Forburgh
| Forburgh | |
 Cities of Nouvelle Alexandrie | |
|---|---|
| Official Name | City of Forburgh |
| Nickname(s) | The Cathedral City |
| Region | Wechua Nation (Qhapaqsuyu) |
| Established | Scotannian period |
| Founder(s) | Scotannia |
| Government | |
| Type | Mayor-council (burghal) |
| Mayor | Beatriz Aldworth |
| City Legislature | Forburgh Burgh Council |
| Population | |
| City Proper | c. 214,000 (1757 AN) |
| Metro Area | c. 486,000 |
| Density | c. 1,650/km² |
| Demonym | Forburgher |
| Geography | |
| Area | 130 km² |
| Elevation | 1,180 m (3,870 ft) |
| Climate | Highland |
| Infrastructure | |
| Principal Roads | Qhapaq Ñan Highway (Rodinia corridor) |
| Principal Districts | Cathedral Close, Kingsgate, Bailieward, Northgate |
| Public Transport |
|
| Airport(s) | Qhapaqsuyu Regional Airport |
| Economy & Culture | |
| Major Industries | Reconstruction, government administration, heritage tourism, construction materials |
| Notable Landmarks |
|
| Sports Teams | Forburgh Athletic |
Forburgh is a city in Qhapaqsuyu, the northernmost suyu of the Wechua Nation, a region of the Federation of Nouvelle Alexandrie, and the seat of the suyu. It stands in the uplands of the Lacara-Rodinia corridor, on high ground above Lake Rodinia in northern Keltia, with the lake port of Port Eylan a short distance to the south.
Founded as the capital of the lake kingdom of Scotannia, Forburgh grew under Hammish and Caputian rule into the most populous city of Caputia and the seat of the Cathedral of Yeren, the largest church of the Yereni faith and the residence of its head, the Arch Yeronim. At its height under Caputia the city held some 2.1 million people. The White Plague emptied it in the last years of Caputian rule, and it stood abandoned through the collapse of Caputia in 1669 AN and the eight decades of The Green that followed, its cathedral derelict and its population dispersed into the Caputian diaspora.
Forburgh was brought under New Alexandrian administration following Operation Northern Vanguard in 1745 AN and the Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745, which made it the seat of the new sixth suyu, Qhapaqsuyu. It is today the largest of the reconstruction districts undertaken by the Keltian Frontier Development Corporation, and the seat of the Apu and of the Court of the Qhapaqsuyu. Its modern population of about 214,000 is roughly a tenth of what the city held at its Caputian height, and the rebuilt districts occupy only a fraction of the ground covered by its ruins.
History
Scotannian capital
Forburgh was founded as the capital of Scotannia, a small monarchy established under King Donald Anderson I whose territory lay around Lake Rodinia in central Keltia. Where the kingdom's port towns, among them Port Augustus, Port Clafin and Port Eylan, grew up around its lake-going ferry trade, Forburgh sat inland above the lake, and served as the seat of the crown and the market of the wider basin. Its other towns included Duleek, Gwent, Termont, Koradec, Macsen and Bamoy.
The Scotannian toponymy of the district, drawn largely from Gaelic and Brythonic roots, survives in the modern street and ward names of the old city, and the earthworks of the royal citadel, the King's Bailey, remain the oldest visible structure in Forburgh. The name of the city itself is Scotannian, and passed unchanged through each of the states that followed.
United Commonwealth and Hammish rule
Scotannia was annexed by the United Commonwealth shortly after its foundation, becoming one of that union's constituent nations alongside Greenuk, Kydros, Taeland, Hamland, Iridia and Monovia. Following the dissolution of the Commonwealth the former Scotannian lands were administered by the Kingdom of Hamland as the Region of Alba, one of the thirteen regions formalized under the Standarization of subdivision of Hammish lands, and Forburgh served as its regional seat.
The Hammish decades set the form of the city's government, reorganized on the burghal model that Forburgh, like Port Eylan, retains to this day, and they were the years in which the Cathedral of Yeren rose to its full importance. Forburgh became the residence of the Arch Yeronim and the pilgrimage point of the scattered Tonarian people, and the presence of the head of the faith drew clergy, endowment and building to the city on a scale that began its growth into a great capital.
Caputian Wakefield
When Hamland became the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia in 1651 AN during the Hammish Civil War, the Rodinia basin passed with it, and Forburgh was made the capital of the Caputian state of Wakefield. Under Caputia the city reached its greatest extent. It was the most populous city of the kingdom, holding at its height some 2.1 million people, and the administrative, mercantile and ecclesiastical center of a large northern state.
The Melusinian Faith, proclaimed after the visions granted to Queen Elizabeth I at Zalae, spread through the lake districts in these years and took its place alongside the older Yereni establishment. The wealth of the Caputian period built much of the Forburgh whose outline survives, the broad street plan, the merchant quarters below the cathedral, and the stone frontages of the Kingsgate, and it was in this period that the city's fame as a Yereni pilgrimage seat was at its greatest.
The White Plague and the emptying
The greatness of Caputian Forburgh ended abruptly. The White Plague reached the city in the last years of Caputian rule and emptied it, carrying off or driving out the whole of its vast population within a few seasons. The Cathedral of Yeren was abandoned with the rest of the city, its clergy dead or fled and the office of the Arch Yeronim broken.
The scale of the loss set Forburgh apart from the other towns of the basin. Where Port Eylan and the lake villages were reduced, Forburgh was all but extinguished, a capital of millions left standing empty. The fall from that height to the modern city of some two hundred thousand, roughly a tenth of its former size, remains the defining fact of the city's history, and the rebuilt districts of today sit within the far larger field of its ruins.
The Green
The collapse of Caputia in 1669 AN removed what remained of organized government from the basin, and the district reverted to The Green. Forburgh, already emptied by the plague, passed the following eight decades as a ruin. For much of that time the wider region fell within the range of the Confederacy of the Dispossessed, a Pan-Greenist resistance movement and pirate confederacy active between 1717 AN and 1750 AN, which maintained bases across northern Keltia and was suppressed only in 1750 AN.
The city was never wholly lost to knowledge, its cathedral and citadel too large to vanish, but it was unpeopled, and its surviving inhabitants dispersed into the wider Caputian diaspora that the New Alexandrian return would later draw upon.
Integration into Nouvelle Alexandrie
Nouvelle Alexandrie secured the Lake Rodinia basin during Operation Northern Vanguard, conducted between 15.VI.1745 AN and 23.VIII.1745 AN by X Corps under General Carlos Mendoza. The Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745 placed the secured territories within a new sixth suyu of the Wechua Nation, named Qhapaqsuyu by an amendment moved by Premier Juan Pablo Jimenez and defined as representing "the prosperous integration of Caputian and Wechuan peoples."[1]
Forburgh was designated the seat of the new suyu, and became the principal object of the reconstruction program that followed. The Keltian Frontier Development Corporation maintains a Forburgh Development Division, the largest of the Corporation's territorial divisions and its costliest single undertaking, charged with clearing, stabilizing and rebuilding the city within the surviving frame of the Caputian capital.[2]
The Cathedral of Yeren
The Cathedral of Yeren stands at the head of the old city, and remains the largest structure in Forburgh and the largest surviving monument of the Qhapaqsuyu. It was raised as the principal church of the Yereni faith, sited in the eastern Scotannian lands as near as could be managed to the lost Tonarian homelands, and it became both the pilgrimage point of the scattered Tonarian people and the residence of the head of the faith, the Arch Yeronim, styled Successor of Yeren. It was the largest Yereni church ever built.
The cathedral was the center of a distinctive practice. Baptism was conferred by kissing a candle lit from an ever-flame held to descend from the prophet's own fire; its liturgy was sung in a low throat-song; and its emblem was a pair of four-pointed stars. The faith taught five virtues, love, bravery, generosity, wisdom and piety, which the Melusinian Faith later inherited as its Five Currents. It was from Forburgh that the prophet Yeren was held to have disappeared, and Guysim I "the Holiest," first Yeronim of the reformed Yereni Church of Hamland, preached in the city claiming to have known the prophet before that disappearance.
When the White Plague emptied Forburgh the cathedral was abandoned with the city, and it was never reconsecrated. Yerenism did not survive as a living faith, its virtues surviving in the Melusinian Faith while its congregations did not, and the Keltian Frontier Development Corporation has treated the building as a monument rather than a church. Its roofs are gone and its interior open to the weather, but the walls, the great crossing and the two western towers still stand, and the Corporation's works at the site have been confined to consolidation, clearing fallen stone, underpinning the towers, and making the ruin safe and legible rather than rebuilding it. It is a scheduled monument under federal heritage protection and the principal object of the city's heritage tourism, visited both as the seat of a vanished faith and as the clearest measure of what Forburgh once was. The Melusinian Faith, which regards the site as ancestral to its own Five Currents, keeps no congregation there.
Coat of arms
The civic arms of Forburgh bear, on a blue field, the two golden four-pointed stars of the Yereni faith, above a base of gray masonry for the cathedral and the walls of the old city. The choice sets Forburgh deliberately apart from its neighbor Port Eylan, whose civic arms are wholly geographic and carry no confessional charge: at Forburgh the cathedral is the identity of the city, and the burgh took the emblem of the vanished faith as a mark of heritage, not of any living observance.
The Barony of Forburgh bears separate arms. On a gold field, a black unicorn rearing, with a twisted red and gold horn and red hooves, as at the Barony of Port Eylan; the Forburgh unicorn is crowned and accompanied in chief by a single four-pointed star, marking Forburgh as the senior of the two frontier creations and the seat of the cathedral. The unicorn was the national animal of Caputia, and its use on both baronies sets the inherited Caputian allegiance on the titles while the civic arms carry the older history of each city.
Geography
Forburgh stands in the uplands of the Lacara-Rodinia corridor on high ground above Lake Rodinia, the freshwater alpine lake that is the source of the Rodinia River and the heart of the old Scotannian kingdom. The city occupies a shelf of level ground overlooking the lake basin, with the ruins and the rebuilt districts spread across a much larger area than the modern population fills. Port Eylan, the lake port, lies a short distance to the south on the shore of the lake itself.
The district is temperate highland, with cool summers and long, hard winters; the arid conditions found along the lower Rodinia do not reach the headwaters. The Lake Rodinia basin was designated a Protected Federal Watershed under the Integration Act, and the reconstruction of Forburgh is carried out under the discharge and development restrictions of that regime.[3]
Demographics
Forburgh had about 214,000 inhabitants in 1757 AN, within a wider Forburgh District of some 486,000. The figure is a small fraction of the roughly 2.1 million the city held at its Caputian height, and Forburgh remains a city rebuilt within its own ruins, its inhabited quarters interspersed with cleared ground and consolidated remains.
As at Port Eylan, the population is substantially a returned one. Article 6 of the Integration Act granted former residents who had fled during the occupation the right to return and reclaim their property, and established a Property Restoration Tribunal to adjudicate their claims.[4] Restitution at Forburgh was slower and more tangled than in the smaller towns: title had passed through Scotannian, Hammish and Caputian registries in succession, the great majority of lots had no surviving claimant, and the vested and unclaimed ground, the larger part of the old city, was released to the burgh and the Corporation for planned redevelopment. The rebuilt districts of Cathedral Close and Kingsgate, raised on restored Caputian title, are the most distinctly Caputian quarters of the modern city.
Alongside the returned Caputian families the city has drawn Wechuan settlers from the south and workers recruited to the reconstruction program, and the Common Tongue and Wechua are both in daily use.
Culture
Religion
The living religion of Forburgh is Melusinian. The Melusinian Faith returned with the resettled Caputian families and maintains the parish churches of the rebuilt districts, and it regards the ruined Cathedral of Yeren as ancestral to its own Five Currents without holding services within it.
The cathedral itself is kept as a monument. Yerenism did not survive the emptying of the city as a living faith, and no Yereni congregation returned; the great church is a heritage site and a place of memory, not of active worship, and the distinction between the vanished faith of the cathedral and the living faith of the city is a marked feature of Forburgh's civic character.
Sport
Forburgh Athletic, the city's football club, was founded under Hammish rule and played in the Hammish league system under the Alba banner before the collapse of organized life in the basin dissolved it along with its league. It was refounded by returnee families during the reconstruction, retaining its Hammish name, and plays at a rebuilt ground in the Northgate district. As at Port Eylan, the survival of the club across the long break is cited locally as a thread of continuity between the Hammish city and the modern one.
Economy
The economy of Forburgh is dominated by reconstruction. The Keltian Frontier Development Corporation maintains its Forburgh Development Division in the city, the largest of the Corporation's territorial divisions, and the rebuilding of the old capital within its surviving frame is by a wide margin the district's principal activity and employer. The Caputian Development Consortium, which holds a 35% interest in the Corporation, maintains an office in the city and is the principal commercial vehicle of the returned community.
As the seat of Qhapaqsuyu, Forburgh also carries the administration of the suyu, and the offices of the suyu government and the Court of the Qhapaqsuyu are among the larger civilian employers. Construction materials are worked in and around the city for the reconstruction program.
Heritage tourism
Heritage tourism is a small but growing sector, built almost entirely on the ruins of the Caputian city and above all on the Cathedral of Yeren. The consolidated cathedral, the earthworks of the King's Bailey and the surviving Caputian frontages of the Kingsgate draw visitors to a city whose scale and history are without parallel in the suyu, and the trade is encouraged by the Corporation as a use for stabilized ruins that are not to be rebuilt. It remains seasonal and modest in absolute terms, and secondary to the reconstruction economy.
Transport
Forburgh is served by the Inti Chikpi Interurbanos long-distance service operated by Nouvelle Alexandrie Railways, which reaches the city from Mayuriti and continues to its terminus at Port Eylan; Forburgh is a through station on the line. Regional bus services connect the city to the lake towns and the wider suyu, and the Qhapaqsuyu Regional Airport lies within the district. The city stands on the Rodinia corridor of the Qhapaq Ñan highway network.
Government
Forburgh is a municipality of Qhapaqsuyu and the seat of the suyu. The suyu is administered from the city by its Apu, Sayri Amaru Ccoyllur, and the Court of the Qhapaqsuyu sits at Forburgh. The city's own government retains the burghal form introduced under Hammish administration, and sits as the Forburgh Burgh Council under a directly elected mayor.
The title Baron of Forburgh is held within the Nobility of Nouvelle Alexandrie by Andrés Fuentes, the senior of a pair of frontier creations alongside the barony of Port Eylan, held by Rosa Delgado.
See also
- Qhapaqsuyu
- Port Eylan
- Saint Salvation
- Yerenism
- Lake Rodinia
- Keltian Frontier Development Corporation
- Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745
- Caputian diaspora
- Wakefield
References
- ^ Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745, Article 3.
- ^ Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745, Article 9.
- ^ Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745, Article 7.
- ^ Northern Keltian Territorial Integration Act, 1745, Article 6.
