The Holy Theocracy of Mangholstadt
At a Glance
| Founding Institution | The Church of Solon |
|---|---|
| Founder | Cephamad, self-proclaimed first Pope of the Church of Solon |
| Government | Papal Theocracy, absolute rule of the Church of Solon |
| Sovereign at the Dawn of the Present Age | Pope Cleon |
| Languages | The Common Tongue (everyday); Pre-Common (heritage & liturgical tongue, the old Latin-rooted speech of the Continent, preserved in scripture, rite, and canon law) |
| Dominant Faith | Mangholstadt Solonism, the western strain; rigid, fundamentalist, and intolerant of doubt |
| Sworn Power | One of the three nations of the Inner Triumvirate (with Arcanmere and Sorkhold), bound by a shared creed of human supremacy |
Overview
Mangholstadt is the great theocracy of the west, the seat of the Church of Solon and the religious authority over the whole western half of the Continent. It is a realm where faith and power have become indistinguishable: where the word of the Pope carries the weight of armies, and where the machinery of devotion has long since been turned to the work of conquest.
At its heart lies a profound irony. The Church venerates Solon as the supreme exemplar of humankind: proof, in its doctrine, that humans are the rightful masters of the Continent now that the Agnivansha are fallen. Of Solon's true blood, the faithful know nothing. What Mangholstadt preaches as the purest of human glories rests, all unknowing, on a foundation it would never accept.
Geography
Mangholstadt holds the far western coast of the Continent, where the land meets the western sea. To its north lies Arcanmere, the Mage Federation; to its east, the small Principality of Voss and, beyond it, Sorkhold, the Slaver Dominion; and further east still, the great expanse of the Crimson Desert divides the western powers from the kingdoms of the Continent's heart.
Its dominion, however, is not measured in coastline alone. Through the Church of Solon, Mangholstadt's true reach extends across the entire western half of the Continent, not as conquered territory, but as the faith every western realm professes and the authority to which their souls must answer.
People & Culture
Mangholstadt's culture is the culture of a religion made into a state. Its rhythms are the rhythms of the calendar of rites; its law is canon law; its public life is ordered, observed, and unforgiving. To picture it is to picture the great holy cities of an older world, their cathedrals and pilgrim-roads, their processions and their inquisitions, raised to the pitch of absolute conviction.
Its people are, by reputation, hardened fanatics. Doubt is not tolerated; deviation is not debated but corrected. The dominant speech is the Common Tongue, but the Church keeps its older heritage tongue, Pre-Common, the Latin-rooted speech of the early Continent, alive in scripture, liturgy, and the language of its courts and councils, much as an older world kept a sacred tongue for its altars.
Slavery is woven through the fabric of daily life. The bondage of the other races is not merely permitted but ordained, justified by the same doctrine of human supremacy on which the whole edifice of the faith is built.
The place of women is narrow and rigidly kept. Where the eastern kingdoms hold their women as honored wards, the Holy Theocracy holds them nearer to property, granting little autonomy and binding them closely to the authority of father and husband. Yet the rule has its exceptions: women of high station wield real power through the offices they hold, and the Sisterhood of the Sixth Veil, almost wholly an order of women, is respected and feared even by noblemen and clergy.
Government
Mangholstadt is a papal theocracy. Supreme authority rests with the Pope, head of the Church of Solon, beneath whom the cardinals administer the faith and the Inquisition enforces it. At the dawn of the present age, the papacy is held by Pope Cleon.
Beneath and beside the formal hierarchy moves a quieter power: the Sisterhood of the Sixth Veil. It was never, by its origins, an arm of the papacy, nor does it formally report to the Pope, yet over the long generations it has become the Church's core intelligence apparatus. Its agents are everywhere, its hand in the politics of distant kingdoms is constant, and its purpose is the slow, patient bending of the whole Continent toward the will of the Holy Theocracy.
Economy
Mangholstadt's wealth is, overwhelmingly, the Church's wealth. It flows from the faithful as tithes and indulgences and the countless lesser payments owed to the Church of Solon, the immense, accumulated treasure of an institution that holds the soul of half a Continent.
Its other great engine is the slave trade. Mangholstadt enslaves humans and the other races alike (wood-elves, dwarves, and every people of the Continent save the Agnivansha), and sells them across the realms, chiefly to its neighbor Sorkhold, the Slaver Dominion. Here the Church's doctrine bends conveniently around its profit: the bondage of the other races is held righteous, while the enslavement of humans by humans is, in liturgy, forbidden, and, in practice, too lucrative to forgo. To these are added the honest exports of its coast and soil: fishing, farming, and the renowned wine of its vineyards.
Religion
The faith of Mangholstadt is Mangholstadt Solonism, the western strain of Solonist worship, administered by the Church of Solon and distinct in temperament from the Arivatan Solonism of the east. Where the eastern strain is tolerant, the western is absolute: a rigid, fundamentalist creed, severe in its law and merciless to dissent.
Its doctrine holds Solon to have been the supreme human, the man who cast down the Agnivansha and proved, in the doing, the supremacy of humankind over every other race of the Continent. That the faithful do not know the truth of Solon's blood is the quiet tragedy at the heart of the whole faith: they venerate as the purest of men one who was not wholly a man at all.
Yet for all its fervor, the faith is, at its heights, an instrument of power before it is a matter of belief. Among the cardinals and the Popes, true conviction is rare; the creed is wielded, more often, as the means by which the Church governs, enriches itself, and justifies its conquests. The rare genuine believers are, for that very reason, the most dangerous of all, for they will sanctify any violence and excuse any cruelty in the name of Solon's will. Beneath it runs a doctrine the common faithful never hear: that the Church's own allies, the Mage Federation and the Slaver Dominion, are to be "saved" (that is, subjugated) last of all.
Military
Mangholstadt's military might is formidable, and at its core stands the Inquisition, less a tribunal than a vast standing army, the armed strength of the faith made manifest. To it are joined the orders of holy knights and the lesser martial arms of the Church.
But the Holy Theocracy's most feared weapon is not its soldiery. Through the Sisterhood of the Sixth Veil and its wider intelligence apparatus, Mangholstadt has perfected the art of breaking its enemies from within, turning courts against their kings and factions against their own before a single banner takes the field.
History
Founding
Mangholstadt was founded in the Second Yuga, in the age when the Agnivansha were last at the height of their power. Its founder was Cephamad, a bard in the company of Solon, silver-tongued and ambitious, who believed less in Solon's vision than in Solon's power. By his own account he was Solon's greatest friend and truest chronicler; in truth, Solon thought little of him. It was Cephamad who labored to raise Solon from a leader into a god, and who set himself, in the telling of Solon's story, at the right hand of the divine. He was also, by a tangle of blood, first cousin to Solon's two wives.
He did not work alone. With him stood Alistair Viswas, once an enslaved miner in the lands that would one day become the Dark Kingdom, and a true believer of a fervor Cephamad himself never matched. Raised to the rank of paladin, Alistair would become the first Emancipator, head of the papal guard and the Inquisition, and his house, the Viswas line, would hold that power for generations to come.
The kingdom itself was born of a parting. When the Solonic Treaty was sealed and the Agnivansha withdrew to the Abaddon range, Solon took the eastern half of the Continent for himself and his heirs, dividing it between his two sons. The western half he gave to Cephamad, the resolution of a bitter feud between the followers of Solon's son Chandra and the followers of Cephamad, who could not agree on how Solon's will was to be carried out. So the two camps parted ways, and the Church of Solon took the west for its own. Cephamad became its first Pope; the Holy Theocracy of Mangholstadt was made.
The Church Ascendant
From that founding, the Church of Solon spread its authority across the whole of the western Continent, until every realm of the west professed its faith and answered to its judgment. With that reach came the power of an institution that held the soul of half a Continent, and with that power, in time, came the corruption, the worldliness, and the appetite for dominion that have marked the Church ever since.
Prior Wars
Mangholstadt's modern might is, by a bitter irony, the inheritance of its greatest humiliation. During the genocidal war waged by Androghengis Chandran, the Second War God, against the Agnivansha, the powers that would become the Inner Triumvirate were not yet bound as they are now. Androghengis conquered all three and brought them to heel, bending even the Holy Theocracy to his purpose; for all the Church's rigor, the War God was more pitiless still.
In his service, Mangholstadt learned the arts of war, the taking of cities and the holding of conquered ground. Through his campaigns and their aftermath, it gained vast territory and influence. Much of the strength the Holy Theocracy wields today was won under his banner. But it learned, too, that it would never again bow to a foreign conqueror, least of all a ruler of Chandran's line. It submitted while Androghengis lived; when he died, it bent every power it had toward ensuring no such master would rise over it again, and toward the patient, lasting subversion of Chandran itself.
The Present Age
For readers caught up to the most recent volume of the Soulfire saga.
At the dawn of the present age, under Pope Cleon, Mangholstadt stands formally at war with the Kingdom of Sangam and the Principality of Voss. Bound by the Inner Triumvirate's three-way pact of mutual defense, under which an attack upon one is counted an attack upon all, it lends its strength to Arcanmere in its war against the Dark Kingdom, and to Sorkhold in its war against Chandran.
Above all, the cardinals and the Pope desire the conquest of Sangam and Chandran alike, for both descend from the sons of Solon, and the Church's authority rests upon its claim to be the one true voice of Solon, a claim no rival heir can be suffered to share. Chandran galls it most of all: in the city of Arivata stands the Temple of Solon, seat of the eastern faith and its Oracle, a rival church the Holy Theocracy means to see torn down.