Duodecimvirate

The terms Novemvirate (until 1652), and later Duodecimvirate (High Secote: prědŭdŭvanadesęte, 'first twelve'), refer to a group of Great Houses of the Tirfatsevid and Neritsovid High Nobility who enjoyed a privileged status above all other cognate groups. The exact privileges afforded to them by this rank differed from period to period, but the original nine families in particular managed to dominate the political and economic life of the Rashimic Littoral and much of Outer Joriscia for almost half a millennium. The most prominent of the twelve families in the Neritsovid period were the Aborids, the Inevskids, the Pashegids, the Eborevids, the Yazimovids, the Alevids, the Tarsevids, the Boroslavids, and the Malenkids.

History

The exact origins of the nine houses constituting the Novemvirate are unclear, but the first evidence of separate protocols followed in respect of senior Secote cognate groups dates from the late 13th century, and the first use of the distinctive title 'Voivode' in reference to these families to the mid-14th; their dominant position seems to have emerged in parallel with the institution of the Great House itself as distinct from the Secote clan. Like other Great Houses, they consisted of multiple closely intermarried family groups claiming common descent and bound together by increasingly sophisticated legal structures, but were differentiated by their right to hold kunentsydoms. At times other Great Houses may have contested their power in practice, but in legal and ideological terms they represented a distinct and elite class. Their superior status typically exercised a sort of centripetal force over other Great Houses, meaning that over time other Houses tended to become attached to them in relationships of client and patron. This trend was to continue throughout most of their history.

After the conquest of Tirfatsia by Nerits in 1495, kunentsydom was abolished and the Novemvirate deprived of much of their power, although they were able to claw some of it back over the next two decades. Nonetheless, their conversion to Vaestism and their friendly overtures to the new Emperor won them an Utterance of Recognition reaffirming their special status under the new dispensation. The High Nobility as a whole came to underpin the entire Neritsovid order, and for most of the period would staff all senior government positions, including governorships and marshalates; the leading houses of the Novemvirate took the lion's share of these positions. The conquests of the first Neritsovid century expanded the geographic reach of the High Nobility and provided a countervailing pressure against the Novemvirs' steady absorption of smaller Houses, with three additional houses - the Yezorids, Oroyarimovids and Mirokrai's Zvezdanovids - being added to the Novemvirate under Ostrobor the Pious (r. 1554–1572), beginning the era of the Duodecimvirate. All three of these families acquired property in the region around Great Pestul as well as their more traditional power bases elsewhere. With the exception of the Zvezdanovids, all of the leading members of the Duodecimvirate (as well as other Great Houses) took up residence in the capital, with Branch Houses increasingly responsible for the management of local affairs.

From the mid-17th century onwards, the relationships between the Great Houses and their local Branch House enforcers became increasingly strained as the latter became increasingly commercialised and often wealthy. This phenomenon did not exclusively affect the Duodecimvirate, but the most prominent of the twelve Houses had a network of relationships of this kind unparalleled by any other House. Towards the end of the Neritsovid period, the state intervened frequently, under Duodecimvirate pressure, to punish recalcitrant Branch Houses, most prominently in the Exorcism of the South (1664-1665), and the Duodecimvirate in fact extended their control into areas of the south traditionally characterised by more small-scale patterns of land tenure (such as Dekoral). But this tendency was decisively broken with the Great Imperial Restoration (1701). The Duodecimvirate, along with the other Pestul-centred Great Houses, saw their relationship with their southern clients unravel overnight; they thus backed the Legitimist counter-candidate, beginning the fateful fragmentation of the Empire.

The fragmentation of the Empire meant that members of the Duodecimvirate houses were to find themselves on opposite sides of political and legal boundaries, with very different effects. Those in what was to become Terophan had all but the smallest privileges of protocol abolished almost immediately by Spytihnev I, himself a Yazimov; even these minor distinctions were abolished during the Third Crown War (1753-1756). In Lacre and Agamar, where Duodecimvirs were in any case few in number outside the ruling dynasties, local branches were soon forced by hostilities with Azophin to prove their loyalty by disowning their relatives elsewhere, although Pashegids in Lacre served as an important bridge between the Grave and the Spytidar Pashegy marshalate during the period 1756-1764.

In Marshalate Azophin, where the Duodecimvirs were concentrated, they were to continue to form a much more prominent part of the body politic. The distinction between Branch and House proper was only abolished by the Edict of Elevation of 1756, but the Duodecimvirate remained distinct in protocol, as well as being the largest and most powerful of the Great Houses throughout the 18th century. With the ban on retaining private forces under Ostrobor IV (r. 1793-1815), however, and the growing focus of even Great Houses on primarily economic activity, the Duodecimvirate houses began to lose their relevance as social units, and over the course of the 19th century they tended to fragment into more consolidated subgroups around particularly wealthy or successful patriarchs. Although the same surnames (or modified versions thereof) continued to provide many of the significant figures of Azophine politics until the total abolition of the aristocracy during the War on Petty Kings (1962-1965), the Duodecimvirate themselves were no longer of much significance.

Contemporary use

The term prědŭdŭvanadesęte continues in popular parlance in Azophin today. During the War on Petty Kings, it was the subject of a common slur in anti-aristocratic propaganda, tat-tysjača, literally 'under-thousand' (as opposed to 'pre-twelve'). The secondary meaning of tāt as a mildly offensive word for the buttocks also plays on the common meaning of prěd as 'forehead'. The Rashimic coinage prědŭdŭvanadesętont ('foremost-twelvist') refers to someone perceived as obsequious or given to embarrassing displays of protocol.