History of Helminthasse
The history of the Alliance of Independent Siur Commonholds – familiarly known as Helminthasse – is a comparatively short one as compared with other modern polities, at just over two hundred years, but has nonetheless seen the territory rise from a collection of rural backwater provinces to a substantial influence on regional affairs within Messenia, with unfulfilled aspirations to be clearly heard on the world stage.
Early 19th century: rebels with a cause
The declaration of secession by the five Siursk commonholds which comprised the Alliance of Independent Siur Commonholds (the full and correct name of the polity commonly known as Helminthasse) had its roots in the period of growing unrest in Siurskeyti at the very tail end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th.
The Siur lands had experienced remarkable growth and expansion in almost two centuries since the unification of the various Siur commonholds by Sterkur Fálk in 1623, and by 1800 were beginning to see the first dim adumbrations of power wielded by a mercantile community – as represented by the nýmenn at home and the overseas-based leifturserkar – as opposed to the traditional noble houses of the Siur lands, the eðalkyn. However, the nature of Siurskeyti as a principally maritime power caused much of this to be concentrated in the country’s port cities – and the two largest, Reylatur and Ostari, in particular – at the expense of inland commonholds which were, they now feared, becoming little more than a resource base. The union had been formed on the basis that the member commonholds would mutually support each other, to the benefit of all; but with the passage of time that basic tenet had been obscured, if not lost. The coastal commonholds which increasingly saw themselves as the “engine room” of Siurskeyti were drifting closer together, towards a fusing-together in which the individual members would have no rights save what the centre allowed them. Already, attempts to level the economic playing field through internal tariff walls and similar mechanisms were being challenged, and defeated, while Siursk central government either stood aside or actively supported the challenges; and the interior was seeing the beginnings of an ongoing drain of population towards the bigger cities and, to a degree, the Siursk overseas territories, as the vast and empty expanses of Serania Major and the challenges of the Siursk holdings in equatorial Lestria drew hundreds off small, tenuously viable farms in the homeland.
Verbal protests began to become physical after around 1805, and opinion-formers in Siurskeyti began to become mindful of a growing fracture between coast and mountains potentially more damaging than any earthquake. Gradually, a new orthodoxy emerged in the inland commonholds that their rights as free Siur could not be maintained while the heavy hand of the coastal commonholds pressed down upon them. This was increasingly true even at the highest levels of society, with leading nobles such as Hringur Slátrari, the thein of Helminthasse, and Fórn Eldhress of Vittflöt now putting themselves in the vanguard of change. On the other side of the coin, though, the pro-unionists argued that only by forming a closer and more tightly-bound union could the Siur as a people truly live up to their potential to the fullest and fulfil the vision of Sterkur Fálk, the first thár and the “father” of Siurskeyti.
The protests met with stern resistance from Siurskeyti’s rulership, with the incumbent thár Ármann Lindskold finding his spine being stiffened by mercantile powers whose bidding he was doing, consciously or otherwise. With a vote against Lindskold on the floor of the Siursk Állmenráð failing on technicalities, Slátrari and other ráðsmenn from the inland commonholds gathered at the Mikillhörsalur in his home city of Virkið in Petrial 1812. Over three days of at-times visceral debate, the agreement to secede from the Siur body politic – set down in written form as the Bandalagsplögg – was put in place; formal resignations followed shortly thereafter, putting the renegades on a collision course to open war with the unity supporters in the country. It took the Siursk government some two months to reach a point where they acknowledged the seriousness of intent of Slátrari – now appointed as ruler or althein of the Alliance – and his supporters; and not until Metrial did they actually put a military force into the field, clashing with the rebel army in the Battle of Lágröð.
The rebels had not been idle in those two months; during this time they had amassed a substantial fighting force – parts of which had been suborned from their opponents as inlander elements within the Siurskeyti army deserted to flock to the Alliance’s colours – and put in large parts of the support systems required both by the army and by their aspirant nation. The Siursk were caught off-balance, losing swathes of land south of the town of Hélla – ultimately cutting it off from the rest of Siurskeyti – as well as in northern Skjóll as the rebels pushed south from Vinhaxa. Although the conflict became more even as the Siursk loyalists concentrated their efforts, the secessionists stubbornly held those gains.
However, the Alliance’s attempt to break down resistance in Hélla by laying siege to the town proved a turning point in the conduct of the war; increasingly from this point, public opinion on both sides of the war edged further towards an honourable peace. Amid a steady diminution of strength as troops on both sides deserted from their posts, the Alliance, which was somewhat less affected by the drain, gathered its remaining strength for a concerted push down the Tarsa valley towards Ostari. Already suffering from failures in morale, the network of support that had allowed the Siursk to fight frayed and broke; Lindskold was ousted from office – the only such instance in Siursk history – and the new thár, Eir Kaupland, agreed to meet with the Alliance’s leaders with a view to a peace agreement. This was finally put into place in Nollonger, with the signing of the Treaty of Fensbrú; in this fashion the Summer War (Sumarstrið) – or, as it is sometimes known, the “War that Died of Shame” (Skammarstrið) – came to an end in the Siur homelands, although communication time lags saw fighting continue into the spring of 1813 in Siursk overseas possessions in Lestria and Serania.
Later 19th century: growing pains
Winning their independence nonetheless left the commonholds of the Alliance with significant problems. The loss of previously internal markets with Siurskeyti caused a sharp downturn in the local economy during the middle 1810s, and only some adroit manoeuvring by Slátrari and his finance minister Galvaskur Tálgær kept the ship of state afloat before new markets – particularly with Elland and with the polities to the north along the Arcedian littoral – took up some of the slack, and before a chastened Siursk mercantile community returned to trade in essential goods on fairer terms with reduced margins. Relations with Siurskeyti continued to be frosty for some time after the split, although showing some improvement from the mid-1830s as the new status quo gained acceptance; nevertheless, the position was perhaps not completely resolved until the signing of the Treaty of Lágskáli in 1847 settled the remaining loose ends.
On a more positive note, good relations were established with Savam – which had viewed the break-up of Siurskeyti positively, and which had actually taken advantage of the confusion of the Summer War to seize and hold the Median island of Dórrey. A formal exchange of ambassadors took place as early as Nollonger 1813, and the Savamese placed sufficient value on the alliance to stage the formal end of hostilities with some of their northern neighbours with the Treaty of Virkið in 1823. Further south, the Alliance was one of the first Messenian polities to recognise the new federal state of Zeppengeran when it came into being in 1848.
The fledgling nation was nonetheless prone to missteps, in part arising out of a misplaced sense of confidence. In response to pleas for assistance from the Arlaturi communion being subjected to repression in the predominantly Cairan Vettermark, the Alliance sent troops to assist – something understandably treated as an invasion by the locals, who called on their larger and stronger Cairan neighbours in Odann for help. Although the Alliance succeeded in breaking the tiny Västrahamn off as an independent polity and safe haven for the Arlaturi communion, the Västrahamn War was a disaster for the Alliance’s army, which was resoundingly thrashed by the stronger and more battle-hardened Odannaigh – and, more seriously, the engagement in the north allowed Alcasia’s army to seize parts of the south-east in Æthelin to which they held historic claims, confident in the belief that the Alliance could not fight a simultaneous war on two fronts. Most of the Sporður region would be held by Alcasia until a further conflict, the Marsh War of 1845, recovered it for the Alliance.
Internally, the later 19th century was marked, as elsewhere in Messenia, by a steady growth in manufacturing industry; the Industrial Revolution had been growing across the subcontinent as native discoveries merged with developments translated from Joriscia – although, arguably, it had been knocked off track in the Siur lands by the Summer War – and the development of factory production caused a drift away from agriculture which was felt even in the historically highly agrarian Alliance. With the new industry came a growth in communications; the first railway line was built in 1869, while a state-owbed postal service had been formalised even while the Summer War was in progress. (Pósturinn Bandalagsins would also take under its wing the new telephone network as it emerged in the early 20th century.) While the landscape of the Alliance commonholds was generally not too helpful to canal construction, some canal works were undertaken in the 1850s and 1860s.
However, the political structure of the Alliance was still essentially the one that had been established – largely on the Siursk model – in 1812, with the althein exercising substantial powers, but advised (and at times restrained) by a council of noblemen, the Eðaldeild. Such a position was becoming difficult to sustain in the face of a growing and increasingly prosperous middle tier of society; by as early as 1830, some of the wealthier merchant families could increasingly approach, or even exceed, the financial status and strength of the lesser nobility. However, while there had been some tinkering at the edges, serious reform was some time in coming. The individual commonholds established legislative houses (viðaldsdeildir) from outside the nobility between 1820 and 1835, although the state-level Fólksdeild, formed on the same principles as the viðaldsdeildir (and, under the Siur traditional amskyldr basis of representation, drawing its membership from those bodies), did not come into being until as late as 1881. That said, the new body was quick to establish itself as a functional operation; and the informal process by which most operational authority fell to the alráðherra (already well advanced by mid-century) gradually shifted to the point where the holder of that office could realistically come from the Fólksdeild – and, indeed, did so exclusively from the end of the Long War period; the last nobleman to serve as alráðherra until recent times was Kapp Elsturhæð af Hydrædsdali (1939-44).
However, the Alliance would find itself drawn back into war as the century wore on, with treaty obligations bringing it into the Autumn War in 1867-68 as its ally Elland was attacked by Odann, who sought to reunite the Dael-speaking communities of northern Messenia under their banner. Although they acquitted themselves better against the Odannaigh than they had in Västrahamn, the result was essentially the same, with a large swathe of northern Elland being annexed to the Sacred Kingdom and the Ellish and Alliance armies taking savage punishment.
Almost as serious a threat to the Alliance was the unrest which swept the commonhold of Vinhaxa in 1879, as the former althein Duðumur Assandull advanced a power-play aimed ultimately at taking Vinhaxa out of the Alliance completely. Skilled handling by the leading politicians of the day, including incumbent althein Eiðsvarinn Hárfell and alráðherra Sann Eldhress, held the country together – and may have shifted the balance of popular opinion within the country away from its being an alliance and towards its being an actual union. Vigorous debate on the matter – and the extent to which this shift betrays the country’s founding principles – continues even today.
Perhaps the shake-up which these conflicts caused swayed later Alliance governments into a greater unwillingness to get involved in other nations’ wars; when Savam attacked north-eastern Elland in 1889 in what has become known as the Embute War, the Alliance cited its ties of alliance to both sides and stated that, since it could not support both sides simultaneously, it would not back either side – although it held itself willing to act as arbitrator in any peace settlement. The breach of the Savamese alliance would cause a twelve-year rift before good relations were restored; Elland would take almost as long to come around, and there was some substantial tension on the Ellish border along the Esker in the east of Ærlasse in the last decade of the century.
Early 20th century: strength in unity?
By 1900 the Alliance – increasingly known across the interordinate community simply as Helminthasse, after Hringur Slátrari’s fief – had emerged from bucolic slumber to become established as a significant, if not necessarily strongly influential, factor in the affairs of Messenia. It had inherited, and strengthened, overseas territories in the wake of the split from Siurskeyti (Kisilland in western Lestria and the Gleymtlönd in central Serania Major), and was reaching out beyond those territories to seek influence elsewhere in the world. Two particular regions would see some substantial input from the Alliance in the early 20th century; the outlanders tried to establish greater trade links with the Baygil Empire around the turn of the century as the Empire briefly entered one of its more open phases, and involvement by Alliance-based companies in the newly-emerging petroleum industry would see it gain some greater influence in Abranoussa in north-eastern Lestria.
With foreign involvements came, regrettably but almost inevitably, foreign conflicts; Kisilland would see itself wracked by tribal warfare against the Siur settlers in the Hoe Handle Rebellion of 1907-10, while there was a brief conflict in Abranoussa, the Left Foot War, also in 1910, prompted by concerns over the Alliance overstepping the limits of its influence. Closer to home, there remained concerns over the relationship with Siurskeyti – which was in one of its poorer phases in the early 1900s, something that would prompt the creation of the Alliance’s secret service, Skynsskor III – although the alliance with Savam, the Mains de Fer, would be renewed in 1901, and better relations with Elland and with Zeppengeran would develop between 1900 and 1910.
The Abranoussan theatre would explode into open warfare again in 1937, as the dictatorial Nesbo Ghek sought to shake off the Alliance in his country, as well as standing off Neyet to his north and west and Yufet to his south. With imports from Abranoussa forming the bulk of supplies for the Alliance’s increasing industrial capacity, intervention by its military was understandable, even as it embedded the army in a four-year-long morass before Ghek’s capture by the Alliance, trial and subsequent execution by Yufet forces ended the affair.
The concerns of war – both its own conflict in Abranoussa and the wider theatres of what became known as the Long War – prompted an increased sense of watchfulness in the country, and allowed a central government leeway to further erode the rights of individual commonholds. Fears of infiltration by agents of hostile foreign powers were widespread during the 1930s and 1940s, with the fellow Hártal-speakers of Siurskeyti looming particularly largely. Laws passed as early as 1935 allowed for internment of foreign nationals in the event that the Alliance went to war in Messenia, and pressure was placed on citizens with dual nationality to renounce their non-Alliance citizenships or be deported, as happened in the case of the popular radio comedian Blær Undinn. Incidents such as that centring on the Siursk cruiser Einarður, which sailed deep into Alliance territorial waters in the Æthelflói in Metrial 1944 – by its own claim, because of adverse sea conditions – did little to ease tensions, with a persistent fear that Helminthasse’s loose alliance with Zeppengeran could prompt an armed response from Siurskeyti, its rival in the so-called “Straits Game”.
When war finally came to Helminthasse, it did so initially in its overseas possessions, where Madaria had long cast covetous eyes over the Helmin Gleymtlönd and, in 1954, acted on those desires in starting the War of the Gold Coast. This conflict became conflated with the Sleepwalker War closer to home, as Zeppengeran and Helminthasse made common cause against Madaria for two years before the Zepnish agreement of a separate peace forced the Helmin to carry the war on alone; the Seranian war dragged on for a further six months before Madaria, now close to complete collapse, gave up the fight.
Later 20th century: adversity to aspiration
In the wake of the final end of the Long War came the catastrophe now known worldwide as the years without summers. Triggered by the exchange of metacosmic weaponry between Terophan and Azophin during the 1958 Sea of Flames campaign, the resultant drop in global mean temperatures prompted agricultural failures across the world and widespread civil unrest, even in countries which had not seen such upheaval in centuries. The Alliance’s still substantial agricultural industry received a hammer-blow, pitching the wider economy into recession; while actual famine was confined to limited areas, the country struggled to feed itself, while the lack of an agricultural surplus struck hard at exports and the balance of payments. The incumbent government under Jónas Örvum introduced a range of harsh measures, including a system of rationing, to guide the country through the worst of the effects. Although these were largely confined to 1958 and 1959, the knock-on effects lingered into the mid-1960s; and the advance of centralised state control ratcheted forward another notch.
Even as the winter frosts were gathering in strength, representatives of government across the world gathered in the Terophane city of Kethpor to bring a formal end to the Long War and to begin to erect structures that might prevent such disasters happening in the future. While the Alliance was not part of the group which formulated the Kethpor Accords – this privilege being reserved to themselves by the so-called “Formulating Council” of great powers – it was one of the original signatories when the Accords were formalised in 1959.
The Alliance’s economy was slow to recover in the post-war period, with GNP per capita not reaching pre-war levels until 1965. However, as it gained strength, there were increasing indications that the Alliance was now outgrowing its traditionally second-tier status among the polities of Arden and genuinely agitating for a position at the top table. Although no more immune to political and economic travails than any other polity, the Alliance enjoyed an extended period of general prosperity between roughly 1970 and 2000; economists’ studies have indicated that the gap in standards of living between the Alliance and Siurskeyti – a familiar benchmark for most of its people – reduced to its narrowest level between 1980 and 1985. The 1980s in particular were marked by a significant reduction in the state’s influence over the economy, driven strongly by the reform-minded alráðherra Högni Traustur, although the changes have been slightly rolled back in more recent years.
21st century: faith in the future
The first decade of the new century has proven a difficult one for the Alliance; adverse terms of trade have meant a loss of economic power, and the aspirations which it once had towards genuine influence in world affairs appear to have receded. The degree to which the government has been obliged to run balance of payment deficits has caused concern for the country’s longer-term health; and the extent to which Siursk companies, in particular, have sought to benefit from weaknesses in the Alliance’s economy have aroused fears that the Siursk, being either unable or unwilling to recover the inland by military force, are increasingly content to make it an economic colony as it was taken to be before 1812.
Although the Alliance has itself remained at peace with its neighbours, this has not precluded it getting involved in foreign military engagements; the eruption of the Baseriote Insurrection in southern Transvechia prompted that country’s long-time ally and patron Savam to call upon its own network of allies to assist. This was seen in the Alliance as something of a cynical decision – Savam had, and has, sufficient military strength to fulfil such tasks alone, but here sought assistance because of adverse domestic public opinion following Operation Northern Spear against Lutoborsk some years earlier. While Alliance troops took part in actions against the Baseriote insurgents – and remained in place during the security operations which followed the effective end of the Insurrection in 2005 – the presence of the Alliance in Transvechia remained unpopular and caused some strains on the alliance with Savam which may only now be easing as Helmin troops withdrew from the Great North in 2021.
In 2005, alráðherra Eir Dæld pushed through a change to Alliance electoral law which overturned the amskyldr principle and replaced it with a system of universal suffrage for all citizens over the age of sixteen, the traditional Siur age of majority. In constitutional terms, this was little short of a revolution – certainly, it was the most significant development in this area since the establishment of the Fólksdeild over 120 years earlier – and it made the Alliance one of only a handful of nations across the world, and arguably the most significant in geopolitical terms, to enforce no restrictions on the franchise. The change was fought savagely in the Landsþing, with Heiðra Steinn af Halshaugi quitting the cabinet in protest. Steinn’s elevation to the alráðherrarsess in 2011 in the wake of the Grenaröxl affair – making her the first noble to hold the office in almost seventy years – led to a belief in some quarters that she would seek to rescind these changes, although no action had been taken prior to her stepping down from the office in 2016, and the idea now seems to have been taken off the table.