In the Caliphate of Azithan, known to its neighbors as the Necromancer Kingdom ...
The Church seeks to urbanize as many cities as possible. After all, what is a city of Faithful if not a consolidated power source to build lifeless?
The pressure for population means a few things:
The Caliphate sends specialized work groups into towns and cities, building apartments for the Faithful, and bath houses for all. These are the exact same model from city to city.
A basic tenement is a little slice of city by itself: residences, storage for flour, lifeless repair, first floor retail. Even a small shrine, and housing for a humble priest. These are designed to have running water, often impossible in the smaller towns. The lifeless collect refuse and vermin. Many of the apartments have balconies, which support minor crops.
Roads are built from one city to another, made of standardized materials. This is usually concrete or brick. This is made absolutely standard. When two roads merge into each other, the new road is exactly the size of the two contributory roads.
Water is brought in when possible. As always, the rich cut in line and get water first. After that, the first priority is the public bath houses, to ensure people are cleaner. Then, the tenement houses built and run by the church. The lifeless are good at hauling water, and do need to be cleaned and kept in good repair.
The church raises orphans. Those who do not become monks or priests often join settlement parties, bringing in additional population to towns and cities.
Ask questions about the lifeless and cities, or make up your own details.
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You make a big deal about the bathhouses, with the primary motivation being sanitation. Would that really be important for the Caliphate? Do they want their populace leading long, healthy lives, or productive but short lives?
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford Separating out my own mental focus is part of why I make this public. :-)
ReplyDeleteI've recently thought a lot about public bathrooms in modern society, and how it reflects on us. So, for example, most places most business are legally required to make their bathrooms accessible to the public. And they don't.
London, I learned, has uninals that pop up at night for use by men and men alone. This is not considered sexist by the UK government, as neither men nor women want to smell the smell of male urine against buildings. (This is the most ridiculous thing.)
I realize this is not a very common subject to have one's brain fixate on, and it'll probably wear off in a few more weeks.
For this; the power of the caliphate ultimately comes from the faithful, right. The priests are selected by their people, and if they lose their backing then they can no longer be a parish priest. Which means they can't be part of the representative priestocracy, or at least play a much smaller roll.
Which also means giving more bread and circuses to your people starts to be a thing. Buy those votes with flour, with shelter, with running water. Buy them in the great coliseums, where lifeless warriors fight lions.
Keep the people happy and safe, so they can put more energies to prayer. And so they keep coming back for all the things you give them.
Does that make sense, or am i letting my own wants interfere with what makes sense?
It makes sense, but I'm not sure it's particularly efficient. More people living less long gives just as many prayers but more corpses.
ReplyDeleteI guess these decisions are being made by the heads of each parish so there is no reason why they would all be the same. Some will be like yours keeping the faithful happy, healthy and long lived. Others will cram in as many humans as possible burning their faith and taking their bodies for lifeless decades quicker.
Tell me more, Brian Ashford . Tell me of the Principality of Ash, within the Caliphate of Azithan.
ReplyDeleteThe priests serve many masters. Firstly their superiors within their order who push for each congregation to be as productive as possible. Secondly the congregation themselves, each of whom places their own demands on the priest's ceremony and guidance and education. The priesthood have to consider the Principality in all they do, following the laws and customs of the land and ensuring that they use their power only in ways which benefit the nation. Finally, the priesthood are slaves to productivity.
ReplyDeleteWithout the time and faith of their congregation they have no power to tend to their lifeless. A larger congregation means more power but also the need for more food production and more homes, more lumber for warmth and construction.
This means that Caliphate communities tend to top out at cities of 10,000 humans, this is the point where all the resources of the congregations are working flat out just to maintain what they already have. These cities are small but dense, mostly built of tenements each housing a congregation of a hundred.
In the Principality of Ash this is all true, but the priorities were slightly skewed in it's early years. A distant church calling themselves the Order of the True White riled up their followers with false tales of legions of flesh eating ghouls. A mob of warriors brimming with false faith burned through the Principality's lifeless. They were driven off but it left the Principality weak and vulnerable.
The priests agreed that they simply didn't have enough lifeless to build the tenements as usual. They built their chapels so that the people could gather and share their faith. They built their mills and bakeries so that the people could eat. Homes and bathhouses could wait.
Life was hard. food was sparse, nights on the floor of the chapel were cold and for years there was no time to improve the lot of the people. This life was too hard for many of the elderly, the priests tried not to be too pleased that they had more lifeless and fewer mouths to feed. Disease passed through, once and then twice and suddenly the priests had a surplus of lifeless to work with.
They took the time to build dormitories for their people, but they had time for no more than that. The lifeless were needed to expand their communities. More farms, more chapels. The people were encouraged to breed, more faithful makes for a stronger Principality and quickly the Principality of Ash grew to be one of the strongest, and most deprived in the Caliphate.
After two generations no one in the Principality would dare place themselves above the community. The Priests here know that their people have it hard but even those that want to improve their people's lot know that they can't . They have grown so far and so fast that they need all the lifeless and all the faith they can get just to maintain their expansive land. Some of their superiors from the capital have visited and been shocked that the congregations here still live like this but they understand that if they build the homes and bathhouses their people will be healthier and live longer, and the supply of new lifeless will dry up. If all the extra building work doesn't cause a famine, the loss of lifeless certainly will.
The elders in the capital look on the Principality of Ash with pride and horror. They had thought the land would be lost to crusaders thirty years ago, now it is the strongest land in the Caliphate, but also the poorest. Currently these elders are discussing how they can help Ash, but should the world turn to war, perhaps they will be looking to how the Principality's values can help the Caliphate.
I was thinking about the standardised tenements. The apartments would all be upstairs so the chapel should be at the bottom of the stairwell effectively forcing everyone to offer a brief prayer every time they come and go. It would also allow each priest to keep an eye on his congregation.
ReplyDeleteIf each tenement had ten apartments, each holding a family of about ten, than gives a congregation of 100 for each small chapel and priest.
100 tenements would give a city of 10,000 which is what the Ancient Romans thought was the optimum number for a city. It's also the average population in the local areas which organically form in modern cities.
Cool.
ReplyDeleteI like how different this is from what I've come up with. Also, I have a cold, so take this with a grain of salt. Lemme stress I think this is pretty cool.
On city size and tenements:
-- Most of the population of the ancient city of Rome lived in tenements, yeah. They didn't do this in all of the cities, because land wasn't near so valuable as in Rome. Part of the reason you need it is city walls.
-- Most cities, yeah, 10,000 is perfect. The Capital is bigger, probably 100,000. There may be other cities at 50,000 or so, effectively regional capitals.
-- If an apartment is 6 stories (common in Rome, because concrete is impressive), with first floor retail / shrine / priest, then you've got 5 floors in an apartment. If these are 100 feet by 50 feet on a floor, that's 5,000 square feet per floor. Times five is 25,000. You can absolutely have 100 people there, but that'd be including kids. And kind of tight, at 250 sq ft per person, which makes sense for slums within the protection of city walls.
-- Cities have things other than tenements. Whether that's homes of the middle class and rich, offices, etc. The smith is probably not in a tenement, because fire bad. The cobbler may well be. Also, a larger temple.
-- I see the tenements as part of the welfare state, for lack of a better term. Some of the middle class, and most of the lower classes would live there. Rich people -- like landed gentry -- live in private houses. Probably with both a city house, and an estate in the country. In Rome, apparently, while the higher floors were completely shitty, the 2nd and even 3rd floors had running water. And the 2nd was often one single apartment, rented by the year to a rich person/family.
-- The Principality of Ash has a lot of Lifeless, yeah. There's a lot of work Lifeless don't do well, basically things that require a lot of skill. Maybe I've not been super clear on that, but everything from blacksmith to tailor to cobbler needs to be done by human hands. Clerk and cop, too. The lifeless are great at following commands, not so great at interpreting them. Priests and wizards can come up with more complicated commands, but a single lifeless can only hold so many.
-- Principality of Ash would have an excess of unskilled labor, and very little high skill labor. They could either trade that to other Principalities, or have a poverty based existence. Sounds like they are going with the latter. Ash may not have much of a market economy, as there's not a lot of excess.
-- In most of the Caliphate, before around 12, you don't participate in services. You're in school instead, learning how to read, as well as additional work. Around 12 is when you'd start an apprenticeship in a guild. From 12 to 50, you do the services. Call it 38 years, and they are pretty healthy so maybe an 80% rate? So, that's 30.4 effective years. In Ash, they probably start earlier -- 8? -- and die earlier -- 40? So, that's 32 years. Maybe less. They are less healthy, so maybe a 60% rate? That's 19.2, call it 20.
Each person, over their life, contributes more in the other realms. Which we could have figured: Ash makes up quality with quantity. Delicious quantity.
Are you cool with the name? I'm thinking it is near the Pole, so colder than the rest. If The Caliphate was Russia (it isn't), then Ash would be siberia. Does that jive with your ideas?
Yeah, that all works for me. A lot of it I was already thinking but I didn't want to write too much!
ReplyDeleteFeel free to cut and paste as you like, it's your setting and I'm just brainstorming.
One maybe way to save Ash from itself: send in a collective of orphans. A hundred orphans, with their lifeless. They show up and build their own places to live. While Ash breeds faster, this puts the freedom and richness that the rest of the Caliphate has on display.
ReplyDelete