Zacapican
Red Banner Tribunal Panchichiltic Tlahtoloyan | |
|---|---|
 Flag | |
| Capital | Tequitinitlan |
| Largest city | Tecolotlan |
| Official languages | Nahuatl |
| Ethnic groups |
|
| Demonym(s) | Zacapine Zacapitec |
| Government | Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy |
| Nochcalima I | |
• Prime Minister | Chicacua Xiomara |
• Senate Speaker | Tachto Callcalan |
• House Speaker | Queya Iluyollo |
| Legislature | Popular Assembly |
| Senate | |
| House of Representatives | |
| Formation | |
• Pre-Dynastic Period | 2,600-2000 BCE |
• Old Empire | 2000-119 BCE |
• First Intermediate Period | 119 BCE-21 CE |
• Middle Empire | 21-1534 CE |
• Second Intermediate Period | 1534-1599 CE |
• Start of New Empire period | 19 August 1599 |
• 1st Constitutional Reformation | 22 February 1706 |
| 1756-1781 | |
• 2nd Constitutional Reformation | 13 November 1781 |
| Population | |
• 2021 estimate |  61,558,935 |
• 2019 census | 60,785,909 |
| GDP (nominal) | 2019 estimate |
• Total | $1.67 Trillion |
• Per capita | $27,474 |
| HDI (2019) | 0.888 very high |
| Driving side | right |
Zacapican, formally the Red Banner Tribual (Nahuatl: Panchichiltic Tlahtoloyan), is an Imperial Federation located in southern Oxidentale, bordering Kayahallpa to the north. It is a constitutional monarchy in which power is shared between the monarchic Huetlatoani (lit. "Great Speaker", equivalent to the title of "Emperor") or the female equivalent Cihuahuetlatoani and the corresponding parliamentary authorities of the Popular Assembly which are the triumvirate formed by the Prime Minister, the Senate Speaker and the House Speaker. The wider Zacapine government is organized as a federation of city states called Atlepetl, each formally ruled by a figurehead Tlatoani lord while the operations of the focal city, satellite towns and rural communities is generally left to the Calpolli, which function as democratic council governments in towns or wards within a city. Atlepetl tier governments therefore mirror the federal tier government with a hereditary noble executive balanced against a popular assembly, derived from nationwide voting districts on the federal level and from Calpolli representatives at the state level.
Modern Zacapican is considered to be the legitimate continuation of an ancient Nahua empire which has occupied the southern cone region of Oxidentale for over 4,000 years, as the Panchichiltic Tlahtoloyan encompasses the 4th and 5th dynasties of the New Empire period in Zacapine historiography. However many aspects of the traditional culture and political structure of the empire have changed dramatically since the early modern period, namely the First Constituional Reformation which reorganized the feudal 2nd dynasty into a crowned republic dominated by wealthy landowners and urban elites which sought to dismantle the ancient Calpolli system, and then by the Red Banner Uprisings of the latter half of the 18th century along with the Second Constitutional Reformation, which again reshaped the national and local government systems according to the revolutionary principles of the rebel Red Banner peasants, re-establishing a revised version of the traditional Calpolli system and empowering the rural aristocracy to rule in the stead of the defunct 3rd dynasty's crowned republic system.
Under the reformed Calpolli system and the revised constitutional monarchy, Zacapican has enjoyed prolonged periods of stability and relative prosperity. Although the accptance of new agricultural and industrial techniques and methods has not been without some resistance, in general the nation has readily accepted and contributed to the advance of technology and its economic applications, allowing modern Zacapican to benefit from a fully developed secondary sector and growing tertiary sector of the economy. Zacapican is therefore considered to be a developed country with a diverse composition of agriculture, manufacturing and service industries. Zacapican is the third largest economy in Oxidentale, behind the economic powerhouses of Mutul and Sante Reze in northern Oxidentale.
Etymology
The common name Zacapican is derived from the nahuatl zacapi, itself a truncated form of zacapiliztli meaning to harvest or collect grasses, maize or other crops, along with the suffix -can. Thus together Zacapican can be translated as "place where the grass is harvested", a term which may have been assigned to the area in which the ancient migratory nahuas settled as they are believed to have imported sedentary agriculture to the region. Historians believe this name was originally ascribed specifically to the Zacaco grassland region in which the nahuas roginally settled, streaching across what is now central and eastern Zacapican, and was only later ascribed to the broader nahua empire which grew to dominate the southern cone of Oxidentale but was always based in the Zacaco plains.
Panchichiltic Tlahtoloyan, generally translated as Red Banner Tribunal, is the formal name of the current government and ruling system within the state. Panchichiltic is derived from the nahuatl Pantli meaning flag and Chichiltic denoting a red color, representing the red colored flags used as the rallying symbol of the Red Banner peasant rebellions which resulting in the overthrow of the previous dynasty and installation of the new regime. Tlahtoloyan is a more traditional designation, derived from the nahuatl Tlahto- meaning a ruling or decision, and the suffix -loyan, and so translates roughly to "place where decisions are made", although it may be more loosely translated as Empire or Tribunal. Those who rule a Tlahtoloyan are termed Tlatoani or Heutlatoani, the former translating directly as "decision maker" but more commonly as "Arbiter" or "Speaker", and the latter simply adding the Hue- prefix meaning big, and so translating to "Great Speaker" (or "Great Arbiter"). In Zacapine culture, a hegemonic Tlatoani is considered equivalent to and may often be loosely translated as King and thus the higher Huetlatoani is considered equivalent to can be translated as Emperor. Female equivalents of both simply involve the addition of the prefix Cihua-, meaning "woman", resulting in Cihuatlatoani and Cihuahuetlatoani translating directly to "Woman Speaker" and "Woman Great Speaker" respectively.
History
Zacapican possesses an extremely long recorded and archeological history which is made all the more remarkable by its organization into a single cultural and political continuity, although this is in part the result of ancient and more recent historical revisionism which sought to organized at times unrelated dynasties and regimes into a more standardized and rationalized format which fit the contemporary view of history. Nevertheless, it is generally acknowledged that the Zacapine civilization is a single continuum which has existed since at least 2,000 BCE and can be generally understood as being made up of one monolithic empire possessing three phases, the old, the middle and the new empire, which are distinguished from one another by the intervening periods of collapse and subsequent reunification. The period preceding the formation of the empire proper is termed the "predynastic period" as no imperial dynasty governed during this time. The present day is commonly understood to fall within the continuing New Empire period, although a dissenting opinion is that the Red Banner rebellions constitute a third intermediate period and thus the present day should fall within a fourth "Neo-Imperial" period. This view is generally contested and rejected by the academic establishment.
Predynastic Period
Old Empire
First Intermediate Period
Middle Empire
Second Intermediate Period
New Empire
First Constitutional Reformation
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While the development of mercantile capitalism was well established since long before the beginning of the New Empire period, the advent of industrial capitalism proved to be a significant disruption to the political and economic order of the feudal Zacapine civilization of the time. Pochteca merchants which had previously filled the role of traders of goods began to use their accumulating wealth to challenge and even eclipse the status of Zacapine nobility. The Pochteca most of all advocated the reorganization of Zacapine agriculture which was organized around the ancient Calpolli system and was primarily based on subsistence farming and food production, seeing the communal land holdings and agricultural methods as antiquated, inefficient and most importantly inefficient and thus unprofitable. This growing class of wealthy lowborn individuals and trading families became an increasingly powerful bloc relative to the aristocracy, and soon were influential enough to force the nobility to give concessions including extending privileges to the merchant caste which had previously been reserved to the nobility. This was overall met with little resistance, save from the most powerful nobles including the Huetlatoani, as these stood to loose the most to the rising merchant class while lesser and un-landed nobles were more amenable to working together and gaining from arrangements with the merchants. This dichotomy resulted in a palace coup and the unceremonious end of the New Empire period's 2nd Dynasty.
What followed was the First Constitutional Reformation which was ratified on the 22nd of February 1706, in which the 3rd dynasty was installed under a system of constitutional monarchy which operated as a crowned republic. In effect, this new dynasty, sometimes called the Pochtec regime, was a limited democracy dominated by factions of the agrarian and urban upper class merchants which held stakes in agricultural and proto-industrial ventures, while the monarchs of the 3rd dynasty were reduced to figureheads which legitimized the de-facto oligarchy which was beginning to replace the old feudal organization of the empire. In particular, the period following the 1st Reformation was characterized by the general destruction and dismantling of Calpolli towns which collectively owned the land in common. These lands would become privatized and consolidated in a process of enclosure which began to rapidly convert lands which had previously been cultivated by a large number of community members utilized small plots into a small number of large plantations and agricultural estates owned and operated by wealthy Pochtecatl. Following the consolidation of agriculture into the new plantation economy, agricultural yield began to shift towards cash crops intended for export.
In particular, crops which could be used to manufacture textiles in urban work-houses were preferred as this would generate profit upon being sold from the field, upon being sold from the work-house as textiles, and then again upon being transported and sold at a profit overseas. This early industrial economy generated a large amount of wealth for the upper classes of Zacapine society and brought an influx of foreign goods and improvements of technology into the country. However, it also brought about dissatisfaction with the nobility which found themselves increasingly sidelined by the merchant caste which they viewed as undeserving upstarts. Moreover, the agricultural policies of the Pochtec regime generated huge waves of landless peasants which emigrated into the cities looking for work, bringing mass poverty and disorder to these urban centers. Those who remained in the countryside found themselves working on land which was once theirs for poor wages, or simply out of work and facing poverty and starvation without access to the land needed to sustain themselves. While the Pochtec regime was considered a golden age by many due to the rapid advances in technology and wealth, it also brought an unprecedented level of poverty and unrest into the country, unrest which would inevitably boil over into rebellion.
Red Banner Rebellions
The Red Banners emerged gradually and in an organic, often chaotic fashion, but once they began in earnest the rebellions show of a pattern of three major waves. The first of these began slowly and was the most diffuse and poorly organized, occurring between 1756 and 1758 before it was put down by the military. However the unrest did not stop just because the fighters had been defeated, as rioting, disobedience and a nationwide low-level insurgency continued even in the "lulls" of relative peace between the major waves of rebellion. As such, the Red Banner Rebellions are generally treated as an continual process that did not disappear between the major waves of uprisings, and so it is treated as a single entity known as the Red Banner Revolution. As a concept, the "Red Banner" rebel was born in the turmoil of the 2nd Intermediate Period as an answer to the abuses of the warrior aristocracy during that time, and so by the time of the 18th century the archetype of the peasant rebel sporting a red battle flag was already well known even in the most isolated communities. Riots occurring across the burgeoning slums of the major cities however these were more easily quelled than the rural uprisings, which waged a guerilla war against the empire's military for nearly two years before being defeated in the field and seeing its members largely scatter but continue their attacks on plantations, shipments of merchandise and military installations. Banditry was observed to rise sharply around this period, both as acts of rebellion perpetrated by Red Banner fighters and as opportunistic crimes committed by common criminals taking advantage of the general collapse of law and order.
Peace was short lived after the end of the first wave of uprisings, as the army's heavy handed retaliation and the practice of collective punishment quickly engendered even greater ire among the peasantry and rallied many that had shied away from armed rebellion to the Red Banners, who rose up a second time now empowered by their new recruits. A renewed campaign of guerilla warfare raged across Zacapican from 1760 to 1766 around which time the Red Banners standing forces were once against defeated in the field and forced in hills and badlands from which they continued to harass their enemies and strike at Pochtec plantations within reach of their base areas. The third and final wave of Red Banner uprisings did not occur until 1774, by which point the Red Banners had fully transformed from a loose collection of disgruntled peasants and urban poor to a organized and complex militia which now had veteran fighters who had been practicing guerilla tactics against the government for years or decades. Simultaneously, support for the government was dropping rapidly as the effects of the unresolved civil war exacerbated many of the consequences of the Pochtec economic and political reforms, and the government's heavy handed repression further galvanized the cause of resistance against them. The final straw occured when a series of major riots once again tore through the many citizes of eastern Zacapican, which the government responded to by attacking the populations of many urban slums with the army directly, pushing not only rioters but the general population out of these difficult to control slum areas of the cities. This proved to be a fatal mistake as a large portion of these now displaced slum residents traveled into the countryside and joined the cause of the Red Banners, triggering the third and final Red Banner uprising.
Now armed with an experienced rebel army, the forces of the Red Banners quickly overran the hinterlands of the Zacaco plain and began to attack the major cities, including the capital Chicomoztoc (modern day Tequitinitlan) which fell to the rebels by 1775. The royal court and the government of the Pochtec regime was evacuated by sea to the western coast of the empire where a temporary capital was established at Tecolotlan. After a period of consolidating forces, a counter-attack began by government forces based in the mountainous western and southern regions against the Red Banners, who's rebel army had successfully captured the most populated regions and productive farmland concentrated on the Zacaco plain. The Pochtec regime was better trained and controlled the navy, maintaining access to high quality foreign weaponry. However, the rebels could now openly recruit in the streets of major cities, and had availed themselves of the contents of many municipal and rural armories as well as a portion of the imperial treasury which was left behind when the capital had been evacuated. Additionally, the Red Banners controlled the most productive agricultural land which they had immediately begun to redistribute to landless peasants and the urban poor as part of their overarching objective of sweeping land reform and the restoration of the Calpolli system. Control of the farmland made it easy for the rebels to supply their army, and furthermore denied the plantation owners among the Pochtecs the ability to raise more funds to pay for their war effort. In capturing the Zacaco region, the rebels had time on their side as the government's war effort could now no longer be sustained indefinitely.
The Pochtec regime's forces remained superior in training and weaponry right up until the end of the war, and they held defensible terrain in the hills and mountains of southern and western Zacapican which made it very difficult to dislodge them and doomed the early Red Banner attacks against them to failure. However, because of the capture of the Zacaco plains the Red Banners no longer needed to completely defeat the regime's military forces in order to win the war. Indeed, while the Pochtec regime retained access to foreign sources of supplies and weapons, their quickly declining finances meant that they needed to recapture parts of rebel held territory if they had any hopes of outlasting the Red Banners. This led to the bloodiest period of the civil war, in which better trained and well equipped Pochtec troops faced off against the determined defense of the Red Banners in their rural garrisons and fortified towns around the edges of Zacaco. Holding a defensive advantage on their own lands, supported by the local population and bolstered by the manpower of the rebellion's cities to the east, the Red Banners maintained their defense for several years.
By 1779, the Pochtec situation had become desperate. Swathes of the army had deserted due to a lack of payment, and some had even defected to the Red Banners as the rebels could now offer more reliable compensation than the government. Exacerbating this problem, the endless attacks against the entrenched peasant armies across the Zacaco plain had brought about massive casualties in many of the best units of the Pochtec army, losses which they were not in a position to replace. In March of 1799, a series of probing attacks broke through the Pochtec lines, revealing major gaps in the government force's defenses. Many among the rebellion were taken aback by the state of the Pochtec army, which they had been massively overestimating as they did not anticipate the degree to which the Pochtec army had deteriorated from the elite and dangerous fighting force it had once been. During the winter of 1799 (June-August), the Red Banner generals prepared their offensives for the following year, stockpiling weapons and supplies. In the summer of 1779-1780, much of the south fell to their campaigning armies, and much of the west had also fallen. The remnant of the Pochtec army continued to fight, holding on to a pocket surrounding the interim Pochtec capital at Tecolotlan, however these forces too fell to the Red Banners by the end of 1780. By the beginning of 1781, all resistance to the forces of the peasant rebellion had been destroyed, and the Red Banners could now dictate their terms unopposed.
Second Constitutional Reformation
Much of 1781 was spent in consolidation and deliberation between various sub factions of the Red Banners. In general, the military leaders and chief figures of the movement and the rebel army were of a poor, peasant background and most were semi-literate or had only recently become literate as part of the rebellion. Very few had interest in holding political power, and this sentiment was echoed by the rank and file of the army as well as the populace which had supported them. The primary aim of the Red Banners had always been land reform, which had now effectively been accomplished by the reformation and reinstitution of the new Calpolli system which dissolved the plantations and returned the land to the peasants under a new, more democratic council-based local apparatus. While minor factions within the more educated wing of the Red Banners expressed republican leanings and a desire to implement a national democracy free of castes and old ideas, these movements saw very little support and effectively died out before they could come to be taken seriously. The majority of Red Banner leaders along with the public were content with handing over the rights and responsibilities of high level power back to the old aristocracy, as many nobles disdained the Pochtecs and their reforms and had even sided with the Red Banners in the conflict. Coexistence between a largely ceremonial warrior aristocracy and autonomous peasant communities was believed to be an achievable goal and was readily accepted by the general public and most of the Red Banners. However, concern remained that once the peasants disarmed, they would once again be put down and exploited by the ruling class and their professional military.
Under the proposed new government, power was to be shared between the peasants and the nobility in such a way that the nobility would be able to return to their traditional role at the head of society but the rights and daily lives of the peasantry and the common folk would not be trampled. A system of constitutional monarchy at the city-state and the imperial level was devised, with the new Popular Assembly drawn directly from the population ensuring that the nobles could not simply wield their newly restored powers unchecked and harm the victory of the Red Banners. Similarly, the Red Banner rebels never disarmed and simply reorganized into a National Guard organization that would allow them to remobilize should the rights of the peasants ever face a threat be it internal or external. This military force remains separate from the standard professional armed forces under the command of the monarchy to the present day, and represents a failsafe measure to prevent abuses of power by the nobility. As part of the proposal, new noble lines were enthroned in various city states which had been stripped of nobility by the Pochtecs or placed under ad-hoc governance by rebel forces. Since the last of the 3rd Dynasty of the New Empire had been destroyed along with the Pochtec regime that supported it, a new noble line was raised to the imperial throne as the 4th dynasty of the New Empire. The ratification of the proposed new government by the Red Banners and many noble delegates represents the founding moment of the Red Banner Tribual, and of modern Zacapican.