PART 57: Discovered Check (September 20, 1850 – September 28, 1855)
Nearly a century after her murder by the Black Chamber during the reign of Empress Anna I Yaroslavovna, Dorothean Kauffmann— alias “Artemis”– was still well-remembered as an important figure in pre-revolutionary Byzantium for her regular skewering of the Roman aristocracy. In the 1850s, when the Capitolino was ascendent and the Julians and Junonians were left in the political wilderness by a first past the post voting system built to keep them out of the National Assembly, the Athens Gazette began to once more run editorials under the “Artemis” byline. “Her” writings give us a valuable insight into the opinions of a liberal opposition torn between their despair at the dominance of Georgiana Sapoutizakis and her Capitolino and the loathing they shared with Sapoutizakis of aristocrats, monarchs, Roman émigrés, and the French.
We shan’t insult your intelligence, dear reader, and pretend the signing & ratification of the Treaty of Mann was not extremely favorable to Byzantium.
Sapoutizakis had clearly exerted a Herculean effort promoting the ideas of the Revolution abroad.
Success abroad, however, is only half the equation. The Capitolino has a certain tendency to look at the gains the Revolution has made in its first half-century and decide that, things already being arranged to their liking, no further progress is necessary.
Yet the defense of liberty requires more than fortifications along our frontiers and railroads tying the poleis together.
The world sits on the precipice of a great change.
The other children of Rome are waking up.
We must maintain our position at the vanguard of change & progress, rather than being content with our present fortunate lot.
The price of political complacency is incalculable.
We must not let ourselves be caught on the wrong side of history. Should Capitolino complacency allow the Republic to become synonymous with stagnation & oppression, a healthy love of liberty and a human yearning for freedom can easily be co-opted by a poisonous nationalism that will tear Byzantium asunder into a thousand atomized ethnic enclaves, ripe for piecemeal conquest at the hands of the de Valois-Vexins and von Wismars of the world.
We are still, at present, one of the brightest lights in a darkening world…
…a crucial example to the younger nations of the world. No longer are we the sole beacon of Republicanism in Europe.
So let us not lead our students in republicanism in Ireland or in liberalism in Germany by overstepping the bounds of the Mandate of the People by meddling in private enterprise.
Let us look instead to the freedom offered in the wild, untamed corners of the globe, where Haida free traders with nothing more than a dream and a mining pick can make their fortune under the wide-open skies of Karatgurk.
The smaller nations of the world will always prefer a rising power to those used to resting easy on the levers of power. We must take care never to become the latter.
—
Times are interesting in the France of Élisabeth de Valois-Vexin. Given its losses against the League and its victories against Lai Ang, one has the unmistakable impression that her entire nation is drifting gradually westward. Perhaps one day France shall simply leap across the sea and relocate to Avalon?
They are considered one of the greatest industrial powers of the world. Consider, though, how much of that wealth was stolen— how many factories now operating under avaricious French aristos were built by Lai Ang enterprise. French industry, placed as it has been in the hands of an archaic feudal aristocracy in a desperate rear-guard action against an empowered bourgeoisie tinged with Jacobin ideas of liberty, is simply incapable of the same productivity as industry built with the blood, sweat, and tears of honest capitalists.
The world sees that French power & its aspirations of Continental leadership pale before the genuine article.
France is yet a mighty beast to slay— but the world can tell there’s already blood in the water. Our sources in Versailles tell us Élisabeth grows more desperate by the day.
The dissolution of this empire is likely to be an extraordinarily messy affair.
The Government rightly prepares for war, and in this, at least, we support the President unconditionally.
She is a soldier by profession & inclination, and understands the needs for sweeping reforms & reorganization of the army during this blessed period of interbellum— in the next war, we might have to face a tougher opponent than the starving conscripts of the Russian empress.
Our liberty from the yoke of feudal obligation gives our institutions a suppleness lacked by the brittle aristocracy of France. In our army, the most qualified rise to the top, rather than being beholden to some inbred ninny who counts a knight or baron amongst their distant forebears.
Perhaps some backwards nations still see blue blood as the riverspring of dignity & respect, and fall spellbound to the stolen majesty of a queen.
All dynasties fall eventually, however. Consider the fate of the once-might Yaroslavoviches— once masters of the twin empires of Kiev & Rome, their fortunes slowly dwindled until the last survivors of their dynasties cowered in Holland— presently being overrun by the free nations of the world.
Pieter I Yaroslavovich, King of Holland; held by the Roman émigrés to be the true emperor of Rome
True sovereignty can only spring from the people themselves. The liberal monarchies— China, the Habsburg realms, the Haida, the Ayiti Federation, et al., recognize that without the people’s mandate their crowns mean nothing. They, perhaps, shall survive through the century.
It is in a Republic, however, that the Mandate of the People is heard most clearly.
And we are pleased that, for once, the Capitolino has extended its aptitude for military reform to the civil government— President Sapoutizakis has just signed legislation from the National Assembly finally abolishing the last vestiges of the literacy tests— in place since before the Commonwealth!– required to exercise the franchise in the Republic. Another cruel vestige of the old Roman world has joined the Senate, the emperor, and the Legion in the dustbin of history.
Every citizen of Byzantium can now have a say in how they are governed. This is, by any measure, a great victory, and we do not wish to undercut it.
Yet until we have exchanged our first-past-the-post voting system for one of proportional representation, we feel a great many voices will continue to go unheard. Or are we to believe that the 90% majority enjoyed by the Capitolino in the National Assembly reflects the undiluted will of the people?
The war against Yaroslavovich Holland proceeds uneventfully.
The Holy Romans had already been making short work of the Dutch— but the mere sight of the Byzantine navy on the horizon caused the Yaroslavoviches to instantly capitulate. Once more, we have shown our allies that we will do whatever is necessary to further their interests.
Such a war hardly required our full attention, and the Government has continued its policy of aggressively intervening in the economy & investing in Byzantium’s factories.
Certainly, industry is a good thing. But we question the efficacy of not allowing the free market to take its course.
Sad news from the east— the war between Hindustan & Marathas which as been waging for so long (well before the alliance between Hindustan & Byzantium was signed) has ended in Hindustani defeat. If only they had called Byzantium into their struggle… the pride of monarchs, even enlightened liberal ones, can be a dangerous thing.
Lithuania has drifted away from the rest of the Victorian League in the years following the First War, and it continued to suffer at the hands of the Franco-Russian Entente.
Ties between it and Byzantium have remained strong, though, and our government acted properly when it elected to intervene on behalf of the Dunins against the lesser de Valois-Vexins in Poland.
The cowardly irenicists sheltered by the church pitched a fit, of course.
Our allies had other ideas!
More concerning news from France has reached the ears of Artemis! Jacobins & other perceived malcontents have been vanishing in the dead of night. Where they have gone, no-one seems to know.
We have our suspicious.
(ooc: whoops should have deleted that decision lmao)
The French have also been observing the performance of the Revolutionary Army’s new rifles against the Polish with no small amount of alarm. We say— it is a little late for Élisabeth de Valois-Vexin to cry crocodile tears for her Polish cousin when she had earlier callously disposed of her ally following its failures in the First War.
The war with Poland seems a trifling affair when juxtaposed with events in the wider world, however.
Asitelahan’s origins lie in the messy aftermath of the conquests of the Ming Frontier Army, when the empire built by Chang Yuchun and his successors broke apart into organized successor states (of which only Lai Ang and Da Qin are still extant) and a patchwork of rebel states whose local governors refused to subject themselves to outside rule. Asitelahan was one of these so-called “Ming revolter” states. All this history— Chang Yuchun’s far outstepping his original mandate to dismantle the Golden Horde & Ilkhanate, the breakup of his empire, and the autonomy of its successors– all stemmed from the inability of even the Ming to rule so vast and sprawling a territory from Beijing.
We live in a very different age— an age of steamships, railroads, and telegraphy.
When the Sultan of Asitelahan, considering the total reverse of his nation’s fortunes since the glories of the eighteenth century, petitioned the Empress of China for her protection, Zhu Chunmei II was delighted to accept.
An embarrassing incident has thrown how far Lai Ang has fallen in the world into sharp relief. The dominion of Tianhui Catalina has lately broken off ties with León and declared its total independence. The Ayiti Federation, eager to expand their holdings in South Avalon to help offset the Haida’s growing power in the Pacific, declared war on the rebellious colony— and then demanded that Lai Ang join them in their war effort. Lai Ang soldiers and sailors are now fighting in Tianhui Catalina, not to restore it to their empire, but to force it to cede territory to the Federation.
A sad spectacle.
France, meanwhile, has once more ceded land to the Holy Roman Empire without so much as one bullet fired.
Élisabeth, presumably, felt that her nation was not yet ready to fight a Third war of the Victorian League. Her nobles were unconvinced, and the result was a frantic internal power struggle of the likes not seen in France for centuries.
The end result was the death of French absolutism. But what followed was not a great flowering of liberty— instead, the so-called Second Estate— the feudal aristocracy– which for the past decades had been growing increasingly powerful on the basis of their stranglehold on French industry– asserted its power.
The “franchise” has been extended to the landed nobility.
A sad showing compared to the true democracies of the world.
Foremost among the new de facto leaders of France are the four “Machine Dukes” who each presided over an industrial monopoly, and, between them, control over half the factories in France.
Henriette de Conteville, Duchesse de Normandie
(Armaments, ammunition, and artillery)
Antoine d’Armagnac, Duc de Guyenne
(Coal, steel, and iron)
General Jean-François Lyautey, Marquis de Bonac & Duc de Bretagne
(Railroads, telegraphs, and shipbuilding)
Caroline de Gontaut, Duchesse de Bourbon
(Lumber, liquor, and canning)
Students of Byzantine history should be quick to remember that four tyrants are worse than one— witness the tetrarchy of Diocletian removing the last feeble vestiges of the Republic that had somehow endured up to their reign.
More to the point, they should remember that there is no enemy to liberty so dangerous and implacable as the doux. Before the Byzantine Republic, before Juno Koca, before the Commonwealth of the Romans, before the creation of the poleis and the promulgation of the Edict of Athens— the first step down the long road from the tyranny of the Dominate to the liberty of Noor Sallejer was the centuries long struggle by Alexios Komnenos and his successors to eradicate the doukes.
Versailles has been rocked to its core. But for the vast majority of those subject to French tyranny– those teeming masses of French and German peasants, those Bretons and Basques occupied by foreign conquerers, those Hui and Spaniards and Andalusians who have found their homes and businesses on the wrong side of the ever-advancing western frontiers of France— life, if it changes at all, will change for the worse.
With the war in Poland brought to a successful conclusion…
…and the people of West Galicia liberated from de Valois-Vexin tyranny…
(ooc… um… about that. Very early in the mod, I thought of using the PLC tag to make a combined Lithuania-Hungary. I abandoned that idea, but I guess I failed to remove their cores from some of their provinces. I then accidentally added a wargoal to force Poland to release some PLC cores, instead of forcing them to cede territory to the actual Lithuania. So I just renamed the resulting abomination “The Krakow Republic” and declared it a victory for democracy, because that’s just the kind of asshole thing the Byzantine Republic would do.)
…it is high time that we drew a line of sand and extended our protection to what’s left of Lai Ang. We are glad that the Government has finally seen reason on this vital issue of international security.
Less encouraging: yet another ludicrously lopsided election result. Even with a fair, proportional representation system, the Capitolino would still enjoy a commanding majority in the National Assembly. What are they so afraid of?
Further dismal news— the Jacobin uprising in French Iberia has been crushed, utterly, by the royalist military.
May the arrow of Artemis sail straight into their hearts.
The tree of liberty cannot grow without the blood of patriots and tyrants. Whether shed by bullet, cannon, or bayonet, sabre, grenade, or hiratine— let it flow.
France is surrounded by powerful enemies. Their only ally of consequence— Russia— has proven itself little more than a paper tigre.
The Victorian League has taken the small nations of Europe into its protection, and will brook no more aggression against them or their people.
We recognize that the wheels of progress must be oiled with reform, lest they grind the common folk into dust to line the pockets of self-serving aristo pigs.
And… whatever problems we might have with the current government, we can say that they preside over a civilized, elected government with the full Mandate of the People at their back.
Even on the distant shores of Avalon, the struggle for liberty advances by great strides with every passing day.
War is coming again, very soon.
But if there is one thing Georgiana Sapoutizakis does well (and we grudgingly admit that there are, in fact, several thinsg she does well), it is play the Great Game.
France is on the backfoot, seeking to delay war at any cost. They know that the deathblow is coming.
Soon, Scandinavia will be evicted from the Continent.
The cause of liberty will have setbacks, to be sure.
Do the Machine Dukes and Élisabeth seek to use the element of surprise against us by declaring war on the League whilst our forces were engaged in Scandinavia? What folly! With our total naval control of the North Atlantic, moving our forces back to the continent is trivial.
We were ready for this. We were ready for anything.
The only thing surprising about the French declaration of war is that they’d be foolish enough to force armed conflict when we are in such a position of strength.
And we are just one member of the most powerful league of states the Near West has seen since the League of Hungary broke the back of the Ming Frontier army.
There is absolutely nothing France can do that could surprise the Third Victorian League.
EMPRESS ZHU CHUNMEI II OF CHINA
WORLD MAP, 1855