History of Kalgachia/The 220s

The 220s began with a phased drawdown of Kalgachi military forces in the Upland Confederation following the Slavegate Convention, only for part of them to be redeployed for border security duties in Northbloom and Northern Schlepogora as the King of Batavia and Amokolia began displaying an indulgent attitude toward civilisational pathogens in the latter realm. The delicacy of the situation with regard to Kalgachia's trade routes through Batavia was not helped by a simultaneous purge of Norestrian emigré specialists in the Directorate of Labour and Economic Planning, displaced as they were by the heir of Kalgachia's most powerful family seeking to follow the example of his relatives and cultivate a critical organ of the national bureaucracy as a power base.

The Northern Pivot (220-221 AL)

For some years suspicions had existed that the King of Batavia and Amokolia, Arkadius IV, was being drawn into the orbit of the Storish élite; a group long shunned by most Micran powers on the consensus that they were little more than a manipulative sex cult operating under the pretence of a royal court. The means by which King Arkadius might have fallen under the spell of Harald Thorstein were unknown, although the relative youth and inattention of the former during the events leading up to the Auspicious Occasion had made him, from a Storish perspective, an exploitable weak point among the other eminent figures of Benacia whose shared disenfranchisement in the shadow of an uncaring Froyalanish hegemony had provoked them to systematically eject persons of Storish descent from the civil life of most of the continent.

In 220 AL elements within the Elwynnese intelligence community leaked the Pact of Reykjavík, a draft covenant between the royal houses of Amokolia and Stormark whereby the Storish colonial territory of Gascony, in Benacia's boreal northwest, would be merged with the Kingdom of Amokolia to form a revivicated Froyalanish state. Reaction among the other states of Benacia was instant and unanimously negative; the Guttuli Protectorate, Ransenar, Sanama, Sathrati, the rump regency of Shireroth, the Sovereign Confederation, the Unified Governorates and indeed Kalgachia took immediate measures to seal off Amokolia's eastern borders and suspend diplomatic relations. A number of parliamentarians in King Arkadius' other realm of Batavia voiced opposition to their sovereign's actions. Further afield, Natopia redoubled its post-Vanic reform efforts in Uppland whilst Talenore and Constancia sent armed volunteers to help the Konkordskaya Bratva and other formations of the Raspur Pact in securing Mishalan against Amokolian frontier provocations.

In the face of opposition from a dozen nations, the Chancellor of Amokolia assumed an attitude so unyielding that in the former's perspective, it all but confirmed his government and sovereign as compromised and fully controlled agents of the Storish ruling house with whom negotiation and reasoning would be futile. In a speech to the Amokolian legislature, the Chancellor committed Amokolia to a policy of unconditional rehabilitation for the Froyalanish people and explicitly identified Amokolia as their homeland. The declaration was followed by an appeal to Kalgachia in particular to repatriate to Amokolia those bonded Froyalanish labourers it had imported from Shireroth between 155 and 164 AL.

By this time Kalgachia's Froyalanish population, having been sterilised as a condition of entry, were all of elderly age and few remained in the workforce. The Lord Lieutenants' Council, the state organ responsible for settling questions of nationality in Kalgachia, recommended a programme of voluntary repatriation which was duly authorised by the Council of Perfecti in 221 AL. Uptake for the programme was, however, minimal - especially for those who arrived in Kalgachia after the abolition of Froyalanish bondage 161 AL, for whom the move across the frontier from Shireroth had improved their status from enyoked community servant to wage-earning citizen.

The Council of Perfecti had accompanied its ruling on repatriations with a rare direct appeal to King Arkadius to avoid ignoring the underlying causes behind the suppression of the Froyalanish, lest his own Amokolian subjects succumb to the same. This was dismissed by the king in a following speech where he implied the behaviour of the Froyalanish before Auspicious Occasion to be to be "natural right" against which the only available countermeasures of the time were eternally illegitimate, "regardless of the history or background". His assertion in the same speech that "different population groups, different customs and traditions illustrate the cultural diversity" was heavily quoted in the Kalgachi media and intercut with the archived works of Froyalanish bards advocating the expansion of their "ancient ways" to all corners of the globe along with footage of refugees fleeing King Noah's purges and forced land clearances in Mishalan.

The effect of King Arkadius' defiance upon Kalgachia's relations with other powers was profound. The perennial state of military tension with the Unified Governorates, already reduced by the Slavegate Convention, now seemed to evaporate almost entirely; efforts were made by the authorities of each side to reduce ideological invective against the other while Kalgachi troops on the Ҳazedinov Line met in no man's land with Black Legionaries from the opposing Abatis Line to play soccer. In Shirekeep, the Regent Li Naomiai - a figure reviled in Kalgachia for her emotive outbursts against the Garden - announced her resignation for the express purpose of improving Sxiro-Kalgachi relations and establishing a unified Benacian front against the new civilisational threat in the north.

Within Kalgachia, a scattered handful of maverick Deep Singer and Nezeni microbiologists who had been the subjects of varying levels of scrutiny and/or detention by the Prefects for expressing Doronist sentiments, suddenly found themselves with restored security clearances and new job oppurtunities within deniable unitary enterprises of the Directorate of Health and Public Welfare. The object of their new work was a large sample set of I-M253 genotypes, collected from the wilds of northeast Apollonia by Unit 666 and obtained in exchange for three pairs of newborn Tee-als at a military airbase in Wuqi.

The Merchants' Purge (222 AL)

in 222 AL the apparently steady trajectory of Benacian affairs set in motion from Amokolia was abruptly reversed by the Treaty of Concord and the simultaneous occupation of parts of Shirekeep by forces of the Verionist Republic, events which returned the focus of post-Shirerithian states to the east overnight and reaffirmed the perpetually capricious and unreliable character of Kalgachia's neighbours in the eyes of DTW officials who had been flirting with notions of a lasting continental consensus.

Although the events did negligible damage to Kalgachia's emergent détente with the UGB, the Directorate of Labour and Economic Planning was alarmed by other results - namely a coordinated round of sanctions against the Verionist Republic by multiple Benacian states and the following emergence of tensions from the USSO and Alduria against Los Liberados which inspired Operation Hugo Grotius. All of these developments had a common point of collateral damage in the form of the Iron Company, on whom Kalgachia was almost entirely dependent for connections to the global marketplace.

Reliance upon such a solitary point of failure, although something of a heresy against the Kalgachi philosophy of state which was noted from the outset, had nonetheless been tolerated by the DLEP and its fixers in the Octavian Import-Export Corporation due to the immense economic benefits obtained while geopolitical risks were judged to be low. Now that the future integrity of the Iron Company's shipping operations came into question, so too did the complacency and hubris of certain DLEP officials and OIEC executives amid the circumstances of their own personal enrichment; after a series of briefings from the Church of Kalgachia and the Troglodyti on the behavioural fingerprints of the Pecuniary Archon, the Prefects assessed that certain members of the Kalgachi business community had wilfully allowed the economic resilience of the Garden to slide toward the periphery of their priorities in exchange for personal riches beyond the comprehension of the ordinary Kalgachi who would be the first to suffer if imports of Liberadosan rum and recreational motor fuel from Eura were compromised by disregard for geopolitical events.

The Prefects duly rounded up scores of DLEP officials and summoned certain Puerto Arcadio-based executives of the OIEC back to Kalgachia to account for their conduct; the majority of the latter, correctly surmising that they would be inducted into mandatory Church re-education programmes the moment they landed at Gravelbottom, instead chose to liberate such funds from the OIEC Expenses & Sundries account as they were able and fled into hiding. Although relations with the Iron Company were eventually stabilised by the Treaty of Lune Villa and assurances of maritime security given by the Raspur Pact, the DLEP was instructed by Kalgachia's ruling Council of Perfecti to commence an immediate diversification of its foreign logistics operation. To this end, discreet enquiries began to arrive at the offices of Kerularios & Co in Aqaba regarding the routing of non-perishable, recyclable and geopolitically-inert commodities to Kalgachia via the UGB in exchange for direct access to Kalgachi exports. The Iron Company wished the Kalgachi government "the best of luck" in their efforts to diversify their trading partners, but invoked its right to refuse goods shipments to or from competitor networks and maintain its monopoly over Batavian and Kasterburger trade routes which it had operated since the 170s AL - a move which, presuming Kerularios took up the slack elsewhere, would create seperate Batavian and Euran markets with their own exclusive shipping contractor and independent connections with the Kalgachi frontier.

The purge of the DLEP in Oktavyan was undertaken in parallel with another, directed mainly at Norestrian emigré bullion specialists within the Reserve Bank of Kalgachia who had been instrumental in establishing the metallurgical quality of the Kalgarrand. Whilst the loyalties of these diligent numismators had always been suspect, their record of service spared them the regime of ritualised penance imposed on the DLEP's foreign trade officials and generally took the form of early retirements with glowing references for onward employment among other Norestrians in emerging Benacian markets. Both house-cleaning efforts within the Directorate were coordinated on the Prefects' behalf by one Caustifer Yastreb: son of the Lady Lieutenant of Oktavyan and the Chairman of the Reserve Bank of Kalgachia, alleged nephew of the chairman of the Council of Perfecti and a noted currency speculator whose financial acumen had won him a private minority stake in the OIEC and now earned him an appointment to the Board of Governors of the Reserve Bank. Here he began to assist his aging father whose diminishing faculties and authority had necessitated the purge of the numismators in the first place, and whose senile deference to the incisive counsel of his red-haired wunderkind quickly marked the young man as the Reserve Bank's heir apparent.

The Protectorisation of the Uplanders (223 AL)

By 223 AL those KDF units in the Upland Confederation which had not been redeployed to help seal the Amokolian border were operating at a reduced alert state. The local Uplanders, modest of means but possessed with typical Laqi shrewdness, began to enlist the idle pool of military infrastructure, supplies and labour around them for the improvement of their own encampments and villages which had failed to advance appreciably beyond a state of tangled, Tee-al-ridden wilderness since the Minarborian collapse. In this they were actively aided and abetted by local KDF commanders who were all too keen to head off that universal scourge of deployed armies, the mischief of enlisted men with too much spare time. Static dwellings, irrigation works, Tee-al shelters and granaries began to proliferate throughout the Confederation's communities, as did upgrades of existing byways from hoof-churned horse tracks to roads of packed and graded soil suitable for light wheeled conveyances. This allowed a number of Kalgachi traders to arrive and market their wares from horse-drawn wagons or wood-gas trucks, the prevailing mode of entrepreneurship in their native mountains where private land ownership was forbidden.

The leaders of the clan Džirgas which composed the Confederation were naturally pleased at this economic injection, not least due to the KDF tolerating their 'taxation' of visiting traders in the Laqi fashion as a positive expression of cultural vibrancy and societal renewal. Through Ataman Ҳazedinov, they now petitioned Kalgachia's ruling Council of Perfecti to advance their Confederation to the same state of protection and esteem enjoyed by Lepidopterum, Northbloom and Lapivril, making the present arrangement permanent whilst maintaining an autonomous distance from the nannying rhizomes of Kalgachi central government who might demand their own cut of the proceeds.

Protectorate status for the Confederation, being internationally recognised as something of a fait accompli since the KDF moved in, was duly declared by the Council of Perfecti with two conditions: the first was that the Confederation's prohibition of entry to Deep Singers and Nezeni be restricted to that battle-scarred portion adjoining the Gubernatorials' domain of Siyacha, maintaining the modified races' seperation from the Nationalist-Humanists whilst allowing them to travel in areas near the Inner Benacian Neutral Zone. The second condition was that most of the Confederation's territory adjoining Kalgachia proper be transferred to the Deep Singer administered protectorate of Lepidopterum, ostensibly to reduce the Confederation's administrative burden and recognise the demographic shift which had occurred since colonies of Deep Singers and Nezeni alike had begun to resettle the area.

Whilst not especially welcomed by the Džirgas, the conditions were accepted after persuasion, monetary gratuities and gentle threats from Ataman Ҳazedinov; the extent to which this favour suggested a strengthened Deep Singer hand in the bowels of Kalgachi state, pursuing an incremental Sixist agenda for the reconquest of their erstwhile Minarborian home, did not pass without remark.

Resources

• Orders of Council made in this decade