Irbat
Marshalate of Irbat ⰔⰕⰓⰡⰕⰟⰅⰛⰉⰋⰋⰕ ⰀⰉⰓⰁⰦⰕⰟ Straṭejiyyt Irbāṭ | |
|---|---|
 Flag | |
 Irbat within Petty-Lestria | |
| Capital and largest city | Aqaqid |
| Official languages | Irbati |
| Religion | Vaestism (official), Siriash |
• Banner | Agamari |
| Demonym | Irbati |
| Government | Marshalate and principality |
• Marshal | Iblēmin Ilmaʿālawi |
• Prince | Ilqeder II |
| Establishment | |
• Independence from Qund | 1011 |
| 13 Dominy 1946 | |
Irbat (Irbati: ⰀⰉⰓⰁⰦⰕⰟ), formally the Marshalate of Irbat (Irbati: ⰔⰕⰓⰡⰕⰟⰅⰛⰉⰋⰋⰕ ⰀⰉⰓⰁⰦⰕⰟ, Straṭejiyyt Irbāṭ), is an island marshalate of Agamar off the coast of southern Petty-Lestria, bordering the Holy Empire to the southwest and Cazacasia to the northwest across the eponymous Strait of Irbat. The oldest independent state in Petty-Lestria, the modern Irbati regime can trace its origins to Salahuddola, a Qundi provincial governor. Irbat is sharply culturally, religiously and linguistically distinct from the surrounding region despite a shared Qundi heritage and language. The island is the only region of Petty-Lestria south of northern Cazacasia that has a Vesnite majority, although it continues to host a significant Sirian minority that belongs in general to the Sophoran Compact and dominates the island's commerce. Power is formally shared between the Agamari Marshal and, by delegation, the court of the Prince, which continues to maintain certain privileges in its leadership of Irbat's Sirian community.
History
Early history
Modern Irbati history begins with the extension of Qundi control to the island in 723CE, which brought the Qundi language and Qundi culture to the island. Qundi seems to have begun displacing the native Tarshi dialect fairly rapidly after Irbat became Qund's southernmost province, and was certainly well established by the late 9th century, although the absence of documentation makes it difficult to establish exactly when it became the primary language on the island as those records that do exist are by their nature in Qundi. Many of the modern customs of the island seem to find precursors in those recorded by late Qundi imperial chroniclers. The Qundis also promoted Siriash as the language of the state, securing a probable Sirian majority for the first time in Irbat's history, although a limited Sirian presence had existed in the coastal regions thanks to earlier missions and trade links with regions to the north.
Independent Irbat
As Qund collapsed over the course of the 10th and 11th centuries, withdrawing its troops from external regions, the local provincial ruler (Emīr) established himself as an independent ruler governing the island and portions of the mainland. This ruler, Salahuddowla, established the Salahiyye dynasty, which was to rule the island for some 240 years before being overthrown by the Rashadiyye dynasty, beginning a series of aristocratic dynasties culminating in today's Rshadiyye, who came to power in 1845 in a coup. Despite the strong institutional presence of Siriash, it has been argued that Irbati Sirians were never particularly well integrated with the Sophoran orthodoxy of their nearest neighbours. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that the penetration of Siriash into the island's interior, and outside aristocratic circles generally, was more limited than elsewhere, although the interpretation of this evidence is much contested. Despite this, the Irbati lamneary of Imsamawiye was also prestigious and respected enough to be able to forge a powerful Empire-Pact dominating eastern Petty-Lestria in the 14th century, and conquests of Lestria made by Elhadhra I Aswidi under its name established the modern Holy Empire. In any case, as Irbat became increasingly closely integrated in the Golden Triangle of Outer Joriscian trade, Vaestism seems to have spread rapidly among the middle and lower classes, including traders. It failed, however, to penetrate elite society, although the Bleliyye dynasty (1510–1699) did adopt a policy of tolerance and even encouragement of Vesnite presence until word of the Edict of Oblition turned Sirian opinion violently against Vaestism everywhere.
After the Edict what had been seen as a largely beneficial presence was increasingly viewed by the rulers and the Sirian elites of Irbat as a potential existential threat, a problem exacerbated by the growing numbers of native Vesnites. Repeated expulsions of 'foreign' Vesnites proved difficult to sustain since Irbat's economy depended heavily on Vesnite traders and their local, also typically Vesnite, interlocutors. As independent Vesnite powers emerged from Great Neritsia over the course of the 18th century, contemporaneous with technological leaps giving them a growing advantage over the outdated and limited military resources of Irbat, foreign interventions on behalf of the local Vesnites by Outer Joriscian states became more and more common. The first such formal interventions were made by Terophan in the late 1730s following the Lethpol Covenant, when the newly recognised Emperor of the Vesnites Spytihnev II dispatched a formal request that privileges formerly extended to Vesnites be renewed. These limited diplomatic gestures, however, were followed by actual gunboat diplomacy. An attempt by Lekhdar III to force Vesnite merchants to make use of local Sirian intermediaries in 1803, a sop to the suffering Sirian merchant elites, was met by the shelling of Aqaqid by Lacrean gunboats. In response to these foreign aggressions, Irbati rulers made more and more intensive attempts to cultivate heresy and autocephalous Vaestism within the island, culminating in the foundation of the Schools of Irbat in 1855 on the model of the Risen Schools of Thawar and the Holy Empire.
Modern period
The 19th and 20th centuries saw extensive efforts of political and military reform to strengthen Irbat in the face of incursions from both eastern and to a lesser extent western Great Powers. As elsewhere in the Sirian world, the competing models offered by the Sirian powers of Messenia – whose structures were prima facie more similar, and who benefited from cognate religious traditions, but whose political development towards greater participation in government presented a threat to the Irbati order – and the more foreign and autocratic alternative presented by Vaestdom led to fierce debate and factional intrigue. A small class of elite Vesnites developed during this period thanks to conversions and the arrival of foreign advisors, although Sirian reaction proved more successful throughout the 19th century. In the early 20th century and during the Long War, when Agamar used Irbat as a staging-post for operations in neighbouring Cazacasia, steps towards a more Vesnite model accelerated with the rise of the Vesnite and Vaestophile intellectuals known as the Emperor's Circle to the highest echelons of government. In 1946 the efforts of the Circle culminated in the Axeman's Coup against the Prince, which procured the establishment of an Agamari marshalate over the island. The Coup left behind an unusual system of dual sovereignty: while the Vaestic government took over the overall administration of Irbat, the Prince was allowed to continue, in effect, as a tolerated polcovode on the lines of older Vaestic practice, holding at least nominal authority over the island's Sirian population. The Schools of Irbat were consequently driven underground, though a small number of adherents appear to have persisted to the present, with the marshalate overseeing occasional demonstrative trials of heretics.
After the Long War, the recently established Agamari marshalate became a centre of opposition to the Equinox Coup of 1959 that established the current Agamari Debates state. Moderate and royalist elements of the Declaration Regency fled to Irbat, establishing the Court in Irbat; it was a delegation of this government that had signed the Kethpor Accords, and most of the mission at Kethpor had themselves made their way to the Petty-Lestrian outpost. Sensing an opportunity to weaken what would doubtless remain its most powerful eastern rival in the wake of the dismemberment of Lacre, Terophan lent more or less overt material support to the exiles on Irbat, while maintaining strategic ambiguity for several years as to its formal recognition of the new régime at Sakari. In 1964, Terophite diplomats brokered the 'Dual Recognition', by which the Agamari Debates were allowed to assume their position on the Panarchate and to receive Terophan's support within Joriscia itself, while themselves agreeing to recognise the marshalate of Irbat in its existing form and to make no effort to root out the conservatives who had made their refuge there. In all these manoeuvrings the Irbati themselves found that they had been left on the sidelines, increasingly replaced in government offices by the imperial exiles, which provoked not a small amount of resentment of the Agamari exiles among the native Vesnites. It was ultimately the Irbati Vesnites who overturned the framework of the Dual Recognition in 1973, in what was almost a re-enactment of the Axeman's Coup in the Aqaqid Revolt: seizing control of Aqaqid, they arrested the Marshal and invited Sakari to impose a new governor at its own discretion. This early episode in the Constellation Crisis effectively reconciled Irbat with the Agamari Debates state, while securing a new form of autonomy as the island's native Vesnites attained a greater role in government. Since 1980, the Marshals of Irbat formally appointed from Sakari have been native Irbati.
Demographics
Today Irbat has a narrow Vesnite majority. The exact demographic history behind this development and how long-established it is is a much-politicised and somewhat vexed question, with most neutral observers leaning towards a date in the late 19th century. Ironically, the Sirian monopolisation of the fruits of industrial and economic development seems to have played a significant role in pushing down birth rates among that formerly dominant community, while the island's Vesnites, who are mostly fairly poor, tend to have large families.