A Brief History of Aururia United
Prehistory and Early History:
~68,000-40,000 BCE: The first humans arrive in Australia.
~35,000 BCE: The first "Californians" are born, whence the sponge-like lifeform is known to have begun to colonise the human population. Before the land bridges sink, the entire continent of Sahul is known to have been so affected.
~8,000 BCE: The first evidence of wattle tree, sugarcane and root crops being intensively cultivated.
~7,000 BCE: The first evidence of intensive fishing of coastal waters.
~6,000 BCE: The first evidence of artificial wetland management and fish farming inland.
~5,000 BCE: "Civilisation". Small towns of 3,000 souls are wide-spread.
¬3,000 BCE: Development of Chieftainess-led city-states like those of Mesoamerica, with monumental architecture of the pyramid type from the period still extant in drier areas. Integrated holistic agriculture also of the Mesoamerican pattern.
~2,000 BCE: Relatively complex and sophisticated culture. Initial use of high complicated copper and bronze forms, but not for tools or weapons. Extremely complicated uses of rope-based tension begin, including the invention of the suspension bridge.
¬1,500 BCE: Confederacies of city-states begin to form, like the Triple Alliance of the Aztecs. Earliest experiments in the creation of copper weapons and tools. First regular use of string-and-hair based writing.
~1,000 BCE: The Sister Empires, one of the Papuan highlands, and the other in the southern part of the Dividing Range flourish, with widespread use of copper and bronze and extensive road networks. These two will dominate the land for the next thousand years in various dynastic incarnations, and introduce the concept of territorial rule, bureaucratic government, and nationhood beyond city-affiliation into Aururian culture. Seal Script based on impressed forms of hair-and-twine writing strings begins to be used in permanent inscriptions.
~180 CE: Hatepe erupts. Sister Empires era ends in chaos and war, establishing a common theme of Aururian history.
~200-300 CE: Lowland civilisations come to the fore, as the highland civilisations stagnate in the post-Hatape era, breaking apart into isolated city-states.
¬700 - 1000 CE: "Aururian Warring States" period, when populations and civilisation have recovered to the point of war and contest between a limited number of very large Queendoms in Aururia.
~1,000 CE: An empire based in the northwestern coast rises to dominance over her rivals and begins to spread control over the continent. Over the next hundred years, this Empire will unify, through diplomacy and war, the lands of Sahul.
Introduction to the rise of the Empire:
The Yhiist religion came out of the ancient polytheist beliefs of the Aururian motherland peoples. The religion holds a belief in Yhi, the Goddess of Sun, Light, and the Entire Universe; Wuriupranili, created from her tears upon Earthen soil, and impregnated also from her tears, with her daughter, Anjea, who leaves and intercedes for humans on behest of Yhi. From the polytheistic origins of the faith there arose a doctrine in the 10th century, progressiing after 900, among the various Queendoms of the lowlands that were fighting amongst each other, while the remnant highland city-states lay in isolated senescence. As the various small Queendoms consolidated into larger ones and absorbed the remaining highland cities, not dissimilar from the Chinese transition from Spring and Autumn to Warring States, there also arose a series of Sages, primarily in the north of Sahul Major, who refined the religious principles of the polytheistic religion into the Yhiist "Rites" (a term customarily used to minimise the idea of disruption from the prior belief).
This doctrine held that philosophically, Yhi must be the absolute creatrix of the universe. It was absurd and impossible for there to be multiple deities--the idea of multiple centres of omnipotence was a logical fallacy of the first order. Thus, Yhi originated all things. In this context Wuriupranili was, as the legends stated, Yhi's creation as well as wife, but not a true Goddess as a true Goddess had to be omnipotent and unending. Wuriupranili and Anjea, their daughter, had neither capability and though immortal beings of great power who lived in a higher plain of existence, were not truly worthy of worship: They were friends and intercessors to the interest of Yhi, in whose image women as demi-creatrices of life as mothers had been formed, thus Yhi herself being distracted by the needs and interests of women, could allow evil to lapse into the universe. It was the duty of rightly-living sisters of the Goddess to undertake a plan of the worship and understanding of Yhi because these gestures would keep Yhi focused on her own task of upholding the sacred world order; whereas if Yhi was distracted her omnipotence was for naught, and aspects of her creation could cause trouble and evil. Anjea, as the leader of the humans, was the chief intercesstrix. Wuriupranili, as the Lady of Water, was the object of Yhi's affection, and could lead her astray or help her to remain focused on her duties as the sovereign creatrix of the universe: Therefore Anjea may always be relied upon for help, whereas Wuriupranili must be convinced that upholding universal order is superiour to her carnal desire for closeness with the all-creating Mother.
This argument, which seamlessly fused the popular traditions with an empowerment of the Yhi clergy as all-powerful, and in doing so allowed action against the clergy of the lesser deities (without interrupting the popular rituals, which could be interpreted as not worshipping the other deities as such), soon created a movement of Yhiists in the north of Aururia Proper (Sahul Major). The Seven Sages of Yhiism led a line from the arguments of the Founding Sage Atara in 893 forward through six following generations. They were sometimes supported by the Yhiist priestesses but vigorously opposed by others, and suffered repeated suppressions, sometimes violent dissensions, through a century. Their preaching of empowerment toward land-mothers (free soil yeowoman who tended the Wattle-seed gardens of integrated holistic agriculture over many generations) prompted a great threat to the petty nobility who lived off their rent; hence the low nobility were the greatest opponents of the rise of Yhiism.
Finally, however, the last Sage Yturru put down "The Doctrine of the Universal Mother" before dying a martyr to an army of Landowners in western Larrakia. Her immediate disciples fled east. Here, the sovereigns of the Duchy of Canobie chose to side with the Yhiist Reformation Clergy who sheltered the disciples of the Sage Yturru and rose in revolt in the Queendom of Coolullah in the year of 1009. After five years of religious strife the Duchess Uruava of Canobie crowned herself Queen of Coolullah under the Yhiist Rite, replacing the prior dynasty. For the most part the subsequent spread of Yhiism was peaceful for another century, with converts being oppressed, certainly, but also gained primarily through actual argument and prosyletization on behest of the disciples of the Sages, rather than by armed force such as in the spread of Islam, as most Yhiist believers would flee to Coolullah, swelling its popular, rather than actively seek resistance against anti-Yhiist forces. Certainly the House of Tyinurru saw in the ideal of all humanity (by which we mean the Touched, here--as the existence of foreigners who were not so in the west of the Indies was only crudely understood by Aururian culture at the time, though trade relations were rapidly developing which would trade this) united in the Chorus of the Singers under Anjea as implicitly empowering the necessity of a unitary state--and Anjea, not revealed to the mortal world, needed a representative thus. This allowed the dynasty to articulate a unifying claim which justified acts of conquest in religious terms.
In the 1080s the Queendom of Djieri, who had traditionally worshipped a goddess oriented with the waters of the lake, moved against the popular spread of the Yhiist Monotheism in the lower classes with a series of repressive laws which for the first time included a death penalty. In 1088 the Queen Allirea of Coolullah, mother of Amarina the Great, used this as an excuse to go to war and express for the first time that ideology of the Universalism of the Singers. She had used the Yhiist doctrine to justify allowing common women to become war archers, displacing the old tradition of only the noblewomen having the time to devote to the incredibly complicated skill of using war-bows, and added a system of training to provide regular pikewomen instead of improvised pike blocks that were traditionally called up from levies to support the Empress. These War Brigades of local, associated women, a sort of Regimental or Thematic system arose, empowering the yeowomanry as a force of support for Coolullah. This allowed her to field a much larger professional army which totally dominated and easily destroyed the Army of the Queendom of Djieri in the War of the Arrow's Shadow, at the decisive battle of Amaroo in 1092.
A coalition of Larrakia and Paruku subsequently invaded from the west, fearing a Queen who had just deposed and annexed the entire realm of one of their Sisters. Both armies were however defeated in three years of war, and from 1095 forward peace uneasily reigned. In the Yhiist doctrine, however, was the belief that the Singers must be united under Anjea to properly keep the balance of the world--the Singers being the community of Yhiist Women (or Touched women more generally)--a world-unifying doctrine that morality and good order would only be upheld by Yhi if she were sung to by the whole of her creation in unified voice. This doctrine, created a vision of world-Empire which thoroughly entranced the young Princess of Coolullah, Amarina.
When Amarina came to the throne in 1103, she refused to maintain the religious toleration edicts of the Peace with Larrakia and Paruku and ordered all women in the lands of Coolullah and Djieri to acknowledge that Yhi was the Universal Omnipotent Mother, and that Wuriupranili and Anjea, though powerful supernatural beings, were only her creations. Larrakia and Paruku declared war, and Amarina was ready for them. She quick-marched west to the pass of Kakadu and met there the combined enemies of her enemies, deploying professional troops on both flanks in the high country, archeresses that covered an advance of her pike out of the narrows of the pass and allowed her to position her Noble Archers main body to dominate the field. The Queen of Larrakia died in battle and her daughter was taken as Amarina's Battle-Captive and wife (their children were restored to the throne of Larrakia as the first of the subordinate Queendoms).
Paruku rallied its defences, but being historically the smallest of the Queendoms in the Warring States period. Amarina marched on the city and battering its army aside in the crossing of the Umbrawarra Gorge, took Paruku to siege. The siege ended with a terrible slaughter by Aururian standards, the population refusing to yield, and Amarina subsequently swore that she would never again conquer and annex another Queendom. This oath, however, was in the context of the Yhiist universal ideology. Henceforth, there would not be absolute conquest, but instead the royal families of the other Queendoms would be integrated with her own by her own body -- intermarrying her captive sovereigns -- and restored to their thrones to rule by their own customs, as long as the ruling Yhiist-Universalist ideology of the State was upheld. In credit to Amarina's enormous organisation and military powers, over the rest of her great reign from 1106 forwards, she never once permitted a great slaughter upon her watch.
In the next nine years three more wars were fought, twice defeating an alliance of Watjubaga and Tjibarr and taking borderlands from them, and driving the women of Yuggera back across the mountains and establishing the border favourable to the old claims of Coolullah. However, the situation seemed stalemated... But in 1117, the Queen of Tanamerah, or the south of Sahul Minor, died, and her daughter, who had been promised to Amarina and betrothed to her in alliance before the Queen of Tanamerah had withdrawn the offer on account of the War of the Rites in 1103, voluntarily reentered the contract, marrying Amarina and willingly pledging her Queendom and sizable navy. This, her first love of her life, was the woman who invested her with the traditional accrutements of the claim of Imperial rule, using both the styles of the Northern and Southern (the Two Sisters) Empires, to achieve a universal pretence. With their galleys ranging ruthlessly along the coast in six years Yuggera and Wajuk were subjected and their Queens married into the dynasty. But contrary winds prevented the crossing of the Great Bight by any fleet, and the strength at sea of Yuduwungu was great. Likewise, a tremendous alliance of Yuduwungu, Watjubaga and Tjunini-Kurnawa made the southeast an ironclad line against her rule.
Amarina turned herself to projects of peace, namely the unfinished canal of her mother that was needed to unify the basin of Djieri with the rivers of the north. It would also allow the ships of Tanamerah access to the southeast, through Lake Djieri and the canals that Watjubaga had built into it from their innumerable interlinked rivers. The project was finished in 1127 after having been initiated in 1090, and an inland fleet gave Amarina the power to fight with enormous numbers of galleys against the inland forces of Watjubaga, in battles to rival the Chinese "Red Cliffs". The campaign's swiftness was spectacular; in two years Watjubaga's cities had fallen and in a single season she campaigned over the mountains to seize the capital of Watjubaga. The Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa resisted until her fleets were defeated in the deep water Battle of Erith in the Bass Straits and finally in 1135 all of Sahul Major and Tjunini-Kurnawa was unified by the Empress Amarina the Great.
Still, the unity of the Sisters demanded by the theology of Yhiism was not complete. To the north, protected by an ornate fastness of incredible mountains, reposed the often very distinct Queendom of Biirungdêwata, with its croppage of taro and yams and profound cultural differences from the rest of the sphere of Aururian civilisation. Amarina sent fleets to the west and east, in the meantime exploring islands which had been unified in all or in part under the reign of the Touched -- colonies in the Moluccas, Timor, and Halmahera were found, whereas to the east the Solomons were found to be inhabited entirely by primitive savages, but Singers, not Beach-Apes, nonetheless. The fleets settled bases from which to control and exact tributes to bring these areas within the scope of the Empress, and then from them launched the invasion of Biirungdêwata. By 1144 with the Queen of Biirungdêwata married to her heir, Empress Amarina had completed her objectives. She ruled for another twenty years, codifying the law of the Empire and establishing to the Queens the right to henceforth choose from among her progeny her successors... A right easily given to them, now that she was the mother, mommy, or grandmother or grandmommy, of every living Touched Queen. The triumph of the Yhiist Rite completed and the Empire unified in law and by the system of canals that she had devoted her peace to building, the crown of the Imperial System was finished in her last years, an enormous capital of a hundred thousand women, Mayi-Thakurti, a planned city at the heart of the Empire and designed and fit for the job of being a supreme Imperial capital. The next hundred and twenty years were a time of peace, good order, and immense prosperity: The Golden Empire. But the Trickster's Older Sister, the Island Slayer, would rumble from her sleep again, and evil and chaos again stalk the land. Nor was the glorious construct of Amarina the Great alone in the world.
1257: The Eruption of Mount Rinjani on the island of Lombok spreads an enormous ash plume downwind, bringing about a year without a summer in even the northern hemisphere. Directly downwind, the eruption, probably the most powerful in the past 4,000 years, might well have wiped out Aururian civilisation were it not for the Wattle Seed being the agricultural staple of their diet. The stubborn trees could regrow from the roots and outlast the terrible effects of the eruption. Nonetheless, it caused immediate chaos, and the slow recovery led to a wave of peasant rebellions.
1265 - 1300: Several Queens are overthrown by rebellions, rebel leaders replacing them, and open defiance to the Empire results. The armies, unable to march or be sustained in the famine, fritter idly away, and California enters a period of senescence and war. For the next thirty-five years the Empress barely controls more than the capital, and can barely feed it. The population of Mayi-Thakurti plunges, Queens and Duchesses fight for power, and rebellions shake the Empire to the bone. The Empress Kolora, badly affected by her mother's depressive resignation at the chaos caused by the eruption of Rinjani, attempts little other than to hold on to Coolullah, and many of the Queens contemptuously address her as only the Queen of Coolullah as she was never elected Empress.
1300 - 1328: Kolora's daughter is cut to a different mettle. The Empress Arinya rides the recovery of agriculture through a series of hard-fought personal battles with rebellious Duchesses to reassert control over the old Djieri and Paruku crownlands. Most of the Queens are as crippled by a refusal of the Duchesses--the whole period of 1257 forward being called the Era of Duchesses in Aururian history--to obey as well. It was in this period that the Crownlands' had their system of nobility reformed to eliminate hereditarianism in ruling land, titles instead being granted for life by merit in the Chinese fashion, but the reform was never successfully extended to the Queendoms. After twelve years of war, Arinya has forced several of the rebellious Queens to re-acknowledge her authority, only for another volcanic eruption in Ecuador to cause a second year without a summer in short order. Though nowhere as bad as the first, it sets back her designs for recovery. She still manages in forcing the Queens at swordpoint to acknowledge both her Mother's and her own Imperial reigns as rightful and declaring her daughter Yara as the legitimate successor.
1328 - 1340: After the death of the Empress Arinya, her daughter the Empress Yara largely succeeds in reestablishing tribute by the remaining disobedient Queens, holding a quorum of the Queenly Council and starting to suppress and eliminate truculent Ducal lines which refuse to reestablish Imperial law and order. The process is again rudely interrupted, this time by the arrival of the Black Death. Though Aururians are enormously resilient to the Black Death by their biology, the plague nonetheless killed up to 15% of the population in some areas and perhaps 10% of the entire Imperial population; a small price compared to the 30 - 40% of some other areas of the world but severe enough to drive the Empire back into chaos. Yara spent the rest of her reign fighting rebellions and accusations the plague proved Yhi was displeased with her reign as the Universalist Matriarch.
1349 - 1380: The reign of the Empress Matari was agreed to by the Queens when Yara gave up pressing her own daughter and instead presented a grand-niece untainted by association with the Imperial Court. She was accordingly widely accepted and in a 31 year reign succeeded in bringing all the Queendoms back into the Empire except for Biirungdêwata and Tjunini-Kurnawa, which had again established themselves as fully independent states; Timor, Halmahera, and the Solomons having been forgotten by the wayside of the chaos of the Years of the Duchesses. Matari succeeded by 1356 in establishing this strong core to the Empire, and spent the rest of her reign in peace, reestablishing the regular bureaucracy and repairing canals. She was universally celebrated by the chronicles of the period as a wise and just Sovereign who proved correct the Aururian custom of inheiritance of the Empress being approved by the Queens.
1380 - 1409: Within its somewhat reduced borders, the Empire completes a full recovery, reestablishing a regular administration down to the lowest levels, and again providing peace and eliminating internicine warfare. The Empress Allirea crushes the Last Revolt of the Duchesses in 1389, and bans the maintenance of more than one regiment in total strength and not more than 100 archers by any Duchess outside of the professional armies of the Queens and the Empire. She focuses on the internal development of the nation rather than the expense of warring with Biirungdêwata or Tjunini-Kurnawa, which would require a great fleet to be built, and begins the maintenance of friendly trade ties with the Mahapajit Empire of the Malay Lands. Then, one day, on the coast of Larrakia, the sun itself is blotted out. The ghostly image of clouds obscuring a setting sun, the quaint disputes of Aururian civilisation are masked into the shimmering arrival of an enormous fleet of ships coming forth with pale men on the decks of the enormous junks, rigged with silk and banded in iron.
1411 - 1435: The expeditions of Zheng He to the southeast and then west into the Indian Ocean were primarily about stabilizing Chinese ocean trade routes and protecting the rights of overseas Chinese. They necessarily entertained close connections with the Mahapajit Empire in establishing its obedience to its tributary master in the Yongle Emperor. For six years the expeditions of the Ming had provided steady and fragmentary data on the existence of a great southern Kingdom of women. Thus between the Third and Fourth Great Voyages of Zheng He to the southeast and west came the First Aururian Voyage. The Aururians, not being known to the Chinese, were not part of the tributary system even notionally, so the great expedition was outfitted to conduct a reconaissance of the trading partners of the Mahapajit.
The Aururian sources do not record the great "Treasure Ships" often associated with the expeditions, but instead assert the largest vessels had eight huge sails of silk and were of a size appropriate in a junk for a displacement of 2,000 tons, thus corresponding with the "Horse Transports" of the official lists. This argument has been used as supporting evidence for the Chinese assertion that the enormous Treasure Ships were just Yangtze barges for the Emperor to review the fleets. Nonetheless, heavily armed with up to twenty-four bronze cannon, a vast array of ships from the two largest sizes of transports and two smaller sizes of warships swarmed over the entrances to the great gulf on which Larrakia sits. The Queen faced thirty thousand Chinese soldiers without warning.
The Chinese, for their part, were amazed that the stories were true: Here were dark-skinned people but unlike those of the coast of Africa, entirely female and living in a nonetheless comprehensive society. They in turns praised and denigrated: Tidiness and order and obedience in society contrasted with immodesty, unnatural occupation and interest. The Aururians for their part called the eunuchs people (That is to say, women), and likely thought they lorded over the men of the fleet as a matter of course, having not encountered a large body of castrated men in leadership positions before. Likely the Imperial Court in Mayi-Thakurti even thought that the Great Celestial Emperor was one at first. The Chinese, in providing horses, silk and clothes in general astonished the Aururians with the immensity of their gifts, and in turn provided the Chinese gold, which was taken as a token of tribute. No embassy was exchanged, however; Larrakia's Queen demurred that she herself owed her daughterly loyalty to the Empress in Mayi-Thakurti, whom the Chinese used the same terms to refer to as the Japanese Emperor.
The expedition returned to China, where the Yongle Emperor's court made plans, after the next regular expedition of the treasure fleet, to send another fleet to secure emissaries and the proper submission of the Aururians to the Chinese throne. This was again undertaken as an intercalendar separate voyage starting in 1415 and arriving at the port of the Imperial Capital in 1416. The fleet numbered more than 250 ships. Zheng He led a great expedition inland in person to the Imperial capital of Mayi-Thakurti, which in those times was a city of more than 200,000 women, overflowing in abundance of gardens and public baths and surrounded by walls, well-supplied by canal barges. This required a certain skill to secure the proper effect: Therefore demonstrations of a massed battery of 200 cannon, and of large numbers of rockets, were conducted for the Aururian court, 4,000 horses were presented as gifts, and Zheng He asked to see the largest storehouse in the capital. He then arranged for those storehouse to be filled seven times over with silk clothes for the Imperial court; in Aururia where only one plant produces fibers and they of not the best quality for clothing, the amount of wealth represented was easily worth its volume, not weight, in gold. This storehouse was also filled three times with fine China ceramics, and then again with tea.
In return, the Imperial Court submitted to the Celestial Emperor by the customary forms, and one princess of the house of Tyinurru was sent with enormous quantities of gold and a menagerie of the native animals of Aururia to the Ming Court as an emissary. It was during these negotiations that the Chinese discovered the process of Aururian reproduction, which was reported back along with the emissary. The only result of this however was a formal Imperial Rescript directing that men should not take Aururians as wives as it was unhealthy and improper for both sides. The emissaries remained with the court until returned home in a third intercalendar voyage in 1420. It was during this voyage that the Empress explained to the new set of emissaries, who went to the Imperial court, the problem of the refusal of Biirungdêwata and Tjunini-Kurnawa to properly submit to Imperial rule. There was great debate in Mayi-Thakurti over this request, but in the end the Empress saw an advantage in the fleets and the tributary relationship. The emissary again remained in China for a long time, securing in 1424 a special voyage outfitted for war. She returned with Zheng He, who first stopped in Palembang, and then the great fleet set out on a true voyage. First collecting a great number of Aururian archers from Mayi-Thakurti, the fleet sailed back around Larrakia.
Sailing favourably with the wind, it crossed the Great Bight and arrived in the southern ports, making a rendezvous with the local Aururian armies and galleys, and together sailed against Tjunini-Kurnawa, defeating its fleet in naval battle. Landing the troops on the shores of the island, the Queen at once submitted and the Empress' representative convinced Zheng He of her sincerity, avoiding for her the fate of being dragged to Beijing in chains. The fleet then sailed north along the east coast of Sahul, standing wide away from the Great Barrier Reef, and in doing so obscuring the existence of the Strait of Torres, which the Empress had desired to be kept secret from the Chinese. The fleet thus presented itself largely intact to the eastern capital of Biirungdêwata. Here the galleys outright surrendered without firing a shot, and the Aururian army was placed with no bloodshed, though the Queen fled into the interior, she would ultimately submit to the Empress in 1430. All together three years had been spent on the operation.
The Treasure Fleet then returned home to find an edict had been passed banning further voyages. This trapped the latest emissary in China from 1426 - 1433 inside of China, where she lived in the Imperial capital in her own estate as a guest of the Emperor. She was returned home during a stop in Larrakia on the Seventh Voyage of the treasure fleets, but was replaced by a new emissary, who after sailing on the voyage with Zheng He found herself stranded in southern China by the permanent cessation of the treasure fleet sailings in 1435 as the Confucian element wont out at court and Zheng He died. She was ultimately given in 1439 permission to outfit one of the veteran ships of the Seventh Voyage for a private journey home, and did so. The Ming did not receive emissaries again from California--the published records of China had shown the real nature of the state -- nor seek them out, until the very late Ming, when the Aururian state had begun to recover and respond to western encroachment.
1435 - 1501: A Peaceful Twilight.
Cowed by the ominous threat of the Ming Treasure Fleets, the Queens obeyed the Empress, at least nominally, for the next sixty-six years. In this period Chinese and Mahapajit traders traveled extensively to Larrakia, the official port for trade with the outside world, and the Empresses sent colonists and soldiers to the Solomon islands and reasserted Imperial authority in a land which while thoroughly Touched had not seen it since the 1260s. An age of absolute prosperity, it was also a time of extremely weak central authority. Driven by the Ming example the Empress was forced to sharply reduce the tribute demanded from the subordinate Queens, and they essentially acted independently of the Imperial centre.
As the memory of the Ming fleets faded, so did the fear of them, and the steady actions of the Queens to assert their independence again resumed. A fateful event finally occurred. The Empress Sinasina died in 1501 in childbirth (an extremely rare occurrence for Aururians). This meant her daughter, Princess Tallara, had not been nominated as successor. In the Irish fashion, inheiritance was through direct womb-descendants of the Empress Amarina, but any such woman could be the heir. The heir was chosen by the council of Queens, and then automatically succeeded after her mother. This made the system virtually ironclad, since normally the Empress simply compelled the Queens to accept her daughter as heir (though in rare cases the Queens had forced acceptance of another Tyinurru) on the girl's birth or well before the Empress died. Sinasina's death in childbirth however meant that there was no heir.
And the Queens were not interested in one. Having enjoyed sixty-six years of not merely prosperity but veritable independence from the Imperial throne, only the Queen of Larrakia, dealing with a growing surge of Islamic piracy as the Mahapajit collapsed in the Indies, had any great support for the restoration of strong Imperial rule. The use of Ming ships to reassert Imperial authority in breakaway Queendoms had severely injured the prestige of the dynasty, and as a result there was a great desire for independence which had not been seen before despite the religious ideology of the state, which by using foreigners had been somewhat violated. The result was that Princess Tallara grew up barely controlling Mayi-Thakurti via her ministers. Control was reasserted over the crownlands, but as Queens pursued petty disputes and border wars with each other there was no effective central government, no ability for Tallara to claim the Imperial crown, and no actual ability to reassert Imperial authority.
1501 - 1527: The Interregnum.
The result was a 26 year interregnum during the childhood of the Empress Tallara, in which Queens fought each other and annexed territory by war, conducted their own foreign policy, and set out expeditions to the Solomons and even beyond, encountering for the first time the Touched population of Kanaka and Fiji, which had spread out from Kanaka and the Solomons and partially but not entirely converted the local population. These were the maximal explorations of the age of the junk, conducted independently of central control. The Queen of Tanamerah in particular tried to assert control over the Solomons and ended up in a sustained war with the Queen of Biirungdêwata.
In the meantime, Larrakia was involved in an increasingly desperate struggle. Ignoring the Ming-era prohibition on Aururian conquest of western islands, she landed in Timor and built up there a base from which to attack Muslim raiders, ultimately controlling about half the island by the end of the interregnum. Fitting out large war-junks was of enormous expense, however, and prevented Larrakia from offering substantial assistance to the Princess Tallara. She turned north to Tanamerah, where she sought out marriage alliance after leading a small force across the border to the east to force Yuggera to submit, which had maintained a peaceful stance in those years and was not willing to war for the sake of independence. With Yuggera's Queen loyally contributing troops subsequently, the Princess, not having any rightful greater title and relying on her wife the Crown Princess of Tanamerah, launched a campaign through the south, forcing a quorum of the Queens to assemble by arrow's-flight after three sharply contested battles. They nominated her Empress in exchange for pardons, but she then shocked them by seizing their daughters to the capital as hostages, and sending out Imperial Intendants to force reforms.
1527 - 1535: Reconsolidation.
A second revolt was attempted, and a second army was sent to the south, crushing the opponents of renewed Imperial power. These battles, using cannons, rockets, crossbows and Chinese horses to augment the traditional archeress and pike, were some of the most terrible in Aururian history in terms of casualties, and broke the power of the southern Queendoms. Henceforth the Empress banned the keeping of armies by Duchesses that were of greater strength than 100 women, and allowed active, professional troops, as opposed to levies, of no more than one regiment from the defeated southern Queens. This established the basic format of the Queenly Militia or Territorial force that was readapted into a formal territorial army in the modern era. Tanamerah and Larrakia secured an exemption for naval forces, which led to the modern Naval Militia.
This time, in a surprise to Biirungdêwata, which traditionally expected invasions from the south to come by the sea, the Empress Tallara brought her army through the snowy mountains and cold valleys of the heights of the dividing range of Sahul Minor, and descended into the heartland of Biirungdêwata via land. This famous crossing of the incredibly treacherous mountains, likened to the Crossing of the Alps by Suvorov, allowed her to deliver her army against the western capital of Biirungdêwata at Dabra, and besieging the Queen of Biirungdêwata at once. This time her entire family was dismissed from the Imperial service and banished to the Solomon Islands, forced to intermarry with local Solomon chieftainesses, and a cadet branch thoroughly intermarried to the Tyinurru was placed on the throne instead. Satisfied by this, Tallara turned herself to Imperial reforms, creating an all-Imperial bureaucracy that could constrict the ability of the Queens to act independently by making the local tax collectors in their own realms answerable to the Empress rather than to the Queens. She likewise put the canal crews and canal mistresses, who collected the all-important central agricultural tariffs, under fully Imperial control. In doing so, she eliminated the ability of the Queens to fiscally martial resources for future revolts. At this point the Aururian state moved toward centralization, instead of the disintegration of the European Holy Roman Empire.
1535 - 1595: The Empress Tallara ruled subsequently for 55 years in peace, dying at a very advanced age of 88 in 1590. This period of strong Imperial rule brought about the creation of a new Queendom of Kokopo out of the Touched islands to the east, restoring regular rule therein. Daughters of the local Chieftainesses with the line of Biirungdêwata united to form the new monarchy, the Blonde-Women of the East as they were sometimes poetically called for the common feature of curly blonde hair which was much rarer in Aururia proper (through intermarriage the gene has since spread widely). Her daughter, Tallara II, followed her to the throne with her inheiritance having been long since secured. The only sour note was the absence of Tjunini-Kurnawa from the Empire, which had resisted further attempts at inclusion. Far from the Muslim threat or the warring of Fijians, Tongans, and Samoans newly discovered to the east, they were a low concern, and before she died Tallara had been more concerned with securing the conquest of Timor and making it yet a new Queendom, diluting the power of the Queens further by increasing their number.
In doing so, however, the Empire, once again prosperous, encountered for the first time rumours of new fleets of great ships of white men in the waters of the Indies, late in the Empress' reign settling near Flores. Likewise, around 1569 a group of them had reputedly come from a completely different direction: The East. These men had arrived at the Kokopo islands and treated with a local Duchess of the southern islands and been bought off to return home with gifts of gold and provisions after staying for several months and causing trouble by stealing from and harassing the local people. For two decades they did not return, and with the young new Empress worried about the activities of such men on Flores to the west (and not sure if it were good or bad on account of the blockade they had flung up against Muslim raiders), nobody noticed until one day a large fleet of many sail descended upon the Solomons, and raided and burned several towns. The news did not reach the Imperial capital until after the fleet had turned south, and arrived off the coast of the city of Neridah in Yuduwungu. It was to be a most fateful encounter.
1596: The Spanish.
In the far southern lands of the world there was commonly understood to exist the great continent of Australia, to counterbalance the weight of land in the northern regions. It was here that the novelist Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo set the story "Las Sergas de Esplandián" at the turn of the 16th century, telling of the great Queen Califa, who with her legions of Amazons upon Griffins, led a race of black women who needed no men and fought as men, and better than men, too, in a land crowned and anointed in endless quantities of gold. It was from the Portuguese in the early 16th century, only two decades after Montalvo's epic and during the time when Europe was flush with the mysteries of the conquest of the Americas, that legends began to pass in the seafairing towns of Iberia that there was indeed such a land, the land of the Amazons of the South, set below and to the east of the spice islands.
And in newly conquered Peru, the navigator Álvaro de Mendaña heard these legends filtering back into the colonies, including one, most prominent, which held the land of the Califa to be the land of the Lost Gold Mines of King Solomon, the land of the Queen of Sheba herself, which had been given back over to Paganism since the ages of the Old Testament. In 1567, Mendaña, the nephew of Lope García de Castro, the Viceroy of Peru, was given two ships and set sail from Callao Peru to the west, sailing much further south than the prior crossings which had followed the route of Magellan to the northwest. After many adventures and hardships at sea, his two galleons set into a marvelous realm of islands. Here, Chinese-style ships, junks, sailed between the different islands around double-hulled canoes of large size, all rigged with battened sails. They were filled with women, black skinned but sometimes blonde haired and curly, who wore almost nothing in the way of clothes. They had towns and cities of stone construction down to the shore, lacking in substantial defences.
He hove into one of the ports, and was presented to the Duchess of Makira, who demanded to know if he was from the Emperor of Chin. Instead averring that he was a servant of the Emperor of lands to the East, and representative of the Christian faith, he attempted to convert the locals. His men, causing trouble, led for the Duchess of Makira to order him out; to quiet his return journey, his ships were given gold, which was astonishingly plentiful and cheap throughout the markets of the land, both as pure gold for simple ornaments and gold alloyed with copper for other uses. Astonished, he returned rich to South America with tales of the immensity of the wealth of the Solomon Islands--the land of the black amazons had been found! And they were pagans who walked on streets paved in gold.
For the next twenty years, Mendaña, no fool, lobbied at court, refusing to sail again until he was given an expedition to rival that of Cortez, for nothing less would be sufficient in his design of conquest. Despite the enormous wealth which had been given casually as a bribe to make him leave, the great cost of the expedition nearly bankrupt him and required wide Royal lobbying. It was finally assented to on the design that it could spare Spain from the late defaults of debt caused on account of the adventure against Elizabeth. With this design conceived, four ships with priests, women and children for a settlement, were to be escorted by 11 ships from Peru, 18 ships sent from Portugal, and 10 ships sent directly from Spain proper, all fitted for war and carrying two tercios of pike and shot, 28 field guns, and 400 cavalry. With this force assembled he set sail from Callao Peru in 1593, and briefly occupying the main islands of the Marquesas, beat against contrary winds to arrive exhausted off Makira. Descending on the coasts of Guadalcanal the population of the towns fled inland as the Spanish landed, throwing down temples to erect a church and plundering gold and fine china left behind in their wake, seizing the yam storehouses for food and resting in the abandoned towns.
The information of the attack arrived to Tallara II, who by now was well aware of the great swathe the Portuguese had set into the western islands. Accordingly a powerful fleet was prepared to sail to the Solomons to fight the incursion of the white men, consisting of many war-junks of the largest type armed with bronze cannon. The fleet missed Mendaña, who after recovering the strength of his forces and interrogating locals for information, set sail to the southwest. He lost three ships wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, and thus rather than descend upon Yuggera turned south to where he could find ultimately the fine and large harbour of Neridah, city and duchy of the same name, within the Queendom of Yuduwungu. With 40 ships he arrived at Neridah, destroying a small Imperial naval squadron of junks in the harbour with the much heavier weight of shot of his galleons and bringing his men ashore to invest the old and decayed medieval walls of the tranquil city.
Duchess Yulubungu of Neridah was invited to accept the Christian faith and offered many prizes for turning over gold, including to become Queen of Yuduwungu. Playing for time she demurred in these things, offering instead to bring the Queen Balbringu of Yuduwungu hence for negotiations, saying she was too loyal to her Queenly Lady to act against her. Mendaña permitted this, and held a baptism for them both, wherein the Queen of Yuduwungu promised to rise in revolt against the Empress and deliver enormous tribute to the King of Spain. Mendaña soon suspected this was a trick, and turned his guns against Neridah when his scouts brought word of preparations to strength the medieval walls with a backing of packed earth. The Queen of Yuduwungu, raised her levees, but being the mass levee of yeowomanry rather than a professional army, it was thrown back by the Spanish, who met her in pitched battle and slew Balbringu the Queen of Yuduwungu in main battle when the Spanish caballeros penetrated the Aururian pike behind the fire of concentrated heavy field artillery at the battle of Kooragang. It had however been enough. her daughter met the rest of the levees to the arrival of the Empress Tallara the Second, while in the meantime Neridah painfully held out against the pounding of eighteen Spanish siege pieces.
The Duchess Yulubungu, trapped within her city, resisted any attempt or cajoling effort to make her surrender, and held all the more valiantly for it. Ulata, now Queen of Yuduwungu, set the countryside burning around Neridah and soon the Spanish themselves were also starving. The arrival of the Imperial Army saw a force of not less than seventy thousand women try to advance. The Spanish, outnumbered ten to one, were however in excellently fortified lines of circumvallation and contravallation and supported by the guns of their fleet, and the effort of the Aururians to break through, despite the horrific rain of arrows which "truly made the sun dark" to the Spanish, could not penetrate the lines and were bloodily repulsed. An attempt of the Imperial fleet to enter Neridah harbour was likewise repulsed by the anchored Spanish directing heavy cannonade against the ships which the Aururian ships could not mount a similar weight to, and Mendaña then sent out an expedition which defeated the Aururian fleet and sailed along the coast, ravaging and pillaging to bring back food for his besieging army that was itself besieged.
In this fashion the terrible dispute of the siege of Neridah continued for another year. Reinforcing Imperial squadrons blocked Mendaña's raiders from leaving Neridah harbour, and in desperation he accordingly tried to send the slaves and captives he had taken of the Aururians into Neridah to weaken them. When the Duchess turned them back, Mendaña ordered them all beheaded, and their heads thrown across the lines to the Imperial army besieging them from the outside "so that we may demoralize the pagans who have no hope in the hereafter". The bloody spectacle brought a furious attack from the Imperial army that was again repulsed, but likewise was the effort of Mendaña to counterattack, finding the impressive strength and power of the Aururian bow sufficient to punch through plate armour at point-blank range in the entrenchments (at 10 yards they could kill through plate), and wound many on the limbs at greater ranges, and combined with the generally valiant defensive resistance of the vastly numerically superiour army their defence was impossible to break through even after deep losses inflicted upon it during the repulse of the Aururian assault on the lines of contravallation on the day prior.
However, the resources of Neridah were not infinite, and with a year the food of the city was utterly exhausted; but living on rats and things grown there and perhaps on their own flesh the people had held out for more than eight months, refusing all the while to surrender. Finally, now weakened with disease and sickness and want of food, Mendaña launched an assault which overcame the battered down old walls, defending against a renewed Imperial relief effort, and punched through to put the city to a terrible sack in which the entire population was slaughtered, save a small number inside the citadel with the soldiers under the command of the Duchess, who held out in defending themselves. Yulubungu, resolving to die with her subjects, succeeded in smuggling her daughter to the Empress but in refusing to escape herself, held out another forty days in the citadel before Mendaña overcame it, burning the remains of Neridah and carting away the gold and silver of the city while throwing the mangled corpses into the bay and proclaiming it a victory for God.
A victory that could not be capitalized upon, as despite all of his efforts turned against the Imperial Army he could not break through the siege works they themselves had built, defended by cannon and rocket as well as bow and crossbow. Finding the ground impossible for an advance, Mendaña, astonished with the haul of gold and silver from Neridah, resolved to sail to the south where he now knew that the Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa persisted in her independence from the Empire. Loading his fleet with the spoils of Neridah, he broke through the Imperial blockade with the loss of six ships and sailed south, leaving Neridah destroyed to its foundations in his wake. Entering Yanakie inlet he marched inland to besiege the great city of Yarram while sending couriers offering an alliance to the Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa. The Queen did not immediately reply, however; Yarram proved just as willing to stand a siege as Neridah; and Mendaña was astonished when the Imperial army arrived, twice as fast as he thought possible, for while disadvantaged in many other ways the legendary foot cavalry of the Aururian professional troops could march with incredible swiftness across an immense network of roads of Roman quality.
Mendaña, seeing the situation nearly hopeless, fought in turn against two successive columns in the Battle of Yarram in an effort to retreat back to Yanakie. In both cases he defeated the successive columns, but could not avoid being encircled by the arrival of the third column vigorously attacking his force. With the other two arriving quickly, eighty thousand Imperial troops fought five thousand Spaniards. They resisted for two days and fifteen hundred broke through. The rest were slain in a day's valiant resistance, Mendaña among their number. The survivors fell back to the ships in chaos, and from the number of those slain the number of Conquistadoras -- about twenty -- were taken prisoner and given as wives to the noblewomen of the Imperial Court.
The remaining Spanish quarreled about who should lead them, the expedition to them not quite a disaster, for now all the spoils of Neridah were to be shared with many fewer survivors. Isabel Barreto de Castro, the wife of Mendaña, won out the contest, and directed that the fleet should sail south to Tjunini-Kurnawa where they might establish the planned colony in alliance with the Queen for a future expedition, and trade guns and cannon for more gold that the Queen might further resist the Empress. Arriving at the harbour of Murdunna, the fleet was indeed initially welcomed, and a colony was allowed to be established. But a few months later the walls being raised were assaulted in the night by Imperial troops that the Queen had allowed to arrive, the fleet blockaded the Spaniards into the harbour, and small boats seized several of the galleons in vigorous fighting. Isabel Barreto herself was captured and presented as a prize to the Queen of Tjunini-Kurnawa, who on hearing the terrible news of Neridah in the form of the Empress sending her the heads of those slain by the Spaniards -- and then to prove they were not invincible, the heads of the Spaniards slain at Yarram! -- had acknowledged her rightful suzerain and lain the trap for the Conquistadors. Proving once again their incredible ability, however, the Portuguese Almiranta of the Fleet under Pedro Fernandes de Queirós cut her anchors and led twenty-three ships in a thundering line with roaring cannons great in a two day long beat against the wind into open water under continuous attack, and then turned to the east and rode the Furious Fifties safely back to Chile, with half the plunder of Neridah and the survivors of the fleet.
Isolation would never again be an option for the Aururian Empire.
1598 - 1605: Gloriana!
Isabel Barreto de Castro proved an adaptable and competent woman. Adapted to her captivity, she moved energetically to turn herself from a hated butcher to a reliable noblewoman in the eyes of the Californians. She worked with her new wife and immediately proposed to the Empress the absolute necessity that, if the Empire wished to remain free, it must secure weapons from Europe and it must do so from its most natural friend, Albion, the Kingdom of England--ruled by Queen Elizabeth. Hearing of this, and having the astrolabe and the compass and captured charts of the entire world from the Spanish ships, the Empress Tallara II in fact readily assented to the sending of a powerful fleet to Europe. 22 junks of the largest type were despatched to the east, and proved themselves fully capable of sailing (there are some fragmentary records of prior circumantipolar voyages) to the Atlantic across the Antarctic ocean, and then north to England.
There the Aururian seawomen were met with astonishment and delight by the Elizabethan English of Portsmouth, with the great fleet laden with gold and spices of the orient in trade. In exchange they wished cannon and muskets, and these were purchased at greatly inflated prices, most proving to be older pieces of poor quality. Nonetheless, the trade went well, and with it, the Spanish were treated to the henceforth astonishing spectacle of one of their pagan target Empires instantly treating with their European allies, and returning home with holds laden with European arms, evading a Spanish effort to bring them to battle on account of bad weather. The expedition created an instant love in Aururia--or California as it was by then already universally known in Europe thanks to Las Sergas de Esplandián--for Elizabeth, the Elizabeth era, and all things Elizabethan and English.
With the first voyage successful, a second was outfitted, while the Spanish galleons were tested, and ultimately a unique hybrid Sino-European method of shipbuilding was constructed out of them by the Aururians, distinctive enough to be called the Aururian Galleon, and a type that persisted in variations as their main ship up until the end of the 18th century when more directly western designs ultimately won out, with some carried over indigenous innovations. These first voyages to England, however, were conducted entirely by junks, and the second great fleet brought back more arms--with the amount of money and spices in play, soon merchants from all over Europe arrived with them--as well as, in consultation with the captured Spanish women, a more aggressive effort to acquire the military treatises of Europe. A third voyage had some more limited success, the limits caused by the death of Elizabeth, far too soon to the Aururian eye, and the greater suspicion James, who desired peace with the Spanish (at least at first), levied upon their interest in guns and arms. Negotiations did as much as possible to provide non-military goods to the third Aururian trading fleet and as miserly a limit of weapons as possible, and sent them off as he traveled away to sign the peace with the Spaniards that brought an end to the hostilities of the Wars of the Armada, temporarily. Nonetheless, the image of England as the land of Gloriana and a friend in the wider world of Colonial politics to which they had now been opened remained for them, and to the English the image of the cheerful and guilelessly brave Amazons as friends against the Spanish likewise dimly lingered for future generations to kindle.
1600 - 1610: Troubles at Home.
In 1600 the volcano Huaynaputina erupts in Peru. By tradition volcanism is associated with dangers and evils and disorder in the Aururian religion, social history, and general cosmology. It has become in some respects a self-fulfilling prophecy, though in the last two major Indonesian eruptions the Imperial government worked aggressively to counter the popular panic. In 1600 the Empire was strong enough against external threats that rebellion from the Queens did not occur. The fleets were still dispatched to Europe. However, Huaynaputina brought forth a period of decades as the Little Ice Age descended onto the world in which Aururian agriculture would suffer reduced yields, at the same time that the Empress Tallara II issued a series of edicts from 1598 forward mandating shifts in production to begin the development of a system of water-driven pumps for reclaiming land from the sea and the development of wind and water mills; expanded cannon forges; and ultimately, the relocation of poor women and encouraging them to take on the job of coal miner, to supply the coke required for making iron cannon in great quantities.
Technical writings from England and the assistance of the captive Spanish women of education created a centralized Imperial plan to develop an iron industry like that of Tudor England in the Weld region, but using coal derived coke rather than charcoal. This first developed in the extreme south around Kaurna, where water transportation by canal and in the protected bays combined with availability of coal and iron through canal transportation to create the necessary characteristics for large-scale manufactury of both cannon and wheelock muskets. The last note is an important one -- the Aururian army, being relatively small compared to the enormous resources of the state (at twice the population, the Empress had no more troops in the 1600s than Louis XIV's France), the Empress considered the bow to still be extremely useful, and had an enormous quantity of trained archers. Accordingly it was not felt the typical matchlock was useful enough; it was used, but only in limited quantities, and native production and imports rapidly centred on the wheelock, which was felt to be reliable enough to be issued enmasse to professional soldier-women instead of crossbows. Thus a limited number of highly skilled women armed with wheelock muskets augmented the archers of the Empire, with both being covered by women whose arms soon roughly mimicked those of the grenadier, with grenade, axe, and armour to protect archers and wheelock-women at close quarters. Pike remained at the customary ratio for European armies of the time, and was slow to die, only being fully eliminated in the 18th century as in Russia and Sweden.
In the meanwhile, the effort to create this force required some real reordering of the national economy. This could take advantage of the marginal farmers finding themselves unable to support themselves, with yields reduced between the twin hammer of the descending ice age and the eruption of Huaynaputina, but it was unpopular, and the first large-scale peasant revolts since the late 13th century occurred as a result, forcing the Empress Tallara II to twice take the field in the 1605 - 1610 -- the first time the Empress herself had had to do so -- against peasant women arming themselves against relocations and economic dislocation. It was in these peasant revolts, some Aururian authors have asserted, that the first whispers of what was to become the Blackskirt anti-foreign ideology manifest themselves.
Last edited by Voyager989 on April 21st, 2015, 2:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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