Imperial usufruct
The term imperial usufruct, in Vaestism, refers to the legal concept and system of land ownership practised across Vaestdom and enshrined in zaconic law. Although typically distinguished in Messenian scholarship from Drŭžaniye, which is generally used to refer to the pre-Vaestic Secote system, this distinction is not native to Outer Joriscia and in most local languages a word derived from the High Secote term is used for landholding.
Structure
The imperial usufruct system rests on the underlying principle of unalienable property ownership as invested in the person of the Emperor (or by extension the Banner-State). Persons and corporate entities making use of land (Drŭžatelĭ) who would be landowners under other legal regimes thus have no inherent right to this property: all such rights are granted, at least in theory, by the imperial person. The types of rights granted to landholders vary depending on the type of landholding, but all are in zaconic understanding solely usufruct rights – that is, the right to make use of the land – rather than ownership rights as seen in, for example, the Cairan world.
Under the typical Vaestic order, land's primordial status is considered to be 'imperial' or 'unmarked', meaning it is controlled and administrated directly by the Emperor. In the most basic kind of property relationship, that between the Emperor and a landholder (a drŭžaniye contract), certain kinds of usufruct rights, often very broad, are devolved to the holder of the contract for a certain period or indefinitely. Historically most drŭžaniye contracts have been heritable in some sense or another, but this is by no means always the case. A second type of direct contract, a straninŭ contract, is made in principle between the Emperor and a School and includes alongside land usufruct rights other administrative responsibilities. With the development of the modern Banner-State the distinction between straninŭ and unmarked land is no longer particularly salient in most countries. Historically unmarked lands were fairly extensive, providing direct revenue to the imperial court, but the trend has been over the last two centuries to pass these lands as others into the care of local or central Schools.
The usufruct system rarely, however, operates so simply. The drŭžatelĭ of land, whether an individual (in rare cases) or a corporate body such as an Estate or School, in many cases delegates some of his own usufruct rights to others through subcontracts known by various names in different countries. These types of contracts are much more complex and variable in terms of what they offer, their terms, their heritability and renewability and generally operate similarly to rental and other contracts in, for example, northern Messenia.
On the local level, drŭžaniye contracts and their associated subcontracts are made and overseen and their details enforced through the School system and often administratively mediated through Boards of Secrets and equivalent institutions. In principle any drŭžaniye contract can be arbitrarily revoked by the state (in this case represented by the Schools) in the name of the Emperor. In practice, the powers of local Schools in this regard are generally somewhat limited, especially assuming normal day-to-day operation; typically it is only in cases of major corporate wrongdoing and legal intervention where the Estate is subject to character judgement that Schools are able to make more than small amendments to the existing system. This restriction, of course, does not apply to the central government. Central governments have often engaged in demediatisation programmes targeting individual landholders or large groups thereof, with no legal impediment to doing so.
History
Emergence
The imperial usufruct system first emerged during the early Neritsovid period as a result of fierce legal and hierological battles between the High Nobility of newly-conquered Tirfatsia and their counterparts in the Scholarly hierarchy. Under pre-Vaestic Tirfatsevid practice, land was distributed by the conquering emperor among the highest-ranking Secote elites, the members of the Great Houses, as large tax farms known as Kunentsydoms (Strany) in which landholders held extensive rights and governmental responsibilities. Although in principle these were held at the Emperor's pleasure, in practice central government weakness vis-à-vis the large landholders known as Voivodes meant that changes in holder were usually more closely associated with inter-noble conflict than with the unilateral imperial exercise of this power.
With Nerits' conquest in the 1490s, the Kunentsydoms were abolished and their powers transferred to the larger Schools, striking a potentially fatal blow to the system. In theory, Nerits' imperial utterance of 1497 gave the unconditional right to distribute and revoke landholdings to the Schools, with the Universal Prophet taking the ultimate position. In practice, however, this vision went mostly unrealised. Although legal revocations of grants began shortly after Nerits' proclamation, in many areas it is unclear how much these expropriations were ever accepted by the local nobility, and a fierce legal battle ensued. Alongside the expropriation of land by Schools, the unapproved sale of land rights by local Scholars – sometimes to estates already occupied by other holders – rapidly accelerated from 1498 onwards, a practice which created chaos on the ground and attracted the ire of both the aristocracy and sometimes of other Scholars, especially in particularly unscrupulous cases.
Sobiebor I and II
The position of the nobles was strengthened markedly in 1499 with Nerits' death and the ascendancy of Sobiebor I to the throne. Perhaps less pious than his father, Sobiebor was keen to shore up his comparatively weak position, especially as concerned his relationship to the Universal Prophet and the Scholars; these latter were not yet the obedient footsoldiers of the Neritsovid state they would later become. As such, assisted by successive Prophets' distraction with escalating violence in the Prysostaia, Sobiebor argued that the title of Emperor of the Vesnites in itself should be taken to imply a Secote-era notion of land distribution rights. The pro-Neritsovid Prophet Sillis (r. 1498–1503) was convinced to endorse this position, though the decision was contested by the New Orthodoxists holding the Prysostaia itself. Sobiebor nonetheless continued to make significant interventions to order the reversal of revocations or to prevent the sale of land rights. With the Council of Shalovar and the beginning of the Bloody Vacancy, the Emperor secured conditional conciliar approval of his right to distribute land in the name of the Prysostaia.
The contradiction at the heart of the system between a temporally powerful but ultimately subordinate Emperor and his weak but theoretically omnipotent Prophet was resolved abruptly with Sobiebor II's ascent to both prophetic and imperial thrones in 1518. With the two roles combined in one Prophet-Emperor, there could be no dispute over his right to ultimate control of the land. One of the new Emperor's first acts was to create the Grand Imperial Office of Records, one of the Grand Offices of Peace, whose first responsibility was the compiling of an adequate cadastral survey. Whilst the Schools were permitted to continue disposing of a significant amount of land and much of it would remain forever outside the hands of the High Nobility, Schools' ability to expropriate was delimited and most (in some places as much as 80%) of the old estates remained in aristocratic hands. Sobiebor's interventions created a clear precedent for the scale on which this could take place without central government involvement, and put an end to the prospect of large-scale expropriation.
Later Neritsovid period
This established the basic working principles of Vaestic land ownership: the imperial-prophetic person with ultimate legal control, the Schools as everyday distributors and the central government's direct involvement in relatively large-scale transfers or transfers involving particular types of rights. The major Neritsovid developments in understandings of land ownership after Sobiebor II centred primarily around the development of a larger body of theoretical structure and precedent around the types of possible rights granted, the central government's day-to-day role and a gradual widening of the types of people or entities who could hold land.
In the imperial heartland of the early years only members of the Great Houses were permitted to hold land directly from the state, but in different areas a type of sub-contracting (the prototypical example being the ⱃⱘⰽⰰ rǫka contract of the Terophatic heartland) developed allowing for agents of the Great Houses – lesser nobility and in some cases members of the emerging class of Serim – to act as proxy landholders for their masters. In certain interior areas settled by use of the Kyame system, such as upper Dekoral, High Lacre and parts of the Province of Loptia (modern-day Lefdim), soldiers were granted direct heritable landholdings of a specific type. In most of these places their right to dispose of these holdings or to (directly) purchase rights to new ones was severely limited, which allowed members of the High Nobility to consolidate indirect or direct control over large regions through systems like the Dekoralese Kizarny. The former Polcovodate of Anabbah after its sublimation (1607) and the frontier steppe region of Chuzastrana also presented different challenges to the central order of things, leading to the development of separate contracting practices there and much freer restrictions on who could hold land.
Post-Neritsovid developments
The developments in the imperial usufruct system following the Great Imperial Restoration of 1701 are closely tied up with the fragmenting of the concept of universal empire, the development of the Banner-State and the emergence, perhaps above all else, of Estatism. Although the full legal and theoretical effects of the division of the Empire were not entirely felt for several decades thanks to a series of accommodations, most famously the Lethpol Covenant (1735), the bell was tolling for the idea of the universal Prophet-Emperor. Under Lethpol the positions of Prophet and Emperor of the Vesnites were divided for the first time, raising again the question of who held ultimate control of the land. These questions were given new urgency by the proclamation of Oktar Matolchy as Emperor of the Sixth Chotarian Empire in the Chotarian Restoration of 1778 and the election of Ostrobor IV of Azophin as Neritsy Emperor in the subsequent Ostroborovid Restoration of 1792, and on the imperial periphery by the Lutoborian counterclaim asserted by Vladibor the Great to the title of Emperor in 1751. Legal theoreticians drew on Secote precedent and the Chotarian example of the consecrated land system to make the argument for the Emperor's ultimate superiority as distributor of land. This position was not readily accepted as a matter of doctrine by the Prysostaia under Zafuvniprourkah, although he avoided making any decisive statement on the question; it was more or less endorsed, with limited caveats, by his successor Yambor in 1785.
As the newly emergent states asserted their sovereignty over the land under their direct control, southern Outer Joriscia also saw marked shifts in ownership patterns, largely thanks to the development of the first legal tools of demediatisation. In nascent Terophan for example the Great Houses which had supported the Legitimist Party saw their intermediate drŭžaniye contracts dissolved and circumvented and the actual operators of the land, the so-called 'branch houses', empowered as direct landholders. Demediatisation mechanisms would prove instrumental in later developments: while in the early post-Neritsovid period landholding was still restricted to aristocrats in most areas (with the exception of those regions settled with Kyames), with the Radiance this began to change. Perhaps the most important development of all was the emergence of a concept of legal personality applying to corporate entities (Estates – though this was prefigured by the familial structure of the Great House).
These new estates began as second-tier landholders typically operating production enterprises on a portion of the much more extensive properties held in the name of an aristocratic owner – the 'Old Estate' – and headed by entrepreneurial members of the local demotic managerial stratum – sometimes referred to as a shorthand by the name of the class of this type which emerged in the Rashimic Littoral, the Serim. From the 1870s onwards, several waves of more or less extensive demediatisation measures brought these estates to the level of independent landholders in their own right, in the process amounting to the near-total dismantling of the landholdings of the High Nobility. Although in most cases this process was fairly peaceful and represented a recognition of the established status quo, in areas where the aristocracy were still very powerful, as in Azophin during the Azophine Reconstruction, it was hotly and even bloodily contested.
The further development of the state as a consolidated governing entity and the increasingly close identification of the Schools and their bureaucracy with that state led during this period to another convergence of the idea of School property with that of state property. Schools continue today to operate both as direct administrators and users of land, not just for the expected state buildings but also for profit-making enterprises in some cases, but this landholding is no longer generally considered equivalent to the drŭžaniye contracts held by non-Schools, and is closer in fact to the old category of unassigned imperial land. The emergence of institutions such as the Boards of Secrets, particularly since the 19th century, as technical intermediaries for the facilitation of Estate capitalism, has, however, served to further rationalise the administration of imperial land by allowing land to be transferred and developed by investment without direct reference to Schools. At any rate, today in most places throughout the Vesnite world direct individual landholding is impossible; land is typically held in the first instance by Estates or by Schools.
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