Star Empire

The Gold Empire, not to be confused with the much later Ogili Gold Empire, also known as the Gold Union, was an alliance of nations positioned around the Gold Sea. It was formed from the union of the Star Empire and Subumpam, each of which were themselves unions of smaller nations who had agreed to a military alliance.

History

The Star Empire was an alliance of states living in tropical and subtropical areas along the western shore of the Gold Sea, and extending inland up to the foothills of the mountains. Its population was entirely aboriginal, and each of its substates consisted almost entirely of just a single ethnicity. When someone moved from one state to another, they were expected to adopt a new language, religion, and tribal identity.

Subumpam, by contrast, was a multiethnic union. Its majority population, the Subumpamese, were recent immigrants to the area from the islands of Laba (as were all other Gold speakers). But there were also many Andanese speakers, and about 7% of the population consisted aboriginals who were closely related to the Star people across the sea. Subumpam was itself a union of several different states, but those states, despite each having their own separate ethnic identities, were thmselves multiethnic, because their state boundaries did not correspond to tribal boundaries. (e.g. aboriginals were everywhere, not just in one territory set aside for them; likewise with the Andanese, who had literally followed the Subumpamese as they arrived and began to set up cities.)

The union betweren the Star Empire and Subumpam was called the Gold Empire, named after the Gold people who lived in Subumpam. The Star government specifically insisted on putting the imperial capital in the East, in Subumpamese territory, because they wanted to bend the Subumpamese people to their will and essentially dominate them. The Subumpamese government agreed because it was smaller, military weaker, and felt that even if they were being yoked to the will of a larger empire they could at least stop worrying about being attacked by their other enemies to the east.

Early problems in Subumpam

The treaty creating the Gold Empire was unpopular in Subumpam. Even though more than 80% of the population of the Empire was located on the western (Star) shore, the founders chose to build their imperial capital in the extreme southeast, near the eastern border of Subumpam. Even though Subumpam was not a democracy and its people were used to being exploited, the sudden appearance of a foreign power forcing the Subumpamese to build castles and fortresses from which they themselves could be even more strictly controlled led to a conflict. This was the Peep Riot (Peep was the name of the city they had chosen for their capital). The Gold rulers were forced to admit that they could not build their capital here, and Peep seceded from Subumpam soon afterwards, joining instead the nation immediately eastward for its own protection even though by doing so they became much poorer. Thus the Goldies realized they needed to put their capital someplace central. Even so, they chose another location within Subumpam, the city of Wabula Pipem. Since word of the revolt had spread among the peasants, they told the Pipemese people that they were not merely a "second choice", as they felt that would spoil their rule, but that they were chosen because they were already the capital of Subumpam and that it made sense for the subimperial capital and the high imperial capital to be in the same place.

The Pipemese rulers realized immediately that they had essentially been removed from power, since they were under the control of foreigners even in their own imperial capital, and began to regret signing the treaty. Soon, the Gold legislature voted to disband the Subumpamese military, since they didn't want to worry about the threat of any more revolts, and threatened to invade and occupy Subumpam with the much larger Star military if they did not immediately comply. Subumpam thus became the only member of the Gold Union without a military.

They also occupied all of Subumpam's ports, placing them under direct control of the Gold military. They raised taxes on the Subumpamese people to pay for an armed police force that watched cities and inspected people to make sure that peasants were not able to buy or produce dangerous weapons. Many positions in the Subumpamese governtment were abolished or replaced with figureheads reporting to the Gold government. A lot of the people promoted were of the small aboriginal minority in Subumpam, even though these people had been separated from the Star nations for thousands of years, had no common language, and did not consider themselves Stars. The Star governors told the aboriginals that they were indeed Stars and that the Subumpamese had stolen their territory.

Some Star people began to see the whole Gold Empire as merely an expanded Star Empire now, since Subumpam, the only non-Star member, had lost many of its statelike characteristics, such as a military, control of its borders, a strong voice in government, and to some extent, a native language, since most of the people in control of its government did not speak Subumpamese, and often did not speak the same languages as each other and thus required help just to communicate. They considered the Subumpamese people to exist solely to help the Star Empire function, and not be deserving of a ogvernment of their own.

Due to the lack of a military, the Gold governors worried about invasion, and so they blocked the major roads leading out of Subumpam. They did not actually do this, as was commonly perceived, to prevent Subumpamese from leaving; in fact, for a small fee, anyone in Subumpam could leave so long as they relocated to somewhere still within the Gold Empire. They promised not to discriminate against Subumpamese if they moved to a Star nation and adopted the native language and religion. However, almost none of the Subumpamese accepted this offer; most who did intended to attack the Star societies they were entering, but found that they were indeed discriminated against by the Stars, and denied the right to own weapons. Some of the aboriginals living in Subumpam did accept the offer, but the Stars were reluctant to let them leave because they wanted to use the aboriginals to spoil the national identity of the Subumpamese. They promised extra power in government for any aboriginals who chose to stay in Subumpam, but not did extend this offer to any other peoples, including the Stars.

But the Gold governors ordered the roads blocked off because they realized they had just deliberately created an extremely weak open wound in their Empire, out of the fear of the native population rebelling, and did not want to put their new preferred home territory in a weak spot. They were afraid to allow the Subumpamese to create another military, even if it was more strictly controlled than before, because they felt that would mean admitting that disbanding the military had been a mistake. They also did not want to force the Star military to waste time and resources occupying Subumpam, but realized that they might in the end be forced to do just that. As a temporary solution, they allowed people from Nama to occupy various key areas within Subumpam.

The shock of seeing Naman soldiers occupying Subumpam, when Subumpam had been promised from the beginning that the whole purpose of the alliance was to protect Subumpam from being crushed by potential enemies such as Nama, was too much for the Subumpamese to bear. Some Subumpamese formed a secret society promising to get Subumpam back out of the Gold Union, even if it meant surrendering control to another union, or even to Nama itself. A throng of unarmed Subumpamese attacked a Naman security guard, who responded by killing them all. The new secret secessionist society was depressed when they heard the news, not only because of the many innocent (as they saw them) victims who had been killed but because it showed that the Subumpamese were far weaker at resisting occupiers than they had been just a few decades before, when the people of Peep successfully resisted the occupation altogether and pulled out of the Union.

On the other hand, despite being massacred by Namans, many Subumpamese actually preferred the Naman soldiers to the Gold/Star occupiers, since the Naman soliders at least were not commonly seen abusing their power. The Star government was suspicious of the decision to hire soldiers from their chief enemy, Nama, to help keep peace in their most unstable part of their empire. This decision had been done originally because the Star military did not want to waste its resources just to occupy its own territory, and because Nama was diverse enough that they felt there was no common "Naman" interest that could possibly be advanced even if the soldiers they were importing decided to try their hardest to cause trouble.

First World War

In 1989, Nama declared war on the Star Empire. This was the widest war the planet had yet seen. It was soon shown that Naman soldiers within Subumpam had indeed been spying for their homeland, and that the Star governors had been wrong to think that Nama was too internally diverse to have a common interest. However, they were correct at least in that not all of Nama was united in supporting this new war; much of Naman territory consisted of coastal strips isolated from even the other coastal strips by mountains and surprisingly deep water. These settlements had little interest in Nama's wider affairs, and many did not even know of them.

The invading Naman army decided to make itself explicitly pro-Subumpam, even though they realized that the Subumpamese people were physically weak due to their lack of weapons and lack of skill even if given weapons, and that in this new war it was likely to expect Subumpamese deaths to be far out of proportion to those of any other nation. They enrolled Subumpamese citizens into the Naman army, giving them preferentially nonviolent jobs so that they would not be frightened or overwhelmed being chased by much more powerful soldiers

Many Star people believed that the invading Namans had magic powers, and secretly hoped Nama would win the war so that they themselves could gain those powers.

Early on, Nama signed treaties with various nearby nations, such as Paba, and Paba effectively became a part of Nama. Note that the Pabaps, so famous for extreme pacifism thousands of years later, had not yet adopted that trait, and in fact had a military much stronger than one would expect for a nation consisting of just one single city. Nama was very generous in these treaties, in that they did not require the other nations to contribute any efforts towards fighting the war, but only required them to allow Namans to enter their nations so that they could establish reliable supplies of food and medicine for their soldiers. As the war went on for a surprisingly long time, these countries became poorer, but nevertheless were much better off than Nama's enemies.

During the early stages of the war, a new party called the Crystal Treasurers (usually referred to as Crystals) came into being. They created a new religion, believing in "the Gems of Tebbala". This is the same religion that the Khulls people held to about two thousand years later. They believed that it was only the Crystals who could conquer Nama.

As the war geared up, the Star Empire lost battle after battle. Most of the battles were fought in Subumpam, as that was where the Star military was weakest. But around the year 2000, people from Nama began spilling into Star territory (the stronger, western side of the Empire), and causing overpopulation problems. This army was composed mostly of people from the deep inland areas of Nama, who had the biological trait of women being taller than men. Thus their army had soldiers both male and female, and behind the advancing front whole families and even whole cities coming to make the Star Empire their new homeland, and to enslave the natives.

The sight of the advancing front of female soldiers actually weakened Star soldiers' resistance somewhat, as although they had known from legends that such people existed, none of the Star people had ever seen them up close. Despite knowing that their lives were in danger, they were reluctant to take up arms against a female army, even a heavily armed one. The Star soldiers figured that even though they were likely to lose the war, being governed by a race of people who put women in control of men would at least be gentle defeat. However they were disappointed to learn that the Namans did not have magic powers.

Nevertheless, the fighting went on, and the Star Empire was not subdued fully until the final peace treaty in the year 2057, declaring Nama the winner of the war and giving it the right to piece off any parts of the Star Empire that they desired, and press them into Nama. Most of the nations voluntarily joined Nama, but others preferred independence. Subumpam was among those that wanted to be independent, but Nama forced them in anyway, primarily because the many Namans who had occupied Subumpam did not know what would happen to them if Subumpam broke away. (Although the war had been sparked by the Star Empire's abuses of Subumpam, as it became clear that Nama was likely to win, Nama shifted its attention to aggressive landgrabs in the more populous west).

Naman languages began to take over all of the Star territory. However, the Naman people were still a minority; the population of the Star Empire had actually been higher than the population of Nama all along, despite Nama's victory, and it was only a small subset of the Naman people who had moved in. Namans thus became a hereditary upper class in Star territory (later called Lobexon), and drove the Lobexonian economy into poverty by doing many of the same things that the Stars had done in Subumpam 100 years earlier: abolishing the native military, raising taxes to pay for extra security in the cities, and allowing only Naman ships to use the Star ports.

Naman occupation

However, the central government in Nama held off on celebrating its victory. Although Lobexon had suffered many deaths, their population was still higher than all of Nama, even the expanded Nama created by their victory in the war. They did not want to make a military commitment to defend all of this territory. Indeed, Nama's central government had had little role in the invasion; they at first merely called for soldiers to help occupy the land, not expecting whole villages from the north to empty out and build places to live there. Moreover, even afdter teh war was over, some Naman warlords continued fighting, making the Stars believe that Nama had no interest in enforcing even the unfair treaty that they had written. Furthermore, Nama also had a problem with Naman warlords leaving the Star Empire altogether to set up even more new countries in the tropical rainforest to the south and west of Lobexon, where they would be totally out of reach of Nama and responsible to no higher authority.

Nama realized it would be advantageous for them to retain direct control over only the coastal areas of the former Star Empire, and leave the inland areas the choice of whether to cooperate or not, but in any case refuse to defend them militarily. The central government of Nama made it very clear to the warlords living in Lobexon that although Nama considered them their allies, they would not be granted automatic help shoudl their slaves rebel, or they be attacked by a third party such as Kxêl.

Note that the Namans occupying Lobexon were generally Macro-Repilian implants from the cold north, and shared little in common with the ocean-facing parts of Nama that had most of the power. Also, as above, the Macro-Repilians stood apart from the others in that their women were taller than their men, and that their women had almost all of the power in society. They saw this as a uniquely Repilian trait (there were no Andanese here), and did not try to impose it on the male-led peoples they now ruled over. As was common in later tall-femaled tribes such as the Moonshines and Poswobs, the Macro-Repilians ruling Lobexon generally permitted men to physically attack women. The Stars living in Lobexon adopted this trait, which led to a sharp increase in the occurrence of rape and wife-beating.

The Triangle War

A political party called Popopilapi emerged in Lobexon now.