Are you seated comfortably? Good. I believe Marcus has once again managed to scare up something good for dinner. The first course will be served soon. Ah, what happened next? Hm, I could continue with where I left off but that would be counterproductive. My perspective of the events was limited to say the least. I believe Marcus would be the better storyteller for this part. He was in the midst of all the movers and shakers. Fine. Alright I will tell it in my way then. If there are any gaps in my knowledge, he can fill it in afterwards.
Let me first begin with clearing up one major misconception, the Autumn Rebellion was a mistake. The original authors of the event had never wanted nor expected a war. A series of miscommunication, arrogance, and opportunism led to the eventual conflict. You will find that a lot of history is made up of less than glamorous truths.
Like many of the world’s woes, the root cause of conflict was a wedding. Some two hundred years ago, Auburn was a kingdom. Independent and held in the iron grip of its royal line. The house of Autun were absolute monarchs. Whether they were good or bad rulers is beyond my interest. What mattered was that the age-old house had starting to go fey. It is an open secret that the highborn can go a little… off. Perhaps it was some hidden damage in their bloodline manifesting itself. Or the results of attempting to keep the “bloodline pure”. Whatever the case, the last few scions of house Autun were either mad, infertile, deformed, or all the above.
A succession of several short-lived unstable monarchs led to the fragmentation of power. There was the very real possibility of the dynasty ending. It was during the reign of the last monarch. A relatively innocuous union between a lesser princesses of house Autun and the Elector Count of Elitz took place. In other times it would have been a minor political marriage. As prestigious as an Elector of the Reich was, their influence in internal politics would have been negligible. But these were less than usual times. The age-old institution that was the royal dynasty was hanging by a thread. Once minor internal factions had consolidated influence and power. Candidates for the next royal successor were being propped up left right and center.
The last king of house Autun must have had some sense left in his canker filled body. He made a hard but necessary decision. King Phillipe Leon Autun, last of his line, adopted a compromise candidate. In that way he hoped to stymie off a civil war. He himself was infertile and the candidates backed by his newly empowered dukes were puppets on their strings. However, a cousin of his that displayed none of the taint his bloodline suffered, had recently given birth to a healthy highborn son. The throne of Auburn thus came into a personal union with the duchy of Elitz.
There is a lot more history and politics that led us to the coming autumn, but I will spare you the lecture. Just know that like all events in history, the rebellion was the result of a thousand reasons great and small. A couple hundred years after that fateful union, a generation for the highborn, we get Manfred Lustenhouwer von und zu Elitz.
Now, Manfred was not a bad man, he was just a mad man. The King and Elector Count occupied a grey area in sovereignty. He was both the subject of the Kaiser and a nominally independent monarch. The Reich had been up to that point, a loose confederation which the Kaiser had to fight tooth and nail to stop it from imploding. They would have been content if not grateful if the Elector Count just paid his imperial realm taxes. However, Jorge Albrecht Karl von Herwarth was no ordinary Kaiser. He was a good emperor. A terrible man yes, but that usually is a prerequisite to be an emperor of any kind. The man was iron. He still is. Ruthless and efficient, he had united the Reich like no other before him. He had enough of a grip that he could consider foreign intervention.
Manfred was like I said a madman. He looked fine. From what I have been told he was fine. For a while at least. The perfect baby boy that the last princess of house Autun bore, went fey. In his younger years he was sound in both body and mind. The son of the compromise candidate looked and acted like a return to glory for the Kingdom. He would have been as well. Von Elitz managed to placate the two dominant factions in his realm, the Conservatives, and the Radicals. But then he went fey.
In his early seventies he started to become erratic. The young king looked fine, but his behavior changed. Once the entire Kingdom pinned their ambitions and affections on him. Perhaps there is something cursed about the Autun bloodline. None of its decedents have escaped its ruinous legacy. Rampant paranoia and deep jealousy set into the monarch’s soul. He spoke to himself incessantly. I think he was halfway between the waking world and the nightmare of his own collapsing mind. By the time I eventually met him, he was long gone.
When King Manfred’s madness began, it was in the form of debilitating headaches and acute pain to all senses. Unable to take up office, power was delegated to the leading nobles and their factions. His cousin the Kaiser took on a more active role as well. The Radicals advocated Reich hegemony. King Manfred who increasingly became infirm and unstable had less of a voice in politics. He became the rallying royal symbol of the radicals.
Ah, you may wish to be careful with voicing your sentiments young sirs. The Radicals are by no means “vile traitors” as you expressed. They were men and women of some ability and a lot of ambition. Auburn is an old kingdom. The very cream of the high nobility is entrenched into its very foundations. Social mobility in the past had more to do with blood and patronage than effort and ability. As “new men”, the Radicals had little means to advance themselves. To break the old regime, they had to break its powerbase. End serfdom and redistribute land. The old aristocracy had amassed properties that made even their most inbred scions wealthy beyond the new aristocracy. To the Radicals the Reich was a sponsor inimically set against the conservatives.
Despite finding myself fighting for them, the Conservatives were a repulsive lot as well. Nationalist old money with a distaste for all things foreign. With Manfred drifting into invalidity, they abhorred the influence of the opportunistic Radicals. They had done well in making themselves rich and powerful. An absolutist emperor like the Kaiser was a threat to all the great houses of Auburn had. Ambition, greed, and xenophobia. The rallying cry of the Conservatives.
Did I say too much? What of Queen Leone? She was a wild factor that nobody expected. Was she any better than them? I do not know… In truth both factions were made up of unpleasant ideologies dressed in noble sentiments. The Radicals were vain and grasping, they had nothing but their own ambitions. Equally the Conservatives were entitled parasites who were apathetic to the harm they caused.
I have said too much. Ironically, the Conservatives were supported by an international host of sponsors. To the east the Tzar had a vested interest that the Reich remained fragmented. To the South the Free Cities were in a constant flux. There was always one of them at war with the Reich. The north was more of an accident on both our parts. The continent had underestimated our capabilities, and we had our own ambitions. Nominally we all supported the Conservatives. They sold themselves as the bulwark against continental Reich hegemony. So, the Tzar sent baubles and letters, the Isle a token parade force, and the Free Cities a scandalous general.
Despite all our sword waving, none of us expected war. I think it caught the Reich by surprise as well. It sure surprised the Conservatives. Despite calling themselves a competing faction the Conservatives were utterly directionless. Artois, de Charney, and Monforte were but a few of the disparate powers that made up the Conservative bloc. They fought each other as much as they fought the Radicals. Each held different views on the future of Kingdom. One thing they all agreed upon was that the Radicals had to go. How they were to be dealt with and who would assume leadership was undecided. The Conservatives lack of unity led to them taking a reactionary stance to the dynamic Radicals. Still the divisions at court were not as such to make conflict an inevitability. The Kaiser and the Radicals wanted the nation unspoiled by civil war. However, a series of actions by ambitious hotheads triggered an escalation in tension.
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Auburn is and was a feudal kingdom. Depending on the nature and ability of the reigning monarch, the absolutism of their authority waxed and waned. By King Manfred’s reign, the once centralized power had long been dissipated. The liege lords of the Kingdoms many territories held almost near autonomy in their realms. Production, taxation, and military matters were more or less unregulated. The Duke of Monforte alone had more than three hundred belted knights. That was not even counting their men at arms and potential levies. Vast hereditary wealth and lands made the Conservatives a power difficult to match.
There was an insurmountable gap in privilege between the lesser aristocrats and those of the old blood. It is said that a true gentleman does not work for his living. For the old blood that is most certainly true. They could luxuriously live off their rents and taxes. In response to their limited environment, many lesser and new aristocrats took up trades to establish themselves. As merchants and bankers, they amassed not insubstantial fortunes. To counter their disparity in arms, they developed and adopted new institutions.
What is a knight? At its most base deconstruction, it is a warrior that offers warlike service in return for renumeration. A mercenary with fine trappings some might say. But to ascribe to such a line of thinking is to neglect the core of the concept. A knight gives their lord service because they are granted lands and titles under the ruling system. No matter how well paid a professional man at arms is, there is an unbreachable wall between them and a knight. The Radicals lacked the prestige and territory to field as many knights as the Conservatives could.
Instead they adopted a new kind of knighthood. In the past there have been various knightly orders. What the Radicals did was pick up the idea and run away with it. Knights of faith and knights of charter had existed. What made Auburn’s knightly orders different was their expansive scale. Wealthy aristocrats who had enough freedom would fund the creation of chivalric orders. Even those without the prestige would petition a charter from the King. The poor could invest joint funds to establish their orders. What a knightly order provided were titled unladed knights.
Imagine the thousands of second sons who would never inherit their father’s titles. Ambitious yeomanry and the countless others now had an open door into the aristocracy. Countless recruits backed by the mercantile wealth of Radical nobles. I am sure you can imagine how that disturbed the Conservative hegemony. However, the potential rivalry in arms was a secondary concern to the Conservatives. What truly terrified them was the effect they would have on the Estate General. By ancient Auburn law, the rank of knight and above had a vote in the Estate.
In response the Conservatives established their own orders. You can imagine how the climate of the Kingdom changed. Thousands of young men under arms. Ever entrenching animosities. Auburn was charged with uncertainty. A storm that should have ended in the noble courts, spilled over into the entire Kingdom. From personal experience the greatest pain with working with people is that they have their own ideas. Often those ideas are detrimental to the group. An inheritance dispute in a minor house led to brother and sister crossing swords. They went on to drag Kingdom politics into their succession. Resolution or stalemate, the issue should have been contained there. After all, leveraging faction politics was nothing new. What made the whole affair so catastrophic was that both claimants were young. They were foolish.
Perhaps it was out of frustrated cynicism, or it was a true spark of romance. The sister took a fancy to a Reich liaison working with the Radicals. She bedded him and named him her consort. I heard the Conservative take on the whole affair long afterwards. They were not kind. The truth probably lies somewhere in the ashes. Whatever the case, the brother was outraged. He ambushed the young man and killed him. It was not a quick death.
His actions led to another unwanted escalation. In response to the lynching of Reich aristocrat, the Kaiser demanded that the Kingdom pay reparations and host an imperial garrison. If the Kingdom would not abide by decency, the Reich would take its own measures to protect its own. Or at least that was the pretext for six hundred of the Kaisers Leibstandarte to size the capital. The Leibstandarte were the Kaiser’s own retinue. A thousand five hundred of the Reich’s cream of the crop fighting men. Of which two hundred were highborn. Of the garrison sent, twenty were from that two hundred.
Such a heavy-handed act shook a lot of support from the Radical camp. Still the dye was cast, and they doubled down on their situation. I am sure you can put together what happened next. The Isles sent an army, the Tzar gifts, and the Free Cities a military advisor. Now you must all realize that these events happened over the span of months if not years. Negotiations between the anti-Reich powers were difficult to say the least. The Duke of Artois managed to establish a majority consensus amongst the Conservatives to accept our show of support. Count de Charney and the moderates in the Conservatives were set against the gesture. He saw it as an unnecessary provocation. Duke Monforte agreed with the count but not out of principle but out of political interest.
So, in the summer of 1226 the Isle sent a small force of housecarls to affirm their support for the Conservatives. House Averntide had negotiated favorable trade concessions with the Duke of Artois. For Isle support he would reopen trade and lower tariffs. We had a vested interest in the Conservatives coming out on top. The Tzar was willing to send his support to anybody antagonistic to the Reich. There was no practical aid he could send, considering the sheer distance between nations. What surprised everybody was the commitment the Free Cities showed. They sent a veteran condottiere captain general and company pre-paid for a years’ service.
The Duke of Artois intended to have his international host parade through the capital, Loueti. It was a highly confrontational strategy. The coalition forces would be billeted with Reich forces in the same city. Any outbreak of conflict in the capital could spark a real diplomatic disaster. I believe Artois was making a deliberate gamble. If he could pull this off, he would consolidate his status as the leader of the Conservatives. He would have the acknowledgement of foreign leaders. It would be quite the fait accompli.
Politics, you cannot live without it. The condottiere column was expected to link up with the Isle volunteers then march on Loueti. In knew none of this. I did not even know a shred of the history I had just recounted. Not that I would have cared an iota if I did. I did pick some up some context with my time spent with Janie. I remember thinking it odd that the Radicals would support the Reich’s embargo with the Isles. Many made their money through trade. I would later learn that the exigencies of politics made strange bedfellows.
I remember that summer to have been a happy one. I had money and friends. As strange as it was, having a purpose even if it were to do nothing, was… good. We maintained our camp and practiced arms with Alwin. Practice in the sense that I had my ego thoroughly crushed. The boy had a talent for footwork. He bladework was nothing special, but he had a natural sense for movement. Fighting Alwin was like hinging yourself constantly being blindsided and your blows weak from swinging from an bad angle. Oskar and Godwin could easily beat him but even they admitted that he had an uncanny ability. I remember Oskar shaking his head looking at him. He told me, “give that boy some experience and in few years, he will be a right terror”.
Winston was a terror already with his axe. He could swing the thing all day and with considerable force. He lacked the ruthlessness that most warriors had. Violence did not come to him easily. He had to work up to it. Then again Alwin lacked it as well but he strange in his own way. Some men become inured to violence, most learn how to bear it. A few come to love the carnage. Alwin was unique. There never was any anger or joy in his fighting. No, there was joy, he enjoyed the fighting. He was indifferent to killing. Osmund was hopeless. There was nothing we could do for him. Or at least there was nothing we could be bothered to do for him. Things would change when the condottiere arrived.