Southern Empire

The lands that are now the southern Empire were once ruled by proud independent city-states controlling trading routes over the Perassic Sea and the steppe. They invited the Empire into their internal feuds and one by one they were absorbed, some by treaty, some by conquest. Calradian aristocrats intermarried with merchant princes and nomad chiefs, many of whom claimed descent from the kings, champions and demigods of eastern legends. In recent generations, as these towns grew to become some of the richest and most populous in the continent, many Senatorial families elsewhere became suspicious that the southerners would someday try to make one of their own into a hereditary monarch. The southern nobility's support for Rhagaea, an unapolegetic advocate of the dynastic principle, would seem to confirm these fears.