Postscript 2 - Notes on the History of the Grand Duchy of Upper Danubia
(more stuff that didn’t
make it into the novel)
King Vladik and the Judicial Reforms of 1524
A Duke instead of a King
"Wood Nymphs" - Female guerilla archers
Maritza's
research and the Great Fire of 1755
King Vladik and the Judicial Reforms of 1524
Prior to the rule of King Vladik the Defender in the early 16th Century, an
offender was convicted of a crime by his local village council, collared by the
village blacksmith, and then became subject to the person who had accused him.
Village elders who, in many cases were handpicked by the area’s most important
landlords, issued the conviction.
It goes without saying that such a system was vulnerable to abuses. It was
common for wealthier persons to falsely accuse villagers or tenants of crimes,
have them convicted and collared, and then utilize them as slaves. The abuse
became worse in the late 15th Century when the custodians of convicted criminals
began selling them as real slaves to neighboring countries. As the abuse became
more common, the Royal Family became concerned that the country could become
depopulated if too many criminals were sold abroad. There was debate within the
Royal Court over how to stop the practice, but given the power of the southern
landlords, nothing much could be done until 1502, the year of the first invasion
from the Ottoman Empire.
The first Ottoman invasion completely altered the balance of power in the
kingdom. Upon finding out that a large Ottoman force was marching northward to
attack the Danubian Kingdom, King Vladik and his small army rode south. Their
purpose was not to confront the Turks on open land where they faced certain
defeat, but instead to organize a massive evacuation of the entire southern half
of the Danubian Kingdom to the comparative safety of the north. Prior to the
King's arrival, the southern part of the kingdom had been panic stricken about
the pending invasion. The tenants and villagers were more than happy to join
their King and flee northward, as were many lower caste knights who knew
anything about Ottoman warfare. Under the leadership of the King, the lower
classes revolted against the landlords, burnt their property, and fled into the
forest. The evacuation of Lower Danubia destroyed the southern landowners as a
social class within days. The southern landlords were left with neither land nor
tenants, and thus their power was completely eliminated.
As the southern refugees crowded the valley around Danube City, the question
arose over what to do about all the convicted criminals among them. The King now
had his opportunity to put an end to the de facto slavery system. He simply
declared that all displaced criminals were under the custody of the Crown, since
it made no sense to keep them accountable to landowners that no longer had any
land and to the elders of villages that no longer existed. During the brief
interlude of peace following the first Turkish invasion, the King ordered all
displaced criminals from the south to be rounded up and sent to live in guarded
dormitories near Danube City.
With nearly half of the criminals in the country now under his control, the
King’s next step was to figure out which ones were wrongly convicted of crimes
and order them freed. He asked the Danubian Church to assign 20 priests to
interview criminals and separate innocent people from ones who had truly
committed crimes. King Vladik's purpose was not entirely altruistic, because he
desperately needed more soldiers for his army. Any criminal wrongly convicted
and willing to fight in the impending campaign against the Holy Roman Empire
would be offered freedom. When the Turks invaded a second time, the offer of
freedom was extended to any displaced criminal willing to fight in the Danubian
Army.
By 1520 King Vladik had successfully fought four military campaigns, but with
each war the number of men available to defend the kingdom had diminished. He
needed more soldiers, and realized that criminals in the custody of the
country's northern landlords could provide him with a much-needed group of new
military recruits. He set about creating a new legal system to justify taking
control of all remaining criminals in Upper Danubia, but his effort was
interrupted by yet another invasion.
King Vladik finally issued the new judicial code in 1524, which was a
far-reaching set of laws that consolidated power under the Crown. Among the
reforms was an edict stating that the private custody of criminals had been
abolished throughout the kingdom, and that all criminals had to travel to Danube
City to place themselves under the custody and protection of the King. He
appointed 10 advisors to replace the 20 priests to interview the newly acquired
criminals to determine guilt or innocence. Those 10 men became Upper Danubia's
first Spokesmen for the Criminals. They rode with detachments of soldiers to
enforce the edict, and long columns of naked, collared criminals streamed
towards the capitol and King Vladik's dormitories. The edict also created the
national Danubian judicial system, abolishing the right of village counsels to
conduct trials and issue sentences. After 1524 the only person who had the right
to issue a sentence or order a criminal collared was an authorized
representative of the Crown.
By the late 1520's the Danubian government became completely unconcerned about
the criminals' pasts. Worried about another invasion, King Vladik simply ordered
all criminals, even recently convicted ones, to train as soldiers while Danubian
scouts nervously patrolled the forests bordering the now lost provinces of Lower
Danubia. The feared invasion finally came in 1531. Nearly all of the country's
remaining criminals, along with the King, his heir, and 80 percent of the
country's men of military age, died in the forests south of Danube City fiercely
defending the kingdom. The country itself survived, but just barely. However,
the legal system created by King Vladik remained in place, as did the idea of
keeping all criminals under the custody of the Crown.
The dormitory system for housing criminals remained in place throughout most of
the 16th and 17th Centuries, due to fears of more invasions. However, over time
the government tired of having to house and feed large numbers of criminals if
there was no military necessity for doing so. In 1710, the Grand Duke
established the Danube City collar-zone and allowed criminals to live with their
families, but under the supervision of their Spokesmen. In 1780 the dormitories
finally were torn down and the stones used to construct a new Parliament
building.
A Duke instead of a King
King Vladik the Defender was killed in battle in 1531, during the final and most
serious invasion of the country from the south. Nearly 70 percent of King
Vladik’s soldiers died in a series of fierce battles as the invaders slowly made
their way through the forests towards Danube City. Finally, the king’s only son,
together with his son-in-law, rallied the survivors of the Danubian Army for one
last attack to prevent the invaders from escaping the forests and besieging
Danube City. King Vladik’s son was killed, and his son-in-law crippled, but the
Danubians won the battle.
The nation was stricken with grief, given that King Vladik and his only son were
dead. The only living heirs to the throne were the King’s daughter and her
wounded husband. When offered the crown the dead King’s son-in-law responded:
“I will rule, if that is what you wish. However, I have no right to be called
King. Our true King has died defending our people, and I will leave his throne
vacant so perhaps he can watch over us from the land of the dead.”
King Vladik’s son-in-law took the title of Grand Duke of Upper Danubia. From
that point on the Danubian Royal Family always referred to themselves as Dukes
instead of Kings.
"Wood Nymphs" - 16th Century
female guerilla archers
In
1531, following the six military invasions that were successfully
repelled by King Vladik, the Danubian Kingdom was a very different place
than it had been prior to 1499, the year he took the crown. The most
obvious change was the loss of the fertile manors of Lower Danubia and
the transfer of nearly half the country’s population to the much less
fertile Eastern Valley. Another obvious change, especially in the region
surrounding Danube City, was the absence of men. King Vladik’s six
military campaigns had decimated the male population, leaving barely 10
percent of all men of military age still alive. Of the survivors many,
including the Grand Duke, were so badly crippled from battle that they
were unable to perform normal chores. The situation was so extreme that
the area around Danube City became known as “The Valley of Women”.
The Grand Duke, quite reasonably, was concerned about yet another attack
from either the Ottoman or the Holy Roman Empire. Were such an attack to
take place there was almost no one available to defend the kingdom
except a few Royal bodyguards and the women of the Central Valley. The
new ruler felt unable to rely on the villagers of the Eastern Valley,
who were in the process of reconstituting the society they formerly had
in Lower Danubia. The crippled Grand Duke and his female subjects were
largely on their own.
Like his father-in-law, the Grand Duke was a shrewd military planner who
was willing to discard social rules and long-held assumptions to defend
his kingdom. He understood that the Central Valley would be most
vulnerable for about a 15-year period, the time needed for a new
generation of boys to grow up and re-build the Danubian Royal Army. That
meant the women of the Central Valley would have to do two things to
save the country that were taboo for European women in the 16th Century:
take up arms to defend the Kingdom, and bear children without husbands.
In 1533 the Grand Duke issued several edicts. The most important was to
open a series of government positions to women, including city guards,
tax collectors, scribes, horse breeders, and archers. The next edict
allowed women to buy and inherit property. A third edict eliminated the
legal stigma of having children out of wedlock. A final edict, issued by
the now ex-communicated Danubian Clergy, opened the Priesthood to women.
1533 marked the year that Danubian women achieved a temporary legal
status that came very close to that of Danubian men.
By 1534, groups of raiders from neighboring countries were attacking
some of the country’s outlying villages to test the Kingdom’s defenses.
The Grand Duke responded by ordering several newly-ordained Priestesses
and survivors of King Vladik’s military command to organize the
villagers to defend themselves.
The Priestesses and ex-soldiers decided to ignore any women who had
children. Instead they concentrated on recruiting teenaged girls and
organized them into bands of guerrilla archers. The girls were
organized into squads of about eight fighters each, taught how to shoot
arrows in rapid succession, live in the wild for extended periods of
time, and move about quickly in the forests.
Officially the female guerillas were called “Daughters of the Crown”,
but unofficially they came to be known as “Wood Nymphs”, or simply
“Nymphs”. A Nymph always began her service at age 15, immediately after
mother braided her hair. Priestesses pledged the girls secretly, and
once a group of eight girls was sworn in, they left their village to
spend the next three years of their lives in the woods. Before they
departed their home village, the girls were sworn to complete secrecy;
not even parents were allowed to know about a Nymph’s pending service.
Nymphs always served away from their home village, to prevent their
families from interfering with their military duties.
The Nymphs relied on fast movement through the trees and very sudden hit
and run attacks against foreign raiding parties. Nymphs usually attacked
at dusk, although they could attack anytime their squad leader thought
there was an opportunity to inflict casualties on an enemy and escape.
The most common attack was to fire a bunch of arrows from an ambush and
then quickly disappear into the woods. After attacking the girls
immediately fled. Hand-to-hand combat had to be avoided if at all
possible, since the Nymphs wore no armor and were not expected to match
the strength of their male opponents. Often several squads of Nymphs set
up a series of ambushes, hoping to goad raiding parties to pursue them
deeper and deeper into the forest. Sneaking up on sleeping opponents or
distracted sentries and stabbing them was also very common, but much
more risky.
Nymphs usually wore nothing but a short leather skirt, boots, and
wristbands. To minimize detection during combat they often painted their
faces and upper bodies green. They carried nothing with them except a
dagger, arrows, and either a long bow or a crossbow. Traveling as
lightly as possible was crucial to escaping their armored opponents.
They quickly dodged through trees, jumped into streams or lakes,
scampered up rocks, or fled into caves and tunnels, so they had to keep
their hands free and their bodies unencumbered. Even the longbows were
designed to aid in a quick escape, because they could easily be broken
and discarded if their owners needed to drop them to flee. Each longbow
had a small lever embedded in the center frame that, if pressed hard
enough, split the wood and rendered it useless to the enemy.
The Nymphs understood that under no circumstances could they be taken
alive. If a Nymph thought she was about to be captured, she was trained
to quickly slit her wrists or her neck with small sharp blades embedded
in each wristband. If a Nymph saw that a companion had been captured,
she was trained to shoot an arrow into her fellow Nymph before fleeing.
The Nymphs' squad leader always carefully planned the escape route
before launching an attack, so forced suicides were relatively rare. As
for capture, there was no recorded history of a Nymph ever being
captured alive.
A typical squad of Nymphs lived in the woods for a total of three years,
from age 15 to age 18. The Danubian Wood Nymphs were the closest thing
Europe had to an Amazonian culture. They lived off the land most of the
time, only occasionally going to a Priest’s house for food or to pick up
winter clothing. The teenagers were entirely self-sufficient and their
lives revolved around constant hit-and-run attacks during the summer and
trying to survive in the wild during the winter. At the end of three
years the squad returned to its members’ home village and each young
veteran received the title to a plot of land as a reward for her
service.
For about 10 years the Nymphs were the Grand Duke’s only line of defense
against both foreign raiders and rebellious village elders from the
Eastern Valley. However, the Grand Duke never intended to have women
fighting for him any longer than was absolutely necessary. The Nymphs’
importance diminished over time, along with the temporary leading role
of women in Danubian society. As a new generation of boys grew up and
began receiving formal military training, the Grand Duke reconstituted
the Royal Army. Armored soldiers again patrolled the southern woods
while other teams of young Danubian men retrieved the huge Turkish siege
cannons abandoned during King Vladik’s attacks and mounted them on
Danube City’s walls. Within a generation Upper Danubia was ready to
defend itself in a more traditional manner. By 1555 far fewer girls were
being recruited to fight for the Duchy. By 1565 the Nymphs as a military
force had vanished completely and became nothing more than a memory and
a source of stories for older single women in the villages to pass along
to their families.
With the return of men to lead Danubian society during the 1560's, women
lost much of their temporary equality, not to regain until the 20th
Century. However, the legacy of the Nymphs did have permanent benefits
for Danubian women. After 1534, Danubians never regarded women as “the
weaker sex”, because for nearly 30 years young women had the chance to
defend the Duchy and prove themselves in combat. Danubian women also
attained permanent property rights as a result of the Nymphs’
landholdings, centuries ahead of women in most other countries. Another
legacy of the Nymphs was the Danubian custom of female Royal Guards, who
later became female Police Officers during the judicial reforms of 1780.
A very important institution where women permanently attained equal
rights was in the Priesthood of the Danubian Church. By 1560 the number
of Priests and Priestesses was equal. In that year the Church mandated
that all Clergy members had to be married to other Clergy members and
work as husband-wife teams. Women became full participants in the Church
hierarchy and from the mid-1500's onward the Danubian Church played a
key role in raising the literacy rates for Danubian females.
Maritza's
research and the Great Fire of 1755
In Danubian society professional historians are held in very high
esteem. Danubian religious beliefs and the veneration of ancestors
explain why a good historian is held in higher regard in the Duchy than
in most other countries. Danubians are obsessed with understanding
everything possible about the country’s past, because their Priests
believe that it is necessary to have a complete understanding of the
conditions under which a person’s ancestors lived to enhance the
spiritual bonds between the living and the dead. Without being able to
accurately visualize what life was like many years ago, it is impossible
for the living to have visions, and it is through visions that the dead
communicate with the living.
Maritza Ortskt-Dukovna spent her professional life as a historian and
researcher of Danubian history. At the relatively young age of 30 she
joined the Guild of the Ancients, which is the most competitive and
highest-ranking group of historians in Danube City. She was a respected
professional by the time her husband became Prime Minister, but there
was nothing particularly exceptional about her work. Her main interest
focused on the century following the death of King Vladik the Defender
and examining how Danubian society evolved following the traumatic years
of the Ottoman invasions.
About five years after her husband became Prime Minister, Maritza’s
career took a dramatic turn when she traveled to Vienna. Her original
goal was to research the lives of two Danubian barons who participated
in defending Vienna during the Turkish siege of 1683.
While looking though a collection of antique maps of city planners, she
found several unpublished maps of Danube City in Viennese archives. When
she examined them in detail she discovered something truly shocking.
Among the Danube City maps were several drafts of the city plan of the
Danubian capitol approved by the Grand Duke after the Great Fire of
1755.
The problem with the maps was their date: 1753. Maritza realized the
city plans had been drawn up at least two years before fire leveled the
Danubian capitol. There was no doubt about it. Those maps clearly were
early drafts the city plan later approved by the Grand Duke in the fall
of 1755, less than a month after fire destroyed every wooden building
within the city walls.
Maritza realized she had just made a discovery; that if true, would be a
horrible shock to her country’s understanding of what happened during
the Great Fire of 1755. What the maps indicated was that the Grand Duke
had been planning to rebuild Danube City years before its destruction
actually took place. The question was; how could he have known in 1753
that the Danubian capitol would need to be rebuilt?
----------
The Great Fire of 1755 took place on a hot windy night at the height of
harvest season, when most of the city’s residents were outside the city
gates working the fields. The flames quickly swept through the tightly
packed wooden buildings, blown downwind from rooftop to rooftop by hot
gusts. As soon as the fire started, the Grand Duke ordered his soldiers
to evacuate everyone still inside the city, instead of attempting to
combat the flames. Most remaining residents escaped over the city walls,
using ladders and supply baskets that just happened to be there. Others
escaped by crossing the Rika Chorna River, in small boats that, once
again, just happened to be tied to the shore. It was a true miracle that
almost no one was killed in the fire, given that every wooden structure
in the city was destroyed within three hours.
In spite of the devastation, residents did not go hungry that winter,
because the entire harvest was kept in new warehouses that had been
constructed outside the city walls in 1754. As for building materials,
that was not a problem either because there were huge piles of bricks,
stone, and lumber that were being collected for a planned expansion of
the city wall. As the smoke cleared from the ruined city, the Grand Duke
announced that his subjects were free to take building materials for
their own needs and that the wall project would have to be postponed.
The only condition he set was that residents could not rebuild inside
the old walled city because it needed to be cleared of debris.
The Danubians always thought that the Ancients had protected them in
1755. Their capitol lay in ruins, but they had plenty of food and
construction materials to build a new and better city outside the old
one. There was no starvation and the Grand Duke’s generosity with the
building materials assured that most people were back in houses before
the weather really got cold. How lucky that the fire took place
precisely at the moment all those supplies had been collected!
There was another “stroke of fortune” during the fire. The nation’s
archives were being temporarily stored in the Temple of the Ancients,
instead of their usual location near the main city cathedral. The Grand
Duke recently had ordered all religious artifacts to be taken there as
well, over the objections of the Clergy, who were offended at the
thought of the Temple being used as a warehouse. Both the Temple and the
cathedral survived the fire intact, but the wooden archive buildings
were leveled. How lucky those buildings were empty and all those
documents and artifacts weren’t lost! Or was it really luck?
While the residents were occupied with building their new houses, teams
of Austrian architects laid out a new capitol and a grid-style street
system for the area inside the Old City Wall. Those Viennese certainly
knew what they were doing: they had a new city plan ready within days of
arriving. The Grand Duke and his planners seemed to know exactly where
to put the new buildings and could visualize what the city would look
like once it was reconstructed. By 1756 the new streets already were
being laid out.
By 1790 the new Danube City was completed. Wide boulevards and graceful
stone government buildings had replaced the narrow streets and
ramshackle wooden residences of the old city. There was no mention of
building a new city wall, but most of the old one was kept intact to
separate the government ministries from the businesses and residences
outside. The new city was much more comfortable and spread out than the
old one. Everyone agreed that the fire, and the way the Grand Duke
handled it, had been a Gift from the Ancients.
----------
The more Maritza thought about it, the more she realized everything that
happened during 1755 indicated the destruction of Danube City was
deliberate. The miraculously low number of casualties, the fact that
there just happened to be huge piles of building materials collected
outside the city walls, the fact that the Grand Duke already had ordered
the construction of several warehouses for grain on the other side of
the Rika Chorna River, the preservation of the archives, and the timing
of the fire were all suspect.
Maritza spent four months in Vienna instead of her planned two weeks,
carefully sorting through correspondence and city plans. What she found
was not reassuring, because apart from more sets of blueprints she found
several letters from the Grand Duke written in 1754 and early 1755. One
letter was an attempt to force the architects to lower their fees, and
another asked how much stone would be needed for two planned ministry
buildings. Then she found the following passage, in the Grand Duke’s
handwriting, in a letter addressed to an Austrian friend in 1754:
This city is a pit of sickness and darkness, an offense to the Ancients
and to the Creator. I trust that this is the last Christmas I must look
out upon the unsightly rooftops and smoky fog that smother our people. I
long for the day this foul landscape is swept from my vision, that I may
look out from my window and see beauty and harmony, not chaos and
despair. May the Ancients make this the last winter I behold this
obscene labyrinth of rotting wood and garbage.
There was a final detail that convinced Maritza that the
wall-construction plan was a ruse. She had found multiple blueprints of
Danube City that predated the fire by two years, but no one in either
Vienna or Danube City ever had seen a blueprint of the touted expansion
of the city walls. She concluded that such a plan never existed.
By the time she returned to Danubia, there no longer was any doubt in
Maritza’s mind. The Grand Duke wanted old Danube City destroyed and
swept from his sight, but had to ensure that his subjects were available
to build him the new city that he wanted. He spent two years planning
the project, making sure he could rid himself of the old city, but keep
his subjects healthy and content enough to build its successor. Hence
the careful collection of food and building supplies, the fire at
precisely the moment most residents were absent, the well-planned
evacuation of those who remained, and the “generosity” that won him the
hearts of the city’s displaced population.
The Great Fire of 1755 was no accident. It had been carefully planned
and deliberately set, for no other reason than the Grand Duke did not
like the way his city appeared.
----------
Master-Historian Maritza Ortskt-Dukovna presented her findings in a
packed auditorium at the National University in Danube City. As she
expected, her audience was shocked and outraged, because she was calling
into question the nation’s understanding of one of the most significant
events of its history. To defile the name of the Grand Duke, considered
the most visionary member of the Royal Family since King Vladik…how dare
she, even if she was the Prime Minister’s wife?
To her shocked audience Maritza simply replied:
“This is what I found, and this is how my training as a historian forced
me to interpret it. I am as troubled by it as anyone else sitting in
this room. I challenge you to prove me wrong. If you can prove me wrong,
it would set my heart at ease, because I didn’t want to believe it
myself. But, as I stated, these are my findings, and this is how I am
forced to interpret them.”
Unfortunately for the reputation of the Grand Duke, none of Maritza’s
fellow historians was able to find any evidence contradicting what she
discovered during her four-month stay in Vienna. Documents from the
Danube City archives, interpreted through the new information coming out
of Vienna, seemed to support her theory that the fire of 1755 had been
deliberately set. Within two years most historians in Danubia
reluctantly accepted the new interpretation of the Great Fire of 1755.
Once her theory became accepted as fact, Maritza quipped: “We can’t be
too hard on the Grand Duke. After-all, his deception did give us a nicer
city.”
