Agreement at Mudry
The Agreement at Mudry (Hártal Samkomulag í Múdri) was an interordinate treaty entered into in 1802 at Mudry, a settlement in the far east of Terophatic Serania, between representatives of the Terophatic territorial government and its counterpart in Siursk Serania. While the Agreement was, in its essence, a response put together on the ground to deal with immediate circumstances, its acceptance as a modus vivendi by the metropolitan governments in Axopol and Ostari has seen it become a key underpinning of the framework of interordinate relations between Terophan and Siurskeyti.
Origins and agreement
The Seranian Treaties of the period between 1760 and 1790 had, in the main, closed off the main areas of disagreement between the Messenian colonial powers in Serania Major over the boundaries between their claims; however, the treaties made no provision for interaction with Joriscian powers – mainly Terophan, Azophin and Agamar – where their own claims abutted on Messenian-claimed lands. This became a continuing issue in the affected areas, in northern Felicia between Azophin and Savam, and in the lands around the eastern coast of the Coactian Sea between Siurskeyti and Zeppengeran on one side and Terophan on the other. The area to the east of the Mirsky Isthmus at the southern end of the Coactian – a stretch of land, 185 kilometres (115 miles) at its narrowest point, which joins the two Seranian subcontinents – became an ongoing flashpoint between Terophatic and Siursk settlers in the last decade of the 18th century.
It must be said that, in terms of the resources which the two metropoles were theoretically capable of bringing to bear, the “war” between Siursk and Terophatic Serania (which neither side ever sought to dignify with a name) was a sideshow at best, and an irritant at worst. Much of the area under dispute was then dense jungle (and a large part of it still is); actual presence on the ground – a key requirement of Messenian law on the question – was limited, and much of the actual fighting in the early years of the conflict consisted of raids on isolated homesteads and the looting of domesticated livestock. However, this did not preclude the loss of lives, with a combined death toll on both sides of almost 100 in the three-year period 1795-98.
With the local population increasing – particularly from the Terophatic side – pressure was increasing for some action short of outright war which would settle the disputes; and, perhaps unusually, reason prevailed enough on both sides for their leaders to seek a negotiated solution. The two sides finally agreed to meet face to face at Mudry, the largest town in the disputed region. In 1802 it was home to less than 3,000 people; the two delegations took over Mudry’s only hotel, and used its ballroom as their meeting chamber.
Although some defined trails existed in the region, an agreement was eventually reached by which these would not be used as boundaries. Instead it was agreed that the border would be established at points along these trails “no more than one week’s travel from any existing settlement”, and would be fixed at an equidistant point between two settlements in any instances where claims overlapped. This is the main reason for the “bulge” pushed into Siursk Serania at the easternmost extremity of Terophatic Serania; Varash, the settlement at the centre of the Varash Circle, then marked the easternmost point of definitive habitation by Terophatic settlers. With some minor variations, this border remains in force today; and the Agreement was finally signed on 25 Metrial 1802.
Response
It should be stressed that neither the Siursk nor the Terophanes had the authority to enter into a settlement which would be binding on its government; and while the Siursk group might have anticipated at least a reasonable hearing from authorities in the home country, their Terophatic counterparts had no such assurance. However, while such an accord might well have been dismissed out of hand twenty years before during the tyrannical rule of Krasimir I – not for nothing called “the Unloved” – his successor and namesake Krasimir II was an entirely different proposition. During his reign (1785–1809) the younger Krasimir undertook a substantial revision of Terophan’s diplomatic practices; and while something like the Agreement at Mudry was unorthodox and frowned upon, the emperor was pragmatic enough not to dismiss it out of hand. Reports from Serania of the agreement were not received until late Dominy 1802, but Krasimir gave it a guarded welcome, charging his subjects on the ground to “stand with a watchful gaze, for even people who love the truth as these ones claim may lie and believe it to be truth if it suits their needs”.
The Siursk response was similarly one of cautious acceptance, born to some fair extent out of unfamiliarity – Siursk contact with Terophan had hitherto been almost entirely the result of mercantile contacts in the Medius Sea as the easterners sought to secure trade routes westward towards Ascesia. Much of that had been guardedly, and on occasions actively, hostile as the Siursk balanced their long-standing proprietorial interest in the Medius against a growing concern that the Terophatic fleet possessed a recognisable technological edge.
The Agreement in practice
For all its significance, the Agreement has been tested only little in the two centuries since it came into being; the most severe test in the period to 1900 was probably in the attempted Agamari capture of the Gæseyjar in 1857–58. In this instance Terophatic base facilities on the mainland initially refused to lend any assistance to the Siursk in their plans to retake the islands, with their commanders unwilling to act without orders against fellow Vesnites. Terophan’s then emperor Zdravoslav unbent enough to offer some logistic support, but went no further.
The Agreement came into greater public prominence in Messenia as a result of the actions of Terophatic emperor Vsevolod I in convening the Congress of Kethpor in 1959; Siurskeyti was at that time the only significant Messenian state with which Terophan had diplomatic links, and the frequently-stated position of the Siursk on the absence of, and need for, a properly-functioning corpus of interordinate law made them valuable allies in mobilising support within Messenia for Vsevolod’s initiative. Ostari did, indeed, come enthusiastically on board for such an idea, although some commentators have since observed that Vsevolod himself was much less supportive of the notion – at least to the extent that it ran counter to the Pax Terophatica which he was building in the east – but was allowing the Siursk to project their own desires onto the project for his own ends.
The existence of an accord has not prevented some significant disagreements between Ostari and Axopol. Perhaps the most serious of these occurred during the early post-war period, as the Terophatic Ascendancy raised alarms even as far away as western Messenia over malevolent intent by Vsevolod. The efforts of Terophan in developing and mounting a kinetic strike capacity in low-Arden orbit were a particular concern; and reports from Siursk sources suggest that a diplomatic incident was narrowly avoided when Sálleit Kaupland, then thár of Siurskeyti and a voluble opponent of the militarisation of space, sought to raise the issue with Vsevolod in person during a state visit to Terophan in 1987. More recently, some terse exchanges took place in 2015 following an incident in which the Siursk light cruiser Tvímælalaust was “escorted” away from Terophatic waters by two patrol ships north-west of the island of Zemer, a Terophatic possession in the southern Sunnar Ocean, after straying into the area when its navigation systems failed.
Attitudes
It should be noted that, at bottom, the Agreement is one of mutual non-aggression rather than an actual alliance, as has sometimes been claimed by outsiders (and, occasionally and where beneficial, by the participants). From the Terophatic side this attitude is, at least in part, rooted in the country’s Vaestic faith; a common practice of zaconic law is to accord, at best, a lesser stratum of rights to non-Vesnite “ignorants” – a state of affairs going back at least as far as the Edict of Oblition laid down in 1607 by the Neritsovid emperor Lyudodar against the empire’s Sirian population. Siursk suspicion of Terophatic intent, as with other Vaestic countries, stems in part from the practice of rabtat in Vaestic societies, which is generally decried as slavery by Arlaturi, and the belief that no truly just society could condone this (although rabtat as an institution is more nuanced than either pure chattel slavery or debt-bondage – the latter, as kvöðin, being practiced by the Siur themselves in times past).