pyrephox | Random Worldbuilding

Armatt is based loosely on Imperial-era Venice, at least in political structure. It is a reigning city-state, with a small, but well-trained army. The city controls a fair amount of territory away from its walls, but is bordered on four sides by larger, stronger countries. One hundred noble families form the elite, and from the One Hundred, the ruler is elected as a life-long appointment. You can't please the ruler and be elevated to nobility; the only way for a new Family to rise is for one of the One Hundred to be wiped out, root and branch. And then, the remaining ninety-nine will vote on what new bloodline to raise. Almost without exception, this has been one of the wealthy trade families. The nobility is not 'landed'. They possess familiar estates within the city that pass into the hands of the heirs, but much of the land is owned by the ruler, the temple, or the guilds. Almost all of the land outside of the city is properly of the office of the ruler, and is rented to tenants or loaned as rewards to citizens who do a service for the crowd. Such life-grants allow the recipient to take all the profits from the land, but not make any notable changes to the land without permission of the crown, and at the recipient's death, all land and property reverts to the possession of the crown. These 'land-lords' are wealthy but entirely beholden to the crown, and have no civil authority...they can't even punish their tenents without permission of the crown, since the land's peasants and serfs remain property of the crown. The land-lords and heads of the city's Guilds have a Second Court, where the politicking is even more vicious than among the Families.

Marriages among the Hundred are fairly peculiar. For one, they each involve three spouses. A noblewoman, a nobleman, and young female priestess of the Temple of Bedu. Bedu is the patron goddess of Armatt, and her sphere of influence is fertility, wealth, and harvest. All children of the marriage are born from the nobleman and priestess, but they are raised from birth as nobles of the nobleman and noblewoman's family. In this way, Armatti noble lines have avoided the degradation of blood and rise of inbred traits, while the monarchy and nobility of the nations around them has become steadily more decayed and unstable. Noblewomen are rendered sterile at birth by priestesses of the temple, and as such, virginity is not prized or required among them. In fact, women and men of the Hundred will often cement binding agreements between families with ritual congress, even if both participants are already married. Women of the Hundred also enjoy a great deal of freedom...they dominate the bureaucratic and administrative positions of the city, including the courts, diplomatic postings, and Great Council meetings. The ruler of the city is often, but not always, female. The men of the Hundred command the armies by which Armatt retains its freedom, as well as running the forges and glassworks, and dominating seacrafts. The Lord Martial is a position of power and influence second only to the ruler, and has only been female once in the city's thousand year history. The 'mother-wives', the priestesses who bear the noble children, are largely confined to the estates and bowers. Unlike noblewomen, a priestess who goes to her marriage bed not a virgin, or who is found to be in an affair outside her marriage, can be stoned to death, not only as an adultress but as a blasphemer. The Temple will step in in cases of abuse, but will not save a priestess from the consequences of breaking her vows.

This somewhat egalitarian outlook has filtered down to the lower classes, and women dominate the trade and craft guilds. Men dominate the arts of war, and related crafts (animal husbandry, blacksmithing, shipbuilding, architecture, etc.). Both sexes tend to be unusually well-educated for the era, an advantage that has helped them to keep their tenuous position of superiority when surrounded by larger powers.

High-class courtesans in Armatt are called 'evening priests' by the commoners. Many wealthy men not in the Hundred will sponsor an evening priest to live in their homes in a parody of the nobility's ritual. Accepted breeding practices are rather reversed, however, and the true wives are rarely pleased with the arrangement. The Temple frowns on this practice, but only prods the Hundred into cleaning out the nests of prostitutes when something truly egregious happens...such as when the brothels start to resemble mock-ups of the Temple, itself.

The Temple has both priests and priestesses. Most of the priests are younger sons of wealthy or noble families, while most of the priestesses are peasant-born and dedicated as babes to Bedu. There is a strong tradition of doing this in the lower classes: there's always the potential that a dedicated daughter will someday be chosen as the wife of one of the Hundred. Even though they'll never meet their parents or know who they were, this possibility pleases many peasant families. Daughters so dedicated are raised within the Great Temple for the first ten years of their lives, then divided into life priestesses and mother candidates, based on loyalty to the Temple, beauty, talents, and personality. No mother-wife is married before the age of 15, and many aren't married at all. The High Priest and High Priestess choose mother candidates based on the personalities, tempraments, and appearances of the nobles to be wed...a strong effort is made to match compatable triads, to minimize the chance of the mother-wife being abused or seeking outside consolation.

Other gods are also worshipped in the city. Bedu's Consort, Tir, is the god of war, storms, and death, and is very popular within the armies and naval crews. Their twin daughters, Mela and Fane, are the sun and moon, and govern knowledge and healing, respectively. Their twin sons, Levin and Durat, are the patrons of art and passionate love, respectively. A few foreign gods have made their way into the city and surroundings, but only Bath-Shabat, dark goddess of poison and lies, has a large enough following to be specifically banned by order of the crown. Her followers are secretive and solitary, but she has more than many know, especially among the Second Court of Guilds and land-lords. And many of those corrupted courtiers turn their hungry eyes to the Hundred, and scheme ways to push themselves into their illustrious ranks.