Pièche
The term Pièches (Rashimic: ⰒⰅⰠⰞⰉⰅⰏ pǐšiem, literally 'Agars') refers to a type of professional standing army retained by various Outer Joriscian states in history, notably the Tirfatsevid Empire, Great Neritsia, and for a time the successor states of the 18th-century Low Neritsovid period. The name reflects the non-local origins of most of the soldiers who served in these armies; in official state parlance, they were typically referred to as Starĭ (High Secote: ⰔⰕⰀⰓⰠ), usually translated as 'veterans' or 'sergeants' and the source of the term Starroz Krai.1 They made up the backbone of the Neritsovid army throughout the Empire's existence, supplemented at times by irregular levies or volunteer forces. In peacetime they garrisoned fractious provinces and border areas and maintained order in Great Pestul.
Pièches were typically organised into columns ranging from a few hundred to several thousand men, typically united by a common geographical origin and/or broader ethnolinguistic identity. Urban pièches often resided in specific garrison quarters of cities, the most prominent example being the Agar-speaking suburb of Great Pestul, Gyemtepyeshi. They nominated their own junior officers (Captains of Ten and Captains of a Hundred) and, with imperial recognition from 1607 onwards, their regimental commanders too. Although at times new members were sourced by recruiting parties sent out to the relevant parts of the Empire, Pièche status was often inherited, and in the 17th century (when regiments began to rely on sons of veterans as their primary mode of recruitment) they developed their own distinctive patronymic surname practices. All these qualities marked them out from local society and served to encourage a strong corporate identity.
Despite the name, Pièches were not primarily of Agar origin. Although companies of Agar were particularly fashionable during the Tirfatsevid period, when the term first became established, under the Neritsovids the Columns stationed in the Rashimophone west were drawn from all over the Starroz Krai and the eastern Empire more broadly. The regiments of the Lacrean-speaking east, conversely – the regiments under the Grave of Lacre, Prince of Lopocka and Prince of Laukuna – were largely drawn from Anabbah and Greater Dekoral. Although the fluid and multilingual character of the Starroz Krai and the shifting character of regiments over time makes it particularly difficult to establish just how homogenous individual columns were, there is solid evidence that many were always broadly multiethnic.
History
Standing armies were already a feature of Chotarian military practice, and seem to have been inherited wholesale by many post-Chotarian polities – the Pseudolacrean regiments of medieval Lacre shared many features with their Pièche contemporaries, for example – but the Pièches as an institution are rooted in the permanent military formations of the Commandery of Axiov, which survived the Tirfatsevid conquest and became a mainstay of the southern Empire's armies. Appointing Commanders for these regiments was one of the Emperor's privileges, and an elaborate hierarchy of command (as well as many theoretical checks against Commanders seizing control of their armies and using them against the Emperor) was put in place, reaching its height under Miroslav I. Although the command system subsequently fell into disuse during the late Tirfatsevid period, the second Neritsovid Emperor, Sobiebor I, resurrected it in the early 16th century. He also raised fifteen additional regiments from Lacre and the Empire's southern periphery, a move which is often taken to mark the beginning of the institution of the Pièches proper. Under Spytistan I, whose reign saw the Neritsovid conquests come to a grinding halt, the Pièche regiments regularly mutinied or forced the imperial government to provide them with extra subsidies, and the government increasingly resorted to long-term commands which encouraged the development of strong personal loyalty to Commanders; this development allowed the Pièches to be transformed into an instrument of elite intrigue during the Errancy Era (1581–1617).
In the Errancy Era the Pièches came to take on an increasingly autonomous role; following the outbreak of the Basileoclast Revolt the Pièches of the Starroz Krai suppressed the heresy largely of their own accord, acclaiming their own imperial claimants in the process, and the structure of the Neritsovid Commandery strained and fragmented in the east. In 1607, Emperor Lyudodar formally abolished the Commandery and ordered those Pièche columns that were not simply disbanded to nominate their own High Captains, who were subsequently appointed, generally for life or until their voluntary retirement in old age, by the Emperor on the recommendation of the soldiers themselves; this applied even to the columns associated with the Grave of Lacre and the Prince of Laukuna (who were compensated with subsidies known as Head Money), while in Anabbah the Principality of Sobieborsk was effectively replaced with a Pièche military governor. These reforms more or less succeeded in transforming the Pièches into a force loyal to the Emperor personally and an extension of his power within the eastern reaches of the Empire. But after two decades of post-war economic recovery during which the fisc had found itself flush with cash, in the 1630s the imperial government began to slide into a budgetary crisis from which it would never truly escape. In a period in which the Empire was fighting very few wars, the Pièches were an increasingly unjustifiable expense. In order to encourage downsizing and productive employment those in the imperial heartland were increasingly granted heritable tax exemptions and other privileges in lieu of salaries, while elsewhere they were often granted tax farms or plots of land, notably in Anabbah, where the Fifteen Captains became fiscally independent of the imperial government. By the 1700s, the Pièches were well on their way to becoming a kind of artisanal aristocracy enjoying special privileges, and their military and order-keeping functions were distinctly secondary.
After the Great Imperial Restoration, the Pièche forces enjoyed something of a revival; along with the independent Anabbine Pièches, the High Captains of Great Pestul, led by Puhtaus and Zhelteis, were among the prime movers of the Legitimist Party, and they were able to raise a significant force and place it at the disposal of the Legitimist Government during the First Crown War. The Government's decision to raise its own army from the Neritsovid heartland (the New Columns), however, eventually allowed for their sidelining, and after their ill-starred attempt to purge their aristocratic enemies in the Captains' Coup of 1734 the Legitimist Pièche columns of the Rashimic Littoral were summarily disbanded by Imperial Edict, though many of the privileges granted to individual members were allowed to remain in effect. Under the pretext of implementing this Edict, over the course of the 1730s their Lacrean and Laukunan counterparts were purged and incorporated into new military forces under local control. In 1753 the Anabbine Insurrection led to the abolition of the regiments of the Fifteen Captains in Anabbah, though here, too, various privileges for the local armed forces remained in place in practice. In the Graviate of Lacre, meanwhile, the Pièches had largely been abolished as such by the mid-18th century, and the tightly regimented Lacrean military was able repeatedly to defeat various foreign challengers in the decades before the Chotarian Restoration of 1778.
The last great exercise of Pièche authority came in Terophan towards the end of the 18th century. The erosion of Pièche autonomy and their supplanting by modern armies were temporarily halted there by the Swing of the Mace in 1773, which installed a military government under the rule of the High Captain Prince Krasimir as Lyubim, later reigning in his own right as Krasimir I from 1779 until his assassination in 1785. This effort to consolidate an outright Pièche régime proved anachronistic: the opposition of the Scholarchate, combined with continuing financial dependence on reticent Noble-Profiteers in the context of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, broke apart the political unity of the Pièches. Following the Great Cacophony of 1785 and the election of Krasimir II, the Pièches were effectively abolished and absorbed into a modern army constituted on Lacrean lines. By the early 19th century, the only Pièche column still officially in existence was the Champions of the Cayvore in Sharis, installed there and privileged with an unusual degree of autonomy by Lyudodar in 1617 – under Terophatic sovereignty, these formally remain the administration of that island to this day, though even here they laid down the Pièche title of 'High Captain' in 1839.