High Nobility
In Outer Joriscia, the term High Nobility (High Secote: ⰂⰟⰔⰑⰜⰉⰋ vysociji) refers to an aristocratic elite of Secote descent. The prototypical High Nobility are those of Great Neritsia, the universal Vaestic Empire, and its predecessor the Tirfatsevid Empire. Historically very prominent in the politics of those two polities and Great Neritsia's successor states, in most regions in Outer Joriscia they have now been reduced to irrelevance by demediatisation and the emergence of the New Estate. The term is occasionally applied to corresponding Secote elites elsewhere, such as the Knyazy of the Lutoborsk.
Post-conquest Secote elites
Although many of the customs today associated with the High Nobility as well as most of the most prominent lineages date specifically from the Tirfatsevid period, the story of the High Nobility in Outer Joriscia begins with the Secote conquest of Outer Joriscia in the early 11th century. The nomadic bands involved in the initial invasion, followed by opportunistic later arrivals, fanned out across the former territories of the Fifth Chotarian Empire. Those in the Chotarian heartland took advantage of the near-total collapse of the inter-urban order to establish an essentially predatory relationship with agrarian society, dividing up the land in typical kunentsy fashion in order to extract ožidomy tribute. It was the comparatively numerous Secote bands of these areas that provided the Secote Emperor's local plenipotentiary, the Steward of the Chotarians, and later after the breakdown of the Empire his ostensible successor in former Chotar, the Emperor of the Eastrons. In other areas where provincial political structures survived more or less intact, such as the Kunentsydom of Mirokrai (the former Maintenancy of Ağame) or the Commandery of Axiov, the Secotes inserted themselves into local political structures on various levels, setting themselves up as petty kings or autonomous clients of Chotarian successor states.
Although initially the Secotes were sharply linguistically, culturally and even physically distinct from the inhabitants of the regions they settled in, in most regions they gradually assimilated to the local population to a greater or lesser degree, producing distinctive groups of hybrid elites of which the prototypical example is the Pseudolacreans. This process was accelerated in the former Chotarian heartland by the resurgence of urban political life and the subsequent shift of the balance of power in favour of the emergent city-states of the Joriscian Lowlands, which led to the belated absorption of most of the Secotes into sedentary life. Although initially subordinate to the Bīrō mercantile classes and serving as purveyors of violence in pursuit of their political aims, in many cases these strongmen-for-hire found after a generation or two in the cities that they were perfectly capable of turning their swords on the Bīrōk if necessary and emerged as petty princes of various city-states. Elsewhere, notably in Agamar and parts of Gergotea, the process of integration was already complete by the time that the Pseudolacreans began to come inside the city walls and the Commanders and the Pseudogergotes were entirely intertwined with native elites.
In Tirfatsia
The political life of the western regions of the old Chotarian Empire survived the conquest of Chotar mostly intact, with two fairly centralised urban polities - the Commandery of Axiov and the Commandery of Tormetia - maintaining nearly uncontested and largely stable control over the former western provinces for almost three centuries after the arrival of the Secotes. Both these Commanderies were produced by native mutinies against Chotarian power which sided with the Secotes, which allowed indigenous dynasties to survive there largely untouched in a way entirely foreign to the post-Chotarian order in the eastern provinces. Although a thinly-spread post-Secote elite established themselves as Ožidomy collectors in the west, the relative depopulation of the interior compared to the prosperous Lacrean coastal plains meant that the majority sought to establish themselves there; after the collapse of the Secote Empire the Kunentsys of the two Commanderies were unable to muster the necessary military strength to resist their destruction or co-optation by the Commanders over the course of the 12th and 13th centuries, and had been almost totally assimilated by the turn of the 14th.
Most of the traditions and institutions characteristic of the High Nobility today can thus be traced not to the conquests of the mid 11th century but to the establishment of the sedentary Tirfatsevid state on the Rashimic Littoral by Ostromir the Great (r. 1331–62). The Tirfatsevids, new arrivals from the steppe, brought with them spoken Vulgar Secote, gave a new lease on life to literary High Secote, and re-established a form of Secote-style imperial rule on the continent for the first time in generations. They also brought with them elements of the cultural life of Inner Joriscia, including Zapovidy and other martial activities.
The Tirfatsevid state operated on Kunentsydom, albeit imposed to some extent on preexisting practices of land ownership. The Kunentsy, necessarily a member of the High Nobility, was in principle appointed by the Tirfatsevid Emperors to a strana ('province') as its military governor. He held this position at the Emperor's pleasure and could be dismissed – again in principle – at any time; the position was not automatically inherited. As Kunentsy, he was expected to provide a certain number of troops and a certain amount of money to his Emperor raised by means of the resources of the strana. He was also expected to maintain order and fulfil the basic functions of provincial government. The remainder of whatever he was able to eke out of the lands under his control was his to dispose of.
In practice, the stranas were treated as, and developed into, private fiefdoms. It was rare for the Emperors to be in a position where they could readily evoke their right to dismiss Kunentsys, particularly the chief landholders known as voivodes. There were, nonetheless, exceptions, and the Tirfatsevid courts occasionally made use of this privilege – an especially spectacular example being Miroslav I's appropriation of the fiefs of the rebellious southern nobility after the Cistormetian War. Through the amalgamation of Strany, intermarriage and the Secotisation of the ruling families of the Old Axiovy, the Tirfatsevid ruling families were consolidated as the Novemvirate, the heads of which conventionally bore the title of 'Voivode'.
It was under the Tirfatsevids that the clan system of the steppes was institutionalised as the Great House, with all the pomp and ceremony that post-Secote Outer Joriscia could muster. During the late Tirfatsevid period in particular, the Kunentsys themselves were increasingly absent from their territories, preferring life – along with their retinues – in the imperial capitals of Inetsograd and Axopol. Their control over their appointed deputies in the provinces was steadily reinforced over the late 14th and 15th centuries by the creation of various titles and House-internal offices bound together by marriage and formal adoption.
Great Neritsia
With the destruction of the Tirfatsevid Empire by Great Neritsia in the 1490s and the latter state's precipitous growth to encompass all of southern Outer Joriscia, the institution of the High Nobility was both rocked to its core and simultaneously presented with broad new horizons. Nerits abolished the Tirfatsevid Kunentsydoms and transferred their rights, powers and strany to the Schools, laying the foundations for the system of imperial usufruct and stripping the Voivodes of their hereditary political offices and of much of their income; whilst some of the latter were clawed back from the Schools through long legal battles over the status of Strany land, the former was gone for good. Nonetheless, Nerits and his family – a Pseudolacrean dynasty, as suggested by the names of Nerits and his son (Sobiebor I) respectively – rapidly took on the aristocratic culture of their adopted homeland. High Secote was imposed as the language of government in every region that the Neritsovids conquered. And although the High Nobility were no longer automatic office-holders by dint of their ancestry, they were still the wealthiest single class in the Empire, the largest landowners, and the most common appointees to in particular military roles – even if they now had to compete with commoners in the Schools. For a brief period from Ostrobor the Pious to Lyudodar, the nobility were encouraged to raise their own armies – a misguided policy which allowed the collapse of imperial authority during the Errancy Era. But even after Lyudodar's punitive measures in 1607–8, the High Nobility continued to play a prominent role in public life. And despite the adoption of Vaestism, they retained many of their previous privileges, including the use of pre-Vaestic names alongside their Vaestic names.
Although a new, strong differentiated High Nobility was not implanted in any of the new Neritsovid territories, members of the Great Houses became provincial governors and local dynasts throughout the Empire, many of them surviving its ultimate collapse and forming the monarchic core of new polities. The Graves of Lacre are perhaps the most famous example of this trend. In some areas where a relatively distinct aristocratic class already existed, they underwent a self-conscious Secote 'revival', adopting many of the Tirfatsevid customs of the Neritsovid heartland. In most areas, these remnant aristocrats were incorporated into the existing High Nobility through adoption and marriage – this was the case in Nerits' homeland of northern Lacre, for example. In other areas, such as the territories controlled by the Lacrean League and Gergotea, Courts of Affinity were used by rivals to systematically dismantle the privileges of these classes and erase their Secote identity through Neritsovid sumptuary laws. In Agamar, and later in Lutoborsk, never closely incorporated into Great Neritsia, these semi-Secote petty aristocracies transformed themselves over the course of a generation or two into respectable Tirfatsevid-style gentlemen, even if they were never quite recognised as so by the Great Houses.
The two centuries of Neritsovid rule also saw the development of a periodically malcontent lower stratum of the High Nobility, the Noble-Profiteers. Whilst the upper rungs of the Great Houses – still termed 'Kunentsys' despite the legal voiding of that title – were resident almost exclusively in Great Pestul for most of the imperial period, occupying the great offices of state, their middle-rung deputies had also become an urban class of absenteeists, replaced on the vast estates of the countryside by the lowest tier of aristocrats who were effectively leaseholders responsible for the actual working of the land. Although connected to the Great Houses, throughout the Neritsovid period those on the lower ranks who were unable to move up the ladder of the increasingly crowded Houses began to establish their own 'branch' Houses, adopting much of the panoply of the larger Households whilst remaining for the moment subordinate to them. This included the adoption of second surnames alongside the name of the Great House with which they were affiliated and the creation of imitation House structures and offices on the very low provincial level. Whilst the Great Houses were closely bound to the Emperor or at least to central imperial politics, it was the southern provincial Noble-Profiteers who formed the primary aristocratic social base of the Great Imperial Restoration.
Post-Neritsovid states
Agamar
Azophin
The modern Azophine state emerged out of the Neritsovid heartland, including the capital and heart of High Noble culture, Great Pestul. Almost all of the Great Houses sided with the Legitimist Party and the Neritsovid candidate, Borovest II against the coalition of upstart Spytihnev Rozoevsky, the southern merchants and the Noble-Profiteers. The Legitimists – especially when the leadership of the Pièche High Captains was replaced by the High Noble troika – succeeded in mobilising an alliance of all strata of the High Nobility around a particularist 'northern' sentiment opposed to imperial violation of certain regional privileges and of the shift of imperial power southward to Axopol threatened by Spytihnev. Ironically, this same alliance – as well as the steady narrowing of the horizons of the Azophine elite as the Legitimist coalition fell apart – led to a certain homogenisation of the High Nobility with much the same effects as in Terophan. Although the old Kunentsy class succeeded in retaining its position and its privileges to a greater extent than elsewhere, over the course of the late 18th and 19th centuries a succession of Lyubimi sought to weaken their rivals by strengthening their client branch houses. During the Azophine Restoration, the reforms of Ratibor IV (r. 1903–15) dealt further blows to the High Nobility as a whole through formal demediatisation of many key estates. The High Nobility continued to occupy a privileged position, however, until the Azophine Reconstruction of the post-Long War period. In the 1960s Ghozteprourkah declared the 'War on Petty Kings', a final wave of demediatisation and attacks on the nobility which ended with the total dissolution of all aristocratic titles and institutions.
Terophan
In Terophan the success of the Great Imperial Restoration (1701) doomed the Great Houses. As a reward for their support of the Restorationist cause, the privileges of the Noble-Profiteers were extended to essentially encompass all those granted to the highest rungs of the High Nobility, and most of the profiteer Houses became entirely distinct entities. Freed from the control of the Kunentsys, the Noble-Profiteers' path was free to consolidate the creation of what became known as the Old Estate. Terophan's dependency on these new homogenised High Nobility grew throughout the Radiance, and during the chaos of the late 19th century Terophatic politics became embroiled in the internal struggles of the aristocracy. The high point of aristocratic power in Terophan was brought to an end in the early 20th century by Vsevolod the Great (r. 1919–70), who crushed the remnants of the High Nobility and instituted a system of merit-based aristocratic titles, rooting the new Terophatic order in the managerial Serim. In spite of the destruction of the traditional privileges of the High Nobility, however, Terophan retains perhaps more than any other state the trappings of their culture. High Secote continues to be used extensively in Terophatic government, and the imperial House has gone to great efforts to maintain its Secote character, traditionally marrying its emperors to imported brides from Inner Joriscia.