The recent coronation of King Antoine IV
For centuries the Burbenhasen dynasty has ruled Archericus as an absolute monarchy. In previous generations the greatest their to their continued position of power and privilege was the clerical class which resulted in a great deal of effort being made on the part of the monarchy & aristocracy to legitimize their authority with religion. The Holiest Archericusian Orthodox Chruch now maintains full control over the lives of the rural serfs. Heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, sorcery, adultery, "sowing mischief in the land", "deviancy" and "impurity" are all capital offenses with the method ranging from judicial torture until the point of death to stoning & burning at the stake. Literacy is strictly forbidden for serfs and "knowing Jewery" is outlawed. Despite this violence peace and order was maintained in a semi-feudal state with the only major disruption to the status quo being the occasional succession dispute between cousins & infighting among aristocratic lords. Indeed the position of the state appeared to be growing as the His Holiest Majesty established oversees colonies in the Caribbean, Sub Saharan Africa and Arabian Africa, all staffed by abundant quantities of slave labour (mostly African with a few enslaved American natives mixed in).
However the emerging professional class of lawyers, doctors, professors and bourgeois shop-keepers were beginning to disrupt this increasingly anachronistic social state. Enlightenment ideals of reason, rationality and progress were leaking into Achericus despite the best efforts of the "Committee for the Protection & Preservation of Public Decency & Morality" (otherwise known as the pope police). Proposals for reforming the medieval monarchy ranged from a modernizing the King's ceremonial advisory body comprised of aristocrats & lords (a move favored by hardline monarchists wishing to preserve the status quo), to creating a parliament limiting the monarchy's power ( called for by constitutional monarchists) to a calls for a Democratic Republic with Separation of Church & State (as liberal radicals favored). Meanwhile the vast majority of rural peasants & serfs are recoiling in starvation from a recent bad harvest while the debts incurred by oversees conquests have only exacerbated the famine. Now the coronation of the wildly incompetent and unpopular King Antione IV has set the stage for revolt, and quite possibly, revolution.
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