Caputian diaspora

Caputian diaspora

Total population
89,533,376 (census)
Regions with significant populations
Chiefly Nouvelle Alexandrie, which holds two Caputian regions, with communities in Alduria, Constancia, the Wechua Nation, Natopia, Ransenar, and the Hexarchy.
Languages
Common Tongue Alexandrian Martino Wechua Haifan Audente (liturgical)
Religion
Melusinian Faith Bovinism Church of Alexandria Faith of Inti
Related ethnic groups
Alexandrian people Hammish
Total from the census of claimants conducted under the authority of the Royal Caputian Government in Exile, which is reported as a single aggregate figure and gives no year. The New Alexandrian census of 1718 AN separately recorded 63,849,610 Caputians resident in the Federation.

The Caputian diaspora comprises the peoples of the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia and their descendants, dispersed across Micras after the kingdom was dissolved on 30.XV.1668 AN. Caputia had existed for fifteen years; as of 1758 AN the diaspora had outlasted it by ninety.

The Royal Caputian Government in Exile, seated at Nivardom in Constancia, holds the records, archives, and National Credit System of the vanished kingdom and describes itself as the steward and protector of the dispersed population rather than as a movement to restore the state. A census conducted under its authority records 89,533,376 persons with claim and proof of Caputian citizenship. The Melusinian Faith, the successor of the kingdom's established Church of Caputia, survived the collapse as a stateless religion under a head in exile, the Matriarch of New Zalae.

The largest concentrations lie in Nouvelle Alexandrie, which holds two Caputian regions, and the dispersal also produced a sovereign state of its own, the republic of Saint Salvation, which governed itself for twenty-one years before its integration into the federation. The government in exile maintains offices in and relations with Constancia, the Wechua Nation, Alduria, and Ransenar.

The diaspora carried no common vernacular out of the kingdom, whose eleven states were multilingual from its founding, and the speech it holds in common is liturgical: Audente, the classical tongue of the Melusinian rite. The Rothborne Settlement of 14.VI.1758 AN gathered the titular crown of Caputia, the headship of the House of Rothborne, and the chairmanship of the government in exile on Princess Guinevere, the second child of Edgard III, and outside every reigning line.

Origins

Caputia was founded in 1653 AN at the end of the Hammish Civil War as the successor state of the Commonwealth of Hamland, and reigned over by Queen Elizabeth I from its capital at Zalae. Its recorded population in 1664 AN was 232,477,000 across eleven states, a Royal District, and the Crown dependencies of Elizabeth Isle and Santa Melusina.

The kingdom fell to two causes together. The White Plague, a fungal infection that originated in Cibola and reached Keltia, is speculated to have been a major contributory factor; the second was a concurrent campaign of political subversion directed against Haifa by the Bassarid Empire. Refugees left in several directions at once, some quitting Keltia altogether and others resettling in the Wechua Nation in anticipation of the conflicts that would follow the death of a Keltian hegemon. Each receiving state shaped the community that settled there. Not every population that left the kingdom left it as Caputians: the Krasnocorian emigration to Caputia had been the largest voluntary population transfer on Micras before the Great Transference, and at the collapse the Krasnocorian ministry of foreign affairs called for a mass migration of its displaced nationals, advising some eight million persons of Krasnocorian origin to move into the territories protected by the relief mission and evacuating the remainder to the Krasnocorian mainland.

The union of Alduria with the Wechua Nation as Alduria-Wechua on 12.XV.1685 AN, and that federation's renaming as Nouvelle Alexandrie in 1693 AN, carried its Caputian residents through changes of nationality without their moving again. The film director Hans Backovic, born at Zalae in 1642 AN, held Hammish citizenship to 1653 AN and Caputian citizenship to 1668 AN; after the fall he took refuge briefly in Constancia, settled at Punta Santiago, and held Aldurian, Aldurian-Wechua, and finally New Alexandrian citizenship until his death in 1737 AN. His later films took up cultural dislocation and identity loss. His daughter Elena Backovic sat as a Deputy of the Federal Assembly for South Lyrica from 1729 AN to 1739 AN, sixty-one years after the fall.

Census

The count of 89,533,376 is a census of claimants rather than of survivors. Its criterion is claim and proof of Caputian citizenship or ancestry, the same standard by which representatives are elected to the government in exile, and it therefore includes descendants born long after the kingdom fell and excludes those who have let the claim lapse. It cannot be set against the 232,477,000 recorded in 1664 AN as a measure of loss, and it far exceeds the resident populations of every identifiable Caputian community taken together. The figure counts a documented inheritance, not people living Caputian lives.

The criterion rests on the kingdom's own records. The government in exile holds the data gathered through the National Credit System, the national reputation and credit scheme proposed in 1658 AN, and through the iHonest registries launched at Zalae in 1659 AN and adopted by several Caputian states thereafter. Those registries linked passports, birth certificates, and other identity documents to their holders, and they are what make a claim provable at a remove of several generations.

The standard is civic in form and produces a population wider than any single people. Caputia was a union of the Hammish, Haifan, Wechua, and Alexandrian populations of its eleven states, and a claim descends from citizenship of that union rather than from descent within one of its communities. Where the term is used as an ethnic label it is narrower: the republic of Saint Salvation counted Caputians at 49.4 percent of its population in its census of 1724 AN, listed as the largest of seven named groups, beside San Luisian, Haifan, Atteran, Pallisican, Lyrican, and Israati. The government in exile uses the wider standard, admitting claim by citizenship or by ancestry alike.

One receiving state counts the population directly. The New Alexandrian census of 1718 AN recorded 63,849,610 Caputians, 22.12 percent of a federal population of 288,651,042 and the second largest ethnic group in the Federation after the Alexandrians. That figure is an ethnic classification made by the receiving state rather than a count of claimants, and it stands beside the census of the government in exile without being reconcilable with it.

Communities

The dispersal settled into four broad limbs: a western one in Alduria and the federation that grew out of it, which holds the great majority; a Keltian one gathered around the holy places and the republic of Saint Salvation; a smaller eastern one traced through the exile's officials into the Benacian Union and Hurmu; and a Cibolan one carried out of the kingdom by sea.

The last of these was an evacuation rather than a flight. The government of Los Liberados, together with the Iron Company and with the support of the Batavian Confederation, undertook a staged removal of the roughly four hundred thousand people still resident in the Caputian state of San Pedro at the end of 1668 AN, opening sea and air routes and annexing Corcovado to sustain an air bridge, and had carried more than one hundred and fifty thousand of them out by the middle of 1669 AN.

Nouvelle Alexandrie

The western limb rests on a grant of nationality. Alduria admitted the dispersal by its Law of Graces, which gave citizenship and a grant of property to refugees of the Alexandrian and Caputian diasporas who undertook to build the country, and the Federation that succeeded Alduria carried the provision into its founding instrument: Article 5 of the Proclamation of Punta Santiago entitles any person able to prove Wechua, Alexandrian, or Caputian descent to citizenship by graces. Caputian descent is therefore a ground of nationality written into the constitution of the state that holds the largest part of the diaspora.

Nouvelle Alexandrie holds two Caputian regions. The Isles of Caputia, constituted in 1686 AN, is the older and the more populous, with a regional population of some sixteen million across its four states; its people are drawn largely from the diaspora, the Shrine of the Seas at Gotfriedplatz is a major sanctuary of the faith, and the city of Melusina in Salzstein carries the goddess's name.

The Region of New Caputia was constituted on the territory of Passas, a domain of the Bassarid Empire whose population was Kralian and Pallisican, which Nouvelle Alexandrie annexed in Operation Purple Splendor between 1717 AN and 1719 AN. The annexed territory was organized under the New Caputia Provisional Authority, renamed New Caputia, and made a homeland for the scattered Caputian people; its admission as a Region was introduced in 1719 AN and took effect on Royal Assent in 1722 AN, and its regional population is 11,683,219 with its capital at Ravaillac. The territory was not empty of the dispersal before the annexation. Hammish displaced by the Hammish Civil War had been admitted to Passas under Pallisican rule, and communities of the Caputian diaspora who kept the worship of Melusine lived in its ports as a minority that suffered under Bassarid rule for its faith and its origins; the mass resettlement that made the region a homeland followed the annexation rather than founding the community. Queen Elizabeth I served as its first Regional Governor and held the office until her death in 1723 AN. She sat as an independent and did not seek election to a full term. The Matriarch of New Zalae resides at St. Melusine in the region, so that the head of the faith sits in New Caputia while its pilgrimage city lies in the Hexarchy.

Saint Salvation

Saint Salvation, a city-state on the Rodinia River at the Attera Gap, was organized as a republic on 8.I.1724 AN after fifty-five years its own history calls an era of disorder. At its census of that year it counted 267,646 people, 49.4 percent of them Caputian and 79.8 percent Melusinian, under the motto Aqua mortem vincit, "water conquers death." It was integrated into Nouvelle Alexandrie by the Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745, which gave its Caputian historical sites and monuments protected status, and the Cathedral of the Seraphine Waters remains its largest religious building.

Alduria

Alduria received the principal share of the wartime and post-collapse evacuations, in which the Hammish Humanitarian Council was the main agency, and Punta Santiago became the largest single Caputian settlement outside the later regions. The Council moved its own seat there, and the city drew the professional and artistic emigration of which Backovic is the best documented instance.

Some of the Aldurian settlements were founded by the refugees themselves. Several of the city-states of the Altusian Republic grew out of encampments of Alexandrian and Caputian refugees, and the republic that federated them listed the Church of Caputia among its recognized religions, tolerated alongside the Church of Alexandria; Altus was folded in turn into Alduria, Alduria-Wechua, and Nouvelle Alexandrie, so that its Caputian foundations now lie inside a state of the Aldurian region. The wealthier communities also paid for the poorer ones. Remittances sent home by Alexandrians and Caputians settled in Natopia and other rich countries became one of the largest financial inflows into Alduria, and donations flowing from Natopia and Alduria between 1672 AN and 1676 AN went into the medical research of the Carrillo National Health System, whose most prominent projects produced vaccines against the Alexandrian flu and the White Plague. Migration under the Law of Graces had dropped precipitously by 1708 AN and was expected to keep falling.

Constancia

Constancia hosts the government in exile at Nivardom, where it maintains the offices through which it represents the diaspora, and it received a share of the refugees displaced from the Wechua Nation in 1668 AN. Constancia opened itself by legislative act: in the second month of 1668 AN the Synklētos adopted a resolution granting entry, resettlement, and asylum to Caputian, Wechua, and other Keltian refugees, taken while Constancian forces were serving in the Humanitarian Mission in former Caputia, a relief operation assembled by seven nations. A Caputian community is established at Nisyros, which King Manco Cápac I of Nouvelle Alexandrie visited on the fifth day of his state visit of 1718 AN.

New Zalae

The old holy city of Zalae fell into ruin after the collapse and was rebuilt as New Zalae, a city-territory of the Hexarchy founded in 1690 AN by proclamation of Praetor Gilgamesh II and given as a gift to his nation and to the faithful dispersed throughout the world. It is the faith's great object of pilgrimage. The city admits any person from Alduria-Wechua or a former Caputian territory on a visa granted at arrival, exempted Melusinian clergy from ordinary limits of stay by joint decree in 1693 AN, and leases restored religious buildings without charge to congregations able to prove ties to land abandoned at the fall. The Matriarch takes her title from the city but holds no sovereignty there.

Wechua Nation and eastward

The Wechua Nation was a destination of the flight and then, in the same year, a place of second displacement: 1,234,987 Caputians resident there were among those who fled in the collapse of 1668 AN, into refugee camps in Alduria, Natopia, Constancia, and Ransenar. After the Restoration of 1673 AN the restored Wechua Nation extended a right to settle to Caputians and Alexandrians, and the community resident there as of 1758 AN dates from that grant.

A smaller limb ran east with the exile's officials. Royston Merrick II, first Prime Minister of the government in exile, was a Shirerithian by birth who took Caputian citizenship in 1655 AN and after the fall held Elwynnese, Hurmudan, and Benacian citizenship, several of them at once, until his death in 1715 AN. Melusinian congregations are established in the Natopian cities of Lindström, Dos Gardenias, Redquill, and Frenzyville, where the faith is the third largest in the empire.

Language

Caputia recorded no single national vernacular. Its languages were the Common Tongue, Wechua, Haifan, Martino, and Alexandrian, and the union was multilingual from its founding. The diaspora accordingly carried no common speech out of the kingdom, and the communities described above hold the languages of the states that received them.

What travels with the whole dispersal is liturgical rather than vernacular. Audente, the classical liturgical tongue of the Melusinian rite, carries the faith's oldest acclamations and blessings, and is kept even where the reading and the homily are given in the language of the congregation. In Ransenar the Alexandrian and Martino tongues hold local official status at Belmuliet on account of the Alexandrian and Caputian population settled there.

Religion

The kingdom recorded its population as 73 percent Melusinian, 15 percent Bovinist, 6 percent adherents of the Church of Alexandria, and 4 percent of the Faith of Inti, with the remainder distributed among other bodies. The dispersal preserved that composition in outline: the Melusinian Faith is the largest and principal religion of both the Caputian and the Hammish diasporas, the second largest religion of Nouvelle Alexandrie, and the third largest of Natopia. It is a sea-ministry within Bovinism and counts itself a sister church of the Dozan Bovic Church rather than a breakaway, so that the two largest confessions of the old kingdom remain kin after the dispersal.

Established under the kingdom as the Church of Caputia, the faith was disestablished with the state on 30.XV.1668 AN and became the stateless religion of the Caputian and Hammish peoples. It remade its headship after losing both crown and holy city: the Synod of St. Melusine of 1745 AN reconstituted the crown-appointed Archbishopric of Zalae as the self-standing Matriarch of New Zalae. The second Matriarch, Séraphine de la Mer, teaches that "the faith has no country but the sea."

Where the church itself was thin, the lay orders carried it. The Order of the Serene Pools is given to contemplation and the keeping of the temples. The Society of the Harmonious Current is the more active, running the charities of the faith among the poor, the sick, and the newly arrived, and burial societies keep the vigil of the Returning Tide. In diaspora towns with neither bishop nor temple the faithful gathered as house-congregations at any living water, a bowl of it standing for the font. The faith also keeps custody of the Most Noble Order of the Melusine, founded by Elizabeth I as the senior order of the kingdom and maintained in exile as a devotional society, its investitures performed by the Matriarch at the Great Tidal Temple in St. Melusine.

Culture

The cultural institutions of the kingdom were centered on Zalae and Judah. Caputian cinema was produced at Blakestown, a renaming of the Zalae suburb of St. Cloud, which released more than two hundred films a year and had begun with The Lands We Met in 1653 AN. The Caputian Performing Technology and Arts School, founded in 1660 AN, admitted any Caputian citizen who passed its examinations without charge. Caputian music drew Wechua wind instruments and melodic shape together with Alexandrian and Martino rhythm and percussion and Hammish and Haifan harmony and strings, on foundations laid by the blues of the Alexandrian-descended population and the gospel singing of the old Church of Hamland. Caputian media were described in the kingdom's own account as carrying distinct Caputian, Haifan, Wechua, and Alexandrian dimensions, reflecting the composition of the country itself.

What is attested in exile is narrower and mostly devotional: the household font kept by families without a temple, water carried home from pilgrimage, the moral virtues the faith calls the Five Currents, and imperial purple as the color the faith traces from ancient Hamland through Caputia to Nouvelle Alexandrie. A traditional Caputian feast was held for King Manco Cápac I at Nisyros during his state visit to Constancia in 1718 AN.

The dispersal built commemorative and scholarly institutions of its own. Memorial sites raised and maintained by the House of Brenneis stand across the Isles of Caputia in remembrance of the White Plague and of the dispersal it caused, the largest of them the Memorial Gardens at Gotfriedplatz. The University of Ravaillac, established in 1720 AN in the capital of New Caputia, houses both the Caputian Historical Society, devoted to the study and preservation of Caputian history, and the Hammish Historical Society, which does the same for the Hammish inheritance from which Caputia came.

Institutions

Four institutions of the kingdom outlived it: its government, in the form of a body in exile; its church, reconstituted without a state; its humanitarian council, which had been founded before the kingdom and continued after it; and the Caputian Legion, a foreign legion raised on 20.II.1688 AN in Alduria-Wechua as nine brigades of 54,000 men recruited from the families of the diaspora, which passed with that federation into Nouvelle Alexandrie and was transferred to New Caputia in 1758 AN to garrison the region. The government in exile carried most of the forms of Caputian administration into its own structure and officials. The dispersal also left a political doctrine behind it: the Federal Humanist Party traces Federalism to the settler communities of the Alexandrian and Caputian diasporas in Alduria finding a common purpose with the Wechua Nation, the Wechua adopting the settlers' political institutions and the settlers accepting the Wechua monarchy.

Government in exile

The Royal Caputian Government in Exile was constituted from the remnants of the kingdom with Queen Elizabeth I at its head, and takes its charter from the Declaration of Nivardom. Delegates of Caputian political parties, organizations, and associations represent the diaspora, elected by persons holding a proven claim. Elizabeth I commissioned Royston Merrick II under a commission of government to serve as its first Prime Minister. The body carried most of the forms of Caputian administration into its own structure, on the principle that its authority flows from the monarch of Caputia and the Head of the House of Rothborne, and it disclaims any intention of recreating the kingdom.

The exile has a house as well as a seat. Caputian House at Nivardom was the private residence of Elizabeth I and the headquarters of the government in exile, and it is treated as extraterritorial by Autokratorial Decree. It also housed the Caputian Foundation until 1675 AN, when the Foundation removed to Dos Gardenias in Natopia. Certain financial assets formerly belonging to Caputian state corporations, taken up by the ESB Group after the collapse, were transferred to the Queen and to the Foundation in 1678 AN, and the Foundation holds corporate shareholdings still, so that the material patrimony of the kingdom passed into a foundation seated in a third country.

Relief bodies

The Hammish Humanitarian Council, later known as the Caputian Humanitarian Council, was founded before the kingdom under its Hammish name and moved its seat from New Kirrie to Zalae and then to Punta Santiago. It reached its greatest activity during the Hammish Civil War, attending the wounded and the detained of every faction, and afterward undertook the mass evacuation of people from the war-torn regions of the former kingdom, principally to Alduria.

The work of documenting the dispersed fell to a second body. The Caputian Resettlement Authority was not a charity but one of five settlement companies chartered by the Federation, and the only one whose purpose was humanitarian rather than colonial. Chartered in 1686 AN, it received appropriations of NAX€211 billion, of which NAX€104 billion was spent locating, transporting, and settling scattered Caputian populations in the Isles of Caputia. It processed approximately 180,000 people between 1686 AN and 1698 AN, then wound up and transferred its assets to the regional government. The Brenneis Foundation, established in 1705 AN to trace ancestry for descendants of the kingdom, holds more than 340,000 files, among them the Authority's complete registry.

Private relief runs alongside the official kind. Sternberg and Partners, founded at Punta Santiago in 1675 AN, still specializes in lending to refugees and displaced persons, and the Carmel Integration Center, established in 1735 AN by the second Count of Carmel, provides language instruction, job training, and orientation to new arrivals in New Caputia. Caputian houses were refounded as well as raised: Seydlitz and Company, established at Zalae on 13.V.1656 AN, was reincorporated at Cárdenas on 11.VIII.1703 AN, a Caputian firm resuming under New Alexandrian charter in the thirty-fifth year after the loss of the country it was founded in.

Notable figures

The figures below fall into three groups: the officers who carried the kingdom's records out of it, the exiles who reached high office in the states that received them, and those remembered for institutions founded after the fall.

Carrie Fitzwater, first Chancellor of the Exchequer, oversaw the removal of the Treasury's records and the archives of the National Credit System from Zalae at the collapse and died at Nivardom in 1687 AN keeping them; the claimant census rests on what she saved. Matthias Brenneis, 1st Baron of Salzstein, led some eighty people out of Forburgh in 1670 AN with cartloads of state documentation, served as Chief Registrar of the Caputian Resettlement Authority from 1686 AN to 1698 AN, and founded the genealogical foundation that bears his name.

Several members of the diaspora reached high office in the states that received them. Gerhardt Eugen Seydlitz, 1st Duke of Gotfriedplatz, was Prime Minister of Caputia from 1665 AN until days before the dissolution, took asylum in Constancia in 1669 AN and moved to Alduria in 1672 AN, and afterward served as President of Alduria and then as President of the Government of Nouvelle Alexandrie, holding the head of government of three nations in one lifetime. Augustus Massey sat in the Imperial Senate of Constancia, and George Frost, an Aldurian citizen of Caputian provenance who worked at Nivardom and served in the Constancian home forces, was appointed Secretary of the Interior of Nouvelle Alexandrie.

Others are remembered for what they built in exile. Levi Sternberg, 1st Count of Carmel, lost his parents and two of his siblings to the plague at Beit Shalom in Haifa, reached Punta Santiago in 1670 AN with nothing but a chest of coin his mother had hidden, is reported to have converted to the Melusinian Faith after hearing the Vision of Zalae read aloud to refugees, and founded the lending house that carried his name. Marina Seraphina, born in the dispersal and the last Archbishop of Zalae before becoming the first Matriarch, was the first head of the faith who never saw the kingdom. Marcus Thornton, born at Zalae in 1663 AN and taken to Constancia at the age of six before settling by way of the Wechua Nation in the Isles of Caputia, wrote The Geopolitics of a Migrating Nation: A Study on Caputian Diaspora in 1691 AN, an account of the dispersal written from within it.

Titular succession

The dignities on which the diaspora's institutions rest were consolidated in 1758 AN. The titular crown of Caputia had descended to Edgard III on the death of Elizabeth I in 1723 AN, and with it the headship of the House of Rothborne, which passes under the Rothborne Family Pact of 1661 AN to her legitimate heirs, and with the headship the chairmanship of the government in exile.

The line of Judith Ravaillac, youngest daughter of Donat Ravaillac and younger sister of Elizabeth I, carried the older family name after the senior line became the House of Rothborne in 1653 AN, and its descendants were reckoned to the House of Carrillo. At the collapse the cadet branch passed into the diaspora with the rest of the kingdom's people, and no titled house descends from it.

The Rothborne Settlement of 14.VI.1758 AN designates Princess Guinevere, the second child of Edgard III, heir to the titular crowns of Caputia and Hamland, declared an indivisible pair. It passes over his eldest child, Empress Clara, for those dignities alone, leaving her and her issue in the Royal Line of the house; her own inheritances, the Natopian throne and the titular Alexandrian imperial dignity, lie elsewhere. The Settlement disposes of the crowns alone, but the headship of the house passes with them, and the chairmanship of the government in exile follows the headship, so that all three descend together.

The effect for the diaspora is that its crown, the headship of its royal house, and the chairmanship of its government in exile are gathered in one person of the generation after Edgard III, and gathered outside every reigning line. The Settlement's savings clause provides that the records, archives, and National Credit System of the former kingdom follow the Caputian crown while remaining in the stewardship of the government in exile, so that custody of the diaspora's documentary inheritance stays with the institution that holds it. The government acknowledged the designation by an instrument of recognition issued at Nivardom, recording that it proceeds from the house whose stewardship the government exercises.

See also

• Matriarch of New Zalae
• Most Noble Order of the Melusine
• Isles of Caputia
• Saint Salvation
• Hammish Humanitarian Council