Board of Secrets
In many parts of Outer Joriscia and wider Vaestdom, a Board of Secrets (Lacrean: ⰕⰉⰕⰍⰑⰞ ⰀⰔⰕⰀⰎ, titkoš astal, literally "secretary table"; also left untranslated as Astal in Ellish) is a council that exercises administrative and financial authority over a particular region, city, or port of trade. The Board's principal modern functions are economic, involving the disbursement of public funds, support of local enterprise, and facilitation of private investment; they thus combine the functions of local councils, public banks, and regional stock exchanges. Boards are mainly associated with Lacre and its historical influence. In Lacre today, in the imperial framework established by Cirran I in the 1960s, Boards are strictly subsidiary to the provincial fejedelem (governor); from their emergence in the period of the Combination of Lacre and throughout Lacrean history, however, Boards have routinely claimed de facto and de jure privileges of autonomy from the rulers of Lacre and their regional representatives. Besides Lacre, Boards are also an important part of administrative hierarchies and local politics in eastern Outer Joriscia, such as in Zemay and Lefdim. Governmental bodies inspired by and based on the Boards, such as the Monition Board of Terophan, have been established across most other Vesnite countries.
History
The Boards arose originally as governing committees of the Lacrean merchant elite known as the bīrōk in the late 13th century: the first document referring to a city's "esteemed secretaries", that is, those in charge of the city's administrative secrets, dates to 1315, and the metonymic term astal or "board" becomes regular by the end of the century. In this capacity, the Boards became ever more closely involved in the facilitation of the burgeoning late medieval Lacrean trade. In the early Neritsovid period, while the Combination still functioned, the wealth and power of the Boards allowed the physical Board buildings of the major Lacrean cities to undergo a remarkable expansion, often accommodating new Schools and public gathering places. By the beginning of the 17th century, wealthy individual citizens regularly used the auspices of the Board in cities such as Shalovar and Kozrat to canvass investment for local and colonial enterprises. Even as they declined as political institutions, then, the Boards increasingly became the centres of economic power in Lacre.
After the dismemberment of the League following the Eternal Treaty of Nardash, the Boards remained in place, though stripped of much of their traditional executive authority. Following the decline and fall of the Neritsovid empire, however, the Boards were mobilised by the Lacrean Graves as a source of power and restored to many of their old privileges; in their new capacity they played a proximate role in the incipient Joriscian industrial revolution of the middle to late 18th century. This period, lasting up to the Great Peninsular War and the emergence of the Tharamann monetary regime, marked a high-point of co-operation between the Boards and the central Lacrean authorities, as the Grave and then the Emperor assumed the position of a powerful landholding investor and noble-profiteer in his own right.
The concentration of economic interests attained in the local Boards by the end of the 17th century allowed them increasingly to act both as public investors in their own right and as mediators for the far-reaching development projects of the Graves. In the 1760s, Oktar Matolchy, who later became the first Chotarian Emperor, established for the first time regional Boards not tied to specific cities in order to direct the extraction of coal and iron in the eastern Varudine foothills; these Boards, including the Imperial Bank and Board of Zaladar, for a long time the largest non-colonial commercial enterprise in Outer Joriscia, were represented at the new imperial capital of Kozrat and sought investment from across and beyond the country. Lacre would also install and regularise Boards as local administrative and economic bodies in its imperial possessions such as Zemay and Lefdim.
Influence
During and after the Lacrean Ascendancy, the Boards were an object of positive interest to Vaestic political thinkers. Nostalgist currents viewed them as a plausible alternative to the centralised power of the Neritsovid emperors, while the centralising administrators of the High Radiance saw in them an efficient mechanism for transmitting the power of the Banner-State. Spytihnev the Arbitrator, Terophatic Emperor from 1816 to 1840, introduced the institution to Terophan as part of his administrative reforms, establishing the first Monition Board at Axopol in 1821. While separated from the empire's provincial structure, the Terophatic Boards were not, however, afforded the political privileges of their Lacrean counterparts, and have remained subject to strict imperial oversight under a narrow interpretation of the Nardash Treaty. Local councils based on Boards were also introduced to Kiy in the Sublimation period of the late 19th century, and remain the principal administrative agencies in urban areas of that country—though, as in Terophan, their autonomy is highly circumscribed.
Primitive native Vesnite convert polities in areas such as Adorac or the Lestrian Neutral Zone have also rationalised their conciliar governments and deliberative functions into bodies based on Boards of Secrets.