Commandery of Axiov
The Commandery of Axiov was a predominantly Old Axiovy successor state to the Fifth Chotarian Empire and, initially, a tributary and kunentsydom of the Secote Empire, centred on the former Chotarian provinces of Askam and Narad.
The Commandery originated in the collapse of the Chotarian Empire in the middle of the 11th century. In Nollonger 1047, in the midst of protracted mutinies over unpaid wages in the wake of the failed Chotarian defence of the western Rashimic Littoral against the invading Secote Empire that year, the Axiovy general Perdor overthrew the Lacrean fejedelem of Askam and extracted an oath of submission from the hierarchy of the temple-court at Ūrsolāk, arrogating the title to himself and expelling the local temple-censors. Perdor defeated an expeditionary force sent by Emperor Lēl VII in the summer of 1048, and with the invasion of Axiov by the Secotes in 1049 he put himself at the disposal of the Secote Empire, offering tribute and submission. Spytihnev the Conqueror invested him as commander and kunentsy later that year, inaugurating the distinctive fusion of Secote and Ishtinist political practice that prevailed both in Axiov and in the Commandery of Tormetia to its north. In 1050, Perdor defeated a second Chotarian attempt to recover the region, and annexed the province of Narad to his south, extending his authority to the southern coast of modern Terophan.
In contrast to the neighbouring Heghta Kingdom, Perdor and his successors did not assume the imperial title, instead reserving ritual veneration to the Secote Emperors who claimed to occupy the Chotarian throne. Nonetheless, having survived the breakup of the Secote Empire in the 1120s, Axiov's ties of submission became increasingly nominal as they paid homage to a succession of Secote suzerains to the east, beginning with the Yaromirovids in the 1120s. The final tribute mission to Kozrat was sent in 1214, after which the Commandery became, effectively, entirely independent, and while veneration of little-known figureheads in the east continued in the temples, the spread of Siriash undermined the significance of this weakened imperial cult.
To a large extent, Axiov was run as a military dictatorship. Apart from a thin and usually remote caste of Secote High Nobles, mostly dissolved into the local military nobility by the 13th century, the kunentsy-fejedelem presided over a fractious set of Axiovy warlords, to whom the remaining civilian administration of the temple hierarchy was entirely subordinate. Hereditary succession was infrequent, and weak rulers were often overthrown. Despite financial demands, however, urban life continued to flourish on the coast, and admitted new waves of Rasheem immigration in the 12th and 13th centuries. Axiov was finally conquered and dismantled by a new invasion from the steppe led by Ostromir the Great in 1333–4, becoming the core of the southern half of the Tirfatsevid Empire.