Hammish Haifa
- This article is about Haifa as an autonomous territory of Hamland from 1620 AN to 1653 AN. For the earlier independent republic, see Free State of Haifa. For the later Caputian state, see Caputian Haifa. For the present-day region, see Haifa.
 Flag | |
 Coat of Arms | |
| Motto: | "Veritas nos elegit" (Truth Chose Us) |
| Status | Autonomous territory of the Commonwealth of Hamland |
| Capital | Abeis |
| Largest Cities | Keybir-Aviv, Lewisburg |
| Official Languages | Common Tongue, Haifan, Hammish |
| Demonym | Haifan |
| Government | Autonomous territory |
| Head of State | The Seneschal of Hamland |
| Governor-General | House of Meir |
| Currency | Hammish Obol (Ø) |
Hammish Haifa was an autonomous territory of the Commonwealth of Hamland on the eastern shore of Lake Morovia in central Keltia, administered from Abeis between 1620 AN and 1653 AN. The territory was created by the Agreement of Dissolution of 1620 AN, under which the Free State of Haifa partitioned its remaining holdings and passed its home region to the Commonwealth. To fund the transition the Commonwealth allocated its entire currency reserve of 16,762.85 obols to Haifa for immediate investment. The governorship of the territory, styled the Realm of Haifa, came to rest with the House of Meir.
Hammish rule left the territory's economic life intact: the diamond fields south of Abeis, the export trade out of Keybir-Aviv, and banking houses in Abeis whose reach ran across the Commonwealth. The collapse of the Hammish government in 1644 AN brought military occupation and the Hammish Civil War, the assassination of interim Prime Minister Donat Ravaillac at a review held to mark the pacification of Haifa, and, between 1650 AN and 1652 AN, the Alexandrian Flu, which killed 30 to 60 percent of the eastern Commonwealth's population. The Geneva Peace Agreement of 1653 AN, concluded under Alexandrian mediation, ended the war, and Haifa passed with the rest of the Commonwealth into the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia, which reorganized it as the state of Haifa.
Etymology and name
Two hypotheses account for the name Haifa. One relates it to the Haifan root CHFA, "to cover, to hide," perhaps for Lake Morovia lying hidden in the middle of the Keltian continent; the other links it to the word CHOF, "beach." Contemporaries called the territory simply Haifa. Its governorship was styled the Realm of Haifa, and the adjectival form Hammish Haifa distinguishes the period of Commonwealth rule from the republic that preceded it and the Caputian state that followed.
History
Haifa spent thirty-three years under Hammish rule. For two decades it was a quiet dependency whose mines, banks, and sporting fixtures ran much as they had under the republic, while the administrative apparatus inherited from the Free State wore away. From 1644 AN the Commonwealth's own collapse reached the territory as military occupation, civil war, and plague, and ended by carrying Haifa into a new kingdom altogether.
Dissolution of the Free State
The republic had proclaimed itself at Abeis in 1602 AN under Ismael Todochev. It reached its fullest extent within a decade and then shed its parts one by one. The premiership of Benjamin Meir, ratified in 1615 AN, lasted a single session; its principal act, the Treaty of St. Andre of 1616 AN, traded the principality of Walstadt to Natopia for the port city of Port St. Andre, and Meir resigned both the premiership and his citizenship within the month. No successor was chosen, and the office stood vacant for the republic's remaining four years. The Wallis Islands declared independence in 1617 AN on the signature of their governor, Erlo Sinders, alone, and were annexed by Passio-Corum thereafter.
In 1620 AN what remained of the citizenry concluded the Agreement of Dissolution, which partitioned the territory. Haifa proper passed to the Commonwealth of Hamland; North Antarctica passed entire to Passio-Corum; and Port St. Andre became the Most Serene Republic of St. Andre, named in the agreement as Haifa's successor state. To St. Andre also passed the obligations of the Treaty of Abeis, the mutual-defense pact with Alexandria that had bound each party to treat an attack on the other as an attack on itself.
Organization as an autonomous territory
Haifa proper was organized as an autonomous territory of the Commonwealth from 1620 AN, with Abeis as its administrative capital. The Commonwealth funded the transition by allocating its entire currency reserve of 16,762.85 obols to Haifa for immediate investment. The union built on an integration already decades old: the first treaty between Haifa and the Commonwealth had been ratified in 1606 AN, Haifan firms had been listed on the Ham50, the Hammish stock market, throughout the Free State period, and the republic had belonged to the Small Commonwealth Unified Economy (SCUE).
In the allocation of the Hammish overseas governorships the Realm of Haifa passed to the House of Meir. The family had been among the founders of Abeis and held its fortune in the city's real estate; its governors were drawn from the branch that remained there, while the line of Benjamin Meir, in Natopian exile since 1617 AN, rose in the service of that empire instead, Meir himself serving as Chancellor of Natopia from 1642 AN to 1651 AN, through the years of the Commonwealth's collapse. The city of Lewisburg, a logistical and administrative hub linking Haifa with the metropole, was founded in the same period and took its name from Lord Lewis.
Hammish administration
Hammish administration disturbed neither the diamond fields south of Abeis nor the trade out of Keybir-Aviv. The Wallis-Haifan Diamond Company carried the stones out of Keybir-Aviv, keeping the Sinders family's commercial interest in Haifan ground after Sinders himself had gone to the Wallis Islands, and Haifan banking continued to serve the Commonwealth as a whole. Grain from the territory's farms moved through Haifa's ports alongside the diamonds, and minor gentry near Abeis held estates for service to the treasury, among them the House of Sternberg at Beit Shalom.
The republic's administrative apparatus did not last as well. By 1625 AN members of the Commonwealth were proposing to renew Haifan institutions, on the reasoning that little of the apparatus was still running; nothing came of the proposal.
Collapse and civil war
The Hammish government collapsed in 1644 AN, when Prime Minister Lord Lewis and Seneschal Juan Teaodir disappeared and months of searching failed to find them. Donat Ravaillac, Minister of the Homeland and the sole surviving member of the government, declared a state of emergency and took office as interim Prime Minister at the head of what became the National Provisional Authority. Unrest reached Haifa in the same year. Disturbances in Israat and Neo Patrova were settled by mediation under Ravaillac's interim premiership; the Haifan unrest was not, and the Hammish military was sent to secure the territory. Its conduct there divided the National Provisional Authority, and Ravaillac's own ministers objected openly to the army's methods. Ravaillac was assassinated by a sniper at a military review in New Kirrie held to mark what the army called the pacification of Haifa. Responsibility for the killing has never been settled. Ravaillac's loyalists held that the military had arranged it, while other accounts laid it to the National Salvation Front.
The war ran on for nine years more under the military government of General Eliphas, and Keybir-Aviv was among the cities that demonstrated against it. The National Provisional Authority raised an Army of Haifa to hold the territory. The National Salvation Front, the Pallisican-backed umbrella of rebel groups based in eastern Hamland, drew its fighters from the rural districts of Anglia & Israat, the regions that had furnished Haifa's original settlers. One of its constituent groups, the Order of Rochefort, was based partly in the territory and funded through Passio-Corum; Eliphas himself had covertly financed the Order's revolts against Ravaillac before taking power.
Plague and passage to Caputia
It was Eliphas's own weapons program that reached Haifa next. The Alexandrian Flu, developed at the Bureau of Research and Defense Technology inside Iron Point Base and loosed in transit to the eastern front, spread through the territory between 1650 AN and 1652 AN. Mortality across the eastern regions of the Commonwealth ran between 30 and 60 percent, and local authorities resorted to mass graves. The Hammish Humanitarian Council, the Commonwealth's relief body, made its greatest effort of the war in the territory's towns as the graves filled. The epidemic eliminated the nascent Haifan Nationalist Army before it had fought. Refugees and demobilized fighters moved into the strait corridor, where Haifan nationalism took root among them, and the war carried the Stripping Path outward into central and eastern Keltia.
The war was settled by the Geneva Peace Agreement, negotiated under Alexandrian mediation after a ceasefire concluded at Maison Verneuil outside Geneva in Alexandria, and Hammish authority did not recover. In 1653 AN Haifa passed with the rest of the Commonwealth into the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia. The Order of Rochefort alone did not merge into the new kingdom's forces. The Caputian crown assumed the Haifan governor-generalship in its own right, and Queen Elizabeth I carried "Queen and Governor-General of Haifa" among her proclaimed styles.
Geography
The territory lay in central Keltia on the Maccabi River, east of Lake Morovia, facing the Strait of Haifa; the island of Jezeraah and the Northern Isles lay in the lake off the territory's shore. It was a generally flat country with hills, inland but seafaring in character. Abeis, the administrative capital, stood at the center of the territory with the diamond fields to its south; Keybir-Aviv, the mining city, and Lewisburg, the Hammish-founded hub on the route to the metropole, were its other principal cities.
Government and politics
Haifa was governed as an autonomous territory of the Commonwealth of Hamland, under the Seneschal and the Chachis Del Nutra, the Commonwealth's parliament, at New Kirrie. Hammish practice gave each region and autonomous territory a Governor-General, appointed by the government and responsible for the development of the jurisdiction in its charge; in Haifa the office was styled the governorship of the Realm of Haifa and held by the House of Meir. The territory kept no legislature of its own. The representative institutions of the republic had not survived the dissolution, and the renewal of Haifan institutions proposed within the Commonwealth in 1625 AN produced no lasting reform. Day-to-day government ran through the governorship and the municipal administrations of Abeis, Keybir-Aviv, and Lewisburg. From 1644 AN the territory passed under the military administration of the National Provisional Authority, and civilian government did not return before the Caputian accession.
Military
During the years of peace Haifa relied on the Commonwealth's military establishment and raised no standing force of its own. After the 1644 AN collapse the Hammish military secured the territory by force, and the National Provisional Authority carried an Army of Haifa on its order of battle: 40,000 personnel in ten regiments, numbered the 76th to the 85th, under the Hammish Land Forces. The Order of Rochefort, one of the armed groups under the National Salvation Front umbrella, operated partly from bases in the territory with a strength of some 12,500 fighters. A Haifan Nationalist Army began to form among displaced Haifans late in the civil war and was destroyed by the flu before it saw action.
Economy
Haifa used the Hammish Obol (Ø), and its economy entered the union already interlocked with the Commonwealth's: Haifan firms had traded on the Ham50 since the Free State period, and the 16,762.85-obol transition fund of 1620 AN was invested directly in the territory. Diamond mining remained the foundation. The fields south of Abeis fed an export trade that the Wallis-Haifan Diamond Company carried out of Keybir-Aviv, and the territory's farms sent their grain out through the same ports. Banking and finance concentrated in Abeis, a position the city retained under Caputia, when it ranked among the kingdom's international banking hubs. The civil war and the flu ended the long expansion; by the accession of 1653 AN the territory's economy, like its population, was a remnant of what the Commonwealth had received in 1620 AN.
Demographics
The population descended from the settlement streams that had met on Lake Morovia before the republic's proclamation: the Israati-descended communities of the mainland, the Afrikaanian refugees who had settled the islands and the southern towns, and the Babki families of Jezeraah. Administrators and soldiers from the metropole joined them under Hammish rule. The Alexandrian Flu emptied the territory between 1650 AN and 1652 AN; mass graves replaced individual burial in the towns, and the movement of refugees and demobilized fighters into the strait corridor in the war's last years redrew the settlement pattern before Caputian administrators could record it.
Culture and sport
Haifa National University at Abeis taught through the territory's years as it had under the republic. The Festival of Union, kept since the republic's early years as the anniversary of the reception of the Afrikaanian refugees, continued under Hammish rule, and the Afrikaanian minority kept the Gorogoro religion and the DakaÏuru language. The territory shared a Hebraic naming register with the city of Judah and the region of Israat. Haifan musicians, alongside Hammish and Israati ones, worked in the genres that later fed the musical heritage of Caputia, and the first film of the Blakestown studio Meir Networks, the romance The Lands We Met, was shot in 1653 AN in the Abeis home of Benjamin Meir.
Haifan sporting bodies kept their separate international membership under Hammish rule, and the territory retained its own football and rugby competitions. The Haifa national football team played its home fixtures at Hapoel Field in Abeis, and its first recorded international was a 3 to 0 defeat by Hamland itself. The Haifa national rugby league team did the same, and the clubs of the Haifan Rugby League, among them the Abeis City Wolves and the Keybir Devils, played on through the years of peace.
Timeline
- 1620 AN: The Agreement of Dissolution passes Haifa proper to the Commonwealth of Hamland, which organizes it as an autonomous territory administered from Abeis.
- 1620 AN: The Commonwealth allocates its entire currency reserve, 16,762.85 obols, to Haifa for immediate investment.
- 1625 AN: Members of the Commonwealth propose renewing Haifan institutions; nothing comes of it.
- 1642 AN: Benjamin Meir, in Natopian exile since 1617 AN, becomes Chancellor of Natopia, holding the office to 1651 AN.
- 1644 AN: The Hammish government collapses; Prime Minister Lord Lewis and Seneschal Juan Teaodir disappear.
- 1644 AN: The military secures the territory, and the National Provisional Authority carries an Army of Haifa of 40,000 in ten regiments.
- 1644 AN: Donat Ravaillac is assassinated at a review at New Kirrie held to mark the pacification of Haifa.
- 1650 AN to 1652 AN: The Alexandrian Flu spreads through the territory, killing 30 to 60 percent of the eastern Commonwealth's population and eliminating the Haifan Nationalist Army.
- 1653 AN: The Geneva Peace Agreement ends the civil war; Haifa passes into the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia.
- 1653 AN: Meir Networks shoots The Lands We Met in Meir's Abeis home, the first film of the Blakestown studio.
Events not placed on the calendar
- The governorship, styled the Realm of Haifa, came to rest with the House of Meir; neither the grant nor any succession within it is dated.
- The Wallis-Haifan Diamond Company's operations out of Keybir-Aviv are attested without a year of establishment.
- The territory's separate international sporting membership ran throughout Hammish rule without a recorded date of grant or renewal.
- Civilian government did not return after 1644 AN, but no instrument marking the transfer to military administration is attested.
