Eulycea
The Kingdom of Eulycea Regnum Eulyceae | |
|---|---|
 Flag | |
| Motto: "Vive Carolus Rex!" | |
| Capital | Brisa |
| Largest city | Ristua |
| Official languages | Eulycean Aroman |
| Demonym(s) | Eulycean |
| Government | Unitary constitutional presidential monarchy |
• King | Charles IV |
• Speaker | Justus Cambria |
| Legislature | Parliament |
| House of Peers | |
| House of the People | |
| Separation from Salvia | |
• Crusader kingdom established | April 12, 1560 |
• Kingdom of Salvia-Eulycea | February 9, 1719 |
• Treaty of [CITY] | September 2, 1790 |
| Area | |
• Total | 210,677 km2 (81,343 sq mi) |
| Currency | libra |
| Driving side | right |
The Kingdom of Eulycea, informally Eulycea, is a middling monarchy on the northern coast of the Palu Peninsula, facing the Synthe Sea, located on Eurth. It is bordered by Metztlitlalio to the south. Its population is estimated at [POP] people, spread over an area of [AREA] square kilometers. The country is known for its abundant precious metals, particularly silver, its strong devotion to its state religion, Eulycean Catholicism, and its monarchist and feudal traditions. Its current ruler is King Charles IV.
Eulycea was established as crusader kingdom by Salvian crusaders in 1560 from the remnants of the Tihuanaco Empire, a native Lycean empire that had been made a tributary of the Yellow Empire for its mineral wealth. In 1707, it became the home of the exiled Salvian monarch, and its later kings claimed the Salvian throne until 1790. Even after a popular rising and constitutional convention in 1855, the king, nobility, and church all remain greatly empowered in the country, to a degree found rarely elsewhere. Its economy is middling, owing to failures to industrialize in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but is experiencing a new renaissance after significant education and financial reforms. Even though expectations for the future look bright, organized crime, corruption, and secessionist and radical movements are prevalent. The kingdom continues to fight an ethnic insurgency in its southwest, along the border with Metztlitlalio.
Etymology
Eulycea was first named by papal decree after the conclusion of the Lycean Crusade in 1560. The prefix “Eu-” was appended to the historical name "Lycea" to indicate, like the prefix “pan-”, its encompassing of all the land and its peoples. Where the name “Lycea” comes from remains a subject for scholarly debate, though the leading theory is that it developed from the name of the river Lys, named by Limonaian merchant explorers in the early sixteenth century.
Geography
Eulycea is located on the northern coast of the Palu Peninsula, an extremely arid and rugged area. The Altacamo Desert, on one end of the kingdom, is one of the driest in the world, with places where it has not rained in centuries. The rest of the country is generally divided into three terrains: the coastal river plains, the altiplano or high plateau, and the mountainous highlands that reach up from foothills into the high Tapeltan Mountains. Despite the dryness, the country maintains mild temperatures, and with the right irrigation is a successful food and agricultural exporter. The country is abundant in mineral wealth. It is particularly famous for its precious minerals, especially silver, which have been mined from its mountains for millennia.
History
Historians believe that people have inhabited present-day Eulycea since as early as 20,000 B.C. However, the earliest identifiable culture arose among the Chincorro people around 3,000 B.C., who ritually buried their dead in so-called “mummy bundles” in the dry Altacamo Desert. Important individuals among the Chincorro, possibly religious leaders, were wrapped in as many as thirty layers of finely-woven textiles, requiring thousands of man-hours to weave by hand. The extremely arid sands of the Altacamo, where in some places it has not rained for centuries, kept these bodies and their bundles well intact. Today, several are displayed at the Royal Museum in Brisa.
Around 1800 B.C., the Proto-Lyceans, bringing with them advanced forms of agriculture and knowledge of irrigation, quickly displaced or assimilated previous cultures such as the Chincorro and founded the first permanent settlements in the region. As they dispersed across the region, they formed new cultures with a mostly homogenous religious pantheon and belief system. As written language did not enter Lycea until the arrival of the Huang in the 1300s A.D., describing the Lyceans’ particular religious doctrines remains difficult. However, their practices indicate pantheism, as well as the veneration of several patron gods, which differed from settlement to settlement, and blood sacrifice, both from animals and people. All of these were common features among all cultures which descended from the Proto-Lyceans, including the Moce, Chimu, Chavin, Nasca, Huari, and Tihuanaco.
By the 700s A.D., state-level organization had begun to appear among the city-states of the Moce culture in Lycea. Unlike previous cultures, Moce city-states were ruled by secular kings rather than a class of priests. Kings demanded their taxes in the form of a corvée towards building their palaces, temples, and other monumental architecture. Art made its first attempts at individual portraiture, in the form of ceramics. The Moce, unlike previous cultures, appeared to practice war frequently. War held more than political importance: it was an important religious ceremony to the Moce in its own right, with captives made sacrifices to please local deities. By 1000 A.D., two cities on the altiplano, or high interior plain, were emerging as new seats of religious and military power: Huari and Tihuanaco. These two cities became the first proper empires in Lycea, conquering their neighbors and expanding the polity beyond a single city. In the 1100s, the Huari suddenly disappeared from the archaeological record, replaced by the Tihuanaco. Most historians believe that in the conflict between the two rising powers, the Tihuanaco had emerged victorious.
The Tihuanaco Empire
The Tihuanaco were the first empire to bring all of Lycea to heel, during the twelfth century A.D. Their eponymous capital was not only their political center but already a major site of pilgrimage to the sun god, who the Tihuanaco locally revered as chief among all gods, possibly to the point of henotheism. However, the king of Tihuanaco, later emperor, was also considered a divine being himself, the brother of the sun. Thus, the priestly class and secular warrior nobility were infused underneath him, creating a more unified and cogent society.
In the conquest of the rest of Lycea, the Tihuanaco did not force the abandonment of other gods; rather, they insisted that their sun god (and his brother, the emperor) was foremost among all other gods, who submitted to his authority. Likewise, most of the outlying territories were left to their own devices, autonomous so long as they paid tribute to Tihuanaco. Benefiting off this largesse, the empire could afford to build some of the greatest and largest architecture the Lycean peoples had ever seen, with stones weighing hundreds of tons quarried and transported as many as thirty kilometers over land to Tihuanaco for use in exquisite stone masonry. The capital was a planned city, oriented along the path of the sun when it rose on the winter solstice.
Trade had always existed between the Lycean peoples and their neighbors to the south of the Tapeltan Mountains in present-day Metztlitlalio. As early as 800 B.C., luxury imports such as tropical bird feathers and leopard pelts, as well as their symbolic representations, adorned local architecture and textiles. In exchange, the fine metallurgy and textiles from Lycea flowed south. But as the Tihuanaco Empire rose to dominate the Lycean region, it found itself in increasing contact with the Crescent Empire of the Azlo people, who worshipped a lunar deity, in direct conflict with the Tihuanaco’s own sun deity. The Wars of the Sun and Moon soon began, with the two young empires battling in the harsh mountain passes in summer and returning to their homes in winter. Since both sides could hold the few navigable passes through the Tapeltans with great ease, even against a vastly-numbered opponent, the wars were never more than stalemates, and eventually became more ritual than geopolitical. However, by the fourteenth century, the exorbitant amount of wealth and lives spent on the wars had crippled the Tihuanaco Empire, leaving it open to conflict from within and without. In 1392, Huang explorers first arrived on Lycean shores, bringing writing, gunpowder, new crops, and many other technological innovations. These did not reinvigorate the empire so much as empower its vassals, and the Wars of the Sun and Moon soon ended, with the Tihuanaco emperor more focused on quelling revolts at home.
In 1475, a new and massive deposit of silver was discovered at Montargent. In the following years, it alone more than doubled the production of silver in the already abundant region. The Tihuanaco emperor, fearful of the Yellow Empire already intending to subjugate him, attempted to conceal the discovery, but did not succeed. In 1480, an army under General Ma Gui landed near present-day Ristua and fought the Tihuanaco emperor and his army in the decisive battle of Costa Flavo. The Tihuanaco emperor was captured and, after making peace with the Yellow Empire, forced to abdicate in favor of the Huang’s puppet, his nephew.
Tributary of the Yellow Empire
The old imperial apparatus of the Tihuanaco was commandeered by the Huang to extract as much precious metal from the new tributary as possible. Huang scribes, inspectors, and administrators came in droves to the region to ensure shipments were made in their proper amounts and on time. Meanwhile, the Yellow Empire’s own military garrison propped up the new Tihuanaco emperor and helped him quell local rebellions against him. Some historians argue Eulycea’s historic institution of slavery began around this time, with the captives of failed revolts pressed into dangerous and exhausting labor in the silver mines.
However, even if they did not revolt, local communities were forced into working in the mines by way of the now-ancient corvée. The unhappy population now looked for the opportunity to decisively overthrow the Tihuanaco puppet emperor and his Yellow handlers. In the early sixteenth century, Limonaian merchant explorers arrived along the Lycean Coast, bringing with them advanced firearms, among other foreign goods. Though trading silver with foreign powers besides the Yellow Empire was an illegal offense, many local communities traded what they could produce, skim, or steal from imperial mints and mines to purchase Limonaian arms. The small Huang garrison, numbering only two thousand, and at that time unwilling to upset its delicate stability by clamping down on trade, initially held off from strictly enforcing the terms of tribute. This resulted in local Lyceans becoming more emboldened. They denied Huang inspectors access to mines, raided mints, and smuggled silver in ever-greater quantities. The alarming rate at which violence and rebellion suddenly flared forced the Huang garrison commander, General Zhu Wan, to request reinforcements. He received eight thousand of them in 1551, and subsequently used them to stamp out the Limonaian trade entirely.
The Lycean Crusade
The Salvians, who had been trading for years for Lycean silver through Limonaian intermediaries, were shocked and angered by the sudden shutting down of the lucrative silver trade by the Yellow Empire. Salvia already needed little provocation to take down what it viewed as an existential and religious threat. Viewing the 1551 reinforcements as an invasion of Lycea, although the region had been a Yellow tributary for three-quarters of a century, the Salvian pope declared the Lycean Crusade. Salvian crusaders, ten thousand strong, departed their homeland in 1553 and landed in Lycea at Promontory Rock eighty days later.
Under the command of Dominic di Brisa, the crusaders fought the Yellow garrison under Zhu Wan at the Battle of Costa Maria. The crusaders were overwhelmed by Zhu Wan’s numerical superiority and nearly utterly defeated. Dominic was slain in battle, and his lieutenant, Adrian di Temeia, took command of the survivors. After receiving a message from the nearby city of Huantar, which promised its assistance, Adrian mounted a confident counteroffensive the following day and forced Zhu Wan and the Yellow garrison back with the help of Huantar’s auxiliaries. The further he pushed into Lycea, the more cities and settlements joined the crusader’s cause, bolstering their numbers well beyond even their own reinforcements from the homeland. Meanwhile, Zhu Wan could receive no more reinforcements from the Yellow Empire, which was beset by Salvian crusaders in its north and south. After receiving a vision of the Virgin Mary, Adrian’s forces defeated the Huang garrison soundly at the battle of Iola. From then on, Zhu Wan could not meet the crusaders on the battlefield and resorted to proto-guerilla tactics for the remainder of the crusade. At the Battle of Montelupo in 1557, Adrian and his bodyguard were ambushed and killed by Yellow forces. A year later, with his garrison whittled down to one thousand men, just one tenth of its original size, Zhu Wan committed suicide and organized resistance ended. The Huang ambassador to Tihuanaco was captured when the capital fell to the crusaders that same year. He negotiated peace on behalf of the Yellow Empire with the Salvians. The Tihuanaco emperor was overthrown by the crusaders, but it would not be until 1560 by papal decree that a new king, the king of Salvia, was crowned as ruler of the land now known as Eulycea. The capital of the new country would be Brisa, the new name for the city of Huantar, in honor of the crusaders’ first fallen leader. Adrian di Temeia was later canonized by the Salvian pope in 1657, on the centennial of his death, as St. Adrian of Eulycea. He is more popularly known as St. Adrian the Crusader.
The crusader kingdom
The Salvian king ruled his new colony in absentia, with his appointed governor Lawrence Constantine taking command. His primary task was to reestablish silver production, which had been crippled by the crusade. However, the task was beset with a number of problems: previous records kept by the Huang were costly to translate; nearly every mint had been destroyed in the war; and the native population was dying out in untold numbers to a new plague. While the local Lycean auxiliaries who had helped the crusaders remove the Huang expected some reward for their loyalty, many either died of disease or did not have their lands restored to them, but awarded instead to the Salvian nobility who had fought in the crusade. Nonetheless, these were considered free men, so long as they converted to the Catholic Church, and could not be pressed into slavery. The same could not be said for many other Lyceans, who were pressed into chattel slavery in the mines to restart silver production. It is estimated that sixty percent of the pre-crusade indigenous population of Eulycea had died by 1580 from the crusade, disease, or in bondage.
With a declining labor force, the governor was forced to seek labor from abroad. Huang people fled the collapsed Yellow Empire for work in droves, and many settled in Eulycea. These people were treated extremely poorly and discriminated against in law and in force by the colonial government and Salvian settlers, who were the only people treated as first class citizens. In the 1580s, however, the Order of Friars of St. Joseph, or the Josephans, founded early in the sixteenth century in Salvia to return the Church to poverty and charity, arrived in Eulycea. The Josephan friars ministered not only to the free auxiliarii, or free native people of Lycea, but to the poor Huang immigrants and enslaved Lyceans, often running into conflict with secular authorities. They operated hospitals, schools, and churches, converting great swathes of the population. They popularized Eulycean Aroman outside of the liturgy and in daily life, making it the new lingua franca instead of the lower class pidgin that had developed between Huang, Salvian, and Lycean influences. Perhaps most radically, some Josephan friars, such as Constant of Ristua, wrote treatises condemning the practice of slavery and laying the theological and philosophical groundwork for the modern conception of human rights—that is, rights inherent to a human person by the nature of their being.
The Josephans were regularly arrested by local authorities on charges of seditious acts, and even in some cases were attacked by Salvian mobs. Nonetheless, the friars’ mission had largely succeeded by 1680. Most of the non-Salvian population spoke Aroman with some degree of fluency, and many were baptized Catholic, angering the colonial nobility who could not keep fellow Catholics in bondage by ecclesial law. The institution of slavery was also dying out on its own: after two centuries of continuously-increasing production, the silver mines’ easiest deposits had been exhausted. Harder to reach veins, required specially-trained miners and engineers, made chattel slavery impractical. Many were begrudgingly freed to the care of the Josephans. In 1705, Peter III, King of Salvia and Eulycea, finally abolished the institution of slavery formally.
Two years later, popular unrest in Salvia led to the People’s War. Peter III and his court fled the country, along with most of the Salvian nobility and many ecclesial officials. While lower ranking nobles and monarchists who did not flee to Eulycea made peace with the new republic, Peter III resolved to keep his claim to the Salvian throne. He began assembling an army and fleet to retake Salvia in the 1710s, but succumbed to illness before he could complete the task. He died in exile in Eulycea in 1718.
The Kingdom of Salvia-Eulycea
Peter III’s son, Phillip, shared his father’s sentiment that he was still the rightful ruler of both Salvia and Eulycea. The Salvian pope disagreed, and would not crown Phillip King of Salvia, only Eulycea, where he actually ruled. Phillip declared the pope a heretic. At his urging the bishops of Eulycea elected a new pope from among their own, Innocent VII, starting the Eulycean Schism and the breakaway Eulycean Catholic Church that remains to this day. Innocent VII crowned Phillip King of Salvia and Eulycea in 1719, beginning the era of the Kingdom of Salvia-Eulycea. Phillip would find that his kingdom was in no state for a reconquest of Salvia. Silver production had fallen to an all time low and he could hardly fund his own government, let alone an invasion fleet and army. His father’s fleet was largely mothballed or sold to foreign powers; the army disbanded. The kingdom negotiated a tight budget for the rest of Phillip’s reign. He died in 1753. Phillip’s successor, Peter IV (or Peter of Eulycea abroad), enjoyed new mining techniques, developments in gunpowder blasting, and new chemicals for purification that all improved precious metals production again, restarting the struggling economy. Peter IV, however, chose to waste most of this wealth on self-luxury, building three different palaces. He wasted so much money that the kingdom was penniless by his death in 1766, with only one out of the three palaces commissioned, the palace on Lake Anna, actually completed.
Peter IV was survived by his two daughters, who married into the Bardylla and di Teuta families. These families, which were already fierce rivals when Peter IV was still living, now competed to have their claimant placed on the throne. The king’s daughter Felicity had a son named Michael Bardylla, aged five, while his daughter Lucie di Teuta had no children, but was pregnant with her first. The feud broke into conflict in 1767, when Lucie gave birth to a son named Augustin di Teuta. The civil war lasted for three years, throwing the country into great turmoil and strife, until the Eulycean Church intervened after Michael Bardylla’s death from fever. Augustin di Teuta was crowned king at age 3 in 1770. Uninterested in reclaiming Salvia at all, and eager to rebuild his kingdom with new access to trade, August negotiated a treaty with representatives of the Salvian republic in [CITY] in 1790. He gave up all claims to the Salvian throne, but did not choose to reconcile the Eulycean Catholic Church with the Salvian Catholic Church. Eulycea was now an independent and sovereign kingdom, forging its own destiny. Augustin presided over new irrigation construction, a flourishing of the agricultural sector, and diversification away from the kingdom’s reliance on its precious metals. He convened many parliaments with his nobility, and generally laid the foundations for the constitutional monarchy the kingdom would reach in the mid-nineteenth century. He died in 1828.
The Eulycean kingdom
Augustin’s son Michael succeeded him with far different intentions than his father, who was generally content to let Church and nobility alone. Michael attempted to centralize the kingdom underneath him, justifying it by his divine right to rule which had been affirmed in many standing documents and legal proceedings. He freely imprisoned enemies and frequently defied the Church, openly taking several mistresses and seizing Church property. To defend himself against revolt, he expanded and modernized the kingdom’s military, and refurbished the navy as a prestige project. Michael died in 1842 of an unknown disease, probably a sexually-transmitted disease. However, a popular theory persists to this day that his death, under suspicious circumstances, was actually an assassination by his many enemies.
Michael had only one legitimate heir, a daughter, who had married into the Sybinan family. She ruled as Queen Rose for two years, from 1842 to 1844, until the birth of her son, Charles. After his birth, he was crowned the new king, but she remained his Queen Regent, ruling in his stead. Meanwhile, a new political movement, popular perhaps due to the low legitimacy of the current king, his Queen Regent, and the poor popularity of his grandfather, was rising in Eulycea. The Chartists demanded a charter from the king of their legal and political rights; they demanded, even as unlanded citizens, representation within the government. They demanded the right to purchase and own land in their own names, which had been denied to everyone except Eulycea’s bloated nobility and the Eulycean Catholic Church. The movement gathered vast strength, particularly in the two largest cities, Brisa and Ristua, where the early stages of the Industrial Revolution were already taking place in Eulycea. It threatened to break out into revolt, and the Queen Regent and her parliament of nobles were unsure if the army of conscripts raised by her father King Michael would not defect themselves to the Chartist cause. She decided to accede to a constitutional convention, held between the nobility, Chartists, and the Church, in 1855.
Though the Chartists entered the negotiations holding the threat of more power than either of the other two players combined, the people they represented remained mostly disempowered after the constitution was drafted and made law. The new parliament, which would be called annually, was bicameral, with the lower house consisting of popularly-elected representatives and the upper house consisting of the Eulycean high nobility and Eulycean bishops, who held their seats for life. Both houses had to agree to legislation for it to pass, weakening the population’s representatives ability to make law as they desired. Furthermore, the king retained significant executive authority, as did his local nobility, and the right of the government to govern was still justified on the basis of his divinely-given authority. Nonetheless, the Chartists received, among adult male citizens, the right to vote and the right to own land, two of their most popular and most fiercely-advocated positions.
Charles came of age in 1860. He was the first of the Sybinan kings which have ruled the kingdom to the present day. Under his rule, which lasted until 1896, he oversaw the early industrialization of the country, including the construction of the country’s first railway (1868) and telegraph (1875). The government protected its fledgling industry with high tariffs, but gave that same industry immense freedom in labor policy. Workers were forced to work long hours for little pay, and many of them were children. Socialism arose for the first time in Eulycea, and even appeared temporarily on the parliamentary ballot, advocating for lower work weeks, minimum wages, employee shares in company stocks, and the prohibition of child labor. The Eulycean pope, Alexander IV, published encyclicals which generally also supported these reforms, but decried the socialist movement, which he believed aimed to rob the value of work and destroy the family by nationalizing all ownership of property. The country slowly fell in line with the Church’s thinking on the matter, passing several reforms at the end of Charles’ reign while ousting the Socialist Party of Eulycea from Parliament, never to be elected again. Nonetheless, the right to unionize remained unguaranteed, and strikes and even labor violence occurred frequently. In 1895, Charles was caught in an anarchist bombing of the Eustatian Gallery. He was uninjured, but died of unrelated, natural causes a year later in 1896.
His son, Charles II, continued the work of industrializing the country, with limited success. Already, the tariffs on foreign consumer goods were becoming an unbearable strain on the economy, even if they protected domestic industry. An economic downturn in the 1920s brought the economy into a deep malaise, throwing many out onto the street, unemployed. Charles II responded with government infrastructure programs, including mandating national service for eighteen year old men. They would first be trained as infantry in the Royal Army, then spend six months on projects of national importance, such as roads and bridges or agricultural harvests. This program continues to the present day. However, the measures were too little to bring the kingdom’s economy out of its stall, and Charles II abdicated in 1928, too old and frail to continue.
Charles’ son Adrian was then crowned, the first Eulycean king to be named for a Eulycean saint, St. Adrian the Crusader. He expanded the infrastructure programs of his father, but also gave new subsidies to the country’s agricultural and mining sectors, allowing them to compete abroad. The country came out of the depression by 1936, and Adrian ruled over it peacefully until December 1951, when he died. Adrian’s nephew, Charles III, took the throne in 1952. He briefly pursued an atomic weapons program in the 1960s, but abandoned the project after international alarm. Charles III modernized the military and used it to suppress socialist and communist movements that had gathered great strength during the reign of his uncle. These movements were largely forced underground by the 1970s, where the Military Intelligence Directorate, more commonly known as Ambroi House, established by Charles III, dealt with them in covert operations. In the 1980s, separatist tensions boiled over in the Tapeltans as ethnic Tapelts attempted to secede from Eulycea once again, as they had in previous revolts dating back to the seventeenth century. Charles III dealt with them severely, with no holds barred. In 1989, he died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving his son, the current king Charles IV, to rule the country.
Charles IV continued to combat the Tapelt insurgency, but refocused efforts on winning over Tapelt noncombatants still loyal to the kingdom and separating them from the guerillas in the mountains. The counterinsurgency campaign flared every few years, but generally quieted down in the 1990s. In 1999, Charles IV’s second child, the Princess Lily Adrienne, was born, and at his request the succession laws in the constitution were amended to allow her to take the throne, if she were the most senior. However, her older brother Charles, the Duke of Brisa, remains Charles IV’s heir apparent. The general improvement of the economy over the course of his reign, perhaps owing to his focus on improving education and enticing foreign investment to Eulycea, has led to many calling Charles IV by the affectionate nickname “Good King Charles.”
Government
Eulycea is a unitary constitutional presidential monarchy. The current monarch is Charles IV. Under the 1855 Constitution, last amended 2001, the king remains both head of state and head of government. While he relinquished his legislative powers, he is still responsible for enforcing the laws passed by the kingdom’s Parliament, the sole and supreme legislative body, using the royal bureaucracy and the empowered nobility beneath him. Parliament is bicameral with the upper house consisting of ducal and ecclesial seats that are held for life and the lower house consisting of popularly-elected representatives who are elected every five years. Important executive offices, such as judges, ministers, and ambassadors, are only given to the king’s nominations who have parliamentary approval. The state religion is Eulycean Catholicism and the official language of the government is Eulycean Aroman.
Underneath the king, an elaborate system of nobility still administers almost all parts of the country. The kingdom is divided into nineteen duchies and four cities, which are ruled by municipal councils. The nineteen dukes retain seats in the upper house of Parliament, the House of Peers. The four cities are not represented in the upper house, but together supply nearly half of the lower house’s elected seats. Duchies are also internally divided into counties, which in turn are divided into baronies, parishes, or municipalities. Even though there are many titles available, only about a fifth of Eulycea’s noble families are landed.
Politics
Only six parties appear on the parliamentary ballot, though many other political movements exist. The lower house of parliament, the House of the People, is currently led by a majority coalition of the Conservative Party, the King’s Party, and the Christian Worker’s Party. In opposition sit the Liberal Party, the Green Party, and the Youth Party. The ruling coalition is well-organized around social issues, but has difficulty finding consensus on economic policy, where the interests of the Conservatives tend to exclude the interests of the Christian Worker’s Party. The coalition is led by the Speaker, Justus Cambria. The Leader of the Opposition is Varus Arva, of the Liberal Party.
Of the political movements in Eulycea that do not appear on the ballot, the Republican Party is the most popular. They wish, by constitutional amendment, to restrict the king and nobility to ceremonial roles in government. The current President of the Republican Party is Blaise Albani. Other popular political movements which Eulyceans may legally join include: the Secularist Party, which wishes to remove the Eulycean Catholic Church from politics; the Young People’s Party, which wishes to lower the voting age from twenty-five to eighteen; the Socialist Party of Eulycea, which wishes to radically redistribute wealth and restrict private ownership of industry; and the Lycean Party, which advocates for the country’s indigenous people (called Lyceans) and their cultural heritage.
There are also political movements which are legally prohibited, though they are far fewer in number and smaller in size. These movements have lost their legal right to organize primarily because of the political violence and terrorism they have perpetrated. On the far left is the Communist Party of Eulycea, while on the far right is the pro-indigenous Neo-Tihuanaco movement, which wishes to reestablish the indigenous empire of Tihuanaco and expel so-called foreigners from their land. Like their neighbor Metztlitlalio to the south, the kingdom’s military has operated counterinsurgency campaigns against the Tapelt nationalists in the mountainous interior.
Royal family
King Charles IV was crowned on the Feast of St. Adrian (August 25), 1989. He succeeded his father Charles III, who died earlier that year. Since 1842, the crown has remained in the Sybinan family, of which Charles IV is the current head. The Eulycean royal line is descended from Peter III, the last Salvian king to rule over that country, who fled to the colony after the People’s War in 1707. Charles IV has one sibling: Prince John, the Duke of Sabia, who is third in line for the throne behind Charles IV’s two children: Prince Charles, the Duke of Brisa, his heir apparent, and the Princess Lily Adrienne. Both children have been with Charles IV’s only wife, Queen Margaret, who he married in 1982.
Prince Charles was born in 1987 and completed his studies abroad. He served in the Royal Navy as a lieutenant commander under the name Charles Sybina. In 2018, he married Christina Bosonona, now Princess Christina, the Duchess of Brisa. The Princess Lily Adrienne was born in 2001. At her birth, the royal succession clauses in the constitution were amended to allow female heirs to inherit the throne, should they prove the most senior (absolute primogeniture). Thus, she is second in line for the throne. She is currently studying at the University of Brisa.
The king and queen are properly addressed as His or Her Majesty, while the princes and princesses are properly addressed as His or Her Royal Highness. Princess Christina, who married into the Sybinan family, is only addressed as Her Highness.
Military
Eulycea has a small professional modern military, organized into three branches: the Royal Navy, the Royal Army, and the Royal Air Forces. All three branches are under the command of the king and the administration of the Ministry of Defense. Outside of the mandatory national service, all military personnel are volunteers. Women only serve combat roles in the Royal Air Forces, as pilots. The military’s primary focus is the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign against Tapelt nationalists in the kingdom’s southwest.
The kingdom practices mandatory national service for all men aged eighteen or older. For a year, young men serve in the Royal Army, trained as infantry for six months and assigned to “national service projects” for the remaining duration. Such assignments include road construction, agricultural harvests, and other large-scale projects. Young men may be exempted from national service if they pursue higher education. Both the Youth Party in Parliament and the Young People’s Party outside Parliament campaign on ending mandatory national service.
Foreign relations
Eulycea retains mostly neutral relations with the vast majority of nations on Eurth. Relations are cool with its neighbor to the south, Metztlitlalio, due to their differing cultural and religious interests. However, the two countries share information and cooperate in suppressing Tapelt nationalists, who are spread across their shared border. While earlier in its history, Eulycea had heated tensions with its mother country, Salvia, the two enjoy friendly cooperation and trade in the present day, especially since their reconciliation in the 1790 Treaty of [CITY], in which the Eulycean king gave up his claims to the Salvian throne. Due to the virulent condemnations of communism by the Eulycean Catholic Church, which remains a major agent in Eulycean politics, the kingdom also has tense relations with Fulgistan.
