THE HISTORIA PERTINAXI: Volume V; Consolidating an Empire

[Nectorist 12869]

 

THE HISTORIA PERTINAXI: Volume V;

Consolidating an Empire

Written by Justinian Nafis, Count of Susa 

and

Adolphus Gloriana, Earl of Suffolk, Prince of Sutica

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Consolidating an Empire

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“I need not aspire to any great conquest or triumph. It is a sweet victory in its own right to see that which my father has given me to prosper and thrive by my hand.”  - Emperor Augustus on the value of peace during his reign

 

Born to Renatus’s greatest general, who himself was the son of one of humanity’s greatest conquerors, the words “boring, bureaucratic, and blasé” were not the descriptors that anyone would have thought would come to be identified with Emperor Augustus. With his reign occupying a brief period between Aurelius, whose ambitious united humanity after several reigns, and Antonius, whose bloodlust and madness led to the end of the Pertinaxi Empire, the relatively peaceful, undisturbed twelve years of Augustus have confounded scholars and virtually erased this Emperor from any sort of popular recognition. For many years, scholars disregarded the reign of Augustus as an aberration, a quick break between the constant warfare and expansion required by the Renatian Empire but of little historical value beyond that. However, more recent analysis has seen him as the forerunner to the Novellen Empire and the Petrine model of government that they implemented, albeit one who could not ensure the longevity of his style of rule. 

 

Augustus Horen was born on the 1st of Godfrey’s Triumph, 1656, to Prince Antonius of Renatus and Maria Ivanovich, alongside his sisters Alexandria and Ophelia, making him one of triplets.. Born between his grandfather’s victory over the Czena Confederation and the beginning of the First Atlas Coalition War, the occasion was auspicious for the future heir, even if he would not remember it into adulthood. Unlike his father, who was born into an alienated world fractured by the collapsing Mardon Empire, the realm that Augustus grew up in was in constant contact with other cultures and peoples. Ideas, languages, clothes, arts, foods, musics, and other fixtures of cultural contact would flow through the Pertinaxi Empire. As Aurelius conquered Atlas through diplomacy and war, adding Belvtiz, Curon, Norland, Ostmark, Haense, Nordengrad, Santegia, Kaz’Ulrah, and dozens of other smaller countries to his Empire, these links only expanded and strengthened.

 

While his father and grandfather were both exceptionally gifted in politics and warfare, most of their knowledge was informal, something that had been taught in practice, not in formal education. After the end of the First Atlas Coalition War, Aurelius had turned inwards in an attempt to modernize Renatus-Marna and transform it from a war tribe to the preeminent state of man. He met successes and failures alike, but the education of Prince Augustus, one given to him by tutors, priests, professors, and other learned men, was part of this notable departure from the Renatus of twenty years ago. From the age of five onwards, the young prince was surrounded by these teachers at nearly every moment. He saw little of his father and grandfather, both frequently on campaign or attending to matters of the state, so it was his mother who oversaw his education. 

 

Maria of Krajia, though little is known about her, seems to have been a more adept modernizer than Aurelius. She was a leader in the fledgling Pertinaxi court, far more than Empress Theodosia, and she imported fashion trends from Adria and Santegia to introduce to Senntisten. She remained a positive influence throughout her son’s life as one of the few forward-thinkers in the realm, and it was certainly her influence that encouraged Augustus’s early forays in liberalism and later reign of enlightened despotism. As was customary then, she rarely directly tutored her son, but there is no doubt that she directed nearly all aspects of his upbringing.

 

The court of Renatus-Marna was never so prestigious as to encourage the permanent residence of much of the higher nobility, nor was Senntisten an inviting city for them. Most of Prince Augustus’s childhood companions were members of his own family. Until they were fourteen, he and his sister Alexandria were inseparable. Nearly identical in appearance, they often played games involving the swapping and confusion of identities, much to the annoyance of their tutors. According to George Defsor, one of the priests in charge of Princess Ophelia’s education (despite also being one of the triplets, she does not seem to have earned the same degree of affection the other two had for each other), several times a year Augustus would don his sister’s dresses and attend her sewing lessons, while Alexandria would wear his surcoat to learn about rulership and government. 

 

Another close friend of Augustus was Prince Alexander of Alstion, son of Prince Charles of Alstion, one of Aurelius’s most capable generals and chancellors. Much like Augustus, Alexander had a quiet, brooding demeanor and did not take easily to the games and pranks of his peers. The two were bright students and shared many tutors, so their eventual friendship was only a matter of time. Augustus and Alexander’s relationship, both as trusted confidants and as political thinkers, was among the most important in the history of the Pertinaxi Empire, as has been relayed in the history of Aurelius and shall be expanded upon further here.

 

Whereas most boys of his age were given a typical knightly education, focused on riding, swordsmanship, chivalry, hunting, poetry, and other basics of the martial gentleman, Augustus was brought up with more modern principles of education. Until he was twenty one, he was given rigorous courses on ethics, logic, law, economy, history, geography, mathematics, geometry, physics, and language instruction in New Marian, Savinian, Flexio, Ancient Elven, and Auvergnian. Physical education was still a component of the prince’s education, but it was not a defining feature, as the art of war was to be exchanged for the art of administration. Augustus would practice fencing for half an hour to an hour every day for the rest of his life, but by his own admission it was for exercise rather than the pursuit of true skill.

 

Travel was not common in Augustus’s youth, and aside from his appearances at court, itself never a great spectacle in Aurelius’s time. Renatus was constantly at war, which invited raids and incursions across its borders endlessly, and the Reivers were a threat to travelers at any time. He made visits to Belvitz, the lands of Marna, and to Santegia, where he impressed himself upon the local population and absorbed what he could. It was, to Augustus, one of the “great misfortunes of [his] life that duties in the Crownlands prevented a fuller survey of Atlas.”

 

In 1677, at the age of 21, Prince Augustus was brought into the royal government, which a year later would become the Imperial government upon his grandfather’s assumption of the Empire. Augustus’s role in the council was mostly nominal, as his duty was to learn more than it was to advise. He shadowed various ministers and observed the primitive bureaucracy that held the realm together, but what was supposed to be an extended education became an epiphany for the prince. The strength of the Imperial Legion had papered over many of the flaws inherent in the Pertinaxi Empire, enough to make it seem like an invincible titan, but Augustus, removed from the glory and propaganda of the army, saw things a different way.

 

The limited governing structure of the Pertinaxi realm may have been acceptable in Aurelius’s early reign, where he had to secure his new kingdom from threats on all sides. Even in the pre-Imperial era, the relatively limited extent of his borders and the state’s direction towards conquest permitted ad-hoc methods of statebuilding. However, in the year 1678, an Empire which was now focused on consolidating its gains, not multiplying them, could not survive on spoils of conquest and irregular tribute alone, with a highly-mobilized population serving as its security apparatus. Faith was far from shaken in the Empire, but it needed to transition into a functioning state with an identity at the heart of it.

 

Augustus’s limited access to his grandfather led him to contact other, like-minded reformists. Prince Alexander, his childhood companion, was the first and most important. Associated with some of the liberal spheres of the Imperial court, Alexander was most interested in the introduction of democracy to humanity, which had so far only seen limited practice in the Duchy of Adria. With him came Edward Morris, a bright ward of the court with similar leanings. While the designs for a democratic experiment lay in the background of their work, the three focused on the more important matters of bureaucratic reform. How would the Empire collect taxes efficiently? How would laws be codified and enforced? How would land be managed, sold, and granted? These questions and more dominated most of the waking hours of these three men, among several others in their growing faction, while they remained locked out of the era’s high politics.

 

Prince Augustus’s distance from the throne was cut immediately by his father’s death in 1680 after catching a fever while on campaign. Overnight, his succession to the throne turned from a distant date in the future to something that could happen at any moment. His grandfather was seventy seven and already tiring of his rule: only three days after Prince Antonius’s death, Augustus was confirmed as the heir to the Empire.

 

The new Crown Prince received these honors soberly while in public, so it is difficult to tell what his frame of mind may have been. His confessor, Father Mark of Towton, noted that his behavior and demeanor hardly changed from one day to the next during this time. The prince maintained a collected, dutiful posture and observed the grieving period of his father for a month, as was custom, but not one day after. This was not a slight to the late Antonius- Augustus probably revered his father to some degree as a great Imperial hero- but the culture of the time did not foster a close relationship between the two. More important to the Crown Prince was the image he was to project, and possibly even above that, the new mission that he was to undertake now that he was intimately involved with managing the state.

 

With a plethora of competent military officers at his disposal, Aurelius did not need his grandson to be the soldier that his father was. Understanding the need for reform, even if he lacked the ability to personally conduct it, the old Emperor tasked his new heir with reviewing the Imperial government and making recommendations for changes. This only half-pleased Augustus, who personally wanted discretion to modify the state as he wished, but the patriarch of the Pertinaxi was not a man to let his power be distributed readily or easily. This compromise proved to be the worst of both worlds. From 1680-1686, Augustus would constantly bring proposed reforms to the Emperor, who would mull on them for a time before returning to the more enticing foreign affairs of diplomacy and intrigue that he excelled at and enjoyed more. The Crown Prince never publicly displayed his frustrations, but he did occasionally vent to his mother and sister Alexandria, who herself had been drawn into her brother’s faction of reformers.

 

Augustus was given his windfall in 1686 when the Emperor finally assented to the creation of the Imperial Parliament. Many of the Empire’s subjects had grown restless, even in this time of peace, and to stave off rebellion Aurelius felt it prudent to invite them to participate in government in a limited scope. He handed off the task of creating the body to his heir, with whom he gave the instructions: “Go only so far as needed to placate their agitation for rule, but do not give them any privilege that we may have to revoke in times of emergency or that may be utilized for the expansion of their own powers.” With those words in hand (quite literally, as they had been given to him in a letter, which was the most common form of communication between he and his grandfather) he gathered Prince Alexander and Edward Morris to make the first democratic experiment in Imperial history.

 

Fortunately for Aurelius, his orders were entirely unnecessary, as he and Augustus were of the same mind. While the Crown Prince was certainly interested in a democratic project, it was not for the sake of democracy and liberalism itself. He was a complete pragmatist who saw the Imperial Parliament as a way to affirm the loyalty of the Crown’s vassals, especially given how the only alternative at the moment- the army- was causing a severe financial strain and was draining the talent pool of capable aristocrats. A limited, ineffectual body to act as a rubber stamp to the Emperor’s decrees was the maximum of what he envisioned.

 

Prince Alexander, an idealist far more vested in the potential that democracy had for the Empire, and Edward Morris, more agnostic on the issue but still entertained by the idea, tried to get Augustus to change his mind, but it was to no avail. Intent on receiving his grandfather’s approval and trying his own political theory, Augustus would not be dissuaded. The final product that emerged after two months of deliberation and debate was a parliament that was hardly more than an advisory body meant to confirm, discussing, at most question, but never challenge, the executive orders of the Emperor and his government. The frustrated Prince Alexander sat as its inaugural speaker, giving Augustus an ally there who would give him an accurate account of how it truly operated, while Edward Morris served as a scribe and would send a transcript of each meeting to the Crown Prince.

 

While he would fade in and out of history, his importance always tangential to the currents of politics and society, Prince Alexander of Furnestock was one of the most forward-thinking men in the Empire during Aurelius’ rule, and he remained an influential voice in Augustus’ government.

 

It was during these years, from 1686 to his inheritance in 1694, that Augustus developed the working routine that he would carry over to his time as Emperor. His work with the Imperial Parliament had impressed Aurelius, and the latter’s failing health forced him to start ceding more and more of his duties to his heir, even if it was with great reluctance. It was not long before Augustus was in regular talks with the Imperial ministers and sitting at their head in council meetings in his grandfather’s stead. With a demeanor that Charles de Rennes, Minister of the Interior, called “austere and tempered, as a leader should be”, with his serious, intelligent aura he could command a council the same way his father and grandfather did. 

 

Discipline and reservation became central to Augustus’s interactions with his work and those he worked with. From the moment he rose (always an hour before dawn), to the moment he went to sleep (always an hour after sunset), he did not smile, laugh, or raise his voice. Papers, either to read, sign, or write, were in his hands at almost every moment, even when he ate. Only during his morning and evening walks around the palace gardens would he loosen his grip on the thick book of documents he carried; however, more often than not he would request a few ministers or noblemen accompany him to discuss policy. As the Count of Kastrovy, Marek Kastrovat noted, the Crown Prince “relished in little and would only give small nods of approval when he thought I had spoken well. It was not a pious sentiment that I felt from him.”

 

Augustus took his role as the state seriously, for when he held the great authority of the Empire, he felt its weight. He once remarked to his sister Alexandria that whenever he had their grandfather’s powers vested in him, he had the ability to remake the Empire. He never exercised any extreme action while he was Crown Prince, but he used his vague office to lay the groundwork for the reforms that he would make. The meager Renatian archives were scoured through, a team of secretaries was hired to gather information from the government ministers, and reports were always written down and stored. Of all the Pertinaxi Emperors, Augustus left behind the largest paper trail, and his efforts to standardize how government business was conducted put him on par with the professionalism of the Johannians before him.

 

Augustus’s temperament and style of governing have led many scholars to deem him a more typical Imperial sovereign as history is used to seeing, and most consider him an aberration from the conquest and propaganda that preceded him with Aurelius and the violence and brutality that succeeded him with Antonius. The even-keeled, smart, stable Augustus is frequently cited as an admirable figure who substituted his grandfather’s glory for building a competent and modern administration, only to have it fatefully ruined at the hand of his bloodlusting son. Even Petrine-era politicians and historians, when waxing scathing verse about the evils of the Pertinaxi, typically spared Augustus of their criticisms, or even tried to claim him as one of their own: Emperor Augustus, an ideological predecessor to the Petrine era’s liberal and meritocratic values.

 

However, most of these scholars of the age have been duped by a propaganda operation that was just as, if not more, effective than Aurelius’s. The shadow of the Coup of Adelburg and the slaying of the child John VI still stain the legacy of the first Pertinaxi even among his most ardent admirers. The burning of Ves and the massacre of its people by Antonius is one of the most infamous crimes in history and has rendered his legacy completely irredeemable. Augustus’s own dark impulses have been hidden by the unassuming image that he cultivated. Sober, boring, and quiet, his lack of overt ambition was itself a very blatant attempt to shape his legacy favorably.

 

The rakish desires that Augustus had for his sisters are written nowhere in his early life. It is likely that he veiled his true feelings, but even if he had displayed them, they would never have been allowed to enter the historical record. Ironically, the most forthcoming about his marriage to one sister, and his possible affair with another, was Augustus himself. Few others knew, or were willing to speak, about the matter. One of these people, of whom scholarship can be most certain, was Aurelius himself. We do not know his thoughts about it, but they cannot have been too negative, because in 1689 he allowed Augustus to marry his younger sister, Helen.

 

It is not known why Augustus wished to marry Helen, who was twelve years his junior and less favored than his sister Alexandria, though the latter’s marriage to Duke Ratibor of Adria six years early may have been a part of it. Helen’s own thoughts towards her brother and her marriage to them are clouded, as the poor sources available have suggested that she was twisted as he and deeply in love with him, or that she was forced into the arrangement without say. Over the course of months, Helen’s identity was manufactured and obscured so that by the time her wedding with Augustus was announced, the unwitting public was told that she was a distant cousin of the Crown Prince, not his younger sister.

 

Held from the 7-9 of the Sun’s Smile, 1689, the wedding of Augustus and Helen was by all accounts a resounding success. Filled with games, hunts, jousts, and feasts, all financed from the Crown Prince’s own estates, the spectacle, which saw participants from all corners of the Empire travel to Carolustadt, enhanced Augustus’s respect among the people of the Empire and flaunted his wealth. While he was never an extravagant man, and even avoided overindulging on food and drink at his own wedding, the future Emperor was well-aware that holding an impressive wedding would acquire invaluable political capital, especially as his succession was on the horizon. The vassals of the realm would expect their leader to be outward-facing, genial, and generous with his wealth. Augustus was not a charismatic man, but he was well-mannered, assertive, and made a strong impression on the lords and ladies who spoke with him during the celebrations.

 

While nearly every man, woman, and child of means in the Empire had made an appearance, the Emperor himself was notably absent. A cold had forced him to retire, so his doctors said, but historians today are divided as to whether Aurelius was genuinely in poor health or was disgusted with the decision of his heir, but by that point either too old or too power-lacking to contest it. He had always wanted to avoid the concentration of power in his heir’s hands at the expense of his own, but his poor health had forced him to surrender more and more of it. Thirty years later, Maria of Krajia would hold to these beliefs and go to the grave claiming that Aurelius had spurned Augustus because he was fearful and jealous of him.

 

Differences that may or may not have been present during Augustus’s wedding did little to affect the two’s working relationship, which was put to the test almost immediately after. On the 3rd of Harren’s Folly, 1689, Torsen Ruric, Earl of Nordengrad, either attacked or was attacked by Haeseni knights while visiting his allies in Arberrang, a pagan, tribal people who were nominally vassals of the Haeseni Crown. After defeating this small contingent of knights, Torsten moved on to Markev, which he assaulted and would have sacked were it not for the timely intervention of a Legion patrol led by Prince Cassius, Augustus’s talented younger cousin. Defeated but not deterred, Torsten claimed the throne of Norland and rose in rebellion against the Pertinaxi.

 

When he first received the news, Augustus, according to the Margrave of Styria, “feared that Torsten’s actions would presage- note to self, find out what the word ‘presage’ means- a wider rebellion, so for three days he fasted. Or maybe it was actually four. Another note to self to cut this part out later when Katrina confirms these details for me.” Fortunately for the Crown Prince, these concerns did not come to pass, but other tributaries of the Empire of Man, such as the dwarves of Kaz’Ulrah and the orcs of Krugmar, joined Nordengrad and Arberrang in war. Aurelius and Prince Cassisu would soon have to take to the field, and Augustus would have to play the role that the former, disgraced Crown Prince Constantine once had: governing the realm from Carolustadt.

 

Having been significantly involved in governing the realm, to the point of being a de-facto regent at times, Augustus was well-prepared to rule the capital while his grandfather was out on campaign. In the first months of the war, as the great armies of the Empire were mobilizing, the Crown Prince turned the Crownlands, from Carolustadt in the east to Dunarsund in the west, into a machine capable of supporting the Legion as it marched north in a blaze of conquest. Although he was no military man, he managed a logistical feat: war taxes were raised and collected quickly and efficiently, scrap iron was gathered and forged into tools and weapons for the legionaries, and thousands of horses and heads of cattle were purchased (or requisitioned). Aurelius even commended his grandson’s efforts before departing towards Nordengrad.

 

Most of Augustus’s efforts in Carolustadt were directed towards supporting the war in one way or another. Resupply caravans were organized and sent from the capital, as were new recruits for the Legion. Taxes were raised, then raised again, so that soldiers would not desert for being denied pay. The crucial, yet obscure role of keeping the Legion fed and marching went without mention in the bulletins issued by Aurelius or within the burgeoning newspapers of the capital, which had been given a new life now that correspondence and reports from the war fed the imaginations of the populace. As victory after victory reached the ears of the eager Imperials, word carried by hussars whose accounts of the war were as much self-promotion as faithful recounting, new heroes and legends were born on the city streets. Nordengrad and San’Kala in 1690, Arberrang in 1691, and Kal’Tarak had brought destruction to the Empire’s enemies, crippling war taxes to its people, and massive debts to its vassals, but the metropole felt little of that. The army that Augustus saw return to him, the army that had thrashed a coalition in three short years due to his efforts, brought only the splendor of victory and none of its ruin.

 

On the 30th of Owyn’s Flame, 1692, the Crown Prince watched cooly from the balcony of the Imperial palace as the Legion dazzled the people of Carolustadt with a great triumph paid for by the spoils of war so clearly brandished on the marble podiums that lined the streets. Looming ominously in the distance, far removed from the festivities in the heart of the city, Augustus could not have felt more at home. When writing to his son, Antonius, in an instruction on the importance of symbols, Augustus believed that he saw his placement for what it was.

 

“It was the seat of the Emperor, a place of high honor, but it was also a reminder. It was a reminder that he [Aurelius], not I, was the august, the dominator, who could do no wrong in the eyes of the army or the poor. Regardless of this, it was not a position I misliked, for from it I could evaluate the triumph without allowing myself to be drunk on the nectar that such events intoxicate all with. I may not have been the object of the desire of the country, but I saw what was evident where their vision was obscured.”

 

The Crown Prince may not have had this same condescension at the time, though his assessment of the triumph would have likely been similar. While Aurelius had privately commended his grandson’s assistance during the war, and Augustus had avoided trying to steal any measure of the public’s affection, it was Prince Cassius who had won more than either. The handsome, dashing man was said to be more like the late Crown Prince Antonius than Augustus himself, and his pedigree as a general during the Third Atlas Coalition War had only made the comparisons more obvious. While the Emperor may not intervene in the succession, Renatus had been founded on a disregard for the right of the Mardonite rule. What was to say that Cassius would not follow that same principle and use his popular backing to acquire the throne for himself after Aurelius’s death?

 

With these thoughts looming in the back of his mind, the Crown Prince doubled down on his mastery of the capital. The end of the war meant Aurelius’s return, but the old, tired Emperor was in no condition to continue as he had before. More responsibility was conferred upon his heir, who used it to cement his position. If Cassius was to have the army and the people, Augustus would have the aristocracy and the government. It was in these years, from 1692-1694, when the Crown Prince was most visible, as he shook off his natural reluctance to join the Empire’s social circles. He made several reviews of the realm, met with officials and nobles from north to south, and took charge of the council of state. Within months of the war’s end, Augustus was Emperor in all but name.

 

Whatever challenge of inheritance that he may have faced from Cassius (historians are still of a divided opinion as to whether Cassius would have ever threatened Augustus’s succession) completely vanished in 1693 when the younger prince attacked Canonist missionaries in Rhosenyr, prompting an excommunication from the Church. Returning from his semi-retirement, Aurelius made a half-hearted attempt to found a state religion centered around the worship of him, but it only served to further disrupt the relations between the Church and the Empire. Much to Augustus’s relief, both his grandfather and cousin agreed to enter exile to their estates in the country to avoid escalating the dispute. It was from this point forward that Augustus was solely in control of the realm.

 

When Aurelius’s death came on the 17th of Harren’s Folly, 1694, Augustus’s ascension to the throne was very much a formality rather than the stark beginning of a new age. The old Emperor’s half-century of rule had, if not degraded, at least seen a loosening of his iron grip in the final years. Augusts made sure to hold a grand funeral for his late grandfather, which saw mourners from across the continent, and then an extravagant coronation with expenses that drained the Imperial treasury by a fifth, but it was tradition and filial piety, rather than political necessity, that guided Augustus’s decisions. For all of his later disagreements with Aurelius and his astute, cold view on politics, he took his role as grandson and successor seriously.

 

In a reversal of what had occurred under Aurelius, the political class of the Empire- its nobility, bureaucracy, and vassals- had aligned themselves with Augustus years before his ascension, and would, with one later exception, prove to be mostly cooperative under his light-handed regime. It was the Legion, the Dragon Knights, and the myriad of mercenary forces that had been hired by the Emperor at some point or another over his various wars. Augustus was not unfamiliar with military matters from a theoretical standpoint, nor was he ignorant to the fact that his lack of experience was harmful to his image, but he had few methods at his disposal for dealing with the malaise that would come to set in within the army.

 

The legions of the Empire underwent strict training procedures that made them the premier fighting force in the world. Augustus personally admired their feats in the wars under his grandfather, but he felt uneasy with them at all times, not having the reputation or experience as a veteran of Aurelius’ conquests. When able, he preferred to have his business carried out by Dragon Knights, who, more attached to the court, were more associated with the circles he came from.

 

Aurelius’s legions had sustained their strength off of the promises of land allotments from conquered territories, which allowed for the retention of experienced, reliable soldiers who vastly outperformed the hastily-raised yeomen and small standing armies of other human nations. However, the decades of war had now brought peace to Atlas, and with peace came the fulfillment of promises. In the weeks after his ascension, over half of the petitions that Emperor Augustus heard at court were from veterans asking for their parcel of land. Nordengrad, White Peak, Rivia, Kaz’Ulrah, and the other lands added by Aurelius were sparsely-populated and ripe for settlement, so week after week, grey-haired men and women who had fought and bled for the Emperor’s grandfather came and asked for their due.

 

The appeasement of the legions was paramount, so Augustus did as he needed. He appointed House Mournstone, former vassals of the Earls of Nordengrad who had defected to the Empire prior to the war, to govern the region and settle five thousand veterans. Governor Raleigh Castleton of Kaz’Ulrah was commanded to settle one thousand, House Hartcold of Rivia was commanded to settle five hundred, and for Governor James Allgood of White Peak to settle another thousand. Edmond Manston, the Minister of the Interior, was charged with overseeing this entire project, which he did with diligence and the approval of the Emperor. Manston was another of the class of non-aristocratic bureaucrats that Augustus had added to his circle early on, and in this instance he proved to be an excellent appointment, as the disgruntled voices of veterans quieted just as soon as they had begun to murmur.

 

By the time that the settlements had been completed in early 1695, Augustus was left with a happy base of veterans, but also a Legion that numbered three thousand on paper, but likely less than that in reality. New recruits were difficult to come by, as young men and women preferred to take advantage of the booming economy to buy land themselves or enter lucrative trades, while the rural peasantry preferred the safety and comfort of their homes to life on patrol. 

Because of the depopulation of the Legion, Augustus was forced to increasingly rely on his Dragon Knights to keep security, but the force that had been the cream of the Empire’s military might had fallen victim to the same series of retirements and recruitment strains as the Legion. Recruits that were found, typically the sons and daughters of poor nobility and gentry, saw the order as a means of social advancement above all else. Corruption became commonplace within the ranks of the Dragon Knights, and the quality of its members declined sharply. 

 

Complaints about lazy investigations, bribes, and poor discipline among their ranks began to flood in from all corners of the Empire. The people demanded that Prince Cassius be returned from his self-imposed exile to lead the Dragon Knights and restore their honor and reputation. Hearing these cries, the Emperor created a commission headed by Calculus de Sola, one of the few Dragon Knights whose reputation had not been tainted.

 

Compounding these difficulties with the military was the large mass of mercenaries that had been hired and kept on the Imperial payroll since 1689, when Torsten’s Rebellion began. They had served well during the war, but they had become a drain on the treasury and had been dead weight for years. Archchancellor Edmund Morris recommended that Augustus end the contract, which he did in the middle of 1695. This cut a massive expenditure from the treasury, putting the Empire’s finances on sound footing, but it also left a massive group of at least two thousand armed, experienced, and now-unemployed mercenaries loose within the Empire.

 

Had it not been for the near-total submission of the continent to the Pertinaxi, then these issues may have resulted in a new coalition or a large-scale rebellion, but fortunately for the Emperor, the atmosphere was not inclined towards either. That said, several small rebellions broke out across the realm. Most were put down without difficulty, but one from 1696-1697 proved to be one of the more serious, if brief, challenges to Augustus’s rule.

 

While many of the rebellious Rurics had been slaughtered during the Third Atlas Coalition War, and the rest of the population either displaced or accepting of the rule of House Mournstone, some few escaped the Siege of the New Krag and began to plan for the restoration of Norland. The foremost among these was Ivar Ash, a distant relative of the Rurics, who assembled a following of displaced Nordengraders and recently-relieved mercenaries. The attacks began in the spring of 1696, when they attacked Fort Myre, a property of Duke Joseph of Adria, and slaughtered the garrison inside. From here, Ivar Ash declared himself King of Norland and initiated a series of ambushes and raids across the Empire. On the 5th of Sigismund’s End, 1696, they attacked Belvitz itself, burned part of the city, and defeated the garrison in battle before withdrawing.

 

The Duke of Adria petitioned the Emperor to send aid, which was granted, but the undermanned Legion and the unready Dragon Knights were spread far too thin and were susceptible to ambush. One patrol on the road to Belvitz was attacked by Ivar Ash on the 10th of Horen’s Calling, leading to the death of two hundred legionnaires and fifteen Dragon Knights. A month later, he attacked another patrol outside of the town of Aequium, killing another one hundred legionnaires and four Dragon Knights. These losses, while relatively minor and isolated, were unsustainable in the long run, and the poor performance of Augustus’s forces in the field further reinforced his reputation as a weaker man than his grandfather. Bounties were put on Ivar’s head, and more resources were pulled from across the realm to quell the rebellion before it inspired others to join him.

 

The height of Ivar’s Rebellion came in 1697 when he and his forces stormed Sutica and slaughtered a caravan of Imperial traders and captured the Queen of Sutica before releasing her for ransom. Ivar intended to use the gold he had obtained from the ransom to hire even more mercenaries and make a serious push to expand his holdings, but on the 1st of Sun’s Smile, 1697, he was killed in a tavern outside of Carolustadt by Uthred Gromach and Sir Philip Marshall, two soldiers in the Legion. His leaderless army broke apart and scattered, and two weeks later Fort Myre was stormed and retaken by Seth Renault, the Marshal of the Legion, and an army of one thousand. The rebellion had been put to a swift end, but while it had never seriously threatened the Empire, it did reveal the weakness of the army in the face of a competent enemy.

 

With few immediate military solutions available, and still at the head of a secure realm, the Emperor and the Archchancellor set about making necessary internal reforms to centralize and strengthen the government, lessening its reliance on the Legion. Archchancellor Morris issued a directive to Imperial officials that called for the “redirection of prior military funds for the development of the state.” This most often meant reforming the civil service and opening schools meant for the training of new bureaucrats. The Foreign Ministry was expanded and given authority to negotiate several peace treaties and trade deals with the few remaining independent nations, marking a sharp departure from the war footing that had been associated with the Pertinaxi. The Interior Ministry saw a similar growth in responsibility: internal security was paramount with the reduction of the army, and this started with rooting out the corruption that had become endemic under Aurelius’s reign.

 

Throughout most of his reign, but especially this period of reform, Augustus was even less visible than his predecessor had been in his later years. But while age had forced Aurelius into seclusion, it was Augustus’s nature that kept him cloistered within offices and council rooms. From breakfast in the morning until supper in the evening, the Emperor was almost always attending to documents at his desk or speaking with his Archchancellor, through whom he dictated orders to his other councilors and officers. He was not inactive (he would hunt each morning and take walks in the evening), but his confinement within his duties alienated himself from his subjects and his family. The Emperor and Empress were rare sights at court, attended mass in a private sanctuary, and frequently made excuses for not going to official functions and festivals of the state. This is not to say they saw much of each other either: breakfast and supper were the two times where the Imperial family was together, but even then they rarely spoke.

 

As his sister-wife spun around in the halls of a cold Carolustadt palace, and his children forgot his face for those of their tutors, the Emperor worked to reshape the land in his image. Although he rarely left the vicinity of Carolustadt, he maintained a good relationship with his vassals, who saw him as the less ruthless, yet just as stable version of Aurelius that he was. The Pertinaxi conquests had brought great riches for the Empire as a whole, but this was rarely felt outside of the metropole. The vassals and outer provinces had gone into debt to provide the troops they were required to send, but the spoils of war either went to individual households or the Emperor’s coffers. To assure his subjects that they would be allowed to finally recover, Augustus had signaled to them early on that his reign was to be oriented towards peace. They embraced this turn of policy with open arms, and so Augustus faced no new rebellions of any serious nature from them.

 

The vassal that had benefited most from this new peace was the Duchy of Curon, led by the crafty Wilhelm Devereux. The eldest son of Alfred of Curon and the rebellious Queen Linette, Wilhelm had grown up as a ward of the Empire, spending much of his early life in Carolustadt under the watchful eye of the state. Because both of his parents had died before he was six, the Duke of Curon held no animosity towards the Pertinaxi for their deaths, nor did he remember Curon before it was conquered during the Second Atlas Coalition War. Instead, he was a bright, if reserved, young man who nonetheless made plenty of valuable connections within the capital, the foremost of these being with Prince Augustus, who was only two years his junior. By the time he was thirty, in 1684, the Emperor deemed him fully assimilated into the ways of the Imperials and deserving of his title and some of his estates back. He was named Duke of Curon that year and returned the city of Cyrilsburg and a few country manors, but this only amounted to a fifth of what his father had owned before his death.

 

Over the following years, through a mix of diplomacy, coercion, and favors from the capital, Wilhelm slowly restored his family’s lands, bringing to him the wealth and properties that had fueled the power of Curonia. From 1683-1694, his expansion was mostly limited to accepting oaths of fealty from old Courlandic families whose keeps and manors had fallen under the control of the many feudatories that dotted the southern Empire, then winning the small field skirmishes that naturally ensued when those higher lords demanded their subjects be returned to their control. This brought Duke Wilhelm notice, but Augustus’ ascension in 1694 brought with him an even surer path of expansion. Supported by the most powerful benefactor one could have, and overseeing a revival of Cyrilsburg that was restoring it to its state before the rebellion in 1667, the Duke of Curon had even more resources to increase his gains. Over the next five years, he incorporated the counties of Ashwood, Suffolk, and Rivia into his domains, as well as the thriving port city of Arbor and the regionally powerful Houses of Merentel, Keint, and Grimoire. By 1700, Curon, a center of commerce if little else, supported a healthy, large population that put it on even footing with the great, old vassals of Adria and Haense.

 

During Aurelius’s reign, rising powers within the Empire- namely Ostmark and Nordengrad- had been treated with suspicion at best, and their eventual rebellions against the crown only confirmed in the Emperor’s mind that his rule was only to be as strong as his Legions. Lacking the same strength of arms, Augustus found a successful alternative in cultivating loyalty among his vassals and playing them off one another. Duke Wilhelm of Curon was an old acquaintance, and he had been brought up in the Renatian court. From Caroulstadt, Emperor Augustus supported the Curonian’s rise and affirmed his actions with the force of his law, and in return Duke Wilhelm affirmed his loyalty to the Pertinaxi and swore that his actions would not go beyond the recovery of his family’s lands.

 

Try as he may, the Emperor’s legitimations of Duke Wilhelm’s expansions did not change the perception of the Curonians among most of the rest of the realm. According to Publius Bracchus, an Adrian nobleman, Duke Ratibor Tuvyic of Adria described his Curonian peer as a “... snow rat to be chased and eaten by the winter foxes, not to be told he may one day be a bear.” In Haense, the Count of Ayer called Curonians “little better than apes, and smellier than them, too.” Notably, the Count of Ayer had never seen an ape in all his life.

 

These petty insults were mostly contained to the respective courts, where they circulated and leaked as most gossip did, but otherwise did not cause any disturbances. However, constituent vassals would eventually have to travel to the metropole, and the many festivities that took place at the capital invited subjects from all over the Empire to travel to the Heartlands. 

 

At one of these events, a tournament held in honor of Archchancellor Morris in either 1700 or 1701, both the Duke of Adria and the Duke of Curon were in attendance. At first, the jousts went well, even despite the absence of the Emperor, but soon, as both Curonian and Adrian knights moved up the lists and began tilting against each other, the two camps grew rowdier. Insults and cries rose as Vladov lances broke against Merentel shields, and knights of Falkenrath cursed the names of Ivanovich riders. It was not long before the fights leapt from the tournament ring into the crowd, where sporadic shoving descended into a full brawl.

 

City guards rushed to pull apart the fighting mob, which took a quarter of an hour to break apart. None had been killed or seriously wounded, but several, including Duke Ratibor, were nursing minor injuries. Within the hour, word had spread to Augustus, who then ordered his two feuding vassals to appear before him. The Duke of Curon complied and raced with his entourage towards the palace, but the incensed Duke of Adria refused, and ordered his men return to Belvitz with him. Not long after, he fell ill and died, but his fervent hatred towards the Curonians, and his defiance of Augustus, was carried forward by his son, Boris, and his chancellor, Alaric Vladov.

 

As Duke Ratibor was racing back to Belvitz, Augustus and Duke Wilhelm conferred privately in the Imperial palace. The Emperor was reluctant to make a firm ruling: the fight had broken out spontaneously, with blame to rest on both sides, and the proud Adrians were not in attendance. Duke Wilhelm argued that their very lack of attendance was itself an act of rebellion, or at least disobedience, and he recounted the many, half-true, rumors of Tuvyic plots against the Imperial throne that had reached the halls of Cyrilsburg. He called for a joint Curonian-Legion army to arrest the Adrians who had been involved in the incident.

 

Archchancellor Morris and Marshal Seth Renault both agreed with Duke Wilhelm, but only so far as they believed that the Adrian insubordinate was a test of the Emperor’s authority. As soon as the Duke of Curon was dismissed to his quarters (he would leave the next day to his capital, sending letters ahead of him to order his vassals to start raising their hosts), the two continued the conversation with Augustus. According to Thomas of Balamena, Marshal Renault’s secretary, who must be noted had a penchant for embellishing, but not outright fabricating, conversations, all three men were wholly reluctant to send the Legion to Adria. It was a thinly-veiled secret that its manpower had not significantly recovered, and a provoked uprising in Adria would take time to quell. If intervention went awry, and the green recruits of the Legion were defeated by the Adrians, it could prompt Haense, Norland, Nordengrad, or Santegia to rise up in rebellion. Were that to happen, Marshal Renault said, “we would be unable to contain the height of the flames.” 

 

It was Archchancellor Morris who came to a workable solution. Given the tensions between Curon and Adria, and the suspected disloyalty among the ranks of the Adrians, a limited war between the two would weaken the latter while allowing the Imperial government to maintain some distance from the outcome. Emperor Augustus agreed to this plan, and within a month his ruling was sent to both of his vassals, then later announced to the realm. Adria and Curon would meet in battle in a predetermined location (the exact place is presently unknown, and a number of sites have been suggested by scholars), the loser would accede to a number of small demands, and peace would be had between the vassals.

 

Augustus streamlined tax collection so that he could have a dependable, independent source of revenue that was not driven by conquest. Although it was limited and paled in comparison to the Johannian or Petrine systems, it allowed him to keep the Empire solvent. Part of his rationale behind intervening in the conflict between Curon and Adria was because a larger feud between the two would disrupt tax collection in some of the Empire’s most lucrative port and trade cities.

 

On the 14th of Sun’s Smile, 1702, the armies of Curon and Adria met in battle. Duke Paul Tuvyic, the fifteen year-old son of the late Duke Ratibor, had made some overtures for peace in the months before, owing to his weaker position as the young inheritor of a notoriously weak office, but the Duke of Curon rebuffed them. On the day of battle, the Curonian army, outnumbering the Adrians four-to-one, soundly routed the Adrians and captured a number of important nobles and officials. Duke Paul accepted the mild peace terms after the battle, over the pleas of his people who claimed that several Dragon Knights had fought alongside the Curonians. The terms were light: House Tuvyic would pay war indemnities, betroth one of their daughters to a son of Duke Wilhelm, and deconstruct a few of their southern fortifications nearest to Curon. The war had not completely crushed Adria, and it would soon be on the road to recovery, but the dissenting voices within the duchy were temporarily silenced.

 

Shortly after the brief war, Augustus summoned Duke Wilhelm to Caroulstadt, where he had arranged a coronation ceremony. The Duke of Curon had proven himself a capable and loyal vassal, able to contain the disparate, rudderless masses of feudal lords and trading villages that had suffered the brunt of Aurelius’s conquests. The tales of Tobias the Conqueror, who had brought House Horen to its knees, were still told to every child during the evenings.  This population ought to have been the first to revolt, but House Devereaux had transformed them into some of the most steadfast Imperials. For this service, Wilhelm was named King of Curonia, cementing his rise to join the ranks of the great vassals of the Empire.

 

And so, for the following two years, peace fell over the lands of Atlas, until certain events forced the migration of the world to the continent of Arcas. It was here that the Empire rebuilt itself under Augustus' direction. His capital, named Helena, was built upon an island near the center of the fertile Arcas grassland. Duke Paul of Adria had his capital, Ves, constructed in the hills east of Helena. King Robert of Haense had his capital, Reza, constructed in the tundras of northern Arcas. King Wilhelm of Curonia had his capital, Avalain, constructed at the far east of the Empire’s borders, in the frozen marshes of Arcas. Within the first two years of settlement on Arcas, thousands of smaller lords and landholders took up residence within the Empire, and towns, farmsteads, castles, and mills dotted the landscape of the sprawling domains of humanity.

 

In the final two years of his life, Augustus ran his government much like he had before: adeptly, quietly, and with a focus on efficiency. Still young, not yet fifty, it was expected that his rule would continue for some time longer, and that it would remain peaceful and without significant controversy. Several writers at the time proclaimed that the great migration to Arcas would bring with it a new age marked by an eternal Empire kept strong by the legions and sound governance. As is known, in two years those predictions would utterly collapse, leaving many contemporary thinkers to wonder how the dispassionate, austere administration of Augustus and his council could give way to the madness of Antonius.

 

As these authors have laid out earlier, Augustus was far from the detached, objective arbiter of the law that he has been presented as, and as he consciously shaped his image to be. His decision to marry his own sister was driven entirely by his dark desires, and him casting her aside was similarly rash. Crown Prince Antonius, languishing in his studies without his father’s intervention, was put on the backburner for the maintenance of an already well-functioning state, with no thought given to what his succession could bring. In his final days, Augustus ensured that the Empire that Antonius would inherit, and the Antonius that the Empire would inherit, would be utterly incapable of withstanding the other.

 

In the years after their defeat in the war against Curon, the Adrian magnates and burghers had approved three different tax increases in the Duma in order to finance a stronger army. To supplement the Vesian Guard and other local forces, they contracted a number of mercenary companies that operated in the region. Naturally, many of these mercenaries had at one time or another taken up arms against the Empire, or had turned to banditry during periods of peace. Of these companies, the most notorious were the Reivers, whose hiring brought the fury of the Emperor. The Adrians had been spared destruction by his own intervention in their conflict, and despite building a thriving hub along one of the Empire’s great trade lines, they had thrown away the prosperity that he was to hand them by hiring his grandfather’s old enemies.

 

“It is unacceptable. I hand them the riches of the Empire, yet they will continue to impale themselves on spikes so they may have reach of my neck,” is what Augustus is recorded to have said upon hearing about Adria contracting the Reivers.

 

On the 5th of Owyn’s Flame, 1706, Augustus released a missive claiming that Duke Paul was not, in fact, the son of the late Duke Ratibor and Augustus’ sister, Princess Alexandria, but rather Augustus and Alexandria themselves. In what was called the Varoche Affair, this ‘confession’ by the Emperor aimed to undermine Paul’s position and perhaps see to his removal from the Ducal throne of Adria. Minutes after he ordered the missive sent around the realm, he summoned Marshal Renault and informed him he would be traveling to Ves to see that the Reiver threat was removed, and that he would need two legions to aid him in removing the enemies to the Empire. After some discussion, arrangements were made and Marshal Renault departed by noon to carry out his orders.

 

Thirty minutes after his meeting with his marshal, the Emperor suffered a heart attack in his chambers. By the time that his servants found him, he was already dead.

In his final moments, Augustus had entirely undone the fabric of Imperial mystique that lent the Pertinaxi unmatched prestige, broken the stability and order that was the foundation of his rule, and left both of those challenges to a son that was entirely unprepared to handle either of them. Apocryphal accounts say that his rash actions were opposed by his council, foremost among them Archchancellor Morris, who argued that no such revelation was needed. 

 

As history has revealed to us, it was not just unnecessary, it was entirely fabricated: as later proven by Queen Viktoria of Haense in her personal studies, Duke Paul was almost certainly the legitimate son of Duke Ratibor and Princess Alexandria. Even more tragically, the hiring of the Reivers had happened without the Duke of Adria’s knowledge, and he would almost certainly have been more than willing to banish them from his realm had he learned exactly who it was that his officers had contracted military services out to. In the mere hours before he died, Augustus had openly stained the Pertinaxi with the sin of incest and put the Adrians on the path towards inevitable conflict with the Empire.

 

Crown Prince Antonius, hidden from the realm at this point, was informed of his father’s death within the hour. He was sparring with Dame Sophia Halcourt, who later told Harold Pinter, a court scribe, that upon hearing of his father’s death, the Crown Prince smiled. He ordered his father’s body to be buried without ceremony; the expenses were to be saved for his coronation. He then sacked nearly all of his father’s council, appointing loyalists in their stead. Even Archchancellor Morris, the principal architect behind the sound governance of Augustus’ reign, was not spared. Believing the capable chancellor to be too peaceful, Antonius forced him into exile. In hours, the Imperial government was entirely in his hands.

 

The next day, Augustus’ body was paraded through the streets of Helena, where a sizable crowd had gathered, but the tears that had been shed for Aurelius were not there for his grandson. Instead, the crowd glowered at the Emperor, who was a stranger to them in life, yet whose nature was revealed to them all the day before. It was not hatred they felt for him, for none could say that they had suffered greatly under his reign, but they felt a deep, heavy contempt. He was the faceless Emperor to be buried with his sins, but the rot that the masses had seen so nakedly could not just be removed with his death. If the Emperor, the nearest thing to a living god on this world, could be so wretched, then could his kin not be the same?

 

The reputation of Augustus hangs in an uneasy place that historical scholarship has yet to resolve. Few national or dynastic histories, among them Pertinaxi and Horenic, want to claim him as their own. Many men of ill reputation have been rehabilitated to some degree or another, owing to overlooked achievements or actions whose impacts have been given the breadth of time to examine, but Augustus carries with him the most mortal flaw that any figure in the past could have: embarrassment. 

 

To the imagination of the common human, the name Augustus is synonymous with vice, sin, and incest, which in turn have become synonymous with the Pertinaxi Dynasty, at least to its greatest detractors. The fact that the Emperor did not display much of the first two in his austere life matters little, for few found anything to recognize him as than the man who wed one sister and confessed to having illegitimate children with another. Antonius’ ascension, and the sudden collapse of the Pertinaxi Empire, left Augustus without any significant institutional legacy, and the lack of writings or military conquests in his life give us little in the way of a paper trail or oral accounts.

 

As diminished as Augustus is, and likely will forever be, in our modern age, his contemporaries viewed him in a different manner. The humiliations that the Imperial vassals suffered under the conquests of Aurelius, and the chaos and instability that Antonius delivered to them all, meant that the twelve-year window of Augustus’ rule was a favorable alternative to the militant expansionism of his grandfather and son. When the great thinkers who would make the Petrine Empire looked backwards for answers to the problems of governance, the model that Augustus had brought, which was in living memory for them all, made for a far more appealing template than the other examples they could draw upon. 

 

While Augustus’ Empire was weak, it was rather adept for the ages. The Emperor had lost the army, but he had raised a cadre of professionals from the gentry and lower nobility that would form a bureaucracy capable of governing the vast and disparate possessions that his grandfather had bequeathed to him. Tax collection was regular, the law was applied somewhat fairly, and the Imperial Crown did not personally intrude into the affairs of its vassals and subjects unless it felt absolutely compelled to. The machine was far from well-oiled, and indeed in many areas it was primitive, but it was a glimpse into a new type of government that could work. For a brief window of time, Augustus and his government proved that, under the right conditions, an Empire built atop a strong bureaucracy, not a strong army, could maintain its form. One could remark that in this age, where standing armies are few and weak, and tenured officials are many, the Augustian model of rule has triumphed.

 

 However, the inspiration that the Augustian model has given many cannot paper over the fact that it ultimately ended in disaster. While Augustus set about to govern the Empire in a different manner than his grandfather, this was more a matter of circumstance than of any intention of laying a template for future rulers to use. Aurelius had conquered the world already; there was no opportunity for a second conqueror to follow. The Empire would have had to shift from a model of expansion to a model of retention, and the failures of Antonius provide a clear example of why an Empire that ruled all of the world could not be developed around the idea of continued expansion, for with few external enemies, the only enemies to create were within.

 

The result of this is that Augustus’ project, if he even conceived of his rule in that manner, could not live for even hours beyond him. He established no barriers to his own power, nor did he mold his successor to follow his path. His government was solely of his own design, and its policies could, and would, be easily reversed upon the ascension of the first ruler who thought differently. Even Archchancellor Morris, who enjoyed a great deal of power and influence in the Imperial cabinet, and was said to be a second Emperor himself, was completely powerless the moment his benefactor died. With no ability for Augustus’ steady, adroit rule to live past him, it gave way to tyranny without even a moment of resistance, and without a single man or woman who would champion it.

 

Vale, Augustus ‘the Prudent’

1st of Godfrey’s Triumph, 1656-5th of Owyn’s Flame, 1706

(r. 17th of Harren’s Folly, 1694-5th of Owyn’s Flame, 1706)

 

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O Ágioi Kristoff, Jude kai Pius. Dóste mas gnósi ópos sas ékane o Theós. Poté min afísoume na doúme to skotádi, allá as doúme móno to fos tis sofías kai tis alítheias. O Theós na se evlogeí.

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The sudden breakdown of security during the reign of Antonius shall be covered in the next volume of The Historia Pertinaxi.