Bysandium

**Bysandium** was an ancient empire stretching over hundreds of miles of desert and some other holdings that are now several meters underwater. It existed from around 1050 BE to 1400 AD, although it is widely agreed Bysandine history is split between two eras, pre-flood and post-flood. The Bysandine Empire was renamed to Sandesia once it became a collection of various holdings in the Sand Isles during the period between 700-900 AD when major flooding hit the area. Sandesian is the ethnic group that resulted from the Tibeto-Sandesian split between the period 7000 to 4000 BE when the Great Realm Drought turned several grasslands and plains into desolate deserts. The split occurred as groups either stayed behind or migrated to mountainous areas. A smaller group that lived in lands unaffected by the drought became the Copians, the land now called France.

Bysandium started as an early agricultural business selling various quality crops, it had no clear business name, but it was often referred to as "Sneed's Seed and Feed". It was started by the merchant Al Sneed in the year 1092 BE, the marketplace owned by Sneed originally being farmlands handed down to Al Sneed by his father Chuck. The business became extremely wealthy, and began funding the construction of massive roads and aqueducts between oases and villages in the desert. Controlling almost every aspect of agriculture and commerce, Al Sneed Jr quickly began to influence and control several Sandesian tribes and founded a massive city state which would be called Bysandium.

## History

### The Seed and Feed Chronicles (1099 - 1045 BE)

The Seed and Feed Chronicles were a series of epics written around 1036 BE by EmpLemon, four years after the death of Al Sneed Jr, documenting the life and times of the Seed and Feed business from the year 1093 to 1050 BE. Several thousand copies were made and the oldest surviving traces to 800 BE, etched upon a clay tablet. The following will heavily summarise the stories.

In the year 1099 BE, Chuck, Al Sneed's Father, became 51 years old and Al Sneed who was the eldest son of 26 was to inherit his lands once he died. The Sneed family was in heavy debt because of what they had inherited from Chuck. Chuck insisted that Al was to continue the small family farm and pay the debt off slowly over his lifetime, but Al Sneed wanted to start something new. Sneed set off on a horse in 1098 BE, traveling to Copian lands and noting down the various forms of plant life, as well as taking various plants back in bulk. Chuck would pass away in the year 1095 BE, never knowing if his son returned home in good condition. The Sneed family farm would be run by Sneed's younger brother for several years until Sneed returned in 1093 BE, having been gone for half a decade. Sneed would convince his brother to grant him a section of his lands to run a business after displaying to him all the plants and crops he had returned with.

Between the years 1093-1087, Sneed experimented with the plants he had returned with. Almost every crop failed to survive in the Sandesian environment but the few that could revolutionized agriculture for every Sandesian, most notably sugar cane. Selling these exotic crops became a lucrative market and soon Sneed bought his brother's lands and paid off the family debt by 1086 BE. He would also have a son in the year 1085 BE named Al Sneed Jr. Al Sneed's vast wealth allowed him hire mercenaries from other tribes to defend his business and he would soon challenge the authority of the chief that ran his village on several occasions. When the village chief Jannie2019 would die in 1084 BE, the people unanimously agreed that Al Sneed should run their village.

Al Sneed's village became a sprawling city with massive marketplaces and Borochanist symbols on several buildings, with construction of these projects spanning from the years 1084-1063 BE. Al Sneed constructed several bridges, small canals, forts, and early aqueducts for many villages in exchange for their able bodied men to join his mercenary army and for trade and goods to flow into his city. Around this time, Sneed also began to connect more and more Sandesian villages together with a large road system integrating over 100 villages by the year 1060 BE. Al Sneed decided to retire during the summer of 1059 BE and let Sneed Jr. take over at the age of 26.

Although the head of a large and prosperous village and owning several forts and plots of land all over the desert, Al Sneed never considered himself a king of any kind nor did he have any real desire to. However, his son would be more ambitious. In 1059 BE the same year he was given his father's titles, Sneed Jr. would impose the earliest known taxes in Realm history upon the use of roads that his father created for the sole intent of expanding trade routes and easier paths to his village for foreign merchants. Sneed Jr. had a standing army of 5,000 mercenaries and potentially 10,000 more were required to be recruited to enforce taxes. From 1059-1050 BE, Al Sneed Jr bribed or forced hundreds of chiefs of Sandesian villages to declare their fealty to Sneed's Seed and Feed. When Sneed Sr died in 1050 BE, Al Sneed Jr. would impose a tax on every single public service funded by Sneed's Seed and Feed, which at that point every village used, increasing his wealth to new heights. With this act, Sneed Jr. decided it was time to raise the Bysandine flag, and declare himself the King of all Sandesians with many wars and rebellions from the villages and tribes he subjugated to deal with for the rest of his life and reign. Unease and insubordination towards Al Sneed's regime would grow as he reduced the autonomy of villages more and more.

### Period of Rebellions (1045 - 900 BE)

Sneed Jr, in 1045 BE, would engage in a war with a rebellious federation of villages. The federation, led by a prominent warlord Georg\_2011, sought to overthrow Al Sneed. At the Battle of Chuck's Bridge in 1043 BE, Sneed Jr would lead 4,000 cavalrymen in a devastating charge, forcing all 7,000 of Georg's men to retreat over a narrow wooden bridge that broke under the weight of the first few hundred that crossed it. Of the men that survived the charge and managed to get across the bridge first or swim to the other side of the river before Bysandine spearmen surrounded it, 3,000 remained to retreat to Fort Gif. Arriving with 15,000 men, Sneed Jr. led the siege which raged on for three years, partially due to the secret tunnels that allowed a steady flow of provisions, weapons, and men. In the last month of the siege of Fort Gif, Sneed Jr was unexpectedly killed by an arrow, shot from a bow which was called "DOOD RDM" by Georg\_2011. Without a direct heir, Sneed Jr's family members and an array of Bysandine pretenders fought over the crown for several years with every village chief wanting their say in the matter. In 1036 BE, Getoutgif Sneed, Al Sneed Jr's younger illegitimate brother, would claim the throne at the age of 24 and restore order to Bysandium after roughly half a decade of several groups fighting over the title of King.

Getoutgif Sneed was somewhat disliked by the Bysandines, and was called "The Bastard King". Getoutgif was found only because Sneed Jr, in his last moments, told a soldier coming to his aid, that his "brother from another mother lived in Mecca.". He hid from the public for years, much to the dismay of his mother who had been telling everyone her son was the next in line to become ruler of Bysandium. Sneed family mercenaries finally found him in 1038 BE, and he pleaded for a crash course of general information necessary to run the Kingdom and its constituents. Several dozen conflicts and many deaths would follow in the two years he stayed behind to learn about matters of Bysandine politics and general skills of governance. Rumors spread and exaggerated his time spent behind the scenes as well as tales of his lack of intellect. Despite the dislike, Getoutgif Sneed was eager to take on the crown, rallying all of the loyalist villages and armies, he forcibly brought order to Bysandium the same year he was throned. The city of Mecca became an important site for Borochanists across the Realm, and would remain a holy site even after the much later Ebakanist surge.

The Sneed dynasty and Bysandium stayed somewhat unstable for several more decades, with there only ever being around five years without an ongoing rebellion or village coalitions challenging Bysandine authority. The rapid shift to scattered loosely connected oasis villages to massive trade cities hugging the sides of rivers left a permanent mark on Bysandine culture, reactionary groups vowing to enstate a more decentralized system of duchies with no ruler. Little is known about the period of time, directly after Getoutgif Sneed's death, in 999 BE to 900 BE. It is mentioned a war happened because Getoutgif Sneed's three sons started to fight over the crown after it was rumored the eldest son Lanchuckster made Getoutgif ill with poisoned food to be crowned. The middleborn Edward, and his followers, considered himself to be next in line because Lanchuckster was a murderer.

The youngest son, Chuckdor initially supported Lanchuckster but became disillusioned with the conflict, and bored of Bysandine politics, often stating he was too mature for it. Chuckdor Sneed instead went on expeditions to the largely unknown lands that his Grandfather Al Sneed ventured to a century ago. In the year 989 BE, Chuckdor led a massive exodus with 20,000 people, largely from rebellious clans and villages who wanted nothing to do with Bysandium, to the Copian lands. Hundreds of families were paid heavily and several loans were taken to fund the project to colonize the Copian lands where Al Sneed had ventured on his own. Roughly 6,000 people died before a permanent settlement was made, from attacks by Solician tribes mistaking them for settlers from the Spawn Empire, as well as diseases and logistical errors causing food shortages. The settlement of Chuckstown, later Copia, was founded on 987 BE. The copious amounts of exotic plants and goods would not yet benefit Bysandium, due to a grueling succesion war back home that would last for another eighty decades, and the rebellious nature of Chuckstown settlers.

### Period of Refinement (900 BE - 760 BE)

In 900 BE the succesion war ended with Richard Sneed's crowning and ascension to the throne, vaguely mentioned as a descendant of the famous scribe EmpLemon who had written the Seed and Feed chronicles nearly two centuries ago, as well as coming from a neutral party in the succesion war. In 892 BE Richard Sneed gathered most of the major warlords and chiefs for a supposed feast, but instead had most of them murdered, with a few managing to escape the massacre. Nobles in Bysandium who wanted to rule over large areas of land, normally divided up by dozens of chiefs, funded and arranged the feast to gain power. Richard would be ambushed travelling the desert and put onto a breaking wheel in 887 BE. Conflicts due to the the feast and Richard's capture lasted until 783 BE, the system of chiefs falling out of favor by the turn of the century as Bysandine emperors attempted less and less to make huge catastrophic moves at centralization as their predecessors did. In 780 BE to avoid further conflict the native Copian kingdom of Garland had a royal marriage with the de facto independant Kingdom of Chuckstown. This later brought on a personal union after an unknown descendant of Chuckidor died in 760. The Garland kingdom inherited the highly developed city of Chuckstown and several provinces, and formed the Copianwealth, or as the Bysandines called them, Copia.