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The Kingdom of Ironfell
- Part of the Twelve Kingdoms
Realm: Sovereign
Population: 1,700,000
Military: 19,000 (moderate)
Economy: Poor, based on agriculture grown on marginal, hilly land. Trade throttled by Ang'arta
Language: Common, also Uskal (in Djorain)
Ironfell is perhaps the poorest of the Twelve Kingdoms, the most war-torn, and the least fortunate. It is located on the northern portion of the Southern Shield highlands, and as a consequence has poor farmland and a rocky, cliff-strewn coastline with no good seaports. Despite these poor conditions, however, geography has left Ironfell as a constant prize to be fought over between greater powers on all sides.
Before the Otessan armies came in their relentless march north, much of what is today Ironfell was an independent principality allied with--and sometimes vassal to--V'tavia. When the Otessans invaded, V'tavia made its stand in Ironfell, trying to keep the fighting on foreign soil. The land was brutally pillaged during three short, brutal wars, and thereafter fought over during the great V'tavia-Otessa conflicts of the 4th and 5th centuries. Otessa turned Ironfell into a heavily garrisoned buffer state. The Calant people and nobles there were heavily oppressed, but the imperial governor gradually co-opted the natives.
The Otessan army was composed in large part of Uskal warriors from the northern stretches of the Empire. As rewards for their service in conquering the Calant lands, these Uskal warriors were rewarded with land seized from Calants who had opposed the invasion. Initially, the Uskal settlements were scattered all over Ironfell. This Uskal warrior elite became the fiercest defenders of Empire, taking up arms themselves to defend their privileges and suppress Calant uprisings.
Under the Otessan occupation Ironfell recovered somewhat due to heavy military spending. The Larian Rebellion of 519 changed the province's nobility but had little effect on the common people. During the late 6th century, however, V'tavian invasions began a long cycle of violence and destruction for the kingdom. Larian and Thalite armies marched all over the kingdom, living off the land and burning out the peasants of their opponents.
The Larian Restoration in the early 8th century brought a respite from war between Ironfell and V'tavia, but the kingdom's small wealth was soon spent in foreign wars as the House of Lar staked out claims through marriage to other lands and thrones across the continent. V'tavia also continued to interfere, invading repeatedly and intervening in succession decisions. Disaffected nobles and minor branches of the Larian family often appealed to the Prince of V'tavia for redress of grievances, and the Thalites always obligingly sent troops to back up their decisions.
During the great V'tavian-Corian wars of the 10th and 11th centuries, Ironfell assumed a critical strategic role for the V'tavians. The border with Ironfell lay close enough to the Tav that Larian armies could--and did--strike at the very heart of Thalite power when V'tavia's armies were fighting to the north and east. What began as Larian opportunism quickly blossomed into a formal alliance between the House of Lar and the Corian House of Teflin.
V'tavia could not easily support a two-front war, and so in 993, V'tavia invaded Ironfell in full force and evicted the entire Larian nobility. A pliant native family, the Fellins, were raised to the monarchy and backed up by the younger sons of V'tavian vassals, who were given castles in Ironfell in reward for service against the Coeur. To further occupy the House of Lar, V'tavia sponsored the independence of the city of Nemarie in the western part of the Larian kingdom of Porphia.
House Fellin ruled Ironfell for the next century with varying degrees of competence. The kingdom continued to be a plaything in the rivalry between the Thalites and the Larians. Neither house was terribly tied to questions of honor and loyalty, and at various times the Fellin kings of Ironfell (supposed V'tavian puppets) were backed by Larian armies against pro-Thalite opposition, only to see the sides switch the next year. The chaos also saw the Larian nobility creep back into Ironfell through marriage and service to the Fellin monarchy.
The principal policy success of the Fellin dynasty was the mass expulsion of Uskals from their land. The process was initiated by land-hungry Calant barons, but when Uskal nobles and their men-at-arms resisted violently, House Fellin called up the kingdom's feudal levies to suppress the Uskals. The ensuing carnage saw tens of thousands of deaths on both sides, mostly civilians, and ended with the surviving Uskals retreating to the hilly, barren province that they called Djorain.
This process was mirrored somewhat later in Porphia, with Uskal farmers driven into the hills to the now densely overpopulated principality of Djorain. From their high strongholds the Uskals maintain permanent martial law and a near-constant state of conflict with their Calant neighbors--always taking advantage of periods of chaos and weakness to expand their territory.
In 1077, the last Fellin king died childless. Ironfell being Ironfell, a violent civil war immediately followed, which quickly escalated into open war between Porphia and V'tavia (with the Coeur fulfilling its end of the old alliance by invading Knight's Lake). A stalemate quickly arose after a year of fighting, and with both sides pressed by problems in their rear (Nemarie and the Coeur, respectively) the two houses agreed to support a compromise candidate, Baron Tyndole Sidren.
House Sidren was a foreign house, holding extensive lands in Sebiland. Believed to be impartial and unconstrained by centuries of feuds, everyone involved hoped for a brief respite. Tyndole I proved to be a competent and fair monarch, shrewd enough to offend neither of his powerful foreign neighbors and beloved by his subjects for simply not doing anything to cause their deaths. His son and successor, Nedrick (crowned 1092) lost popularity after suffering defeats to the growing power of Ang'arta, but Tyndole II (crowned 1126) reversed some of these losses and engaged in several innovative legal and agricultural reforms designed to improve the lot of his impoverished domain. Tyndole also achieved renown by helping to mediate the settlement between V'tavia and the Coeur that ended two centuries of warfare and unified the two principalities into a single kingdom.
Tyndole III (crowned 1169) was young, handsome, famed for his prowess on the battlefield and possessed a beautiful wife and three young sons. His reign began auspiciously with a victory over a Baozite army in 1170 (despite the continued creeping advance of Ang'artan territory) and looked to continue the surprisingly stable and successful Sidren dynasty before tragedy struck.
In 1176, while visiting the keep of a vassal near the Center Seas, a force of Baozite raiders appeared undetected in the middle of the night, sacked the castle and killed the entire royal family (saving only the queen, taken off to the Ang'artan brothels). The Iron Horde came marching over the border and there were no nobles with strong claims to the throne.
Very quickly, Prince Garois du Lar of Porphia (brother of the king) volunteered himself as the defender of Ironfell against the Baozite armies. Raising a force of men-at-arms and "volunteers" from across Porphia, he marched into southern Ironfell where he was welcomed with open arms by the terrified population.
Garois fought several pitched battles against Ang'artan armies with mixed results and in late 1177 reached an armistice with the Baozites. Despite agreeing to the loss of more than a tenth of Ironfell's territory (including some of the kingdom's richest lands in the north) and giving Ang'arta its long-sought "road to the sea" this agreement was initially hailed by most of Ironfell's nobility. Garois settled in for the winter and kept mute about his future plans.
One critic, however, was Princess Arenge Sidren, Tyndale III's cousin, who was married to Elaric Thalia, the nephew of Prince Rennar I of V'tavia. Though Ironfell had not previously recognized inheritance through the female line, Arenge denounced Garois as a foreign interloper who had illegitimately surrendered Ironfell's land and who planned to usurp the kingdom's throne.
In the spring of 1178 Arenge landed in Ironfell with a small force and claimed the throne of Ironfell for her young son Nedrick. Given the absence of strong claimants, Nedrick's was as strong as any other claim by blood, and even Garois--who almost certainly was hoping to become king himself--was prepared to reluctantly accept Nedrick as the next king. The sticking point, however, was the regency for the 7-year-old boy.
Garois, a Larian, was unwilling to accept a regency led by Nedrick's father or mother because of their Thalite connections. Moreover he attacked Arenge and Elaric for failing to come to Ironfell's aid against the Baozites. Garois's Ironfellian allies proposed a Larian regency, and the stage was set for another chapter in Ironfell's bloody history.
In April 1178 a Porphian force under the young knight Alain d'Escardy occupied a strategic castle in northeastern Ironfell that controlled a key harbor, enabling Garois to ward off V'tavian intervention. Arenge took this as an act of war and moved with a small army to besiege d'Escardy. When Arenge refused Garois's demand to lift the siege he attacked, driving her off and beginning a new civil war.
Under pressure from the churches, Garois and Arenge both agreed to suspend their fighting if Ang'arta invaded again. Recognizing this fact, the Iron Horde stayed put but opened up the borders for raiding parties, pillaging land and attacking soldiers and peasants on both sides.
With a stronger military force and with V'tavia blocked from directly intervening, Garois won a series of battles and captured castles from several of Arenge's key local allies, finally forcing her to flee the country as winter descended. With a firm grip on the country, Garois arranged for a collection of Ironfellian nobles to offer him the throne and accepted, being crowned Garois I of Ironfell on January 1, 1179.
The new Larian Restoration did not last long. Garois's army was unable to effectively contain continued Baozite raids, and affected lords grew discontented, extending overtures to Arenge in V'tavia. In May, Elaric Thalia landed with his son and a V'tavian army to renew the challenge against the "Usurper."
The next six months saw brutal fighting and the deaths of much of the flower of the Porphian and V'tavian nobility. (Garois's young son Corien won several key victories but was routed at the Battle of Oakbridge when an expected relief force under d'Escardy failed to arrive, starting a lifelong enmity between the two men.) Finally, the two sides drew up for a climactic battle in the Forest of Sorrows. The Porphians were winning until a stray arrow cut down Garois, causing some of his soldiers to switch sides and others to desert. The Porphians were driven from the field in disarray and effectively conceded the Sidren-Thalite claims to the throne.
Nedrick II Sidren was crowned at the end of 1179 with his mother Arenge as regent and his father, Elaric Thalia, as Captain of the Realm. Upon attaining his majority, Nedrick has continued his alliance with V'tavia-indeed relying on V'tavian backing to hold his border against the fearsome Ang'artan armies.
Other than the continual erosion of her territory to Baozite raiders, the other notable action in Ironfell lately has to do with the Uskal Djorainis, who invaded Porphia in 1216. This has coincided with a lack of conflict on the border between Djorain and Calant Ironfell, raising suspicions that King Nedrick has engaged in a tacit alliance with Djorain to punish their mutual Porphian enemies.
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