War of the Golden Coast
| This is an article on the History of Feyworld | |
| Years: 559 NC to 564 NC | |
| Age: The Third Age of Man | |
| Continent: Aurea | |
| Following Article | |
| Gabinian War | |
The War of the Golden Coast was a four-year war fought between the Zetian Republic and Aescalapea over control of the Aurean Sea and the wealth of the coastline that gave the war its name. It began in 192 BI amid the collapse of a decade of Aescalapean-Zetian trade and ended in 187 BI with the sack of Dracar, the fall of the Aescalapean crown, and the founding of the Zetian Republic's first overseas colony under House Gabinius.
Background
Trade between Zeth and Aescalapea began around 200 BI, when the first Aescalapean ships reached the Zetian docks carrying goods out of the barbarian north. Among that cargo was the aurelia-shell, a small coastal mollusk whose crushed and cured meat yielded a rare golden dye, harvested by the Velsuni fisherfolk of the shoreline south of what later became Treva. The dye's rarity and richness earned that whole stretch of coast, from Velsuni and Tarnii territory down through Aescalapea proper, the name Zetian merchants recorded it under: the Golden Coast. A formal trade agreement between the Zetian Republic and the Aescalapean crown followed, and it held for roughly eight years.
The dye trade was never an open one. The Aescalapean crown, then held by House Statillius under King Brinatus Statillius, claimed a royal monopoly over the aurelia harvest, licensing only a handful of Velsuni diving-clans to gather the shell and paying them a fraction of what the finished dye fetched in Zeth. That monopoly was the true source of Aescalapea's sudden wealth, and it was also, in hindsight, the war's real prize long before anyone in either capital called it that.
Outbreak
In the years after the Ganeic War, the young Republic built its first standing navy and set it to patrolling the Aurean Sea against piracy along its new trade routes. In 192 BI, one vessel that had long evaded those patrols was finally caught in the act of raiding Zetian shipping, and its captain proved to be Ovius Statillius, a cousin of King Brinatus himself and, by several accounts, the crown's own quiet partner in selling aurelia-dye outside the royal monopoly at cut rates to buyers the King could never be seen dealing with directly.
King Brinatus tried to contain the damage by disowning his cousin publicly and having him executed for piracy before Zetian envoys had even finished making their demands, but the gesture came too late to matter. The Senate's demands had grown in the telling: alongside reparations, they now wanted a permanent share of the aurelia trade and a Zetian factor seated in Dracar to oversee it. No Aescalapean king could grant that and keep his throne, and Brinatus was no exception. Talks collapsed within the month, and the two states declared war on one another. It is this second, harder betrayal, an execution that bought nothing, that Aescalapean memory would come to resent more than the war itself, and the name the King's Humiliation stuck long after the more diplomatic War of the Golden Coast became the Imperial standard.
The war that followed, remembered ever after as the War of the Golden Coast, opened as a fight the Republic was not ready for. Aescalapea's galleys and biremes, crewed and provisioned in no small part by the Velsuni and Tarnii coastal peoples, outmatched the newly-raised Zetian fleet at every turn under the command of Admiral Herenneia Pontia, whose family had captained Aescalapean merchant convoys for three generations before the crown gave her a war fleet to command. Her decisive victory came at the Battle of the Amber Shoals, where she drew the smaller Zetian squadrons into the shoals south of the Golden Coast and destroyed most of the Republic's deep-water galleys in a single afternoon. The Republic could not wrest control of the Aurean Sea away from her after that. By 189 BI, the Aescalapean navy had closed every sea lane into Zeth itself, blockading the Republic's own capital.
The Land Campaign and the Fall of Dracar
The blockade was lifted only when the Republic changed its strategy entirely, marching its infantry overland through allied Ganesia to strike at Aescalapea directly. The Aescalapean fleet abandoned the siege of Zeth to defend its own shores, and much of the campaign that followed was fought across the same Velsuni and Tarnii ground that had supplied its navy. Aescalapea's land levies, raised in haste and never intended for anything but garrison duty, met the Republic's legions at the Battle of Ganos Ford and broke within a single day, opening the road to Dracar itself. On land, Aescalapea had no answer for the Republic's legions. By 187 BI, after four years of war, Dracar fell to Quintus Sabatina of House Gabinius, who had succeeded Gracchus of House Zetar as Defender of the Republic. King Brinatus is said to have died on the palace steps rather than surrender them, the last of House Statillius and last King of Aescalapea. The Aescalapean royal palace at Dracar was dismantled stone by stone, and a temple to Galea, later known as the Temple of Galea Triumphant, was built from its ruins.
Aftermath
Aescalapea's defeat made it the Republic's first overseas colony, and House Gabinius was granted governorship of it as Quintus Sabatina's reward. The House wasted little time moving its own seat of power from Zeth to Dracar, and the administration of the province under House Gabinius proved to be cruel and predatory. Some years into that governorship, House Gabinius commissioned the Arch of Sabatina outside the Temple of Galea Triumphant, its relief carved with Quintus Sabatina's triumphal march through Dracar, and had the temple's own floor laid with a matching mosaic of the same procession; both were as much a claim to legitimacy as a memorial; a conquered people are told, in stone and tesserae alike, exactly whose city this now is.
The Velsuni, Ossarae, and Tarnii peoples of the coast were absorbed into the same Imperial peace as the rest of Aescalapea; within a few generations, Zetian and later Aurean speech had replaced their own tongues, and their names survive today only in Zetian trade-records and a scatter of folk practice in the region that would one day become Treva. House Statillius fared little better in the historical record: its royal line ended with Brinatus on the palace steps, though a persistent and unverified tradition in Dracar's older families holds that a branch of Ovius's own descendants survived quietly under changed names, waiting out the centuries of Gabinian rule and every regime since. House Gabinius's rule over its new colony was never gentle, and by 140 BI its provocations against neighboring Milosia had dragged the Republic into a second, far longer war: the Gabinian War.
