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This article describe the Kayamucan World during the 14th century both on civilizational and Geostrategical standpoints.
The Kayamuca Sea was so named after the Kayamuca Empire, which controlled all of its islands and shorelines. The sea link three continents together: Norumbia, Oxidentale, and since the arrival of Latins during the 11th century: Belisaria.
In 1163, the revolt of the Iroquoian speaking Atiwandaronk on the northern edge of the Kayamuca Empire triggered a series of event that led to the fracturing, weakning, and ultimately downfall of the Empire, although a rump state would survive in Ayeli and Tikal, continuing to claim the imperial title. But the event that really marked the change of times was the Belfrasian Crusade from 1256 to 1261, where the Latin Empire led by the Ostian dynasty and the Ilok'tab Dynasty opposed one another for the control of Norumbia. The resulting treaty that divided the remnants of the Kayamuca Empire between the two powers served as the basis on which the 14th century Kayamucan World would be built on.
Western Latin World
Between the 11th and 15th centuries, Latium was divided between two competing crowns, the Claudii dynasty of Adrianople and the Ostian dynasty in Ascanium. However, by the 12th century, the Ostians had become the dominant of the two crowns, leading to their slow reconquest of the Latium. This included the consolidation of their markets into more attractive hubs than those of their rivals, and the reinforcement of their fleet, allowed the Ostian Emperors to start more advantageous, expensive, and lucrative enterprises. These included wars against the Holy Audonian Empire, or their patronage of the mercantile expeditions crossing the Salacian Ocean to trade with the remnants states of the Kayamuca Empire in Norumbia. But under the rule of Empress Theodora I, the Ostian dynasty took it a step further and managed to establish colonies and vassals in Norumbia in the aftermath of the Belfrasian Crusade. This victory boosted their prestige and, after a period of difficulty due to the expenses of the Crusade, allowed the Latins the control over most of the goods transiting in the Northern Salacian Ocean, adding massively to their wealth.
Expansion of the Latin Empire
But at the start of the 14th century, the Ostians had only implemented themselves seriously in Norumbia a mere 40 years ago. The Caesar had direct representative in the major trade hubs and some other portuary cities. These included the cities of Beikena where the Crusaders had first landed in 1256, or the newly established colony of Thessalona. These urban settlements, with their communities of traders and sailors dependent on commerce with Belisaria, had already been under the influence of missionaries since the 11th century, and had in their majority converted to their new hegemon' religion after the Crusades.
During and after the Crusade, the Latins had confiscated the lands that had belonged to the warlords, tribes, or cities that had opposed them, as well as all of the old Kayamuca Empire "imperial lands" that hadn't been appropriated by other warring factions. These lands were redistributed among the natives allies of the Latins as rewards, but also granted to veterans and officers, re-creating the Feudal system the Caesars of Ascanium oversaw back in their homeland. There was also the hope that, through the duties and obligations owed to their Caesars, these new landowners would help pay off the debts incurred by the Empire in the previous decades.
Allied and Federated kingdoms
Beyond their coastal bastions and portuary powerbases, the effective authority of the Latins quickly diminished. Instead, the Empire relied on foederati, Client Kings who had been granted recognition of their previous titles as well as well as new lands from the Confiscations performed by the Crusaders in exchange for their conversion to Fabrianism and signature of a military alliance with the Latins.
These new allies proved a vital and necessary intermediary between the Natives and the Belisarians colonists. After the Crusade, foederati would represent the majority of troops the Empire could muster on the other side of the Salacian Ocean, colonists and settlers being too few to be solely relied upon despite harsher conscription laws for these populations, and the estimated cost of another Crusade remaining too high for it to be viable less than 50 years after the previous grand expedition.
Marriages between newly titled-crusaders and these kings also reinforced their ties with the Latins. The Ostians also implemented a "naturalization-program" for these loyal natives, offering the enviable status of citizen, either as a reward for military and political service or in exchange of a high fee. Because of its distance from Latium proper, citizenship-grants in Norumbia were dependent on the will of the Imperial representatives in Norumbia, and many of them used these grants to build up their network of clients. By the end of the century, these two pillars of the Latin rule in Norumbia had played their role and the division of the landowning aristocracy between "Settlers" and "Client Kings" had mostly disappeared, replaced instead by a multi-faceted but united oligarchy birthed from their union. Many of the most influential families in modern Belfras and Mocapaha can trace their roots back to this metis upper-class of the late 14th and 15th centuries.
Mutulese Market Network
After the Belfrasian Crusade and the final destruction of the Kayamuca Empire, the Mutul led by the Ilok'tab Dynasty became an important player in the Kayamuca Sea, in a constant rivalry with the Latin Empire.
The Crusade represent a real turning point for the Ilok'tab imperium. Despite their official propaganda presenting the Belfrasian campaign as a resounding success, establishing new allies and vassal states in Norumbia, the reality is that it failed its primary goal which was to drive the Latins out from Norumbia. What followed was a difficult period for the K'iche Dynasty : the Tecuman Plague, Eastern Campaigns, and Xuman Crusade were all events that tested the Mutul system and forced it to re-adapt itself to the new circumstances.
The Reformation process really peaked under Ka K'uk'umam, known as Tecuman II "the Wise" in Latin chronicles of the era. The symbols of this changing society was the move of the capital from K'umakah to K'alak Muul in 1318, crystalizing the changing goals of the Divine Throne now concerned mostly by the Kayamuca Sea and no longer constrained to the hinterlands of the Mutul, and the publication of the Bitzk'uh in 1326.
Tecumanic Reformation
Ka K'uk'umam was a patron of scholars and savants. At his new court, he maintained a number of theologians from across the Mutul and organized literary jousts and religious debates. Among his protegees were a small groups of Fabrians monks who were among the first to produce Mutli-latin dictionaries and chronicles about court life in the Mutul. It's probably inspired by the structure of the Bible, and fearing a lack of religious unity would make the Mutul an easy prey for Sarpetic missionaries as it did in Norumbia, that K'uk'umam demanded that every temple across the Divine Kingdom send to K'alak Muul copies of every book and codices in their possession as well as at least one representative so that an Orthodoxy could be established. It's during this vast religious campaign that Uh Chichij was able to make the demonstration of his new printing method to the royal court. This new press would be used by K'uk'uman to distribute across the Divine Kingdom the newly compiled Bitzk'uh.
All in all, Tecuman II' rule is often considered by historians as the true birth of White Path as a coherent religion. The publication of the Bitzk'uh and the development of the state-sponsored Orthodoxy was followed by decade of persecutions against Shamanistic and Magic traditions that rejected the clerical structure of the White Path, but also of certain theologies considered a threat to the newly created State such as the Monadist movement, considered too close to Sarpetic religions to be tolerated.
The Universal Market
The Ilok'tab had already seen the rebirth of the market-centered traditional system of the Mutul, which had been abandoned since the end of the Chaan Dynasty. The end of the Kayamuca Empire saw an economic boom for the trader-elite of the Divine Kingdom, adding new markets to its system where previously the strict state-controlled economy of the Kayamucans had meant trade between the Mutul and its closest neighbors had been limited to smuggling, assimilated to piracy and acts of war. Despite the continuous Commerce raiding and Proxy wars between the Latin Empire and Divine Kingdom across the 14th century, trade boomed between the two and their vassals and allies. iron tools, steel weapons, Mirrors, glass, wine, and Belisarian spices (Cumin, Saffron, Coriander, Anise...) were brought-in by Latin traders, or produced by Latin settlers, and exchanged for platinum, jade and turquoise, dyes, cotton, and Oxidentale spices (Chili, Cocoa, Vanilla...).
The introduction of glasswares in the Mutul proved to be an unexpected economic revolution. Chocolate could now be carried in its liquid state and more easily be controled, stamped, and taxed by authorities. Cocoa beans continued to be used for small transactions, but the rampant threat of fake-beans mixed in larger quantities of cocoa no longer constrained larger exchanges. In the early decades of the century Mutuleses Slave raiders were especially encouraged to bring back Latins artisans. Ironsmiths famously but, above all elses : Glass makers. The Royal Glass Factory of K'alak Muul was thus first established by enslaved Latin artisans bought by the Divine Throne for a fortune and then further equipped and maintained at high costs, just to help meet the new demand for bottles.
Constant expeditions across the Kayamuca Sea proved both costly and risky for lone entrepreneurs, even from the trader-nobility. As a result, the 14th century saw the development of shares and bonds as financiary tools to help develop trade. To pay their expanding armies, the Ilok'tab ended up also adopting these new securities and either distributing them to their soldiery or selling them directly on K'alak Muul marketplaces. The development of securities and financial assests would continue and be refined thourough the century and the next, leading to the creation of dedicated marketplaces and of a financial world that would find its golden age 300 years later at the apex of the Mutul' Oversea Empire.
Norumbian partners and protectorates
Following the Belfrasian Crusade not all Kayamucan Norumbia, then known as Tekamora, fell under Ostian rule. Modern southern Belfras, such as the modern state of Eunos, remained independent. The inhabitants of these lands were Anumpa speakers who probably settled the region centuries before the Tsalagi migration of the late Tekamoran era (6th - 7th century CE ?) who became the dominant ethnies of the regions to their northeast under the Kayamucans.
Under the Kayamucans, the Anumpa people were separated into clans, which mostly respected the pre-conquest social groupings, and then regrouped under Kayamucans leaders nominated from Gadu. Because of the nature of the Empire' economy, the Anumpas remained a mostly rural people, expanding their farmlands deeper inland each generation than form urban settlements silently discouraged by the Kayamucans. The only cities of note were thus coastal ports settled by Tsalagi and, increasingly, Runakuna people, the dominant ethnies of the Empire. Each of these ports would become its own warlord state with the slow collapse of the Kayamucans.
It's on the side of these city-states that the Mutul intervened during the Belfrasian Crusade. They would quickly integrate their patron' Market Network and grow as trade hubs between the North and the South. Beside trade, Latins and Mutuleses also sent religious missions, the later wanting to spread their newly compiled Bitzk'uh as Orthodoxy while the former wished to convert, and potentially subvert, the people.
These clients were used thourough the 14th and 15th centuries as a launching point for further expeditions northward against the Latins. While the 14th century was thus marked mostly by a long lasting naval warfare between the two hegemonic power, with periodic raids on coastal settlements and even sieges and ranged land battles to contest the control of import ports, islands, and borderlands, it's only later in the 15th century that the attention of both power would shift westward with the Mutuleses and their Norumbians allies trying to stop, or at least slow down, the Latin colonisation of these new territories. Once the Latins and their allies became dominant on both coast, the Mutul and its client-states were forced into a defensive posture as they faced an intensification of the Latium' war efforts in Norumbia. After a series of naval and land victories, the Latins were free to steadily conquer southern Belfras, one city after the other. It would take them another century of effort to truly push their control deeper inland, but by the 17th century the attention of the Mutul was firmly set on westward and thus the Latium remained unchallenged in Norumbia.
New Conquests in Oxidentale
Profiteering from the collapse of the Kayamuca Empire, the Mutul paracheived its conquests of the deceased empire' Oxidentalese holdings. In 1314 Gadu, the last capital of the Kayamucans, was destroyed during the Runakuna Revolt, an uprising of the Runakuna settlers who, despite having been displaced from Norumbia to the southern borderland, had retained a strong identity and now dealt the final blow to the dying empire. The Runakuna would form a new enemy for the Mutul, who campaigned annually against them between 1315 and 1325. Ultimately, the Runakuna were defeated and forced south of the Ucayare river. The Mutul integrated all the land up until roughtly Gadu, leaving the rest to tributaries, generally ethnic leaders from other Kayamucan minorities who helped the Mutul against the Runakunas. The Kingdom of Redisus find its roots from this era.
The Runakuna would remain a concern for the Mutul for the rest of the century, as they followed closely their migration south-eastward, intervening multiple time to prevent them from settling in the Nojwitz mountains. Their migration would continue on until they reached the Antis region and end up establishing their own Empire there, Kayamucha, in 1434.