Tyyrik, Tavok
Ceaden Year 5
All things pass through the grand city, the gates of the world. Great ships bearing traders and travelers from far and wide come and go with each breeze. Merchants fill the streets and plazas with exotic goods of all kinds. From silks to spices to slaves to sex... in the godless city there is nothing that cannot be bought. Trade flows as ceaselessly as the tide, stopping not for rest or for war. Towers, tall as the mountains, cast shadows over the waterfront. Roads of water and stone reach deeper into the city, but the sound of coin changing hands persists. Wealth and opulence pervade each corner as citizens of all races indulge in every luxury imaginable. Eventually the canals all lead into a round lake, in the center of which sits the magnificent dome of the Senate, waterfalls cascading down from its tip. A fitting seat of power for the merchant republic it rules. Surely this is the greatest city of all...
~900 years before present
Smoke drifted lazily upwards from the small cabins of the village as the sun sunk behind the mountains in the distance. The settlement was isolated on its small "island", with a sea of water on one side and a sea of dark spruce on the other. It would have seemed a quaint, lovely little village to onlookers, but they didn't know what was really going on. The people were starving. Only a year ago they had been uninformed onlookers themselves, and they too were entranced by the beauty of the land.They had come from the far north, gliding along the coast for months in small kayaks, in search of a better existence. Finally the small band of a couple hundred had reached what seemed to them a paradise; a cool-temperate climate, a sheltered harbor, great forests, and beautiful mountains. But they had soon come to realize that the land had deceived them. Their traditional river-fishing methods did not work in the open ocean, the wildlife was elusive and wily, and the soil was so poor that even the few crops they had grown up north failed them. They subsisted by eating small minks in the nearby forest, but there was little meat on them. Desperate, they elected to send groups of people out in every direction to search for a better land to settle, while the rest remained in the relative safety of the village. Some of the groups went out to sea and some of them went into the dark conifers. Some were never heard from again. But other groups had found something, not lands that they could settle but rather other people. These groups came back to the village with large bundles of foreign food, obtained through trading away the many minks' coats they had collected. The village sent out more and more of these parties as years passed, both to already-known peoples and in search of new ones. Eventually there was not one village for hundreds of miles around that had not heard of the Tav traders and their valuable mink furs. In time, the Tav people began to trade goods from one distant village to another one, benefiting from goods they had not even really worked for. Soon food was in surplus, and the traders started to trade for luxuries rather than strict necessities.
~700 years before present
As the Tav village thrived and grew over the years, the communal culture of the village was replaced by the individualistic one of a fledgling city. With the loss of community came an increase in crime, and it became necessary to govern the people with an elected council. Alongside the goods, the ideas that flowed from distant lands allowed them the city to flourish, and it came to achieve unquestionable economic dominance over the surrounding regions. Stone and concrete replaced wood, currency replaced barter, written language was discovered elsewhere and adapted. The advent of sails allowed merchants to go farther than ever before, reaching lands unimaginably different from their own. Tav colonies popped up along nearby coasts, sharing in some of the greatness of the grand city.
~550 years before present
The merchant-council in power began to be perceived as too autocratic by the Tav people, especially those in other colonies, and they began to grow discontent. The colonies gradually started to grow more and more independent, losing their ties to Tyyrik and cheating out of their taxes to the Tav council. This was unacceptable to the residents in the city, who began to collectively demand that the council step down. Faced with overwhelming pressure, the council agreed to do so once a new constitution was drafted. Seeing this as the opportunity to win over the colonies, the people of Tyyrik invited them to send down a delegate to help draft it. After 3 years it was complete, establishing basic rights of citizens as well as a national Tav Senate that each city of Tavok would send a few senators to according on their population (which left Tyyrik with a sizable plurality, though not a majority).
~300 years before present
As road systems grew more advanced, it became easier to project power inland rather than just on the coast. The people already there were offered citizenship if they succumbed peacefully, and slavery if they chose to resist. The Tav army dealt quickly with the vastly inferior forces of the various inland peoples, and most others saw the futility and gave in. With many inland people acquiring citizenship and small towns and cities forming there, the old system of sending senators was revised to make it districts, rather than cities, that sent Senators. With the unification of those in between the coastal cities, Tavok abandoned its thalassocratic roots and became a true country.
~125 years before present
The more advanced Irat'ak and Saval ships replaced lesser ones, and allowed Tav merchants to truly reach the ends of the earth rather than clinging to the coasts and bays. New goods, people, and ideas flowed in from the newly-accessible lands, further enriching the people and culture of Tavok. At around the same time, the current system of banking arose, which allowed for public ownership of company and more advanced money-lending techniques. Those in finance joined the ranks of businessmen and merchants as the elites in Tavok. Tyyrik, and indeed the country as a whole, became richer than ever before. Tyyrik became a financial hub as well as a trading one, and now, just as it was said that all goods flowed through Tyyrik, so too with all coin.