Politics, Economics, and Society in the Cheren Plains
(Note: Unlike most of my writings about Thalea, I’m not going to write this from a Thalean
point-of-view, but will instead make explicit comparisons with situations on Earth. When discussing
complex social systems it’s just a lot easier to be able to refer to examples from real-life history than to
try to discuss such things with no context.)
Understanding the social systems of the Cheren Plains requires reviewing a bit of Thalean
history. The main thing to remember is that, despite (or perhaps because of) the Plains’ rich soil and
dense populations, their history is one of almost unremitting warfare. As such, the social and economic
system has always been geared toward creating and maintaining military forces.
For most of the last two millennia, the social system which filled that duty was the classic feudal
system. Kings and other rulers would grant some of their lands to major aristocrats in exchange for
military service. This pattern was replicated down the social hierarchy with large landowners subdividing their lands into smaller plots for their own vassals.
At the bottom of the hierarchy, this pattern was very similar to the European manorial system – a
typical noble would own one or more manors, each with its associated fields, pastures, forests, and water
supplies. Some of this land would be worked directly by the lord and his servants, while other parts
would be parcelled out to peasant families in return for various obligations, usually some combination of
rent (typically paid in kind), agricultural labor (working the lord’s fields during certain times of the
year), and military service (either as common foot soldiers or in military support roles such as squires or
carters). The lord would use these resources to fulfill his own military obligations, usually specified in
terms of a certain number of men, along with all necessary arms, mounts, and provisions, for so many
months per year. In addition to their military and economic responsibilities, local lords also typically
served in a quasi-governmental role, with power to enforce the king’s laws.
It must be emphasized that these relationships were often exceedingly complex. As a result of
centuries of inheritances, marriages, and other land transfers, most feudal holdings are non-contiguous,
and can be scattered across large areas. An individual farm holding in a manorial village may include a
house in the village, a plot of land in the fields, grazing rights in the communal pastures, plus various
access and usage rights to harvest fish or timber. At the other end of the spectrum, a major aristocrat
may hold hundreds of manors scattered across a large area, and even the individual manors may consist
of scattered holdings intertwined with those of other lords. Furthermore, the the relationship between a
lords and each of his many vassals, already a multifarious collection of economic, social, military, and
civic interactions, varied greatly based on local laws, traditions, individual agreements, and the value of
the land involved.
One feature of Cheren feudalism that differed greatly from that on Earth was the role of the
knight. On Earth the concept of knighthood included most noblemen and was often a generic term for
any noble with the proper military training. On Thalea, the concept of knighthood was introduced by the
Church of Tedanten during the waning years of the Lemenurian Empire. Knights were religious warriors
who renounced family ties and inheritance in order to dedicate their lives to Tedanten as professional
soldiers. That model quickly spread to other local religions, who founded their own fighting orders,
while some orders were founded without religious affliliations at all, designing knightly codes of a
secular, or at least non-denominational, nature.
While the early chivalric orders were generally supported by direct gifts from noble patrons (or
employers – some orders have always been more mercenary than others), over time many orders were
endowed directly with their own feudal holdings to support their members. Typically a noble would
grant some portion of his land to a chivalric order dedicated to serving his lord, thus permanently
“buying off” his regular military obligations. This practice was often encouraged by kings, who
preferred permanent cadres of professional soldiers over the part-time (and often reluctant) feudal levies.
In this fashion, many chivalric orders became major landowners in their own right, becoming important
and sometimes independent political and economic powers. In this way, endowed chivalric orders bore a
close resemblance to the powerful abbeys of medieval Europe, semi-autonomous organizations which
sometimes even extended across national borders. But rather than being devoted to religious
contemplation they were devoted to military support of a specific sovereign or cause.
This would be an appropriate point to comment on the place of religion in the Cheren social
system. Cheren priests are paradoxically both more and less influential than their counterparts in
medieval Earth. Given their undeniable and often essential miraculous powers, Cheren priests command
great respect and are integrated into all aspects of Cheren life. Any king, nobleman, general, or
community without the divine support of clerics is doomed to failure, or at least a marginal existence.
However, in place of a single church hierarchy with a monopoly on religious power, Cheren culture has
more than a dozen allied yet competing ecclesiastical organizations. This drastically weakens their
“bargaining power” in social relationships, as any church which demands too much can, at least
theoretically, be replaced by the services of a rival church of a more accomodating nature.
Furthermore, Cheren religion (with the notable exception of the Church of Fondam) has never
gone in much for monasticism, which at its heart is based on the idea of walling clerics off in isolated
communities to devote their lives to meditation and prayer. Cheren clerics are in far too much demand
for very practical needs, and are usually closely integrated with the general community. Thus, the
absence of abbeys. While it’s not uncommon for individual churches to be endowed with lands, much
like the chivalric orders (and for much the same reasons, as clerics are a vital part of any military
endeavor), they lack the overwhelming economic and social power of the unified medieval Catholic
church.
So that’s a summary of how Cheren culture was. And this is important because the framework
described above still forms the theoretical underpinnings of the modern Cheren social system. Despite
centuries of change, the Cheren people still often think of their society and government in feudal terms,
even when that model is increasingly anachronistic.
The single most pervasive change to Cheren culture is the transition to a cash economy. This has
actually been going on for a long time now. A cash economy offers numerous incentives, most
importantly that it’s simply far more efficient than the tortuously convoluted details of a typical feudal
relationship. The laundry list of rights, duties, and obligations between lord and his vassals/tenants,
which are difficult to quantify and often subject to dispute, can be replaced by the simple payment of an
annual or monthly rent. The increase in coinage is a boon to trade, making transfers of goods far simpler
than the intricacies of a barter system. As more facets of the economy come to be controlled by money,
it becomes easier for all parties to quantify value in disparate goods or services and to better manage
their resources.
Of course the institution most directly served by the easy quantification of obligations is the
government. Kings and other sovereigns have often been behind the impetus toward the increased use of
money, as it makes almost every aspect of their job easier. It increases the opportunity for direct
taxation, eliminating the problems of perishable taxes in kind. It eases the accumulation and transfer of
capital for large construction projects like roads, bridges, docks, mines, and fortifications. And most
importantly, it’s a godsend for military planning, where the ability to simply pay for soldiers and
materiel alleviates the nightmare of military logistics under a feudal economy.
Because of these advantages, Cheren culture has been slowly but surely shifting to a cash
economy for centuries now, with concomitant evolution in other social institutions. Kings came to rely
less on feudal levies and more on a combination of standing armies, mercenaries, and the chivalric
orders. The Cheren nobility transformed from a warrior class to a class of wealthy, land-owning
aristocrats. The manorial system was fading away, with communal lands being enclosed into
independent farmsteads or large-scale plantations and ranches. A small but growing middle class of
urban craftsmen and merchants, often explicitly modelling their practices on those of the more
mercantile Salman States to the east, was becoming an important part of the economy. Old ties of fealty
and patronage were being replaced by new ties of employment, trade, and even incipient nationalism.
However, all these changes were slow enough that, with the exception of a few historians, most Cheren
people didn’t even realize their society was undergoing a socio-economic revolution. That is, until the
foundation of the Empire of Chelenais.
When Chelen I conquered the Cheren Plains he found himself in charge of a diverse population,
in which each former kingdom, and sometimes even each small region within a larger kingdom, had its
own laws, its own feudal traditions, its own coinage, weights and measures, and tax system. Faced with
the impossibility of governing such a monstrous hybrid, Chelen set about the task of rationalizing these
disparate systems and imposing common rules and standards wherever possible, invariably favoring the
“new ways” over the old. Within a matter of decades he made transformed Cheren society in very
noticeable ways. Direct taxation replaced feudal obligations wherever possible, while many judicial
powers once delegated to local nobles were subsumed back to the emperor. Most of the chilvalric orders
not closely associated with powerful churches were “nationalized”, their loyalty re-directed directly to
the emperor and their lands administered by imperial appointees. These developments necessitated the
creation of nation-wide tax collection and judicial systems, institutions which formed the nucleus of a
rudimentary imperial bureaucracy.
As might be expected, Chelen encountered resistance to these changes, especially from the
aristocrats, who stood to lose the most from his reforms, which bypassed their traditional role in
governing the land. From Chelen’s point-of-view, however, this class, which used to be the bulwark of a
ruler’s military forces, was little more than a vast collection of legally-privileged parasites who served as
the primary impediment to his goal of transforming his empire into a modern state. Unfortunately, they
still controlled the vast majority of Chelenais’s land and resources, so he couldn’t move against them
directly. Instead he could only chip away at their traditional rights while building up a more loyal
government of administrators drawn mostly from the new middle classes.
One of Chelen’s most ingenious and successful methods of de-fanging the Cheren aristocracy
was the same ploy used by Louis XIV back on Earth – he purposefully encouraged the nobility to
complete their long transition from military governors to decadent dilettantes. Just as Louis built
Versailles, Chelen constructed the Purple Palace, an extravagant playground in which the nobility was
given every opportunity to expend their energy and resources on petty intrigues and useless displays of
grandeur. Unlike Louis, Chelen was never able to actually require his nobles to reside in the Purple
Palace, but he did his best to encourage them, lavishing favors and praise on those who spent all their
time away from their ancestral lands (and thus under his watchful eye) and who bankrupted themselves
in order to support a prolifigate lifestyle (thus transferring their wealth into the hands of the middle class
craftsmen and merchants who made the clothes and catered the parties).
As was mentioned, Chelen never achieved quite the success that Louis did in neutralizing his
nobles, but he was well on the way to doing so by the time of his death. Unfortunately, his successors
proved less apt at maintaining his policies. Chelen II seemed to understand his father’s dreams, and
attempted to continue in his footsteps, but he proved to be at best a mediocre politican. Rather than
furthering imperial designs he was forced to spend most of his energy simply preventing the empire
from sliding back into its old ways. And almost everyone agrees that Chelen III’s reign has been a
disaster. Chelen III grew up in the Purple Palace and ended up being caught in the trap his grandfather
had set for others, becoming an ineffective dandy, more interested in the latest fashions and court gossip
than in governing his own empire.
Which leaves the status of the nobility as a whole in a state of flux. Cheren nobles still enjoy a
number of legal rights and privileges not granted to commoners, but few of them mean much without the
family connections to back them up. Many nobles have become impoverished, forced to sell of their
lands or grant favorable long-term leases to tenants. Some have sold or leased out their land voluntarily,
allowing them to invest their wealth into banking or merchant ventures, entering into the new economy
with varying degrees of success. Still others have retrenched themselves, buying or forcing out old
feudal tenants so that they can hire cheap labor to work their land as vast plantations.
The chaos and destruction of the Janus invasion and the succeeding war with Partous has only
further aggravated the situation. Large parts of the Plains, especially in the west, have effectively
seceded from the Empire. Lip service is still paid to the emperor’s rule, but imperial agents and
bureaucrats have been eliminated, ignored, or simply suborned by the locals. In most of these areas the
local aristocrats have seized effective control, sometimes with the consent of the urban middle classes,
sometimes without. The voice of the rural commoners is invariably ignored, except to be squelched
during the increasingly common peasant uprisings. Civil war hasn’t broken out mainly because all
parties are war-weary and broke, plus few want to risk “intervention” from the powerful Theocracy of
Sonniel to the north or the saber-rattling military governors of Bonne in the west, neighboring powers
who would be quick to take advantage of any overt conflict. A few canny observers also worry about the
more subtle threat from the Salmano States, whose guildmasters and merchant princes are both the
primary buyers of Cheren agricultural exports and the holders of vast amounts of Cheren debt.