentially surrendering to Matolchy almost everything which he had asserted at the beginning of the war. The agreement left the Seranias under the nominal authority of the Prysostaia and Vaestdom as a whole and, in practice, allowed for independent claims to be made. Matolchy leapt on this, firmly encouraging migration to the Ondolu cession in the ensuing years.