Ostrobor V, Neritsy Emperor

Ostrobor V Svyat (High Secote: Ostroborǔ 5 Světŭ) was Emperor in the North from his election in 1816 to his death 20 years later. The nephew of his predecessor Ostrobor IV, he inaugurated a tradition of apolitical Emperors, surviving three tumultuous changes of government by keeping himself aloof from events in Great Pestul. His death in 1836 provided the immediate trigger for the Great Peninsular War.

Ostrobor V
Emperor of the Vesnites
Reign	1816–1836
Election	29 Sation 1816
Predecessor	Ostrobor IV
Successor	Spytistan III
Born	11 Nollonger 1764
Died	5 Conservene 1836
House	Neritsovid (Ratiborovid)

Ostrobor was born to Dragodar Neritsy in 1764 in Axopol, a direct descendant of Spytistan II via the Borovest Neritsy branch (kidnapped and taken south during the Voivode Party's coup following Spytistan's death). His father, despite being the older sibling, was passed over in the hunt for a potential Azophine Emperor, ostensibly because of a hunting injury that had left him prone to bouts of melancholy and downgraded his 'Priority', but in fact probably because of Boromir Alevy's preference for a younger and more pliant candidate. Ostrobor, however, was close in age to his uncle and namesake, and followed him to Pestul shortly after his election as Emperor in the North in 1792. Shy and generally uninterested in court intrigues, he occupied a series of court positions throughout his uncle's reign. During the dramatic events of the Interpellation, he appears to have fled Pestul, refusing to participate in Ostrobor IV's bid for power. Whether this is true or not, in subsequent years his uncle refused to see him at his residence in Inetsograd, and as the older Ostrobor grew older without providing any heirs, Spytidar Mudovisky began to position his nephew as likely successor. When Ostrobor IV suffered serious brain damage in an elephant-riding accident in 1815, Mudovisky carefully stage-managed the younger Ostrobor's ascent to the throne, and he was duly elected as Ostrobor V in 1816.

Whether always uninterested in government or learning from the mistakes of his predecessor, Ostrobor deliberately avoided Pestul insofar as was possible, and worked hard to avoid being associated with any of the political currents active there while maintaining the fiction that it was the Emperor who made and dismissed Lyubimi. Made the repository of many Cathedralist and otherwise oppositional hopes, not least by the public at large, he sided consistently with the narrow oligarchy that dominated Azophine politics, aiming always to be on the side of the winners. During the Emperor's Men Uprising of 1815, he lost no time in condemning the rebels who had proclaimed him Prophet-Emperor. When Mudovisky was sidelined by Spytistan Roshimvekh amid the Rice Rebellion of 1824, on the other hand, Ostrobor obligingly invested the great conspirator as Lyubim. Despite this political timidity, he largely succeeded in his earlier reign in casting himself as the solicitous and (ultimately) all-powerful ruler, acting in the interests of the great mass of his subjects. But over the course of the 1820s, he was to become a victim of this very same success. He played a relatively prominent role in the military conspiracy that brought Boromir Anavarsky's Gunbarrel Government to power in 1824 – willingly or otherwise – and this meant that he was associated with the Anavarsky regime as it lurched from catastrophe to catastrophe in its handling of Anabbah and then of the Second Anabbine Insurrection, all the more so as no likely challenger emerged to whom he could attach his support. Nonetheless, his failure to attend the reading of the deeply unpopular Anabbine Utterance in 1836, probably because he was bedbound, was understood by many of his over-optimistic subjects as disapproval of the government and as a signal that he was about to dismiss Anavarsky. When he died later that year without acting, a groundswell of popular anger was channelled into the Cathedral Uprising, which would subsequently provide the pretext for the Great Peninsular War.

Ostrobor was ultimately succeeded by his son, Spytistan III, who was elected in 1844. He is largely forgotten in contemporary Azophine historiography, overshadowed by his uncle and his son.