Combination of Dreams
Combination of Dreams ସ୍ଵପ୍ଣଐକୀକରଣନା Svapnaikīkaraṇa | |||||||
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| 1249–1796 | |||||||
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| Capital | Gate of Light Cataphon (de facto, 1716–1796) | ||||||
| Common languages | Serovitic (administrative and ritual language) | ||||||
| Religion | Bhramavada | ||||||
| Government | Respublican empire (1249–1341) Interordinate community (1341–1716) Military junta (1716–1796) | ||||||
| Pattern Emperor | |||||||
• 1249–1253 | Jayaprakash Abhimaanin | ||||||
• 1253–1279 | Jaimini Jayaprakasha | ||||||
• 1335–1341 | Suvarchasi | ||||||
| History | |||||||
• Assembly of the Pattern | 1249 | ||||||
| 1341 | |||||||
| 1400s | |||||||
| 1664 | |||||||
| 1796 | |||||||
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The Combination of Dreams (Serovitic: ସ୍ଵପ୍ଣଐକୀକରଣନା, Svapnaikīkaraṇa) was a vast Ascesian political formation centred in modern Adorac, which prevailed in various forms for over half a millennium from the conquests of Jayaprakash Abhimaanin and his daughter Jaimini Jayaprakasha in 1231–49 until the Storming of the Gate of Light by the cleric-warlord Nikhil Desai in 1796. The Combination existed as an imperial state centred on the northeast of the Bay of Hawea from 1249 to 1341; as an immense, diverse social arrangement regulated by a comparatively thin central administration until the mid 17th century; and, under the pressure of exogenous economic influence and environmental and social catastrophe, a diminishing but partially centralised confederation of Pattern Fiefdoms that survived until the abolition of the remaining effective political authority of the Gate of Light in 1796. Many of the institutions of the Combination survive to this day in Adorac, and its broader social, intellectual, and economic legacies remain felt throughout its former territories.
History
Establishment and rule of the Pattern Emperors (1231–1341)
The immediate origins of the Combination lie in the emporium city of Sharadpur, whose realm flourished from the late 11th century on the northeastern coast of the Bay of Hawea and along the lower Para Nadi. The extension of Sharadpuri influence further up the Para Nadi in the 1180s had brought into its ambit a number of sophisticated military powers further to the northeast, especially the principality of Bhagadsol. It was from Bhagadsol that the mercenary commander Jayaprakash, later titled Jayaprakash Abhimaanin, began his rise to a powerful position in Sharadpur's internal politics in the 1220s—originally in the employ of the city government, which was endeavouring to stabilise its authority in a climate of relative economic deterioration and increasing popular dissent. After long years of disputes with a city that could ill afford to jeopardise its protection, Jayaprakash turned on his sponsors, and in 1230–1, drawing on the support of Bhagadsol, the peasantry of the Sharadpuri hinterland, and the arms-bearing class within Sharadpur itself, Jayaprakash and his daughter the priestess Jaimini Jayaprakasha led a broad movement to overthrow the city elders in an effective coup d'état and install Jayaprakash as its ruler. With Sharadpur at his command, Jayaprakash moved to consolidate his position by directing the army to the conquest of further territories. This he accomplished in a spectacular series of campaigns over the next two decades, which brought many of the densely populated petty Serovian territories further southeast under his control. During these conquests, Jaimini remained as his regent in Sharadpur, practicing effective power and lending him religious and political support.
Despite the obviously warlike nature of their coming to power, Jayaprakash and Jaimini were scrupulous in their religious observances, and took care to afford their every action a legitimate ideological justification. As the scale of their ambition grew, however, it soon became obvious that there was no precedent wholly fit to describe the pious work that Jayaprakash was undertaking: the Bhramavadic faith deserved a suitable political reconstruction. The work of effecting this reform was ascribed, at least in name, to Jaimini, though the preponderance of evidence collected from the directly surviving fragments of their work suggests she was supported in fact by a range of scholars who would become the Combination's incipient clerisy. The propagandistic, eschatological account they prepared of the conquest was the Combination of Dreams, a prophetic work that came through primarily oral transmission to give its title to the empire as a whole. The Combination presented Jayaprakash as the final unifier of the realm of darkness-below-truth, charged with the weaving of the dreams of humanity, represented by the divided pattern fiefdoms that populated the world, into a single pattern. Thus, in 1249, Jayaprakash consulted with oneiromancers and determined upon the establishment of a new capital on the isle of Rajeshdveep named the Gate of Light; with its foundation, he declared himself Manipulator of the Single Pattern—a term later translated as Pattern Emperor. Not long after his ascension, however, in 1253, Jayaprakash died, and Jaimini succeeded him to rule as Pattern Empress in her own right.
Supported by a new class of powerful military commanders who had risen in the service of her father, Jaimini oversaw a series of new conquests that extended the fledgling core of the Combination around the Bay of Hawea to the southeast, and then a first foray into the grasslands to the northwest, allying there with the semi-nomadic Hapori confederation to crush the Nauri Dynasts further southeast and the Talaga on the northwestern Hawean coast. The imperial era inaugurated by Jayaprakash and Jaimini proved, however, comparatively short-lived. Jaimini was followed by her younger sister Manjusha Jayaprakasha, who ruled from 1279 to 1290 and secured further conquests to the west, and Manjusha in turn by the ephemeral reign of Jaimini's son, Dhyaneshwar, in 1290–2. With Dhyaneshwar's death the rule of Jayaprakash's dynasty came to an end, as the throne was usurped by the general Ahivijayin. Meanwhile, from 1299, governance of the west increasingly devolved to the powerful Hapori warlord Mairo, whose interest in the politics of the Combination was limited mainly to the security of the vital trade in food and luxury goods between the Hapori and the cities of the Hawean coast.
Between 1292 and 1341, the imperial seat changed hands eight times between a succession of great military commanders. At the same time, local political arrangements in the Combination's heartland were increasingly monopolised by a class of wealthy traders and priests known as the mudrapati, who gained central representation through the coterie of priests at the new capital known as the Servitors of the Gate of Light. The disconnect between the interests of the mudrapati, which were spread across the Combination, and the political authority of the military, would determine the course of the Combination over the following centuries. The Servitors now displaced the Pattern Emperors, issuing regulations with the goal of maintaining the Combination as an open economy, culturally unified under the Bhramavadic prophecy established by Jaimini. By the year 1341, the last Pattern Emperor, Suvarchasi, had died, and the office had fallen largely into irrelevance. Co-opted Nauri houses ruled in the west, and larger states fell under the growing sway of the Combination further afield. The mudrapati to the east, largely in Serovian mudrapur cities whose urban governments had been dismantled by the early Pattern Emperors, now increasingly relied on the appointment of their allies and representatives as prefects by the Gate of Light.
Covenant period (1341–c. 1500)
In the summer of 1341, some months after the assassination of Suvarchasi in Metrial, the Servitors of the Gate of Light came to an arrangement with Mairo on the one hand, now long ensconced in his position as commander of the western expanse, and the prefects of the eastern mudrapurs on the other, in the so-called Covenant of the Orange Orchard, which—supposedly temporarily—suppressed the title of Pattern Emperor. The Servitors would thus assume the responsibility of the Pattern themselves, and the practice of devolution of political authority to local rulers would be formalised in their investiture by the Gate of Light. The Pattern Emperors thus ruled for only a century, and for less than half of that time as a hereditary dynasty: the impending prophecies of Jaimini remained unfulfilled, and seem to have soon transformed in the retelling from a religious account of an ongoing conquest to a legendary narrative and mystical prediction of the future.
With the end of the era of the Pattern Emperors, the character of the Combination—and the means by which it expanded its authority—changed radically. The death of Suvarchasi was followed in the short term by fierce competition between the empire's military hegemons, who lorded, in theory, over territories that were themselves far larger than any of the regional kingdoms before the Combination. Spread over such an expansive territory, however, this comparatively small group of captains was increasingly eclipsed by the parties of the Orange Orchard—the Gate of Light, the Hapori, and the cleric-merchants. Nothing like the great campaigns of conquest sustained by Jayaprakash and his successors would be seen again after the 14th century. Expansion would come, instead, through primarily peaceful means: as other Ascesian powers came increasingly to depend on trade with the Combination as a gargantuan economic assemblage, its presence was felt through the immense market that formed from these ties, with common rituals, regulations, policies, and rights afforded to merchants being adopted in the name of embracing Jaimini's vision of unity. In this new environment, business done under the auspices of the mudrapati stretched from Tranoroa to the Gulf of Serrinea; semi-integrated powers such as the Nus Bata Empire upheld the power and reach of the Combination.
There were, however, religious challenges against the interpretation put forth by the Covenant. In the 15th century the Maheshvaad sect demanded that a new Pattern Emperor be revealed after decades of the Covenant's interregnum, stirring up an uprising among the Hapori known as the Mahish heresy, a bloody conflict not ended until the Mahishi's destruction in the grasslands in 1440. Following this, the Sabhian Unity began a more intense rivalry with the Combination known as the Collectors' Contest, as the two empires contended for their claims to Bhramavadic world government. The response of the Combination was the Agnostic Affirmation, a religious movement in which the deferral of pattern unification was elevated into the doctrine of Agnosticism, which now allowed the Combination as an ideal to penetrate peripheral regions at the popular level. The Agnostic dogma also outlined a clear project of social reorganisation to order the patterns; new policies led to massive population growth and the rise of handicraft industry. The Combination's economy now gained much in breadth and depth, shifting from a mere trade network to something revolving around mass production proto-industry held together by efficient traders, while the mudrapati spearheaded its further expansion. As Sabhia collapsed in the 16th century, and the Wars of Dissection destroyed western rulers' attempts to challenge the mudrapati, the Agnostic order emerged unchallenged. The political centre of gravity of the Combination thus concomitantly shifted further west, from the Para Nadi to the delta of the Mangere River.
Golden age of the Gate of Light (c. 1500–1664)
The era between 1500 and the Great Flood of 1664 marked the golden age of the Combination. In this period, the social and economic precedence of the Gate of Light was recognised, to varying degrees, across the better part of the entire Ascesian continent; Serovian traders plied the central routes of the Medius and Messenic Seas, while visitors from Messenia and, later, Great Neritsia arrived in small but growing numbers in the Combination itself. The heartland of the Combination, particularly the Mangere Delta, rapidly garnered an exaggerated reputation as a land of ruby towers and cities of gold; the Combination as a whole encompassed a dizzying array of cultural and political units, brought together in varying degrees of integration through the Combination's interstitial administration (such as the Ministries) and the formal investiture of their leaders by the Servitors of the Gate of Light.
Rise of the Fiefdoms and decline of the Combination (1664–1796)
The Great Flood of the Mangere River in 1664 had devastating consequences for the core territories of the Combination. This episode, which saw the redirection of the river's course to the east, was less a single flood than the transformation of an entire provincial ecosystem: for centuries thereafter, the regions of Ajab and Chashatryana on the northern coast of the Bay of Hawea, previously a heartland of trade and maize cultivation, would be dominated by a stubbornly resistant complex of silt-laden marshlands. Resource shortages, the exogenous influence of colonialism, the rise of new techniques of political and military organisation, and environmental disasters following from the Combination's mismanagement of the new Mangere River complex, now combined to lethally weaken the Combination. For the remainder of the 17th century, the resources at the disposal of the Gate of Light and its loyal local clerics were rapidly expended on efforts to tame the Mengere River and to restore the Combination's favourable position in the world trade system, now eroded by the growth of colonialism and the gathering intrusion of trading interests from Messenia and Joriscia.
Under these pressures, the southwestern periphery rapidly frayed and was then lost entirely; the Tuwheranui grasslands were taken over by the Maramawhero, another millenarian uprising by the disgruntled nomads; and regional hegemons in the southwest endeavoured to stem a growing deflationary crisis by closing the west Hawean ports to foreign trade. By 1716, the Combination had become limited to the eastern half of modern Adorac, where a measure of stability was reintroduced only by the area's conquest in the First Calculator Intervention by the Prajnaganana, a relatively recently admitted Combination constituent based in modern Dimaja, which installed a government governing from Cataphon. The Ganana's own disintegration and withdrawal from Serovia would plunge this area into war as well, concluding in the installation of a military junta in Cataphon by 1752 with Tionastrian support, who centralised the governance of the area. These generals, however, were beholden to the parochial interests of the regions from which they raised their armies, and they were restricted by new developments in the political situation at the local level.
The disintegration and collapse of the Combination's economy through these various pressures wrought havoc on the mudrapati. From the late 17th century their authority was increasingly displaced throughout modern Adorac and further afield by uprisings of irins, warlords who came to power with the support of those peasants and urban labourers who had chafed under the regulations and enclosures pioneered by the merchants in the golden age. Constantly at the mercy of these mobs' demands in a respopular order, the irins usurped the priestly functions of the leaders previously invested by the Servitors of the Gate of Light, claiming to be Pattern Clerics reviving in their own hands the functions of the Pattern Emperor. If the Pattern of the realm of darkness-below-truth had fallen into disarray, its reconstruction would demand the participation of all: the Gate of Light could continue its governance only through those regulations the Clerics chose to accept. With the collapse of the Combination into warfare, this was becoming a very narrow category.
Warlordism, religious upheaval, and foreign intervention rapidly overwhelmed the Gate of Light. Many of the institutions of the Combination of Dreams still survived, but without practicing effective authority the Pattern could only be seen as in further distress, and even more cleric-warlords emerged with increasingly bold ambitions of restoring the unified order. Thus, it was paradoxically a man who sought to reunify the Combination who put an end, according to traditional historiography, to its classical form: Nikhil Desai, a warlord from the northern reaches of Adorac, who took the Gate of Light by force in 1796, as part of his conquests in the Nikhilian Wars. In this sense, the 'fall of the Combination' in 1796 was merely a symbol: in its ideals, the Combination survives to the present day; in its administrative content, it had fallen decades before.