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
|
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 west. 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.
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 a well-known Aescalapean noble. What talks followed between the Zetian Senate and the Aescalapean crown collapsed quickly, and the two states declared war on one another.
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, and the Republic could not wrest control of the Aurean Sea away from them. 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. 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. The Aescalapean royal palace at Dracar was dismantled stone by stone, and a temple to Galea 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 decades that followed proved House Gabinius as cruel governors of the new province. 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 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.
