The Principality of Voss
Merit, bled for.
At a Glance
| Founding House | House Voss |
|---|---|
| Founder | Kalar Voss, swordsman and swordsmith, beloved disciple of Alistair Viswas of Mangholstadt |
| Ruling House (present age) | House Madzeno, come to the throne by marriage into the founder's line |
| Government | Principality; the rule of a Grand Prince, a title near to a king's; dynastic |
| Sovereign at the Dawn of the Present Age | Grand Prince Tegrin Madzeno (younger brother of Zion Madzeno) |
| Languages | The Common Tongue (everyday and lingua franca); Vossian (the tongue of the nobility) |
| Dominant Faith | Arivatan Solonism (adopted late in the reign of Oberon Madzeno; formerly Mangholstadt Solonism) |
| Standing | Long the neutral buffer of the west, the "Switzerland" among greater powers |
Overview
Voss is the small, proud warrior-principality of the west, a realm of few numbers and long memory wedged among the three great powers that would become the Inner Triumvirate. What it has always lacked in size it has made up in the quality of its people and the sharpness of its blades, and in a stubborn, hard-won independence that has outlasted conquerors.
It is a nation founded by a swordsman and ruled, by an old marriage, through his line. Its people prize merit above birth and honor above numbers, and its ruling house carries, quietly, a strand of blood that in most of the west would be counted a disgrace. Voss has survived not by winning wars but by being too useful, and too little threat, to be worth the cost of its destruction.
Geography
Voss holds a small territory in the west-central Continent, hemmed between the Holy Theocracy of Mangholstadt to its west and the Slaver Dominion of Sorkhold to its east, with the Mage Federation of Arcanmere to its north. It is, by any map, a buffer: a slight realm pressed among the three powers of the Inner Triumvirate, and its whole history has been shaped by that unhappy position.
People & Culture
Voss reckons a person by merit and by honor, and by little else. Gender is no bar to station and race no automatic mark against it; what a Vossian is measured by is worth proven, most often, at the edge of a blade. It is a martial culture above all, a nation of swordsmen where the sword is craft, calling, and creed at once, and where a small people has learned to make each of its few worth many.
That tolerance is not only principle but blood. The ruling house of Voss descends from a union between the realm's founder and a woman of the Wood Elves, and the mixed inheritance of that marriage runs, however faintly, in the line that governs still. In a west that enslaves the other races, Voss is an uneasy exception, and it has never entirely forgotten why.
The everyday tongue is the Common Tongue, which serves here as it serves the whole Continent. Vossian, the older speech, is kept by the nobility as the language of court and of lineage.
Government
Voss is a principality, ruled by a Grand Prince, a title that carries, in practice, the weight of a king's. The crown is dynastic, held now by House Madzeno, and at the dawn of the present age it rests on Grand Prince Tegrin Madzeno, younger brother of Zion Madzeno. House Madzeno did not found the realm; it married into it, and the story of how it came to rule is, in truth, the story of Voss itself.
Economy
Voss is not a rich realm, and it has never commanded the numbers or the resources of its neighbors. Its people live chiefly by the land, and its main exports are the plain staples of a small upland country: farm crops, and the wool and goods of its sheep. What raises its name above that modest base is craft. Its renowned tradition of swordsmithing, and of the swordsmen who carry the work, gives a small nation something to trade on where a larger one would simply spend soldiers: a name for quality that other powers will pay, in coin or in protection, to have at their side rather than against them.
Religion
The faith of Voss is Arivatan Solonism, the tolerant eastern strain of the Solonist worship. It was not always so. For most of its history Voss kept to Mangholstadt Solonism, the rigid western creed of its powerful neighbor, and it did so less from conviction than from proximity, shared history, and the plain arithmetic of a small realm that could not afford to offend the Church at its border. Only late in the reign of Oberon Madzeno, the previous monarch, did Voss set that western faith aside and take up the eastern one, an act of quiet independence that turned its face from Mangholstadt and toward the kingdoms of the east.
Military
Voss has never fielded a great army; it has fielded a fine one. Its strength has always been its swordsmen, few in number but famed in quality, and the craft that arms them, the same craft that produced Vossglass, the storied blade forged by the realm's own founder. A nation this small does not buy its survival with force. Voss has kept itself alive by making itself worth more whole than broken, and by lending its blades where they will earn it protection.
History
Founding
Voss was raised in the Second Yuga, in the same aftermath of Solon's Rebellion that gave the west its other powers, and its story begins with Mangholstadt's. The Holy Theocracy was founded by two of Solon's most ardent allies: Cephamad the Messenger, who became the first Pope of the Church of Solon, and Alistair Viswas, who became its first Emancipator, the head of its papal guard and Inquisition. Alistair had a beloved disciple, a great swordsman named Kalar Voss, whom he loved as a son, to the lasting jealousy of the son he had by blood. The land that would become Voss had been taken from its Wood Elves by Mangholstadt decades before, its survivors fled east to Sangam, and at his death Alistair willed that emptied territory to Kalar.
The Founding of a Realm
Kalar Voss settled the land and made it his own. He took a woman of the Wood Elves to wife, a union scandalous in its day, and he gave himself to the two arts he loved above all others: the sword, and the forging of it. From his hand came Vossglass. From his people came a nation of swordsmen, an upstart realm that, for all its small numbers, struck far above its weight. He left no son, only a daughter of that mixed blood, and his greatest disciple, Cax Madzeno, married her. So House Madzeno came to the throne it holds to this day, and Voss passed from its founder's name into its ruling one.
Prior Wars
When Androghengis Chandran loosed his campaign of conquest upon the Continent, Voss did what it has always done: it kept out of the fighting. The War God meant at first to destroy it, as he destroyed so much else, but he came to see the little principality as something more useful left standing, a neutral buffer set among Sorkhold, Arcanmere, and Mangholstadt, the three powers he had bound to his purpose. So Voss survived the age that unmade greater realms, not by resisting the conqueror, but by being worth more to him whole than fallen.
The Present Age
For readers caught up to the most recent volume of the Soulfire saga.
At the dawn of the present age, Voss is ruled by Grand Prince Tegrin Madzeno, and its long neutrality has finally turned. Late in the reign of the previous monarch, Oberon Madzeno, it set aside the western faith of Mangholstadt for the eastern Arivatan creed; and in the war of the age it has cast its lot at last with the Outer Alliance, standing now openly against the Holy Theocracy at its border. For a realm that survived by giving no one cause to strike it, it is a dangerous turn, and a telling one.